“Please. You know there’s no silver like this left in the New World. Except, of course, where I took it from.”
Mota felt his mouth turn dry. “Dawn,” he said as Father Pascual put away the rock. “The western causeway. I’ll have a mule ready for you.”
MOTA HAD ARRIVED AT CUENCAMÉ just four weeks after María Isabel’s death, still steeped in his sorrow, the memories of María Isabel continuing each day to leach into his blood. A branch of the mine had collapsed, and the low, steady toll of the church’s bell summoned coffin sellers to the mine’s iron gate, where already a horde of desperate men clamored for the dead men’s places. They shoved against widows, and two of the strivers toppled an unclaimed corpse. Mota watched with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Here beat the true pulse of the New World. Here its promises of happiness were given the lie, here the earth opened, loosing the upper chambers of Hell, and stripped men of all falsity.
When, a month later, Mota returned from Cuencamé with his audits, he asked the president of the Audiencia for another mine.
AFTER HIS MEETING WITH FATHER PASCUAL, Mota spent the evening rousing men for the expedition. Among the few in the city he trusted, he found three willing to go. The first was Baltazar, a half-Chichimec with a bull neck who’d once guided conductas through the Yucatán and had a skillful way with mules and the various necessities of camp life. The second was El Sepo, a hulking, muscled mulatto who wore gold rings etched with skulls on his fingers, wrote poetry in a little pigskin book, and was an expert tracker and fighter. The last was Fernando, a young, bespectacled creole scholar who always brought with him a satchel of brass instruments fashioned in Leyden and a large sketchbook complete with inks and watercolors for the making of maps and prospects. Mota hadn’t seen any of the three for months, and when he told them where they were going each one laughed and shook his head until Mota showed him the viceroy’s order with its promise of pay. Now all three waited with him at the end of the western causeway. Baltazar fiddled with the packs and hummed a tune from the city’s most recent mascarada, Fernando tested one of his Dutch glasses, and El Sepo frowned and crossed out lines in his pigskin book. Already the sun had risen an inch over the low eastern mountains, and Father Pascual was nowhere to be seen. Mota sat on his horse, attempted to stifle his nerves as he watched the city. Mexico seemed a storyteller’s vision floating in the middle of its lake, lashed to the land by narrow bridges and causeways, its bell towers and palms and poplars caught in the blue smoke of morning. But then Mota caught sight of a street cleaner pulling his cart of furred corpses; he turned away, remembering the feel of María Isabel’s cold, dead hand.
When Father Pascual at last arrived, jogging across the causeway, he shouted his apologies. The man was wearing the same clothes as the day before and carried nothing but a sackcloth bag, stained and worn to a shine at its folds. At Mota’s command Baltazar gave the ex-Jesuit a mule and the party set out.
THE FIRST STAGE OF THEIR JOURNEY, from Mexico to Zacatecas, was the easiest. The road was a smooth, tended highway that ran northwest through long-settled country, passing tidy villages, each with its bell tower and public garden, and taverns with bright wooden signs. Farmers in carts trundled by, forced aside at times by guard wagons hauling ore. Outside one village an old man sold boiled eggs and cupfuls of milk, and outside another a pig drover and his animals, caught in their cloud of dust, appeared like a spirit army on the horizon.
Mota had taken the Zacatecas route dozens of times. Lulled by its familiarity and by the easy tread of his horse, he let his mind open, caught and followed every memory, every thought: the morning his mother helped him dress for an interview with the priest to see if he had a vocation, the eight long days spent tracking a smuggler in the mist-swaddled mountains south of Oaxaca. He’d become so lost in memory’s thicket that when, four days out of the city, Father Pascual began talking, Mota at first didn’t notice.
“It is not one mine but several,” Father Pascual was saying to the others, “that run along a single rich vein in a box canyon deep in the mountains.”
Mota had pressed Father Pascual for details of Tayopa ever since they set out, but the man had refused to speak. All he knew were the rumors — that it lay beyond the farthest edge of Nueva Vizcaya, that the Jesuits who’d found it had worked it in secret so as not to pay the royal fifth, that the Indian uprising that had engulfed the northern provinces two years before had supposedly begun when the Jesuits’ Yaqui slaves revolted. For years stories had circulated throughout New Spain, filigreed by each teller’s imagination. That the Jesuits were building a grand desert city reached by flying boats was one of Mota’s favorites, delivered from the tooth-scarce mouth of a coffee seller in Mérida as he trudged through the street beneath his urn.
“The country is empty and twisting,” Father Pascual continued. “You could search for a dozen years and not find the mine. As much for secrecy as for fear of getting lost, no one was allowed to leave the canyon once he entered, except two of our brethren, who took the silver — only a fraction of it, mind you — to a mission near the coast, where it was packed in shipments of pilgrims’ sandals bound for Rome.
“My third year at Tayopa I became attached to a youth of sixteen. I taught him our language, and when we were discovered we were punished. One night he and I escaped together. I planned to draw a map as we fled and sell it to the governor of Culiacán, to fund our new life. But my youth was killed by one of the Tepehuán guards who patrolled the outer paths. I had not been seen, and I ran in terror, blindly, through country I had crossed only once before. One month later the Yaquis rose and slaughtered the other Jesuits and the Tepehuáns. I hid in a mangrove swamp along the coast, getting provisions and news from a fishing camp of friendly Mayos, then made my way down to the city. Two years have passed since that Tepehuán guard took my happiness, two years during which I mourned and hid in fear of the Society, and I care for nothing now except that I get my pay and can flee this country.”
For a few moments the five rode in silence. Then El Sepo spat. “He is a bugger. He admits it.”
Mota looked at Father Pascual. He remembered the slender, dark-haired courtier’s son who moved from bed to bed during his Salamanca days, thought of the rustlings he sometimes overheard in the camps. Such pleasures occurred, but one never spoke of them. “Are you?” Mota asked.
“I am,” the ex-priest said. “And I suppose you could kill me.” Here he paused, as if granting them the opportunity. “But then you wouldn’t find the mine.”
FIVE DAYS LATER they reached the shallow valley that was Zacatecas. The town lay sprawled below, spread before them like a felled giant, dormant in the late-afternoon sun. The mines, the camps, the stamping mills — all were silent, abandoned. In the refining yards, where normally teams of men stood in the quicksilvered sludge, chanting as they turned it with shovels, weeds now grew and piles of rusting tools awaited buyers. Mota had not visited Zacatecas in some time, but he had heard of its troubles. Two years ago the Crown had called in the miners’ quicksilver debts, and immediately a third had gone bankrupt. Then four of the mines flooded, and not a month later came the worst calamity: the Santa María, the last of the rich mines, lost its vein.
Once they passed the emptied mining works they gained the town proper. Half the houses were shuttered, and those that weren’t were flung open, flashing their gutted insides like a poor man presenting his turned-out pockets to a thief. Even the beggars had gone. And yet people still lived here: the thin smell of wood fire slipped through the air, and before the tread of their horses two dogs paused in the street, whined, and trotted on.