Woman of Light
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
PROLOGUE
The Sleepy Prophet and the Child from Nowhere
The Lost Territory, 1868
The night Fertudez Marisol Ortiz rode on horseback to the northern pueblo Pardona, a secluded and modest village, the sky was so filled with stars it seemed they hummed. Thinking this good luck, Fertudez didn’t cry as she left her newborn on the banks of an arroyo, turkey down wrapped around his body, a bear claw fastened to his chest.
“Remember your line,” she whispered, before she mounted her horse and galloped away.
In Pardona, Land of Early Sky, the elder Desiderya Lopez dreamt of stories in her sleep. The fireplace glowed in her clay home as she whistled snores through dirt walls, her breath dissipating into frozen night. She would have slept soundly until daybreak, but the old woman was pulled awake by the sounds of plodding hooves and chirping crickets, the crackling of burnt cedar, an interruption between dawn and day.
“Enough is enough,” Desiderya muttered and cursed as she slow-rolled from bed onto her balled feet, the noises maddening as she stood. Her back was permanently bent in a slight L, and her long, woven skirt brushed the floor matted in sheepskin. She wrapped herself in a white shawl, and slid her hands into fox-fur mittens, fingerless to easily handle her tobacco. Her pipe was formed of mica clay, and the sparkling burn illuminated Desiderya’s grooved face as she hobbled toward the door, soon fastening a red handkerchief beneath her broad chin. The warmth of her breath tried to linger inside the home, but Desiderya hacked into a phlegmy cough and wrangled the air back into her lungs. You’re coming with me, she spoke and walked outside.
Known as the Sleepy Prophet, she was an important woman in Pardona. During ceremony, she went into trance, recollecting a thousand years’ worth of visions, but her output was unsteady. Many years later when radios had come into fashion and everyone had a massive box near their altars beneath the vigas, the few who still remembered Pardona recalled Desiderya Lopez and how her spirit antenna was often broken. But, sometimes, many times, it worked just fine.
Desiderya stood at the arroyo’s uneven banks, smoking her pipe and considering the sloping way blue darkness layered the nearby mountains. The arroyo gurgled beneath slender ice. The Spanish had named the stream Lucero because starlight shimmered over the water’s trickling back, as if the earth had been saddled with sky. The galloping sounds in her dreams had vanished, and the sacred mountains looked upon Desiderya with what felt like amusement in their grouped trees and rock veins. She squinted and turned over her pipe, removing the mouthpiece with her right hand. She stepped over hardened snow toward a rattling among dormant thistle and chokecherry trees, snagging her left thumb until Desiderya bled darkly about her fingerless mittens.
“Who’s making that racket?” she called out in Tiwa. When there was no answer, Desiderya tried her various dialects, and finally, after waiting several heartbeats, she turned away from the water and brush and said in Spanish, “Freeze then, baby.”
Pidre cried. Loud as a drum.
Desiderya pulled at the thistle and chokecherry branches, their stems flickering like the souls of the newly dead. She gasped at the sight of all the trouble.
There, an infant with wet gray eyes, a baby boy who reached toward the Sleepy Prophet, his face striped in shrubbery shadows.
Desiderya grunted as she lifted the baby from the weeds. He was cold, the bear claw around his neck dusted in snow. “We’ll get you warmed up,” she said with a calm urgency, carrying the baby to the water’s edge, his face cradled to her low breasts. She dipped her left hand into the thinly frozen creek and rinsed the dried blood from her fingertips before smearing a droplet onto the baby’s cheek. He did not cry at the coolness—instead he locked eyes with the Sleepy Prophet, his brow furrowed, serious in his demeanor. Desiderya chuckled at his angry baby face. “It will only be a moment,” she explained. “I am looking for a message.” Over the baby’s face, the water reflected the sky, those reddish and winged planets.
“You were left,” Desiderya said after some time. “Left to be found.”
The baby surprised her then, gathering his lips and attempting to suckle her spacious chest. The Sleepy Prophet laughed. “Been dry for some time, little one.”
Dawn now, orange and lavender lines appeared beyond the eastern mountains. The world warmed as Desiderya carried the baby through the desert, her fur slippers cracking through iced snow. She hummed prayers to the baby as she walked, songs about heat, greetings of light, the blessings of the sun and moon. She brought the baby to the center of Pardona, past the adobe homes with their blue doorways to deflect drifting spirits. In the distance a cemetery of wooden crosses was scattered about the hillside, as if the Spanish had once spilled a bucket of Catholicism over the land. At the old mission church in the plaza, a white cross leaned left and the air sounded with the squawking of sparrows and wrens. Desiderya left the pink-hued morning and entered the church, blessing herself and the baby with holy water at the door. As was tradition, beneath the floorboards, four dead priests were buried. Their spirit voices greeted Desiderya as she stepped over the ground above their coffins. They told her in Spanish that they knew of a secret, and the Sleepy Prophet groaned with annoyance before she asked them to go on, spill it.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Can’t,” they said.
Desiderya stomped the floorboards. She rattled the walls.
“Ouch,” they said.
“Out with it,” she said, and stomped once more.
“Fine,” they said. “The baby has a name. Would you like to know?”
When the dead priests relented, Desiderya repeated the name, her voice echoing throughout the dirt-walled sanctuary. She looked at the baby, who had scratched a faint purple line into his cheek with his translucent fingernails. Desiderya noted to cut them later. “Pidre,” she said and smiled at the baby. “Like stone.”
Deeper inside the chapel, several young women were on their hands and knees sweeping the floor with horsetail brushes. Dried rose petals were piled around them, and at the altar was a clay statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, dressed in red silk. The young women were preparing for her Feast Day, and the church smelled of incense and blue sage and the copal traded and carried from 1,400 miles south in Mexico City. They gazed at the Sleepy Prophet as she stepped before them with the baby in her arms.
“Who is that?” asked a young woman.
“Pidre,” she said, thumbing the baby’s bear claw.
“From where?”
“Seems he’s mixed blood,” said Desiderya. “Maybe Spanish. Probably not French. I’d say from his blanket he comes from the southern villages.”
“Who abandons their own?” another young woman asked with disdain.
Desiderya thought of why babies are sometimes left. She saw images in her mind that she’d rather not see, felt profound hunger, witnessed a village perched high on a hill, horses slaughtered for food, a church crumbling back into the earth from which it was built. The Sleepy Prophet studied Pidre then. He gazed upon her face with recognition. His spirit felt complementary, an old friend, a grandson she had fished from the weeds.
“We cannot know the depths of another’s sacrifice,” Desiderya said, easing the baby into the young woman’s arms. “For now, find him a breast. One that works.”