Amanda found herself dreaming with him; dreaming that she would be with him forever, share in his adventure, have his love, and his children…For she had always been afraid of the things that passed between a man and wife, things a maiden hardly dared to whisper about. But lying on the warm riverbank, he had unfastened her veil to kiss her lips, freed her hair from its covering, sighing in wonder and calling it flame. And his fingers had touched her breast through the cloth of her gown, and started another flame, inside her. That night she had gone to the temple, heavy with guilt, and prayed to God for guidance. But the next afternoon, she let him touch her again…and only the impossibly knotted cord that pinioned her cotton drawers kept her a maiden, at last.
And then, suddenly, the week they had shared was gone, and they clung together in the shadowed heat of the olive grove. “How can I leave without you, Amanda? Come with me—” His fingers lifted tendrils of her hair.
“Stay here, with me, Miguel! Let me speak to Father, he’ll let us marry—”
“I can’t. I can’t stay in one place, there are too many places I still haven’t seen. Come away with me, let me share them with you…You want to see them, too; I see them in your eyes! I’ll buy you strings of opals, to match the fire in your hair…sky-blue butterfly wings that shine with their own light…We’ll cross the mountain wall in a balloon. Come away with me, Amanda!” He caught her hands, kissed her hungrily, drawing her toward the road.
The temple bells began to sound for evening prayer in the village. She pulled free, tears welling in her eyes. “I can’t— the Prophet forbids it!” Afraid of God’s wrath, and her father’s, afraid of the shame it would bring on her family, and to her…afraid that none of those things mattered enough to keep her from his arms, she ran, sobbing, back through the trees.
“Amanda ... I love you! I’ll come back; wait for me! Please wait for me-—’’
Amanda woke up, aching with stiffness and remembered grief, to the sound of the morning bells. She gasped as she focused on the stranger’s naked side lying against her own; stilled her urge to leap away, as memory stilled her terror. His head rested on her shoulder, pillowed on her spreading hair; the stains on the bandage were dark now, but his face still burned with fever. He lay quietly, his ribs barely rising, falling. With infinite care she drew her numbed arm from beneath him, covered him again and stood up. Dog scratched at the door; she let him out into the dawn, let in the pungent, sage-scented air to cleanse the smell of sickness. She noticed a line of dark stains across the hard dirt floor, tracing the stranger’s path from door to bed. Oh God, why must you send me this new trial?
The stranger lived, on the edge of death, through the long day; and that night again she held him in her arms, startled from her sleep by the ghosts of his haunted fever dreams. Names of people, cities and objects, words in a meaningless tongue, filled her own unquiet rest with strange, unnatural dreams. And yet, time and again he spoke the names of places she knew: Losangeles, Palos Verdes, her own Sanpedro.
The dreams clung to him like death’s shroud while two days passed, and three, and four. Amanda carried water from the river, heated it, washed bandages and dressed his wounds. She bathed his parched body, forced liquids down his throat. He was damned, but in his willfulness and sinful pride he struggled for his own destiny, defying the powers of nature and God. She shared in his defiance of fate, afraid to stop and question why.
At last a night came when he slept in her arms breathing quietly and deeply, unharrowed by dreams; and, touching his face in the morning, she knew that he had won. She cried again, as she had cried on the first night.
Late in the afternoon the stranger woke: Amanda looked up from her loom to find him staring silently at her face. She pulled up her veil self-consciously, wondered how long she had been sitting revealed to him, and went to kneel down at his side. He tried to speak, a raw noise caught in his throat; she gave him water and he drank, gratefully.
“Where…where am I?” The words were thick, like his swollen tongue.
“You are in my house.” Habitually she answered what a man asked, and no more.
His hand moved under the blanket, discovering his nakedness. He looked back at her, confused. “Have I been…were we—? I mean, are you a—” She flushed, stiffening upright. “I’m sorry ... I can’t seem to remember, my head—” He lifted his hand with an effort; his fingers grew rigid as they brushed the thick, swathing bandages. He stared at his hand, also bandaged. “Meu Deus ... an accident? Was I in an accident?” He looked away, taking in the small, windowless room, the streaming dusty light that struck her loom from the open door. “Where is this place?”
“This is the village of Sanpedro.” She hesitated. “You fell from the sky, into my father’s field. God…God struck you down. You nearly died.”
“I did?” He sighed suddenly, closing the eye not covered by bandage. “I can believe it.” He was quiet for a long time; she thought he had fallen asleep. She started to get up; his eye opened. “Wait! Wait…don’t go—”
She kneeled down again, feeling the tension in his voice.
“Who are you?”
“Amanda. Amanda Montoya.”
“Who am I?”
She blinked, shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either ...” His hand pressed his head again, the words faded. “Christ ... I don’t remember anything. Not anything—” He broke off. “Except…except ... the field: people, standing in a road, looking at me ... but they wouldn’t help me. They saw me, they knew, but they wouldn’t help me.” He trembled. “God…they wouldn’t help me…” And he slept.
“I know the name San Pedro…” he said stubbornly between sips of broth as she fed him. She had killed a chicken while he slept, and made soup to give him strength. “‘I saw it, somewhere ... the Los Angeles basin? Does that mean anything?” He looked up at her, hopeful, swallowed another mouthful of soup. His eye was as gray as sorrow in the candlelight, and fear lurked in it.
“Yes. It’s the desert, all around us, to the north, to the mountains— We only go into it for metals.”
“Metals!” He pushed up onto his elbows, spilling soup, sank back with a groan. “Metals—” His hand reached for something, found it gone. She wiped soup from his half-grown beard and his chest. “Damn it,” he whispered, “it will come back. It will. When I’m stronger I’ll go to the—the place where it happened, and I’ll remember.”
“Yes,” Amanda said softly, thinking he expected an answer. “Yes, I’m sure you will.”
The gray eye glanced at her, surprised; she realized that he had not been speaking to her. She offered him more soup; he shook his head carefully. “Why do you cover your face— Amanda? You didn’t before ... or your hair; I remember, your hair is red.”
“You weren’t supposed to see it!” She wondered, mortified, what else he remembered. “The prophet Angel teaches us that it isn’t modest for a woman to show herself to a man who is not her husband.”
He smiled stiffly with one side of his mouth. “I’m sleeping in your bed, but you won’t let me look at your face…Who is this ‘Angel’?”
She felt irritation prick her at the tone of his voice. “No wonder you practice sorcery, if you’ve never received his Word. Angel is the son of God, who led our people here from the south. He revealed that the only true and righteous life is one within the pattern of nature, the life all creatures were meant to live. To do sorcery, to try to put yourself in the place of God, from false pride, is to bring down ruin—as you were shown. That’s why my father and the other men wouldn’t help you. It was God’s punishment.”