Aztec

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It was not necessary for me to begin retracing my ancestors' long-ago long march from its terminus in Tenochtítlan, nor from any of the places they had earlier inhabited in the lake district, since those sites could hold no undiscovered secrets of the Aztéca. But, according to the old tales, one of the Aztéca's next-earlier habitations, before they found the lake basin, had been somewhere to the north of the lakes: a place called Atlitalacan. So, from Quaunahuac, I traveled northwest, then north, then northeast, circling around and staying well outside the domains of The Triple Alliance, until I was in the sparsely settled country beyond Oxitipan, the northernmost frontier town garrisoned by Mexíca soldiers. In that unfamiliar territory of infrequent small villages and infrequent travelers between them, I began inquiring the way to Atlitalacan. But the only replies I got were blank looks and indifferent shrugs, because I was laboring under two difficulties.

One was that I had no idea what Atlitalacan was, or what it had been. It could have been an established community at the time the Aztéca stayed there, but which had since ceased to exist. It could have been merely a hospitable place for camping—a grove or meadow—to which the Aztéca had given that name only temporarily. My other difficulty was that I had entered the southern part of the Otomí country, or, to be accurate, the country to which the Otomí peoples had grudgingly removed when they were gradually ousted from the lake lands by the successively arriving waves of Culhua, Acolhua, Aztéca, and other Náhuatl-speaking invaders. So, in that amorphous border country, I had a language problem. Some of the folk I accosted spoke a passable Náhuatl, or the Poré of their other neighbors to the west. But some spoke only Otomite, in which I was by no means fluent, and many spoke a bastard patchwork of the three languages. Although my persistent questioning of villagers and farmers and wayfarers enabled me eventually to acquire a working vocabulary of Otomite words, and to explain my quest, I still could find no native who could direct me to the lost Atlitalacan.

I had to find it myself, and I did. Fortunately, the place-name itself was a clue—Atlitalacan means "where the water gushes"—and I came one day to a neat and cleanly little village named D'ntado Dene, which in Otomite means approximately the same thing. The village was built where it was because a sweet-water spring bubbled from the rocks there, and it was the only spring within a considerably extensive arid area. It seemed a likely place for the Aztéca to have stopped, since an old road came into the village from the north and proceeded southward from it in the general direction of Lake Tzumpanco.

The meager population of D'ntado Dene naturally regarded me askance, but one elderly widow was too poor to indulge too many misgivings, and she rented me a few days' lodging in the nearly empty food-storage loft under the roof of her one-room mud hut. During those days I tried smilingly to ingratiate myself with the taciturn Otomí, and to coax them into conversation. Failing in that, I prowled the outskirts of the village in a widening spiral, seeking whatever supplies my forefathers might have secreted there, even though I suspected that any such random search would be futile. If the Aztéca had hidden stores and arms along their line of march, they must have made sure the deposits could not be dug up by the local residents or any later passersby. They must have marked the caches with some obscure sign recognizable only by themselves. And none of their Mexíca descendants, including me, had any notion of what that sign might have been.

But I cut a long, stout pole, and sharpened the end of it, and with it I prodded deep into every feature of the local terrain that might conceivably not have been there since the world was first created: suspiciously isolated hills of earth, oddly uncleared thickets of scrub growth, the fallen-in remains of ancient buildings. I do not know whether my behavior moved the villagers to amusement or to pity of the alien madman or to simple curiosity, but at last they invited me to sit down and explain myself to their two most venerable elders.

Those old men answered my questions in as few and simple words as possible. No, they said, they had never heard of any such place as Atlitalacan, but if the name meant the same as D'ntado Dene, then D'ntado Dene was doubtless the same place. Because yes, according to their fathers' fathers' fathers, a long time ago a rough, ragged, and verminous tribe of outlanders had settled at the spring—for some years of residence—before moving on again and disappearing to the southward. When I delicately inquired about possible diggings and deposits therein, the two aged men shook their heads. They said n'yehina, which means no, and they said a sentence that they had to repeat several times before I laboriously made sense of it:

"The Aztéca were here, but they brought nothing with them, and they left nothing when they went."

Within not many days, I had left the regions where the last vestiges of even mongrel Náhuatl or Poré were spoken, and was well into the territory inhabited solely by Otomí speaking only Otomite. I did not travel an unswervingly fixed course, for that would have required me to climb trackless hills and scale formidable cliffs and fight my way through many cactus thickets, which I was sure the migrant Aztéca had not done. Instead, as they surely had done, I followed the roads, where there were any, and the more numerous well-trodden footpaths. That made my journey a meandering one, but always I bore generally northward.

I was still on the high plateau between the mighty mountain ranges invisibly far to the east and west, but as I progressed the plateau perceptibly sloped downward before me. Each day I descended a little farther from the highlands of crisp, cool air, and those days of late springtime got warmer, sometimes uncomfortably warm, but the nights were gentle and balmy. That was a good thing, for there were no wayside inns in the Otomí country, and the villages or farmsteads where I could request lodging were often far between. So most nights I slept on the open ground, and even without my seeing crystal I could make out the fixed star Tlacpac hung high above the northern horizon toward which I would plod again at dawn.

The lack of inns and other eating places did not work much hardship on me. The paucity of people in that region made the wild creatures less timid than they were in more populous places; rabbits and ground squirrels would sit up boldly from the grass to watch me pass; an occasional swift-runner bird would companionably pace at my very side; and at night an armadillo or opossum might even come to investigate my camp-fire. Although I carried no weapon but my maquahuitl, scarcely designed for hunting small game, I usually had to do no more than make a swipe with it to secure for myself a meal of fresh meat or fowl. For variety or for side dishes, there was a plenty of growing things.

The name of that northern nation, Otomí, is a shortened rendition of a much longer and less pronounceable term meaning something like "the men whose arrows bring down birds on the wing," though I think it must have been a very long time since hunting was their chief occupation. There are numerous tribes of the Otomí, but they all live by pastoral pursuits: farming tidy fields of maize, xitomatin, and other vegetables; or gathering fruit from trees and cactus; or collecting the sweet-water sap of the maguey plants. Their fields and orchards were so productive that they had a great surplus of fresh foods to send to Tlalteltolco and other foreign markets, and we Mexíca called their country Atoctli, The Fertile Land. However, as an indication of how lowly we regarded those people themselves: we ranked our octli liquor according to three grades of quality, respectively called fine, ordinary, and Otomí.

The Otomí villages all have nearly unpronounceable names—like the largest of them all, N't Tahi, the one your explorers of the northern regions now refer to as Zelalla. And in none of those mumble-named communities did I find a hidden supply store or any other trace of the Aztéca's ever having passed. In only an infrequent village could the aged local storyteller strain his memory backward to recall a tradition that yes, untold sheaves of years ago, a vagrant train of footsore nomads had slouched through the neighborhood, or stopped to rest for a time. And every such elder told me, "They brought nothing with them, and they left nothing when they went." It was discouraging. But then, I was a direct descendant of those vagabonds and I likewise brought nothing. Just once during my journey through those Otomí lands, I may have left a little something—

The Otomí men are short, squat, dumpy, and, like most farm folk, sullen and surly of disposition. The Otomí women are also small, but slim of body, and far more vivacious than their glum men. I will even say the women are pretty—from the knees upward—which I realize is a curious kind of compliment. What I mean is that they have fetching faces, nicely molded shoulders and arms and breasts and waists and hips and buttocks and thighs, but, below the knees, their calves are disappointingly straight and skinny. They dwindle tapering down to their tiny feet, giving the women somewhat the look of tadpoles balancing on their tails.

Another peculiarity of the Otomí is that they enhance their appearance—or so they believe—by the art they call n'detade, which means coloring themselves with permanent colors. They dye their teeth black or red, or alternately black and red. They adorn their bodies with designs of a blue color, pricked into the skin with thorns so the designs remain forever. Some make only a small decoration on the forehead or on a cheek, but others continue doing the n'detade, as frequently as they can stand the pain of it, over the skin of their entire body. They appear always to be standing behind the web of some extraordinary spider that spins blue.

The Otomí men, as far as I am concerned, are neither improved nor impaired by their adornment. For a while, I did think it a shame that so many otherwise handsome women should obscure their beauty behind those webs and whorls and patterns they could never remove. However, as I became more accustomed to seeing the n'detade, I must confess that I began to regard it as a subtle beguilement. The very veiling made the females seem in a measure unapproachable, and therefore challenging, and therefore tantalizing—

At the farthest northern extent of the Otomí lands was a riverside village called M'boshte, and one of the villagers was a young woman named R'zoono H'don we, which means Flower of the Moon. And flowery she was: every visible part of her blossoming with blue-drawn petals and leaves and fronds. Behind that artificial garden, she was fair of face and figure, excepting of course those disappointing calves. At first sight of her, I felt an urge to part her clothes and see how much of her was flower-petaled, then to make my way through the petals to the woman underneath.

Flower of the Moon was attracted to me, too, and I suspect in much the same way: an urge to enjoy an oddity, since my height and breadth, oversized even among the Mexíca, made me rather a giant among the Otomí. She conveyed to me that she was at the time unattached to any other male; she had been recently widowed, when her husband died in the R'donte Sh'mboi, the River Slate, which trickled past the village. Since that water was only about a hand span deep and almost narrow enough for me to jump across, I suggested that her husband must have been a very small man to have drowned in it. She laughed at that, and made me understand that he had fallen and cracked his skull on the river's slate bed.

So the one night which I spent in M'boshte I spent with Flower of the Moon. I cannot speak of other Otomí females, but that one was decorated on every exposable surface of her skin, everywhere but on her lips, her eyelids, her fingertips, and the nipples of her breasts. I remember thinking that she must have suffered excruciatingly when the local artist pricked the flower designs right to the margins of her tender tipíli membranes. For, in the course of that night, I got to see every blossom she wore. The act of copulation is called in Otomite agui n'degue, and it began—or at least Flower of the Moon preferred that I begin—by examining and tracing and fondling and, well, tasting every last petal of every single flower of her whole body's garden. I felt rather like a deer browsing through a sweet and abundant meadow, and I decided that deer must be happy animals indeed.

When I prepared to depart in the morning, Flower of the Moon gave me to understand that she hoped I had made her pregnant, which her late husband had never done. I smiled, thinking she paid me a compliment. But then she conveyed her reason for hoping to bear my son or daughter. I was a big man, so the child should also grow to goodly size, so it would have an exceptional expanse of skin to be embellished with a prodigious number of n'detade drawings, so it would be a rarity that would make M'boshte the envy of every other Otomí community. I sighed, and went on my way.

As long as my course lay beside the waters of the R'donte Sh'mboi, the land about was green with grass and leaves, dotted with the red and yellow and blue of many blossoms. However, three or four days later, the River Slate bent westward, away from my northering course, and took all the cool and colorful verdure with it. Ahead of me were still some gray-green mizquitin trees and silver-green clumps of yuca and a heavy undergrowth of various dusty-green bushes. But I knew that the trees and shrubs would gradually thin out and move farther apart as I moved on, until they would give way to the open and sun-baked and almost barren desert.

For a moment I paused, tempted to turn with the river and stay in the temperate Otomí country, but I had no excuse for doing so. The only reason for my journey was to backtrack the Aztéca, and, as well as I knew, they had come from somewhere yonder—from that desert—or beyond, if there was anything beyond, So I filled my water bag from the river, and I inhaled a last deep breath of the river-cooled air, and I walked on northward. I turned my back on the living lands. I walked into the empty lands, into the burned lands, into the dead-bone lands.

The desert is a wilderness which the gods torment, when they are not ignoring it utterly.

The earth goddess Coatlicue and her family do nothing to add interest to the monotonous and almost uniformly level terrain of gray-yellow sand, gray-brown gravel, and gray-black boulders. Coatlicue does not deign to disturb that land with earthquakes. Chantico does not spurt volcanoes through it, nor Temazcaltoci spit any spouts of hot water and steam. The mountain god Tepeyolotl stays aloofly far away. I could, with the aid of my topaz, just make out the low profiles of mountains far to east and west, jagged mountains colored the gray-white of granite. But they remained always infinitely distant; they never came nearer to me nor I to them.

Each morning, the sun god Tonatíu sprang angrily from his bed, without his accustomed dawn ceremony of selecting his bright spears and arrows for the day. Each evening, he plummeted into bed without donning his lustrous feather mantle or spreading wide his colorful flower quilts. In between the abrupt lifting and dropping of the nights' blessedly cool darkness, Tonatíu was merely a brighter yellow-white spot in the yellow-white sky—sultry, sullen, sucking all the breath from that land—burning his way across the parched sky as slowly and laboriously as I crept across the parched sands below.

The rain god Tlaloc paid even less attention to the desert, though it was by then the season of rains. His casks of clouds often piled up, but only over the granite mountains far away to east and west. The clouds would belly and billow and tower high over the horizon, then darken with storm, and the tlalóque spirits would flail their blazing forked sticks, making a drumming that came to me as a faint mutter. But the sky above me and ahead of me remained forever that unrelieved yellow-white. Neither the clouds nor the tlalóque ventured into the oven heat of the desert. They let their rain spill only as distant gray-blue veils onto those distant gray-white mountains. And the goddess of running water, Chalchihuitlicue, was nowhere in evidence, never.

The wind god Ehecatl blew now and then, but his lips were as parched as the desert earth, his breath as hot and dry, and he seldom made a sound, since he had practically nothing to blow against. Sometimes, though, he blew so hard that he whistled. Then the sand stirred and lifted and drove across the land in clouds as abrasive as the obsidian dust that sculptors use to wear away solid rock.

The gods of living creatures have little to do in that hot, harsh, arid land; least of all Mixcoatl, the god of hunters. Of course I saw or heard the occasional coyote, because that beast seems able to forage a living anywhere. And there were some rabbits, probably put there only for the coyotes to live on. There were wrens, and owls not much bigger than the wrens, living in holes gouged in the cactuses, and always a scavenger vulture or two soaring in circles high above me. But every other desert inhabitant seemed to be of the vermin variety, living underground or under rocks—the venomous rattle-tailed snakes, lizards like whips, other lizards all warts and horns, scorpions almost as long as my hand.

The desert likewise contains little to have interested our gods of growing things. I grant that even there, in the autumn, the nopali cactus puts forth its sweet red tonaltin fruits, and the gigantic quinametl cactus offers sweet purplish pitaaya fruits at the ends of its uplifted arms, but most of the desert cactuses grow only spikes and spines and hooks and barbs. Of trees there is only an occasional gnarled mizquitl, and the yuca of spearlike leaves, and the quaumatlatl which is curiously colored a light, bright green in its every part: leaves, twigs, branches, and even its trunk. The smaller shrubs include the useful chiyactic, whose sap is so like an oil that it makes an easily lighted campfire, and the quauxeloloni, whose wood is harder than copper, almost impossible to cut, so heavy that it would sink in water, if there were any water about.

Only one kindly goddess dares to stroll through that forbidding desert, to reach among the fangs and talons of those touch-me-not plants, to sweeten their ill nature with her caress. That is Xochiquetzal, goddess of love and flowers, the goddess best loved by my long-gone sister Tzitzitlini. Each spring, for a little while, the goddess beautifies every meanest shrub and cactus. During the rest of the year, it might seem to an ordinary traveler that Xochiquetzal has abandoned the desert to unenlivened ugliness. But I still, as I had done in my short-sighted childhood, looked closely at things that would not catch the eye of people with normal vision. And I found flowers in the desert in every season, on the long, thready vines that crept along the surface of the ground. They were miniature flowers, almost invisible unless they were sought, but they were flowers, and I knew that Xochiquetzal was there.

Though a goddess may frequent the desert with ease and impunity, it is no comfortable environment for a human being. Everything that makes human life livable is either scarce or absent. A man trying to cross the desert, ignorant of its nature and unprepared for it, would soon come to his death—and not a quick or an easy one. But I, though I was making my first venture into that wasteland, I was not entirely ignorant or unprepared. During my schooldays, when we boys were taught to soldier, the Cuáchic Blood Glutton had insisted on including some instruction in how to survive in the desert.

For example, I never lacked for water, thanks to his teachings. The most convenient source is the comitl cactus, which is why it is called the comitl, or jar. I would select a sizable one and lay a ring of twigs around it, and set them afire, and wait until the heat drove the comitl's moisture toward its interior. I then had only to slice off the top of the cactus, mash its inner pulp and squeeze the water from that into my leather bag. Also, each night, I cut down one of the tall, straight-trunked cactuses and laid it with its ends propped on rocks so that it sagged in the middle. By the morning, all its moisture would have collected in that middle, where I had only to cut out a plug and let the water trickle into my bag.

I seldom had any meat to cook over my evening campfire, except an occasional lizard, sufficient for about two mouthfuls—and once a rabbit which had still been kicking when I drove off the vulture tearing at it. But meat is not indispensable to the sustenance of life. Throughout the year, the mizquitl tree is festooned with seed pods, new green ones as well as the withered brown ones left from the year before. The green pods can be cooked to tenderness in hot water and then mashed into an edible pulp. The dry seeds inside the old pods can be crushed between two rocks to the consistency of meal. That coarse powder can be carried like pinoli and, when no fresher food is available, mixed with water and boiled.

Well, I survived, and I traveled in that dreadful desert for a whole year. But I need describe it no more, since every one-long-run was indistinguishable from every other. I will only add—in case you reverend friars cannot yet envision its vastness and emptiness—that I had been trudging through it for at least a month before I encountered another human being.

From a distance, because it was dust-colored like the desert, I took it to be just a strangely shaped hummock of sand, but as I got closer I saw it was a seated human figure. Rather joyfully, since I had been so long alone, I gave a hail, but I heard no reply. As I continued to approach I called again, and still I got no answer, though by then I was close enough to see that the stranger's mouth was open wide enough to be screaming.

Then I stood over the figure, a naked woman sitting on the sand and wearing a light powdering of it. If she had once been screaming, she was no more, for she was dead, with eyes and mouth wide. She sat with her legs out before her and parted, with her hands pressed flat on the ground as if she had died while trying strenuously to push herself erect. I touched her dusty shoulder; the flesh was yielding and not yet chill; she had not been dead for long. She stank of being unwashed, as no doubt I did too, and her long hair was so full of sand fleas that it might have writhed had it not been so matted. Nevertheless, given a good bath, she would have been handsome of face and figure, and she was younger than I was, with no marks of disease or injury, so I was puzzled as to the cause of her death.

During the past month, I had got into the habit of talking to myself, for lack of anyone else, so then I said to myself, forlornly, "This desert is surely abandoned by the gods—or I am. I have the good fortune to meet what is perhaps the only other person in all this wasteland, and by good fortune it is a woman, who would have been ideal for a traveling companion, but by ill fortune she is a corpse. Had I come a day earlier, she might have been pleased to share my journey and my blanket and my attentions. Since she is dead, the only attention I can pay is to bury her before the vultures come flocking."

I shed my pack and my water bag and began to scrape with my maquahuitl in the sand nearby. But I seemed to feel her eyes reproachfully on me, so I decided she might as well lie down restfully while I dug the grave. I dropped my blade and took the woman by her shoulders to ease her onto her back—and I got a surprise. She resisted my hands' pressure, she insisted on remaining in a sitting position, as if she had been a stuffed doll sewn to stay bent in the middle. I could not understand the body's reluctance; its muscles had not yet been stiffened, as I proved by lifting one of her arms and finding it quite limber. I tried again to move her, and her head lolled onto her shoulder, but her torso would not be budged. A mad thought came into my mind. Did desert people, when they died, perhaps grow roots that fixed them in place? Did they perhaps gradually turn into those giant but often very human-shaped quinametin cactuses?

I stepped back to consider the incomprehensibly stubborn cadaver—and was surprised again when I felt a sharp stab between my shoulderblades. I whirled around to find myself in a half circle of arrows, all pointed at me. Each was poised on the taut string of a bow, and every bow was held by an angrily frowning man, and every man was clad in nothing but a greasy loincloth of ragged leather, a crust of body dirt, and some feathers in his lank hair. There were nine of the men. Admittedly, I had been preoccupied with my peculiar find, and they had taken pains to come noiselessly, but I should have smelled them long before they were upon me, for their stink was that of the dead woman multiplied by nine.

"The Chichimeca!" I said to myself, or perhaps I said it aloud. I did say to them, "I just now happened upon this unfortunate woman. I was trying to be of help."

Since I blurted that out in a hurry, hoping it would hold back their arrows, I spoke in my native tongue of Náhuatl. But I accompanied the words with gestures intended to be understandable even by savages, and even in that tense moment I was thinking that, if I lived long enough to say anything else, I should have the task of learning yet another foreign language. But, to my surprise, one of the men—the one who had jabbed me with his arrow point, a man about my own age and nearly of my height—said in easily understandable Náhuatl:

"The woman is my wife."

I cleared my throat and said condolingly, as one does when imparting bad news, "I regret to say she was your wife. She appears to have died a short while ago." The Chichimecatl's arrow—all nine arrows—stayed aimed at my middle. I hastened to add, "I did not cause her death. I found her thus. And I had no thought of molesting her, even if I had found her alive."

The man laughed harshly, without humor.

"In fact," I went on, "I was about to do her the favor of burying her, before the scavengers should get at her." I indicated the place where my maquahuitl lay.

The man looked at the furrow I had begun, then up at a vulture already hovering overhead, then at me again, and his stern face softened somewhat. He said, "That was kindly of you, stranger," and he lowered his arrow and relaxed the bowstring.

The other eight Chicimeca did likewise, and tucked their arrows into their tangled hair. One of the men went to pick up my maquahuitl and examine it appraisingly; another began to poke through the contents of my pack. Maybe I was about to be robbed of what little I carried, but at least it seemed that I would not immediately be killed as a trespasser. To maintain the mood of amiability, I said to the just-widowed husband:

"I sympathize in your bereavement. Your wife was young and comely. Of what did she die?"

"Of being a bad wife," he said glumly. Then he said, "She was bitten by a rattle-tailed snake."

I could make no connection between his two statements. I could only say, "Strange. She does not at all appear to have been ill."

"No, she recovered from the venom," he growled, "but not before she had made her confession to Filth Eater, and with me at her side. The only bad deed she confessed to Tlazolteotl was her having lain with a man of another tribe. Then she had the misfortune not to die of the snakebite."

He shook his head somberly. So did I. He continued:

"We waited for her to recover her health, for it would be unseemly to execute an ailing woman. When she was well and strong again, we brought her here. This morning. To die."

I gazed at the remains, wondering what mode of execution could have left the victim without any mark but staring eyes and silently screaming mouth.

"Now we come to remove her," the widower concluded. "A good place of execution is not easy to find in the desert, so we do not desecrate this one by leaving our carrion to attract the vultures and coyotes. It was thoughtful of you, stranger, to have appreciated that fact." He laid a hand companionably on my shoulder. "But we will attend to the disposal, and then perhaps you will share our night's meal at our camp."

"Gladly," I said, and my empty stomach rumbled. But what happened next nearly spoiled my appetite.

The man went to where his wife sat, and he moved her in a way that had not occurred to me. I had tried laying her down. He gripped her under her armpits and lifted. Even so, she still moved reluctantly, and he visibly had to exert some strength. There was a horrid sucking and tearing sound, rather as if the dead woman's bottom had put down roots in the earth. Then she came up off the stake on which she had been impaled.

I knew then why the man had said that a good place of execution was not easy to find. It had to provide a tree of just the right size, one growing straight from the ground without obstructive roots. That stake had been a mizquitl sapling as big around as my forearm, severed at knee height, then sharped to a point at the top, but the coarse bark left on the rest of it. I wondered whether the betrayed husband had sat his wife delicately on the stake point and only slowly let her down its cruelly barked length, or whether he had given her a slightly more merciful quick downward shove. I wondered, but I did not inquire.

When the nine men led me to their camp, they made me welcome there, and they treated me courteously as long as I stayed with them. They had thoroughly inspected the belongings I carried, but they stole nothing, not even my small store of copper trade currency. However I think I might have been treated otherwise if I had been carrying anything of value or leading a train of laden porters. Those men were, after all, the Chichimeca.

The name was always spoken among us Mexíca with contempt or derision or loathing, as you Spaniards speak of "barbarians" and "savages." We derived the name from chichine, one of our words meaning dog. When we said Chichimeca, we generally referred to those dog people among whom I had then arrived; the homeless, unwashed, forever wandering tribes of the desert not far north of the Otomí lands. (Which is why, some ten years earlier, I had been so indignant when the Fast of Feet Rarámuri mistook me for a Chichimecatl.) Those of the near north were sufficiently despied by us Mexíca, but it was widely believed that there were others of even lower degree. Farther north of the dog people supposedly lived still fiercer desert tribes, which we designated the Teochichimeca—as one might say, "the even more awful dog people." And in the desert's farthest northernmost regions supposedly lived even more fearsome tribes, which we called the Zacachichimeca, much as to say, "the most depraved of all the dog people."

But I must report, after having traveled through almost the whole extent of those desert lands, that I found none of those tribes inferior or superior to another. They were all ignorant, insensitive, and often inhumanly cruel, but it was that cruel desert which had made them so. They all lived in a squalor that would disgust a civilized man or a Christian, and they lived on foods that would nauseate a city man's stomach. They had no houses or trades or arts, because they had to keep ceaselessly roaming to forage for the scant sustenance they could wring from the desert. Though the Chichimeca tribes among which I sojourned all spoke a coherent Náhuatl, or some dialect of it, they had no word knowing or other education, and some of their habits and customs were veritably repulsive. But, while they would have horrified any civilized community that they might ever try to visit, I have to say that the Chichimeca had admirably adapted themselves to life in the pitiless desert, and I know few civilized men who could have done the same.

That first camp I visited, the only home its people knew, was just one more piece of the desert, on which they had elected to squat because they knew there was a seepage of underground water accessible by digging some way down in that particular patch of sand. The camp's only homelike aspect was the cooking fires of the tribe's sixteen or eighteen families. Except for the rudimentary cooking pots and utensils, there was no furniture. Near each fire was stacked each family's armory of hunting weapons and tools: a bow and some arrows, a javelin and its atlatl, a skinning knife, a meat-cutting ax, and the like. Only a few of those things were tipped or bladed with obsidian, that rock being a rare commodity in those regions. The majority of weapons were made of the copper-hard quauxeloloni wood, cunningly shaped and sharpened by fire.

Of course there were no solid-built houses, and only two temporary ones: crude little huts constructed by leaning dead-wood sticks haphazardly together. In each hut, I was told, lay a pregnant woman awaiting childbirth, for which reason that camp was more permanent than most, meaning it might exist for several days instead of being merely the usual overnight stop for sleep. The rest of the tribe scorned any shelter. Men, women, and the smallest infant children slept on the ground, as I had lately been doing, but instead of a ground-softening blanket, like mine of felted rabbit hair, they used only old and dirty and tattered deerskins. Equally bedraggled animal skins also composed what sketchy clothing they wore: loinclothes for the men; sleeveless, shapeless, knee-length blouses for the women; nothing at all for the children, even those almost full grown.

But the vilest thing about the camp was its odor, which even the surrounding vastness of open air failed to dispel, and the odor was that of the dog people, every one of them far dirtier than any dog. It might be doubted that a person could get soiled in the desert, for sand is as clean as snow. But those people were mainly befouled with their own dirt, their own secretions, their own negligence. They let their sweat cake on their bodies, so it encrusted the other oils and scurfs that the body normally sheds in unnoticeable flakes. Every wrinkle and fold of their bodies was a tracery of dark grime: knuckles, wrists, throats, inner elbows, backs of knees. Their hair flapped in mats, not strands, and lice and fleas crawled among that greasy matting. Their skin garments, as well as their own skins, were permeated with the additional odors of wood smoke, dried blood, and rancid animal fats. The total stench was staggering, and, although I eventually ceased to notice it, I long thought the Chichimeca the filthiest people I had ever encountered, and the people most uncaring about their filthiness.

They all had extremely simple names—such as Zoquitl and Nacatl and Chachapa, which mean Mud and Meat and Cloudburst—names rather pitiably unsuited to their blighted and starved habitat; but then, maybe they chose such names in a spirit of wishfulness. Meat was the name of the newly made widower who had invited me to visit the camp. He and I sat down at the cooking fire built by a number of other unattached males, apart from the fires of the family groups. Meat and his fellows already knew that I was a Mexícatl, but I was uncomfortably uncertain how to refer to their nationality. So, while one of the men used a yuca-leaf ladle to serve each of us some unidentifiable stew on a curved segment of maguey leaf, I said:

"As you probably know, Meat, we Mexíca are accustomed to speak of all desert inhabitants as the Chichimeca. But no doubt you have another name for yourselves."

He indicated the scattering of campfires and said, "We here are the Tecuexe tribe. There are many others in the desert—Fame, Janambre, Hualahuise, many others—but yes, we are all Chichimeca, since we are all red-skinned people." I privately thought that he and his tribesmen were more the gray color of grime. Meat swallowed a mouthful of stew and added, "You too are a Chichimecatl. No different from us."

I had resented the Rarámuri's calling me that. It was even more outrageous that a desert savage himself should claim kinship with a civilized Mexícatl. But he said it so casually that I realized he meant no presumption. It was true that, underneath their dirt, Meat and the other Tecuexe were of a coppery complexion similar to my own and that of every other person I knew. Tribes and individuals of our race might vary, from palest red-gold to the ruddy brown of cacao, but, generally speaking, red-skinned was the most inclusive description. And so I understood: those scruffy, half-naked, ignorant nomads obviously believed that the name Chichimeca derived not from the chichine, dog, but from the word chichiltic, meaning red. To anyone who chose to believe that, Chichimeca was no contemptuous name; it described every human being in every desert, every jungle, every civilized city of The One World.

I went on feeding my grateful belly—the stew was gritty with sand, but tasty nonetheless—and I meditated on the ties between diverse peoples. Clearly the Chichimeca must once have had some improving contact with civilization. Meat had mentioned his wife's imprudent sickbed confession to Tlazolteotl, so I already knew of the Chicimeca's acquaintance with that goddess. I later learned that they worshiped most of our other gods as well. But, in their isolation and ignorance, they had invented a new one just for themselves. They held the laughable belief that the stars are butterflies made of obsidian, and that the stars' twinkling light is only a reflection of moonlight from those fluttering wings of shiny stone. So they had conceived a goddess—Itzpapalotl, Obsidian Butterfly—whom they regarded as the highest of all gods. Well, in the desert night, the stars are spectacularly bright, and they do seem to hover, like butterflies, just beyond one's reach.

But even if the Chichimeca have some things in common with more civilized peoples, and even if they interpret the very name Chichimeca to imply that all red-skinned peoples are somehow distantly related, they have no compunction about living at the expense of those relatives, distant or near. On that first night I dined with the Tecuexe tribe, the mealtime stew contained bits of tender white meat flaking off delicate bones which I could not recognize as being the bones of lizards or rabbits or any other creatures I had seen in the desert. So I inquired:

"Meat, what is this meat we are eating?"

He grunted, "Baby."

"Baby what?"

He said again, "Baby," and shrugged. "Food for the hard times." He saw that I still did not comprehend, so he explained, "We sometimes leave the desert to pillage an Otomí village and we take, among other things, their infant children. Or we might fight with another Chichimeca tribe in the open desert. When the defeated tribe withdraws, it must leave those of its children too small to run. Since such tiny captives would be of no other use to their captors, they are gutted and cured in the sun, or smoked over a mizquitl fire, so they last a long time without spoiling. They weigh little, so each of our women can easily carry three or four of them dangling from a cord around her waist. They are carried to be cooked and eaten when—as happened today—Obsidian Butterfly neglects to send game for our arrows."

I can see from your faces, reverend scribes, that you deem that practice reprehensible. But I must confess that I learned to eat almost anything edible, with as much satisfaction and as little repugnance as any Chichimecatl, for during that desert journey I knew no laws more peremptory than those of hunger and thirst. Nevertheless, I did not totally discard the manners and discriminations of civilization. There were other dietary eccentricities of the Chichimeca in which not even the direst deprivations could make me participate.

I accompanied Meat and his fellows as long as their wanderings tended more or less northward, in the way I was going. Then, when the Tecuexe decided to veer off to the east, Meat kindly escorted me to the camp of another tribe, the Tzacateca, and introduced me to a friend there with whom he had often done battle, a man named Greenery. So I went along with the Tzacateca as long as they drifted northward, and, when our paths diverged, Greenery in turn introduced me to another friend, by the name of Banquet, of the Hua tribe. Thus I was handed on from one band of Chichimeca to another—to the Toboso, the Iritila, the Mapimi—and thus it was that I lived in the desert through all the seasons of an entire year, and thus it was that I observed some really disgusting customs of the Chichimeca.

In the late summer and early autumn of the year, the various desert cactuses put out their fruit. I have mentioned the towering quinametl cactus, which resembles an immense green man with many uplifted arms. It bears the fruit called the pitaaya, which is admittedly tasty and nourishing, but I think it is most prized because it is so difficult of acquisition. Since no man can climb a spine-clothed quinametl, the fruit can be coaxed loose only with the aid of long poles or thrown rocks. Anyway, the pitaaya is a favorite delicacy of the desert dwellers—such a luxury that they eat each fruit twice.

A Chichimecatl man or woman will gobble one of the purplish globes entire, pulp and juice and black seeds together, and then wait for what those people call the ynic ome pixquitl, or "second harvest." That means only that the eaters digest the fruit and excrete the residue, among which are the undigested pitaaya seeds. As soon as a person has voided his bowels, he examines his excrement, he fingers through it and picks out those nutlike seeds and then eats them again, voluptuously crunching and chewing them to extract their full flavor and measure of nourishment. If a man or woman finds a trace of other excrement anywhere in the desert in that season—whether it be the droppings of an animal or vulture or another human—he or she will leap to examine it and paw through it, in hope of finding overlooked pitaaya seeds to appropriate and eat.

There is another practice of those people which I found even more repellent, but to describe it I must explain something. When I had been traveling in the desert for almost a year, and the springtime came—I was at that time in the company of the Iritila tribe—I saw that Tlaloc does condescend to spill some of his rain upon the desert. For about a month of twenty days, he rains. On some of those days he storms so liberally that the desert's long-dry gullies become raging, frothing torrents. But Tlaloc's dispensation continues for no longer than that one month, and the water soon is sucked into the sands. So it is only during those twenty or so days of rain that the desert becomes briefly colorful, with flowers on the cactuses and the otherwise sere scrub bushes. At that time, too, in places where the ground stays soggy long enough, the desert sprouts a growth I had not seen before: a mushroom called the chichinanacatl. It consists of a skinny stem topped by a blood-red cap which is disfigured by white warts.

The Iritila women eagerly gathered those mushrooms, but they never served any of them in the meals they prepared, and I thought that odd. During that same short, moist springtime, the chief of the Iritila ceased to urinate on the ground like other men. During that time, one of his wives carried always and everywhere a special clay bowl. Whenever the chief felt the urge to relieve himself, she held the bowl and he urinated into it. And there was one other odd circumstance during that season: each day, various of the Iritila males would be too drunk to go out hunting or foraging, and I could not imagine how they could have found or concocted a drunk-making drink. It was a while before I discerned the connection among those various odd things and events.

There was really no great mystery. The mushrooms were reserved to be eaten only by the chief of the tribe. The eating of them gives the eater a sort of combined drunkenness and delicious hallucination, rather like the effect of chewing peyotl. And the inebriating effect of the chichinanacatl is only a little diminished by its being eaten and digested; whatever magical substance it contains goes right through the human body and out by way of the bladder. While the chief was in a constant state of happy stupefaction, he was also frequently urinating into his bowl, and his urine was almost as potent an intoxicant as the original mushrooms.

The first full bowl was passed among his wise men and sorcerers. Each of them swigged greedily from it, and soon was staggering about or lying sodden in bliss. The next full bowl went to the chief's closest friends, the next to the tribe's more stalwart warriors, and so on. Before many days had passed, the bowl was circulating among the tribe's lesser men and oldsters, and finally even among the females. Eventually all the Iritila enjoyed at least one brief respite from the lackluster existence they endured during the rest of the year. The bowl was even hospitably proffered to the stranger among them, but I respectfully declined the treat, and no one seemed insulted or sorry that I did not take a portion of the precious urine.

Despite the Chichimeca's numerous and flagrant depravities, I ought in fairness to say that those desert people are not entirely degraded and detestable. For one thing, I gradually realized that they are not unclean of body and verminous and smelly because they want to be. During seventeen months of the year, every drop of water that can be wrung from the desert—if it is not immediately and avidly lapped up by a thirsty tongue—must be hoarded against the day when there is not even a meagerly moist cactus within reach, and there are many such days. During seventeen months of the year, water is for the inside of the body, not the outside. The short and fleeting season of early spring is the only time when the desert provides water to spare for the luxury of bathing. Like me, every member of the Iritila tribe took advantage of that opportunity to bathe as thoroughly and as often as possible. And, disencumbered of filth, a Chichimecatl looks as human as any civilized person.

I remember one lovely sight I saw. It was late one afternoon, and I had wandered idly some distance from the place where the Iritila had just made camp for the night, and I came upon a young woman taking what was obviously her first bath of the year. She stood in the middle of a small and shallow rain pool caught in a rock basin, and she was alone, no doubt wanting to enjoy the pure water before others also found it and came jostling to share and dirty it. I did not make my presence known, but watched through my seeing crystal, while she lathered herself with the soaplike root of an amoli plant and then rinsed repeatedly—but slowly, leisurely, savoring the unaccustomed pleasure of the occasion.

Tlaloc was preparing a storm in the east, behind her, erecting a wall of clouds as dark as a wall of slate. At first, the girl was almost indistinguishable against it, she was so discolored by her year's accumulation of dirt. But as she lathered and rinsed away layer after layer, her normal skin color came clearer and clearer. Tonatíu was setting in the west, and his beams accentuated the copper-gold of her. In that vast landscape, stretching flat and empty all the way to the dark cloud wall at the horizon, the young woman was the only bright thing. The curves of her naked body were outlined by their gleam of wetness, her clean hair glistened, the water she splashed upon herself broke into drops that glittered like jewels. Against the menacing storm sky behind her, she shone in the last sunlight as prettily as a small piece of glowing amber laid on a great dull slab of slate.

It had been a long time since I had lain with a woman, and that one, clean and comely, was a powerful temptation. But I remembered another woman—impaled on a stake—and I did not go near the pool until the girl finally, reluctantly left it.

During all my wanderings with the various Chichimeca tribes, I took care not to trifle with their women or to disobey any of their few laws or to offend them in any other manner. So I was treated by every tribe as a fellow wanderer and an equal. I was never robbed or mistreated, I was given my share of whatever pitiful fare and comfort they themselves could wrest from the desert—except for the occasional treats I declined, like the bliss-giving urine. The only favor I asked of any of them was information: what they might know of the long-ago Aztéca and their long-ago journey and the rumor that they had buried stores of supplies along their route.

I was told by Meat of the Tecuexe, and by Greenery of the Tzacateca, and by Banquet of the Hua, "Yes, it is known that such a tribe once came through some of these lands. We know nothing else of them except that, like us, like all Chichimeca, they carried little with them and they left nothing of it behind."

It was the same discouraging reply I had kept hearing from the very beginning of my quest, and I continued to hear that same discouraging reply when I put my query to the Toboso, to the Iritila, and to every other tribe with which I traveled for even the briefest time or the shortest distance. Not until my second summer in that accursed desert, by which time I was unutterably sick of it and of my Aztéca ancestors as well, did my question elicit a slightly different response.

I had attached myself to the tribe called Mapimi, and its habitat was the hottest, driest, most dismal desert region of all those I had yet crossed. It was so incalculably far north of the living lands that I would have sworn there could be no more desert beyond. But indeed there was, said the Mapimi, illimitable expanses of it, and even more terrible terrain than any I had seen. That information was naturally distressing to my ears, and so were the opening words of the man to whom I wearily put my stale old question about the Aztéca.

"Yes, Mixtli," he said. "There was once such a tribe, and they made such a journey as you describe. But they brought nothing with them..."

"And," I finished for him, my voice bitter, "they left nothing when they were gone."

"Except us," he said.

It took a moment for those words to penetrate my dejectedness, but then I gaped at him, struck dumb.

He smiled a toothless smile. He was Patzcatl, chief of the Mapimi, a very old man, shrunken and shriveled dry by the sun, and he was even more incongruously named than most other Chichimeca, since Patzcatl means Juice. He said:

"You spoke of the Aztéca's journey, from some unknown homeland called Aztlan. And you spoke of their ultimate destination, the great city they founded far to the south of here. We Mapimi and other Chichimeca, during all the sheaves of years we have inhabited these deserts, we have heard rumors of that city and its grandeur, but none of us has ever approached anywhere near enough to glimpse it. So think, Mixtli. Does it not strike you as remarkable that we barbarians, so distant from your Tenochtítlan and so ignorant of it, should nevertheless speak the same Náhuatl you speak there?"

I considered and said, "Yes, Chief Juice. I was surprised and pleased to find that I could converse with so many different tribes, but I did not pause to wonder why that should be possible. Have you a theory to account for it?"

"More than a theory," he said, with some pride. "I am an old man, and I come from a long line of fathers, all of whom lived to a great age. But I and they were not always old, and in our youth we were inquisitive. Each asked questions and remembered the answers. So each learned and repeated to his sons what knowledge had been preserved of our people's origins."

"I should be grateful for a sharing of your knowledge, venerable chief."

"Know then," said old Juice. "The legends tell that seven different tribes—among them your Aztéca—departed long ago from that Aztlan, The Place of Snowy Egrets, in search of a more pleasant place to live. The tribes were all related, they spoke the same language and recognized the same gods and observed the same customs, and for a long while that mixed company traveled amicably. But, as you might expect, among so many persons on such a long journey, there arose frictions and dissensions. Along the way, various of them dropped out of the march—families, whole calpuli clans, even entire tribes. Some quarreled and left, some stopped from sheer fatigue, some took a liking to a place in which they found themselves and decided to go no farmer. It is impossible now to say which of them went where. Over the sheaves of years since then, those truant tribes themselves have often fragmented and moved apart. It is known that your Aztéca continued all the way to wherever your Tenochtítlan now stands, and perhaps others also traveled that far. But we were not among them, we who are now the Chichimeca. That is why I say this. When your Aztéca crossed the desert lands, they left no stores for future use, they left no trace, they left nothing behind them but us."

His account sounded all too believable, and it was as disconcerting as the assertion of my earlier companion Meat: that the term Chichimeca embraced all peoples of our skin color. The implication was that, instead of finding anything of possible value, like the allegedly hidden hoards of stores, I had found only a horrid rabble eager to claim kinship as my cousins. Quickly putting that ghastly possibility out of my mind, I said with a sigh:

"I still would like to discover the whereabouts of Aztlan."

Chief Juice nodded, but said, "It is far from here. As I told you, the seven tribes came a long way from their homeland before they began to separate."

I looked northward, into what I had been told was an even more awful and limitless desert, and I groaned. "Ayya, then I must keep on through this blighted and accursed wasteland—"

The old man glanced in that direction. He looked mildly puzzled and he asked, "Why?"

Probably I also looked puzzled, at such a foolish question from a man I had thought fairly intelligent. I said, "The Aztéca came from the north. Where else should I be going?"

"North is not a place," he explained, as if I were the dullard. "It is a direction, and an imprecise direction at that. You have already come too far north."

I cried, "Aztlan is behind me?"

He chuckled at my dismay. "Behind, beside, and beyond."

I said impatiently, "And you speak of imprecise directions!"

Still laughing, he went on, "By keeping to the desert all the way, you moved always in a direction west and north, but not enough to the west. Had you not been misled by the notion of north, you might have found Aztlan long ago, without ever braving the desert, without ever leaving the living lands."

I made some sort of strangled noise. The chief continued:

"According to my fathers' fathers, our Aztlan was somewhere southwest of this desert, on the seashore, on the coast of the great sea, and surely there was never more than one Aztlan. But from there, our ancestors—and yours—did much circuitous wandering in those sheaves of years. Quite possibly the Aztéca's last march, as remembered in your Mexíca leg-ends, did bring them directly from the north into what is now Tenochtítlan. Nevertheless, Aztlan should lie almost directly northwest of there."

"So I must go back again... southwest from here..." I muttered, regretting all the dreary months and tedious one-long-runs and dirt and misery I had needlessly endured.

Old Juice shrugged. "I do not say you must. But if you will go on, I advise against your going farther north. Aztlan is not there. Northward is only more desert, more terrible desert, merciless desert in which even we hardy Mapimi cannot live. Only the Yaki can make even brief forays into that desert, and they only because they are more cruel than the desert itself."

I said, with sadness at the recollection, "I know what the Yaki are like. I will turn back, Chief Juice, as you advise."

"Go yonder." He gestured to the southward of where Tonatíu was dropping unowned into an unquilted bed behind the indistinct gray-white mountains which had kept pace with me—but kept their distance—all the way I had come through the desert. "If you would find Aztlan, you must go to those mountains, over those mountains, through those mountains. Beyond those mountains you must go."

* * *

And that is what I did: I went southwest, to and over and through and beyond the mountains. I had been seeing that remote, pale range for more than a year, and I fully expected to have to scale walls of sheer granite. But as I neared them, I saw that it had been only their distance that had made them appear so. The foothills rising from the desert were sparsely covered with typical dusty desert scrub, but the growth got denser and greener as I progressed. The genuine high mountains, when I reached them, I found to be as verdantly forested and hospitable as those of the Rarámuri country. Indeed, as I made my way through those mountains, I found cave villages where the inhabitants resembled the Rarámuri—even in the matter of bodily hair—and spoke very similar languages, and told me that they were in fact relatives of the Rarámuri, whose country, they said, was considerably farther north in that same mountain range.

So, when I came down from those heights at last, on the other side of the ranges, I came down to a beach somewhere south of the beach where I had landed after my involuntary sea voyage, more than ten years before. That coast is called the Sinalobola, I learned from the fisher tribes whose villages I found dotted along it. Those people, the Kaita, were not hostile to my traveling along their beaches, but neither were they inviting, they were simply indifferent; and their women smelled of fish. So I did not linger long in any of their villages as I went south along the Sinalobola, trusting in old Chief Juice's assertion that Aztlan was somewhere on that "coast of the great sea."

For most of my way, I kept to the level sands of the shore, with the ocean on my right hand. Sometimes I had to turn far inland to skirt a sizable lagoon or a coastal swamp or an impenetrable tangle of the stringy mangrove trees, and sometimes I had to wait on the bank of a river full of alligators until a Kaita boatman came by who would grudgingly ferry me to the other side. But my progress was more often rapid, unhindered, and uneventful. A cool breeze from off the ocean tempered the heat of the daytime sun, and after sundown the beach sands retained that same heat, so they were most comfortable to sleep on.

Long after I had left the Kaita lands and found no more villages where I could buy a meal of fish, I was able to dine well on those same odd drumming crabs that had frightened me when I first encountered them, years before. Also, the ocean's tidal movement led me to discover another seafood which I commend as a superbly tasty dish. I noticed that, whenever the waters receded, the flats of mud or sand were not entirely quiescent. Here and there, little spouts and plumes of water squirted upward from the exposed sea bed. Impelled by curiosity, I sloshed out across the flats, waited for one of the little wisps to squirt nearby, and dug down with my hands to find what had caused it. I came up with an ovoid, smooth blue shell, a clam as big as my palm. I suppose the spurt of water was its way of coughing sand out of its throat, or whatever a clam uses for a throat. Anyway, I splashed about the flats and collected an armload of the shellfish and took them ashore, intending to eat them raw.

But then I had a notion. I dug a shallow pit in the dry beach sand and laid the clams in it, first wrapping each shell in damp seaweed to prevent any grit from getting inside, then I piled a layer of sand over them. On top of that I laid a fire of hot-burning dead palm fronds, and let it blaze for a time, then scraped its ashes aside and disinterred my clams. Their shells had acted as miniature steam-bath houses, cooking them in their own salty juices. I pried off their upper shells and ate them—hot, tender, delicious—and I slurped the liquid from their nether shells, and I tell you: I have seldom enjoyed a better meal served up by even a palace kitchen.

As I continued on down the interminable coast, however, the tides no longer uncovered smooth and accessible flats onto which I could stroll to gather clams. The tides simply raised or lowered the level of the water standing in the boundless marshes which I found in my path. Those were thickets of almost junglelike undergrowth tangled among moss-hung mangroves which stood fastidiously high upon their multiple roots. At low tide, the swamp ground was a morass of slimy mud and stagnant puddles. At high tide, it was covered by great sheets of sullen salt water. At all times, the marshes were hot, damp, sticky, stinking, and infested with voracious mosquitoes. I tried to go eastward and find a way around them, but the swamps appeared to extend inland as far as the mountain ranges. So I made my way through them as best I could, wherever possible leaping from one to the next of the drier hummocks of land, the rest of the time wading in wretched discomfort through the fetid water and mud.

I do not remember how many days I struggled slowly through that ugliest, nastiest, and most disagreeable piece of country I had ever encountered. I lived mainly on palm sprouts and mexixin cress and other such greens that I recognized as edible. I slept each night by choosing a tree with a crotch high out of the reach of any passing alligator and the crawling night mists. I would pad that with as much gray paxtli moss as I could gather, and then wedge myself in it, I was not much surprised that I met no other human being, for none but the most torpid and spiritless of humans would have lived in that noxious wilderness. I had no idea what nation it belonged to, or if any had ever bothered to lay claim to it. I knew I was by then far south of the Sinalobola of the Kaita, and I guessed that I must be nearing the land of Nauyar Ixu, but I could not be sure until I heard somebody speak some word of some language.

And then, one afternoon, in the depths of that miserable swamp, I did come upon another human being. A loinclothed young man stood beside a scummy pool of water, peering down into it, holding poised over it a crude spear of three bone points. I was so surprised to see anybody, and so glad, that I did an inexcusable thing. I hailed him in a loud voice—at the very moment he struck his spear down into the water. He snapped his head up, glared at me, and replied in a snarl:

"You made me miss!"

I stood amazed—not by his rude words, for he had reason to resent my having spoiled his aim—but by his not having spoken, as I would have expected, in some dialect of Poré.

"I am sorry," I called, less loudly. He merely dropped his gaze to the water again, wrenching his spear loose from the muck at the bottom, while I approached him quietly and unobtrusively. As I reached his side, he jabbed down with the spear once more, and that time brought it up with a frog wriggling impaled on one of its tines.

"You speak Náhuatl," I said. He grunted and dropped the frog onto a pile of others in a lopsided basket of woven vines. Wondering if I had found a descendant of some stay-at-home ancestor of old Chief Juice, I asked, "Are you a Chichimecatl?" I would of course have been surprised if he had said he was, but what he did say was even more astounding:

"I am an Aztecatl." He leaned over the scummy pool again and slanted his spear and added, "And I am busy."

"And you have a most discourteous way of greeting a stranger," I said. His surliness dispelled whatever awe and stupefaction I might otherwise have been feeling at the discovery of an apparently actual, living, breathing remnant of the Aztéca.

"Courtesy would be wasted on any stranger so misguided as to come here," he growled, not even looking at me. The dirty water splashed as he skewered another frog. "Would any but a fool be visiting this stinking sink of the world?"

I remarked, "Any fool living in it has little cause to insult one who merely visits."

"You are right," he said indifferently, dropping the frog in his basket. "Why do you stand here being insulted by another fool? Go away."

I said tightly, "I have traveled for two years and thousands of one-long-runs, in search of a place called Aztlan. Perhaps you can tell me—"

"You have found it," he interrupted, in an uncaring voice.

"Here?" I exclaimed, in utter astonishment.

"Just yonder," he grunted, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, still not troubling to lift his eyes from his putrid frog pond. "Follow the path to the lagoon, then shout for a boat to take you across."

I turned away from him and looked, and there was a path leading off through the rank undergrowth, and I started along it, hardly daring to believe—

But then I remembered that I had not thanked the young man. I turned again and walked back to where he stood aiming his spear at the pond. "Thank you," I said, and I kicked his legs out from under him, so he fell with a mighty splash into the foul water. When his head broke the surface, festooned with slimy weeds, I dumped the basket of dead frogs onto him. Leaving him spluttering and cursing and clawing for a hold on the slippery bank, I turned yet again and walked toward The Place of the Snowy Egrets, the long-lost, the legendary Aztlan.

I do not really know what I expected or hoped to find. Perhaps an early, less elaborate version of Tenochtítlan? A city of pyramids and temples and towers, only not so modern of design? I do not really know. But what I did find was pitiful.

I followed the dry path winding through the marsh, and the trees around me grew farther and farther apart, the mud on either side of me became more wet and watery. At last the downward-dangling mangrove roots gave place to reeds growing upward through a sheet of water. There the path ended and I was standing on the shore of a lake stained blood-red by the setting sun. It was a great expanse of brackish water, but not a very deep one, to judge from the reeds and canes piercing its surface and the white egrets standing everywhere. Directly in front of me was an island, perhaps two arrow shots distant across the water, and I raised my crystal for a clear look at the place to which those egrets had given the name.

Aztlan was an island in a lake, as is Mexíco-Tenochtítlan, but there, it seemed, the resemblance ended. It was a low hump of dry land made not much higher by the city erected upon it, for there was not a building visible that was of more than one floor. There was not a single upthrusting pyramid, not even a temple tall enough to be seen. The island's sunset redness was overlaid with the blue smoke of evening hearth fires. From the lake around, numerous dugout canoes moved homeward toward the island, and I shouted to the nearest of them.

The man aboard was propelling it with a pole, the lake being too shallow to require the use of a paddle. He slid the canoe through the reeds to where I stood, then peered suspiciously at me and grunted a profanity and said, "You are not the—you are a stranger."

And you are another ill-bred Aztecatl, I thought, but did not say aloud. I stepped into the boat before he could move it away, and said, "If you came for the frog sticker, he claims to be busy, and I believe he is. You will please convey me to the island."

Except for a repetition of the profanity, he made no protest and evinced no curiosity and said not another word as he poled me across the water. He let me step ashore on the edge of the island, then went away—through one of what I then discovered were several canals cut through the island, its only other resemblance to Tenochtítlan. I strolled along the streets for a while. Besides a wide one circling the island's rim, there were only four others, two running the length of the island, two crossing it, all of them primitively paved with crushed oyster and clam shells. The houses and huts that crowded wall to wall along the streets and canals, though I suppose they had wooden frameworks, were plastered with a white surfacing also made of powdered shells.

The island was oval-shaped and quite large, about the size of Tenochtítlan without its northern district of Tlaltelólco. It probably had as many buildings too, but, since they were only of one level, they did not contain anything like the teeming population of Tenochtítlan. From the center of the island I could see the rest of the surrounding lake, and could see that the lake was also surrounded in all directions by the same feculent marsh through which I had come. The Aztéca at least were not so degraded as to live in that dismal swamp, but they might as well have done. The intervening lake waters did not prevent the swamp's night mists and miasmas and mosquitoes from invading the island. Aztlan was a thoroughly unwholesome habitat, and I was glad that my ancestors had had the good sense to abandon it.

I took the current inhabitants to be the descendants of those who had been too dull and listless to have left it in search of a better place to live. And, so far as I could tell, the descendants of the stay-behinds had not acquired any more initiative or enterprise in all the generations since. They seemed defeated and beaten down by their wretched surroundings, and resentful of them, but drearily resigned to them. The people on the streets gave me a glance of knowing me for a newcomer, and a newcomer certainly must have been a rarity there, but not one of them commented to another on my presence. Not one gave me greeting, or kindly inquired if I was as hungry as I doubtless looked, or even sneered at me for an unwelcome intruder.

The night came on, and the streets began to empty of people, and the darkness was relieved only by the fitful gleams of hearth fires and coconut-oil lamps leaking out from the houses. I had seen enough of the city, and in any case could then see very little, which meant I was likely at any moment to walk off the verge of a canal. So I intercepted a latecomer trying to hurry by me unnoticed, and asked him where I could find the palace of the city's Revered Speaker.

"Palace?" he repeated vacantly. "Revered Speaker?"

I should have known that anything like a palace would be inconceivable to those hut dwellers. And I should have remembered that no Revered Speaker of the Aztéca had adopted that title until long after they had become the Mexíca. I amended my question:

"I seek your ruler. Where does he reside?"

"Ah, the Tlatocapili," said the man, and Tlatocapili means nothing more eminent than a tribal chief, like the leader of any barbarian desert rabble. The man gave me hurried directions, then said, "Now I am late for my meal," and vanished in the night. For a people marooned in the middle of nowhere, with so little of anything to occupy them, they seemed foolishly fond of pretending urgency and activity.

Though the Aztéca of Aztlan spoke Náhuatl, they used many words that I suppose we Mexíca long ago discarded, and others that they obviously had adopted from neighbor tribes, for I recognized some of them as Kaita and corrupt Poré. On the other hand, the Aztéca were uncomprehending of many Náhuatl words I used—words that I suppose had come into the language after the migration, inspired by things and circumstances in the outside world of which those stay-at-homes knew nothing. After all, our language still changes to accommodate itself to new situations. Just in recent years, for example, it has added such words as cahuayo for horse, Crixtanoyotl for Christianity, Caxtilteca for Castilians and Spaniards in general, pitzome for pigs....

The city's "palace" was at least a decently constructed house, faced with shining shell plaster, and of several rooms. I was met at the entrance by a young woman who said she was the wife of the Tlatocapili. She did not bid me enter, but nervously asked what I wanted.

"I want to see the Tlatocapili," I said, with the last of my patience. "I have come a long way, especially to see him."

"You have?" she said, biting her lip. "Few come to see him, and he cares to see even fewer. Anyway, he is not home yet."

"May I come in and wait?" I asked testily.

She thought it over, then stood aside, saying indecisively, "I suppose you may. But he will be hungry, and wanting to eat before anything else." I started to remark that I would not mind something of that sort myself, but she went on, "He desired to eat frogs' legs tonight, so he had to go to the mainland, since the lake is too salty for them. And the catch must have been scant, for he is very late coming home."

I nearly backed out of the house again. But then I thought: can the punishment for ducking the Tlatocapili be any worse than spending the night trying to avoid him by wandering this vile island among the pestilent mosquitoes? I followed her through a room where a number of young children and very old folks sat eating a meal of swamp greens. They all goggled at me, but said nothing, and offered me no place at the cloth. She led me to an empty room, where I gratefully sat down on a rough icpali chair. I asked her:

"How does one address the Tlatocapili?"

"His name is Tlilectic-Mixtli."

I almost fell off the low chair, the coincidence was so startling. If he was also Dark Cloud, what should I call myself? Certainly a man whom I had kicked into a pond would take me for an impudent mocker if I introduced myself with his name. Just then, from the outer room, came the noise of his arrival, and his timorous wife ran to welcome her lord and master. I slid my knife around to the back of my waistband, out of sight, and kept my right hand near it.

I heard the murmur of the woman's voice, then the roar of the husband's: "A visitor to see me? To Mictlan with him! I am starving! Prepare these frogs, woman! I had to catch the cursed things twice!" His wife murmured meekly again, and he roared more loudly, "What? A stranger?"

With a savage jerk, he tore aside the curtain at the doorway of the room where I sat. It was indeed the same young man; he still had some of the pond weeds in his hair and he was clotted with mud from his waist down. He glared for an instant, then bellowed, "You!"

I bent from my chair to kiss the earth, but I made the gesture using my left hand, and I still had my right on the haft of my knife when I politely got to my feet. Then, to my great surprise, the young man burst into a peal of hearty laughter and leapt forward to fling his arms around me in a brotherly hug. His wife and several of the younger and older relatives peeked around the door frame, their eyes wide with wonder.

"Welcome, stranger!" he shouted, and laughed some more. "By the splayed legs of the goddess Coyolxauqui, I am pleased to see you again. Just look what you did to me, man! When I finally got out of that sump, all the canoes had gone for the night. I had to wade home across the lake."

I asked cautiously, "You found that amusing?"

He laughed some more. "By the cold hole of the moon goddess's dry tipíli, yes! Yes, I did! In all my lifetime in this weary and wearisome backwater, it was the first occurrence not ordinary and expectable. I thank you for making one unusual thing happen at last in this abyss of monotony. How are you called, stranger?"

I said, "My name is, er, Tepetzalan," taking that of my father for the occasion.

"Valley?" he said. "Tallest valley I ever saw. Well, Tepetzalan, do not fear any retaliation for your treatment of me. By the flabby teats of the goddess, it is a pleasure finally to meet a man with testicles under his loincloth. If my tribesmen have any, they display them only to their women." He turned to bark at his own woman, "There are frogs enough for my friend and myself. Prepare them while I steam away some of this muck. Friend Tepetzalan, perhaps you would also like a refreshing bath?"

As we stripped at the steam house behind the residence—and I took note that his torso was as hairless as mine—the Tlatocapili said, "I presume you are one of our cousins from the far desert. No nearer neighbors speak our language."

"One of your cousins, I think," I said. "But not from the desert. Do you know of the Mexíca nation? Of the great city Tenochtítlan?"

"No," he said carelessly, as if his ignorance was nothing to be ashamed of. He even said, "Among the various miserable villages in these parts, Aztlan is the only city." I did not laugh, and he went on, "We pride ourselves on our self-sufficiency here, so we seldom go traveling or engage in traffic with any other tribes. We know only our closest neighbors, though we care not to mingle with them. To the north of these swamps, for instance, are the Kaita. Since you came from that direction, you must have recognized them as a paltry people. In the swamps south of here, there is only the single insignificant village of Yakóreke."

I was pleased to hear that. If Yakóreke was the nearest community to the southward, then I was closer to home than I had reckoned. Yakóreke was an outpost village of the Nauyar Ixu lands subject to the Purémpecha nation. From anywhere in Nauyar Ixu it was not an impossibly long journey to Michihuácan, and beyond that country lay the lands of The Triple Alliance.

The young man continued, "Eastward of these swamps are the high mountains, in which dwell peoples called the Cora and the Huichol. Beyond those mountains lies a desert wasteland where some of our poor relations have long lived in exile. Only once in a great while does one of them find his way here to the home of his forefathers."

I said, "I know of your poor relations in the desert. But I repeat, I am not one of them. And I also know that not all of your distant relations are poor. Of those who left here so long ago to seek their fortune in the outside world, some of them did find a fortune, a fortune beyond your imagining."

"I rejoice to hear it," he said indifferently. "My wife's grandfather will be even more pleased. He is Aztlan's Rememberer of History."

That remark made me realize that, of course, the Aztéca could have no knowledge of picture writing. We Mexíca had attained it only long after the migration. So they could not possess any history books or other archives. If they relied on an old man to be the repository of their history, then he would be only the latest in a long line of old men who had handed that history down through the ages, one to another.

The other Mixtli went on, "The gods know that this crack in the buttocks of the world is no joyous place to live. But we live here because it has everything we need for life. The tides bring us seafood to eat, without our even having to seek it. The coconut gives us sweets, and oil for our lamps, and its liquid is fermented into a most enjoyably intoxicating drink. Another kind of palm gives us fiber from which to weave cloth, another yields flour, another bears the coyacapuli fruit. We need not trade for any resource with any other tribes, and the swamps protect us from molestation by them...."

He went on with his unenthusiastic listing of the awful Aztlan's natural advantages, but I had ceased listening. I felt slightly dazed, realizing how very remotely related I was to my "cousin" of the same name. It is possible that we two Mixtlis could have sat down and traced our lineage back to a common ancestor, but our divergent development had moved us far apart in more than distance. We were separated by an immeasurable disparity of education and outlook. That cousin Mixtli might as well have been living in the Aztlan of antiquity from which his ancestors had refused to stir, for Aztlan was still what it had been then: the abode of unadventurous sluggards. Ignorant of picture writing, they were equally ignorant of all it could teach: arithmetic, geography, architecture, commerce, conquest. They knew even less than the barbarian cousins they despised, the desert Chichimeca, who had at least ventured some way beyond Aztlan's constricted horizons.

Because my forebears had left that hind end of nowhere and had found a place where the art of word knowing flourished, I had had access to the libraries of the knowledge and experience accumulated by the Aztéca-Mexíca in all the subsequent sheaves of years, not to mention the finer arts and sciences of even older civilizations. Culturally and intellectually, I was as superior to my cousin Mixtli as a god might be to me. But I decided I would refrain from flaunting that superiority. It was not his fault that he had been deprived of my advantages through the lethargy of his ancestors. I felt sorry for that cousin Mixtli. I would do what I could to coax him out of his benighted Aztlan into the enlightened modern world.

His wife's grandfather, Canautli, the aged historian, sat with us while we dined. The old man was one of the persons I had earlier seen eating the unlovely swamp greens, and he watched rather wistfully as we two Mixtlis savored our dish of delicate frogs' legs. I think old Canautli paid more attention to our lip smacking and chop licking than he did to my discourse. Hungry though I was, I managed, between mouthfuls, to tell briefly what had become of the Aztéca who had departed Aztlan: how they had become known as the Tenochca, then as the Mexíca, then as the foremost lords of The One World. The old man and the young one occasionally shook their heads in mute admiration—or maybe disbelief—as I recounted one achievement and advancement and war triumph after another.

The Tlatocapili interrupted once to murmur, "By the six fragments of the goddess, if the Mexíca have become all that grand, perhaps we ought to change the name of Aztlan." Meditatively, he tried two or three new names: "Place of the Mexíca. First Homeland of the Mexíca..."

I went on to give a brief biography of the Mexíca's current Uey-Tlatoani, Motecuzóma, then a lyrical description of his capital city of Tenochtítlan. The old grandfather sighed and closed his eyes, as if to see it better in his imagination.

I said, "The Mexíca could not have progressed so far and so fast if they had not availed themselves of the art of word knowing." Then I hinted heavily, "You too, Tlatocapili Mixtli, might make of Aztlan a grander city—make your people the equals of their Mexíca cousins—if you learned how to preserve the spoken word in lasting pictures."

He shrugged and said, "We have not yet suffered by not knowing."

Nevertheless, his interest seemed to quicken when I showed him—using a slender frog bone to scratch the hard earth of the floor—how simply his own name could be permanently graven.

"Yes, that is a cloud shape," he conceded. "But how could it say Dark Cloud?"

"Merely color it with a dark paint, gray or black. A single picture is capable of infinite useful variations. Paint that figure blue-green, for example, and you have the name Jadestone Cloud."

"Is that so?" he said, and then, "What is jadestone?" And the gulf gaped again between us. He had never seen or even heard of the mineral held sacred by all civilized peoples.

I muttered something about the night getting late, that I would tell more on the morrow. My cousin offered me a pallet for the night, if I did not object to sleeping in a room full of some other probable male relations of mine. I thanked him and accepted, and concluded my evening's discourse by explaining how I had come to Aztlan: tracking backward along my ancestors' route of march, trying to verify a legend. I turned to old Canautli and said:

"Perhaps you would know, venerable Rememberer of History. When they left here, did they carry a sufficiency of supplies that they could have made provision for a necessary return?"

He did not reply. The venerable Rememberer had fallen asleep.

But the next day he said, "Your ancestors took almost nothing with them when they left here."

I had breakfasted together with the whole "palace family," on tiny fish and mushrooms grilled together, and some kind of hot herb drink. Then my namesake had gone out on some civic business, leaving me to converse with the aged historian. But that day, unlike the night before, it was Canautli who did most of the talking.

"If all our Rememberers have spoken truly, those people who departed took only what belongings they could pack in a hurry, and only meager rations for the march. And they took the image of their villainous new god: a wooden image newly and roughly and hastily made, because of the urgency of their going. But that was untold sheaves of years ago. I daresay your people have built many finer statues to replace it since then. We of Aztlan have a different high deity, and only the one image of it. Oh, of course we recognize all the other gods, and have recourse to them when necessary. Tlazolteotl, for instance, cleanses us of our sins; Atlaua fills our fowlers' nets, and so on. But only one reigns supreme. Come, cousin, let me show you."

He took me out of the house and along the city's shell streets. As we walked, his birdlike little black eyes flung an occasional look sideways from their nests of wrinkles, a shrewd and humorous glance at me, and he said:

"Tepetzalan, you have been courteous, or at least discreet. You have not spoken your opinion of us, the remaining Aztéca. But permit me to guess. I would wager that you consider us the dregs that were left in Aztlan when the more worthy ones went away."

True, that was my opinion. I might have said something to put a slightly better face on it, but he went on:

"You believe that our forefathers were too lazy or listless or timid to raise their eyes to some beckoning vision of glory. That they feared the risk and so lost the opportunity. That your own ancestors, by contrast, ventured boldly forth from here in the certain knowledge that they were destined to be exalted above all other peoples of the world."

"Well..." I said.

"Here is our temple." Canautli stopped at the entrance to a low building of the customary crushed-shell plastering, but with many fine shells of conch and other sea creatures inset entire. "Our only temple, and a humble one, but if you will enter..."

I did, and with my topaz I looked at what stood there, and I said, "That is Coyolxauqui," and I said truthfully, admiringly, "That is a superb work of art."

"You recognize her?" The old man sounded a trifle surprised. "I should have thought that your people would have forgotten her by now."

"I confess, venerable one, that she is now regarded only as a minor goddess among our many gods. But the legend is one of our oldest, and it is still remembered."

To tell it briefly, reverend friars, the legend was this. Coyolxauqui, whose name means Adorned with Bells, was one of the godling children of the high goddess Coatlicue. And that goddess Coatlicue, though already a mother many times over, became gravid again when one day a feather floated down upon her from the skies. (How that could impregnate any female, I do not know, but such things happened in many old stories. And it would seem that the daughter-goddess Coyolxauqui was also skeptical when her mother told of it.) Coyolxauqui gathered her brothers and sisters and said, "Our mother has brought shame upon herself and us her children. We must put her to death for it."

However, the child in Coatlicue's womb was the war god Huitzilopóchtli. He heard those words and he sprang instantly out of his mother, full grown and already armed with an obsidian maquahuitl. He slew his scheming sister Coyolxauqui and cut her in pieces and flung those dismembered parts to the sky, where their blood stuck them to the moon. He likewise threw all his other sisters and brothers to the sky, where they have since been stars indistinguishable from the older stars. That newborn war god Huitzilopóchtli, of course, was ever afterward the chief god of us Mexíca, and we accorded to Coyolxauqui no importance whatever. We erected no statues of her or temples for her, and we dedicated no feast days to her.

"To us," said the old historian of Aztlan, "Coyolxauqui has always been the goddess of the moon, and always will be, and we worship her in that guise."

I did not understand, and I said so. "Why worship the moon, venerable Canautli? I ask in all respect. But the moon is of no benefit to mankind, except for its night light, and that is dim at its brightest."

"Because of the sea tides," said the old man, "and those are of benefit to us. This lake of ours, at its western end, is separated from the ocean by only a low rock barrier. When the tide rises, it spills fish and crabs and shellfish into our lake, and they stay here when the tide waters recede. Catching those creatures for our food is much easier in this shallow lake than it would be in the deep sea outside. We are grateful to be so lavishly and punctiliously supplied."

"But the moon?" I said, perplexed. "Do you believe that the moon somehow causes the tides?"

"Causes? I do not know. But the moon certainly gives notice of them. When the moon is at its thinnest, and again when it is at its full round, we know that at a determinable later time the tide will be at its highest, and its spill of provender the most bountiful. Clearly the moon goddess has something to do with it."

"So it would seem," I said, and regarded the image of Coyolxauqui more respectfully.

It was not a statue. It was a disk of stone as perfectly round as the full moon and nearly as immense as the great Sun Stone of Tenochtítlan. Coyolxauqui was sculptured in high relief, as she looked after her dismemberment by Huitzilopóchtli. Her torso occupied the center of the stone—of the moon—her breasts bared to view and hanging slackly. Her decapitated head was in profile at the top center of the moon; it wore a feather headdress, and on the visible cheek was incised the bell symbol from which she took her name. Her severed arms and legs were distributed around her, adorned with bracelets and anklets. There was no picture writing anywhere on the stone, or course, but it still bore traces of its original paint: a pale blue on the stone background, a pale yellow on the goddess's various parts. I asked how old it was.

"Only the goddess knows," said Canautli. "It has been here since long before your forebears went away, since time past all remembering."

"How do you pay homage to her?" I asked, looking around the room, which was otherwise empty except for a strong smell of fish. "I see no signs of sacrifice."

"You mean you see no blood," he said. "Your forefathers also sought blood, and that is why they left here. Coyolxauqui has never demanded any such thing as a human sacrifice. We offer to her only lesser creatures, things of the sea and things of the night. Owls and the nightflying herons and the great green moon moths. Also there is a small fish, so oily of flesh that it can be dried and burned like a candle. Worshipers light them here when they feel the need of communing with the goddess."

As we stepped out of the fishy-smelling temple into the street again, the old man resumed, "Know now, cousin Tepetzalan, what we Rememberers have remembered. In a time long past, we Aztéca were not confined to this single city. This was the capital of a considerable domain, stretching from this coast high into the mountains. The Aztéca comprised numerous tribes, each of many calpultin clans, and they were all under the rule of a single Tlatocapili who was not—like my grandson-by-marriage—a chief in name only. They were a strong people, but they were a peaceable people, satisfied with what they had, and they deemed themselves well cared for by the goddess."

"Until some of those people showed more ambition," I suggested.

"Until some showed weakness!" he said sharply. "The tales tell how some of them, hunting in the high mountains, one day met a stranger from a far land. That one laughed in scorn to hear of our people's simple way of life and their undemanding religion. The stranger said, 'Of all the numberless gods there are, why do you choose to worship the one most feeble, the goddess who was so deservedly humiliated and slain? Why do you not worship the one who overthrew her, the strong and fierce and virile god Huitzilopóchtli?' "

I wondered: who could that outlander have been? Perhaps one of the Toltéca of olden times? No, if a Toltecatl had wished to wean the Aztéca from their worship of Coyolxauqui, he would have proposed the beneficent god Quetzalcoatl as the substitute.

Canautli went on, "Those were the first of our people to be evilly influenced by the stranger, and they began to change. The stranger said, 'Worship Huitzilopóchtli,' and they did. The stranger said, 'Give blood to feed Huitzilopóchtli,' and they did. According to our Rememberers, those were the first human sacrifices ever made by any people who were not outright savages. They held their ceremonies secretly, in the seven great caves in the mountains, and they took care to spill only the blood of expendable orphans and old people. The stranger said, 'Huitzilopóchtli is the god of war. Let him lead you to conquer richer lands.' And more and more of our people listened and heeded, and they offered up more and more sacrifices. The stranger urged, 'Nourish Huitzilopóchtli, make him stronger yet, and he will win for you a life better than you could ever have dreamed.' And the misbelievers grew more numerous, more dissatisfied with their old ways of life, more ready and avid for bloodshed..."

He stopped talking and stood silent for a moment. I looked about us, at the men and women passing by on the street. The residue of the Aztéca. Dress them a little better, I thought, and they could be the Mexíca citizens on any street in Tenochtítlan. No, dress them a little better and put a suffer backbone into them.

Canautli resumed, "When the Tlatocapili learned what was happening in those fringe regions of his lands, he realized who would be the first victims of the new war god. It would be the Aztéca still peaceable and content with their unwarlike goddess Coyolxauqui. And why not? What more available and easy first conquest for the followers of Huitzilopóchtli? Well, the Tlatocapili had no army, but he did have a staunch and loyal body of city guardsmen. He and they went to the mountains and swooped down on the misbelievers, and took them by surprise, and slew many of them. All the rest he disarmed of every weapon they possessed. And he put the curse of banishment on all those traitor men and women. He said, 'So you wish to follow your foul new god? Then take him and take your families and your children and follow your god far away from here. You have until tomorrow to be gone or to be executed.' And by the dawn they had departed, in numbers not now remembered."

After a pause, he added: "I am glad to hear from you that they no longer claim the name of Aztéca."

I stood silent, stunned, until I thought to ask, "And what of the stranger who brought that banishment upon them?"

"Oh, she was among the first slain, naturally."

"She!"

"Did I not mention that the stranger was a woman? Yes, all our Rememberers have remembered that she was a runaway Yaki."

"But that is incredible!" I exclaimed. "What would a Yaki woman know of Huitzilopóchtli or Coyolxauqui or any other Aztéca gods?"

"By the time she got here she had traveled far, and no doubt had heard much. Of a certainty she had learned our language. Some of our Rememberers have suggested that she could have been a sorceress, as well."

"Even so," I persisted, "why should she preach the worship of Huitzilopóchtli, who was no god of hers?"

"Ah, there we can only conjecture. But it is known that the Yaki live mainly by hunting deer, and their chief god is the god who provides those deer, the god we call Mixcoatl. Whenever the Yaki hunters find that the herds are thinning out, they perform a particular ceremony. They seize one of their more dispensable females and truss her as they would truss a deer caught alive, and they dance as they would dance after a successful hunt. Then they gut and disjoint and eat the woman, as they would eat a deer. In their simpleminded, savage belief, that ceremony persuades their god of hunting to replenish the deer herds. Anyway, it is known that the Yaki behaved so in the olden time. Perhaps they are not quite so ferocious nowadays."

"I believe they are," I said. "But I do not see how it could have caused what happened here."

"The Yaki woman had run away from her people to escape that fate reserved for women. I repeat, it is only conjecture, but our Rememberers have always supposed that the woman burned with a desire to see men suffer the same way. Any men. Her hatred of them was indiscriminate. And she found her opportunity here. Our own beliefs may have given her the idea, for do not forget: Huitzilopóchtli had slain and dismembered Coyolxauqui with no more remorse than a Yaki would have shown. So that woman, by pretending to admire and exalt Huitzilopóchtli, hoped to set our men fighting against each other, killing and spilling each other's blood and entrails, as hers might have been spilled."

I was so appalled that I could only whisper, "A woman? It was some unimportant and nameless female who conceived the idea of human sacrifice? The ceremony that is now practiced everywhere?"

"It is not practiced here," Canautli reminded me. "And our supposition may be a total misjudgment. After all, that was long, long ago. But it sounds a typically feminine notion of vengeance, does it not? And evidently it succeeded, for you have mentioned that, in the world outside, men have not ceased slaughtering their fellow men, in the name of one god or another, during all the sheaves of years since."

I said nothing. I could not think what to say.

"So you see," the old man continued, "those Aztéca who left Aztlan were not the best and the bravest. They were the worst and the unwanted, and they went because they were forcibly expelled."

I still said nothing, and he concluded:

"You say you search for the stores your ancestors might have secreted along their route from here. Give up the search, cousin. It is futile. Even if those people had been allowed to leave here with any possessions of use or value, they would not have stored them for a possible retreat along that route. They knew they could never come back."

I stayed not many more days in Aztlan, though my cousin the other Mixtli would have had me stay for months, I believe. He had decided that he wished to learn word knowing and picture writing, and he bribed me to teach him, by giving me a private hut and one of his younger sisters to keep me company in it. She was in no way comparable to a sister once known as Tzitzitlini, but she was a pretty girl, a sufficiently obliging and enjoyable companion. Nevertheless, I had to tell her brother that word knowing could not be learned as quickly as, say, the art of frog spearing. I taught him how to represent physical things by drawing simplified pictures of them, and then I said:

"To leant how to utilize those pictures to build written language, you will require a teacher dedicated to such teaching, which I am not. Some of the best are in Tenochtítlan, and I advise you to go there. I have told you where it lies."

He growled, with some of his earlier surliness, "By the stiff limbs of the goddess, you simply want to get away. And I cannot. I cannot leave my people leaderless, with no excuse except my sudden whim to have a bit of education."

"There is a much better excuse," I said. "The Mexíca have extended their dominions far and wide, but they have yet no colony on this northern shore of the western ocean. The Uey-Tlatoani would be delighted to learn that he has cousins already established here. If you were to present yourself to Motecuzóma, bearing a suitable gift of introduction, you might very well find yourself appointed the ruler of an important new province of The Triple Alliance, a province much more worth ruling than it is now."

"What suitable gift?" he said sardonically. "Some fish? Some frogs? One of my other sisters?"

Pretending I had only that moment thought of it, I said, "Why not the stone of Coyolxauqui?"

He reeled in shock. "Our one and only sacred image?"

"Motecuzóma may not esteem the goddess, but he does appreciate fine works of art."

He gasped, "Give away the Moon Stone? Why, I would be worse hated and reviled than that cursed Yaki sorceress of whom the grandfather Canautli tells!"

"Quite the contrary," I said. "She caused the dissolution of the Aztéca. You would be effecting their reconciliation—and much more. I should say that the sculpture would be a small price to pay for all the advantages of reuniting again with the mightiest nation in all the known lands. But think about it."

And so it was that, when I took my leave of my cousin Mixtli and his pretty sister and the others of his family, he was mumbling, "I could not roll the Moon Stone all that way by myself alone. I must convince others...."

I no longer had any valid reason for exploring; I would be wandering only for the sake of wandering. It was time I went home again; and Canautli told me I would make best time by going straight inland, where the swamps eventually ended, and then over the mountains of the Cora and Huichol. But I will not tell of my progress through those mountains; they were merely more mountains—or of the various peoples I encountered there; they were merely more mountain people. And in truth I have little recollection of that part of my homeward journey, for I was too deeply occupied with my thoughts of all the many things I had already seen and learned... and unlearned. For example:

The word Chichimeca did not necessarily mean "barbarians," though that is what they are. The word could as well mean "red people," the whole race of mankind to which I and every other human belonged. We Mexíca might boast of our accumulated years and layers of civilization and culture, but we were not otherwise superior to those barbarians. The Chichimeca were indisputably cousins of ours. And we too—we proud and haughty Mexíca—we too had once been drinkers of our own urine, eaters of our own excrement.

Our vaunted histories of our peerless lineage were sadly or laughably in error. Our ancestors had not left Aztlan in any daringly heroic bid for greatness. They had been mere dupes, deluded by a woman either mad or magical or simply spiteful. And she a specimen of the most inhuman humans known to exist! But even if that legendary Yaki woman had never really existed, the fact remained that our ancestors had become so bestial and obnoxious that their own people could no longer abide their presence. Our ancestors had left Aztlan at the point of a spear, slinking away under cover of night, in shame and ignominy. Most of them were still outcasts from every decent society, resigned to their perpetual exile in the empty desert. Only a few had somehow wandered into the civilized region of the lakes, and had been let stay there long enough to learn and grow and prosper and themselves appropriate the blessings of civilization. It was only because of that good fortune that they... that we... that I... and all the other Mexíca were not still living an aimless existence, roaming the wilderness, clad in stinking skin garments, keeping alive by eating sun-dried child meat, or worse.

For a long time, as I slouched slowly eastward, I mused on those demeaning and disturbing realizations. For much of that time, I could only gloomily regard us Mexíca as the fruit of a tree rooted in swamp ooze and fed by human manure. But gradually I came to a new realization. People are not plants. They are not fixed to any roots or dependent on them. People are mobile and free to move far from their beginnings—far away, if that satisfies them—far upward, if they have the ambition and ability. The Mexíca had long been vain of their ancestry, and I had suddenly been made ashamed of it. But both attitudes were equally foolish: our ancestors merited neither blame nor credit that we were what we were.

We had aspired to something better than a swamp life, and we had achieved it. We had moved from the island of Aztlan to another island no more promising, and we had made of it the most resplendent city ever seen, the capital of a dominion unsurpassed, the center of a civilization ever broadening outward into lands that would still be mean and poor but for our influence. Whatever our origins or the forces that had impelled us, we had climbed to a height never reached by any other people. And we needed not to argue or explain or excuse our beginnings, our arduous journey through the generations, our arrival at the pinnacle we finally occupied. To command the respect of every other people, we needed to say only that we were the Mexíca!

I straightened my back and squared my shoulders and lifted my head and proudly faced in the direction of The Heart and Center of the One World.

* * *

But I found that I could not long maintain that firm and prideful stride. During all of that journey I had been retracing and unearthing and piecing together the past history of ancient lands and peoples. The nearer I got to home, the more it seemed that all that collected antiquity had permeated my mind, my muscles, and my bones. I felt that I was carrying every sheaf of the years gone by since history began, and I do not think I was simply imagining that burden. There was evidence that it really weighed on me. I walked more slowly and less erectly than I had used to do, and on breasting the higher hills I breathed hard, and when I labored up some very steep slopes my heart pounded on my ribs in angry complaint.

Because of my feeling that I had become weighted with all the ages of the world, I swerved aside as I approached Tenochtítlan. It was too modern for my mood. I decided to go first to an older place, a place I had never yet visited, though it lies not far to the east of where I was born. I wanted to see the place first inhabited in all this area, the site of the earliest civilization ever to flourish here. I circled around the lake basin—north, then southeastward, staying on the mainland—and I came at last to the ages-remembering city of Teotihuacan, The Place Where the Gods Gathered.

There is no knowing how many sheaves of sheaves of years it remembers in its dreaming silence. Teotihuacan is a ruin now, though a majestic ruin, and it has been a ruin during all the recorded history of all the peoples now living in this region. The pavement of its broad avenues was long ago buried under windblown silt and overgrowing weeds. Its ranks of temples are no more than rubble outlines of their former foundations. Its pyramids still tower over the plain, but their topmost points are blunted, their straight lines and sharp angles have softened and crumbled under the battering of years and weathers beyond reckoning. The colors with which the city would once have blazed are worn away—the radiance of its white lime gesso, the gleam of beaten gold, the brilliance of many different paints—and the whole city is now the drab dun and gray of its underlying rock construction. According to Mexíca tradition, the city was built by the gods, to be the place in which they convened while they made their plans for creating the rest of the world. Hence the name we gave it. But according to my old Lord Teacher of History, that legend is only a romantically mistaken notion; the city was actually built by men. Still, that would hardly lessen the wondrousness of it, for those men must have been the long-vanished Toltéca, and those Master Artisans built magnificently.

To see Teotihuacan as I first saw it—in an extravagantly colorful sunset, its pyramids looming up from the flatland and looking in that light as if newly sheathed in the richest red gold, luminous against the background of distant purple mountains and deep blue sky—that is a sight so overwhelming as to make one believe that the city was the work of the gods, or, if it was made by men, that they were a godlike race of men.

I entered the city at its northern end and picked my way through the litter of fallen stone blocks around the base of the pyramid that our Mexíca wise men supposed had been dedicated to the moon. That pyramid had lost at least a third of its height, where its top has been worn away, and its staircase ascends to a welter of loose rocks up there. The Pyramid of the Moon is surrounded by the standing or toppled columns and walls of buildings that must once have been two or three floors high. One edifice we called The Palace of the Butterflies, because of the abundance of those blithe creatures pictured in the murals still visible on its interior walls.

But I did not loiter there. I walked south along the city's central avenue, which is as long and broad as the floor of a good-sized valley, but much more level. We called it in Micaótli, The Avenue of the Dead, and, although it is thick with brush through which snakes slither and rabbits bounce, it still affords a pleasant stroll. More than a one-long-run in length, it is bordered by the ruins of temples on either side—until you are halfway along it. There the left-hand row of temples is interrupted for the unbelievably immense bulk of the icpac tlamanacali that our wise men had decided was The Pyramid of the Sun.

If I say that the whole city of Teotihuacan is impressive, but that The Pyramid of the Sun makes all the rest look trivial, perhaps that will give you some idea of its size and majesty. It is easily half again as big in every dimension as was the Great Pyramid of Tenochtítlan, and that was the grandest I had ever seen before. In fact, no one can say how big The Pyramid of the Sun really is, because much of its base is under the earth deposited there by wind and rain during the ages since Teotihuacan was abandoned. But what remains visible and measurable is awesome. At ground level, each of the four sides is two hundred and thirty paces from corner to corner, and the structure soars as high as twenty ordinary houses piled up on top of each other.

The pyramid's entire surface is rough and jagged, because the smooth slabs of slate with which it was once clad have all come loose from the jutting rock studs that held them. And long before those slates slid down to become a jumble of shards on the ground, I imagine they had already shed their original coating of white lime gesso and colored paints. The structure rises in four tiers, and each one slopes upward at a slightly different angle, for no reason except that that refinement of design deceives the eye and makes the entire edifice somehow appear even bigger than it is. So there are three wide terraces around the four sides and, at the very top, a square platform on which a temple must once have stood. But it would have had to be a very small temple, and quite inadequate for ceremonies of human sacrifice. The staircase ascending the pyramid's front is now so broken and crumbled that the individual steps are barely discernible.

The Pyramid of the Sun faces westward, toward the setting sun, and its front was still colored flame and gold when I reached it. But at that moment the lengthening shadows of the ruined temples on the other side of the avenue began to creep up the pyramid's front, like jagged teeth biting at it. I quickly began to scramble up what remained of the staircase, keeping in the jacinth sunlight all the way, just above and ahead of the encroaching shadow teeth.

I attained the platform at the summit at the same time the last sunlight lifted from the pyramid, and I sat down heavily, wheezing for breath. A late-flying butterfly came fluttering up from somewhere and perched on the platform companionably near me. It was a very large and entirely black butterfly, and it gently waggled its wings as if it too were panting from the climb. All of Teotihuacan was by then in twilight, and before long a pale mist began to rise from the ground. The pyramid on which I sat, for all its massiveness, seemed to be floating unattached to the earth. The city, which had been flamboyantly red and yellow, had become muted blue and silver. It looked peaceful and drowsy. It looked its great age. It looked older than time, but so steadfast that it would still endure when all of time had passed away.

I scanned the city from end to end—at that height it was possible—and, using my topaz, I could see the innumerable pits and dimples in the weed-grown land stretching far on both sides of The Avenue of the Dead: the places where had stood more habitations than there were in Tenochtítlan. Then I saw something else, and it startled me: distant small fires taking bloom. Was the dead city coming to life again? But then I perceived that they were torch lights, a long double line of them, approaching from the south. I was briefly annoyed that I no longer had the city to myself. But I knew that pilgrims often came there, singly or in crowds—from Tenochtítlan, from Texcóco and other parts—to make offerings or prayers in that place where the gods once had gathered. There was even a campground to accommodate such visitors: a vast, rectangular, sunken meadow at the southern extremity of the main avenue. It was believed that it had originally been Teotihuacan's marketplace, and that under the grass must be enclosing walls and a stone-paved plaza.

The night was full dark by the time the torchlight procession reached that place, and for a time I watched, as some of the torches stopped and stayed in a circle, while others moved here and there, their carriers busy with the activity of making camp. Then, being sure that none of the pilgrims would venture farther into the city before morning, I swung around on the platform to face eastward and watch the early rising moon. It was full, as perfectly round and benignly beautiful as Aztlan's stone of Coyolxauqui. When it was well up above the undulant profile of the far-off mountains, I turned yet again to look at Teotihuacan by its light. A gentle night breeze had dispelled the ground mist, and the many edifices were sharply outlined in every detail by the blue-white moonlight, and they threw stark black shadows across the blue ground.

Almost all the roads and the days of my life had been hectic and eventful, with not many leisurely intervals, and I expected that they would continue to be so to their end. But I sat in serenity there for a little time, and I treasured it. I was even moved to make the one poem I ever made in my life. It had little regard for facts or history; it was inspired purely by the moonlight loveliness and silence and tranquility of that place and that time. When I had made the poem in my head, I stood erect atop that towering Pyramid of the Sun, and I said the poem aloud to the empty city:

Once, when nothing was but night,

they gathered, in a time forgotten—

all the gods of greatest might—

to plan the dawn of day and light.

Here... at Teotihuacan.

"Very nice," said a voice not my own, and I started so that I nearly leapt off the pyramid. The voice recited the poem back to me, word for word, slowly and savoringly, and I recognized the voice. I have heard my small effort recited by other people on later occasions, and even in recent times, but never again by the Lord Motecuzóma Xocoyatl, Cem-Anáhuac Uey-Tlatoani, Revered Speaker of the One World.

"Very nice," he said again. "Especially since Eagle Knights are not noted for their poetic turn of mind."

"Nor even sometimes for their knightliness," I said ruefully, knowing that he had recognized me too.

"No need for apprehension, Knight Mixtli," he said, without any audible emotion. "Your elderly under-chiefs took all blame for the failure of the Yanquitlan colony. They were duly executed. There remains no debt outstanding. And before they went to the flower garland they told me of your intended exploration. How did you fare?"

"No better than at Yanquitlan, my lord," I said, suppressing a sigh for the friends who had died on my behalf. "I merely proved that the fabled Aztéca stores do not exist and never did." I gave him a much abbreviated account of my journey, and of my finding the legendary Aztlan, and I concluded with the words I had heard in various languages everywhere. Motecuzóma nodded somberly and repeated the words, staring out into the night as if he could see before him all the lands of his domains, and he made the words sound ominously like an epitaph:

"The Aztéca were here, but they brought nothing with them, and they left nothing when they went."

After a while of rather uncomfortable silence, I said, "For more than two years I have had no news of Tenochtítlan or The Triple Alliance. How fare things there, Lord Speaker?"

"About as dismally as you describe the affairs of the dreary Aztlan. Our wars win us nothing. Our territories have not grown by a hand span since you last knew them. Meanwhile the omens multiply, ever more mysterious and threatening of future disaster."

He favored me with a short history of recent events. He had never ceased harrying and trying to subdue the stubbornly independent neighbor nation of Texcala, but with notable lack of success. The Texcalteca were still independent, and more inimical than ever toward Tenochtítlan. The only recent fighting that Motecuzóma could call even moderately successful had been a mere raid of reprisal. The inhabitants of a town called Tlaxiaco, somewhere in the Mixteca country, had been intercepting and keeping for themselves the rich goods of tribute intended for Tenochtítlan, sent by cities farther south, Motecuzóma had personally led his troops there and turned the town of Tlaxiaco to a puddle of blood.

"But the affairs of state have not been so disheartening as the doings of nature," he went on. "One morning about a year and a half ago, the entire lake of Texcóco suddenly became as turbulent as a stormy sea. For a day and a night, it tossed and foamed and flooded some low-lying areas. And for no reason: there was no storm, no wind, no earthquake to account for the water's upheaval. Then, last year, and just as inexplicably, the temple of Huitzilopóchtli caught fire and burned until it was completely ruined. It has since been restored, and the god has evinced no sign of outrage. But that fire on top of the Great Pyramid was visible everywhere around the lake, and it struck terror into the hearts of all who saw."

"Most strange," I agreed. "How could a temple of stone catch fire, even if some madman held a torch to it? Stone does not burn."

"Coagulated blood does," said Motecuzóma, "and the temple's interior was thickly caked with it. The stench hung over the city for days afterward. But those occurrences, whatever they might have portended, were in the past. Now comes this accursed thing."

He pointed to the sky, and I raised my crystal to peer upward, and I grunted involuntarily when I saw the thing. I had never seen one before; I probably would never have noticed that one if my weak eyes had not been directed to it; but I recognized it as what we called a smoking star. You Spaniards call it a hairy star, or a comet. It was really quite pretty—like a luminous little tuft of down snagged among the ordinary stars—but of course I knew it was to be regarded with dread, as a sure precursor of evil.

"The court astronomers first espied it a month ago," said Motecuzóma, "when it was too small to have been seen by an untrained eye. It has appeared in the same place in the sky every night since, but ever growing larger and brighter. Many of our people will not venture out of their houses at night, and even the boldest make sure their children stay indoors, safe from its baleful light."

I said, "So the smoking star impels my lord to seek communion with the gods of this sacred city?"

He sighed and said, "No. Or not entirely. That apparition is troubling enough, but I have not yet spoken of the even more recent and more dire omen. You know, of course, that the chief god of this city Teotihuacan was the Feathered Serpent, and that it has long been believed that he and his Toltéca would eventually come back to reclaim these lands."

"I know the old tales, Lord Speaker. Quetzalcoatl built some sort of magical raft, and drifted away across the eastern sea, vowing to return some day."

"And do you remember, Knight Mixtli, some three years ago, when you and I and the Lord Speaker Nezahualpili of Texcóco discussed a drawing on a piece of paper brought from the Maya lands?"

"Yes, my lord," I said uneasily, not much liking to be reminded of it. "A house of great size floating upon the sea."

"Upon the eastern sea," he stressed. "In the drawing, the floating house appeared to have occupants. You and Nezahualpili called them men. Strangers. Outlanders."

"I remember, my lord. Were we mistaken in calling them strangers? Do you mean the drawing represented the returning Quetzalcoatl? Bringing his Toltéca back from the dead?"

"I do not know," he said, with uncommon humility. "But I have just had report that one of those floating houses appeared again off the Maya coast, and it turned over in the sea, like a house toppling sideways in an earthquake, and two of its occupants were washed ashore, nearly dead. If there were others in that house, they must have drowned. But those two survivors came alive after a while, and are now living in some village called Tihó. Its chief, a man named Ah Tutal, sent a swift-messenger to ask of me what to do with them, for he asserts that they are gods, and he is unaccustomed to entertaining gods. At any rate, not living and visible and palpable gods."

I had listened in growing astonishment. I blurted, "Well, my lord? Are they gods?"

"I do not know," he said again. "The message was typical of Maya ineptitude—so hysterical and incoherent that I cannot tell even whether those two are male or female—or one of each, like the Lord and Lady Pair. But the description, such as it is, described no man or woman of my experience. Inhumanly white of skin, exceedingly hairy of face and body, speaking a language incomprehensible even to the wisest of the wise men thereabouts. Surely gods would look and talk differently than we do, would they not?"

I thought about it and finally said, "I should suppose that gods can assume any appearance they choose. And speak any human tongue, if they really wish to communicate. One thing I find hard to believe is that gods could capsize their traveling house and half drown themselves, like any clumsy boatmen. But what have you advised that chief, Lord Speaker?"

"First, to remain silent until we can ascertain what sort of beings they are. Second, to ply them with the best food and drink, with all manner of comforts, with companionship of the opposite sex if they desire it, so that they may rest content in Tihó. Third, and most important, to keep them there, well enclosed, unseen by more eyes than have seen them already, to keep their existence as little known as possible. The apathetic Maya may not be unduly excited by this occurrence. But if the news gets out among more discerning and sensitive peoples, it could cause turmoil, and I do not want that."

"I have visited Tihó," I said. "It is more than a village, quite a respectable town in size, and its inhabitants are the Xiu people, considerably superior to most other remnants of the Maya. I expect they will comply, Lord Speaker. That they will keep the matter secret."

In the moonlight I could see Motecuzóma turn in my direction, and his head inclined sharply toward me as he said, "You speak the Maya languages."

"That Xiu dialect, yes, my lord. Passably."

"And you are quick with other exotic languages." He went on before I could comment, but he seemed to speak to himself. "I came to Teotihuacan, the city of Quetzalcoatl, hoping that he or some other god might give me a sign. Some indication of how I should best contend with this situation. And what do I find at Teotihuacan?" He laughed, though the laughter sounded strained, and he addressed me again. "You could atone for many past derelictions, Knight Mixtli, if you were to volunteer to do a thing beyond the capabilities of other men, even the highest priests of men. If you were to be the emissary of the Mexíca—of all mankind—our emissary to the gods."

He said the last words facetiously, as if of course he disbelieved them, though we were both aware that they were not entirely beyond belief. The idea was breathtaking: that I might be the first man ever to talk—not harangue, as the priests did, or confer by some mystic means—but really talk with beings who perhaps were not human, who perhaps were something eminently greater than human. That I might speak words to and hear words spoken by... yes... the gods—

But at that moment I could not speak at all, and Motecuzóma laughed again, at my speechlessness. He got to his feet, upright on the pyramid summit, and he leaned down to clap me on the shoulder, and he said cheerfully, "Too weak to say yes or no, Knight Mixtli? Well, my servants should have a hearty meal ready by now. Come be my guest and let me feed your resolve."

So we cautiously picked our way down a moonlit side of The Pyramid of the Sun, a descent almost as difficult as the climb, and we walked south along The Avenue of the Dead to the campground—overlooked by the third and least of Teotihuacan's pyramids—where fires were burning, cooking was being done, and mosquito-netted pallets were being laid out by the hundred or so servants, priests, knights, and other courtiers who had accompanied Motecuzóma. We were met there by the high priest whom I remembered as having officiated at the New Fire ceremony some five years before. He gave me only a passing glance, and started to say, with pompous importance:

"Lord Speaker, for tomorrow's petitions to the old gods of this place, I suggest first a ritual of—"

"Do not bother," Motecuzóma interrupted him. "There is now no need for pretentious petitions. We will return to Tenochtítlan as soon as we wake tomorrow."

"But, my lord," the priest protested. "After coming all the way out here, with all your retinue and august guests..."

"Sometimes the gods volunteer their blessing before it is even asked," said Motecuzóma, and he threw an equivocal look at me. "Of course, we may never be sure if it is given seriously or only in mocking jest."

So he and I sat down to eat, among a circle of his palace guardsmen and other knights, many of whom recognized and greeted me. Although I was disreputably ragged, dirty, and out of place in that gaudily feathered and jeweled assemblage, the Uey-Tlatoani directed me to the pillowed seat of honor on the ground at his right. While we ate, and while I tried heroically to moderate my voracity, the Lord Speaker spoke at some length about my forthcoming "mission to the gods." He suggested questions I should ask of them, when I had mastered their language, and what questions of theirs I might prudently avoid answering. I waited for him to be silenced by a mouthful of grilled quail, and then I ventured to say:

"My lord, I would make one request. May I rest at home for at least a short time before I set out traveling again? I started this last journey in all the vigor of my manhood's prime, but I confess that I feel as if I have come home in the age of never."

"Ah, yes," the Lord Speaker said understandingly. "No need to apologize; it is the common fate of man. We all come at last to the ueyquin ayquic."

From your expressions, reverend scribes, I take it that you do not comprehend the meaning of the ueyquin ayquic, "the age of never." No, no, my lords, it does not signify an age of any specific number of years. It comes early to some people, later to others. Considering that I was then forty and five years old, well into my middle years, I had eluded its clutch for longer than most men. The ueyquin ayquic is the age when a man beings to mutter to himself, "Ayya, the hills never seemed so steep before..." or "Ayya, my back never used to give me these twinges of pain..." or "Ayya, I never found a gray hair in my head before now...."

That is the age of never.

Motecuzóma went on, "By all means, Knight Mixtli, take time to recover your strength before you go south. And this time you will not go afoot or alone. An appointed emissary of the Mexíca must go in pomp, especially when he is to confer with gods. I will provide for you a stately litter and strong bearers and an armed escort, and you will wear your richest Eagle Knight regalia."

As we prepared to bed down, by the combined light of the setting moon and the dying campfires, Motecuzóma called for one of his swift-messengers. He gave instructions to the man, and the runner immediately set off for Tenochtítlan, to take word to my household of my impending return. It was thoughtful of the Speaker to do that, and it was well intentioned, so that my servants and my wife Béu Ribé should have time to prepare a fitting reception for my homecoming. But the actual effect of that reception was nearly to kill me, and then to make me nearly kill Béu.

I made my way through the streets of Tenochtítlan at the next midday. Because I was as unprepossessing as any beggar leper, and almost as immodestly exposed as a genital-proud Huaxtecatl, the passing people either made a wide circuit around me or ostentatiously drew their mantles close to avoid brushing against me. But when I reached my home quarter of Ixacualco I began to meet remembered neighbors, and they greeted me civilly enough. Then I saw my own house, and its mistress standing in the open door at the top of the street stairs, and I raised my topaz for a look at her, and I almost fell at that moment, right there in the street. It was Zyanya waiting for me.

She stood in the bright light of day, dressed only in blouse and skirt, her lovely head bare—and the unique, the beautiful white streak was clearly visible in her flowing black hair. The shock of the illusion was like the shock of a blow that deranged all my body's senses and organs. I suddenly seemed to be looking out from underwater, from inside a whirlpool; the street's houses and people moved in circles about me. My throat constricted, and my breath would go neither in nor out. My heart bounded first in joy, then in frenzied protest at the strain; it hammered even harder than it had lately done during strenuous hill climbs. I tottered and groped for the support of a nearby torch-lamp post.

"Záa!" she cried, catching hold of me. I had not seen her come running. "Are you wounded? Are you ill?"

"Are you really Zyanya?" I managed to say, in a thin voice squeezed out through my tightened throat. The street had darkened in my sight, but I could still see the gleam of that strand of her hair.

"My dear!" was all she replied. "My dear... old... Záa..." and she held me close against her soft, warm bosom.

I said what seemed obvious to my addled mind, "Then you are not here. I am there." I laughed for sheer happiness at being dead. "You have waited for me all this time... on the nearmost border of the far country..."

"No, no, you are not dead," she crooned. "You are only weary. And I was thoughtless. I should have saved the surprise."

"Surprise?" I said. My vision was clearing and steadying, and I lifted my eyes from her breast to her face. It was Zyanya's face, and it was beautiful beyond the beauty of all other women, but it was not my remembered Zyanya at twenty. The face was as old as mine, and the dead do not age. Somewhere Zyanya was still young, and Cozcatl was younger yet, and old Blood Glutton was still lustily ageless, and my daughter Nochipa would forever be a child of twelve. Only I, Dark Cloud, was left in this world, to endure the ever darker and cloudier age of never.

Béu Ribé must have seen something frightful in my eyes. She let go of me and warily stepped backward. My heart's wildness and the other symptoms of shock had ceased; I merely felt cold all over. I stood erect and I said grimly:

"This time you deliberately pretended. This time you did it on purpose."

Continuing slowly to edge away from me, she said in a quaver, "I thought—I hoped it would please you. I thought, if your wife again looked the way you had loved her..." When her voice trailed away in a whisper, she cleared her throat to say, "Záa, you know the one and only visible difference between us was her hair."

I said through my teeth, "The only difference!" and I took from my shoulder my empty leather water bag.

Béu went on desperately, "So last night, when the messenger told of your return, I made lime water and I bleached just this one lock. I thought you might... accept me... for a while at least..."

"I could have died!" I gritted. "And I gladly would have done. But not for you! I promise, this will be the last of your cursed trickeries and sorceries and indignities heaped upon me."

I had the straps of the leather bag in my right hand. With my left, I lunged to seize her wrist, and I twisted it so she sprawled on the earth.

Absurdly, she cried, "Záa, there is white in your own hair now!"

Our neighbors and some other folk were standing along the street, and they had been simpering to see my wife run to embrace the traveler come home. They stopped that fond smiling when I began to beat her. I truly do think I would have done her to death if I had had the strength and the endurance. But I was weary, as she had remarked, and I was not young, as she had also remarked.

Even so, the flailing leather ripped her light clothing to ribbons, and then scattered the scraps, so that she lay there naked except for a few remaining rags around her neck. Her body of honeyed copper, which could have been Zyanya's body, was striped with vivid red welts, but my strength had not been sufficient to break her skin and draw blood. When I could whip no more, she had fainted from the pain. I left her lying there naked to the gaze of all who cared to look, and I staggered to my house stairs, myself half dead again.

The old woman Turquoise, older yet, was peeking fearfully from the door. I had no voice to speak; I could only gesture for her to see to her mistress. Somehow I made my way up the stairs to the upper floor of the house. Only one bedchamber had been made ready: the one that had been mine and Zyanya's. Its bed was piled high with soft quilts, the top one invitingly turned down on both sides. I cursed, and lurched into the spare chamber, and with great effort unrolled the quilts stored there, and let myself fall limply face forward onto them. I fell into sleep as sometime I will fall into death and into Zyanya's arms.

I slept until the middle of the next day, and old Turquoise was hovering anxiously outside my door when I awoke. The door to the main bedchamber was closed, and no sound came from beyond it. I did not inquire into Béu's condition. I commanded Turquoise to heat water for my bath trough and stones for my steam closet, and to lay out clean clothes for me, and then to start cooking and not to stop until I gave the order. When I had finally had enough of alternate steaming and soaking, and had dressed, I went downstairs and all by myself ate and drank enough for three men.

As the servant was setting down the second platter and perhaps the third jug of chocolate, I told her, "I shall be wanting all the apparel and armor and other accessories of my Eagle Knight garb. When you are finished serving, please get them from wherever they are stored, and see that they are freshly aired, that all the feathers are preened, that all is in perfect order. But right now, send Star Singer to me."

In a tremulous old voice, she said, "I regret to tell you, master, but Star Singer died of the cold of last winter."

I said I was sorry to hear that. "Then you must do the errand, Turquoise, before you attend to my wardrobe and regalia. You will go to the palace—"

She recoiled and gasped, "I, master? To the palace? Why, the guards would not let me near the great door!"

"Tell them you come from me and they will," I said impatiently. "You are to speak a message to the Uey-Tlatoani and to no one else."

She gasped again, "To the Uey—!"

"Hush, woman! You are to tell him this. Memorize it. Just this. "The Lord Speaker's emissary requires no more rest. Dark Cloud is prepared to start upon his mission as soon as the Lord Speaker can make ready the escort."

And so, without seeing Waiting Moon again, I went off to meet the waiting gods.

I H S

S.C.C.M.

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

Most High Majesty, Preeminent among Princes: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this eve of Corpus Christi in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty and one, greeting.

We write this with woe and anger and contrition. In our last letter, we expressed our elation at our Sovereign's sage observation regarding the possible—nay, the seemingly irrefutable—resemblance between the Indians' deity called Quetzalcoatl and our Christian St. Thomas. Alas, we must now, with chagrin and embarrassment, impart some bad news.

We hasten to say that no doubt has been cast upon Your Most Benevolent Majesty's brilliant theory per se. But we must tell you that your devoted chaplain was overly impetuous in adducing evidence to support that hypothesis.

What seemed to us certain proof of our Sovereign's supposition was the otherwise unaccountable presence here of the Host, secreted in that native-made pyx at the ancient city of Tula. We have but recently learned, from listening to our resident Aztec's narrative—as Your Majesty will learn from reading the transcribed pages herewith—that we were deceived by what was no more than a superstitious act of the Indians, committed only a comparatively few years ago. And they were abetted in that by an evidently failed or apostate Spanish priest who had earlier dared an unspeakably profane act of larceny. Wherefore, we have regretfully written to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, confessing our gullibility and requesting that they ignore that false item of evidence. Since all the other apparent links between St. Thomas and the mythical Feathery Snake are purely circumstantial, it is to be expected that the Congregatio will, at least until more tenable proofs are forthcoming, dismiss Your Majesty's suggestion that the Indian deity could in reality have been the Apostle Thomas making an evangelical sojourn in this New World.

It grieves us to make such a disheartening report, but we maintain that it was not the fault of our eagerness to make even more evident the astuteness of our Most Admired Majesty. It was entirely the fault of this ape of an Aztec!

He was aware that we had come into possession of that pyx containing the Sacrament, preserved fresh and intact and, as we judged, for perhaps fifteen centuries. He was aware of the marveling excitement which it engendered in us and in every other Christian in these lands. The Indian could at that time have told us how that object came to be where it was found. He could have averted our premature exclamations over that discovery, and the many church services held to celebrate it, and the high reverence in which we held that apparently divine relic. Above all, he could have prevented our making a fool of ourself by so hurriedly and mistakenly reporting the matter to Rome.

But no. The despicable Aztec watched all the excitement and jubilation, no doubt with concealed and malicious merriment, and said not a word to disabuse us of our joyous misapprehensions. Not until too late, and in the chronological course of his narrative, and only casually, does he make mention of the true origin of those Communion wafers and the manner of their having been secreted at Tula! We ourself feel sufficiently humiliated, knowing how our superiors at Rome will be amused by or disparaging of our having been victimized by a hoax. But we feel immeasurably more contrite because, in our haste to inform the Congregatio, we seemed to impute a similar gullibility to our Most Respected Emperor and King, albeit the deed was done with all good intent of giving Your Majesty due credit for what should have been a reason for rejoicing among Christians everywhere.

We beg and trust that you will see fit to put the blame for our mutual embarrassment where it belongs: on the tricksome and treacherous Indian, whose silence, it is now evident, can be almost as outrageous as some of his utterances. (In the next pages, if you can believe it even when you read it, Sire, he uses the noble Castilian language as an excuse to speak words which surely have never before been deliberately inflicted on the ears of any other Bishop anywhere!) Perhaps our Liege will now take cognizance that, when this creature so brazenly makes jape of Your Majesty's vicar, there can be no question but that, by extension, he makes jape of Your Majesty as well, and not at all unintentionally. Perhaps, Sire, you will at last agree that the day is considerably overdue when we might dispense with the employment of this depraved old barbarian whose unwelcome presence and unwholesome disclosures we have now endured for more than a year and a half.

Please to forgive the brevity and acrimony and unmannerly curtness of this communication, Your Majesty. We are at present too vexed and discomposed to write at greater length or with the mansuetude fitting to our holy office.

May all the goodness and virtue that shine from Your Radiant Majesty continue to illumine the world. Such is the prayer of Your S.C.C.M.'s devoted (if chastened) chaplain,

(ecce signum) Zumárraga

UNDECIMA PARS

Ayyo! After so long neglect, Your Excellency joins us once again. But I believe I can divine the reason. I am now about to speak of those new-come gods, and gods clearly are of interest to a man of God. We are honored by your presence, my Lord Bishop. And not to demand too much of Your Excellency's valuable time, I will hasten my tale to that encounter with those gods. I will only digress to tell of a meeting with one small and lesser being on the road, for that being was later to prove not small at all.

I left Tenochtítlan on the day after the day I had returned to it, and I left in style. Since the fearsome smoking star was not in evidence in the daytime, the streets were crowded with people, and they ogled my parade of departure. I wore my ferociously beaked helmet and feathered armor of an Eagle Knight, and I carried my shield bearing the feather-worked symbols of my name. However, as soon as I had crossed the causeway, I entrusted those things to the slave who carried my flag of rank and my other regalia. I put on more comfortable clothing for the journey, and did not again dress in all my finery except when we came to one or another important community along the way, where I wished to impress the local ruler with my own importance.

The Uey-Tlatoani had provided a gilded and bejeweled litter in which I rode whenever I tired of walking, and another litter full of gifts for me to present to the Xiu chief Ah Tutal, besides other gifts which I was to present to the gods—if gods they proved to be, and if they did not scorn such offerings. In addition to my litter bearers and the porters carrying our travel provisions, I was accompanied by a troop of Motecuzóma's tallest, most robust and imposing palace guards, all of then formidably armed and magnificently garbed.

I need hardly say that no bandits or other villains dared to attack such a train. I need hardly describe the hospitality with which we were received and regaled at every stop along our route. I will recount only what happened when we spent one night at Coatzacoalcos, that market town on the northern coast of the narrowest land between the two great seas.

I and my party arrived near sunset on one of the town's apparently busiest market days, so we did not push into its center to be quartered as distinguished visitors. We merely made camp in a field outside the town, where other late-arriving trains were doing the same. The one that settled nearest ours was the train of a slave trader herding to market a considerable number of men, women, and children. After our company had eaten, I sauntered over to the slave camp, half thinking that I might find a suitable replacement for my late servant Star Singer, and that I might strike a good bargain if I bought one of the men before they went up for bidding in the town market on the morrow.

The pochtéatl told me he had acquired his human herd, by ones and twos, from such inland Olméca tribes as the Coatlicamac and Cupilco. His string of male slaves was literally a string: they traveled and rested and ate and even slept all linked together by a long rope threaded through each man's pierced nose septum. The women and girls, however, were left free to do the work of making the camp, laying the fires, doing the cooking, fetching water and wood and such. As I strolled about, idly eyeing the wares, one young girl carrying a jug and a gourd dipper shyly approached me and sweetly asked:

"Would my Lord Eagle Knight care for a refreshing drink of cool water? At the far side of the field, there is a clear river running to the sea, and I dipped this long enough ago that all the impurities have settled."

I looked at her across the gourd as I sipped. She was plainly a back-country girl, short and slender, not very clean, dressed in a knee-length blouse of cheap sackcloth. But she was not coarse or dark of complexion; in a soft and unformed adolescent way, she was quite pretty. She was not, like every other female in the neighborhood, chewing tzictle, and she was obviously not as ignorant as might have been expected.

"You addressed me in Náhuatl," I said. "How do you come to speak it?"

The girl put on a woebegone expression and murmured, "One does much traveling, being repeatedly bought and sold. It is at least an education of sorts. I was born to the Coatlicamac tongue, my lord, but I have learned some of the Maya dialects and the trade language of Náhuatl."

I asked her name. She said, "Ce-Malinali."

"One Grass?" I said. "That is only a calendar date, and only half a name."

"Yes," she sighed tragically. "Even the slave children of slave parents receive a seventh-birthday name, but I never did. I am less than a slave born of slaves, Lord Knight. I have been an orphan since my birth."

She explained. Her unknown mother was some Coatlicamatl drab, made pregnant by some unknown one of the many men who had straddled her. The woman had given birth in a farm furrow one day while working in the fields, as casually as she would have defecated, and had left the newborn infant there, as uncaringly as she would have left her excrement. Some other woman, less heartless, or perhaps herself childless, had found the abandoned baby before it perished, and had taken it home and given it succor.

"But who that kindly rescuer was, I no longer remember," said Ce-Malinali. "I was still a child when she sold me—for maize to eat—and I have been passed from owner to owner since then." She put on the look of one who has suffered long but persevered. "I know only that I was born on the day One Grass in the year Five House."

I exclaimed, "Why, that was the very day and year of my own daughter's birth in Tenochtítlan. She too was Ce-Malinali until she became Zyanya-Nochipa at the age of seven. You are small for your age, child, but you are precisely the age she—"

The girl interrupted excitedly, "Then perhaps you would buy me, Lord Knight, to be personal maid and companion to your young lady daughter!"

"Ayya," I mourned. "That other Ce-Malinali... she died... nearly three years ago...."

"Then buy me to be your house servant," she urged. "Or to wait upon you as your daughter would have done. Take me with you when you return to Tenochtítlan. I will do any kind of work or"—she demurely lowered her eyelashes—"any not daughterly service my lord might crave." I was drinking again from the dipper at that moment, and I spluttered the water. She said hastily, "Or you can sell me in Tenochtítlan, if my lord is perhaps beyond the age of such cravings."

I snapped, "Impudent little vixen, the women I crave I do not have to buy!"

She did not cringe at my words; she said boldly, "And I do not wish to be bought just for my body. Lord Knight, I have other qualities—I know it—and I yearn for the opportunity to make use of those qualities." She grasped my arm to emphasize her pleading. "I want to go where I will be appreciated for more than just my being a young female. I want to try my fortunes in some great city. I have ambitions, my lord, I have dreams. But they are vain if I am condemned to be forever a slave in these dreary provinces."

I said, "A slave is a slave, even in Tenochtítlan."

"Not always, not necessarily forever," she insisted. "In a city of civilized men, my worth and intelligence and aspirations could perhaps be recognized. A lord might elevate me to the status of concubine, and then even make me a free woman. Do not some lords free their slaves, when they prove deserving?"

I said they did; even I had once done so.

"Yes," she said, as if she had wrung some concession from me. She squeezed my arm, and her voice became wheedling. "You do not require a concubine, Lord Knight. You are a man stalwart and handsome enough that you need not buy your women. But there are others—old or ugly men—who must and do. You could sell me at a profit to one of those in Tenochtítlan."

I suppose I should have sympathized with the child. I too had once been young, and brimming with ambition, and I had yearned to try the challenge of the greatest city of them all. But there was something so hard and intense about the way in which Ce-Malinali tried to ingratiate herself that I found her less than appealing. I said, "You seem to have a very high opinion of yourself, girl, and a very low opinion of men."

She shrugged. "Men have always used women for their pleasure. Why should not one woman use men for her advancement? Although I do not like the act of sex, I can pretend to. Although I have not yet been often used, I have become quite good at it. If that talent can help lift me from slavery... well... I have heard that a concubine of a high lord may enjoy more privilege and power than his legitimate first lady. And even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca collects concubines, does he not?"

I laughed. "Little bitch, you have high ambitions indeed."

She said tartly, "I know I have more to offer than a hole between my legs that is still invitingly tight and tender. A man can buy a techíchi bitch and get that!"

I disengaged her grip on my arm. "Know this, girl. Sometimes a man may keep a dog just to have an affectionate companion. I discern no capacity for affection in you. A techíchi can also be a nourishing meal. You are not clean or appetizing enough to be cooked. You are articulate for one of your age and low origins. But you are only a backwoods brat with nothing to offer except windy boasts and ill-concealed greed and a pathetic notion of your own importance. You admit that you do not even like to employ that vaunted tight hole of yours, which is your only worth. If you exceed any of your sister slaves in any respect, it is merely in vainglorious presumption."

She raged at me. "I can go yonder to the river and wash myself clean—make myself appetizing—and you would not reject me! In fine clothes I can pass for a fine lady! I can pretend affection, and make even you believe it genuine!" She paused, then sneered, "What other woman has ever done otherwise with you, my lord, when she aspired to be something more than a receptacle for your tepúli?"

My fingers twitched to punish her impertinence, but the grubby slave was too nearly grown to be spanked like a child, and too young to be whipped like an adult. So I only put my hands on her shoulders, but I held her hard enough to hurt, and I said between my teeth:

"It is true that I have known other females like you: venal and deceitful and perfidious. But I have known others who were not. One of them was my daughter, born to the same name you wear, and had she lived she would have made it a name to be proud of." I could not suppress my rising anger, and my voice rose with it: "Why did she die, and you live?"

I shook that Ce-Malinali so fiercely that she dropped the water jar. It broke with a crash and a splash, but I paid no heed to that portent of misfortune. I shouted so loudly that heads turned throughout the camp, and the slave trader came running to beg that I not mishandle his merchandise. I think, in that moment, I had been briefly granted the vision of a far-seer, and it had shown me a glimpse of the future, because what I shouted was this:

"You will make that name vile and filthy and contemptible, and all people will spit when they speak it!"

I note Your Excellency's impatience at my dwelling on an encounter that must seem meaningless. But the episode, though brief, was not trivial. Who that girl was, and who she became in womanhood, and what was the ultimate outcome of her precocious ambitions—all those things are of utmost significance. But for that child, Your Excellency might not now be our excellent Bishop of Mexíco.

I had forgotten her myself by the time I fell asleep that night, under the ill-omened smoking star that hung in the black sky above. The next day I and my company moved on, beyond Coatzacoalcos, and kept to the coast, passing through the cities of Xicalanca and Kimpech, and at last we came to the place where the presumed gods waited, in the town called Tihó, capital of the Xiu branch of the Maya people, at the northern extremity of the Uluumil Kutz peninsula. On arrival, I was attired in all the splendor of my Eagle Knight regalia, and of course we were respectfully received by the personal guard troops of the Xiu chief Ah Tutal, and we were conducted through the streets of the all-white city in solemn procession to his palace. It was not much of a palace; one does not expect much grandeur among any of the remnant Maya. But its one-floor, thatched-roof buildings of adobe brick were, like the rest of the town, brightly whitewashed with lime, and the palace buildings were arranged in a square around a commodious inner court.

Ah Tutal, a superbly cross-eyed gentleman of about my age, was properly impressed by the magnificence of the gifts sent him by Motecuzóma, and I was properly feasted with a welcoming banquet, and while we ate he and I conversed on matters like his health and mine and that of all our various living friends and relations. We could not have cared a little finger for such trivial exchanges; the purpose was to measure my grasp of the local dialect of the Maya tongue. When we had more or less determined the extent of my Xiu vocabulary, we got to the reason for my visit.

"Lord Mother," I said to him, for that ludicrous title is the proper way of addressing the chief of any community in those parts. "Tell me. Are they gods, these new-come strangers?"

"Knight Ek Muyal," said the Mother, using the Maya version of my name, "when I sent word to your Revered Speaker, I was sure they must be. But now..." He made a face of uncertainty.

I asked, "Could either of them be the long-gone god Quetzalcóatl who promised to return, the god you call in these lands Kukulkan?"

"No. At any rate, neither of the outlanders has the form of a feathered serpent." Then he sighed and shrugged and said, "In the absence of any marvelous aspect, how does one recognize a god? These two are passably human in appearance, though much hairier and larger than normal. They are bigger than you are."

I said, "According to tradition, other gods have adopted human bodies for a visit to the mortal world. They might understandably choose bodies of intimidating appearance."

Ah Tutal went on, "There were four in the strangely built canoe that was washed ashore on the beach north of here. But when they were brought in litters to Tihó, we discovered that two of them were dead. Can gods be dead?"

"Dead..." I mused. "Could it be that they were not yet alive? Perhaps they were spare bodies the two live ones like to carry about with them, to slip into when they desire a change."

"That never occurred to me," Ah Tutal said uncomfortably. "Certainly their other habits and appetites are most peculiar, and their language is beyond our understanding. Would not gods who take the trouble to appear human also take the trouble to speak human language?"

"There are many human languages, Lord Mother. They may have chosen to speak one that is not comprehensible in this region, but I may recognize it from my travels elsewhere."

"Lord Knight," the chief said, a trifle peevishly, "you have as many arguments as any priest. But can you argue any reason why the two beings refuse to bathe?"

I thought about it. "In water, you mean?"

He gave me a look of wondering if Motecuzóma had sent his court fool as his emissary. He said, enunciating with careful precision, "Yes, in water. What else would I mean by bathing?"

I gave a polite cough and said, "How do you know the gods are not accustomed to bathing in pure air? Or in even purer sunlight?"

"Because they stink!" said Ah Tutal, triumphantly and disgustedly at the same time. "Their bodies smell of old odors and sweats and rancid breath and encrusted dirt. If that were not bad enough, they seem content to empty their bladders and bowels out the back window of their rooms, and content to let that ordure pile up out there, and content to live with the appalling stench of it. The two seem as unacquainted with cleanliness as they are unacquainted with freedom and the good foods we provide."

I said, "What do you mean: unacquainted with freedom?"

Ah Tutal pointed through one of the lopsided windows of his throne room, indicating another low building on the opposite side of the court. "They are in there. They stay in there."

I exclaimed, "Surely you do not keep gods in captivity?"

"No, no, no! It is their own choice. I told you they behave most eccentrically. They have not emerged since their first arrival here, when they were allotted those quarters."

I said, "Forgive the question, Lord Mother. But were they perhaps rudely treated when they first came?"

Ah Tutal looked offended and said icily, "From the very first, they have been treated with cordiality, consideration, even reverence. As I said, two were dead when they got here—or convinced our best physicians that they were dead. So naturally, in accordance with civilized custom, we paid the dead every funeral honor and devotion, including the ceremonial cooking and eating of their most estimable parts and organs. It was at that time that the two live gods scuttled to their quarters, and they have sullenly stayed in there ever since."

I hazarded a guess. "Perhaps they were annoyed that you so hastily disposed of what might have been their extra bodies."

Ah Tutal threw up his hands in exasperation and said, "Well, their self-imposed seclusion would by now have starved the bodies they are wearing, if I did not regularly send to them servants bearing food and drink. Even so, the two eat only sparingly—of the fruits and vegetables and grains, not of any meat, not even delicacies like tapir and manatee. Knight Ek Muyal, I have tried assiduously to ascertain their preferences in all things, but I confess I am baffled. Take the matter of women—"

I interrupted, "Then they use women as mortal men do?"

"Yes, yes, yes," he said impatiently. "According to the women, they are human and male in every particular except their excessive hairiness. And I daresay any god equipped like a man is going to employ that equipment as a man does. If you think about it, Lord Knight, there are not a great many other ways for even a god to use it."

"You are right, of course, Lord Mother. Do go on."

"I have kept sending in women and girls, two at a time, but the outlanders have retained none of them for more than two or three consecutive nights. They keep putting them out again—for me to send others in, I suppose, so I do. None of our women seems to satisfy either of them for long. If they are hoping and hinting for some particular or peculiar kind of woman, I have no way of knowing what it would be or where to get it. I tried sending in two pretty boys one night, and the guests made a frightful commotion and beat the boys and threw them out. By now, there are not many dispensable women left in Tihó or the surrounding countryside for me to try on them. They have already had the wives and daughters of just about every Xiu except myself and others of the nobility. Furthermore, I am risking a rebellion of all our women, since I must use brute force to propel even the lowliest female slave into that fetid den. The women say that the most unnatural and the worst thing about the strangers is that even their private parts are overgrown with hair, and that the outlanders smell even more awful in that crotch of their bodies than in the reek of their breath or their armpits. Oh, I know that your Revered Speaker claims to consider me highly favored and honored to be the host of two gods, or whatever they are. But I wish Motecuzóma were here, so he could try his own skill at being custodian of two such pestiferous guests. I tell you, Knight Ek Muyal, I am beginning to find the honor more of a trial and a nuisance! And how long is it to go on? I no longer want them here, but I dare not turn them out. I thank all the other gods that I chose to house those two clear across the palace square, but even so, at the wind god's caprice, I get a whiff of those unwelcome beings and it nearly knocks me to the ground. In another day or so, the stink will need no wind to help it crawl this far. Right now, some of my courtiers are dreadfully ill of a disease the physicians say they have never encountered before. I personally think we are all beginning to be poisoned by smelling those unclean strangers. And I strongly suspect the reason for Motecuzóma's having sent me so many rich gifts. He hopes to bribe me to keep those two, and to keep them well downwind of his clean city. And I will say moreover—"

"You have been tried indeed, Lord Mother," I put in hastily, to stop his recital of his woes. "It is to your credit that you have borne this responsibility this long. But now that I am here, I may be able to make some helpful suggestions. First of all, before I am formally presented to those beings, I should like an opportunity of hearing their speech, without their knowing that I hear."

"That is easy," Ah Tutal said grumpily. "Just walk across the court and stand to one side of their window, where they cannot see you. During the day, they do nothing in there but jabber as incessantly as monkeys. Only I warn you: hold your nose."

I smiled indulgently as I excused myself from his presence, for I assumed the Mother was exaggerating in that respect, as in some of his other testy attitudes toward the outlanders. But I was wrong. When I approached their quarters, the nauseating stench almost made me bring up the meal I had just eaten. I snorted to clear my nose, and then I did hold it pinched in my fingers as I hurried to flatten myself against the building's wall. There were voices murmuring within, and I sidled closer to the door opening, where I might be able to distinguish intelligible words. Of course, Your Excellency, at that time the sounds of the Spanish language meant nothing to me, as I soon verified by listening. But I knew that moment to be a historic moment, and I stood transfixed in a sort of awe, to hear and remember, as I do to this day, the emphatic words of a strange new being who might very well be a god:

"I swear by Santiago, I am sick of fucking bald cunts!"

And the other voice said—

Ayya!

You startled me, Your Excellency. You leap with such agility for a man well into his age of never. I frankly envy your—

With all respect, Your Excellency, I regret that I cannot retract the words or apologize for them, since they were not my words. I memorized them that day only in the way a parrot does: by repeating the sounds of them. A parrot might innocently caw such sounds even in your cathedral church, Your Excellency, because a parrot cannot know what they signify. The most intelligent parrot could not possibly know, because a female parrot does not possess what you could properly call a—

Very well, Your Excellency, I will belabor the matter no further, and I will refrain from repeating the exact sounds made by the other outlander. But he said, in effect, that he likewise missed and longed for the services of a good Castilian whore, abundantly hairy in her nether parts. And that was all I could stay to overhear, without being sick from the smell and making my presence known. I hastened back to the throne room, gulping fresh air as I went, and there I told the chief Ah Tutal:

"You assuredly did not overstate the fact of their fragrance, Lord Mother. I must see them and try to speak with them, but I should definitely prefer to do that in the open."

He said, "I can have their next meal drugged, and extract them from their den while they sleep."

"No need," I said. "My guardsmen can drag them out right now."

"You would lay hands on the gods?"

"If they summon the lightning and strike us all dead," I said, "we will at least know they are gods."

They did nothing of the sort. Though they struggled and squealed as they were forcibly brought from their quarters into the open courtyard, the two outlanders were not nearly so displeased as were my guardsmen, who could scarcely suppress their retching and gagging. And when the brawny captors released their grip, the two did not leap angrily about or make threatening noises or perform any recognizable sorceries. They fell to their knees before me, and they began to babble piteously, and they made strange gestures with their hands, first clasping them before their faces, then moving them in a repeated pattern. Of course I know now that they were reciting over their clenched hands a prayer in the Christian Latin language, and that they were frantically sketching the sign of the Christian cross from forehead to heart to shoulders.

Also, it did not take me long to divine that they had stayed hidden in the safety of their quarters because they had been affrighted by the Xiu's well-intentioned disposition of their two dead companions. If the outlanders had been terrified by the Xiu, who are a people of gentle mien and simple costume, I could understand their being scared half to death when suddenly confronted by me and my Mexíca—grim-faced big men, clearly warriors, fearsomely arrayed in our battle dress of helmets and plumes and obsidian weapons.

For a time, I only stared at them through my seeing crystal, which made them quail even more abjectly. Though I am now well accustomed and resigned to the unappealing appearance of white men, I was not at that time, and I was both intrigued and repelled by the lime-whiteness of their facial skin—because in our One World white was the color of death and mourning. No human being was that color, except the infrequent tlacaztali freak. Those two at least had humanly brown eyes and black or dark brown hair, but it was uncommonly curly, and the hair atop their heads merged into equally dense growths on their cheeks, upper lips, chins, and throats. The rest of them was concealed by what seemed an inordinate amount of clothing. I am now acquainted with shirts and doublets and pantaloons and gauntlets and jackboots and such things, but I still regard them as excessively clumsy, restrictive, and probably uncomfortable, in comparison with our men's simple and unencumbering everyday costume of loincloth and mantle.

"Undress them," I commanded my guards, who grumbled and glared at me before they complied. The two outlanders again struggled and squealed, and even more loudly, as if they were being flayed of their skin instead of cloth and leather. It was we watchers who might better have complained, since each layer that was removed let free a new and more ghastly wave of fetor. And when their boots were pulled off—yya ayya!—when their boots came off, everyone else in the palace yard, myself included, retreated so hastily and so far that the two outlanders stood cringing naked at the center of an extremely wide and distant circle of onlookers.

I have earlier spoken superciliously of the filth and squalor of the Chichimeca desert dwellers, but I have explained that their dirtiness was a result of the circumstances in which they lived, and that they did bathe and comb and delouse themselves whenever they were able. The Chichimeca were garden flowers by comparison with the white men, who seemed to prefer their repulsiveness and to fear cleanliness as a mark of weakness or effeminacy. Of course, I speak of the white soldiers only, Your Excellency, all of whom, from the lowliest troopers to their Commander Cortés, shared that gross eccentricity. I am not so well acquainted with the bathing habits of the better-bred later arrivals, such as Your Excellency, but I early noticed that all such gentlemen liberally employ perfumes and pomades to give the sweet-smelling impression of being frequent bathers.

The two outlanders were not giants, as Ah Tutal's description might have led me to expect. Only one of them was actually bigger than I was, though the other was about my own size, meaning that they were indeed larger than the average male of these lands. But they stood hunched and quivering as if awaiting the lash of a whip, and they cupped their hands over their genitals like a pair of maiden's dreading ravishment, so the bigness of their bodies was less than impressive. Rather, they looked pitifully flimsy, for their body skin was even whiter than that of their faces.

I said to Ah Tutal, "I shall never be able to get close enough to interrogate them, Lord Mother, until they are washed. If they will not do it, it must be done to them."

He said, "Having now smelled them undressed, Knight Ek Muyal, I must decline the loan of my bathing troughs or steam houses. I should have to destroy and rebuild them."

"I quite agree," I said. "Simply bid your slaves bring water and soap and do it right here."

Although the chiefs slaves used tepid water, smooth ash soap, and soft bathing sponges, the objects of their attention fought and screeched as if they were being greased for the cooking spit, or scalded in the way boars are made tender for the scraping off of their bristles. While that uproar was going on, I spoke to a number of the Tihó girls and women who had spent a night or more with the outlanders. The females had learned a few words of their language, and told them to me, but they were only new words for the tepúli, the sexual act—words not very useful for a formal interrogation. The women also confided to me that the strangers' members were of a size proportionate to their big bodies, hence were admirably immense in erection, compared to the more familiar organs of the Xiu men. Any woman would delight in having such a massive tepúli at her service, they said, were it not so rancid with a lifetime's accumulation of curds that a woman might vomit at sight or scent of it. As one girl remarked, "Only a female vulture could really enjoy coupling with such creatures."

Nevertheless, the women averred, they had dutifully done their best to extend every sort of feminine hospitality—and they professed to be puzzled by the outlanders' prim and disapproving rejection of some of their preferred intimacies. Clearly, said the women, the strangers knew only one mode and one position of taking or giving pleasure, and, as bashfully and stubbornly as boys, refused to essay any variations.

Even if all other evidence had proclaimed the outlanders to be gods, the testimony of the Xiu women would have made me doubt. From what I knew of Gods, they were not at all prudish about the manner of satisfying their lusts. So I early suspected that the strangers were something other than gods, though it was not until much later that I learned they were merely good Christians. Their ignorance and inexperience of sexual variety only reflected on their adherence to Christian morality and normality, and I never knew any Spaniard to deviate from those strict standards even during the boisterous act of committing rape. I can truthfully say that I never saw a single Spanish soldier rape one of our women except in the one orifice and one position permissible to Christians.

Even when the two outlanders were adjudged as clean as they could be made, short of their being boiled for a day or two, they still were not exactly pleasant company. The slaves could do little with soap and water to improve their green mossy teeth and bad breath, for instance. But they were given clean mantles, and their own miasmic, almost crawling clothes were taken away to be burned. My guards brought the two to the corner of the courtyard where Ah Tutal and I sat on low chairs, and pushed them down to sit on the ground facing us.

Ah Tutal had thoughtfully prepared one of those perforated smoking pots, filling it with his richest picíetl and various other pungent herbs. He lighted the mixture and we each pushed a reed through one of the pot's holes and puffed great clouds of aromatic smoke to make an olfactory screen between us and the subjects of our interview. When I saw that they were trembling, I supposed it was from the chill of their drying bodies, or perhaps the intolerable shock of being clean. I later learned that they quaked because they were terrified to see, for the first time, "men breathing fire."

Well, if they did not like the look of us, I did not much like the look of them. Their faces Were even paler since they had lost several layers of ingrained dirt, and what skin was visible above their beards had not the smooth complexion of ours. One man's face was pitted all over like a chunk of lava rock. The other's face was pebbly with pimples and boils and open pustules. When I had enough command of their language to frame a delicate question on that subject, they only shrugged indifferently and said that almost all of their race, male and female, at some time in their lives endured the "small pocks." Some died of the affliction, they said, but most suffered no worse than facial disfigurement. And, since so many were similarly blemished, they did not feel that it detracted from their beauty. Maybe they did not; I thought it a most unsightly mutilation. Or I did then. Nowadays, when so many of my own people have faces pitted like lava rock, I try not to wince when I look at them.

I usually began learning a foreigner's language by pointing to nearby objects and encouraging him to speak the names by which he knew those objects. A slave girl had just then served cups of chocolate to me and Ah Tutal, so I stopped her and held her, and I flipped up her skirt to expose her feminine parts. I pointed a finger there and I said—I said what I now know is a most improper Spanish word. The two outlanders looked very much surprised and a little embarrassed. I pointed toward my own crotch and said another word which I now know better than to say in public.

It was my turn to be surprised. The two bounded to their feet, wild-eyed with distress. Then I understood their panic, and I could not help laughing. They obviously thought that, if I could order them summarily scoured, I could as easily order them castrated for having taken advantage of the local women. Still laughing, I shook my head and made other placative gestures. I pointed again to the girl's crotch and my own, saying "tipíli" and "tepúli." Then I pointed to my nose and said "yacatl." The two heaved sighs of relief and nodded to each other in comprehension. One of them pointed a shaking finger to his own nose and said "nariz." They sat down again and I began to learn the last new language I would ever need to know.

That first session did not end until well after dark, when they began to doze between words. No doubt their vigor had been sapped by their bath, perhaps the first bath in their lives, so I let them stumble to their quarters and to sleep. But I had them up early the next morning and, after one whiff of them, gave them the choice of washing themselves or again being forcibly scrubbed. Though they looked amazed and displeased that anybody should have to suffer such a thing twice in his lifetime, they chose to do it themselves. They did it every morning thereafter, and learned to do it sufficiently well that I could bear to sit with them all day long without too much discomfort. So our sessions lasted from morning to night; we even traded words while we ate the meals brought to us by the palace servants. I might also mention that the guests eventually began to eat the meat dishes, once I was able to explain from what animals they came.

Sometimes to reward my instructors' cooperation, sometimes to bolster them when they got tired and querulous, I would give them a refreshing cup or two of octli. I had brought, among Motecuzóma's "gifts for the gods," several jars of the finest grade of octli, and it was the only one of his many gifts I ever presented to them. On first tasting it, they made faces and called it "sour beer," whatever that might be. But they soon acquired a liking for it, and one night I deliberately made the experiment of letting them drink as much as they wanted. I was interested to note that they got as disgustingly drunk as any of our own people could do.

As the days passed and my vocabulary enlarged, I learned numerous things, and the most important was this. The outlanders were not gods but men, ordinary men, however extraordinary in appearance. They did not pretend to be gods, nor even any kind of spirit attendants preparing the way for the arrival of godly masters. They seemed honestly bewildered and mildly shocked when I made guarded mention of our people's expectation of gods someday returning to The One World. They earnestly assured me that no god had walked this world in more than one thousand and five hundred years, and they spoke of that one as if he were the only god. They themselves, they said, were only mortal men who, in this life and afterward, were sworn devotees of that god. While they lived in this world, they said, they were also obedient subjects of a King, who was likewise a man but a most exalted man, clearly their equivalent of a Revered Speaker.

As I shall later tell, Your Excellency, not all of our people were disposed to accept the outlanders' assertion—or mine—that they were mere men. But after my earliest association with them I never doubted that, and in time I was of course proved right. So, Your Excellency, I will henceforth speak of them not as outlanders or aliens or strangers of mysterious beings, but as men.

The man with the pimples and sores was Gonzalo Guerrero, a carpenter by trade. The man with the pitted face was Jeronimo de Aguilar, a professional scribe like the reverend friars here. It may even be that some of you could have known him at some time, for he told me that his earliest ambition had been to be a priest of his god, and that he had studied for some time in a calmécac or whatever you call your schools for priests.

The two had come, they said, from a land to the eastward, well out of sight beyond the ocean horizon. I had of course already surmised that, and I was not much further enlightened when they told me the land was called Cuba, and that Cuba was only one colony of a much greater and still more distant eastern land called Spain or Castile, from which seat of power their King ruled all his far-flung Spanish dominions. That Spain or Castile, they said, was a land in which all men and women were white of skin, except for a few inferior persons called Moors, whose skins were totally black. I might have found that last statement so incredible as to make me suspicious of everything else the men told me. But I reflected that in these lands there was born the occasional freakish white tlacaztali. In a land of all white people, why should not the freaks be black?

Aguilar and Guerrero explained that they had come to our shores purely by misadventure. They had been among some hundreds of men and women who had left Cuba in twelve of the big floating houses—ships, they called them—under the command of a Captain Diego de Nicuesa, who was taking them to populate another Spanish colony of which he was to be governor, some place called Castilla de Oro, somewhere far to the southeast of here. But the expedition had run into misfortune, which they were inclined to blame on the coming of the ill-omened "hairy comet."

A fierce storm had scattered the ships, and the one carrying them was finally blown onto sharp rocks which punctured and overturned and sank it. Only Aguilar and Guerrero and two other men had managed to flee the flooding vessel in a sort of large canoe carried upon the ship for such emergencies. To their surprise, the canoe had not been long afloat when the ocean threw it upon the beach of this land. The other two occupants of the canoe drowned in the turbulent breakers, and Aguilar. and Guerrero might have died too, had not "the red men" come running to help them to safety.

Aguilar and Guerrero expressed gratitude for their having been rescued, and hospitably received, and well fed and entertained. But they would be even more grateful, they said, if we red men would guide them back to the beach and their canoe. Guerrero the carpenter was sure he could repair any damage it had sustained, and make oars to propel it with. He and Aguilar were both sure that, if their god gave them fair weather, they could row eastward and find Cuba once more.

"Shall I let them go?" asked Ah Tutal, to whom I was translating as the interviews progressed.

I said, "If they can find the place called Cuba from here, then they should have no trouble finding Uluumil Kutz again from there. And you have heard: their Cuba seems to be teeming with white men eager to plant new colonies everywhere they can reach. Do you want them swarming here, Lord Mother?"

"No," he said worriedly. "But they might bring a physician who could cure the strange disease that is spreading among us. Our own have tried every remedy they know, but daily more persons fall ill and already three have died."

"Perhaps these men themselves would know something about it," I suggested. "Let us look at one of the sufferers."

So Ah Tutal led me and Aguilar to a hut in the town, and inside, where a doctor stood muttering and rubbing his chin and frowning down at a pallet where a young girl lay tossing in fever, her face shiny with sweat, her eyes glazed and unseeing. Aguilar's whiteness went rather pink when he recognized her as one of the females who had visited his and Guerrero's quarters.

He said slowly, so that I should understand, "I am sorry to tell you that she has the small pocks. You see? The eruptions are beginning to grow on her forehead."

I translated that to the physician, who looked professionally mistrustful, but said, "Ask him what his people do to treat it."

I did, and Aguilar shrugged and said, "They pray."

"Evidently a backward people," grunted the doctor, but added, "Ask him to which god."

Aguilar said, "Why, they pray to the Lord God!"

That was of no help, but I thought to ask, "Do you pray to that god in some manner which we might imitate?"

He tried to explain, but the explanation was of a complexity beyond my grasp of the language. So he indicated that it could more easily be demonstrated, and the three of us—Ah Tutal, the physician, and I—hurried after him back to the palace courtyard. He ran to his quarters while we stayed at a distance, and he came back to us with something in each hand.

One of the things was a small box with a tight-fitting cover. Aguilar opened it to show its contents: a considerable number of small disks that appeared to have been cut from heavy white paper. He attempted another explanation, from which I gathered that he had illicitly kept or stolen the box as a memento of his days in the priest school. And I further understood that the disks were a special sort of bread, the most holy and potent of all foods, because a person who ate one of them partook of the strength of that almighty Lord God.

The other object was a string of many small beads irregularly interspersed among numerous larger ones. All the beads were of a blue substance that I had never seen before: as blue and hard as turquoise but as transparent as blue water. Aguilar started another complex explanation, of which I heard only the information that each bead represented a prayer. Naturally I was reminded of the practice of placing a jadestone chip in the mouth of someone dead, and I thought the prayer beads might be similarly and beneficially employed by the not yet dead. So I interrupted Aguilar to ask urgently:

"Do you put the prayers in the mouth, then?"

"No, no," he said. "They are held in the hands." Then he gave a cry of protest as I snatched the box and beads from him.

"Here, Lord Physician," I said to the doctor. I broke the string and gave him two of the beads, and I translated what little I had comprehended of Aguilar's instructions: "Take the girl's hands and clench each hand around one of these prayers—"

"No, no!" Aguilar wailed. "Whatever you are doing, it is wrong! There is more to prayer than just—"

"Be quiet!" I snapped, in his language. "We have not time for more!"

I fumbled some of the papery little bits of bread from the box and put one in my mouth. It tasted like paper, and it dissolved on my tongue without my having to chew it. I felt no instant surge of god strength, but at least I realized the bread could be fed to the girl even in her half-conscious condition.

"No, no!" Aguilar shouted yet again, when I ate the thing. "This is unthinkable! You cannot receive the Sacrament!

He regarded me with the same expression of horror that I see right now on Your Excellency's face. I am sorry for my impulsive and shocking behavior. But you must remember that I was only an ignorant pagan then, and I was concerned with hurrying to save a girl's life. I pressed some of the little disks into the doctor's hand and told him:

"This is god food, magic food, and easy to eat. You can force them into her mouth without the risk of choking her."

He went off at a run, or as much of a run as his dignity would permit—

In much the way that His Excellency has just now done.

I clapped Aguilar companionably on the shoulder and said, "Forgive me for taking the matter out of your hands. But if the girl is cured, you will get the credit, and you will be much honored by these people. Now let us find Guerrero and sit and talk some more about your people."

There were still many things I wished to learn from Jeronimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero. And, since by then we could converse with fair comprehension, albeit haltingly, they were equally curious about things in these lands. They asked some questions that I pretended not to understand: "Who is your King? Does he command great armies? Does he possess great riches of gold?" And some questions that I truly did not understand: "Who are your Dukes and Counts and Marquises? Who is the Pope of your Church?" And some questions that I daresay no one could answer: "Why do your women have no hair down there?" So I warded off their questions by asking my own, and they answered all of them with no perceptible hesitation or suspicion or guile.

I could have stayed with them for at least a year, improving my grasp of their language and constantly thinking of new things to ask. But I made the precipitate decision to leave their company when, two or three days after our visit to the ailing girl, the physician came to me and silently beckoned. I followed him to that same hut, and looked down at the girl's dead face, hideously bloated beyond recognition and flushed to a gruesome purple color.

"All her blood vessels burst and her tissues swelled," said the doctor "including those inside her nose and mouth. She died in an agony of simply trying to breathe." He added disparagingly, "The god food you gave me worked no magic."

I asked, "And how many sufferers have you cured, Lord Physician, without recourse to that magic?"

"None," he sighed, and his pomposity deflated. "Nor have any of my colleagues saved a single patient. Some die like this, of strangulation. Some die with a gush of blood from the nose and mouth. Some die in raving delirium. I fear that all will die, and die miserably."

Looking at the ruin of what had been quite a pretty child, I said, "She told me, this very girl, that only a vulture could take pleasure from the white men. She must have had a true premonition. The vultures will now be pleased to gorge on her carrion, and her dying was somehow the doing of the white men."

When I returned to the palace and reported to Ah Tutal, he said emphatically, "I will no longer have the diseased and unclean strangers here!" I could not make out whether his crossed eyes glared at me or past me, but they were undeniably angry. "Do I let them go away in their canoe, or do you take them to Tenochtítlan?"

"Neither," I said. "And do not kill them either, Lord Mother, at least until you receive permission from Motecuzóma. I would suggest that you get rid of them by giving them into slavery. Give them to the chiefs of tribes well distant from here. The chiefs should feel flattered and honored by such gifts. Not even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca has a white slave."

"Um... yes..." Ah Tutal said thoughtfully. "There are two chiefs I particularly dislike and distrust. It would not grieve me should the white men bring misery on them." He regarded me more kindly. "But you were sent all this way, Knight Ek Muyal, to find the outlanders. What will Motecuzóma say when you return empty-handed?"

"Not quite empty-handed," I said. "I will take back at least the box of god food and the little blue prayers., and I have learned many things to tell to Motecuzóma." A sudden thought struck me. "Oh, yes, Lord Mother, there could be one other thing to show him. If any of your females who lay with the white men should prove pregnant, and if they do not fall victim to the small pocks—well, if there are offspring, send them to Tenochtítlan. The Revered Speaker can put them on display in the city menagerie. They ought to be monsters unique among monsters."

Word of my returning to Tenochtítlan must have preceded me by several days, and Motecuzóma must certainly have been simmering with impatience to know what news—or what visitors—I might be bringing. But he was the same old Motecuzóma, and I was not ushered immediately into his presence. I had to stop in the corridor outside his throne room, and change from my Eagle Knight costume into the sackcloth of a supplicant, and then do the ordained adulatory ritual of kissing the earth all the way across the chamber to where he sat between the gold and silver gongs. Despite his cool and unhurried reception of me, though, he was obviously determined to be the first to hear my report—perhaps the only one to hear—for the other members of his Speaking Council were not present. He did allow me to dispense with the formality of speaking only when queried, and I told him all that I have thus far told you, reverend friars, and a few other things I had learned from your two countrymen:

"As best I can calculate, Lord Speaker, it was about twenty years ago that the first floating houses, called ships, set out from that distant land of Spain to explore the ocean to the west of it. They did not then reach our coast because it seems there are a great many islands, large and small, between here and Spain. There were people already resident on those islands and, from the description, I take them to have been something like the barbaric Chichimeca of our northern lands. Some of those islanders fought to repel the white men, some of them meekly allowed the incursion, but all by now have been made subject to those Spaniards and their King. During the past twenty years, then, the white men have been occupied with settling colonies on those islands, and plundering their resources, and trading between the islands and their Spanish homeland. Only a few of their ships, moving from one island to another, or idly exploring, or blown astray by the wind, have until now even glimpsed these lands. We might hope that the islands will keep the white men busy for many more years, but I beg leave to doubt it. Even the biggest island is only an island, therefore limited in riches worth taking and land worth populating. Also, the Spaniards seem insatiable both in their curiosity and in their rapacity. They are already seeking beyond the islands for new discoveries and new opportunities. Soon or later, their seeking will bring them to these lands. It will be as the Revered Speaker Nezahualpili foretold: an invasion, for which we had best prepare."

"Prepare!" snorted Motecuzóma, probably stung by the memory of Nezahualpili's having supported that prophecy by winning the tlachtli contest. "That aged fool prepares by sitting down and sitting still. He will not even help me war against the insufferable Texcalteca."

I did not remind him of what else Nezahualpili had said: that all our peoples should cease the perpetuation of old enmities and unite against that impending invasion.