Chapter VI
VI
Elías
Elías loathed Nueva Espana.
Sun beat down on his back as he walked with mules laden with mercury and items from the Monterrubio household into the mountains.
It was near noon; he sweat from the effort.
Perspiration chilled on his skin, sending gooseflesh racing over his arms and back as a stiff, dry wind snaked through the peaks and down to the mule train.
He ran hot and ripped off the wool cloak called a sarape that one of the workers had offered him. Then he was freezing, down to the bone.
It was like having a fever. He would know.
He had sweat one out in the days since the ill-fated wedding ball where the bride had fainted and lit the fire of plague at the bejeweled heels of all of Zacatecas.
In the ostentatious Monterrubio mansion dripping with all the New World signifiers of new money—plush Eastern rugs, silver candelabras, porcelain imported from the Philippines—he dripped with sweat all night, ripping blankets off the bed and then reaching over to drag them up off the floor half an hour later, hands shaking violently.
The servants of the house cut him as wide a berth as they could. Matlazahuatl , they hissed, which Elías quickly learned meant a certain kind of fatal pestilence. Carlos and Heraclio seemed to scarcely care if he lived or died.
A thump at his door before dawn was all the courtesy he received from Carlos, who he had hoped might be an ally, if not a friend. Not a chance, not anymore. His cousin’s cautious how are you s and polite conversation had evaporated with a hiss after the wedding reception.
“You coming or staying here to rot?” Carlos had shouted, pounding on the door once more.
When Elías crawled into the courtyard, ready to depart to Mina San Gabriel with the rest of the household, Carlos gave him a cold once-over, from sweat-tangled hair to shaking legs.
“If it were matlazahuatl, you’d be dead already.
” Was that a shadow of disappointment in his voice?
“It was probably just the water. Everyone gets sick from the water when they first come here.” He mounted a fine-boned white mare.
“The Díaz carriage will be following us to Casa Calavera. Try not to shit yourself in front of them.”
Elías hated Nueva Espana.
As he walked alongside the mules, the Monterrubios’ only other azoguero—Nicandro Romero Gallástegui, a burly, short, wheat-colored man whose pockmarks strung his mouth at a leering angle and whose hands shook from years of working with mercury—shouted out the names of wilting cacti and dry wild herbs to Elías as they walked.
He remembered none of them. He tried to keep his eyes on the peaks of the mountains, one hand on the shoulder of the mule that bore his books for balance.
If he ignored the vegetation, the rocky outcrops and angle of the mountains could be Andalucía.
If he forced out echoes of the voices of the dead, there was enough peace to be found in that fantasy to make the time pass quickly, if not pleasantly.
Then Romero tried to make conversation, and it all shattered.
“Senor Carlos says you were a forzado convict in the Almadén mines,” he said. “What were you in for?” When Elías did not reply, he pressed on: “Senor Carlos also said you’re dark because your mother was a Moor. So is your casta espanol or morisco?”
Elías clicked his tongue and forced the mule to walk faster over a rocky patch of the road, extending his own stride to leave Romero slightly behind.
Senor Carlos could go lay his golden ass in a grave and rot there, as far as Elías was concerned.
The sharp clop of horses’ hooves on stone echoed up the hill from behind him; the mules instinctively moved slightly off the road into loose rocks.
He followed. And as he glanced over his shoulder at the passing carriage, he regretted not keeping his eye on the horizon and his mind firmly elsewhere.
The woman from the wedding reception gazed out the window. In moments, she was gone, and Elías coughed on the gray, dry dust kicked up in the carriage’s wake.
Just his luck that the only person he had actually enjoyed speaking to since arriving in Nueva Espana would be none other than Alba Díaz de Bolanos, Carlos’s fiancée.
Just his luck that she would look like that: refined, striking, her lines as graceful as a confident hand on parchment.
She had a way of looking past someone with those ink-spill eyes that made him think she walked another plane of existence, as if all the silver and opulence of Zacatecas were so beneath her as to be barely worth her notice.
Just his luck that the sensation of dancing with her had branded itself on his daydreams. She was like a palmful of mercury: achingly lustrous in light or gloom, slipping cool through his fingers. Gone before he could catch his fist closed.
She was none of his business.
Good luck to her with Carlos Monterrubio. With Heraclio, with the debt Victoriano had amassed, with the mine—all of it. She needed it.
And all he needed to do was earn enough silver to book his passage on the next fleet leaving Acapulco.
The sooner they got to the hacienda de minas, the sooner he could begin. The sooner he could put the whole godforsaken land of Nueva Espana at his back and leave.
—
The hacienda de minas was a white tooth in a shadowed maw between peaks.
“It’s called Casa Calavera,” Romero said as they left the mules laden with china and food at the back kitchens of the hacienda de minas. “That’s where you’ll be staying.”
Elías snorted. He pulled his heavily laden mule onward with Romero, leaving Skull House in their wake. “How perfectly ominous.”
This earned him a glimmer of amusement from Romero. His hair and skin were dry as wheat chaff, but something about him made Elías think of oiliness. He was of two minds about the azoguero. Allies were scarce in this cursed place, yes, but what kind of ally was Romero?
“Old Izquierdo named it, not your uncle,” Romero said. “Apparently, calavera was the closest approximation for whatever gibberish the workers called it.” He cast a wary look at the house over his shoulder. “Get Don Heraclio to rename it, won’t you?”
As if Heraclio would listen to anything that came out of Elías’s mouth.
“Izquierdo?” he asked. It was not a name he had heard before.
“The bastard we all used to work for before your old man suggested that Heraclio buy the mine,” Romero said. He stopped abruptly; the mule he led had tucked her ears flat against her skull. She would walk not a step farther. “Come on, you piece of shit,” Romero grumbled, yanking the lead.
The mule dug her heels in. Elías could hardly blame her. Romero had pointed out the mouth of the mine in the mountainside ahead of them. In the gloom, it yawned like a bad dream in the back of one’s mind, luring the sleeper to fall off the path.
It felt as if it were watching them.
“It was Old Izquierdo’s son who died in the cave-in,” Romero said. “That’s why Victoriano was able to get such a good price. Here, let me show you his workshop. You can put your books there, I suppose.”
Elías stumbled. It was not the mule he led, or the uneven ground. Hearing his father’s name from the azoguero’s mouth was like stepping on a rug already in motion from a prankster’s hands.
This was where his father had lived. These were the people with whom he had worked. This was his life.
This.
The gray cacti, the gray dust. The skull house. The ramshackle workshop that Romero pointed him toward before seizing a whip and resuming his battle with the mule who would not walk farther.
An anemic clutch of goats braying in the distance. The ragged peaks. The mouth of the mine watching over everything like the eye of an enormous corpse.
This was what Victoriano had preferred to ever coming home.
This was what he preferred to Elías.
Heat welled like molten metal up his sternum as he walked the path to the workshop. Rage? Tears? Either could come, for all he cared. He was alone as he approached a small, soot-stained stucco building, probably no more than one room; a roof in need of repairs.
Two figures appeared around the corner of the building and hovered near the door.
Not alone, after all.
He swallowed hard, squinting through the shadows.
They were women. One older, dressed in local garb that contrasted sharply with the younger’s upper-class dress.
Upon drawing closer, it became clear that these clothes were threadbare; for all their fine lines and lace, the skirt and sleeves were too short for the girl who inhabited them.
“Elías Monterrubio?” she asked.
Elías stopped in surprise. His heart followed half a beat behind. “Can I help you?”
The girl met Elías’s eyes, forward and blunt, even as the older woman turned her face away with something that could have been a sharp sob, or a hissing intake of breath.
It was a sob, dry and raspy, for another followed in its wake.
The girl stepped forward, hands curling into fists.
“We wanted to meet you,” she said. “Papá always said you would come one day, and here you are.”
A chill swept over Elías, an echo of the fever of the last week. Even his bones felt hollow.
“I don’t follow,” he said, though with each passing second, as the girl looked him up and down with an expression that struck him as eerily familiar, he feared that he did.
“This is my mother, Carolina Hernández,” she said, gesturing at the sobbing woman. “And I am María Victoriana.”
He was falling, as he had fallen through the floor of Abuelo Arcadio’s parlor. His only son . It had had weight to it. Had Abuelo Arcadio known? He must have known.
Elías could hear the old man laughing from here, here in this cursed, hateful land, as the girl finished declaring her name like the terms of war:
“María Victoriana Monterrubio.”