The Devil's Elixir

take trips deep into the forests and canyons of the forbidding mountains, venturing where no European had gone before, meeting tribes that usually welcomed strangers with the tip of an arrow or the edge of a spear.

He never returned from his last trip.

Almost a year after he’d disappeared, Alvaro, fearing the worst, set off with a small contingent of tribesmen to find his lost friend.

Which is why they were here now, sitting around a small fire outside the tribe’s thatched xirixi—the ancestral house of God—discussing the impossible.

“It seems to me that you’ve rather turned into their high priest, or am I mistaken?”

Alvaro was still shaken by his experience, and although the food had restored some strength to his limbs and the fire had warmed him up and dried his cassock, he was still highly agitated.

“They’ve shown me more than I can possibly show them,” Eusebio replied.

Alvaro’s eyes widened with shock. “But—my God, you’re embracing their methods, their blasphemous ideas.” He looked scared, and he leaned in, his brow crowding his eyes. “Listen to me, Eusebio. You must end this madness now. You must leave this place and come back to the mission with me.”

Eusebio looked at his friend and felt his spirits sink. Yes, he was happy to see his old friend, and he was delighted to have shared his discovery with him. But he found himself wondering if he hadn’t made a huge mistake.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t,” Eusebio told him, calmly. “Not yet.”

He couldn’t tell his friend that he still had a lot to learn from these people. Things he hadn’t dreamt possible. It had taken him by surprise to discover—slowly, gradually, and despite his preconceptions and deeply ingrained beliefs—how strong the natives’ connections were to the land, to the living beings that shared it with them, and to the energies that seemed to emanate from it. He’d talked to them about the creation of the world, paradise, and the fall of man. He’d told them about the Incarnation and the Atonement. They’d shared their insights with him. And what he heard startled him. For his hosts, the mortal and the mystical realms were intertwined. What seemed normal to him, they deemed supernatural. And what they accepted as normal—as truth—seemed like magical thinking to him.

At first.

He now knew better.

The savages, he discovered, were noble.

“Taking their medicina, their sacred brews,” he told Alvaro, “has opened up new worlds for me. What you just experienced is only the beginning. You can’t expect me to turn my back on such a revelation.”

“You must,” Alvaro insisted. “You must come back with me. Now, before it’s too late. And we must never speak of this again.”

Eusebio flinched back with surprise. “Not speak of it? Think, Alvaro. This is all we must talk about. It’s something we need to study and understand and master—in order for us to bring it home and share it with our people.”

Alvaro’s face flooded with shock. “Bring it back?” The words sputtered out of his mouth like poison. “You want to tell people about this, this—this blasphemy?”

“This blasphemy is an enlightenment. It is a higher truth they must experience.”

Alvaro was outraged. “Eusebio, I warn you,” he hissed. “The Devil has sunk his claws into you with this elixir of his. You are at risk of perdition, my brother, and I can’t sit back and allow it—not for you, not for any fellow member of the faith. You need to be saved.”

“I’ve passed the gates of heaven already, old friend,” Eusebio replied, calmly. “And the view from here is magnificent.”

It took Alvaro five months to send a message to the archbishop and to the prelate- viceroy in Mexico City, get their replies, and assemble his men, and it was winter by the time he ventured back into the mountains at the head of a small army.

To stop his friend.

To put an end to his sacrilegious ideas using whatever means necessary.

To thwart the Devil and his insidious temptations, and save his friend from eternal damnation.

Armed with bows, arrows, and muskets, the combined force of Spaniards and Indians ascended the first folds of the sierra on steep, rough paths that were covered by thick, matted bushes. Winter torrents had broken up the trails that snaked up the crumpled mountains into deep, stony channels, while straggling branches, flung horizontally across them, made the contingent’s progress even more difficult. They’d been warned about the mountain lions, jaguars, and bears that inhabited the region, but the only living things they encountered were voracious zopilote vultures that hung overhead in anticipation of a bloody banquet and scorpions that haunted their fitful sleep.

As they rose higher, the cold became more intense. The Spaniards, used to a much warmer climate, fared badly. They spent the days fighting the wet, rocky inclines and the nights huddled around their bivouacs, kindling their fires until, mile by arduous mile, they finally neared the dense forest that enshrouded the settlement where Alvaro had left Eusebio.

To their surprise, they found the pathways that wormed through the trees strewn with huge pieces of timber that had clearly been felled by the natives. Fearing an ambush, the troops’ commander ordered his men to slow their pace, prolonging their suffering and straining their nerves and their vision as they crept through the thick gloom of the funereal pines. After enduring toil and torment for three weeks, they finally reached the settlement.

There was no one there.

The tribesmen, and Eusebio, were gone.

Alvaro didn’t give up. He prodded his men forward, the native scouts following the tribe’s trail through the folds of the sierra until, on the fourth day, they reached a deep barranca at the bottom of which flowed a thunderous river. The ravine had been spanned by a rope and timber bridge.

The bridge had been cut down.

There was no other way across.

Alvaro stared at the ropes that hung over the edge of the cliff, consumed by anger and despair.

He never saw his friend again.

II

MEXICO FIVE YEARS AGO

“Pull the goddamn trigger and get your ass out here,” Munro barked through my earpiece. “We’ve got to clear out NOW!”

Tell me something I don’t know.

My eyes darted around, reacting to the three-bullet bursts and the longer, wild frenzies of gunfire that were echoing around me from all over the compound. Then some dull thuds and a searing grunt tore through my comms set, and I knew that another operative from our eight-man team had been cut down.

My body froze as opposing instincts dueled for control. I swung my gaze back to the man who was cowering next to me. His face was all sweaty, locked in anguish from the big, bloody gash in his thigh, his lips quivering, his eyes wide with fear, like he knew what was coming. My grip on the handgun tightened. I could feel my finger hovering over the trigger, tapping it indecisively, like it was red hot.

Munro was right.

We had to get out of there before it was too late. But—