I will set this down in the way a soldier sets down a report — plainly, with the things that happened and not the things I wished had happened instead. I am not a man of learning. I can write what I was taught to write and nothing more. If the words are plain it is because I have no others, and if the account seems strange it is because the thing itself was strange and I will not lie to make it ordinary.
My name is Tomás Solano. I have served under Captain-General Coronado since we departed Compostela in the February of 1540. I was assigned to the first company as a mounted scout because I speak some of the languages of the desert peoples and because I am known among the men for being careful with fire, which on a march through dry country is a quality valued above most others. I have kept cook-fires through rain. I have brought coals back to life after a night of hard wind. It is not a skill that draws attention to a man, but it is the skill that kept the column fed for fourteen months before the day I am now describing.
In the spring of the year 1541, the Captain-General decided to send an advance party northeast across the great grass plain the Indians call the Llano Estacado — the Staked Plain — to locate a suitable site for the next encampment and to be ready with fire when the column arrived. The plain offers little wood. Wind moves across it without interruption from any mountain or forest and extinguishes flame faster than a man can build it. To ride ahead meant riding for days without the certainty of being able to make fire at the end of it. This had cost the expedition time before.
The Captain-General's solution was the vessel.
The Vessel
A clay pot, no larger than a man's two fists pressed together, made by one of the Tlaxcalan allies who traveled with the column. It had a fitted lid with three small holes punched through it — enough to breathe, not enough to spill heat recklessly. Inside, a coal from the previous night's fire, packed in dry ash for insulation, wrapped in a nest of dried grass that would feed it slowly without consuming it. The theory was simple: keep the coal alive across whatever distance separated the advance party from the main column, and the column would have fire waiting when it arrived.
Others had carried such vessels before on shorter rides. It was not unusual work. The Captain-General assigned it to me because I was known to be careful, and because I was already riding ahead as scout, and because no one else wanted the additional responsibility of a clay pot that had to be checked, fed, and sheltered every hour of the march.
I accepted it without comment. I tied the vessel to my saddle with a cord of braided leather, where it could hang free without striking the horse's flank. I could hear it when the horse moved — a faint, dry sound, almost like breath.
We rode out at first light. There were six of us. The plain opened ahead and the column fell behind and by midday there was nothing in any direction but grass and sky and the flat line where they met.
The Third Night
By the third night we were further from the column than any of us had ridden from it before, and the plain had become something I do not have adequate words for. There are no landmarks on the Llano Estacado. There are no hills, no trees, no rivers visible from the surface. There is only grass moving in every direction at once, and above it the sky, which at night on that plain is not the sky of any place I had previously been. It is too large. The stars are too close. A man feels on that plain that the world beneath him is thinner than it appears — that the ground is a floor laid over something much larger, and that the something beneath knows he is there.
I am a Christian. I say this because what I am about to set down could be taken for superstition by a man who was not present, and I want it understood that I know the difference between a sign from God and a trick of an exhausted mind. I am not certain which of those applies to what I heard on the third night. I am not certain the distinction matters.
The fire spoke.
Not in words. I do not claim it formed words. What I claim is that the sounds it made — the low crackling, the occasional sharp report of a coal shifting in its ash nest — arranged themselves in a manner that felt responsive. I asked it, in a low voice, whether it was still alive. It crackled once, immediately. I asked it whether the night would be cold. It crackled twice and then went quiet. I sat back from it and looked at it for a long time and then I wrote in my report that the ember was maintaining its heat satisfactorily and I did not write the other thing.
I am writing it now.
What the Animals Did
The second thing I will set down is what the animals did.
On the plains, the great herds of woolly cattle — the ones the Indians call buffalo — move at night, and the sound of them moving is one of the sounds a scout learns to listen for because it tells you the shape of the country and whether anything is disturbing it. On the fourth night, a herd moved within a quarter mile of our camp. I heard them clearly — thousands of them, the ground trembling with their weight — and then, as if the herd had reached some boundary invisible to me, they stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. The sound ended. I heard them shift, and then begin to move again, and the sound curved away from us and receded in a direction that made no sense given the wind, and in the morning I walked to the place where they had turned and found the ground churned and heavy with their tracks, all of them bending away from the direction of our camp as cleanly as if a wall had been built in the grass.
The wolves were the same. They approached each night — I could hear them, and once I could see their eyes in the dark at the edge of the firelight — but they did not come closer than thirty yards, and they did not leave, and they did not howl, which is the thing wolves do when they are uncertain. They simply sat in the darkness and watched the vessel and, before dawn, moved away without sound.
Two of the other men noticed. Neither of them spoke of it directly. One of them began crossing himself each time he passed the vessel. The other moved his bedroll to the far side of the camp from where I hung it on its cord from a stake in the ground.
What the People Said
On the eighth day we encountered a band of the people the Spanish call Querechos — nomadic hunters who move with the buffalo herds across the plain and who have, in my experience, no particular fear of Spanish soldiers or their equipment. They had approached our camps before without hesitation and traded dried meat for small metal objects and had seemed to regard us with a wary curiosity rather than reverence or alarm.
When they approached our camp on the eighth day, one of them — a woman of middle age who appeared to speak for the group — saw the vessel where it hung from its stake. She stopped. She said something to the others. They did not run, but they did not come closer. She pointed at the vessel and said a word I did not know and then said it again, and then looked at me with an expression I could not classify. Not fear. Not reverence exactly. Something between those things that I have only seen on the faces of men in battle when they are watching something they cannot explain and cannot stop.
I asked our interpreter what the word meant. He said he was not sure. He said it was close to their word for sun, but not the same word. The word she used was more specific. He said it was closer to the sun's fire — the actual burning part of it, not the sun as an object in the sky but the quality of heat that comes from it. He said it was a word used in ceremonies and not usually said in ordinary conversation.
None of them would touch the vessel. The woman gestured to me and spoke again, and the interpreter said she was asking how long I had been carrying it. When I told her twelve days — counting back to the original coal from which this one had been lit — she was quiet for a moment and then spoke to the others and they made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite alarm. The interpreter said she had told them the fire was older than they thought. He said she meant by this something he did not know how to translate. He said the closest he could come was that the fire remembered things.
What I Became
The name came from the Tlaxcalans, not the Spanish. By the time we reached the advance camp on the twelfth day and I set the ember down and fed it into a larger fire that the full column would use that evening, the Tlaxcalan fighters attached to our company had begun calling me by a name that translates, roughly, as the man who carried the sun. Some of the Spanish soldiers heard it and repeated it without fully understanding it, and so it followed me back to the column and then back toward New Spain when the expedition turned south, and I was unable to dislodge it.
I did not mind it, in the end. I had been called worse things.
What I minded was the other thing — the thing I could not say to the Captain-General or to the priest and could not write in the official report and could barely hold in my mind without it slipping away from language entirely. Which is this: on the twelfth day, when I transferred the ember from the vessel to the larger fire, I watched it catch and spread and become something communal and ordinary, and something in me that had been alert for twelve days went quiet. Not relieved. Quiet in the way a room goes quiet after someone has left it.
I do not know what I had been carrying. I know it was alive. I know it crossed the Llano Estacado without dying. I know the wolves sat in the dark and watched it and the buffalo curved away from it and the Querecho woman looked at me as if I were doing something I did not fully understand.
I think she was right.