Page 87 of Homeless

Darcy started shifting her weight, and Elizabeth moaned softly against his collar. “She is alive,” Darcy replied as the padre came close. “Can you help her?”

The padre was reaching up, lifting her head now, touching her brow. He gave instructions, but Darcy did not need words to understand. He let the padre take Elizabeth’s weight for a minute while he pushed back and dismounted. The earth wobbled. The sky shook back and forth with the jarring of his bones, and even the mule seemed to lean. Darcy kept his hand on the saddle for an instant while the world cleared, and then he took Elizabeth down into his arms.

“Padre,” Darcy said, “Can you…”

A wave of blackness swam over his eyes, and he staggered. The padre moved quickly, catching Elizabeth. “Tú también estás enfermo,” he declared.

“Enfermo…” Darcy repeated. “Yes, yes, she is…” No, this would hardly do. He could not fumble his way through with Spanish, and the padre would have already attempted English if he had any. But there remained another language they might have in common.

“Pater,” he pleaded in Latin. “Adiuva nos. Uxor mea — aegrotat — febris —” My wife. She is sick. Fever.

The dusty tongue came out of his mouth stiff, and probably sounding like a desperate schoolboy. The priest's head came up at it, and his tired eyes changed into comprehension.

“Quamdiu?” How long?

“Dies quattuor. Quinque.” Four days. Five. He had lost the count. “Peior fit. Hora in horam.” Worse. Hour by hour.

The priest had lowered Elizabeth to the ground and was already on his knees beside her in the dust of the road, a hand to her face, her throat, thumbing back an eyelid. Then he looked up at Darcy.

“Et tu,” he said. “Tu quoque aegrotas.” You are sick as well.

“Non refert. Illa refert. Solum illa.” It does not matter. She matters. Only she.

He went down to his knees too, not from devotion but because his legs simply curled beneath him. He caught himself on one hand in the dirt, dragging at the belt beneath his coat, at the mules' reins, at everything he had left in the world and laying it out before the priest like an offering on a poor altar. “Habeo — I have — the mules, take them, take all of them — silver, what silver is left —” His Latin faltered, the English rushing into the gaps — “and this —”

He got the cross free from the money belt, and he held it up into the last of the light where the stones caught fire. The priest’s eyes rounded to see such a prize in the hand of a Protestant.

“Benedictus Deus,” he breathed, and his hands reached reverently to touch the gems. “Tuum est?”

“Yes, mine,” Darcy panted. “Habere potes. Omnia. Omnia tibi. Tantum serva eam. Serva uxorem meam.” Everything is yours. Only save her. Save my wife.

The priest smiled wistfully, then pushed the cross back into Darcy’s keeping. ”Habeo quinam. Sed parum. Valde parum.” Quinam… whatever quinam was. But he said he only had a little.

“Quinam?” Darcy asked. “Quid est?”

The padre did not answer the question Darcy was asking, but he held up his hand, thumb and finger nearly closed, to show how little of it he had. “Exercitus omnes cepit. Non est amplius. Non hic.”

That, he understood. The army took it all, there is no more. Not here.

“Sufficit ei?”

The priest looked at Elizabeth, at the burning cheeks, the delirious murmuring and her parched lips. “Fortasse. Ei — fortasse. Si Deus vult.”

Enough — perhaps. If God wills.

Then he looked back at Darcy. “Non satis est alteri.” But not enough for another person.

Darcy nodded and laid the cross over Elizabeth’s chest. “Quia eam.”

Padre Ignacio carried Elizabeth himself, because Darcy had tried, and hardly got more than four steps before his toes dragged and his knees forgot how to straighten. The priest took her to a low room and laid her on a bed. He stood back and made the sign of the cross over himself.

That made Darcy’s heart seize. Not last rites… she could not be that far gone!

“Unde venistis?” the padre asked.

Darcy blinked. Why did he want to know where they had come from? Why did it even matter? “A Tudela. Per vallem — the valley — Calahorra, Estella… a month, more —”

The priest closed his eyes briefly. “Malus locus. Mala aqua, malus aer hoc anno.” A bad place. Bad water, bad air this year.