To Burgos
XXXII
They left La Puebla de Arganzón in a grey dawn that hinted at a hot day ahead, and Darcy was stiff in a way that no single bad night could account for.
He had slept, if it could be called sleeping, folded into a chair with his coat for a blanket, having given Elizabeth the cot without asking and without being thanked.
He had done the same for more than a month’s worth of nights on this road, risen sore, and thought nothing of it.
This was not like before. This was seated in his bones, in his hips and knees and the base of the skull — an ache that did not walk off in the first mile or ease like the after effects of a night of excess.
It must be the morning cold, and the altitude, and the accumulation of years his body suddenly complained of in a way it had never done before.
She was worse.
He watched her come down to the yard and get herself onto the mule — slowly, with a care she would have scorned in anyone else, one hand going to the small of her back and then, as if she had caught herself, taking it away. She had rubbed at her temple twice before they cleared the gate.
He counted such things now. He had begun counting them somewhere on the far side of Vitoria and had not been able to stop.
It could not be… it would be too soon for her to feel the effects of pregnancy.
Was it? He thought so — it had only been a few days, but he had never seen her so altered, and the only thing that had changed in those last few days was…
He thought himself foolish for even considering that as the cause, but he was ignorant enough of such things that he could not entirely rule it out.
Her body had been hard-used since Tudela.
Travel and poor food had worn her thin, heat and worry had left her exhausted.
It would be a cruel trick of nature if she were also now nourishing another life within her.
“You slept?” he asked her as they started out.
“My eyes were closed, the same as yours. Did you sleep?”
“I was asking about you.”
She did not look at him. “Do not fuss. It does not suit you, and it wastes the morning.”
He did not bother asking anything else. He rode his mule out onto the road, the pack mule tied off to his own saddle and Elizabeth riding behind him. The road ran south and west, down and away, and the country began the long, slow business of changing under them.
They came down towards the Ebro through country that dried as it fell.
The green closed behind them mile by mile — the soft Atlantic lush of the Basque hills that he had cursed for its wet and would, he suspected, come to miss.
Ahead, the land widened and paled and hardened, the trees thinning to nothing, the sky getting larger and whiter and more indifferent.
By the time Miranda came in sight, throwing its old castle up on a hill above the river, they were in a different Spain entirely, a bleached and open one, and the wind came off the tableland ahead with nothing in its way to break it.
The Ebro River at Miranda was not the brown, idle thing he had watched drag past Tudela, nor even like the bloated Ega at Estella.
It ran fast and hard under the town, green-grey with the mountains reflected in it, and the bridge across it bore evidence of the war like everything else — one span rebuilt in raw new stone where the old had been dropped into the water by one army or another.
There was a sentry-post at the near end where a hot, weary soldier demanded their papers.
Darcy handed down the salvoconducto and the marriage cerfiticate.
Elizabeth had to answer to Senora Darcy and let the soldier look for a long time at her, longer than their papers required.
Darcy was lifting his hand to back his mule up beside hers, because the soldier’s stare was starting to look less official and more curious, and he had no intention of letting a look become a touch.
A scene at a bridge was a night in a cell, and he could not afford either.
The soldier named a toll. There was no toll; it was simply a sum the man had decided he was owed for the labour of letting them pass.
The coin went. It was always going. He had stopped, somewhere back, wincing as each one left; now it was just a steady bleed without cease.
The silver from the moneychanger's shop was more than half gone.
The money he had got for the watch had dwindled after bribing the clerk in Vitoria and “thanking” Captain Ferrers.
The silver buckles had been liquidated into a mass of copper coins, some of which had paid for feeding three mules and themselves.
The gold cross, he still had, sewn into his money belt.
He thought about the cross more than he liked.
They slept that night in a proper posada.
Darcy had his own truckle that did not collapse when he pulled it out, and which let him stretch out to his full six feet and lie flat for the first time since…
well, since… Elizabeth had a thick quilt, which did not seem sufficient, so he gave her his, and even with that, he heard the bed trembling as she shivered.
Supper had been a hearty stew, served with hot bread and decent wine, and it did Elizabeth no good at all that he could see.
She had eaten almost nothing. She hardly noticed the garlic in the soup, said the wine was no better than the wine at Vitoria, and left most of it for him.
She lay down while it was still light and did not pretend to read or to talk, even to argue with him about the bed or the road or what time they would start the next day.
That frightened him more than any complaint would have, because Elizabeth not talking was Elizabeth using her strength on something else, and he did not know what.
He lay still in the dark and listened to her breathe.
He did not like the sound of it — too quick, too shallow, with a small catch at the top of each breath.
Surely, it was the fatigue, and weeks of bad food, and the general weariness for which no one could fault her.
She was a woman, a small woman at that, who had been formerly used to the comforts of a gentle life.
She had endured everything he had on this road, and her body simply had fewer resources to spend on survival. Rest was all she needed.
His head ached. It had ached every day since the high country, a dull band above his eyes that no water cured, and no sleep, either.
They were down from the mountains now, but the plateau was still high, the air still thin and parched and weaker than anything he had ever known in England.
Their lungs were taking a daily punishing, and nothing short of pushing through to the sea would cure either of them.
The Pancorbo defile was the worst of it.
The road out of Miranda ran on across drying country and then, without much warning, the land ahead simply ended — reared up into rock on either hand and pinched the road into a stony throat between cliffs, a gorge the mountains had grudgingly allowed a road to thread, with old forts broken on the heights above where men had fought for the holding of so narrow and so necessary a passage.
In another humour, he might have thought it magnificent.
Today, he thought only that it was close, and airless, and long, and that the mule's hooves rang off the rock in a way that got into his aching head.
He looked back at Elizabeth frequently, and she had gone a colour of the road — a pale grey-gold dust, as though the country were making her its own.
It was enough that he pulled his own mules off the path, let hers pass, and then brought up the rear with the pack mule, to keep his eyes on her.
Halfway up the gorge, she swayed.
It was not much. A slow list to the left, a hand coming up to the pommel too late, and a shake of her head when she had righted herself. She overcorrected, and her shoulders began dropping to the right.
Darcy slapped his mule to come beside her, and brought a hand against her side, holding her onto the animal. “Are you ill?”
Elizabeth straightened and looked at him as if he were mad. His stomach twisted when he saw the dark circles under her eyes. Those had not been there only two hours ago.
“I was only adjusting my weight,” she protested. “This cursed saddle is harder than the cliff rock.”
Darcy took his hand away. “You are shivering.”
“I have been shivering since we came into the high country. I cannot seem to get enough air.”
He studied her, the way her shoulders hunched, the way her fists locked against the trembling of her body. He had been feeling much the same at these altitudes, but this… this was progressing from troublesome to worrisome. “Do you want to rest?”
“Yes. When we get to the village where we pass the night. This path has hardly room for one mule to pass, let alone two, and there is no place to dismount that does not risk breaking one’s ankle.”
“We have not many more miles today,” he said.
“No. They are just all straight up.”
“Indeed. But we should be in Pancorbo well before dark.”
Her lips thinned into the only sort of smile he had seen from her in days. “How comforting.”
By late afternoon, they came out of the defile into lower ground. Darcy got them lodgings at Pancorbo in a rough venta that smelled of the stable it was attached to, and he lay awake most of that night as well.
Her breathing had got worse, and twice she spoke in her sleep.
He had slept beside her for weeks and had never yet been awakened by her voice.
She was muttering something he could not understand — not to him, not to anyone.
Just random whimpers, a moan, and one deep sigh.
A little while later, she said a few words to someone named Rosa, and once, clearly, “He is trying to cheat you, Uncle. That barrel is not full.”
He chuckled faintly at that. Even in sleep, her mind was ordering things.
But then, a chill settled deep in his bones when he heard her suck air between her teeth and shudder under the blankets.
He sat up from the floorboards and touched her shoulder and then her cheek in the dark.
She was not flushed, as he had feared. Just shivering, and she groped for his hand blindly in the dark as if greedy for its warmth.
He let her drag his hand down to her chest and keep it there. She quaked deeply and hugged it to herself as she pulled in a long breath. It left her with a soft, “Ffffitz….”
He did not sleep that night. He had eased himself to a corner of the mattress, letting her hold his hand in her sleep as long as she liked, until she turned over and huddled deeper under the blankets.
He watched the grey come up in the smell of the stable and leaned his aching head against the wall behind the bed.
Two days to Burgos, perhaps. A day and a half, if the road allowed, and the mules held and Elizabeth could bear the pace. Burgos was a city. A city had physicians, and apothecaries, and beds that were not next to horses, and — God knew — priests, if it came to that.
He did not let himself finish the thought of what it might come to.