In this brilliant debut novel, Lana M. Harrigan writes of the first twenty years of the Spanish conquest of New Mexico, beginning with the march in 1598 by conquistador Don Juan de Onate and his horsemen against the Indian pueblos along the Rio Grande. One village in particular resists--Aco, lying atop a sheer-walled mesa-and after its fall, among the people crippled and enslaved is a young Acoma man named Rohona who falls in love with the highborn wife of his master. The forbidden love affair between Rohona and Maria Angelica de Vizcarra is told against the backdrop of war and rebellion, in the searing sun and blood-soaked sands of the Southwest in a time when the American nation was yet to be born.