Suddenly the mastiff Bocanegra scrambled to his feet, displaying short, thick claws. His collar and breastplate shone in the feeble light of the tent; the dog slipped beneath the canvas and, barking, ran off into the night. But El Señor did not want to think of anything now, not even the reason for his mastiff’s strange behavior; easier to close his eyes behind the handkerchief-bandaged hand, easier to sit alone, his thoughts subdued; better to drift off into a milky vacuum than dwell on memory … surprise … premonition. He murmured a prayer in which he asked God whether it was sufficient, if God and his vassal El Señor found there was any pleasure in the hunting and killing of a hart, that the vassal, even though he not feel it, reject such pleasure for the greater glory of his Creator.
“It is he,” says the man, sure he recognizes certain identifying marks on the body of the shipwrecked youth lying below on the beach.
He and his men spur their horses forward and plunge down the dunes, raising blinding clouds of black dust. Their horses whinny as they near the prostrate body; the horsemen dismount, walk forward, and encircle the body, their footsteps resounding like whiplashes as they stride through pools of tepid water. The horses snort nervously at the unfamiliar scent, and seem to sense intuitively the fear behind the armor of that deep, strange sleep. The slow, silent sea, warm and muddied from the storm, laps at the shore.
The leader kneels beside the body, runs his fingers over the blood-red cross; then, grasping the boy beneath the arms, rolls him over. The youth’s lips part; half his face is blackened by sand. The man with the long, plaited moustache gestures, and his men lift the youth to his feet; the bottle drops from his grasp, and returns to the waves. The youth is dragged to one of the horses and thrown across its back like a prize of the hunt. His arms are lashed to the saddle trappings and his lolling head presses against the animal’s sweating flank. The chief issues a command and the company rides up the dunes and gains the flat rocky plateau extending toward the distant mountains.
Then through the dense fog they hear a sound like the rowels of spurs or metal striking against rock: following the sound appears a litter of burnished ebony; four Negroes strain beneath its weight as they advance toward the party of men leading a horse with a body across it.
A bell tinkles inside the litter and the blacks stop. Again the bell tinkles. The porters, with a concerted groan, hoist the palanquin with powerful arms and deposit it gently upon the desert sand. Exhausted by their efforts and the humid heat following the storm, the four naked men fall to the ground and rub their streaming torsos and thighs.
“Up, pigs!” shouts the man with the plaited moustache; as the horseman raises his whip to lash the porters, he communicates his fury to his mount; the horse rears and pitches in a nervous circle around the litter. The four Negroes, whimpering, get to their feet; their yellow eyes are filled with glassy anger, until a woman’s voice speaks out from behind the closed draperies of the litter: “Leave them alone, Guzmán. It has been a difficult journey.”
The horseman, still circling, still flogging the blacks, shouts above his horse’s snorting: “It is not well for La Señora to go out accompanied only by these brutes. The times are too dangerous.”
A gauntleted hand appears between the curtains. “If the times were better, I would not need the protection of my men. I will never trust yours, Guzmán.”
And she draws the curtains.
The shipwrecked youth believed he had been embalmed by the sea; blood pounded at his temples; he squinted through half-opened eyes; the sight of this fog-shrouded desert was perhaps not too different from what he would have encountered on the floor of an ocean of fire, for as he fell from the ship’s forecastle to the sea, he couldn’t see the waves he was falling toward, only the blazing corposant above him: the St. Elmo’s fire at the top of the mainmast; and when he was tossed unconscious onto the beach, he was wrapped in dense fog. But now, as he opened his eyes, the curtains of the litter also opened; instead of sea or desert or fire or fog, he met someone’s gaze.
“Is it he?” the woman asked, looking at the youth, who stared in turn at black eyes sunk in high cheekbones, brilliant eyes contrasting with a face of silvery paleness; she looked at him, not realizing that from behind a web of sandy eyelashes he was watching her.
“Let me see his face,” the woman said.
The youth saw clearly now, saw the sure, arrogant movements of this woman swathed in black reclining in her litter, looking very like the nervous but motionless bird reposing on her gauntleted wrist. The man with the plaited moustache grasped the youth’s hair and jerked his face upward for the woman to see. The youth’s lusterless eyes caught the impatient movement of her head, framed by the high white wings of a wimpled headdress.
She raised her arm, covered in a full, puffed sleeve; as she spoke, her pointing finger ordered her Negroes: “Take him.”
The sound of panting echoes through the desert, an infinite breathiness that seems to come from the fog itself; then a swift, trembling body, a flash of a huge white dog that growls and throws itself against the leader’s horse; for a moment the chief is stunned; the dog leaps at his legs, drives the spikes of his collar into the belly of the man’s rearing, whinnying horse; the leader pulls his dagger from his waistband, tugs at the reins to control his mount, and aims a vicious, slashing blow at the dog’s head; the dog’s collar scratches the man’s fist, and the dog whines and falls to the ground, his sad eyes staring into the eyes of the forgotten voyager.
At nightfall an exhausted El Señor entered his tent, slumped into his chair, and drew a coverlet around his shoulders. The rain had stopped, and for several hours the servants had been out looking for Bocanegra, but instead of following the trail of the fugitive dog, the hounds stupidly circled the tent, as if the scent of their master’s dog were inseparable from that of the master. Finally El Señor, heavy of heart, resigned himself to the loss of his mastiff — and felt even more chilled.