Other Lives(18)

Leocadia rested her shovel and pick against the wall.

“Rosaura says you’re running with some stranger.”

Leocadia did not answer. She nodded.

“I did not hear you,” her mother said, without looking at her.

“Yes,” Leocadia said finally.

“You have no shame.”

“He asked me for help.”

The slap did not take her by surprise. Leocadia merely bit her lips and went towards the little dinning room strewn with a few cushions, a low table and a rug. Rosaura followed her and placed the baby in a crib. Then she turned towards Leocadia.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Rosaura said. “Somebody else told her. I couldn’t lie.”

“What did you say?”

“You can’t go off with a man like that. Don’t you remember what happened with Rolan?”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she muttered.

“That’s not what it looks like.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter? They’ll gossip.”

“Nothing they haven’t said before.”

Rosaura was upset. She pressed a hand against her chest. “If you don’t care about your reputation, think about us. How much more muck can you pour upon our family? Do you know what they call you in town?”

Leocadia did not want to discuss nicknames. She looked at the pattern of the rug, red and yellow and blue. Rosaura huffed at her.

“You want to live the rest of your life like a pariah? Keep it up. They’ll never forgive you.”

Leocadia went out of the house and stood in their backyard. There were piles of salt sitting there, like an eternal snowdrift. Leocadia grabbed a stick and drew an elephant, like in the pictures she had seen. She drew a monkey and an alligator and even a mermaid. Finally, she scrawled the cartographer’s name, the gesture of some love-sick child instead of a woman.

“Hello Leocadia,” said Bastian.

“Hello,” she said.

“I’ve come to take my wife back. Go tell her I’m here,” he said.

Leocadia did not move for a few moments. Finally, noticing the impatient look in his face, she rubbed off the letters in the salt and slowly walked back inside.

***

“I said I’m not going.”

“I can’t return alone.”

“Who cares? You already have your drawings and measurements and things,” she said.

“I’m not done yet. I need to go back today.”

“It’s not like you can’t find your way there,” she said.

“I’d like it if you accompanied me.”

Leocadia frowned and crossed her arms tight against her chest. She shouldn’t go. But he’d leave soon, taking all the pretty pictures and the nice smile away.

“We’ve got to come back quick,” she said. “And you’ll have to let me look at your other drawings.”

“Fine,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

Once inside the temple she spread his maps around her and looked at all the coasts, mountains and rivers. They surrounded her with their odd names and different topographies. She saw the white salt desert that was her land and Abelardo helped her find her home on it.

“There,” he said.

It was not even on the map. His finger fell over an empty space.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“From far, far away. Across the other corner of the empire,” he said and shuffled through some papers until he found the right one. There he tapped against a little dot. “That’s me.”

“Where were you before Comba?”

“A meandering trajectory. A little haphazard,” he said pointing at another map and tracing a serpentine route over it. “Until I crossed the mountains on a whim and here I sit with you.”

Leocadia looked at the inked locations, traced the same path he had traced with his hands over the parchment. Then her hands flew up, over his face and across his cheeks, plotting a route of a different sort.

“I’m glad you did,” she said and kissed him, first on the cheek, then on the mouth.

He smiled at her and Leocadia painted a new map on his skin using her fingers.

***

Dusk was near. She could feel it. It was terribly late. Leocadia glanced at Abelardo, asleep near the statue’s feet, before grabbing her shawl and slipping outside. She stood barefoot on the steps of the temple, observing the sky and feeling the wind.

She ought to have been more concerned about her reception at home, the town, the words used to describe her. Instead she walked all the way down the steps and stood on the salt plain, enjoying the very blue skies. It would be perfect if it rained. She wanted to show him the desert when it turned into a great mirror. It was a stupid thought: Leocadia could not cast any more spells.

She brushed the hair from her face and wished for rain.

It was not like when she had been a young priestess and cast water spells. Those spells had been difficult, piercing stabs of power that prickled her skin and made her hands ache. She did not ache now, as she threw her head back and smiled at the sky.

There was a single drop of water. It hit her cheek.

Leocadia stared at the sky in wonder and watched clouds gathering in the horizon, rolling closer like the tide. Thunder boomed so loud she pressed her hands against her ears. Heavy rain fell and turned into a full-blown storm, water splattering against the ground, water flowing as freely as in the carvings inside the temple.