Aztec

S.C.C.M.

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

May the serene and beneficent light of Our Lord Jesus Christ shine everlastingly upon Your Majesty Don Carlos, divinely appointed Emperor, etc., etc.

Most August Majesty: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this eve of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.

Your Majesty commands that we continue to send additional portions of the so-called Aztec History "as quickly as the pages are compiled." This grievously astounds and offends your well-intentioned chaplain, Sire. We would not, for all the realms in Your Majesty's domain, dream of disputing our sovereign's desires and decisions. But we thought we had made plain in our earlier letter our objections to this chronicle—which grows daily more detestable—and we hoped that the recommendation of Your Majesty's own delegated Bishop would not be so casually disdained.

We are cognizant of Your Gracious Majesty's concern for the most minute information regarding even the most remote of your subjects, that you may the more wisely and beneficently govern them. Indeed, we have respected that praiseworthy concern ever since the very first task to which Your Majesty personally set us: the extermination of the witches of Navarre. That once dissident province has been, since that sublime and prodigious purging by fire, among the most obedient and subservient of all under Your Majesty's sovereignty. Your humble servant intends equal assiduity in rooting out the age-old evils of these newer provinces—putting the curb rein to vice and the spurs to virtue—thus bringing them likewise to submission to Your Majesty and the Holy Cross.

Surely nothing can be undertaken in Your Majesty's service which will not be blessed by God. And, of a certainty, Your Most Puissant Lordship should know of matters regarding this land, for it is so limitless and marvelous that Your Majesty may well call yourself Emperor of it with no less pride than you do of Germany, which by the grace of God is now also Your Majesty's possession.

Nevertheless, in supervising the transcription of this history of what is now New Spain, only God knows how racked and outraged and nauseated we have been by the narrator's unquenchable effluxion. The Aztec is an Aeolus with an inexhaustible bag of winds. We could not complain of that if he confined himself to what we have asked: that is, an account in the manner of St. Gregory of Tours and other classical historians—names of distinguished personages, brief summaries of their careers, prominent dates, battles, etc.

But this human cataract cannot be restrained from his divagations into the most sordid and repellent aspects of his people's history and his own. Granted, this Indian was a heathen until his baptism no more than a few years ago. The infernal atrocities he committed and witnessed in his earlier life we must charitably concede were done or condoned in ignorance of Christian morality. Still, he is now at least nominally a Christian. One would expect him, if he must dwell on the more bestial episodes of his life and times, to manifest a decent and humble contrition befitting the horrors he describes in such lascivious detail.

He does not. He recognizes no horror in those enormities.

He does not so much as blush at the many offenses to our Lord and to common decency which he is dinning into the ears of our reverend friar-scribes: idolatry, pretense of magic, superstitions, bloodthirst and bloodletting, obscene and unnatural acts, other sins so vile that we here forbear even to name them. Except for Your Majesty's command that all "be set forth in much detail," we would not allow our scribes to commit portions of the Aztec's narrative to the permanence of parchment.

However, Your Majesty's servant has never yet disobeyed a royal order. We will try to regard the Indian's pernicious maunderings merely as evidence that during his lifetime the Adversary arranged many sorts of temptations and trials for him, God permitting it for the stoutening of the Aztec's soul. This, we remind ourself, is no small evidence of the greatness of God, for He chooses not the wise and strong but the simple-minded and weak to be equally instruments and beneficiaries of His mercy. The law of God, we remind ourself, obliges us to extend an extra meed of tolerance to those upon whose lips the milk of the Faith is not yet dry, rather than to those who have already absorbed it and are accustomed to it.

So we will try to contain our disgust. We will keep the Indian with us and let him continue to spew his sewage, at least until we hear of Your Majesty's response to these further pages of his story. Fortunately, we have no other urgent need for his five attendants at this time. And the creature's only recompense is that we allow him a share of our simple fare, and a straw sleeping mat in an unused store closet off the cloister for his use on those nights when he does not take our table scraps to his apparently ailing wife, and spend the night ministering to her.

But we are confident that we shall soon be rid of the Aztec and the foul miasma which we feel surrounding him. We know that when you read the following pages. Sire—indescribably more horripilating than the previous portion—you will share our revulsion and will cry, "No more of this filth!" much as David cried, "Publish it not, lest the unbelievers rejoice!" We will eagerly—nay, anxiously—await Your Esteemed Majesty's command, by the next courier ship, that all pages compiled in the meantime be destroyed and that we oust this reprehensible barbarian from our precincts.

May God Our Lord watch over and preserve Your Most Excellent Majesty for many years in His holy service. Of Your S.C.C.M., the loyal and prayerful chaplain,

(ecce signum) Zumárraga

ALTER PARS

His Excellency does not attend today, my lord scribes? Am I to continue, then? Ah, I see. He will read your pages of my words at his leisure.

Very well. Then let me leave, for now, my overly personal chronicle of my family and myself. Lest you get the impression that I and the few other persons I have mentioned lived in some kind of isolation, apart from the rest of humanity, let me give you a broader view. In my mind, in my recollection, I shall step back and away, so to speak, that I may better make you see our relation to our world as a whole. The world we called Cem-Anáhuac, meaning The One World.

Your explorers early discovered that it is situated between two boundless oceans east and west. The humid Hot Lands at the oceans' edges extend not far inland before they slant upward to become towering mountain ranges, and with a high plateau between those eastern and western ranges. This plateau is so near the sky that the air is thin and clean and sparkling clear. Our days here are almost always springtime mild, even during the midsummer rainy season—until the dry winter comes, when Tititl, god of the year's shortest days, chooses to make some of those days chilly or even achingly cold.

The most populous part of all The One World is this great bowl or depression in the plateau, which you now call the Valley of Mexíco. Here are puddled the lakes that made this area so attractive to human habitation. In actuality, there is only one tremendous lake, pinched in two places by encroaching highlands, so that there are three large bodies of water connected by slightly narrower straits. The smallest and southernmost of these lakes is of fresh water, fed by clear streams melting from the snows of the mountains there. The northernmost lake, where I spent my earliest years, is of reddish and briny water, because it is surrounded by mineral lands which leach their salts into the water. The central lake, Texcóco, bigger than the other two together and composed of their mingled salty and fresh waters, is thus of a slightly brackish quality.

Despite there being only one lake—or three, if you like—we have always divided them by five names. The dun-colored Lake Texcóco aione bears a single name. The southern and most crystalline lake is called Xochimilco in its upper part: The Flower Garden, because that neighborhood is the nursery of precious plants for all the lands about. In its lower part, the lake is called Chalco, after the Chalca nation which borders it. The northernmost lake, though also a single body of water, is likewise divided. The people who live on Tzumpanco, The Skull-Shaped Island, call its upper half Lake Tzumpanco. The people of my native Xaltócan, Island of Field Mice, call their portion Lake Xaltócan.

In a sense, I might liken these lakes to our gods—our former gods. I have heard you Christians complain of our "multitudes" of gods and goddesses, who held dominion over every facet of nature and of human behavior. I have heard you complain that you never can sort out and understand the workings of our crowded pantheon. However, I have counted and compared. I do not believe that we relied on so many major and minor deities as you do—the Lord God, the Son Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary—plus all those other Higher Beings you call Angels and Apostles and Saints, each of them the governing patron of some single facet of your world, your lives, your tonaltin, even every single day in the calendar. In truth, I believe we recognized fewer deities, but we charged each of ours with more diverse functions.

To a geographer, there is but one lake here in the valley. To a boatman laboriously paddling his acáli, there are three broad bodies of water, interconnected. To the people who live on or around the lakes, there are five, distinguished by separate names. Just so, no one of our gods and goddesses had but one face, one responsibility, one name. Like our lake of three lakes, a single god might embody a trinity of aspects....

That makes you scowl, reverend friars? Very well, a god might have two aspects, or five. Or twenty.

Depending on the time of year: wet season or dry, long days or short, planting time or harvest time—and depending on circumstances: wartime or peacetime, feast or famine, kind rulers or cruel—a single god's duties would vary, and so would his attitude toward us, and so would our mode of worshiping or celebrating or placating him. To look at it another way, our lives and harvests and battle triumphs or failures might depend on the temperament and transient moods of the god. He could be, like the three lakes, bitter or sweet or blankly indifferent, as he chose.

Meanwhile, both the god's prevailing mood and the current happenings in our world could be differently viewed by different followers of that god. A victory for one army is a defeat for another, is that not so? Thus the god or goddess might be simultaneously regarded as rewarding and punishing, demanding and giving, doing good and evil. If you grasp all the infinite possible combinations of circumstances, you should be able to comprehend the variety of attributes we saw in every god, the variety of aspects each assumed, and the even greater variety of names we gave each of them—worshipful, respectful, grateful, fearful.

But I will not belabor this. Let me come back from the mystic to the physical. I will speak of things demonstrable to the five senses that even brute animals possess.

The island of Xaltócan is really a gigantic, almost solid rock, set well out from the mainland in the salty red lake. If it were not for three natural springs of fresh water bubbling up from the rock, the island would never have been populated, but in my time it supported perhaps two thousand people distributed among twenty villages. And the rock was our support in more than one sense, for it was tenextetl limestone, a valuable commodity. In its natural state, this form of limestone is quite soft and easily quarried, even with our crude tools of wood, stone, blunt copper, and brittle obsidian, so inferior to yours of iron and steel. My father was a master quarrier, one of several who directed the less expert workers. I remember one of the occasions when he took me to his quarry for instruction in his trade.

"You cannot see them," he told me, "but here—and here—run the natural fissures and striations of this particular stratum of the stone. Though they are invisible to the untrained eye, you will learn to divine them."

I never would; but he never ceased hoping. I watched while he marked the face of the stone with dabs of black oxitl. Other workers came—they were pale with sweat-caked dust—to hammer wooden wedges into the minute cracks he had marked. Then they sloshed water over the wedges. We went home and some days passed, during which the workers kept those wedges well sodden, so they would swell and exert increasing pressure inside the stone. Then my father and I went again to the quarry. We stood on the brink of it and looked down. My father said, "Watch now."

The stone might have been awaiting his presence and permission, for all of a sudden and all of its own accord, the quarry face gave a rending noise and split apart. Some of it came tumbling ponderously down in immense cubic chunks, other parts peeled off in flat square sheets, and they all fell intact into rope nets spread to receive them before they smashed on the quarry floor. We went down and my father inspected them with satisfaction.

"Only a little dressing with adzes," he said, "a little polishing with a slurry of powdered obsidian and water, and these"—he pointed to the limestone cubes—"will be perfect building blocks, while these"—the sheets as big as our house floor and as thick as my arm—"will be panels of facing."

I rubbed the surface of one of the blocks, waist high to myself. It felt both waxy and powdery.

"Oh, they are too soft for any use when they first come loose from the mother stone," said my father. He ran his thumbnail across the block and it scored a deep scratch. "After some while of exposure to the open air, they solidify, they become as strong and imperishable as granite. But our stone, while it is still malmy and workable, can be carved with any harder stone, or cut with an obsidian-grit sawing string."

Most of our island's limestone was freighted to the mainland or to the capital for use as buildings' walls and floors and ceilings. But, because of the fresh stone's easy workability, there were also sculptors busy at the quarries. Those artists chose the finest quality blocks and, while those were still soft, sculptured them into statues of our gods, rulers, and other heroes. The most perfect limestone sheets they carved into low-relief lintels and friezes with which to decorate temples and palaces. Also, using leftover chunks of stone, the artists carved the little household gods treasured by families everywhere. In our house we had small figures of Tonatíu and Tlaloc, of course, and of the maize goddess Chicomecoatl, and the hearth goddess Chintico. My sister Tzitzi even had her own private figurine of Xochiquetzal, goddess of love and flowers, to whom all young girls prayed for a suitable and loving husband.

The stone chips and other detritus from the quarries were burned in the kilns I have mentioned, from which emerged powder of lime, another valuable commodity. This is essential for the mortar used to cement a building's blocks together. It also makes a gesso for plastering and disguising buildings made of cheaper materials. Mixed with water, the lime is used for hulling the kernels of maize that our women grind into meal for tlaxcaltin tortillas and other foods. The lime was even used by a certain class of women as a cosmetic; with it they bleached their black or brown hair to an unnatural yellow hue, like that of some of your own women.

Of course the gods give nothing absolutely free of payment, and from time to time they exacted tribute from us for the wealth of limestone we dug out of Xaltócan. I happened to be at my father's quarry on a day when the gods decided to take a token sacrifice.

A number of porters were hauling a tremendous block of new-cut stone up the long incline, like a curving shelf, that spiraled from the bottom of the quarry to the top. They did it by sheer muscle power, with a tumpline around each man's forehead attached to the rope net that dragged the block. Somewhere high up on that ramp, the block slid too close to the edge, or was tilted by some irregularity in the path. Whatever happened, it slowly and implacably fell sideways. There was much shouting and, if the porters had not instantly ripped the tumplines from their heads, they would have gone over the brink with the block. But one man, far below in the noise of the quarry, did not hear the shouts. The block came down upon him, and one of its edges, like a stone adze, chopped him precisely in half at his waist.

The limestone block had gouged such a deep notch in the quarry floor that it stayed there, balanced on its angular edge. So my father and the other men who rushed to the spot were able without much difficulty to topple it to one side. They found, to their astonishment, that the victim of the gods was still alive and even conscious.

Unnoticed in the excitement, I came close and saw the man, who was now in two pieces. From the waist up, his naked and sweaty body was intact and unmarked. But his waist was pinched wide and flat, so his torso itself rather resembled an adze or a chisel. The stone had simultaneously severed him—skin, flesh, guts, spine—and neatly closed the wound so that there was not even a drop of blood spilt. He might have been a cotton doll that had been sliced across the middle, then sewn at the cut. His bottom half, still wearing its loincloth, lay separated from him, neatly pinched shut and bloodless—though the legs were twitching slightly, and that half of the body was copiously urinating and defecating.

The massive injury must have so deadened all the cut nerves that the man even felt no pain. He raised his head and looked in mild wonder at himself in two halves. To spare him the sight, the other men quickly and tenderly carried him—the upper half of him—some distance away, and leaned him against the quarry wall. He flexed his arms, opened and closed his hands, experimentally turned his head about, and said in a voice of awe:

"I still can move and talk. I see you all, my comrades. I can reach out and touch and feel you. I hear the hewing of tools. I smell the bitter dust of lime. I still live. This is a most marvelous thing."

"It is," my father said gruffly. "But it cannot be for long, Xicama. There is no use even sending for a physician. You will want a priest. Of which god, Xicama?"

The man thought for a moment. "I can soon greet all the gods, when I can no longer do anything else. But while I still can speak, I had better talk to Filth Eater."

So the call was relayed to the top of the quarry, and from there a runner sped to fetch a priest of the goddess Tlazolteotl, or Filth Eater. Her unlovely name notwithstanding, she was a most compassionate goddess. It was to her that dying men confessed all their sins and misdeeds—quite often living men, too, when they felt particularly distressed or depressed by something they had done—so that Tlazolteotl might swallow their sins, and those sins would disappear as if they had never been committed. Thus they did not go with a man, to count against him or to haunt his memory, in whatever afterworld he was headed for.

While we waited for the priest, Xicama kept his eyes averted from himself, where his body appeared to be squeezed into a cleft of the rock floor, and spoke calmly, almost cheerfully, to my father. He gave him messages to impart to his parents, to his widow and orphaned children, and made suggestions as to their disposition of what little property he owned, and wondered aloud what his family would do when its provider was gone.

"Do not trouble your mind," said my father. "It is your tonáli that the gods take you in exchange for the prosperity of us who remain. In thanks for your sacrifice of yourself, we and the Lord Governor will make suitable compensation to your widow."

"Then she will have a respectable inheritance," said Xicama, relieved. "And she is still a young and handsome woman. Please, Head Nodder, prevail on her to marry again."

"I will do that. Is there anything else?"

"No," said Xicama. He looked about him and smiled. "I never thought I would regret seeing the last of this dreary quarry. Do you know, Head Nodder, even this stone pit looks beautiful and inviting now? The white clouds up there, then the blue sky, then the white stone here... like clouds above and below the blue. I wish, though, I could see the green trees beyond the rim—"

"You will," my father promised, "but after you have finished with the priest. We had better not chance moving you until then."

The priest came, in all his black of flaffing black robes and blood-crusted black hair and never-washed sooty face. He was the only darkness and gloom that marred the clean blue and white of which Xicama was sorry to take leave. All the other men moved away to give them privacy. (And my father espied me among them, and angrily bade me begone; that was no sight for a young boy.) While Xicama was occupied with the priest, four men picked up his stinking and still-quivering lower half, to carry it up to the top of the quarry. One of them vomited along the way.

Xicama evidently had led no very villainous life; it did not take him long to confess to Filth Eater whatever he regretted having done or left undone. When the priest had absolved him on behalf of the goddess, and had said all the ritual words and made all the ritual gestures, he stood away. Four more men carefully picked up the still-living part of Xicama and carried him, as rapidly as they could without jostling, up the incline toward the quarry rim.

It was hoped that he would go on living long enough to reach his village and say his own farewell to his family and pay his respects to whatever gods he had personally preferred. But somewhere along the upward spiraling ramp, his pinched body began to gape, to leak his blood and his breakfast and various other substances. He ceased speaking and breathing, and closed his eyes, and he never did get to see the green trees again.

Some of the limestone of Xaltócan had long ago gone into the construction of our island's icpac tlamanacali and teocaltin—or, as you call them, our pyramid and several temples. A share of all the stone quarried was always set aside for taxes we paid to the nation's treasury, and for our annual tribute to the Revered Speaker and his Speaking Council. (The Uey-Tlatoani Motecuzóma had died when I was three, and in that year the rule and throne had passed to his son Axayácatl, Water Face.)

Another share of the stone was reserved to the profit of our tecutli, or governor, to some other ranking nobles, and to the island's expenses: building canoes for water freighting, buying slaves to do the dirtier work, paying quarry wages, and the like. But there was still much of our mineral product left over for export and barter.

That earned for Xaltócan imported trade goods and negotiable trade currency, which our tecutli shared out among his subjects, according to their status and merit. Furthermore, he allowed all the island people—except, of course, the slaves and other low classes—to build their houses of the handy limestone. Thus Xaltócan differed from most other communities in these lands, where the houses were more often built of sun-dried mud brick or wood or cane, or where many families might be crowded into one large communal tenement building, or where folk might even live in hillside caves. Though my own family's house was of only three rooms, it was even floored with smooth white limestone slabs. There were not many palaces in The One World that could pride themselves on being built of finer material. Our use of our stone for building meant, also, that our island was not denuded of its trees, as were so many other peopled places in the valley.

In my time, our governor was Tlauquecholtzin, the Lord Red Heron—a man whose distant ancestors had been among the first Mexíca settlers on the island, and the man who ranked highest among our local nobility. As was customary in most districts and communities, that guaranteed his lifetime tenure as our tecutli, as representative of the Speaking Council headed by the Revered Speaker, and as ruler of the island, its quarries, its surrounding lake, and every single one of its inhabitants—except, in some measure, the priests, who maintained that they owed allegiance only to the gods.

Not every community was so fortunate in its governor as was our Xaltócan. A member of the nobility was expected to live up to his station—that is, to be noble—but not all of them were. And no píli born to the nobility could ever be demoted to any lower class, however ignoble his behavior. (He could, however, if his conduct was inexcusable by his pípiltin peers, be ousted from office or even put to death by them.) I might also mention that, though most nobles got that way by being born to noble parents, it was not impossible for a mere commoner to win elevation to that upper class.

I remember two Xaltócan men who were raised from the macehualtin to the pípiltin and given an estimable lifetime income. Colotic-Miztli, an elderly onetime warrior, had lived up to his name of Fierce Mountain Lion by doing some great feat of arms in some forgotten war against some long-ago enemy. It had cost him such scars that he was gruesome to look at, but it had gained him the coveted -tzin suffix to his name: Miztzin, Lord Mountain Lion. The other man was Quali-Ameyatl, or Good Fountain, a mild-mannered young architect who did no deed more notable than to design some gardens at the governor's palace. But Ameyatl was as handsome as Miztzin was hideous, and during his work at the palace, he won the heart of a girl named Dewdrop, who happened to be the governor's daughter. When he married her, he became Ameyatzin, the Lord Fountain.

I have tried to make clear that our Lord Red Heron was genial and generous, but above all he was a just man. When his own daughter Dewdrop tired of her lowborn Lord Fountain and was surprised in an adulterous act with a blood-born píli, Red Heron commanded that both she and the man be put to death. Many of his other nobles petitioned that the young woman be spared her life and instead be banished from the island. Even the husband swore that he forgave his wife's adultery, and that he and Dewdrop would remove to some far country. But the governor would not be swayed, though we all knew he loved that daughter very much.

He said, "I would be called unjust if, for my own child, I should waive a law that is enforced against my subject people." And he said to Lord Fountain, "The people would someday maintain that you forgave my daughter out of deference to my office and not of your own free will." And he commanded that every other woman and girl of Xaltócan come to his palace and witness Dewdrop's execution. "Especially all the nubile but unmarried maidens," he said, "for their juices run high, and they might be inclined to sympathize with my daughter's dalliance, or even envy it. Let them be shocked at her dying, that they may dwell instead on the severity of the consequences."

So my mother went to the execution, and took Tzitzitlmi.

On their return, my mother said the errant Dewdrop and her lover had been strangled, with cords disguised as garlands of flowers, and in full view of the populace, and that the young woman took her punishment badly, with terrors and pleas and struggling, and that her betrayed husband Good Fountain wept for her, but that the Lord Red Heron had watched without expression. Tzitzi said nothing of the spectacle. However, she told me of meeting at the palace the condemned woman's young brother, Red Heron's son Pactli.

"He looked long at me," she said with a shudder, "and he smiled and bared his teeth. Can you believe such a thing, on such a day? It was a look that gave me gooseflesh."

I would wager that Red Heron did no smiling that day. But you can understand why all the island folk so esteemed our impartially fair-minded governor. In truth, we all hoped the Lord Red Heron would live to a great age, for we regarded unhappily the prospect of being governed by that son Pactli. The name means Joy, a misgiven name if ever there was one. He was an ill-natured and despotic brat long before he even wore the loincloth of manhood. That obnoxious offspring of a courtly father did not, of course, freely associate with any middle-class boys like myself and Tlatli and Chimali, and anyway was a year or two older. But, as my sister Tzitzi flowered into beauty, and Pactli began to manifest increased interest in her, she and I came to share a special loathing of him. However, all that was still in the future.

Meanwhile, ours was a prosperous and comfortable and untroubled community. We who had the good fortune to live there did not have to grind away our energies and spirits just for subsistence. We could look to horizons beyond our island, to heights above those to which we had been born. We could dream, as did my friends Chimali and Tlatli. Both their fathers were sculptors at the quarries, and those two boys, unlike myself, aspired to follow their fathers' trade of art, but more ambitiously than their fathers had done.

"I want to be a better sculptor," said Tlatli, scraping away at a fragment of soft stone which was actually beginning to resemble a falcon, the bird for which he was named.

He went on, "The statues and friezes carved here on Xaltócan go away in the big freighting canoes unsigned and their artists unacknowledged. Our fathers get no more credit for their work than a slave woman who weaves mats of the lake reeds. And why? Because the statues and ornaments we make here are as indistinguishable as those reed mats. Every Tlaloc, for example, looks exactly like every Tlaloc that has been sculptured on Xaltócan since our fathers' fathers' fathers were carving them."

I said, "Then they must be what the priests of Tlaloc want."

"Ninotlancuicui in tlamacazque," growled Tlatli. "I pick my teeth at the priests." He could be as stolid and immovable as any stone figure. "I intend to do sculptures different from all that have ever been done before. And no two, even of my own, will be alike. But all will be so recognizably my work that people will exclaim, 'Ayyo, a statue by Tlatli!' I will not even have to sign them with my falcon symbol."

"You want to do a work as fine as the Sun Stone," I suggested.

"Finer than the Sun Stone," he said stubbornly. "I pick my teeth at the Sun Stone." And I thought that audacity indeed, for I had seen the Sun Stone.

But our mutual friend Chimali gazed toward even farther vistas than did Tlatli. He intended so to refine the art of painting that it would be independent of any sculpture underneath. He would be a painter of pictures on panels and murals on walls.

"Oh, I will color Tlatli's lumpy statues for him, if he likes," said Chimali. "But sculpture requires only flat colors, since its shape and modeling gives the colors light and shade. Also, I am weary of the same old unvarying colors other painters and muralists use. I am trying to mix new kinds of my own: colors that I can modulate in tint and hue so that the colors themselves give an illusion of depth." He made excited gestures, modeling the empty air. "When you see my pictures you will think they have shape and substance, even when they have none, when they have no more dimension than the panel itself."

"But to what purpose?" I asked.

"Of what purpose is the shimmering beauty and form of a hummingbird?" he demanded. "Look. Suppose yourself to be a priest of Tlaloc. Instead of dragging a huge statue of the rain god into a small temple room, and thereby cramping the room even more, the priests of Tlaloc can simply have me paint on a wall a portrait of the god—as I imagine him to be—and with a limitless rain-swept landscape stretching away behind him. The room will seem immeasurably larger than it really is. And there is the advantage of thin, flat pictures over gross and bulky sculptures."

"Well," I said to Chimali, "a shield usually is fairly thin and flat." I was making a joke: Chimali means shield, and Chimali himself was a lean and lanky boy.

At my friends' ambitious plans and grandiose boasts I smiled indulgently. Or perhaps a little enviously, for they knew what they wanted eventually to be and do, and I did not. My mind had yet conceived no notion of its own, and no god had yet seen fit to send me a sign. I knew only two things for sure. One was that I did not want to hew and haul stone from a noisy, dusty, god-menaced quarry. The other was that, whatever career I essayed, I did not intend to pursue it on Xaltócan or in any other provincial backwater.

If the gods allowed, I would take my chances in the most challenging but potentially most rewarding place in The One World—in the Uey-Tlatoani's own capital city, where the competition among ambitious men was most merciless, and where only the worthiest could rise to distinction—in the splendid, the wondrous, the awesome city of Tenochtítlan.

* * *

If I did not yet know what my life work would be, I did at least know where, and I had known since my first and only visit there, the visit having been my father's gift to me on my seventh birthday, my naming day.

Prior to that event, my parents, with me in tow, had gone to consult the island's resident tonalpoqui, or knower of the tonalmatl, the traditional naming book. After unfolding the layered pages to the book's full length—it took up most of his room's floor—the old seer gave prolonged and lip-moving scrutiny to its every mention of star patterns and godly doings relevant to the day Seven Flower and the month God Ascending and the year Thirteen Rabbit. Then he nodded, reverently re-folded the book, accepted his fee—a bolt of fine cotton cloth—sprinkled me with his special dedicatory water, and proclaimed my name to be Chicome-Xochitl Tlilectic-Mixtli, to commemorate the storm that had attended my birth. I would henceforth formally be known as Seven Flower Dark Cloud, informally called Mixtli.

I was sufficiently pleased with the name, a manly one, but I was not much impressed by the ritual of selecting it. Even at the age of seven, I, Dark Cloud, had some opinions of my own. I said out loud that anybody could have done it, I could have done it, and quicker and cheaper, at which I was sternly shushed.

Early on the morning of the momentous birthday, I was taken to the palace and the Lord Red Heron himself graciously and ceremoniously received us. He patted me on the head and said, with paternal good humor, "Another man grown to the glory of Xaltócan, eh?" With his own hand, he drew my name symbols—the seven dots, the three-petaled flower symbol, the clay-gray puffball signifying a dark cloud—in the tocayamatl, the official registry of all the island's inhabitants. My page would remain there as long as I lived on Xaltócan, to be expunged only if I died or was banished for some monstrous crime or moved permanently elsewhere. I wonder: for how long has Seven Flower Dark Cloud's page been gone from that book?

Ordinarily there would have been a deal of other celebration on a naming day, as there had been on my sister's: all the neighbors and our relatives coming with gifts, my mother cooking and serving a grand spread of special foods, the men smoking tubes of picíetl, the old folks getting drunk on octli. But I did not mind missing all that, for my father had told me, "A cargo of temple friezes leaves today for Tenochtítlan, and there is room aboard for you and me. Also, word comes of a great ceremony to be held in the capital—the celebration of some new conquest or the like—and that will be your name-day festival, Mixtli." So, after no more than a congratulatory kiss on the cheek from my mother and my sister, I followed my father down to the quarries' loading dock.

All our lakes bore a constant traffic of canoes, coming and going in all directions, like hordes of water striders. Most were the little one- and two-man acaltin of fowlers or fishermen, made from a single gutted tree trunk and shaped like a bean pod. But others ranged upward in size to the giant sixty-man war canoes, and our freight acáli consisted of eight boats nearly that big, all lashed side by side. Our cargo of the carved limestone panels had been carefully piled aboard, each stone wrapped in heavy fiber mats for protection.

With such a load on such an unwieldy craft, we naturally moved very slowly, though my father was one of more than twenty men paddling (or poling, where the water was shallow). Owing to the curving route—southwest through Lake Xaltócan, south into Lake Texcóco, thence southwest again to the city—we had to cover some seven of the distances we called one-long-run, each of which would be approximately equivalent to one of your Spanish leagues. Seven leagues to go, then, and our big scow seldom moved faster than a man can walk. We left the island well before midday, but it was well into the night when we tied up at Tenochtítlan.

For a while, the view was nothing out of the ordinary: the red-tinted lake I knew so well. Then the land closed in on both sides as we slipped through the southern strait, and the water around us gradually paled to a dun color as we emerged into the vast lake of Texcóco. It stretched away so far to the east and south of us that the land yonder was only a dark, toothed smudge on the horizon.

We crept southwest for a time, but Tonatíu the sun was slowly cloaking himself in the radiance of his sleeping gown by the time our oarsmen backed water to bring our clumsy craft to a halt at The Great Dike. That barrier is a double palisade of tree trunks driven into the lake bottom, the space between the parallel rows of logs packed solid with earth and rock fill. Its purpose is to prevent lake waves, whipped up by the east wind, from flooding the low-lying island-city. The Great Dike has gates set into it at intervals, and the dikemen keep those gates open in most weathers. But of course the lake traffic headed for the capital is considerable, so our freighter had to wait a while in line before it could edge through the opening.

As it did so, Tonatíu drew the dark covers of night over his bed, and the sky went purple. The mountains to the west, directly ahead of us, looked suddenly as sharply outlined and dimensionless as if they had been cut from black paper. Above them, there was a shy twinkle and then a bold spark of light: After Blossom again assuring us that this was only one more of many nights, not the last and everlasting one.

"Open wide your eyes now, son Mixtli!" called my father from his place at the oars.

As if After Blossom had been a signal fire, a second light appeared, this one low beneath the jagged line of black mountains. Then there came another point of light, and another, and twenties upon twenties more. And thus I saw Tenochtítlan for the first time in my life: not a city of stone towers, rich woodwork, and bright paint, but a city of light. As the lamps and lanterns and candles and torches were lit—in window openings, on the streets, along the canals, on building terraces and cornices and rooftops—the separate pinpoints of light became clusters, the clusters blended to form lines of light, the lines drew the outlines of the city.

The buildings themselves, from that distance, were dark and indistinct of contour, but the lights, ayyo, the lights! Yellow, white, red, jacinth, all the various colors of flame—here and there a green or blue one, where some temple's altar fire had been sprinkled with salt or copper filings. And every one of those shining beads and clusters and bands of light shone twice, each having its brilliant reflection in the lake. Even the stone causeways that vault from the island to the mainland, even those wore lanterns on posts at intervals along their reach across the water. From our acáli, I could see only the two causeways going north and south from the city. Each looked like a slender bright-jeweled chain across the throat of night, with the city displayed between them, a splendid bright-jeweled pendant on the night's bosom.

"Tenochtítlan, Cem-Anahiuac Tlali Yoloco," murmured my father. "It is truly The Heart and Center of the One World." I had been so transfixed with enchantment that I had not noticed him join me at the forward edge of our freighter. "Look long, son Mixtli. You may experience this wonder and many other wonders more than once. But, of first times, there is always and forever only one."

Without blinking or moving my eyes from the splendor we were all too slowly approaching, I lay prone on a fiber mat and stared and stared until, I am ashamed to say, my eyelids closed of themselves and I fell asleep. I have no recollection of what must have been considerable noise and bustle and commotion when we landed, nor of my father's carrying me to a nearby inn for boatmen, where we stayed the night.

I awoke on a pallet on the floor of an unremarkable room, where my father and a few other men lay still snoring on pallets of their own. Realizing that we were in an inn, and where that inn was, I leapt to lean out the window opening—and for a moment felt dizzy at seeing my altitude above the stone pavement below. It was the first time I had ever been inside a building atop a building. Or that is what I thought it was, until my father later showed me, from the outside, that our room was on the upper floor of the inn.

I lifted my eyes to the city beyond the dockside area. It shone, it pulsated, it glowed white in the early sunlight. It made me proud of my own home island, because what buildings were not constructed of white limestone were plastered white with gesso, and I knew that most of the material had come from Xaltócan. Of course the buildings were frescoed and inlaid with bands and panels of vividly colored paints and mosaics, but the dominant effect was of a city so white, so nearly silver, that it almost hurt my eyes.

The lights of the night before were all extinguished now. Only a still-smoldering temple fire somewhere sent a trail of smoke into the sky. But now I saw a new marvel: from the top of every roof, every temple, every palace in the city, from every highest eminence projected a flagpole, and from every staff flew a banner. They were not squared or triangular like battle ensigns; they were pennants many times longer than they were broad. And they were all white, except for the colored insignia they bore. Some of those I recognized—that of the city itself, of the Revered Speaker Axayácatl, of some gods—but others were unfamiliar to me: the symbols of local nobles and special city gods, I supposed.

The flags of your white men are always swatches of cloth, often impressive in their elaborate blazonings, but still mere rags which either hang limp on their staffs or flutter and snap peevishly like a country woman's washing hung to dry on cactus spines. By contrast, those incredibly long banners of Tenochtítlan were woven of feathers—feathers from which the quills had been removed and only the lightest down used for the weaving. They were not painted or dyed. The flags were intricately woven of the feathers' natural colors: egret feathers for the white grounds of the flags, and for the designs the various reds of macaws and cardinals and parakeets, the various blues of jays and herons, the yellows of toucans and tanagers. Ayyo, I tell you true, I kiss the earth, there were all the colors and iridescences that can come only from living nature, not from man-mixed paint pots.

But most marvelous, those banners did not sag or flap, they floated. There was no wind that morning. Just the movement of people on the streets, and acaltin in the canals stirred enough air current to support those tremendous but almost weightless pennants. Like great birds unwilling to fly away, content to drift dreamily, the banners hung full-spread on the air. The thousands of feather banners undulated gently, soundlessly, magically, over all the towers and pinnacles of that magic island-city.

By daring to lean perilously far out the window opening, I could see, away to the southeast, the two volcano peaks called Popocatepetl and Ixtacciuatl, The Incense-Burning Mountain and The White Woman. Though it was the start of the dry season and the days were warm, both the mountains were capped with white—the first snow I had ever seen—and the smoldering incense deep inside Popocatepetl wafted a blue plume of smoke that floated over him as lazily as the feather banners floated over Tenochtítlan. I hurried from the window to wake my father. He must have been weary and wanting sleep, but he arose without complaint, with a smile of understanding at my eagerness to be out and away.

The unloading and delivery of our barge's cargo being the responsibility of its freightmaster, my father and I had the day to ourselves. He had one errand—to make some purchase my mother had ordered; I forget what—so we first wended our way northward into Tlaltelólco.

As you know, reverend friars, that portion of the island—what you now call Santiago—is separated from this southern part only by a broad canal crossed by several bridges. But Tlaltelólco was for many years an independent city, with its own ruler, and it brashly kept trying to outdo Tenochtítlan as chief city of the Mexíca. Tlaltelólco's delusions of superiority were for a long time humorously tolerated by our Revered Speakers. But when that city's late ruler Moquihuix had the effrontery to build a temple pyramid higher than any in the four quarters of Tenochtítlan, the Uey-Tlatoani Axayácatl was justifiably annoyed. He ordered his sorcerers to harass that now intolerable neighbor.

If the stories are true, a carved stone face on one wall of Moquihuix's throne room suddenly spoke to him. The remark was so insulting to his manhood that Moquihuix snatched up a war club and pulverized the carving. Then, when he went to bed with his First Lady, the lips of her tipíli parts also spoke to him, impugning his virility. Those occurrences, besides making Moquihuix impotent even with his concubines, much affrighted him, but still he would not cede allegiance to the Revered Speaker. So, earlier in that same year in which I made my naming-day visit, Axayácatl had taken Tlaltelólco by force of arms. He himself, Axayácatl, personally threw Moquihuix off the top of his upstart pyramid and dashed out his brains. And, just those few months later, by the time my father and I saw Tlaltelólco—though it was still a fine city of temples and palaces and pyramids—it was satisfied to be the fifth "quarter" of Tenochtítlan, the city's marketplace appendage.

Its immense open market area seemed to me to be as big as our whole island of Xaltócan, and richer, and more full of people, and far noisier. Walkway aisles separated the area into squares where the merchants laid out their wares on benches or groundcloths, and every square or a square of squares was allotted to a different kind of merchandise. There were sections for goldsmiths and silversmiths, for feather workers, for sellers of vegetables and condiments, of meat and live animals, of cloth and leather goods, of slaves and dogs, of pottery and copperware, of medicines and cosmetics, of rope and cord and thread, of raucous birds and monkeys and other pets. Ah, well, that market has been restored, and you have doubtless seen it. Though my father and I got there early in the morning, the place was already thronged with customers. Most were macehualtin like us, but there were lords and ladies too, imperiously pointing at the wares they wanted and leaving the haggling of price to their accompanying servants.

We were fortunate in arriving early, or at least I was, for there was one stall in the market which sold a commodity so perishable that it would be gone before midmorning, the most distinctive delicacy among all the foods for sale. It was snow. It was brought the ten one-long-runs from the crest of Ixtacciuatl, by relays of swift-messengers racing through the cool of the night, and the merchant kept it in thick clay jars under heaps of fiber mats. One serving of it cost twenty cacao beans. That was an entire day's wage for the average workman anywhere in the Mexíca nation. For four hundred beans you could buy a passably strong and healthy slave for life. So snow was more expensive, by weight, than anything else in the Tlaltelólco market, even the most costly jewelry of the goldsmiths' stalls. Few but the nobles could afford a taste of that rare refreshment. Nevertheless, said the snow man, he always sold out his morning's supply before it melted.

My father made a token grumble. "I remember the Hard Times. In the year One Rabbit, the sky snowed snow for six days in a row. Snow was not just free for the taking, it was a calamity." But of course he relented and said to the vendor, who could hardly have cared less, "Well, since it is the boy's naming day..."

He unslung his shoulder bag and counted out the twenty cacao beans. The merchant examined each of them to make sure it was not a carved wood counterfeit or a hollowed-out bean weighted with dirt. Then he uncovered one of his jars, scooped out a spoonful of the precious delicacy, patted it into a cone made of a curled leaf, poured over it a dollop of some sweet syrup, and handed it to me.

I took a greedy bite and nearly dropped it, so surprised was I at its coldness. It made my lower teeth and my forehead ache, but it was the most delicious thing I had eaten in my young life. I held it out for my father to taste. He lapped it once with his tongue, and obviously savored it as much as I did, but pretended he wanted no more. "Do not bite it, Mixtli," he said. "Lick it so it will last longer."

When he had bought whatever it was my mother wanted and had sent a porter carrying it to our boat, he and I went south again toward the center of the city. Although many of the ordinary buildings of Tenochtítlan were two and even three floors tall—and most of them made even taller for being set on pillars to avoid dampness—the island itself is nowhere more than two men's height above the waters of Lake Texcóco. So there were in those days almost as many canals as streets cutting up and down and across the city. In places a canal and a street ran side by side; the people walking could converse with the people afloat. At some corners we would see crowds of people bustling back and forth in front of us; at others we would see canoes gliding past. Some of those were passenger craft for hire, to whisk busy persons about the city more rapidly than they could walk. Others were the private acaltin of nobles, and those were much painted and decorated, and held awnings aloft to ward off the sun. The streets were of hard-packed smooth clay surfacing; the canals had masonry banks. In the many places where a canal's waters were almost at street level, its footbridges could be swiveled to one side while a boat passed.

Just as the network of canals made Lake Texcóco practically a part of the city, so did the three main avenues make the city part of the mainland. Where those broad streets left the island they became wide stone causeways, along which a man could walk to any of five different cities on the mainland to the north, west, and south. There was another span which was not a walkway but an aqueduct. It supported a trough of curved tiles, wider and deeper than a man's two arms could stretch, and this still brings to the city sweet water from the spring of Chapultepec on the mainland to the southwest.

Since all the roads of the land and all the water routes of the lakes converged here at Tenochtítlan, my father and I watched a constant parade of the commerce of the Mexíca nation, and of other nations as well. Everywhere about us were porters trudging under the weight of loads heaped on their backs and supported by forehead tumplines. Everywhere there were canoes of all sizes, piled high with produce going to and from the Tlaltelólco market, or the tribute from subordinate peoples going to the palaces, the treasury, the national warehouses.

Just the multicolored baskets of fruit would give an idea of the extent of the trade. There were guavas and custard apples from the Otomí lands to the north, pineapples from the Totonaca lands on the eastern sea, yellow papayas from Michihuácan to the west, red papayas from Chiapan far to the south, and from the nearer-south Tzapoteca lands the tzapotin marmalade plums which gave that region its name.

Also from the Tzapoteca country came bags of the dried little insects which yield the several brilliant red dyes. From nearby Xochimilco came flowers and plants of more kinds than I could believe existed. From the far southern jungles came cages full of colorful birds, or bales of their feathers. From the Hot Lands both east and west came bags of cacao for the making of chocolate, and the black orchid pods that make vanilla. From the southeastern coastland of the Olméca came the product which gave that people their name: óli, strips of elastic gum to be braided into the hard balls used in our game of tlachtli. Even the rival nation of Texcala, perennial enemy of us Mexíca, sent its precious copali, the aromatic resin for making perfumes and incense.

From everywhere came packs and panniers of maize and beans and cotton; and bundles of squawking live huaxolome (the big, black, red-wattled birds you call gallipavos) and baskets of their eggs; and cages of the barkless, hairless, edible techíchi dogs; and haunches of deer and rabbit and boar venison; and jars of the clear sweet-water sap of the maguey plant, or the thicker white fermentation of that juice, the drunk-making drink called octli....

My father was pointing out to me all those things, and telling me their names, when a voice interrupted him: "For just two cacao beans, my lord, I will tell of the roads and the days that lie beyond your son Mixtli's name day."

My father turned. At his elbow, and not much taller than his elbow, stood a man who himself looked rather like a cacao bean. He wore a tattered and dirty loincloth, and his skin was the color of cacao: a brown so dark it was almost purple. His face was creased and wrinkled like the bean. He might have been much taller at some time, but he had become bent and crouched and shrunken with an age no one could have estimated. Come to think of it, he must have looked much as I do now. He held out one monkey hand, palm up, and said again, "Only two beans, my lord."

My father shook his head and said politely, "To learn of the future, I go to a far-seer."

"Did you ever visit one of those seers," the bent man asked, "and have him recognize you instantly as a master quarrier from Xaltócan?"

My father looked surprised and blurted, "You are a seer. You do have the vision. Then why—?"

"Why do I go about in rags with my hand out? Because I tell the truth, and people little value the truth. The seers eat the sacred mushrooms and dream dreams for you, because they can charge more for dreams. My lord, there is lime dust ingrained in your knuckles, but your palms are not callused by a laborer's hammer or a sculptor's chisel. You see? The truth is so cheap I can even give it away."

I laughed and so did my father, who said, "You are an amusing old trickster. But we have much to do elsewhere—"

"Wait," said the man insistently. He bent down to peer into my eyes, and he did not have to bend far. I stared straight back at' him.

It could be assumed that the mendicant old fraud had been lurking near us when my father bought me the flavored snow, and had overheard the mention of my significant seventh birthday, and had taken us for spendthrift rustics in the big city, easily to be gulled. But much later, when events made me strain to recall the exact words he spoke...

He searched my eyes and murmured, "Any seer can look far along the roads and the days. Even if he sees something that will truly come to pass, it is safely remote in distance and time, it neither avails nor threatens the seer himself. But this boy's tonáli is to look closely at the things and doings of this world, and see them near and plain, and know them for what they signify."

He stood up. "It will seem at first a handicap, boy, but that kind of near-seeing could make you discern truths the far-seers overlook. If you were to take advantage of the talent, it could make you rich and great."

My father sighed patiently and reached into his bag.

"No, no," the man said to him. "I do not prophesy riches or fame for your son. I do not promise him the hand of a beautiful princess or the founding of a distinguished lineage. The boy Mixtli will see the truth, yes. Unfortunately, he will also tell the truth he sees. And that more often brings calumny than reward. For such an ambiguous prediction, my lord, I ask no gratuity."

"Take this anyway," said my father, pressing on him a single cacao bean. "Just do not predict anything more for us, old man."

In the center of the city there was little commercial traffic, but all the citizens not occupied with urgent business were beginning to congregate in the grand plaza for the ceremony of which my father had heard. He asked some passerby what it was to be, and the man said, "Why, the dedication of the Sun Stone, of course, to celebrate the annexation of Tlaltelólco." Most of the people gathered were commoners like ourselves, but there were also enough pípiltin there to have populated a sizable city of nobody but nobles. Anyway, my father and I had arrived early on purpose. Although there were already more people in the plaza than there are hairs on a rabbit, they nowhere near filled the vast area. We had room to move about and view the various sights to be seen.

In those days, Tenochtítlan's central plaza—In Cem-Anáhuac Yoyótli, The Heart of the One World—was not of the mind-stunning splendor I would see on later visits. The Snake Wall had not yet been built to enclose the area. The Revered Speaker Axayácatl was still living in the palace of his late father Motecuzóma, while a new one was being built for him diagonally across the plaza. The new Great Pyramid, begun by that First Motecuzóma, was still unfinished. Its sloping stone walls and serpent-banistered staircases ended well above our heads, and from inside could be seen poking the top of the earlier, smaller pyramid that was being thus enclosed and enlarged.

But the plaza was already awesome enough to a country boy like me. My father told me that he had once crossed it in a straight line and paced it off, placing foot before foot, and that it measured almost exactly six hundred of his feet. That whole immense space—some six hundred man's-feet from north to south and from east to west—was paved with marble, a stone whiter even than Xaltócan's limestone, and it was polished as smooth and shiny as a tezcatl mirror. Many people there that day, if their sandals were soled with one of the more slippery kinds of leather, had to take them off and walk barefoot.

The city's three broadest avenues, each wide enough for twenty men to walk abreast, began there at the plaza and led out of it, north, west, and south, to become the three equally wide causeways going all the way to the mainland. The plaza itself was not then so full of temples and altars and monuments as it would be in later years. But there were already modest teocaltin containing statues of the chief gods. There was already the elaborate rack on which were displayed the skulls of the more distinguished xochimíque who had been sacrificed to one or another of those gods. There was the Revered Speaker's private ball court in which were played special ritual games of tlachtli.

There was also The House of Song, which contained comfortable quarters and practice studios for those foremost musicians, singers, and dancers who performed at religious festivals in the plaza. The House of Song was not, like all the other edifices on the plaza, entirely obliterated with the rest of the city. It was restored and is now, until your cathedral Church of San Francisco shall be completed, your Lord Bishop's temporary diocesan headquarters and residence. It is in one of the rooms of that House of Song that we now sit, my lord scribes.

My father correctly supposed that a seven-year-old would hardly be enraptured by religious or architectural landmarks, so he took me to the sprawling building at the southeast corner of the plaza. That housed the Uey-Tlatoani's collection of wild animals and birds, and it too was not yet so extensive as it would be in later years. It had been begun by the late Motecuzóma, whose notion was to put on public display a specimen of the land and air creatures to be found in all the parts of all these lands. The building was divided into countless rooms—some mere cubicles, some large chambers—and troughs from a nearby canal kept a continuous flow of water flushing out the rooms' waste matter. Each room opened onto the viewers' passageway, but was separated from it by netting or in some cases stout wooden bars. There was an individual room for each creature, or for those several kinds of creatures that could live together amicably.

"Do they always make so much noise?" I shouted to my father, over the roaring and howling and screeching.

"I do not know," he said. "But right now some of them are hungry, because they have deliberately not been fed for some time. There will be sacrifices at the ceremony, and the remains will be disposed of here, as meat for the jaguar and cuguar cats, and the coyotin wolves and the tzopilotin vultures."

I was eyeing the largest animal native to our lands—the ugly and bulky and sluggish tapir; it waggled its prehensile snout at me—when a familiar voice said, "Master quarrier, why do you not show the boy the tequani hall?"

It was the bent brown man we had earlier met in the street. My father gave him an exasperated look and demanded, "Are you following us, old nuisance?"

The man shrugged. "I merely drag my ancient bones here to see the Sun Stone dedication." Then he gestured to a closed door at the far end of the passage and said to me, "In there, my boy, are sights indeed. Human animals far more interesting than these mere brutes. A tlacaztali woman, for instance. Do you know what a tlacaztali is? A person dead white all over, skin and hair and all, except for her eyes, which are pink. And there is a dwarf with only half a head, who eats—"

"Hush!" my father said sternly. "This is a day for the boy to enjoy. I will not sicken him with the sight of those pitiful freaks."

"Ah, well," said the old man. "Some do enjoy viewing the deformed and the mutilated." His eyes glittered at me. "But they will still be there, young Mixtli, when you are grown mature and superior enough to mock and tease them. I daresay there will be even more curiosities in the tequani hall by then, no doubt even more entertaining and edifying to you."

"Will you be silent?" bellowed my father.

"Pardon, my lord," said the hunched old man, hunching himself even smaller. "Let me make amends for my impertinence. It is almost midday and the ceremony will soon begin. If we go now and get good places, perhaps I can explain to you and the boy some things you might not otherwise understand."

The plaza was now full to overflowing, and the people were shoulder to shoulder. We would never have got anywhere close to the Sun Stone, except that more and more nobles were now haughtily arriving at the last moment, borne in gilded and upholstered litter chairs. The crowds of commoners and lower classes parted without a murmur to let them through, and the brown man audaciously eeled along behind them, with us behind him, until we were almost as far forward as the front ranks of real notables. I would still have been hemmed in without a view, but my father hoisted me to one shoulder. He looked down at our guide and said, "I can lift you up too, old man."

"I thank you for your thoughtfulness, my lord," said that one, half smiling, "but I am heavier than I look."

The focus of all eyes was the Sun Stone, set for the occasion on a terrace between the two broad staircases of the unfinished Great Pyramid. But it was shrouded from our sight with a mantle of shining white cotton. So I occupied myself with admiring the arriving nobles, for their litter chairs and their costumes were something to behold. The men and women alike wore mantles entirely woven of feathers, some varicolored, some of just one coruscating hue. The ladies' hair was tinted purple, as was customary on such a day, and they held their hands high to display the bangled and festooned rings on their fingers. But the lords wore many more ornaments than their ladies. All had diadems or tassels of gold and rich feathers on their heads. Some wore gold medallions on neck chains, gold bracelets and armlets and anklets. Others wore ornate plugs of gold or jewels piercing earlobes or nostrils or lower lips, or all of those.

"Here comes the High Treasurer," said our guide. "Ciuacoatl, the Snake Woman, second in command to the Revered Speaker himself."

I looked, eager to see a snake woman, which I assume must be a creature like those "human animals" which I had not been allowed to look at. But it was just another píli, and a man at that, distinguished only for being even more gorgeously attired than most of the other nobles. The labret he wore was so heavy that it dragged his lower lip down in a pout. But it was a cunning labret: a miniature serpent of gold, so fashioned that it wriggled and flickered its tiny tongue in and out as the Lord Treasurer bobbed along in his chair.

Our guide laughed at me; he had seen my disappointment. "The Snake Woman is merely a title, boy, not a description," he said. "Every High Treasurer has always been called Ciuacoatl, though probably none of them could tell you why. My own theory is that it is because both snakes and women coil tight around any treasures they may hold."

Then the crowd in the plaza, which had been murmurous, quieted all at once; the Uey-Tlatoani himself had appeared. He had somehow arrived unseen or had been hidden somewhere beforehand, for now he suddenly stood beside the veiled Sun Stone. Axayácatl's visage was obscured by labret, nose plug, and ear plugs, and shadowed by the sunburst crown of scarlet macaw plumes that arched completely over his head from shoulder to shoulder. Not much of the rest of his body was visible either. His mantle of gold and green parrot feathers fell all the way to his feet. His chest bore a large and intricately worked medallion, his loincloth was of rich red leather, on his feet he wore sandals apparently of solid gold, laced as high as his knees with gilded straps.

By custom, all of us in the plaza should have greeted him with the tlalqualiztli: the gesture of kneeling, touching a finger to the earth and then to our lips. But there was simply no room for that; the crowd made a sort of loud sizzle of combined kissing sounds. The Revered Speaker Axayácatl returned the greeting silently, nodding the spectacular scarlet feather crown and raising aloft his mahogany and gold staff of office.

He was surrounded by a hoard of priests who, with their filthy black garments, their dirt-encrusted black faces, and their blood-matted long hair, made a somber contrast to Axayácatl's sartorial flamboyance. The Revered Speaker explained to us the significance of the Sun Stone, while the priests chanted prayers and invocations every time he paused for breath. I cannot now remember Axayácatl's words, and probably did not understand them all at the time. But the gist was this. While the Sun Stone actually pictured the sun Tonatíu, all honor paid to it would be shared with Tenochtítlan's chief god Huitzil-opochtli, Southern Hummingbird.

I have already told how our gods could wear different aspects and names. Well, Tonatíu was the sun, and the sun is indispensable, since all life on earth would perish without him. We of Xaltócan and the peoples of many other communities were satisfied to worship him as the sun. However, it seemed obvious that the sun required nourishment to keep him strong, encouragement to keep him at his daily labors—and what could we give him more vitalizing and inspiriting than what he gave us? That is to say, human life itself. Hence the kindly sun god had the other aspect of the ferocious war god Huitzilopóchtli, who led us Mexíca in all our battle forays to procure prisoners for that necessary sacrifice. It was in the stern guise of Huitzil-opóchtli that he was most revered here in Tenochtítlan, because it was here that all our wars were planned and declared and the warriors mustered. Under yet another name, Tezcatlipóca, Smoldering Mirror, the sun was the chief god of our neighbor nation of the Acolhua. And I have come to suspect that innumerable other nations I have never visited—even nations beyond the sea across which you Spaniards came—must likewise worship that selfsame sun god, only calling him by some other name, according as they see him smile or frown.

While the Uey-Tlatoani went on speaking, and the priests kept chanting in counterpoint, and a number of musicians began to play on flutes, notched bones, and skin drums, my father and I were privately getting the history of the Sun Stone from our cacao-brown old guide.

"Southeast of here is the country of the Chalca. When the late Motecuzóma made a vassal nation of it, twenty and two years ago, the Chalca were of course obliged to make a noteworthy tribute offering to the victorious Mexíca. Two young Chalca brothers volunteered to make a monumental sculpture apiece, to be placed here at The Heart of the One World. They chose similar stones, but different subjects, and they worked apart, and no one but each brother ever saw what he carved."

"Their wives sneaked a look, surely," said my father, who had that sort of wife.

"No one ever got a look," the old man repeated, "during all those twenty and two years they worked to sculpture and paint the stones—in which time they grew middle-aged and Motecuzóma went to the afterworld. Then they muffled their finished works separately in swathings of fiber mats, and the lord of the Chalca conscripted perhaps one thousand sturdy porters to haul the stones here to the capital."

He waved toward the still-shrouded object on the terrace above us. "As you see, the Sun Stone is immense: more than twice the height of two men—and ponderously heavy: the weight of three hundred and twenty men together. The other stone was about the same. They were brought over rough trails and no trails at all. They were rolled on log rollers, dragged on wooden skids, ferried over rivers on mighty rafts. Just think of the labor and the sweat and the broken bones, and the many men who fell dead when they could no longer stand the pull or the lashing whips of the overseers."

"Where is the other stone?" I asked, but was ignored.

"At last they came to the lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco, which they crossed on rafts, to the major causeway running north to Tenochtítlan. From there it was a broad way and a straight one, no more than two one-long-runs to the plaza here. The artists sighed with relief. They had worked so hard, so many other men had worked so hard, but those monuments were within sight of their destination...."

The crowd around us made a noise. The twenty or so men whose lifeblood would that day consecrate the Sun Stone were in line, and the first of them was mounting the pyramid steps. He appeared to be no captured enemy warrior, just a stocky man about my father's age, wearing only a clean white loincloth, looking haggard and unhappy, but he went willingly, unbound and without any guards impelling him. There on the terrace he stood and looked stolidly out over the crowd, while the priests swung their smoking censers and did ritual things with their hands and staffs. Then one priest took hold of the xochimíqui, gently turned him, and helped him lie back on a block in front of the veiled monument. The block was a single knee-high stone, shaped rather like a miniature pyramid, so, when the man lay propped on it, his body arched and his chest thrust upward as if eager for the blade.

He lay lengthwise to our view, his arms and legs held by four assistant priests, and behind him stood the chief priest, the executioner, holding the wide, almost trowel-shaped black obsidian knife. Before the priest could move, the pinioned man raised his dangling head and said something. There were other words among those on the terrace, then the priest handed his blade to Axayácatl. The crowd made noises of surprise and puzzlement. That particular victim, for some reason, was to be granted the high honor of being dispatched by the Uey-Tlatoani himself.

Axayácatl did not hesitate or fumble. As expertly as any priest, he stabbed the knife point into the man's chest on the left side, just under the nipple and between two ribs, then made a slash with the knife edge, then rotated the wide blade sideways to separate the ribs and open the wound wider. With his other hand he reached into the wet red opening, seized the un-scratched and still-beating heart, and tore it loose from its enlacement of blood vessels. Not until then did the xochimíqui utter his first sound of pain—a blubbering sob—and the last sound of his life.

As the Revered Speaker held high the glistening, dripping, purple-red object, a priest somewhere jerked some hidden string, the shroud fell away from the Sun Stone, and the crowd gave a concerted "Ay-y-yo-o!" of admiration. Axayácatl turned, reached up, and ground the victim's heart into the very center of the circular stone, into the mouth of Tonatíu carved there. He mashed and rubbed the heart until it was only a smear on the stone and nothing was left in his hand. I have been told by priests that a heart's donor usually lived long enough to see what became of his heart. But that one could not have seen much. When Axayácatl was finished, the blood and ground meat were scarcely visible, because the carved sun face was already painted a color very like that of heart's blood.

"That was cleanly done," said the bent man at my father's side. "I have often seen a heart go on beating so vigorously that it jumps from the executioner's fingers. But I think this particular heart had already been broken."

Now the xochimíqui lay unmoving, except that his skin twitched here and there, like the skin of a dog tormented by flies. The priests rolled his carcass from the stone and let it tumble unceremoniously off the terrace, while a second victim plodded up the stair. Axayácatl honored no more of the xochimíque, but left the rest to the priests. As the procession went on—each man's extracted heart being used to anoint the Sun Stone—I peered closely at the massive object, so I might describe it to my friend Tlatli, who, even way back then, had begun practicing to be a sculptor by whittling bits of wood into doll figures.

Yyo ayyo, reverend friars, if you could but have seen the Sun Stone! Your faces show disapproval of the dedication ceremony, but if you had ever once seen the stone, you would know it to have been worth all its cost in toil and years and human lives.

The carving alone was beyond belief, for that was porphyry, a stone as hard as granite. In the center was the face of Tonatíu, eyes staring, mouth agape, and on either side of his head were claws grasping the human hearts which were his provender. Surrounding that were the symbols of the four eras of the world which preceded the era in which we now live, and a circle comprising the symbols of our twenty day-names, and a circle of the alternating symbols of jadestone and turquoise, the gems held in highest esteem of all found in our lands. Around that, again, a circle of the day's sun rays alternating with the night's stars. And, girdling the whole, two sculptures of the Fire Serpent of Time, their tails at the top of the stone, their bodies making the round of it, and their heads meeting at the bottom. In one stone, that one artist had captured all of our universe, all of our time.

It was painted in bold colors, meticulously applied on those precise places where each color belonged. Yet the painter's real skill was most evident where no paint at all had been put on. Porphyry is a stone that holds fragments of mica, feldspar, and quartz. Wherever one of those bits of crystalline rock was embedded, the artist had left it unpainted. So, as the Sun Stone stood in the midday radiance of Tonatíu himself, those tiny clear jewels flashed at us pure sunlight from among the glowing colors. The entire great object seemed not so much colored as lighted from within. But I suppose you would have to have seen it in all its original glory to believe it. Or through the clearer eyes and in the clearer light I enjoyed in those days. Or perhaps with the mind of an impressionable and still-benighted little heathen boy...

Anyway, I turned my attention from the stone to our guide, who was continuing his interrupted history of the thing's painful progress hither:

"The causeway had never before known such a weight. The two brothers' two mighty stones were moving along on their log rollers, one behind the other, when the road buckled under the leading burden, and that wrapped stone went to the bottom of Lake Texcóco. The porters rolling the second—this Sun Stone here—stopped it just short of the brink of the broken causeway. It was lowered onto a raft again and floated around the island to the plaza here. Thus it alone was saved for us to admire today."

"But the other?" asked my father. "After all that work spent, could not a little more have been expended?"

"Oh, it was, my lord. The most experienced divers went down time after time. But the floor of Lake Texcóco is a soft and maybe bottomless ooze. The divers prodded with long poles, but they never located it. The stone, whatever it was, must have gone down edge on."

"Whatever it was?" echoed my father.

"No one but its artist ever laid eyes on it. No one ever will. It may have been more magnificent even than that"—the old man indicated the Sun Stone—"but we will never know."

"Will not the artist tell?" I asked.

"He never did."

I persisted, "Well, could he not do it over again?" A task of twenty and two years seemed rather less to me then than it would now.

"Perhaps he could, but he never will. He took the disaster as evidence of his tonáli, as a sign that the gods had spurned his offering. That was he whom the Revered Speaker just now honored with the Flowery Death at his own hand. The rejected artist gave himself to be the first sacrifice to the Sun Stone."

"To his brother's work," my father murmured. "Meanwhile, what of the brother?"

"He will receive honors and rich gifts and the -tzin to his name," said our guide. "But the whole world will forever wonder, and so will he. Might there not be a work more sublime even than the Sun Stone lying unseen beneath Lake Texcóco?"

In time, indeed, the myth-enhanced unknown came to be more treasured than the tangible reality. The lost sculpture came to be called In Huehuetotetl—The Most Venerable Stone—and the Sun Stone regarded as only a middling substitute. The surviving brother never carved another work. He became an octli drunkard, a pitiful ruin, but he had enough self-respect remaining that, before he brought irredeemable shame to his new and noble title, he too volunteered to participate in a sacrificial ceremony. And when he died the Flowery Death, his heart did not, either, leap from the executioner's hand.

Ah, well, the Sun Stone too has been lost and gone these eight years now, buried under the rubble when The Heart of the One World was demolished by your war boats and cannon balls and battering beams and fire arrows. But perhaps one day your own rebuilt new City of Mexíco will be razed in its turn, and the Sun Stone will be rediscovered shining among the ruins. Even—aquin ixnentla?—perhaps someday The Most Venerable Stone as well.

My father and I went home again that night, on our composite acáli now loaded with trade goods procured by the freightmaster. You have heard the major and most memorable events of that day, that celebration of my seventh birthday and naming day. It was, I think, the most enjoyable of all the birthdays I have passed, and I have passed more than my share.

* * *

I am glad I got to see Tenochtítlan when I did, for I never again saw it the same way. I do not mean just because the city grew and changed, or because I came back to it surfeited and no longer impressionable. I mean I literally never saw anything so clearly again with my own two eyes.

I have earlier spoken of my being able to discern the chiseled rabbit in the moon, and After Blossom in the twilight sky, and the details of the insignia on Tenochtítlan's feather banners, and the intricacies of the Sun Stone. Within five years after that seventh birthday, I could not have seen After Blossom if some sky god had run a surveyor's string from the star to my eye. Metztli the moon, at his fullest and brightest, became no more than a featureless yellow-white blob, his once sharp circle fuzzing indistinctly into the sky.

In brief, from about the age of seven onward, I began to lose my sight. It made me something of a rarity, and not in any enviable sense. Except for those few born blind, or those who became so from a wound or a disease, almost all our people possess the keen eyesight of eagles and vultures. My decreasingly clear vision was a condition practically unknown among us, and I was ashamed of it, and did not speak of it, and tried to keep it my own hurtful secret. When someone would point and say, "Look there!" I would exclaim, "Ah, yes!" though not knowing whether I should goggle or dodge.

The dimness did not come upon me all at once; it came gradually, but inexorably. By the time I was nine or ten, I could see as clearly as anyone, but only to a distance of perhaps two arms' length. Beyond that, the outline of things began to blur, as if I were seeing them through a transparent but distorting film of water. At a more considerable distance—say, looking from a hilltop across a landscape—all the individual outlines blurred so much that objects mingled and merged, and a landscape was to me no more than an eccentrically patterned blanket of amorphous smears of color. At least, in those years, with a clear visual field of two arms' length, I could move about without falling over things. When bidden to fetch something in one of the rooms of our house, I could find it without having to grope.

But my scope of vision continued to diminish, down to perhaps one arm's length of clarity before I reached my thirteenth birthday, and I could no longer pretend well enough for it to go unnoticed by others. For a time, I suppose my family and friends thought me merely clumsy or slipshod or maybe dimwitted. And at that time, with the perverse vanity of boyhood, I would rather have been thought a lout than a cripple. But it inevitably became obvious to everyone that I was lacking in the one most necessary of the five senses. My family and friends behaved variously toward this suddenly revealed freak among them.

My mother blamed my condition on my father's side of the family. It seems there was once an uncle who, drunk on octli, had reached for another pot of some similarly white liquid, and had swallowed it all before noticing that it was the powerful caustic xocoyatl, used for cleaning and bleaching badly begrimed limestone. He survived and never drank again, but he was blind all the rest of his life, and, according to my mother's theory, that lamentable inheritance had been handed down to me.

My father did no blaming or speculating, but consoled me rather too heartily: "Well, being a master quarrier is close-up work, Mixtli. You will have no trouble peering for the threadlike cracks and crevices."

Those of my own age—and children, like scorpions, stab instinctively, savagely—would cry out to me, "Look there!"

I would squint and say, "Ah, yes."

"That is really something to see, is it not?"

I would squint harder, desperately, and say, "It truly is."

They would burst into laughter and yell derisively, "There is nothing there to see, Tozani!"

Others, my close friends like Chimali and Tlatli, would also sometimes blurt out, "Look there!" but they would quickly add, "A swift-messenger comes running toward the Lord Red Heron's palace. He wears the green mantle of good news. There must have been a victorious battle somewhere."

My sister Tzitzitlini said little, but she contrived to accompany me whenever I had to go any distance or into unfamiliar surroundings. She would take my hand, as if merely making the fond gesture of an older sister, and unobtrusively she would guide me around any obstacles in my path not readily visible.

However, the other children were so many, and they so persistently called me Tozani, that soon their elders addressed me the same—unthinkingly, not unkindly—and eventually so did everybody but my mother, father, and sister. Even when I had adapted to my handicap, and managed no longer to be so clumsy, and other people had little cause to notice my shortsightedness, by then the sobriquet had stuck. I thought that my given name of Mixtli, meaning Cloud, ironically suited me better than before, but Tozani I became.

The tozani is the little animal you call the mole, which prefers to spend its life underground, in the dark. When it infrequently emerges, it is blinded by the mere light of day, and squints its tiny eyes closed. It neither sees nor cares to see.

I cared very much, and for a long time in my young life I went pitying myself. I would never become a tlachtli ball player, to hope for the high honor of someday playing in the Revered Speaker's own court a ritual game dedicated to the gods. If I became a warrior, I could never hope to win knighthood. Indeed, I would be god-protected if I had a life expectancy of as much as one day in combat. As for earning a living, supporting a family of my own... well, a quarrier I would not become, but of what other labor was I capable?

I toyed wistfully with the possibility of becoming some kind of traveling worker. That could take me eventually south to the far land of the Maya, and I had heard that the Maya physicians knew miraculous cures for even the most hopeless eye ailments. Perhaps there I could be healed, and could come home again in bright-eyed triumph as an unbeatable tlachtli goalsman, or a battle hero, or even a knight of one of the three orders.

But then the encroaching dimness seemed to slow its approach and stop at my arm's length. It did not, really, but after those early years its further progress was less perceptible. Today, with the unaided eye, I cannot make out my wife's face farther than a handspan from my own. It matters little, now that I am old, but it mattered much when I was young.

Nevertheless, slowly I resigned myself and adapted myself to my limitations. That strange man in Tenochtítlan had spoken aright when he predicted that my tonáli was to look close, to see things near and plain. Of necessity I slowed my pace, I was often still, I scrutinized instead of scanning. When others hurried, I waited. When others rushed, I moved with deliberation. I learned to differentiate between purposeful movement and mere motion, between action and mere activity. Where others, impatient, saw a village, I saw its people. Where others saw people, I saw persons. Where others glimpsed a stranger and nodded and hastened on, I made sure to see him close, and later I could draw a picture of his every lineament, so that even an accomplished artist like Chimali would exclaim, "Why, Mole, you have caught the man, and to the life!"

I began to notice things that I think escape most people, keen-eyed though they may be. Did you ever notice, my lord scribes, that the maize grows faster at night than in the day? Did you ever notice that every ear of maize has an even number of rows of kernels? Or almost every ear. But to find one with an odd number of rows is a happenstance far more rare than to find a clover leaf with four petals. Did you ever notice that no two fingers—no two of your own—no two in the entire human race, if my studies are any proof—have precisely the same pattern of whorls and arches infinitesimally etched on the balls of the fingertips? If you do not believe me, compare your own. Compare each other's. I will wait.

Oh, I know there was no significance or profit in my noticing such things. They were but trivial details on which to exercise my new penchant for looking close and examining with care. But that necessity-made-virtue, combined with my aptitude for copying exactly the things I could see, finally led me to take an interest in our people's picture writing. There was no school on Xaltócan that taught such an abstruse subject, but I sought out every scrap of writing I could find, and studied it intently and struggled to read its meaning.

The numerical writing, I think, anyone could easily make out. The shell symbol for zero, the dots or fingers for ones, the flags for twenties, the little trees for hundreds. But I remember the thrill when one day I first puzzled out a pictured word.

My father took me along on some business visit to the governor and, to keep me occupied while they talked in some private chamber, the governor let me sit in his entry hall and look at the register of all his subjects. I turned first to my own page. Seven dots, flower symbol, gray cloud. Then I ever so carefully moved to other pages. Some of the names were as easy to comprehend as my own, simply because I was familiar with them. Not far before my page was that of Chimali, and of course I recognized his: three fingers, the duck-billed head symbolizing the wind, the two intertwined tendrils representing smoke, rising from a feather-fringed disk—Yei-Ehecatl Pocuia-Chimali: Three Wind Smoking Shield.

The more frequently repeated drawings were easy to espy. After all, we had only twenty day-names. But I was suddenly struck by the not so immediately evident repetition of elements from Chimali's name and my own. One page near the back, hence recently drawn, showed six dots, then a shape like a tadpole standing on its head, then that duck-billed symbol, then the three-petaled thing. I could read it! I knew whose it was!

Six Rain Wind Flower, the baby sister of Tlatli, who had only last week celebrated her naming birthday.

Somewhat less gingerly now, I turned the stiff folded pages back and forth, looking at the pages on both sides of the pleats, searching for other repetitions and recognizable symbols I could piece together. The governor and my father returned just after I had laboriously worked out another name, or believed I had. With a mixture of timidity and pride I said:

"Excuse me, Lord Red Heron. Would you have the goodness to tell me, am I right, does this page record the name of some person called Two Reed Yellow Eyetooth?"

He looked and said no, it did not. He must have seen my face fall, for he patiently explained:

"It says Two Reed Yellow Light, the name of a laundress here in the palace. The Two Reed is obvious. And yellow, coztic, is easy to indicate simply by using that color, as you have divined. But tlanixtelotl, 'light'—or more precisely 'the eye's element'—how does one make a picture of something so insubstantial? Instead, I put a drawing of a tooth, tlanti, to represent not the meaning but the sound of the tlan at the beginning of the word, and then a picture of an eye, ixtelolotl, which serves to make clear the meaning of the whole. You grasp it now? Tlanixtelotl. Light."

I nodded, feeling rather deflated and foolish. There was more to picture writing than just recognizing the drawing of a tooth. In case I had not realized it, the governor made it plain:

"Writing and reading are for those trained in such arts, son of Tepetzalan." And he gave me a man-to-man clap on the shoulder. "They take much learning and much practice, and only the nobility have the leisure for so much study. But I admire your initiative. Whatever occupation you do undertake, young man, you ought to do it well."

I daresay the son of Tepetzalan should have complied with the Lord Red Heron's broad hint, and stuck to the trade of Tepetzalan. Weak-eyed and ill equipped as I was for any more ambitious or venturesome occupations, I could have drudged away an uneventful but never empty-bellied life as a real mole of a quarrier. A life less satisfying, perhaps, than the one I stubbornly persisted in pursuing, but it would have brought me far smoother roads and more tranquil days than I was to know when I went my own way. Right at this moment, my lords, I could be employed in helping to build your City of Mexíco. And, if Red Heron was right in his estimation of my abilities, possibly making of it a better city than your own imported architects and stonemasons are doing.

But let it pass, let it all pass, as I myself let it all pass—heedless of the Lord Red Heron's implied command, heedless of my father's genuine pride in his trade and his attempts to teach it to me, heedless of my mother's carping complaints that I was reaching above my ordained station in life.

For the governor had given me another hint, and one that I could not ignore. He had revealed that the picture writing did not always mean what it looked like, but what it sounded like. No more than that. But that was enlightening enough and tantalizing enough to keep me searching out bits of writing—on temple walls, on the island's tribute roll in the palace, on any paper carried by any passing tradesman—and doing my untaught, earnest best to make sense of them.

I even went to the ancient tonalpoqui who had so glibly given me my name, four years before, and asked if I might pore over his venerable naming book when it was not in use. He could not have recoiled more violently if I had asked to use one of his granddaughters as a concubine when she was not otherwise busy. He repulsed me with the information that the art of knowing the tonalmatl was reserved for the descendants of tonalpoque, not for unknown and presumptuous brats. It may have been so. But I will wager that either he remembered my declaring that I could have named myself as well as he had done, or—more likely—he was a frightened old fraud who could no more read the tonalmatl than I could at that time.

Then, one evening, I met a stranger. Chimali and Tlatli and I and some other boys had been playing together all afternoon, so Tzitzitlini was not along. On a shore far distant from our village we found a holed and rotting old hulk of an acáli, and got so absorbed in playing boatmen that we were taken by surprise when Tonatíu gave his red-sky warning that he was preparing for bed. We had a long way to walk home, and Tonatíu hurried to bed faster than we could walk, so the other boys broke into a trot. In daylight I could have kept up with them, but the dusk and my blighted vision forced me to move more slowly and pick my way with care. Probably the others never missed me; anyway, they soon outdistanced me.

I came to a crossroads, and there was a stone bench there, I had not passed that way in some time, but now I remembered that the bench bore several incised symbols, and I forgot everything else. I forgot that it was now almost too dark for me even to see the carvings, let alone decipher them. I forgot why the bench was there. I forgot all the lurking things that might descend on me as the night descended. I even heard an owl hoot somewhere nearby, and paid that omen of danger no attention. There was something there to read, or try to read, and I could not pass by without trying.

The bench was long enough for a man to lie upon, if he could have lain comfortably on the ridges of stone carving. I bent over the marks, and stared at them, and traced them with my fingers as well as my eyes, and moved from one to the next and the next—and nearly sprawled across the lap of a man sitting there. I sprang away as if he had been red-hot to the touch, and stammered an apology:

"M-mixpantzinco. In your august presence..."

Politely enough, but wearily, he made the customary reply, "Ximopanolti. At your convenience..."

Then we stared at each other for a space. I assume he saw only a slightly grubby, squinting boy of about twelve years old. I could not see him in detail, partly because the night was well upon us now, partly because I had leapt so far away from him. But I could make out that he was a stranger to the island, or at least to me, that his mantle was of good material though travel-stained, that his sandals were worn from long walking, and that his coppery skin was dusty from the road.

"What is your name, boy?" he asked at last.

"Well, they call me Mole—" I began.

"I can believe that, but it is not your name." Before I could put in a word, he asked another question, "What were you doing just now?"

"I was reading, Yanquicatzin." I really do not know what there was about him, but it made me address him as Lord Stranger. "I was reading the writing on the bench."

"Indeed?" he said, in what sounded like tired disbelief. "I would never have taken you for an educated young noble. What does the writing say, then?"

"It says: From the people of Xaltócan, a resting place for the Lord Night Wind."

"Someone told you that."

"No, Lord Stranger. Excuse me, but—see?" I moved close enough to point. "This duck-billed thing here stands for wind."

"It is not a duck bill," the man snapped. "That is the trumpet through which the god blows the winds."

"Oh? Thank you for telling me, my lord. Anyway, it stands for ehecatl. And this marking here—all these closed eyelids—that means yoali. Yoali Ehecatl, the Night Wind."

"You really can read?"

"A very little, my lord. Not much."

"Who taught you?"

"No one, Lord Stranger. There is no one on Xaltócan to teach the art. It is a pity, for I should like to learn more."

"Then you must go elsewhere."

"I suppose so, my lord."

"I suggest you do it now. I tire of being read to. Go elsewhere, boy called Mole."

"Oh. Yes. Of course, Lord Stranger. Mixpantzinco."

"Ximopanolti."

I turned back once for a last look at him. But he was beyond the range of my short sight, or he was swallowed up in the dark, or he had simply got up and gone.

I was met at home by a chorus of my father, mother, and sister expressing a mixture of worry, relief, consternation, and anger at my having stayed out so long alone in the perilous dark. But even my mother quieted when I told how I had been delayed by the inquisitive stranger. She quieted, and she and my sister looked with wide eyes at my father. He looked with wide eyes at me.

"You met him," my father said huskily. "You met the god and he let you go. The god Night Wind."

All through a sleepless night I tried, without much success, to see the dusty, weary, surly wayfarer as a god. But if he had been Night Wind, then by tradition I was due to get my heart's desire. There was only one problem. Unless wanting to learn to read and write might qualify, I did not know what was my heart's desire. Or I did not know until I got it, if that is what I got.

* * *

It happened on a day when I was working at the first apprentice job I was given at my father's quarry. It was no onerous work; I had been appointed watchman of the big pit during the time when all the workmen downed tools and went home for their midday meal. Not that there was much risk of human thievery, but if the tools were left unguarded, small wild animals would come to gnaw the tool hafts and handles for the salt the wood had absorbed from the workers' sweat. A single prickly little boar could chew up a whole, hard ebony pry-bar during the men's absence. Fortunately, my mere presence there was sufficient to keep the salt-seeking creatures at bay, for whole swarms of them could have invaded unseen by my mole eyes.

That day, as always, Tzitzitlini ran out from home to bring me my own midday meal. She kicked off her sandals and sat with me on the sunlit grassy rim of the quarry, chattering gaily while I ate my fare of tiny boned lake whitefish, each rolled and broiled in a tortilla. They had come wrapped in a cloth and were still hot from the fire. My sister looked warm too, I noticed, though the day was cool. Her face was flushed and she kept fanning the square-cut top of her blouse away from her breasts.

The fish rolls had a slight but unusually tart taste. I wondered if Tzitzi instead of our mother had prepared them, and whether she was chattering so volubly just to keep me from teasing her about her apparent lack of cooking skill. But the taste was not disagreeable, and I was hungry, and I felt quite replete when I had finished. Tzitzi suggested that I lie down and digest my meal in comfort; she would keep watch for any intruding prickly little boars.

I stretched out on my back and looked up at the clouds which once I could see so clear-cut against the sky; now they were but formless white swatches among formless blue swatches. I had got accustomed to that by now. But all at once something more disturbing began to happen to my vision. The white and blue commenced swirling, slowly at first, then more rapidly, as if some god up there had begun to stir the sky with a chocolate beater. Surprised, I started to sit up, but I was suddenly so dizzy that I fell back upon the grass.

I felt uncommonly odd, and I must have made some odd noise, for Tzitzi leaned over me and looked into my face. Addled though I was, I got the impression that she had been waiting for something to happen to me. The tip of her tongue was caught between her brilliant white teeth, and her narrowed eyes gave me a look of seeking some sign. Then her lips smiled mischievously, her tongue's tip licked them, and her eyes widened with a light almost of triumph. She remarked on my own eyes, and her voice seemed strangely to come like an echo from far away.

"Your pupils have got so large, my brother." But she still smiled, so I felt no cause for alarm. "Your irises are scarcely brown at all, but almost entirely black. What do you see with those eyes?"

"I see you, my sister," I said, and my voice was thick. "But somehow you look different. You look..."

"Yes?" she prompted.

"You look so beautiful," I said. I could not help saying it.

Like every boy my age, I was expected to disdain and disprize girls—if I even deigned to notice them—and of course one's own sister was more to be disparaged than any other girl. But I would have known Tzitzitlini to be beautiful even if the fact had not been remarked so often in my hearing by all the adults, women and men alike, who caught their breath at first catching sight of her. No sculptor could have captured the lissome grace of her young body, for stone or clay cannot move, and she gave the illusion of being always in flowing motion even when she was most still. No painter could have mixed the exact golden-fawn color of her skin, or the color of her eyes: doe-brown flecked with gold...

But that day something magical had been added, and that was why I could not have refused to acknowledge her beauty, even if I had been so inclined. The magic was visible all about her, an aura like that of the mist of water jewels in the sky when the sun comes out immediately after a rain.

"There are colors," I said, in my curiously thickened voice. "Bands of color, like the mist of water jewels. All around your face, my sister. A glow of red... and outside that a glow of purple... and... and..."

"Looking at me gives you pleasure?" she asked.

"It does. You do. Yes. Pleasure."

"Then hush, my brother, and let yourself be given pleasure."

I gasped. Her hand was underneath my mantle. And remember, I was nearly a year short of that age to wear a loincloth. I should have found my sister's bold gesture an outrageous violation of my privacy, except that somehow it did not now seem so, and in any case I felt too numb to raise my arms and ward her off. I could feel almost nothing except that I seemed to be growing in a part of my body where I had never noticeably grown before. So was Tzitzi's body changing. Her young breasts ordinarily showed only as modest mounds beneath her blouse, but now, as she knelt over me, her nipples were swollen; they poked like little fingertips against the thin cloth covering them.

I managed to raise my heavy head and gazed wearily down at my tepúli in her manipulating hand. It had never before occurred to me that my member could be unsheathed of its skin so far down its length. That was the first time I had ever seen more than the tip and the pouty little mouth of what was now, with its outer skin slid back, revealed to be a ruddy and bulbous-ended shaft. It looked rather like a gaudy mushroom sprouting from Tzitzi's tight grasp.

"Oeya, yoyolcatica," she murmured, her face almost as red as my member. "It grows, it becomes alive. See?"

"Toton... tlapeztia," I said breathlessly. "It becomes glowing hot..."

With her free hand, Tzitzi lifted her skirt and anxiously, fumblingly unwound her diaperlike undergarment. She had to spread her legs to get it entirely undone, and I saw her tipíli, close enough that it was clear even to my sight. Always before, there had been nothing between her legs but a sort of close-shut crease or dimple, and even that had been almost imperceptible because it was blurred by a light fuzz of fine hairs. But now her cleft was opening of itself, like—

Ayya, Fray Domingo has upset and broken his inkwell. And now he leaves us. Distressed by the accident, no doubt.

During this interruption, I might mention that some of our men and women grow just a trace of ymáxtli, which is that hair in that private place between the legs. But most of our race have no hair at all there, or anywhere else on the body, except for the luxuriant growth on the head. Even our men have only scant facial hair, and any abundance is regarded as a disfigurement. Mothers daily bathe their boy babies' faces with scalding hot lime water, and in most cases—as in my own, for example—that treatment discourages the emergence of a beard all through a man's life.

Fray Domingo returns not. Do I wait, my lords, or go on?

Very well. Then I return to that hilltop long ago and far away, where I lay dazed and wondering while my sister worked so busily to take advantage of my condition.

As I said, her tipíli cleft was opening of itself, becoming a budding flower, showing pink petals against the flawless fawn skin there, and the petals even glistened as if drenched with dew. I fancied that Tzitzitlini's new-blossomed flower gave off a faint musky fragrance like that of the marigold. And meanwhile, all about my sister, about her face and her body and her now uncovered parts, there still shimmered and pulsated those inexplicable bands and waves of various colors.

She lifted my mantle out of her way, then raised one of her slender legs to sit astride my lower body. She moved urgently, but with the tremor of nervousness and inexperience. With one quivering small hand she held and aimed my tepúli. With the other she seemed to be trying to spread farther open the petals of her tipíli flower. As I have told earlier, Tzitzi had already had some practice at utilizing a wooden spindle as she now utilized me, but she was still narrowed by her chitoli membrane and was tight within. As for me, my tepúli was of course nowhere near man-size. (Though I know Tzitzi's ministrations helped to hurry it toward mature dimensions—or beyond, if other women have spoken true.) Anyway, Tzitzi was still virginally pursed, and my member was at least larger than any thin spindle substitute.

So there was a moment of anguished frustration. My sister's eyes were tight shut, she was breathing like a runner in a race, she was desperate for something to happen. I would have helped, if I had known what it was supposed to be, and if I had not been so numbed in every part of my body except that one. Then, abruptly, the threshold gave way. Tzitzi and I cried out simultaneously, I in surprise, she in what might have been either pleasure or pain. To my vast amazement, and in what manner I still could not entirely comprehend, I was inside my sister, enveloped by her, warmed and moistened by her—and then gently massaged by her, as she began to move her body up and down in a slow rhythm.

I was overwhelmed by the sensation that spread from my warmly clenched and slowly stroked tepúli to every other part of my being. The mist of water jewels about my sister seemed to brighten and grow, to include me as well. I could feel it vibrating me and tingling me all over. My sister held more than that one small extension of myself; I felt totally absorbed into her, into Tzitzitlini, into the sound of small bells ringing. The delight increased until I thought I could no longer tolerate it. And then it culminated in a burst even more delicious, a sort of soft explosion, like that of the milkweed pod when it splits and flings its white fluffs to the wind. At the same moment, Tzitzi breathed out a long soft moan of what even I, even in my ignorance, even half unconscious in my own sweet delirium, even I recognized as her rapturous release.

Then she collapsed limply along the length of my body, and her long soft hair billowed all about my face. We lay there for some time, both of us panting hard. I slowly became aware that the strange colors were fading and withdrawing, and that the sky above had stopped its whirling. Without raising her head to look at me, my sister said against my chest, very quietly and shyly, "Are you sorry, my brother?"

"Sorry!" I exclaimed, and frightened a quail into flying up from the grass near us.

"Then we can do it again?" she murmured, still without looking at me.

I thought about it. "Can it be done again?" I asked. The question was not so hilariously stupid as it sounds; I asked out of understandable ignorance. My member had slipped out of her, and was now wetly cold and as small as I had heretofore known it. I can hardly be derided for thinking that perhaps a male was allotted only one such experience in a lifetime.

"I do not mean now," said Tzitzi. "The workmen will be returning. But another day?"

"Ayyo, every day, if we can!"

She lifted herself on her arms and looked down at my face, her lips again mischievously smiling. "I will not have to trick you next time?"

"Trick me?"

"The colors you saw, the dizziness and numbness. I did a most sinful thing, my brother. I stole one of the mushrooms from their urn in the pyramid temple, and cooked it into your fish rolls."

She had done a daring and dangerous thing, besides a sinful one. The small black mushrooms were called teonanacatl, "flesh of the gods," which indicates how scarce and precious they were. They came, at great expense, from some holy mountain deep in the Mixteca lands, and they were to be eaten only by certain priests and professional seers, and then only on special occasions when it was necessary to foresee the future. Tzitzi would assuredly have been killed on the spot if she had been caught filching one of the sacred things.

"No, do not ever do that again," I said. "But why did you?"

"Because I wanted to do—what we just now did—and I was afraid you might resist if you knew clearly what we were doing."

Would I have? I wonder. I did not resist then, nor any time afterward, and I found every subsequent experience just as blissful, even without the enhancement of colors and vertigo.

Yes, my sister and I coupled countless times over the next years while I still lived at home—whenever we had the opportunity—during the mealtime break at the quarry, on deserted stretches of the lakeshore, twice or thrice in our own house when both our parents were absent for what we knew would be an adequate while. We mutually learned not to be quite so awkward at the act, but of course we were both inexperienced—neither of us would have thought of trying those transports with anyone else—so there was not a great deal we could teach each other. It was a long time before we even discovered that it could be done with me on top, though after that we invented numerous variant positions.

Now my sister slid off me and stretched luxuriously. Both our bellies were wet with a small smear of blood from the rupture of her chitoli, and with another liquid, my own omícetl, white like octli but stickier. Tzitzi dipped a wad of dry grass into the small jar of water she had brought with my meal and washed us both clean, so that there should be no telltale trace on our clothes. Then she rewound her undergarment, rearranged her rumpled outer clothes, kissed me on the lips, said "Thank you"—which I should have thought of saying first—wrapped the water jar in its cloth, and ran off down the grassy slope, skipping merrily.

There and then, my lord scribes, and thus, ended the roads and the days of my childhood.

I H S

S.C.C.M.

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

Most Eminent Majesty from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this All Souls' Day of the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.

In sending, at Your Majesty's behest, yet another increment of the Aztec History, this necessarily obedient but still reluctant servant begs leave to quote Varius Geminus, on an occasion when he approached his emperor with some vexata quaestio: "Whoever dares speak before thee, oh Caesar, knows not thy greatness; whoever dares not speak before thee, knows not thy goodness."

Though we may risk giving affront and receiving rebuke, we beseech you, Sire, that we may be granted permission to abandon this noxious enterprise.

Inasmuch as Your Majesty has recently read, in the previous portion of manuscript delivered into your royal hands, the Indian's bland and almost blithe confession of having committed the abominable sin of incest—an act proscribed throughout the known world, civilized and savage alike; an act execrated even by such degenerate peoples as the Basques, the Greeks, and the English; an act forbidden even by the meager lex non scripta observed by the Indian's own fellow barbarians; therefore an act not to be condoned by us because it was committed before the sinner had any knowledge of Christian morality—for all these reasons, we had confidently expected that Your Pious Majesty would be sufficiently appalled to order an immediate end to the Aztec's oratory, if not to the Aztec himself.

However, Your Majesty's loyal cleric has never yet disobeyed a command from our liege. We append the further pages collected since the last were sent. And we will keep the scribes and the interpreter at their enforced and odious occupation, setting down still further pages, until such time as our Most Esteemed Emperor may see fit to give them surcease. We only beg and urge, Sire, that when you have read this next segment of the Aztec's life history—since it contains passages that would sicken Sodom—Your Majesty will reconsider your command that this chronicle be continued.

That the pure illumination of Our Lord Jesus Christ always guide the ways of Your Majesty, is the devout wish of Your S.C.C.M.'s devoted missionary legate,

(ecce signum) Zumárraga

TERTIA PARS

At the time of which I have been speaking, when I was given the name of Mole, I was still in school. Every sundown, when the working day was done, I and all the other boys above seven years of age, from all the villages and residences of Xaltócan, went either to The House of Building Strength, or, boys and girls together, to The House of Learning Manners.

In the former school, we boys endured rigorous physical exercises, and were taught the ball game of tlachtli and the rudiments of handling battle weapons. In the latter school, we and the girls our age were given some sketchy history of our nation and other lands, some rather more intensive instruction in the nature of our gods and the numerous festivals dedicated to them, and were taught the arts of ritual singing, dancing, and playing of musical instruments for the celebration of all those religious ceremonies.

It was only in those telpochcaltin, or lower schools, that we commoners mingled as equals with the children of the nobility, and even with a few of the demonstrably brighter and more deserving slave children. That elementary education, stressing politeness, piety, grace, and dexterity, was regarded as sufficient schooling for us middle-class youngsters, and a real honor for the handful of slave children who were deemed worthy and capable of any schooling whatever.

But none of the slave boys, and few of us middle-class boys—and never a girl child, even a daughter of the nobility—could look forward to any further education than that provided by The Houses of Manners and Strength. The sons of our nobles usually left the island to attend one of the calmécactin, since there was no such school on Xaltócan. Those institutions of higher learning were staffed and taught by a special order of priests, and their students learned to be priests themselves, or to be governing officials, or scribes, historians, artists, physicians, or professionals of some other calling. Entrance to a calmécac was not forbidden to any ordinary boy, but the attendance and boarding there was too costly for most middle-class families to afford, unless a boy was accepted at no cost at all, for having shown great distinction in the lower school.

And I must confess that I distinguished myself not at all in either The House of Learning Manners or that of Building Strength. I remember, on my first entering the music class at the school of manners, the Master of the Boys asked me to sing something, so that he might judge the quality of my voice. And I did, and he did, saying, "A wondrous thing to hear, but I do not believe it is singing. We will try you on an instrument."

When I proved equally incapable of wringing a tune from the four-holed flute, or any kind of harmony from the various tuned drums, the exasperated Master put me into a class which was learning one of the beginners' dances, the Thundering Serpent. Each dancer makes a small spring forward with a stamping noise, then whirls completely around, crouches on one knee and turns again in that position, then makes another stamping forward leap. When a line of boys and girls does this in progression, the sound is of a continuous rolling boom and the visual effect is that of a long snake twining its way along in sinuous curves. Or it should be.

"This is the first Thundering Serpent I ever saw with a kink in it!" shouted the Mistress of the Girls.

"Get out of that line, Malinqui!" shouted the master of the Boys.

Thereafter, to him, I was Alfaqui, the Kink. And thereafter, when our school's students performed in public, at festival ceremonies in the island's pyramid plaza, my only contribution to the music and dancing was to beat a turtleshell drum with a pair of small deer antlers or to click a pair of crab claws in each hand. Fortunately, my sister maintained the honor of our family at those events, she being always the featured solo dancer. Tzitzitlini could dance without any music at all, yet make the spectators believe they heard music all about them.

I was beginning to feel that I possessed no identity at all, or else so many that I knew not which to accept as really my own. At home I had been Mixtli, the Cloud. To the rest of Xaltócan I was becoming generally known as Tozani, the Mole. At The House of Learning Manners I was Alfaqui, the Kink. And in The House of Building Strength I soon became Poyautla, the Fogbound.

By good fortune, I was not as lacking in muscle as in musical bent, for I had inherited my father's stature and solidity. By the time I was fourteen I was taller than schoolmates two years older. And I suppose a stone-blind man could do the stretching and leaping and weightlifting exercises. So the Master of Athletics found no fault with my performance until we began to engage in team sports.

If the game of tlachtli allowed the use of hands and feet, I might have played better, for one moves one's hands and feet almost instinctively. But the hard óli ball can be struck only with knees, hips, elbows, and buttocks, and when I could see the ball at all, it was only a dim blob further blurred by its speed. Consequently, though we players wore head protectors, hip girdles, knee and elbow sleeves of heavy leather, and thick cotton padding over the rest of our bodies, I was constantly being bruised by the blows of the ball.

Worse, I could seldom distinguish my own teammates from the opposing players. When I did infrequently knee or hip the ball, I was as likely as not to slam it through the wrong one of the squat stone arches, the knee-high goals which, according to the complicated rules of the game, are continually being lugged from place to place at the ends of the court. As for putting the ball through one of the vertical stone rings high up in the midline of the court's two enclosing walls—meaning an immediate win, no matter what the score of goals already made by either team—that is next to impossible for even the most experienced player to do even by accident; it would have been a miracle for fogbound me.

It was not long before the Master of Athletics gave up on me as a participant. I was put in charge of the players' water jar and dipper, and of the pricking thorns and sucking reeds with which, after each game, the school physician eased the stiffness of the players by drawing the turgid black blood from their bruises.

Then there were the war games and the weapons instruction, under the tutelage of an elderly and scarred cuáchic, an "old eagle," the title of one whose battle valor has already been proved. His name was Extli-Quani, or Blood Glutton, and he must have been well over forty years old. For those exercises, we boys were not allowed to wear any of the plumes or paints or other array of real warriors. But we carried boy-sized shields of wood or wicker covered with leather, and we wore boy-sized suits of the soldiers' standard battle garb. Those garments were of thickly quilted cotton, toughened by having been soaked in brine, and they covered us from neck to wrists and ankles. They allowed a reasonable freedom of movement, and they were supposed to protect us from arrows—at least those arrows propelled from a distance—but ayya! they were hot and scratchy and sweaty things to wear for longer than a short while.

"First you will learn the battle cries," said Blood Glutton. "In combat, of course, you will be accompanied by the conch trumpeters and the beaters of the thunder drums or the groaning drums. But to those must be added your own voices shouting for slaughter, and the sound of your fists and weapons pounding upon your shields. I know from experience, my boys, that an overwhelming clamor of noise can be a weapon itself. It can shake a man's mind, water his blood, weaken his sinews, even void his bladder and bowels. But you must make that noise, and you will find it twice effective: it heartens your own battle resolve while it terrifies your enemy."

And so, for weeks before we had even a mock weapon, we yelled the shrieks of the eagle, the rasping grunts of the jaguar, the long-drawn hoots of the owl, the alalalala! of the parrot. We learned to caper in feigned eagerness for battle, to menace with broad gestures, to threaten with grimaces, to pound our shields in drumming unison until they were stained with the blood of our hands.

Some other nations had weapons different from those we Mexíca relied on, and some of our own units of warriors were equipped with arms for particular purposes, and even an individual might choose always to use whichever weapon he had become most proficient with. Those other arms included the leather sling for throwing rocks, the blunt stone ax for bludgeoning, the heavy mace whose knob was studded with jagged obsidian, the three-pointed spear of bones barbed at the ends so they inflicted a tearing wound, or the sword fashioned simply of the toothed snout of the sawfish. But the basic weapons of the Mexíca were four.

For the opening encounter with an enemy, at a long distance, there was the bow and arrow. We students practiced for a long time with arrows tipped only with soft balls of óli instead of sharp obsidian. For example, one day the Master formed twenty or so of us into a line and said:

"Suppose the enemy are in that patch of nopali cactus." He indicated what was to my fogbound vision only a green blur some hundred strides away. "I want full pull on the bowstring and I want your arrows angled upward, exactly midway between where the sun stands and the horizon below him. Ready? Take stable stance. Now take aim at the cactus. Now let fly."

There was a swooshing noise, then the boys groaned in concert. All the arrows had arced to the ground in a respectably tight grouping and at the hundred-strides distance of the cactus patch. But that was thanks to Blood Glutton's having specified the pull and the angle. The boys groaned because they had all been equally and dismally off target; the arrows had landed far to the left of the cactus. We looked to the Master, waiting for him to tell us how we could have aimed so wrong.

He gestured at the square and rectangular battle ensigns whose staffs were stuck here and there in the ground about us. "What are these cloth flags for?" he asked.

We looked at each other. Then Pactli, son of the Lord Red Heron, replied, "They are guidons to be carried by our separate unit leaders in the field. If we get scattered during a battle, the guidons show us where to regroup."

"Correct, Pactzin," said Blood Glutton. "Now, that other flag, that long feather pennant, what is it for?"

There was another exchange of glances, and Chimali ventured timidly, "We carry it to show pride that we are Mexíca."

"That is the wrong answer," said the Master, "but a manly one, so I will not whip you. But observe that pennon, my boys, how it floats upon the wind."

We all looked. There was not enough of a breeze that day to hold the banner straight out from its staff. It hung at an angle to the ground and—

"It is blowing to our left!" another boy shouted excitedly. "We did not aim wrong! The wind carried our arrows away from the target!"

"If you miss your target," the Master said drily, "you have aimed wrong. Blaming it on the wind god does not excuse it. To aim correctly, you must consider the force and direction in which Ehecatl is blowing his wind trumpet. That is the purpose of the feather pennon. Which way it hangs shows you which way the wind will carry your arrows. How high it hangs shows you how strongly the wind will carry them. Now, all of you march down there and retrieve your arrows. When you get there, turn about, from a line, and aim at me. The first boy who hits me will be excused for ten days from even his deserved whippings."

(We did not march, we ran for the arrows, and quite gleefully sent them back at the cuáchic, but not one of us hit him.)

For fighting at a nearer range than arrow shot, there was the javelin, a narrow, pointed blade of obsidian on a short shaft. Unfeathered, it depended for accuracy and piercing power upon its being thrown with utmost strength.

"So you do not hurl the javelin unaided," said Blood Glutton, "but with this atlatl throwing-stick. It will seem a clumsy method at first, but after much practice you will feel the atlatl to be what it is: a lengthening of your arm and a doubling of your strength. At a distance of as many as thirty long strides, you can drive the javelin clear through a tree as thick as a man. So imagine, my boys, what it will do when you fling it at a man."

There was also the long spear, with a broader and heavier obsidian head, for jabbing, thrusting, piercing before an enemy got really close to you. But, for the inevitable hand-to-hand fighting, there was the sword called the maquahuitl. It sounds innocent enough, "the hunting wood," but it was the most terrible and lethal weapon in our armory.

The maquahuitl was a flat stave of the very hardest wood, a man's-arm long and a man's-hand wide, and all along both edges of its length were inset sharp flakes of obsidian. The sword's handle was long enough for wielding the weapon with one hand or with both, and it was carefully carved to fit the grip of that weapon's owner. The obsidian chips were not merely wedged into the wood; so much depended on that sword that even sorcery was added to it. The flakes were cemented solidly with a charmed glue made of liquid óli, the precious perfumed copali resin, and fresh blood donated by the priests of the war god Huitzilopóchtli.

Obsidian makes a wicked-looking arrowhead or spear or sword edge, as shiny as quartz crystal but as black as the afterworld Mictlan. Properly flaked, the stone is so keen that it can cut as subtly as a grass-blade sometimes does, or cleave as deep as any bludgeon ax. The stone's one weakness is its brittleness; it can shatter against a foe's shield or against his opposing sword. But, in the hands of a trained fighter, the obsidian-edged maquahuitl can slash a man's flesh and bone as cleanly as if he were a clump of weeds—and in all-out war, as Blood Glutton never ceased reminding us, the enemy are but weeds to be mowed.

Just as our practice arrows, javelins, and spears were tipped with óli gum, so were our mock maquahuime made harmless. The stave was of light, soft wood, so the sword would break before it dealt a too punishing blow. And instead of obsidian chips, the edges were outlined only with tufts of feather down. Before any two students fought a sword duel, the Master would wet those tufts with red paint, so that every blow received would register as vividly as a real wound, and the mark would last almost as long. In a very short time, I was cross-hatched with wound marks, face and body, and I was quite embarrassed to be seen in public. Then it was that I requested a private audience with our cuáchic. He was a tough old man, hard as obsidian, and probably uneducated in anything besides war, but he was no stupid clod.

I stooped to make the gesture of kissing the earth and, still kneeling, said, "Master Blood Glutton, you already know that my eyesight is poor. I fear you are wasting time and patience in trying to teach me to soldier. If these marks on my body were real wounds, I should have been dead long since."

"So?" he said coolly. Then he squatted to my level. "Fogbound, I will tell you of a man I once met down in Quautemálan, the country of The Tangled Wood. Those people, as perhaps you know, are all timorous of death. This particular man scampered from every least suspicion of danger. He avoided the most natural risks of existence. He burrowed away in snug security. He surrounded himself with physicians and priests and sorcerers. He ate only the most nutritious foods, and he seized eagerly on every life-preserving potion he heard of. No man ever took better care of his life. He lived only to go on living."

I waited for more, but he said no more, so I asked, "What became of him, Master Cuáchic?"

"He died."

"That is all?"

"What else ever becomes of any man? I no longer remember even his name. No one remembers anything at all about him, except that he lived and then he died."

After another silence, I said, "Master, I know that if I am slain in war my dying will nourish the gods, and they will amply reward me in the afterworld, and perhaps my name will not be forgotten. But might I not be of some service in this world for a while before I achieve my dying?"

"Strike just one telling blow in battle, my boy. Then, even if you are slain the next moment, you will have done something with your life. More than all those men who merely drudge to exist until the gods tire of watching their futility and sweep them off to oblivion." Blood Glutton stood up. "Here, Fogbound, this is my own maquahuitl. It long served me well. Just feel the heft of it."

I will admit that I experienced a thrill when for the first time I held a real sword, not a toy weapon of corkwood and feathers.

It was most atrociously heavy, but its very weight said, "I am power."

"I see that you lift it and swing it with one hand," observed the Master. "Not many boys your age could do that. Now step over here, Fogbound. This is a sturdy nopali. Give it a killing stroke."

The cactus was an old one, of nearly tree size. Its spiny green lobes were like paddles, and its barked brown trunk was as thick as my waist. I swung the maquahuitl experimentally, with my right hand only, and the obsidian edge bit into the cactus wood with a hungry tchunk! I wiggled the blade loose, took the handle in both hands, swung the sword far back behind me, then struck with all my force. I had expected the blade to cut rather more deeply, but I was truly surprised when it slashed cleanly all the way through the trunk, splashing its sap like colorless blood. The nopali came crashing down, and the Master and I both had to leap nimbly away to avoid the falling mass of sharp spines.

"Ayyo, Fogbound!" Blood Glutton said admiringly. "Whatever attributes you lack, you do have the strength of a born warrior."

I flushed with pride and pleasure, but I had to say, "Yes, Master, I can strike and kill. But what of my dim vision? Suppose I were to strike the wrong man. One of our own."

"No cuáchic in command of novice warriors would ever put you in a position to do so. In a War of Flowers, he might assign you to the Swaddlers who carry the ropes to bind enemy prisoners that they may be brought back for sacrifice. Or in a real war, you might be assigned to the rear-guard Swallowers whose knives give merciful release to those comrades and foes left lying wounded when the battle has swept on past them."

"Swallowers and Swaddlers," I mustered. "Hardly heroic duties to win me reward in the afterworld."

"You spoke of this world," the Master sternly reminded me, "and of service, not heroism. Even the humblest can serve. I remember when we marched into the insolent city of Tlaltelólco, to annex it to our Tenochtítlan. That city's warriors battled us in the streets, of course, but its women, children, and old dodderers stood upon the housetops and threw down at us large rocks, nests full of angry wasps, even handfuls of their own excrement."

Right here, my lord scribes, I had better make clear that, among the different kinds of wars we Mexíca fought, the battle for Tlaltelólco had been an exceptional case. Our Revered Speaker Axayácatl simply found it necessary to subjugate that haughty city, to deprive it of independent rule, and forcibly to make its people render allegiance to our one great island capital of Tenochtítlan. But, as a general rule, our wars against other peoples were not for conquest—at least not in the sense that your armies have conquered all of this New Spain and made it an abject colony of your Mother Spain.

No, we might defeat and humble another nation, but we would not obliterate it from the earth. We fought to prove our own might and to exact tribute from the less mighty. When a nation surrendered and acknowledged fealty to us Mexíca, it was given a tally of its native resources and products—gold, spices, óli, whatever—that henceforth it would annually deliver in specified quantities to our Revered Speaker. And it would be held subject to conscription of its fighting men, when and if they should be needed to march alongside us Mexíca.

But that nation would retain its name and sovereignty, its own ruler, its accustomed way of life, and its preferred form of religion. We would not impose on it any of our laws, customs, or gods. Our war god Huitzilopóchtli, for example, was our god. Under his care the Mexíca were a people set apart from others and above them, and we would not share that god or let him be shared. Quite the contrary. In many defeated nations we discovered new gods or novel manifestations of our known gods, and, if they appealed to us, our armies brought home copies of their statues for us to set in our own temples.

I must tell you, too, that there existed nations from which we never were able to wring tribute or fealty. For instance, contiguous to us in the east there was Cuautexcalan, The Land of the Eagle Crags, usually called by us simply Texcala, The Crags. For some reason, you Spaniards choose to call that land Tlaxcala, which is laughable, since that word means merely tortilla.

Texcala was completely ringed by countries all allied to us Mexíca, hence it was forced to exist like a landlocked island. But Texcala adamantly refused ever to submit in the least degree, which meant that it was cut off from importing many necessities of life. If the Texcalteca had not, however grudgingly, traded with us the sacred copali resin in which their forestland was rich, they would not even have had salt to flavor their food.

As it was, our Uey-Tlatoani severely restricted the amount of trading between us and the Texcalteca—always in expectation of bringing them to submission—so the stubborn Texcalteca perpetually suffered humiliating deprivations. They had to eke out their meager crop of cotton, for example, meaning that even their nobles had to wear mantles woven of only a trace of cotton mixed with coarse hemp or maguey fiber; garments which, in Tenochtítlan, would have been worn only by slaves or children. You can well understand that Texcala harbored an abiding hatred for us Mexíca and, as you well know, it eventually had dire consequences for us, for the Texcalteca, and for all of what is now New Spain.

"Meanwhile," said Master Blood Glutton to me on that day we conversed, "right now our armies are disastrously embroiled with another recalcitrant nation to the west. The Revered Speaker's attempted invasion of Michihuácan, The Land of the Fishermen, has been repulsed most ignominiously. Axayácatl expected an easy victory, since those Purémpecha have always been armed with copper blades, but they have hurled our armies backward in defeat."

"But how, Master?" I asked. "An unwarlike race wielding soft copper weapons? How could they stand against us invincible Mexíca?"

The old soldier shrugged. "Unwarlike the Purémpecha may be, but they fight fiercely enough to defend their Michihuácan homeland of lakes and rivers and well-watered farmlands. Also, it is said they have discovered some magic metal that they mix into their copper while it is still molten. When the mixture is forged into blades, it becomes a metal so hard that our obsidian crumples like bark paper against it."

"Fishermen and farmers," I murmured, "defeating the professional soldiers of Axayácatl...."

"Oh, we will try again, you may wager on it," said Blood Glutton. "This time Axayácatl wanted only access to those waters rich in food fish, and those fruitful valleys. But now he will want the secret of that magic metal. He will challenge the Purémpecha again, and when he does, his armies will require every man who can march." The Master paused, then added pointedly, "Even stiff-jointed old cuáchictin like me, even those who can serve only as Swallowers and Swaddlers, even the crippled and the fogbound. It behooves us to be trained and hardened and ready, my boy."

As it happened, Axayácatl died before he could mount another invasion into Michihuácan, which is part of what you now call New Galicia. Under subsequent Revered Speakers, we Mexíca and the Purémpecha managed to live in a sort-of wary mutual respect. And I hardly need remind you, reverend friars, that your own most butcherlike commander, Beltran de Guzmán, is to this day still trying to crush the diehard bands of Purémpecha around Lake Chapalan and in other remote corners of New Galicia that yet refuse to surrender to your King Carlos and your Lord God.

I have been speaking of our punitive wars, such as they were. I am sure that even your bloodthirsty Guzmán can understand that kind of warfare, though I am also sure he could never conceive of a war—like most of ours—which left the defeated nation still surviving and independent. But now let me speak of our Wars of Flowers, because those seem incomprehensible to any of you white men. "How," I have heard you ask, "could there have been so many unprovoked and unnecessary wars between friendly nations? Wars that neither side even tried to win?"

I will do my best to explain.

Any kind of war was, naturally, pleasing to our gods. Each warrior, dying, spilled his lifeblood, the most precious offering a human could make. In a punitive war, a decisive victory was the objective, and so both sides fought to kill or be killed. The enemy were, as my old Master put it, weeds to be mowed. Only a comparatively few prisoners were taken and kept for later ceremonial sacrifice. But whether a warrior died on the battlefield or on a temple altar, his was accounted a Flowery Death, honorable to himself and satisfying to the gods. The only problem was—if you look at it from the gods' point of view—that punitive wars were not frequent enough. While they provided much god-nourishing blood and sent many soldiers to be afterworld servants of the gods, such wars were only sporadic. The gods might have to wait and fast and thirst for many years between. That displeased them, and in the year One Rabbit, they let us know it.

That was some twelve years before my birth, but my father remembered it vividly and often told of it with much sad shaking of his head. In that year, the gods sent to this whole plateau the harshest winter ever known. Besides freezing cold and biting winds which untimely killed many infants, sickly elders, our domestic animals, and even the animals of the wild, there was a six-day snowfall which killed every winter crop in the ground. There were mysterious lights visible in the night skies: wavering vertical bands of cold-colored lights, what my father described as "the gods striding ominously about the heavens, nothing of them visible but their mantles woven of white and green and blue heron feathers."

And that was only the beginning. The spring brought not just an end to the cold but a scorching heat; the rainy season ensued, but it brought no rain, the drought killed our crops and animals as dead as the snows had done. Nor was even that the end. The following years were equally merciless in their alternate cold and heat and dearth of rain. In the cold our lakes froze over; in the heat they shrank, they became tepid, they became bitter salt, so that the fish died and floated belly up. and fouled the air with their stench.

Five or six years continued thus: what the older folk of my youth still referred to as the Hard Times. Yya ayya, they must have been terrible times indeed, for our people, our proud and upstanding macehualtin, were reduced to selling themselves into slavery. You see, other nations beyond this plateau, in the southern highlands and in the coastal Hot Lands, they had not been laid waste by the climatic catastrophe. They offered shares of their own still-bounteous harvests for barter, but that was no generosity, for they knew that we had little to trade except ourselves. Those other peoples, especially those inferior to us and inimical to us, were only too pleased to buy "the swaggering Mexíca" for slaves, and to demean us further by paying only cruel and miserly prices.

The standard trade was five hundred ears of maize for a male of working age or four hundred for a female of breeding age. If a family had one sellable child, that boy or girl would be relinquished so the rest of the household might eat. If a family had only infants, the father would sell himself. But for how long could any household subsist on four or five hundred ears of maize? And when those were eaten, who or what remained to be sold? Even if the Good Times were suddenly to come again, how could a family survive without a working father? Anyway, the Good Times did not come—

That was during the reign of the First Motecuzóma and, in attempting to alleviate his people's misery, he depleted both the national and his personal treasury, then emptied all the capital's storehouses and granaries. When the surplus was gone, when everything was gone except the still-grinding Hard Times, Motecuzóma and his Snake Woman convened their Speaking Council of elders, and even called in seers and sayers for advice. I cannot vouch for it, but it is said that the conference went thus:

One hoary sorcerer, who had spent months in studying the thrown bones and consulting sacred books, solemnly reported, "My Lord Speaker, the gods have made us hungry to demonstrate that they are hungry. There has not been a war since our last incursion into Texcala, and that was in the year Nine House. Since then, we have made only sparse blood offerings to the gods. A few prisoners kept in reserve, the occasional lawbreaker, now and then an adolescent or a maiden. The gods are quite plainly demanding more nourishment."

"Another war?" mused Motecuzóma. "Even our hardiest warriors are by now too feeble even to march to an enemy frontier, let alone breach it."

"True, Revered Speaker. But there is a way to arrange a mass sacrifice..."

"Slaughter our people before they starve to death?" Motecuzóma asked sardonically. "They are so gaunt and dried-up that the whole nation probably would not yield a cupful of blood."

"True, Revered Speaker. And in any case, that would be such a mendicant gesture that the gods probably would not accept it. No, Lord Speaker, what is necessary is a war, but a different kind of war...."

That, or so I have been told, and so I believe, was the origin of the Flowery Wars, and this is how the first of them was arranged:

The mightiest and most centrally situated powers in this valley constituted a Triple Alliance: we the Mexíca with our capital on the island of Tenochtítlan, the Acolhua with their capital at Texcóco on the lake's eastern shore, and the Tecpanéca with their capital at Tlácopan on the western shore. There were three lesser peoples to the southeast: the Texcalteca, of whom I have already spoken, with their capital at Texcala; the Huexotin with their capital at Huexotzinco; and the once mighty Tya Nuü—or Mixteca, as we called them—whose domain had shrunken until it consisted of little more than their capital city of Chololan. The first were our enemies, as I have said; the latter two had long ago been made our tribute payers and, like it or not, our occasional allies. All three of those nations, however, like all three of ours in the Alliance, were being devastated by the Hard Times.

After Motecuzóma's conference with his Speaking Council, he conferred also with the rulers of Texcóco and Tlácopan. Those three together drafted and sent a proposal to the three rulers in the cities of Texcala, Chololan, and Huexotzinco. In essence it said something like this:

"Let us all make war that we may all survive. We are diverse peoples, but we suffer the same Hard Times. The wise men say that we have only one hope of enduring: to sate and placate the gods with blood sacrifices. Therefore, we propose that the armies of our three nations meet in combat with the armies of your three nations, on the neutral plain of Acatzinco, safely far to the southeast of all our lands. The fighting will not be for territory, nor for rule, nor for slaughter, nor for plunder, but simply for the taking of prisoners to be granted the Flowery Death. When all participating forces have captured a sufficiency of prisoners for sacrifice to their several gods, this will be mutually made known amongst the commanders and the battle will end forthwith."

That proposal, which you Spaniards say you find incredible, was agreeable to all concerned—including the warriors whom you have called "stupidly suicidal" because they fought for no apparent end except the extremely likely and sudden end to their own lives. Well, tell me, what professional soldier of your own would refuse any excuse for a battle, in preference to humdrum, peacetime garrison duty? At least our warriors had the stimulus of knowing that if they died in combat or on an alien altar, they earned all people's thanks for pleasing the gods, while they earned the gods' gift of life in a blissful afterworld. And, in those Hard Times, when so many died of inglorious starvation, a man had even more reason for preferring to die by the sword or the sacrificial knife.

So that first battle was planned, and it was fought as planned—though the plain of Acatzinco was a dreary long march from anywhere, so all six armies had to rest for a day or two before the signal was given to commence hostilities. Other intentions notwithstanding, a goodly number of men were killed; some inadvertently, by chance and accident; some because they or their opponents fought too exuberantly. It is difficult for a warrior, trained to kill, to refrain from killing. But most, as agreed, struck with the flat of the maquahuitl, not with the obsidian edge. The men thus stunned were not dispatched by the Swallowers but were quickly bound by the Swaddlers. After only two days, the priest-chaplains who marched with each army decided that prisoners enough had been taken to satisfy them and their gods. One after another, the commanders unfurled the prearranged banners, the knots of men still grappling on the plain disengaged, the six armies reassembled and marched wearily home, leading their even wearier captives.

That first, tentative War of Flowers took place in midsummer, normally also mid-rainy season, but in those Hard Times just another of the interminable hot, dry spells. And one other thing had been prearranged by the six rulers of the six nations: that all of them should sacrifice all their prisoners in their six capital cities on the same day. No one remembers the exact count, but I suppose several thousand men died that day in Tenochtítlan, in Texcóco, in Tlácopan, in Texcala, in Chololan, in Huexotzinco. Call it coincidence if you like, reverend friars, since the Lord God was of course not involved, but that day the casks of clouds at last broke their seals, and the rain poured down on all this extensive plateau, and the Hard Times came to an end.

That very day, also, many people in the six cities enjoyed full bellies for the first time in years, when they dined on the remains of the sacrificed xochimíque. The gods were satisfied to be fed merely with the ripped-out hearts heaped on their altars; they had no use for the remainder of the victims' bodies, but the gathered people did. So, as the corpse of each xochimíqui, still warm, rolled down the steep staircase of each temple pyramid, the meat cutters waiting below dissected it into its edible parts and distributed those among the eager folk crowding each plaza.

The skulls were cracked and the brains extracted, the arms and legs were cut into manageable segments, the genitals and buttocks were sliced off, the livers and kidneys were cut out. Those food portions were not just flung to a slavering mob; they were distributed with admirable practicality, and the populace waited with admirable restraint. For obvious reasons, the brains went to priests and wise men, the muscular arms and legs to warriors, the genitalia to young married couples, the less significant buttocks and tripes were presented to pregnant women, nursing mothers, and families with many children. The leftovers of heads, hands, feet, and torsos, being more bone than meat, were put aside to fertilize the croplands.

That feast of fresh meat may or may not have been an additional advantage foreseen by the planners of the Flowery War; I do not know. All the various peoples in these lands had long ago eaten every still-existing game animal, every domesticated bird and dog raised for food. They had eaten lizards and insects and cactus. But they never had eaten any of their relatives and neighbors who succumbed to the Hard Times. It might be thought an unconscionable waste of available nutriment, but in every nation the starving people had disposed of their starved fellows by burial or burning, according to their custom. Now, however, thanks to the War of Flowers, they had an abundance of bodies of unrelated enemies—even if those were enemies only by an exaggeration of definition—and so there was no compunction about making a meal of them.

In the aftermath of later wars, there was never again such an immediate butchery and gorging. Since there was never again such a massed and ravenous hunger to assuage, the priests set up rules and rituals to formalize the eating of captives' flesh. The victorious warriors of later wars took only token morsels of their dead enemies' muscular parts, and partook of them ceremoniously. The bulk of the meat was apportioned out among the really poor folk—generally meaning the slaves—or was fed to the animals in those cities which, like Tenochtítlan, maintained a public menagerie.

Human flesh, like almost any other animal flesh, when properly hung, aged, seasoned, and broiled, makes a tasty dish, and it is suitable for sustenance when there is no other meat. However, just as it can be proven that close-kinship marriage among our noble families did not result in superior offspring, but more often the contrary, I think it could be equally demonstrated that humans who feed only on humans must similarly decline. If a family's bloodline is best improved by marriage outside the line, so a man's blood must be best strengthened by the ingestion of other animals. Thus, with the passing of the Hard Times, the practice of eating the slain xochimíque became—for all but the desperate and degenerate poor—only one more religious observance, and a minor one.

But the first War of Flowers was such a success, coincidence or not, that the same six nations continued to wage others at regular intervals, for a safeguard against any future displeasure of the gods and any recurrence of the Hard Times. I daresay we Mexíca had little further need of that stratagem, for Motecuzóma and the Revered Speakers who succeeded him did not again let years elapse between real wars. There was seldom a time thereafter when we did not have an army in the field, extending our tributary dominion. But the Acolhua and the Tecpanéca, having few ambitions of that sort, had to depend on the Wars of Flowers to provide Flowery Deaths for their gods. So, since Tenochtítlan had been the instigator, it continued willingly to participate: The Triple Alliance versus the Texcalteca, the Mixteca, and the Huexotin.

To the warriors it mattered not. Punitive war or Flowery War, a man had as much chance of dying. He had also as much opportunity of being acclaimed a hero or even awarded one of the orders of knighthood, whether he left a notable number of enemies dead on some disputed field or brought home a notable number alive from the plain of Acatzinco.

"For know this, Fogbound," said Master Blood Glutton, on that day of which I have spoken. "No warrior, in a real war or a War of Flowers, must ever expect to be counted among the fallen or the captured. He must expect to live through the war and to come out of it a hero. Oh, I will not dissemble, my boy. He may very well die, yes, while still thrilling to that expectation. But if he goes into battle not expecting victory for his side and glory for himself, die he surety will."

I tried to convey, while trying not to sound pusillanimous, that I was not afraid to die, but neither was I eager to. In whatever kind of war, I was evidently destined for no higher office than Swallower or Swaddler. Such a duty, I pointed out, could as well be assigned to women. Would I not be of more value to the Mexíca nation, to humanity as a whole, if I were allowed to exercise my other talents?

"What other talents?" grunted Blood Glutton.

That stopped me for a moment. But then I suggested that if, for example, I succeeded in mastering the picture writing, I could accompany the army as a battle historian. I could sit apart, on an overlooking hilltop perhaps, and write a description of each battle's strategy and tactics and progress, for the edification of future commanders.

The old soldier regarded me with exasperation. "First you say you cannot see to fight an opponent face to face. Now you say you will encompass the whole confused action of two entire clashing armies. Fogbound, if you are seeking exemption from this school's weapons practice, save your breath. I could not excuse you if I would. In your case, there is a charge upon me."

"A charge?" I said, nonplussed. "A charge from whom, Master?"

He frowned, annoyed, as if caught in a slip of the tongue, and growled, "A charge I impose upon myself. It is my sincere belief that every man should experience one war, or at least one battle, in his lifetime. Because, if he survives, he savors all the rest of his life the more richly and dearly. Now, enough of this. I shall expect to see you on the field as usual at tomorrow's dusk."

So I went away then, and I went on with the combat drills and lessons in the days and months that followed. I knew not what the future held for me, but I did know one thing. If I was destined for some undesirable duty, there were only two ways to evade it: either show myself incapable of it or show myself too good for it. And good scribes were at least not made weeds for the obsidian to mow. That is why, while I uncomplainingly attend both the Houses of Building Strength and Learning Manners, in private I worked ever more intensely and feverishly to puzzle out the secrets of the art of word knowing.

* * *

I would make the gesture of kissing the earth, Your Excellency, if that were a custom still observed. Instead, I simply straighten my old bones upright so that I stand, like your friars, to salute your entrance.

It is an honor to have Your Excellency's presence grace our little group once again, and to hear you say that you have examined the collected pages of my story thus far. But Your Excellency asks searching questions relative to certain events therein, and I must confess that your questions make me lower my eyelids in embarrassment, even in some shame.

Yes, Your Excellency, my sister and I continued to enjoy each other at every opportunity during those growing-up years of which I have recently spoken. And yes, Your Excellency, we knew that we sinned.

Probably Tzitzitlini knew it from the start, but I was younger, so it was only gradually that I became aware that what we were doing was wrong. Over the years I have come to realize that our females always knew more about the mysteries of sex, and knew it earlier, than any males. I suspect the same is true of the females of all races, including your own. For they seem inclined, from their youngest years, to whisper among themselves, and to trade what secrets they learn about their own bodies and the bodies of men, and to consort with old widows and crones who—perhaps because their own juices have long gone dry—are gleefully or maliciously eager to instruct young maidens in womanly wiles and snares and deceptions.

I regret that I am not, even yet, sufficiently knowledgeable of my new Christian religion to know all its rules and strictures on the subject, though I gather that it frowns on every manifestation of sexuality except an occasional copulation between Christian husband and wife for the purpose of producing a Christian child. But even we heathens observed a few laws and a great many traditions regarding accepted sexual behavior.

A maiden was to remain a virgin until she married, and she was encouraged not to marry young, for our religion recognized that our living room and resources would be depleted by more than a moderate harvest of children in each generation. Or a maiden might choose not to marry but to join the auyanime, whose service to our warriors was a legitimate female occupation, if not exactly an exalted one. Or, if she was disqualified for marriage by ugliness or some other deficiency, she might become a maátitl for pay, and go astraddle the road. There were some girls who maintained their maidenhood so that they might win the honor of sacrifice in some ceremony which required a virgin; and others so that they might serve all their lives, like your nuns, as attendants to the temple priests—though there was speculation about the nature of that attendance and the duration of that virginity.

Chastity before marriage was not so demanded of our men, for they had always available the willing maátime and the slave women, willing or unwilling; and anyway, a man's virginity can hardly be proved or disproved. Neither can a woman's, I might confide—as Tzitzi confided to me—if she has time to prepare before her wedding night. There are old women who keep pigeons that they feed with the dark red seeds of some flower known to them, and they sell the eggs of those birds to would-be virgins. A pigeon's egg is small enough to be easily secreted deep inside a woman, and its shell is so fragile that an excited bridegroom will break it without feeling it, and the yolk of that specially bred egg is the exact color of blood. Also, the crones sell to women an astringent ointment made from the berry which you call the buckthorn, which will pucker the most slack and gaping orifice to adolescent tightness...

As you command, Your Excellency, I shall try to refrain from giving so many specific particulars.

Rape was a crime not often heard of among our people, for three reasons. First, it was almost impossible to commit without being caught, since most of our communities were so small that everyone knew everyone else, and strangers were exceedingly noticeable. Also, it was a rather unnecessary crime, there being plenty of maátime and slave women to satisfy a man's really urgent needs. Also, rape was punished with death. So was adultery, and so was cuilónyotl, the sex act between man and man, and so was patlachuia, the sex act between woman and woman. But those crimes, while probably not rare, were rarely discovered unless the partners were caught in the act. Such sins are, like virginity, otherwise elusive of proof.

I should make it clear that I speak here only of those practices banned or shunned among us Mexíca. Except for the sexual liberties and ostentations permitted during some of our fertility ceremonies, we Mexíca were rather austere in comparison to many other peoples. I remember, when I first traveled among the Maya, far to the south of here, I was shocked by the aspect of some of their temples, which had their roof drainpipes formed in the shape of a man's tepúli. All during the rainy season they urinated unceasingly.

The Huaxteca who live to the northeast, on the shore of the eastern sea, are exceptionally gross in matters of sex. I have seen temple friezes there carved with representations of the many positions a man and woman can assume. And any Huaxtecatl man with a tepúli larger than average would go walking about, even in public, even when visiting more civilized places, wearing no loincloth at all. That boastful strutting gave the Huaxteca men a reputation for rampant virility, which may or may not have been deserved. However, on those occasions when captured Huaxteca warriors have been put up for sale at the slave market, I have seen our own Mexíca noblewomen—veiled, and staying on the fringe of the crowd, but making signals for their servant to bid for this or that Huaxtecatl on the selling block.

The Purémpecha of Michihuácan to the west of here are most lax, or lenient, in matters of sex. For example, the sex act between a man and a man is not only not punished, it is condoned and accepted. It has even got into their picture writing. Perhaps you know that the symbol for a woman's tipíli is the drawing of a snail shell? Well, to write of the act between two males, the Purémpecha unashamedly would draw the picture of a nude man with a snail shell covering his real organs.

As for the act between my sister and myself—your word is incest?—yes, Your Excellency, I believe that was forbidden in every nation known. And yes, we risked death if we had been caught. The laws prescribed particularly grisly forms of execution for copulation between brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son, uncle and niece, and so on. But such couplings were prohibited only to us macehualtin, who constituted most of the population. As I earlier remarked, there were noble families which strove to preserve what they called the purity of their bloodlines by confining their marriages only to near relatives, though there was never any evidence that it improved any succeeding generations. And of course not the law nor tradition nor people in general gave much notice to what went on among the slave class: rape, incest, adultery, what have you.

But you ask how my sister and I evaded discovery during our long indulgence in our sin. Well, having been so harshly chastised by our mother for much lesser mischiefs, we had both learned to be discreet in the extreme. A time came when I was away from Xaltócan for months on end, and I ached for Tzitzitlini, and she ached for me. But at every homecoming, I would give her only a cool brotherly kiss on the cheek and we would sit apart, concealing our inner tumult, while I recounted to our parents and other news-hungry relatives and friends all my doings in the world beyond our island. It might be a day or several days before Tzitzi and I could find or make an opportunity to be together in private and in secret and in no danger. Ah, but then, the hasty disrobing, the frantic caresses, the first release—as if we two lay on the slope of our own small, secret, and awakening volcano—then the more leisurely fondlings, the softer and more exquisite explosions...

But my absences from the island came later. Meanwhile my sister and I were never once surprised in the act. Of course, we would have incurred calamity if, like Christians, we had conceived a child at every coupling, or at any of them. That possibility might never have entered my own head; what boy could imagine being a father? But Tzitzi was a female, and wiser about such things, and she had taken precautions against the contingency. Those old women of whom I have spoken, they sold secretly to unmarried maidens—as our apothecaries sold openly to married couples who did not want to make a child every time they went to bed—a powder ground from the tlatlaohuéhuetl, which is that tuber like a sweet potato, only a hundred times bigger; what you call in Spanish the barbasco. Any woman who daily takes a dose of the powdered barbasco runs no risk of conceiving an unwanted—

Forgive me, Your Excellency. I had no idea I was saying anything sacrilegious. Do please be seated again.

I must report that, for a long time, I was personally running a risk, even when I was safely distant from Tzitzi. During our twilight military classes at The House of Building Strength, squads of six or eight boys together were regularly sent off to remote fields or stands of trees where we did a pretense of "standing guard against attack on the school." It was a boring duty, which we usually enlivened by playing patoli with jumping beans.

But then someone of the boys, I forget who, discovered the solitary act. He was not shy or selfish about his discovery, and immediately demonstrated the art to the rest of us. From then on, the boys no longer carried beans when they went on guard; they had their games equipment attached. For that is all it amounted to: a game. We held contests and made wagers on the amount of omícetl we could ejaculate, the number of times we could do it in succession, and the time needed in between for resurgence. It was like our even younger days, when we had competed to see who could spit or urinate farthest or most copiously. But in this new competition I was at hazard.

You see, I often came to the games not long out of the embrace of Tzitzi and, as you can imagine, my reservoir of omícetl was pretty well drained, not to mention my capacity for arousal. Hence my ejaculations were but few and feeble dribbles compared with the other boys', and often I could not get my tepúli erect at all. For a time, my comrades hooted and made fun of me, but then they began to regard me with worried and even pitying looks. Some of the more compassionate boys suggested remedies to me—eating raw meat, sweating long in the steam house, things like that. My two best friends, Chimali and Tlatli, had discovered that they achieved vastly more thrilling sensations when each manipulated the other's tepúli rather than his own. So they suggested—

Filth? Obscenity? It lacerates your ears to hear me? I am sorry if I distress Your Excellency—and you, my lord scribes—but I do not relate these events out of idle prurience. They all have a bearing on less trivial events which came later, and which came as a result of all this. If you will hear me out?

Eventually some of the older boys got the idea of putting their tepultin where they belonged. A few of our comrades, including Pactli, the governor's son, went scouting in the village nearest our school. There they found and drafted into service a slave woman of twenty-some years, maybe even thirty. Rather fittingly, her name was Teteo-Temacaliz, meaning Gift of the Gods. At any rate, she was a gift to the guard posts, which thereafter she visited almost daily.

Pactli had the authority to command her to that attendance, but I do not believe she had to be commanded. For she proved a willing, even vigorous participant in the sexual games. Ayya, I suppose the poor slut had reason. She had a comical bulge on her nose, and she was dumpily built, with great doughy thighs, and I imagine she had not much hope of marriage even to a man of her own tlacotli class. So she took to her new avocation of road straddler with lewd abandon.

As I have said, there might be six or eight boys camping afield at the guard posts on any given evening. When Gift of the Gods had serviced each of that number, the first would be ready for another turn, and the round would begin again. I am sure the lascivious Gift of the Gods could have gone on all night. But after a while of that activity she would get full of omícetl, slimy and slippery, and begin to give off the odor of an unhealthy fish, so the boys would stop of their own accord and send her home.

But she would be there again, the next afternoon, stripped naked, splayed wide open, and panting to commence. I had taken no part in those doings, had done no more than watch, until one evening, when Pactli finished using Gift of the Gods, he whispered something to her, and she came to where I sat.

"You are Mole," she said, leering. "And Pactzin tells me you have a difficulty." She made movements of temptation, her loose-lipped tipíli directly in front of my burning face. "Perhaps your spear would welcome being held in me and not in your fist for a change." I mumbled that I was not in any need of her at the moment, but I could not protest too much, with six or seven of my comrades standing about and grinning at my discomfiture.

"Ayyo!" she exclaimed, when with her hands she lifted my mantle and undid my loincloth. "Yours is a choice one, young Mole!" She bounced it in her palm. "Even unawakened, it is grander than the tepúli of any of the older boys. Even that of the noble Pactzin." My surrounding fellows laughed and nudged each other. I did not look up at the Lord Red Heron's son, but I knew that Gift of the Gods had just earned for me an enemy.

"Surely," she said, "a gracious macehuali will not deny pleasure to a humble tlacotli. Let me arm my warrior with a weapon." She took my member between her big flabby breasts, squeezed them together with one arm and began to massage me with them. Nothing happened. Then she did other things to me, attentions with which she had not favored even Pactli. He turned, thunder-faced, and stalked away from us. Still nothing happened, although she even...

Yes, yes, I hasten to conclude this episode.

Gift of the Gods finally gave up in annoyance. She threw my tepúli back against my belly and said petulantly, "The conceited cub warrior saves his virginity, no doubt for a woman of his own class." She spat on the ground, abruptly left me, seized another boy, wrestled him down, and began to buck like a wasp-stung deer—

Well.

His Excellency did ask me to speak of sex and sin, did he not, reverend friars? But it seems he cannot ever listen for long without turning as purple as his cassock, and betaking himself elsewhere. I should at least like him to know what I was leading up to. But of course—I was forgetting—His Excellency can read of it when he is calmer. May I proceed then, my lords?

Chimali came and sat beside me, and said, "I was not one of those who laughed at you, Mole. She does not excite me either."

"It is not so much that she is ugly and slovenly," I said. And I told Chimali what my father had recently told me: of that disease nanaua which can come from unclean sexual practices, the disease which afflicts so many of your Spanish soldiers, and which they fatalistically call "the fruit of the earth."

"Women who make a decent career of their sex are not to be feared," I told Chimali. "Our warriors' auyanime, for instance, keep themselves clean, and they are regularly inspected by the army physicians. But the maátime who will spread themselves for just anybody, and for any number, they are best avoided. The disease comes from unclean parts, and this creature here—who knows what squalid slave men she services before she comes to us? If you ever get infected with the nanaua, there is no cure. It can rot your tepúli so it falls off, and it can rot your brain until you are a stumbling, stammering idiot."

"That is the truth, Mole?" asked Chimali, quite ashen in the face. He looked at the sweating, heaving boy and woman on the ground. "And I was going to have her too, just so I would not be jeered at. But I had rather be unmanly than be an idiot."

He went at once and informed Tlatli. Then they must have spread the word, for the waiting line diminished after that evening, and, in the steam house, I often saw my comrades examining themselves for symptoms of rot. The woman came to be called by a variant of her name: Teteo-Tlayo, Offal of the Gods. But some of the schoolboys continued recklessly rutting on her, and one of those was Pactli. My contempt for him must have been as obvious as his dislike of me, for he came to me one day and said menacingly:

"So the Mole is too careful of his health to soil himself with a maátitl? I know that is only your excuse for your pitiable impotence, but it implies criticism of my behavior, and I warn you not to slander your future brother." I gaped at him. "Yes, before I rot, as you predict, I intend to marry your sister. Even if I become a diseased and shambling idiot, she cannot refuse a nobleman. But I would prefer that she come to me willingly. So I tell you, brother-to-be. Never let Tzitzitlini know of my sport with Offal of the Gods. Or I will kill you."

He strode away without waiting for me to reply, which, in any case, I could not have done at that moment. I was dumb with dread. It was not that I feared Pactli personally, since I was a shade the taller of us and probably the stronger. But if he had been a weakling dwarf, he was still the son of our tecutli, and now he bore me a grudge. The fact was that I had lived in trepidation ever since the boys began their games of solitary sex, and then their couplings with Offal of the Gods. My poor performance, and the derision I endured, those embarrassments did not wound my boyish vanity so much as they put fear in my vitals. I truly had to be thought impotent and unmanly. Pactli was as underwitted as he was overbearing, but if he ever began to suspect the real reason for my seemingly feeble sexuality—that I was lavishing it all elsewhere—he was not too stupid to wonder where. And on our small island, it would not take him long to ascertain that I could be trysting with no female except...

Tzitzitlini had first caught Pactli's interest when she was only a bud of a girl, when she visited the palace to attend that execution of his own adulterous sister princess. More recently, at the springtime Feast of the Great Awakening, Tzitzi had led the dancers in the pyramid plaza—and Pactli had seen her dance, and he had been fully smitten. Since then, he had repeatedly managed to encounter her in public and had spoken to her, a breach of manners for any man, even a píli. He had also recently invented excuses to visit our house two or three times, "to discuss quarry affairs with Tepetzalan," and there he had to be let enter. But Tzitzi's cool reception of him and her unconcealed distaste for him would have sent any other young man slinking away for good.

And now the vile Pactli told me he was going to marry Tzitzi. I went home from school that night and, as we sat around our supper cloth, after our father had given thanks to the gods for the food before us, I bluntly spoke up:

"Pactli told me today that he intends to take Tzitzitlini to wife. Not perhaps, or if she accepts him, or if the family gives consent. But that he intends it and will do it."

My sister stiffened and stared at me. She drew her hand lightly across her face, as our women always do at something unexpected. Our father looked uncomfortable. Our mother went on placidly eating, and just as placidly said, "He has spoken of it, Mixtli, yes. Pactzin will soon be out of the primary school, but he still must spend some years at the calmécac school before he can take a wife."

"He cannot take Tzitzi," I said. "Pactli is a stupid, greedy, unwholesome creature—"

Our mother leaned across the cloth and slapped my face, hard. "That is for speaking disrespectfully of our future governor. Who are you, what is your high station, that you presume to defame a noble?"

Biting back uglier words, I said, "I am not the only one of this island who knows Pactli to be a depraved and contemptible—"

She hit me again. "Tepetzalan," she said to our father. "One more word out of this unruly young man and you must attend to his correction." To me she said, "When the píli son of the Lord Red Heron marries Tzitzitlini, all the rest of us become pípiltin as well. What are your great prospects, with no trade, with only your useless pretense of studying word pictures, that you could bring such eminence to your family?"

Our father cleared his throat and said, "I care not so much for the -tzin to our names, but I care less for discourtesy and infamy. To refuse a nobleman any request—especially to decline the honor Pactli confers by asking our daughter's hand—would be an insult to him, a disgracing of ourselves, that we could never live down. If we were let to live at all, we would have to leave Xaltócan."

"No, not the rest of you." Tzitzi spoke for the first time, and firmly. "I will leave. If that degenerate beast Pactli... Do not raise your hand to me, Mother. I am a woman grown, and I will strike you back."

"You are my daughter and this is my house!" shouted our mother.

"Children, what has come over you?" pleaded our father.

"I say only this," Tzitzi went on. "If Pactli demands me, and you accede, not you or he will ever see me again. I will leave the island forever. If I cannot borrow or steal an acáli, I will swim. If I cannot reach the mainland, I will drown. Not Pactli or any other man will ever touch me, except a man I can give myself to."

"On all of Xaltócan—" our mother sputtered. "No other daughter so ungrateful, so disobedient and defiant, so—"

This time she was silenced by our father, who said, and said solemnly, "Tzitzitlini, if your unfilial words had been heard outside these walls, not even I could pardon you or avert your due punishment. You would be stripped and beaten and your head shaved. Our neighbors would do it if I did not, as an example to their own children."

"I am sorry, father," she said in a level voice. "You must choose. An undutiful daughter or none."

"I thank the gods I need not choose tonight. As your mother remarked, it will be a few years yet before the young Lord Joy can marry. So let us speak of it no more now, in anger or otherwise. Many things may happen between now and then."

Our father was right: many things might happen. I did not know if Tzitzi had meant anything she said, and I had no chance to ask her that night or the next day. We dared no more than to exchange a worried and yearning glance from time to time. But, whether or not she held to her resolve, the prospect was desolating. If she fled from Pactli, I should lose her. If she succumbed and married him, I should lose her. If she went to his bed, she knew the arts of convincing him that she was virgin. But if, before then, my own behavior made Pactli suspect that another man had known her first—and me of all men—his rage would be monumental, his revenge inconceivable. Whatever the hideous manner he chose for slaying us, Tzitzi and I would have lost each other.

Ayya, many things did happen, and one of them was this. When I went to The House of Building Strength at the next day's dusk, I found my name and Pactli's on Blood Glutton's roster, as if it had been ordained by some ironic god. And when our squad got to the appointed patch of trees, Offal of the Gods was already there, already naked, sprawled, and ready. To the astonishment of Pactli and our other companions, I immediately ripped off my loincloth and flung myself upon her.

I did it as clumsily as I could, a performance calculated to make the other boys believe it was my first, and a performance that probably gave the slut as little pleasure as it gave me. When I judged it had gone on long enough, I prepared to disengage, but then the revulsion got the better of me, and I spewed vomit all over her face and naked body. The boys roared and rolled on the ground with laughter. Even the wretch Offal of the Gods was capable of recognizing the insult. She gathered up her garments, and she clutched them to her nakedness, and she ran away, and she never came back.

* * *

Not long after that incident, four other things of note occurred in rather rapid succession. At least, that is how I remember them happening.

It happened that our Uey-Tlatoani Axayácatl died—very young, from the effects of wounds he had received in the battles against the Purémpecha—and his brother Tixoc, Other Face, assumed the throne of Tenochtítlan.

It happened that I, along with Chimali and Tlatli, completed what schooling was afforded on Xaltócan. I was now regarded as "educated."

It happened that our island's governor sent a messenger to our house one evening to summon me immediately to his palace.

And it happened that, at last, I was parted from Tzitzitlini, my sister and my love.

But I had best recount those occurrences in more detail, and in the order of their happening.

The change of rulers did not much affect the lives of us in the provinces. Indeed, even in Tenochtítlan, little was later remembered of Tixoc's reign except that, like his two predecessors, he continued work on the still-rising Great Pyramid in The Heart of the One World. And Tixoc added an architectural touch of his own to the plaza. He had stonemasons hew and carve the Battle Stone, a massive flat cylinder of volcanic rock which lay like a stack of immense tortillas between the unfinished pyramid and the Sun Stone's pedestal site. The Battle Stone was nearly as high as a man and about four strides across its diameter. Around the rim were low-relief carvings of Mexíca warriors. Tixoc prominent among them, engaged in combat and in subduing captives. The flat round top of the stone was the platform for a kind of public dueling, in which, a long time later, and in an unusual way, I would have occasion to participate.

Of rather more immediate concern to me, at that time, was the end of my formal schooling. Not being of the nobility, I was of course not entitled to go on to a calmécac of higher learning. And my record as Malinqui the Kink in one of our schools, and as Poyautla the Fogbound in the other, had hardly been of a nature to make any of the higher schools on the mainland invite me to attend at no cost.

What particularly embittered me was that, while I hungered in vain for the chance to learn more than the trivial knowledge our telpochcaltin could teach, my friends Chimali and Tlatli, who cared not a little finger for any further formal learning, did each get an invitation from separate calmécactin—and both of those in Tenochtítlan, my own dream destination. During their years in Xaltócan's House of Building Strength they had distinguished themselves as tlachtli players and as cub warriors. Though an elegant nobleman might have smiled at the "graces" the two boys had absorbed from The House of Learning Manners, they had nevertheless shone there too, by designing original costumes and settings for the ceremonies performed on festival days.

"It is too bad you cannot come with us, Mole," said Tlatli, sounding sincere enough but no whit less happy at his own good fortune. "You could attend all the dull schoolroom classes, and leave us free for our studio work."

Under the terms of their acceptance, both boys would, besides learning from the calmécac priests, also be apprenticed out to Tenochtítlan artists: Tlatli to a master sculptor, Chimali to a master painter. I was sure that neither of them would pay much heed to the lessons in history, reading, writing, counting, and such, the very things I ached for most. Anyway, before they departed, Chimali said, "Here is a good-bye gift for you, Mole. All my paints and reeds and brushes. I will have better ones in the city, and you may find them useful in your writing practice."

Yes, I was still pursuing my untutored study in the arts of reading and writing, though my ever becoming a word knower now seemed hopelessly remote, and my moving to Tenochtítlan a dream that would forever come untrue. My father had likewise despaired of my ever becoming a dedicated quarrier, and I was now too old to serve only to sit at the empty pit and shoo away animals. So, for some while past, I had been earning my keep and contributing to our family's support by working as a common farmboy.

Of course, Xaltócan has no such thing as farmland. There is not enough arable topsoil for staple crops like the maize, which requires deep earth for its nourishment. So Xaltócan, like all island communities, grows the bulk of its vegetable foods on the wide and ever spreading chinampa which you call floating gardens. Each chinamitl is a raft of woven tree limbs and branches, moored at the lake edge, then spread with load upon load of the richest soil, freighted out from the mainland. As the crops extend their roots season by season, new roots twining down old ones, they eventually clutch the lake bottom and hold the raft firmly in place. Other gardens are built and moored alongside. Every inhabited island in all the lakes, Tenochtítlan included, wears a wide ring of fringe of these chinampa. On some of the more fertile islands, it is difficult to discern where the god-made, land leaves off and the man-made fields begin.

It takes no more than mole eyesight or mole intellect to tend such gardens, so I tended those belonging to our family and neighbors in our quarter. The work was undemanding; I had plenty of free time. I applied myself—and Chimali's gift of paints—to the drawing of word pictures: training myself to make the most complex symbols ever simpler, more stylized, smaller in size. Unlikely as it then seemed, I still nursed the secret hope that my self-education might somehow yet improve my lot in life. I smile pityingly, now, to recall my young self sitting on a dirt raft among the sprouting maize and beans and chilis—among the reeking fertilizer of animal entrails and fish heads—while I scribbled away at my writing practice and dreamed my lofty dreams.

For example, I toyed with the ambition of becoming one of the pochtéa traveling merchants, and thus journeying to the Maya lands where some wonder-working doctor would restore my eyesight, while I should become rich from my shrewd trading along the way. Oh, I devised many a plan to turn a trilling amount of trade goods into a towering fortune, ingenious plans that I was sure no previous trader had ever thought of. The only obstacle to my assured success—as Tzitzi tactfully pointed out, when I confided some of my ideas—was that I lacked even the trifling amount of capital I reckoned I would need to begin with.

And then, one afternoon when the workday was done, one of the Lord Red Heron's messengers appeared at our house door. He wore a mantle of neutral color, signifying neither good news nor bad, and he said politely to my father, "Mixpantzinco."

"Ximopanolti," said my father, gesturing for him to enter.

The young man, about my own age, took only a single step inside and said, "The Tecutli Tlauquecholtzin, my master and yours, requires the presence of your son Chicome-Xochitl Tlilectic-Mixtli at the palace."

My father and sister looked surprised and bewildered. I suppose I did too. My mother did not. She wailed, "Yya ayya, I knew the boy would one day offend the nobles or the gods or—" She broke off to demand of the messenger, "What mischief has Mixtli done? There is no need for the Lord Red Heron to trouble himself with whipping or whatever is decreed. We will gladly attend to the punishment."

"I do not know that anyone has done anything," said the messenger, eyeing her warily. "I merely obey my order. To bring him without delay."

And without delay I accompanied him, preferring whatever waited at the palace to whatever my mother's imagination might conceive. I was curious, yes, but I could not think of any reason to quake. If that summons had come in an earlier time, I would have worried that the malicious Pactli had contrived some charge against me. But the young Lord Joy had himself gone off, two or three years before, to a Tenochtítlan calmécac which accepted only the scions of ruling families, themselves rulers-to-be. Pactli had since come back to Xaltócan only on brief school holidays. During those visits, he had paid calls at our house, but always during the working day when I was not at home, so I had not even seen him since the days of our having briefly shared Offal of the Gods.

The messenger stayed a respectful few paces behind me as I entered the palace throne room and bent to make the gesture of kissing the earth. Beside Lord Red Heron sat a man I had never seen on the island before. Though the stranger sat on a lower chair, as was proper, he considerably diminished our governor's usual air of importance. Even my mole vision could make out that he wore a brilliant feather mantle and ornaments of a richness that no nobleman of Xaltócan could flaunt.

Red Heron said to the visitor, "The request was: make a man of him. Well, our Houses of Building Strength and Learning Manners have done their utmost. Here he is."

"I am bidden to make a test," said the stranger. He produced a small roll of bark paper and held it out to me.

"Mixpantzinco," I said to both the nobles before I unrolled the thing. It bore nothing I could recognize as a test; only a single line of word pictures, and I had seen them before.

"You can read it?" asked the stranger.

"I forgot to mention that," said Red Heron, as if he had taught me himself. "Mixtli can read some simple things with a fair measure of comprehension."

I said, "I can read this, my lords. It says—"

"Never mind," the stranger interrupted. "Just tell me: what does the duck-billed face signify?"

"Ehecatl, the wind, my lord."

"Anything else?"

"Well, my lord, with the other figure, the closed eyelids, it says Night Wind. But—"

"Yes? Speak up, young man."

"If my lord will excuse my impertinence, that one figure does not show a duck's bill. It is the wind trumpet through which the wind god—"

"Enough." The stranger turned to Red Heron. "He is the one, Lord Governor. I have your permission, then?"

"But of course, of course," said Red Heron, quite obsequiously. To me he said, "This is the Lord Strong Bone, Snake Woman to Nezahualpili, Uey-Tlatoani of Texcóco. Lord Strong Bone brings the Revered Speaker's personal invitation that you come to reside and study and serve at the court of Texcóco."

"Texcóco!" I exclaimed. I had never been there, or anywhere in the Acolhua country. I knew no one there, and no Acolhuatl could ever have heard of me—certainly not the Revered Speaker Nezahualpili, who, in all these lands, was second in power and prestige only to Tixoc, the Uey-Tlatoani of Tenochtítlan. I was so astounded that, unthinking and unmannerly, I blurted, "Why?"

"You are not commanded," the Texcóco Snake Woman said brusquely. "You are invited, and you may accept or decline. But you are not invited to question the offer."

I mumbled an apology, and the Lord Red Heron came to my support, saying, "Excuse the youngster, my lord. I am sure he is as perplexed as I have been these several years—that such an exalted personage as Nezahualpili should have fixed his regard on this one of so many macehualtin."

The Snake Woman only grunted, so Red Heron went on, "I have never been given any explanation of your master's interest in this particular commoner, and I have refrained from asking. Of course, I remember your previous ruler, that tree of great shade, the wise and kindly Fasting Coyote, and how he used to travel alone throughout The One World, his identity disguised, to seek out estimable persons deserving of his favor. Does his illustrious son Nezahualpili carry on that same benign avocation? If so, what in the world did he see in our young subject Tlilectic-Mixtli?"