The Hacienda at Santo Niño

• Chapter 1 The River of Sorrows
• Chapter 2 Sunstone and Iron
• Chapter 3 The Governor's Ledger
• Chapter 4 Foundations of Dust
• Chapter 5 The Broken Acequia
• Chapter 6 A Muster of Ghosts
• Chapter 7 Red Clay and Cedar Smoke
• Chapter 8 Letters Without an Ocean
• Chapter 9 The Bell Tower's Shadow
• Chapter 10 The First Harvest
• Chapter 11 Parched Altars
• Chapter 12 Blood in the Furrows
• Chapter 13 Whispers in the Kiva
• Chapter 14 The Silvered Spur
• Chapter 15 Salt of the Llano
• Chapter 16 A Patriarch's Oath
• Chapter 17 The Dry Well
• Chapter 18 Night of the Red Moons
• Chapter 19 Iron Collars
• Chapter 20 Ashes on the Wind
• Chapter 21 The Council of Sand
• Chapter 22 The Mayordomo’s Vigil
• Chapter 23 The Breach at the Gate
• Chapter 24 The Silence of the Crown
• Chapter 25 Fire in the Corrales
• Chapter 26 The Dust of Santo Niño

The mud of the Rio del Norte smelled like dead weeds and rusted iron, a sour, heavy stench that clung to wool trousers long after the water had drained back toward New Spain. In the high summer of 1626, there was very little water to speak of anyway. What had been a grey, broad highway for snowmelt two months prior was now reduced to a braid of sluggish, coffee-brown trickles winding between bleached gravel bars that looked like the ribs of beached whales.

Diego de Trujillo stood on the west bank with his boots sinking to the welt in pale silt. He was twenty-eight years old, though his skin had already taken on the texture of cured goat leather around the eyes from four seasons of staring into the blinding glare of the northern plateau. As mayordomo of the Hacienda at Santo Niño, he held the honor of being accountable for everything that died between the red bluffs and the cottonwoods, which, in that dry year, included two milk cows, sixteen sheep, and an acre of sweet corn that had turned brown before its ears could form kernels larger than dried peas.

Behind him, two Tiwa boys from the nearby pueblo of San Gabriel were hauling a waterlogged cedar trunk out of the main ditch with a rawhide rope. Their backs were bare, slick with sweat and grey river clay, muscles straining against the dead weight of wood that had lodged itself across the intake sluice three nights ago. If they did not clear the timber before midday, the trickle in the acequia would back up into the alkaline flats and turn into salt froth, leaving the lower orchard as dry as a church floor.

"Pull, Manuel," Diego called out, not unkindly. He did not raise his voice to a shout; shouting in the dry air tore the throat and accomplished little that a steady pull could not. "Lift from the root end. If the horn catches on the stones again, we will be chopping it into kindling before noon."

The older boy, who had been baptized with the name of a dead saint from Extremadura and still answered to it when bread or silver was involved, gave a brief grunt. With a wet, sucking gasp, the snag broke free from the gravel, releasing a swirl of black silt that drifted downstream like ink in tallow. A sluggish pulse of water slid into the mouth of the ditch, gurgling over the sun-baked mud. Diego watched it go. The water was warm enough to boil an egg in, and there was not nearly enough of it to reach the peach saplings at the far wall, but it was something. In the Kingdom of New Mexico, a man learned to count three inches of muddy seepage as an act of divine mercy.

He wiped his palms on his buff-leather coat, a heavy, stiff garment that smelled perpetually of old grease and vinegar, the standard defense against both Apache cane arrows and the biting gnats of the bosque. The coat had belonged to his uncle, who had brought it north with Don Juan de Oñate twenty-eight years earlier, back when every gentleman in the column believed they were riding toward seven cities roofed with hammered gold. Instead, they had found three dozen mud-brick towns, an ocean of sagebrush, and winters cold enough to split the barrels of their matchlocks.

The silver was north, they had said. Or it was west, across the great gorge where the river vanished into red rock. Or it was east, in the grass country where the cows grew humps and the savages lived in tents of hide. Diego had never seen a grain of it. The only metal that mattered at Santo Niño was the iron on the plows, and every scrap of that had to be hauled fifteen hundred miles from Mexico City on two-wheeled ox carts that took eighteen months to make the journey, provided the waterholes had not turned to poison along the Jornada del Muerto.

Diego climbed the terrace toward the house. The Hacienda at Santo Niño was not a castle, though the late Don Hernán had called it one in his letters to the viceroy. It was a sprawling, thick-walled fortress of sun-dried adobe, built around two enclosed courtyards where the smell of horse manure fought an endless, drawn-out battle with the smoke of pinon logs. The outer walls were eight feet tall and pierced with narrow loop-holes every ten paces. From a distance, rising out of the grey-green bench above the river, it looked less like a home than a brown boulder that had been squared off with an adze.

In the inner courtyard, under the shade of a willow ramada that had dropped half its leaves from the heat, Doña Catalina sat with her sewing basket. She was sixty, but she carried herself with the terrifying, stiff-necked dignity of an Old Castilian who had not forgiven the wilderness for failing to provide her with silk damask and fresh lemons. Her husband, Don Hernán de la Cruz, had been dead five years, buried beneath the hard dirt floor of the church at San Gabriel, but his boots still stood greased and upright beside the hearth in the sala, as if he might walk through the cedar gate at any moment to demand an accounting of the sheep.

"The water is moving, Doña Catalina," Diego said, taking off his broad-brimmed felt hat. His hair, dark and greased with bear fat against the lice, clung to his forehead.

The old woman did not look up from the square of coarse linen she was hemming. Her fingers were swollen at the knuckles, grey with the lime dust that seemed to sift through every shuttered window in the house.

"The water is always moving, Diego," she said, her voice dry as dried husks scraping in the breeze. "The question is whether it reaches the beans before the sun bakes them into pebbles. The cook says we have half a sack of last year’s meal left. The flour from Santa Fe did not come."

"The Governor’s wagon broke an axle at the sand hills," Diego replied, leaning against the rough upright of the ramada. He was thirsty, but he knew better than to ask for water until the midday meal was served; water carried from the river had to sit in the large clay tinajas for two days until the red silt dropped to the bottom, and the fresh well inside the yard had turned sulfurous in May. "Bernal sent word by an Indian boy. He will be three days late. Maybe four."

"Bernal is a fool who buys mules from his cousins and wonders why they go lame on the trail," Doña Catalina murmured. She pulled a thread tight with a sharp little jerk of her wrist. "Your father would have had that wagon over the pass before the feast of Saint John. He did not wait for the Governor's leave to grease an axle."

Diego said nothing to that. His father had died of the quinsy in the winter of 1618, cursing the cold and the priests with his final breath, leaving Diego nothing but three horses with bad hocks, a debt of forty pesos to the Franciscan procurator, and the title of mayordomo over an estate that produced more sand than silver. It was useless to argue with the old woman about the dead. To hear her tell it, the men who had crossed the desert in '98 were ten cubits high and could split a pine tree with a pocketknife, while the current generation did nothing but lose sheep and complain about the gnats.

Yet, Diego remembered Don Hernán. He remembered the old man in the high summer of 1604, during the second year of the great hunger, when the soldiers had taken the corn from the pueblos at the point of the sword.

That was the summer the Rio del Norte had first earned its secret name among the people of the valley: the River of Sorrows. The water had failed then, too. Don Hernán had ridden out on his grey stallion, an animal with blood on its bit and ribs like barrels, accompanied by six men with matchlocks and slow-matches smoking in their hands. They had crossed the river where the ford was shallow, splashing through the dead reeds toward the mud houses of the Tiwa.

Diego had been a child of six, riding behind his father on an old sorrel mare, his small legs bruised by the stirrup leathers. He had watched Don Hernán sit his horse in the middle of the village plaza while the friar, a thin man whose habit was grey with grease around the collar, read aloud from a parchment that neither the Indians nor Diego could understand. The paper spoke of kings across the sea and the bishop of Rome, but what it meant was that two hundred baskets of maize had to be loaded into the rawhide bags on the pack mules, or the men with the smoking ropes would blow the granary doors off their pivots.

Don Hernán had not shouted then, either. He had sat his horse with one gloved hand on the pommel of his saddle, his face like a piece of salted beef, watching the women of the pueblo carry out the red and blue ears of corn with their heads down and their blankets pulled over their mouths. A young man, scarcely older than Diego was now, had stepped out from the dark doorway of an estufa—the underground chambers the friars called dens of the devil—holding a short bow made of horn.

He had not notched an arrow. He had only stood there, his chest painted with black soot, looking at the grey horse and the iron bit that tore its lips.

Don Hernán had merely nodded. Diego’s father had raised his harquebus, the match hissed as it bit the pan, and the roar had echoed off the mesa like summer thunder. The smell of black powder, sulfurous and thick, had rolled through the village, mixing with the smell of parched squash blossoms and roasted meal. The young man had fallen sideways into the dirt, his leg kicking once against an earthen pot, shattering it into red shards.

"Take the large baskets," Don Hernán had said, his voice flat, unaffected by the noise or the smoke. "The small ones are mostly chaff. We need grain that will keep until the spring."

They had ridden back across the river with the mules groaning under the weight of the bags, the hooves of the horses clicking against the dry cobblestones. The water had been so low that the river did not even wet the horses’ bellies. On the far bank, three Indian women had followed them for half a league, not weeping aloud, but making a low, dry whistling sound between their teeth that sounded like the wind through cedar limbs.

"You are dreaming, Diego," Doña Catalina said now, her voice cutting through the heat of the courtyard like a dull knife.

Diego blinked. The glare from the whitewashed wall of the chapel opposite was dazzling, hurting the back of his head. The boy Manuel was standing by the well with a wooden bucket, his hair dripping with brown river water he had used to cool his neck.

"I was thinking of the wagons," Diego lied. "If the flour is late, we will have to slaughter another steer. The salt meat from the autumn is nearly gone, and what is left is grey with brine rot."

"Then kill the steer with the crooked horn," she said without hesitation. "He breaks the hurdles in the corral anyway. And tell the cook to save the tallow. Father Esteban says the altar candles at San Gabriel are down to their wicks, and he cannot say a proper mass without light, even if the sun is high enough to blind an owl."

"The Father Esteban should look to his own goats if he wants candles," Diego said, though he knew he would kill the steer anyway. "He has eight head at the mission that eat the bark off the cottonwoods and do nothing for their keep."

"The Church does not grease axles, Diego. It saves your soul, which is considerably more stained than your coat." Doña Catalina set her linen down and looked at him for the first time. Her eyes were small and dark, like two raisins dropped in lard, but they were not dim. "Do you think they will come back this year?"

Diego did not need to ask who she meant. The word Apache was seldom spoken inside the hacienda walls after noon; the heathen had a way of appearing out of the shimmering heat waves of the sand hills whenever their name was uttered three times in succession.

"They have no horses," Diego said. "The raid at Taos left them with six mares, and they ate four of them before they reached the river. They are hungry, too, Doña Catalina. The buffalo have not moved south this summer. The hunters from Picuris say the plains are as empty as a copper kettle."

"They do not need horses to crawl over an adobe wall while you are snoring," she said. "Your father slept with a pistol under his pillow. Even when the fever had him by the throat, he had his fingers on the frizzen."

"My father died with his boots off," Diego said, turning toward the gate. "And the pistol was empty because he had traded his last half-pound of powder to the sergeant at Santa Fe for six flasks of grape brandy from El Paso."

He left her there under the willow branches, not waiting for the inevitable lecture on filial piety. The heat had reached its zenith, that dead hour between noon and three when the air seemed to stop moving altogether, pinned down against the dirt by the weight of the sky.

He walked out through the zaguán, the heavy double gates of rough-hewn pine that were studded with iron spikes against axes. The wood was split along the grain by thirty years of sun, and the iron was orange with rust, but the timber was four inches thick and the bar was an oak baulk that took two men to lift. Outside, the valley lay stretched out like an old hidesheet laid out to dry.

To the east, the Sangre de Cristo range stood blue and sharp against the pale horizon, their peaks bare of snow now except for three thin streaks of white in the high cirques that looked like chalk marks on a slate. To the west, the Jemez bluffs were red and flat-topped, ancient and indifferent, casting no shade down upon the sage-covered flats that sloped toward the river.

Diego climbed the small dirt rampart that commanded the corral wall. A single sentinel sat there under a piece of cowhide stretched over four willow poles: an old genízaro named Bartolo, whose ears had been cropped twenty years ago in Parral for some forgotten theft of harness leather. He was half-asleep, an ancient arquebus resting across his bare knees, its walnut stock mended with wet sinew that had shrunk hard and yellow in the dry air.

"Anything from the south?" Diego asked.

Bartolo did not jump. He spat a thin stream of tobacco juice between his naked toes into the red dust below. "A crow," he said. "Two sheep from the lower flock that are limping. And the friar’s boy from San Gabriel. He went down the ditch with a net to catch suckers."

"Did he catch any?"

"Mud," the old man said. "The fish are all belly-up in the shallows. The water is too hot for them. They rot before they can grow scales."

Diego squinted downstream. Three miles away, where the river narrowed between two dark spurs of basalt, a thin smudge of grey smoke rose into the white sky. It was too straight and thin to be a camp fire; it was the signal smoke from the high mesa above the junction, where the Indians kept their lookouts.

"They are talking to the river people," Bartolo murmured, not looking at the smoke. "They have been puffing that smoke since the third watch. One long, two short. It means the friar has gone to Santa Fe to complain about the corn."

"How do you know that?"

Bartolo gave a dry, toothless wheeze that served him for a laugh. "Because I have ears, patrón, even if the Governor’s hangman took the rims off them. The people at San Gabriel knew the friar was going before he had his mule saddled. They know how many beans are in your storehouse. They know your buff coat has a torn gusset under the left arm."

Diego touched the leather beneath his arm; the seam had indeed parted three days ago when he was hauling the cedar log. He took his hand away quickly, annoyed that the old man had seen it.

"Tell the boys to bring the sheep into the inner ditch before the sun hits the red rock," Diego said. "If the water stays low, the coyotes will cross the gravel bars without wetting their tails. We lost three lambs last week to the ones with the mange."

"It is not coyotes that will eat those lambs," Bartolo muttered, picking up his piece of horn and a scraper to clear the crust from his touch-hole. "A hungry Christian eats mutton; a hungry heathen eats whatever he can drive into the brush."

Diego did not answer. He stepped down from the rampart, his spurs clinking against the hard caliche of the path. The silence of the afternoon was enormous, broken only by the rhythmic, dry cicadas that seemed to live in the very dust beneath his feet, rattling their wings in a mechanical frenzy that made the temples throb.

In the small smithy next to the stables, the forge was cold. There had been no charcoal since the wood-cutters were chased out of the cedar hills two weeks back by four men on foot who had shot two arrows into their cart-ox and vanished into the arroyos. The anvil, an eight-pound block of iron brought up from Zacatecas on an ass's pack-saddle, sat on its cottonwood stump like an altar to an abandoned god. A half-finished spade blade lay across it, red with new rust, its edge jagged where the smith had run out of fuel before he could draw the metal thin.

Everything was waiting. The whole kingdom was waiting—for the rain that did not fall, for the supply train that was three months overdue from the south, for the Governor to send the twenty soldiers he had promised for the frontier garrison, soldiers who were probably sitting in the cantina at Santa Fe playing cards with greasy pasteboards and drinking bad maize beer.

And Madrid was further away than heaven. A letter sent from this valley had to travel six hundred leagues by mule to the coast, three months in the hold of a galleon if the English privateers did not burn it off Havana, and another two months on the road from Seville to the Escorial. By the time some clerk with ink-stained cuffs read that the hacienda at Santo Niño was out of seed corn and iron shoes, the men who had written the words would be skeletons beneath the adobe floor, their names recorded only in the baptismal books that the mice were slowly eating in the vestry at San Gabriel.

Diego walked down to the small private chapel that Don Hernán had built into the western corner of the compound. The door was made of split cedar, held together with forged nails whose heads were shaped like four-petaled flowers. Inside, it was ten degrees cooler than the court, the air smelling of old candle tallow, dry earth, and the faint, bitter scent of the dried wild lavender the Indian girls scattered on the floor to keep down the fleas.

The altar was a slab of pine covered with a cloth of coarse Mexican cotton, yellowed around the fringe. Above it hung an image of the Christ Child—the Santo Niño—painted on a flat board of dried cottonwood by some soldier who had more piety than draftsmanship. The Child had the face of a middle-aged dwarf with huge, mournful black eyes and two round red circles painted on his cheeks like spots of blood. He held an iron globe in one hand and three silver-plated nails in the other, gifts from Don Hernán after his first expedition to the plains had failed to find the city of the Gran Quivira.

Diego did not kneel. He had a cramp in his left thigh from wading in the river mud, and besides, he had always felt that Don Hernán’s chapel was more of a guardhouse than a house of prayer.

Instead, he looked at the floor in front of the altar. A flat limestone slab, brought from the canyon with great labor on a stone-boat, marked the resting place of the founder. There was no name carved upon it—there were no stonecutters in the kingdom who could carve letters, only men who could rough out building blocks with a sledge—but someone had scratched a crude cross into the limestone with a cold chisel, and beside it, the brand that Don Hernán had burned into the flanks of four thousand cattle: a circle with two horns and a cross through the middle.

"We are down to eighteen bushels of meal, Don Hernán," Diego said softly to the stone. "And the river is dry enough to walk across at the narrows."

The stone made no answer. From the ceiling beams, where the swallows had built their mud nests in the corners, a single dry feather drifted down, turning over and over in the thin shaft of yellow sunlight that pierced the clerestory, until it settled quietly upon the cross, grey and motionless in the dust.

In the fourth month of 1599, when the cottonwood leaves were still curled like the ears of newborn mice, Don Hernán de la Cruz had driven three iron wedges into the basalt bench overlooking the river and sworn that God had made the ground for cattle.

He was forty-four years old then, with teeth as sound as walnuts and a beard that still had more black pepper than salt in its curls. Behind him on the trail had trailed forty wagons, their iron tires shrieking against granite axles, four hundred head of gaunt Andalusian cattle whose hipbones threatened to cut through their hide, and twenty-two men-at-arms who had spent the better part of a year learning that gold did not grow on juniper bushes. They had marched out of Compostela with silk ribbons on their lances and five priests who sang hymns whenever an ox died of snakebite. By the time they reached the northern narrows, the ribbons had been shredded to tie splints on broken gunstocks, and the priests smelled entirely of parched lard and bad water.

Don Hernán had possessed an astrolabe made of brass, a heavy round instrument engraved with the signs of the zodiac, and an uncle who sat on the Council of the Indies. The astrolabe had fallen into a river crossing near the Conchos and was now presumably being used as a fishhook straightener by the Chichimecas, but the uncle remained an indomitable fact in Madrid. That uncle had secured for him a grant written upon heavy parchment that granted Hernán all lands from the eastern ridge of the blue mountains to the red cliffs where the eagles nested, to have and to hold under the fifth part due to the King. The King, of course, was Philip, sitting in his drafty palace of dark granite half a world away, entirely unaware that the red cliffs were inhabited by six hundred souls who spoke a language like the clicking of dry beans and had never heard of Extremadura.

"Here," Don Hernán had said to his lieutenant, a young Basque named Elorriaga whose nose had been frozen half off during the snows of the pass. "The soil has lime in it. Where the scrub oak grows that thick, the dirt is deep enough for rye."

"The water is down in the ditch, señor," Elorriaga had pointed out, leaning over his horse's neck to spit out a mouthful of dust. "A cow cannot climb eighty feet of rock every time she wants to wet her muzzle."

"Then we will bring the ditch to the cow," the Don replied. "The King did not send us north to drink goat milk from bowls like monks. He sent us to plant iron."

To prove the matter, he had dismounted and taken from his saddlebag a sunstone—a piece of yellow spar he had bought from an apothecary in Zacatecas who swore it would draw gold from the earth the way a lodestone drew needles. He held the crystal up to the hard, cold noon sun of the plateau. It cast a greasy, yellow spot onto the pale caliche. Where the beam fell, Don Hernán struck the ground with the pommel of his dagger until the crust cracked, revealing the red clay underneath. It was the same clay the natives used to make their cookpots, tough and greasy to the touch, smelling faintly of sulfur and dried weeds.

"Build the storehouse here," he told the men who had gathered in a sullen circle around his horse. "Twelve paces by forty. Stone at the bottom, adobe on top. If the roof burns, the grain stays whole. And bring the chains from the third cart."

The chains were made of Bilbao iron, three links to the pound, brought north to secure the pack mules when they took fright at rattlesnakes. Before the sun had set behind the western mesa, however, they were wrapped around the ankles of eleven men who had been dragged out of the small village across the gravel bar. They were short, broad-shouldered men with hair cut square across their foreheads like horse manes, and they did not scream when the cold iron bit into their skin. They only sat on the stones and looked at the white men’s boots with a profound, terrifying lack of curiosity.

Don Hernán had believed in order. A gentleman who did not keep his ledgers with clean ink was no better than an illiterate muleteer, and so he carried a portable desk of walnut bound with straps of untanned calfskin. Every evening, by the light of a tallow dip stuck into a hollow turnip, he wrote down the disbursements of the day in a hand that looked like rows of little iron spikes.

Item: Two fanegas of maize taken for the use of the horses. Item: One iron spade broken against the ditch rock. Item: A Christian burial for the soldier Pedro Ramos, who fell into the arroyo while drunk on mescal and broke his neck against an ash root. Item: Six yards of coarse linen given to the Indian captain to show the King's favor.

The Indian captain had not wanted the linen. He had left it on the willow fence where the sheep had chewed the hem into fringe before the night was out. What he had wanted was for the horses to be moved out of the lower bend where the wild beans grew, but Don Hernán could not understand the clicks and gutturals of the old man’s speech, and the friar, who claimed to understand the languages of the heathen by the grace of the Holy Ghost, was too busy constructing a brush altar for the morning mass to trouble himself with pasture rights.

"They will learn," Don Hernán told his wife when she finally arrived two years later in the great baggage train of 1601. Doña Catalina had been twenty-five then, with white skin that looked as though it would blister if exposed to the light through an oiled parchment window, and three walnut chests filled with ecclesiastical lace that smelled of lavender and Madrid damp. She had stepped out of the heavy wooden coach into eight inches of red dust, looked at the mud-brick walls that rose like an outcrop of dried dung against the sagebrush, and said nothing for three full days.

"They are natural men," Don Hernán told her, sitting on a three-legged stool while an Indian boy washed his feet in a brass basin. "Like the ancient Lusitanians before the Romans gave them laws and wine. You cannot give them sheep without an iron fence, Catalina. If you do not watch them, they eat the ewes and leave the rams to starve."

"They have eyes like sheep themselves," she had remarked on the fourth day, her first spoken words in the province. She was watching three girls from the river village who were grinding parched corn between two flat stones under the portal. "They do not look at you when you pass. They look at the hem of your gown to see if the wool is greasy."

"Let them look," Don Hernán said. "They will see nothing that does not belong to me."

He was not an idle tyrant; he worked harder than any three of his peons, rising before the morning star had dipped behind the western peaks and staying in the saddle until the saddlecloth was stiff with sweat like dried horn. He had surveyed every foot of the great ditch himself, carrying a pine board with a groove cut along its edge where a round lead ball rolled to show the fall of the water. Where the rock was too hard for the picks, he had wood hauled from three leagues away to build fires against the stone, then dashed buckets of cold river brine over the hot face until the granite cracked with the sound of cannon shot.

Two men had been blinded by the flying shards, and one had his arm crushed beneath a sliding boulder that took six oxen to shift. Don Hernán had given each of them a silver real and a promise that their names would be remembered in the chapel prayers every Sunday until their debts were paid. The stone stayed where it had fallen, forming the eastern buttress of the intake gate, and upon it he had scratched with his cold chisel the date and the three letters that marked all his tools: H. C. X.

The work had taken four summers. By the fifth, the water ran.

It did not run cleanly; it was thick, turbid stuff, carrying the red soil of the northern canyons so that it looked like blood pulsing through an artery of dried mud. But it turned the flats between the house and the cottonwoods green with the small, bright spikes of winter wheat. When the first green ears showed their beards in June, Don Hernán had ridden his grey horse down between the furrows, reached down from the stirrup to pluck a head, and rubbed it between his palms until the white milk of the grain stained his fingers.

"You see?" he said to Diego’s father, who was riding a half-starved roan behind him, carrying the spare matchlock. "The governor said this land was good for nothing but lizards and salt grass. The governor is an advocate who never smelled anything stronger than ink in his mother’s parlor. When we have fifty fanegas of this in the bin, we will buy twenty mares from Nueva Vizcaya. Real mares, not these mountain goats with broom tails."

"The water is low in the upper channel, Don Hernán," Diego’s father had ventured. He was a quiet man from Ciudad Real who had come north because he had killed his cousin’s pig in an argument over a hedge and had spent ten years regretting the impulse. "The people at the pueblo say the snow was light in the high places this winter. If the river drops another foot, the mouth of the acequia will be six inches above the gravel."

"Then we will lower the gate," Don Hernán had said, not turning his head. "And if the river drops further, we will build a wing dam out of juniper brush and river mud all the way to the other bank. The river does not belong to the pueblo, Trujillo. The water belongs to the man who has the sense to lead it where it can do work."

He had not looked at the hills then. A man with three hundred head of branded calves does not need to look at the hills; he looks at the grass, the salt blocks, and the condition of the iron tires on the supply carts. If the wild people of the north were moving through the piñon forests, they were only doing what they had done since the time of the Moors, drifting like the smoke of burning weeds, leaving behind nothing but the gnawed bones of deer and an occasional horse track that vanished in the gravel.

Yet the iron had to come from somewhere, and that was the thorn that festered in the Don’s side every month of the year. There was no iron in New Mexico. There was stone enough to build ten cathedrals, and wood enough to keep the hearths of Toledo burning for a century, but every nail, every horse nail, every hinge and sickle had to be bought in the south with good silver and carried across the six hundred leagues of the desert trail on the backs of mules that were constantly dying of the murrain.

By 1612, a single iron shoe for a mule was worth two hides and three fanegas of wheat. A broken spade was not thrown away; it was taken to the charcoal fire, hammered flat, welded to a scrap of old scythe, and drawn out into an adze or an axe-eye. Don Hernán kept the scrap iron in a small cedar chest with three locks under his own bed. He had the keys tied to his belt by a strip of rawhide, next to his rosary and his seal.

Once every season, he would unlock that chest while Diego—then a boy who could scarcely chin the edge of the table—stood on his tiptoes to watch. Inside, nested in dried sheep wool to keep out the damp, lay the wealth of the hacienda: five worn plowshares, forty pounds of iron strap salvaged from a burned cart, three dozen horse nails packed in tallow, and a heavy Spanish iron stirrup that had been dropped in the sand by some soldier during the retreat from the northern mesa fourteen years before.

"Look at that, boy," Don Hernán would say, holding up a nail by its square head. His fingers were stiff with the gout by then, knotted like the roots of the salt cedar, but he held the iron with the tenderness of a priest lifting the monstrance. "Madrid thinks the silver is what holds this kingdom together. The friars think it is the water from the font. But it is this. If you drop this in the trail and leave it for the horses to tread into the mud, you have given away three sheep. Remember that when your father starts talking about buying wine from the wagon-master. Wine makes a man piss against the wall and forget his name; iron stays in the ground long after his skin has turned to dust."

He had made Diego count them. Every nail, every hook, every scrap of strap that was wider than two fingers. If a nail was missing from the count, the herdsmen went without their tobacco for a week, and Diego spent the afternoon on his knees in the dust behind the forge, sifting the dirt through an old hair sieve to find the bit of grey metal that had fallen into the sweepings.

"The old man was mad about iron," Diego muttered to himself now, standing in the middle of the empty forge yard in the summer of 1626.

The sun had shifted slightly toward the west, turning the red rock of the bluffs into a deep, rust-colored copper that seemed to radiate heat like a furnace door. The cicadas were louder now, a great, dry sawing that filled the whole basin between the river and the sky.

Diego picked up the half-finished spade from the anvil. It was light—too light. The smith, an old Tlascalan named Mateo who had come north with the second wagon train and could hardly lift a five-pound hammer anymore, had been drawing the iron too thin to make it cover the wood of the blade. It would split the first time it struck a river boulder in the intake ditch. If it split, there was no more iron to weld to the nose; the scrap chest under the floorboards in the sala was nearly as empty as the flour bins.

Across the compound, the kitchen door creaked open. An old Indian woman named Magdalena, whose ears had been pierced with bits of turquoise before the friars had cut them out with sheep shears, came out carrying an earthen bowl covered with a clean rag. She walked with the shuffling, wide-legged gait of women who had spent their childhood carrying water jars on their heads up the stone paths of the cliffs.

"The Doña says you are to come and eat," she said in her flat, toneless Spanish, not looking at Diego's face. "The stew is made of the goat that died by the sheepfold. She says if you wait until the bell, the flies will have the meat."

"Did she take the salt out of the crock?" Diego asked, setting the iron blade back on the cottonwood stump.

"Two spoons," the woman said. "No more. She says the salt wagon will not come until the feast of Saint Michael, and the bacon in the cellar is sweating yellow."

Diego wiped his brow with the greasy sleeve of his buff coat and followed her across the hard-packed yard. The heat was a physical weight, like a sodden wool blanket pressed against the face. In the shade of the north wall, where the adobe had not seen the sun since dawn, four skinny hounds lay stretched out on their sides as if they were dead, their ribcages rising and falling in quick, shallow pants that did not even stir the dust beneath their noses.

The sala was long, low-ceilinged, and dark. The only light came through two narrow windows high up under the vigas, covered with sheets of scraped sheep-parchment that had been oiled with pig fat to make them translucent. Everything inside was brown or grey: the heavy pine table that Don Hernán had hacked out of three whole logs with a broadaxe, the four high-backed chairs with rawhide seats that had sagged into deep hollows from thirty years of heavy Spanish rumps, and the two paintings on the far wall that depicted the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence and the Surrender of Granada, both of them so darkened by cedar smoke and flyspecks that Saint Lawrence appeared to be roasting on a bed of dry sheep manure and the King of Granada looked like an old muleteer presenting a saddle to the Queen.

Doña Catalina was already seated at the head of the table. She did not take off her black head-cloth, even in the house; she wore it pinned under her chin with a bent brass needle, her pale, sour face framed by the dark wool like a dried pear in an iron hoop.

"Sit," she said, without looking up from the bowl before her. "The priest is not coming. He sent the boy to say his leg is bad again. The leg is always bad when the mutton is tough, but he was agile enough to ride down to San Ildefonso on Tuesday to see about the tithe-corn."

Diego sat in the chair opposite the empty boots of Don Hernán. They were huge boots, made of triple-thickness cowhide that had turned nearly black from decades of neat's-foot oil, their wide tops flopped over like the ears of an elephant. They were stuffed with dry straw to keep their shape, standing against the whitewashed wall with an aggressive, immovable permanence that made the rest of the room feel like a temporary encampment.

"We will kill the steer tomorrow morning," Diego said, dipping an iron spoon into the grey stew. The broth tasted mostly of wild onions and the sulfurous well water, with the distinct, musk-heavy taint of old buck goat that had run too long on the dry benches. "If we do it before the sun comes up, the meat will have two hours to cool before the flies find the carcass. Manuel can take four quarters down to the river to hang in the cottonwoods where there is a draft."

"The priest will want the tongue," the old woman said, chewing slowly with her side teeth. "He says the tongue is the right of the Church because it was given to praise the Creator."

"The priest can have the tripe," Diego replied. "And he can come and scrape it himself. Manuel has to work on the ditch until the water reaches the lower ditch-gate. If the corn does not get three inches before Saturday, the tassels will drop off and we will be eating wild grass seeds like the heathens."

Doña Catalina stopped her spoon halfway to her mouth. Her hand, dark with liver spots and pale with flour dust, shook with a fine, rhythmic tremor that she could not entirely suppress.

"My husband," she said, her voice dropping into that rhythmic, singsong cadence she used whenever she spoke of the early years, "never gave the tripe to a priest. When Father Martínez came with the column in '98, Don Hernán had two yearlings roasted whole in the courtyard and gave the father the choice of the sirloin. We had silver plates then. Real plates, from the mine at San Luis, with the de la Cruz arms beaten into the rim. Twelve of them."

"They are in the Governor's chest at Santa Fe, Doña Catalina," Diego said wearily. He had heard the inventory of the silver plates at least once a month since his sixteenth year. "Your husband gave them to Governor Peralta to settle the fine for the four horses that were taken from the royal corral during the muster."

"Peralta was an Andalusian horse-thief," she spat, her black eyes flashing with sudden, sharp malice. "His grandfather was a tailor who converted to keep his skin whole during the Inquisition. He did not know a silver plate from a tin pan. He melted them down to make buttons for his coat, the animal. He had eight daughters and not one of them had a dowry that would buy a sick mule, so he wore the silver on his sleeves to make the merchants think he had estates in Guadalajara."

Diego did not answer. He was hungry, and the goat stew, despite its smell, was hot. He broke a piece of the grey corn cake that sat on the wooden trencher between them. It was coarse, full of grit from the grinding stone, and tasted of wood ashes.

From the courtyard outside came the sound of a horse’s shod hoof striking a stone. It was a single, heavy click, followed by the dry rattle of a bit and the distinctive, low grunt of an animal that had come a long way through the heat with a heavy load.

Diego stopped his spoon.

"Is that Bernal?" Doña Catalina asked, her hand freezing over her bowl.

"Bernal has three mules and a donkey," Diego said, rising from his chair so quickly that his scabbard struck the edge of the heavy table, making the pewter spoons rattle. "Mules do not step like that. A mule drags his toes in the sand."

He walked to the doorway, ducking his head under the low cedar lintel.

In the middle of the courtyard, standing in the full white glare of the noon sun, was a single horseman. The horse was a bay gelding, its coat darkened to the color of wet liver with sweat, its head hanging so low that the iron bit nearly touched the white dust of the yard. On its flank was a brand that Diego had not seen in seven years: the triple cross of the Presidio of San Mateo, three hundred leagues to the south across the Jornada.

The rider was not a soldier. He was a small, dried-up man with skin the color of an old boot and hair that had been cropped short around the ears with sheep shears. He wore a doublet of buckskin that had turned greasy and black around the collar, and his legs were wrapped in strips of coarse grey wool held together with leather thongs. Across the pommel of his saddle lay a leather dispatch cylinder, sealed at both ends with red wax that had begun to run and smear in the dry heat, sticking to the horse's mane like clotted blood.

The man looked at Diego with eyes that were red-rimmed and squinted from staring across fifty leagues of salt flats. He did not get down from the horse; he seemed to lack the strength to swing his leg over the high wooden cantle.

"Is this the house of Don Hernán de la Cruz?" the rider asked. His voice was like two gravel stones rubbing together in a bucket.

"He is dead," Diego said, stepping down from the portal into the heat. "Five years dead. I am the mayordomo. Who sent you?"

The man looked at the dispatch cylinder on his pommel, then reached out with a hand that was grey with dust and peeled it away from the horse’s hair with a wet, tearing sound.

"The Viceroy," the man said. "The new one. The Marquis of Cerralvo."

He did not offer the cylinder. He simply let go of it, and it fell into the dust at Diego’s feet, raising a small puff of white powder that drifted away on the noon wind toward the chapel wall.

"He wants the sheep," the rider croaked. He reached down to touch his horse’s neck, his fingers sinking into the lathered hair. "The Crown needs eight hundred head from the northern encomiendas for the supply column at the pass. The King’s ships have not come to Vera Cruz, and the soldiers in the south have not had lard since the Epiphany."

From the dark doorway of the sala, the voice of Doña Catalina came out, dry and sharp as a cricket in the wall:

"Tell him the sheep are dead," she called out, though she had not yet seen the rider’s face. "Tell him the river took them. Diego, pick up that paper before the dogs piss on it."

Diego looked down at the red wax on the leather cylinder. The seal was impressed with the royal arms—the castles and the lions, tiny and intricate, pressed into the Spanish wax by some secretary who had never seen an adobe wall or felt the sting of alkali dust in his teeth. A single red ant was crawling across the third lion’s head, wandering through the curls of the crown, searching for something sweet in the dry resin.

Diego did not pick it up. He looked past the rider, out through the open zaguán toward the blue line of the mountains where the snow was almost gone, leaving only three thin white marks that looked like the scars of an old lash across the sky.

"Get down from the horse, uncle," Diego said to the messenger. "The water is salty, but the boy can draw a bucket from the bottom of the well before the heat turns it sour. And your horse has a loose shoe on the near hind. If you ride him back to the river like that, you will be carrying the saddle on your own back before you reach the sand hills."