Teresa of the New World

by Sharman Apt Russell

  Enough, Horse said, pawing the ground. You don’t need to convince me. I’ll carry you and the boy. I’ve ridden in moonlight before.

  As fast as you can, Teresa whispered into the horse’s ear, as she clamped her knees tightly across his back and pressed down on Pomo so he wouldn’t fall. Plague could return at any moment. She felt the animal grin in her mind just before he began to gallop. He had rested and eaten for almost two days. He was ready to run.

  The moon followed them the whole way, fat and orange, a cheerful companion. The path also seemed to spur them forward as it angled down from the mountains onto a broad level plain. Eventually, of course, although not soon, the horse tired and had to walk, almost until dawn. Then when the gelding scented water—a stream neither wide nor deep—he insisted on stopping. There is less water ahead, he warned. All night, I have smelled the desert.

  Teresa lifted Pomo and let him drop to the ground. When she got off the horse herself, every part of her body ached. She had also seen how the moonlight shone now on cactus and rock, with fewer pine and scrub oak. They had been descending steadily, the path forking more than once. She had always picked the northern route, north and east, and this route led them away from the pine-topped mountains with their cool breezes and clear waters running to the sea.

  “We’ll drink here,” she said to Pomo, who had slept for much of the ride. Later in the morning, she would look for buffalo gourds. If she could kill a large enough animal, she could use its stomach or bladder to carry water, too. If only she had a real knife, she thought, something better and sharper than her cutting tool.

  As she found a place for them to rest, a grassy spot of earth under a hackberry tree, Teresa worried about that lost knife, about what they would eat next, about buffalo gourds. Even if she could carry water for herself and Pomo, she could not carry enough for Horse. He would have to find a spring or creek in the desert, for himself and for them as well. She wondered how big this desert was and how many days it would take to cross it. She wondered if one of them should stand guard in case there were wolves or lions or slavers nearby. She wondered if they could really outrun Plague. Was any place safe from him?

  But north—through the desert—was the way that led to the wise woman. That was the way they had to go. She wondered . . . head on the ground now, eyes closed . . . and then she was asleep, Pomo curled against her thigh, the horse standing and sleeping close by.

  Long past sunrise, when she woke, Plague was there, too. He sat on a rock, watching them, his arms wrapped around his knees. He waited for her in the form of her mother.

  At first, Teresa just stared at the woman. There was something so familiar about those dark brown eyes and lips curving up. Teresa blinked and half-rose on her elbows. The woman was naked except for a grass skirt. She smelled of salt and fish, and her head had been flattened slightly in the back. She was still almost young, older than Teresa but not yet middle-aged. Her brown face crinkled into laugh lines when she smiled.

  “Te-re-sa!” her mother said in a lilting voice.

  “Mother,” Teresa whispered. “Where . . . where is the baby?”

  “The baby . . .” the woman stopped.

  “My sister?” Teresa prompted and stood, careful not to disturb Pomo. The horse nickered low, also awake.

  “Let’s talk about you,” Teresa’s mother said gently. “It has been so long. You left without saying good-bye.”

  A shudder went through Teresa’s hard heart.

  But “You are so young,” Teresa said. “You can’t be my mother. Where is my sister? My mother would know this.”

  “Te-re-sa,” her mother lilted, “aren’t you happy to see me?”

  Teresa took a breath to steady herself. “My sister is dead, isn’t she? And you, my mother. My mother is also dead. I think you can only take the shape of people you have killed.”

  “No,” her mother sighed, “you are wrong about that.”

  Plague shook his head sadly before continuing. “But, yes, your mother is dead and your baby sister. After you left without saying good-bye, another poor shipwrecked stranger came to their tribe, and they welcomed him, too. He also brought the sickness that made their skin burn and their bodies shake as though the Bad Spirit were rattling them from the inside. Many of them died. All your family. Your grandfather. Your aunts. The stranger killed them.”

  “You killed them,” Teresa replied, not knowing how to feel. She hadn’t thought about her family in so long. “Plague killed them.”

  “Perhaps,” her mother conceded. She gestured, still gentle, still sad. “But the Spanish have done other bad things, haven’t they? They took your friends as slaves, all the poor people who traveled with your father. The captain took them. And they sneered at you. Alonso del Castillo and Andrés Dorantes. They mocked you. They stole your father away with their talk of gold, their sweet-smelling wardrobes and chairs and escritorios.”

  Teresa tried to think about buffalo gourds. Could she find a gourd in which to carry water? The sun shone brightly on the grass and yellow flowers by the stream.

  “Listen to me,” her mother coaxed. “Only a few leagues away to the west, a group of Spanish slave hunters are herding their slaves to Mexico City. You can join them now, you and the boy. That will be your revenge, to see them sicken, too. You can watch their skin burn, watch them shake! That will revenge your mother. That will revenge your baby sister. Take me to these men.”

  Pomo was waking up, murmuring and stretching. When he saw the woman on the rock, he froze like a spotted fawn.

  “It’s all right,” Teresa said quickly. “I won’t let him near you.” She took the boy’s hand and pulled him to his feet. Step by step, they backed up, toward the horse. “The Spanish are protected,” she told her mother, just as a distraction. “They don’t die of the sarampión or viruela. They don’t worry about escarlatina.”

  “Some of them do,” Plague said with a shrug. “Some of them can still get sick. And their slaves will certainly get very sick. Their slaves will burn and shake and that will make their owners very unhappy. In the meantime, we will go together into the next town, and then all the way to Mexico City. That is a place I love very much.”

  “I won’t help you,” Teresa said. Get ready, she told the horse.

  Her mother sighed and watched, and Teresa understood that Plague had limits. She or the boy had to go to him. Maybe they had to touch or be touched by him. Also, although Plague was clever and sly, he had forgotten about her baby sister. And his plan to sicken the Spanish slave hunters was not very persuasive. He hadn’t remembered that they would make her and Pomo slaves, too, and that the boy would also get sick. Why would she risk that for revenge? Plague did not know humans as well as he thought.

  When Teresa could feel Horse’s breath on her neck, she turned and lifted Pomo to his back. Grabbing the horse’s mane, she scrambled up behind, and Horse wheeled, and then they were thundering on their way north and east across the desert plain. The path was gone now. They would have to use the sun and stars for direction.

  14

  All that day, she urged the horse forward even though he was tired from yesterday’s travel, even though Pomo was cranky and restless, even though her head ached and her eyes felt as if they had been rubbed with sand. Let’s go, Teresa said when the horse slowed. The desert is what he is avoiding. He can’t cross the desert after us.

  That is not true, the horse replied. You know that is not true.

  Teresa frowned because Horse was right. Why would Plague hate the desert—except that the desert had so few people. And Plague needed people. Plague loved people.

  The wise woman will help us, she said confidently to the gelding. We have to find her before Plague finds us again and thinks of some new trick. We have to cross this desert before we die of thirst. Hurry! she commanded over the pain of her headache.

  Horse neighed angrily. I know how fast I can go in this heat!

  “I want to get off,” Pomo said, drumming his feet a
gainst the horse’s ribs. “I don’t want to ride anymore.”

  “Hush,” Teresa said, “Horse is scenting for water.”

  They were all so thirsty. The desert blazed so much hotter than the mountains, and they had left the stream before they had had a chance to drink. Teresa could feel the bare skin burning on her arms and face and sandaled feet, and she knew the same thing was happening to Pomo, who was completely naked. She should make Horse stop so that she could give Pomo her cotton shirt stained with prickly pear juice. She should find Pomo some clothes of his own, and she wondered what happened to the cotton shirts and yucca sandals of the Mayan shamans when they shape-shifted. Did they tear and break and tangle in the jaguar’s limbs? Did the shape-shifting jaguar run through the forest wearing the rags of a leather skirt? Stupid, Teresa scolded herself. The shamans undressed first. They had rituals. They knew what to do. Oh, it was so hot!

  They rode past cholla and ocotillo and the short humped cactus. Teresa craned her neck looking for prickly pear. That would save them. The fruits of the tall-limbed cactus were also beginning to ripen, and she searched for those plants as well.

  In the late afternoon, the horse found a spring. The seep of water was surrounded by clumps of yellow grass and animal tracks hardened in drying mud. After drinking her fill, Teresa went to search for food and found a few red currant berries. On a nearby hill, a jojoba bush had ripened nuts, crunchy and oily. She and Pomo ate those and drank again from the tiny seep and then Teresa was eager to move on—to cross the desert and find the wise woman.

  But the horse refused to travel further that day. He needed rest.

  In the morning, he went reluctantly and only because he had grazed all the dry yellow grass. There was nothing left for him to eat.

  “I don’t want to ride,” Pomo said as Teresa lifted the boy onto the horse’s back. Teresa’s cotton shirt covered him now from neck to feet, and Teresa was in a bad mood with only her leather skirt and dabs of mud protecting her bare breasts. Her efforts to find a buffalo gourd had failed, and they still had no way to carry water. Despite all the tracks near the seep, she hadn’t seen a rabbit or packrat or anything to stone for their supper or breakfast. All the currant berries and jojoba nuts were gone. Like Horse, they had nothing to eat.

  “We’ll find something later,” she muttered to herself.

  “I want to get off,” Pomo began though they had not yet started.

  The day seemed even more miserably hot than the day before, and with each hour, they were thirstier and hungrier, their rumps and thighs chafed and bruised bumping against Horse’s bony back. A heat rash broke out on the boy’s face, and he complained continuously. The sun beat down like something that hated them. The air felt thick and solid. Mirages shimmered in the shape of towering buildings or mountains or blue ponds just ahead. But none of these things were real. The ponds, especially, were not real.

  By sunset, Horse had not yet smelled water. He shambled along, step, step, step, stumble, stumble, stumble. Teresa could feel his exhaustion. We should stop, she said at last.

  No, the horse whispered, surprising her. We will use the moonlight. We should keep going. Teresa swayed on the gelding’s back, holding on to Pomo. Here and there, she spotted the humped barrel cactus. She knew that a thirsty traveler could break open this plant and use its pulp for liquid. But if they drank the mashed pulp on an empty stomach, they would get even sicker, defecating dirty water. They needed food first.

  She swayed and dreamed of a pool below a cottonwood tree.

  Once again, moonlight silvered the desert plants and rocks. It was beautiful and familiar, as if she had seen all this before, the silver moon, these silver plants. Of course, she had—she remembered now—not on a horse, not with a boy, but with her father and Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo and the Moor Esteban. They had often walked by moonlight, her father humming a Spanish song. Río de Sevilla, de barco lleno, ha pasado el alma, no pasa el cuerpo . . .

  Horse plodded through the night, and when the sun rose, he said he had to find shade. He could no longer travel in the daylight. The horse stumbled to the overhang of a boulder that half-sheltered a scraggly mesquite tree. Once Teresa and the boy dismounted, she realized that they would not be riding again. The animal was at the end of his strength. He could barely speak to her, his thoughts blurred. They would have to walk now.

  Teresa wondered, with shame, if she should have offered to do this earlier. She wondered how easily, how quickly, the horse would be traveling through the desert if he were not carrying them.

  Pomo whispered something in a cracked voice as they settled under the tree branches, leaving the shade of the boulder for the horse. The boy was pleading for water, water and food. Teresa looked about, but all the mesquite beans had fallen to the ground and been eaten by animals. The horse stood nearby, too tired to try the tough yellow grass that grew up sparsely.

  “It’s all right,” Teresa lied to the boy. “Go to sleep.”

  Pomo coughed and she saw it—a glimmer of yellow in the boy’s dark eyes, a shading into liquid green-gold. The child was thirsty and hungry enough to change. Now Teresa could hear the animal’s voice. I have you, and I have the horse, the jaguar counted up his treasure. Plenty of flesh, plenty of blood.

  No! Teresa shouted. Horse jerked awake.

  No, Teresa said, and with all her strength she pushed the jaguar down deep into the boy. She denied him. She stopped his breath. She strangled him half to death, or maybe all the way to death, for he disappeared—growling. He could not have the boy. He could not have her. He could not have the horse.

  “We will find another way,” she told Pomo.

  The dark eyes lost their shine and only Pomo looked back at her, wet-lashed, woe-be-gone, trusting. “Go to sleep,” she repeated.

  And they all slept then, half-waking and sleeping again, half-sleeping, scratching and full of aches and pain. The horse’s skin shivered with flies that also bothered Teresa, tickling her face and buzzing in her ear. When the shade from the overhanging rock moved with the sun, the horse moved with it, crowding closer to the tree, his body radiating more heat.

  Near dawn, the coolest part of the day, Teresa dreamed she was lying next to a fire. If she didn’t push it away, she would burn up. This was worse than the Governor’s kitchen, worse than a summer full of baking turkeys and ducks and bread. She pushed out with her hands, strangely unafraid of the red coals or yellow-orange flames. She beat the fire down—and woke to find herself hitting Pomo, shoving him out of the shade and into the sun. The little boy didn’t care. He didn’t even moan. Shocked, Teresa dragged his body back under the tree. Fever had made his skin hot to touch. He was the fire.

  Desperately, Teresa looked about at the horse, at the boulder, at the blue sky. No, no, she thought. She couldn’t bear it.

  Now someone was coming for her, across the desert, weaving through the needled cactus and mesquite. Someone was shouting her name, “Teresa! Teresa!”

  Teresa began to cry silently, for it was her father. The lone figure was Cabeza de Vaca. As the man came closer, she saw that he had aged terribly after his years in the south as the Governor of the Río de la Plata, after his own men of arms had rebelled against him. His beard and hair were completely white, his skin mottled like old leather. Still his pale blue eyes were the same, and his long nose, and most of all, his wonderful voice.

  “Teresa!” he called. “I have been looking for you. I have been calling and calling out for you, seeking you wherever I go. Praise the Heavenly Father! I have never been so happy. My greatest wish has come true.”

  Her father was here at last. She had always known he would come back for her.

  “Teresa,” he said, and she wanted only to get up and run to him. She wanted only to be held in his arms.

  15

  “Thank God in His infinite mercy,” her father repeated himself. “We have been reunited! How often I have prayed for this day. Come to me, dear child. Dear child!” Cabeza de Va
ca opened his arms as he walked toward her. He was dressed as a well-to-do Spaniard, in an embroidered cotton shirt and leather pants, with strong well-made sandals but without the helmet or metal armor of a conquistador. His white beard had been trimmed not long ago although his long white hair flowed freely about his shoulders, having escaped its leather tie. His clothes were stained, as though he had also been walking for miles in the hot desert. Across his shoulder he carried a flat leather bag.

  “Teresa, I have looked for you! Oh, so long! You cannot know the countless weeks and months and years I have spent thinking of you and praying for you,” her father spoke in his usual voluble fashion. “After those godless colonists turned against me, my own misguided men took me back to Spain, a prisoner in the hold of the ship. A prisoner! Fortunately, the King rallied to my side. After I was vindicated and released, I immediately sailed back to Vera Cruz and took a horse to Mexico City. I am done, finished, with the southern provinces and their ungrateful inhabitants. I rode like a madman to the Governor’s house only to find that you were gone and the house deserted. Imagine my feelings! I began to walk north. I knew, yes, somehow I knew I would find you. The Redeemer would help me find you. I had faith, and my faith kept me strong and brought me to you and you to me.”

  Her father was very close now. Teresa could see the spittle on his beard. She stood up painfully and took a step back into the mesquite tree.

  Her father stopped. “Teresa, what is wrong?”

  “The boy is sick.” She hesitated.

  “Sick? You have a sick child? Let me see,” her father demanded.

  “Stay away!”

  “Teresa,” her father chided. He held up his hands, palms out. Then he put them together in a gesture of prayer. “Perhaps I can help. I am a healer, after all.”

  Teresa felt dizzy. It was true. Her father was a healer. She had seen how he had taken the arrowhead from the man’s chest, how the man had jumped up the next day completely well. She had seen many other healings as well. Now her father said that he had been looking for her all these months and years. In one soft corner of her hard heart, she had dreamed of this.