Within a few minutes’ time the raiders had raced through the mission, setting fire to the straw huts and destroying clay vessels, casks, tools, looms… anything within reach, all without encountering the least resistance. Their chilling war yells and the speed at which they moved drowned out the calls of the male neophytes locked in the women’s lodge. Heady with success, they charged the church, loosing a rain of arrows that bounced uselessly off the strong adobe walls. At the order of Chief Gray Wolf they attempted to ram the heavy wood doors, which trembled with the impact but did not yield. The noise and war whoops rose in volume with each thwarted attempt to breach the door, while some of the more athletic and emboldened warriors looked for a way to climb up to the narrow window slits and bell tower.
Inside the church the tension became more unbearable with each echoing crash upon the door. The defenders four missionaries, five soldiers, and eight neophytes were in place along the sides of the nave, protected behind sacks of sand and backed up by Indian girls ready to reload their weapons. De la Vega had trained them the best he could, but not too much could be expected of a few terrified girls who had never seen a musket at close range. Their task consisted of a series of actions that any soldier performed without thinking but which had taken the captain hours to explain to them. Once the weapon was ready, the girl handed it to the man responsible for firing it, and prepared another. When the trigger was pulled, a spark lit the powder in the pan, which in turn ignited the main charge in the barrel. Damp powder, flint residue, and blocked touch holes often caused misfires; it was not unusual, in addition, to forget to remove the rammer from the barrel before firing.
“Don’t be discouraged, that’s how it goes in war. Noise and commotion. If one weapon fails to work, the next one should soon be ready, so you can keep right on killing,” Alejandro de la Vega instructed.
The remaining females and all the children of the mission were secured in a room behind the altar. Padre Mendoza had sworn to protect them with his life. The valiant defenders, with fingers on the trigger and half their faces protected by kerchiefs soaked in vinegar and water, silently awaited the order from the captain, the one person unfazed by the Indians’ yelling and the slamming of bodies against the door.
Coldly, de la Vega calculated how long the wood door would resist; the success of his plan depended on acting at the precise moment and in perfect coordination. He had not had occasion to fight since the campaigns in Italy several years before, but he was lucid and calm. The only sign that betrayed apprehension was the tickling in his hands that he always felt before firing.
Eventually the Indians tired of crashing against the door and fell back to catch their breath and receive instructions from their chief. A terrifying silence replaced the former hullabaloo. That was the moment de la Vega chose to give the signal. The church bell began to ring furiously as four neophytes lighted rags dipped in tar, producing a thick, stinking cloud. Two others lifted the heavy crossbar bolting the door. The peals aroused the Indians, who regrouped to attack again. This time the door unexpectedly yielded at the first contact; they tumbled into the church, fell over each other, and collided with the barrier of sacks of sand and rocks. Coming from the brilliant light outdoors, they were blind in the darkness and smoke of the interior. From the sides of the nave, ten muskets fired in unison, wounding several Indians who fell in their tracks, screaming. The captain lighted a fuse and within a few seconds the flame had reached the sacks filled with a mixture of gunpowder, tallow, and lead that had been set up in front of the barricade. The explosion rocked the foundations of the church, set off a hail of metal particles and pebbles, and shook the large wood cross over the altar right off the wall. Protected behind their parapets, the defenders were able to reload their weapons and get off a second round before the first arrows flew through the air. Several Indians lay sprawled on the floor, and those who were still on their feet were coughing and tearing from the smoke, making an easy target for the defenders’ musket balls.
De la Vega’s crew reloaded three times before Chief Gray Wolf, followed by the most courageous warriors, swarmed over the barricade and surged into the nave of the church. In the chaos of battle, Captain Alejandro de la Vega never took his eyes off the Indian chief; soon he broke free of the braves surrounding him and leapt toward the chief, roaring like a wild beast, sword in hand. He brought down his blade with all his strength, but it slashed through empty air because Chief Gray Wolf’s instinct had warned him, and he had dodged to the side, avoiding the blow. The momentum of the swing threw the captain off balance; he lunged forward, tripped, and fell to his knees as his sword struck the ground and snapped in two. With a howl of triumph, the Indian lifted his lance to run the captain through, but the gesture was never completed. A blow to the nape of the neck felled the chief, who dropped facedown on the floor, where he lay motionless.
“May God forgive me!” exclaimed Padre Mendoza, who was wielding a musket by the muzzle, landing blows right and left with ferocious pleasure.
To the surprise of Captain de la Vega, who had thought he was a dead man, a dark pool was rapidly forming around the chief, and the proud wolf’s head was turning red. Padre Mendoza crowned his inappropriate jubilation with a stout kick to the inert body of the fallen chief. All he had to do was smell the gunpowder and he had reverted to the bloodthirsty soldier he had been in his youth. Almost instantly, the word spread among the Indians that their chief was down; they began to fall back, at first hesitantly and then at top speed, vanishing into the distance. The victors, dripping with sweat and half suffocated, waited until the dust of the attacker’s retreat had settled before they went outside to draw a breath of fresh air. A salvo of shots fired into the air was added to the crazed ringing of the church bell; that and the boisterous hurrahs of men and women with a new lease on life drowned out the moans of the wounded and the hysterical weeping of the women and children still locked behind the altar, swooning in the smoke.
Padre Mendoza rolled up the sleeves of his blood-soaked cassock and set about restoring his mission to normal, unaware that he had lost an ear and that the blood was not his enemies’ but his own. He totted up the mission’s minimal losses and sent two prayers up to heaven, giving thanks for their triumph but also asking forgiveness for having lost all trace of Christian compassion in the heat of the battle. Two of his soldiers had suffered minor wounds, and an arrow had pierced the arm of one of the missionaries. They had one death to mourn, that of a fifteen-year-old Indian girl who had helped load the weapons. She had fallen faceup, her clubbed skull cracked open, her large, dark eyes wide with surprise. While Padre Mendoza was organizing his band to put out the fires, bind up the wounded, and bury the dead, Captain Alejandro de la Vega, with another sword in hand, was searching the nave of the church, looking for the body of the Indian chief, with the idea of impaling his head on a pike and planting it at the entrance of the mission to discourage anyone who might cherish the idea of following his example. He found Chief Gray Wolf where he had fallen, barely a pathetic bundle in the puddle of his own blood. With one sweep of his hand the captain jerked off the wolf’s head and with the toe of his boot turned over the body, which seemed much smaller than it had while flourishing a spear. Still blind with rage and panting from the exertion of the battle, de la Vega grabbed the chief by his black hair and lifted his sword to decapitate him with a single stroke, but just before he swung, the Indian opened his eyes and looked at the captain with an unexpected expression of curiosity.
“Blessed Virgin Mary, he’s alive!” exclaimed de la Vega, stepping back.
Even more than the fact that his enemy was still breathing, he was surprised by the beauty of his elongated, caramel-colored, thick-lashed eyes, the limpid eyes of a deer set in a face covered with blood and war paint. De la Vega dropped his sword, knelt, and put his hand beneath the chief’s neck, carefully pulling him up to a sitting position. The deer eyes closed and a long moan escaped the parted lips. The captain looked around and found that they
were alone in this part of the church, very near the altar. On an impulse, he lifted the wounded Indian, meaning to throw him over his shoulder, but the chief was much lighter than de la Vega had expected. He carried him in his arms as he would a child, threading his way among sacks of sand and rock, weapons, and the bodies of the dead, which still had not been removed by the missionaries, and stepped outside the church into the light of that autumn day, which he would remember for the rest of his life.
“He’s alive, Padre,” he announced, laying the wounded chief on the ground.
“Too bad, Captain, because we will still have to execute him,” replied Padre Mendoza, who by now had a shirt rolled around his head like a turban to stanch the blood flowing from his lopped-off ear.
Alejandro de la Vega could never explain why instead of seizing the moment to decapitate his enemy, he hurried off to look for water and rags to sponge his injuries. Helped by a young female neophyte, he parted the heavy black hair and rinsed the long wound, which began to bleed again at contact with the water. He palpated the skull, verifying that there was an angry wound but that the bone was intact.
He had seen worse in war. He took up a curved needle used for making mattresses and a length of horsehair that Padre Mendoza had put to soak in brandy, and stitched up the scalp. Then he washed off the chief’s face, noting the light skin and delicate features. With his dagger he slit the bloody wolf-skin tunic to see whether there were other wounds, and as he did so he grunted with shock.
“He’s a woman!” he shouted, horrified.
Padre Mendoza and the others came running up, only to stand and stare, mute with amazement, at the virginal breasts of the warrior.
“It’s going to be much more difficult to kill him now,” Padre Mendoza sighed finally.
Her name was Toypurnia, and she was barely twenty years old. She had been able to convince the warriors of several tribes to follow her because she was preceded by a legend. Her mother was White Owl, a shaman and healer from the Gabrieleno tribe, and her father was a sailor, a deserter from a Spanish ship. He had lived for years in hiding among the Indians, until he was carried off by a bout with pneumonia; his daughter was an adolescent at the time. Toypurnia learned the basics of the Spanish language from her father, and from her mother, the use of medicinal plants and the traditions of her people. Her extraordinary destiny was manifest only a few months after birth, on an afternoon when her mother left her sleeping beneath a tree while she bathed in the river. A wolf had approached the bundle wrapped in skins, picked it up in its jaws, and dragged it off into the woods. A desperate White Owl followed the animal’s tracks for several days, but found no trace of the baby girl. During that summer the mother’s hair turned white, and the tribe continued to search, until the last hope of finding the child had evaporated. At that point a ceremony was performed to guide her to the vast plains of the Great Spirit. White Owl refused to participate in the rites and never stopped scanning the horizon; she felt in her bones that her daughter was still alive. One early morning at the beginning of winter a filthy little creature emerged from the mist; she was naked and covered with dirt, and she was crawling with her nose to the ground. It was the lost child, growling like a dog and smelling like a wild animal. They named her Toypurnia, which in the language of her tribe means Daughter-of-Wolf, and they raised her as if she were a boy, with a spear and a bow and arrow, because she had come out of the forest with a fearless heart.
Alejandro de la Vega learned these things in the days following the battle, straight from the mouths of the Indian prisoners who were locked in the lodge, moaning over their wounds and humiliation. Padre Mendoza had decided to free them as they mended, since he could not hold them captive indefinitely, and without their chief they seemed to have returned to their former docile and indifferent state.
He did not want to whip them, as he was certain they deserved, because punishing them would merely provoke more resentment, and neither did he mean to convert them to his faith, because it seemed to him that none of them had the makings of a Christian; they would be rotten apples spoiling the purity of his flock. It did not escape the padre’s attention that young Toypurnia exercised a strong fascination over Captain de la Vega, who looked for any excuse to keep going down to the underground wine cellar where they held the captive. The missionary had two good reasons for choosing the cellar for her prison: first, he could keep it locked, and second, the darkness would give Toypurnia opportunity to meditate on her actions. Since the Indians assured him that their chief could turn into a wolf and escape from any confinement, he took the additional precaution of tying her with leather thongs to the rough planks that served as her cot. The young woman hovered for several days between unconsciousness and nightmares, bathed in feverish sweat, and fed spoonfuls of milk, wine, and honey by Captain de la Vega’s own hand. From time to time she waked in total darkness and feared that she had been blinded, but other times she opened her eyes in the trembling light of a candle and saw the face of a stranger calling her name.
One week later, Toypurnia took her first secret steps on the arm of the handsome captain, who had decided to ignore Padre Mendoza orders to keep her bound and in the dark. By then, the two were able to communicate, since she remembered the fragmentary Spanish her father had taught her and he made the effort to learn words in her tongue.
When Padre Mendoza surprised them holding hands, he decided it was time to consider that his prisoner was well, and proceed with her sentencing. There was nothing further from his nature than to execute anyone in truth, he didn’t even know how to do it but he was responsible for the safety of the mission, and of his neophytes, and willingly or not this woman had caused several deaths. Sadly, he reminded the captain that in Spain the penalty for crimes of rebellion and banditry, like Toypurnia’s, was death by garrote, with the iron collar slowly choking off her life.
“We are not in Spain,” the captain replied, shuddering.
“I assume that you agree with me, Captain, that for as long as this woman is alive we are all in danger; she will rally the tribes again. There will be no garrote that is too cruel but with pain in my heart, I say that she will have to be hanged. There is no alternative.”
“This woman is a mestiza, Padre, half Spanish by blood. You have jurisdiction over the Indians in your charge, but not over her. Only the governor of Alta California can set her sentence,” the captain argued.
Padre Mendoza, for whom the idea of being the cause of another human’s death was too heavy a burden, immediately seized upon that logic. De la Vega offered personally to go to Monterey and ask Pedro Fages to decide Toypurnia’s fate, and the missionary accepted with a deep sigh of release.
Alejandro de la Vega reached Monterey in less time than was normally required for a rider to cover that distance; he was in a hurry to carry out his project, and he wanted to avoid the raiding Indians. He traveled alone, and at a gallop, stopping at missions along the road to change his horse and sleep a few hours. He had followed that trail before, and he knew it well, but he was always awed by the magnificence of nature: endless forests, a thousand varieties of animals and birds, streams and gentle slopes, the white sands of the beaches of the Pacific. He had no unpleasant encounters with Indians: they were wandering around in the hills without a chief and without a purpose, demoralized. If Padre Mendoza’s predictions were correct, their enthusiasm had been punctured completely, and it would take years for them to reorganize. The Presidio, built on an isolated promontory seven hundred leagues from Mexico City and half the world away from Madrid, was as gloomy as a dungeon, a monstrosity of stone and mortar that served as headquarters for a small contingent of soldiers, the only company of the governor and his family. That day a thick fog amplified the cries of the seagulls and the crashing of waves upon the rocks.
Pedro Fages received the captain in a nearly bare room in which small windows admitted very little light but failed, on the other hand, to keep out the icy wind off the sea. The walls were covered with mo
unted bear heads, swords, pistols, and Dona Eulalia de Calli’s‘s coat of arms, embroidered in gold but worn now, and almost humble. In the way of furniture, there were a dozen bare wood chairs, an enormous armoire, and a military table. The ceiling was black with soot and the floor was tamped-down earth, the same as in the rudest barracks. The governor was a corpulent man with a colossal voice and the rare virtue of being immune to flattery and corruption. He wielded power with a quiet conviction that it was his accursed fate to lead Alta California out of barbarism, whatever the price. He compared himself to the first Spanish conquistadors, who had added a great part of the world to the empire, and he carried out his obligation with a sense of history, although if truth be known, he would have preferred to enjoy his wife’s fortune in Barcelona, as she asked him daily to do. An orderly served them red wine in crystal goblets from Bohemia carried thousands of miles in the trunks of Eulalia de Califs, a refinement in strong contrast to the rude furnishings of the fort. The two men toasted the far-off homeland and their friendship, commenting on the revolution in France, in which the people had taken up arms against the king. That had happened more than a year before, but the news had just reached Monterey. They agreed that there was no reason to be alarmed; surely by this time order would have been restored, and King Louis XVI would be back on the throne, though they thought he was a poor specimen of a man and not worthy of their sympathy. Deep down, they were happy that the French were killing each other, but good manners prevented them from expressing that aloud. Somewhere in the distance they could hear the muted sound of voices and yelling, which gradually grew so loud that it was impossible to ignore.
“Forgive me, Captain. These women…” said Pedro Fages, with a gesture of impatience.
“And is Her Excellency, Dona Eulalia, well?” inquired Alejandro de la Vega, blushing to his ear tips.