The Year of the Long Road

Hear now what the road did — the road that had no sea.
From Veracruz to the river the King had promised them the road ran eleven hundred miles, and they would walk it — the sea-people, who had thought the sea would be the hard half — six months of it, into a country with no rim of water, a country that did not end, and did not end, and did not end.
And it was an old country — older than Spain is in Spain.
They walked through cities the Spanish had taken and not built, and were fed, up that road, by people poorer than themselves, who set down maize for strangers because a far-off Crown had written their town’s name on a list of who would give.
At Cuautitlán they rested. And there the Church married the young of them — single to single, girl to boy — for the King granted land to families, not to loose souls, and a frontier has a long and standing need of wives.
So a harness-maker who had left his island the last of a line was wed, in a borrowed town, into the start of one.
And on that road the news at last came walking back to meet them: Lanzarote, it said, had been burning since September, field and village going under a slow grey tide of fire —

and half that party were Lanzarote’s, and learned, far inland, that the island they had ached toward had no road back left in it.
The door behind them had not closed. The door behind them had burned.
North, then, and north — Saltillo, the presidios, the dry hard going, the road taking its toll in horses, and in graves — toward a green river on the open llano with a Payaya name, and a day the record keeps exactly: the ninth of March, 1731.