Don Raimundo spoke apologetically to Mercy. “He says the master brings all his requirements when he visits, but since this is never more than a few days out of a year, there’s no need for much furniture,” Zane explained.
“Tell him I understand,” said Mercy, but she didn’t.
It seemed to her that if someone didn’t care more than that about such a potentially beautiful place, more about the people whose work supported him, he had no right to ownership. Her father had always taught her that owning meant caring for, that the responsibility was at least as important as the benefit.
Within minutes, hammocks had been slung for them in rooms opening onto a rear courtyard. A white-clad young woman with soft, dark eyes brought Mercy a basin and pitcher of water. Mercy washed, took down her hair, brushed it out, and pinned it in a loose knot.
“Dinner is ready,” Zane called at her door. There had been constraint in his manner ever since the priest’s joking words about marriage, and Mercy was irritated enough to exude a polite chill of her own.
The table was spread on the veranda, which had been hastily tidied up and mopped, for the tiles still glistened in the lantern glow. Don Raimundo was sharing his own meal with them, so Zane had invited him to join them. Or was it to avoid dining alone with Mercy? The mayordomo seemed embarrassed at this democracy, but as two women brought sweet potatoes, chicken in a thick, spicy sauce, a very good corn gruel, and tortillas, he found refuge in food, and Mercy and Zane were hungry enough to match his enthusiasm.
Afterward, there was hot chocolate and a creamy caramel pudding called flan. Mercy still ached from the long day’s ride, but it was pleasant to gaze out toward the trees dominating the approach to the house and the white bulk of a church at the far end of the clearing. And from the well, protected by trees, came the soft voices of women fetching water for their huts, which were situated behind the church.
Zane had translated some of Don Raimundo’s sparing remarks, but when Zane asked permission to smoke, Mercy decided to seek her haṁmock. Conversations that had to be interpreted for two people were awkward. Zane was being so formally correct that she longed to kick him, and she was tired. She voiced her thanks and good nights. As she sank into the hammock, nothing ever felt as good.
Mercy was so stiff the next morning that she felt bruised, but the soreness eased as she dressed, though she wondered if the muscles of her back and thighs would ever be the same as before the journey began. After a hearty breakfast of eggs, refried beans, and tortillas, she waited for the rest of their small caravan, standing by an arch of the veranda and watching women visit the well for water and neighborly conversation.
Listening to their laughter and jokes, she felt the lonely isolation of being an outsider, wondered if she would ever belong anywhere, as they did here, and thought she probably wouldn’t, unless somehow she got back home to Texas.
There’d be Jolie, of course. Surely, if Mercy was patient, they’d grow close. In time it should be possible to make friends among some of the hacienda women. It wouldn’t do to count on Zane, though. Padre Martín’s little joke had spooked him like spurs clapped to an untamed colt.
The morning breeze was cool enough to banish her last bit of sleepiness, and, abruptly, it carried a sound different and higher than the soft domestic merriment of the women.
It came again—a cry of distress. The women at the well either didn’t hear or didn’t respond. Mercy hesitated. The faint scream reached her again, seeming to come from the long stone row that housed the commissary, storerooms, and infirmary. Picking up her skirt, Mercy ran toward it and now she heard a sibilance and a fleshy sound before each cry.
Through the open door of what seemed to be an office, she saw a girl, old enough to have small breasts showing under her white shift, with her thin brown wrists gripped by a stocky, powerful man Mercy thought to be mestizo from the lightness of his skin. A skinny, sallow white man was raising a braided rope. Mercy sprang forward, deflecting the blow.
“Stop it!” she cried. “How dare you beat a girl!”
The man stared at her in shock, shrugged, answered in Spanish, then turned to resume his business. Mercy got in front of him. She didn’t know what the thin child had done, but she didn’t look more than fourteen, and, apart from the brutality, it was wretched to see the gratification in the men’s faces as they manhandled her.
“Didn’t they whip slaves in Texas?” drawled a cool voice from the door.
“My father wouldn’t own slaves, and I never saw a whipping!” Mercy blazed, swinging toward Zane. “Am I supposed to let this happen because I’m from the South?”
“Wherever you’re from, one would expect you to stay out of what doesn’t concern you.”
Dismayed, realizing the vulnerability of her position, Mercy glanced at the girl, who was trying to stand erect even though blood trickled from her bitten lip and her dark eyes were dilated with shock and pain. Mercy moved close to her, and the mestizo who had served as a human whipping post released wrists so fragile and slim that it seemed a miracle he hadn’t snapped them.
“She can’t have done anything to deserve this!”
“She may be a thief, a troublemaker, or lazy.”
“She’s not much older than your own daughter! How would you like her to be treated like this?”
Zane looked from Mercy to the girl. Plainly irritated, he asked the white man a question, then received a flood of indignant self-justification.
“She refuses to marry any of the men suggested for her,” Zane explained. “She says she’s a descendant of Jacinto Canek, a chief who led an uprising in 1761, and she will never marry a tame Indian and produce more. Such talk and behavior are threats to the tranquility.”
“The apathy, you mean,” retorted Mercy. “It’s interesting that men everywhere have the same answer for spirit or pride in a woman: put a man’s weight and hand on top of her, and fill her with babies so that in caring for them she’ll forget what was real for her as a person!”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work,” said Zane with an icy smile that infuriated Mercy till she remembered what his wife had done. “And though you were married, it hasn’t gentled your tongue. You might remember, madam, that though I have no wish constantly remind you of it, I’ve the same rights over you as the manager has over this girl. You both are in debt-bondage.”
Mercy laughed in his face, too outraged to care what he did. “Maybe you’d like to borrow the whip and teach me my place?”
Something leaped between them, a vibrating, magnetic energy that pierced Mercy, making her knees weak. Did Zane feel it, or did anger cause that smoldering deep in those impenetrable eyes that were now the color of the black waters of lakes?
“The girl must obey. Don Raimundo is strict, but not cruel. Once she accepts a normal life, she’ll be content.”
And her soul would die, the spirit that defied all the power of the hacienda—men who could beat her to death or maim her till it would be a punishment for a man to take her.
“Can you buy her?” Mercy asked.
Reluctantly, Zane said, “I could purchase her debt, which comes from her father, who came into servitude during a great famine. Many people sold their labor for life in those times just for enough to eat. And, since a debt, above what an owner charges for food, clothing, and shelter, can almost never be paid back, it descends to the children.”
“Please pay what she owes,” Mercy begged. “It can’t be the price of even one of those pairs of shoes you bought me! I’ll pay you back someday, somehow.”
“How, indeed?” he countered. “You labor is mine. Perhaps you have tucked away some family jewel you managed to hide from your slip-fingered husband?”
“My father’s medical books.”
“You must prize them to have brought them all this way, but I doubt that musty medical treatises would be of value to me.” His eyes touched her throat and she flushed as the telltale pulse leaped and throbbed. “There’s one thing I coul
d take, but I prefer to have it given, so I won’t ask for that.” Moments seemed to pass as he glanced lazily from the men to the girl and back to Mercy. “You’ve demanded that I buy her. You want to save her pride. What about your own? Will you kneel for her? Will you beg?”
Mercy threw back her head. She stared into the mocking, hard-angled face, started to say I’d sooner die!, but caught herself.
What did it matter if he got perverse satisfaction from humbling her? To save the girl was the important thing. But, oh, it hurt, oh, it was difficult to sink to her knees.
“Buy her,” she said. “Please buy her.”
Zane watched Mercy strangely.
“Get up,” he said. “I will speak to Don Raimundo.”
Twenty minutes later Mercy had salved the girl’s back where the skin was broken and they were back on the camino real, the girl, Mayel, perched on a scraggly burro that Don Raimundo had thrown into the bargain. He’d been so glad to get rid of an increasingly troublesome problem that he hadn’t been much vexed with Mercy, though he’d warned Zane that the Indian girl would be trouble.
“She can be your maid,” Zane told Mercy somewhat dourly. “I hold you completely accountable for her.”
“But I don’t speak Spanish, let alone Mayan!”
“You’ll certainly have to learn.”
At least he seemed over his withdrawn mood of the day before. And he had bought Mayel, even if Mercy had knelt for that.
“Who’s this Canek that Mayel is so proud of?”
“He was batab of Quisteil, a village where a fiesta turned into a riot back in 1761. His real name was Jacinto de los Santos Uc, but he changed it to Canek in memory of the last Itzá king, because prophecies foretold that one of the Itzás would drive all the whites into the sea from where they came. He rallied hundreds of Mayas, but the ladinos came down with a crushing force, took Quisteil, and when they caught up with Canek, they marched him and several hundred prisoners to Mérida.”
“Then?”
“In the main plaza he was quartered, his flesh torn with pincers, and the fragments burned to ashes to scatter to the winds. Two hundred of his men got two hundred lashes each and had an ear cut off, while eight more were strangled. But Canek’s name was remembered. It was used to inspire the Mayas at the start of the War of the Castes.”
Mercy felt sick. She didn’t think she could ever visit that plaza again. Zane shot her a quick glance.
“I’m sorry. But you’d better understand this country. You can see why Don Raimundo was uncomfortable at having a descendant of Canek’s refusing to accept her lot.”
“But surely he had other descendants.”
“Doubtless. The difference is that this one cares.”
Maybe that was all the difference with anyone, anywhere.
They were amidst small, rolling hills now, taking a side road toward Uxmal. “It’s slightly out of our way,” said Zane. “But if you read Stevens’ account with Catherwood’s wonderful engravings, you’ll want to see it. The region is known for fevers, so we won’t linger, even though the rainy season seems to be over.”
The trees and vegetation pushed densely toward the path, sometimes overgrowing it till Vicente had to hack away vines with his machete. In any case, they had to duck a lot, for the path was cleared for a walking man, not riders. Mercy was glad when they came out into an open field, then was gripped with awe and a sense of desolation as they gazed toward a towering pyramid, obscured with trees and brush and a complex of lower buildings facing it in a quadrangle, their terraces, foundations, and elaborately friezed facades smothered with vines and weeds that grew rank all over the great field.
Some distance away on an elevation gleamed a long white building like an island rising from a sea of green.
“That’s the governor’s mansion,” said Zane. “Stevens and his friends stayed there when they were exploring the ruins. They cleared out enough vines and brush to make pictures of the temples, but it doesn’t take long for the jungle to take back anything man does.”
Mayel was pointing at the huge, rubble-strewn pyramid, speaking with the sort of delighted shudder children reserve for scary stories.
Zane made some teasing reply and said to Mercy, “She’s saying that the witch whose egg-hatched son, The Dwarf, or Magician, raised this pyramid in one night lives in an underground cave near here and will give water to thirsty travelers in exchange for babies, which she feeds to a giant snake.”
“Does she really believe that?” Mercy demanded, studying the girl’s face, which, now that she wasn’t in pain, showed roguish dimples in both cheeks and chin. Her skin was like dark honey, with slim eyebrows winged up, and there was a delicately Oriental look about her.
“Why not? Aren’t the old rain gods in the sixth heaven with San Miguel Arcángel, the lords of the wilds in the fifth, animal guardians with San Gabriel in the fourth, wind gods on the second level? And in the first heaven, just above earth, don’t village and cornfield guardians keep watch? And the devil’s well mixed with the old earthquake god.” He chucked at her expression. “Be honest. Which is more fanciful—the old faith, or the conquering one with which it’s intertwined?”
Any religion that gave animals and wild places guardians appealed to Mercy. She had never liked the concept of salvation or damnation of individual souls to overwhelm the beauty and terror and power of the natural world, like the marvel of wings and the depths of the ocean. Souls, Elkanah used to say, would fare better if their owners worried less about them and more about their responsibilities and challenges in the living world.
She shrugged at Zane’s question and stared at the top of the pyramid, its overgrown summit towering against the brilliant sky. “Didn’t they practice human sacrifice?”
“Yes, though not on the scale of the Aztecs. Besides, everyone believed the victims went to the highest heaven along with warriors killed in battle and women who died in childbirth.”
“They put women in the best heaven?”
Zane nodded. “The Vikings did the same. They and the Mayas considered childbirth a struggle as valiant and important as any war of man.”
Mercy had delivered a few babies, though most people had felt it was scandalous for a young unmarried woman to attend a birth. It was a battle, though casually accepted as the destiny of a woman. Men seemed to prefer to forget that without the agony of women, their own lordly kind could not be perpetuated.
“Good for the Mayas—and for the Vikings, too!” Mercy said so vigorously that Zane laughed without any of that irony that so often embittered his mirth.
They turned their mounts and within a quarter of an hour were at the Hacienda Uxmal, gloomy and seldom visited by its owner, where they got down to stretch and watered the animals before starting back to the camino real.
“Tekax tonight,” Zane said encouragingly, as if he guessed how every muscle in her body protested as he helped her into the saddle. “And the next day we’ll arrive at La Quinta!”
Mercy was ready. Whatever awaited her there, at least she could get off this animal.
Earlier, Zane had spoken to Mercy about an empty house in Tekax where they could spend the night. Entering its courtyard now, Vicente and Zane unloaded and unsaddled. With her thoughts on the fair they were to attend that night, Mercy watched as Vicente plunked one pack inside the empty house and then turned to Mayel with some direction or other. Promptly, the girl rummaged about among the remaining packs, then brought out the hammocks. Entering the house, Mercy helped her swing these from pegs in several different rooms, and she showed by gesture that she wished Mayel to sleep in her room.
Some Indian boys Vicente had hired to water the animals brought water for the house, and Mayel seemed as glad to wash off the dust of the journey as Mercy was. Mercy salved the girl’s back again, though Mayel indicated she was all right now.
Despite having had a full bath in Mérida, two days of traveling had made her feel thoroughly grubby. There would surely be tubs at La Quinta, and M
ercy pictured one, filled with warm water, with great longing. She thought she smelled of horses, and, truly, it would be strange if she didn’t.
“We’ll eat at the fair,” Zane called. “Are you ready?”
“Shall we take Mayel?”
“I suppose so,” he said ungraciously, “though I wouldn’t be heartbroken if she ran away.” He added a few words and the girl’s face seemed to bloom. From a hemp sack that apparently held all she possessed, she produced a frayed red ribbon and began to loop it where her hair was gathered at the back of her head.
Mercy raised a hand. “Wait!” she said. “Un momento!”
She searched in the pack of materials and trimmings, produced a length of yellow satin ribbon, and cut it with scissors from her reticulè. Shaping a huge double bow, she fastened it in Mayel’s hair and let her peer into the small mirror Mercy kept with her brush and other necessities.
Mayel’s eyes widened. She touched the bow with small, hesitant fingers, then glanced questioningly at Mercy.
“For you,” Mercy said, nodding. She’d learn all the Spanish and Mayan she could, but there was no reason why Mayel shouldn’t know some English.
Like a burst of sunlight, Mayel smiled. As if making a momentous resolution, she bent over and would have kissed Mercy’s hand, except that Mercy caught her in her arms and they embraced. How good and healing it was to give and get affection untinged by stormy tensions of male and female! Mayel was too old to be Mercy’s daughter, but she was the right age to be a sister without the competitiveness of being close in age, and as they held each other, Mercy felt free for the first time in years to love another person without fear of betrayal.
Tekax nestled among wooded hills that became low mountains to the south. Its broad streets were full of whites, Indians, and mestizos on foot and mounted on mules or horses, many of the Indians carrying long straw basket-bags on their backs, full of goods to be sold or bartered.
Besides Indian huts embowered by vines and trees, there were many stone houses in Tekax, and those on the plaza were especially fine, one even having three stories and balconies overlooking the street. The church was magnificent, reached by a great flight of stone steps. People thronged in and out, pausing at a table by the door to buy candles that Zane said would be lit at the altar, blown out, and promptly resold.
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