didn’t like her boss. She’d described him, more than once, as a pig. Vanna was seldom happy with anyone, these days.
Dickon rounded the block and aimed the Plymouth for home. As he drove the stale anger Vanna had left behind slowly drained from the car and from his day. He could work on Sunday’s sermon this morning, then, in the afternoon, he could help Ray Sincaine clean the church windows. A quiet day, at least until Vanna came home. He started to whistle a hymn tune as he entered the twisting stretch.
A jangling telephone greeted Dickon when he got home. “Hello,” Dickon said.
“Hello yourself!” a grating voice Dickon recognized immediately responded. “Beautiful mid-morning isn’t it! Have you been outside yet?” Dickon groaned silently. Ray Sincaine was a pest who called almost every morning to chat with Dickon. Dickon cordially detested the man.
“No, Ray,” Dickon said. “I hadn’t woken up yet. I was in Las Tumbas late yesterday.”
“You have time to chat?”
“Not really, Ray. I’ve got to get ready and go over to Los Albaricoques later this morning. I have a Presbytery Parish Welfare Committee meeting at noon.”
“What’s that all about? Not thinking of leaving, are you?” Dickon wondered what brought this to Ray’s mind, and then shrugged off the thought. Deacon Sincaine was a quirky thinker.
“No, just a routine consultation. It’s the Presbytery’s way of keeping its finger on the pulse of the parishes.”
“Well, give us a good report, then. You’ll remember how much we increased our mission giving?”
“Yes, Ray. I’ll make a point of that, and tell him about the increase in Sunday School attendance, too.”
“Right you are, Reverend.” Dickon heard the gratification in Ray’s voice. Ray’s recruitment efforts had brought three more children into the Sunday School. That was a significant increase for a small rural congregation. “Still on for cleaning windows this afternoon, Reverend?”
“Yes,” Dickon said. “I should be back about three.”
“I’ll be at the church at three,” Ray said. “Ringing off, now.” The phone clicked. Dickon heard the dial tone return as he was putting down the receiver. He groaned. A committee meeting followed by Ray Sincaine promised a stressful afternoon. He fervently hoped Vanna came home in a mellow mood.
Mission
Salvación Mandor swept the stoop before her mission at 112 Lost Lane. It was her pre-lunch ritual. She looked at the sky, trying to gauge how long the fog would linger. She heard the muted Carnival music from the Avenue, and sighed. She had not felt young and carefree like that Carnival for many years--not since Lieutenant Shinn sailed from Lima and disappeared.
Today she felt especially burdened. Unease prickled in her back-brain. She tried to shrug it off, but it persisted. The unease nagged at her subconscious through the noon meal. Then the sun found Lost Lane and brightened the mission’s interior. La Señora left the volunteers to complete the washing up, and went to her cell, as she called her office, closed the door, and fell into a meditative trance. Somewhere in her trance, she linked with the unicorn mind.
The unicorn was a unique creature; it passed most of its days disguised as a llama, currently resident in the zoo. On occasion, when cosmic need merited, the unicorn shed its llama skin, and, using the toes on its left foot, screwed in a unique unicorn horn it kept in the llama shed behind an old board. Most times, though, it just communed with Salvación at a sub-intellectual level.
The llama-unicorn was part of Salvación’s inheritance from her Quechua mother. It was her spirit guide, soul’s companion, and strengthening presence. Just now, her link with the unicorn was sparking with trouble. Something big and bad was coming her way.
Salvación relinquished her meditative trance and returned her spirit to her body in its cell. The visions the unicorn with the unique horn sent were often unclear. This time it had sent Salvación no vision at all. She had gotten only dark gray psychic fuzz with random sparks of multicolored light in it. Salvación did not know how to interpret this sending, except as a warning to prepare the mission with food, blankets, and other necessaries. When in doubt, be prepared, her mother had often quoted. She left her cell and went to find a volunteer to take a list at her dictation.
She found Willy. He had come to her mission about a month earlier, dressed in very ragged briefs with shackle and manacle marks on his wrists and ankles. He spoke not a word when La Señora encountered him at the gates to the mission. He simply shivered in the cold morning air and raised pleading eyes to her. She could not turn him down, of course; sanctuary was his for the asking. He had proven a useful scamp, good as a messenger and a general “dog’s body” around the mission.
La Señora had discovered he commanded an adequate vocabulary for most normal transactions, though he was slow to speak, and slower to answer questions. When La Señora tried to determine where he had come from, all she could get by way of description was that he had run away “from the place where they hurt me.” He admitted to no name. La Señora chose to call him Willy Waugh, after the williwaw winds that blow from land to sea around Cape Horn. They were wild, feral, winds, and Willy reminded her of them.
La Señora considered his scrawny frame; a month’s worth of feeding had put some flesh on him, but not much. She wished he could write. She didn’t know if he could or not, but now wasn’t the time to find out.
“Find me a volunteer,” she said. “Anyone who can write will do.” Willy nodded, his customary response to a request or command, and scurried away. There was something furtive about his movements, as if he feared a blow might fall at any moment. At least she had persuaded him he needed to wear some sort of garment around his waist at all times; his natural mode was nudity.
When the volunteer, Anne Tenor, came, La Señora began to dictate a list of emergency supplies to lay in. Everyone at the Mission who was able spent most of the balance of the day shopping and storing emergency blankets, food, and the like.
Mountain Magic (From the Book of Bygone Days)
Clouds writhe and wreathe around the peaks of the Andes, making sport in the sky with the sun. Taller they seem than the sky itself. Here, far from the prying eyes of science and commerce (even whole cities may hide among the foliage of the cloud forests), the happenings of older, mystic truths may play out their courses unimpeded by that degraded, mundane, reality we all accept as true.
This is the land of the Quechua, and their predecessors. The authority of the Spanish governments is nominal here. The rule of the llama god takes precedence over the suffering Christ of the black-robed priests. The folk are faithful at mass, true, but faithful to their own cosmology, not to the imported Roman vagaries.
One who lived here the people called simply “El Curandéro,” the healer. No one remembered his name, neither the Quechua name nor his Spanish name. To all authorities of the government and church he was a simple llama keeper who dabbled in herbal medicines on the side. Since his medicines did no harm, and sometimes even worked, no one in power was the least distressed about his practice.
El Curandéro had fathered a daughter on a woman of Lima. Once he had left his refuge among the peaks. He had walked many days on the old roads of his ancestors until he came to the Spanish city. Once there he sought out a woman of easy virtue, paid her fee, and got on her a child. Then he returned to his mountain and its thick foliage.
When the woman of Lima determined she was pregnant, she set out to find the man who had given her the child. As the fetus waxed within her, she walked ever eastward and upward, mindful of the life within her, homing by instinct on the hut of El Curandéro.
El Curandéro practiced divination in the brown waters of the Urubamba that frothed and churned over the rocky streambed at the foot of his mountain. He read from the frantic flamenco zapateado of the white foam as it leaped over the rocks what was to be. He knew the woman approached him, and that her time was almost up
on her. He went upriver to Ollantaytambo and greeted the woman.
“Señora,” he said to her in the narrow streets the Incas had lined with stone houses, “welcome.” He led her into a stone house where old women lived. “This is the mother of my child,” he said to them. “Her time is almost upon her. Help her to bring forth her babe.” Then he left and went up the mountain to meditate.
In her time the woman brought forth a girl child. The child was healthy. The old women sent word to El Curandéro that he had a daughter. He came down again to Ollantaytambo to bless her and name her. He could not heal the child’s mother. Her odyssey from Lima had come at the end of a dissolute life that sapped her strength. She died in the child’s first year. El Curandéro left it to the women of Ollantaytambo to raise the child, though he often visited with her and played with her. When she was old enough to cook for him, he invited her to live on the mountain with him and his llamas. She didn’t stay long.
A young Spanish policeman enticed her away with promises of riches. Once he had had his way with her, he abandoned her in the slums of Lima. There she made the unfortunate acquaintance of an Episcopal bishop on holiday, who smuggled her into the United States and a life of white slavery.
El Curandéro could see, when he read the rapids of