Jason stared at her astounded, but Ephraim said casually, “Oh, they'll get out all right, ma'am. Except for the big passage they already know ain't the one, that little tunnel we come out is the only one what goes for more than ten or fifteen feet.” He chuckled. “Howsomever, they surely will be scared out of a year's growth. I reckon it'll be a while before they come barging after us like that soon again.”
“You see, Robbie, I'm not really the monster you thought me,'' Jason laughed. He was in too good a humor to be put out by anything.
“You love it all, don't you?” she replied. “There's nothing would make you stop now, am I right?”
“You're in love with it all, too, dear girl — admit it. Can you see Rosemary or Daphne or even Josefina crawling around the insides of mountains through bat guano without so much as asking why?” He grinned at her broadly, irrepressible in his triumph.
“Why you conceited ass, if it hadn't been for Ephraim and their incredibly stupid carelessness, you’d have gotten the lot of us killed.” It was only then that she realized she was grinning as widely as he, thoroughly delighted with all of them.
When they returned to the inn, everyone was just sitting down to supper. Will glowered at them and Gavin looked anguished, but the rest seemed to take for granted Jason’s and her relationship, whatever each of them thought it might be. It was as if she and he had come to that stage of drunkenness in which everything is funny. They both laughed too much at the wrong things and a couple of times burst into simultaneous laughter at nothing at all.
Toward the end of the meal, however, Jason was flirting outrageously with a delighted Josefina, and for Roberta the laughing and the exultance were suddenly over. By the time she played her Emilia to his Iago, no one would ever have known that either of them had laughed at all that evening. In the end, Jason did go off with Josefina, and Roberta tossed and turned and sighed for what seemed hours as she tried to let down enough to go to sleep.
*
The troupe was accepted socially far more than they had been elsewhere. For the remaining days of their stay, the actors staggered away from huge eight-course comidas that lasted until five or six o'clock to fall groaning into bed hoping to sleep off the excess before appearing on the stage. They took to skipping supper entirely.
Hugh spoke for all of them when he said on the last night, “Thank God we’re leaving tomorrow. Much more of this and we none of us would be able to waddle. I’m not even dreading the ride back, though I suppose I ought.”
Jason was out in the courtyard smoking a cigar after dinner and waiting for Josefina to finish her bath.
“Jason?” Roberta said tentatively.
He smiled at her. “Hello, Robbie. What can I do for you?”
“Aren’t we having a meeting before we leave?”
“Well, aren’t you the glutton for punishment! No, there’s no need. The Cuernavacans are with us meeting or no meeting, and the vacationers we’ll catch in Mexico.”
“Where’s Ephraim?”
“Where he’ll do us the most good,” Jason answered evasively.
“I — “ she began, then broke off helplessly. She couldn’t even put into words how miserable she felt. She wrung her hands together silently.
“Hang on,” he advised gently, “and it will pass. There’s bound to be a big letdown after bringing off something like that. I wouldn’t have brought you along except that I didn’t think I could get them to come plunging after us without you.”
“How did you know what I was going to say?” she asked wonderingly.
He looked at her a moment, his face not much more than a white oval in the starlight. “Because I feel it myself.” He snapped the end of the cigar away with a flick of his fingers and went back indoors. She stood there looking after him.
*
At four o’clock of a February morning even Cuernavaca was chill, and they all shivered with drowsiness, cold, and dread of the ordeal ahead of them. Several of the horses wanted to buck after the long rest, but before long they were all sorted out and clattering out of the inn courtyard, the animals snorting white puffs like smoke and tossing their heads impatiently.
After hours of hard climbing they picked up fresh horses at Huitzilac and made very good time across the rolling tableland dotted with woods until they reached Ajusco, overlooked by an ominous mountain, its slopes black with pines. As they cantered noisily into the village, Roberta noticed a number of rough-looking men lounging about the wild, overgrown plaza. She heard then a familiar whinny and remembered Ephraim’s “That mare of Jorge’s is as good as a watchdog.”
So that was how Jason could have been so daft as to leave their own horses in a village with a reputation as a real robbers’ roost. By the time she spotted Ephraim himself leaning against a wall cleaning his nails with the point of a knife, she would have been surprised not to see him. She glanced at Jason, who looked insufferably smug, and made a face at him. He laughed and swung off his horse, paying no attention whatever to the Texan.
Roberta happened to be looking at Ephraim when Rosemary said in a clear voice, “My, what a villainous-looking collection of ruffians.”
Ephraim never stopped what he was doing, but he gave Roberta a slow, deliberate wink. It was all she could do not to laugh. That was the last laughter that day, however, for though the horses were fresh, their riders were feeling the long jolting miles, especially the women, whose sidesaddles dictated such an awkward position.
“How do you feel, lass?” Will asked sympathetically. “You shoulder still hurt?”
She shook her head. “It looks absolutely spectacular, though. It's gone through the blues and purples and magentas into the greens and yellows. I didn’t even have a headache after the first day. I’m afraid I used up several of my nine lives on that one.”
“I meant it when I said that the idea of you being killed terrified me,” he offered, watching her closely.
“I’m sure you did, Will,” she answered evenly.
“I also meant that kiss,” he went on more confidently. “If only you weren’t a virgin...”
“Oh, but I’m not,” she hastily reassured him on impulse. “I haven’t been for a long time. Couldn’t you tell?”
Will looked at her openmouthed. “I’ll be damned. And here we were all tippytoeing around you as if you’d break if someone so much as looked at you. It was that bastard Jason, I suppose. I should have known with you both off somewhere all the time.”
“Hardly Jason.” Hardly Jason? He was younger than Will by a good eight years at least and a grown man where Gavin was still only a boy. It wasn’t Jason in her daylight visions, however, but rather this maddening and yet irresistible red and gold lover with the amber eyes.
Her tone must have convinced him, for he said, “Gavin, then.”
She laughed. “Oh my, no. Someone you don’t even know. Two someones in fact.”
“That’s not possible!” he protested. “You’ve been living with us all this time.”
“You don’t seem to have any problem slipping out.” He looked a little uncomfortable, then brightened. “Well, you won’t have to worry about being molested by me for a hell of a long time after this ride, lass, I’ll tell you that. If that fool Jason has any ideas about other rides like this, he can just forget it.”
“I doubt that he has.” She thought of his face the night they had arrived in Cuernavaca, the lines of suffering deep around his mouth and eyes.
*
The week that followed their return to Mexico City, they had no performances scheduled, but there was plenty to do. The horses all had to be shod, equipment repaired, comfortable clothes suitable for long rides purchased, and nonperishable food such as beans, rice, and smoked and sun-cured meat collected. The costumes and props had to be sorted and packed according to each play, then separated into mule loads, for they would be carried by mule train from city to city.
As the period of waiting drew to a close, Roberta began to look on the house with new
eyes. It had been a refuge, an eye in the storm so to speak, and she felt reluctant to leave it. Out there somewhere was a vast land of towering volcanoes, barren stony plains, fertile wooded hills, endless sere brush flats, and fantastic natural wonders that, beautiful as they were, threatened her by their very distances, and by their uncaring brutality.
Out there too was the end of the childhood Jason claimed she had never relinquished and a turning point that would affect the rest of her life.
With a shiver she heard Zaragoza say, “...you’re going to have to be careful not to become gaunt later on. I see some of those fierce large American women with their wrinkled skin pulled tight over hollow cheekbones, and they make me shudder.”
An iron February cold fed from the snowpacks of Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl clamped down the day before they left, and they huddled around the fireplace between spurts of packing what they would actually take with them on the horses. The mule train with most of their baggage had left two days before, and they would not see it again before Morelia. They planned to spend the first night at the Desierto de los Leones, then take five leisurely days to pass over the Mil Cumbres area and drop down into the valley of Morelia. Their long journey was finally about to begin.
CHAPTER XIV
The months that followed saw them plodding and scrambling over a thousand miles of virtual wilderness, burnt by the sun, occasionally drenched with rain, always pressing toward another and yet another town, and yet another audience.
From the haunted moonlit ruins of the monastery at Desierto de los Leones to the culmination of their tour at the Feria de San Marcos, there was a blur of inns clean and filthy, theaters small and large, the everlasting packing up and unpacking of their unwieldy baggage. Masking as an arriero, Ephraim went with them all the way, to Roberta a friendly guardian in a vast, unknown land.
At Desierto de los Leones, a high pine forest near Mexico City, there was no warning whinny, even from their own horses tethered not far away. The first Roberta knew of anything amiss was when Jason rose to his feet and stood with a hand placed negligently on one hip. Blinded by the glow of the fire, Roberta took several moments to make out the mounted men who sat silently on their horses in the moonlight. At first she thought it might be Ephraim's crew, but soon realized her mistake.
One of the men walked his horse easily into the circle of firelight. The whole upper part of his face down past the nose was masked by a black hood that disappeared beneath his silver mounted black hat. “I regret it deeply,” he said in cultured Spanish, “but I’ll have to trouble you for your valuables.”
“I regret it also,” Jason replied evenly. “You see, my valuables are in truth very valuable to me, far more valuable than they would be to you. Besides, my men are waiting just beyond that line of trees for you if you so much as make a hostile move.”
“A nice try, my friend, but there is one problem. I don't believe you.” He took a pistol from the holster of his side and cocked it.
Just then there came a sharp crack from the dark trees and the masked man's hat flew off. Jason suddenly had a pistol in his hand as well. “I'd say it was a Mexican standoff, wouldn't you?” he said pleasantly. “I don't want a running battle with you any more than you want to have one. Be more careful next time of the game you choose; you could have been killed to a man.” The masked man smiled then and touched the barrel of his gun to his forehead in a silent salute, and wheeled his horse about. The horseman behind him was forced to rear his mount to avoid colliding with his chief. As he wheeled away the fire flared briefly to reveal a familiar face. He made it, Roberta thought, he actually did it. Not even the beard could disguise that high-cheekboned face with its arrogant arched nose: Colonel Olmedo had indeed managed the first part of his plan.
“My God,” Will breathed, “I could see all those crosses right in front of my eyes, one for each one of us.”
“I'm grateful you thought of the escort, Jason, but you might have told us,” Hugh sighed plaintively. “I nearly dropped of heart failure right there as I stood.”
Later Jason took her over to the ruins of the monastery, where they would be unheard, then grasped her arm with fingers of steel.
“Did you see who was with them?” he demanded. “Did you?”
She nodded, her eyes never leaving his face.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Would you like to tell me what your lover was doing with those men?”
“For heaven’s sake, Jason, he’s not my lover. He’s — “
He put his hand on her mouth. “Did you hear anything?”
Then she did hear it, the sound of sobbing, high, gasping, as if a child were crying. Then there came a child’s thin silvery voice, freezing the blood in her veins.
“Jasey, Jasey!” it sobbed inconsolably. “Jasey, it’s so cold! Help me. Jasey. Jaaaseeey!” At the last the voice rose to a diminishing shriek as if the child who called were going farther and farther away.
Jason stood frozen, his face wild in the moonlight. “Toby!” he groaned. “Ah God, let me be!”
Terror and exhaustion made her hesitate for a moment, but then she put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t, Jason. I heard it too.”
He took a deep breath, his face now like stone. “You heard it too?” he asked, hardly an inflection in his voice.
“Jason, it was real, I know it was real.”
“It couldn’t have been. No one knows enough to call me that.” He looked at her without expression. “No one except you.”
“Jason, you’re mad. Somebody else must know. Perhaps someone overheard us; it wouldn’t have been difficult.”
“Why would anyone in the company do such a thing? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Why would I?”
“That’s right, why would you? Why would anyone? If they wanted to get rid of me, they have only to kill me. If you heard it, at least I’m not going mad.”
“Would it be worth looking for someone?”
“You're convinced someone did this, aren’t you?”
“Someone must have done it. I might have believed the ghost of a rollicking friar, but hardly that of a young man killed a thousand miles or more away. Use your head, Jason.”
“I can’t be sure, Robbie. You know, haunted places are supposed to be the best ones for contacting the spirits of the departed.”
“I know nothing of the kind. For me, the dead are dead. I’d have gone out of my mind if I’d thought Mama and Margarita were hovering about somewhere.”
He pulled out a cigar, but Roberta noticed that the flame wavered as he lit it. “Out of my mind... I went to a seance once to try to reach Toby,” he said after a pause.
“Oh, Jason!” she cried, her heart wrung. He couldn’t have surprised her more if he’d said his hair had turned blue.
“Needless to say, it didn’t work.”
“What was Toby supposed to say to you?”
“God help me, I wanted him to forgive me.”
“Jason, Jason, you seem to be so strong most of the time, more than strong — invulnerable. I keep forgetting you’re human just like the rest of us. Not only human, obsessed. This quest you’re on, it’s as irrational as going to a seance. It’s yourself you have to forgive, Jason, only yourself.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” He sounded very tired. “Now all you have to tell me is how to do it.”
He walked off then into the darkness, leaving her staring after him.
They were in the Valley of Toluca, a high wild cold place of swamps and standing water and maguey fields, beyond which lay the snow-covered volcano of Nevado de Toluca and at its foot the sad and solitary town, when Roberta heard the spatter of gravel at her window.
Wondering why Jason would take this strange means to get her attention, she opened the wooden shutter and leaned out to find a bearded stranger looking up at her. She started to tell him he had gotten the wrong window when she realized that it was Cristiano. She nodded and withdrew to
get her manga and go down to him.
Roberta slipped by the lighted doorway of the common room, noting that Jason was safely inside, and eased back the bar on the heavy wooden door in front. Tiptoeing around to the stables in back, she cursed the occasional puddles of water that were all but impossible to see before she stepped into them. Out of the dark a hand gripped her arm, and she felt a jolt, even though she knew he had been there waiting for her.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You must be mad. Jason saw you last night, you know.”
“I wouldn’t have risked it, only I had to talk to you. Something could happen to me at any time, and there must be someone safe who knows what I know.”
Safe! She nearly laughed out loud. The secret policfe were after her every bit as avidly as the soldiers pursued the outlaws. She thought of Cristiano’s mold-ering skull nailed to the tree at Las Cruces and shuddered. “Is there no one else between here and Mexico to whom you can give your information?”
“No one. To make it worse, we’re on our way to Morelia.”
“Your family lives there, don’t they?”
“I must not compromise them. I’m not sure I could make them believe me anyway.”
“You must have friends in Morelia, you grew up there, didn’t you?”
“Ah, but which are the foxes and which the geese? Now will you just stop arguing and listen for a change?” he said impatiently. “There are fourteen of us, led by an escaped murderer named El Negro, the Black One. His complexion is dark enough all right, but I doubt that was the only reason they gave him the name. Before we stumbled on you, we hit a group of eight men traveling horseback. You were wrong about one thing. They don't take the bodies off into the forest to bury them, they bury them under the road.”
“Under the road!” Of course, run their horses over the spot two or three times, and who could tell? “Isn't that dangerous in the middle of the day? What if someone comes along?”
A Masque of Chameleons Page 19