Free Daughters of Babylon by Elaine Stirling Page B

appointed.”
    “Ooh, Madame, do calm yourself. Working up a froth will solve nothing.” The Lady Jocelyne placed a fishing crate against the far wall and covered it with tarpaulin. “This is hardly a throne, but sit. You’ll feel better.”
    “Thank you,” the queen said, and continued her circuit from the doorway of the chatillionte to the back wall, knuckles pressed to her chin. Arturo did not understand the word chatillionte , but he had committed it, as he would every word of this conversation, to memory.
    Arturo knew from his early years, having been scrubbed and tutored in a household of women, about the world’s monarchs. Louis VII was king of the Franks and his queen was the illustrious Álienor or Eleanora, as they called her in Galicia. Their royal court lived most of the year at Poitiers in Bordeaux, many leagues north of here, but here she was, on her own land. He, Arturo de Padrón, was resting his eyes upon the Duchess of Aquitaine, in the very cove that his uncle had selected as the site for conger eels. And in that moment of illustrious pleasure, the queen swung round and saw him through the window. Her face froze, all colour drained, and she screamed.
    Her royal shock ignited his. Arturo spun on his heels and tore from the hut across rocky ground toward the beach. Arms pumping, he leaped over boulders and plowed through sandy patches. Tío Benicio might call his decision to flee cowardice, but at the moment, he didn’t give a fig’s pip what his uncle thought. He skidded through puddles and surely would have outrun Queen Eleanora and her ladies in their ponderous gowns, had it not been for the grassy knoll he attempted to jump over.
    He landed short, and the quicksand grabbed hold of him like a succubus, snaring first one ankle and then the other. The watery sludge squelched and pulled at him. Caught to the knees, his struggling accelerated the sinking, his legs splayed, mid-run, like a wishbone.
    Arturo clawed at the air. He spat out every curse and prayer the fishermen and priests had taught him. Stretching his arms, he tried to wriggle toward a clump of bulrushes, and every effort threw him further out of reach.
    The sucking accelerated, pulling him deeper the harder he fought. His shoulders slipped beneath the surface of the quicksand, then his neck, chin, mouth. Arturo’s last breath was squeezed out of his lungs by the pressure of sand and sea. Salty ooze filled and burned his nostrils, the insides of his ears, even the shameful places where’d he soiled and peed himself in terror. His final thoughts rose and bubbled out: there would be no feast of big juicy bígaros to please tío Benicio and Plutarco de Padrón would return home with no son, with only the satisfaction of having been right about his progeny’s ineptitude. With a final muddy pop, Arturo thought no more.

CHAPTER THREE
    The village of Las Cuevas,
Veracruz, Mexico
1972
    The colonists of Virginia in the 1600s, long before there was a United States of America with gringos hungry for oil and copper and sulphur and gold, long before teenage kids were smoking, snorting, dabbing tongues to dots on paper, anything to fly out of the emotional coffins that back-to-back world wars had nailed them into—those colonists called the vines that crept so pretty along split-rail fences, devil’s weed. They also called it jimson, after Jamestown, where the first apothecaries, who couldn’t yet communicate, if they’d even tried, with the Algonquian or Iroquois medicine men, were learning by trial and error how not to kill asthmatic, neuralgic, and hemorrhoidal patients with the seeds and leaves they called Stranomium . Thornapple, stinkweed, devil’s trumpet, manzana peruana —there were more names for datura than Lupo Sanchez bothered to cram into his head; here, in Mexico, they called her toloache.
    The casita de toloache , little house of datura, was the outermost dwelling at the far end of Las Cuevas, furthest from the sugarcane