His expression doubted her, changed. “You were there—”
“Yes.” She looked down.
He took a deep breath, held it. “But—when I came down to your door, you helped me. Why? Weren’t you afraid of God’s punishment, too?”
She smiled. “There’s little more that God could do to me, or I to God. ...” She got up and moved away, gave the last of the soup to Dog where he lay under the table, her own hunger forgotten.
“Amanda?”
She straightened up, looked back at the stranger.
“When I’m well—”
“Then you must leave.” She rubbed her arms inside the loose sleeves of her dress. “Or people will call me a harlot.” And they call me too many things already.
“But what if I can’t—” He didn’t finish it.
She went back to her loom. When she looked up again, he was sleeping.
Days passed; the swollen redness slowly went out of his wounds, the sight of his blistered arm no longer turned her stomach. But still he sometimes dropped off to sleep in the middle of a sentence, to wake minutes or hours later, out of a mumbling, delirious dream; a dream that he could never remember. He pressed her angrily, almost desperately, for the details of his dreams, old ones and new, swearing at her once because she couldn’t write them down.
“Women are not taught to write,” she had snapped. “Women are taught to serve their husbands, and—and their fathers. Only men have a need to write.”
“What kind of garbage is that?” He struggled to sit up, propping his back against the cool wall. “You need to write, so you can tell me what I say! This place is the damnedest, most backward piece of real estate in the entire Northwest Territory!” He frowned, analyzing. “In what’s left of it—”
She glared at him. “Then it’s a pity you’ll have to stay here. Perhaps that’s God’s final punishment to you.” She dared many things, in her speech with this stranger, that she would never have dared with a man of her own village or one strong enough to strike her.
He looked up sullenly. “What makes you think I’ll stay in San Pedro?”
“Because your flying ship is broken. You’ll never get back to wherever you came from, across the desert and the mountain, without it.”
He was silent; she saw tension drawing the muscles of his hollowed cheek. “I see,” he said finally. “What…what happens to ‘sorcerers’ in San Pedro?”
“Anything.” She hardened her voice, and her heart. “They’re outcasts. They can pray for forgiveness, and do penance at the temple, if someone will sponsor them. But you’re an outsider. You have no family, and no money; no one will protect you. If you offend people, they will stone you. If not, they’ll ignore you; you’ll have to beg to live. Some walk out into the desert, and never come back—” The silent, burning mirror of light; the scented, fevered wind; the shimmering, unattainable peaks of Sangabriel. ... It had drawn her away, as she gathered brush, more than once; but never far enough.
The stranger sat, stricken, his uncovered eye expressionless with the confusion of his emotions. Almost defiantly he said, “What if I won’t leave here?”
“Then Dog will tear your throat out.”
He slid down the wall onto the straw, pulling the blanket up over his shoulders, and turned his back on her. That night she lay sleepless on her own new pallet of straw, hearing the hard, bitter voices of the midnight bells.
The next morning she knelt at her metate, watching the sun rise over the distant peaks as she ground the grain she had gleaned from her father’s fields. Dog lay stretched on the cool dirt, tongue lolling, looking half-dead in his eye-rolling ecstasy. She smiled, glanced up as he raised his head and barked once, inquiringly.
The stranger stood in the doorway of the cottage, wearing his torn, close-fitting pants and nothing else. The pants hung precariously around his hips; his ribs showed. He sat down abruptly against the house, sighed in satisfaction, smiled at her. “It’s a beautiful morning.”
She looked down, watching the motion of the smooth granite mano beneath her palms, made ashamed at the sight of him and by the memory of her cruelty.
But if he was angry, or afraid, he showed no sign, only stretched his scarred limbs gingerly in the soothing heat of the early sun. He watched her form the flat, gritty loaves of unleavened bread. “Can I help?”
“No,” she said, startled. “No, enjoy the sun. You—you need to go slowly, to recover your strength. Besides, this is woman’s work.” She chided, mildly.
“It doesn’t look too complicated. I expect I could learn.”
“Why should you want to?” She wondered if the blow on the head had driven him mad, as well. ‘“It’s unnatural for a man to want to do women’s work. Don’t you remember anything?”
“I don’t remember that. But then,” he shrugged, “I don’t think I was ever an Angelino, either. I only thought—maybe I could help out with some of the work around here. You never seem to rest…You’d have more time for your hobby.” His voice was oddly cajoling.
“Hobby?” She struck her flint against the bar of steel, saw sparks catch in the tinder-dry brush beneath the oven. “What hobby?”
“Your weaving.” He scratched his bandaged head, smiling cheerfully. “Mother of God, this itches.” He scratched too hard, winced.
She turned to stare at him, at the linen that bound his head, in stunned disbelief. “It’s not my hobby! It’s how I stay alive: by weaving cloth. It took me two months to finish the piece I tore into rags, to bind your wounds!”
His hand froze against his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that—people wove cloth by hand…” He looked down at his pants. “Let me make it up to you, Amanda. Let me work while you weave; it doesn’t matter if it’s women’s work. I’m just grateful to have my life.”
Smoke blew into Amanda’s eyes, brought stinging tears. She wiped them away and didn’t answer.
But she let him help her with the endless, wearying tasks that wove the pattern of her life, so that she could weave cloth, instead. At first he was too weak to do more than toss the sparse handful of grain to the sparse handful of scrawny chickens, hunt for their occasional eggs, sit on a stool in the sun tending her cooking pot. He ate ravenously, never quite seeming to realize how little there was, and she was glad that it was the autumn harvest, when the little was more than usual. And she was glad that he would soon be gone…
But as his strength returned he began to do more, though he still collapsed into dreaming trances sometimes while he worked. He mumbled to himself, too, as though he really were a little mad, as he fetched water up the long slope from the river, walked out across the brown pastures to the desert’s edge, bringing back brush and deadwood to chop up for her fire. She was afraid to send him to town, or even into her father’s fields to glean—for his own sake, or hers, she didn’t know. But, of his own accord, he began to fish from the riverbank: He gutted and scaled his glassy-eyed catches, spitted them over the fire for her dinner; and as the days passed she began to feel a trace of softness cushioning the sharp edges of her bones. She watched the stranger’s own emaciated body fill out, saw, unwillingly, that he had a strong and graceful build. She cut a slit in one of her blankets to make him a poncho; to protect him from the hot sun, to protect herself from the shameful embers the sight of him began to stir within her.
At last, as though he had postponed it as long as he dared, the stranger asked her to take him to the place where he had fallen to earth. She led him back through the rustling shadows along the palm-lined track, to the field where his machine lay in pieces in the amber sea of grain. He stopped in the road, stared, his face burning with hope ... but he only shook his head and crossed the irrigation ditch, dry now, into the field. He began to search through the grasses, forgetting her, hunting for his past as Dog hunted for squirrels.