Aztec Autumn

XXIII

The distance from our starting place to the Yaki lands is three times the distance between Aztlan and the City of Mexíco, so my going there and my returning constituted the longest journey I ever made in my life.

I let G'nda Ké do the guiding of us, because she had come that way at least once before. For all I knew, generations of G'nda Kés had made the journey back and forth innumerable times during the sheaves of sheaves of years since that infamous first G'nda Ké had arrived among my ancestors in Aztlan. Those G'nda Kés' collective memory of this whole western part of The One World might well have been inscribed on this G'nda Ké's brain at birth, as plainly as a word-picture map.

It seemed that she might truly be eager to see her homeland again, because she did not—as certainly could be expected—try to make the journey as tiresome or uncomfortable or hazardous or endless as she could. Except when she directed us to veer around a tar pit ahead, or a quaking sand, or some other obstacle, I could tell by the sun that she was keeping to a course as directly northwestward as was possible, through the valleys of the coastal mountain ranges. The distance would have been shorter if we had followed the coastline west of the mountains or the flat Dead-Bone Lands to the east—but either way would have taken more time and been far more arduous for us, sweltering in the seaside swamps or shriveling in the mercilessly hot desert sands.

Nevertheless, and even without G'nda Ké's attempting to add hardships to it, the journey was rigorous and tiresome enough. Climbing a steep mountainside, of course, strains and cramps a body's muscles, seemingly all of them. You reach the crest with a sigh of heartfelt relief. But then you discover, going down the steep other side, that your body has countless other muscles to get strained and cramped. G'nda Ké and I and the two warriors—they were named Machíhuiz and Acocótli—endured those travails well enough, but we frequently had to stop and let the Tícitl Ualíztli regain his breath and strength. None of those mountains is high enough to wear a perpetual crown of snow, as does Popocatépetl, but many of them rise as far as the chill regions of the sky where Tlaloc reigns, and many were the nights that we five shivered sleepless, even wrapped in our heavy tlamáitin mantles.

Often and often, at night, we would hear a bear or jaguar or cuguar or océlotl snuffling inquisitively about our camp site, but they kept their distance, for wild animals have a natural abhorrence of humans—of live ones, anyway. Other game was plentiful by day, however: deer, rabbits, the masked mapáche, the pouch-bellied tlecuáchi. And there were abundant growing things: camótin tubers, ahuácatin fruits, mexíxin cress. When Ualíztli found some of the herb called camopalxíhuitl, he mixed that with the fat of our slain animals and made an ointment with which to soothe our sore muscles.

G'nda Ké asked him for some of the herb, to squeeze juice from it into her eyes, "because it makes them more dark and lustrous and beautiful." But the tícitl refused her because, he said, "Anyone fed a bit of that herb can soon be dead, and I would not trust you, my lady, to have it in your possession."

There were many waters in those mountains, both ponds and streams, all of them cold and sweet and delicious. We were not equipped for netting their fish or waterfowl, but the axólotin lizards and frogs were easily caught. We also dug amóli root and, cold though the waters were, bathed almost every day. In short, we never lacked for good food and drink and the pleasure of being clean. I can also say—now that I am no longer having to climb them—that those mountains are surpassingly lovely to look at.

During most of our journey, we were hospitably welcomed by the villages we came to. We slept under roofs, and the local women cooked for us many delicacies that were new to us. At every village, Ualíztli immediately sought out its tícitl, and begged various medicaments and implements from his colleague's stores. Though Ualíztli muttered that most of those backwoods tíciltin had pathetically antiquated notions of the physician's art, he was soon again carrying a well-stocked sack.

The person I sought to befriend in every community was its headman, or chief, or lord, or whatever he called himself. During most of our journey, we were traversing the lands of the peoples called the Cora, the Tepehuáne, the Sobaípuri and the Rarámuri, which is why they were amicable toward us, all those nations and tribes having long had dealings with Aztéca traveling traders and, before the downfall of Tenochtítlan, with Mexíca traders as well. They all spoke different languages, and some of their words and phrases I had learned—as I have earlier told—from their scouts sent to get a look at the white men, when those scouts and I resided at the Mesón de San José in the City of Mexíco. But G'nda Ké, because of her many and extensive travels, was much more fluent than I in all those languages. So, untrustworthy though she was at any responsible task, I employed her as my interpreter.

The message I wished to convey to every headman was the same: that I was collecting an army to overthrow the alien whites, and would he lend me as many strong, brave, truculent men as he could spare? Evidently G'nda Ké did not spitefully mistranslate my words, because almost all the headmen responded eagerly and generously to my request.

Those who had sent scouts south into the Spanish-held lands had already heard vivid firsthand reports of the white men's brutal oppression and mistreatment of those of our people who had survived the Conquest. They knew of the enslavements in obrajes, the killings, the whippings, the brandings, the humiliation of once-proud men and women, the imposition of an incomprehensible but cruel new religion. Those reports had naturally circulated among all the other tribes and communities and nations nearby, and, even at secondhand, had fired every manly and able-bodied man with an ardor to do something in retaliation. Now, here was their opportunity.

The headmen hardly had to call for volunteers. As soon as they relayed my words to their subjects, I would be surrounded by men—some of them mere adolescents, some old and rickety—enthusiastically shouting war cries and waving their weapons of obsidian or bone. I could take my choice, and those I picked I sent southward, with directions—as precise as I could make them—to enable their finding Chicomóztotl and joining Nochéztli there. Even to those too old or too young, I assigned an important errand:

"Go and spread my message to every other community, as far abroad as you can take it. And to every man who volunteers, give those same directions I have just given."

I should remark that I was not collecting men who merely wanted to be warriors. All of these were well accustomed to battle, because their tribes so often fought with neighboring ones, over territorial boundaries or hunting grounds or even to abduct each other's women for wives. However, none of these rustics had any experience of mass warfare, of being a component in an army, of serving in organized contingents that would act in disciplined concert. I was relying on Nochéztli and my other knights to teach them all they would need to know.

I suppose it was only to be expected that as we five travelers made our way farther and farther to the northwest, I would find my message received with more incredulity than enthusiasm. The communities in those distant reaches of The One World were smaller and more isolated, one from another. They apparently had little wish or need for mutual intercourse or trade or even communication. The few contacts between or among them occurred only when two or more had occasion to fight each other—as did those communities we had previously visited—usually for causes that more civilized people would have thought trifling.

Even the numerous tribes of the Rarámuri country—the name means the Runner People—seemed seldom to have done their running very far from their home villages. Most of their headmen had heard only vague rumors of strangers from beyond the Eastern Sea having invaded The One World. Some of those men felt that if any such thing really had happened, it was a disaster so distant that it was of no concern to them. Others flatly refused to believe the rumors at all. And eventually our little group arrived in regions where the resident Rarámuri had heard nothing whatever of the white men, and several of them laughed uproariously at the notion that whole hordes of uniformly white-skinned persons could exist.

The prevailing attitudes of indifference or skepticism or outright disbelief notwithstanding, I continued to reap harvests of new recruits for my army. I do not know whether to credit that to my urgent and persuasive argument, or to the men's having got tired of fighting their neighbors and desiring new enemies to vanquish, or to their simply wanting to journey far from their old familiar and unexciting haunts. The reason did not matter; what mattered was that they took up their arms and went south toward Chicomóztotl.

The Rarámuri lands were the northernmost in which the names Aztéca and Mexíca were even remotely recognized, and the last in which we travelers could expect to be received with hospitality or even with toleration. When we passed around the rim of a magnificent waterfall, admiring its grandeur as we did so, G'nda Ké said:

"The cascade is called Basa-séachic. It marks the boundary of the Rarámuri country, and indeed the farthest limit to which the Mexíca, at the very peak of their power, claimed to hold dominion. When we follow the riverside below the falls, we will be venturing into the Yaki lands, and we must go cautiously and watchfully. G'nda Ké does not much care what a wandering party of Yaki hunters would do to the rest of you. But she does not want them slaughtering her before she has a chance to hail them in their own tongue."

So, from there on, we went almost as stealthily as Ualíztli and I had crept through the underbrush while escaping from Compostela. But the wariness proved to have been unnecessary. For the space of three or four days, we met no one, and by the end of that time our course had brought us down from the thickly forested mountains into a region of low-growth rolling hills. On one of those we saw our first Yaki—a hunting party of six men—and they saw us at the same moment, and G'nda Ké called to them some greeting that stopped them from charging upon us. They stayed where they were, and regarded her icily as she went ahead of us to introduce herself.

She was still earnestly talking to them in the unlovely Yaki language—all grunts and clicks and mumbles—as we other four approached. The hunters were not speaking at all, and gave us men only the same icy stare. But neither did they make any threatening moves, so while G'nda Ké yammered on, I took the opportunity to look them over.

They had good hawklike faces and strong-muscled bodies, but they were about as unclean as are our priests, and wore their hair just as long and greasy and tangled. They were bare to the waist, and at first, I thought they were wearing skirts made of animal pelts. Then I made out that the skirts were of hair hanging loose all around, hair as long as their own and much longer than grows on any wild animal. It was human hair, the dried scalps still attached and tied about the men's waists with belt ropes. Several of them had added to the skirts the game they had slain this day—all small animals, carried by their tails tucked into those scalp belts. I might mention here that all kinds of game are abundant in those lands, and are eaten by the Yaki. But their men like best the meat of the pouch-bellied tlecuáchi, because it is so heavily larded with fat, which they believe gives them endurance in their hunting or fighting forays.

Their weapons were primitive, but hardly less lethal for that. Their bows and spears were of cane, their arrows of stiff reed and the spears were similar to those used by some fisher people, having three pointed prongs at the striking end. The arrows and spears were tipped with flint, a sure sign that the Yaki never had dealings with any of the nations to the south, where obsidian comes from. They had no swords like our maquáhuime, but two or three of them carried—dangling from thongs about their wrists—clubs of the quauxelolóni wood that is as hard and heavy as Spanish iron.

One of the six men now grunted a brief remark to G'nda Ké, jerked his head backward in the direction from which they had come, and they all turned and went that way. We five followed, though I wondered if G'nda Ké had merely urged her countrymen to take us to some larger gathering of hunters, where we could more easily be overpowered, scalped and slain.

Either she had not, or if that had been her intent, she had failed to persuade them. They led us, without ever once turning their heads to see if we came along, through the hills and through the rest of that day until, at evening, we came to their village. It was situated on the north bank of a river called, unsurprisingly, the Yaki, and the village was named, unimaginatively, Bakúm, which means only "water place." To me it was a village, and a meager and exceptionally squalid one, but G'nda Ké insisted on calling it a town, explaining:

"Bakúm is one of the Uonáiki—that is, one of the Eight Sacred Towns—founded by the revered prophets who begot the whole race of us Yaki in the Batna'atóka—that is, in the Ancient Time."

In the matter of living conditions and amenities, Bakúm appeared to have made very little progress since that Ancient Time, however long ago that had been. The people dwelt in dome-shaped huts crudely made of split cane crisscrossed into mats, and the mats laid overlapping. The entire village—every Yaki village I visited—was enclosed by a high fence of cane stalks held together and upright by intertwined vines. I had never before, anywhere in The One World, seen any community so seclusive and unsociable that it fenced itself off from everybody and everything beyond. None of the huts was a steam hut, and despite the village's name of "water place," it was unpleasantly evident that the villagers took from the river only drinking water, never washing water.

The river's plentiful canes and reeds were employed for every conceivable purpose, not just for weapons and building mats and fencing material, but also for all the utensils of daily life. The people slept on woven-reed pallets, the women used split-cane knives and scooped-out cane spoons in their cooking, the men wore cane-and-reed headdresses and tootled on cane whistles in their ceremonial dances. The only other evidences of artisanry that I saw among the Yaki were ugly brownware clay pots, carved and painted wooden masks and the cotton blankets woven on back-strap looms.

The land all about Bakúm was as fertile as I had seen anywhere, but the Yaki did only perfunctory farming—the Yaki women did, I should say—of maize, beans, amaranth, squash and just enough cotton to provide them with blankets and the women's apparel. Their every other vegetable need was supplied by wild-growing things—fruits of trees and cactus, various roots and grass seeds, bean pods of the mizquitl tree. Because the Yaki preferred to eat the fat of game animals, rather than render it into oil, they used for their cooking an oil laboriously pressed—by the women—from certain seeds. They knew nothing of making octli or any other such drink; they grew no picíetl for smoking; their only intoxicant was the cactus bud called peyotl. They neither planted nor gathered any medicinal herbs, or even collected wild bees' honey for an alleviative balm. As Ualíztli observed, early on, with disgust:

"The Yaki tíciltin, such as they are, rely on fearsome masks and chants and wooden rattles and pictures drawn in trays of sand to cure any and every indisposition. Except for women's complaints—and most of those are only complaints, not genuine illnesses—the tíciltin have precious few cures to their credit. These people, Tenamáxtzin, are truly savages."

I entirely agreed. The one and only aspect of the Yaki that a civilized person could find worthy of approbation was the ferocity of their warriors, whom they called yoem'sontáom. But that ferocity was, after all, exactly what I had come looking for.

When, in time, and with G'nda Ké translating, I was allowed to converse with Bakúm's yo'otuí—its five elders; there was no single chief in any community—I discovered that the word Yaki is really an all-inclusive name for three different branches of the same people. They are the Ópata, the Mayo and the Káhita, each inhabiting one, two or three of the Eight Sacred Towns and the country roundabout, each staying strictly segregated from the others. Bakúm was Mayo. I discovered also that I had been misinformed about the Yaki's detesting and slaughtering each other. At least, they did not quite. No man of the Ópata would kill another of the Ópata, unless he had very good reason for the act. But he would cheerfully slay any of his neighbor Mayo or Káhita who gave the slightest offense.

And all the three branches of the Yaki, I learned, were closely related to the To'ono O'otam, or Desert People, of whom I had first heard from the much-traveled slave Esteban. The To'ono O'otam lived far away to the northeast of the Yaki lands. To do some enjoyable killing of them required a long, long march and an organized onslaught. So, about once a year, all the Yaki yoem'sontáom would put aside their mutual animosities and would companionably combine to make that march against their Desert People cousins. And those would almost rejoicingly welcome the incursions, as giving them good excuse for butchering some of their Ópata, Mayo and Káhita cousins.

About one thing, however, I had not been misinformed, and that was the Yaki's abominable attitude toward their womenfolk. I had always referred to G'nda Ké simply as Yaki, and it was not until we got to Bakúm that I learned she was of the Mayo branch. I would have thought it her good fortune that the hunting party we had encountered were also Mayo, bringing her to a Mayo community. Not so. I soon realized that Yaki women were not regarded as being Mayo or Káhita or Ópata or anything else except women, the lowest form of life. When we entered Bakúm, G'nda Ké was not embraced as a long-lost sister blessedly returned to her people. All the villagers, including the females and children, watched her arrival as icily as the hunters had done, and as icily as they regarded us male outlanders.

That very first evening, G'nda Ké was put to work with the other women, preparing the night's meal—lardy tlecuáchi meat, maize cakes, roasted locusts, unidentifiable beans and roots. Then the women, including G'nda Ké, served the fare to the village men and boys. When those had eaten their fill, before they went off to chew peyotl, they indicated offhandedly that I, Ualíztli, Machíhuiz and Acocótli could scavenge among their leftovers. And not until we four had eaten most of what was left did the women, including G'nda Ké, dare to come and pick through the scraps and crumbs.

The men of whatever Yaki breed, when they were not fighting one cousin or another, did nothing but hunt all the day long—except in the Káhita village called Be'ene, on the shore of the Western, Sea, where later I saw the men do some lackadaisical fishing with their three-pronged spears and some lazy digging for shellfish. Everywhere, the women did all the work and lived only on remainders, including what little remainder of—I cannot say "affection"—what little remainder of forbearance their men might come home with, after a hard day afield.

If a man returned home in a fairly benign mood, he might greet his woman with a mere passing snarl instead of a blow. If he had had a really successful hunt or fight, and came home in a really good frame of mind, he might even condescend to fling his woman to the ground, lift her cotton skirt and his skirt of scalps, and engage her in a less than loving act of ahuilnéma, uncaring of how many onlookers might be present. That, of course, was why the village populations were so scant; the couplings occurred so seldom. More often, the men came home disgruntled, muttering curses and would beat their women as bloody as they would like to have bloodied the deer or bear or enemy that had got away.

"By Huitztli, I wish I could treat my woman so," said Acocótli, because, he confided, back in Aztlan he had a wife almost as mean-spirited as G'nda Ké, who bullied and nagged him unmercifully. "By Huitztli, I will, from now on, if I ever get home again!"

Our G'nda Ké found few opportunities in Bakúm to exercise her mean spirit. Being worked like a slave, being regarded as otherwise worthless, she endured those humiliations not apathetically like the other women, but in sullen and smoldering anger, because even the other women looked down on her—for her having no man to do the beating of her. (I and my companions refused to oblige her in that respect.) I know she would mightily have liked to command some awed and admiring adulation from her people, by boasting of her far travels and her evil exploits and the turmoils she had caused among men. But the women scorned to respect her in the least, and the men glared her to silence whenever she tried to speak to them. Perhaps G'nda Ké had been so long away from her people that she had forgotten how miserably insignificant she would be even in such coarse and ignorant company—that she would be accounted something less than vermin. Vermin at any rate could make themselves an annoyance. She no longer could.

No one beat her, but she was subject to orders from everyone, including the women, because they performed or assigned all the work of the village. They may have been envious of G'nda Ké's having seen something of the world outside the dreary Bakúm, or of her having once ordered men around. They may have despised her simply for her being not of their village. Whatever the reason, they behaved as maliciously as only small-minded women of petty authority can behave. They worked G'nda Ké unceasingly, taking special delight in giving her the dirtiest and hardest of tasks. It gladdened my heart to see it.

The only injury she received was a small one. While gathering firewood, she was bitten by a spider on the ankle, and it made her slightly ill. I personally would have thought it impossible for one tiny venomous creature to sicken a much larger and far more venomous one. Anyway, since no woman was allowed to shirk her work for any indisposition short of giving birth or visibly dying, G'nda Ké—screeching and protesting in mortification—was forced to stretch out on the ground for the ministrations of the village tícitl. As Ualíztli had said, that old fraud did nothing but don a mask designed to frighten off evil spirits, and bellow a nonsensical chant, and make nonsensical pictures on the ground with varicolored sands and shake a wooden rattle full of dried beans. Then he pronounced G'nda Ké hale and whole and ready for work again, and to work she was put.

The single small distinction G'nda Ké was accorded in Bakúm was the permission, when she was not at some other labor, to sit as interpreter between me and the five old yo'otuí. There she could speak, at least, and—since I never learned more than a few words of the language—she almost certainly must have tried to make herself a heroine by denouncing me as a quimíchi, or an agitator of dubious motives, or anything else that might have made the elders order us outlanders ousted or executed. But this much I know: There is no word for heroine in the Yaki tongue, no concept of any such kind of woman in the Yaki mind. If G'nda Ké did desperately try that tactic, I am sure the yo'otuí heard her rantings as nothing but woman-wind to be ignored. If she did insist that we Aztéca be exterminated, and if the old men took any notice at all, they would perversely have done just the opposite. So it may have been thanks to another of G'nda Ké's attempts at perfidy that the yo'otuí not only let me stay and speak my message but also listened attentively to me.

I should explain how those yo'otuí governed—if governed is the word—for the Yaki system was unique in The One World. Each of the old men was responsible for one ya'úra, meaning "function," of the five ya'úram of his village: religion, warfare, work, customs and dance. Necessarily, some of their duties overlapped, while others were scarcely required at all. The elder in charge of work, for example, had little to do but punish any female malingerer, and such a woman simply did not exist in Yaki society. The elder in charge of warfare had only to give his blessing whenever the yoem'sontáom of his village decided to make a raid on some other, or whenever the yoem'sontáom of all the three Yaki branches combined to make their almost-ritual raids on the Desert People.

The other three old men more or less governed in concert: the Keeper of Religion, the Keeper of the Customs and the Leader of the Dances. The Yaki religion could rightly be called no religion at all, for they worship only their own ancestors, and of course anyone among them who dies becomes, that moment, an ancestor. Since the anniversary of any ancestor's death is a cause for ceremonies honoring it, hardly a night goes by in the Yaki lands without a ceremony, major or minor, depending on how important that person had been in life. The only "gods" recognized by the Yaki are their two longest-ago ancestors, scarcely real gods, but more like the Lord and Lady Pair whom we Aztéca have always believed were the first begetters of our race. We do not actively worship ours, but the Yaki call theirs Old Man and Our Mother, and venerate them most deeply.

Also, the Yaki believe that their deserving dead go to a happy and eternal afterlife, like our Tonatíucan or Tlálocan, or the Christians' heaven. They call theirs The Land Beneath the Dawn, and rather foolishly insist that it is not immeasurably far away but nearby, just east of a notched mountain peak called Takalá'im, which sits in the very middle of the Yaki lands. Where their undeserving dead go, the Yaki do not know and do not seem to care, for they can conceive of no place like our Míctlan or the Christians' hell.

They do, however, believe that they, the living, must be constantly on their guard against a whole host of invisible evil godlings or spirits called the chapáyekám. Those are the pestiferous fomenters of illness, accidents, drought, flood, defeat in battle and every other misfortune that besets the Yaki race. So, while the Keeper of Religion sees to it that his people properly honor their ancestors, all the way back to Old Man and Our Mother, the Keeper of the Customs is charged with warding off the chapáyekám. It is he who carves and colors the wooden masks intended to frighten them away, and he is continually trying to devise ever more hideous visages.

It follows that the Leader of the Dances is the busiest of the five yo'otuí, for the communal dances are considered essential to the affairs of all the other four. The village work will not get properly done, the battles will not be won, the ancestors will not be sufficiently honored and the malignant spirits will not be adequately propitiated or dispelled unless the dances are done—and done just so. The Leader himself is too old to dance, and I found it somewhat comical that all the other men, who devoted their days to rough and bloody pursuits, should spend their every night in dancing solemnly, formally, even daintily, around celebratory bonfires. (It is hardly necessary to remark that the women never took part.)

The Leader dispensed to the dancers enough peyotl to give them unflagging energy, but not enough to fuddle or frenzy them so that they missed the precise steps and figures that had been prescribed through all the ages since the Ancient Times. The Leader hovered close to keep his hawk eye on the dancers, and to yank from among them any man who made a misstep or had the impudence to introduce a new one. They danced to what they called music, made by the men too old or crippled to dance. But since they lacked the variety of instruments invented by more civilized people, what they made was, to my ears, sheer noise. They blew on cane whistles, blew through water-filled gourds, rasped notched cane stalks together, shook wooden rattles and pounded on double-headed drums. (Though there was no paucity of animal hides, those drumheads were of human skin.) And the dancers themselves added to the noise, wearing anklets of cocoons, the dead insects inside clattering at every step.

For the dances honoring Old Man and Our Mother, or more recently departed ancestors, the men wore fanlike headdresses, but fashioned either of stiff cane strips or fluttering reeds, rather than feathers. For the dances intended to repel the wicked chapáyekám, every man wore one of those gruesome carved and daubed masks, no two alike. For the dances danced to celebrate a battle victory—or to anticipate one—the men wore cóyotin skins with the dead animals' toothy heads capping their own.

Then there was a dance done by one man alone, he the acknowledged best dancer in the village. This was the performance done to attract game for the hunters, in seasons when a drought or a disease had diminished the local population of wild animals. It truly was a graceful and exciting dance, and the more enjoyable because it was done without any "music." The man wore atop his head, secured by thongs, a buck deer's head—the handsomest procurable, with an impressive rack of antlers—and he was otherwise naked, except for bracelets and anklets of cocoons and he held in either hand an intricately carved wooden rattle. These provided the only accompanying noise as he various bounded like a startled buck, capered like a carefree fawn, shuffled bent over and wary, jerking his head about, like a hunter on the prowl. He might have to do this dance to exhaustion, many nights in a row, before some scout came to report that the game had returned to their usual habitats.

The Leader of the Dances confided to me, through G'nda Ké, that the game-attracting dance was much more efficacious in accomplishing its purpose when the dancer could dance around a sacrificial "doe." That would be a human female, tightly bound inside a doeskin. After she had been danced around for the ritual length of time, she would be butchered—just as was done to a real doe—dismembered, cooked and eaten by the men, they doing much slobbering and lip-smacking, so the wild game would sense their gratitude. Unfortunately, said the Leader, the Mayo men had not recently made any female-abducting raids on any alien village, so that part of the ceremony could not be demonstrated for my admiration. There were plenty of expendable Mayo females, he conceded, but they were too tough and stale and stringy to be lip-smackingly eaten. G'nda Ké managed to look affronted and sulky even at being slighted in that regard.

It mattered not to me that the Yaki men spent half their lives in dancing for reasons that I deemed absurd. What mattered was that the other half of their lives they dedicated to pure savagery, and that was what I wanted from them. When G'nda Ké translated my words to the five yo'otuí, they very pleasantly surprised me by being more receptive to my message than some of the Rarámuri chiefs had been.

"White men..." murmured one of the elders. "Yes, we have heard of white men. Our cousins, the To'ono O'otam, claimed to have had some of those wandering through their country. They even mentioned a black man."

Another grumbled, "What is the world coming to? Men should all be one color. Our color."

And another cautioned, "How can we know if the degenerate Desert People spoke truly? Had they been Yaki, now, they would have taken scalps to prove the existence of such beings."

And he was reminded by another, "We have never seen scalps of the evil chapáyekám, but we know they exist. And they are of no color at all."

And the fifth, the elder in charge of warfare, said, "I believe it would do our yoem'sontáom good to fight someone besides their own relatives for a change. I vote that we lend them to this outlander."

"I concur," said the elder in charge of the village work. "If this outlander speaks truly about the rapacity of the white men, we may someday not have any relatives to fight, anyway."

"I agree," said the Leader of the Dances. "Let us keep here only the Deer Dancer and enough other dancers to satisfy Old Man and Our Mother."

"And to repulse the chapáyekám," said the Keeper of the Customs.

"Surely all others of our color," said the elder who governed religion, "will wish to join in annihilating those of different color. I vote that we invite our cousins the Ópata and Káhita to participate."

The warfare elder spoke up again. "And why not our cousins the To'ono O'otam as well? This would be the grandest-ever alliance of relatives. Yes, that is what we will do."

So it was arranged. Bakúm would send a warrior "bearing the staff of truce" to relay my message to all the others of the Eight Sacred Towns, and a second messenger to the far-off Desert People. I promised two things in return for such generous cooperation. I would appoint one of my own warriors to lead all the Yaki men south to our gathering place at Chicomóztotl, and the other to wait here in Bakúm to guide the Desert People's warriors when they came. I would also, when all those yoem'sontáom got to Chicomóztotl, equip them with obsidian weapons far superior to theirs of flint. The elders accepted my offer of guides, but indignantly rejected the offer of weapons. What had been good enough for Old Man, and for their every male ancestor since, was good enough for modern warfare, they said, and I prudently did not argue the matter.

I was glad we had reached agreement when we did, for thereafter I was deprived of my means of communicating with the Yaki. G'nda Ké claimed to be feeling ever more ill, and incapable of even the exertion of interpreting. Indeed, she looked ill, her complexion having faded almost to the pallor of a white woman, so that her freckles were her most visible feature. When even the elder in charge of work, and the women who had worked her so hard, allotted her a domed hut of her own in which to lie and rest, it seemed they had decided—since she was not about to give birth—that she must be about to die. But I, knowing G'nda Ké, dismissed that notion. I was sure that her prostration was just another of her ruses, doubtless her way of expressing her vexation at my having been more cordially accepted by her own people than she had been.

XXIV

While we waited for the men of the other Yaki branches to assemble, Machíhuiz, Acocótli and I occupied our time in doing a sort of training of the Mayo warriors of Bakúm. That is to say, we mock-fought against them with our swords and javelins of obsidian edges and points, so that they would learn to parry such assaults with their primitive weapons. It was not that I expected the Yaki ever to be battling against the men of my own army. But I was fairly certain that when my army fully engaged the Spaniards, they would add to their ranks many of their native allies, such as the Texcaltéca who had helped the white men in their long-ago overthrow of Tenochtítlan. And those allies would not be carrying arcabuces, but obsidian-bladed maquáhuime and spears and javelins and arrows.

It was rather a slow and awkward process, training these yoem'sontáom without someone to translate my commands and instructions and advice. But warriors of every race and nation, probably even the white ones, share an instinctive understanding of each other's movements and gestures. So the Mayo men had not too much trouble learning our Aztéca arts of thrusts and slashes and feints and withdrawals. They learned so well, in fact, that I and my two companions frequently got bruised by their dense-wood war clubs and pricked or scratched by their triple-flint spears. Well, of course, we three gave as good as we got, so I kept the Tícitl Ualíztli always in attendance at our training sessions, to apply his arts when necessary. And I gave no thought whatever to the absent G'nda Ké until, one day, a Bakúm woman came and timidly tugged at my arm.

She led me—and Ualíztli came along—to the little cane hut that had been lent to G'nda Ké. I went in first, but what I saw made me instantly back out and motion for the tícitl to enter instead. Clearly, G'nda Ké had not been pretending; she appeared to be as near dying as the villagers had earlier supposed.

She lay stretched out naked on a reed pallet, and she was copiously sweating, and she had somehow got extremely fat, not just in the places where well-fed women often do, but all over—nose, lips, fingers, toes. Even her eyelids had become so fat that they practically closed her eyes. As she once had told me, G'nda Ké was freckled over her whole body, and now, with that body so bloated, her countless freckles were so large and distinct that she might have grown a jaguar's skin. In my one brief glance, I had seen the Mayo tícitl squatting beside her. I never yet had glimpsed that man's face, but even the grim-visaged mask he wore seemed now to have a puzzled and helpless expression, and he was only listlessly shaking his curative wooden rattle.

Ualíztli emerged from the hut, looking rather perplexed himself, and I asked him, "What could they possibly have been feeding her, to make her so grossly fat? In this Yaki land, I have never seen a woman more than meagerly fed."

"She has not grown fat, Tenamáxtzin," he said. "She is swollen with putrid fluids."

I exclaimed, "A simple spider bite could have done that?"

He gave me a sidelong look. "She says it was you, my lord, who bit her."

"What?!"

"She is in excruciating agony. And much as we all have loathed the woman, I am sure you would wish to be a little merciful. If you will tell me what kind of poison you applied to your teeth, I might be able to give her a more easeful death."

"By all the gods!" I raged. "I have long known that G'nda Ké is criminally insane, but are you?"

He quailed away from me, stammering, "Th-there is a horribly gaping and suppurating sore on her ankle..."

Through gritted teeth I said, "I grant you, I have often contemplated how I might most ingeniously slay G'nda Ké, when she was of no more use to me. But bite her to death? In your wildest imaginings, man, can you credit that I would put my mouth to that reptile? If ever I did that, I would be the one poisoned and suffering and suppurating and dying! It was a spider that bit her. While she was gathering wood. Ask any of the drabs who first attended her."

I started to reach for the Mayo woman who had fetched us, and who was goggling at us in fright. But I desisted, realizing that she could neither comprehend nor answer a question. I simply flailed my arms in futile disgust, while Ualíztli said placatively:

"Yes, yes, Tenamáxtzin. A spider. I believe you. I should have known that the witch-woman would lie most atrociously, even on her deathbed."

I took several deep breaths to calm myself, then said, "She doubtless hopes that the accusation will reach the ears of the yo'otuí. Worthless though they hold every woman, this one is a Mayo. If they give heed to her perjury, they might vengefully refuse me the support they have promised. Let her die."

"Best she die quickly, too," he said, and went again into the hut. I suppressed several different kinds of repulsion, and followed him inside, only to be further repulsed by the sight of her and—I noticed now—the rotting-meat stench of her.

Ualíztli knelt beside the pallet and asked, "The spider that bit you—was it one of the huge, hairy sort?"

She shook her fat and mottled head, pointed a fat finger at me, and croaked, "Him." Even the Mayo tícitl's wooden mask wagged skeptically at that.

"Then tell me where you hurt," said Ualíztli.

"All of G'nda Ké," she mumbled.

"And where do you hurt worst?"

"Belly," she mumbled and, just then, a spasm of pain must have stricken her there. She grimaced, shrieked, flung herself onto her side and doubled over—or as far as she could, her distended stomach folding into fat rolls.

Ualíztli waited until the spasm passed, then said, "This is very important, my lady. Do the soles of your feet hurt?"

She had not recovered sufficiently to speak, but her bulbous head nodded most emphatically.

"Ah," said Ualíztli with satisfaction, and stood up.

I said, marveling, "That told you something? The soles of her feet?"

"Yes. That pain is the distinctive sign diagnostic of the bite of one particular spider. We seldom encounter the creature in our lands to the south. We are more familiar with the big, hairy one that looks more fearsome than it really is. But in these northerly climes there is found a truly lethal spider that is not large and does not look especially dangerous. It is black, with a red mark on its underside."

"Your breadth of knowledge astounds me, Ualíztli."

"One tries to keep well informed in one's trade," he said modestly, "by exchanging bits of lore with other tíciltin. I am told that the venom of this black northern spider actually melts the flesh of its prey, to make it the more easily eaten. Hence that ghastly open sore on the woman's leg. But, in this case, the process has spread within her whole body. She is literally liquefying inside. Curious. I would not have expected such extensive putrefaction except in an infant or a person old and infirm."

"And what will you do about it?"

"Hasten the process," Ualíztli murmured, so that only I might hear.

G'nda Ké's eyes, from between their puffed lids, were anxiously asking also: What is to be done for me? So Ualíztli said aloud, "I shall bring special medicaments," and left the hut.

I stood gazing down at the woman, not pityingly. She had regained breath enough to speak, but her words were disjointed, her voice only croaks and rasps:

"G'nda Ké must not... die here."

"Here as well as anywhere," I said coldly. "It appears that your tonáli has brought you to the end of your roads and your days, right here. The gods are far more inventive than I could possibly be, in devising the proper disposal of one who has lived ever evilly, and already lived too long."

She said again, but stressing one word, "G'nda Ké must not... die here. Among these louts."

I shrugged. "They are your own louts. This is your own land. It was a spider native to this land that poisoned you. I think it fitting that you should have been felled not by an angry human's hand, but by one of the tiniest creatures inhabiting the earth."

"G'nda Ké must not... die here," she said yet again, though it seemed she spoke more to herself than to me. "G'nda Ké will not... be remembered here. G'nda Ké was meant... to be remembered. G'nda Ké was meant... somewhere... to be royalty. With the -tzin to her name..."

"You are mistaken. You forget that I have known women who deserved the -tzin. But you—to the very last, you have striven to make your mark on the world only by doing harm. And for all your grandiose ideas of your own importance, for all your lies and duplicities and iniquities, you were destined by your tonáli to be nothing more than what you were and what you are now. As venomous as the spider and, inside, just as small."

Ualíztli returned then, and knelt to sprinkle plain picíetl into her leg's open sore. "This will numb the local pain, my lady. And here, drink this." He held a gourd dipper to her protuberant lips. "It will stop your feeling the other pains within."

When he rose again to stand beside me, I growled, "I did not give you permission to relieve her agony. She inflicted enough on other people."

"I did not ask your permission, Tenamáxtzin, and I will not ask your pardon. I am a tícitl. My allegiance to my calling takes precedence even over my loyalty to your lordship. No tícitl can prevent death, but he can refuse to prolong it. The woman will sleep and, sleeping, die."

So I held my tongue, and we watched as G'nda Ké's swollen eyelids closed. What happened next I know surprised Ualíztli as much as it did myself and the other tícitl.

From the hole in G'nda Ké's leg began to trickle a liquid—not blood—a liquid as clear and thin as water. Then came fluids more viscous but still colorless, as malodorous as the sore. The trickle became a flow, ever more fetid, and those same noxious substances started issuing from her mouth, too; and from her ears and from the orifices between her legs.

The bloat of her body slowly but visibly diminished, and as the taut-stretched skin subsided, so did the jaguar spots of it shrink to a profusion of ordinary freckles. Then even they commenced to disappear as the skin slackened into furrows and creases and puckers. The flow of fluids increased to a gush, some of it soaking into the earthen floor, some of it remaining as a thick slime from which we three watchers stepped warily well away.

G'nda Ké's face collapsed until it was just a featureless, wrinkled skin shrouding her skull, and then all her hair wisped away from it. The leakage of fluids lessened to an ooze, and finally the whole bag of skin that had been a woman was empty. When that bag began to split and shred and slip downward and dissolve into the slime on the ground, the masked tícitl gave a howl of pure horror and bolted from the hut.

Ualíztli and I continued to stare until there was nothing to be seen but G'nda Ké's slime-glistening, gray-white skeleton, some hanks of hair, a scatter of fingernails and toenails. Then we stared at one another.

"She wanted to be remembered," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "She will certainly be remembered by that Mayo in the mask. What in the name of Huitztli was that potion you gave her to drink?"

In a voice about as shaky as mine, Ualíztli said, "This was not my doing. Or the spider's. It is a thing even more prodigious than what happened to that girl Pakápeti. I daresay no other tícitl has ever seen anything like this."

Stepping cautiously through the stinking and slippery puddle, he reached over and down to touch a rib of the skeleton. It instantly broke loose of its attachment there. He gingerly picked it up and regarded it, then came to show it to me.

"But something like this," he said, "I have seen before. Look." Without any effort, he broke it between his fingers. "When the Mexíca warriors and workers came with your Uncle Mixtzin from Tenochtítlan, you may remember, they drained and dried the nastier swamps around Aztlan. In doing so, they dug up the fragments of numerous skeletons—of both humans and animals. The wisest tícitl of Aztlan was summoned. He examined the bones and declared them to be old, incredibly old, sheaves and sheaves of years old. He surmised that they were the remains of persons and animals sucked down in a quaking sand that had, at some time long forgotten, existed in that place. I got to know that tícitl before he died, and he still had some of the bones. They were as brittle and crumbly as this rib."

We both turned to look again at G'nda Ké's skeleton, now quietly falling apart as it lay there, and Ualíztli said, in a voice of awe, "Neither I nor the spider put that woman to death. She had been dead, Tenamáxtzin, for sheaves of sheaves of years before you or I were born."

We emerged from the hut to see that Mayo tícitl dashing about the village and jabbering at the top of his voice. In his immense and supposed-to-be-dignified mask, he looked very foolish and the other Mayo were regarding him with incredulity. It occurred to me that if the whole village should get excited about the uncommon manner of G'nda Ké's dissolution, the elders might still have reason for suspicion of me. I decided to remove all traces of the woman's death. Let it be even more of a mystery, so the tícitl's fantastic account would be un-provable. To Ualíztli I said:

"You told me you carry something combustible in that sack." He nodded and took out a leather pouch of liquid. "Splash it all on the hut." Then, rather than go and take a brand from the cooking fire that stayed always alight in the middle of the village, I surreptitiously employed my burning-glass, and in moments the cane-and-reed hut was blazing. The people all stared in amazement at that—and Ualíztli and I pretended to do the same—as it and its contents burned to ashes.

I may have ruined forever the local tícitl's reputation for truthfulness, but the elders never summoned me to demand an explanation of those strange occurrences. And, during the next days, the warriors from other villages came straggling in from various directions, all well armed and appearing eager to get on with my war. When I was informed, by gestures, that I had collected every available man, I sent them south with Machíhuiz, and Acocótli went off northward with another Yaki, to spread the word among the Desert People.

I had already decided that Ualíztli and I would not make the arduous mountain journey to Chicomóztotl, but would take an easier and quicker course. We left Bakúm and went west, along the river, through the villages of Torím, Vikám, Potám and so on—those names, in the unimaginative Yaki manner, meaning the "places of," respectively, wood rats, arrow points, gophers and so on—until we came to the seaside village of Be'ene, "sloping place." Under other circumstances, it would have been suicidal for two strangers to essay such a journey, but of course all the Yaki by now had been told who we were, and what we were doing in these lands, and that we had the sanction of the yo'otuí of Bakúm.

As I have said, the Káhita men of Be'ene do some fishing off that Western Sea shore. Since most of the men had gone off to enlist in my war, leaving only enough fishers to keep the village fed, there were a number of their seaworthy acáltin not being used. I was able, with gestures, to "borrow" one of those dugout canoes and two paddles for it. (I did not expect ever to return those things, and I did not.) Ualíztli and I stocked our craft with ample supplies of atóli, dried meats and fish, leather bags of fresh water, even one of the fishermen's three-pronged cane spears, so we could procure fresh fish during our voyage, and a brownware pot full of charcoal over which to cook them.

It was my intent that we would paddle to Aztlan—rather more than two hundred one-long-runs distant, I calculated, if one can speak of "runs" on water. I was eager to see how Améyatl was faring, and Ualíztli was eager to tell his fellow tíciltin about the medically marvelous two deaths he had witnessed while in my company. From Aztlan, we would go inland to rejoin the Knight Nochéztli and our army at Chicomóztotl, and I expected we would reach there at about the same time the Yaki and To'ono O'otam warriors did.

I was unacquainted with the Western Sea that far north, where it borders the Yaki lands, except that I knew—Alonso de Molina had told me—that the Spaniards called it Mar de Cortés, because the Marqués del Valle had "discovered" it during his idle wanderings about The One World after he was deposed from his rulership of New Spain. How anyone could presumptuously claim to discover something that had existed since time began, I do not know. Anyway, the Be'ene fishermen informed me, with unmistakable gestures, that they fished only close inshore, because farther out the sea was dangerous, having strong and unpredictable tidal currents and vagarious winds. That information did not much dismay me, for I certainly intended to keep just outside the surf line the whole way.

And, for many days and nights, that is what Ualíztli and I did, paddling in unison, then taking turns at sleeping while the other paddled. The weather stayed clement and the sea stayed calm, and the voyage during those many days was more than pleasant. We frequently speared fish, some of them new to both of us, but delicious when broiled over the charcoal fired by my lente. We saw other fish—those giants called yeyemíchtin—which, even if we had somehow speared one, we could not have cooked over any pot smaller than the crater of Popocatépetl. And sometimes we would knot our mantles in such a way that they could be dragged through the water behind us to scoop up shrimp and crayfish. And there were the flying fish, which did not have to be caught at all, because one of them would leap into our acáli almost every other day. And there were turtles, large and small, but of course too hard-shelled to be speared. Now and then, when we saw no people on shore to whom we would have to explain ourselves, we put in just long enough to gather whatever fruits, nuts and greens were in season, and to replenish our water bags. For a long while, we lived well and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

To this day, I almost wish the voyage had continued so. But, as I have remarked, Ualíztli was not young, and I will not blame that good old man for what happened to interfere with our serene progress southward. I woke from one of my stints of sleep, in the middle of the night, feeling that I had somehow overslept my allotted time, and wondering why Ualíztli had not waked me to take my turn at paddling. The moon and stars were thickly clouded over, the night so very black that I could see nothing whatever. When I spoke to Ualíztli, then shouted, and he made no answer, I had to grope my way all along the acáli to ascertain that he and his paddle were gone.

I will never know what became of him. Perhaps some monster sea creature rose from the night waters to snatch him from where he sat, and did it so silently that I never woke. Perhaps he was stricken with some one of the seizures not uncommon in old men—for even tíciltin die—and, flailing in its grip, inadvertently threw himself over the acáli's side. But it is more likely that Ualíztli simply fell asleep and toppled over, paddle in hand, and got a mouthful of water before he could call for help, and so drowned—how long ago and how far away I had no idea.

There was nothing I could do but sit and wait for the day's first light. I could not even use the remaining paddle, because I did not know how long the acáli had been adrift or in which direction the land lay. Usually, at night, there was an onshore wind, and we had so far kept our course in the dark by keeping that wind always on the paddler's right cheek. But the wind god Ehécatl seemed to have chosen this worst possible night to be whimsical; the breeze was only light, and puffed at my face first on one side, then the other. In air so gently moving, I should have been able to hear the sea's surf, but I heard nothing. And the canoe was rocking more than was usual—that was probably what had waked me—so I feared that I had been carried some distance away from the solid, safe shore.

The first glimmer of day showed me that that was what had happened, and had happened to a distressing degree. The land was nowhere in sight. The glimmer at least enabled me to know which way was east, and I seized up my paddle and began stroking furiously, frantically, in that direction. But I could not hold a steady course; I had been caught in one of those tidal currents the fishermen had told of. Even when I could keep the prow of the acáli pointed east toward land, that current moved me sideways. I tried to take some comfort from the fact that it was carrying me south, not back northward again or—horrible to contemplate—carrying me west and farther out to sea, out where nobody had ever gone and returned from.

All that day I paddled, struggling mightily to keep moving east of south, and all the next day, and the next, until I lost count of the days. I paused only to take an occasional drink of water and bite of food, and ceased for longer spells when I got absolutely fatigued or knotted with cramp or desperate for sleep. Still, however often I awoke and resumed paddling, no land appeared on the eastern horizon... and never did. Eventually my store of food and water ran out. I had been improvident. I should earlier have speared fish that I could have eaten, even raw, and from which I could have wrung drinkable juices. By the time my provisions were gone, I was too weak to waste any energy in fishing; I put what strength I had left into my futile paddling. And now my mind began to wander, and I found that I was mumbling aloud to myself:

"That vicious woman G'nda Ké did not really die. Why should she have done, after living unkillable all those sheaves and sheaves of years?"

And, "She once threatened that I would never be rid of her. Since she lived only to do evil, she might easily live as long as evil does, and that must be until the end of time."

And, "Now she has taken her revenge on us who watched her seeming to die—a quick revenge on Ualíztli, a lingering revenge on me. I wonder what appalling thing she has done to that poor innocent tícitl back in Bakúm..."

And at last, "Somewhere she is gloating at my plight, at my pitifully trying to stay alive. May she be damned to Míctlan, and may I never meet her there. I shall entrust my fate to the gods of wind and water, and hope I shall have merited Tonatíucan when I die..."

At that, I threw away my paddle and stretched out in the acáli to sleep while I waited for the inevitable.

I said that, to this day, I almost wish the voyage had continued as uneventfully as it had begun. The good Tícitl Ualíztli would not have been lost, I would soon have seen Aztlan and dear Améyatl again, and then Nochéztli and my army, and then have got on with my war. But if things had happened so, I would not have been impelled into the most extraordinary of all my life's adventures, and I would not have met the extraordinary young woman I have most loved in all my life.

XXV

I did not exactly sleep. The combination of my being unutterably weary, weakened by hunger, blistered by the sun, parched with thirst—and withal, too dispirited to care—simply sank me into an insensibility that was relieved only by an occasional bout of delirium. During one of those, I raised my head and thought I saw a distant smudge of land, off where the sea met the sky. But I knew that could not be, because it lay on the southern horizon, and there is no land mass in the southern stretches of the Western Sea. It had to be only a taunting apparition born of my delirium, so I was grateful when I subsided again into insensibility.

The next unlikely occurrence was that I felt water splashing on my face. My dull mind did not respond with alarm, but dully accepted that my acáli had been swamped by a wave, and that I would shortly be entirely underwater, and drowned, and dead. But the water continued just to splash my face, stopping my nostrils so that I involuntarily opened my dry, cracked, gummed-together lips. It took a moment for my dulled senses to register that the water was sweet, not salt. At that realization, my dull mind began to fight its way upward through the layers of insensibility. With an effort, I opened my gummed-together eyelids.

Even my dulled, dimmed eyes could descry that they were seeing two human hands squeezing a sponge, and behind the hands was the extremely beautiful face of a young woman. The water was as fresh, cool and sweet as her face. Dully, I supposed that I had attained Tonatíucan or Tlálocan or some other of the gods' blissful afterworlds, and that this was one of that god's attendant spirits waking me to welcome me. If so, I was exceedingly glad to be dead.

Anyway, dead or not, I was slowly recovering my vision, and also the ability to move my head slightly, to see the spirit the better. She was kneeling close beside me and she wore nothing but her long black hair and a maxtlatl, a man's loincloth. She was not alone; other spirits had convened to help welcome me. Behind her, I could now see, stood several other female spirits of various sizes and apparently various ages, all wearing the same costume—or lack of it.

But, I dully wondered, was I being welcomed? Though the lovely spirit was gently rousing and refreshing me with water, she regarded me with a not very kindly look and addressed me in a tone of mild vexation. Curiously, the spirit spoke not my Náhuatl tongue, as I would have expected in an afterlife arranged by one of the Aztéca gods. She spoke the Poré of the Purémpe people, but a dialect new to me, and it took a while for my dull brain to comprehend what she was repeating over and over:

"You have come too soon. You must go back."

I laughed, or intended a laugh. I probably squawked like a seagull. And my voice was raw and raspy when I summoned up enough Poré to say, "Surely you can see... I came not by choice. But where... so providentially... have I come to?"

"You truly do not know?" she asked, less severely.

I shook my head, only feebly, but I should not have done that, for it rocked me back into insensibility. As my mind went reeling and fading away into darkness, though, I heard her say:

"Iyá omekuácheni uarichéhuari."

It means, "These are The Islands of the Women."

A long while back, when I described what Aztlan was like in the days of my childhood, I remarked that our fishermen took from the Western Sea every sort of edible and useful and valuable thing except those things that are called, in all the languages of The One World, "the hearts of oysters." By ancient tradition, and by agreement throughout the Aztéca dominions, the collection of the Western Sea's oyster-heart pearls has always been done exclusively by the fishermen of Yakóreke, the seaside community situated twelve one-long-runs south of Aztlan.

Oh, now and again, an Aztécatl fisherman elsewhere, dredging up shellfish just to sell as food, would have the good fortune to find in one of his oysters that lovely little pebble of a heart. No one bade him throw it back into the sea, or forbade him to keep or sell it, for a perfect pearl is as precious as a solid gold bead of equal size. But it was the Yakóreke men who knew how to find those oyster-hearts in quantity, and they kept that knowledge a secret, handing it down from fisher fathers to fisher sons, none ever confiding it to any outsider.

Nevertheless, over the sheaves of years, outsiders had learned a few tantalizing things about that pearl-gathering process. One thing everyone knew was that just once each year all the sea-fishers of Yakóreke set out in their several acáltin, each canoe heavily laden with some kind of freight, the nature of which was hidden by coverings of mats and blankets. The natural presumption would have been that the men carried some secret sort of oyster bait. Whatever it was, they carried it out of sight of land. That, in itself, was a feat so bold that no envious fisherman from any other place, in all the sheaves of years, had ever dared to try to follow them to their secret oyster ground.

This much else was known: the Yakóreke men would stay out there, wherever they went, for the space of nine days. On the ninth day, their waiting families—and pochtéca traders gathering there from all over The One World—would sight the fleet of acáltin coming landward from the horizon. And the canoes came no longer heaped with shrouded freight, nor even laden with oysters. Each man brought home only a leather pouch full of the oysters' hearts. The merchants waiting to buy those pearls knew better than to ask where the men had got them, or how. And so did the fishermen's womenfolk.

So much was known; outsiders had to conjecture the rest, and they made up various legends to fit the circumstances. The most credible supposition was that there had to be some land out there west of Yakóreke—islands, maybe, surrounded by shoal waters—because it would be impossible for any fishermen to dredge up oysters from the great depths of the open sea. But why did the men go out only once a year? Perhaps they kept slaves on those islands, collecting oyster-hearts all year round, and saving them until their masters came at an appointed time, bearing goods to trade for the pearls.

And the fact that the fishermen told their secret only to their sons, not to the females of Yakóreke, inspired another touch to the legend. Those supposed slaves on those supposed islands must be females themselves, and the Yakóreke women must never know, lest they jealously prevent their menfolk from going there. Thus grew the legend of The Islands of the Women. All my young life I had heard that legend and variants of it—but, like everyone else of good sense, I had always dismissed the tales as mythical and absurd. For one reason, it was foolish to believe that an isolated populace all female could have perpetuated itself over so many lifetimes. But now, by pure chance, I had found that those islands did and do exist in fact. I would not have survived if they did not.

The islands are four, in a line, but only the middle two, the largest, have sufficient fresh water to allow of population, and they are populated entirely by women. I counted at that time one hundred and twelve of them. I should more accurately say females instead of women, since they included infants under a year old, small children, nubile girls, young women, mature women and old women. The most ancient was the one they called Kukú, or Grandmother, she whom they all obeyed as if she had been their Revered Speaker. I made a point of looking at all the children—they wore not even a maxtlatl—and the very youngest of them, the very newest born, were of the female sex.

Once I had convinced the women that I had indeed come to their islands inadvertently, unknowing of their existence—not even believing in them—their Kukú gave me leave to stay awhile, long enough to regain my strength and to carve for myself a new canoe paddle, both of which I would need to get back to the mainland. The young woman who had first succored me with a spongeful of water was commanded to see to my sustenance, and to see that I behaved myself, and she seldom let me out of her sight during the first days of my stay.

Her name was Ixínatsi, which is the Poré word for that tiny chirping insect called a cricket. The name was apt, for she was as perky and sprightly and good-humored as is that little cricket creature. To the casual eye, Ixínatsi would have seemed just another Purémpe woman, though of a countenance unusually gorgeous to look at and a demeanor never less than vivacious. Any observer could admire her sparkling eyes, glossy hair, luminous complexion, beautifully rounded, firm breasts and buttocks, shapely legs and arms, dainty hands. But only I and the gods who made her would ever know that Cricket was in fact very different—darlingly and deliciously different—from all other women. However, I am getting ahead of my chronicle.

As old Kukú had bidden her, Cricket cooked for me—all kinds of fish, and garnished the dishes with a yellow flower called tirípetsi; the flower, she said, possesses curative properties. Between meals she plied me with raw oysters and mussels and scallops—in much the same way that some of our mainland peoples forcibly feed their techíchi dogs before slaughtering them for food. When the comparison occurred to me, it made me uneasy. I wondered if the women were manless because they were man-eaters, and I inquired, which made Ixínatsi laugh.

"We have no men, for eating or for anything else," she said, in that dialect of Poré which I was hurrying to learn. "I feed you, Tenamáxtli, to make you healthy again. The more quickly you get strong, the more quickly you can go away."

Before I went away, though, I wished to know more about those legendary islands, besides the obvious fact that they were no baseless legend. I could surmise for myself that the women had had Purémpe ancestors, but that those ancestors had departed from their native Michihuácan long, long ago. The women's altered language was evidence of that. So was the fact that they did not follow the very old Purémpe fashion of shaving their heads bald. When Cricket was not busy gorging me with food, she had no qualms about answering my many questions. The first thing I asked was about the women's houses, which were not houses at all.

The islands, in addition to their being fringed with coconut palms, are heavily forested with hardwood trees on their upper slopes. But the women live all day in the open and at night, to sleep, they crawl into crude shelters underneath the many fallen trees. They had dug small caves under them or, where a trunk leaned at an angle, they had walled in the space with palm leaves or slabs of bark. I was lent one of those makeshift nooks for my own, next to the one occupied by Ixínatsi and her four-year-old daughter (named Tirípetsi, after that yellow flower).

I asked, "Why, with all these trees, do you not cut them into boards for building decent houses? Or at least use the saplings, which do not require slicing?"

She said, "It would be of no use, Tenamáxtli. Too often, the rainy season brings such terrible storms that they scour these islands bare of anything movable. Even the strong trees, many of them are blown down each year. So we make our shelters under the fallen ones, that we may not be blown away. We build nothing that cannot easily be rebuilt. That is also why we do not try to grow crops of any sort. But the sea gives us abundant food, we have good streams for drink, coconuts for sweets. Our only harvest is of the kinúcha, and we trade them for the other things we need. Which are few," she concluded and, as if to illustrate, swept her hand down her all but naked body.

The word kinúcha of course means "pearls." And there was good reason why the island women needed little from the world across the sea. All except the youngest girls spent every day hard at work, which tired them so that they passed their nights in deep slumber. Barring the brief intervals they allowed themselves for eating and obligatory functions, they worked or they slept, and they could imagine no other activities. They were as indifferent to the ideas of diversion and leisure as they were to the lack of male mates and boy children.

Their work is certainly demanding—and unique among feminine occupations. As soon as the day is light enough, most of the girls and women either swim out into the sea or push out on rafts made of vine-lashed tree limbs. Each woman carries looped to her arm a basket made of loosely woven withes. From then until the light fades at dusk, those women dive repeatedly to the bottom of the sea, to pry loose the oysters that abound there. They surface with a basket full of the things, empty them onto the beach or their raft, then dive to fill it again. Meanwhile, the girls too young and the women too old to dive do the drudgery of opening the oysters—and throwing away almost all of them.

The women do not want the oysters, except for the comparatively few they eat. What they seek are the oysters' kinúcha, the hearts, the pearls. During my stay in the islands, I saw pearls enough to have paid for raising an entire modern city there, if a city had been wanted. Most of the pearls were perfectly round and smooth, some were irregularly bulbous; some were as small as a fly's eye, some as large as my thumb end; most were of sizes varying between those extremes. Most, also, were a softly glowing white, but there were pinks and pale blues and even an occasional kinú the silver-gray color of a thundercloud. What makes pearls so esteemed and so valuable are their rarity and difficulty of acquisition, though one would suppose that if any oyster has a heart, they all should.

"They all do," said Cricket. "But only a very few have the right sort." She tilted her pretty head, gazing at me. "Your own heart, Tenamáxtli, it is for feeling emotions, yes? Like love?"

"So it seems," I said, and laughed. "It thumps more noticeably when I love somebody."

She nodded. "As does mine, when I look at my little Tirípetsi and feel love for her. But oysters do not all have hearts that know emotion as human hearts do. Most oysters just lie inert, and wait for the water currents to bring them nourishment, and aspire to nothing more than oyster-bed placidity, and do nothing but exist as long as they can."

I started to remark that she might be describing her own island sisters or, for that matter, the majority of humankind, but she went on:

"Only one oyster in many—perhaps one in a hundred hundreds—has a heart that can feel, that can want to be something more than a slime in a shell. That one oyster among so many, that one with a feeling heart, well, his is the heart that becomes a kinú, visible and beautiful and precious."

Surely that nonsense could be believed nowhere except in The Islands of the Women, but it was such a sweet fancy that my own heart would not let me dispute it. And, now that I think back, that must have been the moment when I fell in love with Ixínatsi.

At any rate, her belief in questing for unoysterlike oysters seemed to console her on those days when she might dive a hundred hundreds of times between first and last light, and bring up whole nations of oysters without a kinú among them. So she never once—as I would have done—cursed the oysters or the gods or even spat angrily into the sea when a whole day's work was done in vain.

And cursedly hard work that is, too. I know, for I tried it one day, in secret, in waters the women were not then working—staying underwater long enough to pry just one oyster off a rock down there. That was as long as I could stay. But the women begin their diving when they are mere children. By the time they are grown, they have so developed in the upper body that they can hold their breath and remain submerged for an astonishingly long time. Indeed, those women of the islands have bosoms more remarkable than I have ever seen elsewhere.

"Look at them," said Cricket, holding one of her magnificent breasts in either hand. "It is because of these that the islands have come to be the domain of women only. You see, we worship the big-bosomed goddess Xarátanga. Her name means New Moon, and in the arc of every new moon you can see the curve of her ample breast."

The similarity had never occurred to me before, but it is so.

Cricket continued, "New Moon long ago ordained that these islands should be inhabited only by females, and all men have respected that commandment, for they fear that Xarátanga would take away the oysters—or at least their valuable kinúcha—if any but women tried to harvest them. Anyway, the men could not do that. As you confessed to me, Tenamáxtli, you proved your own ineptitude at it. We women are fitted by New Moon to be superior divers." She jiggled her breasts again. "These help our lungs to be capable of holding much more air than any man's can."

I could not divine any connection between milk-giving and air-breathing organs, but I was no tícitl, so I did not argue the matter. I could only admire. Whatever extra function the women's breasts might or might not serve, their superb development and ageless firmness indubitably add to the women's handsomeness. And there is another thing that makes the islanders differ from mainland women, and makes them attractive in a striking way, but to explain that aspect I must digress slightly.

There are on those islands many other inhabitants besides the women. Various kinds of sea turtles lumber from shore to sea and back, and there are crabs everywhere, and of course there is a multitude of birds, raucous of voice and promiscuous of droppings. But the most distinctive creature is the animal the women call the pukiitsí, which is to say a sea-dwelling version of the beast called cuguar in Náhuatl. The name must have come down to them from their Michihuácan ancestors, for none of the islanders could ever have seen a cuguar.

The pukiitsí does vaguely resemble the mountain-dwelling cuguar, though its expression is not fierce, rather winningly mild and inquisitive. A pukiitsí is similarly whiskered about the muzzle, but its teeth are blunt, its ears tiny and its finlike paws are not killer-clawed. We of Aztlan saw these sea animals only rarely—when an injured or dead one washed up on our shores—because they do not care for sandy or swampy places, but prefer rocky ones. And we called them sea-does, simply because of their big, warm, brown doe eyes.

There might be hundreds of the sea-cuguars about The Islands of the Women at any one time, but they live on fish and are not at all to be feared, as real cuguars are. They would gambol in the waters right alongside the diving women, or lazily sun themselves on the offshore rocks, or even sleep floating on their backs in the sea. The women never killed them for food—the meat is not very tasty—but occasionally a sea-cuguar would die of some other cause, and the women would hasten to skin it. The glossy brown pelt is valued as a garment, both for its beauty and for its water-shedding properties. (Ixínatsi made me an elegant overmantle from one of the skins.) That coat of hair is dense enough that the sea-cuguars can live in the sea without their bodies ever getting cold or waterlogged, and the sleekness of the coat enables them to arrow through the water as swiftly as any fish.

The perpetually diving women have developed a trace of a similar coat. Now, I long ago made the point that our peoples of The One World are usually devoid of body hair, but I should amend that assertion. Every human being, even the newest and apparently hairless baby, wears an almost invisibly fine down over most of his or her body. Stand a naked man or woman between you and the sun and you will see. But the down of those island women has grown longer—encouraged, I imagine, by their having been sea divers for so many generations.

I do not mean that they are furred with coarse hair like that of white men's beards. The down is as fine and delicate and colorless as milkweed floss, but it covers their coppery bodies with a sheen like that of the sea-cuguars and serves the same purpose of making them more agile in the water. When an island woman stands with the sunlight falling from behind her, she is edged and outlined in shining gold. In moonlight she glistens silver. Even when she is long out of the sea and completely dry, she looks delightfully dewy, and more supple than other women are, and as if she could slip easily from the embrace of the strongest man...

Which brings me to the subject that had, all this while, been uppermost in my mind. I have mentioned the many generations of the women divers. But how did one generation beget the next?

The answer is so simple as to be ridiculous, even vulgar, even somewhat revolting. But I did not summon up enough nerve to ask the question until the night of my seventh day in the islands, on which day old Kukú had decreed that I must depart the next morning.

XXVI

I had finished cutting and shaping my paddle, and Ixínatsi had stocked my acáli with dried fish and coconut meat, plus a line and a bone hook with which I could catch fresh fish. She added five or six green coconuts from which she had sliced the stem end of each, so it remained closed only by a thin membrane. The heavy shell would keep the contents cool even in the sun; I had only to puncture the membrane to drink the sweet and refreshing coconut milk.

She gave me the directions which all the women had memorized, though none of them had ever had reason or wish to visit The One World. Between the islands and the mainland, she said, the tidal currents were always southerly, mild and stable. I was to paddle directly east each day at a steady but not overstrenuous pace. She rightly presumed that I knew how to maintain an eastward course, and she said that what southward drifting my acáli would do—while I slept at night—was allowed for in the instructions. On the fourth day I would sight a seaside village. Cricket did not know its name, but I did; it had to be Yakóreke.

So, on the night that Kukú had said would be my last there, Cricket and I sat side by side, leaning against the fallen tree trunk that roofed our two shelters, and I asked her, "Ixínatsi, who was your father?"

She said simply, "We have no fathers. Only mothers and daughters. My mother is dead. You are acquainted with my daughter."

"But your mother could not have created you all by herself. Nor you your Tirípetsi. Sometime, somehow, in each case, there had to have been a man involved."

"Oh, that," she said negligently. "Akuáreni. Yes, the men come to do that once a year."

I said, "So that is what you meant when you first spoke to me. You told me I had come too soon."

"Yes. The men come from that mainland village to which you are going. They come for just one day in the eighteen months of the year. They come with loaded freight canoes, and we select what we need, and we trade our kinúcha for them. One kinú for a good comb made of bone or tortoiseshell, two kinúcha for an obsidian knife or a braided fishing line—"

"Ayya!" I interrupted. "You are being outrageously cheated! Those men exchange those pearls for countless times that value, and the next buyers trade them for another profit, and the next and the next. By the time the pearls have passed through all the hands between here and some city market..."

Cricket shrugged her moon-radiant bare shoulders. "The men could have the kinúcha for no payment at all, if Xarátanga should choose to let them learn to dive. But the trading brings us what we need and want, and what more could we ask? Then, when the trading is all done, Kukú gathers those women who want to have a daughter—even those who may not be so eager, if Kukú says it is their turn—and Kukú selects the more robust of the men. The women lie in a row on the beach, and the men do that akuáreni we must endure if we are to have daughters."

"You keep saying daughters. There must be some boys born."

"Yes, some. But the goddess New Moon ordained that these be The Islands of the Women, and there is only one way to keep them so. Any male children, being forbidden by the goddess, are drowned at birth."

Even in the dark, she must have seen the expression on my face, but she misinterpreted it, hastening to add:

"That is not a waste, as you may think. They become nourishment for the oysters, and that is a very worthwhile use for them."

Well, as a male myself, I could hardly applaud that merciless weeding out of the newborn. On the other hand, like most god-commanded doings, it had the purity of stark simplicity. Keep the islands a female preserve by feeding the oysters on whose hearts the islanders depend.

Cricket went on, "My daughter is almost of an age to commence diving. So I expect Kukú will order me to do akuáreni with one of the men when they come next time."

At that I did speak up. "You make it sound as enjoyable as being attacked by a sea monster. Does none of you ever lie with a man just for the pleasure of it?"

"Pleasure?!" she exclaimed. "What pleasure can there be in having a pole of flesh painfully stuck inside you and painfully moved back and forth a few times and then painfully pulled out? During that while, it is like being constipated in the wrong place."

I muttered, "Gallant and gracious men you women invite for consorts," then said aloud, "My dear Ixínatsi, what you describe is rape, not the loving act it should be. When it is done with love—and you yourself have spoken of the loving heart—it can be an exquisite pleasure."

"Done how with love?" she asked, sounding interested.

"Well... the loving can start long before a pole of flesh is involved. You know that you have a loving heart, but you may not know that you also have a kinú. It is infinitely more capable of being loved than that of the most emotional oyster. It is there."

I pointed to the place, and she seemed immediately to lose interest.

"Oh, that," she said again. She unwound her single garment and shifted to move her abdomen into a moonbeam, and with her fingers she parted the petals of her tipíli, and looked incuriously at her pearl-like xacapíli, and said, "A child's plaything."

"What?"

"A girl learns very young that that little part of her is sensitive and excitable, and she makes much use of it. Yes—as you are doing now with your fingertip, Tenamáxtli. But, as a girl matures, she grows bored with that childish practice and finds it unwomanly. Also, our Kukú has taught us that such activity depletes one's strength and endurance. Oh, a grown woman does it once in a while. I do it myself—exactly as you are doing it to me this moment—but only for relief when I feel tense or ill-humored. It is like scratching an itch."

I sighed. "Itching and push-pull and constipation. What awful words you use to speak of the feeling that can be the most sublime of feelings. And your aged Kukú is wrong. Lovemaking can invigorate you to much greater strength and satisfaction in every other thing you do. But never mind that. Just tell me. When I fondle you there, is it like your own scratching of an itch?"

"N-no," she admitted, with a break in her voice. "I feel... whatever I feel... it is very different..."

Trying to suppress my own arousal, so I could speak as soberly as an examining tícitl, I asked, "But it feels good?"

She said softly, "Yes."

When I kissed her nipples, she whispered, "Yes."

As I kissed farther down the sleek-pelted, moon-glistening length of her body, she said almost inaudibly, "Yes."

I kissed to where my hand was, then moved my hand out of the way. She started and gasped, "No! You cannot... that is not how... oh, yes, it is! Yes, you can! And I... oh, I can!"

It took a while for Cricket to recover, and she breathed as if she had just come up from the sea depths when she said, "Uiikíiki! Never... when I myself... it has never been like that!"

"Let us make up for the long neglect," I suggested, and I did things that took her to those depths—or heights—twice again before I even let her know that I had a pole of flesh available when it should be wanted. And when it was, I was embraced and enfolded and engulfed by a creature as lithe and sinuous and pliant and nimble as any sea-cuguar cavorting in its own element.

Then it was that I discovered something absolutely novel about Ixínatsi—and I would have sworn that no woman could ever again surprise me in any way. It was not until we lay together that I discovered it, because her delightful difference from all other women resided in her most intimate parts. Manifestly, when the unborn Cricket was being fashioned by the gods, while she was still within her mother's womb, the kindly goddess of love and flowers and connubial happiness must have said:

"Let me endow this girl-child Ixínatsi with one small uniqueness in her female organs, so that when she grows to womanhood she can perform akuáreni with mortal men as joyously and voluptuously as I myself might do." It was indeed only a small alteration that the goddess effected in Cricket's body, but ayyo!—I can attest that it added an incredible piquancy and exuberance when she and I joined in the conjugal act.

The love goddess is called Xochiquétzal by us Aztéca, but is known as Petsíkuri by the Purémpecha, including these island women. Whatever her name, what she had done was this. She had set Cricket's tipíli opening just a little farther back between her thighs than is the case in ordinary women. Thus her tipíli's inner recess did not simply extend straight upward inside her body, but upward and forward. When she and I coupled face-to-face, and I slid my tepúli into her, it gently flexed to fit that curve. So, when it was fully sheathed inside her, my tepúli's crown was pointing back toward me, or, rather, toward the back of her belly's navel button.

In our Náhuatl language, a woman's body is often respectfully referred to as a xochitl, a "flower," and her navel as the yoloxóchitl, or "bud center" of that flower. When I was inside Ixínatsi, then, my tepúli literally became the "stalk" of that bud, that flower. Just to realize, in my mind, that she and I were so very intimately conjoined—not to mention the vivid sensations involved—heightened my ardor to a degree I could never have believed possible.

And, in her arranging of Ixínatsi's feminine parts, the goddess had provided, for both Cricket and myself, yet a further enhancement of the joy that comes in the act of love. The slightly rearward placement of her tipíli orifice meant that when my tepúli penetrated her to its hilt, my pubic bone was necessarily close and hard against her sensitive xacapíli pearl, much more tightly than it would be with an ordinary woman. So, as Ixínatsi and I clasped and rocked and writhed together, her little pink kinú accordingly got caressed, rubbed, kneaded—to excited erection, then to urgent throbbing, then to paroxysms of rapture. And Cricket's increasingly heated response naturally heated me as well, so that we were equally, gleefully, dizzily, almost swooningly exultant when together we came to climax.

When it was over, she of the prodigious lungs, of course, got her breath back before I did. While I still lay limp, Ixínatsi slipped into her den under the tree and emerged to press something into my hand. It glowed in the moonlight like a piece of the moon itself.

"A kinú means a loving heart," she said, and kissed me.

"This single pearl," I said weakly, "would buy you much. A proper house, for instance. A very good one."

"I would not know what to do with a house. I do know—now—how to enjoy akuáreni. The kinú is to thank you for showing me."

Before I could gather breath to speak again, she had bounded upright and called across the tree trunk, "Marúuani!" to the young woman who lived in the shelter on the other side. I thought Cricket was going to apologize for the doubtlessly unfamiliar noises we had been making. Instead she said urgently, "Come over here! I have discovered a thing most marvelous!"

Marúuani came around the root end of the tree, idly combing her long hair, pretending to be not at all curious, but her eyebrows went up when she saw us both unclothed. She said to Ixínatsi, but with her eyes on me, "It sounded—as if you were enjoying yourselves."

"Exactly that," Cricket said with relish. "Our... selves. Listen!" She moved close, to whisper to the other woman, who continued to regard me, her eyes widening more each moment. Lying there, being described and discussed, I felt rather like some hitherto unknown sea creature just washed ashore and causing a sensation. I heard Marúuani say, in a hushed voice, "He did?" and after some more whispering, "Would he?"

"Of course he will," said Ixínatsi. "Will you not, Tenamáxtli? Will you not do akuáreni with my friend Marúuani?"

I cleared my throat and said, "One thing you must realize about men, my dearest. It takes them at least a little resting—between times—for the pole to stiffen again."

"It does? Oh, what a pity. Marúuani is eager to learn."

I considered, then said, "Well, I have shown you some things, Cricket, that do not require my participation. While I regather my faculties, you could demonstrate the preliminaries to your friend."

"You are right," she said brightly. "After all, we will not always have men with poles at our bidding. Marúuani, take off your loincloth and lie down here."

Somewhat guardedly, Marúuani obeyed, and Ixínatsi stretched out beside her, both of them just a little way from me. Marúuani flinched and gave a small shriek at the first intimate touch.

"Be still," said Cricket, with the confidence of experience. "This is how it is done. In a moment you will know."

And it was not long before I was watching two supple, shining sea-cuguars doing the contortions of coupling—much as the real animals do it—except that these were much more graceful, since they had long, shapely arms and legs to intertwine. And the watching of it hastened my own availability, so I was ready for Marúuani when she was ready for me.

I repeat, I was in love with Ixínatsi even before we did the act of love. I had already, that very night, determined to take her and her little girl with me when I left the island. I would do it by persuasion, if possible. If not, I would—like a brute Yaki—abduct them by force. And now, having found out how uniquely and wonderfully Cricket was constructed for the act of love, I was more determined than before.

But I am human. And I am male. Therefore I am incurably, insatiably curious. I could not help wondering if all these island women possessed the same physical properties that Cricket did. Although the young woman Marúuani was comely and appealing, I had never felt any desire for her, certainly not what I had felt and still felt for Ixínatsi. However, after watching what had just occurred, and being aroused by it to an indiscriminate lustfulness, and with Ixínatsi unselfishly urging me on...

Well, that is how my stay in the islands came to be indefinitely prolonged. Ixínatsi and Marúuani spread the word that there was something more to life than just working and sleeping and occasionally playing with one's self—and the other island women clamored to be introduced to it. Grandmother's scandalized objections were shouted down, probably for the first time in her reign, but she became resigned to the new state of affairs when it effected a noticeable increase in the workers' good spirits and productivity. Kukú enforced only one condition: that all akuáreni be confined to the nighttimes—which I did not mind, because it gave me the days for sleeping and regaining my stamina.

Let me say here that I would not have obliged any of the other women if Cricket had evinced the least jealousy or possessiveness. I did it mainly because she seemed so happy to have her sisters thus enlightened, and seemed to take pride in that being done by "her man." In truth, I would rather have restricted my attentions to her alone, for she was the one that I deeply loved—the only one, then or ever—and I know she loved me, too. Even Tirípetsi, who at first had been shy and uneasy about having a man in residence, came to regard me fondly, as other little girls elsewhere regard their fathers.

Also, and this is important, the other island women were not physically constructed as was Ixínatsi. They were as ordinary in that respect as every other woman I have coupled with in my lifetime. In short, I was so infatuated with Cricket that no other woman would ever measure up to the standards she had set. It was only because she wished it that I lent my services to the women at large. I did that more dutifully than avidly, and even instituted a sort of program—a petitioning woman every other night, the nights between being devoted to Cricket alone—and those were nights of love, not just loving.

It may be that because I had seldom lacked for women—and certainly did not now—I had become somewhat jaded with the commonplace, and the very newness of Ixínatsi was what vitalized me so. I only know that the sensations shared by her and myself kindled in me fires that I had never felt, even in my lustiest youth. As for dear Cricket, I am sure she had no idea that she was physically superior to ordinary women. Nothing could ever have made her suspect that she had been so god-blessed at birth. And, of course, it may be that she was not the only female in human history to have been thus endowed by a goddess. Possibly some aged midwife, after numberless years of attending a numberless multitude of females, could have told of having sometime found some other young woman similarly constructed.

But I cared not. From this time forward, I would not ever need or seek or want any other lover—however extraordinary—now that I possessed this most exceptional one of all. And whether or not Ixínatsi realized that in our frequent and fervent embraces she was enjoying ecstasies surpassing those that the love goddess grants to every other woman in the world... well, she did enjoy them. And so did I, so did I. Yyo ayyo, how we did enjoy them!

Meanwhile, I lay at least once with every island woman and girl who was physically mature enough to appreciate the experience. Though our akuáreni was always done in the darkness, I know I also coupled with some who were rather beyond mature—but none of the really old ones, like Kukú, for which I was thankful. I might well have lost count of the women I obliged with my teachings, if I had not been recompensed for my services. Eventually, I owned exactly sixty-five pearls, the largest and most perfect of that year's harvest. That was Cricket's doing; she insisted that it was only fair exchange that my students pay me one pearl apiece.

In the beginning, there was such mass enthusiasm that there was a constant traffic of females rafting every night back and forth between the two inhabited islands. But there was only one of me, and the other women had to alternate with Ixínatsi, so during that time many of them earnestly essayed to learn by imitation, as Ixínatsi had taught Marúuani. Sometimes I would be lying with a woman, going through the ceremony from first fondlings to final consummation, and two other females—her sister and her daughter, it might be—would lie right next to us, alternately eyeing our doings and then doing them to one another, insofar as possible.

After I had personally served every eligible girl and woman at least once, and the demand for me was not so imperative, the women continued, on their own, to discover the numerous ways they could pleasure one another, and freely traded partners, and even learned to do it in threes and fours—all this with blithe disregard for any consanguinity among them. Ixínatsi and I, in our intervals of rest at night, would often hear, among the other forest sounds, the sound of those women's wonderful breasts slapping rhythmically together.

All this while, I was ardently wooing Ixínatsi—not to make her love me; we knew we loved one another. I was trying to persuade her to come with me, and bring the daughter I now thought of as my own, to The One World. I besieged her with every argument I could muster. I told her, with honesty, that I was the equivalent of Kukú in my own domain, that she and Tirípetsi would live in a genuine palace, with servants at their command, lacking nothing they could possibly need or want, never again having to dive for oysters, or skin sea-cuguars for their hides, or fear the storms that might ravage the islands, or lie down to mate with strangers.

"Ah, Tenamáxtli," she would say with an endearing smile, "but this is palace enough"—indicating the tree-trunk shelter—"as long as you share it with us."

Not quite so honestly, I omitted all mention of the Spaniards' having occupied most of The One World. These island women did not yet know that such things as white men existed. Evidently the men from Yakóreke had likewise refrained from speaking of the Spaniards, possibly out of concern that the women might withhold their kinúcha, hoping to start a new commerce with richer traders. For that matter, I reminded myself, I could not be sure that the Spaniards had not already overwhelmed Aztlan, in which case I had no Kukúdom, so to speak, with which to tempt Cricket. But I firmly believed that she and Tirípetsi and I could make a new life for ourselves somewhere, and I regaled her with tales of the many lovely, lush, serene places I had found in my travels, where we three might settle down together.

"But this place, Tenamáxtli, these islands, they are home. Make them your home, too. Grandmother is accustomed to having you here now. She will no longer be demanding that you depart. Is this not as pleasant a life as we could find anywhere else? We need not fear the storms and strangers. Tirípetsi and I have survived all the storms, and so will you. As for the strangers, you know I will never again lie with one of those. I am yours."

In vain, I tried to make her envision the more varied life that could be lived on the mainland—the abundance of food and drink and diversion, of travel, of education for our daughter, the opportunities of meeting new people quite different from those she was used to.

"Why, Cricket," I said, "you and I can have other children there, to be company for little Tirípetsi. Even brothers for her. She can never have any here."

Ixínatsi sighed, as if she was wearying of my importunities, and said, "She can never miss what she has never had."

I asked anxiously, "Have I made you angry?"

"Yes, I am angry," she said, but with a laugh, in her cricket-merry way. "Here—take back all your kisses." And she began kissing me, and kept on kissing me every time I tried to say anything more.

But always, with sweet stubbornness, she dismissed or countered my every argument—and one day she did it by alluding to my own enviable current situation:

"Do you not see, Tenamáxtli, that any mainland man would absolutely pounce to trade places with you? Here you have not only me to love you and lie with you—and you will have Tirípetsi, too, when she is of age—you have, when you so desire, any other woman of these islands. Every woman. And, in time, their daughters."

I was hardly qualified to start preaching morality. I could only protest, and with utmost sincerity, "But you are all I want!"

And now I must confess something shameful. That same day, I went off into the woods to think, and I said to myself, "She is all I want. I am captivated by her, obsessed, besotted. If I dragged her away from here against her will, she would never love me again. Anyway, what would I be dragging her to? What awaits me yonder? Only a bloody war—killing or being killed. Why should I not do what she says? Stay here in these fair islands."

Here I had peace, love, happiness. The other women were making ever fewer demands on me, now that the novelty had worn off. Ixínatsi and Tirípetsi and I could be a self-contained and self-sufficient family. Since I had broken one of the islands' sacred traditions—by living here as no man had ever done before—I believed that I could break others. Old Grandmother had gone unheeded in that instance, and, anyway, she would not live forever. I had every expectation that I could wean the women away from their man-hating goddess New Moon, and turn them instead to worship of the kindlier Coyolxaúqui, goddess of the full-hearted full moon. No longer would boy infants be fed to the oysters. Cricket and I and all the others could have sons. I would eventually be the patriarch of an island domain, and its benevolent ruler.

For all I knew, the Spaniards had by now overrun the entire One World, and I could hope to accomplish nothing by going back there. Here, I would have my own One World, and it might be sheaves of years before any farther-reaching Spanish explorers should stumble upon it. Even if the white men had subjugated so much of the mainland—or later would—that the Yakóreke fishermen could no longer visit the islands, I was sure that they would not reveal the location. If they came no more, well, I now knew the course back and forth. I and, in time, my sons could paddle stealthily to that shore to procure the necessities of life—knives and combs and such—that had to be bought with pearls...

Thus shamefully did I contemplate abandoning the quest that I had pursued during all the years since I watched my father burn to death, the quest that had led me along so many roads, into so many hazards, through so many adventures. Thus shamefully did I seek to justify discarding my plans to avenge my father and all others of my people who had suffered at the hands of the white men. Thus shamefully did I try to concoct excuses for forgetting those many—Citláli and the child Ehécatl, dauntless Pakápeti, the Cuáchic Comitl, the Tícitl Ualíztli, the others—who had perished in helping me toward my aim of vengeance. Thus shamefully did I seek plausible reasons for my deserting the Knight Nochéztli and my hard-gathered army and, indeed, all the peoples of The One World...

I have been ashamed, ever since that day, that I even thought of so disgracing myself. I would have lost the race I never ran. Had I actually done that—succumbed to Ixínatsi's love and the islands' easefulness—I doubt that I could long have lived with my shame. I would have come to hate myself, and then have turned the hate on Cricket for her causing me to hate myself. What I might have done for love would have destroyed that love.

Further to my shame, I cannot even claim with conviction that I would not have chosen to surrender my quest—and my honor—because it so happened that the gods made the choice for me.

Toward twilight, I returned to the seaside, where the divers were wading ashore with their last baskets of the day. Ixínatsi was among them, and when she saw me waiting for her, she called cheerily, mischievously, with a meaningful grin:

"I think by now, darling Tenamáxtli, I must owe you at least one more kinú. I shall dive this moment and bring you the Kukú of all kinúcha." She turned and swam to the nearest rock outcrop, where some indolent sea-cuguars were basking and gleaming in the last low rays of sunlight.

I called to her, "Come back, Cricket. I wish to talk."

She must not have heard me. Glistening as golden as the animals about her, radiant and beautiful, she stood poised on one of the rocks, gave me a jaunty wave of her hand, dove into the sea and never came out again.

When finally I realized that not even the strongest-lunged woman could have stayed underwater so long, I raised an outcry. All the other divers still in the shallows came splashing ashore in fright, probably thinking I had espied a shark's fin. Then, after some hesitation, the more intrepid of them swam back to the area I pointed to—where I had seen Ixínatsi plunge under—and they dove again and again, until they were exhausted, without finding her or any indication of what had happened to her.

"Our women," said a creaky old voice beside me, "do not all live to my great age."

It was Kukú, who had naturally hastened to the scene. Although she might have berated me for having disturbed the complacency of her realm, or for having been partly to blame for Cricket's loss, the old woman sounded as if she wished to solace me.

"Kinú-diving is more than rigorous work," she said. "It is perilous work. Down there lurk savage fish with tearing teeth, others with poisonous stings, others with clutching tentacles. I do not think, however, that Ixínatsi fell prey to any such fish. When there are predators in the vicinity, the sea-cuguars bark a warning. More likely she has been swallowed."

"Swallowed?" I echoed, thunderstruck. "Kukú, how could a woman be swallowed by the sea in which she has lived for half her life?"

"Not by the sea. By the kuchúnda."

"What is the kuchúnda?"

"A giant mollusk, like an oyster or clam or scallop, only unbelievably bigger. As big as that rock islet yonder where the sea-cuguars are dozing, big enough to swallow one of those sea-cuguars. There are several of the kuchúndacha hereabouts, and we do not always know where, for they have the ability, like a snail, to creep from place to place. But they are visible and recognizable—each kuchúnda keeps its massive upper shell agape, to clamp down on any unwary prey—so our women know to stay well clear of them. Ixínatsi must have been unusually intent on her oyster-gathering. Perhaps she saw a prize kinú—it happens sometimes, when an oyster lies open—and she must have relaxed her vigilance."

I said miserably, "She went promising to fetch just such a kinú for me."

The old woman shrugged and sighed. "The kuchúnda would have slammed its shell shut, with her—or most of her—inside. And since it cannot chew, it is now slowly digesting her with its corrosive juices."

I shuddered at the picture she evoked, and I went sorrowfully away from the place where I had last seen my beloved Cricket. The women all looked sad, too, but they did no keening or weeping. They appeared to regard this as no uncommon event in a day's work. Little Tirípetsi had already been told, and she was not weeping, either. So I did not. I grieved only silently, and silently cursed the meddling gods. If they had to intervene in my life—sternly pointing me to my destined future roads and days—they could have done it without so gruesomely ending the life of the innocent, vivacious, marvelous little Cricket.

I said good-bye only to Tirípetsi and Grandmother, not to any of the other women, lest they try to detain me. I could not now take the child with me, because of where I was going, and I knew she would be lovingly cared for by all her aunts and cousins of the islands. At dawn, I put on the elegant skin mantle Ixínatsi had made for me, and I took my sack of pearls, and I went to the southern end of the island, where my acáli had waited all this time, stocked with the provisions put into it by Ixínatsi, and I pushed off and paddled eastward.

So The Islands of the Women are still The Islands of the Women, though I trust they are now a more convivial place by night. And any Yakóreke fishermen who visited after my time could have had no cause to resent my having been there. Those who may have come immediately after me could hardly have sired any children—surely every possible mother-to-be was already on her way to being one—but the men must have been so riotously welcomed and overwhelmingly entertained that they would have been ingrates indeed if they complained about a mysterious outlander's having preceded them.

But I thought, and I hoped, as I went away, that perhaps I would not be gone forever. Someday, when I had finished doing what I must do, and if I survived the doing of it... someday, when Tirípetsi had grown to be the image of her mother, the only woman I ever truly loved... someday toward the end of my days...