“Where the hell is Hoffmann?”
He slowed, hearing his name, and the voice of Esteban Vaca from the Corps of Engineers.
“Relax,” Coelho said. “If he’s half an hour late, he’s early; you know that. I think he makes a point of it.”
“Mother of God; I just don’t understand why you put up with it!”
“You know why I put up with it. He’s the best damned prospector I’ve ever seen; he knows more about metals than half the chemists in Brasil. He’s uncanny at ferreting out deposits ...” Coelho’s chair squeaked.
“How much of an instinct does he need to find the Los Angeles basin? I suppose only some crazy fool who talks to himself in a crowd would even want to go look for it.”
Laughter.
“You’d talk to yourself, too,” Coelho said, “if you spent most of your life in the middle of nowhere. ...”
“And besides, I know I’ll never talk behind my back.” Hoffmann grinned as he entered the room, saw Coelho’s thick neck redden with embarrassment. “So, you want me to scout the Los Angeles basin.” He straddled a chair, resting his arms on the hard back. “That’s news. I thought we didn’t have the fossil-fuel resources to mine clear up in the Northwest Territory. Or did we take over Venezuela while I was asleep?” The Los Angeles basin…He felt a sudden eagerness, the sense of freedom and fulfillment that only prospecting brought into his life.
“We didn’t; but they estimate it won’t take us much longer. If that’s so, the Corps of Engineers is thinking of reopening the Panama Canaclass="underline" If it’s feasible we’ve solved the transportation problem. And the coast’s inhabited—which gives us a local pool of gook labor, to do the dirty work in the ruins.” Vaca smiled.
“You stink, Vaca,” Hoffmann mumbled. Vaca looked up sharply.
“Come on, Hoffmann.” Coelho tapped his fountain pen wearily on the blotter. “Nobody makes you work for us. All we need from you is a report on whether the Los Angeles basin is worth our while.”
Hoffmann shrugged unapologetically, felt them assessing his rumpled civilian clothes, the battered hat jammed down over his shaggy hair, his muddy desert boots. Even Coelho, who ought to be used to it, and to him, by now. Hoffmann said absently, “I use you, you use me…”
They looked at him.
“All right, I do want the job. I’m ready whenever you are. What background stuff can you…” He watched as Coelho’s face dissolved into the milky white globe of a street lamp; got up, staring as Vaca’s face became the face of his uncle. The desk was a spreading, formless darkness, a gaping mouth to swallow him. Ragged teeth tore into his flesh as he fell through the doorway of another dream. . . .
Amanda started out of a nodding dream at the stranger’s cry. The candle before her on the bare wooden table was half burned away, like the night beyond the door. She got up from her stool, stumbling over Dog at her feet, and went to kneel again beside the pallet. She had stripped off the bloody rags of the stranger’s clothing and bathed him, picked metal from his torn flesh, bound his wounds and burns with the healing pith of aloe vera leaves broken from the serrated bush in the yard. And she had prayed, as she worked, that he would die, and God would take away the torment of his suffering from them both. . . .
But he did not die, and he lay now huddled between her blankets, shivering and sweating, his face on fire under her hand. She wiped it again with cool water, saw fresh blood on the white linen that swathed his head. He mumbled words that she almost understood, altered strangely. She whispered reassurance, tried to still his restless motion. His blistered hand closed spasmodically on her dress, jerking her down. “Mae, I’m cold…s-so cold, mae ...” She struggled as his other hand trapped her wrist, and she heard the threadbare cloth begin to tear. “... cold ...”
She went limp on the straw beside him to save her dress, shuddered as he pressed against her. “No—” She felt the fever heat even through her clothing; but there were no more blankets to keep him warm. “Angel, Son of God, forgive me…” She put her arms around him and let him find the comfort of her own warmth. He sighed, and quieted, touching her in his delirium as a child seeks its mother, as a husband seeks his wife. Amanda heard the steeple bells sound midnight in the town below, remembered them on too many nights, when she lay alone with sleepless sorrow. Slowly her rigidness softened; her hair slipped free of its cloth as she moved her head, and spread across her shoulders. Memory caressed her with a stranger’s unknowing hands, and Amanda began to weep. . . .
Diego Montoya was a merchant, dealing with the captains of the ships that sailed the long coast to the southern lands. He had no sons but only the burden of three daughters who must be dowried for marriage. But he was a wealthy man, by the standards of Sanpedro, and he had determined that his daughters would marry well…and so recover his losses in giving them away. His eldest daughter, Estella, was a beauty, and he had managed to match her to the wealthiest heir in town. And then he had begun to negotiate a match for his second daughter, awkward, reed-thin Amanda.
He had protected his daughters, like the valuable property they were, particularly keeping them from the sailors with whom he dealt and whom he knew too well. Again and again he impressed on his daughters the need for chasteness and obedience, the Prophet’s warnings about the sins against natural law that damned the souls of the footloose sailors and their women.
But Amanda had drawn water from the well in the courtyard, and the handsome, black-haired boy drank as he waited while his captain spoke with her father inside. He was different from the sailors she had seen, somehow in her heart she felt he was not like any man she had ever seen—and he looked at her over the cup’s edge in a way no man ever had, hesitantly, with pleasure. She stole glances at him, at his bare brown arms, his rough gray tunic, the laces of his sandals hugging his calves. He wore golden plugs stretching his earlobes.
“Thank you, maid.” He set down the cup, caught at her with his eyes as she began to turn away. “Are you”—he seemed to be trying to think of something to say—“are you the daughter of this house?” He looked embarrassed, as if he’d hoped it would be something more profound.
“The second daughter.” Knowing that she should not, she stayed and answered him.
“What’s your name? I’m Miguel,” he acknowledged his effrontery with a bob of his head. “I—I think you are very fair.’’
She blushed, looking down again, twisting the soft laces of her bodice. “You shouldn’t say that.”
“I know . . .”
“My—name is Amanda.”
Her father saw them together by the well as he came to the doorway and ordered her sharply into the house.
But the next afternoon she slipped away, to meet Miguel on the path that wound along the river, and every afternoon, through the week that his ship was in port. Miguel answered questions her heart had never known how to ask, that had nothing to do with the limits of the world she knew. He was eighteen, hardly older than she was, but he had left his home in the far south years before, longing to see what lay beyond the headlands of the harbor. He told her tales of the peoples of the south and their strange cities, strange customs, strange beasts. He told her of men who flew, suspended beneath great bags of air; who crossed mountains higher than the shimmering peaks she could see at the desert’s limits, to visit the southern lands. He said that they came from a land where there were wonders even he could not imagine, boasted that someday he would find a way to steal aboard one of the airships and explore all the new wonders that hid behind the mountain wall.