Interlude: 1536
The wind soughing through the branches of pine trees mimicked the rumble and crash of distant surf. Years had passed since Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca had seen the ocean, and it would, he believed, be a lifetime before he would breathe its salty air again. He had loved the sea until it turned on him. Even so, he found himself missing it.
Squatting out of the wind behind an outcropping of dun-colored rock, Alvar looked down the hill at the throng filling the valley. He had come to think of them as his people. Six hundred strong, they represented more than twenty different villages. They were savages whose only exposure to the true Faith was what he had been able to bring to them. Most were naked or else clad, as he was, only in the rawest of animal skins, their faces and bodies painted or tattooed or scarred or adorned with bones. But they were kind and decent people who followed Alvar and his three companions willingly, even enthusiastically.
He rested on his haunches, observing his congregation. The sun had dropped behind the hills that walled off the valley a short time earlier, and in twilight’s gloom the Indians gathered around fires. Some ate, others danced or shouted or sang. The Moor, Estevan—Alonso del Castillo’s slave—no doubt was either making love to one of the Indian girls, or was about to, or possibly had just finished. Alvar didn’t know if it was his exotic appearance, with his dark brown skin and tightly coiled black hair (but then, to the savages weren’t they all exotic, even the ones who were pale-skinned, hairy-chested, and bearded?), or his easy laughter or his facility with languages, but the girls seemed unable to resist Estevan’s charms, and he unwilling to deny himself their attentions. Alvar suspected trouble would come of it, sooner or later.
Probably sooner, because these past several days Estevan had changed his ways, paying attention to only one young lady. A remarkable beauty, to be sure, she had silky black hair draping down her back like an ebon waterfall and dark eyes that fairly glowed with an inner fire when she laughed (which, in Estevan’s presence, she did often). But she was also the daughter of a shaman and betrothed to a young warrior—a tall, muscular specimen who wielded a spear as if he had been born holding it. Alvar didn’t like the way the young man eyed Estevan, didn’t like the way Estevan made no secret of his attraction to the girl, didn’t like the way the girl responded whenever Estevan so much as glanced her way and had stopped paying the least mind to her intended.
If it came to trouble, Alvar would have to try to keep it confined to those two, Estevan and the young warrior. He had not survived shipwreck, slavery, and solitude just to die under the spears and arrows of his followers, turned against him by the actions of one of his own.
Alvar turned his gaze to the east, where the moon had just begun to rise over the hills they had crossed yesterday. Was it ungodly to think of the Indians as his tribe, his congregation? He was no priest or holy man, just the simple treasurer of the ill-fated Narváez expedition. There was no earthly reason for strangers to flock to him over anyone else.
But they had. He liked to credit the force of his own personality, but in his honest moments he knew it was because he had the power to heal, and because he treated those he met with respect and decency. Surely God had bestowed the healing abilities on him as a means of saving his life for some future task. If not for the fact that he could lay hands on the ill and the injured and restore their health, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca would have been killed long ago, in the Floridas or somewhere else along the way. Instead, he had survived, even prospered, if prosperity were counted in the number of people who called one friend or brother, or in skins, or in backloads of corn laid at one’s feet.
The storm that had lashed the ships of the Narváez expedition had occurred in October of 1528, he remembered. He had tried to keep the calendar in his mind, tried to note the changing of the seasons, in case he ever found his way back to civilization and would need to report his adventures to the Crown. It was hard to do, though. They passed through arid country, cold in winter and hot in summer, but dry more often than not, making spring and autumn hard to distinguish. And during the times he had been near-starving, naked and alone in the wilderness, or kept in the bonds of slavery, his mind had not been working as it should and the days and weeks and months had blurred into one another. He believed five years had passed, possibly more, since he had last seen any Christians other than Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and Estevan.
The miracles the good Lord worked through Alvar’s hands had terrified him, initially. On the first occasion, an Indian had been taken ill with horrible stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhea wracking him to the point that death of thirst or starvation seemed imminent. Alvar had been brought into the man’s presence by the Indian sorcerer into whose service he had been pressed. While the sorcerer blew on the sick man through a tube, chanting and clicking his tongue—all to no avail—Alvar had felt himself filled with the power of the Lord. He had tried to resist, fearing that Satan, not God, directed his hands. But he had been drawn to the patient’s side, and his hands—quite out of his control by now—pressed down onto the sick man’s stomach. Words he had never heard, much less uttered, escaped his lips, and blood flowed over his fingers even though the man’s gut had been uninjured, his skin taut. Then something emerged into Alvar’s waiting hands: a stone smaller than his fist, as smooth as a river rock, coated with blood. Reacting instinctively, Alvar hurled the stone into a nearby fire, where it sizzled like a ball of fat and vanished.
With its disappearance, the man’s health returned. Almost instantly, he sat up—his stomach still smooth, skin unbroken, although coated with the blood that had washed over Alvar’s hands—and smiled. Color flooded into his cheeks. When he spoke, a cheer went up from those gathered around. Within a few minutes, he strode around the village telling all who would listen how the slave had saved his life.
Alvar’s master had been unable to keep him, after that—and more, had immediately come to see Alvar as a peer rather than as a half-human beast. He had freed Alvar, who headed west, as he had always encouraged the others stranded in the Floridas with him to do. East would only take them to the same ocean they had come from, with Spain an impossible distance away. West and south, in Mexico, he would find Christians, he was sure. So he followed the sun and God led him to his fellows, captives of the Anagados people. He joined them, and on their second day together they managed to escape. Running for days, they finally found the Avavares, enemies of the Anagados, who happily took them in. When a fall injured one of the Indians and Alvar, again doing the Lord’s bidding, healed that man’s injury, the Indians excitedly spread the word to the peoples to their west.
In this way, the four reunited Christians chased the sunset, word of Alvar’s powers preceding them, the welcome they received growing at every stop. Villages offered everything they had to the Christians, knowing that when they brought the four travelers to the next village, they would be repaid and more. No two tribes spoke the same language, but there were similarities from one tongue to the next, so they could understand one another and translate the next village’s words.
There were moments when Alvar forgot his humility and compared himself, looking upon those who followed (and, yes, worshipped) him, as his flock and he as their Lord. At those times, God the One and Only refused to smite him, so Alvar determined that he was being saved for some other purpose in days or years yet to come. When the temptation grew too strong, Alvar had to remove himself from the others, to remind himself that it had not been so very long since he had been naked and starving, wandering mindlessly through the wastelands of the Indies. He tried to make his plans at these times, uncorrupted by adulation and unswayed by his fellow Christians.
Now, he worried about Estevan and the girl. He didn’t believe the generosity of the Indians was without bounds, although he had yet to cross them. If it came to a fight between the Moor and the Indian warrior, though—over a situation in which Estevan was clearly in the wrong—the Indians might easily rise up.
And yet, when he saw Estevan and the girl together, he recognized lust and more, and it became ever harder to imagine that the black would give her up without a struggle.
He would talk to the Moor, he decided, and to Estevan’s master, Castillo. He would make them both see what could happen if they were not careful. His mind made up—anyway, the wind sent icy fingers under his loincloth, and below warm fires and prickly pear wine beckoned—he started down the hill. He dressed as the Indians did, barefoot, an animal skin over his loins his only attempt at modesty. He carried a spear with a stone tip lashed to it, which God willing he would never have to use against a human being.
When he reached the valley, what he found in the glow of the fire outside the shelter the Indians built, every night, for him to share with his comrades, shocked him. Estevan was not making love, after all, although he was with the girl again. Instead, he had found a large chunk of white stone that looked as pure as Italian marble. The girl sat cross-legged in the dirt, naked, arms folded almost demurely over her breasts, while Estevan chipped at the stone like a sculptor, using harder rocks as hammer and chisel.
“Now you’re an artist, Estevanico?” Alvar asked him.
“Perhaps I always have been,” Estevan replied with a grin. He waved a hand at his work, nearly as large as the girl herself. “But I never had such a subject before, or such a perfect stone to carve. It’s as if she hides inside, just waiting for me to bring her out.”
“Where did you come by it?”
“Here, in the camp. As if it was biding its time here until we came.”
“And when we move on tomorrow, what then? Will you carry it on your back?”
“Señor Dorantes has already taken care of that,” Estevan answered. “He is showing some of the Indians how to make wooden wheels. There are trees here tall enough to form planks from. By midmorning at the latest, I will have a cart, and a ramp to load her onto it. Many hands make the work go fast.”
Alvar simply shrugged and went into the hut. Estevan had it all figured out, it seemed. He had an answer for everything, and he had charmed his own master into helping in his crazy scheme.
Alvar hoped it was a scheme they would all survive.