by Diego Vega
“That’s ridiculous!” Diego said. “They’d see you coming a mile away!”
Stackpole traced the island shoreline on the chart with his finger. “She may be right,” he said.
“Ha! Ha, Mr. Fancy Hidalgo Vaquero!” she crowed.
“But she’s right about another thing. You’d be forced to do it at night. You wouldn’t want one of their lookouts on the point here seeing you coming.” He pointed to the tip of Santa Cruz.
“When could we do it?” Diego asked.
“Tonight,” Trinidad said. “Why not tonight? The breeze is right. It’s running right up the channel, which is rare enough. We’ve still got a few hours before sunset. We could make it there tonight.”
“You’d catch the tide,” Stackpole said. He took down an almanac and leafed to a page. “You’d have a quarter moon rising two hours after sundown. Enough to see by, but it would be hard to spot a little boat at a distance. I hate to say it, but tonight might be best.”
Diego looked at Bernardo. They nodded at each other.
“I’m going with you,” Stackpole said.
Diego shook his head. “No, Capitán. With respect, you should stay behind to tell someone we went. If we don’t come back tomorrow, someone should come for us.”
Stackpole nodded. “No one can get you there better than Trinidad. She knows the currents and the rocks better than anyone”—the girl grinned with pride—“and she can handle that little boat better than anyone.”
“Let’s get this straight, Diego,” Trinidad said with a smirk. “On the water, I’m the captain. It’s me who’s in charge. Got that?”
Diego sighed; Bernardo shrugged.
Stackpole laughed. “Her big revenge. She gets to order you two around. Well, at least she’ll bother someone other than me for a change. I’ll get you some heavy sweaters. The wind’s chilly out there.”
18
THE ISLAND CAMP
THE NIGHT WAS AS black as pitch from the tar pits. The only light was a tiny candle shaded in the compass box at Trinidad’s feet. In the bit of reflected glow, her face was easy, untroubled. She watched the compass, then the stars, then the black shape of the sail against the stars. Her head nodded between them, up and down. Her hand on the tiller shifted only a little this way, a little that way. The big Pacific swell lifted under the tiny boat and dropped away so the motion was a long, easy swoop. Bubbles caught in the bow wave passed under the hull and hissed away from the transom. Water gurgled musically inside the centerboard box. Trinidad hummed softly to herself with her watching rhythm: compass, stars, sail, compass, stars, sail.
Diego and Bernardo sat against the windward rail of the boat. They were wrapped in a spare sail for warmth. Diego knew he should be afraid: he didn’t know what they were sailing into, and they were out on the colossal Pacific in a boat as big as the hacienda’s dining table. Yet there sat Trinidad, as calm as Estafina making tortillas in the morning. The boat’s motion had a comforting regularity. He felt the lift and fall of the sea, and somehow felt the pressure of the wind in the sail. He felt the driving rush of the boat, too, purposeful and sure.
Diego thought Trinidad would be chatty and annoying for the entire trip. But out here she was another person.
Fans and frilled dresses? Not this tough little woman. Diego remembered the blacksmith’s daughter fleeing in tears from the blackbirders. He was glad Trinidad hadn’t been there. If a blackbirder had asked her to sit on his lap, there would have been broken crockery flying and something like a bull-and-bear fight. Trinidad would have gotten them into even more trouble. But he liked her for that.
It was Diego who broke the silence. “Are you warm enough?”
“Hm?” Her humming stopped. “Oh, sure. Thick sweater. Stackpole made it.”
“Knitted it?”
“Sure. Great knitter, Stackpole. Black sheep’s wool, unwashed. Oil still in it. Sailor stuff.” Then she fell back to humming, and the conversation was over.
Against all expectations, Diego slumped against Bernardo and the two boys slept like babies in a rocking cradle, wrapped in a canvas blanket. In the rhythm of the boat’s motion, Diego dreamed about dancing with Esmeralda Avila.
“What?” Diego jerked awake, unsure of where he was for a moment. Trinidad had touched his arm. The motion of the boat had changed in some way, and the light of the risen moon made everything remarkably bright.
“Diego. Bernie. We’re about half a mile from shore here, so pay attention.” Her voice was soft. “Don’t shout; don’t talk out loud. Voices carry over water. When we get close to shore, things will happen quickly. You want to be ready and know what to do.”
“What do we do?” Diego asked. His vanity was stung, because this was all unfamiliar to him and a redheaded girl was firmly in charge.
“Simple,” she said. “We’ll be coming into a little stretch of sand beach behind a big rock. When I tell you to get ready, Diego, you get to the starboard side of the bow. That’s your right side. Bernardo, you stay on the port side, where you are now. I’ll bring down the sail, and we’ll come in slowly. When I say, ‘Now,’ both of you jump out on your sides and hold onto the boat. We’ll be in water maybe up to your waist. If it’s deeper, don’t panic. You’ll feel the bottom quick enough.”
“So we stand on the bottom?” he asked.
“Don’t stand there, but grab the edge of the boat and run up the beach with it as far as you can drag it with the wave. Okay?”
“We jump out, grab the boat, and drag it up the beach. Why aren’t you jumping out?”
“Because I’m the captain.”
“That’s no good reason!” Diego hissed.
“I’m kidding,” she said quietly. “I stay here to keep weight in the stern so the bow is light and rides up on the beach. I’ll be in the water as soon as it grounds out.”
“Oh,” Diego said, telling himself he should have thought of that. Well, how good would she be roping a bull?
“You want to grab that painter, too?”
“What painter? Why do we have to paint?”
“No. The painter is what we call the line that’s attached to the bow.”
“Why don’t you just call it—”
“Hush,” she said, “we’re getting close now. Are you ready?”
The boys nodded.
She stood for a moment and gathered the sail as it came down, tucking it into a roll. She sat down again. “Ready?”
Bernardo and Diego nodded. A house-sized rock was looming over them.
The boat paused on the crest of a wave, then rushed forward. “Now!” Trinidad called over the wave’s roar.
Diego vaulted over the bow and plunged into the water up to his waist. The bottom was hard sand. The boat that had seemed so small tugged at him like a cow pony. His legs were slow in the water as he pulled up toward the beach. He heard Trinidad plunge over the stern and felt her push forward. It touched once, twice, then the wave fell back and they were out of the water.
“Here comes another wave,” Trinidad whispered. “Keep pulling!”
When the second wave fell back, the boat sat solidly in the sand. Trinidad took the painter from Diego and ran up the beach, tying it around a boulder.
“See that rock face above us?” she whispered. “There’s a trail along its base. It reaches over that way, then switches back a few times before the ridge. Off to the right, along the ridge, there’s a trail leading down to the beach on the far side. It may be hard to find in the dark.”
The boys followed Trinidad, plunging into shadows. They stumbled at first, following more by sound than sight, but their eyes sharpened even in the dim light. They mounted the steep slope at an angle.
Diego was aware of a vertical wall on one side. They had reached the trail along the rock face. They changed directions several times with the trail. He was glad Trinidad knew her way. He would have been lost long before.
They stopped on the ridge, breathing heavily. Bernardo clicked his tongue like an insect and
pointed down. The lights of a few fires glimmered through the trees below.
“If you have a trumpet,” Diego whispered, “now is not the time to practice blowing it.”
Trinidad did not think this was funny in the least.
When they were several hundred paces along the ridge, Trinidad held up her hand. “Stay here,” she said softly. She disappeared and returned. “I found the trail, about fifty paces farther on. It’s steep and it’s rocky. Take it slow; pick your steps. We don’t want any rocks rattling down ahead of us. Are you all set?”
The descent was a nightmare. The darkness was deeper on the western side of the ridge, away from the rising moon, and the footing was difficult. The sense of height on the slope was hard to judge, so when they broke out of the brush suddenly, the camp’s fires seemed right in their laps. They backed into the brush again.
It was a big camp. The closest fire was really a hundred paces away. They were in a cupped valley, about five hundred paces from the trees down to the beach. Sailors were talking around one of the fires, laughing. They heard the clink of wine bottles on mugs. And they heard a few low moans from a dark shape close to them.
Diego began to make out the structure of this shape, a stockade of lashed palm trunks and driftwood. Could this be where the blackbirders kept their pueblo slaves?
“I’ll get closer,” Diego whispered. He shook his head. “I don’t like it, but we’ve got to know what’s here.”
He could feel Bernardo nod more than see him. He lowered himself to creep on his belly.
Trinidad put her hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Be careful, Diego.” She tousled his hair for luck. She was a good friend to have in a tight spot.
From his hands and knees, the stockade looked miles away. He moved with almost painful slowness, putting one hand down, then a knee, then another hand…a palm frond fell ten paces from him! The crash sounded like a musket shot. But the breeze was blowing, changing its direction. It must have been a sound familiar to the blackbirders in camp, because they continued their drinking and talking.
He crept like the hands of a clock, it seemed, but he was finally up against the palm trunks of the stockade. He could smell unwashed bodies and urine. Another moan two paces away startled him.
Were these blackbirders or captives? There was only one way to tell, though it would be the most dangerous thing he had done all night.
Diego tossed a pebble at the stockade. “Can someone tell me where Padre Mendoza’s mule has gone?” he whispered.
There was a sudden stir of bodies. Diego was terrified.
Then a voice whispered back, “Who wants to know?”
Diego gulped. “Diego de la Vega, amigos. Are you in trouble out here?”
“The worst,” the voice replied. “Wait a heartbeat, hijo, there is a friend of yours who wants a word with you.”
There was a pause, more shifting of bodies, and then the familiar voice of Montez almost in his ear, “Estafina didn’t send you with any tamales, did she?”
“No, Tío.” Diego called Montez “uncle” as he would any older man. “But when she finds that you’ve been lying about on the islands, doing nothing, you’ll be in trouble. She’ll say, ‘There’s work to be done, Montez! The night is for sleep; the day is for work!’”
Montez gave a short chuckle.
“She has missed you. We’ve all missed you. Help is at hand.”
“Gracias a Dios,” Montez whispered. “God be thanked. Can you get us out of here?”
“How many of you are there, Tío?”
A whispered conference behind the stockade, then, “Maybe four dozen, Diego. Men of the pueblo and a few sailors. Why are we here? What did we do to these men?”
“All you did was show your skill. Whoever took you wants only skilled men. We think someone plans to set up some kind of colony. They need you to make it prosper. Who took you?”
Diego heard the voice of the carpenter, Paco Pedernales. “Vaqueros, but of a strange kind. Not Californios, but perhaps from somewhere below Panama. Then these bad sailors.”
“Did they say where they were taking you, Tío?”
“Not by name,” Paco whispered mournfully. “Someplace far away, across the ocean. Far from California.” He sounded frightened by the distance from home.
“How many sailors are keeping you?”
“Not more than fifteen or twenty, but they are well armed. What can you do for us, Diegolito?” Montez asked.
“Now, tonight, nothing. But with God’s grace, we’ll get back to the mainland by morning. When Don Alejandro and Estafina come for you, I don’t envy those sailors.”
“God bless you, hijo,” Montez said.
“And you, Tío. But now I must get back to the mainland and see to your rescue. Adios, hermanos.”
Diego crawled back to the treeline as slowly and carefully as he had come. But now the fate of his Angeleño friends rode with him. The journey felt much longer.
Finally Bernardo’s hands gripped his arms and pulled him into the bushes.
Trinidad wanted to know everything immediately, whispering, “Well? What’s over there? What’s the story?”
“They’re all in the stockade, all the pueblo men and some sailors.”
“Are they tied up? Are they hurt? Are the blackbirders close?”
“Before we have a public meeting about it, Trinidad, can we just get out of the blackbirders’ pockets? We must get back to the mainland as quickly as we can.”
“I just wanted some information,” she hissed.
“I’ll tell you everything when we’re on the water again. Get us out of here, Captain!”
The mention of her honorary title satisfied her. She tousled his hair again, and they started up the trail behind her.
When they were across the ridge, Diego asked, “Can you land us near our hacienda?”
“If the wind doesn’t change, yes. I can drop you offshore, but I can’t land the boat in surf. We shouldn’t sail to San Pedro, first? Are things moving that fast?”
“Fast, very fast. You heard what Stackpole said: if the blackbirders feel threatened, they’ll run with whatever prisoners they have. And once they’re gone, none of them will ever come back. Don Alejandro must hear of this immediately.”
“What can he do?”
“If the don can’t do something, no one can.”
On the beach they dragged the boat across the sand into the water. They fought the waves, getting the little vessel off the shore and clear of the rock. There was the mainland looming across the moonlit channel. Diego wished he had wings.
19
COUNCIL OF WAR
THE WIND WAS STRONGER, but it had shifted into the northwest. The steeper waves were behind them as they headed south and east. When the breaking crests passed beneath them, the little boat lifted and surged forward. Diego watched Trinidad constantly maneuver, using the tiller and the sail. This was not the dreamy motion that had lulled him to sleep on the way out.
No matter how sweetly the sea might have rocked him, he could never have slept on this passage—not with this responsibility. How could they rescue their friends?
The moonlit shore seemed to approach like a turtle, in slow jerks. Then it leaped out at them, looming fast. Trinidad was fighting big whitecaps close inshore.
“Diego, Bernie, I can’t bring the boat too close without breaking its back on the bottom.”
Bernardo made a sign. Diego translated it. “He says he’s a duck. Easy.”
“I’ll get you as close as I can. When it’s time to go overboard, we’ll wait for a lull between waves. I’ll give you the signal. I’ll take the boat out again and scoot down to San Pedro and Stackpole.”
“Not a word to anyone else!” Diego shouted. The inshore waves were noisy now. He looked ahead to the lines of surf that began off the beach. Then he changed his mind and turned back to Trinidad. “The fishermen in San Pedro…Stackpole will know who he can trust?”
She nodded: Of course.
“Whatever the don decides, we’ll need boats to get men back out to Santa Cruz.” Trinidad’s face darkened. “Yes, yes, and women,” Diego added. Her face brightened again. “Perhaps as soon as tonight. And, God willing, we’ll need boats to bring back four dozen Angeleños. When can we get back to the island? What will the weather do to us?”
She thought a moment and shouted over the rising noise of the breakers, “This wind will die out in the afternoon. We can use the land breeze this evening. The tide? Not so bad, not so good. It will be a slow passage this evening, but we can make it.”
“Then tell Stackpole to have some trustworthy men and boats ready. But it’s got to be kept secret! No one, especially Moncada and his vaqueros, can get wind of this. We need surprise!”
“Stackpole’s a Boston Yankee. They’re good at keeping things to themselves,” she shouted. “Now get ready to swim for it. Over you go!”
Diego and Bernardo rolled over the boat’s side between crests. The night was chilly enough that the sea felt almost warm for a moment. Then the illusion disappeared and the cold began. They were struggling to ride the big waves in, desperate to stay close to each other. Stackpole’s heavy sweaters felt like lead weights when they lifted their arms out of the water to stroke. They touched bottom once, but that was an offshore sandbar. Then they were tumbled forward by a big breaker and came up spluttering.
They looked behind them and waited for a fresh breaker. It gathered offshore and they started to swim inshore as fast as their clothes would let them. They caught the wave, and for a few thrilling moments they bodysurfed down the face of the wave before being tumbled again. They rode another breaker, and another.
The last breaker spit them up onto the beach like bundles of old clothes. They tried to rise and run to dry sand, but the undertow sucked them off their legs long enough to be pounded by a following wave.
They stood in the shallows, streaming with water, sand gritting under their clothes.