Aztec

* * *

When I dragged myself home that night, again eager to be out of my plumage and into a cleansing cloud of steam, I got only an offhand greeting from my daughter, instead of the usual scamper to fling herself upon me in a four-limbed hug. She was sitting on the floor, undressed, in an awkwardly backward-arched posture, holding a tezcatl mirror over her head as if she was trying to get a view of her bare back, and was too engrossed in the attempt to take much notice of my arrival. I found Béu in the adjoining room and asked her what Cocóton was doing.

"She is at the age of asking questions."

"About mirrors?"

"About her own body," said Béu, adding scornfully, "She was told a number of ignorant mistruths by her Tene Ticklish. Do you know that Cocóton once asked why she does not have a little dangle in front, like the boy up the street who is her favorite playmate? And do you know what that Ticklish told her? That if Cocóton is a good girl in this world, she will be rewarded in her afterlife by being reborn as a boy."

I was tired and grumpy, not too happy at that moment with my own burden of body, so I muttered, "I will never know why any woman should think it rewarding to be born a male."

"Exactly what I told Cocóton," Béu said smugly. "That a female is far superior. Also much more neatly made, not having an excrescence like the dangle in front."

"Is she trying instead to grow a tail behind?" I asked, indicating the child, who was still trying with the mirror to look down her back.

"No. Today she noticed that every one of her playmates has the tlacihuitztli, and she asked me what it is, not realizing she has one herself. Now she is trying to examine it."

Perhaps, reverend scribes, like most recently arrived Spaniards, you are unfamiliar with the tlacihuitztli mark, for I understand it does not appear on any white children. If it appears on the bodies of your blackamoors, I suppose it would be unnoticeable. But all our infants are born with it: a dark spot like a bruise in the small of the back. It may be as large as a dish or as little as a thumbnail, and it seems to have no function, for it gradually diminishes and fades and, after ten years or so, entirely disappears.

"I told Cocóton," Béu went on, "that when the tlacihuitztli is all gone, she will know she has grown into a young lady."

"A lady of ten years old? Do not give her too fanciful ideas."

Béu said loftily, "Like some of the foolish notions you have given her, Záa?"

"I?" I said, astonished. "I have answered all her questions as honestly as I know how."

"Cocóton told me how one day you took her walking in the new park at Chapultepec, and she asked you why the grass was green, and you told her it was so she would not walk on the sky by mistake."

"Oh," I said. "Well, it was the most honest answer I could think of. Do you know a better one?"

"The grass is green," Béu said authoritatively, "because the gods decided it should be green."

I said, "Ayya, that never occurred to me." I said, "You are right." I nodded and said, "Beyond a doubt." She smiled, pleased with her wisdom and with my acknowledgment of it. "But tell me," I said. "Why did the gods chose green instead of red or yellow or some other color?"

Ah, Your Excellency arrives just in time to enlighten me. On the third day of Creation, was it? And you can recite our Lord God's very words. "To every thing that creepeth upon the earth, I have given every green herb." One can hardly dispute it. That the grass is green is evident even to a non-Christian, and of course we Christians know that our Lord God made it so. I merely wonder, still—after all the years since my daughter inquired—why did our Lord God make it green instead of...?

Motecuzóma? What was he like?

I understand. Your Excellency is concerned to hear matters of import; you are rightly impatient of trivial subjects like the color of the grass or the small, dear things I remember of my little family in the long-ago. Nevertheless, the great Lord Motecuzóma, in whatever forgotten place he lies how, is but a buried smudge of decomposed matter, perhaps discernible only if the grass grows a brighter green where he lies. To me, it seems that our Lord God cares more for keeping His grass green than He cares for keeping green the memory of the greatest noblemen.

Yes, yes, Your Excellency. I will cease my unprofitable musings. I will cast my mind back, that I may satisfy your curiosity about the nature of the man Motecuzóma Xocoyotzin.

And a man is all he was, a mere man. As I have said, he was about a year younger than myself, which would mean he was thirty and five when he took the throne of the Mexíca—or of the entire One World, as he would have it. He was of average height for a Mexícatl, but his body was of slender build and his head was a trifle large, and that touch of disproportion made him appear somewhat shorter than he really was. His complexion was of a fine, light copper color, his eyes were coldly bright, and he would have been handsome but for a slightly flat nose which made his nostrils spread a bit too broadly.

At his ceremony of inauguration, when Motecuzóma doffed the black and blue mantles of humility, he was draped with garments of surpassing richness, which indicated the kind of taste he would always thereafter indulge. At his every public appearance, he wore a costume that was never twice the same in every detail, but in sumptuosity was always on the order of what I now describe:

He wore either a red leather or an ornately embroidered cotton maxtlatl, the flaps of which hung below his knees front and back. That excessively ample loincloth, I suspect, he may have adopted to prevent any accidental exposure of the genital malformation I have alluded to. His sandals were gilded and sometimes, if he was required only to appear and not do much walking, their soles were of solid gold. He might wear any number of ornaments—a golden necklace with a medallion that covered most of his chest; a labret in his lower lip, made of crystal enclosing a feather of a fisher bird; ear plugs of jadestone and a nose plug of turquoise. On his head was either a coronet or diadem of gold, tufted with tall plumes, or one of those great overarching headdresses all of arm-long quetzal tototl tail feathers.

But the most striking feature of his costume was the mantle, always of a length to hang from his shoulders to his ankles, always of the most beautiful feathers from the most rare and precious birds, always of the most painstaking feather work. He had mantles made of all scarlet feathers, or all yellow, all blue or green, or a mingling of various colors. But the one I remember best was the voluminous mantle made all of the iridescent, scintillating, varicolored feathers of none but hummingbirds. When I remind you that the largest feather on a hummingbird is scarcely bigger than the little tufty eyebrow of a moth, Your Excellency may appreciate the feathersmiths' talent and labor and ingenuity that went into the making of that mantle, and the inestimable worth of it as a true work of art.

Motecuzóma had not evinced such luxurious tastes during his two years as regent, while Ahuítzotl was still alive—or half alive. Motecuzóma and his two wives had lived simply, occupying just a few corner rooms of the old and by then rather derelict palace built by his grandfather Motecuzóma the Elder. He had dressed inconspicuously, and had eschewed pomp and ceremony, and had refrained from exercising all the powers inherent in the regency. He had promulgated no new laws, founded no new frontier settlements, instigated no new wars. He had confined his attention only to those day-to-day affairs of the Mexíca domains that required no momentous decisions or pronouncements.

However, on his installation as Revered Speaker, when Motecuzóma shed those somber blue and black robes, he threw off all humility at the same moment. I think I can best illustrate by recounting my first meeting with the man, some months after his accession, when he began calling in all his nobles and knights for interviews, one by one. His expressed intent was that he wished to become familiar with those subordinates he did not yet know except as names on a roster, but I believe his true intent was to awe and impress us all with his new air of majesty and magnificence. Anyway, when he had worked his way down through courtiers and nobles and wise men and priests and seers and sorcerers, he came eventually to the ranks of the Eagle Knights, and in due time I was summoned to present myself at court in the forenoon of a certain day. I did so, resplendent and uncomfortable again in all my feathered regalia, and the steward outside the throne room door said:

"Will my lord the Eagle Knight Mixtli divest himself of his uniform?"

"No," I said flatly. It had been trouble enough to get into.

"My lord," he said, seeming as nervous as a rabbit, "it is required by order of the Revered Speaker himself. If you will please to take off the eagle head and the mantle and the taloned sandals, you can cover the body armor with this."

"With rags?" I exclaimed, as he handed me a shapeless garment made of the maguey-fiber cloth we used for sacking. "I am no supplicant or petitioner, man! How dare you?"

"Please, my lord," he begged, wringing his hands. "You are not the first to resent it. But henceforth the custom is that all appearing before the Revered Speaker will come barefooted and in beggarly garb. I dare not admit you otherwise. It would cost my life."

"This is nonsense," I grumbled, but, to spare the poor rabbit, I put off my helmet, shield, and outerwear, and draped myself in the sackcloth.

"Now, when you go in—" the man started to say.

"Thank you," I said crisply, "but I know how to comport myself in the presence of high personages."

"There are some other new rules of protocol," said the wretch. "I entreat you, my lord, not to draw displeasure on yourself or on me. I merely tell you the orders given."

"Tell me," I said, through my teeth.

"There are three chalk marks on the floor between the door and the Revered Speaker's chair. As you enter, the first mark is just beyond the threshold. There you stoop and make the gesture of tlalqualiztli—finger to floor to lips—saying, 'Lord.' Walk to the second-mark, again make obeisance, and say, 'My lord.' Walk to the third mark, kiss the earth again, and say, 'My great lord.' Do not rise then until he gives you leave, and do not approach closer to his person than that third chalk mark."

"This is unbelievable," I said.

Avoiding my stare, the steward went on, "You will address the Revered Speaker only when he asks a direct question requiring your reply. Do not at any time raise your voice above a discreet murmur. The interview will be concluded when the Revered Speaker says it is. At that moment, make the tlalqualiztli where you stand. Then walk backward—"

"This is insanity."

"Walk backward, always keeping your face and front respectfully to the throne, dropping to kiss the earth at each chalk mark, and continue to walk backward until you are out the door and in this corridor again. Only then may you resume your garb and your rank—"

"And my human dignity," I said sourly.

"Ayya, I beseech you, my lord," said the terrified rabbit. "Do not essay any such jest in yonder, in the presence. You would come out not backward, but in segments."

When I had approached the throne in the prescribed humiliating manner, saying at the proper intervals, "Lord... my lord... my great lord," Motecuzóma let me remain crouched for a long moment before he condescended to drawl, "You may rise, Eagle Knight Chicome-Xochitl Tlilectic-Mixtli."

Ranked behind his throne stood the elderly men of the Speaking Council, most of them, of course, left over from previous reigns, but there were two or three new faces. One of the new ones was the newly appointed Snake Woman, Tlacotzin. All the men were barefooted and, instead of their customary yellow mantles of distinction, wore the same drab sacking cloth that I did, and looked unhappy about it. The Revered Speaker's throne was a modestly low icpali chair, not even raised on a dais, but the elegance of his costume—especially in contrast to the others in the room—belied any pretense of modesty. He had a number of bark papers unfolded full length across his lap and trailing to the floor on either side, and evidently he had just read from one of them my full name. Next he made a show of consulting several different panels of several different papers, and said:

"It appears that my uncle Ahuítzotl entertained the idea of someday elevating you to the Speaking Council, Knight Mixtli. I entertain no such idea."

"Thank you, Lord Speaker," I said, and meant it. "I have never aspired to—

He interrupted, in a biting voice, "You will speak only when I indicate by a question that your reply is required."

"Yes, my lord."

"And that reply was not required. Obedience need not be expressed; it is taken for granted."

He studied the papers again, while I stood mute, hot with anger. I had once thought Ahuítzotl foolishly pompous, always speaking of himself as "we," but in retrospect he seemed warm and outgoing, compared to this icily aloof nephew of his.

"Your maps and journals of your travels are excellent, Knight Mixtli. These of Texcala will be of immediate use, for I plan a new war which will end forever the defiance of those Texcalteca. I also have here your maps of the southern trace routes all the way into the Maya country. All superbly detailed. Very good work indeed." He paused, then flicked his cold gaze up at me. "You may say 'thank you' when your Revered Speaker compliments you."

I duly said, "Thank you," and Motecuzóma went on:

"I understand that in the years since you presented these maps to my uncle, you have made other journeys." He waited, and when I did not reply, he barked, "Speak!"

"I have not been asked a question, my lord."

Smiling without humor, he said, very precisely, "During those later journeys did you also make maps?"

"Yes, Lord Speaker, either on the road or immediately on my return home, while my memory of landmarks was still fresh."

"You will deliver those maps here to the palace. I will have use for them when eventually I make war in other places after Texcala." I said nothing; obedience was taken for granted. He continued, "I understand also that you have an admirable command of many provincial languages."

He waited again. I said, "Thank you, Lord Speaker."

He snarled, "That was not a compliment!"

"You said admirable, my lord."

Some of the Speaking Council rolled their eyes, others squeezed their eyes shut.

"Cease your insolence! Which languages do you speak?"

"Of Náhuatl, I command both the educated and the common speech used here in Tenochtítlan. Also the more refined Náhuatl of Texcóco, and the various rough dialects spoken in such foreign lands as Texcala." Motecuzóma impatiently drummed his fingers on his knee. "I am fluent in the Lóochi of the Tzapoteca, not quite so fluent in the many dialects of the Poré of Michihuácan. I can make myself understood in the language of the Mixtaca, in several of the Olméca tongues, in that of the Maya and the numerous dialects derived from Maya. I have a few words of Otomite and—"

"Enough," Motecuzóma said sharply. "It may well be that I can give you an opportunity to practice your talents, when I make war upon some nation whose phrase for 'we surrender' I do not know. But for now, your maps will suffice. Make haste to deliver them."

I said nothing; obedience was taken for granted. Some of the old men were mouthing silently but urgently at me, and I wondered why, until Motecuzóma almost shouted, "That was dismissal, Knight Mixtli!"

I backed out of the throne room as required and, in the corridor as I doffed the beggar sackcloth, I said to the steward, "The man is mad. But is he tlahuele or merely xolopitli?" Náhuatl has two words for a madman: xolopitli means one only harmlessly deranged; tlahuele means a dangerous raving maniac. Each word made the rabbit steward flinch.

"Please, my lord, modulate your voice." Then he mumbled, "I will grant you, he has his peculiarities. Do you know? He takes only one meal a day, in the evening, but in preparation for it he orders whole twenties of dishes prepared, even hundreds, all different, so that when his mealtime comes he may call for whatever food appeals to him at that instant. Out of all those prepared, he may devour one and daintily taste of only two or three others."

"And the rest go to waste?" I asked.

"Oh, no. To every meal he invites all his favorite and highest-ranking lords, all those within the reach of his messengers. And the lords come, by twenties and even hundreds, even if it means leaving their own dinners and families, and they eat whatever foods the Uey-Tlatoani spurns."

"Odd," I murmured. "I should not have taken Motecuzóma to be a man who liked so much company, even at mealtime."

"Actually, he does not. The other lords eat in the same great dining hall, but conversation is forbidden, and they never get the least glimpse of the Reverend Speaker. A high screen is set around the corner where he sits to dine, so he sits unseen and unmolested. The other lords might not even know he is present, except that once in a while, when Motecuzóma is particularly pleased with some one dish, he will send it around the hall, and all must taste of it."

"Then he is not mad," I said. "Remember, it has always been rumored that the Uey-Tlatoani Tixoc died of poison. What you have just described sounds eccentric and extravagant, but it could also be Motecuzóma's shrewd way of assuring that he does not go the way his uncle Tixoc did."

Long before meeting Motecuzóma, I had conceived a considerable antipathy toward him. If I came away from the palace that day feeling any new sentiment about the man, it was only a mild stirring of pity. Yes, pity. It seemed to me that a ruler should inspire others to extol his eminence, not do it himself; that others ought to kiss the earth to him because he deserved it, not because he demanded it. To my mind, all the protocol and ritual and panoply with which Motecuzóma had surrounded himself were less majestic than pretentious, even pathetic. They were like his abundance of dress ornaments, no more than the garniture of greatness, assumed by a man uneasy, insecure, uncertain that he himself was of any greatness at all.

I got home to find that Cozcatl had come calling, and was waiting to tell me the latest news of his school. While I began to divest myself of my Eagle Knight garb for more comfortable clothes, he rubbed his hands together in great good humor and announced:

"The Revered Speaker Motecuzóma has engaged me to undertake the training of his entire palace staff of servants and slaves, from the highest stewards to the scullery help."

That was such good news that I called for Turquoise to bring us a jug of cooled octli that we might celebrate. Star Singer also came running, to bring and light for each of us a poquietl.

"But I have just come from the palace," I said to Cozcatl. "And I got the impression that Motecuzóma's servants are already trained—or at least cowed to groveling—the same as his Speaking Council and every other person connected with his court."

"Oh, his servants serve well enough," said Cozcatl. He sucked on his tube and blew a smoke ring. "But he wants them polished and refined, to be the equal of Nezahualpili's staff in Texcóco."

I said, "It appears that our Revered Speaker has feelings of envy and rivalry about more than the mannerly servants of the Texcóco court. I might even say feelings of animosity. Motecuzóma told me today that he proposes to launch a new war against Texcala, which is not surprising. What he did not say, but I have heard elsewhere, is that he tried to order Nezahualpili to lead the assault, and with Acolhua troops forming the bulk of the army. I also hear that Nezahualpili most firmly declined that honor, and I am glad—after all, he is no longer young. But it does seem that Motecuzóma would like to do what Ahuítzotl did in our own war days, Cozcatl. To decimate the Acolhua, or even force Nezahualpili himself to fall in combat."

Cozcatl said, "It may be, Mixtli, that Motecuzóma has the same reason that Ahuítzotl had."

I took a bracing drink of octli and said, "Do you mean what I fear you mean?"

Cozcatl nodded. "That onetime child bride of Nezahualpili whose name is no longer mentioned. Being Ahuítzotl's daughter, she was Motecuzóma's cousin... and maybe something more than cousin to him. For whatever it signifies, it was immediately after her execution that Motecuzóma took the black robes of priesthood and celibacy."

I said, "A coincidence that indeed invites speculation," and drained my cup of octli. It inspirited me enough to say, "Well, he long ago gave up the priesthood, and he now has two legal wives, and he will be taking more. Let us hope that he eventually gives up his animus toward Nezahualpili. Let us also hope that he never learns of the part you and I played in his lady cousin's downfall."

Cozcatl said cheerfully, "Do not worry. The good Nezahualpili has forever kept silent about our involvement. Ahuítzotl never connected us with the affair. Motecuzóma does not, either, or he would hardly be patronizing my school."

I said with relief, "You are probably right." Then I laughed and said, "You seem impervious to worry or even to pain." I pointed to his poquietl. "Are you not likely to do yourself serious injury?"

He had apparently not noticed that the hand holding his lighted smoking tube had lowered so that the burning coal of it rested against the bare skin of his other arm. When I called it to his notice he jerked the poquietl away and looked glumly at the angry red burn mark it had left on his skin.

"Sometimes my attention gets fixed on something," he muttered, "and I am unaware of—trifles like that."

"Trifles?" I said. "It must hurt worse than a wasp sting. I will call for Turquoise to bring an ointment."

"No, no, I do not—I hardly feel it at all," he said, and stood up. "I will see you soon again, Mixtli."

He was just leaving the house when Béu Ribé came in from some errand. Cozcatl greeted her warmly, as usual, but her smile at him seemed rather strained, and, when he was gone, she said to me:

"I met his wife on the street, and we spoke a few words. Quequelmíqui must know that I am acquainted with Cozcatl's history, and his wound, and their marriage of accommodation to it. But she seemed radiantly happy, and she looked at me with a sort of challenge, as if she dared me to make any remark."

A little drowsy from the octli, I said, "Make a remark about what?"

"About her being pregnant. It is obvious to any woman's eyes."

"You must be mistaken," I said. "You know it to be impossible."

She gave me an impatient look. "Impossible it may be, but mistaken I am not. Even a spinster recognizes that condition. It cannot be long before even her husband takes note of it. And what then?"

There was no answer to such a question, and Béu left the room without waiting for one, leaving me to sit and think. I should have realized, when Ticklish came to me pleading that I give her the one experience her husband could not, that she had really wanted me to give her something more lasting than just the experience. She wanted a child—a Cocóton of her own—and who better than the beloved Cocóton's father to provide it? More than likely, Ticklish had come to me already having eaten of fox meat or of the herb cihuapatli or one of the other specifics that supposedly assure a woman's impregnation. Well, I very nearly had succumbed to her blandishments. Only Béu's unexpected arrival had given me an excuse to refuse. So I was not the father, and Cozcatl could not be, but somebody was. Ticklish had made it plain that she would resort to other expedients. I said to myself, "When I sent her away from here, she had all the remainder of that day...."

No doubt I should have been more concerned about the matter, but at that time I was working hard, in obedience to Motecuzóma's order that I hand over all the maps of all my travels. In doing so, I took some liberty in my interpretation of his order. I did not deliver to the palace my original maps, but took the time to make copies of them all, and submitted them one by one as they were completed. I excused the delay by explaining that many of the earlier-drawn originals were fragmentary and travel-stained, some done on poor paper or even scratched on grape leaves, and that I wanted my Lord Speaker to have fresh, clean, and durable drawings. The excuse was not entirely an untruth, but my real reason was that the original maps were precious to me as mementos of my wanderings, some of which I had made in company with my adored Zyanya, and I simply wanted to keep them.

Also, I might want to travel those roads again, and perhaps keep on going, not to return, if the reign of Motecuzóma made Tenochtítlan too uncomfortable for me. With that possible emigration in mind, I omitted some significant details from the map copies I provided to the Uey-Tlatoani. For example, I left out any mark of the black lake where I had stumbled upon the giant boar tusks; if there was any more treasure there, I might someday have need of it.

When not working, I spent as much time as possible with my daughter. I had got into the pleasant habit of telling her a story every afternoon, and of course I told her such tales as would have most interested me when I was her age: stories replete with action and violence and high adventure. In fact, most of them were true accounts of my own experiences. Or a slightly embellished truth, or a slightly diluted truth, as the case might be. Such tales required me frequently to roar like a maddened jaguar or chatter like an angry spider monkey or howl like a melancholy coyote. When Cocóton quailed at some of the noises I produced, I prided myself on my talent for telling an adventure so vividly that a listener could almost share it. But one day the little girl came to me at the accustomed time for my entertaining her, and she said most solemnly:

"May we speak, Tete, as grown persons would?"

I was amused at such grave formality from a child only about six years old, but I replied just as gravely, "We may, Small Crumb. What do you have on your mind?"

"I wish to say that I do not think the stories you tell are the most fitting for a young girl to hear."

Somewhat surprised, even hurt, I said, "Do tell me your complaint about my unsuitable stories."

She said, as if soothing a petulant child even younger than herself, "I am sure they are very good stories. I am sure a boy would like very much to hear them. Boys like to be frightened, I think. My friend Chacalin"—she waved in the direction of a neighbor's house—"he sometimes makes animal noises and his own noises frighten him into crying. If you like, Tete, I will bring him each afternoon to hear your stories instead of me."

I said, perhaps a trifle peevishly, "Chacalin has his own father to tell him stories. Doubtless very exciting tales, the adventures of a pottery merchant in the Tlaltelólco market. But, Cocóton, I have never noticed you crying when I told a story."

"Oh, I would not. Not in front of you. I cry at night in bed when I am alone. For I remember the jaguars and the serpents and the bandits, and they come even more alive in the dark, and they chase me through my dreams."

"My dear child!" I exclaimed, drawing her to me. "Why did you never mention this before?"

"I am not very brave." She hid her face against my shoulder. "Not with big animals. I suppose not with big fathers either."

"From now on," I promised, "I shall try to appear smaller. And I will tell no more of fierce beasts and skulking bandits. What would you prefer that I tell about?"

She pondered, then asked in a shy voice, "Tete, did you never have any easy adventures?"

I could think of no immediate answer to that. I could not even imagine such a thing as an "easy adventure," unless it was something of the sort that might happen to Chacalin's father—selling a customer a jug with a hairline crack, and not being caught at it. But then I remembered something, and I said:

"I once had a foolish adventure. Would that be acceptable?"

She said, "Ayyo, yes, I would enjoy a foolish tale!"

I lay down on the floor on my back, and bent my knees to a peak. I pointed and said, "That is a volcano, a volcano named Tzeboruko, which means to snort with anger. But I promise, I will do no snorting. You sit up there, right on the crater of it."

When she was perched on my kneecaps, I said the traditional "Oc ye nechca," and I began to tell her how the volcano's overflow had caught me sitting stupidly in the middle of the ocean bay. During the course of the story, I refrained from making the noises of lava erupting and steam boiling, but, at the story's high point, I suddenly cried "Uiuioni!" and waggled my knees, then bumped them upward. "And o-o-ompa! I went away with the water!" The bounce dislodged Cocóton so that, at the ompa, she slid down my thighs to stop with a thump on my belly. It knocked the breath out of me and made her giggle and gurgle with delight.

It seemed I had hit on a story, and a form of story-telling, eminently suitable for a little girl. Every afternoon for a very long time thereafter, we had to play the Volcano Erupting. Even though I managed to think up other unfrightening tales, Cocóton insisted that I also tell and demonstrate how Tzeboruko had once flung me off The One World. I told it over and over and over, always with her participation—tremulous atop my knees as I drawled and drew out ever longer the suspense of the preliminaries, then gleeful when I bounced her, squealing as she slid, then heartily laughing at my whoosh of breath when she came down with a thump. The Volcano Erupting went on erupting every day until Cocóton grew old enough that Béu began to disapprove of her "unladylike behavior," and Cocóton herself began to find it a "childish" game. I was somewhat sorry to see my daughter growing out of her childhood, but I was by then well wearied of being jolted in the belly.

Inevitably, the day came when Cozcatl called on me again—in a pitiable state: his eyes red-rimmed, his voice hoarse, his hands interlaced and twisting as if they fought each other.

I asked him gently, "Have you been crying, my friend?"

"Doubtless I have reason to," he said in that gravelly voice. "But no, I have not. What it is..." He unlaced his knotted fingers to gesture distractedly. "For a while past, my eyes and my tongue both seem somehow to have been—thickening—filming over."

"I am sorry," I said. "Have you consulted a physician?"

"No, and I did not come to speak of that. Mixtli, was it you who did it?"

I made no hypocritical pretense of ignorance. I said, "I know what you mean. Béu remarked on it some time ago. But no, it was not my doing."

He nodded and said miserably, "I believe you. But that only makes it harder to bear. I will never know who it was. Even if I beat her half to death, I do not think she would tell. And I could not beat Quequelmíqui."

I consider for a moment, then said, "I will tell you this. She wanted me to be the father."

He nodded again, like a palsied old man. "I had supposed so. She would have wanted a child as much like your daughter as possible." After a pause, he said, "if you had done it, I would have been hurt, but I could have borne it—"

With one hand he stroked a curiously pale patch on his cheek, almost silver in color. I wondered if he had again absentmindedly burned himself. Then I noticed that the fingers of his stroking hand were almost colorless at the tips. He went on, "My poor Quequelmíqui. She could have endured a marriage to a sexless man, I think. But after she came to have such a mother love for your daughter, she could not endure an unfruitful marriage."

He looked out the window, and he looked unhappy. My little girl was playing with some of her friends in the street outside.

"I hoped—I tried to provide a substitute satisfaction for her. I started a special class for the children of the servants already in my charge, preparing them to follow their parents into domestic service. My real reason was that I hoped they would divert my wife's yearning, that she could learn to love them. But they were other people's children... and she had not been acquainted with them from infancy, as with Cocóton—"

"Look, Cozcatl," I said. "This child in her womb is not yours. It never could have been. But, except for the seed, the child is hers. And she is your beloved wife. Suppose it had happened that you married a widow already the mother of a young child. Would you suffer torments if that had been the case?"

"She has already tried that argument on me," he said gruffly. "But that, you see, would not have been a betrayal. After all these years of a happy marriage. Happy for me, at least."

I recalled the years during which Zyanya and I had been all in all to each other, and I tried to imagine how I would have felt if she had ever been unfaithful, and finally I said, "I sympathize sincerely, my friend. But it will be your wife's issue. She is a handsome woman, and the child is bound to be a comely one. I can almost promise that you will soon find yourself accepting it, taking it to your heart. I know your kind nature, and I know you can love a fatherless child as deeply as I love my motherless daughter."

"Not exactly fatherless," he growled.

"It is your wife's child," I persisted. "You are her husband. You are its father. If she will not name a name even to you, she will hardly tell another. And of the physical circumstances, who else is there who knows? Béu and myself, yes, but you can be certain that we would never tell. Blood Glutton is long dead, and so is that old palace doctor who tended you after your injury. I can think of no one else who—"

"I can!" he interrupted grimly. "The man who is the father. He may be an octli drunkard who has been boasting of his conquest in every lakefront drinking house for months past. He may even appear at our house someday and demand—"

I said, "One would suppose that Ticklish exercised discretion and discrimination," though privately I could not be too sure of that.

"There is another thing," Cozcatl continued. "She has now enjoyed a—a natural kind of sex. Can she ever really be satisfied any longer with... with my kind? Might she not go seeking a man again?"

I said sternly, "You are agonizing over possibilities that probably will never come to pass. She wanted a child, that is all, and now she will have a child. I can tell you that new mothers have little leisure for promiscuity."

"Yya ouíya," he sighed huskily. "I wish you were the father, Mixtli. If I knew it was the doing of my oldest friend... oh, it would have taken a while, but I could have made my peace with it—"

"Stop this, Cozcatl!" He was making me feel twice guilty—that I very nearly had coupled with his wife—and that I had not.

But he would not be silenced. "There are other considerations," he said vaguely. "But no matter. If it were your child inside her, I could make myself wait... could have been a father for a time, at least..."

He seemed to have drifted into senseless rambling. I sought desperately for words that would bring him back to sobriety. But he suddenly burst out weeping—the harsh, rasping, dry sobs with which a man cries; nothing like the gentle, melting, almost musical weeping of a woman—and he ran from the house.

I never saw him again. And the rest is ugly, so I will tell it quickly. That same afternoon, Cozcatl marched away from his home and school and students—including all the palace servants in his charge—marched off to enlist in the forces of The Triple Alliance fighting in Texcala, and marched onto the point of any enemy spear.

His abrupt departure and sudden death occasioned as much puzzlement as grief among Cozcatl's many friends and associates, but his motive was generally assumed to have been a rather too reckless loyalty to his patron, the Revered Speaker. Not Ticklish nor Béu nor I ever said anything to cast doubt on that theory, or on the equally accepted assumption that the bulge under his wife's skirt had been put there by Cozcatl before he so rashly went off to war.

For my part I never said anything to any of our acquaintances, not even to Béu, about a suspicion of my own. I remembered Cozcatl's unfinished fragments of sentences: "I could make myself wait... could have been a father for a time, at least..." And I remembered the poquietl burn he had not felt, the thickened voice and gummy eyes, the silvery stain on his face....

The funeral services were held over his maquahuitl and shield, brought home from the battlefield. On that occasion, in the company of countless other mourners, I coldly proffered formal condolences to the widow, after which I deliberately avoided seeing her again. Instead, I sought out the Mexícatl warrior who had brought Cozcatl's relics and was present at their interment. I put to him a blunt question and, after some hesitant shuffling of his feet, he answered:

"Yes, my lord. When the physician of our troop tore open the armor from around this man's wound, he found lumps and scaly patches of skin over much of the man's body. You have guessed right, my lord. He was afflicted with the teococoliztli."

The word means The Being Eaten by the Gods. Clearly, the disease is also known in the Old World you came from, for the first arriving Spaniards said, "Leprosy!" when they encountered here certain men and women lacking fingers, toes, nose or—in the final stages—much of a face at all.

The gods may begin eating their chosen teococox abruptly or gradually, and they may do the eating slowly or voraciously, or in various different ways, but none of the God-Eaten has ever felt honored to be thus chosen. At first there may be only a numbness in parts of the body, as in the case of Cozcatl, who failed to feel that burn on his forearm. There can be a thickening of the tissues inside the eyelids, nose, and throat, so that the sufferer's sight is affected, his voice coarsened, his swallowing and breathing made difficult. The body's skin may dry and slough off in tatters, or it may bulge with numberless nodules that break into suppurant sores. The disease is invariably fatal, but the most horrible thing about it is that it usually takes so long to eat its victim entirely. The smaller extremities of the body—fingers, nose, ears, tepúli, toes—are gnawed away first, leaving only holes or slimy stumps. The skin of the face grows leathery, silvery-gray, and loose, and it sags, so that a person's forehead may droop down over the aperture where his nose used to be. His lips may bloat, the lower one so heavy and pendulous that his mouth hangs open ever after.

But even then the gods continue leisurely with their meal. It may be a matter of months or years before the teococox is unable to see or talk or walk or make any use of his fingerless hand stumps. And still he may go on existing—bedridden, helpless, stinking of decay, suffering that ghastly misery—for many more years before he finally suffocates or strangles. But not many men or women choose to endure that half-life. Even if they themselves could bear it, their most loving loved ones cannot long endure the stomach-turning horror of tending their needs and bodily functions. Most of the God-Eaten choose to live only so long as they are still human beings, then they take their own life with a draft of poison or an improvised garrotte or a dagger thrust—or by finding some way to achieve the more honorable Flowery Death, as Cozcatl did.

He had known what awaited him, but he loved his Quequelmíqui so much that he would have endured and defied the God-Eating as long as he could—or as long as she could, without recoiling at the sight of him. Even when he realized that his wife had betrayed him, Cozcatl might have stayed to see the child—to be a father for a time, at least, as he told me—if the child had been mine. But it was not; his wife had betrayed him with a stranger. He had no wish or reason to postpone the inevitable; he went and impaled himself on a Texcalteca spear.

I felt more than the simple grief of bereavement at losing my friend Cozcatl. After all, I had been responsible for him during much of his life, ever since he was my nine-year-old slave in Texcóco. Even that long ago, I had almost caused his execution by involving him in my campaign of revenge against the Lord Joy. Later he had lost his manhood while trying to protect me from Chimali. It was my asking Ticklish to be mother to Cocóton that had made her so avidly desire real motherhood. My near involvement in her adultery had been only narrowly averted by circumstances, not by my rectitude or my fidelity to Cozcatl. And even there I had done him a disservice. If I had bedded and impregnated Ticklish, Cozcatl might yet have lived a while, and even happily, before the God-Eating took him....

Thinking on it, I have often wondered why Cozcatl ever called me friend.

Cozcatl's widow served as sole director of their school and staff and students for some few months longer. Then she came to term and was delivered of her accursed bastard. And cursed it was; it was born dead; I do not recall even hearing what sex it would have been. When Ticklish was able to walk, she also, like Cozcatl, went walking away from Tenochtítlan, and never came back. The school was left in confusion, with the unpaid teachers threatening to leave too. So Motecuzóma, vexed by the prospect of having his servants return to him only half polished, ordered that the abandoned property be confiscated. He put it in the charge of teacher-priests recruited from a calmécac, and the school continued in existence as long as the city did.

* * *

It was about that time that my daughter Cocóton passed her seventh birthday, and we all of course ceased to call her Small Crumb. After much deliberation and choosing and discarding, I decided to add to her birth-date name of One Grass the adult name of Zyanya-Nochipa, which means Always Always, said first in her mother's language of Lóochi and repeated in Náhuatl. I thought the name, besides being a memorial of her mother, was also an adroit employment of the words. Zyanya-Nochipa could be taken to mean "always and forever," an enhancement of her mother's already lovely name. Or it could be rendered "always Always," to signify that the mother lived on in the person of her daughter.

With Béu's help, I arranged a grand feast of celebration for the day, to be attended by the little neighbor Chacalin and all my daughter's other playmates and all their parents. Beforehand, however, Béu and I escorted the birthday girl to have her new name inscribed in the register of citizens just come of that age. We did not go to the man who was in charge of keeping track of the general population. Since Zyanya-Nochipa was the daughter of an Eagle Knight, we went to the palace tonalpoqui, who kept the register of the more elite citizens.

The old archivist grumbled, "It is my duty and my privilege to use the divinatory tonalmatl book and my interpretive talents to select the child's name. Things have come to a grievous pass when parents can simply come and tell me what the new citizen is to be named. That is unseemly enough, Lord Knight, but you are also naming the poor young one with two words exactly alike, though in two different languages, and neither word means any thing. Could you not at least call her Always Bejeweled or something comprehensible like that?"

"No," I said firmly. "It is to be Always Always."

He said in exasperation, "Why not Never Never? How do you expect me to draw upon her page in the registry a name symbol of abstract words? How do I make a picture of meaningless noises?"

"They are not at all meaningless," I said with feeling. "However, Lord Tonalpoqui, I anticipated such an objection, so I presumed to work out the word pictures myself. You see, I have been a scribe in my time." I gave him the drawing I had made, which showed a hand gripping an arrow on which was perched a butterfly.

He read aloud the words for hand, arrow, and butterfly, "Noma, chichiquili, papalotl. Ah, I see you are acquainted with the useful mode of picturing a thing for its sound alone. Yes, indeed, the first sounds of the three words do make no-chi-pa. Always."

He said it with admiration, but it appeared to cost him some effort. I finally grasped that the old sage was afraid of being cheated of his full fee, since I had left him nothing but copywork to do. So I paid him an amount of gold dust that would amply have reimbursed him for several days' and nights' study of his divinatory books. At that, he ceased grumbling and set to work most eagerly. With the proper ceremony and care, and the use of rather more brushes and reeds than were really necessary, he painted on a panel page of his register the symbols: the One single dot and the tufty Grass and then my concocted symbols for Always, twice repeated. My daughter was formally named: Ce-Malinali Zyanya-Nochipa, to be familiarly called Nochipa.

At the time Motecuzóma acceded to the throne, his capital of Tenochtítlan had only half recovered from the devastation of the great flood. Thousands of its inhabitants were still living crowded together with those of their relations fortunate enough to have a roof, or were living in shanties heaped up of the flood's rubble or of maguey leaves brought from the mainland, or were living even more wretchedly in canoes moored under the city causeways. It took two more years before Tenochtítlan's reconstruction, with adequate buildings for tenement dwelling, was completed under Motecuzóma's direction.

And while he was at it, he built a fine new palace for himself, on the bank of the canal at the southern side of The Heart of the One World. It was the most immense, most luxurious, most elaborately decorated and furnished palace ever built anywhere in these lands, far grander even than Nezahualpili's city and country estates combined. As a matter of fact, Motecuzóma, determined to outdo Nezahualpili, built himself an elegant country palace as well, on the outskirts of that lovely mountain town of Quaunahuac which I have several times admiringly mentioned. As you may know, my lord friars, if any of you have visited there since your Captain-General Cortés appropriated that palace for his residence, its gardens must be the most vast, the most magnificent and variously planted of any you have ever seen anywhere.

The reconstruction of Tenochtítlan might have proceeded more rapidly—the whole of the Mexíca domain might have been better assured of prosperity—had not Motecuzóma been engaged, almost from the moment he took the throne, in supervising one war after another, and sometimes two wars at once. As I have told, he immediately launched a new assault on the oft-beset but always obdurate land of Texcala. But that was only to be expected. A newly installed Uey-Tlatoani almost always began his reign by flexing his muscles, and that land was, by virtue of its propinquity and stolid enmity, the most natural victim, however little value it would have been to us if we ever had conquered it.

But at the same time, Motecuzóma was first beginning to lay out the gardens of his country estate, and he heard from some traveler about a distinctive tree which grew only in one small region of northern Uaxyacac. The traveler rather unimaginatively called it just "the red-painted-flower tree," but his description of it intrigued the Revered Speaker. That tree's blossoms, said the man, were so constructed that they looked exactly like miniature human hands, their red petals or lobes making fingers with an apposed thumb. Unfortunately, said the traveler, the sole habitat of that tree was also the home ground of one paltry tribe of the Mixteca. Its chief or elder, an old man named Suchix, had reserved the red-painted-flower tree to himself—three or four big ones growing about his squalid hut—and kept his tribesmen forever searching for and uprooting any new sprouts that might dare to spring up elsewhere.

"He does not just have a passion for exclusive possession," the traveler is reported to have said. "The hand-shaped flower makes a medicine that cures heart ailments which resist any other treatment. Old Suchix heals sufferers from all the lands about, and charges them extravagantly. That is why he is anxious that the tree remain a rarity, and his alone."

Motecuzóma is said to have smiled indulgently. "Ah, if it is a mere matter of greed, I shall simply offer him more gold than he and his trees can earn in his lifetime."

And he sent a Mixteca-speaking swift-messenger trotting toward Uaxyacac, carrying a fortune in gold, with instructions to buy one of the trees and pay any price Suchix asked. But there must have been more than miserliness about that old Mixtecatl chief; there must have been some trace of pride or integrity in his nature. The messenger returned to Tenochtítlan with the fortune undiminished by a single grain of gold dust, and with the news that Suchix had haughtily declined to part with so much as a twig. So Motecuzóma next sent a troop of warriors, carrying only obsidian, and Suchix and his whole tribe were exterminated, and you can now see the tree of the handlike blossoms growing in those gardens outside Quaunahuac.

But the Revered Speaker's concern was not entirely for events abroad. When he was not plotting or trying to provoke a new war, or directing its prosecution from one of his palaces, or personally enjoying it by leading an army into combat himself, he stayed at home and worried about the Great Pyramid. If that seems inexplicably eccentric to you, reverend scribes, so did it seem to many of us, his subjects, when Motecuzóma conceived a peculiar preoccupation with what he had decided was the structure's "misplacement." It seems that what was wrong was that on the two days of the year, in spring and autumn, when the length of day and night are precisely equal, the pyramid threw a small but perceptible shadow to one side at high midday. According to Motecuzóma, the temple should not have cast any shadow at all at those two instants of the year. That it did, he said, meant that the Great Pyramid had been built just slightly—perhaps only the breadth of a finger or two—skewed from its proper position in relation to Tonatíu's course across the sky.

Well, the Great Pyramid had placidly sat so for some nineteen years since its completion and dedication—for more than a hundred years since Motecuzóma the Elder first started its construction—and during all that time not the sun god nor any other had given any sign of being displeased with it. Only Motecuzóma the Younger was troubled by its being that tiny bit off axis. He could often be seen standing and regarding the mighty edifice, looking morose, as if he might have been about to give a vexed and corrective kick at one of its misplaced corners. Of course, the only possible rectification of the original architect's error would have been to tear down the Great Pyramid entirely and rebuild it from the ground up, a daunting project to contemplate. Nevertheless, I believe that Motecuzóma might have got around to doing just that, except that his attention was forcibly diverted to other problems.

For it was about that time that a series of alarming omens began to occur: the strange happenings that, everyone is now firmly convinced, presaged the overthrow of the Mexíca, the downfall of all the civilizations flourishing in these lands, the death of all our gods, the end of The One World.

One day toward the close of the year One Rabbit, a palace page came hurrying to summon me to an immediate appearance before the Uey-Tlatoani. I mention the year because it had an ominous significance of its own, as I shall explain later. Motecuzóma did not bid me omit the ritual of repeatedly kissing the earth as I entered and crossed the throne room, but he impatiently drummed his fingers upon his knee, as if wishing I would hasten the approach.

The Revered Speaker was unattended on that occasion, but I noticed two new additions to the room. On each side of his icpali throne a great metal wheel hung by chains in a carved wooden frame. One was of gold, the other of silver; each disk was three times the diameter of a war shield; both were intricately embossed and etched with scenes of Motecuzóma's triumphs and with word-pictures explaining them. The two wheels were of incalculable worth just for their weight of precious metal, but they were made vastly more valuable by the artistry lavished upon them. It was not until a later time that I learned they were more than ornaments. Motecuzóma could reach out and pound a fist upon either of them, which sent a hollow boom resounding throughout the palace. Since each made a slightly different booming note, his hammering on the silver disk would bring the chief steward hurrying to him, and a blow upon the gold would bring a whole troop of armed guards on the run.

Without any formal greeting, without any withering sarcasm, with considerably less than his customary icy calm, Motecuzóma said, "Knight Mixtli, you are familiar with the Maya lands and peoples."

"I said, "Yes, Lord Speaker."

"Would you consider those people unusually excitable or unstable?"

"Not at all, my lord. To the contrary, most of them are nowadays about as phlegmatic as so many tapirs or manatees."

He said, "So are many priests, but that does not hinder their seeing portentous visions. What of the Maya in that respect?"

"Seeing visions? Well, my lord, I daresay the gods might vouchsafe a vision to even the most torpid of mortals. Especially if he has intoxicated himself with something like the god-flesh mushrooms. But the pathetic remnants of the Maya scarcely take note of the real world around them, let alone anything extraordinary. Perhaps if my lord would further enlighten me as to exactly what we are discussing..."

He said, "A Maya swift-messenger came, from what nation or tribe I do not know. He came rushing through the city—not at all torpidly—and paused only long enough to gasp a message to the guard at my palace gate. Then he ran on in the direction of Tlácopan before I could be told the message, or I would have ordered him held for questioning. It appears that the Maya are sending such men pelting through all lands to tell of a marvel which has been seen in the south. There is a peninsula there called Uluumil Kutz, which juts into the northern ocean. You know it? Very well, the Maya inhabitants of that coast have recently been amazed and affrighted by the appearance offshore of two objects never seen by them before." He could not resist keeping me in suspense for a moment's pause. "Something like a giant house floating upon the sea. Something gliding along with the aid of widespread wings." I smiled in spite of myself, and he scowled, saying, "Are you now about to tell me that the Maya do have demented visions?"

"No, my lord," I said, still smiling. "But I believe I know what it was they saw. May I ask a question?" He gave me a curt nod. "Those things mentioned—floating house, winged object—were they the same things, or separate?"

Motecuzóma scowled more darkly. "The messenger was gone before any more details could be elicited. He did say that two things had been sighted. I suppose one could have been a floating house and the other an object with wings. Whatever they were, they reportedly stayed well offshore, so it is likely that no observer could give any very accurate description. Why do you maintain that cursed grin?"

I tried to repress it, and said, "Those people did not imagine those things, Lord Speaker. They are merely too lazy to have investigated them. If any observer had had the initiative and courage to swim close, he would have recognized them as sea creatures—wonderful ones, and perhaps not a common sight, but no profound mystery—and the Maya messengers would not now be spreading unwarranted alarm."

"Do you mean you have seen such things?" said Motecuzóma, regarding me almost with awe. "A floating house?"

"Not a house, my lord, but a fish literally and honestly bigger than any house. The ocean fishermen call it the yeyemichi." I told of how I had once been helplessly adrift in a canoe upon the sea, when whole hosts of the monsters had floated close enough to endanger my frail craft. "The Revered Speaker may find it hard to credit, but if a yeyemichi had its head butting the wall outside my lord's window yonder, its tail would be flapping among the remains of the late Speaker Ahuítzotl's palace, clear on the other side of the great plaza."

"Say you so?" Motecuzóma murmured wonderingly, looking out the window. Then he turned again to me to ask, "And during your sojourn at sea, did you also encounter water creatures with wings?"

"I did, my lord. They flew in swarms about me, and at first I took them to be ocean insects of immense size. But one of them actually glided into my canoe, and I seized and ate it. Indisputably it was a fish, but just as indisputably it had wings with which it flew."

Motecuzóma's rigid posture relaxed a little, clearly in relief. "Only fish," he muttered. "May the doltish Maya be damned to Mictlan! They could panic entire populations with their wild tales. I will see that the truth is instantly and widely told. Thank you, Knight Mixtli. Your explanation has served a most useful purpose. You deserve a reward. Let it be this. I invite you and your family to be among the select few who, with me, will ascend Huixachi Hill for the New Fire ceremony next month."

"I shall be honored, my lord," I said, and I meant it. The New Fire was lighted only once in the average man's lifetime, and the average man never got a close look at the ceremony, for Huixachi Hill could accommodate only a comparatively few spectators in addition to the officiating priests.

"Fish," Motecuzóma said again. "But you saw them far at sea. If they have only now come close enough inshore for the Maya to see them for the first time, they still could constitute an omen of some significance—"

I need not stress the obvious, reverend friars; I can only blush at the recollection of my brash skepticism. The two objects glimpsed by the Maya coast dwellers—what I so fatuously dismissed as one giant fish and one winged fish—were of course Spanish seagoing vessels under sail. Now that I know the sequence of long-ago events, I know that they were the two ships of your explorers de Solis and Pinzon, who surveyed but did not land upon the shore of Uluumil Kutz. I was wrong, and an omen it was.

That interview with Motecuzóma took place toward the end of the year, when the nemontemtin hollow days were approaching. And, I repeat, that was the year One Rabbit—by your count, the year one thousand five hundred and six.

During the unnamed empty days at the close of every solar year, as I have told you, our people lived in apprehension of the gods' smiting them with some disaster, but never did our people live in such morbid apprehension as then. For One Rabbit was the last year of the fifty and two composing a xiumolpili, or sheaf of years, which caused us to dread the worst disaster imaginable: the complete obliteration of mankind. According to our priests and our beliefs and our traditions, the gods had four times previously purged the world clean of men, and would do it again whenever they chose. Quite naturally, we assumed that the gods—if they did decide to exterminate us—would pick a fitting time, like those last days of the last year binding up a sheaf of years.

And so, during the five days between the end of the year One Rabbit and the beginning of its successor Two Reed—which, assuming Two Reed arrived and we survived to know it, would start the next sheaf of fifty and two years—it was fear as much as religious obedience which made most people behave in the approved meek and muted manner. People almost literally walked on tiptoe. All noise was hushed, all talking done in whispers, all laughter forbidden. Barking dogs, gobbling fowl, wailing babies were silenced insofar as possible. All household fires and lights were put out, as in the empty days that terminated every ordinary solar year, and all other fires were extinguished as well, including those in temples, on altars, in the urns set before the statues of the gods. Even the fire atop Huixachi Hill, the one fire that had been kept ever burning for the past fifty and two years, even that was put out.

In all the land there was not a glimmer of light during those five nights.

Every family, noble or humble, smashed all their clay vessels used for cooking and storage and dining; they buried or threw into the lake their maize-grinding metlatin stones and other utensils of stone or copper or even precious metals; they burned their wooden spoons and platters and chocolate beaters and other such implements. During those five days they did no cooking, anyway, and ate only scantily, and used segments of maguey leaves for dishes, and used their fingers to scoop and eat the cold baked camotin or congealed atóli mush or whatever else they had prepared in advance. There was no traveling, no trading or other business conducted, no social mingling, no wearing of jewelry or plumes or any but the plainest garments. No one, from the Uey-Tlatoani to the lowliest tlacotli slave, did anything but wait, and remain as inconspicuous as possible while he waited.

Though nothing noteworthy happened during those somber days, our tension and apprehension understandably increased, reaching its height when Tonatíu went to his bed on the fifth evening. We could only wonder: would he rise once more and bring another day, another year, another sheaf of years? I should say that the common folk could only wonder; it was the task of the priests to try what persuasion was in their power. I Shortly after that sundown, when the night was full dark, a whole procession of them—the chief priest of every god and goddess, major and minor, each priest costumed and masked and painted to the semblance of his particular deity—marched from Tenochtítlan and along the southern causeway toward Huixachi Hill. They were trailed by the Revered Speaker and his invited companions, all dressed in such humbly shapeless garments of sacking that they were unrecognizable as lords of high degree, wise men, sorcerers, whatever. Among them was myself, leading my daughter Nochipa by the hand.

"You are only nine years old now," I had told her, "and there is a very good chance that you will still be here to see the next New Fire, but you might not be invited to see that ceremony up close. You are fortunate to be able to observe this one."

She was thrilled by the prospect, for it was the first major religious celebration to which I had yet escorted her. Had it not been such a solemn occasion, she would have skipped merrily along at my side. Instead, she paced slowly, as was proper, wearing drab raiment and a mask fashioned by me from a piece of a maguey leaf. As we followed the rest of the procession through a darkness relieved only by the dim light of a sliver of moon, I was reminded of the time so long ago when I had been thrilled to accompany my own father across Xaltócan to see the ceremony honoring the fowler-god Atlaua.

Nochipa wore a mask concealing her whole face because, on that most precarious night of all nights, every child did. The belief—or the hope—was that the gods, if they did decide to expunge mankind from the earth, might mistake the disguised young folk for creatures other than human, and might spare them, and so there would be at least some seedling survivors to perpetuate our race. The adults did not try any such feeble dissimulation, but neither did they go to sleep resigned to the inevitable. Everywhere in the lightless land, our people spent that night upon their rooftops, nudging and pinching each other to keep awake, their gaze fixed in the direction of Huixachi Hill, praying for the blaze of the New Fire to tell them that the gods had once again deferred the ultimate disaster.

The hill called in our language Huixichtlan is situated on the promontory between lakes Texcóco and Xochimilco, just south of the town of Ixtapalápan. Its name came from its thickets of huixachi shrub which, at that season of the turning of the year, were just beginning to open their tiny yellow flowers of disproportionately great and sweet fragrance. The hill had little other distinction, since it was a mere pimple in comparison to the mountains farther distant. But, jutting up abruptly from the flat terrain around the lakes, it was the one eminence sufficiently high and near enough to all the lake communities to be visible to the inhabitants of them all—as far away as Texcóco to the east and Xaltócan to the north—and that was the reason for its having been selected, sometime far back in our history, as the site of the New Fire ceremony.

As we mounted the path that spirals gently upward to the hilltop, I was close enough to Motecuzóma to hear him murmur worriedly to one of his counselors, "The chiquacentetl will rise tonight, will they not?"

The wise man, an elderly but still-keen-eyed astronomer, shrugged and said, "They always have, my lord. Nothing in my studies indicates that they will not always do so."

Chiquacentetl means a group of six. Motecuzóma was referring to the tight little cluster of six faint stars whose ascent in the sky we had come to see—or hoping to see. The astronomer, whose function was to calculate and predict such things as star movements, sounded sufficiently confident to dispel anybody's qualms. On the other hand, the old man was notoriously irreligious and outspoken in his opinions. He had infuriated many a priest by saying flatly, as he did just then, "No god, of all the gods we know, has ever shown any power to disrupt the orderly progress of the heavenly bodies."

"If the gods put them there, old unbeliever," snapped a seer, "the gods can shift them at will. They simply have not, in our lifetime of watching the skies, been so inclined. Anyway, the question is not so much whether the Chiquacentetl will rise, but will the group of six be at the exact proper point of ascent in the sky at the exact middle point of the night?"

"Which is not so much up to the gods," the astronomer said drily, "as to the time sense of the priest blowing the midnight trumpet, and I will wager he is drunk long before then. But, by the way, friend sorcerer, if you are still basing any of your prophecies on the so-called group of six stars, I am not surprised that you are so often wrong. We astronomers have long known them to be chicontetl, a group of seven."

"You dare to refute the books of divination?" sputtered the seer. "They all say and always have said chiquacentetl."

"So do most people speak of a group of six. It takes a clear sky and clear eyes to see it, but there is indeed a seventh pale star in that cluster."

"Will you never cease your irreverent aspersions?" snarled the other. "You are simply trying to confound me, to cast doubt on my predictions, to defame my venerable profession!"

"Only with facts, venerable sorcerer," said the astronomer. "Only with facts."

Motecuzóma chuckled at the exchange, sounding no longer worried about the outcome of the night, and then the three men moved out of my hearing as we reached the summit of Huixachi Hill.

A number of junior priests had preceded us there, and they had everything in readiness. There was a neat stack of unlighted pine-splint torches and a towering pyramid of kindling and logs which would be the signal fire. There were other combustibles: a fire-drilling stick and its block and scorched-thread tinder, finely shredded bark, wads of oil-soaked cotton. The night's chosen xochimíqui, a clean-limbed young warrior recently captured from Texcala, already lay arched naked across, the sacrificial stone. Since it was essential that he lie still throughout the ceremony, he had been given a drink containing some priestly drug. So he lay quite relaxed, his eyes closed, his limbs loose, even his breathing barely perceptible.

The only light was from the stars and bit of moon overhead, and the reflected moonlight made the lake shine below us. But our eyes had by then become adjusted to the darkness, and we could make out the folds and contours of the land around the hill, the cities and towns looking dead and deserted, but really waiting wide awake and almost audibly pulsing with apprehension. There was a cloud bank on the horizon to the east, so it was some while before the awaited and prayed-for stars climbed above it into visibility. But finally they came: the pale cluster and, after them, the bright red star that always follows. We waited while they made their slow way up the sky, and we waited breathlessly, but they did not vanish on the way, or fly asunder, or veer from their accustomed course. At last, a collective sigh of relief went up from the crowded hill when the time-counting priest blew a bleat on his conch shell to mark the night's mid-moment. Several people breathed, "They are right in place, right on time," and the chief priest of all the priests present, the high priest of Huitzilopóchtli, commanded in a mighty roar, "Let the New Fire be lighted!"

A priest placed the fire block on the chest of the prostrate xochimíqui, and carefully fluffed the threads of tinder upon it. A second priest, on the other side of the stone, leaned over with the drilling stick and began to twirl it between his palms. All of us spectators waited anxiously; the gods could still deny us the spark of life. But then a wisp of smoke rose from the tinder. In another moment there was a glow of tentative smoldering. The priest holding the block steady with his one hand used his other to feed and coax the firefly spark: tufts of oily cotton, shreds of dry bark—and achieved a small, flickering, but definite flame. It seemed to wake the xochimíqui slightly; his eyes opened enough to look down at the awakening New Fire on his breast. But he did not look for long.

One of the attending priests gingerly moved the fire-bearing block aside. The other produced a knife, and made his slash so deftly that the young man scarcely twitched. When the chest was laid open, the one priest reached in, plucked loose the throbbing heart, and lifted it out, while the other set the blazing block in its place in the gaping wound, then quickly but expertly laid upon it still more and bigger bits of cotton and bark. When there was a sizable flag of flame rising from, the chest of the feebly stirring victim, the other priest laid the heart gently in the middle of the fire. The flames subsided momentarily, dampened by the heart's blood, but they rose again with vigor and the frying heart sizzled loudly.

A cry went up from all present, "The New Fire is lighted!" and the crowd, immobile until then, commenced a bustle of movement. One after another, in order of rank, the priests seized torches from the stack and touched them to the xochimíqui's fast-crisping breast to light them in the New Fire, then bore them away at a run. The first one used his torch to ignite the waiting pyramid of wood, so that every distant eye fixed on Huixachi Hill should see the great blaze and know that all danger was past, that all was still well with The One World. I fancied I could hear the cheers and laughs and happy sobs that went up from the rooftop watchers all around the lakes. Then the priests ran down the hill's pathway, their torch fires fluttering behind them like hair aflame. At the base of the hill waited still other priests, gathered from communities near and far. They seized the torches and scattered to bear the precious fragments of the New Fire to the temples of the various cities and towns and villages.

"Take off your mask, Nochipa," I told my daughter. "It is safe now to do so. Take it off so you may see better."

She and I stood on the north side of the hilltop, watching the tiny flares and sparks of light explode away from beneath us, streaking off in all directions. Then there were other silent explosions. The nearest town, Ixtapalápan, was the first to have its main temple fire relighted, then the next-nearest town of Mexicaltzínco. And at each temple were waiting numbers of the town's inhabitants, to plunge their own torches into the temple fires and run to relight the long-cold hearth fires of their families and neighbors. So each torch that streaked away from Huixachi Hill first dwindled to a mere bright dot in the distance, then blossomed into a temple fire, then that exploded into an outflung burst of sparks, and each darting spark left a trail of motionless sparks behind it. The sequence was repeated over and over, in Coyohuacan, in great Tenochtítlan, in communities farther away and farther apart, until the whole vast bowl of the lake lands was fast coming again to light and life. It was a cheering, thrilling, exhilarating sight to see—and I tried hard to imprint it among my happier memories, because I could not hope to see such a sight ever again.

As if reading my thoughts, my daughter said quietly, "Oh, I do hope I live to be an old woman. I should so like to see this wonder the next time, Father."

When Nochipa and I finally turned back to the big fire, four men were crouched near it in earnest consultation: the Revered Speaker Motecuzóma, the chief priest of Huitzilopóchtli, the seer, and the astronomer of whom I earlier spoke. They were discussing what words the Uey-Tlatoani would speak, the next day, to proclaim what the New Fire had promised for the years to come. The seer, squatting over some diagrams he had drawn in the earth with a stick, had evidently just delivered himself of a prophecy to which the astronomer took exception, for the latter was saying mockingly:

"No more droughts, no more miseries, a fruitful sheaf of years in the offing. Very consoling, friend sorcerer. But you see no imminent omens appearing in the skies?"

The seer snapped at him, "The skies are your affair. You make the maps of them and I will attend to reading what the maps have to tell."

The astronomer snorted. "You might find more inspiration if once in a while you looked at the stars instead of the foolish circles and angles you draw." He pointed at the scratches in the dirt. "You read of no impending yqualoca, then?"

The word means an eclipse. The seer, the priest, the Revered Speaker, all three repeated together, and unsteadily, "Eclipse?"

"Of the sun," said the astronomer. "Even this old fraud could foresee it, if he once looked at past history instead of pretending to know the future."

The seer sat gulping, speechless, Motecuzóma glared at him. The astronomer went on:

"It is on record, Lord Speaker, that the Maya of the south saw an yqualoca take a hungry bite at Tonatíu the sun in the year Ten House. Next month, on the day Seven Lizard, it will have been exactly eighteen solar years and eleven days since that occurred. And according to the records collected by me and my predecessors, from lands north and south, such a darkening of the sun regularly happens somewhere in The One World at intervals of that duration. I can confidently predict that Tonatíu will again be eclipsed by a shadow on the day Seven Lizard. Unfortunately, not being a sorcerer, I cannot tell you how severe will be that yqualoca, nor in which lands it will be visible. But those who see it may take it for a most maleficent omen, coming so soon after the New Fire. I would suggest, my lord, that all peoples ought to be informed and forewarned, to make their fright the less."

"You are right," said Motecuzóma. "I will send swift-messengers into all lands. Even those of our enemies, lest they interpret the omen to mean that our power is weakening. Thank you, Lord Astronomer. As for you..." He turned coldly to the trembling seer. "The most wise and expert of diviners is liable to error, and that is forgivable. But a totally inept one is a real hazard to the nation, and that is intolerable. On our return to the city, report to my palace guard for your execution."

In the morning of the next day, Two Reed, first day of the new year Two Reed, the big market of Tlaltelólco, like every other market in The One World, was crowded with people buying new household implements and utensils to replace the old ones they had destroyed. Though the people could have had but little sleep after the lighting of the New Fire, they were all cheerful and vocal, refreshed as much by the fact that they had resumed their best garments and jewelry as by the fact that the gods had seen fit to let them go on living.

At midday, from the top of the Great Pyramid, the Uey-Tlatoani Motecuzóma made the traditional address to his people. In part, he related what the late seer had predicted—good weather, good harvests, and so on—but he prudently diluted that oversweet honey with warnings that the gods would continue their benefices only so long as the gods were pleased with the Mexíca. Therefore, said Motecuzóma, all men must work hard, all women be thrifty, all wars be fought with vigor, all the proper offerings and sacrifices be made on ceremonial occasions. In essence, the people were told that life would go on as it always had. There was nothing novel or revelatory in Motecuzóma's address, except that he did announce—as casually as if he had arranged it for a public entertainment—the forthcoming eclipse of the sun.

While he was orating from the pyramid summit, his swift-messengers were already trotting out from Tenochtítlan to all points of the horizon. They carried to rulers and governors and community elders everywhere the news of the imminent eclipse, and they stressed the fact that the gods had given our astronomers prior notice of the event, hence it would bring no tidings, good or bad, and should cause no unease. But it is one thing when people are told to pay no attention to a fearsome phenomenon; it is quite another thing when those people are exposed to it.

Even I, who had been one of the first to hear of the impending yqualoca, could not regard it with yawning composure when it did take place. But I had to pretend to view it with calm and scientific disinterest, for Nochipa and Béu Ribé and both the servants were with me in our rooftop garden that day of Seven Lizard, and I had to set them all an example of fearlessness.

I do not know how it appeared in other parts of The One World, but here in Tenochtítlan it seemed that Tonatíu was totally swallowed. And it was probably only for a brief while, but to us it was an eternity. That day was heavily overcast, so the sun was only a pale and moonlike disk at his brightest, and we could look directly at him. We could see the first bite taken from his rim, as it were from a tortilla, and then see the munching proceed right across his face. The day darkened and the springtime warmth fled away and a winter chill blew across the world. Birds flew about our rooftop, all confused, and we could hear the howling of neighbors' dogs.

The crescent bitten out of Tonatíu got bigger and bigger, until at last his whole face was swallowed and it became as dark a brown as the face of a Chiapa native. For an instant, the sun was even darker than the clouds around it, as if we looked through a small hole in the day and into the night. Then the clouds, the sky, all the world darkened to that same night darkness, and Tonatíu was gone entirely from our sight.

The only comforting lights to be seen from our roof were the few flickers of fires burning outside temples and a pink tinge on the underside of the smoke hanging over Popocatepetl. The birds ceased to fly about, except that one scarlet-headed flycatcher fluttered down between me and Béu and perched in one of our garden shrubs, tucked its head under its wing and apparently went to sleep. For those long moments while the day was night, I almost wished I could hide my own head. From other houses on the street, I could hear shrieks and moans and prayers. But Béu and Nochipa stood silent, and Star Singer and Turquoise were only quietly whimpering, so I suppose my attitude of staunchness had some reassuring effect.

Then a slender crescent of light showed again in the sky, and slowly broadened and brightened. The arc of the swallowing yqualoca slid reluctantly away, letting Tonatíu emerge from its lips. The crescent grew, the bitten segment diminished, until Tonatíu was a disk again, and entire, and the world was again in daylight. The bird on the branch beside me raised its head, looked about in almost comical puzzlement, and flew away. My women and servants turned pale faces and tremulous smiles on me.

"That is all," I said authoritatively. "It is over." And we trooped downstairs to resume our own several activities.

Rightly or wrongly, many people later claimed that the Revered Speaker had deliberately told an untruth when he said that the eclipse would be a matter of no ill omen. Because, only a few days later, the entire lake district was shaken by an earthquake. It was a mere tremor compared to the zyuüú which Zyanya and I had once lived through, and, though my house shook as others did, it stood as sturdily as it had during the great flood. But, trivial though I accounted it, the quake was one of the worst ever felt in these parts, and many buildings did fall in Tenochtítlan, in Tlácopan, in Texcóco, and in smaller communities, and in their falling crushed their occupants to death. I believe some two thousand people died, and the survivors' wrath against Motecuzóma was so loud that he had to pay heed to it. I do not mean he paid any reparations. What he did was to invite all people to The Heart of the One World to see the public garrotting of that astronomer who had predicted the eclipse.

But that did not end the omens, if omens they were. And some of them I say flatly were not. For example, in that single year Two Reed, more stars were seen to fall from the night sky than had been reported in all the years, all of them together, during which our astronomers had been keeping count of such things. Throughout those eighteen months, every time a star fell, everyone who saw it would come or send a message to the palace to report it. Motecuzóma did not himself see the obviously erroneous arithmetic involved and, since his pride would not let him risk another accusation of having misled his subjects, he made public announcements of that seeming deluge of stars, as the count mounted alarmingly.

To me and others, the reason for the unprecedented total of dying stars was evident: ever since the eclipse, more people were watching the skies, and more apprehensively, and every single one of them was eager to announce anything unnatural that he saw there. On any night of any year, a man standing outdoors with his eyes on the sky, for only the time it takes to smoke a poquietl, will see two or three of the more fragile stars lose their feeble grip on the sky and fall dying to earth, trailing a shroud of sparks. But, if great numbers of watchers see and report just those two or three, the combined reports must make it seem as if every night is constantly and ominously raining down stars. And that is what our people remember of that year Two Reed. Had it truly been so, the sky would have been blackly empty of all its stars by year's end, and ever since.

That unprofitable game of collecting fallen stars might have gone on unabated, except that in the following year, Three Knife, our people were diverted by a different sort of omen, and one that more directly involved Motecuzóma. His unmarried sister Papantzin, the Lady Early Bird, chose that time to die. There was nothing remarkable about her death, except that she died rather young, for she supposedly died of some typical and unremarkable female ailment. What was ominous was that, only two or three days after her burial, numerous citizens of Tenochtítlan claimed to have met the lady walking about by night, wringing her hands and wailing a warning. According to the report of those who encountered her—and those multiplied nightly—the Lady Papan had left her grave to bring a message. And her message was that, from the afterworld, she had seen great conquering armies advancing upon Tenochtítlan from the south.

I privately concluded that the rumormongers had seen only the familiar and tiresome old spirit of the Weeping Woman, who was forever wailing and wringing her hands, and that they had either wrongly or willfully misinterpreted her weary old complaint. But Motecuzóma could not so easily disown the purported phantasm of his own sister. He could quell the rising gossip only by ordering that Pagan's grave be opened, and at night, to prove that she lay quiet therein and was not wandering about the city.

I was not among those who made the midnight excursion, but the lurid story of what happened on that occasion became well known to all in these lands. Motecuzóma went in company with a number of priests, and some of his courtiers for witnesses. The priests dug away the covering earth and lifted the splendidly shrouded body to the surface of the ground, while Motecuzóma stood fidgeting nervously nearby. The priests unwound the swathings of the dead woman's head to make positive her identification. They found her not yet much decayed, and they found her to be certainly the Lady Early Bird and certainly dead.

Then, it is said, Motecuzóma gave a terrified shriek, and even the impassive priests recoiled, when the lady's eyelids slowly opened and an unearthly green-white light shone from where her eyeballs had been. According to the story, that glare fixed directly upon her brother, and he, in the grip of horror, addressed to her a long but incoherent speech. Some said it was an apology for disturbing her rest. Some said it was a guilty confession, and they also later said that the illness of which Motecuzóma's supposedly maiden sister had died was in fact a fatally miscarried pregnancy.

Gossip aside, it was attested by all the witnesses present that the Revered Speaker finally turned and fled from the open grave. He fled too soon to see one of the glowing green-white eyes of the corpse begin to move, to uncoil and to ooze down her shrunken cheek. It was nothing unnatural, only a petla-zolcoatl, one of those long, leg-fringed, nasty-looking centipedes that, like the glowworms, are peculiarly and brightly luminous in the dark. Two of the creatures had evidently burrowed into the cadaver through the portals most easily chewed, and had curled up, one in each eye socket, to live comfortably and dine leisurely inside the lady's head. That night, disturbed by the commotion, they slowly, blindly crawled out from where the eyes had been, and, squirming between her lips, disappeared again.

Papantzin made no more recorded public appearances, but other strange events were noised about, causing so much trepidation that the Speaking Council appointed special investigators to seek the truth of them. But, as I remember, none could be corroborated, and most were dismissed as the fabrications of attention seekers or the hallucinations of heavy drinkers.

Then, when that hectic year had ended, and its hollow days were over, and the succeeding year of Four House began, the Revered Speaker Nezahualpili unexpectedly arrived from Texcóco. It was told that he had come to Tenochtítlan merely to enjoy our celebration of The Tree Is Raised, he having seen his native Texcóco's version so often over the years. The truth is that he had come for a secret consultation with Motecuzóma. But the two rulers had been closeted together for no longer than a small part of a morning before they sent to command a third consultant to join them. To my surprise, it was me they sent for.

In the prescribed robe of sacking, I made my entrance into the throne room, and made it even more humbly than was demanded by protocol, since the room contained two Revered Speakers that morning. I was slightly shocked to see that Nezahualpili had gone nearly bald of head and that his remaining hair was gray. When I at last stood upright before the dais and the two icpaltin thrones side by side between the gold and silver gongs, the Uey-Tlatoani of Texcóco recognized me for the first time. He said, almost with glee:

"My former courtier Head Nodder! My onetime scribe and picture maker Mole! My once-heroic soldier Dark Cloud!"

"Dark Cloud indeed," growled Motecuzóma. That was his only greeting to me, and he gave it with a glower. "You know this wretch, then, my lord friend?"

"Ayyo, there was a time we were very close," said Nezahualpili, smiling broadly. "When you spoke of an Eagle Knight named Mixtli, I did not make the connection, but I should have known he would rise from title to title." To me he said, "I greet you and congratulate you, Knight of the Eagle Order."

I hope I mumbled the proper response. I was occupied with being glad that I wore the long-skirted sack, for my knees were slightly knocking together.

Motecuzóma asked Nezahualpili, "Was this Mixtli always a liar?"

"Not ever a liar, lord friend, my pledge on that. Mixtli has always told the truth as he saw it. Unfortunately, his vision has not always accorded comfortably with that of other people."

"Neither does that of a liar," said Motecuzóma through his teeth. To me he said, almost shouting, "You made us all believe that there was nothing to be feared from—"

Nezahualpili interrupted, saying soothingly, "Permit me, lord friend. Mixtli?"

"Yes, Lord Speaker?" I asked huskily, still unaware of what trouble I was in, but all too aware that I was in it.

"A little more than two years ago, the Maya sent swift-messengers through all these lands, to give notice of strange objects—floating houses, they said—sighted off the shores of the peninsula called Uluumil Kutz. You recall the occasion?"

"Vividly, my lord," I said. "As I interpreted the message, they had but seen a certain great fish and a certain flying fish."

"Yes, that was the reassuring explanation put abroad by your Revered Speaker Motecuzóma, and believed by all people, to their considerable relief."

"To my considerable embarrassment," Motecuzóma said grimly.

Nezahualpili made a placative gesture in his direction, and continued speaking to me. "It transpires that some of the Maya who saw that apparition made pictures, young Mixtli, but it is only now that one of them has come into my possession. Would you still say that this pictured object is a fish?"

He handed down to me a small square of tattered bark paper, and I scrutinized it. It bore a typically Maya drawing, so small and crabbed of style that I could not do more than guess at what it was meant to represent in fact. But I had to say, "I confess, my lords, that it more resembles a house than it does the mighty fish with which I confused it."

"Or the flying fish?" asked Nezahualpili.

"No, my lord. The wings of that fish spread sideways. As well as I can tell, this object appears to wear its wings sticking straight upward from its back. Or its roof."

He pointed. "And those round dots in a row between the wings above and the roof below them. What do you make of those?"

I said uncomfortably, "It is impossible to be certain from this crude drawing, but I venture the guess that the dots are meant to show the heads of men." Miserably, I raised my eyes from the paper, to look straight at each Speaker in turn. "My lords, I recant my former interpretation. I can only plead that I was inadequately informed. Had I seen this picture at that time, I would have said that the Maya were rightly frightened, and right to warn the rest of us. I would have said that Uluumil Kutz had been visited by immense canoes somehow moved by wings and filled with men. I could not say of what people the men are or whence they come, except that they are strangers and obviously have much knowledge. If they can build such war canoes, they can wage war—and perhaps a war more fearsome than we have ever known."

"There!" said Nezahualpili, with satisfaction. "Even at the risk of displeasing his Lord Speaker, Mixtli flinches not from telling the truth as he sees it—when he sees it. My own seers and sayers read the same portent when they saw that Maya drawing."

"Had the omens been read correctly and sooner," muttered Motecuzóma, "I would have had more than two years in which to fortify and man the coasts of Uluumil Kutz."

"To what purpose?" Nezahualpili asked. "If the strangers do choose to strike there, let the expendable Maya bear the brunt. But if, as it seems, they can invade from the limitless sea, there are limitless coasts on which they might land, east or north, west or south. Not all the warriors of all nations could adequately man every vulnerable shore. You had better concentrate your defenses in a tighter ring and closer to home."

"I?" Motecuzóma exclaimed. "What of you?"

"Ah, I will be dead," said Nezahualpili, yawning and stretching luxuriously. "The seers assure me of that, and I am glad, for it gives me reason to spend my last years in peace and repose. From now until my death I shall make war no more. And neither will my son Black Flower when he succeeds to my throne."

I stood before the dais uncomfortably, but apparently unnoticed and forgotten; I was given no signal of dismissal.

Motecuzóma stared at Nezahualpili and his face darkened. "You are removing Texcóco and your Acolhua nation from The Triple Alliance? Lord friend, I should hate to speak the words betrayal and cowardice."

"Then do not," snapped Nezahualpili. "I mean that we will—we must—reserve our warring for the invasion foretold. And when I say we, I mean all nations of these lands. We must no longer waste our warriors and our resources in fighting each other. The feuds and rivalries must be suspended, and all our energies, all our armies pooled together to repel the invader. That is how I see it, in the light of the omens and my wise men's interpretation of them. That is how I shall spend my remaining days, and Black Flower will do the same after me—working for a truce and solidarity among all nations, so that all may present a united front when the outlanders come."

"All very well for you and your tamely disciplined Crown Prince," said Motecuzóma insultingly. "But we are the Mexíca! Ever since we attained our supremacy in The One World, no outsider has set foot inside this dominion without our permission. So it shall ever be, if we must fight alone against all nations known or unknown, if all our allies desert us or turn against us."

I was a little sorry to see the Lord Nezahualpili take no umbrage at that outright expression of contempt. He said, almost sadly:

"Then I will tell you of a legend, lord friend. Perhaps it has been forgotten by you Mexíca, but it still can be read in our Texcóco archives. According to that legend, when your Aztéca ancestors first ventured out of their northern homeland of Aztlan and made their years-long march which ended here, they knew not what obstacles they might encounter on the way. For all they knew, they might find lands so forbidding or peoples so unfriendly that they would deem it preferable to retrace their road and return to Aztlan. Against that contingency, they arranged for a swift and safe withdrawal. At eight or nine of the places they stopped between Aztlan and this lake district, they collected and hid ample stocks of weapons and provender. If they were forced to retreat homeward again, they could do it at their own pace, well nourished and well armed. Or they could turn and make a stand at any of those prepared positions."

Motecuzóma gaped; clearly he had not heard that tale before. Well, neither had I. Nezahualpili concluded:

"At least, so says the legend. Unhappily, it does not say where those eight or nine places are. I respectfully suggest, lord friend, that you send explorers northward through the desert lands to seek them out. Either that or lay out another line of stores. If you choose not to make every neighbor nation your ally now, the time will come when none will be, and you may have need of that escape route. We of the Acolhua prefer to gird ourselves with friends."

Motecuzóma sat silent for a long while, hunched on his chair as if huddled against an approaching storm. Then he sat up straight, squared his shoulders, and said, "Suppose the outlanders never come. You will have lain supine to no purpose but to be trampled by whichever friend first feels strong enough."

Nezahualpili shook his head and said, "The outlanders will come."

"You seem very sure."

"Sure enough to make a wager of it," said Nezahualpili, suddenly jovial. "I challenge you, lord friend. Let us play at tlachtli in the ceremonial court. No teams, just you against me. The best of three games, say. If I lose, I will take it as an omen contradicting every other. I will retract all my gloomy warnings and put all the Acolhua arms and armies and resources at your command. If you lose..."

"Well?"

"Concede only this. You will leave me and my Acolhua free from all your future entanglements, so that we may pass our last days in more peaceful and pleasant pursuits."

Motecuzóma instantly said, "Agreed. The best of three games," and he smiled wickedly.

He might well have smiled so, for he was not alone in thinking Nezahualpili mad to have challenged him to the games. Of course, no one else except myself—and I had been sworn to secrecy—knew at that time what the Revered Speaker of Texcóco had wagered on the outcome. So far as Tenochtítlan's citizens and visitors were concerned, the contest would be simply another entertainment for them, or an extra honor paid to Tlaloc, during the city's celebration of The Tree Is Raised. But it was no secret that Motecuzóma was at least twenty years younger than Nezahualpili, nor that tlachtli is a brutal game best played by the young, strong, and sturdy.

All around and beyond the ball court's outer walls, The Heart of the One World was packed with people, nobles as well as commoners, squeezed shoulder to shoulder, though not one in a hundred of them could have hoped to see even a glimpse of the games. But when some bit of play made the favored spectators inside the court cry a praiseful "ayyo!" or groan "ayya!" or breathe a prayerful "hoo-oo-ooo," all the people in the plaza outside echoed and amplified the cheer or the lament or the owl hoot, without even knowing why.

The steplike tiers of stone slanting upward from the court's marble inner walls were crowded with the very highest nobles of Tenochtítlan and those of Texcóco who had come with Nezahualpili. Possibly in compensation or bribe for my keeping their secret, the two Revered Speakers had allotted me one of the precious seats there. Though an Eagle Knight, I was the lowest-ranking person in that august company—excepting Nochipa, for whom I had arranged a place by perching her on my lap.

"Watch and remember, Daughter," I said into her ear. "This is something never seen before. The two most notable and lordly men in all The One World, pitted one against the other, and in public show. Watch it and remember it all your life. You will never see such a spectacle again."

"But, Father," she said, "that player wearing the blue helmet is an old man." She used her chin to point discreetly at Nezahualpili, who stood at center court, a little apart from Motecuzóma and the high priest of Tlaloc, the priest in charge of all that month's ceremonies.

I said, "Well, the player in the green head-protector is about my own age, so he is no spry juvenile either."

"You sound as if you favor the old man."

"I hope you will cheer for him when I do. I have wagered a small fortune on his winning."

Nochipa swung sideways on my lap and leaned back to stare into my face. "Oh, you foolish Father. Why?"

I said, "I do not really know." And I did not. "Now sit still. You are heavy enough without wriggling."

Though my daughter had just then turned twelve years of age and had had her first bleeding, hence wore the garb of a woman, and was beginning to swell and curve prettily into woman's shape, she had not—I thanked the gods—inherited her father's size, or I could not have endured sitting between her and the hard stone seat.

The priest of Tlaloc made special prayers and invocations and incense burnings—at tedious length—before he threw high the ball to declare the first game under way. I will not attempt, my lord scribes, to tell of the ball's every bound and bounce and rebound, for I know you are ignorant of the complex rules of tlachtli and could not begin to appreciate the finer points of the game. The priest scuttled from the court like a black beetle, leaving only Nezahualpili and Motecuzóma—and the two goalkeepers at either end of the court, but those men stayed immobile and unnoticed except when the progress of the game required them to move one goal yoke or another.

Those things, the movable low arches through which the players had to try to put the ball, were not the simple half-circles of stone provided on ordinary courts. The goal yokes, like the court's vertical walls, were of finest marble and, like the winning-goal rings set high in the walls' center points, they were elaborately carved and polished and brilliantly colored. Even the ball had been specially braided for that contest, of strips of the liveliest óli, the overlapping strips colored alternately blue and green.

Each of the Revered Speakers wore a padded leather band around his head and ears, secured by straps crossing the top of his head and under his chin; and heavy leather disks at elbows and knees; and a tightly wound, bulkily quilted loincloth, over which was belted a leather hip girdle. The head protectors were, as I have mentioned, of the two colors of Tlaloc—blue for Nezahualpili and green for Motecuzóma—but, even without that differentiation, even without my topaz, even I would have had no trouble distinguishing the two opponents. Between the paddings and quillings, Motecuzóma's body showed firm and smooth and muscular. Nezahualpili's was gaunt and ribby and stringy. Motecuzóma moved easily, springingly, lithe as óli himself, and the ball was his from the moment the priest tossed it up. Nezahualpili moved stiffly and awkwardly; it was pitiful to see him chase his fleet adversary, like Motecuzóma's shadow detached and trying to catch him up. A sharp elbow nudged my back; I turned to see the Lord Cuitlahuac, Motecuzóma's younger brother and commander of all the Mexíca armies. He grinned tauntingly at me; he was one of the several men with whom I had laid a sizable wager in gold.

Motecuzóma ran, he leapt, he floated, he flew. Nezahualpili plodded and panted, his bald head gleaming with sweat under the straps of his headgear. The ball hurtled, it bounced, it flickered back and forth—but always from Motecuzóma to Motecuzóma. From one end of the court, he would hip it hard toward the wall where Nezahualpili stood indecisive, and Nezahualpili was never quick enough to intercept it, and the ball would angle off that wall toward the farther end of the court, and somehow, impossibly, Motecuzóma would be there to strike it again with elbow or knee or buttock. He sent the ball like an arrow through this goal yoke, like a javelin through that one, like a blowpipe pellet through the next, the ball going through every low arch without ever touching either side of the stone, every time scoring a goal against Nezahualpili, every time raising an ovation from every spectator except me, Nochipa, and Nezahualpili's courtiers.

The first game to Motecuzóma. He bounded off the court like a young buck deer, untired, unwinded, to the handlers who rubbed him down and gave him a refreshing sip of chocolate, and he was standing, haughty, ready for the next game, when the trudging, sweat-dripping Nezahualpili had barely reached his resting seat among his own handlers. Nochipa turned and asked me, "Will we be poor, Father?" And the Lord Cuitlahuac overheard, and gave a great guffaw, but he laughed no more when the play resumed.

Long afterward, veteran tlachtli players were still arguing various and contradictory explanations for what subsequently occurred. Some said it had simply taken the playing of the first game to limber Nezahualpili's joints and reflexes. Some said that Motecuzóma had rashly played the first game so strenuously that he prematurely tired himself. And there were many other theories, but I had my own. I knew Nezahualpili of old, and I had too often seen a similar rickety, hobbling, pathetic old man, a man the color of a cacao bean. I believe I saw, that day of the tlachtli contest, Nezahualpili's last pretense at that decrepitude when he mockingly gave away the first game to Motecuzóma.

But no theory, including mine, can really account for the marvel that then occurred. Motecuzóma and Nezahualpili faced off for the second game, and Motecuzóma, having won the previous one, threw the ball into play. With his knee he lobbed it high in the air. It was the last time he ever touched that ball.

Naturally, after what had gone before, almost everyone's eyes were on Motecuzóma, expecting him to flicker away that instant and be under the ball before his aged opponent could creak into motion. But Nochipa, for some reason, watched Nezahualpili, and it was her squeal of delight that brought every other spectator to his feet, everybody roaring-together like a volcano in eruption. The ball was jiggling merrily inside the marble ring high in the north wall of the court, as if pausing there long enough to be admired, and then it fell through on the side away from Nezahualpili, who had elbowed it up there.

There was an uproar of exultation on the court and in the tiers, and it went on and on. Motecuzóma rushed to embrace his opponent in congratulation, and the goalkeepers and handlers milled about in a frenzy. The priest of Tlaloc came dancing and flaffing onto the court, waving his arms and raving, unheard in the din, probably proclaiming that to have been an augury of favor from Tlaloc. The cheering spectators jumped up and down in place. The bellow of "AYYO!" got even louder, ear-breakingly louder, when the crowd in the great plaza beyond the court heard the word of what had occurred. You will have gathered, reverend friars, that Nezahualpili had won that second game. Placing the ball through that vertical ring on the wall would have won it for him even if Motecuzóma had already been many goals ahead.

But you must understand that such a ringed ball was almost as much of a thrill for the onlookers as for the man who ringed it. That was so rare an occurrence, so unbelievably rare, that I do not know how to tell you how rare it was. Imagine that you have a hard óli ball the size of your head, and a stone ring, its aperture of just slightly larger diameter than that of the ball, poised vertically and twice your height above you. Try putting that ball through that hole, using not your hands, using only your hips, knees, elbows, or buttocks. A man might stand for days, doing nothing else, uninterrupted and undistracted, and never do it. In the swift movement and confusion of a real game, its doing was a thing miraculous.

While the crowd inside and outside the court continued its wild applause, Nezahualpili sipped at chocolate and smiled modestly, and Motecuzóma smiled approvingly. He could afford to smile, for he had only to take the remaining game to win the contest, and the ringed ball—albeit his opponent's doing—would ensure that the day of his victory would be remembered for all time, both in the archives of the sport and in the history of Tenochtítlan.

It was remembered, the day is still remembered, but not joyously. When the tumult finally quieted, the two players faced off again, the throw to be Nezahualpili's. He kneed the ball into the air at an angle and, in the same movement, dashed away to where he knew it would descend, and there kneed the ball again, and again with precision, up to and through the stone ring above. It happened so swiftly that I think Motecuzóma had no time to move at all. Even Nezahualpili appeared unbelieving of what he had done. That ringing of the ball twice in a row was more than a marvel, more than a record never to be matched in all the annals of the game, it was an accomplishment veritably stunning.

Not a sound went up from the ranks of spectators. We scarcely moved, not even our eyes, which were fixed wonderingly on that Revered Speaker. Then a cautious murmuring began among the onlookers. Some of the nobles mumbled hopeful things: that Tlaloc had shown himself so mightily pleased with us as to have taken a hand in the games himself. Others growled suspicions: that Nezahualpili had ensorcelled the games by devious magic. The nobles from Texcóco disputed that accusation, but not loudly. No one seemed to care to speak in a loud voice. Even Cuitlahuac did not grumble audibly when he handed me a leather pouch heavy with gold dust. Nochipa regarded me solemnly, as if she suspected me of being secretly a seer of the outcome of things.

Yes, I won a great deal of gold that day, through my intuition, or a trace of loyalty, or whatever undefinable motive had made me put my wagers on my onetime lord. But I would give all that gold, if I had it now—I would give more than that, ayya, a thousand of thousand times more than that, if I had it—not to have won that day.

Oh, no, lord scribes, not just because Nezahualpili's victory validated his predictions of an invasion sometime to come from the sea. I already believed in the likelihood of that; the Maya's crude drawing had convinced me. No, the reason I so bitterly regret Nezahualpili's having won the contest is that it brought a more immediate tragedy, and upon no one but me and mine.

I was in trouble again almost as soon as Motecuzóma, in I a furious temper, stalked off the court. For somehow, by the time the people had emptied out of the seats and the plaza that day, they had all learned that the contest had involved more than the two Revered Speakers—that it had been a trial of strength between their respective seers and sayers. All realized that Nezahualpili's victory lent credence to his doomful prophecies, and knew what those prophecies were. Probably one of Nezahualpili's courtiers made those things known, while trying to quell the rumors that his lord had won the games by sorcery. All I know for certain, though, is that the truth got out, and it was not my doing.

"If it was not your doing," said the icily irate Motecuzóma, "if you have done nothing to deserve punishment, then clearly I am not punishing you."

Nezahualpili had just left Tenochtítlan, and two palace guards had almost forcibly brought me before the throne, and the Revered Speaker had just told me what was in store for me.

"But my lord commands me to lead a military expedition," I protested, flouting all the established throne-room protocol. "If that is not punishment, it is banishment, and I have done nothing—"

He interrupted, "The command I give you, Eagle Knight Mixtli, is in the nature of an experiment. All the omens indicate that any invading hordes, if they come at all, will come from the south. It behooves us to strengthen our southern defenses. If your expedition is a success, I will send other knights leading other emigrant trains into those areas."

"But, my lord," I persisted, "I know nothing at all about founding and fortifying a colony."

He said, "Neither did I, until I was bidden to do exactly that, in the Xoconóchco, many years ago." I could not gainsay it; I had been somewhat responsible for it. He went on, "You will take some forty families, approximately two hundred men, women, and children. They are farm people for whom there is simply no available land to farm here in the middle of The One World. You will establish your emigrants on new land to the south, and see that they build a decent village, and arrange its defenses. Here is the place I have chosen."

The map he showed me was one I had drawn for him myself, but the area to which he pointed was empty of detail, for I had never yet visited there.

I said, "My Lord Speaker, that spot is within the lands of the Teohuacana people. They also may resent being invaded by a horde of foreigners."

With a humorless smile he said, "Your old friend Nezahualpili advised us to make friends of all our neighbors, did he not? One of your jobs will be to convince the Teohuacana that you come as a good friend and staunch defender of their country as well as ours."

"Yes, my lord," I said unhappily.

"The Revered Speaker Chimalpopoca of Tlecopan is kindly providing your military escort. You will command a detachment of forty of his Tecpanéca soldiers."

"Not even Mexíca?" I blurted in dismay. "My Lord Motecuzóma, a troop of Tecpanéca are sure to be unruly under the command of one Mexícatl knight!"

He knew it as well as I; it was part of his malice, part of my punishment for having been a friend of Nezahualpili. Blandly, he went on:

"The warriors will provide protection on the journey into Teohuacan, and will stay to man the stronghold you are to build there. You will also stay, Knight Mixtli, until all the families are well settled and self-supporting. That settlement you will name simply Yanquitlan, The New Place."

I ventured to ask, "May I at least recruit a few good Mexíca veterans, my lord, to be my under-officers?" He would probably have said an immediate no, but I added, "Some old men I know, who were long ago discharged as over-age."

He sniffed contemptuously and said, "If it will make you feel safer to recruit additional warriors, you will pay them yourself."

"Agreed, my lord," I said quickly. Eager to get away before he could change his mind, I dropped to kiss the earth, murmuring as I did so, "Has the Lord Speaker anything else to command?"

"That you depart immediately and make all haste southward. The Tecpanéca warriors and the families of your train are being mustered now at Ixtapalápan. I want them in your new community of Yanquitlan in time to get their spring seeding in the ground. Be it done."

"I go at once," I said, and shuffled on bare feet backward to the door.

* * *

Even though it was pure vindictiveness that made Motecuzóma fix on me as his pioneer colonizer, I could not complain overmuch, since it was I who had first urged the idea of such colonization—to Ahuítzotl, those many years earlier. Besides, to be honest, I had lately become rather bored with being the idle rich man; I had been haunting The House of Pochtéa, hoping to hear of some rare trading opportunity that would take me abroad. So I would have welcomed my assignment to lead the emigrant train, except that Motecuzóma insisted I stay with the new settlement until it was firmly rooted. As well as I could estimate, I would be immured in Yanquitlan for a full year, if not for two or more. When I was younger, when my roads and my days seemed limitless and countless, I would not have missed that much time subtracted from my life. But I was forty and two, and I begrudged the spending of even one of my remaining years tied to a dull job in a dull farm village, while perhaps brighter horizons beckoned all about.

Nevertheless, I prepared for the expedition with all possible enthusiasm and organization. First I called together the women and servants of my household, and told them of the mission.

"I am selfish enough not to want to be without my family during that year or more, and also I think the time can be used to advantage. Nochipa my daughter, you have never traveled farther from Tenochtítlan than the mainland beyond the causeways, and then only seldom. This journey may be rigorous but, if you would care to accompany me, I believe you would benefit by seeing and knowing more of these lands."

"And you think I must be asked?" she exclaimed with delight, and clapped her hands. Then she sobered to say, "But what of my schooling, Father, at The House of Learning Manners?"

"Simply tell your Mistress Teachers that you are going abroad. That your father guarantees you will learn more on the open road than inside any four walls." I turned to Béu Ribé. "I should like you to come too, Waiting Moon, if you would."

"Yes," she said at once, her eyes bright. "I am glad, Záa, that you no longer wish to walk alone. If I can be—"

"You can. A maiden of Nochipa's age should not go unattended by an older woman."

"Oh," she said, the brightness leaving her eyes.

"A company of soldiers and lower-class farm folk may be rude company. I should like you to stay always at Nochipa's side, and share her pallet every night."

"Her pallet," Béu repeated.

I said to the servants, "That will leave you, Turquoise and Star Singer, to occupy and care for the house and safeguard our belongings." They said they could and would, and promised that we would find everything in perfect order when we came back, however long we might be gone. I said I had no doubt of it. "And right now I have one errand for you, Star Singer."

I sent him to summon the seven old warriors who had been my own small army on other expeditions. I was saddened but not much surprised when he returned to report that three of them had died since last I had required their services.

The surviving four who did come had been fairly along in years when I first knew them as friends of Blood Glutton; they had not grown younger, but they came without hesitation. They came into my presence bravely, forcing themselves to walk with upright posture and sturdy tread, to divert my attention from their ropy musculature and knobby joints. They came booming with loud voices and laughs of anticipation, so the wrinkles and folds of their faces might have been taken to be only the lines of good humor. I did not insult them by remarking on their pretense at youth and vigor; their having come so gladly was proof enough to me that they were still capable men; I would have enlisted them even if they had arrived limping on sticks. I explained the mission to them all, then spoke directly to the oldest, Qualanqui, whose name meant Angry at Everybody:

"Our Tecpanéca soldiers and the two hundred civilians are waiting at Ixtapalápan. Go there, friend Angry, and make sure they will be ready to march when we are. I suspect you will find them unprepared in many respects; they are not seasoned travelers. The rest of you men, go and purchase all the equipment and provisions we will need—the four of you, myself, my daughter, and my lady sister."

I was more concerned with my emigrants' completing the long march than with any unfriendly reception we might meet in Teohuacan. Like the farm folk I was escorting, the Teohuacana were an agricultural people, and few in number, and not known for pugnacity. I fully expected that they would even welcome my settlers, as new people to mingle with and marry their offspring to.

When I speak of Teohuacin and the Teohuacana, I am of course using the Náhuatl names bestowed on them. The Teohuacana were actually some branch of the Mixteca, or Tya Nuü, and called themselves and their country Tya Nya. The land had never been besieged by us Mexíca or put under tribute to us because, except for farm products, its treasures were few. They consisted of hot mineral springs, not resources easily confiscated, and anyway the Tya Nya freely traded to us pots and flasks of the water from those springs. The water tasted and smelled awful, but it was much in demand as a tonic. And since physicians often ordered their patients to go to Tya Nya and bathe in those hot, stinking waters, the natives had also profited by building some rather luxurious inns adjacent to the springs. In sum, I did not expect much trouble from a nation of farmers and innkeepers.

Angry at Everybody returned to me the next day to report, "You were right, Knight Mixtli. That band of rustic louts had brought all their kitchen grinding stones and images of all their favorite gods, instead of an equal weight of seed for planting and pinoli powder for traveling rations. There was much grumbling, but I made them discard every replaceable encumbrance."

"And the people themselves, Qualanqui? Will they constitute a self-supporting community?"

"I believe so. They are all farmers, but there are men among them who have also the skills of masons and brickmakers and carpenters and such. They complain of only one trade lacking. They are not provided with priests."

I said sourly, "I never heard of a community which settled or grew anywhere, but that a plenitude of priests seemed to sprout from the ground, demanding to be fed and feared and revered." Nevertheless, I passed the word on to the palace, and our company was supplied with six or seven novice tlamacazque of various minor gods, priests so young and new that their black robes had hardly yet begun to be encrusted with blood and grime.

Nochipa, Béu, and I crossed the causeway on the eve of our planned departure day, and spent the night in Ixtapalápan, so that I could call the train to order at first light, and introduce myself, and see that the tumplined loads were equitably divided among all the able-bodied men, women, and older children, and get us all early on the road. My four under-officers bawled the Tecpanéca troops to attention, and I closely inspected them, using my topaz. That caused some covert snickering in the ranks, and the soldiers thereafter referred to me among themselves—I was not supposed to be aware of it—as Mixteloxixtli, a rather clever blending of my name with other words. It would translate roughly as Urine Eye Mixtli.

The civilians of the train probably called me by even less flattering names, for they had numerous grievances, of which the main one was that they had never intended or wanted to be emigrants at all. Motecuzóma had omitted to tell me that they had not volunteered for removal, but were "surplus population" rounded up by his troops. So they felt, with some justification, that they were being unfairly banished to the wilderness. And the soldiers were almost equally unhappy. They disliked their role of nursemaid, escort, and the making of a long march from their Tlácopan home, with their destination no honorable battlefield but an indefinite garrison duty. Had I not brought my four veterans to keep the troops in order, I fear that Commander Urine Eye would have had to cope with mutiny or desertion.

Ah, well. Much of the time I was wishing I could desert. The soldiers at least knew how to march. The civilians lagged, they strayed, they got sorefooted and lame, they grumbled and whimpered. No two of them could ever pause to relieve themselves at the same time; the women demanded halts to breast feed their infants; the priest of this or that god had to stop at specified times of day to offer up a ritual prayer. If I set a smart marching pace, the lazier people complained that I was running them to death. If I slowed to accommodate the laggards, the others complained that they would die of old age before journey's end.

The one thing that made the march pleasurable for me was my daughter Nochipa. Like her mother Zyanya, on her first trip far from home, Nochipa exclaimed joyously at each new vista revealed by each new turn in the road. There was no landscape so ordinary but that something in it gladdened her eye and heart. We were following the main trade road southeastward, and it is a route of much scenic beauty, but it was somewhat over-familiar to me and Béu and my under-officers—and the emigrants were incapable of exclaiming over anything but their miseries. But we could have been crossing the dead wastes of Mictlan, and Nochipa would have found it all new and wonderful.

She sometimes would break into song, as birds do, for no seeming reason except that they are winged creatures, and happy to be so. (Like my sister Tzitzitlini, Nochipa had won many honors at her school for her talent at singing and dancing.) When she sang, even the most hateful malcontents among our company would cease their grumbling for a while, to listen. Also, when she was not too tired from the day's walking, Nochipa would lighten the dark nights by dancing for us after our evening meal. One of my old men knew how to play a clay flute, and had brought it along. On those nights Nochipa danced, the company would bend down on the hard ground with less lamentation than usual.

Apart from Nochipa's brightening of the long and tiresome journey, I remember only one incident along the way that struck me as out of the ordinary. At one night's camping place, I walked some distance out of the firelight to relieve myself against a tree. Chancing to pass the tree again some while later, I saw Béu—she did not see me—and she was doing a singular thing. She was kneeling at the base of that same tree and scooping up the bit of mud made by my urination. I thought that perhaps she was preparing a soothing poultice for some marcher's blistered foot or sprained ankle. I did not interrupt her or later remark on the occurrence.

But I should tell you, lord scribes, that among our people there were certain women, usually very old women—you call them witches—who had knowledge of certain secret arts. One of their capabilities was to make a crude little image of a man, using the mud from a place where he had recently urinated, and then, by subjecting that doll to certain indignities, to make the man himself suffer an unexplainable pain or illness or madness or lust or loss of memory or even loss of his possessions until he became impoverished. But I had no reason to suspect Waiting Moon of having been a witch all her life without my ever realizing it. I dismissed her collection of the mud that night as a mere coincidence, and forgot all about it until much later.

Some twenty days' march out of Tenochtítlan—it would have been only twelve days for an experienced and unencumbered traveler—we came to the village of Huajuapan, which I knew of old. And, after spending the night there, we turned sharply northeastward on a lesser trade road that was new to all of us. The path led through pleasant valleys green with early spring verdure, winding among low and lovely blue mountains, toward Tya Nya's capital town, which was also called Tya Nya, or Teohuacan. But I did not take the entire train that far. After some four days along that route, we found ourselves in an extensive valley, at the ford of a wide but shallow stream. I knelt and took up a palmful of the water. I smelled it, then tasted it.

Angry at Everybody came to stand beside me, and asked, "What do you think?"

"Well, it does not spout from one of the typical Teohuacan springs," I said. "The water is not bitter or malodorous or hot. It will be good for drinking and for irrigation. The land looks to be good earth, and I see no other habitations or plantations. I think this is the place for our Yanquitlan. Tell them so."

Qualanqui turned and bellowed for everyone to hear, "Set down your packs! We have arrived!"

I said, "Let them rest for the remainder of today. Tomorrow we will begin—"

"Tomorrow," interrupted one of the priests, suddenly at my elbow, "and the day after that, and the day after that, we will devote to the consecration of this ground. With your permission, of course."

I said, "This is the first community I ever founded, young Lord Priest, and I am unacquainted with the formalities. By all means, do everything that is required by the gods."

Yes, I said those very words, not realizing how the words could be taken as my bestowal of unlimited religious license; not foreseeing the manner in which the words might eventually be interpreted by the priests and people; not remotely suspecting that I would, all my life long, regret that casual utterance.

The initial ritual, the consecration of the local terrain, took three entire days of prayer and invocation and incense burning and the like. Some of the rites occupied only the priests, but others required the participation of all of us. I did not mind, for the soldiers and settlers alike were enlivened by the days of rest and diversion. Even Nochipa and Béu were obviously glad that the ceremonies gave them reason to dress in clothes more rich and feminine and ornamental than the traveling garb they had worn for so long.

And that gave some of the colonists another diversion—me too, since it amused me to watch it. Most of the men of the train had wives and families, but there were three or four widowers with children but no wives, and those took the opportunity of the consecration days to pay court to Béu, one after another. There were also, among the males of the train, boys and young men of an age to make awkward approaches to Nochipa. I could not blame them, young men or older ones, for Nochipa and Béu were infinitely more beautiful and refined and desirable than the squatly built, coarse-featured, paddle-footed farm women and girls of the company.

Béu Ribé, when she thought I was not watching, would haughtily repulse the men who came asking that she be their partner in one of the ceremonial dances, or inventing any other excuse to be near her. But sometimes, when she knew I was nearby, she would let the oaf stand there while she flirted and teased outrageously, her smile and eyes so warm that they made the wretch begin to sweat. She was clearly trying just to taunt me by making me realize anew that she was still an attractive woman. I did not have to be reminded; Waiting Moon was indeed as lovely of face and body as Zyanya had been; but I, unlike the farmers fawning on her, had long been inured to her spiteful wiles of first temptation then rejection. I merely beamed and nodded, like a benevolently approving brother, and her eyes would go from warm to cold, her voice from sweet to corrosive, and the suddenly spurned suitor would retreat in confusion.

Nochipa played no such games; she was as chaste as all her dances had been. To every young man who approached, she turned a look of such wonderment, almost astonishment, that he very soon—after mumbling only a few shy words—quailed before her gaze and slunk away, red-faced, kicking the ground. Hers was an innocence that proclaimed itself inviolable, an innocence that apparently made every supplicant feel as embarrassed and ashamed as if he had lewdly exposed himself. I stood apart, feeling two kinds of pride in my daughter: pride in seeing that she was lovely enough to attract many men; pride in knowing that she would wait for the one man she wanted. Many times since then, I have wished that the gods had struck me down in that instant, in punishment for my complacent pride. But the gods know crueler punishments.

On the third night, when the exhausted priests announced that all the consecration was accomplished, that we could begin the mundane work of locating a new community on ground presumably made hospitable and safe, I said to Angry at Everybody:

"Tomorrow we will have the farm women start cutting branches for huts, and grass for thatching them, while their men start clearing the riverside for planting. It was Montecuzóma's command that they get seed in the earth as soon as possible, and the people will need only the flimsiest of houses while they work at that. Later, but before the rains start, we will lay out streets and plots for their permanent dwellings. But in the meantime the soldiers have nothing to occupy them. Also, by now, the news of our coming must have reached the capital. I think we should hasten to visit the Uey-Tlatoani, or whatever the Teohuacana call their ruling lord, and make our intentions known. We will take the soldiers along. They are numerous enough to prevent our being summarily seized or repelled, yet not such a large force as to imply that we come in belligerence."

Qualanqui nodded and said, "I will inform the farm families that their holiday ends tomorrow, and I will have the Tecpanéca ready to march."

As he went off, I turned to Béu Ribé and said, "Your sister my wife once lent her charm to help me sway another foreign ruler, a man far more formidable than any in these lands. If I arrive at the court of Teohuacan similarly accompanied by a beautiful woman, it might make this mission, too, appear more friendly than audacious. Could I ask you, Waiting Moon...?"

"To go with you, Záa?" she said eagerly. "As your consort?"

"To all appearances. We need not reveal that you are merely my lady sister. Considering our age, it should excite no comment when we request separate accommodations."

She surprised me by flaring angrily, "Our age!" But she calmed just as quickly, and murmured, "Of course. Reveal nothing. Your mere sister is yours to command."

I said, "Thank you."

"However, lord brother, your earlier command was that I stay at Nochipa's side to protect her from this rude company. If I go with you, what of Nochipa?"

"Yes, what of me?" asked my daughter, plucking at my mantle on the other side. "Do I go too, Father?"

"No, you stay here, child," I said. "I do not really expect to meet trouble on the road or in the capital, but there is always that risk. Here you will be safe among the numbers. And safe in the presence of the priests, whom any hostiles would hesitate to attack, out of religious awe. These farmer louts will be toiling so hard that they will have no time to molest you, and they will be too tired at night for the eligible males even to attempt flirting with you. In any case, Daughter, I have observed that you can discourage them capably enough. You will be safer here, Nochipa, than on the open road, and we will not be gone for long."

But she looked so downcast that I added, "When I return, we will have ample leisure time and the freedom of all this country. I promise you that we will see more of it. Just you and me, Nochipa, traveling light and far."

She brightened and said, "Yes, that will be even better. Just you and me. I will stay here willingly, Father. And at night, when the people are tired from their labors, perhaps I can make them forget their weariness. I can dance for them."

Even without the dragging train of colonists, it took another five days for me and Béu and our escort of forty and four to reach the town of Teohuacan, or Tya Nya. I remember that much, and I remember that we were most graciously received by the lord ruler, though I no longer remember his name or his lady's, or how many days we stayed as their guests in the rather ramshackle edifice they called a palace. I do remember his saying:

"That land you have occupied, Eagle Knight Mixtli, is one of our most pleasant and fertile stretches of terrain." To which he hastily added, "But we have not people to spare from other farms and other occupations to go and work it. Your colonists are welcome to it, and we welcome their presence. Any nation profits from new blood in its body."

He said much more, of the same import, and he gave me gifts in exchange for those I had brought him from Motecuzóma. And I remember that we were often and bountifully feasted—my men as well as Béu and myself—and we forced ourselves to drink that nasty mineral water of which the Teohuacana are so proud; we even smacked our lips in a pretense of savoring it. And I remember that there were no noticeably raised eyebrows when I asked for separate rooms for Béu and myself, though I have a vague recollection of her coming into my room during one of the nights there. She said something, she begged something—and I replied harshly—and she pleaded. I think I slapped her face... but now I cannot recall—

No, my lord scribes, do not look at me so. It is not that my memory has begun now suddenly to fail. All those things have been unclear to me during all the years since they happened. It is because something else happened soon afterward, and that thing so seared itself into my brain that it burned out my remembrance of the events preceding. I remember that we parted from our Tya Nya hosts with many mutual expressions of cordiality, and the townspeeple lined the streets to cheer us on our way, and only Béu seemed less than happy at the success of our embassy. And I suppose it took us another five days to retrace our route....

It was twilight when we came to the river, at the bank opposite Yanquitlan. There did not seem to have been much building done during our absence. Even using my seeing crystal, I could make out only a few huts erected on the village site. But there was some sort of celebration again in progress, and many fires burned high and bright, though the night was not yet fallen. We did not immediately start to ford the river, but stood listening to the shouts and laughter from the other side of the water, because it was the happiest sound we had ever heard from that uncouth company. Then a man, one of the older farmers, unexpectedly emerged from the river before us. He saw our troop halted there, and came splashing through the shallows, hailing me respectfully:

"Mixpantzinco! In your august presence, Eagle Knight, and welcome back. We feared you might miss all of the ceremony."

"What ceremony?" I asked. "I know of no ceremony in which the celebrants are bidden to go swimming."

He laughed and said, "Oh, that was my own notion. I was so-warm from the dancing and merrymaking that I had to cool off. But I have already had my share of blessings with the bone." I could not speak. He must have taken my silence for incomprehension; he explained, "You yourself told the priests to do all things required by the gods. Surely you realize that the month of Tlacaxipe Ualiztli was already well along when you left us, and the god not yet invoked to bless the clearing of the land for planting."

"No," I said, or groaned. I did not disbelieve his word; I knew the date. I was only trying to reject the thought that made my heart clench like a fist closing. The man went on, as if he was proud to be the first to tell me:

"Some wanted to await your return, Lord Knight, but the priests had to hurry the preparations and the preliminary activities. You know that we had no delicacies for feasting the chosen one, or instruments for making the proper music. But we have sung loudly and burned much copali. Also, since there is no temple for the requisite coupling, the priests sanctified a patch of soft grass screened by bushes, and there has been no lack of volunteer mates, many of them several times over. Since all agreed that our commander should be honored, even in his absence, all were unanimous in the choice of the symbolic one. And now you have returned in time to see the god represented in the person of—"

He stopped abruptly there, for I had swung my maquahuitl through his neck, cleaving it clear to the bone at the back. Béu gave a small scream, and the soldiers behind her goggled and craned. The man stood wavering for a moment, looking bewildered, nodding slightly, soundlessly opening and shutting his mouth and the wider red lips below his chin. Then his head flopped backward, the wound yawned open, blood spouted, and he fell at my feet.

Béu said, aghast, "Záa, why? What made you do that?"

"Be silent, woman!" snapped Angry at Everybody. Then he gripped my upper arm, which perhaps stopped me from falling too, and said, "Mixtli, we may yet be in time to prevent the final proceeding—"

I shook my head. "You heard him. He had been blessed with the bone. All has been done as that god requires."

Qualanqui sighed and said hoarsely, "I am sorry."

One of his ancient comrades took my other arm and said, "We are all sorry, young Mixtli. Would you prefer to wait here while we—while we go across the river?"

I said, "No. I am still in command. I will command what is to be done in Yanquitlan."

The old man nodded, then raised his voice and shouted to the soldiers bunched on the path, "You men! Break ranks and spread out. Make a skirmish line up and down the riverbank. Move!"

"Tell me what has happened!" cried Béu, wringing her hands. "Tell me what we are about to do!"

"Nothing," I said, my voice a croak. "You do nothing, Béu." I swallowed the impediment in my throat, and I blinked my eyes clear of tears, and I did my best to stand up straight and strong. "You do nothing but stay here, on this side of the water. Whatever you hear from over here, and however long it goes on, do not move from this spot until I come for you."

"Stay here alone? With that?" She pointed at the corpse.

I said, "Do not fear that one. Be happy for that one. In my first rage I was too hasty. I gave that one an easy release."

Angry at Everybody shouted, "You men! Advance in skirmish line across the river. Make no sound from here on. Encircle the village area. Let no least person escape, but surround them all and then wait for orders. Come, Mixtli, if you think you must."

"I know I must," I said, and I was the first to wade into the water.

Nochipa had spoken of dancing for the people of Yanquitlan, and so she was doing. But it was not the restrained and modest dancing which I had always seen her do. In the purple dusk, in the mixture of twilight and firelight, I could see that she was totally unclothed, that she danced with no grace, but with grossly indecent sprawlings of her legs, while she waved two white wands above her head, occasionally reaching one of them out to tap some person who pranced near.

Though I did not want to, I raised my topaz to see her more clearly. The only thing she wore was the necklace of opals I had given her when she was four years old, and to which I had added a new firefly stone on each of the eight birthdays—the so very few birthdays—she had had since. Her usually braided hair hung loose and tangled. Her breasts were still firm little mounds, and her buttocks still shapely, but between her thighs, where her maiden tipíli should have been almost invisible, there was a rent in her skin, and through it protruded a flopping male tepúli and jiggling sac of olóltin. The white things she waved were her own thigh bones, but the hands that waved them were a man's, and her own half-severed hands dangled limply from his wrists.

A cheer went up from the people as I stepped inside the circle of them dancing around the dancing thing that had been my daughter. She had been a child, and a shining, and they had made carrion of her. That effigy of Nochipa came dancing toward me, one glistening bone extended, as if she would give me a blessing tap before I hugged her in a father's loving embrace. The obscene thing came close enough for me to look into the eyes that were not Nochipa's eyes. Then its dancing feet faltered, it ceased to dance, it stopped just out of my reach, stopped by my look of loathing and revulsion. And when it stopped, so did the gleeful crowd stop its milling and its prancing and its joyful noise, and the people stood looking uneasily at me and at the soldiers who had ringed the site. I waited until nothing could be heard but the crackling of the celebration fires. Then I said, addressing nobody in particular:

"Seize this foul creature—but seize him gently, for he is all that remains of a girl who once was alive."

The small priest in Nochipa's skin stood blinking in unbelief, and then two of my warriors had him. The other five or six priests of the train came shouldering through the crowd, angrily protesting my interruption of the ceremony. I ignored them and said to the men holding the god-impersonator:

"Her face is separate from her body. Remove the face from him—with the greatest care—and bear it reverently to that fire yonder, and say some small prayer for her who gave it beauty, and burn it. Bring me the opals she wore at her throat."

I averted my own face while that was done. The other priests began to rage even more indignantly, until Angry at Everybody gave such a fearsome snarl that the priests became as quiet and meek as the motionless crowd.

"It is done, Knight Mixtli," said one of my men. He handed me the necklace; some of the firefly stones were red with Nochipa's blood. I turned again to the captive priest. He no longer wore my daughter's hair and features, but his own face, and it twitched with fright.

I said, "Lay him supine on the ground, right here, being very careful not to lay rough hands on my daughter's flesh. Peg his hands and feet to the ground."

He was, like all the priests of the train, a young man. And he screamed like a boy when the first sharp stake was hammered through his left palm. He screamed four times altogether. The other priests and people of Yanquitlan moved and murmured, rightly apprehensive of their own fate, but all my soldiers held their weapons at the ready, and no one dared be the first to try to run. I looked down at the grotesque figure on the ground, writhing against the four stakes that fixed its spraddled extremities. Nochipa's youthful breasts proudly pointed their russet nipples toward the sky, but the male genitals protruding from between her spread legs had gone flaccid and shrunken.

"Prepare lime water," I said. "Use much lime in the concentration, and drench the skin with it. Keep on wetting the skin all night long, until it has become well sodden. Then we will wait for the sun to come up."

Angry at Everybody nodded approvingly. "And the others? We await your command, Knight Mixtli."

One of the priests impelled by terror, lunged between us and knelt before me, his bloodstained hands clutching the hem of my mantle, and he said, "Knight Commander, it was by your leave that we conducted this ceremony. Any other man here would have rejoiced to see his son or daughter chosen for the personation, but it was yours who best met all the qualifications. Once she had been chosen by the populace, and that choice approved by the people's priests, you could not have refused to relinquish her for the ceremony."

I gave him a look. He dropped his gaze, then stammered, "At least—in Tenochtítlan—you could not have refused." He tugged at my mantle again and said imploringly, "She was a virgin, as required, but she was mature enough to function as a woman, which she did. You told me yourself, Knight Commander: do all things required by the gods. So now the girl's Flowery Death has blessed your people and their new colony, and assured the fertility of this ground. You could not have withheld that blessing. Believe me, Knight Commander, we intended only honor... to Xipe Totec and to your daughter... and to you!"

I gave him a blow that toppled him to one side, and I said to Qualanqui, "You are familiar with the honors traditionally accorded to the chosen Xipe Totec?"

"I am, friend Mixtli."

"Then you know the things that were done to the innocent and unblemished Nochipa. Do all the same things to all this filth. Do it in whatever manner you please. You have sufficient soldiers. Let them indulge themselves, and they need not hurry. Let them be inventive, and leisurely at it. But when all that is done, I want nobody—nothing—left alive in Yanquitlan."

It was the last command I gave there. Angry at Everybody took charge then. He turned and barked more specific orders, and the crowd howled as if already in agony. But the soldiers moved eagerly to comply with their instructions. Some of them swept all the adult men into a separate group, and held them there with their weapons. The other soldiers put down their arms and took off their clothes and went to work—or to play—and when any one of them tired, he would change places with one of those standing guard.

I watched, all through the night, for the great fires kept the night alight until dawn. But I did not really see, or gloat at what happened before my eyes, or take any satisfaction in the reprisal. I paid no heed to the screams and bellows and wails and other, more liquid noises occasioned by the mass rape and carnage. I could see and hear only Nochipa dancing gracefully in the firelight, singing melodiously as she did so, to a single flute's accompaniment.

What Qualanqui had ordered, what actually occurred, was this. All the smallest children, the babes in arms and toddling infants, were snatched by the soldiers and cut to pieces—not quickly, but as one would slowly peel and slice a fruit for the eating of it—while their parents watched and wept and threatened and cursed. Then the remaining children, all those judged old enough to be sexually used, the males as well as females, were used by the Tecpanéca, while their older sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers were forced to look on.

When those children had been so riven that they no longer afforded pleasure, the soldiers flung them aside to die. They next seized the bigger children, and the adolescent girls and boys, and finally the younger women and men—I have mentioned that the priests were all young men—and similarly served them. The one priest staked to the ground watched and whimpered, and looked fearfully down toward his own vulnerably exposed parts. But even in this slavering rampage, the Tecpanéca realized that that one was not to be touched, and he was not.

From time to time, the older men penned at one side tried frantically to break loose, when they saw wives, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters being despoiled. But the ring of guards stolidly held the men captive, and would not even let them turn away from watching the spectacle. Finally, when every other usable piece of flesh had been used until it was no longer usable, when it lay dead or lay wishing and trying to die, the Tecpanéca turned to the older folk. Though by then somewhat depleted of both appetite and ability, the soldiers managed adequately to ravish all the mature women, and even the two or three elderly grandmothers who had made the journey.

The next day's sun was high when all that was over, and Angry at Everybody ordered the penned men let loose. They, the husbands and fathers and uncles of the ruined, went about the littered ground, flinging themselves weeping on this and that limp, broken, naked body besmeared with blood and drool and omícetl. Some of the used bodies were still alive, and they lived to see the soldiers—at Qualanqui's next command—seize their husbands and fathers and uncles. What the Tecpanéca did to those men with their obsidian knives, and with the things they amputated, made each man sexually abuse himself while he lay bleeding to death.

Meanwhile, the staked-down priest had been keeping quiet, perhaps hoping he had been forgotten. But as the sun rose higher, he realized that he was to die more hideously than all the others, for what was left of Nochipa began to exact its own revenge. The skin, saturated with lime water, slowly and excruciatingly contracted as it dried. What had been Nochipa's breasts gradually flattened as the skin tightened its embrace around the priest's chest. He began to gasp and wheeze. He might have wished to express his terror in a scream, but he had to hoard what air he could inhale, just to live a little longer.

And the skin continued inexorably to contract, and began to impede the movement of the blood in his body. What had been Nochipa's neck and wrists and ankles shrank their openings like slow garrottes. The man's face and hands and feet began to bloat and darken to an ugly purple color. Through his distended lips came the sound "ugh... ugh... ugh..." but that gradually was choked off. Meanwhile, what had been Nochipa's little tipíli shut ever more virginally tight around the roots of the priest's genitals. His olóltin sac swelled to the size and tautness of a tlachtli ball, and his engorged tepúli bulged to a length and thickness bigger than my forearm.

The soldiers wandered about the area, inspecting every body lying about, to ascertain that each was surely dead or dying. The Tecpanéca did not mercifully dispatch the ones still alive, but only verified that they would die in the gods' good time—to leave, as I had commanded, no living thing in Yanquitlan. There was nothing more to keep us there, except to view the dying of that one remaining priest.

So I and my four old comrades stood over him and watched his agonized, slight stirring and the shallow movement of his chest, while the ever constricting skin made his torso and limbs get thinner and his visible extremities get larger. His hands and feet were like black breasts with many black teats, his head was a featureless black pumpkin. He found breath enough to give one last loud cry when his rigid tepúli could no longer contain the pressure, and split its skin, and exploded black blood, and fell in tattered shreds.

He was still dimly alive, but he was finished, and our vengeance was done. Angry at Everybody ordered the Tecpanéca to pack in preparation to march, while the other three old men forded with me back across the river to where Béu Ribé waited. Silently, I showed her the bloodstained opals. I do not know how much else she had seen or heard or guessed, and I do not know how I looked at that moment. But she regarded me with eyes full of horror and pity and reproach and sorrow—the horror uppermost—and for an instant she shrank from the hand I reached out to her.

"Come, Waiting Moon," I said stonily. "I will take you home."

I H S

S.C.C.M.

Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

Most Perspicacious and Oracular Prince: from the City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, two days after the Feast of the Purification, in this Year of Our Lord one Thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.

Sovereign Sire, we can only express our admiration at the depth and daring of our Liege's cogitations in the field of speculative hagiology, and our genuine awe at the brilliant conjecture propounded in Your Majesty's latest letter. Viz., that the Indian's best-beloved deity, Quetzalcoatl, so frequently alluded to in our Aztec's narrative, could have been in actuality the Apostle Thomas, visiting these lands fifteen centuries ago for the purpose of bringing the Gospel to these heathens.

Of course, even as Bishop of Mexíco, we cannot give the episcopal imprimatur to such a strikingly bold hypothesis, Sire, prior to its consideration among higher ranks of the Church hierarchy. We can, however, attest that there exists a body of circumstantial evidence to support Your Majesty's innovative theory:

Primus. The so-called Feathery Snake was the one supernatural being recognized by every separate nation and variant religion so far known to have existed in all of New Spain, his name being severally rendered as Quetzalcoatl among the Náhuatl-speakers, Kukulkan among the Maya-speakers, Gu-kumatz among peoples even farther south, etc.

Secundus. All these peoples agree in the tradition that Quetzalcóatl was first a human, mortal, incarnate king or emperor who lived and walked on earth during the span of a lifetime, before his transmutation into an insubstantial and immortal deity. Since the Indians' calendar is exasperatingly inutile, and since there no longer exist the books of even mythical history, it may never be possible to date the alleged earthly reign of Quetzalcoatl. Therefore, he could very well have been coeval with St. Thomas.

Tertius. All these peoples likewise agree that Quetzalcoatl was not so much a ruler—or tyrant, as most of their rulers have been—but a teacher and a preacher and, not incidentally, a celibate by religious conviction. To him are attributed the invention or introduction of numerous things, customs, beliefs, etc., which have endured to this day.

Quartus. Among the numberless deities of these lands, Quetzalcoatl was one of the very few that never demanded or countenanced human sacrifice. The offerings made to him were always innocuous: birds, butterflies, flowers, and the like.

Quintus. The Church holds it to be historical fact that St. Thomas did travel to the land of India in the East, and did there convert many pagan peoples to Christianity. So, as Your Majesty suggests, "May it not be a reasonable supposition that the Apostle should also have done so in the then-unknown Indies of the West?" A reprobate materialist might remark that the sainted Thomas had the advantage of an overland route from the Holy Land to the East Indies, whereas he would have found some difficulty in crossing the Ocean Sea fifteen centuries before the development of the vessels and navigational facilities available to modern-day explorers. However, any cavil at the abilities of one of the Twelve Disciples would be as injudicious as was the doubt once voiced by Thomas himself and rebuked by the risen Christ.

Sextus et mirabile dictu. A common Spanish soldier named Diaz, who occupies his off-duty hours in idly exploring the old ruins of this area, recently visited the abandoned city of Tolan, or Tula. This is revered by the Aztecs as having been once the seat of the legendary people called the Toltecs—and of their ruler, the king later to become deity, Quetzalcoatl. Among the roots of a tree sprung from a crack in one of the old stone walls, Diaz found a carved onyx box, of native manufacture but of indeterminate age, and in this box he found a number of white wafers of delicate bread, quite unlike anything baked by these Indians. Diaz at once recognized them, and we, when they were brought to us, verified them as the Host. How these sacramental wafers came to be in that place and in a native-made pyx, how many centuries they may have been secreted there, and how it is that they did not long ago dry and crumble and perish, no one can guess. Could it be that Your Erudite Majesty has supplied the answer? Could the Communion wafers have been left as a token by the evangelist St. Thomas?

We are this day relating all these data in a communication to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, giving due credit to Your Majesty's inspired contribution, and will eagerly await the opinion of those theologians at Rome, far more sapient than ourself.

May Our Lord God continue to smile upon and favor the enterprises of Your Imperial Majesty, to whom unbound admiration is due and professed by all your subjects, not least by your S.C.C.M.'s chaplain and servant,

(ecce signum) Zumárraga

DECIMA PARS

For the same reason that I do not have much recollection of the events just prior to the obliteration of Yanquitlan, I do not clearly remember the things that happened immediately afterward. I and Béu and our escort marched north again toward Tenochtítlan, and I suppose the journey was unremarkable, for I recall little of it except two brief conversations.

The first was with Béu Ribé. She had been weeping as she walked, weeping almost constantly, ever since I told her of Nochipa's death. But one day, somewhere on the return route, she suddenly stopped both weeping and walking, and looked about her, like someone roused from sleep, and she said to me:

"You told me you would take me home. But we are going north."

I said, "Of course. Where else?"

"Why not south? South to Tecuantépec?"

"You have no home there," I said. "No family, probably no friends. It has been—what?—eight years since you left there."

"And what have I in Tenochtítlan?"

A roof under which to sleep, I might have remarked, but I knew what she really meant. So I said simply, "You have as much as I have, Waiting Moon. Memories."

"Not very pleasant ones, Záa."

"I know that too well," I said, without sympathy. "They are the same ones I have. And we will have them wherever we wander, or wherever we call home. At least you can grieve and mourn in comfort in Tenochtítlan, but no one is dragging you there. Come with us or go your own way, as you choose."

I walked on and did not look back, so I do not know how long it took her to decide. But the next time I lifted my gaze from my own inward visions, Béu was again walking at my side.

The other conversation was with Angry at Everybody. For many days the men had respectfully left me to my brooding silence, but one day he strode along with me and said:

"Forgive my intrusion on your sorrow, friend Mixtli. But we are getting near home, and there are things you should know. They are some things which we four elders have discussed and presumed to settle among ourselves. We have made up a story, and we have instructed the Tecpanéca troops to tell the same. It is this. While all of us—you and we and the soldiers—were making that embassy to the court of Teohuacan, while we were necessarily absent with good reason, the colony was set upon by bandits, and looted and massacred. On our return to Yanquitlan, we naturally went raging and searching for the marauders, but found no trace of them. Not so much as one of their arrows, whose feathering would have told us from what nation they came. That uncertainty of the bandits' identity will prevent Motecuzóma from instantly declaring a war upon the innocent Teohuacana."

I nodded and said, "I will tell it exactly so. It is a good story, Qualanqui."

He coughed and said, "Unfortunately, not good enough for you to tell, Mixtli. Not to Motecuzóma's face. Even if he believed every word of it, he would not hold you blameless for the failure of that mission. He would either order you throttled by the flower garland or, if he happened to be feeling kindly, he would give you another chance. Meaning you would be commanded to lead another train of colonists, and probably to the same unspeakable place."

I shook my head. "I could not and would not."

"I know," said Angry at Everybody. "And besides, the truth is bound to leak out, soon or later. One of those Tecpanéca soldiers, when he gets home safe to Tlácopan, is sure to boast of his part in the massacre. How he raped and slew six children and a priest, or whatever. It would get back to Motecuzóma; you would be caught in a lie; and you would certainly get the garrotte, if not worse. I think it better that you leave the lying to us old men, who are only hirelings, beneath Motecuzóma's notice, hence in less danger. I also think you might consider not returning to Tenochtítlan at all—not for some time, anyway—since your future there seems to offer only a choice of capital punishment or renewed banishment to Yanquitlan."

I nodded again. "You are right. I have been mourning the dark days and roads behind me, not looking toward those ahead. It is an old saying, is it not, that we are born to suffer and endure? And a man must give thought to his enduring, must he not? Thank you, Qualanqui, good friend and wise adviser. I will meditate upon your counsel."

When we came to Quaunahuac, and that night took lodgings at an inn, I had a dining cloth set apart for me and Béu and my four old comrades. When we had done eating, I took from my waistband my leather sack of gold dust and dropped it on the cloth, and said:

"There is your pay for your services, my friends."

"It is far too much," said Angry at Everybody.

"For what you have done, it could not possibly be. I have this other purse of copper bits and cacao beans, sufficient for what I will do now."

"Do now?" echoed one of the old men.

"Tonight I abdicate command, and these are my last instructions to you. Friend officers, you will proceed from here around the western border of the lakes, to deliver the Tecpanéca troops to Tlácopan. From there you will cross the causeway to Tenochtítlan and escort the lady Béu to my house, before you report to the Revered Speaker. Tell him your nicely concocted story, but add that I have inflicted on myself a punishment for the failure of this expedition. Tell him that I have voluntarily gone into exile."

"It will be done so, Commander Mixtli," said Angry at Everybody, and the other three men murmured agreement.

Only Béu asked the question: "Where are you going, Záa?"

"In search of a legend," I said, and I told them the story that Nezahualpili had not long ago told to Motecuzóma in my hearing, and I concluded, "I will retrace that long march our forefathers made in the time when they still called themselves the Aztéca. I will go northward, following their route as nearly as I can construe it and as far as I can trace it... all the way to their homeland of Aztlan, if such a place still exists or ever did. And if those wanderers truly did bury armories of weapons and stores at intervals, I will find them too, and map their locations. Such a map could be of great military value to Motecuzóma. Try to impress that upon him when you report to him, Qualanqui." I smiled ruefully. "He may welcome me with flowers instead of a flower garland when I return."

"If you return," said Béu.

I could not smile at that. I said, "It seems my tonáli forces me always to return, but every time a little more alone." I paused, then said between my teeth, "Someday, somewhere, I will meet a god and I will ask him: Why do the gods never strike me down, when I have done so much to deserve their anger? Why do they instead strike down every undeserving one who has ever stood close to me?"

The four elderly men appeared slightly uneasy at having to hear my bitter lament, and they seemed relieved when Béu said, "Old friends, would you be kind enough to take your leave, that Záa and I may exchange a few private words?"

They got up, making a cursory gesture of kissing the earth to us, and, when they went off toward their quarters, I said brusquely, "If you are going to ask to accompany me, Béu, do not ask."

She did not. She was silent for a considerable time, her eyes downcast to her nervously twining fingers. Finally she said, and her first words seemed totally irrelevant, "On my seventh birthday I was named Waiting Moon. I used to wonder why. But then I knew, and I have known for years now, and I think Waiting Moon has waited long enough." She raised her beautiful eyes to mine, and somehow she had made them entreating instead of mocking for a change, and somehow she even managed a maidenly blush. "Let us now at last be married, Záa."

So that was it, I said to myself, remembering again how she had surreptitiously collected that mud I had made. Earlier, and for only a brief time, I had wondered if she fashioned an image of me in order to curse it with misfortune, and if that was what had deprived me of Nochipa. But that suspicion had been a fleeting one, shaming me even to think of it. I knew Béu had loved my daughter dearly, and her weeping had demonstrated a sorrow as genuine as my tearless own. So I had forgotten the mud doll—until her own words revealed that she had made it, and why. Not to blight my life but merely to weaken my will, so that I could not reject her pretendedly impulsive but transparently long-planned proposal. I did not immediately reply; I waited while she proffered her carefully marshaled arguments. She said first:

"A moment ago, Záa, you remarked that you are ever more and more alone. So am I, you know. We both are, now. We have no one left but each other."

And she said, "It was acceptable that I should live with you while I was known to be the guardian and companion of your motherless daughter. But now that Nochipa... now that I am no longer the resident aunt, it would be unseemly for an unmarried man and woman to share the same house."

And she said, with another blush, "I know there could never be a replacement for our beloved Nochipa. But there could be... I am not too old..."

And there she let her voice fade away, in a very good simulation of modesty and inability to say more. I waited, and held her eyes, until her blushing face glowed like copper being heated, and then I said:

"You need not have troubled with conjuration and cajolery, Béu. I intended to ask you the same thing this very night. Since you seem agreeable, we will be married tomorrow, as early as I can awaken a priest."

"What?" she said faintly.

"As you remind me, I am now most utterly alone. I am also a man of estimable estate and, if I die without an heir, my property is forfeit to the nation's treasury. I should prefer that it not go to Motecuzóma. So tomorrow the priest will draw a document affirming your inheritance as well as the paper attesting our marriage."

Béu slowly got to her feet and looked down at me, and she stammered, "That is not what... I never gave a thought to... Záa, I was trying to say..."

"And I have spoiled the performance," I said, smiling up at her. "All the blandishments and persuasions were unnecessary. But you need not count them wasted, Béu. Tonight may have been good practice for some future use, when perhaps you are a wealthy but lonely widow."

"Stop it, Záa!" she exclaimed. "You refuse to hear what I am earnestly trying to tell you. It is hard enough for me, because it is not a woman's place to say such things—"

"Please, Béu, no more," I said, wincing. "We have lived too long together, too long accustomed to our mutual dislike. Saying sweet words at this late date would strain either of us, and probably astound all the gods. But at least, from tomorrow on, our detestation of each other can be formally consecrated and indistinguishable from that of most other married—"

"You are cruel!" she interrupted. "You are immune to any tender sentiment, and heedless of a hand reaching out to you."

"I have too often felt the hard back of your tender hand, Béu. And am I not about to feel it again? Are you not going to laugh now and tell me that your talk of marriage was just another derisive prank?"

"No," she said. "I meant it seriously. Did you?"

"Yes," I said, and raised high my cup of octli. "May the gods take pity on us both."

"An eloquent proposal," she said. "But I accept it, Záa. I will marry you tomorrow." And she ran for her room.

I sat on, moodily sipping my octli and eyeing the inn's other patrons, most of them pochtéa on their way home to Tenochtítlan, celebrating their profitable journeys and safe return by getting eminently drunk, in which pursuit they were being encouraged by the hostel's numerous available women. The innkeeper, already aware that I had engaged a separate room for Béu, and seeing her depart alone, came sidling to where I sat, and inquired:

"Would the Lord Knight care for a sweet with which to conclude his meal? One of our charming maátime?"

I grunted, "Few of them look exceptionally charming."

"Ah, but looks are not everything. My lord must know that, since his own beautiful companion seems cool toward him. Charm can reside in other attributes than face and figure. For example, regard that woman yonder."

He pointed to what must surely have been the least appealing female in the establishment. Her features and her breasts sagged like moist clay. Her hair, from having been so often bleached and recolored, was like wire grass dried to kinky hay. I grimaced, but the innkeeper laughed and said:

"I know, I know. To contemplate that woman is to yearn for a boy instead. At a glance, you would take her for a grandmother, but I know for a fact that she is scarcely thirty. And would you believe this, Lord Knight? Every man who has ever once tried Quequelyehua always demands her on his next visit here. Her every patron becomes a regular, and will accept no other maátitl. I do not indulge, myself, but I have it on good authority that she knows some extraordinary ways to delight a man."

I raised my topaz and took another, more searching look at the draggle-haired, bleary-eyed sloven. I would have wagered that she was a walking pustule of the nanaua disease, and that the effeminate innkeeper knew it, and that he took malicious pleasure in trying to peddle her to the unsuspecting.

"In the dark, my lord, all women look alike, no? Well, boys do too, of course. So it is other considerations that matter, no? The highly accomplished Quequelyehua probably already has a waiting line for tonight, but an Eagle Knight can demand precedence over mere pochtéa. Shall I summon Quequelyehua for you, my lord?"

"Quequelyehua," I repeated, as the name evoked a memory. "I once knew a most beautiful girl named Quequelmíqui."

"Ticklish?" said the innkeeper, and giggled. "From her name, she must have been a diverting consort too. But this one should be far more so. Quequelyehua, the Tickler."

Feeling rather sick at heart, I said, "Thank you for the recommendation, but no, thank you." I took a large drink of my octli. "That thin girl sitting quietly in the corner, what of her?"

"Misty Rain?" said the innkeeper, indifferently. "They call her that because she weeps all the time she is, er, functioning. A newcomer, but competent enough, I am told."

I said, "Send that one to my room. As soon as I am drunk enough to go there myself."

"At your command, Lord Eagle Knight. I am impartial in the matter of other people's preferences, but sometimes I am mildly curious. May I ask why my lord chooses Misty Rain?"

I said, "Simply because she does not remind me of any other woman I have known."

The marriage ceremony was plain and simple and quiet, at least until its conclusion. My four old stalwarts stood as our witnesses. The innkeeper prepared tamaltin for the ritual meal. Some of the inn's earlier-rising patrons served as our wedding guests. Since Quaunahuac is the chief community of the Tlahuica people, I had procured a priest of the Tlahuica's principal deity, the good god Quetzalcoatl. And the priest, observing that the couple standing before him were somewhat past the first greening of youth, tactfully omitted from his service the usual doleful warnings to the presumably innocent female, and the usual cautionary exhortations to the presumably lusting male. So his harangue was mercifully brief and bland.

But even that perfunctory ritual elicited some emotion from Béu Ribé, or she pretended it did. She wept a few maidenly tears and, through the tears, smiled tremulous smiles. I must admit that her performance enhanced her already striking beauty, which, as I have never denied, was equal to and almost indistinguishable from the sublime loveliness of her late sister. Béu was dressed most enticingly and, when I looked at her without the clarification of my crystal, she appeared still as youthful as my forever twenty-year-old Zyanya. It was for that reason that I had made repeated use of the girl Misty Rain throughout the night. I would not risk Béu's making me want her, even physically, so I drained myself of any possibility of becoming aroused against my will.

The priest finally swung his smoking censer of copali around us for the last time. Then he watched while we fed each other a bite of steaming tamali, then he knotted the corner of my mantle to a corner of Waiting Moon's skirt hem, then he wished us the best of fortune in our new life.

"Thank you, Lord Priest," I said, handing him his fee. "Thank you especially for the good wishes." I undid the knot that tied me to Béu. "I may need the gods' help where I am now going." I slung my traveling pack on my shoulder and told Béu good-bye.

"Good-bye?" she repeated, in a sort of squeak. "But Záa, this is our wedding day."

I said, "I told you I would be leaving. My men will see you safely home."

"But—but I thought—I thought surely we would stay here at least another night. For the..." She glanced about, at the watching and listening guests. She blushed hotly and her voice rose, "Záa, I am now your wife!"

I corrected her, "You are married to me, as you requested, and you will be my widow and my heiress. Zyanya was my wife."

"Zyanya has been ten years dead!"

"Her dying did not sever our bond. I can have no other wife."

"Hypocrite!" she raged at me. "You have not been celibate for these ten years. You have had other women. Why will you not have the one you just now wed? Why will you not have me?"

Except for the innkeeper, who was smirking lewdly, most of the people in the room stood fidgeting and looking uncomfortable. So did even the priest, who nerved himself to say, "My lord, it is customary, after all, to seal the vows with an act of... well, to know each other intimately—"

I said, "Your concern does you credit, Lord Priest. But I already know this woman far too intimately."

Béu gasped. "What a horrid lie to tell! We have never once—"

"And we never will. Waiting Moon, I know you too well in other ways. I also know that the most vulnerable moment in a man's life occurs when he couples with a woman. I will not chance arriving at that moment to have you disdainfully reject me, or break into your mocking laughter, or diminish me by any other of the means you have been so long practicing and perfecting."

She cried, "And what are you doing to me this moment?"

"The very same," I agreed. "But this once, my dear, I have done it first. Now the day latens, and I must be on my way."

When I left, Béu was dabbing at her eyes with the crumpled corner of her skirt that had been our marriage knot.