THE BOOK OF RAVEN

chapter three

Gabriela de Rokha descended to my cell in the cold dawn with a bowl of porridge and a bitter but warming cup of what she told me was chocolatl. Robed in that dim light, with her river of black hair descending around her oval face, she seemed to me a kind of goddess, and I was pathetically grateful for her murmured reassurances as she gently buckled a stout leather collar around my neck, clipped a brass chain to it, and led me upstairs, shuffling along in the half-gait my ankle shackles allowed, and out to our wagon, where the black and gray horses were breathing fog. After I had mounted the wagon-bench, Gabriela ran my chains through eyebolts, and draped the rough warmth of a blanket over my shoulder. All these preparations were witnessed by the hirelings who stood idly smoking, but the longku did not descend to the yard to see us off.

“Why am I your prisoner?” I asked her, as calmly as I could manage, after the roofs of Kitkitdizze were lost in the misty trees behind us.

“Oh, do not say prisoner, Lew Wain,” sighed Gabriela. “That word sounds so harsh. Think of it as disguising yourself in an adventure we are undertaking together. You do not know the rules, the code, in this California. Travelling as a hireling or paisanu, you might easily give offense by failing to answer courteously in an idiom you do not know. You would be called out to fight with puñales. As a sclavu you are under my protection and you will answer to no one but me.”

Gabriela and I continued from Kitkitdizze two days by wagon, descending foothill roads in a through flowery hills where horses ran and cattle grazed along with deer and tule elk. By day she kept me shackled on the wagon and by night I was locked in sclavu-cells in the inns. Gabriela always reassured me of my eventual freedom, and she explained the status and occupation of the folks we passed along the road. “That’s a hellboy there in the plug hat, he works on the railroad.”

“They have railroads here?”

“Oh yes. But his wife is Washo from across the Gran Sierra, you can tell by the pattern of her cap. Now those fellows in the gray robes walking with staves are Pochteca, if they saw something untoward, such as a sclavu travelling unshackled, they would be sure to note it down and find out why.”

Outside Kotomyan, a larger town on the river Americanu, three crosses stood stark against the evening sky. Ravens pecked at the bodies hung there. I did not want to look, but I could not tear my eyes away as we passed. “Who were those guys, anyway? What did they do?”

“Insurrectionists,” Gabriela told me. “Rebelling against the administration of Imperial Mexico. No, look, that one was bald, she was a sclavu like you.” We left the horses at a stables in Kotomyan where she had rented them some days before in the company of the late Steve Reese, and Gabriela bought our passage on a steam-train. The narrow-gauge tracks followed more or less along the route of interstate eighty which I had driven the other way some days ago and in another world. The train huffed and whistled through orchards and along levees between rice-paddies, under the whirling and dipping wingbeats of incredible multitudes of birds, toward the river-port city of Wishuna, on roughly the site of Sacramento, in the gathering summer heat of the great central valley of California.

In Wishuna Gabriela pointed out haughty men who bore the white sash of longku-rank, and elegant cazingas who displayed much of their wealth in the form of golden beads and olivella necklaces. Self-respecting merchants wore lace-trimmed jackets, while everyday paisanus and hirelings went about in grubby jerkins, and there were head-shaved bare-back sclavus of both genders and all ages. Gabriela distinguished native Turtles of various ranks and many nations: Miwok and Modoc, Patwin and Yokuts, Pomo and Maidu. I despaired of keeping them straight. “Now who’s that?” I asked as a couple stalked proudly by, each trailing long plumes of smoke, her long hair done up in a turban, his braided under a black floppy felt hat with golden hoops of earrings.

“Don’t point,” Gabriela chided me. “Remember, you’re a lowly sclavu. Any ciudadanu who takes offense may run you through and recompense me ten golden pesus when all is done. Those are Seadogs from Puertu Buenu.” There were priestesses of the Goddess in scarlet wimples, goldsmiths in leather aprons, and printers with ink under their nails. Vaquerus wore cowhide chaps, putas left one thigh bare in invitation, and consejales carried a rod of office. Hard-faced Mexican soldiers patrolled in pairs, carrying flintlock pistols which Gabriela called harkebuses. Those in silver armor with a feather crest were Cuauhtli, or Eagles, and those who sported leopard-spotted capes flung back over their black greaves were Ocelotli, or Jaguars.

Schooled by Gabriela, I did my best to act the part of the faithful sclavu when we were in public, kneeling at her feet in our compartment on the steam-train and bearing her burdens to our caravansary. She did not send me to a sclavu-cell in the Bull and Bear in Wishuna, a couple of cobbled blocks above the lazy flow of the River Tehama, but kept me in her chamber, where she kindly removed my shackles and spoke to me gently in English. She sent out for a hearty meal of venison, acorn-bread and greens, with a sweet tart beer she said was manzanita, and when night fell she welcomed me into her bed and allowed me to become her lover.
I was so grateful for Gabriela’s affection. I had a terrible thirst for being loved. Maya’s leaving had opened such a dark wound. I could not care if she was some years older, nor did it matter at the moment where she was taking me. I buried my face in her shawl, drinking her scent. “This wool is so soft,” I whispered.

“That is alpaca,” she told me, her gentle fingers exploring my nakedness. “Me alegra que te gustase. It comes from Tahuintsuyu, what you call Peru, the Inca’s realm. I have had it since I was a young woman. I am glad we did not get Steve’s blood on it.”

“Won’t people wonder,” I asked, “if you might be unduly intimate with this slave of yours?”

“Uy, Lew,” Gabriela laughed gently, pulling me inside her, “if I had a golden peso for every high-born cazinga who diddles herself in private with a well-hung sclavu, I’d be a rich woman. Ah, yes, slowly.”

“You are a rich woman, I believe,” I told her when we were done.

“Over here I have chosen to meet the modest needs of my mission, yes.” Gabriela blew out the candle with a final kiss, and soon she was snoring; but I lay long awake. The spell of her affection was abruptly broken; I was terribly alone, in a strange bed with an old woman, lost in a beautiful and brutal world whose rules I did not know. She had left me unchained; if I ever was to escape, now was my chance.

I had observed as Gabriela had put both our pistolas, as well as the implement she called the timedoor, in a wooden box she locked with a long key which she kept hanging about her neck, and which also served to lock and unlock my shackles. I reached gently for the key, and woke her just enough to find myself caught in the web of a honeyed kiss that seemed to go on for a hundred years. “You want more?” I asked.

“Más y más,” Gabriela insisted sleepily. “Y cada vez más. My sweet Lew Wain.” But at length she slept smiling, with one hand still clutching her key. Drained and cold, I sat up alone. Well, now or never, key or no key. I pulled on my pantaloons.
Gabriela half-stirred. “Gotta pee,” I explained. She murmured something about a chamber pot and drifted down into slumber. I closed the door as gently as I could behind me and tiptoed down the stone stairs of the Bear and Bull.

In late May, which over here you would call Fawn Moon, the nights in the great valley of California are not so very cold, but all I had to protect me over my pantaloons was a rough blanket. I shivered as I picked my way barefoot down the cobblestones toward the river Tehama. The quarter moon was setting behind a row of trees, and there were dim streetlights at intervals, whose glass bulbs sheltered wicks which burned what I later learned was whale oil. Half a block from the river I heard hoofbeats behind me. I flattened myself into a doorway. A pair of Jaguars on black horses rode slowly by, yawning.

The river, I thought, there would be boats. Did boats have motors in this world? Or I could row. In any case the current would carry me downstream, toward the Bay, toward the ocean, toward San Francisco. Eventually, I thought, I might drift somehow beyond the scope of this altered reality and find myself safe again in my own world, threatened by nothing worse than suicide, poverty and nuclear destruction.

I stumbled along the wharves, avoiding the glow of little fires where watchmen, called serenus over here, warmed their hands. I did not dare climb aboard any of the larger craft, with their rigging swaying gently at their berths. Finally I saw a fat little rowboat. How different could such things be, over on this side? Shivering, I stepped aboard, hoping not to make any noise, but I tripped on a bailing-can unseen in the dimness and went sprawling, banging my nose painfully on the gunwale.

A cry rose from the nearest watchfire, and soon black forms came running along the dock. Blood spurting from my face, I scrabbled for the oars. The painter was still tied! Panting, I struggled to loose it. As footsteps thundered darkly toward me, the rope came free and I gripped the oars with with mucky hands and pulled, pulled for my life.

Black figures silhouetted against the night shouted incomprehensible warnings as I pulled away from the mooring into the dark river. Luckily for me, I suppose, my pursuers were only humble serenus, not to be trusted with an harkebus; but soon enough they would raise the alarm in Wishuna and I had to imagine that someone in a boat with weapons might well come after me.
I rowed out into the dark Tehama until the fires and oil-lamps along the margin of the wharf receded to not much brighter than the myriad stars above me and below me in the river. When the current began to pull the city past me I relaxed at the oars, sweaty and shivering. My cloaking blanket was soaked, as were my pantaloons. The moon was going down in the trees on the far side of the river. I could hear frogs bellowing for mates, the low hoo-hoo of a hunting owl.

Now I heard the chugga-chugga of a steam-engine starting up along the distant docks, and saw a light moving. Whatever craft might come in my pursuit could certainly outrun me, and I would be a sitting duck out here on the breast of the river. I had to shelter somehow under those far trees. Again I pulled and pulled, my breath coming harder now and the sweat of action no longer compensating for the chill of the night.

The black trees grew slowly against the starry sky. The huff of the steam engine behind me was louder now, and its lights circled north of me on the dark Tehama. My oars splashing and my breath heaving, I labored in under dark banks clustered with roots and branches, looking for some sheltered cove to hide my boat.

My pursuers were not stupid; they had to know an escaping man would make for this western shore. They were still some ways to my north, but they were searching close in toward the banks. I waited till my oar touched gravel bottom, then I scrambled overboard into waist-deep water, shipped the oars, gave the boat a final riverward shove, and waded toward the dark woods.

It was very dark under the trees, and I clambered over stones and roots, making my way more by touch than sight. As the patrol-boat huffed by, peering in by torchlight toward the shore, I pulled my soaking blanket round me and kept very still, like one more tree-root, and smiled in triumph as they passed. But neither I nor they had gone very far before with a cry they spied my empty rowboat drifting.
Now I did catch panic and ran blindly, away from the river, tripping and falling, my blanket ripped away by an overhanging branch. I don’t know how far I ran until my sharpening night vision revealed some deeper darkness underneath a boulder.

I scurried to shelter in that small crevice. Curled fetal, the harsh roof of the boulder scraped my back. There was a musty smell, as if some beast had used this refuge before me. All I could hope was that it would hide me for the night. I hugged myself, a poor forked animal, shivering uncontrollably, longing for the sun.

A few days earlier I had thought myself ready to die. Now I wanted only to live, to see another morning. I thought with awed regret of the distant refuge of Gabriela’s bed where I had been loved and warm. Toward dawn there was a clatter as a brace of men with torches came and passed along a distant trail.

I waited until the sun touched the boulder above me, then dragged my stiff self painfully out of my dank refuge. I took stock of my assets. Pantaloons, no blanket, bare feet bleeding. Hunted for my life, in a strange world. No water, no food. At least I was alive. On balance, not so bad. I took great enjoyment in the luxury of a good long piss, and it was not until I was finished that I realized I was being watched.

After all in my headlong flight I must have left a trail through the river-bottom brush that a child could easily have followed. “E sclavu,” said a calm voice, “jatorra vu, trankilu.”

“What?”

A man and a woman, young enough to call boy and girl, like enough to be brother and sister, sat smiling on a log in plain view of my boulder. They carried daggers — puñales —at their belts, but neither had a gun, an harkebus in hand. I pulled up my pantaloons and ran.

I had been a record-setting sprinter in years gone by, but now I was barefoot and bleeding and lost. The brother and sister had good cowskin boots and were less than a league from the village where they had probably lived all their lives. They also had a net which they flung over me. In less time than it takes to tell this I was sprawling, entwined.

The lad produced brass shackles, and the lass affixed my wrists in front of me and hobbled my ankles. “Trankilu?” they asked again and I nodded. They said their names, which were Koru and Nopah, as well as much more that I didn’t understand. Then we sat on a stone and they companionably gave me water and a crust of acorn bread. Finally, they lit a black cigarillu which they shared with me, puff and puff, like the best of friends.

I shuffled behind Koru, ahead of Nopah, along a trail which grew broader as it approached the outbuildings of a village or longkuria which I later identified as Yodo’i. Perhaps I could have bashed them with my chains and run a few more paces before I was caught. The truth was, I knew my game was up.

At Yodo’i we were greeted by elders, one wearing a white sash, who praised Koru and Nopah and promised them, I suppose, a share of the reward for my capture. The longku asked me a few cursory questions which I was entirely unable, or unwilling, as they must have thought, to answer. Shrugging, they stripped my filthy pantaloons, took off my shackles and put me naked into a stout cage of bound sticks, which sat in the shade of the village plaza. I had a bowl of water, as if I were a dog, and a crust. Otherwise no one paid me much notice until about noon, when a wagon pulled by two horses rattled into town.

I was hoping desperately that this would be driven by Gabriela de Rokha, but it was two stoutish women of middle years dressed in brown jerkins, who I now suppose to have been hirelings of the Conseju of Wishuna. The women took me out of the cage, asked me more incomprehensible questions, shackled me again with heavier cuffs of iron, and handed some coins to the longku. I did not see if Koru and Nopah got their promised share, as I was made to climb into the back of the wagon, where my chains were passed through eyebolts as before.

They clucked to the horses and we rolled off through the heat of the day. The women, whose names I never learned, took no more notice of me as they drove along than if I had been a cow or pig to bring to market. After an hour or less we came down to a dock of the Tehama, where they left the wagon and hustled me aboard a steam-lancha, perhaps the very one that had been searching for me last night.

With casual cruelty the women left me chained out naked on the deck in the hot sun as they joined the steersman in the cool shadow of the wheelhouse. The lancha edged upriver along the west bank, taking advantage of every eddy. Among a myriad of birds a few bold seagulls dived at my face. I waved them away with my manacled hands, once catching a wingful of feathers squarely.

We came about upstream of Wishuna and crossed the great blue breast of the Tehama to slide into the shade of the docks from which I had escaped the night before. I almost cried to see Gabriela de Rokha standing there on the wharf in the sun in her straw sombrero and white cotton dress. She spared me no greeting but turned at once to bargain with my captors. “Cazinga, na,” they acknowledged her, and soon golden coins passed hand to hand. The heavy iron shackles were unlocked and replaced by Gabriela’s lighter brass ones. Then she led me away by my neck-chain up the cobbled streets. At the courtyard gate of the Bear and Bull she paused to address me bitterly in English. “You had to try to escape, Lew Wain. Just when I was coming to love and trust you. But I suppose that to a man like you the love of an old woman means very little.”

“Gabriela, I can explain everything ——”

She jerked on my neck-chain, hard, and I fell to my knees on the cobbles. “Hush, sclavu! Where do you imagine you were going anyway? Maybe I should have left you to the mercies of the Goddess. Do you know what Her priestesses do to runaway sclavus?”

“Crucify me?”

“Hah! They are not so gentle!” I suppose that at length Gabriela forgave me, for she brought me into her chamber and sent for food and spoke kind words, and when night fell she allowed me gently back into the warmth of her bed, but still she refused to remove my shackles. All in all I was glad to be returned to her warmth and protection.

The following morning we took passage downriver on a gaff-rigged dhow with an auxiliary steam-boiler in the stern. Swollen with snowmelt, the Tehama’s fluvial current drew us on through mazy channels lined with reeds and willows, rich with wingbeats of waterbirds which the boatmen named winak and lalak. There were villages along the stream, houses on stilts and floating docks extending into the water, with small boats gently rocking. From one of these landings I had been carried captive on the patrol lancha.

All the long warm afternoon we passed to portside the double peak of what I called Mount Diablo but which Gabriela named as Kuksu Mountain. At last we chugged slowly, riding the current but against a stiff afternoon breeze, through the narrow strait of Karkinez, where I remembered a bridge with speeding cars. Now the Bay of California spread its wide lobes before us, dominated by the familiar silhouette of the Goddess Tamalpais. Against a scarlet dusk, the westward Gate, unspanned by any golden bridge, opened on Downriver Ocean.

Naturally, as we travelled, I found myself beginning to recognize phrases of the Seadog language here and there from hellboys and fellow sclavus. Some of them chimed with what Koru and Nopah or the elders of Yodo’i had said to me. Meanwhile Gabriela drilled me in usage and courtesy, how to say please (vorcitu) and thank you (zamati), with whom to use the informal vo and the formal merci, and how to count by fives and twenties to four hundred. I took the lesson of my failed escape to heart and made no further attempt to avoid Gabriela’s custody.

Once, in my neediness, as we lay beneath warm blankets, I asked Gabriela if she and Steve had been lovers. “Una vez,” she admitted, but she assured me that neither was exactly the love of each other’s life. “Uy, Lew,” my mistress sighed, “you have enough to do with learning the customs and languages of this world where I have found you refuge without worrying your head about poor dead Steve!”

“I suppose that’s true,” I nodded.

“Think about it, Lew, if it were not for me you would be lying in the earth of the Sierra with a bullet in your brain instead of him!”

All she would tell me of Steve Reese was that he was from my world, from San Francisco, from some years in the future, but that his claim to have invented the timedoor was almost certainly exaggerated. As for the timedoor, Gabriela refused to explain its workings, nor would she allow me to examine the device. Nor since then have I have ever witnessed the device in action, nor ever passed through it again.

Gabriela and I lay together one final night in the cantina of the Drunken Orca at the
head of the wharf at Ocean View. Maybe it was the pungent apple-guaru we both drank, for Gabriela clung to me sobbing, naked as I was but for the ankle-shackles she had prudently refused to remove. “This is the last time,” she told me, “la última vez. For me, perhaps not for you, Lew Wain. Everything must come to its ending, no es verdad? Only now that I am an old woman I find it harder than I would have thought to let you go.”

“You’re not so old,” I told her gallantly.

“Gracias por el piropo, Lew Wain,” she smiled sadly, but I believe she lay awake in the dark long after I drifted down to sleep’s black waters.

In the morning we crossed the Bay on a lateen-rigged fayuca which bobbed and heaved upon the choppy waters. Where I have expected the towers of San Francisco, I saw a modest harbor town no grander than Wishuna, its shingled roofs cupped among grassy sand-hills. Drawing nearer, I saw a grove of swaying masts, all painted white. I heard creaking of mast and chain, yelp of sea-lion, bells and whistles, clop of horses, dogs barking, chirr of wagon-wheels, cursing in Seadog, the whining song of a bandoneon. I saw a casual urban geometry of redwood timbers and weathered siding, stairs and balconies, gable windows like so many eyes looking out over the water. I smelled salt fog dissolving, fish-guts on cobblestones, woodsmoke from chimneys, shit of horse and dog and man, sweat of sclavu laborers stripped to the waist and the spicy tang of cookpots bubbling with mulligatawney.

Now if I close my eyes and sniff it through my open window, the unmistakable aroma of Puertu Buenu is like the scent of an old lover who lifted her head from my pillow this morning or half a lifetime ago. This page stained with my tears.

“Can I trust you not to do anything silly?” Gabriela asked when we stood on the wharf.

“Believe me,” I nodded firmly, “I have learned my lesson.” She removed my bonds, but for a symbolic brass shackle round my left ankle. I shouldered Gabriela’s luggage, and followed my mistress from the wharf, past a plaza with a white gazebo among palm trees, fronted on one side by the golden dome of a Capilla and on another by a massive wall capped with a frieze of serpents at whose gate black-armored Jaguars stood guard, and thence uphill along a cobbled thoroughfare busy enough with morning’s commerce that a proud cazinga and her laboring sclavu drew no second glance.

Finally we paused before the entrance to a cantina not unlike the Bull and Bear or Drunken Orca. Hanging from iron chains above the gate swung a wooden placard carved with seven buxom maidens hoisting cups, their naked thighs entwined. Among their fading tresses glittered seven silver-painted stars.

“Here we are, Lew Wain. This is the Seven Sisters.” Gabriela’s glance seemed to seek reassurance as much as to offer it. Then she took a deep breath and plunged into the courtyard, motioning me to follow.

Putas and stevedores, longkus and captain’s wives, looked up casually from their gossip as we crossed the smoky taproom of the Seven Sisters. Our destination was a window seat where an old man in a black leather jerkin sat alone above his mug, a staff carved with the head of an eagle leaning against his chair, the smoke of his black cigarillu slowly rising into curlicues of sun.

I understood little of the transaction that followed, by which the sclavu known as Lew was debtfreed, grubstaked —Gabriela counted out golden pesos — and formally apprenticed to the consejal Shagroy da Leones for a period of seven years, upon which terms this hireling Luchu Wain became a free ciudadanu of the loyal Imperial city of Puertu Buenu. Smiling, Gabriela unlocked the remaining brass shackle from my ankle, produced a deerskin jerkin, and told me to cover my back decently.

“Papa, Goddess knows your bookstore don’t have the cash to hire a hellboy for a trecena in Uayeb,” objected —I reconstruct the precise words I didn’t understand at the time, but her attitude was clear — a large young woman in a blue cotton apron, whose bold dark features were softened by a constellation of freckles. At her neck she wore a scarlet kerchief which identified her as a lay priestess of the Goddess Tonantzin.

“Katerina da Leones, muchu gustu,” smiled Gabriela.

“Cazinga, na.” The young woman curtsied without much grace.

“Tranquil, mijita.” The old man indicated the stack of gold coins on the table and scooped them into his pouch. “Bring us chocolatl, daughter. Gabriela, you must have hunger. My fren Luchu Wain, you wan food?” This last emerged in creaky but recognizable English. “Do I say right?”

The gold apparently offered a convincing argument, as Katerina, still glowering, turned and bellowed toward the kitchen as the cantina regulars resumed the smoky hum of their conversations.

Now I dared to raise my eyes to the face of my new employer. A grizzling of white clung to his bumpy nutmeg of a skull. His face was deeply grizzled, and his right ear gleamed with the gold hoop of a merchant sailor. I would have said he had some few years more than Gabriela, and in fact Shagroy told me he was born in Eleven Rabbit, the year of the great earthquake, when the red tile roof of the Conseju collapsed, and had it not happened at dawn there would have been great loss of life, a date which measured him some five-and-sixty.

“Muchu gustu, Luchu Wain,” said Shagroy, gripping my elbow with his strong right hand. His left, I saw, hung useless from the shoulder, the result, as he told me later, of a saber-stroke suffered in a melee at Whaler’s Cove with Tongan piratas who attempted to sack Puertu Buenu in the winter of year Four Reed, which I would make out to be 1951 on the other side. Shagroy would have had five-and-forty years, and not a young man to be serving in the city’s defenses. “You have arrived in a good moment,” he told me laughing, “to help this viejitu move many boxes of books! E, Gabriela, I already like this one better than that skinny mozo you were dragging around last winter!”