Aztec Autumn

IX

"¿Acuántos patos ha matado hoy?" I asked, with some diffidence.

"¡Caray, cientos! ¡Y a tenazón!" he said, grinning proudly. "Unos gansos y cisnes además."

Well, he had understood my asking how many ducks he had slain that day, and I had understood his reply: "Hah, hundreds! And without even aiming. Also some geese and swans."

It was the first time I had tested my command of Spanish on anyone but my teacher and classmates. This young man was a soldier doing fowler duty at the lakeside, and he seemed amiable, perhaps because I was in Spanish garb and he took me to be a domesticated and Christianized manservant of some sort. He went on:

"Por supuesto, no comemos los cisnes. Demasiado duro a mancar." And he took pains to make that clear to me, waggling his jaw in an exaggerated manner. "Of course, we do not eat the swans. Too tough to chew."

I had come here to the lakeside on other occasions, to watch what Pochotl had called the "strange but effective means" employed by the Spaniards to harvest the waterfowl that descended onto the lake at every dusk. It was indeed a strange method, and it was done with the thunder-stick (properly called an arcabuz) and it was indeed effective.

A considerable number of the arcabuces were tied firmly to posts sunk in the lake's bank, the weapons pointing straight out across the water. Another battery of arcabuces was similarly tied to stakes, but pointing upward at various angles and in various directions. All those weapons could be tended and set off by a single soldier. First, he pulled a string and the leveled arcabuces boomed their flashes and smokes directly across the lake surface, killing many of the birds floating there and frightening the rest into sudden flight. At which, the fowler pulled another string, and those severally aimed, uptilted arcabuces fired all together, knocking whole swarms of the birds out of the air. Then the soldier would go about to all the weapons, doing something at the front of their tubes and something else at the rear of them. By the time he had completed that task, the birds would have calmed and resettled on the water, and the twofold slaughter would commence again. Finally, before full darkness came, the fowler would send out boatmen in acáltin canoes to collect the drifts of dead birds.

Though I had witnessed that procedure several times, this was the first time I had nerved myself to ask questions about it.

"We indios never used anything but nets," I told the young soldier, "into which we drove the birds. Your method is much more rewarding. How does it work?"

"Very simple," he said. "A string is tied to the gatillo of each of the leveled arcabuces." (I was already puzzled, for gatillo means a "little cat" or a "kitten.") "All those strings are tied to a single string for me to pull and fire those weapons all at once. Likewise, strings are tied to the gatillos of all the upward-aimed—"

"I could see that," I said. "But how does the arcabuz itself work?"

"Ah," he said, and pridefully led me to one of the staked weapons, knelt beside it and began to point. "This little thing here is the gatillo." It was a bit of metal protruding from under the rearward part of the arcabuz, crescent-shaped to be pulled by a finger or, in this case, a string, and the kitten was inside a metal guard, evidently to prevent its being pulled accidentally. "And this thing here is the wheel, which is spun by a spring that you cannot see, inside the lock there." The wheel was just that—a wheel—but small, about the size of an ardite coin, made of metal and grooved with tiny teeth all around.

"What is a spring?" I asked.

"A narrow leaf of thin metal, wound into a tight coil by this key." He showed me the key, then used it to sketch a small, tight spiral in the earth at our feet. "That is what the spring looks like, and every arcabucero carries a key." He inserted his into a hole in what he had called "the lock," turned the key a time or two, and I heard a faint grating noise. "There, the wheel is ready to spin. Now, this thing here we call a cat's-paw." It was another small metal piece, not like a cat's paw at all, but shaped more like a bird's head, gripping in its beak a bit of gravel. "That stone," the soldier explained, "is a pirita." And I recognized it as a tiny fragment of what we call the "false-gold."

"Now, we cock the cat's-paw back, ready to strike," he went on, thumbing it backward with a click, "and another spring holds it there. Then—observe—I squeeze the kitten, the wheel spins and at the same instant the cat's-paw slaps its pirita against the wheel and you will see a spray of sparks."

Which is exactly what occurred, and the soldier looked more proud than ever.

"But," I said, "there was no flash or noise or smoke from the tube."

He laughed indulgently. "That is because I had not yet loaded the arcabuz or primed its cazoleta."

He produced two large leather pouches and, from one of them, dribbled a small pile of dark powder into my palm. "That is the pólvora. See, now I pour a measured amount of it down the mouth of the cañon here, and shove in behind it a small piece of cloth. Then, from this other pouch, I take a cartucho." He showed me a small, transparent sac—like a bit of tied-off animal intestine—packed with little metal pellets. "For shooting enemies or large animals, of course, we use a heavy round bala. But for birds we use a cartucho of perdigones." Then, with a long metal rod, he tamped all the contents tightly down in there. "Last of all, I put a mere touch of the pólvora here on the cazoleta." That was a little pan sticking out shelflike from the lock, where the sparks from the wheel and the false-gold would strike it. "You will notice," he concluded, "that there is a narrow hole going from the cazoleta into the cañon where the charge of pólvora is packed. Now, here, I wind the spring and you squeeze the gatillo."

I knelt down to the charged weapon with commingled curiosity, timidity and dread. But the curiosity was foremost, because I had come here and accosted the young soldier with precisely this end in mind. I put my finger through the guard beneath the arcabuz's lock, hooked it around the kitten and squeezed.

The wheel spun, the cat's-paw snapped down, the sparks sprayed, there was a noise like an angry little snarl and a puff of smoke from the powdered pan... and then the arcabuz rocked backward, and I flinched wildly away, as its mouth roared and spewed a flame and a bloom of blue smoke and, I had no doubt, all those death-dealing metal pellets. When I had recovered from the shock and the ringing in my ears, the young soldier was laughing heartily.

"¡Cáspita!" he exclaimed. "I will wager that you are the first and only indio ever to fire such a weapon. Do not let anyone know that I let you do it. Come, you can watch me load all the arcabuces for the next fusillade."

As I followed him, I said, "Then the pólvora is the absolute essential component of the arcabuz. The lock and wheel and cats and such are simply to make the pólvora work as you wish it to."

"Indeed, yes," he said. "Without the pólvora there would be no firearms at all in the world. No arcabuces, granadas, culebrínas, petardos. Ni siquiera triquitraques. Nada."

"But what is the pólvora?" I asked. "What is it made of?"

"Ah, now that I will not tell you. It was rash enough of me to let you play with the arcabuz. The orders are that no indio be allowed to handle any weapon of the white men, and my punishment for that would be dire. I certainly cannot reveal the composition of the pólvora."

I must have looked downcast, because he laughed once more and said, "I will tell you this much. The pólvora is obviously very much a man's property, for manly uses. But, oddly enough, one of its ingredients is a very intimate contribution from the ladies."

He went on laughing as he went on working, and as I drifted away. He took no notice of my departure, nor had he noticed that the small amount of the pólvora he had poured into my hand had gone into my own belt pouch, nor that I had picked up one of the wheel-winding keys I found lying beside one of the other arcabuces.

Bearing those items, I made my way to the Cathedral—hurrying thence, before I might forget any detail of the contrivances I had been shown. It was past the hour of Compline when I got to Alonso's workroom, so the notarius was not there, probably busy at his devotions. I found a blank piece of bark paper and, with a stick of charcoal, began to draw: the kitten and its guard, the cat's-paw, the wheel, the spiral of spring...

"Are you returned to work late this evening, Juan Británico?" said Alonso, coming through the door.

I managed not to jump or act startled. "Only practicing some word-pictures of my own," I said offhandedly, crumpling the paper but holding on to it. "You and I do so much translating of other scribes' work that I feared I might be forgetting the craft. So, having nothing better to do, I came back here to practice."

"I am glad you did. I would like to ask you something."

"A su servicio, Cuatl Alonso," I said, hoping I did not look wary.

"I have just come from a meeting of Bishop Zumárraga, Archdeacon Suárez-Begega, the Ostiarius Sánchez-Santoveña and various other custodians. They are all agreed that it is time the Cathedral was provided with more dignified and resplendent furnishings and vessels. We have been using makeshift paraphernalia only because a whole new Cathedral must be built before long. However, since such articles as chalice and monstrance, pyx and stoup—even larger things, like a rood screen and a font—can be easily moved to the new building, it has been agreed that we procure all those things, and of a quality befitting a Cathedral."

"Surely," I said, "you are not seeking my agreement?"

He smiled. "Hardly. But you may be of assistance, since I know you wander widely about the city. These fixtures and appurtenances must be of gold and silver and precious gems. Your people used to be sublimely accomplished at such works. Before we send a crier through the streets, calling for a master jewelsmith to come forward, I thought you might be able to suggest someone."

"Cuatl Alonso," I said, gleefully clapping my hands together, "I know the very man."

Back at the mesón, I said to Pochotl, "You are acquainted with the Spanish weapon we call the thunder-stick?"

"The arcabuz, yes," he said. "At any rate, I have seen what it can do. One of them put a hole—as if it had thrown an invisible javelin—clear through my elder brother."

"Do you know how the arcabuz works?"

"How it works? No. How should I?"

"You are an artist of great ingenuity. Could you make one?"

"Make a device that is both outlandish and prodigious? A thing I have seen only from a distance? Without even knowing how it works? Are you tlahuéle, friend, or merely xolopítli?"

There are two Náhuatl words meaning "deranged." Tlahuéle refers to a person who is violently and dangerously insane. Xolopítli refers to one who is witless in only a moony and harmless degree.

I said, "But could you build one if I show you pictures of the parts that make it work?"

"How can you possibly do that? None of us is allowed anywhere near the white men's arms or armor."

"I have done that. Here, look." I showed him the paper of drawings I had made, and, right there, with a bit of charcoal, I completed a couple of the pictures that had been left unfinished when Alonso interrupted me. I told Pochotl what the drawings represented and how the various pieces performed to make an arcabuz do its death-dealing.

Pochotl mumbled, "Well, it would not be impossible to forge and shape the pieces, and to fit them together as you have described. But this is work for a common smith, not for an artificer of delicate jewelry. All of it, anyway, except for these strange things you call springs."

"Except the springs, exactly," I said. "That is why I come to you."

"Even assuming I can lay hands on the iron and steel required, why should I waste my time fooling with such a complicated contraption?"

"Waste what time?" I asked sardonically. "What are you spending your time on, beyond eating and sleeping?"

"Be that as it may, I told you I want nothing to do with your ludicrous idea of revolution! Making an unlawful weapon for you would involve me in your tlahuéle delirium, and I would stand yoked beside you at the burning stake!"

"I shall absolve you and go to the stake alone," I said. "Meanwhile, suppose I offer you a reward irresistible in payment for the arcabuz?"

He said nothing, only glared darkly at me.

"The Christians are looking for an artist to sculpture for their Cathedral numerous items of gold and silver and gems." Pochotl's eyes went from dark to brightly glowing. "Dishes and cups and other vessels, also articles that I cannot describe to you, all to be most ornately worked. Splendiferous things. The man who makes those will leave a heritage to posterity. An outlandish posterity, of course, but—"

"But artistry is artistry!" Pochotl exclaimed. "Even in the service of an alien people and an alien religion!"

"Indubitably," I said, complacent. "And, as you yourself have remarked, I am something of a darling of the Christian clergy. Were I to put in a word on behalf of a certain incomparable artificer..."

"Would you? Yyo ayyo, Cuatl Tenamáxtli, would you?"

"Should I do so, I believe that artist would be assured of the commission to do the work. And all I would ask in return would be that he waste his free time in the construction of my arcabuz."

Pochotl snatched up the paper of my drawings. "Let me take and study this." He started away, muttering, "...Have to contrive some way to procure the metals..." But then he turned back, frowning, and said, "When you explained the workings of the arcabuz, Tenamáxtli, you made it plain that the secret powder called pólvora is the one vital component. What is the use of my building this weapon if you have no pólvora?"

"I have a pinch of it," I said, "and I think I may be able to divine the separate constituents. By the time you have made the weapon, Pochotl, I hope to have the pólvora in abundance. That young soldier was indiscreet enough to give me a hint that may help."

"The hint," I said to Netzlin and Citláli, "was that women make some contribution to this powdery mixture. An intimate contribution, he called it."

Citláli widened her eyes at that, as she and her husband and I, squatting on the earthen floor of their little house, regarded the pinch of pólvora I had carefully put onto a piece of bark paper.

"As you can see," I went on, "the powder appears gray in color. But, working very meticulously with the tip of a tiny feather, I have succeeded in separating the almost impalpable grains of it. As best I can determine, there are only three different sorts mixed together. One kind is black, one is yellow and one is white."

Netzlin grunted skeptically. "So much painstaking and ticklish labor, and what do you learn from that? The specks could be pollens from any number of different flowers."

"But they are not," I said. "I have already identified two of them, simply by touching a few grains of each to my tongue. The black specks are nothing but common charcoal. The yellow ones are the dust of that crusty excretion found around the vents of any volcano. The Spaniards use that for several other purposes as well—for preserving fruits, for making dyes, for caulking their wine casks—and they call it azufre."

"So those two would be easy for you to procure," said Netzlin. "But the white grains defy your so-clever investigation?"

"Yes. All I can tell about those is that they taste something like salt, only more sharp and bitter. That is why I brought the pólvora here"—I turned to Citláli—"because that soldier spoke of women."

She smiled with good humor but shrugged helplessly. "I can discern the white grains in that little pile, but I certainly do not recognize them. Why should a woman's eyes see more to them than yours do, Tenamáxtli?"

"Perhaps not the eyes," I said. "A woman's other senses and intuitions are known to be much more acute than a man's. Here, I will separate out a number of those specks." I had brought the little feather, and delicately employed it, so that I teased a minute quantity of the white grains apart from the rest. "Now, taste them, Citláli."

"Must I?" she asked, eyeing them askance. Then she leaned forward—with considerable effort, because her protuberant belly was in the way—lowered her head to the paper and sniffed. "Must I really taste them?" she asked again, sitting back on her heels. "They smell exactly like xitli."

"Xitli?" said both Netzlin and myself, blinking at her, because that word means "urine."

Citláli blushed with embarrassment and said, "Well, like my xitli, anyway. You see, Tenamáxtli, we have only a single public retiring-closet here on this street, and only immodest women go there to urinate. Most of us use axixcáltin pots and, when they are full, go and empty them in that closet's pit."

"But nobody—not even a Spanish woman, I am sure—urinates powder," I said. "Unless, Citláli, you are one uncommon human being."

"I am no such thing, you simpleton!" she said, in mock anger, but blushing again. "However, I have noticed that while the xitli sits undisturbed between emptyings, at the bottom of the axixcáli there come into being some little whitish crystals."

I stared at her, cogitating.

"The way a moss or a scale sometimes develops at the bottom of a water jar," she elaborated, as if she thought me so dense that I needed a simple illustration.

I continued staring at her, making her blush redder yet.

"Those crystals I speak of," she said, "if they were ground very fine on a metlatl stone, they would be a powder just like those white grains you have there."

Almost breathlessly, I said, "You may have hit on it, Citláli."

"What?!" her husband exclaimed. "You think that is why the soldier mentioned women in connection with the secret powder?"

"In an intimate connection," I reminded him.

"But would a female's xitli be any different from a male's?"

"In one respect, I know it is, and so do you. You must have seen that when a man urinates outdoors, on the grass, the grass is not at all affected. But wherever a woman urinates, the grass goes brown and dead."

"You are right," he and his wife said together, and Netzlin added, "It is such a commonplace occurrence that no one ever even speaks of it."

"And charcoal is also a commonplace thing," I said. "And so is the volcanic yellow azufre. It stands to reason that something as common as a female's xitli could provide the third ingredient of the pólvora. Citláli, forgive my audacious rudeness, but may I borrow your axixcáli pot for a while, and do some experimenting with its contents?"

She went still redder in the face, maybe by now all the way down to her taut belly, but her laugh was unabashed. "Do with it what you like, you preposterous man. Only do bring back the pot, please. I have ever more frequent need of it now that the child is due to be born at any moment."

It took both hands to carry the clay container, covered but audibly sloshing, back to the mesón—and I got some queer looks from passersby along the way, because everyone knows an axixcáli by sight.

Yes, I had been living all this while at the mesón—or at least sleeping and taking meals there—and so had Pochotl, while many other lodgers had come and gone in the meantime. So, feeling guilty about my leech-like dependence on the friars of San José, I had often joined Pochotl in helping them clean the place, fetch wood to stoke the fires, stir and serve the soup, things like that. I might have thought that the friars were lenient about my staving on and on because they knew of my attending classes next door. But they were equally lenient about the perpetual residence of Pochotl, so obviously they were not showing me any partiality. In my opinion, they were kindheartedly carrying charity to an extreme of benevolence. Even though I was one of its chief beneficiaries, that day I returned from visiting Netzlin and Citláli, I made bold to ask one of the soup-ladling friars about that.

To my bewilderment, the friar actually sneered at me. "You think we do this for love of you shiftless layabouts?" he snarled. "We do this in God's name, for our own souls' sake. Our order bids us to debase ourselves, to work among the lowest of the lowly, the filthiest of the filthy. I am here at this mesón only because so many other brothers of the order had already volunteered for the leprosery that there was no room there for me. I had to settle for serving you indio sluggards. And that I do, and in doing that I lay up for myself credits in heaven. But one thing I do not have to do is associate with you. So get back to your lazy fellow redskins."

Well, I thought charity comes in some strange guises. I wondered if the nuns of Santa Brígida felt similar contempt for the multicolored orphans in their charge—caring for them ostensibly in the name of their God, but really in the expectation of reward in the afterlife. I wondered also if Alonso de Molina had been kind and helpful to me only for that same reason. Such thoughts naturally strengthened my resolve not to adopt such a crass religion. Bad enough that my tonáli had decreed that I be born into The One World precisely when I would have to share my lifetime with these Christians; I certainly did not intend to spend my afterlife among them.

No longer feeling guilty, but feeling ashamed of myself for having partaken of the friars' grudging charity, I decided to move away from their mesón. The Cathedral elders had been paying me only a pittance for my work with notarius Alonso—barring whatever extra they had paid for my three articles of Spanish attire: shirt, trousers and boots. Still, of my wages I had spent only the occasional bit for a midday meal, so my savings should enable me to take lodging at one of the cheap native hostelries situated in the colación neighborhoods. I went to my pallet determined that this was the last night I would sleep there, that in the morning I would pack up my few belongings—which now included Citláli's axixcáli—and be gone. However, no sooner had I made that decision than it turned out that the decision had already been made for me, doubtless by those same mischievous, interfering gods who had for so long been persistently at my heels.

In the middle of the night I was awakened—as was everyone else in the men's chamber—by the shouting of the aged warder whom the friars left to watch over the premises after they had departed:

"¡Señor Tennamotch! ¿Hay aquí un señor bajo el nombre de Tennamotch?"

I knew he meant me. My name, like so many other Náhuatl words, was always a tongue-twister for the Spaniards, particularly because they are unable to pronounce the soft "sh" sound represented by the letter x with which they write my name. I scrambled up from my pallet, threw on my mantle, and went down the stairs to where the old man stood.

"¿Señor Tennamotch?" he barked, angry at having been disturbed himself. "Hay aquí una mujer insistente e importuna. La vejezuela demanda a hablar contigo."

A woman? Insistently demanding to speak to me? The only female I could think of, who might come seeking me at midnight, was the mulata child Rebeca, and that was highly unlikely. Anyway, the warder had called her an "old hag." Mystified, I followed him out the front door, and there stood a woman, old indeed, and no one I had ever seen before. Tears were flowing down along the many wrinkles of her face as she said in Náhuatl:

"I am midwife to the young woman friend of yours, Citláli. The baby is born, but the father has died."

I was shocked, but not too shocked to correct her. "You mean the mother, surely." Even I knew that even the healthiest-appearing woman could die in giving birth, but it gave me a heart pang that dear Citláli should have done so.

"No, no! The father. Netzlin."

"What? How could that be?" Then I remembered his extreme eagerness to see a son born to him. "Did he die of the excitement? Of a stroke of the hands of a god?"

"No, no. He waited in the front room, pacing. The instant the baby gave its first cry in the other room, Netzlin roared triumphantly and went crashing out the door into the street, bellowing, 'I have a son!' though he had not yet even seen the child."

"Well? Did he come back and find it was a daughter? And that killed him?"

"No, no. He gathered all the men of the barrio, and bought much octli for them, and they all got drunk, but he much more drunk than the others."

"And that killed him?" I demanded in frustration. "Old mother, you will never make a storyteller. Best stick to midwifing."

"Well... yes. But, after tonight, I think I may even give up that humble profession and—"

"Will you get on?" I shouted, almost dancing in impatience.

"Yes, yes. You could say the drinking did kill poor fuddled Netzlin. He was caught by the soldiers on night patrol. They beat and cut him to death."

I was too stunned to say anything. The old midwife went on:

"The neighbors came to tell us. Citláli was already near to frenzy. and the news of Netzlin's death on top of everything else drove her near to madness. But she was able to tell me where to find you and—"

"What do you mean—on top of everything else? Did the birthing cause injury to her? Is she in pain? In danger?"

"Just come, Tenamáxtli. She needs comforting. She needs you."

Rather than go on asking frantic questions and getting dotard answers that were nearly sending me into a frenzy, I said, "Very well, old mother. Let us hurry."

As we approached the unlighted house, we heard no screams or moans or other sounds of distress coming from within. But I let the old woman precede me, and waited in the front room while she tiptoed into the other. She returned with a finger held to her lips, whispering: "She sleeps at last."

"She is not dead?" I asked, in a sort of a shout of a whisper.

"No, no. Only sleeping, and that is good. But come now—quietly—and see the infant. It sleeps also."

With a tongs, she plucked an ember from the cooking hearth and used it to light a coconut-oil lamp, and with that led me into the room where Citláli slept. In a straw-padded box beside her pallet lay the child, neatly swathed, and the midwife held the lamp so I could look down at it. To me it looked like any other newborn: red and raw and as wrinkled as the midwife, but apparently entire, with all the requisite appendages, the proper number of ears and fingers and toes and such. It lacked hair, true, but there was nothing unusual about that.

"Why did you want me to see it, old mother?" I whispered. "I have seen babies before, and this one appears no different."

"Ayya, friend Tenamáxtli, it has no eyes."

"The child is blind? How could you tell?"

"Not just blind. It has no eyes. Look more closely."

Since the child was asleep, I had taken for granted that its eyelids were closed. But now I could see that there was no line of closed lashes. Where there should have been lids, each eye socket was closed over—from the faint little eyebrows down to the cheekbones—with the same delicate skin that covered the rest of the face, only slightly indented where the eyeballs should have been.

"By all the darkness of Míctlan," I muttered, horrified. "You are right, old mother. It is a monster."

"That is why Citláli was so distraught, even before she heard the news about Netzlin. At least he was spared knowing of this." She hesitated, then asked, "Shall I throw it into a canal?"

That would have been the kindest thing, for both Citláli and the infant. It would indeed have been the obligatory thing, according to the customs of The One World. Children born defective in either body or intellect were disposed of, immediately the defect was discovered. It was the natural and expected thing to do, in order that such creatures not grow up to be a burden to themselves and to the community, or, worse, perhaps to bear similarly blighted children themselves. No one wept or regretted or disputed the quick disposal of such unfortunates. It was too plainly necessary, to maintain undiluted the best physical and mental qualities of the race. One nation, the Cloud People of Uaxyácac, renowned for their beauty, even disposed of infants who were merely ugly.

But, I reminded myself, this was no longer The One World, free to follow its age-old, wise traditions. I knew that the Christians let their own varicolored and despised mongrel offspring live and grow up—even those wretched ones of splotched brown-and-white complexion that they called pintojos, from whom everyone of every other color turned his gaze away in revulsion. So there was probably a Christian law requiring that any child—though misbegotten and, for whatever reasons of practicality, unwanted—must be kept and reared, at whatever cost in misery to itself, its parents and all the rest of society. I was not sure that such a law existed; I would have to remember to ask Alonso if the Christians truly were that insensitive and pitiless and unmerciful. Anyway, this one poor creature's fate need not be decided this very night, so I told the midwife:

"It is not for me to say. Netzlin would assuredly have told you to get rid of it. But he is gone, and Citláli is its only parent. We will wait for her to wake."

X

"I wish to keep the child," said Citláli when she had awakened and I had spoken some consoling and encouraging words, and she was able to regard the two sudden disasters in her life with more composure than she had the night before.

I asked her, "Have you considered what you will have to bear? Besides staying in constant and vigilant attendance on the child—perhaps even until it is full grown, or even until one of you dies—you will suffer the scorn and derision of all our people, especially our priests. And to what sort of tonáli has your baby been destined? A life of abject dependence on its mother. A life of inability to deal with the commonest happenings of every day, let alone any real difficulty that may come along. Practically no hope of its ever doing anything in life to earn a place in the happy afterworld of Tonatíucan. Why, no tonalpóqui will even deign to consult his book of omens to give the child an auspicious name."

"Then its birthday name will have to serve as its only name," she murmured, undeterred. "Yesterday was the day Two-Wind, was it not? So—Ome-Ehécatl its name will be, and that is fitting. The wind has no eyes, either."

"There," I said, "you have spoken it. Ome-Ehécatl will never even see you, Citláli; never know what its own mother looks like; never marry and give you grandchildren; never support you in your old age. You yourself are still young and comely and talented in your craft, and sweet of nature, but you will not likely attract another husband, not with such a gross impediment hung upon you. Meanwhile—"

"Please, Tenamáxtli, no more," she said sadly. "In my sleep I confronted all those obstacles in my dreams, one after another. And you are right. They are formidable. Nevertheless, little Ehécatl is all that I have left of Netzlin and our life together. That little I wish to keep."

"Very well, then," I said. "If you must persist in this folly, I insist on helping you to do so. You will need a friend and an ally against those obstacles."

She looked at me unbelievingly. "You would encumber yourself with both of us impediments?"

"For as long as I can, Citláli. Mind you, I do not speak of marriage or of permanence. There will come a time when I expect to be doing—other things."

"That plan of which you have spoken. To drive the white men out of The One World."

"Yes, that. But, for right now, I had already decided to move out of the mesón and seek private lodgings. I will stay here with you—if you agree—and contribute my savings to the household. I think I need no further classes in my study of Spanish, and I know I want no more in the study of Christianity. I will continue to do my work with the Cathedral's notarius, to keep on earning those wages. In my free time I will occupy Netzlin's concesión stall in the market. I see there is a supply of baskets yet to be sold, and when you regain your strength, you can make more. There will be no need for you ever to leave Ehécatl's side. In the evenings, you can assist me in my experiments at making pólvora."

"It is more than I could have hoped for, and you are kind to offer it, Tenamáxtli." But she looked vaguely troubled.

"You have been kind to me, Citláli, ever since we met. And already helpful, I believe, in that matter of the pólvora. Have you some objection to my offer?"

"Only that I, too, have no intention of marrying anyone. Or to be anyone's woman. Even if that is the price of survival."

I said stiffly, "I suggested no such thing. Nor did I expect you to infer it."

"Forgive me, dear friend." She reached out a hand and held mine. "I am sure you and I could easily become... and I know the powdered root that safeguards against... but it does not always avert mishaps... Ayya, Tenamáxtli, I am trying to say that I very well might yearn someday to have you—but not to chance having another deformed child like—"

"I understand, Citláli. I promise, we shall live together as chastely as brother and sister, bachelor and spinster."

Which is what we did, and for quite a long time, during which many things occurred, of which I shall try to tell in sequence.

That first day, I removed my belongings—and the sloshing axixcáli pot—from the Mesón de San José, never to go there again. I also took away with me the artificer Pochotl, and led him to the Cathedral, and introduced him to the notarius Alonso, and highly recommended him as the one man best qualified to devise all those sacramental baubles that were wanted. Before Alonso, in turn, led him off to meet the clerics who would instruct and supervise him, I told Pochotl where I would be living from now on, and then told him in an undertone:

"I will, of course, be seeing you here at the Cathedral, and will be much interested in your progress with this work. But I trust you will report to me at my new lodgings your progress in that other work."

"I will, to be sure. If all goes well for me here, I shall be immeasurably indebted to you, Cuatl Tenamáxtli."

And that very night I began my attempts at concocting pólvora. All the traveling the axixcáli had endured had not dissolved or disturbed the little whitish crystals that, true to Citláli's word, had formed in the bottom of the pot. I gingerly extracted those from the xitli, and set them to dry on a piece of bark paper. Then, simply at a venture, I set the pot itself on the hearth fire until the remaining urine came to a boil. It produced a fearful stink and made Citláli exclaim, in mock horror, that she was sorry she had let me move into the house. However, my venture proved worthwhile; when all the xitli had boiled away, it left still more of the little crystals.

While all of those were drying, I went off to the market and easily found lumps of charcoal and of the yellow azufre for sale, and brought home with me a quantity of each. While I pounded those lumps into powder with the heel of my Spanish boot, Citláli, though still abed, ground the xitli crystals on a métlatl stone. Then, on my piece of bark paper, I thoroughly mixed the black, yellow and white grains together in equal measure. For the sake of caution against accident, I took the paper to the muddy alley outside the house. A number of the neighborhood children, already attracted by the stench I had inflicted on the locality, watched with curiosity as I touched an ember from the hearth to that powder mixture. And then they cheered, though the result was no thunder or lightning, merely a small, sparkly fizzle and a cloud of smoke.

I was not too disappointed to make a gracious bow to the children in thanks for their applause. I had already perceived, in the pinch of pólvora I had got from the young soldier-fowler, that the mixture was not compounded equally of black, white and yellow. But I had to start somewhere, and this first attempt had been a success in one important respect. Its cloud of blue smoke smelled exactly like the smoke that had erupted from the arcabuces at the lakeside. So the crystal derived from female urine must be the third ingredient of pólvora. Now I had only to try various proportions of those ingredients to achieve the proper balance. My chief problem, obviously, would be the procurement of enough of those xitli crystals. I half thought of asking the gathered children to run home and bring me all their mothers' axixcáltin. But I dismissed that idea; it would cause questions from the neighbors—the first, probably, being their asking why a demented man was at large in their streets.

Some months went by, during which I kept boiling urine at every opportunity, until I think the neighborhood in general had got used to the smell, but I personally was getting thoroughly sick of it. Anyway, that labor did yield the crystals, though still in minute quantities, making it difficult for me to try differing measures of the white powder and the other two colors. I kept track of all my experiments, recording them on a piece of paper that I was careful not to misplace—listing them like this: two parts black, two yellow, one white; and three parts black, two yellow, one white; and so on. But no mixture I tried gave any more heartening result than the very first, when the proportions had been one and one and one. That is to say, most mixtures provided only a sparkle, fizzle and smoke, and some gave no result at all.

Meanwhile, I had explained to the notarius Alonso why I was ceasing to attend the classes at the Colegio. He agreed with me that my fluency in Spanish would be best improved, henceforward, by my actually speaking and hearing it, rather than studying the rules of it. He was not so approving, however, of my retirement from Tete Diego's teachings about Christianity.

"You could be imperiling the salvation of your immortal soul, Juan Británico," he said solemnly.

I asked, "Would not God count it a good deed that I hazard my salvation in order to support a helpless widow woman?"

"Well..." he said, uncertain. "But only until she is able to support herself, Cuatl Juan. Then you must resume your preparation for Confirmation."

At intervals thereafter, he would inquire as to the health and condition of the widow, and every time I could tell him honestly that she was still housebound, having to care for her crippled child. Thereafter, too, I believe Alonso kept me employed long beyond the time that I was really of any use to him—finding ever more obscure, even dull and valueless pages of word-pictures made far away and long ago, for me to help him translate—just because he knew that my wages went mostly for the upkeep of my little household.

Whenever I was not occupied with that, I visited the several workrooms that the Cathedral had provided for Pochotl. His clerical employers had first tested his skill by giving him a very small amount of gold in a lump, to see what he might do with it. I forget what it was that he created, but it made the priests ecstatic. From then on, they allowed him increasing quantities of gold and silver, and gave him instructions as to what to make—candlesticks and censers and various urns—and left the actual design of those things to him, and were vastly pleased with every one of them.

So now Pochotl was master of a smelter room where all the metals he used were melted and refined; a forging room where the coarser metals—iron, steel, brass—were hammered into shape; a room of mortars and crucibles in which the precious metals were liquefied; a room of workbenches, all strewn with tools of the utmost delicacy. And of course he had many assistants, some of them who had previously also been jewel-artificers in Tenochtítlan. But most of the helpers were slaves—and most of those were Moros, because those people are immune to the hottest heat—who did the heavy drudgery requiring not much skill.

Naturally, Pochotl was as happy as if he had been transported alive to the blissful afterworld of Tonatíucan—"Have you noticed, Tenamáxtli, how I am becoming enviably fat again, now that I am well paid and well fed?"—and he enjoyed showing me his every new production, and he took pleasure in my admiring them as much as the priests did. But there at the Cathedral he and I never spoke of his other work; that project we discussed only when he came to the house, to ask questions about various parts of the arcabuz that I had sketched for him:

"Is this piece supposed to move like so? Or like so?"

And in time he began to bring actual metal pieces to show, for my approval or comment.

"It is a good thing," he said, "that you got me appointed to the Cathedral's enterprise at the same time you asked me to build this weapon. Just the making of the arcabuz's long, hollow tube would have been impossible without the tools I now have. And only today, I was trying to bend a thin metal strip into that spiral you called a spring, and fumbling at it, when I was unexpectedly interrupted by a certain Padre Diego. He startled me by speaking to me in Náhuatl."

"I know the man," I said. "Caught you, did he? And he would hardly believe a spring to be any kind of church decoration. Did he scold you for neglecting your proper work?"

"No. But he did ask what I was fooling with. Cunningly, I told him that I had had an idea for an invention, and I was struggling to bring it into reality."

"An invention, eh?"

"That is what Padre Diego said, too, and he laughed in ridicule. He said, 'That is no invention, maestro. It is a contrivance that has been familiar to us civilized folk for ages and ages.' And then—can you guess what he did, Tenamáxtli?"

"He recognized it as a piece of an arcabuz," I groaned. "Our secret project is exposed and thwarted."

"No, no. Not at all. He went away somewhere and came back, bringing me a whole handful of different sorts of springs. The spiral coil that I require to spin the grooved wheel." He showed me the spring. "Also the flat kind that bends back and forth, which I need for snapping what you called the cat's-paw." He showed me that one, too. "In brief, I now know how to make those things, but I do not need to. The good priest made me a gift of them."

I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. "Marvelous!" I exclaimed. "For once, the coincidence-loving gods have been gracious. I must say, Pochotl, you are having more success than I." And I told him of my discouraging experiments with the pólvora.

He thought for a moment, then suggested, "Perhaps you are not experimenting under the right conditions. From what you have described as the workings of the arcabuz, I think you cannot judge the efficacy of the pólvora until you pack it into a tightly constricted space before you touch fire to it."

"Perhaps," I said. "But I have only pinches of the powder to work with. It will be a long time before I can fabricate enough of it to pack into anything."

However, the very next day the gods of coincidence arranged another happy furtherance of my project.

As I had promised Citláli, I was spending some part of every day at the late Netzlin's market stall. That required little of me except to be there standing among the baskets whenever a customer wished to buy one, because Citláli had told me the price she expected to be paid for each one—in cacao beans or snippets of tin or maravedí coins—and the customer could judge the quality without my needing to point it out. He or she could even pour water into any of Citláli's baskets to test it; they were all so tightly woven that they would not leak water, let alone seeds or meal or whatever else they were destined to contain. Since there was nothing else for me to do, between customers, I spent the time conversing with passersby or smoking picíetl with other stall-keepers or—as I was doing on the day of which I speak—pouring onto my stall's shopboard small mounds of charcoal, azufre and xitli powders, so I could morosely meditate on them and their infinite number of possible combinations.

"Ayya, Cuatl Tenamáxtli!" boomed a hearty voice in a pretense of dismay. "Are you going into competition with my wares?"

I looked up. It was a man named Peloloá, a pochtécatl trader whom I knew from previous encounters. He regularly came to the City of Mexíco, bringing the two prime products of his native Xoconóchco, that coastal Hot Land far to the south, whence had come most of our cotton and salt since long before the white men set foot in The One World.

"By Iztocíuatl!" he exclaimed, invoking the goddess of salt, as he pointed at my pathetic pile of white grains on the shopboard. "Are you intending to trounce me at my own trade?"

"No, Cuatl Peloloá," I said, smiling ruefully. "This is not a salt that anyone would wish to buy."

"You are right," he said, touching a few grains to his tongue, before I could stop him and tell him it was purely essence of urine. Then he surprised me, saying, "It is only the bitter first-harvest. What the Spaniards call salitre. It sells so cheaply that it would hardly pay you a living."

"Ayyo," I breathed. "You recognize this substance?"

"But of course. Who from the Xoconóchco would not?"

"Do you boil women's urine in the Xoconóchco, then?"

He looked blank and said, "What?"

"Nothing. No matter. You called the powder 'first-harvest.' What does that mean?"

"What it says. Some people think we simply dip a scoop into the sea and strain the salt directly from it. Not so. The making of salt is a more complicated process. We dike off the shallows of our lagoons and let them dry, yes, but then those chunks and lumps and flakes of dry matter must be rid of their many impurities. First, in fresh water, they are sieved clean of sand and shells and weeds. Then, again in fresh water, the substance is boiled. From that initial boiling come crystals that are also sieved out. Those are the first-harvest crystals—salitre—exactly what you have there, Tenamáxtli, only yours has been pulverized. To get to the goddess's invaluable real salt takes several more stages of refinement."

"You said this salitre sells, but cheaply."

"The Xoconóchco farmers buy it merely to spread it on their cotton fields. They claim it enhances the ground's fertility. The Spanish employ salitre in some manner in their tanneries. I know not what use you might be thinking of making of it—"

"Tanning!" I lied. "Yes, that is it. I contemplate adding fine leather goods to my stock here. I was only puzzled as to where to get the salitre."

"I shall be glad to bring you a whole tamémi load, on my next trip north," said Peloloá. "Cheap it is, but I shall charge you nothing at all. You are a friend."

I raced home to announce the good news. But in my excitement, I did it awkwardly. I dashed through the doorway curtain, shouting:

"You can cease urinating now, Citláli!"

My inelegant entrance threw her into such a paroxysm of laughter that it was a while before she could gasp out, "I once—called you—preposterous. I was wrong. You are—totally xolopítli!" And it was a while longer before I could gather my wits and rephrase my announcement, and tell her what great good fortune had befallen me.

Citláli said shyly, and she was seldom shy, "Perhaps we should make a small celebration. To show gratitude to the salt goddess Iztocíuatl."

"A celebration? Of what sort?"

Still shyly, and blushing now, she said, "I have been taking the powdered root tlatlaohuéhuetl throughout the past month. I believe we need worry about no mishap if we were to give its vaunted impregnability a trial."

I looked at her—"with new eyes," I was about to say, but that would not be true. During all this time that we had been sleeping apart, on pallets in the separate rooms, I had been desiring her, but virtuously had given no sign of it. Also, it had been so very long since I had lain with a female—the tiny brown Rebeca—that I might soon have resorted to the services of a maátitl. Citláli must have taken my brief hesitation as reluctance, for now she said boldly, with laughter, and made me laugh, too:

"Niez tlalqua ayquic axitlinéma." Which means, "I promise not to urinate."

And so we embraced laughing, which, I now learned for the first time, is the very best way to begin.

All this while, Ome-Ehécatl had been growing, from a babe in arms, to an infant that crawled, to a weanling learning wobblily to walk. I kept expecting Ehécatl to die any day, and no doubt Citláli did, too, because a child afflicted with a physical deformity so evident at birth usually has other defects that are not visible, and dies very young. During Ehécatl's infancy, the only other deficiency that became apparent was the child's never learning to speak, and possibly that indicated deafness as well. That may have troubled Citláli more than it did me; I was frankly pleased that the child never cried, either.

Anyway, its brain appeared to function well enough. While learning to walk, Ehécatl also learned to make its way most adroitly around the house and learned early on to veer clear of the cooking hearth. Whenever Citláli decided to give the child some outdoor exercise, she would stand it in the street and point it and give it a gentle shove. Ehécatl would dauntlessly toddle straight along the middle of that street, confident that its mother had made sure nothing was in the way. Of course, Citláli was always gentle and kindly toward everyone, but I believe she also had maternal feelings, even for such an offspring as Ehécatl. She kept the child clean, and tidy of dress—and well fed, though at first it had difficulty in finding her teat and, later, in wielding a spoon. The other neighborhood children rather surprised me with their attitude. They seemed to regard Ehécatl as a kind of plaything—not human like themselves, certainly, but not as inert as a straw or clay doll—and played almost affectionately with the child, without ever being abusive or derisive. All in all, while getting to live for more years than such monstrosities usually do, Ehécatl passed those years as pleasantly as an incurable cripple could ever have hoped to do.

I knew that Citláli's chief worry about the child was the question of its afterlife, whether Ehécatl went there young or old. Citláli probably had some concern for her own afterlife, as well. No person of The One World is necessarily damned to the nothingness of Míctlan after death—as Christians are to hell—simply because he or she has been born, has lived and has died. Still, to assure that one does not get plunged to Míctlan, one should have done something in one's lifetime to merit residing afterward in the sun god's Tonatíucan or one of the other beneficent gods' similarly appetizing afterworlds.

A child's only hope of doing that is to sacrifice itself—that is, have its parents sacrifice it—to appease the hunger and the vanity of one god or another. But no priest would have accepted a useless object like Ehécatl as an offering to even the least of gods. A grown man can best attain his desired afterworld by dying in battle or on the altar of a god, or doing some deed noteworthy enough to please the gods. A grown woman can also die in sacrifice to a god, and some have done deeds as praiseworthy as any man's, but most have deserved their places in Tonatíucan or Tlálocan, or wherever, simply by being the mothers of children whose tonáli has destined them to be warriors or sacrifices or mothers. Ome-Ehécatl could never be any of those things, which is why I say Citláli must have had some anxiety about her own prospects after death.

XI

Some months after our earlier encounter in the market, the pochtécatl Pololoá came again from the Xoconóchco, and brought along one tamémi laden with nothing but a big sack of the "first-harvest" salitre, and grandly presented that to me, and even bade the porter continue carrying it as far as my house. And there I began devoting every free moment to trying the black, white and yellow powders in mixtures of varying proportions, and noting down every experiment I made. I now had a good deal more free time than before, because both Pochotl and I had been dismissed from our duties at the Cathedral.

"It is because the Church has a new pope at Rome," the notarius Alonso explained in a tone of apology. "The old Papa Clemente Séptimo has died and been succeeded by the Papa Paulo Tercero. We have just been informed of his accession and his first directives to all the world's Catholic Christian clergy."

I said, "You do not sound pleased by the news, Cuatl Alonso."

He grimaced sourly. "The Church commands that every priest be celibate and chaste and honorable—or at least that he pretend to be. That certainly should apply to the pope, the highest priest of all. But it is well known that while he was still just the Padre Farnese, he began his climb through the Church hierarchy by what the coarser folk call 'lamiendo el culo del patron.' That is to say, he put his own sister, Giulia the Beautiful, to bed with the earlier Papa Alessandro Sexto, thereby winning for himself substantial preferments. And this Papa Paulo himself has by no means been celibate during his life. He has numerous children and grandchildren. And one of those, a grandson, Paulo has already—immediately on attaining the papacy—made a cardinal at Rome. And that grandson is only fourteen years old."

"Interesting," I said, though I did not find it very much so. "But what has this to do with us here?"

"Among his other directives, Papa Paulo has decreed that every diocese commence to conserve on its expenditures. That means we can no longer finance even such a small luxury as your work with me on the codices. Also, the pope has addressed Bishop Zumárraga specifically in the matter of what he calls 'squandering' gold and silver on 'fripperies.' All the precious metals the Church has acquired here in New Spain he decrees must be shared among less fortunately endowed bishoprics. Or so he says."

"You do not believe him?"

Alonso blew out a long breath. "Doubtless I am predisposed to distrust him, because of what I know of his personal life. Nevertheless, it sounds to me as if Papa Paulo is appropriating his own private King's Fifth from the treasures of New Spain. Anyway, that is why Pochotl must leave off his wondrous jewelsmithing for us, and you your help with the translations."

I smiled at him. "You and I both know, Cuatl Alonso, that for a long while you have been merely—and compassionately—inventing work for me to do. But I have some savings put by. I think that I and the widow and orphan I support will not suffer much hardship from my leaving this post."

"I shall be sorry to see you go, Juan Británico. But I strongly recommend, now that you will not be occupied here, that you put those hours to good advantage by resuming your Christian studies under Padre Diego."

"It is thoughtful and caring of you to tell me that," I said, and meant it, but I made no promise.

He sighed, then said, "I should like to bestow on you a small gift, by way of saying farewell." He took up a bright object that was holding down the papers on his table. "Everybody owns a thing like this nowadays—I mean every Spaniard—but this particular one was given to me by that poor wretched heretic whom you and I saw executed outside the Cathedral here."

Ayyo, I thought, a gift to him from my own father, and now from him to me. Alonso handed it over, a piece of crystal the size of my palm, circular and smoothly polished. I still had that other crystal that my father had involuntarily bequeathed, tucked safely among my belongings. But that was a yellow topaz, and this was clear quartz. Also, this one was differently shaped, being gently rounded on both surfaces.

"That old man recounted how he discovered these objects, somewhere in the southern lands," said Alonso, "and made them popular utensils among all his people. They are now much used by us Spaniards—very useful things they are, indeed—but they seem to have been forgotten by you indios."

"Useful?" I asked. "How?"

"Observe." He took it from me and held it in a shaft of sunlight from the window. In his other hand he took a piece of bark paper and held it so the sunlight came through the crystal onto the paper. Moving the paper and crystal back and forth, he gradually brought that spot of light down to a bright point on the paper. And, after a very brief moment, the paper began to emit smoke there—then, amazingly, broke into a small but real flame. Alonso blew it out and handed the crystal back to me. "A burning-glass," he said. "We also call it a lente, from the shape of it, like the bean of the same name. With it, a person can kindle a fire without any need for steel and pirita, or without the drudgery of drill-stick and block. When the sun is shining, anyway. I trust you will find it useful, too."

I certainly would, I was thinking exultantly. It was like a gift from the gods. No—a gift from my father Mixtli, now surely a dweller in Tonatíucan. He must have been watching me from that afterworld as I struggled to master the making of pólvora—and must know why I was doing so—and decided to make the struggle easier for me. Even long gone and far removed from mortal concerns, my father Mixtli must be in accord with my intention to rid The One World of its alien masters. And this was his way of telling me so, from beyond the immeasurable distances that separate us living from the dead.

I said nothing of that to Alonso de Molina, of course, but only, "I thank you very much, indeed. I will think of you every time I make use of the lente." And then I said good-bye.

Pochotl was no more woebegone than I at being dismissed from the Cathedral roster of workers. He had cannily invested the wages he had been paid, having built for himself a more than decent house and workshop in one of the better colaciones of the city set aside for native settlement. His house was, in fact, right on the edge of the Traza reserved for the Spaniards. And such numbers of those Spaniards had been dazzled by the articles Pochotl had crafted for the Cathedral that he was already being solicited to do private commissions.

"The white men are finally striving to emulate us in culture and refinement and good taste," he said. "Have you noticed, Tenamáxtli? They no longer even smell so bad as before. They have acquired our habit of bathing, though perhaps not so frequently or thoroughly as we do. And now they have learned to appreciate the kind of jewelry that I have always done—much finer and more ingenious works than those of their own clumsy artificers. So they bring me their gold, their silver, their gems, and tell me what they want—a necklace, a finger ring, a sword hilt—and leave me to determine the design. None yet has been less than overjoyed at the results or failed to pay me handsomely. And none has yet remarked on my always somehow having a bit of the metal left over to keep for my own."

"I am mightily glad for you," I said. "I only hope that you have some time free for—"

"Ayyo, yes. The arcabuz is almost complete. I have finished the metal works of it, and now have only to mount those properly in the wooden stock. I was much aided, odd though it may seem, by the order of my dismissal from the Cathedral. The bishop bade me empty and clean my workrooms, and he set guards to make sure that I did not carry off any of the valuables with which I had been entrusted. And I did not, but I did take the opportunity, seeing the soldiers' weapons up close, to ogle every detail of the way those arcabuces are put together. Now—how are you faring in the making of the pólvora?"

I was still engaged in the seemingly never-to-end process of trying different mixtures of the powders, and I will not recount all the dreary time and infuriating attempts I had to endure. I will merely say that I finally achieved success—with a mixture that was two-thirds salitre and one-third comprising equal measures of charcoal and azufre.

When, one afternoon, I used my new lente to bring a dot of sunlight down to ignite that little heap of grayish powder—what would prove to be the ultimate and conclusive trial—the alley outside our house was empty of any of the local children. They all had got even more bored than I by the repeated puny fizzles. On this occasion, however, the powder absolutely spewed sparks, and only a modest puff of the acrid blue smoke. But, most important, it uttered that angry sound like a muted snarl—what I had heard when the young soldier let me pull the gatillo and fire his arcabuz. At last, I knew how to make pólvora, and could make it in significant quantities. After doing a small, private victory dance and giving silent but heartfelt thanks to the war god Huitzilopóchtli—and to my revered late father Mixtli—I hurried off to Pochotl's house to announce my grand achievement.

"Yyo ayyo, I stand in awe of you!" he exclaimed. "Now, as you can see, I too am very nearly done." He gestured at his workbench, bearing the metal components I had already examined, and now also the wooden stock that he was shaping. "While I finish my work, I suggest that you do what I suggested before: test the pólvora in some kind of firmly constricted container."

"I intend to," I said. "Meanwhile, Pochotl, make for the arcabuz also some round lead balls for it to discharge. They must be of a size to ram down into the hollow tube, but must fit snugly in there."

I went again to the market and begged a lump of common clay from a potter there. I took it home and, while Citláli watched pridefully, poured onto that a very modest measure of pólvora, rolled the clay tightly around it to make a ball about the size of a nopáli fruit, punched a tiny hole in that with a quill, then set the ball to dry near the hearth. The next day, it was as hard as any pot, and I took it out to the alley.

This being something new to them, the local children did gather around again, and were equally interested by the lente I was about to use. But I waved them off to a respectful distance—and also put an arm up to shield my face—before I touched the crystal's hot spot to the quill-hole. I am glad that I took those precautions, because the ball disappeared on the instant, with a flash that was dazzling even in the daylight, a cloud of the pungent blue smoke, a noise almost as loud as was made by the arcabuz I had once discharged—and a spray of sharp fragments that stung my raised arm and bare chest. Two or three of the children uttered small yelps, but none of us was more than slightly nicked. Rather too late, it occurred to me that there might have been a roving patrol somewhere near enough to have heard the report. No one came to investigate, but I decided to do my experimenting, from then on, well away from the city.

So, a few days later, carrying a pólvora-packed hard pottery ball as big as my fist, and some of the powder carried loose in a pouch, I took a ferry acáli at the western edge of the island and crossed to the mainland bluff called Chapultépec, Grasshopper Hill. I could easily have walked there; this part of the lake was only about knee-deep, green-brown and fetid. The rocky front of the bluff had formerly, so I was told, been carved with gigantic faces, the many-times-magnified visages of four of the Revered Speakers of the Mexíca. But the faces were gone, because Spanish soldiers had boisterously used them for practice in firing the immense, wheel-mounted, big-mouthed thunder-tubes called culebrinas and falconetes. The bluff was now just a rocky-fronted bluff again, its only notable feature being the aqueduct that jutted out from it, carrying the water from Chapultépec's springs to the city.

All about, the parkland that the last Motecuzóma had laid out—with gardens and fountains and statues—likewise had been obliterated. There existed now only grass, wildflowers, underbrush and, here and there, the great, towering oldest-of-old trees, the ahuehuétquin cypresses, too invulnerably tough for even the Spaniards to chop down. The only people I saw anywhere around were the slaves who were at work every day, repairing the ever-occurring leaks and fractures in the aqueduct. I had to trudge but a short way inland to find myself alone, and to find a spot of ground clear of underbrush, on which to place the object I carried.

This time, I had made the clay ball with a flattened base, and had put there the quill-hole, so the hole was on a level with the ground when I set down the thing. I opened my pouch, and starting from that quill-hole, I dribbled a thin stream of the pólvora to a considerable distance and around the root spread of a big cypress. There, safe behind the tree's trunk, I took out my burning-glass, held it in a sunbeam that had made its way through the foliage, and kindled a small flame at the very end of my powder train. As I had hoped, the loose pólvora began sparking and snarling, and the sparks danced merrily back the way I had come. I realized that this would not always be a practical way to ignite my experimental balls; any breath of wind would interrupt its progress; but that day no wind did. The sparking went around the cypress's bole and out of my sight, but I could still smell the distinctive sharp odor of the pólvora trail's burning.

Then, though I had anticipated it, or at least fervently hoped for it, there erupted such a roar of noise that I jumped in spite of myself. The tree that shielded me seemed to rock, too. Countless birds burst from the greenery all about, screeching and cawing, and the underbrush rustled violently to the scampering of unseen animals. I heard the whizzing sound of the pottery shards flying in all directions, and a few of them going thunk against the limbs of my sheltering tree, while leaves and twigs cut loose by them came fluttering down, and the blue smoke spread its pungent miasma far and wide in the windless air.

From somewhere in the distance, I heard human shouts, too. So, as soon as there was no more patter of things falling roundabout, I left my tree and went to where the ball had been. A patch of the earth as big as a petatl mat was scorched black, and the nearby bushes were charred to shriveling. At the edge of the clearing, a rabbit lay dead; it had been pierced right through by one of the shards.

The shouts were getting nearer and more excited. I only then remembered that the Spaniards had built, on the heights of Grasshopper Hill, a fort-and-stockade structure they called the Castillo, and that it was always full of soldiers, because that was where new army recruits were trained. Even the rawest recruit would, of course, have recognized the sound of a pólvora explosion and—it having come from the depths of a usually uninhabited forest—would dash out with his comrades to find out where and how it had happened, and by whose doing. I did not want to leave any evidence for those soldiers. I had no time to try to erase the burn mark, but I did pick up the rabbit before I scurried off toward the lakeside.

That night, Pochotl visited the house, with an oily rolled-up mantle under his arm and a many-creased grin on his face. With the sly, secretive mien of a conjuror, he laid the bundle on the floor and very slowly unrolled it, while Citláli and I watched bright-eyed. There it was: the replica arcabuz, and very authentic it looked.

"Ouiyo ayyo," I murmured, genuinely pleased and genuinely admiring of Pochotl's artistry. Citláli smiled from one to the other of us, pleased for us both.

Pochotl handed me the key for winding the spring inside. I inserted it in its place, turned it and heard the ratcheting noise I had heard once before. Then, with my thumb, I pulled back the cat's-paw holding its flake of false-gold, and it clicked and stayed back. Then, with my forefinger, I tugged the gatillo. The cat's-paw snapped down, the false-gold struck the grooved wheel just as the wheel was spun by its wound-up spring—and the resultant sparks sprayed right across the little cazoleta pan as they were supposed to do.

"Of course," said Pochotl, "the crucial test will be to try it fully charged with pólvora and one of these." He handed me a pouch of the heavy lead balls. "But I advise you to go far away from here, Tenamáxtli, to do that. The word is already abroad. An unaccountable blast was heard today by the Chapultépec garrison." He winked at me. "The white men fear—as well they might—that someone besides themselves possesses some quantity of the pólvora. The street patrols are stopping and searching every indio carrying pots or baskets or any other possibly suspicious container."

"I expected that," I said. "I will be more circumspect henceforth."

"One other thing," said Pochotl. "I still regard your idea of revolution as foolish in the extreme. Consider, Tenamáxtli. You know how long it has taken me to make this one arcabuz. I believe it will work as warranted. But do you expect me or anyone to construct the thousands you would need to equal the weaponry of the white men?"

"No," I said. "No more need be made. If this one works as warranted, I shall use it to—well—acquire another from some Spanish soldier. Then use those two for the acquisition of two more. And so on." Pochotl and Citláli stared at me, either aghast or struck with admiration, I could not tell. "But now," I cried, jubilant, "let us celebrate this auspicious occasion!"

I went out and bought a jar of the best octli, and we all drank happily of it—even little Ehécatl was given some—and we adults got sufficiently inebriated that, come midnight, Pochotl bedded down in the front room rather than risk encountering a patrol. And Citláli and I reeled and giggled as we went to our pallet in the other room, there to continue the celebration in an even more enthusiastic fashion.

For my next series of experiments I made only clay balls no bigger than quails' eggs, each containing a mere thumbnail's measure of pólvora. These all burst asunder with little more noise than a castor pod makes when it explodes its seeds, so the local children soon lost interest in those, too. But they enjoyed a different amusement I gave them—asking them to be lookouts for me, prowling all the streets around, to run and warn me if they espied a patrolling soldier anywhere. Since I already knew I had made a satisfactory pólvora and had observed its nicely destructive behavior when ignited in tight confinement, what I was trying now was to find a way to set off a pólvora-packed ball, small or large, from a distance—some means more reliable than laying a trail of loose powder.

I have mentioned the manner in which our people generally smoked our picíetl: rolled inside what we called a poquíetl, a tube of reed or paper that slowly burned along with the herb—not in a non-burning clay pipe, as the Spaniards do.

Occasionally we, and the white men, too, liked to mix with the picíetl some other ingredient—powdered cacao, certain seeds, dried blossoms—to change its taste or fragrance. What I did now was to roll numbers of very thin paper poquíeltin that contained the herb mixed with varying traces of pólvora. An ordinary poquíetl burns slowly as a smoker puffs on it, but is likely to extinguish itself when laid down for a while. I thought the addition of pólvora would keep an unattended tube alight but still let it burn only slowly.

And I was right. Trying these tiny paper poquíeltin in varying circumferences and lengths and content of picíetl plus pólvora, I eventually hit on the right combination. Inserted into the quill-hole of one of my miniature pottery balls, such a poquíetl could be lighted and would burn for a time—brief or prolonged, depending on its length—before reaching the hole and demolishing the ball with that clap of noise. There was no way I could accurately time such things—for instance, to make a number of balls burst simultaneously. But I could make and trim a poquíetl to a length that, when lighted, would give me ample time to be far away from the scene when it burned down to the ignition hole. I could also be sure that no vagrant breeze or the footstep of some passerby would disrupt its burning, as could so easily happen with a loose powder trail.

To verify that, I next did something so daring, hazardous and downright wicked that I did not even tell Citláli about it beforehand. I made another fist-size, pólvora-packed clay ball and inserted into its quill-hole a lengthy poquíetl. On the next sunny day, I put it into my waist pouch and walked from the house to the Traza, to the building I had long ago identified as the barracks of the lesser-ranking Spanish soldiers. There was, as always, a sentry on duty at the entrance, armed and armored. Looking as stupid and inoffensive as I could manage, I sauntered past him to the corner of the building, and there stopped and knelt as if to dislodge a pebble from my sandal.

I was able, both quickly and silently, to light the protruding end of the poquíetl, then to wedge the hard ball into the space between the corner stone and the street's cobblestones. I glanced at the guard; he was paying me no attention; nor was anyone else on the crowded street; so I stood up and sauntered on my way. I had gone at least a hundred paces before I heard the bellow of the blast. Even at that distance, I also heard the whizzing of the flying shards, and one of them actually tapped me lightly on my back. I turned and looked, and was gratified to see the commotion I had caused.

There was no visible damage to the building, except for a black, smoking blotch on its side, but two people were lying supine and bleeding near it—a man in Spanish dress and a tamémi whose yoke lay beside him. From out of the barracks came scampering not only the sentry but also numerous other soldiers, some of them only half-dressed, but all carrying weapons. Four or five of the indios on the street began running, from sheer terror at this unprecedented occurrence, and the soldiers went pelting after them. So I casually returned, to join the numerous others who stood about and gawked, obviously innocent of any involvement.

The Spaniard on the ground writhed and moaned, still alive, and a soldier brought the barracks médico to attend him. The unoffending tamémi, however, was quite dead. I was sorry, but I felt sure that the gods would regard him as having fallen in battle, and would treat him kindly. This had not really been a battle, of course, but I had struck a second blow against the enemy. Now, after two such inexplicable happenings, the white men had to have realized that they were suddenly beset by subversion, and they had to be disconcerted, perhaps even frightened, by that realization. As I had promised my mother and uncle, I had become the worm in the coyacapúli fruit, eating it from within.

During the rest of that day, the soldiers—every one in the city, I think—fanned out among the colación neighborhoods, searching houses, market stalls, the bags or bundles carried by native men and women, even making some of those strip off their clothes. But they gave that up after only the one day, their officers probably having decided that if illicit pólvora existed anywhere, it could easily be hidden (as I had hidden mine), and that the pólvora's separate ingredients, if any could be found, were totally innocuous and easily explainable. Anyway, they never got to our house, and I simply sat back and enjoyed the white men's discomfiture.

The next day, however, it was my turn to be discomfited, when a messenger came from the notarius Alonso—who knew where I lived—bidding me to appear before him at my earliest convenience. I dressed in my Spanish attire and went to the Cathedral and greeted him, again trying to look stupid and inoffensive. Alonso did not return my greeting, but gazed morosely at me for several moments before saying:

"Do you still think of me every time you use your burning-glass, Juan Británico?"

"Why, of course, Cuatl Alonso. As you said, it is a most useful—"

"Do not call me 'cuatl' any more," he snapped. "I fear we are no longer twins, brothers, even friends. I also fear that you have shed all pretense of being a Christian, meek and mild, respectful and obedient to that creed and to your superiors."

I said boldly, "I never was meek or mild, and I never have regarded Christians as my superiors. Do not call me Juan Británico any more."

Alonso glowered, but held his temper. "Hear me now. I am not officially involved in the army's hunt for the perpetrator of certain recent disturbances of the peace of this city. But I am as concerned as any decent and dutiful citizen should be. I do not accuse you personally, but I know you have a wide acquaintance among your fellows. I believe you could find the villain responsible for those acts as quickly as you found for us that goldsmith when we needed one."

Still boldly, I said, "I am no more a traitor to my own people, notarius, than I am obedient to yours."

He sighed and said, "So be it, then. We once were friends, and I will not directly denounce you to the authorities. But I give you fair warning. From the instant you leave this room, you will be followed and watched. Your every move, your every encounter, every conversation, every sneeze will be monitored and noted and reported. Soon or later, you will betray either yourself or another, perhaps even some person dear to you. If you do not go to the burning stake, be assured that someone will."

"That threat," I said, "I cannot abide. You give me little choice but to depart from this city forever."

"I think that would be best," he said coldly, "for you, for the city and for all who have ever been close to you."

He dismissed me forthwith, and one of the Cathedral's tame indio servants made no attempt to be unobtrusive as he trailed me all the way home.

XII

I had resolved to quit the City of Mexíco even before Alonso so coldly recommended that I do so. That was because I had despaired of ever raising an army of rebellion from among the city's inhabitants. Like the late Netzlin—and now Pochotl—the local men were too dependent on their white masters to want to rise up against them. Even had they wanted to, they were by now so enervated and unwarlike that they would not have dared to make the attempt. If I was to recruit any men like myself, resentful of the Spaniards' domination and bellicose enough to challenge it, I must retrace my journey hither. I must go again northward, into the unconquered lands.

"You are more than welcome to come with me," I told Citláli. "I truly have treasured the blessing of your nearness, your support and—well, everything you have meant to me. But you are a woman, and some years older than I, so you might find that I set too brisk a pace on the road. Especially since you would have to be leading Ehécatl by the hand."

"You are definitely going, then," she murmured unhappily.

"But not forever, despite what I said to the notarius. I fully intend to come back here. At the head of an armed force, I trust, sweeping the white men from every field and forest, every village, every city, including this one. However, that cannot be soon. So I will not ask you to wait for me, dear Citláli. You are still an exceedingly handsome woman. You may attract another good and loving husband, aquín ixnentla? At any rate, Ehécatl is old enough now for you to take the child with you when you tend the market stall. With what you earn there, and with the sum we have put by, and without my being an extra mouth to feed—"

She interrupted, "I would wait, dearest Tenamáxtli, however long. But how can I hope that you will ever be back? You will be risking your life out there."

"As I would, Citláli, even if I stayed here. As you have been risking yours. If I had been caught in the crime of experimenting with the pólvora, you would have been dragged to the stake along with me."

"I risked that because it was a chance we were taking together. I would go anywhere, do anything, if only we did it together."

"But there is Ehécatl to consider..."

"Yes," she whispered. Then, suddenly, she burst into tears and demanded, "Why are you so determined to pursue this folly? Why can you not resign yourself to recognize reality, and bear with it, as others have done?"

"Why?" I echoed, dumbfounded.

"Ayya, I know what the white men did to your father, but—"

"That is not reason enough?" I snapped. "I can still see him burning!"

"And they slew your friend, my husband. But what have they done to you? Tenamáxtli, you have suffered neither injury nor insult, beyond those few words spoken long ago by the mesón friar. Every other white man you have mentioned, you have said only good things of him. The kindness of the man Molina, the other teachers who gave of their knowledge, even that soldier who started you on your quest for the pólvora..."

"Crumbs from their table! The richly laden table that used to be ours! Whether my tonáli dictates that I shall succeed in restoring that table to our people, I do not know. But I am sure it bids me try. I refuse to believe that I was born to settle for crumbs. And I am wagering my life on that."

Citláli sighed so deeply that she seemed to shrink a bit. "How much longer will I have you by me? Or how little longer? When do you plan to go?"

"Not immediately, for I will not slink away, like a techíchi dog, with its head hung low and its tail tucked under. I want to leave something for the City of Mexíco—for all of New Spain—to remember me by. And what I have in mind, Citláli, is one final crime that you and I can commit together."

I cannot refute what Citláli had said: that I myself had never had pain, deprivation, imprisonment or even indignity inflicted on me by the Spaniards. But, during my years in the city, I had met or become aware of a multitude of my fellows who had. There were, as I have mentioned, the onetime warriors branded with the G, and the other slaves branded with the mark of their owners. There were the wretched, drunken men and women I had seen beaten and minced to death by the patrols, as Netzlin had been. And I had seen the once-pure blood of our race diluted, dirtied and disgraced in the varicolored mongrel offspring of the Spaniards and Moros.

Also I knew—not from personal experience, I rejoice to say, but from those very few who had somehow escaped—the horrors of the obrajes. These were vast, stone-walled, iron-gated workshops where cotton or wool was washed, carded, spun, dyed and woven into fabrics. The obrajes had first been established by the Spanish corregidores as a means of making a profit from convicted criminals. Criminal indios, I mean. Rather than just being locked up in idleness, such miscreants were put to that filthy, dreary and laborious work (and a cruelly demeaning work, for a man). They were paid no wages at all, were given only squalid quarters and no privacy whatever, were poorly fed, barely clothed, never let to bathe—and never let to leave the obraje until the expiration of their prison sentence, which few of them lived long enough to enjoy.

And the obrajes were profitable, so much so that individual Spaniards set up their own, and were freely given state prisoners to work in them, until eventually there were not enough prisoners to go around. At which time, the obraje owners began wheedling our people into handing over their children. Those boys and girls, the owners promised, would be apprenticed to learn a trade that they could follow in later life, and meanwhile the parents would be saved the cost of their upbringing. Worse yet, the abbots and abbesses of Christian orphan asylums, such as that at the Refugio de Santa Brígida, were easily persuaded to give their indio wards a choice, as soon as the children were old enough to understand: either take holy orders, to become a Christian nun or friar, or be damned to go and live and labor in an obraje. (The orphans of mixed blood, such as Rebeca Canalluza, were exempted from that damnation, because the Christian asylum-keepers could not be sure that some Spanish parent might not someday come looking to acknowledge and claim them.)

Whether or not the enslaved criminals had been deservedly convicted, those were at least grown men. The conscripted orphans and "apprentices" were not. But, just like the criminals, those boys and girls were almost never seen outside the obraje gates again. Like the criminals, they were worked unmercifully, often to death, and they suffered degradations and defilements that the grown men were spared. The obrajes were guarded and overseen not by their Spanish owners, but by cheaply hired Moros and mulatos. Those creatures delighted in showing their superiority to mere indio rustico children by beating and starving them, when they were not repeatedly forcing ahuilnéma upon the girls and cuilónyotl upon the boys.

The Christian corregidores and alcaldes and the Christian owners of obrajes and the converted-Christian native tepísquin all colluded in these atrocities, and the Christian Church connived at them, for their own aggrandizement, of course, but for another reason as well. The Spaniards had firmly convinced themselves that every single one of our people was a lazy, shiftless layabout who would never work unless compelled by imminent punishment, starvation or violent death.

That was not and never had been true. In the old days, our able-bodied men and women had often been commandeered by their lords—whether local nobles or Revered Speakers—to do unpaid labor, much of it drudging, on many a public project. In this city, for example, those had ranged from the building of the Chapultépec aqueduct to the erection of the Great Temple of Tenochtítlan. And our people did such work willingly, eagerly, because they regarded communal labor as just another way of getting together for cheerful social intercourse. They would undertake any task assigned to them if it was presented—not as a task—as an opportunity for convivial mingling. The Spanish masters could profitably have taken advantage of that trait in our people, but they preferred to use the lash and the sword and the prison and the obraje and the threat of the burning stake.

I grant that there were some good and admirable men among the whites—Alonso de Molina, for one, and others whom I would meet in time to come. There was even one among the black Moros who would become my staunch ally, friend and fellow adventurer. And then there was you, mi querida Verónica. But of our encounter I will tell in its place.

I grant, too, that my hoped-for overthrow of the white men's regnancy was in truth intended, at least partly, as my personal revenge for the murder of my father. My aim may also have been partly ignoble—in that I, like any young man, would have gloried in being acclaimed by the populace as a conquering hero, or, if I died in the striving, being exuberantly welcomed by all the warriors of the past when I arrived in the Tonatíucan afterworld. However, I maintain that, even more, my aim was to upraise all our downtrodden peoples and to bring our One World back from oblivion.

To make memorable my taking leave of the City of Mexíco, I had conceived a veritably temptestuous parting salute. Though I had already twice caused the Spaniards some alarm and agitation, that furor subsided after several days in which no more disturbances occurred. Only an occasional, really suspicious-looking person on the street was being stopped and searched or stripped, and only in the precincts of the Traza. I had to assume that I was still under the watchful eye of a Cathedral spy at all times, but I made sure that he never saw me do anything that would reward his vigilance.

When I told Citláli what I had in mind, she laughed approvingly, even while she shivered with mixed emotions of trepidation and gleeful anticipation—and enthusiastically agreed to assist me. So, as I set about preparing fully four of the clay balls, each as big as the ball used in a tlachtli game, each tightly packed with pólvora, I instructed her in all the details of my plan.

"The last time," I said, "I managed only to put a black smudge on the outside of the Spanish soldiers' building, and in the process slew a passing tamémi. This time, I wish to explode the pólvora inside a building—I am confident that it will cause great destruction—and not to kill any innocents. Well, admittedly, there are always several maátime about the place, selling their favors to the soldiers, but I do not regard such women as innocents."

"Do you mean that same barracks building in the Traza?"

"No. The street there is forever crowded with passersby. But I know of one place in which and around which there are never any persons but Spaniards. And the maátime. You will take the pólvora balls in there for me. The military school and stronghold called the Castillo, high on Grasshopper Hill."

Citláli exclaimed, "I am to carry these death-dealing objects inside? Inside a building full of soldiers, surrounded by soldiers?"

"Its stockade is ringed about by oldest-of-old trees, and it is very loosely guarded. I recently spent a whole day prowling its environs, unobserved, peering from behind one after another of those trees, and I am satisfied that you can easily get into and out of the Castillo without any danger of harm or capture."

She said, "I should very much like to be satisfied of that, myself."

"The stockade gates are always wide open, and the cadetes, as the recruits are called, wander in and out. So do their soldier-teachers. So do ordinary Spaniards, those who bring food and supplies and such. So do the maátime. And the one lone armed guard at the gate simply lolls about, uncaring. He challenges no one, not even the whores. I suppose the Spaniards feel they can be lax about protecting such a place, because what person in his right mind would try to wreak damage inside a military garrison?"

"Only I? Citláli the Brave and Foolhardy?" she said archly. "Please do assure me, Tenamáxtli, that I am doing this in my right mind."

"When I have explained everything," I said, "you will see how practical is my plan. Now, I myself cannot get through that stockade gate without being challenged and doubtless arrested. But you can."

"I pretend to be a maátitl? Ayya, do I look that much like a slut?"

"Hardly. You are far prettier than any of those. And you will be carrying a basket of fruit by its handle, and leading Ehécatl. Nothing could look more innocent than a young mother strolling through the greenwood with her child. If anyone does ask, you say that one of the maátime is your cousin, and you are bringing her a gift of fruit. Or that you hope to sell your fruit to the cadetes. That you need the money to support your obviously disabled child. I will teach you enough of the Spanish words for you to make those remarks. You will not be stopped. Then, once you are inside the Castillo, you simply set down your fruit basket and stroll out again. Set it near something combustible, if possible."

"A basket of fruit? These clay things do not much resemble fruit."

"Let me finish. Right now—you see?—into the quill-hole of this one of the balls I am inserting a thin poquíetl as long as my forearm. I will light it before you approach the stockade gate, and it will take a long, slow while to burn down and ignite the ball, by which time you and Ehécatl will be safely outside with me again. That one ball, when it bursts, will ignite the other three. All together, they should make a really spectacular explosion. Very well. When these have dried rock-hard and we are ready to go, I will place them in one of your elegant baskets, then cover them with fruits from the market." I paused and said, half to myself, "Those ought to be coyacapúli fruits. And I must try to find some with worms—like me—inside them."

"What?" said Citláli, puzzled.

"A private jest. Pay it no mind. Coyacapúli fruits are light of weight, not to make the basket too heavy. Anyway, I shall be carrying it until we get to the Castillo. Well, then. On the first sunny day, we three will leave this house and amble casually westward across the island, I with the basket, you leading Ehécatl..."

So that is what we did, a few days later, all of us dressed in immaculate white clothing and acting innocently carefree. To any onlooker we would have appeared to be only a happy family going off to enjoy an outdoor meal in the open air somewhere. And I assumed that there had to be an interested onlooker, some one of the Cathedral hirelings.

Besides the basket, I was carrying my arcabuz beneath my mantle, its stock clamped under my free arm so it hung vertically. It forced me to walk a bit stiffly, but it was invisible. And I had loaded it beforehand, exactly as I had once seen it done—a good measure of pólvora and a cloth patch and a lead ball rammed down the tube, a chip of false-gold held by the cat's-paw, the whole weapon awaiting only a pinch of pólvora on the little cazoleta pan to be ready to fling its lethal missile. I really had no notion of how to aim the thing, beyond vaguely pointing it. But, if the arcabuz also worked, and if fortune favored me, my swift-flying ball of lead might actually strike and wound some Spanish soldier or cadete.

If there was anyone following us, he was at least temporarily balked when, at the island's edge, I beckoned to a ferryman and we got aboard his acáli. I had him pole us first southward, toward the flower gardens of Xochimilco—where even Spanish families sometimes go for a day's outing—until I was sure no other acáli was pursuing us. Then I directed the ferryman to turn, and we landed at the mudflats bordering what was once the Chapultépec park. We climbed uphill, encountering no one, until the Castillo's roof was in sight. Then we dodged from tree to tree, going ever closer, until we could see the gate and the numerous figures going in and out, or to and fro, or just idling about, and still no one raised any outcry. At last we came to the tremendously thick-trunked ahuéhuetl I had earlier chosen, no more than a hundred paces distant from the gate, and we crouched behind that.

"It appears to be just another routine day at the Castillo," I said, as I disencumbered myself of the arcabuz and laid it beside me. "No extra guards, no one looking particularly wary. So the more quickly we do this, the better. Are you and the child ready, Citláli?"

"Yes," she said, her voice steady. "I did not tell you, Tenamáxtli, but last night we both went to a priest of the good goddess Tlazoltéotl, and I confessed all the misdeeds of our lifetimes. Including this one, if this is one." She saw the expression on my face and hastily added, "Just in case anything should go wrong. So, yes, we are ready."

I had winced at Citláli's mention of that goddess, because one does not usually invoke Filth Eater until one feels death is near—hence asks her to take and swallow all one's sins, in order to go purged and clean to one's afterlife. But, if it made Citláli feel better...

"This poquíetl will go on emitting its trail of smoke and smell while it burns," I said, as I used my lente and a stray sunbeam to light the paper that protruded slightly from the basket. "But there is a breeze up here today, so it will not be too noticeable. If anyone does smell it, he will doubtless think some cadetes have been practicing with their arcabuces. And I say again, the poquíetl will give you plenty of time to—"

"Let me have it, then," she said, "before I am overcome by nervousness or cowardice." She took the basket's handle and Ehécatl's hand. "And give me a kiss, Tenamáxtli, for... for encouragement."

I would have done that anyway, and gladly, lovingly, without her asking. She hesitated, peering around the tree, only until she was sure no one was looking our way. Then she stepped from behind the trunk and, the child beside her, walked sedately, serenely out from the tree's dense shade into the bright sunlight—as if they had just then come up the hill through the deep wood. I took my eyes off them only long enough to prime the arcabuz's cazoleta with a pinch of pólvora and to click the cat's-paw rearward, ready for firing. But when I looked again at the mother and child, what I saw was disconcerting.

Many of the men outside the gate were glancing with smiles of approval at the handsome woman approaching them. There was nothing unnatural about that. But then their gaze dropped to the eyeless Ehécatl, and their smiles turned to expressions of disbelief and distaste. Their focused attention caught the attention, too, of the armed guard leaning against the gate. He stared at the approaching pair, then straightened from his slouch and moved to intercept them. This was a contingency that I should have foreseen and prepared for, but I had not, or I most certainly would have instructed Citláli to desist from our plan if she were challenged.

Citláli stopped in front of him and they exchanged some words. I supposed that the guard said something like, "In God's name, what kind of freak is this you have in tow?" But Citláli would not have understood that, nor been able to make coherent reply. What she was saying—or trying to say—I assumed was one of the remarks in which I had drilled her: that she was visiting a maátitl cousin, or that she was peddling fruit. She could simply have set down her basket and stalked away, as if offended.

Anyway, the guard, seeing this comely woman up close, appeared to lose interest in her malformed little companion. As well as I could tell from my hiding place, he grinned and uttered a command, gesturing ominously with his arcabuz, for Citláli let go the child's hand and—to my astonishment—gave the basket to Ehécatl! That small person had to use both arms to hold it. Then Citláli turned Ehécatl to face the gate and gave a gentle push. As Ehécatl toddled obediently and directly toward the open entrance, Citláli raised her hands and began slowly undoing the knots that closed her huipil blouse. Not the guard nor the other men roundabout gave any notice to the child carrying the basket through the gate. All eyes were salaciously fixed on Citláli as she undressed.

Obviously, the guard had ordered her to strip for a thorough search—he had that authority—and she was doing it slowly, as voluptuously as any maátitl, to divert everyone's attention from Ehécatl, now out of my sight inside the stockade somewhere. Here was another distressing contingency for which we had not prepared. What was I to do? I knew from previous observation that the Castillo's fort door was in a line with the gate; presumably little Ehécatl would continue on, straight through it and into the fort. But then what?

I was now standing erect behind my tree, only my head extended far enough to keep watching, and I was uncertainly fingering the gatillo of my arcabuz. Should I discharge it now? I certainly was tempted to kill some one of the white men, who were clustered now and staring avidly, for Citláli had bared herself above the waist. All I could see was her shapely back, but I knew well that her breasts were lovely things to look upon. She began, still slowly, provocatively, undoing the waistband of her long skirt. It seemed to me—and perhaps also to those smirking onlookers—a sheaf of years before that skirt dropped to the ground. Then Citláli commenced another sheaf of years of unwinding her tochómitl undergarment. The guard took a step closer to her, and all the other men crowded close behind him, when at last Citláli tossed the cloth away and stood totally naked before them.

At that instant came a bellow of noise and a billow of smoke from some remote place inside the stockade, inside the fort itself, making every one of the watching men flinch even farther toward Citláli, then turn to gape openmouthed—as another and louder thunder boomed inside their fort, and another, louder yet. The red tiles of the fort's roof jittered and danced, and several fell off. Then, as if those still-reverberating roars had been only preliminary ebullitions—as occasionally the great volcano Citlaltépetl clears its throat three or four times before belching up a devastating eruption—so did the fort erupt with a blast that must have been heard all over the valley.

Its entire roof lifted high into the air, and disintegrated there, so the tiles and timbers soared even higher. From under them rose a tremendous, roiling, yellow-and-red-and-black cloud of commingled flames, smoke, sparks, unidentifiable pieces of the fort's interior furnishings, flailing human bodies and limp fragments of human bodies. I was quite sure that even my extravagant employment of several pólvora balls could not have caused such a cataclysm. What must have happened—little Ehécatl must have toddled, unhindered, as far as some storeroom of the fort's own pólvora or its cache of some other terribly sensitive combustible, just at the moment my basketful ignited and blew apart. I briefly wondered—could the child have been guided by our war god Huitzilopóchtli? By the spirit of my dead father? Or was it simply Ehécatl's own tonáli?

But I had other things to wonder about. Simultaneously with the fort's flying all to pieces, every person between it and me staggered as if by a heavy blow—including the guard and his captive Citláli—and several of the men lost their footing and fell down. Also, Citláli's discarded garments went whisking away from around her feet. I could not see anything to account for those happenings. But then I felt a shock as if cupped hands had abruptly slammed hard against both my ears. A mighty gale of wind, with the force of a stone wall falling, dashed against my ahuéhuetl and every other tree in the vicinity. Leaves, twigs, small branches, all went hurtling away from the site of that awesome explosion. The wall of wind was gone as suddenly as it had come, but had I not been behind my tree, my cazoleta would have been blown clean of pólvora and my arcabuz made useless.

When those people between me and the gate regained their balance, they stared horrified at the destruction within the stockade, and the fiercely blazing fire, and at the pieces of stone, wood, weapons—and their fellows—dropping from the sky. (Some of the men who had fallen did not get up; they had been hit by the things hurled straight outward by the blast.) The gate guard was the first to realize who was responsible for the disaster; he whirled again to face Citláli, a snarl contorting his visage. Citláli turned and ran, toward me, and the guard pointed his arcabuz at her back.

I pointed mine, too—at him—and squeezed the gatillo. My arcabuz performed exactly as it was supposed to, with a roar and a jolt that numbed my shoulder and rocked me backward a step or two. Where my lead ball went, whether it struck the guard or any of the others, I have no idea, because my view of them was clouded by the blue smoke I had created. Anyway, regretfully, I had not prevented the guard from discharging his own weapon. One moment Citláli was running toward me, her fine breasts bouncing lightly. The next moment, those breasts, her whole upper body, opened out like a red flower bursting into blossom. Gouts of blood and gobbets of flesh spewed out ahead of her to spatter on the ground, and onto those shreds of herself she fell face forward and lay still.

There was no sign or sound of pursuit as I fled down the hill. Evidently the discharge of my weapon had gone unheard, as I had expected, in the general tumult. And if I had hit anybody with the lead ball, his fellow soldiers probably assumed that he had been felled by one of the far-flung pieces of the fort. When I reached the lakeside, I did not stand about, waiting for an acáli to come along. I strode straight out across the mudflats and then, knee-deep in the turbid water, waded all the way back to the city, staying close under the aqueduct's tree-trunk piles to avoid being seen from either shore. Once I got to the island, though, I had to wait awhile before I had an opportunity to slip unnoticed in among the crowds of people that had gathered there, buzzing excitedly as they gazed at the tower of smoke still hanging over Grasshopper Hill.

The streets were all but empty as I scuttled to our familiar colación of San Pablo Zoquipan and to the house Citláli and I had shared for so long. I doubted that any Cathedral spy was still keeping watch—he would be down beside the lake with almost every other city resident—but if he was on duty, and if he challenged me or even followed me, I was fully prepared to kill him. Inside the house, I recharged my arcabuz, to be ready for that necessity or any other. Then I lifted to my back, with a tumpline around my forehead, the bale of my belongings that I had prudently packed beforehand. The only other things I took from the house were our little hoard of money—in cacao beans, tin snippets, a variety of Spanish coins—and my sack of salitre, the one pólvora ingredient that might be hard to find elsewhere. With a piece of rope, I made a sling for my arcabuz, so it could be carried inconspicuously under my pack and sack.

On the street again, I saw none of the few passersby take any interest in my doings and, glancing back from time to time, saw no one following me. I did not head north to the Tepeyáca causeway by which my mother, my uncle and myself had so long ago entered the City of Mexíco. If soldiers should be sent chasing me, the notarius Alonso would be in conscience bound to tell them that I was most likely going directly homeward, toward the Aztlan I had told him about. So I went west through the city instead, and across the causeway that leads to the town of Tlácopan. And there, as I stepped onto the mainland, I turned just long enough to shake my clenched fist back at the city—the city that had slaughtered both my father and my lover—swearing an oath that I would be back, to avenge them both.

Many things have happened in my lifetime that have forever hung heavy in my heart. The death of Citláli was one of those occurrences. And I have known many regrettable losses, leaving voids in my heart that never would be filled again. The death of Citláli was one of those occurrences, too.

I have just now spoken of her as my lover, and of course, in the physical sense, she was certainly that. She was also most lovable and loving—and for a very long while I would be desolate, bereft of her dear presence—but in truth I never loved her unreservedly. I knew it then, and I know it even better now, because, at a later time in my life, I would love with all my heart. Even if I had been totally and utterly smitten with Citláli, I could not have brought myself to marry her. For one reason, she had been the wife of another before me. I had been a second-best, so to speak. For another reason, I could never have hoped for children of my own, not by her, not with the sad example of Ome-Ehécatl always in view.

Though I am sure that Citláli was well aware of my feelings—or my insufficiency of them—she never gave the least hint of that awareness. She had said, "I would do anything..." meaning that, if need be, she would die for me. And she had done just that, and more than that. With her successful accomplishment of my taunting farewell insult to the City of Mexíco, she had won for both Ehécatl and herself not only my gratitude, but also that of the gods.

As I have said, Ehécatl would have had no hope of escaping damnation to the eternal nothingness of Míctlan—and neither would Citláli, since she had given birth only to a child too dreadfully defective for any of our priests to have accepted it for sacrifice to any god. But now Citláli had contrived to make sacrifices of both mother and child—and at the same time to annihilate many of the alien white men. That deed, worthy of a warrior hero, was certain to please all our old-time gods, so she and Ehécatl were assured of an afterlife of ease and opulence. I knew they both would be happy during that eternity, and I could even hope that the gods would benignantly bestow on Ehécatl the eyes to see the splendors of whichever afterworld they had gone to.

XIII

Our people have a saying: that a man who goes he knows not where does not need to fear losing the road. My only aim was to get well away from the City of Mexíco before I turned northward into the unconquered lands. So, from Tlácopan, I took the roads that continued to lead me westward. In time, I found myself in Michihuácan, the homeland of the Purémpe people.

This nation was one of the few in The One World that had never been subsumed or put under tribute by the Mexíca. The chief reason for Michihuácan's sturdy independence in those days was that the Purémpe artisans and armorers knew the secret of compounding a brown metal so hard and sharp that, in battle, the blades made of it easily prevailed over the brittle obsidian weapons of the Mexíca. After just a few tries at subduing Michihuácan, the Mexíca were satisfied to settle for a truce, and thereafter the two nations engaged freely in trade—or almost freely; the Purémpecha never did let any other people of The One World learn the secret of their marvelous metal. Of course, that metal is no longer a secret; the Spaniards recognized it on sight as what they call bronce. And those brown blades could not prevail against the white men's even harder and sharper steel—nor their softer metal, the lead propelled by pólvora.

Nevertheless, even with inferior weaponry, the gallant Purémpecha fought more fiercely against the Spaniards than had any other nation thus invaded. As soon as those white men had conquered and secured what is now New Spain, one of the most cruel and rapacious of their captains, a man named Guzmán, led a force westward from the City of Mexíco—the same way I had just now come. His intent was to seize for himself as much land and as many subjects as his commander Cortés had acquired. Though the word Michihuácan means only "Land of the Fishermen," Guzmán soon found—as the Mexíca had found before him—that it could as well have been called Land of Defiant Warriors.

It cost Guzmán several thousand of his soldiers to advance—and advance only creepingly—across the lush fields and rolling hills of that eye-pleasing countryside. Of the Purémpecha, many more thousands fell, but there were always some remaining to go on fighting, undeterred. To slash and blast and burn his way to Michihuácan's northern border, where it abuts the land called Kuanáhuata, and to its western edge, which is the coast of the Western Sea, took Guzmán nearly fifteen years. (As I have mentioned, back when my mother, my uncle and I journeyed to the City of Mexíco, we often had to circle warily around parts of Michihuácan in which bloody battles were still being waged.) As a warrior myself, I must concede, considering what it had cost Guzmán in years and casualties, that he had fairly won the right to claim all that land and to give it a new name of his own choosing—New Galicia, honoring his home province back in Old Spain.

But he also did things inexcusable. He herded together the few Purémpe warriors he had taken prisoner alive and all the other Purémpe men and boys throughout New Galicia who might someday decide to turn warriors, and he shipped them off as slaves, over the Eastern Sea, to the island of Cuba and another island somewhere out there called Isla Española. Thus Guzmán could be sure that those men and boys, unable to speak the tongues of the islands' native slaves and the imported Moro slaves, would be helpless to foment any further defiance against their Spanish masters.

So it was that, by the time I arrived in Michihuácan, the population consisted entirely of females young and old, aged males and barely adolescent boys. I being the first adult-but-not-elderly man seen thereabouts in recent memory, I was regarded as a curiosity, and a welcome one. During my travel westward across what had been the Mexíca lands, I had had to request food and shelter in the villages and farmsteads I had come upon. The menfolk of those places always agreeably accorded me that hospitality, but I had had to ask. Here in Michihuácan, I was positively besieged with offers of food, drink, a place to sleep and "stay as long as you like, stranger." When I passed homesteads along the road, their womenfolk—because there were no menfolk—would actually run out from their doorways to tug at my mantle and invite me inside.

If I was a novelty to them, so were the Purémpecha a novelty to me—even though I had expected them to be the kind of people they were. That was because I had met a number of their elderly (hence surviving) men in the City of Mexíco—pochtéca merchants or messengers or mere vagabonds—at the Mesón de San José or in the marketplaces. The heads of those men were as bald as huaxolómi eggs, and, they told me, so was the head of every man, woman and child in Michihuácan, because the Purémpecha regarded sleek, shiny baldness as the crowning touch of human beauty. Still, my having seen those men with their heads shaved clean of everything but eyelashes had not made much impression on me; after all, they were old enough to be bald in any case. It was quite different when I got to Michihuácan, to see every single soul—from infants to children to grown women and grandmothers—as hairless as the old men among them.

Most of The One World's people, including myself, took pride in our hair and wore it long. We men let it grow to shoulder length, with a heavy fringe across our foreheads; women's hair might reach to their waists or below. But the Spaniards, deeming their beards and mustaches the only true symbols of virility, thought our men looked effeminate and our women slatternly. They even coined a word, balcarrota (roughly "a haystack"), with which to speak of our hairstyle, and spoke it disparagingly. They also—since they were continually accusing us of petty pilferage from their belongings—assumed that we hid such stolen items under all that hair. So Guzmán and the other Spanish lords of New Galicia doubtless highly approved of the Purémpe custom of total baldness.

However, there were in Michihuácan other customs of which I am certain the Spaniards, being Christians, could not have approved. That is because Christians are disquieted even by any mention of sexual acts, and are veritably horrified by any out-of-the-ordinary sexual behavior—far more so than they are repelled by, say, human sacrifices to "pagan gods." Those Purémpe men in the city, when I was learning what I could of their Poré language, had taught me many Poré words and phrases relating to sexual matters. Those men, I repeat, were old, long past any capacity for coupling or the least cravings of that sort. Nevertheless, they lustfully smacked their gums as they recounted the various and remarkable, even unseemly and scandalous ways in which they had slaked the sexual appetites of their youth—and had been allowed by local custom to do so.

I say "unseemly and scandalous" not because I myself have ever been any paragon of chastity or modesty. But my Aztéca people, and the Mexíca, and most others, always had been almost as prudish as Christians in regard to sex. We had no written laws and regulations and shall-nots, as the Christians do, but tradition taught us that certain things simply were not to be done. Adultery, incest, promiscuous fornication (except during certain fertility ceremonies), the conceiving of bastards, rape (except by warriors in enemy territories), the seduction of the underaged, the act of cuilónyotl between males and patlachúia between females, all those were forbidden. While we, unlike the Christians, acknowledged that any person might be of a deviant or even depraved nature, and that any normal person might misbehave when overwhelmed by lust, we did not sanction such doings. If anything of that sort was discovered, the perpetrator (or participants) would at the very least be shunned by all decent people forever after, or be banished into exile, or be severely punished, or even be put to death with the "flower garland" noose.

But, as those aged Purémpe men in the city had so gleefully and bawdily forewarned me, the customs of Michihuácan could not have been more different. Or more lenient. Among the Purémpecha, not any imaginable kind of sexual congress was prohibited, so long as both (or all) the participants concurred in the act—or at least did not vociferously complain of the act, as in the case of animals employed by men and women who had a taste for that sort of coupling. In former days, said the old men, only the native doe and buck deer had satisfactorily met those people's two requirements: namely, that the creature be catchable and that it have a usable feminine orifice or masculine protuberance. Indeed, they said, copulation with a buck or a doe was regarded by everyone, especially the priests, as a praiseworthy act of religious devotion, because the Purémpecha believe that deer are earthly manifestations of the sun god. Since the coming of the Spaniards, however, said the old men, more than a few Purémpe females and the surviving adolescent males had found reason to be glad for the white men's introduction of embraceable jack and jenny asses, rams and ewes, billy and nanny goats.

Well, I had no predilections of that sort, and, if any of the many females I encountered in Michihuácan had previously been entertaining themselves with bestial surrogates for their vanished menfolk, they were happy enough to discard the animals when I came along. There being such an abundance of women and girls eager for my attentions, everywhere I wandered in that land, I could take my pick of the comeliest, and I did. At first, I admit, it was a trifle hard for me to get accustomed to bald women. It was even hard sometimes to tell the younger among them from the younger males, because both sexes of the Purémpecha dress almost exactly alike. But I gradually developed an almost Purémpe admiration for their baldness, as, over time, I learned to perceive that the facial beauty of some women is actually enhanced by being otherwise unadorned. And in their having shed their tresses, they had by no means diminished any of their feminine fervors and amative abilities.

Only once did I make a misjudgment in that respect, and I blame that occurrence on chápari, the beverage that the Purémpecha make from the honey of their land's wild black bees, a drink incalculably more inebriating than even Spanish wines. I had stopped for a night at a travelers' inn, where the only other guests were an elderly pochtécatl and a messenger almost as old. The inn's owner was a bald woman, and her three bald helpers were apparently her daughters. Over the course of the evening I partook indiscreetly of the inn's delicious chápari. I got sufficiently sodden that I had to be helped to my cubicle and undressed and deposited on my pallet by the smallest and most beautiful of the servants, who then, unbidden, lavished on my tepúli that wonderfully ardent ingurgitation I had first experienced with my birthday auyaními in Aztlan and later, many times, with my cousin Améyatl and other women. No man is ever too drunk to enjoy that experience to the utmost.

So, afterward, I bade the servant undress and let me gratefully reciprocate with the same attention to her xacapíli. Muddled as I was, I had it well within my mouth before I realized it was rather too prominent to be a xacapíli. It got spit out of my mouth, not in revulsion, but because I gave such a sudden laugh at my own befuddled mistake. The beautiful boy looked hurt, and backed away, and his tepúli instantly wilted very nearly to xacapíli stubbiness—which sight inspired in me some drunken ideas of experimentation, so I beckoned him to me again. When he finally departed, I gave him a drunkenly extravagant maravedí coin by way of thanks, then fell drunkenly asleep, to wake the next day with an earthquake of a headache and only the dimmest recollection of what experiments the boy and I had engaged in.

Considering Michihuácan's abundance of available womanhood and girlhood—not to mention boys and domestic animals, should I ever get so very drunk as to essay further experimentation—and the land's bounty of other good things, I could have supposed myself prematurely transported to Tonatíucan or one of the other afterworlds of eternal joyfulness. Besides its limitless sexual license and opportunity, Michihuácan offered also a voluptuous variety of food and drink: the delicate lake and river fish that can be found nowhere else, eggs and stews of the turtles that abound on its seacoast, clay-baked quail and toasted hummingbirds, vanilla-flavored chocólatl and of course the incomparable chápari. In that land, one could even feast with only one's eyes: on the profusely flowered rolling meadows, the sparkling streams and limpid lakes, the richly fruiting orchards and farm fields, all bordered by the blue-green mountains. Yes, a man young, healthy and vigorous might well be tempted to stay in Michihuácan forever. And so I might have done, had I not dedicated myself to a mission.

"Ayya, I will never recruit any warlike men here," I said. "I must move on."

"What about warlike women?" asked my consort of the moment, a radiantly lovely young woman, whose feather-fan eyelashes seemed even more luxuriant in contrast to her otherwise hairless and glowing visage. Her name was Pakápeti, which means "Tiptoe." When I only looked blankly at her, she added, "The Spaniards committed an oversight when they killed or abducted only our menfolk. They ignored the capabilities of us women."

I snorted in amusement. "Women? Warriors? Nonsense."

"It is you who speak nonsense," she snapped. "You might as well claim that a man can ride a horse faster than a woman can. I have seen both Spanish men and women on horseback. As to which can ride the faster, much depends on the horse."

"I have no men or horses," I said ruefully.

"You have that," said Tiptoe, indicating my arcabuz. I had been practicing with it all afternoon, trying with only middling success to knock individual ahuácatin fruits off a tree near her hut. "A woman could use it as expertly as you do," she said, trying hard not to sound sarcastic. "Make or steal more of those thunder-sticks and..."

"That is my intention. As soon as I have enough of an army to warrant the need of them."

"I would not have to travel very far hereabout," she said, "to recruit for you a considerable number of strong and willing and vengeful women. Except for those whom the Spaniards took for household slaves—or bed-warmers—the rest of us would not even be missed, if we disappeared from our customary abodes."

I knew what she meant. On my way westward, thus far, I had carefully stayed clear of the many Spanish estancias, all of which, naturally, encompassed Michihuacán's prime growing and grazing lands. There being no more Purémpe men, and the Purémpe women having been judged suitable only for indoor services, the outdoor work of the farms and ranches and orchards was done by imported male slaves. From a distance, I had seen the black Moros laboring, overseen by Spaniards on horseback, each usually with whip in hand. The new masters of Michihuácan had planted the fields mostly with marketable crops—the alien wheat and sweet cane and a greenery called alfalfa, and the trees that grow alien fruits called manzanas, naranjas, limónes and aceitunas. Less tillable fields were thick with herds of sheep or cows or horses, and there were pens full of pigs, chickens and gallipavos. Even places so swampy they had never been tilled before were planted with a foreign water-growing grain called arroz. Since the Spaniards managed to wrest harvests and profits from almost every piece of Michihuácan, the plots left to the surviving Purémpecha were few and small and only grudgingly productive.

Pakápeti said, "You have spoken of eating well in this land, Tenamáxtli. Let me tell you why that is. What patches we have of maize and tomatoes and chilis are tended by our old men and women. The children gather fruits, nuts, berries, the wild honey for making sweets and chápari. It is we women who bring in the meat. Wild fowl, small game, fish, even the occasional boar and cuguar."

She paused, then added wryly, "We do not do that with thunder-sticks. We use the ancient means of fowling nets and fishing lines and obsidian hunting weapons. Also, we women continue the ancient Purémpe crafts of making lacquerware and glazed pottery. Those objects we barter for other foods from the seacoast tribes, and for pigs or chickens or lambs or kids from the Spaniards. We live, even without menfolk, and we live not badly, but we live only by the sufferance of those white masters. That is why I say we would not be missed if we marched off to war."

"At least you live," I said. "You would assuredly not live so well if you went to war. If you lived at all."

"Other women have fought the Spaniards, you know. The Mexíca women, during the final battles in the streets of Tenochtítlan, stood on the rooftops and threw down on the invaders stones and nests full of wasps and even lumps of their own excrement."

"Much good it did them. I knew an even braver Mexícatl woman in more recent times. She actually slew a number of the white men, and much good it did her. She lost her own life in consequence."

Tiptoe said urgently, "We, too, would gladly give our lives if we could take some of theirs." She leaned close, those extraordinary eyelashes wide, fixing me with eyes as dark and lovely as the lashes. "Only try us, Tenamáxtli. It would be the last thing the Spaniards would ever expect. An uprising of women!"

"And the last thing I should ever hope to be involved in," I said with a laugh. "Me—at the head of an army of females. Why, every dead warrior in Tonatíucan would be convulsed, either with hilarity or with horror. The idea is ludicrous, my dear. I must seek men."

"Go then," she said, sitting back and looking extremely vexed. "Go and get your men. There still are some in Michihuácan." She waved an arm vaguely northward.

"Still some men here?" I said, surprised. "Purémpe men? Warriors? Are they in hiding? In ambuscade?"

"No. They are in swaddling," she said contemptuously. "Not warriors and not Purémpecha. They are Mexíca, imported here to settle new colonies around the lake Pátzcuaro. But I fear you will find those men much less stalwart and much more meek than myself and the women I could gather for you."

"I grant, Tiptoe, that you are anything but meek. Your name-giver must have badly misread his tonálmatl book of names. Tell me about those Mexíca. Imported by whom? For what purpose?"

"I know only what I have heard. Some Spanish Christian priest has founded colonies all around that Lake of Rushes, for some peculiar purpose of his own. And there being no Purémpe men still in existence, he had to bring men—and their families—from the Mexíca lands. I hear also that the priest coddles all those settlers as tenderly as if they were his children. His babes in swaddling, just as I said."

"Family men," I muttered. "You are probably right about their not being very much disposed to rebellion. Especially if they are being so well treated by their overlord. But if that is so, he sounds little like a Christian."

Pakápeti shrugged, and that made my heart smile, for she happened to be naked at the time, and her darling breasts bounced with the movement. Not at all heart-smilingly, but frostily, she said, "Go and see. The lake is only three one-long-runs from here."

The Lake of Rushes is the exact color of the chalchíhuitl, the jadestone, the gem that is held sacred by every people of The One World. And the low, rounded mountains enclosing Pátzcuaro are a darker shade of that same blue-green color. So, as I crested one of the mountains and looked down, the lake appeared to be a bright jewel that had been dropped upon a bed of moss. There is an island in the lake, Xarákuaro, that must once have been the brightest facet of that gem, for I am told that it was covered with temples and altars that glowed and coruscated with colored paints and gold leaf and feather banners. But Guzmán's soldiers had razed all those edifices and scoured the island down to the barrenness that it still is.

Gone, too, were all the original communities that had ringed the lake, including Tzintzuntzaní, "Where There Are Hummingbirds." That had been the capital city of Michihuácan, a city composed entirely of palaces, one of them the seat of Tzímtzicha, last Revered Speaker of the vanquished Purémpecha. From my mountaintop, I could see only one thing remaining from olden days. That was the pyramid, east of the lake, notable for its size and form, not tall but lengthy, combining both round and square shapes. And that iyákata, as a pyramid is called in Poré, I knew was a survivor from a really olden time, erected by a people who lived here long before the Purémpecha. Even in Tzímtzicha's day, it had been ruinously crumbled and overgrown, but it was still an awesome sight to see.

There were again villages scattered around the lake's rim, replacing those that had been leveled by Guzmán's men, but these were in no way distinctive, all their houses having been built in the Spanish style, low and flat, of that dried adobe brick. In the nearest village, directly below the height where I stood, I could see people moving about. All were clad in Mexíca fashion and were of my own skin color; I saw no Spaniards anywhere among them. So I descended thither, and greeted the first man I came upon. He was seated on a bench before the doorway of his house, painstakingly whittling and shaping a piece of wood.

I spoke the customary Náhuatl salute, "Mixpantzínco," meaning "In your august presence..."

And he replied, not in Poré, but also in Náhuatl, with the customary polite "Ximopanólti," meaning "At your convenience..." then added, cordially enough, "we do not have many of our fellow Mexíca coming to visit Utopia."

I did not want to confuse him by saying that I was actually an Aztécatl, nor did I ask the meaning of that strange word he had just spoken. I said only, "I am a stranger in these parts, and I only recently learned that there were Mexíca in this vicinity. It is good to hear my native tongue spoken again. My name is Tenamáxtli."

"Mixpantzínco, Cuatl Tenamáxtli," he said courteously. "I am called Erasmo Mártir."

"Ah, after that Christian saint. I too have a Christian name. Juan Británico."

"If you are a Christian, and if you are looking for employment, our good Padre Vasco may make room for you here. Have you a wife and children somewhere?"

"No, Cuatl Erasmo. I am a solitary wayfarer."

"Too bad." He shook his head sympathetically. "Padre Vasco accepts only settlers with families. However, if you care to stay for a time, he will most hospitably afford you guest lodging. You will find him in Santa Cruz Pátzcuaro, the next village west along the lake."

"I will go there, then, and not keep you from your work."

"Ayyo, you are no hindrance. The padre does not make us labor unceasingly, like slaves, and it is pleasant to converse with a newcome Mexícatl."

"What is it that you are making, anyway?"

"This will be a mecahuéhuetl," he said, indicating some nearly finished parts behind the bench. They were pieces of wood about the size and gracefully curvaceous shape of a woman's torso.

I nodded, recognizing what the parts would be when assembled. "What the Spaniards call a guitarra."

Of the musical instruments that the Spanish introduced to New Spain, most were at least basically similar to those already known in our One World. That is to say, they made music by being blown through or shaken or struck with sticks or rasped with a notched rod. But the Spaniards had also brought instruments totally different from ours, such as this guitarra and the vihuela, the arpa, the mandolina. All of our people were much amazed—and admiring—that such instruments could make sweet music from mere strings, tightly strung, being plucked with the fingers or rasped with an arco.

"But why," I asked Erasmo, "are you copying a foreign novelty? Surely the white men have their own guitarra makers."

"Not so expert as we are," he said proudly. "The padre and his assistants taught us how to make these, and now he says we make these mecahuéhuetin superior even to those brought from Old Spain."

"We?" I echoed. "You are not the only maker of guitarras?"

"No, indeed. Every man here in San Marcos Churítzio concentrates on this one craft. It is the particular enterprise assigned to this village, as other villages of Utopia each produce lacquerwork or copperware or whatever."

"Why?" was all I could think to say, for I had never before known of any community devoted to doing just one thing and nothing else.

"Go and talk to Padre Vasco," said Erasmo. "He will be happy to tell you all about his engendering of our Utopia."

"I will do that. Thank you, Cuatl Erasmo, and mixpantzínco."

Instead of saying "ximopanólti" in farewell, he said, "Vaya con Dios," and added cheerfully, "Come again, Cuatl Juan. Someday I intend to learn to play music from one of these things."

I trudged on westward, but halted in an uninhabited area and went among some bushes to change from my mantle and loincloth into the shirt and trousers and boots I carried in my pack. So I was Spanishly attired when I arrived at Santa Cruz Pátzcuaro. On inquiry, I was directed to the small adobe church and its attached casa de cura. The padre himself answered the door there; he was in no wise so aloof and inaccessible as most Christian priests are. Also, he was dressed in sturdy, heavy, work-stained shirt and breeches, not a black gown.

I made bold to introduce myself, in Spanish, as Juan Británico, lay assistant to Fray Alonso de Molina, notarius of Bishop Zumárraga's Cathedral and said I was presently engaged, at my master Alonso's behest, in visiting Church missions in these hinterlands, to evaluate and report on their progress.

"Ah, I think you will give good report of ours, my son," said the padre. "And I am pleased to hear that Alonso is still toiling so assiduously in the vineyards of Mother Church. I remember the lad most fondly."

So I and my prevarication were instantly accepted, without question, by the good priest. And good I found him truly to be. Padre Vasco de Quiroga was a tall, thin, austere-looking but really merry-humored man. He was old enough to be bald enough that he required no tonsure, but he was still vigorous, as was attested by his work clothes, for which he humbly apologized.

"I should be properly cassocked to welcome an emissary of the bishop, but I am today helping my friars build a pigsty behind this house."

"Do not let me interrupt—"

"No, no, no. Por cielo, I am glad to take a respite. Sit down, son Juan. I can see that you are dusty from the road." He called to someone in some other room to bring us wine. "Sit, sit, my boy. And tell me. Have you yet seen much of what the Lord has helped us to accomplish hereabouts?"

"Only a little. I talked for a while to an Erasmo Mártir."

"Ah, yes. Of all our skillful guitarra makers, perhaps the most skillful. And a devout Christian convert. Then tell me also, Juan Británico. Since you are named for an English saint, are you perhaps acquainted with the late saintly Don Tomás Moro, also of England?"

"No, padre. But—excuse me—I was given to understand that the men of England are white men."

"So they are. Moro was this man's name, not his race or color. He was but lately and unjustly and vilely slain—his Christian piety his only crime—executed by the king of that England, who is an odious and despicable heretic. Anyway, if you do not know of Don Tomás, I suppose you do not know of his far-famed book, De optima Reipublicae statu..."

"No, padre."

"Or of the Utopia he prefigured in that book?"

"No, padre, except that I heard the artisan Erasmo speak the word."

"Well, Utopia is what we are trying to create here, around the shores of this paradisal lake. I only wish I could have undertaken it years ago. But I have not been that long a priest."

A young friar came in, bringing two exquisitely carved and lacquered wooden cups, clearly Purémpe products. He handed one to each of us and silently withdrew, and I drank gratefully of the cool wine.

"For most of my life," the padre went on, sounding contrite, "I was a judge, a man of the legal profession. And any practice of the law—let me tell you, young Juan—is a venal and corrupt and loathly occupation. At last, thanks be to God, I realized how I was so foully defiling myself and my soul. That is when I tore off my judicial robe, took holy orders and eventually was ordained to wear the cassock instead." He paused and laughed. "Of course, many of my former adversaries in the courts have gleefully quoted to me the old proverb: Hartóse el gato de carne, y luego se hizo fraile."

It took me a moment to translate that in my head: "The cat got a gutful of meat before it turned friar."

He went on, "The Utopia envisioned by Tomás Moro was to be an ideal community whose inhabitants would exist under perfect conditions. Where the evils bred by society—poverty, hunger, misery, crime, sin, war—would all have been done away with."

I forbore from commenting that there would be some people, even in an ideal community, who might wish to retain the right to enjoy sinning or waging war.

"So I have repopulated this pleasant piece of New Galicia with colonist families. Besides instructing them in the tenets of Christianity, I and my friars show them how to use European tools and how to employ the most modern methods of agriculture and husbandry. Beyond that, we strive not to direct or meddle in the colonists' lives. True, it was our Brother Agustín who taught them how to make guitarras. But we found elderly Purémpe men who could be persuaded to lay aside old rivalries and teach the colonists the age-old Purémpe handicrafts. Now each village devotes itself to perfecting one of those arts—woodwork, ceramics, weaving and so on—in the finest tradition of the Purémpecha. Any colonists incapable of learning such artisanry make their contribution to Utopia by farming or fishing or raising pigs, goats, chickens and such."

"But, Padre Vasco," I said. "What use have your settlers for such things as guitarras? That Erasmo to whom I spoke, he did not even know how to play music on it."

"Why, those are sold to merchants in the City of Mexíco, my son. The guitarras and the other crafted objects. Many of them are bought by brokers who, in turn, export them all the way back to Europe. We get handsome prices for them, too. The bulk of our farmers' and herders' produce also is sold. Of the money received, I pay a portion to the village families, equally divided among them. But most of our income is spent on new tools, seeds, breeding stock—whatever will improve and benefit Utopia as a whole."

"It all sounds most practical and laudable, padre," I said, and sincerely meant it. "Especially since, as Erasmo said, you do not make your people drudge like slaves."

"¡Válgame Dios, no!" he exclaimed. "I have seen the infernal obrajes in the city and elsewhere. Our colonists may be of an inferior race, but they are human beings. And now they are Christians, so they are not brute animals without souls. No, my son. The rule here in Utopia is that the people work communally for just six hours a day, six days a week. Sundays, of course, are for devotions. All the rest of the people's time is theirs to spend as they like. Tending their own home gardens, private doings, socializing with their fellows. Were I a hypocrite, I could say that I am simply being Christian in being no tyrannical master. But the truth is that our people work harder and more productively than any whip-driven slaves or obraje laborers."

I said, "Another thing Erasmo told me is that you allow only men and women already married to settle in this Utopia. Would you not get even more work out of single men and women, unburdened with children?"

He looked slightly uncomfortable. "Well, now, you have broached a rather indelicate subject. We do not presume to have re-created Eden here, but we do have to contend with both Eve and the serpent. Or with Eve as the serpent, I might better say."

"Ayya, forgive my having asked, padre. You must mean the Purémpe women."

"Exactly so. Bereft of their own menfolk, and learning that there were young, strong men here in Utopia, they have frequently descended on us to—how shall I say?—entice our men into performing at stud. They were absolutely pestiferous when we first settled here, and still to this day we get the occasional female visiting and importuning. I fear our family men are not all—or always—able to resist the temptation, but I am sure that unmarried ones would be much more easily seduced. And such debaucheries could lead to the ruin of Utopia."

I said approvingly, "It appears to me, Padre Vasco, that you have everything well thought out and well in hand. I shall be pleased to report that to the bishop's notarius."

"But not solely on my unsupported word, son Juan. Go all the way around the lake. Visit every village. You will need no guide. Anyway, I would not want you to suspect that you were being shown only the exemplary aspects of our community. Go alone. See things plain and unvarnished. When you return here, I shall be gratified if then you can say, as San Diego once said, that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only."