placed high in the north wall. A transverse clerestory window also provided light. This was a source of illumination that was apparently of the friars’ invention, for Rosas had not previously seen a window of this construction. This window was placed where the nave joined the apse, its blue-tinged light masked by the grime of time.
There was little decoration. An ornamented wooden bed molding, placed underneath the corbel course of the roof and upon which the corbels rested, was made of carved poles, laid end-to-end, projecting slightly from the surface of the wall. The molding, a rope motif patterned after the Franciscan cord symbolizing the vow of chastity, was ornamental and perhaps structural, too, serving to bind and strengthen the wall at its points of greatest load.
The sacristy was a modest room with a cupboard, a small altar, a rack for liturgical instruments, and a small fireplace. There was also an internal well four varas wide and over 40 varas deep, with a curb of earth and stone, and a wooden bucket sitting precariously on its rim.
In an anteroom near the front of the church there was a baptismal font built of adobes and consisting of a large olla, a wide-mouthed clay pot or jar that rose from the center of the earthen floor. There was little else, no pews, no hangings, nothing to burn.
What Rosas had toured was a fortress with thick, high, adobe walls offering no projections to hide an enemy. It had been designed to offer shelter but also constraint, to inspire feelings of well-being, calm, awe, or oppression, as the friars wished. The enormous space provided them with the capacity required to enhance their word, gesture, or the musical accompaniment of Catholic ritual.6
“One could hold out here forever,” the governor remarked. Salas looked at him and smiled but did not respond.
* * *
“Are we to prepare accommodations here for the governor while the men of the supply train repair their wagons?” asked Salas’s assistant.
Salas, who had found in the new governor an arrogant, irreverent, and uncompromising person, rather than the cooperative, if not actually weak and pliant individual he had hoped to find, said, “I wouldn’t give him as much as an egg unless I was allowed to sprinkle it with ashes to dull his palate or dilute it with water to smother its taste. I don’t know where they find these men, Father,” he added in exasperation. “At least Governors Ceballos and Ossorio were admirals—even though we have no need for a navy here. But this one? What is he? A Frenchman from Auvergne? A Gavache from Gevaudon? God only knows! No wonder his wife and child deserted him while he was in Flanders,” he said, repeating a bit of gossip he had heard from Fray Manso. “Perhaps he’s a franchone, one of those foreigners who roams about Spain as a beggar, a peddler, a knife-grinder, or as a castrator of animals! No. We will not prepare accommodations. And if he rings the bell requesting entrance to the convento, Father, please pretend you don’t hear him. Perhaps he’ll go away.”
6
Nicolas and Maria
After we leave Cochiti and have negotiated the cliffs at La Majada,” said Nicolas Ortiz to the wagon master, Francisco Gomez, “I ask for permission to ride ahead and to inform the senior judge and the members of the cabildo of our arrival.”
“And to see your Maria, too, I assume,” said Blas de Miranda, smiling knowingly at his friend who had presented his request to Gomez.
“I must admit that’s an added incentive,” Ortiz laughed, his large, luminous eyes glowing with delight. “But the welcome for a new governor is traditional,” he added, further justifying his request, “and Antonio Baca must be told.”
“Well, I’m sure he knows we’re coming,” Gomez said, “although the exact day may still be unknown to him. Today’s Friday, is that right?” Gomez asked rhetorically, as he worked at rearranging the wood of their campfire with the heel of his boot. “We’ll need your help in climbing the cliffs tomorrow,” he said to Ortiz, “but once we’ve reached the mesa you may go ahead. Tell don Antonio that we’ll be there within two days.”
“I owe you!” Ortiz said.
“You owe me nothing,” Gomez replied laughingly. “Besides, you’ll be lucky if her papa doesn’t shoot you.”
Nicolas laughed at Gomez’s remark, recalling these exact words as spoken by Blas de Miranda on the day he first met her.
* * *
In a stunning dawn, crisp and unblemished except for an enormous cloud hanging over the eastern mountains, Nicolas left his party on the mesa above La Majada, a sheltered place on the Camino Real (Royal Road) where shepherds with their flocks of sheep put up for the night. Riding ahead of the wagon train, which had just negotiated a series of black basaltic cliffs dividing the lower and upper regions of the Rio Grande, Nicolas, who knew how to press horses to their limit, bypassed the ancient lava beds of quemado.
Nicolas approached the Tano pueblo at La Cienaga (The Marsh), where the Rio de Santa Fe, a tributary of the Rio Grande, completes its underground course and again comes to the surface. There he struggled through a forest of bogs, their odors a musky redolence of cedar and mildewed grass. The bogs, widened here by beaver dams, were a series of tranquil pools clogged with logs, branches, brush, and rocks all plastered together, which his horse could not penetrate. I should not have tried to cross here, he said to himself, realizing that in his haste to reach the capital, he had merely slowed his progress. Backtracking through a jungle of thorn bushes and impenetrable willows, he finally regained the southern edge of the bogs and, above them, to the east, the Santa Fe River.
Following the cottonwood-bordered Rio de Santa Fe toward the royal villa, Nicolas rode across an alluvial plain, barren, rocky, fringed with coarse gray scrub, and rising to snowy peaks on this, the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo range. The pale peaks of mountains to the north, serrated and scalloped in their birth, gave to the region a sense of majesty and expanse. This was the part of New Mexico that had given to the kingdom its greatest challenges, its primal beauty, its demand of stoic endurance from its inhabitants. The sky behind the peaks was ugly, turbulent, with an occasional rumble of high thunder as Nicolas rode on.
Nicolas continued on across a sunlit landscape whose sagebrush land eventually turned into pinon and juniper foothills. Buzzards flying in tight circles above him glided on wings borne by unseen currents of air. Before him, he could see what the buzzards were contemplating, a dead coyote lying in the open before a stand of chamisa (rabbitbrush). While he watched, a large buzzard, its enormous wings outstretched to slow its descent, guttered to an ungainly landing beside the carcass. Suddenly, the seemingly dead coyote leaped to its feet, lunging at the startled bird that attempted to turn and take to the sky. The clever coyote leaped into the air and wrestled the bird to the ground where, with a quick bite to the base of the buzzard’s neck, the coyote ended its struggle. Nicolas smiled to himself, thinking, you can never tell. Death leaps up when you least expect it.
Outside of the villa, which had been built on a sheltered bank of the Rio de Santa Fe, Nicolas left the woods that grew thickly alongside the river and rode toward the still uncompleted parish church. This occupied an entire block and was being built away from the plaza according to the king’s ruling. Set within a half circle of carnelian-colored hills, it was the most prominent point on the eastern horizon.
The cultivated fields of Las Milpas de San Miguel (The Maize Fields of St. Michael) and Barrio de Analco were on the river’s southern bank. Within the six vecindades, or villa districts on the northern bank a haphazard collection of low, flat-roofed houses were clustered around small fields and the royal palace. As he rode, he looked beyond the oxen, horses, and mules grazing within the defensive walls of la muralla, to the scattered ranches partially hidden among the eastern
