Juan Carlos Carrera y Carrera, gentleman, mine owner, and father of a beautiful daughter, knew himself to be a man of destiny. That morning, he had two reasons for requiring his cousin Juan Luc to accompany the embassy on its tour. First, he wanted somebody to keep the businessman occupied while he found out whatever the Envoy could tell him of Balcor’s purposes in welcoming these foreigners. Second, Juan Carlos was aware that, although Juan Luc had the long Carrera y Carrera nose and the velvety Carrera y Carrera eyes, when the two cousins stood together, the difference between them was as clear as the difference between shining veins of silver and dull green copper deposits.
In fact, he’d have preferred that all three of the Carrera y Carrera cousins might be present that morning so that the strangers could see his own superiority, but the mines could never be left without an owner on watch, so Juan Antonio was not available. The soldiers kept the workers in line and also beat off occasional attacks by those men who had fled to the mountains after their uprising failed, but unsupervised soldiers can run amok. A second uprising was no part of the plans Juan Carlos had for Andesia.
He could tell from their uneasy glances at the military guard marching ahead and behind them that his guests were unused to such an escort, so without being asked Juan Carlos told them, “My country is not so old as yours. There is no police in Andesia. We have soldiers to keep order.”
The businessman was quick to wonder, “Who keeps the soldiers in order?”
This fellow was too bold for Juan Carlos’s taste, as if he were the equal of a Carrera y Carrera or a Baron. “The General and Captain Malpenso,” he snapped, and demanded, “Who keeps in order your police?”
There was a brief hesitation, a glance exchanged between Envoy and businessman, before the young Baron answered this. “The law,” he said. “We have the law to govern and to protect us. I wonder that your new King has not told you about my country and will ask him about that, when we meet. For he must be eager to greet us, just as we are eager to present him with the compliments of King Teodor.”
“The General will know that better than I,” Juan Carlos answered smoothly, and promised, “He will soon be back among us, I have heard.” As if struck by a sudden thought, he added, “If it pleases you, perhaps one morning you would like to ride up into the hills? General Balcor keeps a fine stable. Do you ride?”
“Of course,” the Envoy answered, a little disdainfully, while Señor Bendiff shook his head and remarked that he used to drive workhorses in front of a wagon but now he went about in a motorcar.
“And the Secretary?” Juan Carlos asked, barely glancing at the fellow. “But of course he must. He is, as you say, a gentleman, with a gentleman’s accomplishments. We can find worthy mounts for you both.”
“I look forward to it all,” the Envoy responded.
“You will not, of course, be able to repay our hospitality,” Juan Carlos told him, in proud forgiveness of the Envoy’s unavoidable failure to keep up his end of the social bargain.
“Unhappily,” the Envoy agreed, untroubled. “Unless your King were to send an embassy to our country, or perhaps even come himself, to revisit our cities, to discuss forms of government and taxation with our King and elected representatives.”
Juan Carlos was leading his group past the bridge to show them the parade ground, with the long barracks just beyond. He dismissed the Envoy’s suggestion. “I don’t think the King of Andesia will want to travel.”
“How could he not?” Señor Bendiff seemed surprised to hear this. But how could a businessman understand a King’s behavior? Señor Bendiff insisted, “Surely he has the funds to do so, and in style, I would think, for do the mines not pay a part of their profits to him? And all the people of the land, too. Am I to believe there are no taxes in Andesia?”
Juan Luc laughed and, not understanding as his cousin did what might be learned from this information, foolishly assured their visitor that half of the revenues of the mines were paid into the royal coffers. “Of course a mine will eventually, inevitably, give out, but for now there is no hardship for us to pay a tax,” he said. “As you can see,” he added, indicating the large carved silver buckles he and his cousin wore at their waists.
Juan Carlos changed the subject again. “The soldiers parade at midday. They are very proud of their drills, which they work hard to make perfect. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a company of soldiers on parade?” he asked the Secretary, graciously including him. “You will not be disappointed, I think.”
The little Secretary acknowledged the Andesian’s words and his graciousness with a slight nod, and this irritated Juan Carlos. Who did the young man think he was? He had no reason for pride, as far as Juan Carlos could see. He served a master, following him about like a dog, and he was not by any means a distinguished figure in his own right, a slight fellow with ordinary features—Juan Carlos looked coldly into that face. Ordinary except for the eyes, he corrected himself. The Secretary’s eyes were, really, an unpleasant color, a color Juan Carlos had last seen during the uprising, on the blades of spades and hoes raised into the smoking air, their metal still stained with the dirt of their normal uses. Or perhaps it was blood that stained them—he had not lingered to find that out. But this Secretary was an annoyance, no more, a gnat, a cog, and Juan Carlos was sorry he could not fob him off on Juan Luc so that he himself could continue making an impression on the Baron. The man would be a good match for Elizaveta, and she in turn would make a fine Baroness. A father need never consider his child’s fate sealed until the wedding vows have been exchanged.
Juan Carlos could see now in how many ways this embassy might suit his own plans.
The party crossed the river, Juan Carlos pointing out the solidity of the bridge (“Erected by the Carrera y Carreras more than fifty years ago”), and entered into the wide plaza, with its sculpted fountain in one corner (“Designed by my great-uncle, who studied in Rome with the most modern sculptors of the time”), around which a few women were gathered, filling jugs and buckets. On benches around the sides of the open space, old men sat in the spring sunlight, watching the small children who chased one another around, shrieking with the excitement of the game. More women sat cross-legged on woven blankets with whatever they had to bring to market spread out before them. Soldiers lounging in shady doorways snapped to attention when the party entered but did not speak to the escort, and neither were they spoken to. When they saw the strangers, the children fell quiet and stared, but everyone else studiously ignored them as they crossed the plaza. The alley they were going down now was dirt, and the houses along it low, without gardens, almost windowless. The Baron, Juan Carlos noted, looked back over his shoulder, as if memorizing the tranquil and picturesque scene, or perhaps admiring the great fountain.
Juan Carlos directed the young man’s attention ahead and upward. “From here are seen the mines, on the mountain. You see how the workers move about?” and then he pointed toward their right. It was time to include the three others in the conversation. “Our mercado,” he announced, and they all turned to the low, flat-roofed building, with its single door of solid wood. Its few windows were set high on the walls, and barred.
“This is Stefano’s store, where your housekeeper can find anything she desires,” Juan Carlos said, and then told the businessman, “Our Stefano is a clever man. He has used the profits from his wagon trains to purchase farmlands, and there he grows vegetables to supply the tables of those who know the pleasure of good food. He is a man you will understand, I think. He is often invited to dine with us, with his two pretty daughters, whom he is educating as best he can.”
“Ah. So there is a middle class in Andesia,” Señor Bendiff remarked.
“Oh no,” Juan Carlos assured him. “There is only Stefano and our doctor, Doctor Hawkins, who brought his wife up from the coast for the healing mountain air many years ago, and when she died he stayed on to care for our families. They do not form a class, not at all.”
Señor Bend
iff humphed, as if he knew better than Juan Carlos, who was born and raised in Apapa. He asked, “Why are the store windows barred? They’re too high for any thief to enter. Why are there six soldiers here? On guard? Must the store be guarded? Is there such unease about its security?”
Juan Carlos did not care for this businessman, who had no idea that there were topics gentlemen didn’t discuss.
“The soldiers keep careful watch because of our recent troubles,” Juan Luc explained. “There was an uprising.”
“Do you expect another rebellion?” the businessman asked. “Was that bomb a part of a plot?”
Two more unacceptable topics, and Juan Carlos spoke quickly, before his cousin could make things worse. “The uprising was nothing, only some of the farmers from the countryside making things difficult. But our neighbors sent Balcor and his soldiers to help us, and Balcor named Captain Malpenso, who was a member of the late King’s special guard, as his second-in-command. We have a good prison in the cellars of the palace,” he promised the visitors, lest they worry. “And we are not afraid to fill it.”
—
Grammie had asked Joachim to go out into the countryside and discover whatever there was to be learned beyond the city confines. During the long days on the Estrella, separated from his garden, Joachim produced drawings of ships, of sea and sky, of deck games and orchestras. He completed two portraits and a still life of the buffet set out every afternoon for the first-class passengers. He had learned to enjoy new subjects. However, he was not entirely pleased about this change and he suspected that it was all—somehow—the fault of that woman. Hadn’t she virtually chased him onto the boat?
Now he protested the assignment. “I don’t know the language.”
“One picture is worth a thousand words,” Grammie reminded him unsympathetically.
“Don’t you want to help?” Colly wondered.
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” Tomi’s voice was full of enough surprise to embarrass even Joachim, so when Grammie added, a little desperately, “We need all the information we can get,” he said, “All right. I’ll try, but I’m not making promises.”
He accepted a slab of flat bread wrapped in a napkin from Suela, and from Devera a canteen of water, tucked them into his rucksack, added a few pencils and a sketch pad, and slung it over his shoulder. The guards stopped him at the door.
One soldier said something to another, in which Joachim might have heard the word serviente, which he thought he might have understood, so he nodded, sí, sí. The soldiers shrugged and let him pass.
The few people Joachim saw out and about on the narrow city streets were obviously unaccustomed to strangers. Women pulled shawls more closely around their shoulders and kept their eyes fixed on the dusty road. Old men in ponchos pulled their chupallas down low. Soldiers watched him from doorways and street corners. Uneasy at all this attention, Joachim walked fast, hurrying toward the hills. It wasn’t long before he’d left the little city behind and could walk freely, slowly, looking about him. He stopped whenever he saw a vista or a plant he wanted to sketch, or anything else that caught his eye: the arrangement of three curved terraces, like a schoolchild’s contour map, or a solitary building next to a small garden, its doorway empty, or a particular stony peak that had been sharpened like a spear point by wind and weather. Sometimes his attention was caught by a distant horseman moving across the hillsides, the only sign of human life to be seen.
At midday, Joachim sat on a grassy hillside that rose gently up toward the mountains to have his lunch. He was not far from one of the small houses, but nobody seemed to be at home. For company he had one of the herds they had noticed the day before. Between taking bites of the chewy bread and swallows of tepid water, Joachim opened his sketch pad. The animals came in varying shades of brown and gray. With their furry faces, they were appealing creatures who reminded him of Sunny, although they didn’t have her smooth coat or soft, floppy ears. In fact, their coats were thicker even than the heavy spring wool on a sheep, but their sympathetic dark eyes and fearlessness about a stranger reminded him of his dog. Quickly, he sketched a creature, and next to it drew the form of a man, to show its size.
As he sat there, the ground solid beneath him and a sharp pencil in his hand, he pictured himself, as seen from above, a lone man on an isolated hillside, beret on his head, working at the sketch pad on his knees—and he realized with a jolt that halted the movement of his pencil that this landscape drawing was a change, and there had already been several others in the last weeks. He’d thought he could work peacefully only in his own garden, but that woman with her hats had taken that peace away from him—thanks to Max, Joachim thought, with a comfortable grumbly feeling. Still picturing himself from a bird’s-eye view, a man on a hillside grumbling contentedly about something that had happened hundreds of miles and many weeks before, Joachim almost smiled.
Could he be laughing at himself? And if he was, what was the harm in that?
One of the woolly creatures approached him with the soft clucking noise a large, contented chicken might emit, and Joachim did smile as he began to draw the long-lashed eyes and furry muzzle of the first friendly face he’d seen in this country. The sun flowed over him, gentle as water, and the air shone clear. The ugliness of the mines was at his back, so he saw just a hillside sloping gently down to the river, along the sides of which the city nestled. Joachim felt as if he had been dropped into a new-made, unspoiled world.
Something moved at the edge of his vision and reminded him of what he was: a foreigner, with a secret purpose for being on this hillside. It was human movement and he lifted his head to look. A woman was walking toward him. She must have come out of the silent house, and when Joachim looked at it now, he glimpsed two children peeking through the open doorway.
The woman was short, square of body and of face, and she marched right at him. She wore a loose shirt and a heavy skirt. Joachim turned his attention to his drawing until she came up close and stared down, at him, at his sketch pad. To show her that he was friendly, he turned the pages back to find the drawing of the herd, which was probably hers. She grunted, then crouched down beside him for a better look. She reached out a finger, which was not clean, and touched one of the animals on its rump. She grunted again, and smiled, and Joachim couldn’t help but see the gaps where teeth had once grown.
He risked asking her a question, using the Spanish word and pointing at one of the animals. “Dog?”
Laughter bubbled out of her. She shook her head. “Alpaca,” she told him.
“Alpaca,” he echoed.
She nodded and took the hem of her skirt in her hand. She held it out to him so that he could feel it while she said again, “Alpaca.”
“Soft,” he said without thinking, and she stared at him out of dark, serious eyes. Then she surprised him. She sat down cross-legged beside him and ordered him with words and gestures, “Draw me.”
Joachim did, the quickest of sketches. He tore the page out and gave it to her.
She rose to her feet and told him, with more gestures and words, to accompany her back to the house. He did as he was told.
Later that day, trying to express everything to Grammie and the two boys—because he was too impatient to report his success to insist on waiting for the others to return from dinner at the Carrera y Carrera compound—he spread out his sketches: of the old woman seated on the one wide, low bed, where apparently everybody slept, weaving on a backstrap loom; of the little boy holding the carded wool while an older sister turned the spindle, twisting it into yarn; of that first woman as she worked on a vertical loom; of the pile of woven fabric on a shelf, waiting to be sewn together into some article of clothing for warmth against the next winter. His last sketch showed the one room of their home, a small fire in one corner, the cooking pot hanging from a tripod over the low flames.
“She gave me some kind of corn bread. She insisted on feeding me,” Joachim reported, “and the children couldn’t take their eyes off
of it. But she wanted me to eat it, so I did, but…I drew the two children for her and that’s when…” Joachim stopped speaking, to arrange his thoughts, which were not thoughts, really, so much as feelings.
His hesitation made Max’s grandmother anxious and she demanded, “When what, you irritating man?”
“Was it something bad?” Colly wondered.
“Dangerous?” Tomi hoped. “What was it?”
“It was hoofbeats,” Joachim told them. “And the next thing I know, the woman and her mother are shoving me into the bed—rucksack, sketch pad, pencil, and all—and burying my beret under the blankets. The old lady stayed there, sitting beside me, rocking back and forth and making little moaning noises. If they hadn’t looked so frightened, I’d have asked what was going on. And the children just…they disappeared. In a flash. Just—gone. Onto the roof, as it turned out, but all I could figure out was that they wanted me to lie there and be moaned over. So I did,” he said, smiling, “and I groaned a little, too, when the hoofbeats stopped right outside the door.”
His listeners waited, watching his face.
The Book of Kings Page 12