"Good idea," Godin said. "Get X-rays, in case my field-expedient diagnosis was wrong."
"Byron, this is important," Annja said. "Is there anything else you can tell us?"
"Oh, yes," Byron said. "Just before the men burst in he said to give you a message."
" What?" Annja was gratified, if slightly, to hear Godin utter the incredulous monosyllable in unison with her.
He nodded carefully. "He said to tell what he called 'those who come after'to seek for him 'within three leagues' of the spot he was first found."
Godin stood by the door, poised to exit. The slight frown furrowing his brow indicated he was very upset. Puzzled but knowing no time remained, Annja joined him.
As he held the door for her, Annja's conscience twinged. She looked back at Byron, who now sat holding his head in his hands. He's hurt. He's innocent. Isn't my duty to look after him?
Byron looked up at her and smiled. "Don't worry, Annja," he said beatifically. "I'm not the one you're meant to look out for."
"Leagues?" Annja said.
Godin lay on his back on her motel-room bed with his shoes off and the backs of his hands over his eyes. "You're a historian," he said with unaccustomed asperity. "Surely you know what a league is."
He had experienced a savage coughing fit shortly after they came into the room. He had gone into the bathroom for quite a while. Even now he seemed to be slow recovering. She tried not to let herself feel concern as she sat at a round table by the floor-length curtains covering the window, waiting for her notebook PC to connect with the motel's broadband network.
"It's just not a term I'm used to hearing in everyday speech."
"What about this affair suggests the everyday?" Godin said.
She made a sound from the base of her throat and shook her head. Her insides seemed to writhe with frustration and urgency. They have the child! What are they doing to the poor little thing?
"Forget leagues," she muttered, typing furiously. She was barraging Google with sets of search terms, trying to track down all known Holy Child reports. "How the hell are we supposed to know where he was first found? We have dozens of encounter reports. Some of them are certainly phony. And how do we know how many sightings happened without anyone even reporting them? What if there's no way to find out the first time he was picked up? And does that mean this time around? In New Mexico? Or every Holy Child sighting clear back to Spain?"
"What if he does not mean being found in person?" the Jesuit asked.
She looked hard at him. "What do you mean?"
"Think back on the history of the sanctuary of Chimayó. Was there not some story associated with the miraculous discovery of the image on display there?"
She blinked. "I think you're right."
She started yet another Google search. The truth was, she had gotten so overloaded and jaded with tracking various images and origins of the Santo Niño, literally around the world, that she had simply glossed over the Chimayó legend.
"The quickest and easiest story to check firsthand," she said, "and the last I actually follow. I have a lot to learn about this hero business."
"Life is a process of on-the-job training," Godin said.
She was worried. His voice sounded weak. Maybe he's just showing his age.He was not a young man, not by any means, although that fact was hard to keep in mind if one spent any time in his company. His silver-gray hair, seamed face and air of worldly experience were more than counterbalanced by his vigor, physically and mentally, and a sprightly, youthful – or perhaps ageless – spirit.
And then again the events of the past few days had Annja worn to a nub, physically and emotionally. And she wasa remarkably fit young woman even before the sword had brought her capabilities whose full extent she had yet to learn.
"Here we go," she said, attending to the screen. "I could kick myself for spacing this out. Legend has it that some time in the 1800s a man was out plowing the fields near the town of Chimayó. His daughter told him she heard church bells ringing from underground. When he dug down he found a wooden statue of the Holy Child. It's the one kept in the chapel next to the sanctuary. The hole the father dug is where the holy dirt supposedly comes from."
She clicked back and forth between several other citations. "Basically what I get are all on the same theme, with slight variations."
She looked over to Godin. "Want to hear some other versions?"
"As the accounts are likely to bear only passing resemblance to any kind of historical accuracy," he said, "I think I shall pass."
Her shoulders sagged and her back rounded. "You don't think this has any significance?"
"I didn't say that. Whatever or whoever the Holy Child – ourHoly Child, as it were – may be, I doubt literal history holds much importance to him."
She rocked back in her chair and tapped her fingers on the tabletop beside her computer. "I know we're pressed for time," she said, "but would you care to elaborate on that? It seems like it ought to be significant, but I'm too fuzzed to figure out where you're going."
"Understandably, my dear." He sat up, coughed slightly into a fist, shook his head. Then, seeming to rally, he went on.
"I think we can take it for granted that our Holy Child is not literally a thirteenth-century child roaming the Earth."
"Since I seem to be stuck accepting impossibilities a lot these days," she said, "why not? Couldn't he be a ghost of the real kid who smuggled bread and water to the prisoners?"
"The shell," Godin said.
He smiled at Annja's look of puzzlement. "The golden brooch the Santo Niño wears on his cape is called a St. James shell. It was not added to portrayals of the Santo Niño until two centuries after the supposed events in Atocha."
"All right. But couldn't a ghost appear wearing it? Whatever it wanted to?" She shook her head. "For-give me for not being too up on the habits and abilities of ghosts, since I don't believe in them and all."
"You will learn," Father Godin said with a knowing smile. "In the meantime, I believe you make my point for me. Whatever this entity is, he – I prefer to call him he,rather than it,because I am a sentimental old fool – chooses to present the appearance we see."
"Okay. I'll give you that. And so – "
"He chooses, specifically, to present himself as a figure out of legend, fraught with spiritual significance. Why is that? I suspect the full truth is as unknowable as the true mind of God. But does it not suggest that our little friend is concerned more with symbology and myth than the world of the literal and material?"
"I guess," Annja said.
She turned back to her computer and brought up a Google map for Chimayó and its environs. "But what does that really do for us? A nine-mile radius around the sanctuary is a lot of terrain."
"True. And that particular region of the Rio Grande Valley north of Santa Fe happens to be full of restricted Los Alamos satellite sites, which complicates our search. My intuition tells me wherever the Santo Niño has been taken has something to do with one of those sites."
"You think this shadowy agency – or contractor – that hired your friend Mad Jack – "
"We're hardly friends," Godin said in tones of mild reproof. "Indeed, he and I have each tried to kill the other more than once. Although those were in the course of our professional lives, and so had nothing to do with friendship one way or another."