"Crawford—"
There was a plea in her voice. She sat quiescent, waiting. His lips flattened against his teeth. He moved slowly to the pinto, standing there, staring at the sweaty saddle. The smell of it grew in his nostrils. He was filled with the impulse to turn and run. His body twitched with it.
"Crawford—"
He put his foot in the stirrup and stepped aboard.
Silver Persimmons, Turtle Sink, Rio Diablo. They were names on the chart. They were spots in the brasada. They were names in his head and their reality blended with black letters on faded parchment. He lost all sense of time. His only consciousness was of movement. No telling how long it took them from Haunted Ruins to Silver Persimmons. The weird brush floated past in a sea of mingled pain and trembling and sweating. The stark arms of chaparral supplicated the night on every side. The cenizo's ashen hue had turned a sick lavender from recent rain, and it reeled biliously into vision and out again. Then Chapotes Platas were gleaming like newly minted coin beneath the risen moon. The woman talked sometimes, watching Crawford, in a low, insistent way.
"My mother was the curandera of the village. You have no idea how many plants those herb-women can make medicine from. On Saturday we would go to the river a mile away and gather herbs. I used to enjoy that. It was as far away from home as I got. The rest was mostly work. Nothing very nice to remember. Choking to death in the fumes of the herbs my mother had cooking constantly in the big brass kettle in our jacal. Rubbing my eyes all day in the smoke. She was stone blind from that. Grinding corn on the metate. I must have spent half my waking hours with that metate. Do you blame me for marrying Capitán Mendoza when he asked? I didn't love him. He was brutal and ugly. But he was stationed in Mexico City. I was fourteen at the time—"
Turtle Sink ceased to be inked words on yellowed paper and rose abruptly from the shadowed depths of the brush—a stony water hole with sand white as bleached bones covering its bottom and the scarred, mottled shell of a huge turtle barely visible in the black shadow beneath one end. They were beyond that when the sound of his breathing slid momentarily across the uppermost reaches of his consciousness. It was not as labored, or as harsh. Then it was her voice, floating in again.
"After Mendoza died, riding with Diaz, I got a job entertaining in a cafe near Collegio Militar. It was there I first met Huerta. He taught me to speak English, gave me my first taste of what money can do. Tarant had known Huerta before, and when Rockland sent him down to look into the Delcazar papers, Tarant contacted Huerta to help him. Huerta was there when Tarant came across the portion of the derrotero Delcazar's uncle had possessed. That's how Huerta knew Rockland would have it. When Huerta told me about it, I showed him the portion of the map I had—"
Now it was his legs. First it had been his breath, now it was his legs. He realized they were hanging free against the stirrup leathers. He was sitting a horse without tension for the first time since Africano had rolled him. He turned toward Merida. Maybe it was in his face.
"Your legs don't hurt now, do they?"