Aztec

* * *

At the causeway to Tenochtítlan, where the city loomed before us luminous white in the dove-colored dusk, I sent my men ahead of me by twos and threes. By the time I set foot on the island, the night had come down, and the city was ablaze with firelight, candlelight, and lamplight. In that inconstant illumination I could see that my house was finished, and that it was a sightly one, but I could not make out all its exterior details. Since it was set on pillars about my own height above ground level, I had to climb a short stair to the entrance. There I was admitted by a middle-aged female I had never seen before, obviously a new-bought slave. She introduced herself as Teoxihuitl, or Turquoise, and said, "When the porters arrived, the mistress went upstairs, that you might have privacy for the business of men. She will await you in your chamber, master."

The woman showed me into the lower-floor room where my seven companions were devouring a cold meal she had hurried to lay for them. When dishes had also been provided for me, and we had all allayed our hunger, the men helped me pivot the false wall of that room and secrete their packs behind it, where some others of my goods had already been stored. Then I paid the men the homecoming share of their wages, and paid them rather more than I had promised, for they had performed admirably. They all kissed the earth to me as they departed, after making me swear that I would summon them again if I should conceive any other projects that would be to the taste of seven elder warriors otherwise consigned to peace and stagnation.

Upstairs, I found the sanitary closet exactly as I had told the architect it should be: as complete and efficiently self-emptying as those I had admired in palaces. In the adjacent steam room, the slave woman Turquoise had already heated and laid the glowing stones and, when I had finished my first bath, she poured water over them to make the clouds of steam. I sweated there for a good while, then returned to the bathing basin again, until I was satisfied that I had got all the dust and grime and smell of travel out of my pores.

When, naked, I stepped through the connecting door to the bedchamber, I found Zyanya equally naked, lying invitingly supine atop the bed stack of soft quilts. There was only a dim red light from a brazier in the room, but it glinted on the pale streak in her hair and outlined her upthrusting breasts. Each of them was a beautifully symmetrical mound, with on top of it the smaller mound of her areola, exactly like the profile of Popocatepetl as you see it through the window there, my lords friars: a cone upon a cone. No, of course there is no need for me to regale you with such details. I only explain why my breathing altered as I moved toward Zyanya, and why I spoke only a few words:

"Béu is safe. There is other news, but it can wait."

"Let it wait," she said, and she smiled, and she reached for the nearest approaching part of me.

So it was quite some time later that I told about Béu Ribé: that she was alive and safe, but dismally unhappy. I am glad that we had made love first. It gave Zyanya the usual lasting languor of pleasure and satisfaction which, I hope, softened the words I had to speak. I told of Béu's unfortunate encounter with the Mexícatl officer, and tried to make it sound—as indeed Béu had made it sound—more of a farce that a tragedy.

I concluded, "I think it is her stubborn pride that makes her stay on there, keeping the inn. She is determined to take no notice of what the townspeople may think of her, whether they think shame or sympathy. She will not leave Tecuantépec for any good reason or for any better life, because it might be taken as a sign that she had weakened at last."

"Poor Béu," Zyanya murmured. "Is there nothing we can do?"

Suppressing my own opinion of "poor Béu," I meditated and finally said, "I can think of nothing but for you to suffer a misfortune. If her only sister needed her desperately, I believe she would come to you. But let us not tempt or provoke the gods. Let us not discuss mischance."

The next day, when Ahuítzotl received me in his grisly throne room, I again told my confected story: that I had gone to see that my wife's sister had not suffered in the sack of Tecuantépec and, while there, had taken the opportunity to go farther south and procure more of the magical crystals. I again ceremoniously made him a present of one, and he thanked me without great enthusiasm. Then, before bringing up a subject which I expected would bulge his eyeballs and fire his irascibility, I told him something to sweeten his temper.

"My travels, Lord Speaker, took me into the coastal land of the Xoconóchco, whence comes most of our cotton and salt. I spent two days among the Mame people, in their main village of Pijijia, and there the elders called me into council. They desired me to bring a message to the Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexíca."

He said indifferently, "Speak the message."

"Know first, my lord, that the Xoconóchco is not a nation, but a vast extent of fertile land inhabited by various peoples: the Mame, the Mixe, the Comiteca, and even smaller tribes. Their territories all overlap, and their allegiance is only to such tribal elders as those in Pijijia. The Xoconóchco has no central capital or governing body or standing army."

"Interesting," muttered Ahuítzotl. "But not very."

I went on, "To the east of the rich and fruitful Xoconóchco is the unproductive jungle country of Quautemálan, The Tangled Wood. Its natives, the Quiche and Lacandon, are degenerate remnants of the Maya. They are poor and dirty and lazy, and heretofore have been accounted beneath contempt. However, they have recently summoned the energy to emerge from Quautemálan and make raids into the Xoconóchco. Those scavengers threaten that their raids will increase in frequency, will become an unremitting war, unless the Xoconóchco peoples agree to pay them heavy tribute of cotton and salt."

"Tribute?" grunted Ahuítzotl, interested at last. "Our cotton and salt!"

"Yes, my lord. Now, we can hardly expect peaceable cotton farmers and sea fishers and salt panners to mount a fierce defense of their lands. But they do have spirit enough to resent those demands. They are unwilling to give to the Quiche and Lacandon what they have formerly and profitably sold to us Mexíca. They believe our Revered Speaker should be equally outraged at the idea."

"Spare us your emphasis of the obvious," growled Ahuítzotl. "What did those elders propose? That we go to war for them against Quautemálan?"

"No, my lord. They offer to give us the Xoconóchco."

"What?" He was honestly staggered.

"If the Uey-Tlatoani will accept the Xoconóchco lands as a new province, all its petty rulers will relinquish their offices, all its separate tribes will relinquish their identities, all will swear loyalty to Tenochtítlan as voluntary Mexíca. They ask only two things: that they be allowed to go on living and working as they always have, unmolested, and that they continue to receive a living wage for their labor. The Mame speak for all their neighbor tribes in requesting that a Mexícatl noble be appointed ruler and protector of the Xoconóchco, and that a strong garrison of Mexíca troops be established and maintained there."

Looking pleased for a change, even dazzled, Ahuítzotl murmured to himself, "Incredible. A rich land, free for the taking, freely given." To me he said, more warmly than he had ever before addressed me, "You do not always bring annoyances and problems, young Mixtli."

I modestly said nothing.

He went on, thinking aloud, "It would be the farthest dominion of The Triple Alliance. Put an army there and we would have much of the entire One World, from sea to sea, between two jaws. The nations thus flanked would evermore hesitate to be troublesome, lest those jaws gnash together and chew them up. They would be apprehensive, biddable, servile...."

I spoke up again: "If I may point out another advantage, Lord Speaker. That army will be far from here, but it need not depend on supply trains from Tenochtítlan. The Mame elders promised me that it will be supported and provisioned without stint. The soldiers will live well in the abundance of the Xoconóchco."

"By Huitztli, we will do it!" Ahuítzotl exclaimed. "We must of course present the proposition to our Speaking Council, but that will be only a formality."

I said, "My lord might care to tell the Speaking Council this, too. Once the garrison is established, the soldiers could be joined by their families. Tradesmen would follow. Still other Mexíca might wish to leave these crowded lake lands and resettle in that ample Xoconóchco. The garrison could become the seed of a colony, even a lesser Tenochtítlan, perhaps someday the second greatest city of the Mexíca."

He said, "You do not dream small, do you?"

"Perhaps I took a liberty, Revered Speaker, but I mentioned that possibility of colonization in the council of Mame elders. Far from objecting, they would be honored if their land should become the site of, so to speak, the Tenochtítlan of the south."

He looked at me approvingly, and drummed his fingers for a moment before speaking. "In civil status you are nothing but a bean-counting merchant, and in military rank a mere tequiua..."

"By my lord's courtesy," I said humbly.

"And yet you—a nobody—you come and give us a whole new province, more valuable than any annexed by treaty or force since the reign of our esteemed father Motecuzóma. That fact will also be brought to the attention of our Speaking Council."

I said, "The mention of Motecuzóma, my lord, reminds me." And I then told him what was harder to tell: the harsh words spoken about his nephew by the Bishosu Kosi Yuela. As I had expected, Ahuítzotl began to bulge and snort and redden conspicuously, but his anger was not directed at me. He said bluntly:

"Know, then. As a priest, young Motecuzóma paid unswerving obedience to every least and trivial and imbecilic superstition imposed by the gods. He also tried to abolish every human failing and weakness, in himself as in others. He did not froth and rage, as do so many of our priests; he was always cold and unemotional. Once, when he uttered a word that he thought might displease the gods, he pierced his tongue and dragged back and forth through it a string on which were knotted some twenty big maguey thorns. Again, when a base thought crossed his mind, he bored a hole through the shaft of his tepúli and did that same bloody self-punishment with the string of thorns. Well, now that he has become a military man, he seems equally fanatic on the subject of making war. It appears that, in his very first command, the coyote whelp has flexed his muscles, contrary to orders and good order—"

Ahuítzotl paused. When he went on, he seemed again to be thinking aloud. "Yes, he would naturally yearn to live up to his grandfather's name of Wrathful Lord. Young Motecuzóma is not pleased to have peace between our nation and others, since that leaves him the fewer adversaries to challenge. He wants to be respected and feared as a man of hard fist and loud voice. But a man must consist of more than those things. Or he will cower when he is opposed by a harder fist, a louder voice."

I ventured to say, "My impression, my lord, is that the Bishosu of Uaxyacac dreads the possibility that your truculent nephew may someday be Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexíca."

At that, Ahuítzotl did turn his glare on me. "Kosi Yuela will be dead long before he has to worry about his relations with some new Uey-Tlatoani. We are but forty and three years old, and we plan to live long. Before we die or turn dotard, we will make known to the Speaking Council who our successor is to be. Offhand, we forget how many of our twenty children are male, but surely among them there is another Ahuítzotl. Bear in mind, Tequiua Mixtli, that the loudest drum is the one most hollow, and its only service or function is to stay motionless and be beaten upon. We will not set upon this throne a hollow drum like our nephew Motecuzóma. Remember our words!"

I did, and I do, and ruefully.

It took a while for the Revered Speaker to subdue his indignation. Then he said quietly, "We thank you, Tequiua Mixtli, for the opportunity of that garrison in the far Xoconóchco. It will be the young Wrathful Lord's next assignment. He will be ordered immediately to the south, to establish and build and command that distant post. Yes, we must keep Motecuzóma busy—and safely far from us—or we might be tempted to beat with heavy drumsticks upon our own kinsman."

Some days passed, and what time I did not spend in bed, getting reacquainted with my wife, I spent in getting accustomed to my first home of my own. Its exterior was of gleaming white Xaltócan limestone, decorated only modestly with some filigree carving, and none of that embellished with color. To the passerby, it was merely the typical home of a successful but not too successful pochtéatl. Inside, however, its appointments were of the finest, and it smelled throughout of newness, not of the smokes and foods and exudations and old quarrels of previous inhabitants. The doors were all of nicely carved cedar, turning in pivots in sockets top and bottom. There were windows in the outdoor-facing walls, front and back, with reliable slat blinds on all of them.

The ground floor—which, as I have said, did not rest on the ground—contained a kitchen, a separate room for dining, and another room in which we could entertain guests or I could conduct business with visiting associates. There was not space enough to make any provision for slave quarters; Turquoise simply unrolled her woven-reed pallet in the kitchen after we were abed. The upper floor of the house consisted of our bedchamber and another for guests, each with its sanitary closet and steam room; plus a third, smaller bedroom for which I could see no purpose, until Zyanya, smiling shyly, said, "Someday there may be a child, Záa. Perhaps children. It can be a room for them and their nursemaid."

The rooftop of the house was flat, surrounded by a waist-high balustrade of stones cemented in a fretwork pattern. The entire surface had already been spread with rich chinampa loam, ready for the planting of flowers, shade shrubs, and kitchen herbs. Our house was not tall, and there were many others roundabout, so we had no view of the lake, but we could see the twin temples atop the Great Pyramid, and the peaks of the smoking volcano Popocatepetl and the sleeping volcano Ixtacciuatl. Zyanya had furnished the rooms, upstairs and down, with only the immediately necessary items: the piled-quilt beds, some wicker storage chests, a few low chairs and benches. Otherwise the rooms were echoingly empty, the gleaming stone floors uncarpeted and the white-limed walls unadorned.

She said, "The more important furnishings, the ornaments, the wall hangings—I thought the man of the house ought to choose such things."

"We will visit the markets and the workshops together," I said. "But I will come only to agree to your choices and to pay for them."

In similar wifely restraint, she had bought just the one slave, and Turquoise had sufficed to assist Zyanya in all the work of preparing the house for habitation. But I decided that we should buy another female to share the everyday labor of cooking, cleaning, and other chores, plus a male slave to tend the rooftop garden, run my errands, and the like. So we acquired a not so young but still wiry man named, in the grandiloquent manner of the tlacotli class, Citlali-Cuicani, or Star Singer, and a young housemaid named, quite contrary to slave custom, Quequelmíqui, which means only Ticklish. Possibly she had got the name because she was much given to unprovoked giggling.

We immediately enrolled all three—Turquoise, Star Singer, and Ticklish—to spend their spare hours studying at the school newly founded by my young friend Cozcatl. His own highest ambition, in the days when he was himself a child slave, had been to learn the skills necessary to attain the highest domestic post in a noble household, that of Master of the Keys. But he had already risen considerably above that station, possessing an estimable house and fortune of his own. So Cozcatl had turned his residence into a school to train servants. That is, to make of them the best servants possible.

He told me, with pride, "I have of course engaged expert instructors to teach the basic employments—cookery, gardening, embroidery, whatever a student wishes to excel at. But I myself teach each student the elegant manners he otherwise could learn only through long experience, if at all. Since I have worked in two palaces, my students pay close heed to my teachings, even though most of them are much older than I."

"Elegant manners?" I said. "For mere menials?"

"So that they are not mere menials, but valuable and valued members of a household. I teach them how to comport themselves with dignity instead of the usual cringing servility. How to anticipate their employers' wants even before they are voiced. A steward, for example, learns to keep always prepared a poquietl for his master to smoke. A housekeeper learns to advise her mistress which flowers are about to bloom in the garden, so the lady can plan in advance the floral arrangements for her rooms."

I said, "Surely no slave could afford the fee for your training."

"Well, no," he admitted. "At present all my students are already in domestic service, like those three of yours, and their fees are paid by their masters. But the schooling will so increase their ability and worth that they will earn promotions within their households—or be sold for a profit—meaning they must be replaced. I foresee a great demand for the graduates of my school. Eventually, I will be able to buy slaves from the market, train them, place them, and collect their fees from the wages they earn."

I nodded and said, "It will be a good thing for them, for their employers, and for you. An ingenious idea, Cozcatl, You have not just found your place in the world, you have carved an entirely new niche, for which no one is better fitted than yourself."

He said with humility, "I could not have done it but for you, Mixtli. Had we not adventured together, I would probably still be a drudge in some Texcóco palace. I owe all my good fortune to the tonáli, whether it was yours or mine, that linked our lives."

And I too, I thought, as I walked slowly home, was much indebted to a tonáli I had once cursed as capricious, if not malign. It had caused me grief and loss and unhappiness. But it had also made me a man of property, a man of substantial wealth, a man lofted high above the expectations of his birth, a man married to the most desirable woman among women, and a man still young enough to explore further enticing prospects.

As I strolled toward my comfortable home and the welcoming arms of Zyanya, I was moved to waft my gratitude toward the supposed sky residences of the major gods. "Gods," I said—in my mind, not aloud—"if gods there be, and you are they, I thank you. Sometimes you have taken from me with one hand while giving to me with the other. But on the whole you have given me much more than you have taken. I kiss the earth to you, gods."

And the gods must have been grateful for my gratitude. The gods wasted no time in arranging that when I entered my house, I should find a palace page waiting with a summons from Ahuítzotl. I took only time enough to give Zyanya a hurried kiss of greeting and farewell, then followed the boy through the streets to The Heart of the One World.

It was quite late that night when I came home again, and I was very differently dressed, and I was more than a little intoxicated. Our slave Turquoise, when she opened the door to me, instantly forgot any poise she might have learned at Cozcatl's school. She took one look at me and my somewhat disordered profusion of feathers, gave a piercing shriek, and fled toward the back of the house. Zyanya came, looking anxious.

She said, "Záa, you were gone so long—!" Then she too gave a squeak and recoiled from me, exclaiming, "What did that monster Ahuítzotl do to you? Why is your arm bleeding? What have you got on your feet? What is that thing on your head? Záa, say something!"

"Hello," I mumbled foolishly, with a hiccup in it.

"Hello?" she echoed, taken aback by the absurdity. Then she said crisply, "Whatever else, you are drunk," and went away toward the kitchen. I slumped down onto a bench, but I came energetically to my feet again—perhaps even some distance off the floor—when Zyanya poured ajar of shockingly cold water over my head.

"My helmet!" I cried, when I stopped coughing and spluttering.

"A helmet, is it?" said Zyanya, as I struggled to get it off and dry it before the wetting should damage it. "I thought you were caught in the craw of some giant bird."

"My lady wife," I said, with the stately sobriety of the half drunk, "you might have ruined this noble eagle head. Now you are standing on one of my talons. And look—just look at my poor draggled feathers."

"I am. I am looking," she said, in a strangled voice, and I perceived that she was trying mightily not to burst out laughing. "Get out of that silly costume, Záa. Go to the steam room. Sweat some of the octli out of you. Clean that blood off your arm. Then come to bed and tell me... tell me what on earth..." She could hold the laughter no longer, and it came forth in peals.

"Silly costume, indeed," I said, contriving to sound both haughty and hurt. "Only a woman could be so insensitive to the regalia of high honor. Were you a man, you would kneel in awe and admiration and congratulation. But no. I get ignominiously drenched and laughed at." With which, I turned and stalked majestically up the stairs, only stumbling occasionally in my long-taloned sandals, to go and soak and sulk in the steam room.

Thus did I behave with lugubrious bluster, thus was I received with indulgent mirth, on what should have been the most solemn evening of my life to date. Not one in ten or twenty thousand of my countrymen ever became what I had that day become—In Tlamahuichihuani Cuautlic: a Knight of the Eagle Order of the Mexíca.

I further humiliated myself by falling asleep in the steam room, and was quite unconscious of being moved when Zyanya and Star Singer somehow got me out of there and into the bed. So it was not until morning, when I lay late abed, sipping hot chocolate in an attempt to ease the ponderous weight of my headache, that I could coherently tell Zyanya what had happened at the palace.

Ahuítzotl had been alone in the throne room when the page and I arrived, and he said abruptly, "Our nephew Motecuzóma left Tenochtítlan this morning, leading the considerable force that will man the garrison in the Xoconóchco. As we promised, we mentioned to our Speaking Council your admirable role in negotiating the acquisition of that territory, and it was decided that you should be rewarded."

He made some signal, and the page departed, and a moment afterward the room began to fill with other men. I would have expected them to be the Snake Woman and other members of the Speaking Council. But, looking through my topaz, I was surprised to see that they were all warriors—the elite of warriors—all Eagle Knights, in full-feathered battle armor, eagle-head helmets, wing pinions fringing their arms, taloned sandals on their feet.

Ahuítzotl introduced them to me, one by one—the highest chieftains of the Eagle Order—and said, "They have voted, Mixtli, to raise you—in one vaulting bound—from the mediocre rank of tequiua to full knighthood in their exalted company."

There were various rituals to be performed, of course. Though I had been stricken nearly speechless, I made an effort to find my voice, so that I could swear the many and wordy oaths—that I would be faithful to and fight to the death for the Eagle Order itself, for the supremacy of Tenochtítlan, for the power and prestige of the Mexíca nation, for the preservation of The Triple Alliance. I had to gash my forearm, the knight chieftains doing likewise, so that we could rub our forearms one against another and so mingle our blood in brotherhood. Then I donned the quilted armor with all its adornments, so that I had arms like wide wings, a body feathered all over, feet like an eagle's strong claws. The culmination of the ceremony came when I was crowned with the helmet: the eagle's head. It was made of corkwood, stiff paper, and óli-glued feathers. Its wide-open beak protruded above my forehead and under my chin, and its glaring obsidian eyes were somewhere above my ears. I was given the other emblems of my new rank: the stout leather shield with my name symbols worked in colored feathers on its front, the paints to make my face fierce, the gold nose plug to wear as soon as I felt like having my septum pierced for it....

Then, rather heavily encumbered, I sat with Ahuítzotl and the other knights while the palace servants brought an opulent banquet and many jars of the best octli. I had to make a pretense of eating heartily, since by then I was so flustered and excited that I had little appetite. There was no way, though, that I could avoid drinking in response to the numerous and vociferous toasts raised—to me, to the Eagle chieftains present, to Eagle Knights who had died spectacularly in the past, to our supreme commander Ahuítzotzin, to the ever greater might of the Mexíca.... After a while, I lost track of the toasts. That is why, when I was finally let depart from the palace, I was more than a little addled and my splendid new uniform was in some disarray.

"I am proud of you, Záa, and happy for you," Zyanya said when I had concluded my account. "It is indeed a great honor. And now, what brave feat will you do, my warrior husband? What will be your first deed of valor as an Eagle Knight?"

I said feebly, "Were we not supposed to pick flowers today, my dear? When the freight canoe brings them from Xochimilco? Flowers to plant in our roof garden?"

My brain hurt too badly for me to strain it, so I did not even try to understand why Zyanya again, as she had done the night before, burst into peals of laughter.

* * *

Our new house meant a new life for all of us who inhabited it, so we had much to occupy us. Zyanya continued to be busy with the evidently interminable task of visiting market stalls and artisans' workshops in chase of "just the right sort of matting for the nursery floor" or "a figurine of some sort for that niche at the top of the stair" or something else that seemed always to elude her.

My contributions were not always received with acclamation, as for instance when I brought home a small stone statue for that staircase niche and Zyanya pronounced it "hideous." Well, it was, but I had bought it because it looked exactly like that brown, wizened, and hunched old-man disguise in which Nezahualpili had used to accost me. Actually, the figure represented Huehueteotl, Oldest of Old Gods, so called because that was what he was. Though no longer widely worshiped, the aged, wrinkled, sardonically smiling Huehueteotl was still venerated as the god first recognized in these lands and known since time before human memory, long before Quetzalcoatl or any of the later favorites. Since Zyanya refused to let me put him where guests would see him, I set The Oldest of Old Gods at my side of our bed.

Our three servants, in the free time during their first few months with us, attended their classes at Cozcatl's school, and to noticeable effect. The little maid Ticklish was cured of giggling every time she was spoken to, and gave only a modest and obliging smile. Star Singer became so attentive that he presented me with a lighted poquietl almost every time I sat down, and—not to rebuff his solicitude—I smoked rather more than I wanted to.

My own business was that of consolidating my fortune. Trains of pochtéa had for some time been coming into Tenochtítlan from Uaxyacac, bearing flasks of purple dye and skeins of empurpled yarn which they had purchased legitimately from the collected stock of the Bishosu Kosi Yuela. They had of course paid an exorbitant price for it, and of course asked an even more extortionate price when they doled it out through the Tlaltelólco merchants. But the Mexíca nobles—their ladies especially—were so avid for that unique coloring that they paid whatever was asked. And, once the legitimately acquired purple was on the market, I was able discreetly and without detection to pour my own stock trickling into the stream.

I sold my hoard for more easily concealable currency: carved jadestones, a few emeralds and other gems, gold jewelry, quills of gold dust. But Zyanya and I kept enough of the dye for our own use that I believe we owned more purple-embroidered garments than the Revered Speaker and all his wives. I know ours was the only house in Tenochtítlan with solid-purple draperies at the windows. Those were visible only to our invited guests, however; they were backed with less sumptuous stuffs on their street side.

We were most frequently visited by longtime friends: Cozcatl, lately and more properly known as Master Cozcatl; associates of mine from The House of Pochtéa; one or several of Blood Glutton's old fellows-in-arms who had helped me secure the purple. But we also made many acquaintances among our higher-class neighbors in our Ixacualco quarter and the nobles we met at court—in particular a number of noble-women who had been captivated by Zyanya's charm. One of those was the First Lady of Tenochtítlan, which is to say Ahuítzotl's premier wife. When she came to visit, she often brought her eldest son, Cuauhtemoc, Swooping Eagle, the young lord who would be the likeliest successor to his father's throne. Though the Mexíca succession was not immutably patrilineal, like that of some other nations, an eldest son was the first candidate considered by the Speaking Council on the death of a Uey-Tlatoani who left no surviving brother to succeed him. So Zyanya and I treated Cuautemoctzin and his mother with fitting deference; it does no harm to be on good terms with him whom you may someday be addressing as Revered Speaker.

From time to time during those years, a military messenger or a pochtéatl's porter coming up from the south would make a side trip past our house to bring us a message from Béu Ribé The message was always the same: she was still unmarried, Tecuantépec was still Tecuantépec, the inn was still prospering, and even more so with the increased traffic to and from the Xoconóchco. But the very sameness of that scant news was rather depressing, since Zyanya and I could only assume that Béu remained unmarried not from inclination but from a lack of suitors.

And that always recalled the exiled Motecuzóma to my mind, for I was sure—though I never said so, even to Zyanya—that he had been the Mexícatl officer of strange proclivities who had devastated Béu's life. Just as a matter of family loyalty, I suppose I might have felt animosity toward that Motecuzóma the Younger. Just from what Béu and Ahuítzotl had told me, I might have felt contempt for a man partly crippled both in his private parts and in his appetites. But not I or anyone could deny that he did a soldierly job of holding and developing the Xoconóchco for us.

He located his army garrison practically on the border of Quautemálan, and he oversaw the design and building of a stout one, and the neighboring Quiche and Lacandon no doubt watched with dismay as its walls went up and the patrols marched about it. For those wretched people never made another foray outside their jungle, they never again threatened or blustered or, indeed, showed any other sign of ambition.

They lapsed back into being no worse than squalid and apathetic, and, as far as I am aware, they still are so.

Your own Spanish soldiers who first traveled into the Xoconóchco expressed surprise on finding there, so far distant from Tenochtítlan, so many peoples unrelated to us Mexíca—the Mame, Mixe, Comiteca, and such—who spoke our Náhuatl. Yes, that was the farthest land on which one could stand and say, "This is Mexíca soil." It was also, despite its distance from The Heart of the One World, perhaps our most loyal province, and that was due in part to the fact that many of our people moved into the Xoconóchco after its annexation.

Even before Motecuzóma's garrison was completed, other comers began to settle in the area and to build homes and market stalls and rudimentary inns and even houses of pleasure. They were Mexíca and Acolhua and Tecpanéca immigrants seeking wider horizons and opportunities than they could find in the ever more crowded lands of The Triple Alliance. By the time the garrison was fully built and armed and manned, it threw its protective shadow over a town of estimable size. The town took the Náhuatl name of Tapachtlan, Place of Coral, and, though it never approached the size and splendor of its parent Tenochtítlan, it is still the biggest and busiest community east of the Tecuantépec isthmus.

Many of the newcome northerners, after staying a while in Tapachtlan or elsewhere in the Xoconóchco, moved on farther yet. I have never journeyed quite so far, but I know that, east of the Quautemálan jungle, there are great fertile highlands and coast lands. And beyond them there is another isthmus, even more narrow than that of Tecuantépec, winding between the northern and southern oceans and extending no one can tell how far. Some insist that somewhere down there a river connects the two oceans. Your own Captain-General Cortés went looking for it, in vain, but some Spaniard may find it yet.

Though the onward-pressing emigrants consisted only of individual explorers, or at most of family groups, and though they settled only sparsely throughout those far lands, I am told that they have left their mark indelibly on the native peoples of those places. Tribes never originally or remotely related to any of us of The Triple Alliance now wear our faces; they speak our Náhuatl language, though in corrupt dialects; they have adopted and perpetuated many of our customs and arts and gods; they have even renamed their villages and mountains and rivers with Náhuatl names.

Several Spaniards who have traveled widely have asked me, "Was your Aztec Empire really so vast that it abutted upon the Inca Empire in the great continent to the south?" Although I do not fully comprehend the question, I always tell them, "No, my lords." I am uncertain of what an empire is, or a continent, or an Inca. But I do know that we Mexíca—Aztecs, if you must—never pushed our border beyond the Xoconóchco.

Not everybody's eyes and interests were fixed toward the south in those years. Our Uey-Tlatoani, for one, was not ignoring the other points of the compass. I rather welcomed the interruption of my increasingly domestic daily routine when one day Ahuítzotl called me to his palace to ask if I would undertake a diplomatic mission into Michihuácan.

He said, "You did so well for us in the Xoconóchco and in Uaxyacac. Do you think you might now seek for us better relations with The Land of the Fishermen?"

I said I could try. "But why, my lord? The Purémpecha allow our travelers and merchants unhindered passage across their country. They engage freely in trade with us. What more can we ask of them in the way of relations?"

"Oh, think of something. Anything that would justify your visiting their ruling Uandakuari, old Yquingare." I must have looked blank, for he leaned forward to explain. "Your supposedly diplomatic negotiations will be only a mask for your real mission. We want you to bring us their secret of making that superbly hard metal which defeats our obsidian weapons."

I took a long breath and, trying to sound reasonable instead of apprehensive, I said, "My lord, the artisans who know how to forge that metal are assuredly well guarded against any encounters with strangers who might tempt them to betray their secret."

"And the metal itself is kept locked away, out of sight of the inquisitive," said Ahuítzotl impatiently. "We know all that. But we also know of one exception to that policy. The Uandakuari's closest advisers and personal guards are always armed with weapons of that metal, to ward off any attempts on his life. Get into his palace and you have a chance of getting hold of a sword, a knife, something. That is all we need. If our own metalworkers can have but a specimen to study, they can find out the composition of it."

I sighed and said, "As my lord commands, an Eagle Knight must do." I thought over the difficulties of the task ahead and suggested, "If I am going there only to steal, I really need no complicated excuse of diplomatic negotiations. I could be merely an envoy-bringing from the Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl a friendly gift for the Revered Speaker Yquingare."

Ahuítzotl also thought about it, frowning. "But what?" he said. "There are as many precious things in Michihuácan as there are here. It would have to be something unavailable to him, something unique."

I said, "The Purémpecha are much given to strange sexual diversions. But no. The Uandakuari is an old man. Doubtless he has already sampled every sexual delight and indecency and is jaded beyond—"

"Ayyo!" cried Ahuítzotl exultantly. "There is one delight he cannot possibly have tried, one he cannot possibly resist. A new texquani we have just bought for our human menagerie." I flinched, visibly I am sure, but he took no notice; he was sending a steward to bring whatever it was.

I was trying to imagine what kind of human monster could arouse the tepúli of even the most pornerastic old lecher, when Ahuítzotl said, "Look at this, Knight Mixtli. Here they are," and I raised my topaz.

The two girls were about as plain of face as any girls I had ever seen, but in simple charity I could hardly have called them monstrous. A trifle unusual, yes, in that they were identical twins. I took them to be about fourteen years old, and of some Olméca tribe, since they were both chewing tzictli, as placidly as a matched pair of manatees. They stood shoulder to shoulder, slightly turned toward each other, each with her nearmost arm thrown across the other's nearmost shoulder. They wore a single blanket wrapped around both their bodies from their chests to the floor.

"They have not yet been shown to the public," said Ahuítzotl, "because our palace seamstresses have not finished the special blouses and skirts they require. Steward, remove the blanket."

He did, and my eyes goggled when I saw the girls naked. They were not just twins; it appeared that in the womb they had somehow got melted together. From armpit to hip, the two were joined by a mutual skin, and so tightly that they could not stand, sit, walk, or lie down except half facing each other. For a moment, I thought they had only three breasts between them. But I stepped closer and saw that the middle breast was two normal breasts pressed together; I could part them with my hand. I looked the girls over: four breasts in front, two sets of buttocks in back. Except for their unlovely, unintelligent faces, I could see no deformity but that section of shared skin.

"Could they not be sliced apart?" I inquired. "They would each have a scar, but they would be separate and normal."

"Whatever for?" growled Ahuítzotl. "Of what earthly use are two more mud-faced, tzictli-chewing Olméca drabs? Together, they are novel and valuable and can enjoy the pleasurably idle life of a tequani. At any rate, our surgeons have concluded that they cannot be separated. Inside that binding flap of skin, they share vital blood vessels. But—and this is what will beguile old Yquingare—each girl does have her own tipíli, and both are virgins."

"It is a pity they could not be handsome," I mused. "But you are right, my lord. The sheer novelty of them should make up for that lack." I addressed the twins: "Do you have names? Can you talk?"

They said, in the Coatlicamac tongue, and almost in unison, "I am Left." "I am Right."

Ahuítzotl said, "We had planned to present them to the public as the Lady Pair. Named for the goddess Omeciuatl. A sort of joke, you see."

I said, "If an uncommon gift will make the Uandakuari more amicable toward us, the Lady Pair is that gift, and I will gladly be the bearer of it. Just one recommendation, my lord, to render them more attractive. Have them both shaved bald of hair and eyebrows. It is the Purémpe fashion."

"Singular fashion," said Ahuítzotl wonderingly. "The hair is the only thing attractive about either of these. But it will be done. Be prepared to depart as soon as their wardrobe is completed."

"At your summons, Lord Speaker. And I shall hope that the Lady Pair's presentation at that court will cause enough excitement that I can purloin one of the metal weapons unnoticed in the commotion."

"Do not just hope," said Ahuítzotl. "See to it!"

"Ah, the poor children!" Zyanya exclaimed, when I introduced her to the Lady Pair. I was surprised to hear someone express pity for them, since everyone else involved with Left and Right had either gaped or snickered, or, in the manner of Ahuítzotl, had regarded them as a marketable commodity, like the meat of some rare game animal. But Zyanya mothered them tenderly throughout the whole journey to Tzintzuntzani, and continually kept assuring them—as if they had brains enough to care—that they were traveling toward a wondrous new life of freedom and luxury. Well, I supposed they would be better off in the comparative liberty of a country palace, even serving as a sort of reversible concubine, than as an object being forever pointed at and laughed at in the confines of a city menagerie.

Zyanya went with me because, when I told her of that latest and queerest embassy laid on me, she insisted on coming along. At first I said a loud no, for I knew that no one in my party would live longer than the moment in which, very likely, I would be caught trying to steal one of the sacrosanct metal weapons. But Zyanya argued persuasively that, if our host's suspicions were allayed in advance, I would have the greater opportunity of getting close to such a weapon and getting it into my possession undetected.

"And what looks less suspicious," she asked, "than a man and wife traveling together? I should like to see Michihuácan, Záa."

Her man-and-wife idea did have some merit, I reflected, if not exactly the merit she ascribed to it. For the lewd and licentious Purémpecha to see a man traveling with his own, everyday, commonplace female mate—in that country where, for the asking, he could have any other mate, or kind of mate, or number of mates—that would indeed dumbfound the Purémpecha. They would scornfully dismiss me as too impotent, witless, unimaginative, and lethargic to be a thief or a spy or anything else dangerous. So I said yes to Zyanya, and she immediately began packing for the journey.

Ahuítzotl sent me word, and I reported to the palace, when the twins and their wardrobe were ready to go. But ayya, I was horrified when I first saw the girls after they had been shorn of hair. Their naked heads looked like their naked breasts—sharply conical, tapering to a point—and I wondered if my recommendation had been an awful mistake. A bald head might be the epitome of beauty to a Purémpe, but a bald pointed head? Well, it was too late to remedy; bald they would have to remain.

Also, it was only then belatedly discovered that no ordinary litter chair would accommodate Left and Right, and that a special one would have to be constructed to their peculiar requirements, which delayed our departure for a few days. But Ahuítzotl was determined to spare no expense on that expedition, so, when we finally did set out, we made quite a procession.

Two palace guards strode ahead, their hands conspicuously empty of weapons, but I knew them both to be expert at hand-to-hand unarmed combat. I carried nothing but the emblazoned shield identifying me as an Eagle Knight, and the folded letter of introduction signed by the Uey-Tlatoani Ahuítzotl. I walked beside Zyanya's four-bearer chair, and acted my role of tame husband, directing her attention to this or that landmark. Behind us came the eight-manned litter of the twins, and their spare bearers who took turn about at the heavy chair's carrying poles. That specially built litter was not just a seat, but a sort of small hut on poles, roofed above and curtained on its two open sides. The tail of the procession comprised the numerous slaves laden with our packs and panniers and provisions.

Three or four days on the westering trade road brought us to a village called Zitakuaro, where a guardpost on its outskirts marked the frontier of Michihuácan. There we halted while the Purémpecha border guards respectfully scanned the letter I presented, and then only prodded but did not open our various packs. They did look somewhat amazed when they peered into the oversized litter chair and found two identical bald girls riding side by side in what appeared to be a most uncomfortable position. But the guards did not comment. They waved courteously for me and my lady and our party to pass on through Zitakuaro.

After that, we were not again stopped or challenged, but I commanded that the curtains be kept closed on the Lady Pair's litter, so that they should not be visible to the people who eyed our passing. I knew that a swift-messenger would already have informed the Uandakuari of our approach, but I wanted to keep his gift a mystery and undescribed, insofar as possible, until we got to his palace and surprised him with it. Zyanya thought me cruel, to make the twins ride all that way without seeing anything of the new country in which they would live. So, every time I showed her something of interest, she would stop our train until the road was clear of passersby, and then herself go back to lift the twins' curtain and show them whatever it was. She kept doing that all the way across Michihuácan, rather to my exasperation, since Left and Right were utterly apathetic and incurious about their surroundings.

The trip would have been tedious for me had it not been for the presence of Zyanya; I was glad she had persuaded me to let her come. She even made me forget, now and then, the hazardous task I was to undertake at our destination. Every time our train rounded a bend in the road or breasted the crown of a hill, Zyanya would see something new to her, and she would exclaim over it, and listen with childlike intensity as I explained it to her.

The first thing that excited Zyanya's attention, of course, was the preponderance of glossily hairless people. I had told her of that custom, but telling is no substitute for seeing. Until gradually she got used to it, she would stare at a passing youth and murmur, "That one is a boy. No, a girl..." And I must admit that her curiosity was reciprocated. The Purémpecha were accustomed to seeing other people unshorn—foreign travelers, their own lower classes, and perhaps stubborn eccentrics—but they had never seen a lovely woman with a wealth of long hair and a vivid white strand streaking through it. So they also stared and murmured.

There were other things to see besides the people. The part of Michihuácan which we were then traversing has mountains, as does every other land, but there they seem always to sit on the horizon as a mere frame for the level or gently rolling country they enclose. Some of that territory is forested, some is grown up in meadows of useless but lovely grass and wild flowers. But much of it consists of wide-spreading, bountifully producing farms. There are immeasurable swales of maize, beans, chilis, orchards of ahuacatin and of sweeter fruits. Here and there in the fields stand the adobe cribs in which seed and produce are stored—conical bins, rather resembling the Lady Pair's tapering heads.

In those regions, even the humblest dwellings are good to look at. All made of wood, since wood is so abundant there, they are put together without mortar or tie ropes but with ingeniously tight notches in the planks and beams. Every house has a high, peaked roof, its eaves deeply overswooping the house all around, the better to give cool shade in the hot season and to shed rain in the wet, and some of the roofs are fancifully made so that their four corners turn upward in perky ornamental points. That was the season of swallows, and there are nowhere more swallows than in Michihuácan—flitting, fluttering, flickering, gliding all about—no doubt because those capacious roof eaves make such fine nesting places for them.

With its woods and waters, Michihuácan is a hospitable home for all sorts of birds. The rivers reflect the bright flashing colors of jays and flycatchers and fisher birds. In the forests the carpenter birds make a constant tattoo of drumming and drilling. In the lake shallows stand big white and blue herons, and the even bigger kuinko. That bird has a bill shaped like a spoon, an ungainly shape, and gawky long legs. But the kuinko is superb in its sunset-colored plumage, and when a flock of them all take wing at once it is like watching the wind made pink and visible.

The single greatest concentration of Michihuácan's population lived in the multitude of villages ringing the big Lake of Rushes, Patzkuaro, or perched on the many small islands in that lake. Although every village derived most of its sustenance from netting the waters' fish and fowl, every village was bidden by the Uandakuari to produce or provide one special, local commodity or service which it traded to all the others. One community made hammered copperware, another wove cloth, another braided rushes into matting, another made lacquerware, and so on. The village named for the lake, Patzkuaro, was the marketplace for those various things. One island in mid-lake, Xarakuaro, was built up with temples and altars, and was the ceremonial center for the residents of every village. Tzintzuntzani, Where There Are Hummingbirds, was the capital and heart of all that activity, so itself produced nothing but the decisions and orders and rulings that governed the whole nation. It consisted entirely of palaces and was entirely inhabited by nobles and their families, their courtiers, priests, servants, and such.

As our train approached Tzintzuntzani, the first man-made object we could see, from several one-long-runs down the road, was the ancient iyakata, as a pyramid is called in Poré, looming on the heights east of the nobles' palaces. Old beyond imagining, not tall but extravagantly elongated, that iyakata—a curious blend of square and round edifices—was still an awe-inspiring pile of stone, though it had long ago lost all its slab sheathing and gesso and coloring, and was much crumbled and overgrown with verdure.

The numerous palaces of Where There Are Hummingbirds, being all built of wood, might have been accounted less imposing than the stone palaces of Tenochtítlan, but they had their own kind of grandeur. Under the spreading eaves of their high-peaked, curly-cornered roofs, they were all two floors high, and the upper floor was completely encircled by an outside gallery. The ponderous cedar trunks upholding those buildings, the columns and banisters, the many beams visible under the eaves, all those things were elaborately worked and carved into curls and fretwork. Wherever artists could reach, the rich lacquers had been laboriously hand-applied. Every palace was lavishly ornamented, glowing with color and gold leaf, but of course the Uandakuari's palace made all the others look trivial.

Swift-messengers had kept Yquingare apprised of our progress, so our arrival was expected, and a crowd of nobles and their ladies waited to receive us. Our company had earlier veered off to the lakeside and, separating for privacy, we had all bathed and changed into our finest garments. We came, feeling fresh and looking proud, into the palace forecourt—a walled garden overhung by tall shade trees—where I ordered the litter chairs set down. I dismissed our guards and bearers, and they were led off to be quartered with the servants. Only Zyanya, the Lady Pair, and myself went on through the garden to the tremendous palace building. In the general confusion of the greeters milling all about us, the twins' odd way of walking went unremarked.

In a welcoming murmur and chatter, not all of which I could comprehend, we were ushered between the palace's cedar-trunk portals onto the cedar-slab terrace, then through the great open door, then through a short corridor and into Yquingare's reception hall. It was immensely long and wide, and two floors high: like the interior court of Ahuítzotl's palace, only roofed over. Stairways on each side climbed to an encircling inside balcony off which the upper rooms opened. The Uandakuari sat on a throne that was only a low chair, but the long walk from the entrance to where he sat was clearly designed to make every visitor feel like a supplicant.

Big as it was, the hall was quite crowded with elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen, but they all pressed back on both sides to make an aisle for us. I, then Zyanya, then the Lady Pair, in slow procession walked solemnly toward the throne, and I raised my topaz just long enough to get a good look at Yquingare. I had seen him only once before, at the dedication of the Great Pyramid, and in those days I had not seen clearly. He had been old then, and was older now: a shriveled little wisp of a man. It might have been his hairlessness that had inspired the fashion among his people, but he did not have to use an obsidian razor to maintain his. He was as toothless as he was bald, and nearly voiceless: he bade us welcome in a faint rustle, like the sound of a small seedpod shaking. Though I was glad to be ridding myself of the lumpish Lady Pair, I felt some compunction at giving even a freak into the tendril fingers of that gnarled and withered old weed.

I handed over Ahuítzotl's letter, and the Uandakuari handed it in turn to his oldest son, peevishly commanding him to read it aloud. I had always thought of princes as being young men; that Crown Prince Tzimtzicha, if he had let his hair grow, would have been gray-headed; but his father still wheezed orders at him as if he had not yet donned a loincloth under his mantle.

"A gift for me, eh?" croaked the father, when the son had finished reading the letter in Poré. He fixed his bleary eyes on Zyanya, standing beside me, and smacked his gums. "Ah. Could be a novelty, yes. Shave off all but that one white lock..."

Zyanya, horrified, took a step backward. I hastened to say, "Here is the gift, my Lord Yquingare," and reached for the Lady Pair. I stood them directly before the throne and tore their one-piece purple garment from neck to hem. The assembled crowd gave a gasp at my destroying such a precious piece of cloth—then gave another gasp as the garment fell to the floor and the twins stood naked.

"By the feathered balls of Kurikauri!" breathed the old man, using the Poré name for Quetzalcoatl. He went on saying something, but his voice was lost in his courtiers' hubbub of astonished exclamation, and I could only make out that he was drooling down his chin. The gift was an obvious success.

All present, including the Uandakuari's several surviving crone wives and concubines, were given an opportunity to come jostling for a close look at the Lady Pair. Some men, and a few women too, boldly reached out a hand and fondled some part of one girl or the other. When everybody's lubricious curiosity was satisfied, Yquingare rasped a command that cleared the reception hall of all but himself, us visitors, the Crown Prince, and a few stolid guards stationed in the corners.

"Nourishment now," the old man said, rubbing his dry hands together. "Must prepare to give a good account of myself, eh?"

The prince Tzimtzicha relayed the order to one of the guards, who departed. In a moment, servants began coming in to lay a dinner cloth right there, and—when Zyanya had reclothed the twins with their torn dress—we all six sat down. I gathered that the Crown Prince would not ordinarily have been allowed to eat at the same time as his father, but he was fluent in Náhuatl and was occasionally needed as interpreter when the old man or myself mishandled one another's language. Meanwhile, Zyanya helped feed the Lady Pair with a spoon. They were otherwise inclined to eat even the foam of chocolate with their fingers, messily, and to chew with their mouths open, and generally to nauseate anyone else present.

At that, their manners were no worse than the old man's. When the rest of us had been served the delectable white fish that are found nowhere but in the Lake Patzkuaro, he said with a toothless grin, "Eat. Enjoy. Can take nothing but milk myself."

"Milk?" Zyanya repeated, in polite inquiry. "Milk of the doe, my lord?"

Then her winglike eyebrows went up. A very large, very bald woman came in, knelt beside the Uandakuari, lifted her blouse and presented to him a very large breast which, if it had had a countenance, could have been her hairless head. During the rest of the meal, when Yquingare was not asking for particulars of the Lady Pair's origin and acquisition, he was sucking noisily at first one noselike nipple, then the other.

Zyanya avoided looking at him again; so did the Crown Prince; and they merely pushed their food around on their gold-and-lacquer plates. The twins ate heartily, because they always did, and I ate heartily because I was paying less attention to the vulgarity of Yquingare than I was to another thing about him. On first entering the room, I had noticed that the guards held spears whose blades were of a coppery hue, but an oddly dark-colored copper. I had then perceived that both the Uandakuari and his son wore short daggers of the same metal, hung in thong loops at their waists.

The old man was addressing to me a rambling, roundabout speech, which I suspected was going to end in his asking whether I could also procure for him a set of conjoined adolescent twin males, when Zyanya, as if she could listen to no more, interrupted to ask, "What is this delicious drink?"

The Crown Prince, appearing delighted with the interruption, leaned across the cloth to tell her that it was chápari, a product of bees' honey, a most potent product, and that she had better not drink too much of it on her first trial.

"How wonderful!" she exclaimed, draining her lacquered cup. "If honey can be so intoxicating, why are not bees always drunk?" She hiccuped and sat thinking, evidently about bees, for when the Uandakuari tried to resume his driveling inquiry, Zyanya said loudly, "Perhaps they are. Who could tell?" And she poured another cup for herself and for me, somewhat oversloshing them.

The old man sighed, took one last suck at his nurse's slobbered teat, and gave it a loud dismissing slap to signal that the dreadful meal was done. Zyanya and I hastily drank our second cups of chápari. "Now," said Yquingare, munching his mouth so that his nose and chin several times chomped together. His son jumped around behind him to haul him to his feet.

"A moment, my lord," I said, "while I give the Lady Pair a word of instruction."

"Instruction?" he said suspiciously.

"To comply," I said, smirking like a practiced pimp. "Lest, as virgins, they be annoyingly coy."

"Ah?" he rasped, smirking back. "Virgins as well, are they? Compliance, yes, by all means compliance."

Zyanya and Tzimtzicha gave me identical looks of contempt as I led the twins aside and imparted the instructions, the urgent instructions I had just devised. It was difficult, for I had to speak fast, and in their native language of Coatlicamac, and they were so very stupid. But finally they both nodded a sort of dim comprehension and, with a shrug of hope and despair, I shoved them toward the Uandakuari.

Unprotesting, they accompanied him up one staircase; helped him to climb it, in fact, looking like a crab helping a toad. Just before they reached the balcony, the toad turned and called something to his son, in Poré, so hoarsely that I caught not a word. Tzimtzicha nodded obediently to his father, then turned to ask if I and my lady were ready to retire. She only hiccuped, so I said we were; it had been a long day. We followed the Crown Prince to the stairs on the other side of the hall.

Thus it happened that, there in Tzintzuntzani, for the first and only time in our married life, Zyanya and I slept with somebody besides each other. But please to remember, reverend friars, that we were both a bit drunk on the powerful chápari. Anyway, it was not exactly what it sounds, and I will do my best to explain.

Before leaving home, I had tried to tell Zyanya about the Purémpecha's predilection for inventive, voluptuous, and even perverse sexual practices. We had agreed that we would not evince surprise or disgust, whatever hospitality of that nature our hosts might offer us, but would decline it as graciously as possible. Or we thought we had so agreed. By the time the hospitality was provided, and we recognized it for what it was, we were already partaking. And we did not then recoil because—though she and I could never afterward decide whether it was wicked or innocuous—it was undeniably delightful.

As he led us toward the upper floor, Tzimtzicha turned and gave me an imitation of my own pimplike smirk, and inquired, "Will the knight and his lady wish separate rooms? Separate beds?"

"Certainly not," I said, and I said it in a chilly voice, before he might next suggest, "Separate partners?" or some other indecency.

"A conjugal chamber then, my lord," he said, agreeably enough. "But sometimes," he went on, casually, conversationally, "after a hard day's travel, even the most devoted couple may be fatigued. The court of Tzintzuntzani would think itself remiss if its guests should feel, ahem, too tired to indulge each other, even for a single night. Hence we offer a facility called atanatanarani. It enhances the adequacy of a man, the receptiveness of a woman, perhaps to an extreme they have never before enjoyed."

The word atanatanarani, as best I could unravel its elements, meant only "a bunching together." Before I could inquire how a bunching together could enhance anything, he had bowed us into our chambers, backed himself out, and slid shut the lacquered door.

The lamplighted room contained the biggest, deepest, softest bed of piled quilts I had ever seen. There also awaited us two elderly slaves: one male, one female. I eyed them with apprehension, but they merely asked our permission to draw our baths. Adjoining the bedroom was a separate sanitary closet for each of us, complete with its own bathing trough and already hot steam room. My servant helped me sponge myself in the bath and afterward briskly pumiced me in the steam room, but he did nothing else, nothing untoward. I assumed that the slaves, the bathing and steaming were what the Crown Prince had meant by "a facility called atanatanarani." If so, it was but a civilized amenity, nothing obscene, and it had worked well. I felt refreshed and tingly-skinned and more than "adequate," as Tzimtzicha had put it, to "indulge" my wife.

Her slave and mine bowed out, and she and I emerged from the sanitary closets to find the main chamber dark. The windows' draperies had all been closed and the oil lamps extinguished. So it took us a moment to find each other in that big room, and another moment to find even that immense bed. It was a warm night; only the topmost quilt had been turned back; we slid under it and lay side by side, sprawled on our backs, content for the moment just to enjoy the cloud-softness under us.

Zyanya murmured sleepily, "Do you know, Záa, I still feel as drunk as a bee." Then she gave a sudden small twitch and gasped, "Ayyo, you are eager! You took me by surprise."

I had been about to exclaim the same thing. I reached down to where a small hand was gently touching me—her hand, I had supposed—and said in amazement, "Zyanya!" just as she said:

"Záa, I can feel... it is a child down there. Playing with my... playing with me."

"I have one, too," I said in awe. "They were waiting for us, under the quilt. What do we do?"

I expected her to say, "Kick!" or "Scream!" or to do both those things herself. Instead, she gave another small gasp, and then a honey-drugged giggle, and repeated my question: "What do we do? What is yours doing?"

I told her.

"So is mine."

"It is not unpleasant."

"No. Decidedly not."

"They must be trained for this."

"But not for their own satisfaction. This one, anyway, is far too young."

"No. To enhance our pleasure, as the prince said."

"They might be punished if we rebuffed them."

I make those exchanges sound cool and dispassionate. They were not. We were speaking to each other in husky voices and in phrases broken by our involuntary gasps and movements.

"Is yours a boy or a girl? I cannot reach far enough to—"

"I cannot either. Does it matter?"

"No. The head is smooth, but the face feels as if it might be beautiful. The eyelashes are long enough to—ah! yes!—with the eyelashes!"

"They are well trained."

"Oh, exquisitely. I wonder if each is trained just to... I mean..."

"Let us trade, and find out."

The two children did not object to changing places under the quilt, and their performance was not diminished by it. Perhaps my new one's mouth was a trifle more warm and wet, having just come from...

Well, not to linger too long on that episode, Zyanya and I were soon in a frenzy, ravenously kissing, clutching, and clawing at each other; doing other things above the waist while the children were even busier below. When I could hold back no longer, we coupled like jaguars mating, and the children, squeezed out from between us, swarmed all over our bodies, tiny fingers here, tiny tongues there.

It happened not once, but more times than I can remember. Whenever Zyanya and I paused to rest, the children would snuggle for a time against our panting and perspiring bodies. Then very delicately they would insinuate themselves again, and start to tease and fondle. They would move back and forth from her to me, sometimes individually, sometimes together, so that for a while I would be attended by both of them and my wife—then both they and I would concentrate on her. It did not end until she and I were simply capable of no more, and we collapsed in the slumber of surfeit. We never did find out the sex or age or appearance of our accomplices. When I was awakened very early in the morning they were gone.

What woke me was a scratching at the door. Only half conscious, I got up and opened it. I saw nothing but the predawn darkness of the balcony and the great well of the hall beyond, but then a finger scratched at my bare leg. I started and looked down, and there were the Lady Pair, as naked as myself. They were on all fours—on all eights, I should say; the crab again—and they were both grinning lasciviously up at my crotch.

"Happy thing," said Left.

"His too," said Right, jerking her pointed head—in the direction of the old man's room, I assumed.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded, as ferociously as I could in a whisper.

One of their eight extremities reached up and put Yquingare's dagger in my hand. I peered at the dark metal, even darker in that gloom, and ran my thumb along it. Hard and sharp it was, indeed.

"You did it!" I said, feeling a rush of gratitude, almost affection, for the monster crouching at my feet.

"Easy," said Right.

"He put clothes beside bed," said Left.

"He put that in me," said Right, poking my tepúli and making me jump again. "Happy."

"I get bored," said Left. "Nothing to do. Only be jiggled. I reach to clothes, feel around, find knife."

"She hold knife while I have happy," said Right. "I hold knife while she have happy. She hold knife while—"

"And now?" I interrupted.

"Finally he snore. We bring knife. Now we go wake him. Have more happy."

As if they could hardly wait, before I could even thank them, the twins scuttled crabwise along the dark balcony. So I silently gave thanks instead to the apparently invigorating properties of mammalian milk, and went back inside the chamber to wait for sunrise.

The courtiers of Tzintzuntzani did not appear to be early risers. Only Crown Prince Tzimtzicha joined Zyanya and me for breakfast. I told the elderly prince that I and my company might as well be on our way. It seemed obvious that his father was enjoying his gift; we would not loiter about and make him interrupt his enjoyment just to entertain uninvited guests.

The prince said blandly, "Well, if you feel you must go, we will not detain you. Except for one formality. A search of yourselves, your guards and slaves, your possessions and packs and whatever else you are taking away. No insult intended, I assure you. Even I must endure it whenever I leave here to travel anywhere."

I shrugged as indifferently as one can when a cluster of armed guards is closing in to ring one about. Discreetly and respectfully, but thoroughly, they patted the clothed parts of me and Zyanya, all over, then politely asked us to step out of our sandals for a moment. In the forecourt garden, they did the same to all our men, had all our packs emptied out, even fingered among the cushions of the litter chairs. Other people were up and about by then, most of them the children of the palace, who watched the proceedings with bright and knowing eyes. I looked at Zyanya. She was looking closely at the children, trying to see which of them... When she caught me smiling at her, she blushed darker than the small blade of metal—its wooden handle removed—which I was carrying at the back of my neck, hidden under my hair.

The guards reported to Tzimtzicha that we were taking away nothing we had not come with. His watchfulness changed abruptly to friendliness and he said, "Then of course we insist that you take something, as a reciprocal gift for your Uey-Tlatoani." He handed me a small leather sack, which I later found to contain a quantity of the finest quality oyster-heart pearls. "And," he went on, "something even more precious. It will just fit in that outsized litter of yours. I do not know what my father will do without it, his most prized possession, but it is his command."

At which he gave us the tremendous, bald, and big-breasted woman who had nursed the old man at the previous night's meal.

She was at least twice as heavy as the twins together had been, and all the way home the bearers cursed their lot in life. Every one-long-run or so, the whole train had to stop and stand fidgeting while, the mammal unashamedly milked herself with her fingers to relieve the pressure. Zyanya laughed the whole way back, even laughed when we presented the gift to Ahuítzotl and he ordered me garrotted on the spot. But when I hastened to tell him what that milk-animal apparently could do for the wizened old Yquingare, Ahuítzotl looked contemplative and canceled the order that I be strangled, and Zyanya laughed the more—so that even the Revered Speaker and I joined in the laughter.

If Ahuítzotl ever did get any invigoration out of the milk woman, she was a more valuable plunder than the killer-metal dagger turned out to be. Our Mexíca metalsmiths studied it intently, and scratched deep into it, and took filings from it, and at last concluded that it was made by puddling melted copper and melted tin together. But try as they might, they never could get the proportions right, or the temperature, or something, and they never did succeed in duplicating the metal.

However, since no tin existed in these lands except for those miniature hatchet-shaped scraps we used for trade currency—and since those came up the trade routes from some unknown country far, far to the south, passed from hand to hand—Ahuítzotl was at least able to order an immediate and continuing confiscation of all of them. So the tin disappeared from circulation as currency, and since we had no other use for it, I suppose Ahuítzotl simply stacked it away somewhere out of sight.

In a way, it was a selfish gesture: if we Mexíca could not have the mystery metal, no one could. But the Purémpecha already owned enough weapons made of it to discourage Tenochtítlan's declaring war on them ever again, and the stopping of the tin supply prevented them from making enough additional weapons that they could ever be emboldened to declare war on us. So I suppose I can claim that my mission into Michihuácan was not totally without result.

* * *

At the time we returned from Michihuácan, Zyanya and I had been man and wife for some seven years; and I daresay our friends looked on us as an old married couple; and she and I had come to regard our life as fixed in its course and impervious to change or disruption; and we were happy enough with each other that we were satisfied to have it so. But the gods willed otherwise, and Zyanya made it known to me in this way:

We had been one afternoon visiting the First Lady at the palace. On our way out, we saw in a hallway that milk-animal woman we had brought from Tzintzuntzani. I suspect that Ahuítzotl simply let her live on in the palace as a general servant, but on that occasion I made some humorous remark about his "wet nurse," expecting Zyanya to laugh. Instead she said, rather sharply for her:

"Záa, you must not make vulgar jokes about milk. About mother's milk. About mothers."

I said, "Not if it gives you offense. But why should it?"

Shyly, anxiously, apprehensively, she said, "Some time about the turn of the year, I... I will be... I will be a milk-animal myself."

I stared at her. It took me a moment to comprehend and, before I could respond, she added, "I have suspected for some little time, but two days ago the physician confirmed it. I have been trying to think of a way to tell you in soft and sweet words. And now"—she sniffled unhappily—"I just snap it at you. Záa, where are you going? Záa, do not leave me!"

I had gone off at an undignified run, but only to procure a palace litter chair so she would not have to walk the way back to our home. She laughed and said, "This is ridiculous," when I insisted on lifting her onto the chair cushions. "But does it mean that you are pleased, Záa?"

"Pleased?" I exclaimed. "Pleased!"

At our house, Turquoise looked worried to see me assisting the protesting Zyanya up the short flight of stairs. But I shouted to her, "We are going to have a baby!" and she shrieked with joy. At the noise, Ticklish came running from somewhere, and I commanded, "Ticklish, Turquoise, go this instant and give the nursery a good cleaning. Make all the necessary preparations. Run and buy whatever is lacking. A cradle. Flowers. Put flowers everywhere!"

"Záa, will you hush?" said Zyanya, half amused, half embarrassed. "It will be months yet. The room can wait."

But the two slave women had already dashed obediently, exuberantly up the stairs. And, over her protests, I helped Zyanya up there too, and insisted she lie down for a rest after her exertion of visiting the palace. I went downstairs to congratulate myself with a drink of octli and a smoke of picíetl, and to sit in the twilight and gloat in solitude.

Gradually, though, my excitement subsided into more serious meditation, and I began to perceive the several reasons why Zyanya had been somewhat hesitant about telling me of the coming event. She had said it would occur about the turn of the year. Counting backward on my fingers, I realized that our child must have been conceived during that night in old Yquingare's palace. I chuckled at that. No doubt Zyanya was a bit discomfited by that fact. She would have preferred that the child had its beginning in more sedate circumstances. Well, I thought it far better to conceive a child in a paroxysm of rapture, as we had done, than in a torpid acquiescence to duty or conformity or inevitability, as most parents did.

But I could not chuckle at the next thought that came to me. The child could be handicapped from the moment of his birth, because it was possible that he would inherit my weakness of vision. Granted, he would not have to stumble and grope through as many years as I had done before I discovered the seeing crystal. But I pitied an infant who would have to learn how to hold a topaz to his eye even before he learned how to get a spoon to his mouth, and his being pathetically unable to toddle about on his infant excursions without it, and his being cruelly called Yellow Eye or the like by his playmates....

If the child was a girl, that close-sightedness would not be such a disadvantage. Neither her childhood games nor her adult occupations would be strenuous or dependent on the keenness of her physical senses. Females were not competitive with each other until they reached the age when they vied for the most desirable husbands, and then it would be less important how my daughter saw than how she looked. But—agonizing thought—suppose she both saw and looked like me! A son would be pleased to inherit my head-nodder height. A girl would be desolated, and she would hate me, and I would probably be revolted by the sight of her. I imagined our daughter looking exactly like that tremendous milk woman....

And that gave rise to another worry. During the many days prior to the night of the child's conception, Zyanya had been in intimate proximity to the monstrous Lady Pair! It was well attested that countless children had been born deformed or deficient when their mothers were affected by far less gruesome influences. Worse yet, Zyanya had said "some time about the turn of the year." And right then fell the five nemontemtin! A child born during those nameless and lifeless days was so ill-omened that its parents were expected, even encouraged, to let it die of malnourishment. I was not so superstitious as to do that. But then, what kind of burden or monster or evildoer might that child grow up to be...?

I smoked picíetl and drank octli until Turquoise came and saw my condition and said, "For shame, my lord master!" and summoned Star Singer to help me to bed.

"I will be a shambling ruin before the time arrives," I said to Zyanya the next morning. "I wonder if all fathers have such worrisome apprehensions."

She smiled and said, "Not nearly as many as a mother does, I think. But a mother knows she can do absolutely nothing but wait."

I sighed and said, "I see no other course for me, either. I can only devote my every moment to caring for you and tending you and seeing that no slightest harm or affliction—"

"Do that and I will be a ruin!" she cried, as if she meant it. "Please, my darling, do find something else to occupy you."

Stung and deflated by the rejection, I slouched off to take my morning bath. But, after I had come downstairs and breakfasted, a diversion did present itself, in the person of a caller, Cozcatl.

"Ayyo, how could you have heard already?" I exclaimed. "But it was thoughtful of you to come calling so quickly."

My greeting seemed to bewilder him. He said, "Heard of what? Actually I came to—"

"Why, that we are going to have a baby!" I said.

His face went briefly bleak before he said, "I am happy for you, Mixtli, and for Zyanya. I call on the gods to bless you with a well-favored child." Then he mumbled, "It is only that the coincidence flustered me for a moment. Because I came this morning to ask your permission to marry."

"To marry? But that is news as marvelous as my own!" I shook my head. "Imagine... the boy Cozcatl, of an age to take a wife. Sometimes I do not notice how the years have gone. But what do you mean, ask my permission?"

"My intended wife is not free to marry. She is a slave."

"So?" I still did not comprehend. "Surely you can afford to buy her freedom."

"I can," he said. "But will you sell her? I want to marry Quequelmíqui, and she wants to marry me."

"What?"

"It was through you that I first met her, and I confess that many of my visits here have been something of a pretext, so that she and I could have a little time together. Most of our courtship has been conducted in your kitchen."

I was astounded. "Ticklish? Our little maid? But she is barely adolescent!"

He reminded me gently, "She was when you bought her, Mixtli. The years have gone."

And so they had, I thought. Ticklish could be only a year or two younger than Cozcatl, and he was—let me see—he had turned twenty and two. I said magnanimously:

"You have my permission and my congratulations and my felicitations, Cozcatl. But buy her? Most certainly not. She is but the first of our wedding gifts to you. No, no, I will hear no protest; I insist on it. Had she not been schooled by you, the girl would never have been worth consideration as a wife. I remember her when she first came here. Giggling."

"Then I thank you, Mixtli, and so will she. I also want to say"—he looked flustered again—"I have of course told her about myself. About the wound I suffered. She understands that we can never have children, like you and Zyanya."

It was then that I realized how my own abrupt announcement must have dashed his own exultation. All unknowingly and unintentionally, I had been heartless. But before I could frame words of apology, he continued:

"Quequelmíqui swears that she loves me and will accept me for what I am. But I must be sure that she fully realizes—the extent of my inadequacy. Our kitchen caresses have never got to the point of..."

He was floundering in embarrassment, so I tried to help. "You mean you have not yet—"

"She has never even seen me unclothed," he blurted. "And she is a virgin, innocent of all knowledge about the relations between a man and a woman."

I said, "It will be Zyanya's responsibility, as her mistress, to sit her down for a woman-to-woman talk. I am sure Zyanya will enlighten her on the more intimate aspects of marriage."

"That will be a kindness," said Cozcatl. "But after that, would you also speak to her, Mixtli? You have known me longer and—well, better than has Zyanya. You could tell Quequelmíqui more specifically of my limitations as a conjugal partner. Would you do that?"

I said, "I will do my best, Cozcatl, but I warn you. A virginally innocent girl suffers doubts and trepidations about taking even a commonplace husband of ordinary physical attributes. When I tell her bluntly what she can expect from this marriage—and what she cannot—it may further affright her."

"She loves me," Cozcatl said ringingly. "She has given her promise. I know her heart."

"Then you are unique among men," I said drily. "I know only this much. A woman thinks of marriage in terms of flowers and birdsong and butterfly flutterings. When I speak to Ticklish in terms of flesh and organs and tissues, it will at best disillusion her. At worst, she may fly in panic from ever marrying you or anybody. You would not thank me for that."

"But I would," he said. "Quequelmíqui deserves better than an appalling surprise on her wedding night. If she decides to refuse me, I had rather it be now than then. Oh, it would destroy me, yes. If the good and loving Quequelmíqui will not have me, neither will any other woman, ever. I shall enlist in some army troop and go off to war somewhere and perish in it. But whatever happens, Mixtli, I would not hold it against you. No, I plead that you do me this favor."

So, when he departed, I told Zyanya of his news and his request. She called Ticklish from the kitchen, and the girl came blushing and trembling and twisting her fingers in her blouse hem. We both embraced her and congratulated her on having captured the affection of such a fine young man. Then Zyanya put a motherly arm around her waist and led her upstairs, while I sat down with my paint pots and bark paper. When I had written the document of manumission, I nervously smoked a poquietl—several of them, before Ticklish came downstairs again.

She had been blushing before; now she glowed like a brazier; she was quivering even more visibly. Her agitation may have made her look prettier than she usually was, but it was truly the first time I had noticed that she was in fact a most attractive girl. I suppose one never pays much attention to the familiar furnishings of one's house until someone from outside compliments a piece.

I handed her the paper and she said, "What is this, my master?"

"A document which says that the free woman Quequelmíqui must nevermore call anyone master. Try instead to think of me as a family friend, for Cozcatl has asked that I explain some things to you."

I plunged right in, with not much delicacy, I fear. "Most men, Ticklish, have a thing called a tepúli—

She interrupted, though without raising her bowed head. "I know what that is, my lord. I had brothers in my family. My lady mistress says a man puts it inside a woman... here." She pointed modestly at her lap. "Or he does if he has one. Cozcatl told me how he lost his."

"And thereby lost his ability ever to make you a mother. He is also deprived of some of the pleasures of marriage. But he has not been deprived of his desire that you enjoy those pleasures, or his ability to give them to you. Though he has no tepúli to link you and him together, there are other means of doing the act of love."

I turned slightly away, to spare us both the unease of my seeing her blushes, and I tried to speak in the flat, bored tone of a schoolmaster. Well, the basic instructions can be told in a schoolmasterish voice, but—when I began to dwell on the numerous stimulating and satisfying things that can be done to a woman's breasts and tipíli and especially the sensitive xacapili, by means of fingers and tongue and lips and even eyelashes—well, I could not help remembering all the nuances and refinements I myself had employed and enjoyed, in times recent and past, and my voice tended to become unsteady. So I hurried to conclude:

"A woman can find those delights nearly as satisfying as the more usual act. Many would rather be thus satisfied than merely impaled. Some even do those things with other women, and give no thought to the absence of a tepúli."

Ticklish said, "It sounds..." and so quaveringly that I turned to look at her. She sat with her body tensed to rigidity, her eyes and fists tight closed. "It feels..." Her whole body jerked. "Won-der-ful..!" The word was long-drawn, as if wrung from her. It took a while for her fists to unclench and her eyes to open. She lifted them to me, and they were like smoky lamps. "Thank you for... for telling me those things."

I remembered how Ticklish used to giggle without provocation. Could it be possible that she was excitable in other ways without being touched or even undressed?

I said, "I can no longer command you, and this is an impertinence you may refuse. But I should like to see your bosom."

She looked at me with wide-eyed innocence, and she hesitated, but then slowly she raised her blouse. Her breasts were not large, but they were well formed, and their nipples swelled just from the touch of my gaze upon them, and their areolas were dark and large, almost too big for a man's mouth to encompass. I sighed, and signaled that she could go. I hoped I was in error, but I very much feared that Ticklish would not always be satisfied with less than real copulation, and that Cozcatl risked being eventually the unhappiest kind of husband.

I went upstairs and found Zyanya standing in the doorway of the nursery, no doubt contemplating additions and improvements to its facilities. I did not say anything of my misgivings about the wisdom of Cozcatl's marriage. I merely remarked:

"When Ticklish leaves, we will be one servant short. Turquoise cannot manage the household and look after you as well. Cozcatl picked an untimely moment to declare his intentions. Most unfortunate for us."

"Misfortune!" Zyanya exclaimed brightly. "You said once, Záa, that if I needed help, we might persuade Béu to join us here. The departure of Ticklish is a very minor misfortune, thank the gods, but it provides an excuse. We will need another woman around the house. Oh, Záa, let us ask her!"

"An inspired notion," I said. I was not exactly palpitant at the prospect of having the embittered Béu about, especially during such a nervous time as that, but whatever Zyanya wanted I would get for her. I said, "I will send an invitation so imploring that she cannot refuse."

I sent it by the same seven soldiers who had once marched south with me, so that Waiting Moon would have a protective escort if she did agree to come to Tenochtítlan. And she did, without protest or reluctance. Nevertheless, it took her some time to make all the arrangements for leaving the inn's management to her servants and slaves. Meanwhile, Zyanya and I provided a grand wedding ceremony for Cozcatl and Ticklish, and they went off together to live in his house.

It was well into winter when the seven warriors delivered Béu Ribé to our door. By that time, I was honestly as anxious and as pleased to see her as Zyanya was. My wife had got large—alarmingly so, in my opinion—and had begun to suffer aches and irritabilities and other symptoms of distress. Although she peevishly kept assuring me that those things were quite natural, they worried me and kept me hovering about her and trying to do helpfulnesses for her, all of which made her more peevish yet.

She cried, "Oh, Béu, thank you for coming! I thank Uizye Tao and every other god that you have come!" And she fell into her sister's arms as if embracing a deliverer. "You may have saved my life! I am being pampered to death!"

Béu's luggage was put in the guest chamber prepared for her, but she spent most of that day with Zyanya in our room, from which I was forcibly excluded, to mope about the rest of the house and fret and feel discarded. Toward twilight, Béu came downstairs alone. While we took chocolate together, she said, almost conspiratorially:

"Zyanya will soon be at that stage of her pregnancy when you must forgo your... your husbandly rights. What will you do during that while?"

I nearly told her it was none of her business, but I said only, "I imagine I will survive."

She persisted, "It would be unseemly if you were to resort to a stranger."

Affronted, I stood up and said stiffly, "I may not enjoy enforced continence, but—

"But you could hope to find no acceptable substitute for Zyanya?" She tilted her head as if seriously expecting an answer. "In all of Tenochtítlan you could find no one as beautiful as she is? And so you sent to faraway Tecuantépec for me?" She smiled and stood and came very close to me, her breasts brushing my front. "I look so very much like Zyanya that you might deem me a satisfactory substitute, am I not right?" She toyed with my mantle clasp, as if she would mischievously undo it. "But, Záa, although Zyanya and I are sisters, and physically so similar, we are not necessarily indistinguishable. In bed, you might find us very different...."

Firmly I put her away from me. "I wish you a pleasant stay in this house, Béu Ribé. But, if you cannot hide your dislike of me, will you at least refrain from demonstrating it in such maliciously insincere coquetry? Cannot we both manage simply to ignore each other?"

When I strode away, her face was as flushed as if I had surprised her in some indecent act, and she was rubbing her face as if I had slapped her for it.

* * *

Señor Bishop Zumárraga, it is an honor and a flattery to have you join us once again. Your Excellency is just in time to hear me announce—as proudly as I announced it those many years ago—the birth of my beloved daughter.

All my apprehensions, I am happy to say, proved unfounded. The child evinced intelligence even before she emerged into this life, for she waited prudently in the womb until after the lifeless nemontemtin days had passed, and made her appearance on the day Ce-Malinali, or One Grass, of the first month of the year Five House. I was then thirty and one years old, somewhat overage to be starting a family, but I preened and strutted just as preposterously as younger men do—as if I had alone conceived and carried and been delivered of the infant.

While Béu stayed at Zyanya's bedside, the physician and the mid-wife came to tell me that the child was a female and to answer all my anxious questions. They seemed to think me demented when I wrung my hands and said, "Speak the truth. I can bear it. Is it really two girls in one body?" No, they said, it was not any kind of twins, but a single daughter. No, she was not of extraordinarily great size. No, she was not monstrous in any respect and she appeared unmarked by any portents. When I pressed the doctor as to the acuity of her eyesight, he replied in some exasperation that newborn babies are not notable for eagle vision, or for boasting about it if they have it. I must wait until she could talk and tell me herself.

They gave me the child's navel string, then went back into the nursery to dip One Grass in cold water, to swaddle her and to subject her to the midwife's cautionary and instructive harangue. I went downstairs and, with unsteady fingers, wrapped the moist string around a ceramic spindle wheel and, mouthing a few silent prayers and thanks to the gods, buried it under the stones of the kitchen hearth. Then I hurried upstairs again to wait impatiently to be admitted for my first look at my daughter.

I kissed my wanly smiling wife and, with my topaz, examined the dwarf face cuddled in the bend of her elbow. I had seen the new offspring of other parents, so I was not shocked, but I was a bit disappointed to find that ours was in no way superior. She was as red and wrinkled as a chopini chili pod, as bald and ugly as an aged Purémpe. I tried to feel a proper rush of love for her, but without success. I was assured by all present that it was indeed my daughter, a new fragment of humankind, but I would have been equally prepared to believe them if they had confessed that it was a newborn, still-hairless howler monkey. It had the howl, at any rate.

I need hardly say that the child day by day appeared more human, and that I viewed her with more appreciative and affectionate regard. I called her Cocóton, a common nickname for girl children; it means the crumb fallen from a larger piece of bread. It was not long before Cocóton began to manifest a resemblance to her mother, and necessarily her aunt, which is to say that no baby could have become more quickly more beautiful. Her hair grew in, in ringlets. Her eyelashes appeared, and they had the same abundance, in miniature, as the hummingbird-wing lashes of Zyanya and Béu. Her eyebrows grew in, and they had the same winglike uptilt as those of Zyanya and Béu. She began to smile more frequently than she howled, and her smile was that of Zyanya, compelling all about her to reflect it. Even Béu, who in recent years had been so dour, was influenced often to smile that same radiant smile again.

Zyanya was soon up and about, though her activities were for a time centered only on Cocóton, who insisted that her milk-animal be frequently available. Béu's presence made it unnecessary for me to watch over the welfare of Zyanya and our baby, and I was often ignored by both women, even by the baby, when now and then I proffered uninvited suggestions or attentions. Nevertheless, I did occasionally insist on being obeyed, simply as the man of the household. When Cocóton was nearly two months old, and was no longer so frequently needful of her milk supplier, Zyanya began to show signs of restlessness.

She had been pent in the house for months, getting no farther outdoors than our rooftop garden, to bask in the beams of Tonatíu and the breezes of Ehecatl. She would like to venture farther outside, she said, and reminded me that the ceremony honoring Xipe Totec was soon to be held in The Heart of the One World. She wanted to attend. I positively forbade it.

I said, "Cocóton was born unmarked and unmonstrous and with seemingly unimpaired eyesight, thanks to her tonáli, or ours, or the gods' good will. Let us not now put her at hazard. As long as she is nursing, we must take care that evil influences do not get into your milk, through your being frightened or upset by some shocking sight. I cannot think of anything more likely to horrify you than the Xipe Totec celebration. We will go anywhere else you ask, my love, but not to that."

Oh, yes, Your Excellency, I had often seen the honoring of Xipe Totec, for it was one of the most important religious rituals observed by us Mexíca and by many other peoples. The ceremony was impressive, I might say unforgettable, but even in those days I could scarcely believe that any participant or onlooker enjoyed it. Though it has now been many years since I last saw Xipe Totec die and come back to life, I still can hardly bear to describe the manner of it—and my revulsion owes nothing to my having become Christian and civilized. However, if Your Excellency is so interested and insistent...

Xipe Totec was our god of seedtime, and that came in our month of Tlacaxipe Ualiztli, which can be translated as The Gentle Flaying. It was the season when the dead stumps and stalks of last year's harvests were burned off or cleared away or turned under, so the earth was clean and ready to receive its new planting. Death making way for life, you see, as it does even for Christians, when at every seedtime the Lord Jesus dies and is reborn. Your Excellency need not make noises of protest. The impious similarity goes no further.

I will not describe all the public preliminaries and accompaniments: the flowers and music and dancing and colors and costumes and processions and the thunder of the drum which tears out the heart. I will make this as mercifully brief as I can.

Know, then, that a young man or girl was selected beforehand to act the honored role of Xipe Totec, which means The Dear One Flayed. The personifier's sex was less important than the requirement that he or she be grown to full stature but be still a virgin. Usually it was a foreigner of noble birth, captured in some war when still a child and saved especially to represent the god when grown. Never was a slave purchased for the purpose, because Xipe Totec merited and demanded and was provided a young person of the highest available class.

For some days before the ceremony, the youth was housed in the temple of Xipe Totec and was treated with every kindness, lavished with every pleasure of food and drink and entertainment. Also, once the youth's virginity had been acceptably substantiated, it was quickly disposed of. He or she was allowed unlimited sexual license—encouraged to it, even forced to it when necessary—for it was a vital part of playing the god of springtime fertility. If the xochimíqui was a young man, he could name all the girls and women of the community whom he had ever desired, unwed or not. Assuming those women consented, as did many even of the married ones, they would be brought to him. If the xochimíqui was a girl, she could name and summon all the men she wanted, and spread herself for them.

Sometimes, however, the youth selected for the honor of godhood would be averse to that aspect of the performance. If it was a young woman, and she tried to decline the opportunity to wallow, she would be forcibly deflowered by the high priest of Xipe Totec. In the case of a determinedly chaste young man, he would be tied down and straddled by a female temple attendant. If, once introduced to the pleasure, the young person was still recalcitrant, he or she would have to endure repeated violation by the temple women or priests and, when those were sated, by any commonfolk who might desire to take a turn. There was always a sufficiency of those, the devout who slavered to couple with a god or goddess, the merely lecherous, the curious, the childless women or impotent men who hoped to be impregnated or rejuvenated by the deity. Yes, Your Excellency, there occurred every sexual excess Your Excellency's fancy can envision—except the coupling of god and man or goddess and woman. Such acts, being the very contravention of fertility, would have been repugnant to Xipe Totec.

On the day of the ceremony, after the attending crowd had been entertained by many performances of dwarfs and jugglers and tocotine and such, Xipe Totec made his public appearance. The young girl or man was dressed as the god, in a costume combining dry old maize husks and bright new sprigs of greenery, in a wide-spreading fan crown of the most colorful feathers, in a flowing mantle and gilded sandals. The youth was carried many times about The Heart of the One World in an elegant litter chair, with much pageantry and deafening music, while he or she scattered seeds and maize kernels over the cheering and chanting throng. Then the procession came to Xipe Totec's low pyramid in one corner of the plaza, and all the drumming and music and singing stopped, and the crowd hushed, as the young personifier of the god was set down at the foot of the temple's staircase.

There two priests helped her divest herself of the costume, piece by piece, until she stood entirely naked before all the plaza's massed eyes—some of which already knew every detail and private crevice of her body. The priests handed her a bundle of twenty small reed flutes, and she turned her back to the crowd. The two priests flanked her as she slowly climbed toward the altar stone and temple above. She played a trill on one of the flutes at each of the twenty ascending steps, then broke that flute in her hands. On the last step, she may perhaps have played a little longer and more sadly on the last flute, but the escorting priests would not let her prolong the song unduly. It was required that Xipe Totec's life end when the final flute's trilling ended.

Then she was seized by the other priests waiting at the pyramid summit, and was laid backward across the stump of stone there, and two of the priests whipped out their obsidian knives. While one rent the breast and tore out the still pulsing heart, the other sawed off the still blinking and mouthing head. In none of our other ceremonies was the sacrificial victim decapitated, and it had no religious significance even in the Xipe Totec rites, where the xochimíqui was beheaded only for a practical reason: it is easier to remove a dead person's skin when the head and body are separated.

The flaying was done out of sight of the crowd, the two pieces of the youth having been whisked inside the temple, and the priests were very deft at it. The head's skin was slit up the back, from nape to crown, the scalp and face peeled off the skull and the eyelids cut away. The body was also slit up the back, from anus to neck stump, but the skin of arms and legs was carefully loosed as untorn empty tubes. If the xochimíqui had been a young woman, the padding of soft flesh inside her breasts and buttocks was left intact to preserve their rotundity. If it had been a young man, his tepúli and olóltin were left attached and dangling.

The smallest priest of Xipe Totec—and there was always one small man among them—quickly doffed his robes and, naked, donned the two pieces of the costume. The body skin being still moist and slippery on the inside, it was not difficult for him to wriggle his own arms and legs into the corresponding tubes. The dead feet had been removed, for they would interfere with the priest's dancing, but the dead hands were left attached to wave and flap alongside his own. The torso skin of course did not meet at the back, but it was there perforated for thongs which laced it tight around his body. The priest then put on the dead youth's hair and face, positioned so that he could see through the empty eyeholes and sing through the slack lips, and it too was laced up the back. Any traces of blood on the outside of the costume were sponged off and the slit in the chest skin was sewn shut.

All that took very little longer than it takes me to tell it to Your Excellency. It seemed to the onlookers that the dead Xipe Totec had scarcely left the altar stone than he reappeared alive in the temple doorway. He stood bent, pretending to be an old man, leaning for support on two glistening thighbones, the only other parts of the xochimíqui's body utilized in the ceremony. As the drums roared to greet him, The Dear One Flayed slowly straightened up, like an old man becoming young again. He danced down the pyramid stairs and capered maniacally about the plaza, flourishing the slimy thighbones and using them to give a tap of blessing to everyone who could press close enough.

Before the ceremony, the small priest always made himself drunk and delirious by eating many of the mushrooms called the flesh of the gods. He had to, for he had the most arduous part in the remainder of the proceedings. He was required to dance frantically and unceasingly, except during those periods when he collapsed unconscious, for five days and nights thereafter. Of course, his dance gradually lost its first wild abandon, as the skin he wore began to dry and tighten on him. Toward the close of the five days, it was so shrunken and crackly as to be really constrictive, and the sun and air had turned it to a sickly yellow color—for which reason it was called the Garment of Gold—and it smelled so horrible that no one then in the plaza would come near enough for Xipe Totec to bless him with a tap of a bone—

His Excellency's latest anguished departure impels me to remark—if it is not irreverent, lord scribes—that His Excellency has a remarkable faculty for joining us always to hear only those things that will most annoy or disgust him to hear.

In later years I was to say, with deep regret, that I wished I had never denied Zyanya anything; that I ought to have let her do and see and experience everything that caught her interest and dilated her eyes with wonder; that I should never even once have thwarted her blithe enthusiasm for every smallest thing in the world about her. Still, I cannot reproach myself that I kept her from ever seeing the Xipe Totec ceremony.

Whether or not I can claim any credit, no bad influences got into Zyanya's milk. The baby Cocóton thrived on it, and grew, and grew ever more pretty, a miniature of her mother and aunt. I doted on her, but I was not the only one who did. When Zyanya and Béu one day took the baby with them to market, a Totonacatl passerby saw Cocóton smiling from the shawl sling in which Béu carried her, and asked the women's permission to capture that smile in clay. He was one of those itinerant artists who turn out quantities of terra cotta figurines from molds and then tramp about the countryside to sell them cheaply to poor farm folk. On the spot, he adroitly did a little clay portrait of Cocóton, and later, after he had used it to make his mold for stamping out the duplicates, he came and presented Zyanya with the original. It was not really a perfect likeness, and he had put upon it the flared Totonaca headdress, but I instantly recognized my daughter's broad and infectious smile, complete with dimples. I do not know how many copies he made, but for a long time you could see little girls everywhere playing with that doll. Even some adults bought it under the impression that it represented the laughing young god Xochipili, Lord of Flowers, or the happy goddess Xilonen, Young Maize Mother. I should not be surprised if there are still some of those figurines here and there, still unbroken, but it would, lacerate my heart if I found one now and saw again that smile of my daughter and my wife.

Toward the close of the child's first year of life, when she had grown her first little maize-kernel teeth, she was weaned in the age-old manner of Mexíca mothers. When she cried to be suckled, her lips would more and more often encounter not Zyanya's sweet breast but a bitter leaf cupped over it: one of the astringent, mouth-puckering leaves of the sabila maguey. Gradually, Cocóton let herself be persuaded to take instead soft mushes like atóli, and eventually abandoned the nipple altogether. It was at that time that Béu Ribé announced that she was no longer needed by our family, that she would return to her inn, that Turquoise could easily take over the care of the infant when Zyanya was weary or occupied with other things.

I again provided an escort for Béu: the same seven soldiers whom I had come to regard as my private little army, and I walked with her and them as far as the causeway.

"We hope you will come again, sister Waiting Moon," I said, though we had already spent most of that morning saying farewells, and Béu had been given many gifts, and both women had wept a good deal.

"I will come whenever I am needed... or wanted," she said. "Getting away from Tecuantépec this first time should make it easier for me in the future. But I think I shall not often be needed or ever wanted. I would rather not admit having been wrong, Záa, but honesty compels me. You are a good husband to my sister."

"It takes no great effort," I said. "The best of husbands is that man who has the best of wives."

She said, with a touch of her former teasing manner, "How do you know? You have married only one. Tell me, Záa, do you never feel even a fleeting attraction to... to any other woman?"

"Oh, yes," I said, laughing at myself. "I am human, and human emotions can be unruly, and there are many other alluring women. Like you, Béu. I can even be attracted to women less beautiful than Zyanya or you—merely out of curiosity about the possible other attributes under their clothes or behind their faces. But in nearly nine years my thoughts have never yet progressed to the deed, and to lie beside Zyanya quickly dispels the thoughts, so I do not blush for them."

I hasten to say, reverend friars, that my Christian catechists taught me different: that a wanton idea can be just as sinful as the most lascivious fornication. But I was then still a heathen; we all were. So the whims that I did not invite and did not commit did not trouble me any more than anybody else was troubled by them.

Béu looked at me sidelong from her glorious eyes and said, "You are already an Eagle Knight. It only remains for you to be honored with the -tzin to your name. As a noble, you need not stifle even your most secret yearnings. Zyanya could not object to being the First Wife among your others, if she approved of the others. You could have all the women you want."

I smiled and said, "I already do. She is most aptly named Always."

Béu nodded and turned and, without looking back, walked out of sight along the causeway.

There were men working that day at the island end of the causeway Béu crossed, and others working along the length of it, as far as the midway fort of Acachinánco, and there were other laborers at work on the mainland to the southwest. The men were building the two ends of a new stone aqueduct to bring an increased supply of fresh water to the city.

For a long time, the many communities and settled lands of the lake district had been so rapidly increasing in population that all three nations of The Triple Alliance were becoming intolerably overcrowded. Tenochtítlan, of course, was the worst affected, for the simple reason that it was an island incapable of expansion. That is why, when the Xoconóchco was annexed, so many city dwellers picked up their families and households and moved to settle there. And that voluntary migration gave the Uey-Tlatoani the idea of encouraging other removals.

By then, it had become evident that the Tapachtlan garrison would forever discourage any further forays of enemies into the Xoconóchco, so Motecuzóma the Younger was relieved of his command there. As I have explained, Ahuítzotl had reasons for keeping his nephew at a distance. But he was also shrewd enough to go on making use of the man's proven ability for organization and administration. He sent Motecuzóma next to Teloloapan, a flyspeck village between Tenochtítlan and the southern ocean, and commanded him to make of it another fortified and thriving community on the model of Tapachtlan.

For that, Motecuzóma was given another sizable army troop and a sizable number of civilians. Those were families and individuals who may or may not have been dissatisfied with life in Tenochtítlan or its environs, but when the Revered Speaker said, "You will go," they went. And when Motecuzóma allotted them estimable landholdings in and around Teloloapan, they all settled down under his governorship, to make of that miserable village a respectable town.

So, as soon as Teloloapan had a garrison built and was feeding itself with its own harvests, Motecuzóma the Younger was again relieved of command and sent to do the same thing elsewhere. Ahuítzotl ordered him to one petty village after another: Oztoman, Alahuiztlan—I forget all their names, but they were all situated on the farther borders of The Triple Alliance. As those remote colonies multiplied and each of them grew, they accomplished three things pleasing to Ahuítzotl. They drained away more and more of the excess population of our lake district—from Texcóco, Tlácopan, and other lake cities as well as from Tenochtítlan. They provided us with strong frontier outposts. And the continuing process of colonization kept Motecuzóma both profitably occupied and far from any possibility of intriguing against his uncle.

But the emigrations and removals could only stop the increase of population in Tenochtítlan; there was never enough of an outpouring to lessen the crowding and elbowing of those who remained. The island-city's chief need was of more fresh water. A steady supply of that had been arranged by the first Motecuzóma when he built the aqueduct from the sweet springs of Chapultepec, more than a sheaf of years before, about the same time he built the Great Dike to protect the city from windblown floods. But the flow from Chapultepec could not be persuaded to increase just because more was needed. That was proved; a number of our priests and sorcerers tried all their means of suasion, and all failed.

It was then that Ahuítzotl determined to find a new source of water, and sent those same priests and sorcerers and a few of his Speaking Council wise men to scout other regions of the nearby mainland. By whatever means of divination, they did tap into a previously undiscovered spring, and the Revered Speaker at once began to plan a new aqueduct. Since that newfound stream near Coyohuacan gushed up more strongly than that of Chapultepec, Ahuítzotl even planned for it to make fountains spout in The Heart of the One World.

But not everybody was so enthusiastic, and one who advised caution was the Revered Speaker Nezahualpili of Texcóco, when he was invited by Ahuítzotl to inspect the new spring and the work just getting under way on the new aqueduct. I did not hear their conversation with my own ears; there was no reason for me to be present on that occasion; I was probably at home playing games with my baby daughter. But I can reconstruct the consultation of the two Revered Speakers from what I was told by their attendants long after the event.

For one thing, Nezahualpili warned, "My friend, you and your city may have to choose between having too little water and having too much of it," and he reminded Ahuítzotl of some historical facts.

This city is now and has for sheaves of years been an island surrounded by water, but it was not always so. When the earliest ancestors of us Mexíca came from the mainland to make their permanent habitation here, they walked here. It was no doubt a sloppy and uncomfortable march for them, but they did not have to swim. All the area that is now water between here and the mainland to the west, to the north, to the south, was in those days only a soggy swamp of mud and puddles and sawgrass, and this place was then merely the one dry and firm extrusion of land in that widespread marsh.

Over the years of building a city here, those early settlers also laid firmer paths for easier access to the mainland. Perhaps their first paths were no more than ridges of packed earth, a trifle higher than the bog. But eventually the Mexíca sank double rows of pilings and tamped rubble between them, and on top of those foundations laid the stone pavings and parapets of the three causeways that still exist. Those causeways impeded the marsh's draining its surface waters into the lake beyond, and the blocked swamp waters began perceptibly to rise.

It made a considerable improvement over previous conditions. The water covered the stinking mud and the leg-slashing sawgrass and the standing puddles from which swarms of mosquitoes were endlessly being born. Of course, if the water had continued to mount, it could eventually have covered this island, too, and flooded into the streets of Tlácopan and other mainland cities. But the causeways were built with wooden-bridged gaps in them at intervals, and the island itself was trenched with its many canals for the passage of canoes. Those spillways allowed a sufficient overflow of the waters into Lake Texcóco on the island's eastern side, so the artificially created lagoon rose only so high and no higher.

"Or it has not yet," Nezahualpili said to Ahuítzotl. "But now you propose to pipe new water across from the mainland. It must go somewhere."

"It goes to the city for our people's consumption," Ahuítzotl said testily. "For drinking, bathing, laundering..."

"Very little water is ever consumed," said Nezahualpili. "Even if your people drink it all the day long, they must urinate it as well. I repeat: the water must go somewhere. And where but into this damned-in part of the lake? Its level could rise faster than it can drain out through your canals and causeway passages into Lake Texcóco beyond."

Beginning to swell and redden, Ahuítzotl demanded, "Do you suggest we ignore our newfound spring, that gift of the gods? That we do nothing to alleviate the thirst of Tenochtítlan?"

"It might be more prudent. At least, I suggest you build your aqueduct in such a way that the flow of water can be monitored and controlled—and shut off if necessary."

Ahuítzotl said in a growl, "With your increasing years, old friend, you become increasingly a fearful old woman. If we Mexíca had always listened to those who told us what could not be done, we should never have done anything."

"You asked my opinion, old friend, and I have given it," said Nezahualpili. "But the final responsibility is yours, and"—he smiled—"your name is Water Monster."

The Aqueduct of Ahuítzotl was finished within a year or so after that, and the palace seers took great pains to choose a most auspicious day for its dedication and the first unloosing of its waters. I remember well the date of the day, Thirteen Wind, for it lived up to its name.

The crowd began to gather long before the ceremony commenced, for it was almost as much of an event as the dedication of the Great Pyramid had been, twelve years earlier. But of course all those people could not be let onto the Coyohuacan causeway where the main rituals were to be performed. The mass of commonfolk had to clump together at the southern end of the city, and jostle and lean and peer for a glimpse of Ahuítzotl, his wives, his Speaking Council, the high nobles, priests, knights, and other personages who would come by canoe from the palace to take their places on the causeway between the city and the Acachinánco fort. Unfortunately, I had to be among those dignitaries, in full uniform and in the full company of Eagle Knights. Zyanya wanted also to attend, and to bring Cocóton with her, but again I dissuaded her.

"Even if I could arrange for you to get close enough to sec anything," I said, as I wriggled into my quilted and feathered armor that morning, "you would be buffeted and drenched by the lake wind and spray. Also, in that crush of people, you might fall or faint, and the child could be trampled."

"I suppose you are right," said Zyanya, sounding not much disappointed. Impulsively, she hugged the little girl to her. "And Cocóton is too pretty to be squeezed by anybody but us."

"No squeeze!" Cocóton complained, but with dignity. She slipped out of her mother's arms and toddled off to the other side of the room. At the age of two years, our daughter had a considerable store of words, but she was no chattering squirrel; she seldom exercised more than two of her words at a time.

"When Crumb was first born, I thought her hideous," I said, as I went on dressing. "Now I think her so pretty that she cannot possibly get any more so. She can only deteriorate, and it is a pity. By the time we want to marry her off, she will look like a wild sow."

"Wild sow," Cocóton agreed, from the corner.

"She will not," Zyanya said firmly. "A child, if it is pretty at all, reached its utmost infant beauty at two, and goes on being lovely—with subtle changes, of course—until it reaches its utmost childhood beauty at six. Little boys stop there, but little girls—"

I growled.

"I mean boys stop being beautiful. They may go on to become handsome, comely, manly, but not beautiful. Or at least they should hope not. Most women dislike pretty men as much as other men do."

I said I was glad, then, that I had grown up ugly. When she did not correct me, I assumed a look of mock melancholy.

"Then," she went on, "little girls reach another eminence of beauty at twelve or thereabouts, just before their first bleeding. During adolescence, they are usually much too gangly and moody to be admired at all. But then they begin to blossom again, and at twenty or so—yes, at twenty, I would say—a girl is more beautiful than she ever was before or ever will be again."

"I know," I said. "You were twenty when I fell in love with you and married you. And you have not aged by a day since then."

"Flatterer and liar," she said, but with a smile. "I have lines at the corners of my eyes, and my breasts are not so firm as then, and there are stretch marks on my belly, and—"

"No matter," I said. "Your beauty at twenty made such an impression on my mind that it has remained indelibly carved there. I will never see you otherwise, even when someday people tell me, 'You old fool, you are looking at an old crone.' I shall not believe them, for I cannot."

I had to pause for a moment's thought, but then I said in her native language, "Rizalazi Zyanya chuupa chu, chuupa chu Zyanya," which was a sort of playing with words, to say more or less, "Remember Always at twenty makes her twenty always."

She asked tenderly, "Zyanya?"

And I assured her, "Zyanya."

"It will be nice," she said, with a misty look about her eyes, "to think that as long as I am with you, I will forever be a girl of twenty. Or even if sometimes we must be apart. Wherever you are in the world, there I am still a girl of twenty." She blinked her lashes until her eyes were glowing again, and she smiled and said, "I should have mentioned before, Záa—you are not really ugly."

"Really ugly," said my loved and loving daughter.

It made us both laugh, and broke that enchanted moment. I took up my shield and said, "I must go." Zyanya kissed me good-bye, and I left the house.

It was still quite early in the morning. The garbage scows were plying the canal at the end of our street, collecting the night's heaps of refuse. That disposal of the city's wastes was the most menial work in Tenochtítlan, and only the most derelict of wretches were employed at it—hopeless cripples, incurable drinkers, and the like. I turned away from that depressing sight and walked in the other direction, uphill along the street toward the main plaza, and I had gone some way before I heard Zyanya call my name.

I turned and raised my topaz. She had come out of the house door to wave one more farewell and call something to me before going inside again. It could have been something womanly: "Tell me what the First Lady wore." Or something wifely: "Take care not to get too wet." Or something from the heart: "Remember that I love you." Whatever it was, I did not hear it, for a wind came up, a wind, and blew her words away.

* * *

Since the Coyohuacan spring was on a part of the mainland somewhat higher than the street level of Tenochtítlan, the aqueduct sloped downward from there. It was rather broader and deeper than a man's spread arms could reach, and it was nearly two one-long-runs in length. It met the causeway just where the Acachinánco fort stood, and there it angled left to parallel the causeway's parapet, straight into the city. Once ashore, its trough branched to feed lesser channels running throughout both Tenochtítlan and Tlaltelólco, and to fill storage basins at convenient spots in every quarter, and to spout from several newly built fountains in the main plaza.

To some degree, Ahuítzotl and his builders had heeded the caution of Nezahualpili that the stream of water be controllable. At the angle where the aqueduct joined the causeway, and again at the point where it entered tie city, the stone trough had been notched with vertical slots, into which fitted stout boards shaped to the curvature of the trough. The boards merely had to be dropped into the slots to cut off the flow of water, should that ever be necessary.

The new structure was to be dedicated to the goddess of ponds and streams and other waters, the frog-faced Chalchihuitlicuó, and she was not so demanding of human offerings as were some other gods. So the sacrifices that day were to be only as numerous as necessary. At the far end of the aqueduct, at the spring, out of our sight, was another contingent of nobles and priests, and a number of warriors guarding a gathering of prisoners. Since we Mexíca had been lately too busy to engage even in any Flowery Wars, most of those prisoners were common bandits whom the Younger Motecuzóma had encountered in his marchings hither and yon, and captured and sent to Tenochtítlan for just such purposes.

On the causeway where Ahuítzotl stood—along with me and some hundreds of others, all of us trying to keep our various plumes and pinions from taking wing on the east wind—there were prayers and chants and invocations, during which the lesser priests swallowed a quantity of live frogs and axololtin and other water creatures, to please Chalchihuitlicuó. Then an urn fire was lighted, and some priestly secret substance sprinkled on it to make it billow a blue-colored smoke. Though the gusts of wind tore at the smoke column, it climbed high enough to signal the other ceremonial group at the Coyohuacan spring.

There the priests threw their first prisoner into the trough of that end of the aqueduct, slit his body open from throat to groin, and let his body lie there while his blood ran. Another prisoner was thrown in and the same thing done. As each earlier corpse began to run dry, it was yanked out, so that more and freshly gushing ones could be piled in. I do not know how many xochimíque were slain and drained there, before the first of their blood sluggishly oozed into view of the waiting Ahuítzotl and his priests, all of whom sent up a praiseful cheer at the sight. Another substance was sprinkled on the urn fire, producing a red smoke: the signal for the priests at the spring to cease their slaughter.

It was time for Ahuítzotl to make the most important sacrifice, and he had been provided with a uniquely suitable victim: a little girl about four years of age, dressed in a water-blue garment with green and blue gems sewn all over it. She was the daughter of a fowler who had drowned when his acáli overturned sometime before she was born, and she had been born with a face very like that of a frog—or of the goddess Chalchihuitlicue. The girl's widowed mother had taken those water-related coincidences as a sign from the goddess, and had volunteered her daughter for the ceremony.

To the accompaniment of a great deal more chanting and cawing of the priests, the Revered Speaker lifted the little girl into the trough before him. Other priests poised themselves beside the urn fire. Ahuítzotl pressed the child supine in the trough and reached for the obsidian knife at his waist. The urn fire's smoke changed to green, another signal, and the priests at the mainland end of the aqueduct let loose the spring water. Whether they did that by pulling free some kind of stopper, or breaking one last earthen dike, or rolling aside a boulder, or what, I do not know.

I do know that the water, though at first it came colored red, did not come oozing as the blood had done. With the momentum of its long slide from the mainland, it came rushing, an immense liquid spear, its point made of boiling pink foam. Where the water had to round the angle of the trough at the causeway, all of it did not; some of it reared up there and broke over the parapet like an ocean comber. Still, enough of it surged on around the bend to take Ahuítzotl by surprise. He had just slit open the child's breast and grasped her heart, but he had not had time to sever its connecting vessels, when the rush of water swept the still-writhing child away from him. She tore loose of her own little heart—Ahuítzotl stood holding it, looking stunned—and the girl shot off toward the city like a pellet through a blowpipe.

All of us on the causeway stood as if we had been sculptured there, motionless except for our wind-whipped feather headdresses and mantles and banners. Then I became aware that I was wet to the ankles. So was everybody; Ahuítzotl's women began squealing in distress. The pavement under us was awash in water that was rapidly rising. It was still leaping the parapet from the angle in the aqueduct, and the whole Acachinánco fort was shaking from the impact of it.

Nevertheless, the greater part of the water continued to race along the trough and on to the city, with such force that, when it hit the branching channels there, it broke like surf on a beach. Through my crystal I could see the tightly packed crowd of spectators milling in the splash and spray, fighting to disperse and flee. All through the city, beyond our sight, the new channels and storage basins were brimming over, wetting the streets and emptying into the canals. The new plaza fountains were spurting so exuberantly high that their water did not fall back into the drainage pools around them; it was spreading in a layer across the entire extent of The Heart of the One World.

The priests of Chalchihuitlicue broke out in a babble of prayers, beseeching the goddess to abate her abundance. Ahuítzotl roared for them to be silent, then began bellowing names—"Yolcatl! Papaquiliztli!"—the names of the men who had discovered the new spring. Those who were present obediently sloshed through the now knee-high water, and, knowing well why they had been called, one by one leaned backward across the parapet. Ahuítzotl and the priests, without any ritual words or gestures, tore open the men's chests, tore out and flung their hearts into the racing water. Eight men were sacrificed in that act of desperation, two of them ancient and august members of the Speaking Council—and it did no good whatever.

So Ahuítzotl shouted, "Drop the trough gate!" and several Arrow Knights leapt forward to the parapet. They seized the wooden panel designed to shut off the water's flow, and slid it down into the trough's slots. But, for all their combined strength and weight, the knights could push the panel only so far. As soon as its curved lower edge went into the water, the powerful current tilted it in the slot and jammed it at that point. For a moment there was silence on the causeway, except for the water's swoosh and gurgle, the sighing and hooting of the east wind, the creaking of the beleaguered wooden fort, and the muted hubbub of the fast-departing crowd at the island end. Looking at last defeated, with all his plumes drenched and drooping, the Revered Speaker said, loudly enough for us all to hear:

"We must go back to the city and see what damage has been done, and do what we can to allay the panic. Arrow and Jaguar Knights, come with us. You will commandeer all the acaltin on the island and row immediately to Coyohuacan. Those fools yonder are probably still celebrating. Do whatever you can to stop or divert the water at its source. Eagle Knights, stay here." He pointed to where the aqueduct joined the causeway. "Break it. There. Now!"

There was some confusion as the several designated groups disentangled. Then Ahuítzotl, his wives and his retinue, the priests and nobles, the Arrow and Jaguar Knights—all were slogging toward Tenochtítlan, as swiftly as they could with the nearly thigh-deep water dragging at them. We Eagle Knights stood contemplating the heavy stone and stout mortar of the trough. Two or three knights struck at the stone with their maquahuime, making the rest of us dodge the flying splinters of broken obsidian. Those knights looked disgustedly at their ruined swords and threw them into the lake.

Then one elderly knight went some way down the causeway to peer over its parapet. He called to us, "How many of you can swim?" and most of us raised our hands. He pointed and said, "Right here, where the aqueduct swerves, the force of the water's changing direction is making the pilings tremble. Perhaps, if we can chop at them, we could weaken them enough that the structure will quake itself apart."

And that is what we did. I and eight other knights struggled out of our clammy and bedraggled uniforms, while unbroken maquahuime were found for us, then we dove over the parapet into the lake on that side. As I have said, the waters west of the causeway were in those days nowhere very deep. If we had had to swim, the chopping would have been impossible, but the rising water was yet only shoulder-high at that spot. Even so, it was no trifling job. Those tree-trunk supports had been impregnated with chapopotli to resist decay, and that made them resistant to our blades as well. The night had come and gone, and the sun was up, when one of the massive pilings jerked and gave an explosive crack! I was underwater at that moment and the concussion nearly stunned me, but I surfaced to hear one of my fellow knights shouting for us all to climb back to the causeway.

We got there just in time. That part of the aqueduct which angled off from the causeway was quivering violently. With a grinding noise, it broke at the bend in it. Flinging water in all directions, that loose end of the structure shook like the warning tail of a coacuechtli snake. Then a section some ten paces long slewed to one side, as the pilings we had chopped gave way under it, and broke loose with a groan and toppled with a mighty splash. The jagged end of the trough out there was still cascading water into the lake, but it was pouring no more into Tenochtítlan. Even as we stood there, the water already on the causeway began to ebb.

"Let us return home," one of my brother knights sighed, "and hope we have saved some homes to return to."

Home. Let me put off for a little while the telling of my homecoming.

The water that had poured into Tenochtítlan for the better part of a day and a whole night had inundated parts of the city as deep as the height of a man. Some houses built low, and not of stone, had crumbled in that flood; and even some houses built high had been toppled from their supports; and many people had been injured; and about twenty—mostly children—had been drowned or crushed or otherwise lost. But the damage and casualties had been limited to those parts of the city where the branch channels and storage basins had overflowed, and that water had drained away into the canals soon after we Eagle Knights severed the aqueduct.

However, before the litter of that lesser inundation could be cleared away, the second and greater flood came. We had only broken the aqueduct, not stoppered it, and the other knights whom Ahuítzotl had sent to the mainland were unable to stanch the spring there. It continued to gush its waters into the part of the lake contained and confined between our western and southern causeways. Meanwhile, the wind continued to blow from the east, preventing the excess water from draining out into the big Lake Texcóco through the causeway passages and the canals crossing our city. So the canals filled and brimmed and overflowed, and the water rose over the island, and Tenochtítlan became a great cluster of many buildings poking up not from an island but from an unbroken sheet of water.

Immediately upon his return from the aborted dedication ceremony, Ahuítzotl sent a boatman to Texcóco, and Nezahualpili came immediately in response to the call for help. He had a force of workmen rushed straight to the unquenchable Coyohuacan spring and, as all had hoped, he did devise a means of pinching off the flow. I have never visited the site, but I know it is on a hillside, and I gather that Nezahualpili commanded the digging of a system of trenches and earthworks which diverted part of the spring's effluence over the far side of the hill where it could run harmlessly into empty land. Once that was accomplished, and the spring tamed, and the flood all dissipated, the aqueduct could be repaired and put back into use. Nezahualpili designed gates that would, as required by the city's needs, let much or little of the spring's water down the aqueduct. And so, to this day, we still drink those sweet waters.

But Nezahualpili's salvage operation was no overnight accomplishment. While he and his workmen labored, that second flood stood at its crest for four entire days. Though few or no people perished in it, at least two-thirds of the city was destroyed, and the rebuilding of Tenochtítlan took some four years to complete. The flood would not have caused so much damage if the water had merely covered our streets and lain quietly there. Instead, it surged back and forth, moved one way by the force impelling it to seek a uniform level, moved the other way by the malicious east wind. Most of Tenochtítlan's buildings were held above street level by pilings or some other kind of foundation, but that was only to lift them above the ground's dampness. Their foundations had never been intended to withstand the battering currents they then endured—and most of them did not stand. Adobe houses simply dissolved in the water. Stone houses, small and large, fell when their underpinnings were gnawed away, and they broke into the blocks of which they were built.

My own house stood unharmed, probably because it was rather newer built, hence stronger than most others. In The Heart of the One World the pyramids and temples also remained standing; only the comparatively fragile skull rack came down. But just outside the plaza, one entire palace collapsed—the newest and most magnificent of all—the palace of the Uey-Tlatoani Ahuítzotl. I have told how it straddled one of the city's main canals, so that the passing public might admire its interior. When, like all the other canals, that one overflowed, it first filled the ground floor of the palace and then bulged the lower walls outward, at which the whole great edifice came thundering down.

I did not know of those happenings, I did not even know I was fortunate enough to have still a house of my own, until after the last of the water ebbed away. In that second and worse flood, the water's rising was at least less sudden, giving time for the city to be evacuated. Except for Ahuítzotl and his other governing nobles, the palace guard, some other troops of soldiers and a number of priests stubbornly continuing to pray for godly intervention, practically everyone in Tenochtítlan fled across the northern causeway to find shelter in the mainland cities of Tepeyáca and Atzacoálco, including me, my two servants, and what remained of my family.

To go back to that earlier day, that early morning when I came home dragging my sodden Eagle Knight regalia...

It was obvious, as I approached, that my Ixacualco quarter of the city had been among the districts hit hardest by that first spate from the aqueduct. I could see the high-water mark still wet on the buildings, as high as my head, and here and there an adobe house sat askew. The hard-packed clay of my street was slippery with a film of mud; there were puddles and rubbish and even some valuable objects apparently dropped by people in flight. There were at that moment no other people to be seen—no doubt they were indoors, unsure whether the flood wave would come again—but the street's unaccustomed emptiness made me uneasy. I was too tired to run, but I shuffled as rapidly as possible, and my heart lifted when I saw my house still standing, unmarked except for the deposit of slime on its entry stairs.

Turquoise flung open the front door, exclaiming, "Ayyo, it is our lord master! All thanks to Chalchihuitlicue for sparing you!"

Wearily but with feeling, I said I wished that particular goddess in Mictlan.

"Do not speak so!" pleaded Turquoise, tears running down the wrinkles of her face. "We feared that we had lost our master also!"

"Also?" I gasped, an invisible band tightening painfully around my chest. The elderly slave woman broke into violent weeping and could not reply. I dropped the things I was carrying and seized her by the shoulders. "The child?" I demanded. She shook her head, but whether in denial or grief I could not tell. I shook her fiercely and said, "Speak, woman!"

"It was our lady Zyanya," said another voice from behind her, that of the manservant Star Singer, who came to the doorway wringing his hands. "I saw the whole thing. I tried to stop her."

I did not let go of Turquoise or I should have fallen. I could only manage to say, "Tell me, Star Singer."

"Know then, my master. It was yesterday, at dusk, the time when the street torch lighters would ordinarily have been coming. But of course they did not; the street was a seething cataract. Only one man came—being swept along and bludgeoned against the torch poles and the house stairs. He kept trying to find his footing or to seize onto something that would stop his progress. But, even when he was still distant, I could see that he was already crippled and he could not—"

As harshly as I could, in my agony and weakness, I said, "What has all this to do with my wife? Where is she?"

"She was at this front window," he said, pointing, and went on with infuriating deliberation. "She had been here the whole day, worrying and waiting for your return, my lord. I was with her when the man came flailing and thrashing down the street, and she cried out that we must save him. I was naturally not eager to venture into that raging water, and I told her, 'My lady, I can recognize him from here. It is only an old derelict who sometimes of late has worked on the garbage canoes which serve this quarter. He is not worth anyone's trouble."

Star Singer paused, swallowed, and said huskily, "I can make no complaint if my lord beats me or sells me or slays me, for I should have gone to save the man. Because my lady gave me a look of wrath and went herself. To the door and down the stairs, while I watched from this window, and she leaned into the flood and caught him."

He paused and gulped again, and I rasped, "Well? If they were both safe...?"

Star Singer shook his head. "That is what I do not understand. Of course, my lord, the stairs were wet and slippery. But what it looked like—it looked as if my lady spoke to the man, and started to let go of him, but then... but then the waters took them. Took them both, for he was clutching to her. I could see only a tumbling bundle as they were swept together out of my sight. But at that I did run out, and plunged into the current after them."

"Star Singer almost drowned, my lord," said Turquoise, sniffling. "He tried, he really did."

"There was no sign of them," he resumed, miserably. "Toward the end of the street, a number of old adobe houses had fallen—perhaps on them, I thought. But it was getting too dark to see, and I was knocked nearly insensible by a floating timber. I seized the doorpost of a sturdy house and clung there all the night."

"He came home when the waters went down this morning," said Turquoise. "Then we both went out and searched."

"Nothing?" I croaked.

"We found only the man," said Star Singer. "Half buried under some fallen rubble, as I had suspected."

Turquoise said, "Cocóton has not yet been told about her mother. Will my lord go up to her now?"

"And tell her what I cannot believe myself?" I moaned. I summoned some last reserve of energy to straighten my sagging body and said, "No, I will not. Come, Star Singer. Let us search again."

Beyond my house the street gently sloped downward as it approached the canal-crossing bridge, so the houses down there had naturally been more violently struck by the wall of water. Also, they were the less impressive houses on the street, built of wood or adobe. As Star Singer had said, they were houses no longer; they were heaps of half-broken, half-dissolved bricks of mud and straw, splintered planks, and oddments of furniture. The servant pointed to a crumple of cloth among them and said:

"There lies the wretch. No loss at all. He lived by selling himself to the men of the garbage boats. Those who could not afford a woman could use him, and he charged only a single cacao bean."

He lay face down, a thing of filthy rags and mud-matted long gray hair. I used my foot to turn him over, and I looked at him for the last time. Chimali looked back at me with empty eye sockets and gaping mouth.

Not then, but some while later, when I could think, I thought about Star Singer's words: that the man had lately been aboard the scows serving our neighborhood. I wondered: had Chimali only recently discovered where I lived? Had he come haunting, hoping, blindly groping for one more opportunity to work mischief on me or mine? Had the flood given him the chance to inflict the most hurtful possible injury, and then to put himself beyond my vengeance forever? Or had the whole tragedy been a ghastly and gleeful contrivance of the gods? They do seem to find amusement in arranging concurrences of events that would otherwise be unlikely, inexplicable, beyond belief. I would never know.

And at that moment I knew only that my wife was gone, that I could not accept her being gone, that I had to search. I said to Star Singer, "If the cursed man is here, so must Zyanya be. We will move every one of these millions of bricks. I will start on it, while you go for more hands to help. Go!"

Star Singer scampered away, and I leaned over to lift and fling aside a wooden beam, but I kept on leaning and pitched forward on my face.

It was late afternoon when I came back to consciousness, and in my own bed, with both the servants bending solicitously over me. The first thing I asked was, "Did we find her?" When both the heads shook in rueful negation, I snarled, "I told you to move every brick!"

"Master, it cannot be done," whimpered Star Singer. "The water rises again. I returned and found you just in time, or you would have been face down in it."

"We were wondering whether to rouse you," said Turquoise, in obvious anxiety. "The word has been spoken by the Revered Speaker. The whole city must be vacated before it is all under water."

And so that night I sat sleepless on a hillside among a multitude of sleeping fugitives. "Long walk," Cocóton had commented, on the way. Since only the first people to leave Tenochtítlan had found accommodations on the mainland, the later arrivals had simply stopped wherever there was room to lie down in the countryside. "Dark night," said my daughter appropriately. We four had not even a sheltering tree, but Turquoise had thought to bring blankets. She and Star Singer and Cocóton lay rolled in theirs, snugly asleep, but I sat up, with my blanket about my shoulders, and I looked down at my child, my Crumb, the precious and only remnant of my wife, and I mourned.

Some time ago, my lord friars, I tried to describe Zyanya by comparing her to the bounteous and generous maguey plant, but there is one thing I forgot to tell you about the maguey. Once in its lifetime, just once, it puts up a single spear which bears an abundance of sweet-scented yellow flowers, and then the maguey dies.

I tried hard that night to take comfort from the unctuous assurances our priests always spoke: that the dead do not repine or grieve. Death, said the priests, is merely one's awakening from a dream of having lived. Perhaps so. Your Christian priests say much the same thing. But that was small comfort to me, who had to remain behind in the dream, alive, alone, bereft. So I passed that night remembering Zyanya and the too-brief time we had together before her dream ended. I still remember—

Once, when we were on that journey into Michihuácan, she saw an unfamiliar flower growing from a cleft in a cliff, some way above our heads, and she admired it, and she said she wished she had one like it to plant at home, and I could easily have climbed up and plucked it for her....

And once—oh, it was no particular occasion—she woke in love with the day, and that was not unusual for Zyanya—and she made a small song, and then a melody for it, and she went about softly singing it to fix it in her memory, and she asked me if I would buy her one of the those jug flutes called the warbling waters, upon which she could play her song. I said I would, the next time I met a musician acquaintance and could persuade him to make me one. But I forgot, and she—seeing I had other things on my mind—she never reminded me. And once...

Ayya, the many times...

Oh, I know she never doubted that I loved her, but why did I let slip even the least opportunity to demonstrate it? I know she forgave my occasional thoughtless lapses and trivial neglects; she probably forgot them on the instant, which I never have been able to do. Through all the years of my life since then, I have been reminded of this or that time when I might have done such and such, and did not, and will never have the chance again. Meanwhile, the things I would prefer to remember persist in eluding me. If I could recall the words of that small song she made when she was happiest, or even just the melody of it, I could hum it sometimes to myself. Or if I knew what it was she called after me, when the wind took her words, that last time we parted—

When all of us fugitive inhabitants finally returned to the island, so much of the city was in ruins that the rubble earlier heaped along our street was indistinguishable from what had fallen afterward. Laborers and slaves were already shoving the wreckage about, salvaging the unbroken and reusable limestone blocks, leveling the rest as a foundation to rebuild upon. So Zyanya's body was never found, nor any trace of her, not so much as one of her rings or sandals. She vanished as utterly and irretrievably as that small song she once made. But, my lords, I know she is still here somewhere—though two new cities in succession have since then been built over her undiscovered grave. I know it, because she did not take with her the jadestone chip to insure her passage to the afterworld.

Many times, late at night, I have walked these streets and softly called her name. I did it in Tenochtítlan and I do it still in this City of Mexíco; an old man sleeps little at night. And I have seen many apparitions, but none of them hers.

I have encountered only unhappy or malevolent spirits, and I could not mistake any of them for Zyanya, who was happy all her life and who died while trying to do a kindness. I have seen and recognized many a dead warrior of the Mexíca; the city teems with those woebegone specters. I have seen the Weeping Woman; she is like a drifting wisp of fog, woman-shaped; and I have heard her mournful wail. But she did not frighten me; I pitied her, because I too have known deprivation; and when she could not howl me down, she fled my words of solace. Once, it seemed to me that I met and conversed with two wandering gods, Night Wind and The Oldest of Old Gods. Anyway, that is who they claimed to be, and they did me no harm, deeming that I have had harm enough in my life.

Sometimes, on streets absolutely dark and deserted, I have heard what could have been Zyanya's merry laugh. That might be a product of my senile imagination, but the laugh has each time been accompanied by a glint of light in the darkness, very like the pale streak in her black hair. And that might be a trick of my feeble eyesight, for the vision has each time disappeared when I fumbled my topaz to my eye. Nevertheless, I know she is here, somewhere, and I need no evidence, however much I yearn for it.

I have considered the matter, and I wonder. Do I meet only the doleful and misanthropic denizens of the night because I am so like them myself? Is it possible that persons of better character and gladder heart might more readily perceive the more gentle phantasms? I beg you, my lord friars, if one of you good men should encounter Zyanya some night, would you let me know? You will recognize her at once, and you will not be affrighted by a wraith of such loveliness. She will still seem a girl of twenty, as she did then, for death at least spared her the diseases and desiccation of age. And you will know that smile, for you will be unable to resist smiling in return. If she should speak...

But no, you would not comprehend her speech. Just have the kindness to tell me that you saw her. For she still walks these streets. I know it. She is here and will be always.

I H S