Aztec

* * *

I am glad that the Señor Bishop Zumárraga is not with us today, my lord scribes, for I must tell of a sexual encounter I know His Excellency would deem sordid and repulsive. He would probably turn purple again. In truth, even though more than forty-years have passed since that night, I myself am still made uneasy by the memory of it, and I would omit the episode, except that its recounting is necessary to the understanding of many and more significant incidents that later derived from it.

When the fourteen of us finally descended the last long foothills of the Tzempuula mountains, we came down again into Tzapoteca territory at a sizable city on the bank of a wide river. You now call it the Villa de Guadalcazar, but in those days the city, the river, and all the expanse of lands about it were called in the Lóochi language Layu Beezyu, or The Place of the Jaguar God. However, since that was a busy crossroads of several trade routes, most of its people spoke Náhuatl as a second language, and as often used the name our Mexíca travelers had given the place: Tecuantépec, or simply Jaguar Hill. No one then or now, except myself, seems ever to have thought it ludicrous to apply the name of Jaguar Hill to the broad flowing river as well, and to the exceptionally unhilly lands beyond.

The city was only about five one-long-runs from where the river spills into the great southern ocean, so it had attracted immigrant settlers from several other peoples of that coastal area: Zoque, Nexitzo, some Huave, and even displaced groups of the Mixteca. On its streets, one encountered quite a variety of complexions, physiques, costumes, and accents. But fortunately the native Cloud People predominated, so most of the city folk were as superlatively handsome and courtly as those of Záachila.

On the afternoon we arrived, as our little company stumbled wearily but eagerly across the rope bridge spanning the river, Blood Glutton said, in a voice hoarse from dust and fatigue, "There are some excellent hostels yonder in Tecuantépec."

"The excellent ones can wait," I rasped. "We will stop at the first one."

And so, tired and famished, as ragged and filthy and malodorous as priests, we lurched into the dooryard of the first inn we found on the river side of the city. And from that impulsive decision of mine—just as the wisps of smoke must uncoil from the twirl of a fire-drilling stick—there inevitably unfurled all the events of all the remaining roads and days of my life, and of Zyanya's life, and the lives of persons I have already mentioned, and of other persons I shall name, and even of one person who never had a name.

Know, then, reverend friars, that it began so:

When we had all of us, the slaves included, bathed and then steamed and then bathed again and then dressed in clean garments, we called for food. The slaves ate outside in the twilit dooryard, but Cozcatl, Blood Glutton, and I had a cloth laid for us in a torch-lighted and rush-carpeted inside room. We glutted ourselves on delicacies fresh from the nearby sea: raw oysters and boiled pink shrimps and a baked red fish of great size.

My stomach's hunger assuaged, I noticed the extraordinary beauty of the woman serving us, and I remembered that I was capable of other hungers. I also noticed something else out of the ordinary. The proprietor of the hostel was obviously of an immigrant race: a short, fat, oily-skinned man. But the serving woman to whom he brusquely snapped orders was obviously of the Ben Záa: tall and supple, with skin that glowed like amber and a face to rival that of her people's First Lady Pela Xila. It was unthinkable that she might be the landlord's wife. And, since she could hardly have been a born or bought slave in her own country, I assumed that some misfortune had forced her to indenture herself to the boorish and foreign-born innkeeper.

It was difficult to judge the age of any adult woman of the Cloud People—the years were so kind to them—especially one as sightly and graceful as that servant. If I had known that she was old enough to have a daughter of my own age, I might not have spoken to her. I might not have done it in any case, except that Blood Glutton and I were washing down our meal with copious drafts of octli. Whatever impelled me, when the woman next came near I made bold to look up at her and inquire:

"How is it that a woman of the Ben Záa labors for an uncouth inferior?"

She glanced around to make sure the innkeeper was not that moment in the room. Then she knelt to murmur in my ear, to answer my question with a question, and a most surprising question, spoken in Náhuatl:

"Young Lord Pochtéatl, will you want a woman for the night?" My eyes must have goggled, for she blushed deep marigold and lowered her own eyes. "The landlord will provide you with a common maátitl who has straddled the road from here to the fishermen's beach on the coast. Allow me, young lord, to offer myself instead. My name is Gie Bele, which in your language is Flame Flower."

I must still have gaped foolishly, for she stared straight at me and said, almost fiercely, "I will be a maátitl for pay, but I am not yet. This would be the first time since my husband's death that I have ever... not even with a man of my own people..."

I was so touched by her embarrassed urgency that I stammered, "I—I would be pleased."

Gie Bele glanced about again. "Do not let the innkeeper know. He exacts a part of the payment to his women, and I would be beaten for cheating him of a customer. I will be waiting outside at first dark, my lord, and we will go to my hut."

She hastily gathered up our empty dishes and left the room, as the proprietor bustled self-importantly into it. Blood Glutton, who of course had overheard our exchange, gave me a sidelong look and said sarcastically:

"The first time ever. I wish I had a cacao bean for every time a female has said that to me. And I would lop off one of my testicles for every time it proved to be the truth."

The innkeeper came over to us, smirking and rubbing his fat hands together, to ask if we would like a sweet with which to conclude our meal. "Perhaps a sweet to be enjoyed at leisure, my lords, while you rest upon your pallets in your rooms."

I said no. Blood Glutton glared at me, then bellowed at the stout man, "Yes, I will sample the fare! By Huitztli, I will have his, too!" He jerked his thumb at me. "Send them both to my room. And mind you, the two tastiest you can serve up."

The landlord murmured admiringly, "A lord of noble appetite," and scurried away. Blood Glutton still glared at me, and said in exasperation:

"You drooling imbecile. It is the second trick a female learns in that trade. You will arrive at her hut to find she still has her man, probably two or three of them, all strapping fishermen, and all pleased to meet this new fish she has hooked. They will rob you and stamp you flat as a tortilla."

Cozcatl said shyly, "It would be a pity if our expedition should end untimely in Tecuantépec."

I would not listen. I was besotted by more than the octli. I believed the woman to be the kind I had wanted but had been unable to approach in Záachila: the chaste kind who would not sully herself with me. Even if, as Gie Bele had implied, I was only to be her first of many future paying lovers, I would still be the first. And yet, fuddled though I may have been by drink and desire and even imbecility, I had sense enough to wonder: why me?

"Because you are young," she said, when we met outside the inn. "You are young enough that you cannot have known many women of the kind who would make you unclean. You are not as handsome as my late husband, but you could almost pass for one of the Ben Záa. Also you are a man of property, who can afford to pay for his pleasure." When we had walked a little way in silence, she asked in a small voice, "You will pay me?"

"Of course," I said thickly. My tongue was as swollen by the octli as my tepúli was swollen with anticipation.

"Someone must be my first," she said, as if stating a fact of life. "I am glad it is you. I only wish they all might be like you. I am a destitute widow with two daughters, so now we are accounted no better than slaves, and my girls will never have decent husbands of the Cloud People. Had I known what their lives held in store, I would have withheld my milk when they were infants, but it is too late now to prefer them dead. If we are to survive, I must do this—and they must learn to, as well."

"Why?" I managed to ask. Because I was walking somewhat weavingly, she took my arm to guide me, and we made our way through the dark alleys of the city's poorer residential area.

Gie Bele waved her free hand back over her shoulder and said sadly, "The hostel was once ours. But my husband was bored by the life of an innkeeper and he was always going off adventuring—hoping to find a fortune that would set us free of it. He found some rare and odd things, but never anything of value, while we went ever deeper into debt to the trader who lent and exchanged currencies. On his last expedition, my husband sought a thing he was much excited about. So, to borrow the necessary funds, he put up our inn as a pledge." She shrugged. "Like a man who pursues the flicker of the Xtabai swamp ghost, he never came back. That was four years ago."

"And now that trader is the innkeeper," I muttered.

"Yes. He is a man of the Zoque, named Wáyay. But the property was not enough to redeem our entire debt. The Bishosu of this city is a kindly man, but when the claim was laid before him he had no choice. I was bound over, to work from sunrise to sunset. I can be thankful that my girls were not. They earn what they can—doing sewing, embroidery, laundry—but most people who can pay for such work have daughters or slaves of their own to do it."

"For how long must you serve this Wáyay?"

She sighed. "Somehow the debt never seems to decrease. I would try to quell my revulsion and offer him my body, in part payment, but he is a eunuch."

I grunted in wry amusement.

"He was formerly a priest of some god of the Zoque and, as so many priest do, in a mushroom ecstasy he cut off and laid his parts on the altar. He immediately regretted that, and left the order. But he had by then set aside for himself, from the believers' offerings, enough to set himself up in business."

I grunted again.

"The girls and I live simply, but it gets harder for us every day. If we are to live at all..." She squared her shoulders and said firmly, "I have explained to them what we must do. Now I will show them. Here we are."

She preceded me through the tatty cloth-curtained doorway of a rickety shack of saplings and thatch. It was a single room with a pounded earth floor, lighted by one fish-oil wick lamp, and pitifully furnished. I could see only a quilt-covered pallet, a feebly glowing charcoal brazier, and a few articles of feminine apparel hung on the inside twig stumps of the sapling walls.

"My daughters," she said, indicating the two girls who stood with their backs against the far wall.

I had been expecting two small and grubby brats, who would eye with awe the stranger their mother had suddenly brought home. But the one was as old as I; she was as tall as her mother, and just as shapely and fair of face. The other was perhaps three years younger, and of equal comeliness. They both stared at me with pensive curiosity. I was surprised, to put it mildly, but I made a bravura gesture of kissing the earth to them—and would have fallen on my face, had not the younger one caught me.

She giggled despite herself, and so did I, but then I stopped in puzzlement. Few Tzapoteca females show their age until they get well along in years. But that girl was only seventeen or so, and already her black hair had one startling strand of white streaking back from her forehead, like lightning through midnight.

Gie Bele explained, "A scorpion stung her there, when she was a baby still crawling. She nearly died of it, but the only lasting effect was that one lock of hair, white ever since."

"She is—they are both as beautiful as their mother," I mumbled gallantly. But my face must have expressed my twinge of consternation at having discovered that the woman was old enough to be my own mother, for she gave me a worried, almost frightened look and said:

"No, please do not think of taking one of them instead of me." She whipped her blouse over her head, and instantly blushed so extensively that the blush suffused her bare breasts. "Please, young lord! I offered only myself. Not yet the girls..." She seemed to mistake my numb silence for indecision; she quickly undid both her skirt and undergarment, and let them drop to the ground, and stood naked before me and her daughters.

I glanced uneasily at them, my eyes no doubt as wide as theirs were, and it must have seemed to Gie Bele that I was comparing the available wares. Still imploring, "Please! Not my girls. Use me!" she forcibly dragged me down beside her on the pallet. I was too shocked to resist, and she flung my mantle to one side and tugged at my loincloth, saying breathlessly, "The innkeeper would demand five cacao beans for a maátitl, and he would keep two for himself. So I will ask only three. Is not that a fair price?"

I was too dazed to reply. The private parts of us both were exposed to the view of the girls, who stared as if they could not look away, and their mother was next trying to roll me on top of herself. Perhaps the girls were not unacquainted with their mother's body, and perhaps they had even seen an erect male organ before, but I was sure they had never seen the two together. Drunk though I may have been, I protested, "Woman! The lamplight, the girls! At least send them outdoors while we—"

"Let them see!" she almost screamed. "They will be lying here on other nights!" Her face was wet with tears, and I finally understood that she was not so resigned to whoredom as she had tried to pretend. I grimaced at the girls and made a violent gesture. Looking frightened, they whisked out through the door curtain. But Gie Bele did not notice, and cried again, as if demanding the utmost debasement of herself, "Let them see what they will be doing!"

"You want others to see, woman?" I growled at her. "Let them see the better, then!"

Instead of sprawling atop her, I turned onto my back, lifting her at the same time, and set her kneeling astride me, and I impaled her to the hilt of myself. After that first painful moment, Gie Bele slowly relaxed against me and lay quiescent in my embrace, though I could feel her tears continuing to trickle onto my bare chest. Well, it happened quickly and powerfully for me, and she certainly felt the spurt inside her, but she did not pull away as any other bought woman would then have done.

By then, her own body was wanting satisfaction, and I think she would not have noticed if the girls had been still in the hut, would not have given thought to the detailed demonstration provided by our position, or the damp noise of suction made by her rocking back and forth the length of my tepúli. When Gie Bele came to climax, she reared up and leaned back, her distended nipples pointing high, her long hair brushing my legs, her eyes shut tight, her mouth open in a mewing cry like that of a jaguar kitten. Then she collapsed again onto my chest, her head beside mine, and she lay so limp that I would have thought she had died, except that she breathed in short gasps.

After a little, when I had myself recovered, slightly more sober for the experience, I became aware of another head near me on my other side. I turned to see immense brown eyes, wide behind their luxuriant dark lashes: the winsome face of one of the daughters. At some point she had reentered the hut and knelt beside the pallet and was regarding me intently. I drew the quilt over the nakedness of myself and her still-motionless mother.

"Nu shisha skaru..." the girl began to whisper. Then, seeing that I did not comprehend, she spoke softly in a broken Náhuatl, and giggled when she told me guiltily, "We watched through the cracks in the wall." I groaned in shame and embarrassment; I still burn when I think of it. But then she said thoughtfully, seriously, "Always I supposed it would be a bad thing. But your faces were good, like happy."

Though I was in no philosophic mood, I told her quietly, "I do not think it is ever really a bad thing, But it is much better when you do it with someone you love." I added, "And in private, without mice watching from the walls."

She started to say something more, but suddenly her stomach grumbled, more loudly than her voice had spoken. She looked pathetically mortified, and tried to pretend it had not happened, and drew a little away from me.

I exclaimed, "Child, you are hungry!"

"Child?" She petulantly tossed her head. "I have near your age, which is old enough for—for that. I am not a child."

I shook her drowsing mother and said, "Gie Bele, when did your daughters last eat a meal?"

She stirred and said meekly, "I am allowed to feed on the leftovers at the inn, but I cannot bring much home."

"And you asked for three cacao beans!" I said angrily.

I could have remarked that it might more rightly have been myself asking a fee, for performing to an audience, or instructing the young. But I groped for my castoff loincloth and the purse I kept sewn into it. "Here," I said to the daughter, and caught her hands and poured into them perhaps twenty or thirty beans. "You and your sister go and buy food. Buy fuel for the fire. Anything you like, and as much as you can carry."

She looked at me as if I had filled her hands with emeralds. Impulsively, she bent over and kissed my cheek, then bounded up and out of the hut again. Gie Bele raised up on one elbow to look down at my face.

"You are kind to us—and after I behaved so. Please, would you let me be kinder to you now?"

I said, "You gave me what I came to buy. I am not trying now to buy your affection."

"But I want to give it," she insisted, and began to give me an attention which may be exclusive to the Cloud People.

It really is much better when it is done lovingly—and in private. And she truly was so attractive that a man could hardly get enough of her. But we were up and dressed again when the girls returned, laden with comestibles: one entire and enormous plucked fowl, a basket of vegetables, many other things. Chattering cheerfully to each other, they set about building up the brazier fire, and the younger daughter courteously asked if her mother and myself would dine with them.

Gie Bele told them that we had both eaten at the inn. Now, she said, she would guide me back there and find some chore to occupy her there during what remained of the night, for if she slept she would surely oversleep the sunrise. So I bade the girls good night and we left them to what may have been, for all I knew, their first decent meal in four years. As the woman and I walked hand in hand through streets and alleys seeming darker even than before, I thought about the famished girls, their widowed and desperate mother, the greedy Zoque creditor... and at last I said abruptly:

"Would you sell me your house, Gie Bele?"

"What?" She started so that our hands came unlinked. "That dilapidated hut? Whatever for?"

"Oh, to rebuild into something better, of course. If I continue trading, I shall certainly pass this way again, perhaps often, and a place of my own would be preferable to a crowded inn."

She laughed at the absurdity of my lie, but pretended to take it seriously, asking, "And where in the world would we live?"

"In some place much finer. I would pay a good price, enough to enable you to live comfortably. And," I said firmly, "with no necessity for the girls or you to go astraddle the road."

"What—what would you offer to pay?"

"We will settle that right now. Here is the inn. Please to put lights in the room where we dined. And writing materials—paper and chalk will do. Meanwhile, tell me which is the room of that fat eunuch. And stop looking frightened; I am being no more imbecilic than usual."

She gave me a wavering smile and went to do my bidding, while I took a lamp to find the proprietor's room, and interrupted his snoring with a hard kick to his massive rear end.

"Get up and come with me," I said, as he spluttered with outrage and sleepy bewilderment. "We have business to transact."

"It is the middle of the night. You are drunk. Go away."

I had almost to lift him to his feet, and it took a while to convince him that I was sober, but I finally hauled him—still struggling to knot his mantle—to the room Gie Bele had lighted for us. When I half-dragged him in, she started to sidle out.

"No, stay," I said. "This concerns all three of us. Fat man, fetch out all the papers pertinent to the ownership of this hostel and the debt outstanding against it. I am here to redeem the pledge."

He and she stared at me in equal astonishment, and Wáyay, after spluttering some more, said, "This is why you rout me from my bed? You want to buy this place, you presumptuous pup? We can all go back to bed. I do not intend to sell."

"It is not yours to sell," I said. "You are not its owner, but the holder of a lien. When I pay the debt and all its accrual, you are a trespasser. Go, bring the documents."

I had the advantage of him then, when he was still befogged with sleep. But by the time we settled down to the columns of number dots and flags and little trees, he was again as acute and exacting as he had ever been in his careers of priest and currency changer. I will not regale you, my lords, with all the details of our negotiations. I will only remind you that I did know the craft of working with numbers, and I knew the craftiness possible to that craft.

What the late explorer husband had borrowed, in goods and currency, added up to an appreciable sum. However, the premium he had agreed to pay for the privilege of the loans should not have been excessive, except for the lender's cunning method of compounding it. I do not remember all the figures there involved, but I can give a simplified illustration. If I lend a man a hundred cacao beans for one month, I am entitled to the repayment of a hundred and ten. For two months, he repays a hundred and twenty beans. For three months, a hundred and thirty, and so on. But what Wáyay had done was to add the ten-bean premium at the end of the first month, and then on that total of a hundred and ten to calculate the next premium, so that at the end of two months he was owed a hundred twenty and one beans. The difference may sound trifling, but it mounts proportionately each month, and on substantial sums it can mount alarmingly.

I demanded a recalculation from the very start of Wáyay's giving credit to the inn. Ayya, he squawked as he must have done when he awoke from that disastrous mushroom rapture of his priesthood days. But, when I suggested that we refer the matter to Tecuantépec's bishosu for adjudication, he gritted his teeth and redid the arithmetic, with me closely monitoring. There were many other details to be argued, such as the inn's expenses and profits over the four years he had been running it. But finally, as dawn was breaking, we agreed on a lump sum due him, and I agreed to pay in currency of gold dust, copper and tin snippets, and cacao beans. Before I did so, I said:

"You have forgotten one small item. I owe you for the lodging of my own train."

"Ah, yes," said the fat old fraud. "Honest of you to remind me." And he added that to the accounting.

As if suddenly remembering, I said, "Oh, one other thing."

"Yes?" he said expectantly, his chalk poised to add it in.

"Subtract four years' wages due the woman Gie Bele."

"What?" He stared at me aghast. She stared too, but in dazzled admiration. "Wages?" he sneered. "The woman was bound over to me as a tlacotli."

"If your accounting had been honest, she would not have been. Look at your own revised arithmetic. The Bishosu might have awarded you a half interest in this property. You have not only swindled Gie Bele, you have also enslaved a free citizen."

"All right, all right. Let me count. Two cacao beans a day—

"Those are slave wages. You have had the services of the inn's former proprietress. Certainly worth a freeman's wage of twenty beans a day." He clutched his hair and howled. I added, "You are a barely tolerated alien in Tecuantépec. She is of the Ben Záa, and so is the Bishosu. If we go to him..."

He immediately ceased his tantrum and began frantically to scribble, dripping sweat onto the bark paper. Then he did howl.

"More than twenty and nine thousand! There are not that many beans on all the cacao bushes in all the Hot Lands!"

"Translate it to gold-dust quills," I suggested. "It will not sound so big a sum."

"Will it not?" he bellowed, when he had done the figuring. "Why, if I accede to the wage demand, I have lost my very loincloth on the entire transaction. To subtract that amount means you pay me less than half the original amount I paid out as a loan!" His voice had gone up to a squeak and he sweated as if he were melting.

"Yes," I said. "That agrees with my own figures. How will you have it? All in gold? Or some in tin? In copper?" I had fetched my pack from the room I had not yet occupied.

"This is extortion!" he raged. "This is robbery!"

There was also a small obsidian dagger in the pack. I took it out and held its point against Wáyay's second or third chin.

"Extortion and robbery it was," I said in my coldest voice. "You cheated a defenseless woman of her property, then made her drudge for you during four long years, and I know to what desperate straits she had come. I hold you to the arithmetic you yourself have just now done. I will pay you the amount you last arrived at—"

"Ruination!" he bawled. "Devastation!"

"You will write me a receipt, and on it you will write that the payment voids all your claim on this property and this woman, now and forever. You will then, while I watch, tear up that old pledge signed by her husband. You will then take whatever personal possessions you have, and depart these premises."

He made one last try at defiance: "And if I refuse?"

"I march you to the Bishosu at knife point. The punishment for theft is the flower-garland garrotte. I do not know what you would suffer beforehand, as a penalty for enslaving the free-born, since I do not know the refinements of torture in this nation."

Slumping in final defeat, he said, "Put away the knife. Count out the currency." He raised his head to snap at Gie Bele, "Bring me fresh paper—" then winced and made his tone unctuous, "Please, my lady, bring me paper and paints and a writing reed."

I counted quills of gold dust and stacks of tin and copper onto the cloth between us, and there was little but lint left in the pack when I was done. I said, "Make the receipt to my name. In the language of this place I am called Záa Nayazu."

"Never was an ill-omened man better named," he muttered, as he began to make the word pictures and columns of number glyphs. And he wept as he worked at it, I swear.

I felt Gie Bele's hand on my shoulder and I looked up at her. She had labored all the day before and then had endured a sleepless night, not to mention other things, but she stood straight, and her glorious eyes shone, and her whole face glowed.

I said, "This will not take long. Why do you not go back and fetch the girls? Bring them home."

When my partners woke and came for breakfast, Cozcatl looked rested and bright again, but Blood Glutton looked somewhat drawn. He ordered a meal consisting mainly of raw eggs, then said to the woman, "Send me the landlord, too. I owe him ten cacao beans." He added, "Spendthrift lecher that I am, and at my age."

She smiled and said, "For that entertainment—for you—no charge, my lord," and went away.

"Huh?" grunted Blood Glutton, staring after her. "No inn gives that commodity free."

I reminded him, "Cynical old grouch, you said there are no first times. Perhaps there are."

"You may be crazy, and so may she, but the innkeeper—"

"As of last night, she is the innkeeper."

"Huh?" he blurted again. He said huh? twice more, once when his breakfast platter was brought by the surpassingly lovely girl of my own age, and again when his big cup of frothy chocolate was brought by the surpassingly lovely younger girl with the streak of pale lightning in her black hair.

"What has happened here?" Blood Glutton asked bewilderedly. "We stop at a rundown hostel, an inferior establishment of one greasy Zoque and one slave woman..."

"And overnight," said Cozcatl, sounding equally amazed, "Mixtli turns it into a temple full of goddesses."

Our party stayed a second night at the inn, and when all was quiet, Gie Bele stole into my room, more radiant in her newfound happiness than she had been before, and that time the lovingness of our embrace was not at all dissembled, or forced, or in any other way distinguishable from an act of true and mutual love.

When I and my troop shouldered our packs and took our leave, early the next morning, she and then each of the daughters held me tight and covered my face with tear-wet kisses and said a heartfelt thank-you. I looked back several times, until I could no longer make out the inn among the blurry jumble of other buildings.

I did not know when I would be back, but I had sown seeds there, and from that time on, however far and long I wandered, I could never again be a stranger among the Cloud People, any more than the farthest climbing tendril of a vine can detach itself from its roots in the earth. That much I knew. What I could not know, or even dream, was what fruit those seeds would bear—of glad surprise and crushing tragedy, of wealth and loss, of joy and misery. It would be a long time before I tasted the first of those fruits, and a longer time before they all ripened in their turn, and on one of those fruits I have not yet fed entirely to its bitter core.

* * *

As you know, reverend friars, this entire land of New Spain is lapped on either side by a great sea which extends from the shore to the horizon. Since the seas lie more or less directly east and west of Tenochtítlan, we Mexíca have generally referred to them as the eastern and western oceans. But, from Tecuantépec onward, the land mass itself bends eastward, so those waters are more accurately called there the northern and southern oceans, and the land is only a narrow, low-lying isthmus separating the two. I do not mean that a man can stand between the oceans and spit into whichever he chooses. The waist of the isthmus is something like fifty one-long-runs from north to south, about a ten-day journey, but an easy one, because most of the land between is so flat and featureless.

However, on that journey, we were not crossing from one coast to the other. We traveled eastward over the misnamed Jaguar Hill flat plains, with the southern oceans always somewhere not far to our right, though never within sight of the trail. We had sea gulls hovering overhead more often than vultures. Except for the oppressive heat of those lowlands, the marching was easy, even monotonous, with nothing to look at but tall yellow grass and low gray scrub. We made good time, and there was an abundance of easily killable game for food—rabbits, iguanas, armadillos—and the climate was comfortable for nighttime camping, so we did not sleep in any of the villages of the Mixe people whose territory we were then traversing.

I had good reason to push hard for our destination, the lands of the Maya, where I could finally start trading the goods we carried for more valuable goods to carry back to Tenochtítlan. My partners of course knew something of the extravagances in which I had lately indulged, but I did not confess to them all the details or the prices I had paid. So far, I had struck but one advantageous bargain along the way, when I sold the slave Four to his relatives, and that was a long while back. Since then I had made only two transactions, both of them costly and neither of any visible or immediate profit to us. I had bought Chimali's feather tapestry only for the sweet revenge of destroying it. At even greater price, I had bought a hostel for the pleasure of giving it away. If I was reticent with my partners, it was from some shame at not having yet shown myself a very shrewd pochtéatl.

After several days of traveling quickly and easily across the dun-colored flats, we saw the pale blue of mountains begin to rise on our left, and gradually loom up in front of us, too, and darken to blue-green, and we were again climbing, that time into thick forests of pine and cedar and juniper. Thereabouts we began to encounter the crosses that have always been held holy by the several nations of the far south.

Yes, my lords, their cross was practically identical to your Christian cross. Like it, a trifle longer in height than in breadth, the only difference being that the top and side arms bore a bulge at their ends rather like a clover leaf. To those peoples, the religious significance of the cross resided in its symbolizing the four points and center of the compass. But it had a practical use as well. Whenever we found a waist-high wooden cross implanted in some otherwise empty wilderness, we knew that it did not demand, "Be reverent!" but invited us to "Be glad!"—for it marked the presence nearby of good, clear, fresh water.

The mountains got steeper and more rugged until they were as formidable as those back in Uaxyacac. But we were more experienced climbers by then, and we should not have found them too daunting, except that, in addition to the normal chill on the heights, we suffered a sudden attack of viciously cold weather. Well, even in those southern lands it was then midwinter, and the short-day god Tititl was exceptionally hard on us that year.

We trudged along bundled in every kind of clothing we carried, and with our sandals tied on over swaddlings of rags around our feet and lower legs. But the obsidian winds penetrated even those coverings, and on the higher peaks the wind flung snow like tin splinters. We were glad then to have pine trees all about. We collected the sap oozing from them, and boiled it until its irritating oils were gone and it had thickened to the gummy black oxitl which repels both coldness and wetness. Then we undressed and slathered the oxitl over our entire bodies before bundling up again. Except for clear patches around our eyes and lips, we were as night-black as the blind god Itzcoliuqui is always pictured.

We were then in the country of the Chiapa and, when we began to come upon their scattered mountain villages, our grotesque appearance caused some surprise. The Chiapa do not use the black oxitl, but are accustomed to smear themselves all over with jaguar or cuguar or tapir fat, for similar protection against bad weather. However, the people themselves were almost as dark as we were; not black, of course, but the darkest cacao-brown skin I had yet seen on an entire nation of beings. It was the Chiapa tradition that their longest-ago ancestors had emigrated from some original homeland far to the south, and their complexion tended to confirm the legend. They had apparently inherited the color of forebears who had been well baked by a much fiercer sun.

We travelers would gladly have paid for just a touch of that sun. When we plodded through the valleys and hollows sheltered from the wind, we suffered only the numbness and lethargy of freezing cold. But when we crossed a mountain by way of a pass, the sharp wind whistled through it too, like arrows shot through a cave tunnel, none scattering, all striking. And when there was no pass, when we had to clamber all the way up and over a mountain, there would be snow or sleet pelting us at the top, or there would be old snow on the ground for us to wade and slither through. We were all miserable, but one of us was more miserable than the rest: the slave Ten had been stricken with some ailment.

He had never uttered a word of complaint-and never lagged behind, so we did not even suspect that he was feeling ill until the morning his tumplined pack, like a heavy hand, simply pushed him to his knees. He tried gamely to rise but could not, and collapsed full length on the ground. When we pulled loose the tumpline and unburdened him and turned him face up, we discovered than he was so hot with fever that his plastering of oxitl had literally cooked to a dry crust all over his body. Cozcatl asked solicitously if he was especially affected in any specific part. Ten replied, in his broken Náhuatl, that his head felt cloven by a maquahuitl and that his body felt on fire and that every one of his joints ached, but that otherwise nothing in particular was bothering him.

I asked if he had eaten of anything unusual, or if he had been bitten or stung by any venomous creature. He said he had eaten only the meals we all shared. And his only encounter with any creature had been with a notably innocuous one, seven or eight days before, when he tried to run down a rabbit for our evening stew. He would have had it, too, if it had not nipped him and bounded free. He showed me the pinch marks of the rodent teeth on his hand, then rolled away from me and vomited.

Blood Glutton, Cozcatl, and I felt sorry that, if any of us had to be taken ill, it should be Ten, for we all liked him. He was the one slave who had been the most tractable and unflagging of all our porters. He had loyally helped to save us all from the Tya Nuü bandits. It was he who had oftenest volunteered for the somewhat unmanly task of cooking. He was the strongest among the slaves, after the hulking Four we had sold, and had borne the heaviest pack from that time. He had also submissively carried the unwieldy and unwholesome cuguar pelt; indeed, he still had the thing, for Blood Glutton would not let it be discarded.

We all rested, until Ten himself was the first to get to his feet. I felt his forehead and it seemed that the fever had abated. I looked more closely at his dark brown face and said, "I have known you for more than a sheaf of days, but I only now realize. You are of this Chiapa country, are you not?"

"Yes, master," he said weakly. "From the capital city of Chiapan. That is why I wish to press on. I hope you will be kind enough to sell me there."

So he hoisted his bundle, slipped the tumpline again around his head, and we all went on, but by twilight of that day he was staggering in a manner pitiful to behold. Still he insisted on keeping the pace, and refused all suggestions of another halt or a lightening of his load. He would not put it down until we found a valley out of the wind, with a cross marking an icy creek flowing turgidly through it, and there made camp.

"We have killed no game lately," said Blood Glutton, "and the dogs are long gone. But Ten should have some nourishing fresh food, not just atóli mush and windy beans. Have Three and Six each start twirling a drill. It should take them so long to get a fire going that I can make a catch of something."

He found a limber green withe, bent it into a hoop, tied to it a scrap of almost threadbare cloth to make a crude net, and went to try his skill in the creek. He came back after a while, saying, "Cozcatl could have done it. They were sluggish with the cold," and exhibited a mess of silvery green fish, none longer than a hand or thicker than a finger, but enough of them to fill our stew pot. Looking at them, however, I was not sure I wanted them in the pot, and I said so.

Blood Glutton waved away my objection. "Never mind that they are ugly. They are tasty."

"They are unnatural," complained Cozcatl. "Every one of them has four eyes!"

"Yes, very clever fish, these fish. They float just below the creek surface, their upper eyes watching for insects in the air, their lower eyes alert for prey under the water. Perhaps they will endow our ailing Ten with some of their own wide-awakeness."

If they did, it was only enough to prevent his getting the good night's sleep he needed. I myself woke several times to hear the sick man thrashing and coughing and hawking up phlegm and mumbling incoherently. Once or twice I did make out what sounded like a word—"binkizaka"—and in the morning I drew Blood Glutton aside to ask him if he had any idea what it meant.

"Yes, one of the few foreign words I know," he said superciliously, as if he thereby conferred a favor on it. "The binkizaka are creatures half human, half animal, which haunt the mountain heights. I am told that they are the hideous and obnoxious offspring of women who have unnaturally mated with jaguars or monkeys or whatever. When you hear a noise like thunder in the mountains, but there is no storm, you are hearing the binkizaka making mischief. Personally, I believe the sounds are of landslides and rockfalls, but you know the ignorance of foreigners. Why do you ask? Have you heard strange noises?"

"Only Ten talking in his sleep. I think he was in delirium. I think he is more ill than we supposed."

So, overriding his plaintive protests, we took Ten's load and divided it amongst the rest of us, and left him only the mountain lion's skin to carry that day. Unburdened, he walked well enough, but I could tell when he was seized by a chill, for he would bend that stiff old hide around his already thick swaddling of garments. Then the chill would pass, and the fever rack him, and he would doff the skin and even open his clothing to the cold mountain air. He also breathed with a gurgling noise, when he was not coughing, and what he coughed up was a sputum of exceptionally foul smell.

We were climbing eastward up a mountain of considerable size, and arrived at its top to find our way interrupted. We stood on the brink of a canyon running out of sight to the north and south, the steepest-sided canyon I have ever seen. It was like a gash cut through the ranges by some angry god who had slashed down from the sky with a god-sized maquahuitl, swinging it with all his god strength. It was a sight that was breathtakingly impressive, beautiful, and deceptive, all at the same time. Though a cold wind blew where we stood, it evidently never penetrated that canyon, for the nearly perpendicular rock walls were festooned with clinging flowers of all colors. At the very bottom were forests of flowering trees, and soft-looking meadows, and a silver thread which appeared, from where we stood, to be the merest brook.

We did not try to descend into the inviting depths, but turned south and followed the canyon rim until it gradually began to slope downward. By dusk it had lowered us to the level of that "brook," which was easily a hundred man's-steps from bank to bank. I learned later that it is the River Suchiapa, the broadest, deepest, swiftest-flowing river in all of The One World. That canyon, cut by it through the Chiapa mountains, is also unique in The One World: five one-long-runs in length and, at its deepest, nearly half a one-long-run from brink to bottom.

We had come down to a plateau where the air was warmer and the wind more gentle. We also came to a village, though a poor one. It was called Toztlan, and it was scarcely big enough to support a name, and the only meal the villagers could provide us was a hash made of boiled owl, which gags me even in recollection. But Toztlan did have a hut big enough for us all to sleep under shelter for the first time in several nights, and the village population did include a physician of sorts.

"I am only an herb doctor," he said apologetically, in faltering Náhuatl, after he had examined Ten. "I have given the patient a purge, and can do no more. But tomorrow you will arrive at Chiapan, and there you will find many famous pulse doctors."

I did not know what pulse doctoring might be, but, by the next day, I could only hope it would be an improvement on herb doctoring. Before we got to Chiapan, Ten had collapsed and was being carried on the cuguar hide he had carried for so long. We took turns, by fours, bearing the improvised litter by the leg-skins at its corners, while Ten lay upon it and writhed and—between spasms of coughing—complained to us that several binkizaka were sitting on his chest and preventing him from breathing.

"One of them is gnawing on me, too. See?" And he held out his hand. What he showed was only the place where the harmless rabbit had nipped him, but, for some reason, that spot had ulcerated into an open sore. We carriers tried to tell him that we saw nothing sitting or eating upon him, and that his problem was only the thinness of the air on that high plateau. We ourselves had such difficulty in breathing that none of us could carry for long before we had to be relieved by another.

Chiapan looked nothing like a capital of anything. It was merely one more village, situated on the bank of a tributary of the Suchiapa River, and I supposed it was the capital only by virtue of its being the largest village of all the villages in the Chiapa nation. A few of its buildings, too, were of wood or adobe, instead of their all being the usual stick-and-thatch huts, and there were the crumbling remnants of two old pyramids.

Our little company came into town reeling with fatigue and calling for a doctor. A kindly passerby heeded our obviously urgent cries, and stopped to peer at the barely conscious Ten. He exclaimed, "Macoboo!" and shouted something else in his language which sent two or three other passersby off at a run. Then he made a beckoning gesture to us and trotted ahead to lead us to the abode of a physician who, we gathered from other gestures, had some command of the Náhuatl tongue.

By the time we got there, we had been joined by an excitedly jabbering crowd. It seemed that the Chiapa do not, like us Mexíca, have entirely individual names. Though each person naturally has some distinguishing name, it is attached to a family name, like those of you Spaniards, which endures unchanging through all the generations of that family. The slave we called Ten was of the Macoboo family of Chiapan, and the helpful citizen, recognizing him, had shouted for someone to run and tell his relatives of his return to town.

Ten was unhappily in no condition to recognize any of the other Macoboo who converged on us, and the doctor—though visibly gratified to find such a crowd clamoring at his door—could not let them all inside. When the four of us carrying Ten had laid him on the earthen floor, the aged physician commanded that the hut be cleared of everybody except himself, his crone of a wife who would assist him, the patient, and myself, to whom he would explain the treatment while he performed it. He introduced himself to me as Doctor Maash and, in not very good Náhuatl, told me the theory of pulse doctoring.

He held the wrist of Ten Macoboo while he called out the name of each god, good and bad, in whom the Chiapa believe. As he explained it, when he shouted the name of the deity who was afflicting the patient, Ten's heart would pound and his pulse quicken. Then the doctor, knowing which god was responsible for the ailment, would know exactly what sacrificial offering should be made to persuade that god to cease the molestation. He would also know the proper medicines to administer to repair whatever damage had been done by the god.

So Ten lay there on the cuguar skin, his eyes closed in the sunken hollows of their sockets, and old Doctor Maash held his wrist, leaned over him, and shouted into his ear:

"Kakal, the bright god!" then a pause for the pulse to respond, then, "Totik, the dark god!" and a pause and "Teo, the love goddess!" and "Antun, the life god!" and "Hachakyum, the mighty god!" and so on, through more Chiapa gods and goddesses than I can remember. At last he squatted back on his heels and muttered in apparent defeat, "The pulse is so feeble that I cannot be sure of the response to any name."

Ten suddenly croaked, without opening his eyes, "Binkizaka bit me!"

"Aha!" said Doctor Maash, brightening. "It would not have occurred to me to suggest the lowly binkizaka. And here indeed is a hole in his hand!"

"Excuse me, Lord Doctor," I ventured. "It was not any of the binkizaka. It was a rabbit that bit him."

The physician raised his head so he could scowl down his nose at me. "Young man, I was holding his wrist when he said 'binkizaka,' and I know a pulse when I feel it. Woman!" I blinked, but he was addressing his wife. He afterward explained to me that he told her, "I shall need to confer with an expert in the lesser beings. Go fetch Doctor Kame."

The crone scuttled out of the hut, elbowing through the craning crowd, and in a few moments we were joined by another elderly man. The Doctors Kame and Maash huddled and muttered, then took turns holding Ten's flaccid wrist and roaring "Binkizaka!" into his ear. Then they huddled and consulted some more, then nodded in agreement. Doctor Kame barked, another order to the old woman and she departed again in a hurry. Doctor Maash told me:

"It is profitless to sacrifice to the binkizaka, since they are half beasts and do not understand the rites of propitiation. This being an emergency case, my colleague and I have decided on the radical measure of burning the affliction out of the patient. We have sent for the Sun Slab, the most holy treasure of our people."

The woman came back with two men, carrying between them what looked at first glance like a simple square of rock. Then I saw that its upper surface was inlaid with jadestone in the form of a cross. Yes, very similar to your Christian cross. In the four spaces between the arms of the cross, the rock had been bored completely through, and in each of those holes was a chunk of chipilotl quartz. But—and this is important for the understanding of what followed, my lords—each of those quartz crystals had been ground and polished so it was of perfectly round circumference and smoothly convex on both its upper and lower sides. Each of those transparent panes in the Sun Slab was like a flattened ball, or an extremely symmetrical clam.

While the two men stood holding the Sun Slab over the prostrate Ten, the old woman took a broom and, with his handle, poked holes in the thatch of the roof, each hole admitting a beam of the afternoon sun, until finally she punched a hole that let a beam right down on the patient. The two doctors tugged at the cuguar pelt to adjust Ten's position relative to the sunbeam and the Sun Slab. Then occurred a thing most marvelous, and I crept closer to see better.

Under the doctors' direction, the two men holding the heavy stone slab tilted it so the sun shone through one of the shaped quartz crystals and made a round spot of light on Ten's ulcerated hand. Then, moving the stone back and forth in the sunbeam, they made that round spot of light concentrate down to one intense dot of light, aimed directly upon the sore. The two doctors held the limp hand steady, the two men held the dot of light steady, and—believe me or not, as you will—a wisp of smoke came from the ugly sore. In another moment, there was a sizzling noise and a small flame was there, almost invisible in the brightness of that intensified light. The doctors gently moved the hand about, so that the sun-made flame went all over the ulcer.

At last, one of them said a word. The two men carried the Sun Slab out of the hut, the old woman began trying with her broomstick to rearrange the straw of the roof, and Doctor Maash motioned for me to lean and look. The ulcer had been as completely and cleanly seared as if it had been done with a fire-hot copper rod. I congratulated the two physicians—sincerely, since I had never seen the like before. I also congratulated Ten on having borne the burning without a sound.

"Sad to say, he did not feel it," said Doctor Maash. "The patient is dead. We might have saved him, if you had told me of the binkizaka's involvement and saved me the unnecessary routine of going through all the major gods." Even in his ragged Náhuatl, his tone came through as tartly critical. "You are all alike, when you need medical treatment. Keep a stubborn silence about the most important symptoms. Insist that a physician must first guess the affliction, then cure it, or he has not earned his fee."

"I shall be pleased to pay all fees, Lord Doctor," I said, just as tartly. "Would you be pleased to tell me what you have cured?"

We were interrupted by a small, wizened, dark-skinned woman who slipped into the hut at that moment and shyly said something in the local language. Doctor Maash grumpily translated:

"She offers to pay all medical expenses, if you will consent to sell her the body instead of eating it, as you Mexíca customarily do with dead slaves. She is—she was his mother."

I ground my teeth and said, "Kindly inform her that we Mexíca do no such thing. And I freely give her son back to her. I only regret that we could not have delivered him alive."

The woman's woebegone face became a little less so as the physician spoke. Then she asked another question.

"It is our custom," he translated, "to bury our dead upon the pallet on which they died. She would like to buy from you this smelly skin of a mountain lion."

"It is hers," I said, and for some reason I lied: "Her son killed the beast." I made the doctor earn his fee as an interpreter if for nothing else, for I told the whole story of the hunt, only casting Ten in Blood Glutton's role, and making it sound as if Ten had gallantly saved my life at peril of his own. By the end of the story, the woman's dark face was glowing with maternal pride.

She said something else, and the disgruntled doctor translated: "She says, if her son was so loyal to the young lord, then you must be a good and deserving man. The Macoboo are indebted to you forever."

At that, she called in four more men from outside, presumably Macoboo kinsmen, and they carried Ten away on the accursed pelt that he would not now ever be rid of. I emerged from the hut behind them, to find that my partners had been eavesdropping. Cozcatl was sniffling, but Blood Glutton said sarcastically:

"That was all very noble. But has it occurred to you, good young lord, that this so-called trading expedition has given away rather more of value than it has yet acquired?"

"We have just now acquired some friends," I said.

And so we had. The Macoboo family, which was a big one, insisted that we be their guest during our stay in Chiapan, and lavished on us both hospitality and adulation. There was nothing we could ask that would not be given, as freely as I had given the dead slave back to them. I believe the first thing Blood Glutton requested, after a good bath and a hearty meal, was one of the comelier female cousins; I know I was given a handsome one for my own use. But the first favor I asked was that the Macoboo find me a Chiapan resident who spoke and understood Náhuatl. And when such a man was produced, the first thing I said to him was:

"Those quartz crystals in the Sun Slab, could they not be used instead of the tedious drill and tinder for lighting fires?"

"Why, of course," he said, surprised that I should find it necessary to inquire. "We have always used them so. I do not mean the ones in the Sun Slab, for the Sun Slab is reserved for ceremonial purposes. Perhaps you noticed that its crystals are as big as a man's fist. Clear quartz of that size is so rare that naturally the priests appropriate it and proclaim it holy. But a mere fragment will serve for fire lightings, when it is properly shaped and polished."

He reached under his mantle and extracted from the waist of his loincloth a crystal of that same clamshell convexity, but not much bigger than my thumbnail.

"I need hardly remark, young lord, that it only functions as a burning instrument when the god Kakal shines his sunlight through it. But even at night it has a second use—for looking closely at small things. Let me show you."

He demonstrated how it could be held at just the proper distance between eye and object—we used the embroidery on my mantle hem for the purpose—and I almost jumped when the pattern loomed so large to my sight that I could count the colored threads of it.

"Where do you get these things?" I asked, trying to keep my voice from sounding overeager.

"Quartz is a fairly common stone in these mountains," he was frank to admit. "Whenever anybody stumbles upon a good clear bit, he saves it until it can be brought here to Chiapan. Here live the Xibalba family, and only that family has known through all its generations the secret of fashioning the rough stone into these useful crystals."

"Oh, it is no profound secret," said the current Master Xibalba. "Not like a knowledge of sorcery or prophecy." My interpreter had introduced us, and did the translating as the crystalsmith casually went on, "It is mainly a matter of knowing the proper curvature to impart, and then merely having the patience to grind and polish each crystal exactly so."

Hoping I sounded equally casual, I said, "They make interesting novelties. Useful, too. I wonder that I have not yet seen them copied by the craftsmen of Tenochtítlan."

My interpreter remarked that there had probably never before been any reason for the Sun Slab to have been exhibited in the presence of anyone from Tenochtítlan. Then he translated Master Xibalba's next comment:

"I said, young lord, that there is no great secret to making the crystals. I did not say it is easy, or easily imitated. One must know, for example, how to keep the stone precisely centered for the grinding. It was my greatest-grandfather Xibalba who first learned how."

He said that with pride. He might seem casual about the secrets of his craft, but I was sure that he would never reveal them to any but his own progeny. That suited me perfectly; let the Xibalba remain the only keepers of the knowledge; let the crystals remain inimitable; let me buy up enough of them—

Pretending hesitation, I said, "I think... I believe... I might just possibly be able to sell such things for curiosities in Tenochtítlan or Texcóco. I could not quite be sure... but yes, perhaps to scribes, for greater accuracy in doing their detailed word pictures..."

The master's eyes gleamed mischievously as his comment was relayed to me. "How many, young lord, do you think you believe you might possibly but not quite require?"

I grinned and dropped the pretense. "It would depend on how many you can provide and the price you ask."

"You see here my entire stock of working material as of this day." He waved at the one wall of his workroom which was all shelves, from thatch to ground; on every shelf, nestled in bolls of cotton, were the rough quartz stones. They were distinctive only for the angular, six-sided shapes in which they came from the earth, and they ranged in size from that of a finger joint to that of a small maize cob.

"Here is what I paid for the stock," the artisan went on, handing me a bark paper bearing numerous columns of numbers and symbols. I was mentally adding up the total when he said, "From this stock I can make six twenties of finished crystals of varying sizes."

I asked, "How long would that take?"

"One month."

"Twenty days?" I exclaimed. "I should have thought one crystal would take that long!"

"We Xibalba have had sheaves of years in which to practice," he said. "And I have seven apprentice sons to help me. I also have five daughters, but of course they are not allowed to touch the rough stones, lest they ruin them, being females."

"Six twenties of crystals," I mused, repeating his provincial mode of counting. "And what would you charge for that many?"

"What you see there," he said, indicating the bark paper.

Puzzled, I spoke to the interpreter. "Did I not understand correctly? Did he not say that this is what he paid? For the rough rock?" The interpreter nodded, and through him I again addressed the crystalsmith:

"This makes no sense. Even a street vendor of tortillas asks more for the bread than she paid for the maize." Both he and the translator smiled indulgently and shook their heads. "Master Xibalba," I persisted, "I came here prepared to bargain, yes, but not to steal. I tell you honestly, I would be willing to pay eight times this price, and happy to pay six, and overjoyed to pay four."

His answer came back, "And I would be obliged to refuse."

"In the name of all your gods and mine, why?"

"You proved yourself a friend of the Macoboo. Hence you are a friend of all the Chiapa, and we Xibalba are Chiapa born. No, protest no more. Go. Enjoy your stay among us. Let me get to work. Return in one month for your crystals."

"Then our fortune is already made!" Blood Glutton exulted, as he played with the sample crystal the artisan had given me. "We need not travel any farther. By the great Huitztli, you can sell these things back home for any price you ask!"

"Perhaps," I said. "But we have a month to wait for them, and we have a surplus of goods we still can trade, and I have a personal reason for wanting to visit the Maya."

He grumbled, "These Chiapa women are dark of skin, but they far excel any you will find among the Maya."

"Old lecher, do you never think of anything but women?"

Cozcatl, who did not think of women at all, pleaded, "Yes, do let us go on. We cannot come this far and not see the jungle."

"I also think of eating," said Blood Glutton. "These Macoboo lay an ample dinner cloth. Besides, we lost our only capable cook when we lost Ten."

I said, "You and I will go on, Cozcatl. Let this lazy ancient stay here, if he likes, and live up to his name."

Blood Glutton groused a while longer, but, as I well knew, his appetite for wandering was as strong as any of his other appetites. He was soon off to the marketplace to procure some items he said we would need for jungle travel. Meanwhile, I went again to the Master Xibalba and invited him to take his pick of our trade goods, as an earnest against my paying the balance of his price in harder currency. He again mentioned his numerous offspring, and was pleased to select a quantity of mantles, loincloths, blouses, and skirts. That pleased me as well, because those were the bulkiest things we carried. Their disposal unburdened two of our slaves, and I had no trouble in finding ready purchasers right there in Chiapan, and their new masters paid me in gold dust.

"Now we visit the physician again," said Blood Glutton. "I was long ago given my protection against snakebite, but you and the boy have not yet been treated."

"Thank you for your good intent," I said. "But I do not think I would trust Doctor Maash to treat a pimple on my bottom."

He insisted, "The jungle teems with poisonous serpents. When you step on one, you will wish you had stepped into Doctor Maash's hut first." He began to tick off on his fingers, "There is the yellow-chin snake, the coral snake, the nauyaka..."

Cozcatl paled, and I remembered the elderly trader in Tenochtítlan telling how he had been bitten by a nauyaka and had cut off his own foot to keep from dying. So Cozcatl and I went to Doctor Maash, who produced one fang apiece of each of the snakes Blood Glutton had mentioned, and three or four more besides. With each tooth he pricked our tongues just enough to draw blood.

"There is a tiny dried residue of venom on each of these fangs," he explained. "It will make you both break out in a mild rash. But that will vanish in a few days, and thereafter you will be safe against the bite of any snake known to exist. However, there is one further precaution you must bear in mind." He smiled wickedly and said, "From this moment for ever, your teeth are as lethal as any serpent's. Be careful whom you bite."

* * *

So we departed from Chiapan, as soon as we could pry ourselves loose from the insistent hospitality of the Macoboo, and of those two female cousins in particular, by swearing that we would soon return and be their guests again. To continue eastward, we and our remaining slaves had to climb another mountain range, but the god Tititl had by then restored the weather to the warmth appropriate to those regions, so the climb was not too punishing, even though it took us above the timberline. On the other side, the slope swept us precipitously down and down—from the lichened rock of the heights, to the line where the trees began, then through the sharp-scented forests of pine and cedar and juniper. From there, the familiar trees gradually thinned, as they were crowded out by kinds I had never seen before, and those appeared to be fighting for their lives against the vines and lianas that climbed and curled all over them.

The first thing I discovered about the jungle was that my limited eyesight was no great handicap in there, for distances did not exist; everything was close together. Strangely contorted trees, giant-leafed green plants, towering and feathery ferns, monstrous and spongy fungus, they all stood close, they pressed in and hemmed us about, almost suffocatingly so. The canopy of foliage overhead was like a green cloud cover; on the jungle floor, even at midday we were in a green twilight. Every growing thing; even the petals of flowers, seemed to exude a warm, moist stickiness. Though that was the dry season, the air itself was dense and humid and thick to breathe, like a clear fog. The jungle smelled spicy, musky, ripe-sweet and rotten: all the odors of rampant growth rooted in old decay.

From the treetops above us, howler and spider monkeys yelped and countless varieties of parrots screeched their indignation at our intrusion, while other birds of every conceivable color flashed back and forth like warning arrows. The air about us was hung with hummingbirds no bigger than bees and fanned by fluttering butterflies as big as bats. Around our feet the underbrush was rustled by creatures stirring or fleeing. Perhaps some were deadly snakes, but most were harmless things: the little itzam lizards which run on their hind legs; the big-fingered frogs which climb trees; the multicolored, crested, dewlapped iguanas; the glossy brown-furred jaleb, which would scamper only a short way off, then stop to peer beady-eyed at us. Even the larger and uglier animals native to those jungles are shy of humans: the lumbering tapir, the shaggy capybara, the formidably claw-footed anteater. Unless one steps incautiously into a stream where alligators or caymans lurk, even those massive armored beasts are no hazard.

We were more of a menace to the native creatures than most of them were to us. During our month in the jungle, Blood Glutton's arrows provided us with several meals of jaleb, iguana, capybara, and tapir. Edible, my lords? Oh, quite. The meat of the jaleb is indistinguishable from that of the opossum; iguana flesh is white and flaky like that of the sea crayfish you call lobster; capybara tastes like the most tender rabbit; and tapir meat is very similar to pork.

The only large animal we had to fear was the jaguar. In those southern jungles the cats are more numerous than in all the temperate lands together. Of course, only a jaguar too old or too ill to hunt more nimble prey will attack a full-grown human without provocation. But little Cozcatl might have been a temptation, so we never let him out of a protective group of us adults. And, when we marched through the jungle in single file, Blood Glutton made us all carry our spears held vertically, the blades pointing straight up above our heads, because the jungle jaguar's favored way of hunting is simply to loll on a tree branch and wait to drop on some unwary victim passing below.

Blood Glutton had bought in Chiapan two items for each of us and I do not think we could have survived in the jungle without them. One was a light and delicately woven mosquito netting which we often draped over ourselves even during the daylight marches, so pestilent were the flying insects. The other item was a kind of bed called a gishe, simply a net of slender rope, woven in a sort of beanpod shape, which could be slung between any two close-set trees. It was so much more comfortable than a pallet that I carried a gishe on all my later travels, for use wherever there were trees to support it.

Our elevated beds put us out of the reach of most snakes, and the mantles of netting at least discouraged things like bloodsucker bats, scorpions, and other vermin of little initiative. But nothing could keep the more ambitious creatures—ants, for instance—from using our gishe ropes for a bridge and then tunneling under the nets. If ever you wish to know what the bite of a jungle fire ant feels like, reverend friars, hold one of Master Xibalba's crystals between the sun and your bare skin.

And there were even worse things. One morning I awoke feeling something oppressive on my chest, and cautiously lifted my head to see a thick, hairy, black hand laid there, a hand nearly twice the span of my own. "If I am being pawed by a monkey," I thought drowsily, "it is an unheard-of new breed, bigger than any man." Then I realized that the heavy thing was a bird-eating tarantula, and that there was only flimsy mosquito cloth between me and its sickle jaws. On no other morning of my life have I ever arisen with such alacrity, getting out of my coverings and as far as the ashes of the campfire all in a single bound, trailing a yell that brought everyone else to his feet almost as urgently.

But not everything in the jungle is ugly or menacing or pestilential. For a traveler who takes reasonable precautions, the jungle can be hospitable and beautiful as well. Edible game animals are easy to secure; many of the plants make nourishing cooked greens; even some of the ghastliest fungoid growths are delicious to eat. There is one arm-thick liana that looks as crusty and dry as baked clay; but cut off an arm's-length of it and inside you find it as porous as a bees' comb; tilt it over your head and it trickles out a generous drink of the freshest, sweetest, coolest water. As for the jungle's beauty, I cannot begin to describe the brilliant flowers I saw there, except to say that, of their thousands of thousands, I remember no two of similar shape and coloring.

The most gorgeous birds we saw were the numerous varieties of the quetzal, vividly colored, distinctively crested and plumed. But only infrequently did we glimpse the most magnificent and treasured bird of all, the quetzal tototl, the one with emerald tail feathers as long as a man's legs. That bird is as proud of its plumage as any nobleman who wears it later. Or so I was told by a Maya girl named Ix Ykoki. She said that the quetzal tototl builds a globular nest unique among birds' nests because it has two doorway holes. Thus the bird can enter through one and depart through the other without having to turn around inside and risk breaking one of those splendid tail plumes. Also, said Ix Ykoki, the quetzal tototl feeds only on small fruits and berries, and it snatches those from trees and vines as it flies past, and it eats them on the wing, rather than perched comfortably on a bough, to assure that the juice does not drip and stain those pendant plumes.

Since I have mentioned the girl Ix Ykoki, I might as well remark that, in my opinion, not she nor the other resident human beings added appreciably to the beauty of those jungle lands.

According to all the legends, the Maya once had a far richer, mightier, and more resplendent civilization than we Mexíca ever approached, and the remaining ruins of their onetime cities are powerful evidence in support of those legends. There is also evidence that the Maya may have learned all their arts and skills directly from the peerless Toltéca, before those Master Artisans went away. For one thing, the Maya worship many of the same Toltéca gods that we Mexíca also later appropriated: The beneficent Feathered Serpent whom we call Quetzalcóatl they call Kukulkan. The rain god whom we call Tlaloc they call Chak.

On that expedition and later ones, I have seen the remains of many of the Maya cities, and no one could deny that they must have been overwhelming in their prime. In their empty plazas and courtyards can still be seen admirable statues and carved stone panels and richly ornamented facades and even pictures from which the lively colors have not faded in all the sheaves upon sheaves of years since they were painted. I particularly noticed one detail of the Maya buildings—door openings gracefully upward-tapered in shape—that our modern architects have never yet tried or perhaps been able to imitate.

It took countless Maya artists and artisans many generations and much labor and loving care to build and beautify those cities. Now they stand empty, forsaken, forlorn. There is no mark of their having been besieged by enemy armies, or of their having suffered even the slightest of natural disasters, yet their thousands of inhabitants for some reason abandoned every one of them. And the descendants of those inhabitants are now so ignorant and uncaring of their own history that they cannot tell—they cannot even venture a plausible guess—why their ancestors left those cities, why the jungle was allowed to reclaim and overthrow them. Today's Maya cannot even tell why they, who should have inherited all that grandeur, now live resignedly in wretched grass-shack villages on the outskirts of those ghost cities.

The once vast but unified dominion of the Maya, formerly ruled from a capital city called Mayapan, has long been fractured into geographically different northern and southern divisions. I and my companions were then traveling in the more worthwhile part: the luxuriant jungle country called Tamoan Chan, Land of the Mists, which stretches limitlessly eastward from the boundaries of the Chiapa territory. To the north, where I traveled on a later occasion, is the great peninsula jutting into the northern ocean, the first place your Spanish explorers set foot in these lands. I should have thought that, after one look at those uninviting barrens, they would have gone home and come here no more.

Instead, they gave that land a name which is even more absurd than your Cow-Horn for Quaunahuac or Tortilla for what used to be Texcala. When those first Spaniards landed and asked, "What is this place called?" the inhabitants, never having heard Spanish before, quite naturally replied, "Yectetan," which means only "I do not understand you." Those explorers made of that the name Yucatan, and I suppose the peninsula will be called so forever. But I should not laugh. The Maya's own name for that region—Uluumil Kutz, or Land of Plenty—is just as ridiculous, or possibly ironic, since the greater part of that peninsula is pitifully unfruitful and unsuited for human habitation.

Like their divided land, the Maya themselves are no longer one people under one ruler. They have fragmented into a profusion of tribes headed by petty chiefs, and all are mutually contemptuous and disparaging, and most of them are so dispirited and sunk in lethargy that they live in what their ancestors would have considered disgusting squalor. Yet every one of those splinter tribes preens itself on being the sole and only true remnant of the master Maya race. I personally think the oldtime Maya would disavow relationship with any of them.

Why, the louts cannot even tell you the names of their ancestors' once great cities, but call them anything they please. One such city, though now smothered in jungle, still shows a sky-reaching pyramid and a turreted palace and numerous temples, but it is unimaginatively called Palemke, the Maya word for any trivial "holy place." In another abandoned city, the interior galleries have not yet all been invaded by destructive vines and creepers, and on those inside walls are skillfully painted murals depicting warriors at battle, court ceremonies, and the like. The descendants of those warriors and courtiers, when asked what they know of the place, shrug indifferently and speak of it as Bonampak, which means only "painted walls."

In Uluumil Kutz is a city almost unravaged by erosion, and it might well be known as The Place of Man-Made Beauty, to honor the intricate yet delicate architecture of its many buildings; but it is called only Uxmal, meaning "thrice-built." Another city is superbly situated on a hilltop overlooking a wide river, deep in the jungle. I counted the ruins or foundations of at least one hundred tremendous edifices built of green granite blocks, and I believe it must have been the most majestic of all the old Maya centers. But the wretches now living roundabout call it merely Yaxchilan, which is to say a place where there are some "green stones."

Oh, I will grant that some of the tribes—notably the Xiu of the northern peninsula and the Tzotxil of the southern jungles—still manifest some intelligence and vitality and a regard for their lost heritage. They recognize classes according to birth and status: noble, middle, bonded, and slave. They still maintain some of the arts of their ancestors: their wise men know medicine and surgery, arithmetic and calendar keeping. They carefully preserve the countless thousands of books written by their predecessors, though the fact that they know so little of their own history makes me doubt that even their best-educated priests ever take the trouble to read the old books.

But even the ancient, civilized, and cultured Maya observed some customs we moderns must regard as bizarre—and it is unfortunate that their descendants have chosen to perpetuate those eccentricities while letting so many more worthy traits wither away. To an outsider like me, the most noticeable grotesquery is what the Maya regard as beauty in their own appearance.

From the evidence of the oldest paintings and carvings, the Maya have always had hawk-beak noses and receding chins, and they have forever striven to enhance that resemblance to birds of prey. What I mean is that the Maya, ancient and current, have deliberately deformed their children from birth. A flat board is bound to a baby's forehead and kept there throughout its infancy. When it is finally removed, the child has a forehead as steeply receding as its chin, thus making its naturally prominent nose seem still more of a beak.

That is not all. A Maya boy or girl, however otherwise naked, will always be wearing a pellet of clay or resin suspended by a string around the head so that it dangles right between the eyes. This is intended to make the child grow up cross-eyed, which the Maya of all lands and classes deem another mark of surpassing beauty. Some of the Maya men and women have eyes so very crossed that I think it is only the clifflike nose between which keeps the eyes from merging. I have said that there are many beautiful things in the jungle country of Tamoan Chan, but I would not include the human population among them.

I probably would have ignored all the unattractive, hawk-faced women, except that—in a village where we spent the night, a village of the cleanly Tzotxil—one girl seemed to gaze at me with a determined fixity, and I assumed she had been smitten with passion for me at first glance. So I introduced myself by my latest name: Dark Cloud is Ek Muyal in their language, and she shyly confided that she was Ix Ykoki, or Evening Star. Only then, standing close to her, did I discern that she was exceedingly cross-eyed, and I realized that she probably had not been looking at me at all. Even at that moment when we were face to face, she could have been staring at a tree behind my back, or her own bare foot, or maybe both at once, for all I could determine.

That somewhat disconcerted me, but curiosity impelled me to persuade Ix Ykoki to sleep that night with me. And I do not mean that I was fired by any prurient curiosity as to whether a girl with crossed eyes might be interestingly peculiar in her other organs. It was simply that I had for some time been wondering what the act of copulation, with any female, might be like in one of those hanging, free-swinging net beds. I am pleased to report that I found it not only possible but also delightful. Indeed, I was so transported that it was not until we lay apart in the swaying gishe, spent and sweaty, that I realized I had given Ix Ykoki a number of love bites, and that at least one of them had drawn a bead of blood.

Of course that made me remember the warning words of Doctor Maash, when he had administered the snakebite treat-met, and I lay awake through most of the rest of the night, suffering an agony of apprehension. I waited for Ix Ykoki to go into convulsions, or to stiffen slowly and grow cold beside me, and I wondered what kind of punishment the Tzotxil dealt out to murderers of their women. But Ix Ykoki did nothing more alarming man to snore all night through her great nose and in the morning she bounded jauntily from the bed, her crossed eyes bright.

I was happy that I had not slain the girl, but the fact also perturbed me. If the bungling old pulse doctor who told us that our own teeth were now poisonous had merely been repeating one of his people's stupid superstitions, there was every likelihood that Cozcatl and I were not at all protected against the venomous snakes—or that Blood Glutton ever had been. I so advised my partners, and thereafter we watched even more closely where we put our feet and hands as we made our way through the jungle.

A little later, I made the acquaintance of another physician, of the kind I had wanted for so long and had come so far to see: one of those Maya doctors famed for their ability to treat ailments of the eye. His name was Ah Chel, and he was also of the Tzotxil tribe, and Tzotxil means Bat People, which I took as a good omen, since bats are the creatures which see best in the darkness. Doctor Ah Chel had two other assets which recommended him to me: he spoke an adequate Náhuatl, and he was not himself cross-eyed. I think I would have been somewhat distrustful of a cross-eyed eye doctor.

He indulged in no pulse feeling or god calling or other mystic means of diagnosis. He began straightforwardly by putting into my eyes drops of juice from the herb camopalxhuitl, to enlarge my pupils so he could look inside them. While we waited for the drug to take effect, I talked—perhaps just to ease my own nervousness—and told him of that sham Doctor Maash, and the circumstances of Ten's illness and death.

"Rabbit fever," said Doctor Ah Chel, nodding. "Be glad that none of the rest of you handled that diseased rabbit. The fever does not kill of itself, but it weakens the victim so that he succumbs to another ailment which fills the lungs with a thick liquid. Your slave might still have lived if you had brought him down from the heights to a place where he could have breathed air more thick and rich. But now let us have a look at you."

And he produced a clear crystal, indubitably one of Master Xibalba's and he peered closely into each of my eyes, then sat back and said flatly, "Young Ek Muyal, there is nothing afflicting your eyes."

"Nothing?" I exclaimed. I wondered if, after all, Ah Chel was as much a pretender as Maash. Between my teeth I said, "There is nothing wrong except that I can see with clarity no farther than the reach of my arm. You call that nothing?"

"I mean there is no disease or disturbance of your vision which I or anyone can treat."

I swore one of Blood Glutton's imprecations, and I hoped it made the great god Huitzilopóchtli wince in his private parts. Ah Chel gestured for me to hear him out.

"You see things blurred because of the shape of your eyes, and they were born to be that way. An uncommonly shaped eyeball distorts vision in the same way as this uncommonly shaped piece of quartz. Hold this crystal between your eye and a flower, and you see the flower plain. But hold the crystal between your eye and a distant garden, and that garden is just a blur of colors."

I said miserably, "There is no medicine, no surgery...?"

"I am sorry to say there is not. If you had the blinding disease caused by the black fly, yes, I might wash that away with medications. If you were afflicted with what we call the white veil, yes, I could cut that out and give you better vision, though not perfect. But there is no operation which can make the eyeball smaller, not without destroying it entirely. We will never know a remedy for your condition, any more than any man will ever know the secret place where the aged alligators go to die."

Even more miserably, I mumbled, "Then I must live all the rest of my life in a fog, squinting like a mole?"

"Well," he said, sounding not very sympathetic to my self-pity, "you can also live the rest of your life thanking the gods that you are not utterly blinded by the veil or the fly or something else. You will see many who are." He paused, then said pointedly, "They will never see you."

I was so cast down by the physician's verdict that I passed the remainder of our time in Tamoan Chan in rather a glum humor, and I fear I was not very good company for my partners. When a guide from the Pokomam tribe of the far eastern jungle took us to see the marvelous lakes of Tziskao there, I looked at them as coldly as if the Maya rain god Chak had created them to affront me personally. Those are some sixty bodies of water, ranging from small ponds to estimable lakes in size, and they have no connecting straits between them, and they have no visible inlet streams, yet they never diminish in the dry season or overflow in the wet. But the really noteworthy thing about them is that no two of all those lakes are of the same color.

From the high ground where we stood overlooking six or seven of the waters, our guide pointed and said proudly, "Behold, young traveler Ek Muyal! That one is dark green-blue, that one is the color of turquoise, that one is as bright green as an emerald, that one is dull green like jadestone, that one is the pale blue of the winter sky...."

I grumbled, "They might be as red as blood, for all I could tell." And that of course was simply not true. The truth was that I was seeing everything and everybody through the dark of my own despondency.

For a brief while, I courted optimism by trying some experiments with Master Xibalba's burning crystal I carried. I already knew that it was of use for seeing close things even closer and clearer, so I endeavored to make it help me see far things as well. I tried holding it close to my eye while I looked at a tree, then holding it at arm's length, then holding it at varying distances between. No use. When aimed at objects more than a hand span beyond it, the quartz only made them more indistinct than my unaided eye did, and the experiments only made me more depressed.

Even when dealing with the Maya buyers of our trade goods, I was sour and sullen, but fortunately there was enough demand for our wares that my unwinning demeanor was tolerated. I brusquely refused the offers of pelts of jaguar and ocelot and other animals, the feathers of macaw and toucan and other birds. What I wanted was gold dust or metal currency, but such things were not much circulated in those uncivilized lands. So I let it be known that I would trade our goods—the fabrics and garments, the jewelry and trinkets, the manufactured medicines and cosmetics—only for the plumes of the quetzal tototl.

In theory, any fowler who acquired those leg-long, emerald-green feathers was obliged, on pain of death, to present them immediately to his tribal chief, who would use them either for personal adornment or as currency in his dealing with other chiefs of the Maya and the more powerful rulers of other nations. But in practice, as I hardly need say, the fowlers gave their chiefs only a share of those rarest of feathers, and kept the rest for their own enrichment. Since I positively refused to trade for anything but the quetzal tototl plumes, the customers had to go off to do hasty trades among their fellows... and quetzal tototl plumes I got.

As we gradually dispensed with our goods, I sold off the slaves who had carried them. In that land of the lazy, not even the nobles had much work to which to put slaves, still less could afford to own them. But every tribal chief was eager to boast a superiority over rival chiefs, and a holding of slaves—though they might be only a drain on his treasury and his larder—constituted a legitimate boast. So, for good gold dust, I sold ours variously and impartially to the chiefs of the Tzotxil, the Quiche, and the Tzeltal, two slaves apiece, and only the remaining two accompanied our return to the Chiapa country. One carried the large but unweighty bale of feathers, the other's load consisted of those few trade items we had not yet disposed of.

As he had promised, the artisan Xibalba had his finished crystals waiting for me when we got back to Chiapan—in all, a hundred twenty and seven of them, of varied sizes—and, thanks to my sale of the slaves, I was able to pay him in pure gold-dust currency, as I had promised. While he carefully wrapped each crystal separately in cotton, then bundled them all together in cloth to make a tidy package, I said to him, by way of the interpreter:

"Master Xibalba, these crystals make a looked-at object look bigger. Have you ever contrived a kind of crystal that would make objects appear smaller?"

"Oh, yes," he said, smiling. "Even my greatest-grandfather probably tried his hand at fashioning other things than burning crystals. We all have. I do myself, just for amusement."

I told him how limited was my vision, and added, "A Maya doctor told me that my eyes behave as if I am always looking through one of the enlarging quartzes. I wondered, if I could find such a thing as a reducing crystal, and if I looked through it..."

He regarded me with interest, and rubbed his chin, and said, "Hm," and went through the back of his workshop to his house. He returned with a wooden tray of shallow compartments, each holding a crystal. They were of all different shapes; some were even miniature pyramids.

"I keep these only for curiosities," said the artisan. "They are of no practical use, but some have amusing properties. This one, for instance." He lifted out a short bar of three flat sides. "It is not quartz, but a transparent kind of limestone. And I do not grind this stone; it cleaves naturally in flat planes. Hold it yonder, in the sun, and see the light it throws on your hand."

I did, half expecting to flinch from a burn. Instead I exclaimed, "The mist of water jewels!" The sunlight passing through the crystal to my hand was transformed; it was a colored band, ranging from dark red at one extreme, through yellow and green and blue, to the deepest purple; it was a tiny simulacrum of the colored bow one sees in the sky after a rain. "But you are not looking for playthings," said the man. "Here." And he gave me a crystal of which both surfaces were concave; that is to say, it was like two dishes with their bottoms cemented together.

I held it over the embroidered hem of my mantle, and the pattern shrank to half its width. I raised my head, still holding the crystal before me, and looked at the artisan. The man's features, blurred before, were suddenly sharp and distinct, but his face was so small that he might that instant have leapt away from me and out the door and entirely across the plaza.

"It is a marvel," I said, shaken. I put down the crystal and rubbed at my eye. "I could see you... but so far away."

"Ah, then that one diminishes too powerfully. They have different strengths. Try this one."

It was concave only on one side; the other face was perfectly flat. I raised the thing cautiously...

"I can see," I said, and I said it like a prayer of thanksgiving to the most beneficent of gods. "I can see far and near. There are spots and ripples, but everything else is as clear and sharp as when I was a child. Master Xibalba, you have done something the celebrated Maya physicians admit they cannot. You have made me see again!"

"And all those sheaves of years... we thought these things useless..." he murmured, sounding rather awed himself. Then he spoke briskly. "So it requires the crystal of one plane surface and an inner curve. But you cannot go about forever holding the thing out in front of you like that. It would be like peering through a knothole. Try bringing it close against your eye."

I did, and cried out, and apologized: "It hurt as if my eye was being drawn from its socket."

"Still too powerful. And there are spots and ripples, you say. So I must seek a stone more perfect and unflawed than the finest quartz." He smiled and rubbed his hands together. "You have set me the first new task the Xibalba have had in generations. Come back tomorrow."

I was full of excitement and expectation, but I said nothing to my companions, in case that hopeful experiment too should come to nothing. They and I again resided with the Macoboo, to our great comfort and the great gratification of the two female cousins, and we stayed for six or seven days. During that time, I visited the Xibalba workshop several times daily, while the master labored over the most scrupulously exact crystal he had ever been asked to make. He had procured a wonderfully clear chunk of jewel-grade topaz, and had begun by shaping it into a flat disk of a circumference that covered my eye from brow to cheekbone. The crystal was to remain flat on its outer side, but the inner concavity's precise thickness and curvature could be determined only by the experiment of my looking through it every time the master ground it down a little more.

"I can keep thinning it and increasing the arc of curve little by little," he said, "until we reach the exact reducing power you require. But we must know when we reach it. If ever I grind away too much, the thing is ruined."

So I kept going back for trials, and when my one eye got bloodshot from the strain, we would change to my other, and then back again. But finally, to my inexpressible joy, there came the day, and the moment in that day, when I could hold the crystal against either eye, and see through it perfectly. Everything in the world was clear and crisply outlined, from a book held in reading position to the trees on the mountain horizon beyond the city. I was in ecstasy, and Master Xibalba was nearly so, with pride in his unprecedented creation.

He gave the crystal one final gleaming polish, with a wet paste of some fine red clay. Then he smoothed the crystal's edge and mounted it in a sturdy circlet of copper hammered to hold it securely, and that circlet had a short handle with which I could hold the crystal to either eye, and the handle was tied to a leather thong so I could keep it always about my neck, ready for use and safe from loss. I took the finished instrument to the Macoboo house, but showed it to no one, and waited for an opportunity to surprise Blood Glutton and Cozcatl.

When the twilight was turning to night, we sat in the door-yard with our hostess, the late Ten's mother, and a few others of the family, all of us elder males having a smoke after our evening meal. The Chiapa do not smoke the poquietl. Instead, they use a clay jar punctured with several holes; this they pack with picíetl and fragrant herbs and set to smoldering; then each participant inserts a long, hollow reed into one of the jar's holes and all enjoy a community smoke.

"Yonder approaches a handsome girl," murmured Blood Glutton, pointing his reed down the street.

I could barely make out a distant suggestion of something pale moving in the dusk, but I said, "Ask me to describe her."

"Eh?" grunted the old soldier, and he lifted his eyebrows at me, and he sarcastically used my former nickname. "Very well, Fogbound, describe her—as you see her."

I put my crystal to my left eye and the girl came sharply into view, even in that poor light. Enthusiastically, like a slave trader at the block, I enumerated all the visible details of her physique—skin complexion, length of her hair plaits, the shapeliness of her bare ankles and feet, the regular features of her face, which was handsome indeed. I added that the embroidery on her blouse was of the so-called pottery pattern. "She also wears," I concluded, "a thin veil over her hair, and under it she has trapped a number of live fireflies. A most fetching adornment." Then I burst out laughing at the expression on the faces of my two partners.

Since I could use only one eye at a time, there was a certain flatness, a lack of depth to everything I looked at. Nevertheless, I could again see almost as clearly as I had when I was a child, and that sufficed for me. I might mention that the topaz was of the pale-yellow color; when I looked through it I saw everything seemingly sunlighted even on gray days; so perhaps I saw the world as rather prettier than others did. But, as I discovered when I looked into a mirror, the use of the crystal did not make me any prettier, since the eye behind it appeared much smaller than the uncovered one. Also, because it was natural for me to hold the crystal in my left hand while my right was occupied, for some time I suffered from headache. I soon learned always to hold the topaz to alternate eyes, and the headache went away.

I know, reverend scribes, that you must be amused at my fulsome babbling about an instrument that is no novelty to you. But I never saw another such device until many years later, until my first encounter with the earliest arriving Spaniards. One of the chaplain friars who came with the Captain-General Cortés wore two such crystals, one for each eye, held in a leather strap which was tied around his head.

But to me and the crystalsmith, my device was an unheard-of invention. In fact, he refused all payment for his labor and even for the topaz, which must have been most costly. He insisted that he was well repaid by his own pride in his achievement. So, since he would take nothing from me, I left with the Macoboo family a quantity of quetzal tototl plumes to be delivered to him when I was long enough gone that he could not refuse them—and I left a sufficiency to make the Master Xibalba perhaps the richest man in Chiapan, as I felt he deserved to be.

At night I looked at stars.

From having been for so long so deeply dejected, I was suddenly and understandably buoyant of spirit, and I announced to my partners, "Now that I can see, I should like to see the ocean!"

They were so pleased with the change in me that they did not demur when we left Chiapan going southward rather than westward, and had to make our way over and through yet another jumble of rugged mountains, and mountains that were slumbering volcanoes. But we came through them without untoward incident, and came down to the oceanside Hot Land inhabited by the Mame people. That flat region is called the Xoconóchco, and the Mame occupy themselves with the production of cotton and salt for trade with other nations. The cotton is grown on the wide, fertile stretch of loam between the rocky mountains and the sandy beaches. In what was then late winter, there was nothing distinctive about those fields, but I later visited the Xoconóchco in the hottest season, when the cotton bolls are so big and profuse that even the green plants bearing them are invisible, and the whole countryside seems to be heavily blanketed by snow, even while it swelters under the sun.

The salt is made year-round, by diking the shallow lagoons along the coast and letting their waters dry, then sifting the salt from the sand. The salt, being also as white as snow, is not hard to distinguish from the sand, for all the beaches of the Xoconóchco are a dull black; they consist of the grit and dust and ashes belched by those volcanoes inland. Even the foam of the surf of that southern sea is not white, but is colored a dirty gray by the endlessly roiled dark sand.

Since the harvesting of both cotton and salt is work of the dreariest drudgery, the Mame were pleased to pay a good price in gold dust for our last two slaves, and they also bought our few remaining trade goods. That left me, Cozcatl, and Blood Glutton with no burden but our own traveling packs, the small bundle of crystals, and the bulky but not heavy bale of feathers—no great load for us to carry unaided. And, all the way home, we were not once molested by bandits, perhaps because we looked so very unlike any typical pochtéa train, or perhaps because all the existing bandits had heard of our previous encounter and its outcome.

Our route northwestward was an easy one, along the coastal flat lands all the way, with either calm lagoons or the mumbling sea surf on our left and the high mountains on our right. The weather was so balmy that we availed ourselves of overnight shelter in just two villages—Pijijia among the Mame and Tonala among the Mixe people—and then only for the luxuries of having a freshwater bath and of dining on the delicious local sea fare: raw turtle eggs and stewed turtle meat, boiled shrimps, raw or steamed shellfish of all sorts, even broiled fillets of something called the yeyemichi, which I was told is the biggest fish in the world, and which I can attest is one of the tastiest to eat.

We eventually found ourselves trudging directly westward, and once again on the isthmus of Tecuantépec, but we did not again go through the city of that same name. Before we got there, we met another trader, who told us that if we struck slightly to the north of our westerly route we would find an easier way through the Tzempuula mountains than we had taken on our outbound crossing of them. I would have liked to see again the lovely Gie Bele and, not incidentally, to make more inquiries about the mysterious keepers of that purple dye. But I think that, after all our wanderings, I was being strongly pulled by the homing urge. I know my companions were, and I let them persuade me to turn as the trader had suggested. That route also had the virtue of taking us for a long way through a part of Uaxyacac we had not before traversed. We did not find ourselves retracing our outward trail until we passed again through the capital city of Záachila.

As in setting out upon a trading expedition, certain days of the month were considered propitious for returning from one. So, as we got nearer home, we placed ourselves and even idled for one extra day in that pleasant mountain town of Quaunahuac. When at last we breasted the final rise, and the lakes and the island of Tenochtítlan came in sight, I kept stopping to admire the view through my crystal. My one-eyed vision somewhat diminished the city's bulk to a flatness, but still it was a heart-lifting thing to see: the white buildings and palaces gleaming in the springtime sunshine, the glimpses of their many-colored roof gardens, the blue wisps of smoke from altar and hearth fires, the feather banners floating almost motionless on the soft air, the massive and twin-templed Great Pyramid dominating the whole.

With pride and gladness we finally crossed the Coyohuacan causeway and entered the mighty city, in the evening of the well-omened day One House, in the month we called The Great Awakening, in the year Nine Knife. We had been away for one hundred forty and two days, more than seven of our months, and we had known many adventures, many wondrous places and peoples, but it was good to come back to the center of Mexíca majesty, The Heart of the One World.

* * *

It was forbidden that any pochtéatl bring his returning train into the city in daylight, or that he make any boastful parade of his entrance, no matter how successful and profitable his expedition might have been. Even if there had existed no such sumptuary law, every pochtéatl realized the prudence of coming home unobtrusively. Not everybody in Tenochtítlan yet recognized the prosperity of all the Mexíca depended on their intrepid traveling merchants, hence many people resented the traders' legitimately profiting from the prosperity they brought. The ruling noble classes in particular, since they derived their wealth from the tribute paid by defeated nations, insisted that any peaceful commerce detracted from their due portion of war-won plunder, and so they inveighed against "mere trade."

So every homecoming pochtéatl made sure to enter the city dressed in his plainest clothes, and to come in the concealment of dusk, and to have his treasure-laden porters follow him by ones and twos. And the home the merchant came home to would be a comparatively modest house, though in its closets and trunks and under its floors there might gradually accumulate a fortune that could build for him a palace rivaling that of the Uey-Tlatoani. Not that I and my partners had to sneak into Tenochtítlan; we led no train of tamémime, and our cargo was but two dusty bales; our clothes were stained and worn, and we went to no homes of our own, but to a travelers' hostel.

The next morning, after several consecutive baths and steamings, I dressed in my best and presented myself at the palace of the Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl. Since I was no stranger to the palace steward, I had not long to wait until I was granted an audience. I kissed the earth to Ahuítzotl, but forbore from raising my crystal to see him clearly; I was not sure but that a lord might object to being viewed so. Anyway, knowing that one, I could assume that he glowered as usual, as fiercely as the grizzled bear adorning his throne.

"We are pleasantly surprised to see that you have returned intact, Pochtéatl Mixtli," he said gruffly. "Was your expedition a success, then?"

"I believe it was profitable, Revered Speaker," I replied. "When the pochtéa elders have evaluated my cargo, you can judge for yourself from your treasury's share. Meanwhile, my lord, I hope you may find this chronicle of interest."

At which I handed to one of his attendants the travel-battered books I had so faithfully compiled. They contained much the same account I have given you, reverend friars, except that they omitted such nonessentials as my encounters with women, but included considerably more description of terrain and communities and peoples, also many maps I had drawn.

Ahuítzotl thanked me and said, "We and our Speaking Council will examine them most attentively."

I said, "In the event that some of your advisers may be old and weak of eye, Lord Speaker, they would find this helpful," and I handed over one of the crystals. "Of these I brought a number to sell, but the biggest and most brilliant I bring as a gift to the Uey-Tlatoani."

He did not seem much impressed until I asked his permission to approach and demonstrate to him how it could be employed for close scrutiny of word pictures or of anything else. Then I led him to an open window and, using a scrap of bark paper, showed him how it could also be used for starting fires. He was enthralled and he thanked me profusely.

Long afterward, I was told that Ahuítzotl carried his fire-making stone on every war campaign in which he took part, but that he delighted more in making a less practical peacetime use of it. That Revered Speaker is remembered to this day for his irascible temper and capricious cruelties; his name has become part of our language: any troublesome person is now called an ahuitzotl. But it seems the tyrant had a streak of childish prankishness as well. In conversation with any one of his most staid and dignified wise men, he would maneuver him toward a window. Then, unnoticed, Ahuítzotl would hold his burning crystal so that it aimed the sun's painfully hot dot onto some tender place like the back of the man's bare knee—and the Revered Speaker would bellow with laughter to see the old sage leap like a young rabbit.

From the palace, I went back to the hotel to collect Cozcatl and Blood Glutton, both also newly clean and well dressed, and our two bundles of goods. Those we took to The House of Pochtéa, and we were immediately shown into the presence of the three elders who had helped send us on our way. While cups of magnolia-scented chocolate were handed around, Cozcatl unfolded our bigger bale for the inspection of its contents.

"Ayyo!" said one of the old men. "You have brought a respectable fortune in plumes alone. What you must do is to get the richer nobles to bid for them in gold dust, until the price is as high as it will go, and only then let the Revered Speaker know of the existence of this trove. Simply to maintain his own supremacy of adornment, he will pay more than the highest price bid."

"As you advise, my lords," I concurred, and motioned for Cozcatl to open the smaller bundle.

"Ayya!" said another of the old men. "Now here, I fear, you have been overly impetuous." He dolefully fingered two or three of the crystals. "These are nicely shaped and polished but, I regret to tell you, jewels they are not. These are bits of mere quartz, a more common stone even than jadestone, and with no religious associations to give it the adventitious worth of jadestone."

Cozcatl could not suppress a giggle, nor Blood Glutton a knowing smirk. I myself smiled as I said, "But observe, my lords," and I showed them the two properties of the crystals, and instantly they were in a ferment of excitement.

"Unbelievable!" said one of the elders. "You have brought something absolutely new to Tenochtítlan!"

"Where did you find them?" said another. "No, do not even think of answering. Forgive me for asking. A treasure unique should be the discoverer's alone."

The third said, "We will offer the bigger ones to the higher nobles and—"

I interrupted to point out that all the crystals, big and small, performed equally well as object enlargers and fire starters, but he impatiently hushed me.

"That matters not. Each píli will want a crystal of a size befitting his rank and his sense of self-importance. I suggest that you sell each by its weight, and start the bidding at eight times their weight in gold. With the pípiltin topping each other's bids, you will get considerably more."

I gasped in astonishment. "But my lords, that could earn us more than my weight in gold! Even after the shares paid to the Snake Woman and to this honorable society... and even divided three ways... it would put all three of us among the wealthiest men in Tenochtítlan!"

"You object to that?"

I stuttered, "It—it scarcely seems right. To profit so richly from our very first venture... and from common quartz, as you remark... and from a product I can supply in quantity. Why, I can provide a burning crystal for every humblest household in all the domains of The Triple Alliance."

One of the elders said sharply, "Perhaps you can, but if you have good sense you will not. You have said that the Revered Speaker now possesses one of these magic stones. As of now, only one hundred twenty and six other nobles can own a similar crystal. My boy, they will bid outrageously, even if these things were made of compacted mud! Later, you can go and get more, for sale to still other nobles, but never more than these few at a time."

Cozcatl was beaming happily and Blood Glutton was near to drooling. I said, "I will certainly not persist in objecting to the prospect of substantial wealth."

"Oh, you three will be spending some of it without delay," said another of the elders. "You have mentioned the shares due to the Tenochtítlan treasury and to our god Yacatecutli. Perhaps you are unaware of our tradition that every homecoming pochtéatl—if he comes home with an estimable profit—lays a banquet for all the other pochtéa who are in the city at the time."

I looked to my partners and they nodded without hesitation, so I said, "With the greatest of pleasure, my lords. But we are new to this..."

"Happy to be of help," said the same man. "Let us set it for the night of the day after tomorrow. We will throw open the facilities of this building for the occasion. We will also arrange for the provision of food, drink, musicians, dancers, female company, and of course we will see to the invitation of all the qualified and accessible pochtéa, while you may invite any other guests you like. Now"—he roguishly tilted his head—"this banquet can be one of modesty or extravagance, according to your taste and generosity."

I again silently consulted my partners, then said expansively, "It is our first. It should betoken our success. If you will be so kind, I should like to ask that every dish, every drink, every appointment be of the finest available, and regardless of the cost. Let this banquet be one to be remembered."

I, at least, remember it vividly.

Hosts and guests, we all were dressed in our finest. Having become full-fledged and successful pochtéa, Cozcatl, Blood Glutton, and myself were entitled to wear certain gold and jeweled ornaments to mark our new station in life. But we, confined ourselves to a modest few baubles. I wore only the bloodstone mantle clasp given me by the Lady of Tolan long ago, and a single small emerald in my right nostril. But my mantle was of the finest cotton, richly embroidered; my sandals were of alligator hide, laced to the knee; my hair, which I had let grow long during the journey, was caught up at the nape with a braided circlet of red leather.

In the building's courtyard, the carcasses of three deer sizzled and turned on spits over an immense bed of coals, and all the other foods provided were of comparable quality and quantity. Musicians played, but not too loudly to overwhelm the conversation. There was a bevy of beautiful women circulating among the crowd and, every so often, one of them would perform a graceful dance to the music. Three slaves of the establishment were appointed to do nothing but serve us three partners, and, when not occupied at that, they stood and waved vast feather fans over us. We were introduced to the other arriving pochtéa, and heard accounts of their own more notable excursions and acquisitions. Blood Glutton had invited four or five of his old-soldier comrades, and he and they were soon convivially drunk. Cozcatl and I knew no one in Tenochtítlan to invite, but one unexpected guest turned out to be an old acquaintance of mine.

A voice at my side said, "Mole, you never cease to amaze me." I turned to see the shriveled, cacao-skinned, gap-toothed man who had appeared at other signal moments in my life. On that occasion he was less grubby and better dressed, at least wearing a mantle over his loincloth.

I said with a smile, "Mole no longer," and raised my topaz and took a really clear look at him. Somehow, on doing that, I sensed that there was something about him more familiar than his merely being recognizable.

He grinned almost evilly, saying, "I find you variously a nonentity, a student, a scribe, a courtier, a pardoned villain, a warrior hero. And now a prosperous merchant—gloating with a golden eye."

I said, "It was your own suggestion, venerable one, that I go and travel abroad. Why should I not enjoy my own banquet celebrating my own successful enterprise?"

"Your own?" he asked mockingly. "As all your past achievements have been your own? Unaided? Single-handed?"

"Oh, no," I said, hoping with that disclaimer to parry the darker implications of his questions. "You will meet here my partners in this endeavor."

"This endeavor. Would it have been possible without that unexpected gift of goods and capital you invested in the journey?"

"No," I said again. "And I fully intend to thank the donor, with a share of—"

"Too late," he interrupted. "She is dead."

"She?" I echoed vacantly, for I had of course been thinking of my former patron, Nezahualpili of Texcóco.

"Your late sister," he told me. "That mysterious gift was Tzitzitlini's bequest to you."

I shook my head. "My sister is dead, old man, as you have just remarked. And she certainly never had any such fortune to leave to me."

He went on, unheeding, "The Lord Red Heron of Xaltócan also died during your travels in the south. He called to his deathbed a priest of the goddess Tlazolteotl, and such a sensational confession as he made could hardly be kept secret. Doubtless several of your distinguished guests here know the story, though they would be too polite to speak of it to you."

"What story? What confession?"

"How Red Heron concealed his late son Pactli's atrocity in the matter of your sister."

"It was never adequately concealed from me," I said, with a snarl. "And you of all people know how I avenged his killing of her."

"Except that Pactli did not kill Tzitzitlini."

That staggered me; I could only gape at the man.

"The Lord Joy tortured and mutilated her, with fire and knife and vicious ingenuity, but it was not her tonáli to die of that torment. So Pactli spirited her off the island, with his father's connivance and with at least the mute acquiescence of the girl's own parents. Those things Red Heron confessed to Filth Eater, and when the priest made them publicly known they caused an uproar on Xaltócan. It grieves me to tell you also that your father's body was found on a quarry floor, where evidently he jumped from the brink. Your mother has simply and cowardly fled. No one knows where, which is fortunate for her." He started to turn away, saying indifferently, "I think that is all the news of occurrences since you left. Now shall we enjoy—?"

"You wait!" I said fiercely, clutching the shoulder knot of his mantle. "You walking fragment of Mictlan's darkness! Tell me the rest! What became of Tzitzitlini? What did you mean about that gift having come from her?"

"She bequeathed to you the entire sum she received—and Ahuítzotl paid a handsome price—when she sold herself to his menagerie here in Tenochtítlan. She would not or could not tell whence she came or who she was, so she was popularly known as the tapir woman."

Except that I still clutched his shoulder, I might have fallen. For a moment, everything and everybody about me disappeared, and I was looking down a long tunnel of memory. I saw again the Tzitzitlini I had so adored: she of the lovely face and shapely form and willowy movement. Then I saw that revolting immobile object in the menagerie of monstrosities, and I saw myself vomiting at the horror of it, and I saw the single sorrowful tear trickling from its one eye.

My voice sounded hollow in my ears, as if I really did stand in a long tunnel, when I said accusingly, "You knew. Vile old man, you knew before Red Heron ever confessed. And you made me stand before her—and you mentioned the woman I had just lain with—and you asked me how would I like to"—I choked, nearly vomiting again at the recollection.

"It is good that you got to see her one last time," he said, with a sigh. "She died not long after. Mercifully, in my opinion, though Ahuítzotl was most annoyed, having paid so prodigally...."

My vision returned to me, and I found that I was violently shaking the man and saying rather insanely, "I could never have eaten tapir meat in the jungle if I had known. But you knew all the time. How did you know?"

He did not answer. He only said blandly, "It was believed that the tapir woman could not move that mass of bloated flesh. But somehow she toppled over, face forward, so that her tapir snout could not breathe, and she suffocated to death."

"Well, it is now your turn to perish, you accursed foreseer of evils!" I think I was out of my mind with grief and revulsion and rage. "You will go back to the Mictlan you came from!" And I shoved into the throng of banquet guests, only dimly hearing him say:

"The menagerie keepers still insist that the tapir woman could not have died without assistance. She was young enough to have lived in that cage for many, many more years—"

I found Blood Glutton and rudely interrupted his conversation with his soldier friends: "I have need of a weapon, and no time to fetch one from our lodgings. Are you carrying your dagger?"

He reached under his mantle to the back binding of his loincloth, and said, with a hiccup, "Are you to do the carving of the deer meat?"

"No," I said. "I want to kill somebody."

"So early in the party?" He brought out the short obsidian blade and squinted to see me better. "Are you killing anyone I know?"

I said no again. "Only a nasty little man. Brown and wrinkled as a cacao bean. Small loss to anybody." I reached out my hand. "Please, the dagger."

"Small loss!" Blood Glutton exclaimed, and withheld the knife. "You would assassinate the Uey-Tlatoani of Texcóco? Mixtli, you must be as drunk as the proverbial four hundred rabbits!"

"Assuredly somebody is!" I snapped. "Cease your babbling and give me the blade!"

"Never. I saw the brown man when he arrived, and I recognize that particular disguise." Blood Glutton tucked the knife away again. "He honors us with his presence, even if he chooses to do it in mummery. Whatever your fancied grievance, boy, I will not let you—"

"Mummery?" I said. "Disguise?" Blood Glutton had spoken coolly enough to cool me somewhat.

One of the soldier guests said, "Perhaps only we who have often campaigned with him are aware of it. Nezahualpili likes sometimes to go about thus, so he may observe his fellows at their own level, not from the dais of a throne. Those of us who have known him long enough to recognize him do not remark on it."

"You are all lamentably sodden," I said. "I know Nezahualpili too, and I know, for one thing, that he has all his teeth."

"A dab of oxitl to blacken two or three of them," said Blood Glutton, with another hiccup. "Lines of oxitl to feign wrinkles on a face darkened by walnut oil. And he has a talent for making his body appear crabbed and wizened, his hands gnarled like those of a very old man...."

"But really he needs no masks or contortions," said the other. "He can simply sprinkle himself with dust of the road and seem a total stranger." The soldier hiccuped in his turn and suggested, "If you must slay a Revered Speaker tonight, young lord host, go after Ahuítzotl, and oblige all the rest of the world as well."

I went away from them, feeling somewhat foolish and confused, on top of all my other feelings of anguish and anger and—well, they were many and tumultuous....

I went looking again for the man who was Nezahualpili—or a sorcerer, or an evil god—no longer intending to knife him but to wring from him the answers to a great many more questions. I could not find him. He was gone, and so was my appetite for the banquet and the company and the merriment. I slipped out of The House of Pochtéa and went back to the hostel and began packing into a small bag only the essentials I would need for traveling. Tzitzi's little figurine of the love goddess Xochiquetzal came to my hand, but my hand flinched away as if it had been red hot. I did not put it into the bag.

"I saw you leave and I followed you," said young Cozcatl from the doorway of my room. "What has happened? What are you doing?"

I said, "I have no heart to tell of all that has happened, but it seems to be common gossip. You will hear it soon enough. And because of it I am going away for a time."

"May I come with you?"

"No."

His eager face fell, so I said, "I think it best that I be alone for some while, to plan what is to become of the rest of my life. And I am not now leaving you a defenseless and masterless slave, as you once feared. You are your own master, and a rich one. You will have your share of our fortune, as soon as the elders convey it. I charge you to keep safe my share, and these other belongings of mine, until I return."

"Of course, Mixtli."

"Blood Glutton will be moving from his former barracks quarters. Perhaps you and he can buy or build a house—or a house apiece. You can resume your studies or take up some craft or set up in some business. And I will be back again, sometime. If you and our old protector still have the spirit for traveling, we can make other journeys together."

"Sometime," he said sadly, then squared his shoulders. "Well, for this abrupt departure of yours, can I help you prepare?"

"Yes, you can. In my shoulder bag and in the purse sewn into my loincloth I will carry an amount of small currency for expenses. But I also want to carry gold, in case I should come upon some exceptional find—and I wish to carry that gold dust secreted where any bandits will not easily find it."

Cozcatl thought for a moment and said, "Some travelers melt their dust into nuggets, and hide those in their rectum."

"A trick every robber knows too well. No, my hair has grown long, and I think I can make use of it. See, I have emptied all my quills of gold dust onto this cloth. Make a tidy packet of it, Cozcatl, and let us devise some way to secure it on the back of my neck, like a poultice, hidden by my hair."

While I finished packing my bag, he folded the cloth meticulously over and over. It made a pliant wad no bigger than one of his own small hands, but it was so heavy that he needed both his hands to lift it. I sat and bowed my head and he laid it across my nape.

"Now, to make it stay..." he muttered. "Let me see..."

He fixed it in place with a stout cord tied to each end of the packet, run behind my ears and across the top of my head. That was further secured and hidden by my putting a folded cloth across my forehead, like the band of a tumpline, and tying it at the back. Many travelers wore such things to keep their hair and sweat out of their eyes.

"It is quite invisible, Mixtli, unless the wind blows. But then you can always make a cowl of your mantle."

"Yes. Thank you, Cozcatl. And"—I said it quickly; I had no wish to linger—"good-bye for now."

I had no fear of the Weeping Woman or the many other malevolent presences haunting the darkness to waylay such incautious adventurers as myself. Indeed, I snorted wrathfully when I thought of Night Wind—and the dusty stranger I had met so frequently in other nighttimes. I stepped out of the city and onto the southbound Coyohuacan causeway again. Halfway along it, at the Acachinánco fort, the sentries were more than a little surprised to see someone out walking at that time of night. However, since I was still so festively dressed, they did not detain me on suspicion of my being a thief or fugitive. They merely asked a question or two to make sure I was not drunk, that I was well aware of what I was doing, then let me proceed.

Farther on, I turned left onto the Mexicaltzínco branching of the causeway, went through that sleeping town and continued eastward, walking all night long. When the dawn began to come, and other early travelers on the road began to give me cautious greetings while eyeing me oddly, I realized that I must present an unusual spectacle: a man dressed very like a noble, with knee-laced sandals and a jeweled mantle clasp and an emerald nose ornament, but with a trader's pack and shoulder bag and a sweatband across his forehead. I removed and stowed the jewelry in my bag, then turned my mantle inside out to conceal its embroidery. The packet on the nape of my neck was an annoying encumbrance for a time, but I eventually got used to it, and took it off only when I slept or bathed in privacy.

That morning I pressed on eastward into the rising and fast-warming sun, feeling no fatigue or need to sleep, my mind still a turmoil of thoughts and recollections. (That is the most hurtful thing about sorrow: the way it invites the crowding-in of memories of happier times, for poignant comparison with one's present misery.) During most of that day I was backtracking the trail I had once marched, along the southern shore of Lake Texcóco, with the victorious army returning from the war in Texcala. But after a while that track diverged from mine, and I left the lakeside, and I was in country I had not seen before.

* * *

I wandered for more than a year and a half, and through many new lands, before I reached anything like a destination. During much of that time I remained so distraught that I could not now tell you, my lord scribes, all the things I saw and did. I think, if it were not that I still remember many of the words I learned of the languages of those far places, I should find it hard to retrace in memory even the general route I followed. But a few sights and events do still stand in my recollection, much as the few volcanoes of those eastward lands stand above the lower-lying ground around them.

I strode quite boldly into Cuautexcalan, The Land of the Eagle Crags, the nation I had once entered with an invading army. No doubt, if I had announced myself as a Mexícatl, I would never have left it again. And I am just as glad not to have died in Texcala, for the people there have one religious belief so simplistic that it is ridiculous. They believe that when any noble dies, he lives a joyous afterlife; when any lesser person dies, he lives a wretched one. Dead lords and ladies merely shed their human bodies and come back as buoyant clouds or birds of radiant plumage or jewels of fabulous worth. Dead commoners come back as dung beetles or sneaking weasels or stinking skunks...

Anyway, I did not die in Texcala, or get recognized as one of the hated Mexíca. Although the Texcalteca people have always been our enemies, they are physically no different from us, and they speak the same language, and I was easily able to imitate their accent, to pass as one of them. The only thing that did make me somewhat conspicuous in their land was my being a young and healthy man, alive and not maimed. That battle in which I was involved had decimated the population of males between the ages of puberty and senescence. Still, there was a new generation of boys growing up. They grew up learning bitter enmity to us Mexíca, and swearing vengeance against us, and they were full grown by the time you Spaniards came, and you know what form the vengeance took.

However, at the time of my idly tramping through Texcala, all that was far in the future. My being one of the few adult and adequate males caused me no trouble. To the contrary, I was welcomed by numerous alluring Texcalteca widows whose beds had gone long unwarmed.

From there, I drifted south to the city of Chololan, capital of the Tya Nuü and, in fact, the largest single remaining concentration of those Men of the Earth. It was evident that the Mixteca, as they were called by everyone but themselves, had once created and maintained an enviably refined culture. For example, there in Chololan I saw buildings of great antiquity, lavishly adorned with mosaics like petrified weaving, and the buildings could only have been the original models for the supposedly Tzapoteca-built temples at the Cloud People's Holy Home of Lyobaan.

There is also a mountain at Chololan, which in those days bore on its top a magnificent temple to Quetzalcoatl, a temple most artfully embellished with colored carvings of the Feathered Serpent. You Spaniards have razed that temple, but apparently you hope to borrow some of the sanctity of the site, for I hear that you are building a Christian church in its place. Let me tell you: that mountain is no mountain. It is a manmade pyramid of sun-dried mud bricks, more bricks than there are hairs on a whole herd of deer, oversilted and overgrown since time before time. We believe it to be the oldest pyramid in all these lands; we know it to be the most gigantic ever built. It may look now like any other mountain bearing trees and shrubbery, and it may serve to elevate and exalt your own new church, but I should think your Lord God would feel uncomfortable on those heights so laboriously raised for the worship of Quetzalcoatl and no other.

The city of Chololan was ruled by not one but two men, equal in power. They were called Tlaquiach, the Lord of What Is Above, and Tlalchiac, the Lord of What Is Below, meaning that they dealt separately with spiritual and material matters. I am told that the two were often at odds, even at blows, but at the time I arrived in Chololan they were at least temporarily united in some minor grudge against Texcala, the nation from which I had just come. I forget what the quarrel was about, but there also shortly arrived a deputation of four Texcalteca nobles, sent by their Revered Speaker Xicotenca to discuss and resolve the dispute.

The Lords of What Is Above and What Is Below refused even to grant audience to the envoys. Instead, they ordered their palace guards to seize and mutilate them and send them home again at spear point. The four noblemen had the skin completely flayed from their faces before they went staggering and moaning back toward Texcala, their heads raw red meat with eyeballs, their faces mere flaps hanging down on their chests. I think all the flies of Chololan followed them northward out of the city. Since I could foresee only war resulting from that outrage, and since I did not care to be conscripted to fight in it, I also departed hastily from Chololan, only I went to the east.

When I crossed another invisible border and was in the Totonaca country, I stopped for a day and a night in a village where the window of my inn gave me a view of the mighty volcano called Citlaltepetl, Star Mountain. I was satisfied to regard it from that respectful distance, using my topaz crystal to look upward from the green and flowered warmth of the village at that frosted and cloud-swept pinnacle.

Citlaltepetl is the highest mountain in all The One World, so high that its snowcap covers the entire upper third of it—except when its crater overflows a gout of molten lava or burning cinders and makes the mountain for a while red-topped instead of white-topped. I am told that it is the first landmark visible to your ships coming hither from the sea. By day, their lookouts see the snowy cone or, by night, the glow of its crater, long before anything else of New Spain is to be seen. Citlaltepetl is as old as the world, but to this day, no man, native or Spaniard, has yet climbed all the way to the top of it. If anyone ever did, the passing stars would probably scrape him off his perch.

I came to the other boundary of the Totonaca lands, the shore of the eastern ocean, at a pleasant bay called Chaichihuacuecan, which means The Place of Abundant Beautiful Things. I mention that only because it constituted a small coincidence, though I could not know it then. In another springtime, other men would set foot there, and claim the land for Spain, and plant in those sands a wooden cross and a flag the colors of blood and gold, and call that the place of the True Cross: Vera Cruz.

That ocean shore was a much prettier and more welcoming one than the coast along the Xoconóchco. The beaches were not of black volcanic grit, but of powdery sands that were white or yellow, sometimes even coral pink in color. The ocean was not a green-black heaving turbulence, by a crystalline turquoise blue, gentle and murmurous. It broke upon the sands with only a whispery froth of white foam, and in many places it shelved away from the beach so shallowly that I could wade almost out of sight of the land before the water reached as high as my waist. At first the shore led me nearly directly south, but, over innumerable one-long-runs, that coast curves in a great arc. Almost imperceptibly I found that I was walking southeast, then due east, and eventually northeast. Thus, as I have said before, what we of Tenochtítlan call the eastern ocean is more properly the northern ocean.

Of course, that shore is not all sand beaches fringed with palm trees; I should have found it monotonous if it had been. Along my long way, I several times encountered rivers debouching into the sea, and would have to camp and wait for some fisherman or ferryman to appear and carry me across in his dugout canoe. In other places, I found the dry sands getting damp under my sandals, then wet, and turning into marshy, insect-infested swamps, where the graceful palm trees gave place to gnarled mangroves with knobby raised roots like old men's legs. To get past those swamps, I sometimes camped and waited for a passing fisher boat to take me around them offshore. But at other times I detoured inland until the swamps shallowed and dwindled into dry land on which I could circle around them.

I remember getting a fright the first time I did that. The night caught me on the soggy fringe of one of those marshes and I had a hard time finding enough dry grass and sticks to make even a small campfire. In fact, it was so small and gave so little light that, when I lifted my eyes, I could see—among the moss-hung mangroves beyond—a fire rather brighter than mine, but burning with an unnatural blue flame.

"The Xtabai!" I thought immediately, having heard many stories of the ghost woman who walks those regions, wrapped in a garment that emits an eerie light. According to the stories, any man who approaches her finds that the garment is only a hood to hide her head, and that the rest of her body is bare—and seductively beautiful. He is ineluctably tempted to come closer, but she keeps backing coyly away from him, and suddenly he discovers to his dismay that he has walked into a quicksand from which he cannot extricate himself. As he is sucked down by the sand, just before his head goes under, the Xtabai at last drops the cowl and reveals her face to be that of a wickedly grinning skull.

Using my seeing crystal, I watched that distant, flickering blue flame for a while, the skin of my spine rippling, until at last I said to myself, "Well, I will not dare sleep while that thing lurks out there. But since I am forewarned, perhaps I can get a look at her and still be on my guard against stepping into the quicksand."

Carrying my obsidian knife, I moved in a crouching walk to the tangle of trees and vines, and then in among them. The blue light waited for me. I tested each patch of ground with my foremost foot before I put my weight on it, and, though I got wet to the knees and my mantle got much torn by the surrounding brush, I never found myself sinking. The first unusual thing I noticed was a smell. Of course, the entire swamp was fetid enough—stagnant water and decaying weeds and musty toadstools—but that new smell was awful: like rotten eggs. I thought to myself, "Why would any man pursue even the most beautiful Xtabai, if she reeks like that?" But I pressed on, and finally stood before the light, and it was no ghost woman at all. It was a smokeless blue flame, waist high, sprouting directly from the ground. I do not know what had set it alight, but it obviously fed on that noxious air seeping from a fissure in the earth.

Perhaps others have been lured to their deaths by the light, but the Xtabai itself is innocuous enough. I never have discovered why a noisome air should burn when ordinary air does not. But on several later occasions I again encountered the blue fire, always with the same stench, and, the last time I took the trouble to investigate, I found another material as extraordinary as the burnable air. Near the Xtabai flame I stepped into some kind of sticky muck and instantly thought, "This time the quicksand has got me." But it had not; I easily stepped out of it and carried a palmful of the odd substance back to my campfire.

It was black, like the oxitl we extract from pine sap, only more slimy than gummy. When I held it to my fire to examine it, a gobbet of it fell into the flames, causing them to flare higher and hotter. Rather pleased at that accidental discovery, I fed my whole handful to the fire and, without my having to add another stick, it burned brightly all night. Thereafter, whenever I had to make camp anywhere near a swamp, I did not bother to look for dry wood; I looked for the black muck oozing up from the ground, and always it made a hotter fire and a brighter light than any of the oils we are accustomed to use in our lamps.

I was then in the lands of the people we Mexíca indiscriminately called the Olméca, simply because that was the country which supplied most of our óli. The people themselves, of course, recognize various nations among them—Coatzacoali, Coatlicamac, Cupilco, and others—but the people are all very much alike: every grown man goes about stooped under the weight of his name, and every woman and child goes about constantly chewing. I had better explain.

Of the trees native to that country, there are two kinds which, when their bark is slashed, dribble a sap that solidifies to some degree. One tree produces the óli that we use in its more liquid form for a glue, and in its harder, elastic form for our tlachtli balls. The other kind of tree produces a softer, sweet-tasting gum called tzictli. It has absolutely no use except to be chewed. I do not mean eaten; it is never swallowed. When it loses its flavor or resiliency, it is spit out and another wad thrust in the mouth, to be chewed and chewed and chewed. Only women and children do that; for a man it would be considered an effeminacy. But I thank the gods that the habit has not been introduced elsewhere, for it makes the Olméca women, who are otherwise quite attractive, look as vapid and mindless as a lumpy-faced manatee everlastingly munching river weeds.

The men may not chew tzictli, but they have developed an impediment of their own which I think just as imbecilic. At some time in the past, they started wearing name badges. On his chest a man would display a pendant of whatever material he could afford, anything from sea shell to gold, bearing his name symbols for any passerby to read. Thus a stranger asking a question of another stranger could address him by name. Unnecessary perhaps, but in those days the name badge was no worse than an encouragement to politeness.

Over the years, however, that simple pendant has been ponderously elaborated. To it now is added a symbol of the wearer's occupation: a bunch of feathers, say, if he is in that trade; and an indication of his rank in the nobility or commonalty: additional badges with the name symbols of parents and grandparents and even more distant forebears; and baubles of gold, silver, or precious stones to boast his wealth; and a tangle of colored ribbons showing that he is unmarried, married, widowed, the father of how many progeny; plus a token of his military prowess: perhaps several other disks bearing the names of communities in whose defeat he has taken part. There may be much more of that frippery, hanging from his neck nearly to his knees. So nowadays every Olmecatl man is bowed down and almost hidden by his agglomeration of precious metals, jewels, feathers, ribbons, shells, coral. And no stranger ever has to ask a question of another; every man wears the answer to just about everything anyone might want to know from or about him.

Those eccentricities notwithstanding, the Olméca are not all fools who have dedicated their lives to tapping the sap of trees. They are also justly acclaimed for their arts, ancient and modern. Scattered here and there along the coastal lands are the deserted old cities of their forebears, and some of the relics remaining are astonishing. I was particularly impressed by the stupendous statues carved of lava rock, now buried to their necks or chins in the ground and much overgrown. All that is visible of them is their heads. They wear most lifelike expressions of alert truculence, and all wear helmets that resemble the leather head-protectors of our tlachtli ball players, so the carvings may represent the gods who invented that game. I say gods, not men, because any one of those heads, not to mention the unimaginable body underground, is far too immense to fit inside the typical house of a human being.

There are also many stone friezes and columns and such, incised with naked male figures—some very naked and very male—which appear to be dancing, or drunk, or convulsed, so I assume that the Olméca's ancestors were a merry people. And there are jadestone figurines of superb finish and precise detailing, though it would be difficult to separate the older of those from the newer, for there are still many artisans among the Olméca who do incredible work in gemstone carving.

In the land called Cupilco, in its capital city of Xicalanca—beautifully situated on a long, narrow spit of land with a pale blue ocean lapping on one side and a pale green lagoon lapping at the other—I found a smith named Tuxtem whose specialty was the making of tiny birds and fishes, no bigger than a finger joint, and every infinitesimal feather or scale on those creatures was alternately of gold and silver. I later brought some of his work to Tenochtítlan, and those Spaniards who have seen and admired them—a few pieces yet remain—say that no smith anywhere in what they call the Old World has ever done anything as masterful.

I continued following the coast, which led me completely around that Maya peninsula of Uluumil Kutz. I have already described that drear land to you in brief, my lords, and I will not waste words in describing it at any greater length, except to mention that on its western coast I remember only one town of a size big enough to be called a town: Kimpech; and on its northern coast another: Tihó; and on its eastern coast another: Chaktemal.

I had by then been gone from Tenochtítlan for more than a year. So I began, in a general way, to head homeward again. From Chaktemal I struck inland, due west, across the width of the peninsula. I carried adequate atóli and chocolate and other traveling rations, plus a quantity of water. As I have said, that is an arid land of maliferous climate, and it has no definable rainy season. I made the crossing early in what would be your month of July, which was the eighteenth month of the Maya year, the one called Kumkti—Thunderclap—not because it brought storms or the least mizzle of rainfall, but because that month is so dry that the already sere lands make an artificial thunder of groaning and crunching as they shrink and shrivel.

Maybe that summer was even more severely hot and parched than usual, because it provided me with a strange and, as it proved, a valuable discovery. One day I came to a small lake of what looked like that black muck I had earlier found in the Olméca swamps and utilized to fuel my campfires. But when I picked up and threw a stone into the lake, it did not go in; it bounced on the surface as if the lake had been made of congealed óli. Hesitantly, I set foot on the black stuff and found it just slightly yielding to my weight. It was chapopotli, a material like hard resin, but black. Melted, it was used to make bright-burning torches, to fill cracks in buildings, as an ingredient of various medicines, as a paint that would keep out water. But I had never seen an entire lake of it before.

I sat down on the bank to have a bite to eat while I contemplated that find. And, even as I sat there, the Kumku heat—which was still making the country all about me snap and rumble—also fractured the chapopotli lake. Its surface cracked in all directions as if overlaid with a spider web, then it broke up into jagged black chunks, and those were heaved about, and among them were thrown up some lengthy brown-black things which might have been the limbs and branches of a long-buried tree.

I congratulated myself that I had not ventured out upon the lake just in time to get tossed and probably injured in its convulsions. But, by the time I had finished eating, all was quiet again. The lake was no longer flat; it was a chopped-up jumble of shiny black fragments, but it looked unlikely to be further agitated, and I was curious about those objects it had cast up. So I cautiously stepped out on the lake again and, when it did not swallow me, picked my way among the black lumps and shards, and found that the thrown-up things were bones.

Having been discolored by their interment, they were no longer white, as old bones usually are, but they were of a size inconceivable, and I was reminded that our lands were once inhabited by giants. However, though I recognized here a rib, there a thighbone, I also recognized that they were from no human giant, but from some monster animal. I could only suppose that the chapopotli had long ago been liquid, and that some creature had unwarily stepped into it and been caught and sucked down, and that over the ages the liquid had solidified to its present consistency.

I found two bones even more gigantic than the others—or at first I thought they were bones. Each was as long as I was tall, and cylindrical, but as thick as my thigh at one end, tapering to a blunt point no bigger than my thumbtip at the other end. And each would have been even longer except that it had grown in a gradual curve and recurve, like a very hesitant spiral. They, like the bones, were stained brown-black from the chapopotli in which they had been entombed. I puzzled over them for some time before I knelt and, with my knife, scraped at the surface of one until I uncovered its natural color: a shining, mellow, pearly white. Those things were teeth—long teeth like a boar's tusks. But, I thought to myself, if that trapped animal had been a boar, it had indeed been a boar fit for the age of giants.

I stoop up and considered the things. I had seen labrets and nose plugs and similar bangles carved from the teeth of bears and sharks and the tusks of ordinary-sized boars, and they sold for as much as goldwork of the same weight. What, I wondered, could a master carver like the late Tlatli do with the material of teeth such as these?

The country there was sparsely inhabited—not surprisingly, in view of its bleakness. I had to wander into the greener, sweeter land of Cupilco before I came upon a village of some obscure Olméca tribe. The men were all óli tappers by occupation, but that was not the season for collecting sap, so they were sitting about idle. I did not have to offer much in payment for four of the burliest of them to work as porters for me. I almost lost them, though, when they realized where we were headed. The black lake, they said, was both a holy and a fearsome place, and a place to be avoided; so I had to increase the promised pay before they would go on. When we got there and I pointed out the tusks, they made haste to hoist them, two men to a tooth, and then we all got away from there as quickly as possible.

I led them back through Cupilco and to the ocean shore and along that spit of land to the capital city of Xicalanca and to the workshop of that master smith Tuxtem. He looked surprised, and not much pleased, when my porters tottered in with their queer loglike burdens. "I am not a woodcarver," he said at once. But I told him what I believed the things to be, and how fortuitously I had found them, and what rarities they must be. He touched the spot I had scraped on the one tusk, and his hand lingered there, and he caressed it, and a gleam came into his eyes.

I dismissed the weary porters, with thanks and a trifle of extra payment. Then I told the artist Tuxtem that I wanted to hire his services, but that I had only the most general idea of what I wanted him to do with my find:

"I want carvings I can sell in Tenochtítlan. You may cut up the teeth as you see fit. From the larger pieces, perhaps you can carve figurines of Mexíca gods and goddesses. From the smaller pieces, perhaps you can make poquietl tubes, combs, ornamental dagger handles. Even the tiniest fragments can make labrets and the like. But I leave it to you, Master Tuxtem, and to your artistic judgment."

"Of all the materials in which I have worked in my life," he said solemnly, "this is unique. It affords an opportunity and a challenge which I shall surely never find again. I will think long and deeply before I even abstract a small sample on which to experiment, with tools and finishing substances...." He paused, then said almost defiantly, "I had better tell you this. Of myself and my work, what I demanded is simple: only the best. This will not be the work of a day, young Lord Yellow Eye, or a month."

"Of course not," I agreed. "If you had said it was, I would have taken the trophies and gone. In any case, I do not know when I will again pass through Xicalanca, so you may take all the time you require. Now, as to your fee..."

"I am doubtless foolish to say this, but I would deem it the highest price I have ever been paid if only you promise to make it known that the pieces were sculptured by me, and tell my name."

"Foolish of your head, Master Tuxtem, though I say it with admiration of your heart's integrity. Either you set a price, or I make this offer. You take a twentieth part, by weight, of the finished works you do for me, or of the raw material to finish as you please."

"A munificent share." He bowed his head in agreement. "Had I been the most grasping of men, I should not have dared to ask such extravagant payment."

"And do not fear," I added. "I shall choose the buyers of those works as carefully as you choose your tools. They will be only persons worthy to own such things. And every one of them will be told: this was made by the Master Tuxtem of Xicalanca."

Dry though the weather had been on the peninsula of Uluumil Kutz, it was the rainy season in Cupilco, which is an uncomfortable time to walk through those Hot Lands of almost jungle growth. So I again kept to the open beaches as I made my way west, until I came to the town of Coatzacoalcos, what you now call Espiritu Santo, which was the terminus of the north-south trade route across the narrow isthmus of Tecuantépec. I thought to myself: that isthmus is almost all level land, not heavily forested, with a good road, so it would be an easy journey even if I got frequently rained upon. And at the other side of the isthmus was a hospitable inn, and my lovely Gie Bele of the Cloud People, and the prospect of a most refreshing rest before I continued on to Tenochtítlan.

So at Coatzacoalcos I turned south. Sometimes I walked in company with pochtéa trains or with individual traders, and we passed many others going in the opposite direction. But one day I was traveling alone, and the road was empty, when I topped a rise and saw four men seated under a tree on the other side. They were ragged, brutish-looking men, and they slowly, expectantly got to their feet as I approached. I remembered the bandits I had met once before, and I put my hand to the obsidian knife in my loincloth band. There was really nothing more I could do but walk on, and hope to walk past them with an exchange of greetings. But those four did not put up any pretense of inviting me to partake of a meal, or ask to share my own rations, or even speak. They simply closed in on me.

* * *

I came awake. Or awake enough to know that I lay unclothed on a pallet, with one quilt under me and another covering my nakedness. I was in a hut apparently empty of any other furnishings, and dark except for glints of daylight leaking through the sapling walls and the straw thatch. A middle-aged man knelt at my bedside and, from his first words, I took him to be a physician.

"The patient wakes," he said to someone behind him. "I feared he might never recover from that long stupor."

"Then he will live?" asked a female voice.

"Well, at least I can begin to treat him, which would have been impossible if he had remained insensible. I would say that he came to you barely in time."

"We almost turned him away, he looked so frightful. But then, through the blood and the dirt, we recognized him as Záa Nayazu."

That did not sound right. At that moment, I somehow could not quite remember my name, but I believed it was something less melodious than the lilting sound spoken by that female voice.

My head hurt atrociously, and felt as if its contents had been removed and a red-hot boulder substituted, and my body was sore all over. My memory was blank of many other things besides my real name, but I was sufficiently conscious to realize that I had not just fallen ill of something; I had in some way been injured. I wanted to ask how, and where I was, and how I had come there, but I could not make my voice work.

The doctor said to the woman I could not see, "Whoever the robbers were, they intended to give him a killing blow. Had it not been for that thick bandage he already wore, his neck would have snapped or his skull shattered like a gourd. But the blow did give his brain a cruel shaking. That accounted for the copious bleeding from the nose. And now that his eyes are open—observe—the pupil of one is larger than the other."

A girl leaned over the physician's shoulder and stared down at my face. Even in my dazed condition, I took note that her own face was lovely to behold, and that the black hair framing it had one pale lock streaking back from her forehead. I had a vague remembrance of having seen her before, and, to my puzzlement, I also seemed to find something familiar even in looking up at the underside of the thatched roof.

"The unequal pupils," said the girl. "That is a bad sign?"

"Extremely so," said the doctor. "An indication that something is wrong inside the head. So, besides trying to strengthen his body and heal the cuts and bruises, we must take care that his brain rests free of exertion or excitement. Keep him warm and keep the hut dim. Give him the broth and the medicine whenever he is awake, but on no account let him sit up, and try to prevent him even from talking."

Foolishly, I attempted to tell the physician that I was quite incapable of talking. But then the hut suddenly darkened even more, and I had the sickening sensation of falling swiftly down into a deep blackness.

They told me later that I lay there for many days and nights, and that my periods of consciousness were only sporadic and brief, and that in between them I would lie in a stupor so profound that it caused the doctor much worry. Of my waking moments, I remember that sometimes the physician was at my side, but always the girl was. She would be gently spooning between my lips a warm, rich-tasting broth or a bitter-tasting medicine, or she would be washing with a sponge what parts of me she could reach without moving my supine body, or she would be smoothing a flower-smelling salve over it. Her face was always the same—beautiful, concerned, smiling encouragement at me—but strangely, or so it seemed to me in my daze, sometimes her black hair bore the stark white streak and sometimes it did not.

I must have wavered between life and death, and I must have chosen or been granted by the gods or been destined by my tonáli to have the former. For the day came when I awoke with my mind somewhat cleared, and I looked up at the queerly familiar roof, and I looked at the girl's face close to mine, and I looked at her hair with the white lock running through it, and I managed to croak, "Tecuantépec."

"Yaa," she said, and then said yes again, but in Náhuatl, "Quema," and she smiled. It was a weary smile, after her long vigil of night and day attendance on me. I started to ask—but she laid a cool finger across my lips.

"Do not talk. The doctor said you must not for a while." She spoke Náhuatl haltingly, but better than I remembered having heard it spoken in that hut before. "When you are well, you can tell us what you remember of what happened. For now, I will tell you what little we know."

She had, one afternoon, been feeding the fowl in the door-yard of the inn, when an apparition came staggering toward her, not along the trade road but from the north, across the empty fields bordering the river. She would have fled inside the hostel and barricaded the door, but her shocked surprise held her motionless long enough for her to see something familiar in the naked man encrusted with dirt and dried gore. Nearly dead though I had been, I must have been making deliberately for the remembered inn. My lower face was masked and my chest was coated with the blood that still trickled from my nostrils. The rest of my body was scored with red scratches from thorns, mottled with bruises from blows or falls. The soles of my bare feet were raw meat, embedded with dirt and small sharp stones. But she had recognized me as her family's benefactor, and I had been taken in. Not into the hostel, for I could not have rested quietly there. It had become a busy and thriving place, much favored by Mexíca pochtéa like myself—which, she said, accounted for her improved command of Náhuatl.

"So we brought you to our old house here, where you could be tended undisturbed by the comings and goings of guests. And, after all, the hut is yours now, if you remember buying it." She motioned for me not to comment, and continued, "We assume you were set upon by bandits. You arrived here wearing nothing and carrying nothing."

I was alarmed by a sudden recollection. With anxious effort, I raised an aching arm and felt about my chest until my fingers found the topaz crystal still hanging there on its thong—and I breathed a long sigh of relief. Even the most rapacious of robbers would probably have supposed that to be a god-token of some kind, and superstitiously would have refrained from seizing it.

"Yes, that much you were wearing," said the girl, watching my movement. "And this heavy thing, whatever it is." She slid from under my pallet the cloth wad with its strings and sweat-band dangling.

"Open it," I said, my voice hoarse from having been so long unused.

"Do not talk," she repeated, but she obeyed me, carefully unfolding layer after layer of the cloth. The revealed gold dust, somewhat caked by perspiration, was so bright that it nearly lit up the hut's dark interior—and did spark golden lights in her dark eyes.

"We always supposed you were a very rich young man," she murmured. She thought for a moment and then said, "But you reached to make sure of that pendant first. Before the gold."

I did not know if I could make her comprehend my wordless explanation, but with another effort I brought the crystal up to my eye and looked at her through it for as long as I could hold it there. And then I could not have spoken, if I would. She was beautiful; more beautiful than I had once thought her, or since remembered her. Among the things I could not remember was her name.

That lightning-streak through her hair caught one's eye, but it was unnecessary to a loveliness that caught at one's heart. Her long eyelashes were like the wings of the tiniest black hummingbird. Her brows had the curve of a soaring sea gull's outflung wings. Even her lips had a winglike lift to each corner: a sort of tiny tuck, which made her appear always to be treasuring a secret smile. When she did smile, though, there was no mistaking it, for she did so then, perhaps at the wondering expression on my own face. The tucks deepened into winning dimples, and the radiance of her face was far more bright than my gold. If the hut had been full of the unhappiest of people—grieving mourners or somber-souled priests—they would have been compelled by her smile to smile in spite of themselves. The topaz dropped from my feeble hand, and my hand dropped to my side, and I dropped not into another stupor but a healing sleep, and she told me later that I slept with a smile on my face.

I was eminently glad I had come back to Tecuantépec, and had made the acquaintance of that girl—or had made her acquaintance again—but I wished that I could have come in health and strength and in the full panoply of a successful young merchant. Instead, I was bedridden and sapless and flaccid, not very appealing to look at, covered as I was with the scabs of my numerous cuts and scratches. I was still too weak to feed myself or take my own medicines, except from her hand. And, if I was not to smell bad besides, I had to submit even to her washing me all over.

"This is not fitting," I protested. "A maiden should not be washing the naked body of a grown man."

She said calmly, "We have seen you naked before. And you must have come naked across half the extent of the isthmus. Anyway"—her smile became teasing—"even a maiden can admire the long body of a handsome young man."

I think I must have blushed the entire length of my long body, but at least my weakness spared me the mortification of having one part of that body obtrusively respond to her touch, and perhaps send her fleeing from me.

Not since the impractical dreams Tzitzitlini and I had shared, when we were very young, had I contemplated the advantages of marriage. But it did not require much contemplation for me to decide that I would probably nowhere or never again find such a desirable bride as that girl of Tecuantépec. My head injury was still some way from full recovery; both my thinking and my memory were erratic; but I retained one recollection of the Tzapoteca traditions—that the Cloud People had little reason and less desire to marry outside the Cloud People, and that any of them who did was forever an outcast.

Nevertheless, when the doctor finally gave me leave to talk as much as I liked, I tried to speak words that would make myself attractive to the girl. Though I was only a despised Mexícatl, and at the moment a laughably poor specimen even of that breed, I exerted all the charm of which I was capable. I thanked her for her goodness to me, and complimented her on having a kindliness that equaled her loveliness, and spoke many other cajoling and persuasive words. But among my more flowery speeches, I managed to mention the considerable estate I had already amassed at a yet young age, and dwelt on my plans for enlarging it further, and made it clear that any girl who did wed me would never be in want. Though I refrained from ever blurting out a direct proposal, I did make allusive remarks like:

"I am surprised that such a beautiful girl as yourself is not married."

She would smile and say something like: "No man yet has captivated me enough to make me surrender my independence."

Another time I would say, "But certainly you are courted by many suitors."

"Oh, yes. Unfortunately, the young men of Uaxyacac have few prospects to offer. I think they yearn more to own a share of the inn than to own all of me."

On another occasion I would say, "You must meet many eligible men among the constant traffic of guests at your hostel."

"Well, they tell me they are eligible. But you know that most pochtéa are older men, too old for me, and outlanders besides. Anyway, however ardently they may pay court, I always suspect that they already have a wife at home, probably other wives at the end of every trade route they travel."

I was emboldened to say, "I am not old. I have no wife anywhere. If ever I take one, she will be the only one, and for all my life long."

She gave me a long look, and after some silence said, "Perhaps you should have married Gie Bele. My mother."

I repeat: my mind was not yet what it should have been. Until that moment, I had either somehow confused the girl with her mother, or had totally forgotten the mother. I had certainly forgotten having coupled with her mother, and—ayya, the shame!—in the girl's own presence. Given the circumstances, she must have thought me the most salacious of lechers, to be suddenly courting her, the daughter of that woman.

I could only mumble, in horrendous embarrassment, "Gie Bele... but I remember... old enough to be my own mother...."

At which the girl gave me another long look, and I said no more, and I pretended to fall asleep.

I reiterate, my lord scribes, that my mind had been woefully affected by my injury, and that it was excruciatingly slow to regather its wits. That is the only possible excuse for the blundering remarks I uttered. The worst blunder, the one with the saddest and longest-lasting consequences, I made when one morning I said to the girl:

"I have been wondering how you do it, and why."

"How I do what?" she asked, smiling that blithe smile.

"On some days your hair has a remarkable white streak through its whole length. On others—like today—it has not."

Involuntarily, in the feminine gesture of surprise, she passed a hand across her face, where for the first time I saw dismay. For the first time those uptilted winglike corners of her mouth drooped downward. She stood still, looking down at me. I am sure my face showed only bewilderment. What emotion she was feeling, I could not tell, but when she finally did speak there was a slight tremor in her voice.

"I am Béu Ribé," she said, and paused as if waiting for me to make some comment. "In your language, that is Waiting Moon." She paused again, and I said truthfully:

"It is a lovely name. It suits you to perfection."

Evidently she had hoped to hear something else. She said, "Thank you," but she sounded half angry, half hurt. "It is my younger sister, Zyanya, who bears the white strand in her hair."

I was struck speechless. Again, it was not until that moment that another memory came back to me: there had been not one but two daughters. During my time away, the younger and smaller had grown to be almost the identical twin of the elder. Or they would have been nearly identical but for the younger girl's distinctive lock of hair, the mark—I remembered that, too—of her having been stung by a scorpion when she was an infant.

I had stupidly not realized that there were two equally beautiful girls attending me alternately. I had fallen passionately in love with what, in my mind's confusion, I took to be one irresistible maiden. And I had been able to do that only because I had boorishly forgotten that I was once at least a little in love with her mother—their mother. Had I stayed longer in Tecuantopec on my first visit, that intimacy could well have culminated in my becoming the girls' stepfather. Most appalling of all, during the days of my slow convalescence, I had indiscriminately, simultaneously, with impartial ardor, been yearning for and paying court to both of what might have been my stepdaughters.

I wished I were dead. I wished I had died in the barrens of the isthmus. I wished I had never awakened from the stupor in which I had lain for so long. But I could only avoid the girl's eyes and say nothing more. Béu Ribé did the same. She tended my needs as deftly and tenderly as always, but with her face averted from mine, and when there was nothing further to do for me, she departed without ceremony. On her subsequent visits that day, bringing food or medicine, she remained silent and aloof.

The next day was the streak-haired younger sister's turn, and I greeted her with "Good morning, Zyanya," and I made no reference to my indiscretion of the day before, for I wistfully hoped to give the impression that I had only been playing a game, that I had all along known the difference between the two girls. But of course she and Béu Ribé must have thoroughly discussed the situation and, for all my hopefully bright banter, I fooled her no more than you would expect. She threw me sidelong glances while I babbled, though her expression seemed more amused than angry or hurt. Maybe it was only the look which both the girls ordinarily wore: that of treasuring a secret smile.

But I regret to report that I was not yet done with making blunders, or of being desolated by new revelations. At one point I asked, "Does your mother tend the inn all the time you girls are taking care of me? I should have thought Gie Bele could spare a moment to look in on—"

"Our mother is dead," she interrupted, her face going momentarily bleak.

"What?" I exclaimed. "When? How?"

"More than a year ago. In this very hut, for she could not well pass her confinement at the hostel among the guests."

"Confinement?"

"While she waited for the baby's arrival."

I said weakly, "She had a baby?"

Zyanya regarded me with some concern. "The physician said you are not to trouble your mind. I will tell you everything when you are stronger."

"May the gods damn me to Mictlan!" I erupted, with more vigor than I would have thought I could summon. "It must be my baby, must it not?"

"Well..." she said, and drew a deep breath. "You were the only man with whom she had lain since our father died. I am sure she knew how to take the proper precautions. Because, when I was born, she suffered extremely, and the doctor warned her that I must be the last child. Hence my name. But so many years had passed... she must have believed she was past the age of conceiving. Anyway"—Zyanya twisted her fingers together—"yes, she was pregnant by a Mexícatl outlander, and you know the Cloud People's feeling about such relations. She would not ask to be attended by a physician or midwife of the Ben Záa."

"She died of neglect?" I demanded. "Because your stiff-necked people refused to assist—?"

"They might have refused, I do not know, but she did not ask. A young Mexícatl traveler had been staying at the inn for a month or more. He was solicitous of her condition, and he won her confidence, and finally she told him all the circumstances, and he sympathized as wholeheartedly as any woman could have done. He said he had studied at a calmécac school, and that there had been a class in the rudimentary arts of doctoring. So when her time came, he was here to help."

"What help, if she died?" I said, silently cursing the meddler.

Zyanya shrugged in resignation. "She had been warned of the danger. It was a long labor and a difficult birth. There was a great deal of blood and, while the man tried to stanch the bleeding, the baby strangled in its navel string."

"Both dead?" I cried.

"I am sorry. You insisted on knowing. I hope I have not given you cause for a relapse."

I swore again, "To Mictlan with me! The child... what was it?"

"A boy. She planned—if they had lived—she said she would name him Záa Nayazu, after you. But of course there was no naming ceremony."

"A boy. My son," I said, gritting my teeth.

"Please try to be calm, Záa," she said, addressing me for the first time with warm familiarity. She added, compassionately, "There is no one to blame. I doubt that any of our doctors could have done better than the kindly stranger. As I say, there was much blood. We cleaned the hut, but some traces were indelible. See?"

She swung aside the doorway's cloth curtain to admit a shaft of light. It showed, on the wooden doorpost, the ingrained stain where a man had slapped it to leave his signature of a bloody hand.

I did not suffer a relapse. I continued to mend, my brain gradually clearing of its cobwebs and my body regaining its weight and strength. Béu Ribé and Zyanya continued to wait upon me alternately, and of course I was careful nevermore to say anything to either of them that could be construed as paying court. Indeed, I marveled at their tolerance in having taken me in at all, and in lavishing so much care upon me, considering that I had been the primary cause of their mother's untimely death. As for my entertaining any hope of winning and wedding either girl—although I sincerely and perversely still loved them equally—that had become unthinkable. The possibility of their ever having been my stepdaughters was a matter of mere speculation. But that I had sired their short-lived half brother was an unalterable fact.

The day came when I felt well enough to be on my way. The physician examined me and pronounced my pupils again normal in size. But he insisted that I give my eyes some time to get used to full daylight again, and that I do so by going outdoors only a little longer each day. Béu Ribé suggested that I would be more comfortable if I passed that time of adjustment at the inn, since there happened to be a room empty there right then. So I acceded, and Zyanya brought me some of her late father's clothes. For the first time in I do not know how many days, I again donned a loincloth and mantle. The sandals provided were far too small for me, so I gave Zyanya a tiny pinch of my gold dust and she ran to the market to procure a pair of my size. And then, with faltering steps—I was really not so strong as I had thought—I left that haunted hut for the last time.

It was not hard to see why the inn had become a favored stopping place for pochtéa and other travelers. Any man with good sense and good eyesight would have pleasured in putting up there, simply for the privilege of being near the beautiful, almost twin hostesses. But the hostel also provided clean and comfortable accommodations, and meals of good quality, and a staff of attentive and courteous servants. Those improvements the girls had made deliberately; but they had also, without conscious calculation, permeated the air of the whole establishment with their own smiling good spirits. With servants enough to do the scullery and drudgery work, the girls had only supervisory duties, so they dressed always in their best and, to enhance their twin-beauty impact on the eye, always in matching colors. Though at first I resented the way the inn's guests leered at and jested with the innkeepers, I later was grateful that they were so occupied with flirtation that they did not—as I did—one day notice something even more striking about the girl's garb.

"Where did you get those blouses?" I asked the sisters, out of the hearing of the other tradesmen and travelers.

"In the market," said Béu Ribé "But they were plain white when we bought them. We did the decoration ourselves."

The decoration consisted of a pattern bordering the blouses' bottom hems and square-cut necklines. It was what we called the pottery pattern—what I have heard some of your Spanish architects, with a seeming amazement of recognition, call the Greek fret pattern, though I do not know what a Greek fret is. And that decoration was done not in embroidery thread, but in painted-on color, and the color was a rich, deep, vibrant purple.

I asked, "Where did you get the color to do it with?"

"Ah, that," said Zyanya. "It is nice, is it not? Among our mother's effects we found a small leather flask of a dye of this color. It was given to her by our father, shortly before he disappeared. There was only enough of the dye to do these two blouses, and we could think of no other use for it." She hesitated, looked slightly chagrined, and said, "Do you think we did wrong, Záa, in appropriating it for a frivolity?"

I said, "By no means. All things beautiful should be reserved only to persons of beauty. But tell me, have you yet washed those blouses?"

The girls looked puzzled. "Why, yes, several times."

"The color does not run, then. And it does not fade."

"No, it is a very good dye," said Béu Ribé, and then she told me what I had been delicately prying to find out. "It is why we lost our father. He went to the place which is the source of this color, to buy a great quantity of it, and make a fortune from it, and he never came back."

I said, "That was some years ago. Would you have been too young to remember? Did your father mention where he was going?"

"To the southwest, along the coast," she said, frowning in concentration. "He spoke of the wilderness of great rocks, where the ocean crashes and thunders."

"Where there lives a hermit tribe called The Strangers," added Zyanya. "Oh, he also said—do you remember, Béu?—he promised to bring us polished snail shells and to make necklaces for us."

I asked, "Could you lead me near to where you think he went?"

"Anyone could," said the older sister, gesturing vaguely westward. "The only rocky coastline in these parts is yonder."

"But the exact place of the purple must be a well-kept secret.

No one else has found it since your father went looking. You might remember, as we went along, other hints he let drop."

"That is possible," said the younger sister. "But Záa, we have the hostel to manage."

"For a long time, while you were tending me, you alternated as innkeepers. Surely one of you can take a holiday." They exchanged a glance of uncertainty, and I persisted, "You will be following your father's dream. And he was no fool. There is a fortune to be made from the purple dye." I reached out to a potted plant nearby and plucked two twigs, one short, one long, and held them in my fist so that equal lengths protruded. "Here, choose. The one who picks the short twig earns herself a holiday, and earns a fortune we will all three share."

The girls hesitated only briefly, then raised their hands and picked. That was some forty years ago, my lords, and to this day I could not tell you which of the three of us won or lost in the choosing. I can only tell you that Zyanya got the shorter twig. Such a trivially tiny pivot is was, but all our lives turned on it in that instant.