After a few hundred yards the Plaza de San Agustín opened before them, squared by four oak trees whose overburdened limbs knelt to the ground. Mota halted, the others pulling up behind him. The lodgings he had counted on were boarded up. As he contemplated the wide, blank wall of the convent that formed the plaza’s west side — it, at least, was in good repair — he drank from his waterskin. Then, without an exchange of words, Mota guided the others up the next street, toward the Plaza Pública, where he remembered a tavern. They were halfway there when a man in a dusty velvet coat and dirt-stained shirt shot out in front of them from the large stone house on their right. The man waved his hands for them to stop. It took Mota several moments before he recognized him as Don Ignacio Peñafiel, the town’s alcalde. Two years before he’d been fat, his lace cuffs like the traceries of powdered sugar decorating a pastry. Those lace cuffs, blackened with grime, now sagged from bony wrists.
“Don Juan,” Don Ignacio said to Mota. “I almost don’t believe my eyes. What brings you here?” The alcalde looked at the others, his jowls and neck loose with lost flesh. “You must be hungry, tired. Please, do me the honor of a visit. All your party are welcome to my home.”
As soon as Mota accepted the offer, Don Ignacio turned and whistled, and two sour-faced Tepeque servants ambled from the house and guided the horses and mules into the courtyard. The animals stabled, Don Ignacio invited the white men to his second-floor parlor — Baltazar and El Sepo, Indian and mulatto, were to stay behind with the beasts — and begged them to sit while he busied himself at a broad, creaking credenza along the back wall, unlocking one of its cabinets with a key tied around his neck. Mota looked about the room. At first glance, it seemed in order, but on closer inspection he noted pale beards of dust hanging from the walls, holes in the curtains where insects had gnawed unchecked.
A pleased sigh emerged from the credenza, and, inching back out, Don Ignacio brought forth a half-emptied bottle of Madeira. After he stood he straightened his loose trousers and coat, then poured precise, small volumes of the wine into four glasses. He handed Mota the first.
“I hope you have not come to tax us more,” Don Ignacio said.
“Don’t worry,” Mota answered. “My business is to the north.”
“Is it?” Don Ignacio asked, then moved away to hand around the other glasses.
“Far to the north,” Mota said. He sipped his Madeira. “But I confess,” he added, “I never expected to find Zacatecas in such straits.”
“Temporary, temporary,” Don Ignacio said. “The vein will be found. The mines will be drained. The Crown will show mercy. I’m sure of it.” He sat in the high-backed, spindle-legged chair he’d saved for himself, then looked at Mota, Fernando, and Father Pascual in turn. “Come now. I have heard a story. You are seeking Tayopa.”
Mota shifted in his seat, turned his glass in his fingers. “It is just that,” he said. “A story.”
Don Ignacio grinned. “I’ve heard slabs of silver were left there, sitting out, waiting to be taken. I have two daughters in the convent. They send me tearstained letters. Their habits give them rashes.
They freeze at night and the nuns take away their blankets. One slab — just one slab — would see them married off.”
Mota looked at the man. He remembered Don Ignacio’s daughters, two egg-shaped creatures stuffed into silk. The last time he had visited, they had sat at the end of the room, large-eyed and silent as they snuck strips of ham from their handkerchiefs into their lapdogs’ mouths. Then the shatter-thump of the stamping mills had resounded through the valley, reached even the alcalde’s curtained parlor, and Don Ignacio had been trying to distract him — with false protests and complaints — from the assay office accounts.
“The mine is fantasy,” Mota said, and at this Don Ignacio remained silent until, some minutes later, a bell summoned them to a dinner of meatless stew.
Later that evening, past midnight, Mota woke to a rustling. He’d slept lightly, uncomfortable in Don Ignacio’s house. Now, leaning his head up, he saw a figure crouched before his spilled packs: one of the Tepeques, turning papers over in the moonlight. Mota took his dagger from beneath his pillow and crept up to the Indian. Clapping one hand over the man’s mouth, he brought the dagger point to his throat with the other. At the touch of steel, the Tepeque stiffened in his arms. Mota thought about pulling the dagger closer, feeling it slice into flesh, letting the Tepeque’s blood stream over his fingers. He’d awoken clenched by a sorrow, and he hungered for whatever alchemy the Tepeque’s blood might work in his heart. But instead, after holding him a little longer, he dragged the Indian to the door and with a kick set him free. Then he roused the others and within fifteen minutes they were riding out of town on the northern trail.
HIS BRIEF TIME WITH MARÍA ISABEL, Mota had long decided, had simply been an aberration from his life’s regular, solitary course.
While a boy in Seville, he’d often sat in the corner of his father’s study, alone, and watched the other children in his quarter with a cold eye. They sometimes played beneath the study’s window, and after they had left, in pursuit of some other pleasure, Mota would slip into the street to pick up the pig’s bladder they had abandoned — he would blow into it, as they had, and marvel at how it stretched — or hide where the cleverest had hid during their last game. Sometimes the children found him and invited him to play. He would run with them as they made faces at the wandering Capuchin mendicant, stole a cone of sugar from the grocer’s cart, halted with a hush before a bearded, iron-chested soldier on his mount. But always he felt a shadow between himself and those who were briefly his fellows.
The shadow had returned once María Isabel was put in the ground. During the years following Cuencamé, when Mota performed his work, assaying ores and checking ledgers, he shut himself away from others, and as his story was learned the people of the camps treated him with a careful respect, believing him to be in the grip of a melancholy that in time, as his injured heart healed, would be sloughed off. But he remained unchanged, and eventually their respect turned to disdain. They said he was like a spoiled child fed only on sweets, that he let pain rot within him. When Mota overheard this he agreed: he could feel the rot just beneath his skin, viscid and black.
IN DURANGO, cattle filled the streets, lowing and raising a dust that dimmed the sky while vaqueros circled and struck them with tasseled whips, readying them for the drive to the great mining camps at Parral. Two days beyond the town they crossed mud flats and wide salt marshes, then switch-backed up a rocky gap in the Sierra San Andrés. During the uprising, Father Pascual told them, a band of Conchos had set up in the gap and waylaid refugees from the coast. After the Conchos returned to the north, he’d heard, a presidio captain’s daughter, a girl of thirteen, came out of the hills, belly round with child, tongue clipped from her mouth.
Six days later Mota and his men reached the ragged settlement that was Tamotchala, a single street of tents and half-finished adobe houses. In its fly-filled market Indians sat with vegetables and twists of rusted tin on their blankets, gathered from who knew where, while scrawny mules stood roped together, avoiding sale. It was a desperate, dreary place, but Mota, despite himself, felt a muffled fluttering in his gut. He had been to Tamotchala just once before, to inspect the nearby Ojo de Dios mine, a pit worked by a handful of creoles and half bloods living beneath stick shelters. But he’d never been beyond the town. Few had. Above Tamotchala spread the blank parchment of the viceroy’s map.