Aztec Blood

THIRTY-THREE

I was tired from the hard ride. I was tired of hiding in bushes. I was sick to my soul from fleeing strangers and from being condemned for secrets I knew nothing about. I had gotten only a couple of hours sleep the night before, and I laid down and fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the ground.

I awoke to darkness, the song of night birds, and the rustle of predators that kill by the light of the moon. Still thoughts nagged me. Ramon and the old matron clearly did not live in Veracruz. Had they, I would have recognized them. Apparently the archbishop's arrival had brought them. Therefore, I reasoned, Ramon and the old matron lived some distance away, perhaps as far as the City of Mexico.

Whatever events had spawned the terrible hate the old matron had for me had happened long ago, of that I was certain. The fray had intimated that the events went back to before my birth. In those days he was a priest on a great and powerful hacienda, one larger than Don Francisco's, the hacienda we left when I was about twelve. His priestly robes would protect him from all harm because the Church would have investigated and punished any who harmed a priest.

Yet events of the past had cost him his priesthood. He also said only ignorance of these events could protect me. But the fray himself was not ignorant. And he no longer had the protection of the Church.

What would save him?

I set out on the road. I wanted one more conversation with the fray. He was clearly in danger. Perhaps he and I should leave Veracruz together. After seeing him, I would then go to Beatriz's. She was probably not back from the fair, but I could hide in her place. No one would look for me there. I had nothing to eat and no wish to stay alone in the wilderness.

The road was deserted—no travelers journeyed at night, and it was too close to the city for camps. The moon reflected off the dunes with brilliant luminosity, throwing off enough light for me to spot the snakes that slithered from the swamps.

By the time I reached the town, hunger gnawed at my stomach like a rabid wolf. Worse, I felt a blood-chilling drop in temperature. Then the wind sprang up, whipping my hair across my face, almost blowing my manta off. El norte was on the way.

A good el norte had the strength to knock down buildings, strip ships from their moorings, and blow them back to sea. Here in the dunes, wind-whipped sand would strip the skin from your hands and face. El norte was nothing anyone would wish to be caught in, and yet here I was, utterly exposed.

First I had to speak to the fray, before I went to Beatriz's room, a dingy little cubbyhole in a squalid building close enough to the water to suffer its fetid summer stink and the fury of hell when el norte blew. Her landlord was a former household slave who had been freed by a woman who manumitted all of her slaves upon her death. Having suffered the pain and misfortune of slavery had not made him a more understanding person when he bought his own house and rented pieces of it. But I was certain I could sneak in without him seeing me. Beatriz's hovel might hide and shelter me for the night, but there would be little or nothing to eat in it. She cooked her tortillas and beans every day on the ground outside, and I would find nothing there the rats had not sampled first.

I was on the edge of town, and the wind was now racketing through the Veracruz streets with cyclonic gusts, sweeping away the dirt and dregs that had accumulated since the last great blow.

By the time I reached the House of the Poor, clouds had blotted out the moon and turned the night black. The wind ripped at my clothes, and flying sand stung my face and hands.

I flew through the door yelling, "Fray Antonio!"

A single table candle lit the room, most of which was shrouded in shadows. I didn't see that Ramon and two other men were there until it was too late. The fray was seated on a stool with his arms and wrists trussed up behind his back with thick, hemp rope. A piece of the same heavily knotted hemp gagged his mouth tight. One of the men held the fray while Ramon beat him with the leaded buttstock of his wrist quirt. The fray's lividly distended face was covered with blood and contorted with pain. A third man apparently watched the door because the second I entered it slammed shut, and he grabbed me by the arms.

Ramon came toward me, unsheathing his fourteen-inch, double-edged, Toledo-steel dagger.

"I will finish what I started the day you were born," he said.

Fray Antonio broke free from the man's restraint. Charging the man holding me, he butted him in the side like an attacking bull. Both of them sprawled onto the floor. Ramon lunged at me, knife blade first, but I sidestepped, and he shot past me, stumbling over his partner, who was trying to regain his footing. Both went down together. Ramon, struggling to stand, furious at having missed me, suddenly spotted a second target in the bound and gagged fray, who was underneath him. Raising the knife high over his head with both hands, he drove the fourteen-inch blade into the fray's stomach all the way to the brass haft.

"Rot in hell, you son-of-a-whore!" Ramon screamed.

Gasping through his rope gag in agony, the fray rolled onto his back, his eyes walling, his mouth open, flooding with blood. His knees pulled up to his chest in mock genuflection. His chin fell slack, and his eyes rolled back till only the whites showed. All the while Ramon clung onto the knife handle and twisted the blade in and out, back and forth in a 180-degree semicircle. I raced for the door, running like the wind, my mind reeling in mute horror. I heard shouts behind me, but they meant nothing. Darkness, el norte's approaching wrath, and losing my pursuers were everything. Soon the shouts were lost, and I was left alone with the black of night and the howling wind.

THIRTY-FOUR

When I was certain that Ramon and his men were not on my trail, I went to Beatriz's room. There was barely enough space for a sleeping pallet and a wall crucifix. The wall was split with cracks and broken boards that let in wind, rain, and mosquitoes. The freed slave who owned the building and charged exorbitant rents, extorting one out of every three reales from the putas and sugarcane hucksters he boarded, clearly did not bother with repairs.

I clambered up the stairs along the side of the building that led to Beatriz's room. I paused in front of her door. None of us had anything of value, so no one locked their doors, at least none among the poor. In fact, if someone had found a lock, that would have been the only thing around here worth stealing.

The whole structure shuddered under the storm. Still the building had endured el nortes before and, I believed, would again. In any event its odds on survival were better than mine. Far better than the fray's—the only father I had known.

I entered the pitch-dark room, sat in a corner, and quietly cried. Over and over in my mind's eye, I saw the knife plunge and twist into the fray. The vision would not go away.

I held up my neck crucifix, my only valued possession, which Fray Antonio claimed to have been my mother's. I studied Christ on his cross and swore that one day vengeance would be mine, not the Lord's.

As I write these words with the mother's milk of a dungeon whore, I can again see the knife driving into the fray's gut, shock on his bloodied face, and Ramon's fist twisting the blade.

That scene was burned into my brain—forever.

Beatriz did not return from the fair until the morning of the next day. She was shocked to find me at her room. "Everyone knows," she said. "It's shouted on the streets. You killed Fray Antonio. And before that you killed a man at the fair."

"I killed no one."

"Do you have proof? Witnesses?"

"I'm a lépero. In both cases the killers were gachupins. It wouldn't matter if the Holy Mother backed me up."

What was the word of a mestizo? Even the sympathetic Beatriz doubted my story. I could see it in her eyes. She had been told from birth that Spaniards could do no wrong and that half-castes were innately treacherous. If a Spaniard said I was guilty, it must be true. And she cared for the fray.

"They say you murdered Fray Antonio after he caught you stealing charitable donations. You have a price on your head."

I tried to explain what had happened, but it sounded so crazy I found it hard to credit myself. I could see in Beatriz's eyes that she didn't believe me either. And if she didn't, no one would.

She took a bag of maize down to the street to fix tortillas. That I was accused of killing the finest man I knew wounded me deeply. I had no desire to leave her room or see anyone.

I paced back and forth in her room, then watched Beatriz through the window opening, rolling and cooking tortillas below. After a while, her landlord stopped to talk to her for a moment. I stepped back from the window for fear of being spotted, and it was a good thing. He looked up to where I was concealed, a quizzical expression on his face, and then hurried away down the street.

Her reaction to my story had, of course, troubled me. Not that I blamed her—what would I say if she told me she was wanted for two murders? But this was worse. That fat, lazy pig of a landlord never hurried anywhere, and now he was racing up the street like his pants were on fire.

She turned and stared at the window. I showed myself, and her features were a mix of guilt and confusion, fear and rage, confirming my worst fears. She had informed on me.

I leaned out the window. Up the street I could see him talking to three horsemen. It could not have been worse; their leader was Ramon.

THIRTY-FIVE

I escaped out the back of the building, over rooftops, and down into an alley. Behind me men shouted and raced after me, sounding an alarm. I could hear fury in their voices and for good reason. The fray was universally beloved, while I was a lowly lépero, and everyone loathed léperos. They would sell their mothers to a shipful of sailors for a few cocoa beans.

Veracruz was not a large city like Mexico, which the fray said was the largest city in the New World. The town swelled and shrank with the coming and going of the treasure fleet, its normal population only a few thousand. I was now exiting an alley into the heart of the city, not far from the main plaza, where our wealthiest citizens lived. I needed to get out of the city, but I was a long way from the outskirts and would be easily spotted here.

Up the street I saw a grand coach waiting in front of a great house. The coachmen were off to the side, pitching coins at a cup a dozen feet away, their backs to both me and the carriage.

I ran across the street and looked under the coach for a place to hide. Then I heard voices. In a panic I opened the door and slipped inside. Fur coverlets were draped over the two cushioned benches. The areas under the seats, used for storage, were empty. I pushed aside a coverlet, which reached all the way to the coach floor, and crawled under its bench seats. Turning onto my side, I let the fur drop back to the floor. I was hidden.

The voices outside faded. I felt something under me and discovered two books under my ribcage. I lifted the fur curtain just enough to get a little light and scanned the titles.

They were boring religious tomes. I recognized one as a book the fray owned from his days as a village priest, but something about the size of the book struck me as wrong. The fray's copy was much thicker. Opening the book, I discovered that after the title page and a couple of pages of religious doctrine, there was a second title page: La Picara Justina, Naughty Justina, The Tale of a Picara Who Deceives Her Lovers Just as a Picaro Does His Masters.

On the way to the fair, Juan had told Fray Antonio about this very book, that he had heard copies of it had arrived on the treasure fleet, smuggled past the inspectors of the Holy Office. It was a scandalous portrayal of a deshonesta woman who bedded and tricked men. He was eager to find a copy at the fair.

The second book, also disguised as a religious tome, was a play called Burlador de Sevilla, The Trickster of Seville, by Tirso de Molina. The frays had discussed it months before. Fray Antonio had dismissed it as "tripe." Its rogue was a despoiler of women named Don Juan, who tricked them into becoming his lovers then abandoned them. As with Naughty Justina, the play about Don Juan was on the Inquisition's banned book list.

A treasure fleet smuggler had obviously sold these two libros indecente as religious works. If the Inquisition got their hands on either seller or buyer, they would be in major trouble. Not only were the books themselves contraband, the false covers represented serious blasphemy.

Someone summoned the coachmen and servants, who had been tossing coins, to the house. They were to pick up the trunks and load them onto the coach. Their footfalls faded as they went to the house.

Should I get out of the coach and run? But run where? I asked myself. The answer was made for me. The coach door opened, and someone got in. I squeezed back as far as I could, barely breathing.

The carriage had barely shifted when the person stepped aboard, so I knew the person wasn't a grown man. Through a split in the fur cover I could tell from dress hem and shoes that a female had entered. A hand suddenly entered beneath the curtain—no doubt in search of Don Juan. The hand found my gaping face instead.

"Don't scream!" I pleaded.

A shocked gasp filled the carriage, but it wasn't enough to alert the attendants.

I drew the curtain and stuck my head out. "Please don't shout. I'm in trouble!"

The very girl who'd interceded between me and the pock-faced boy with the whip gaped at me.

"What are you doing there?" she asked in stunned surprise.

I stared once more at her dark eyes, sable tresses, and high, fine cheekbones. Despite the danger I was speechless at her beauty.

"I'm a prince," I finally said, "in disguise."

"You're a lépero. I'm calling the servants."

As she grabbed the door handle, I showed her the two books I had found.

"Are these what you were looking for under the seat? Two deshonesto books banned by the Holy Office."

Her eyes widened with guilt and fear.

"Ay, such a beautiful young girl. It would be a pity if the Inquisition stripped the flesh from your bones."

She struggled for control, terror and rage at war with each other.

"They burn people at the stake for having books like these."

Unfortunately, she would not bluff.

"Blackmail me? How do you know I won't say the books were yours, and that you were trying to sell them to me. If I say that, you'll be flogged as a thief and sent to the northern mines to die."

"Worse than that," I said, "there's a mob outside hunting me for something I didn't do. Being a lépero, I have no rights. If you call for help, they'll hang me."

My fifteen-year-old voice must have rung with sincerity because her anger instantly faded and her eyes narrowed.

"How did you know the books are banned? Léperos can't read."

"I read Virgil in Latin and Homer in the Greek. I can sing the song that Die Lorelei sang to lure sailors to their doom on the rocks of the Rhine, the Sirens' song Odysseus heard bound to his mast."

Her eyes widened once more but then flared incredulously. "You lie. All léperos are ignorant, unlettered."

"I'm a bastard prince, I am Amadis de Gaul. My mother was Elisena who, at my birth, set me adrift at sea on a wooden ark with my father Perion's sword by my side. I am Palmerin de Oliva. I, too, was raised by peasants, but my mother was a princess of Constantinople who likewise concealed my birth from her ruler."

"You are insane. You might have heard these stories, but you cannot claim to read like a scholar."

Aware that silken ladies succumb to pity as well as flattery, I quoted Pedro, the street lad from Cervantes's play, Pedro, the Artful Dodger.

A foundling too I was, or "son of the stone,"

And no father had I:

No greater misfortune a man may have.

I haven't a notion where I was reared,

I was one of those mangy orphans

At a charity school, I suppose:

On a slum diet and scourgings in plenty

I learnt to say my prayers,

And to read and write as well.

Foundlings were called "sons of the stone," because they were displayed on slabs in a cathedral. There people could view and acquire them if they wished.

She continued with the next lines:

But I learned on the side

To snaffle the alms,

Sell cat for hare and steal with two fingers.

To my misfortune she knew not only her poetry, but the lépero's larcenous heart as well.

"Why are you in this coach?"

"I'm hiding."

"What crime did you commit?"

"Murder."

She gasped again. Her hand went to the door.

"But I am innocent."

"No lépero is innocent."

"True, señorita, I am guilty of many thefts—food and blankets—and my begging techniques may be questionable, but I've never killed anyone."

"Then why do they say you killed someone?"

"It is a Spaniard who killed them both, and it is his word against my own."

"You can tell the authorities—"

"Can I?"

Even at her innocent age she knew the answer to that one.

"They say I killed Fray Antonio—"

"Holy Maria! A priest!" She crossed herself.

"But he's the only father I've ever known. He raised me when I was abandoned and taught me to read, write, and think. I wouldn't hurt him; I loved him."

Voices and footsteps silenced my words.

"My life is in your hands."

I slipped my head back behind the curtain.

Trunks thumped on top of the coach, and it rocked as passengers climbed aboard. From the shoes and voices I was able to identify two women and a boy. From the boy's shoes, pants legs, and the sound of his voice I took him to be about twelve or thirteen and realized he was the boy who tried to hit me. Of the two women, one was quite a bit older.

The girl I had spoken to was addressed as Eléna. The voice of the older woman was commanding, an old matron.

The boy started to stow a bundle under the seat where I was hiding, and I heard the girl stop him. "No, Luis, I filled the space already. Put it under the other one."

Thank God the boy obeyed.

Luis sat next to Eléna and the two older women took the seat I was hidden under. Once the travelers were settled in, the coach started up the cobblestone streets. As the coach rumbled along, the older woman began questioning Eléna about remarks the girl had made earlier. The comments had angered the old woman.

I soon realized that Eléna was unrelated to the other passengers. The women were Luis's mother and his grandmother. I could not pick up the older woman's name.

As was the custom among genteel Spanish families, despite their age, a marriage between Eléna and Luis was already arranged. The union was deemed propitious, but it didn't seem that way to me. Among other things everything Eléna said irritated the old woman.

"You made a statement at dinner last night that disturbed Doña Juanita and me," the old matron said. "You actually said that when you were old enough, you would disguise yourself as a man, enter the university, and get a degree."

Cho! What a statement for a young girl to make—for any woman to make. Women were not allowed at universities. Even women of good families were frequently illiterate.

"Men are not the only ones with minds," Eléna said. "Women should also study the world around them."

"A woman's sole vocation is her husband, her children, and the management of her household," the old matron said sternly. "An education would put false ideas in her head and teach her nothing she can use. I, for one, am proud that we have never had our minds weakened and polluted with book learning."

"Is that all there is for us?" Eléna asked. "All we are good for—bearing babies and baking bread? Was not one of the greatest monarchs in the history of Spain, our beloved Isabella, a woman? Didn't the warrior called Joan of Arc lead the armies of France to victory? Elizabeth of England was on the throne of that cold island when our great and proud Armada was—"

A hard, sharp slap sounded and Eléna cried out in surprise.

"You impertinent girl. I shall advise Don Diego of your unladylike remarks. Like all of us, your place in life has been set by God. If your uncle has not instructed you of that, you will soon learn when you marry and your husband takes the strap to you."

"No man will take a strap to me," Eléna said defiantly.

Another slap, but this time Eléna did not cry out.

Ojalá! Had I been on the seat beside Eléna, I would have slapped that old woman's head off.

"Great Mother, she's only a girl with foolish ideas," the other woman said.

"Then it's time she learned her place as a woman. What kind of wife would she make for Luis with these crazy thoughts racing through her brain?"

"I shall marry whom I please."

Another slap. Dios mio, this girl had heart!

"You are not to speak again unless I speak directly to you. Do you understand? Not one word from you."

At which point Luis emitted a mean, malicious laugh, clearly amused at his bride-to-be's discomfort.

"Don Ramon has instructed me on the handling of a woman," Luis said, "and trust me, my hand will be firm."

I so recoiled at Ramon's name that I almost exposed myself.

"He told me they're like horses," Luis said. "When breaking them in your saddle, he said, do not forget to use your whip."

The older woman laughed, the mother's guffaws segued into a rasping, hacking cough. I had heard that grate before. On the streets they called it "a death rattle." One day she would expectorate blood. Soon after that she would be gone.

If the Dark Diceman cast lots for her soul, the lots would come up coffins.

Eléna's response to their ridicule was blood-chilling silence. What spirit the girl had! If Luis thought to break this one to saddle, he would be bitterly disappointed.

"I've heard from your married cousin that you've been writing poetry, Eléna," the old woman said. "She said it scandalizes the family. When we return you to Don Diego after your visit, I shall discuss this and other matters with him. These strange interests you evince are the devil's idle hands, not God's handiwork. If necessary, I shall whip that devil out of you—personally."

From my vantage point I could see Eléna's foot tapping, tapping, tapping. She seethed under the lecture—but was not one bit cowed.

The side of Luis's boots bore his family's coat of arms, etched in silver: a shield featuring a rose and a knight's steel, mesh glove forming a fist. There was something vaguely familiar about the coat of arms, but many wealthy Spanish possessed them.

The city's cobblestone streets now yielded to the sandy Jalapa road, presently taking us through the dunes and swamps. Even though it was reinforced by timbers, the coach wouldn't follow it for long. The mountain foothills were impassable for anything larger than a donkey cart.

Where the passengers were ultimately headed, I had no idea. They could have been journeying to the City of Mexico for all I knew. Whatever their destination, they would not be continuing by coach. Soon they would choose between mule litter or horseback.

I was just starting to doze off, when the driver yelled down that we were being stopped by soldados.

A moment later one of them said to us, "We are checking all travelers departing the city. A notorious lépero thief has murdered a beloved priest in cold blood. Cut open his stomach and twisted the blade by the looks of it. Apparently, the priest caught him stealing."

Juanita gasped. I could see Eléna's legs stiffen. The heinous accusation put her conscience to the test. The fray's words echoed in my mind: If they catch you, nothing will save you.

"Are you sure he did it?" Eléna asked. She was clearly troubled, even forgetting to follow the old woman's injunction to remain silent.

"Naturalmente. Everyone knows he did it. He has murdered other men before."

Ay caramba! My crimes were growing!

"Will he get a fair trial if you find him?" she asked.

The man laughed. "A trial? He is a mestizo, a half-breed lépero. If the alcalde is merciful, he will not be tortured too severely before execution."

"What does he look like?" Eléna asked.

"The devil himself. Bigger than me, with an ugly face and murderous eyes. Looking into his eyes, you can see the devil grin. And his teeth are like a crocodile's. Oh, he is a mean one, that's for sure."

"But he's just a boy!" Eléna exclaimed.

"Hold on," the soldado told the driver, "a rider on horseback is signaling for you to wait."

I heard the man's horse move away from the coach, and the old matron directed questions at Eléna. "How did you know it was a boy?"

I froze with fear at the question and almost gasped.

"Why I—I heard men talking near the coach when I came out."

"Why do you ask so many questions?"

"I—I was just curious. A lépero boy begged from me while I was waiting for you. After my encounter with the street boy, who knows?"

"I hope you didn't give the lépero money," Juanita said. "Keeping them fed would be the same as feeding the rats who steal our grain."

Horse's hoofs pounded up to the coach.

"Bueno dias, your graces."

"Ramon!" Luis shouted.

"Bueno dias, Don Ramon," said the grandmother.

My blood raced. I almost shot out from under the seat, screaming. The murderer of Fray Antonio was here. Of all the thousands of Ramons on this earth, this one had to haunt me like a shadow wherever I went.

"How goes your hunt?" the old matron asked.

How did she know Ramon was hunting for me?

Ay, I did not have to stick my head out from under the seat to discover the color of the woman's dress. It would be solid ebony without even a hint of white lace at the cuffs. A crone who wore widows weeds as a badge of honor—and authority.

Now I remembered where I had seen the coat of arms on Luis's boots—on the woman-in-black's coach door. I had escaped into the hands of my pursuers.

"He will not get out of the city," Ramon said. "I have offered a hundred pesos for his capture. We will have him dead by sunset."

"Dead? But what of a trial?" Eléna asked.

I heard a slap. Again, Eléna refused to cry out.

"I ordered you to be silent, girl. Do not speak unless spoken to. But if you must know, mestizos have no rights under the law. Ramon, send word to the hacienda the minute you know something. We will be there a few days before we leave for the capital. Come yourself when you have good news."

"Yes, Your Grace."

"Good news" would be news of my death.

The coach moved on. Behind me a killer was leading a city-wide search to find and kill me. Ahead of me was a hacienda where the killer would come when he couldn't find me in the city.

THIRTY-SIX

The coach rumbled on for two hours. From their talk I realized we were still on the Jalapa road. They had closed the wooden windows and put nosegays on to ward off the miasma swamp that causes the dread fever.

The grandmother gratefully slept.

Juanita tried to sleep but was continually awakened by her consumptive death rattle.

Eléna and Luis barely spoke. He was openly contemptuous of books, even the "religious" ones that he thought she read. From his sarcastic remarks, I inferred she had taken out a small book of poems and was reading. To him, horses, hunting, and dueling were all that mattered. Hombría was everything.

"Books teach us nothing that we need to know," he said condescendingly. "They are composed by quill pushers, by ink-stained wretches who would fold at the first sight of a spirited horse or an advancing swordsman."

"Your father writes beautifully," Eléna said.

"Which is why I have modeled my life on that of Don Ramon and your uncle."

"Do not belittle your father," his mother scolded gently.

"I will respect him when he trades that sharpened goose quill for a well-honed sword."

At midday the coach stopped at an inn. I understood from their comments that this was the coach's last stop. From here the women would mount mule litters, Luis a horse.

After they left the coach, I slipped out from under the seat. Peering out the window, I saw Eléna with the others standing in the shade of the inn porch, lined up to enter the inn. I exited the far door and raced for bushes a hundred steps away. I didn't look back until I reached them. When I did, I turned and saw Eléna. She had stayed outside on the patio while the others went in. I lifted my hand to wave to her as Luis stepped out and saw me.

Not looking back again, I ran deep into the bushes.

THIRTY-SEVEN

I had to get off of the Jalapa road. With the treasure fleet and the excitement of the archbishop's arrival, it was no doubt the busiest road in New Spain. As was said about Rome, all roads ultimately led to the great City of Mexico in the heart of the valley of the same name. Despite the wondrous tales I had heard of the island city the Aztecs called Tenochtitlan, I would not dare venture there. Many times the size of Veracruz, the City of Mexico held not just the viceroy and his administrative offices, but most of the notables in the country owned a home—or more likely a palace—in the city. My chances of encountering the murderous doña and her henchmen there would be great.

If the black-hearted boy Luis suspected that I was the notorious killer lépero, or Eléna foolishly shared a moment of candor with him, searchers could already be on my trail. I hurried along, walking swiftly. I would not be able to leave the road until I came to one of the trails off of it that meandered through the scattered villages in the foothills and mountains. I was unfamiliar with the area and could not simply head off into the forest-jungle in search of a village. I was frightened, afraid of being captured, tortured, killed. But even at fifteen years old, I was also worried that I would die and leave wrongs unpunished.

I understood life is hard. That there is no justice for the poor, the indios, and the half-bloods. Injustices were a part of life, and wrongs created more wrongs like a rock dropped in a pond created ripples. But the memory of Ramon twisting the dagger in the fray infuriated me then and haunts me now. In my young mind, if I died with the fray's death unavenged, my grave would not be a resting place but a place where I thrashed in eternal discontent.

There was no one I could turn to. The alcalde would never believe a mestizo over a Spaniard. Even if someone listened to my woes, there would be no justice for me. Justice in New Spain was not administered by Themis, the Greek goddess of justice, who weighed the will of the gods on her scales. Mordida was the Mother of Justice in the colonies. Alcaldes, judges, constables, and jailers all purchased their offices from the king and were expected to collect the bribes called mordida, "the bite," to turn a profit on the public office. I could not even offer a nibble.

I heard the pound of horses and moved off the road quickly, hiding in the bushes. Four horsemen went by. I recognized none of them. They may have been vaqueros returning to a hacienda from the Veracruz festival—or hunters looking for a beggar boy with a hundred pesos on his head. Ay, that much money was a fortune. Vaqueros earned less for a year's work.

When silence returned to the road, I went back onto it and hurried along.

My only knowledge of New Spain was the Veracruz-Jalapa area. The village of my birth was in the northern part of the Valley of Mexico, and other than my memory of the group of huts themselves, I knew nothing of the region. Fray Antonio had told me that most of New Spain from Guadalajara to the end of the Yucatan region was either jungle, mountain, or deep valley. There were few cities of any note, and most communities were indio villages, many of which were on haciendas. He had once shown me a map of New Spain, pointing out that there were only a few cities dominated by the Spanish and that there were many villages, hundreds, that had little contact with the Spanish other than a priest somewhere in the area. The terrain in every direction, until one reached the dreaded northern deserts, lent itself much more toward donkey and mule trains over paths cut out by the tread of human and animal feet than for the use of carts with wheels.

Which was one reason, the fray said, the Aztecs never developed the wheeled cart, which is in such great use in Europe and other places in the world. They understood the function of a wheel and built wheeled toys for their children. But they had no use for carts because they had no beasts of burden to pull them—the horse, donkey, mule, and oxen are all brought to the New World by the Spanish. Without carts, there was no use for wide roads. The Aztec beast of burden was himself and slaves; and other than in cities, they needed only foot trails.

After an hour's walk I saw indios leaving the main road to take a small trail. A wooden sign at the head of the trail said Huatúsco. I had heard the name before, but did not know whether it was a village or town. Nor did I know how far it was, or what I would do when I got there. When I saw the sign on the way to the fair I had asked the fray whether Huatúsco was a place of importance. He was not familiar with the place, but told me that it was probably an indio village. "There are dozens of trails off the road between Veracruz and the Valley of Mexico," he had said, "and most lead from one indio village to another."

Plodding down the trail, no more than a foot-and-mule path, worries began to crowd out fear of pursuit. I had no money. How would I eat? One cannot beg for food from people who are so poor that a handful of maize and beans was a meal. How long could I steal before I got a spear in my back? Going into indio country was more frightening to me that hiding out in a city. As I had told the fray, in a jungle I would be food. But there were no cities for me to crawl into, and I had to get off the main road.

Ay, I was not too young for work, but I had no skills. I had two hands and two feet, which made me capable of only doing the simplest manual labor. In a land where an indio's only virtue, in Spanish eyes, was as a dray animal, a teenage boy was not going to be in demand. Not that I could work for a Spaniard. New Spain was a big place but the Spaniards in it were small in number compared to the indios. Word that a mestizo had killed Spaniards would spread like the pox. I would have to avoid all Spaniards.

I wondered how the picaro, Guzman, would have approached the problem. When he acted as a beggar one moment and an aristocrat the next, he changed the way he walked and talked.

My knowledge of the Aztec tongue was picked up from indios on the streets of Veracruz and had improved from mingling with so many indios at the fair. It was not perfect; but there were so many indio tongues and dialects, my speech itself would not be that suspect. However, my appearance would.

A mestizo was not an uncommon sight in towns and along the roads. But a half-blood would be noticeable in indio villages. I was taller for my age and lighter skinned that most indios, although I had spent years under the blazing sun of the tierra caliente and most of the year I was dark enough to be taken for an indio. The height was not as noticeable as the skin color because I would be taken for being older. My feet were already encrusted with enough dirt to hide their lineage.

My hair was not as black as most indios, so I pulled my hat down on my head. For those few times when my hair would be exposed, I would need something, perhaps the charcoal from a dead fire, to darken it, but for now my feet were driven by the necessity to keep moving. Most Spaniards would not notice the difference anyway.

Thinking about my appearance, as my dirty feet carried me along the trail, I decided that the way I walked and talked, the language of my body movements, were most likely to give me away. A lépero raised on the streets of a town would not have the quiet, stoic attitude that characterized the indio. Our voices were louder, our feet and hands moved faster. The indios were a defeated people, conquered by the sword, decimated by disease that killed nine out of ten of them, broken and slaughtered in mines and cane fields, shackled, branded, and ruled by the whip.

I needed to adopt that stoic indifference that ubiquitously characterized the indio—except when he was drunk. When I came into contact with people, I would have to appear quieter, less assertive.

I walked quickly and with no sense of direction except to keep one foot in front of the other and get away from whoever might be following. As I discovered during my earlier trip alone along the Jalapa road, I knew little of how to scrounge for food or find shelter in the wilds. An hour along the path I passed fields of corn. Indios who tended them gave me the same dark looks that I had experienced on the Jalapa road. Ay, these indios were stoic but not estúpido. Like a man watching another lusting after his woman, these peóns saw the hunger in my eyes when I gazed at their tall, slender, shapely stalks of corn.

In the city, many dark stories were told of Aztec tribes in the trackless jungles and mountains who still performed human sacrifices and ate the victims afterward. These tales were entertaining tales on a city street—not here in indio country.

It had rained earlier and the sky said it would rain again soon. I had nothing with which to light a fire, nor was there wood dry enough to burn. It came before I had trudged another hour, first in a mist and then as a downpour. I welcomed the rain because it would hinder and discourage a search for me. But I had to find shelter.

I came to a small village, no more than a dozen huts. I saw no one except a dark-eyed, naked child staring from a doorway, but I sensed other eyes on me. There was no place for me in this little village of indios and I kept going. If I had stopped to even beg a tortilla, I would be remembered. I wanted to be looked upon as just another person returning from the fair.

A fray on a mule followed by four indios servants on foot passed me. I was tempted to stop and tell him my story of woe but wisely kept going. As Fray Antonio told me, not even a priest would accept the word of a lépero accused of murdering Spaniards.

I walked through the mud of another village, rain still falling. Dogs barked at me and one chased me until I hit it with a rock. The indios raised dogs for food; and if I had had the makings of a fire, I would have butchered the mongrel and had a juicy leg of dog for dinner.

Soon my hat was wet atop my head, my manta soaked on my shoulders, and my pants and shirt equally as soaked. My sparse clothing was well enough to weather the heat of the coast, but I shivered in the cold rain that followed me like a bad omen.

More cornfields and thatched houses with corncribs overflowing tempted me as I went by. My stomach growled until it was too weak to complain. I came to a maguey field and looked around. Not seeing anyone, I went to one of the plants that was in the process of being harvested. I was too tired to search for a secret cache. There was probably no hidden supply anyway. A small field, it probably belonged to an indio who used it for his personal consumption and sold a little.

The heart of the plant had already been cut out. Hollowed pieces of reed were stacked nearby. I broke off a piece to suck out the juice of the plant. I tried repeatedly until I was finally able to extract juice. I hated the sour, rancid flesh taste and smell of the unfermented juice of the maguey, but it would ward off starvation.

The punishing rain from the gods came down harder and harder. I was forced to leave the trail to find cover under broad-leafed vegetation. I arranged the wide leaves over me and curled up in a ball. ¡Ay de mi! Again, it came to me how little I knew about the indio side of life, that part of my ancestry that had been connected to this land since time immemorial. I felt like an intruder in the land, someone the indio gods, who had retreated into the jungles and mountains, looked down on with contempt.

No matter what I did, how I shifted, the rains found me. I shivered wet and cold and miserable until I finally slipped into a troubled sleep.

I dreamt of dark things, things without shape but that left me with deep fear and foreboding when I awoke. It was still dark, the middle of the night. The rain had stopped. The air had turned warmer and the black night filled with fog. As I lay silently, trying to shake off the fright I still felt from the dream, I heard something moving in the bushes and my fears became ablaze.

I listened intently, not moving a muscle, barely breathing. The sound came again. Something was moving in the brush, not far from me. The dread raised by my dreams was still with me and my first thought went to evil. The most evil thing of the night was Night Ax, the ferocious Aztec forest spirit that waylaid travelers who were foolish enough to journey after dark. Night Ax—a headless entity with a wound in its chest that opened and closed with the sound of an ax striking wood—stalked the night, seeking the unwary. People heard someone chopping wood in the dark. When they went to investigate, Night Ax chopped off their head and stuck the head inside his chest opening.

Night Ax was a fiend mothers used to scare children into behaving. Even I had had the threat that unless I minded, Night Ax would come and chop off my head. The threat came not from Fray Antonio, of course, but from the street people who spent the night at the House of the Poor.

The noise I heard was not the sound of chopping wood but of something moving through the bushes, something big. As I listened I was certain that it was the sound of the New World tiger, the jaguar. A hungry jaguar was faster and as deadly as Night Ax.

I lay frozen in fear until the sound of movement was long gone. Even the silence that followed in the wake of the sounds was eerie. I had heard stories of other creatures, snakes that could crush every bone in your body and deadly spiders as big as a man's head. Neither made a sound before it was atop of you.

I told myself that the sounds were noises one would normally hear in the dark; the night birds, beetles, and crickets were silent because it was too wet for them to stick their heads out of their shelter, but the fear nagged me that they were silent because something bigger and more deadly was looking for a victim.

I slept fitfully and this time my dream took form—I dreamt I had amputated the fray's head instead of the prostitute's leg.

THIRTY-EIGHT

At the first hint of dawn I left the bushes and got back on the trail. My clothes were wet, and I needed to hurry along to get my body warm. With the rising sun, the dampness of the vegetation turned to steam. For a while I could not see more than a couple dozen feet of trail ahead. As I walked the road climbed higher, and soon I broke out of the fog and into sunshine and blue sky.

I rubbed dirt on my face and hands to darken my skin and kept my head down when I passed people. Late in the afternoon, weak from hunger, I came to a clearing in which half a dozen different encampments were being set up for the night. They were all indio traders. Most carried their goods on their back and a few even had a donkey. There were no mules in sight. Few indios could afford a donkey, much less the larger animal that cost almost twice the price of a donkey.

I needed food but my fear was too great to even approach the indios. These men who traveled from village to town would be more sophisticated and in possession of much more information than simple farmers. I had determined that I was going to steal maize from the next unattended field I came to and eat it raw.

Shying away from the encampment, I started into the bushes to avoid contact with any of them when I saw a familiar figure. The Healer who used snakes to cure ills was unloading bedding and supplies from his donkey. The last time I had seen the man he had sold me a worthless piece of volcano excrement.

I hurried over to help him unload, greeting the old man in Náhuatl. He showed no surprise at my sudden appearance or my assistance.

"I'm happy to see you again," I said. "Do you remember me from the fair?"

"I remember, I remember. I have been expecting you."

"Expecting me? How did you know I would come?"

A flock of birds chattered overhead as they flew by. The old man pointed up at them. He made a throaty noise, akin to a raspy chuckle. He gestured at me to continue the unloading. As I unloaded the donkey, he knelt and began to make a dinner fire.

The sight of the fire brought a long, loud cry from my stomach. Any intention I had of coercing the Healer to return the money faded as I helped him prepare food. Guzman often traveled with an older person. The old indio sorcerer could no doubt use a young man to assist and serve him, both while traveling and in his act.

Soon I had my belly full from hot tortillas, beans, and chilies. My hunger cured, I squatted beside the dying fire while the Healer smoked a pipe. The pipe was elaborately carved in the shape of an Aztec god that was a common stone figure at many old ruins—Chac-Mool, laying on his back with his belly up. The hearts torn from the breasts of sacrificial victims were thrown into the bowl he held on his belly as food for the gods.

The bowl was now full of tobacco that the Healer lit.

I could see that the Healer was a sorcerer with many different types of magic in his sorcerer's bag. He was, of course, a Tetla-acuicilique, he-who-recovers-the-stone, a sorcerer who removed sickness-causing objects from the body. I had seen fakers retrieve small stones from the sick on the streets of Veracruz.

I had also heard of sorcerers who could understand the secret language of birds and could divine a person's fate from them. These sorcerers were considered preternaturally gifted and commanded high fees from indios. There was an Aztec word for those who divine by the flight and song of birds, but I did not know it.

"I ran away from my Spanish master," I told him. "He beat me much and worked me more than a pair of mules."

I elaborated upon the lie as only a lépero can. The old man listened silently, smoke curling from his pipe. It occurred to me that the smoke might tell him that I was lying, but the only sound that came from him was a low hum. Soon I felt the lies sticking in my throat.

Finally he got up and handed me a blanket from a pack removed from the donkey.

"We leave early tomorrow," he said. His face revealed nothing, but his voice was soothing. I felt both like crying and telling him the truth, but I was not sure how he would react to a tale of murder. I curled up under the blanket, relieved. More man just a full stomach, I had found a guide in the wilderness.

Again, I mourned Fray Antonio, my father in life if not in blood. It had not been a perfect life with the fray. Drinking and fornicating were numbered among his sins. But I never doubted the fray's love.

As I lay upon the ground, staring up at the night sky, I thought about the old matron and the killer Ramon. There was a living person who could provide the answers to their murderous rage toward me. The woman who raised me, Miahi. I assumed she was still alive. She would have the answers to what happened in the past that has erupted and spewn smoke and fire in my life. From years of listening to the fray when he had too much vino, I know she had left for the City of Mexico with some of his money and that there had been no word from her since. He called her a puta, but I did not know if that was his anger speaking or her occupation.

Before I dozed off I saw an indio merchant pull up his pant leg and prick his leg with a sharp piece of obsidian. He rubbed some of the blood on the tip of his walking staff and let more drops fall to the ground.

I looked over to the Healer with a question on my face. He made a low, chuckling sound like the song of certain birds. "You have much to learn about the Way of the Aztec. Tomorrow you will start learning how to walk the Path."

THIRTY-NINE

The next morning I heard hooves, and I went off into the bushes as if I needed to relieve myself. It was a mule train led by a Spaniard on horseback. After the last mule passed, I crept back out. I caught the eye of the Healer and turned away shamefaced.

The other travelers who had been camped around us moved on, but the Healer paused to smoke his pipe. I assumed he was going to tell me that I could not accompany him. When we were alone in the clearing and the donkey packed, the old man disappeared into the bushes for some time. When he came back he squatted next to a flat rock and worked berries and tree bark into a dark mush.

He motioned me over and applied the stain to my face, neck, hands, and feet. I took the rest of the paste and rubbed it on my chest. From a pack on the mule he gave me pants and a shirt that were made of a coarse maguey material to put on instead of my softer cotton clothes. An old hat of dirty straw went on my head to complete my conversion into a rural indio.

"Women use this to color their hair," he said about the dye. "It will not wash off, but it will wear off in time."

Still shamefaced at having tried to deceive him, or at least for having gotten caught at it, I mumbled my thanks.

He was not finished. Taking powder out of a pouch, he had me sniff it. I sneezed repeatedly, and my eyes teared. Still, he made me sniff it several times more. My nose burned and blood throbbed in it.

Before we set off down the road, he had me look into his mirror of polished obsidian. I swear he had a hint of a grin on his face when he gave me the mirror.

My nose was fat, puffed up. The fray would not have recognized me if we had passed on the street.

"It will stay swollen for a week," the Healer said.

"What do I do then?"

"Sniff more."

"I don't like that stuff. Is there something else we can do?"

His twittering hum grew a little louder.

"Cut off your nose."

We loaded the donkey. The last thing that went on the pack animal was a reed basket.

"What's in the basket?" I asked.

"Snakes."

I shuddered. Snakes. Eh, they could not be poisonous, otherwise the Healer couldn't do his act, handling them and even concealing them in his mouth. But who knew? Perhaps the old sorcerer had a special covenant with the Snake God that made him immune from the bite of a snake.

He handed me the donkey's lead rope and we went down the trail.

As we walked, the Healer told me that Spanish medicine does not work on indios.

"We are one with the land. The spirits of our gods are everywhere, in every stone, every bird, in the trees and the grass, the maize on the stalk, the water in the lake, and the fish in the stream. The Spanish have only one god."

"The Spanish conquered the indios." I spoke gently, out of respect for the old man's feelings.

"They have a powerful god, one who speaks through their muskets and cannons and horses that carry a man swiftly into battle. But the Spanish conquer only what the eye can see. Our gods are still here," he pointed to the jungle, "and there and all around us. Gods that carry sickness in the air, gods that warm the earth so the maize will feed us, gods that bring rain, and angry gods that throw fire down from the sky. These the Spanish never conquered."

It was the longest speech I had heard the old man make. I listened quietly, respectfully. Just as I had paid homage to Fray Antonio when he taught me how to wriggle lines on a piece of paper to form Spanish words, I paid honor to this old man whose feet had seen more of New Spain than an eagle's eye.

"Because we indio are one with the land, we must honor and pay tribute to the gods who bring illness and the ones who cure us. That tribute is blood. Last night you saw a merchant give blood to the gods, asking them to accept the small sacrifice in the hopes that he will get to his journey's end without sickness finding a way into his body or a jaguar dragging him off into the forest to devour him. Praying to the Spanish god would do him no good because the Spanish god does not protect the indios.

"¡Ayya ouiya! In my lifetime, nine of every ten indios have died from the diseases and punishments the Spanish have inflicted upon them. Spanish medicine poisons indio bodies. Indios are drained of their blood by the Spanish—it is spilled in their mines, their hacienda fields, their sugar mills, and workshops. More indio blood is spilled each day under the Spanish than had been spilt in a year of Aztec sacrifices, but not a drop of it is in tribute to the Aztec gods. This has angered the gods, and they believe the indios have abandoned them. They show their anger by letting the Spanish ravish them. Too many indios have forgotten the path that took them to greatness.

"Your blood has been salted by the Spanish. The indio spirits in you have been asleep, but you can awaken them and sweeten your blood with them. To awaken them you must walk the Way of your indio ancestors."

"Will you teach me the Aztec Ways?"

"One cannot be taught the Ways. One can be shown the direction, but only their heart will guide them to the truth. I will point you in the right direction, boy, but you must make the journey alone. The gods will test you," he twittered, "and sometimes the test is so severe that they rip the heart from your chest and throw your body to their favorites, the jungle cats. But if you survive you will know magic stronger than the fire the Spanish shoot from their muskets."

I had never given much thought to the indio side of my blood. In a world where the Spanish dominated, only their blood—or the lack of it—mattered. Now I found myself as fascinated about learning the Way of the Aztec as I was about Spanish literature and sword fighting. In truth, I had stepped from the world of New Spain to the world of the old Aztec. Just as I had had a guide in the fray, who led me through the culture of the Spanish, I was being offered help in learning the path of my indio side.

I was curious about the Healer. Where had he come from? Did he have a family?

"I came from the stars," he told me.

FORTY

At midday we arrived at a small village where the cacique, the indio headman, welcomed the Healer. We sat outside the cacique's thatched hut, along with several of the old men of the village. Most of the villagers were working in the fields.

The Healer gave the assembly a gift of tobacco. Pipes were lit and they spoke of the harvest and their fellow villagers. If we had come to the village for a purpose, it was not evident. Nor was it urgent. Life moved slowly for these old men; only death came at a gallop.

No one asked anything about me, and the Healer volunteered nothing. I squatted with my haunches on my heels and drew meaningless patterns in the dirt as I listened to the talk. I had difficulty understanding many of the words. My Veracruz Náhuatl was inadequate. Fortunately I am good with languages and was able to increase my ability to speak the tongue even as I listened to the chatter of the old men.

It was more than an hour before they got down to business, and the cacique told him of a woman who needed his services.

"She is suffering from the espanto," the cacique said. His voice fell into a whisper as he spoke.

Eh, the espanto! This was something that even I knew something about. I have heard indios in Veracruz whisper of this terrible element. Like the cacique, they spoke the word only in a low voice—if they spoke it at all.

Espanto was terror, caused by witnessing something frightening. Not just an ordinary tragedy like the death of a loved one; usually it was something in the supernatural sphere, in the form of a ghost or other apparition. It was said that those who have seen Night Ax, the headless specter who stuffs heads in the hole in his chest, and Camazotz, the huge, blood-thirsty bat from the southern region who swoops down and rips people apart with enormous teeth and claws, suffer from espanto for the rest of their lives. People who had the infliction often are unable to eat and end up wasting away until they die.

There was more discussion between the Healer and the cacique on the way to the woman's hut, but I followed too far behind to hear. When we got to the hut, the woman came out and greeted the assembly. After the proper introductions, to which I deliberately kept out of the center, everyone sat on logs and tobacco was passed around.

A haze of smoke rose from the six people as they smoked their pipes. The woman puffed as much smoke from her pipe as any of the men.

She was a widow of about forty, a short, stocky india who had spent a lifetime working the fields, making tortillas, and nursing babes. She told the Healer that her husband had been dead for a year. This was her second husband, the one before having fathered her three children, two boys and a girl. One boy and the girl had died from the peste and the surviving boy was married, had a family, and lived in the village. The woman married the now-deceased second husband about five years ago. Their relationship had been a stormy one. "He was infected by Tlazoltéotl," she told the Healer.

I recognized the name of the goddess. Tlazoltéotl was the Aztec Venus, a goddess of love.

"He gave much blood to Tlazoltéotl," she said, "and the goddess rewarded him with the strength of many men in his lovemaking. He made constant demands on me for ahuilnéma." She dabbed tears in her eyes. "I did it so often that soon I could not sit down to roll tortillas. It was not decent. Even in the daylight, he would come home early from the fields and demand that he put his tepúli in my tipíli."

The Healer and the assembled old men murmured their sympathy for the woman's plight. I wondered what the problem was now that he was dead. But she soon enlightened us.

"He died last year and for a few months I had peace. But now he has come back."

I had been scratching meaningless designs into the dirt, but she suddenly had my attention.

"He comes to me in the middle of the night, takes my blanket off, and removes my nightclothes. While I lay naked, he takes off his clothes and gets on the bed with me. I try to keep him away from me, but he forces my legs apart."

She showed the old men how the ghost of her husband forced her legs apart, pushing at the inside of her thighs with her hands while her legs trembled and tried to resist the pressure. The old men as a group mouthed aaayyyyo as her legs finally split apart enough for her husband's pene to slip in. All eyes were on the area between her legs that she had exposed to get across her point.

"He comes to me not once a night but at least three or four times!"

A gasp of astonishment rose from the old men. Even I gasped. Three or four times a night! The continuous nocturnal struggles that the old woman went through showed on her face—dark circles under tired eyes.

"I cannot eat and my body is wasting away!" she wailed.

The old men confirmed excitedly that the woman was indeed wasting away.

"She was twice this size," the cacique said, "a woman of good proportion, who could work all day in the fields and still make tortillas."

The Healer asked her more questions about the apparition that raped her at night, going into minute detail about how he looked, the expression on his face, what he wore, and how his body felt to her.

"Like a fish," the woman said, "his tepúli feels cold and wet, slippery like a fish, when he slips it in my tipíli—" She shuddered as if she could feel the cold fish inside of her, and we all shuddered with her.

After questioning her, the Healer got up and walked away from the hut, moving along the edge of a set of trees near a maize field. Birds flew in and out of the trees. His own gentle twittering was carried back to us on a breeze.

We all remained squatted by the woman as the Healer walked among the trees. Everyone had an ear cocked in the Healer's direction, quietly straining to hear what insight the Healer gained from birds. I, too, listened to the songs and chatters of the birds, but gained no wisdom about the woman's problem.

Finally the Healer came back to share what he had divined.

"It is not the dead husband who visits you at night," he told the woman, as we listened eagerly. "Tlazoltéotl has created a shadow image of the husband, and it is this shadow that comes at night." He held up his hand to shut off the woman's excited response that the ghost was solid. "The shadow is a reflection of your husband. He looks and feels like him, but he is a mirror image created with Tlazoltéotl's personal smoking mirror."

The Healer slipped out his own smoking mirror, and the woman and men drew back from it in fear and awe.

"We must burn her hut," the cacique said, "to rid her of this fiend. He must hide in a dark corner and come out at night to have his pleasure with her."

The Healer clicked his tongue. "No, it would do no good to burn the hut—not unless the woman was in it. The shadow fiend is inside of her!"

More gasps. The Healer was a true showman. He used his hands, eyes, and facial expressions to get across every point. I could imagine him on a comedia stage with the picaros at the fair, the audience alternately in awe and shock from his pronouncements, as he explained how life was but a dream....

"Tlazoltéotl has hidden the shadow in you," he told the woman. "We need to draw it out and destroy it so it cannot come back and violate you."

He instructed the cacique to get a fire going; then he led the woman into the hut. I followed inside, but he barred everyone else but the cacique.

"Lie down on the bed," he told the woman.

When she was on her back on the bed, he knelt down beside her and began to hum near her ear. His humming got louder and developed into a soft chant.

His mouth got closer and closer to her ear and finally his lips were brushing the woman's ear. She was wide-eyed and frozen in fear as if she expected him to mount her as her husband's ghost had done.

He slowly moved away from her ear, just inches, but enough so that the cacique and I could see that he was drawing a snake from her ear and into his mouth.

He suddenly stood up and spit the snake into his hand. Rushing by the cacique, he ran outside. I followed him outside with the cacique and the woman on my heels.

The Healer paused before the fire and held the wriggling snake in the air, hoarsely whispering an incantation of words that were completely unfamiliar to me. I knew it was not Náhuatl; no doubt they were magic words learned from secret sources and known only to those in the inner circle of magic.

He threw the snake into the fire. When the snake hit the flames, a whiff of green flame flashed. As he stood by the fire and made more proclamations in the strange tongue, I wondered if I had seen a little dust come out of his pocket and hit the flames just before the fire flashed green.

Sweating and trembling from ecstatic excitement, he turned to the woman. "The demon who has violated you each night, I have burned in this fire. It is gone and cannot return. Tlazoltéotl no longer has any control over your life. You will sleep well tonight and will never again be visited by the shadow creature."

After receiving his pay, a handful of cacao beans, the Healer led us back to the cacique's house, where pipes were once more lit and a jug of pulque passed around.

The old men were still discussing the oversexed ghost a little later when horsemen came into the village. I had heard the horses approaching and started up to flee but sat down at a look from the Healer. He was right. I could not outrun a horse.

Three men rode into the village: A Spaniard was on a horse. His clothes were similar to the man who had chased me at the fair, and I took him to be a hacienda overseer. The other two men were on mules, an indio and an africano. Both of these mule riders were dressed better than common indios and slaves. From their appearance I concluded that they were not simply vaqueros but a step above, men who held some authority over common workers.

I knew the moment I saw them that these men were hunters looking for me. Rather than simply passing through the village, they looked about with the wariness and intensity of men on a mission.

They paused their mounts by us. The cacique rose and greeted them, the mounted indio returning his greeting before he addressed all of us in Náhuatl.

"Have any of you seen a mestizo boy, about fourteen or fifteen years old? He would have passed through in the last couple of days."

I had to lift my head a little to look up to the indio on the mule. My hat was pulled down because of the sun, and I shaded my eyes with my hand in the hopes of concealing part of my face, hoping that the searchers would only see my big nose.

I waited gripped by fear as a general discussion ensued among the old men about who had passed through the village in the last two days. Finally the cacique said, "No mestizo has passed this way."

The elders murmured their assent.

"There is a reward," the hacienda indio said. "Ten pesos if you catch him."

Ayyo! The reward was a hundred pesos. These searchers were thieves who would cheat poor indios out of most of the reward.

FORTY-ONE

That evening as we lay in our blankets, I said to the Healer, "The way you disguised my face fooled not only the Spaniard and the vaqueros, but even the cacique and the old men who were around me for hours."

"You did not fool the cacique or the elders; they know you are a mestizo."

I was shocked. "Why didn't they tell the Spaniard?"

"Their enemy is your enemy," the Healer said. "The cacique's son was forced to labor in a hole the Spanish have dug in the ground to steal silver. These holes are to the north, in the land of the Mictlán, the dark place where the dead go. The silver is put into the mountains by Coyolxauhqui, the Moon goddess. It is her excrement and she puts it in the mountains as a gift to her fellow god, Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the underworld. Digging the holes to steal the wealth of Mictlantecuhtli angers him, and he causes the tunnels to cave in. Many indios die there, some from the cave-ins and others from starvation and beatings. The cacique's son passed from sorrow to the Dark Place while working in one of the holes.

"The Spanish have recently come again to this small village and taken men. All are the sons, grandchildren, or nephews of the elders. The young men are being forced to dig a hole through a mountain to drain the lake surrounding Tenochtitlan, the city the Spanish called Mexico. Mictlantecuhtli is again angered by this violation, and many indios have died digging through this mountain."

"But there is a reward offered," I said. "Ten pesos is mucho dinero, probably more than the cacique or anyone else in the village see at any one time."

"The Spaniard's gold is stolen from Huitzilopochtli, the sun god, who excretes it for Mictlantecuhtli. The villagers do not want the gold. These are vengeful gods, who take many indio lives. The cacique and the other elders want their sons to live and the Spanish to stop forcing them to anger the gods."

Any Veracruz indio or mestizo, household servant, or street trash would have slit my throat and turned my dead body in for a reward of ten pesos. They would have revealed me to the Spaniard just in the hopes of a small reward. I learned something about the indios of New Spain: The domesticated indios, raised like work animals on haciendas and in cities, were different than the ones who were not corrupted by the conquerors. There were still indios who followed the old ways and to whom honor was more important than gold.

I asked the most important question. "How did the cacique know I'm not indio? The color of my skin? Hair? My facial features? Did I expose any pale skin? What was it?"

"Your smell."

I sat up. "My smell?" I was indignant. That morning I had washed with water from a creek. Late that afternoon both the Healer and I had used the cacique's temazcalli, his steam hut. While the Spanish did not bath as much as an indio, I bathed more than a Spaniard.

"How could he tell from my smell? Don't people all smell the same?"

The only response from the Healer was birdlike twittering.

"I must know," I insisted. "What do I have to do to make sure I smell like an indio? I don't have access to a temazcalli every day. Is there a special soap I can use?"

He tapped his heart. "Sweat and soap cannot take away what is in the heart. When you walk the Way of your indio ancestors, you will be an indio."

Before we left the village the Healer treated several others for ailments. Like Fray Antonio, who "doctored" the poor of Veracruz, the Healer was also a man of practical medicine, although the fray would not have recognized his methods.

A woman brought a small child to be examined for a stomach problem. The Healer held the child over a trough of water, studying the reflection. He twittered a bit and then prescribed pulverized avocado seed and crushed plantain in raw, unfermented maguey juice.

He examined a man suffering from a bad cough with his smoke mirror. The man, emaciated and in obvious discomfort, described pains in his chest, abdomen, and back. The Healer prescribed pulque and honey.

I was surprised that he had not drawn snakes from either person. "You told me that all illness is caused by the invasion of the body by evil spirits and they take the form of snakes that wiggle around the body. Why didn't you draw the evil snakes from the child and the man today?"

"Not all sickness can be sucked out. The woman whose dead husband has been forcing her to have sex at night believes his ghost is attacking her. When she sees the snake come out, she realizes that the ghost is gone. The man suffers from los aires, bad spirits in the air, which have entered his body. The snakes are too small and too many to suck out. They are everywhere in his body. He will die soon."

That shocked me. "The child will die, too?"

"No, no, the child's stomach is just upset. It would be a waste of a snake to use it with a child who would not understand that the evil had been withdrawn."

I knew that the snakes were not evil spirits in the body but were stored in a basket hauled around on the Healer's donkey. What he seemed to be telling me was that what he took from people's heads were bad thoughts. The thoughts themselves were maladies.

Although I had assisted the fray in cutting off a prostitute's leg and many lesser medical treatments, bad thoughts were a strange malady to me. Yet it seemed to work. Each person who had the snake removed smiled and was noticeably happier afterward.

The woman who suffered from the abuse of her husband brought us corn cakes and honey for breakfast and told the Healer that she had had the first good night's sleep in months. Had the woman gone to a Spanish doctor and complained of a ghost, he would have sent her to a priest for an exorcism. The priest would have used prayers and the cross to drive the evil from her—and perhaps solicited the help of the Inquisition to inquire whether the woman was a witch.

Whose method was the more humane? The more effective?

I was beginning to understand what the Healer meant when he said the Spanish had conquered the flesh of the indio but not the spirit.

FORTY-TWO

When I awoke in the morning, the Healer had already left his blanket. I went to the creek to wash and saw him in a small clearing between the trees. He was surrounded by birds, one of which was on his shoulder and eating from his hand.

Later, when we were traveling to the next village, he told me that he had been given knowledge about me.

"You have died once," he said, "and you will die again before you know your name."

I had no clue as to the meaning of this prophecy; he refused to say anything more.

The Healer began to guide me in learning the Aztec Ways as we journeyed between villages.

The Aztec way of life was to honor one's family, clan, tribe, and gods. Children were taught and strictly disciplined from birth about the way they must act and live and treat others.

The umbilical cord of a male child was given to a warrior who buried it on a battlefield, thus ensuring that the boy grew up to be a strong warrior. The umbilical cord of a girl child was buried under the floor of the house to keep her close to home.

"When an Aztec child is born," he said, "the father calls upon a soothsayer to read the child's path in life. The day sign the child is born under will affect him throughout life. There are good signs that bring happiness, health, and even wealth, and bad ones that bring failure and sickness."

"How are the paths determined?"

"The Tonalamatl, The Book of Fates, which sets forth the good and bad days, must be consulted. The day and week signs of your birth and other events surrounding it must be probed. A favorable birth sign brings rewards in life... but only if you lead your life according to the sign. An evil life will turn a fortunate birth sign bad."

He asked me questions about the day and time of my birth. That much I knew, along with the fact that the fray had hinted at ominous events surrounding my birth. I also knew from street talk something about good and bad days. The days of the Aztec calendar were numbered and named. One Crocodile, meaning the first time in the calendar day crocodile occurred, was considered a fortuitous day to be born on. Five Coatl, serpent, was a bad day. I was only familiar with the character of a few signs I heard street people talking about, but I knew there were days named for deer, rabbit, water, wind, and other things.

The Healer disappeared into the forest for two hours. Upon his return, we ate a meal I had prepared over our campfire. While he was gone, I had foretold the future for a pregnant india who had had two girls and was desperate to birth a boy. After examining the ashes in her cooking fire and muttering some Latin at a flock of birds, I advised her that she would indeed have a boy. The grateful woman gave me the duck I'd roasted for our meal.

I dared not tell the Healer that I was telling fortunes.

I listened to him as I attacked the duck with great enthusiasm.

He spoke solemnly. "Each of us has our destiny cast by the gods. For some there are clear signs of good fortune, while pain and misfortune will be the circumstance of others." He shook his head. "You fall within the Shadow Fates, the destines the gods have left uncompleted. Your day is Four and the sign is Ollin, motion. The gods do not cast the destiny of those born under this sign because motion is changeable. It runs here and there and changes direction many times. It is under the control of Xolotl, the Plumed Serpent's evil twin. You see Xolotl blazing in the night sky at certain times of the year, the dark side of the star, while the light side blazes in the morning."

From the description I assumed Xolotl was the evening star, the nighttime manifestation of Venus, as opposed to the morning star. Xolotl, a dog-headed monster, was another favorite character at mascaradas.

"It is said that those born under the motion sign change their path in life frequently and often become rogues and tale bearers."

Eh, that caught my attention.

"Because they are so fluid, they are able to change shapes. The darkest side of those born under the sign of motion are the shape changers who are able to take on different forms, even the shape of animals."

"Why is that considered the dark side?" I asked.

"Because there are evil persons who do much harm under the guise of animals or in the shape of another person."

The Healer also told me I needed an Aztec name.

I removed my mouth from the carcass of the duck I was gnawing and wiped duck fat from my chin. "What should my Aztec name be?"

"Nezahualcóyotl."

I recognized the name. Next to Montezuma, he was the most famous indio king. There were many tales about Nezahualcóyotl, the king of Texcoco. He was famous for his poetry and wisdom. But from the amused glint in the Healer's eye when he bestowed the name upon me, I realized I was not being honored for my wisdom or literary talents.

The name meant "Hungry Coyote."

Along the road the Healer showed me vegetation—plants and trees and bushes—that were useful in the healing arts, and the ways of the forest and jungle and the animals and people that inhabit them.

"Before the Spanish came, the revered speakers, what we called our Aztec emperors, had not only a great animal and serpent zoo, but vast gardens in which thousands of plants were grown that were used by healers. The potency and healing powers of the plant were determined by using them on criminals and prisoners who were to be sacrificed."

The great medical gardens and books suffered the same fate most Aztec knowledge did—the priests who followed the conquistadors destroyed them. What had the fray said about such ignorance? What they didn't understand, they feared and destroyed.

The Healer showed me plants that were used for wounds and ulcers, to heal the blisters of burns, reduce swelling, cure skin diseases and eye problems, cool fevers, soothe the stomach, calm the heart when it is too active and stimulate it when it is too quiet. Jalop was used to unlock the bowels, a plant called "urine of a tiger" to make water come when urination was difficult.

"Aztec doctors sewed up wounds with human hair. They set broken bones with pieces of wood and put a gum of ocozotl tree with resin and feather over the wood."

Not even the fish were free from the influence of Aztec herbs. Indios crushed a plant called barbasco and threw it into rivers and lakes. The herb stunned the fish and forced them to the surface, where the indios grabbed them.

Children were instructed to keep their teeth clean to avoid decay; salt and powered charcoal were used with a wooden instrument to clean teeth.

I saw an amazing example of Aztec tooth remedies in a village where another traveling healer had stopped at the same time we did. This healer's specialty was removing painful teeth—painlessly. He applied a substance to the teeth that instantly deadened the tooth. Within hours, the tooth had fallen out.

I asked the Healer what the man had applied that worked so well.

"The venom of a rattlesnake," he said.

The Healer told me not all the products of plants were used to heal. Veintiunilla, the "little twenty-one," caused death in exactly twenty-one days. Persons given the plant developed an insatiable thirst for potent drinks like pulque and cactus wine, and drank the intoxicating beverages until they died.

"Evil Aztec whores tricked men into drinking macacotal, the steeping from a snake. Ayyo, these men engage in ahuilnéma with six or seven women, one after another, and moments later are ready to have ahuilnéma with even more women. This goes on and on, with the man unable to control his urge, giving anything he owns to the whores, until the life is gone from him and his flesh hangs from his bones."

To have power to satisfy so many women. Muy hombre! What a way to die, eh, amigos?

Another indio aphrodisiac was the "witches rose." Medicine women used magic words to make roses open before their season. These were sold to men for a wicked purpose: the seduction of women. The rose was hidden under the woman's pillow. When she inhaled the scent, she became intoxicated with love for the person who put the rose there and called his name.

I asked him about the drugs that robbed one of their mind. His expression never changed, but when he was amused by something a glint came to his eye and he would emit a quiet, birdlike chuckle. He did so as he told me about yoyotli, the dust that made one so happy and pliable that you danced gaily to the sacrificial block where the priest was waiting with an obsidian knife to cut your heart out.

"Flower weavers are the sorcerers who bring our minds into contact with the gods," the Healer said. Peyotl, from the buds of cacti that grow only in the Place of the Dead, the northern deserts; and brown seeds from ololiuqui, a plant that climbs and clings to other plants, were used to "take people to the gods," which I understood to mean that the person entered a dreamlike state. From the babbling uttered and visions the person experienced, a healer could determine the person's malady.

Teunanacatl, a bitter black mushroom, was called the "flesh of the gods." Occasionally served with honey at feasts, it also took one to the gods, but the hallucinations were less than those created by peyotl. "Some people laugh hysterically, others image they are being chased by snakes or that their bellies are full of worms eating them alive. Others fly with the gods."

A plant that could be smoked was called coyote weed by the Healer. "It makes the smoker feel calm and soothes deep pains." A small smile on his face hinted that some of the tobacco he smoked was of the coyote weed variety.

The most powerful substance was teopatli, the divine ointment. The Healer spoke of it with a tone of awe. To the seeds of certain plants "are added the burnt ashes of spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and other noxious insects, petum to make the flesh painless, and ololiuqui to lift the spirits." When applied to the skin, it made the person invincible, as if an invisible shield was held in front of him. "The greatest warriors of the Aztec were the Jaguar Knights and Eagle Knights; it is said that the weapons of their enemies could not cut them when they had the teopatli ointment applied to their skin."

As the months passed by and we went from one small village to another, I never encountered another rider searching for me. Soon enough of the fear was gone for me to stop puffing up my nose. Because the sun darkened my skin so well, I needed little dye. But for safety's sake the Healer gave me a "sore" to wear on my cheek, a small, black piece of bark held on with sap.

We stayed away from the larger villages and towns while I learned how to think and act like an indio.

Even more than the Spanish, the indios were ruled by superstition and the whim of their gods. Nothing they did or experienced, from the sun overhead and ground beneath their feet, giving birth or to going to the marketplace to sell ears of maize, went without having some spiritual power involved. Sickness came mostly from evil spirits, bad aires, that one breathed in or was touched by. And the cure was to remove the spirits with the magic and herbs of a healer.

The Spanish priests battled the indio superstitions, trying to replace them with Christian rites. Most of the indio customs I found to be harmless or, in the case of herbal medical remedies, to be extremely beneficial. Occasionally I would be shocked.

In our travels to places little visited by outsiders, we came to a village where an old woman had been stoned to death just before our arrival. Her body, with bloodied stones lying about, was still on the ground when we walked in leading the donkey.

I asked the Healer what great crime the old woman had committed.

"She died not for her sins, but the sins of all the villagers. The oldest woman in the village is chosen each year to hear the confessions of all the people in the village. She is then stoned to death to win atonement for the entire village."

¡Ayya ouiya!

The gods were as involved in death as they were in life. Just as there was a Christian world of death, the Aztecs had their places where dead spirits resided, both an underworld and a heavenly paradise. Where you went, to the underworld or the celestial heaven, what happened to your soul, depended not upon conduct during life but on how you died.

The House of the Sun was a celestial paradise to the east of the Aztec world. Warriors killed in battle, people who were sacrificed, and women who had died in childbirth shared the honor of residing in this wondrous place after death. The house of the sun was filled with beautiful gardens, perfect weather, and the finest foods. It was the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Allah, paradise.

Warriors who dwelled there passed their time in bloodless battles. But each morning they assembled as a vast army on a great open plain that stretched almost endlessly to the horizon. They were waiting for the sun to rise in the East. When the first glow of light slipped above the horizon, the warriors greeted it by clashing their spears against their shields; then they escorted the sun on its journey across the sky.

After four years, the warriors, sacrifice victims, and women who'd died in childbirth returned to earth as hummingbirds.

Most people, those who succumbed to disease, accidents, and the maladies of old age, went to the Dark Place, the place of the dead, Mictlan.

This underworld, far to the north of the Aztec world, was a place of scorching deserts and winds that can freeze a person in place. The lord of Mictlan was Mictlantecuhtli, a god who wore a skull mask and a cloak of human bones. To reach Mictlan the soul had to journey through eight hells before arriving at the ninth hell, where Mictlantecuhtli and his goddess queen live.

Each of the journeys had the type of dangers Odysseus experienced and the ghoulish horrors of Dante's infernal. The dead must first cross a wide and swift river. A red or yellow dog was needed for this task. After forging the river, they had to pass between two mountains which were clashing together. The tasks became more and more difficult—a mountain of razor-sharp obsidian to be climbed, a region of icy winds that could sear flesh from the bone; places where banners battered wayfarers, where arrows pierced the unwary, and savage beasts ripped open chests to eat human hearts. In the eighth realm, the dead had to climb narrow ledges of cliffs.

After four years of trial and torment, the dead achieve the ninth hell, a place deep in the bowels of the earth. In this fiery bowel of the Lord Mictlantecuhtli and his queen, the essence of the dead—what the Christians called the soul—was burned to achieve eternal peace.

Eh, I would take the Christian heaven over Mictlan. Even thieving, murdering léperos make it there as long as they repent at the end.

The preparation for the journey after death also depends on the way one had died.

"Those who died in battle and childbirth were burned atop a pyre," the Healer told me. "This frees the spirit for its upward journey to the Eastern Heaven. Those who are to journey to the realm of the Lord of the Dead, Mictlantecuhtli, are buried beneath the ground. This gives them a start on their journey through the underworld."

Regardless of their destination, the dead were dressed in their finest ceremonial clothing and provided with food and drink for their journey. A piece of jade or other valuable placed in the mouth of the dead was money for buying whatever they needed in the hereafter. Even the poor were given food and water to help them on the long trip.

Those who could afford it made the journey to the House of the Sun or the underworld with a companion, a red or yellow dog.

When the Healer told me that, I glanced over at his yellow dog that never left his side, day or night.

Kings and great nobles made the journey surrounded by the wealth and splendor they'd enjoyed in life. Stone tombs were constructed and filled with food, chocolate, and sacrificed wives and slaves. Instead of a simple piece of jade, earthly treasure—objects of gold and silver and gems—were put in the tomb. The dead notable would be positioned seated in a chair with his weapons and golden breastplate or carried upon a litter.

The funeral customs of these people were not unlike those the fray had told me existed among the ancient Egyptians. "Because of the pyramids, funeral rites, and the fact that some Aztecs circumcised males in the manner of Semites, some scholars believed the Aztecs were originally from the Holy Lands, perhaps a lost tribe of Israel."

Aztec poets compared human life to the fate of a flower, rising from the earth, growing toward the sky, blooming, then swallowed up by the earth again.

"Our souls in your eyes are but as wisps of smoke or clouds rising out of the earth," they sang.

And they were fatalistic about death. It spared no one, rich or poor, good or bad. The Healer sang to me across the flames of a campfire:

Even jade will shatter,

Even gold will crush.

Even quetzal plumes will tear.

One does not live forever on this earth:

Only for an instant do we endure.

"Did they believe in life after death?" I asked the Healer. "Like the frays teach about the Christian religion?"

Where are we going, ay, where are we going?

Will we be dead there, or will we live still?

Will there be existence again there?

Will we feel again the joy of the Giver of Life?

"Your question," he said, "is answered by a third song."

By chance are we to live a second time?

Your heart knows it.

Only once have we come to live.

FORTY-THREE

Along with learning the Ways of the Aztec, I slowly picked up the methods of the Healer, not just learning the art of treating wounds and sickness, but much more important in my eyes, the technique of pulling an "evil" snake from a person's head. I couldn't stomach putting one of the Healer's snakes in my mouth when doing the trick and instead I practiced with a twig.

I soon was able to put my "magic" into practice in a most delightful way.

The Healer had gone off to meditate with birds, and I was in the hut provided by the village cacique. Bored and with time on my hands, a dangerous combination for any youth, I had put on the Healer's colorful feather manta and elaborate headdress that covered most of my face. I was practicing the snake trick when the local cacique entered the hut.

"Great Sorcerer," he said, "I have waited for your arrival. I have problems with my new wife. She is very young, and is proving difficult for this old man to deal with."

The fray always claimed that I had a devil in me. At the old man's words, the devil in me awoke and took control. I could not resist finding out what problems this old man had with his young wife.

"I need you to come now to my hut and examine her. Some evil spirit has entered her tipíli and my tepúli is unable to penetrate into her."

Eh, I had seen the Healer deal many times with sex problems. It would be an easy task for me. Mumbling nonsense and gesturing with my hand, I sent him out of the hut. Once he was outside, I pocketed one of the Healer's pet snakes. The notion of using the snake was repulsive to me, but he would expect it.

The cacique's house was the largest house in the village. While most of the village huts consisted of one or two rooms, his had four.

Ayya. The old man's wife was a surprise. A young, good-looking female, little older than me. Very ripe for ahuilnéma, even if it was an old pene being poked at her.

The cacique explained the problem. "She is too tight. I cannot get my tepúli into her. My tepúli is hard," he assured me, expanding his chest with air, "that is not the problem. And she is not too small. I can open her tipíli with my hand and put three fingers inside. But when I try to shove into her, the opening is not large enough."

"It is los aires," the young woman told me, using the Spanish phrase. "I was washing clothes by the riverbank when I breathed in an evil spirit. When my husband tries to put his tepúli in me, it will not go in even if I help it with my hand because the spirit closes my tipíli."

I muttered an incoherent response in a muffled voice.

She spoke impassively, but her eyes were very much alive. And those lively eyes were intently examining what little of my face was exposed by openings in the Healer's headpiece. No doubt she was picking up clues about my age that her husband's old eyes never caught.

I heard other men outside, the village elders gathering to see the magic. I ushered the cacique out to tell them they could not enter, mumbling the instruction so that I barely understood the words myself.

With him out of the room, I spoke to the girl. "Why are you not having ahuilnéma with your husband," I said, in a normal voice. "And don't tell me it's evil spirits."

"What kind of healer are you? They are always old men."

"A new type. I have knowledge not only of indio medicine but of Spanish as well. Tell me why you are not permitting your husband to have ahuilnéma with you."

She scoffed. "When I married, it was promised that I would have many presents. He is the richest man in the area, but he does not give me gifts. If he gives a chicken for me to pluck and cook for him, he thinks it is a present."

A woman after my own heart. The demon would go away if she got what she wanted. But ¡ay de mí! I had presented myself as the Healer and the cacique was familiar with his technique. Neither he nor the village elders would be satisfied unless a snake was pulled from her. The slimy little green snake was wiggling in my pocket. From the feel, I was certain I now had snake mierda in the pocket, too. There was no possibility that I would put the horrible little creature in my mouth.

Obeying my instructions, the cacique entered alone. "The village elders wish to see you remove the evil spirit."

I put one of the Healer's talismans in front of my lips and spoke into it with the hoarse mutter I was affecting.

"The elders cannot enter. The evil spirit must be removed from your wife."

"Yes, yes, they want to—"

"From her tipíli."

"Aaaak!" He gasped and gagged and began coughing. For a moment I thought he was going to drop dead on the spot. His health was important to me. If he died, I would probably never make it out of the village alive.

I was greatly relieved when he got his breathing going again.

"The demon is in her tipíli, and it is from there I must draw it. Being a doctor, it is of course proper and respectful that I perform the task. Of course, if you wish to never have ahuilnéma with your wife..."

"I don't know, don't know," he said, "perhaps I will try again—"

"Ayya! If you do, the demon will enter your tepúli!"

"No!"

"Yes. Until the demon is removed, she cannot even share her bed with you. Or cook for you. It might enter through your mouth with the food."

"¡Ayya ouiya! I must eat. Remove it from her."

"You may stay," I said, graciously, "but you must turn around and face the wall."

"Face the wall? Why must I—"

"Because the demon will seek another hole to enter after I remove it. It may go inside your mouth, up your nose, in your..." I patted my backside.

He groaned aloud.

"You must also keep repeating the chant I tell you. It is the only way to keep the demon from coming after you. Keep repeating these words over and over. Rosa rosa est est, rosa rosa est est."

I turned to examine his wife as he stood with his back to me, literally saying over and over that a rose is a rose is a rose...

I had the young wife lie down on a mat and remove her skirt. She had nothing on beneath it. Most of my experience with women had been in the dark, one might say, but the two girls at the river had instructed me well about the treasures to be found on a woman's body.

I put my hand on her mound of black hair and slowly allowed my hand to slip between her legs. As my hand moved down, her legs spread. I became instantly excited. My pene throbbed wildly. Her tipíli opened like a buttercup in the sun as my hand touched it. I let my fingers move in and around the lush, wet, warm opening. I found her witch's teat and began to gently caress it.

She began to flow with the movement of my hand, her hips moving up and down. Ayya! The only demon in this young woman's tipíli was the neglect she got from having to lay with an old man.

I heard the cacique tapering off from reciting roses. "You must keep the spirits away. Keep chanting."

He picked up immediately.

I turned back to the young woman. She was staring at me with eyes that told me she liked very much what I was doing. I started to lean down to take the witch's teat in my mouth, but she stopped me.

"I want your pene," she whispered, using the Spanish word. Her eyes were as lush and lustful as her hot-wet tipíli. She may not have been opening for the old cacique, but I had the feeling more than one village boy had enjoyed her favors.

In truth, while I was a teller of tales, sí, a liar if you insist, I will admit honestly that I had little prior experience doing what the indios called ahuilnéma. The great opportunity at the fair had been lost when my garrancha got excited too quickly. Now, despite the danger of being caught—and not just skinned, but probably skinned and slow roasted—my pene was throbbing wildly, telling me that it wanted to explore new stimulation beyond what it had experienced by my own hand.

Her hand went to my pants and undid the cord holding them up. She pulled my pants down and took my pene in her hand, drawing it toward her tipíli.

The throbbing was so fierce that I thought my pene was going to explode.

I started to mount her and... and... mierda!

That juice that Snake Flower craved for her love potion exploded out of my pene. For a moment I convulsively jerked. The juice shot out and struck the young woman's stomach.

She looked down at her violated stomach and back into my eyes. She hissed something in Náhuatl. I did not recognize the word, but the meaning was clear.

Shamefaced, I slipped off of her and pulled up my pants.

"Rosas rosas rosas... can I stop now?" The cacique sounded exhausted.

I pulled the slimy little snake out of my pocket and told him to turn around.

"The demon is gone." I threw the demon into the fire, "but there is another problem. The demon got inside of your wife because she was weak from being unhappy. When she is happy, the demon cannot enter her. Each time you wish to do ahuilnéma with your wife, you must give her a silver reale. If you do that, the demon will not come back."

The cacique clutched his heart, and the girl grinned broadly as I left.

I hurried to the hut where we were staying to remove the headdress and cape before the Healer returned.

Fray Antonio had told me that a great king named Solomon had had the wisdom to order a baby chopped in two to determine which of the two women who claimed it was the baby's mother. I felt that my solution to the problem of the cacique and his wife had the same type of wisdom that this king of ancient Israel had possessed.

But ¡ay de mí! my performance as a lover was a failure. I had lost honor. Sí, amigos, honor. I was learning the Aztec Ways, but I was still a Spaniard. At least half of one; and I had been shamed again by my pene.

Using Plato's logic, I determined that the problem lay with my inexperience. I knew from my days on the streets that young boys train their penes. I must perform more practice with my hand to ensure that my garrancha is ready the next time it is given the opportunity.

FORTY-FOUR

"You will not know the Ways of the Aztec until you speak to your ancestors," the Healer told me.

I had been with the Healer for over a year. My sixteenth birthday had come and gone, and I was nearing another birthday. We had traveled from village to village. I had learned the Náhuatl language as it should be spoken and could hold a conversation in other indio dialects. From all I had learned about the indio in our travels, I thought that I knew the Ways of my Aztec ancestors; but when I told this to the Healer, he would click his tongue and shake his head.

"How do I talk to the gods?" I asked him.

He twittered like a bird. "You must go to where they reside and open your mind. We are going to the Place of the Gods," he said.

We had entered the Valley of Mexico, the great cavity between high mountains that contained the most prized land in New Spain. The valley had been the heart and soul of the Aztec world, and now it was the same for the Spanish of the New World. In it were the five-great-lakes-that-were-really-one, including Lake Texcoco that the Aztecs had built Tenochtitlan upon—the great city the Spanish in turn razed to build the City of Mexico.

But it was not to that city-on-the-water that the Healer was taking me. As was our custom, we avoided all large towns. We were on our way to another city, one that once had more people than Tenochtitlan. Our destination was about two days' walk from the City of Mexico.

"Are there many people in this city that you're taking me to?"

"More than the sands along the Eastern Sea," he said, referring to the Veracruz coast, "but you cannot see them." He cackled.

I had never seen the old man so ecstatic. But it was no wonder because we were entering Teotihuacan, the place of the gods, the city that was holy to the Aztecs and which they called the Place That Men Become Gods.

"Teotihuacan is an not an Aztec city," the Healer told me. "It is much older than the Aztecs. It was built by a civilization older and mightier than all of the known indio empires. It was the greatest city in the One World."

"What happened to it? Why are there no people there now?"

"Ayya. The gods engaged in battles among themselves. People fled the city as the gods fought because death fell from the sky like the new rains. The city is still there, but only the gods walk its streets."

The Healer's knowledge of the city was based not upon learning found in books, but upon the knowledge found in legends and tales of old. A day would come when I would learn more about Teotihuacan. It would be no surprise to me that the Healer's knowledge of the city was correct.

Teotihuacan, lying about ten leagues northeast of the City of Mexico, was truly one of the wonders of the world. It was the great city of the classic era of the indio, a New World Rome and Athens. Sprawled over an immense area, the ceremonial center of the city alone was larger than many of the great Aztec and Mayan cities. It is said that the city rose about the time of the birth of Christ and fell about the same time the Dark Age was falling upon Europe.

The masters of the civilization that flourished in Teotihuacan were truly gods. The temples they built were the examples for all the great indio religious edifices that followed, but all that followed were dwarfed by the originals.

My breath left me and my heart jumped when Teotihuacan came into view. The two greatest pyramids of the One World, the monuments the Aztecs most feared and loved and worshipped, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, were the most stunning as we came upon the deserted city. These great pyramids were what the Aztecs copied for the ones they built.

The two main groups of temples were connected by a broad avenue, the Way of the Dead. Half a league long, it was wide enough for two dozen carriages to drive side-by-side. At the north end of the city was the Pyramid of the Moon, along with lesser pyramids. To the east, the greatest pyramid of all: the Pyramid of the Sun. Over seven hundred feet wide in each direction at its base, it rose over two hundred feet into the sky.

A great stairway at the Pyramid of the Sun, climbing up the five levels of the temple—stairs to the heavens—faced the Way of the Dead.

The Pyramid of the Moon was similar in appearance to that of the Sun, but not as large.

Near the center of the city, just east of the Way of the Dead, was the Ciudadela, the Citadel: a vast, sunken court surrounded on all four sides by temples. In the middle of this compound was the Temple of Quetzalcóatl. This temple—a stepped pyramid like those of the Sun and the Moon—had dramatic sculptured representations of Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, and the Fire Serpent, the bearer of the Sun on its diurnal journey across the sky each day. The temple was frightening and majestic.

Each year the Aztec emperors came to Teotihuacan to pay homage to the gods. They walked down the Way of the Dead toward the Temple of the Sun amid other temples and the tombs of ancient kings who had become gods. Now the Healer and I walked in the footsteps of those Aztec rulers.

"The Sun and Moon, husband and wife, became gods when they sacrificed themselves to take the earth out of darkness, becoming the golden fire of day and silvery light of night," the Healer said.

We stood before the greatest pyramid on earth, the Temple of the Sun, covering ten acres of ground.

The old man cackled. "The gods are still here; you can feel them. They have your heart clutched in their fist, but they will not rip it out if you honor them."

He pulled up his sleeve and nicked the tender skin on the underside of his arm with an obsidian knife. He let the blood drip to the ground and handed me the knife.

I cut my arm and held it out so the blood would fall to the ground.

Three men and a woman came out of the shadows of a temple and slowly walked toward us. I recognized not their faces but their occupations: sorcerers and wizards, all of them. Each was as ancient and venerable as the Healer.

They exchanged the esoteric greetings of secret signs and veiled language known only to those who practiced the Dark Arts.

"These will be your guides to speak to your ancestors," the Healer said. "They will make your blood Aztec and take you to places where only those with true blood are permitted to enter."

Up to now I had not taken seriously the Healer's comments that I was to speak with the gods. Looking at the venerable faces and secretive eyes of the sorcerers who had come to guide me, I became anxious. How does one speak with the gods?

They led me to an opening in the great Sun pyramid, a hidden recess that I would not have found by myself even if I had been looking for it. The tunnel led to a huge cavern in the bowels of the pyramid, a cave as big as an indio ball court.

A fire in the center of the cave was waiting for us. I heard the trickle of water along the sides of the walls. The smell was of fire and water.

"We are in the womb of the earth," the woman said. "We came out of caves and into the light a thousand ancestors ago. This cave is the mother of all caves, the holiest of the holy. It was here before the Pyramid of the Sun was built." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "It was here during the darkness after each of Four Suns had gone dark and cold."

Blood from our arms was spilled into the fire. We sat before the fire, our legs crossed. A wind blew against me, a cold breeze that frightened the hair on the back of my neck and sent a cold serpent of fear shivering down my spine. Where the wind had entered the cavern, I could not tell, but never before had I felt a wind that seemed to be so alive.

"He is with us," the old woman chortled.

One of the sorcerers chanted an ode to the gods:

In heaven you live;

The mountains you uphold,

Anáhuac is in your hand,

Everywhere, always you are awaited,

You are invoked; your are entreated,

Your glory, your fame are sought.

In heaven you live:

Anáhuac is in your hand.

Anáhuac was the heartland of the Aztec Empire, the valley now called Mexico, with its five interlocking lakes, Zumpango, Xaltocan, Xochimilco, Chalco, and Texcoco. It was in the heart-of-the-heart of Anáhuac that they built Tenochtitlan.

Our Father the Sun,

In plumes of fire;

Our Mother the Moon,

In silver night.

Come to us,

Bring your light.

Wind as cold as the underworld caressed me again. I shivered down to my toes.

"The Feathered Serpent comes to us," the Healer said. "He is with us now. We called him with our blood."

The woman knelt behind me and put an Aztec warrior's cape of bright feathers, yellow and red and green and blue, over my shoulders. She put a warrior's helmet on my head and handed me a sword of hard wood with an obsidian edge so sharp it could split a piece of hair.

The Healer nodded approval after I was dressed. "Your ancestors will not honor you unless you come to them as a warrior. From the moment of birth, an Aztec was trained to be a warrior. That is why his birth cord was taken into battle and buried on the battlefield by a warrior."

He motioned for me to sit before the fire. The old woman knelt down beside me. She was holding a stone cup filled with a dark liquid.

"She is xochimalca, a flower weaver," the Healer said. "She knows the magic potions that let the mind bloom so that it can rise to the gods."

She spoke to me, but I did not understand what she said. I recognized the language as related to Aztec, but it was again the priestly language known only to the few. The Healer interpreted for her.

"She will give you a potion to drink, obsidian knife water. In it are many things, octli, the drink that intoxicated the gods, the cactus bud the white faces call peyotl, the holy dust called ololiuhqui, blood scraped from the sacrificial block at the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlan before the Spanish destroyed it. There are other things in it, substances that are known only to the flower weaver that came not from the ground we stand upon but the stars above us.

"Those whose hearts were ripped out at the sacrificial block were given this drink before they were sacrificed. As with warriors who die in battle and women who die in pregnancy, those sacrificed are paid the divine honor of living with the gods in the House of the Sun. Obsidian knife water takes one there, to the gods."

Seated before the blazing fire, surrounded by the chanting of sorcerers, I drank the potion.

¡Ayya ouiya! My mind became a river, a dark, flowing stream that soon turned into raging rapids and then into a black maelstrom, a whirlpool of midnight fire. My mind twisted and turned until it spun out of my body. When I looked back, I was soaring in the shadowy ceiling of the cavern. Below me was the fire with the wizards and my own familiar form gathered around it.

An owl flew by me. They were birds of evil omen, announcing death with their nocturnal hoots. I fled out of the cave to escape the death that the owl carried. Day had become night outside; a moonless, starless black shroud encased the earth.

The Healer's voice came to me, whispered in my ear as if I still sat beside him next to the fire in the cave.

"Your Aztec people were not born in this mother of caves in Teotihuacan but in the north, the land of winds and deserts where the Dark Place is found. They did not call themselves Aztecs. That was a name bestowed upon them by the Spanish conquerors. They called themselves Mexicas. They were driven from their northern land by bitter winds; storms of dust, because no rains fell. They were driven south by hunger and desperation, south to the land the gods favored and kept warm and wet. But there were already people in the south, people powerful enough to stop them and destroy the Mexicas. These people were blessed by the sun and rain god. They built a wondrous city called Tula. Not a place of the gods like Teotihuacan, but a city of beauty and pleasure, of great palaces and gardens that rival those of the Eastern Heaven."

It would be in Tula that our Aztec ancestors first understood their destiny, the Healer said.

Tula: the name was magic in my ears even as I listened to the haunted voice of the Healer. Sahagun, a Spanish priest who came to New Spain soon after the conquest, compared the legend of Tula to Troy, writing, "that great and famous city, very rich and refined, wise and powerful, suffered the fate of Troy."

"Quetzalcóatl had been at Teotihuacan, but he left it for Tula," the Healer said. "At Tula he angered and affronted Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, the god of wizards and sorcerers, and Tezcatlipoca took his revenge. He tricked Quetzalcóatl into getting drunk on pulque; and when lost in this drunken haze, Quetzalcóatl lay with his own sister. Shamed by his sin, he fled Tula and set sail on the Eastern Sea, swearing that he would return someday to reclaim his kingdom.

"Quetzalcóatl is one of your god-ancestors, but there are many others. The most important is Huitzilopochtli, the warrior god of the Aztecs. He took the form of a hummingbird and spoke to his tribe with the voice of a bird. Huitzilopochtli will be your guide."

Huitzilopochtli. Warrior. God. Hummingbird Wizard.

As I soared in the black shroud, I knew the truth.

I am Huitzilopochtli.

FORTY-FIVE

The door the flower weaver's potion opened in my mind took me to a distant place and time. When I was leader of the Aztecs.

As I lay dying I saw the Way my people must follow.

I am Huitzilopochtli and the people called Mexicas are my tribe.

We came from the north, the Bitter Land, where the earth was hot and dry and the wind blew dirt in our mouths. Food was scarce in the Bitter Land, and we roamed south, hearing of green valleys that were lush with maize so fat a man's arms could not fit around a single ear. In the north we must fight the hard earth to raise corn so thin it doesn't nourish a cockroach. Many years ago the rain god refused to water our lands, and our people suffered hunger until they found the way of the hunter. Now we hunt with bow and arrow for game that cannot outrun our bolts.

We Mexicas are a small tribe, just two hundred cooking fires. Because we do not have land that can feed us, we wander in search of a home, to the green, lush south, coming into contact with the people who are already settled. All of the good land has been taken, and our tribe is not large enough to force others from their fields.

We move continuously in search of a refuge. We have no beasts of burden except ourselves. Everything we own is carried on our backs. Before the first light we are up and walk until the sun god has fallen. Each man must go out with bow and arrow and knife and kill food for the one meal we have. Our children die of hunger in their mothers' arms. Our warriors are so weak from hunger and fatigue that a single man cannot carry back a deer when they are favored by the gods and kill one.

We are hated everywhere we go. We must have a place of sun and water, but there are people in our path and they drive us away when we find a place where we can rest and grow maize.

The Settled People named us the Chichimecas, the Dog People, and poke fun at our crude ways, calling us barbarians who wear animal skins instead of cotton, who hunt instead of farm, eat raw meat instead of cooked over a fire. They do not understand that what we do is necessitated by our need to survive. Blood gives us strength.

The north is the place of the dead, the dark place feared by the people of the south, and they fear us starved barbarians who come from there. They claim we try to seize their land, and that we are wife stealers who grab their women when they are washing clothes along the riverbanks and take them as our own. Ayya, we are a lost tribe. So many have died from sickness, starvation, and war that we must replenish our people. The healthy women of the Settled People can give us children who could survive until we can find our home.

What we ask for is just a place with sun and water to grow food. We are not fools. We are not searching for the Eastern Heaven. We are told that in the south there are mountains that sometime roar and fill the sky and earth with smoke and fire, rivers of water that fall from the heavens and rush off of mountains to wash away everything in their path, gods who shake the ground underfoot and split the earth to swallow whole villages, and winds that howl with the ferocity of wolves. But it is also a land where food grows easily, where the fish and fowl and deer are plentiful, a place where we can survive and thrive.

To us, everything is alive—the rocks, the wind, the volcanoes, the earth itself. Everything is controlled by spirits and gods. We live in fear of angry gods and try to appease them. The gods have driven us from the north. Some say it is Mictlantecuhtli who drives us before his wrath, that he needs our northern lands because the Dark Place is filled with the dead. But I believe we have done something to offend the gods. We are a poor people and make few offerings to them.

I lay dying.

We were driven from a village of the Settled People who believed we lusted after their women and their food. One of their spears found my chest in the battle.

Fleeing their greater numbers and healthier warriors, we climbed to a hillside where it would be difficult for them to attack us. I am the tribe's high priest, wizard, king, and greatest warrior. Without me the tribe will not survive. Even as I lie dying, I can hear the victors below sacrificing Mexica prisoners that they captured. The sacrificed warriors and those who fell on the field of battle will go to the Eastern Heaven, a land filled with the honey of life, so my concern is for the survivors.

Although we are greatly outnumbered by our enemies, they were not able to completely destroy us because we have two things they lack: arrows and desperation. The bow and arrow was new to them. They fought only with spears and swords edged with obsidian. With plentiful food and more warriors, we would be invincible.

The Settled People celebrating their victory below were right. We sought their fields of ripe maize and their ripe women. We need the food to nourish us and the women to give us children. We have lost many warriors and need to replenish our stock.

As I, Huitzilopochtli, chief and priest of my tribe lay dying, surrounded by the lesser priests and headmen, I watched a hummingbird sucking the nectar from a flower. The hummingbird turned and spoke to me.

"Huitzilopochtli, your tribe suffers because it has offended the gods. You ask for food and shelter and victory over your enemies, but you offer nothing in return. The gods need food, too, and their food is the nectar of man. The Settled People are using the blood of the Mexicas to win the favor of the gods. If your people are to survive, you must offer us blood."

We of the north were ignorant of the needs of the gods. We did not know they demanded blood for their favors. We did not know the covenant between man and god:

Feed the Sun God blood and it shines on the land.

Feed the Rain God blood and it wets the crops.

I knew then the destiny of my people, and my own. My path would be to lead my people out of the wilderness to their destiny despite my mortal wounds. It had been prophesied by the high priest Tenoch, as he lay dying, that our destiny would be fulfilled at a place where an eagle fought a snake atop a cactus. Until we found that place, we would be wanderers.

I beckoned the priests and headmen to put their heads closer to me so I might instruct them.

"We must return and attack the Settled People. In the darkness before the dawn, when they are drunk and exhausted from their celebration, we will fall upon them and avenge ourselves."

"We don't have the strength," a headman said.

"We will surprise them. Our desperation will be our strength. We must attack and take prisoners. We have offended the gods because we have not offered them blood. To be strong, we must take many prisoners to sacrifice to them. Only then will the gods reward us."

I would not let them waver. If we fought, we had a chance.

"We must make an offering tonight in order to have victory on the morrow. We took two prisoners today. A woman and her baby. Sacrifice them. Rip out their hearts while the hearts are still beating. And let their blood soak the earth as tribute to the gods. Then cut up their bodies. Each of our strongest warriors is to get a taste."

I told them my body was dying, but I would still be with them because my spirit would not die but would go through a transfiguration—to become a god.

"The gods have revealed to me the true meaning of my name. Huitzilopochtli is Hummingbird Wizard. In the future I will speak to you in the voice of a hummingbird."

The Mexicas were without a tribal god. I was to be their god, a vengeful god of war and sacrifice.

"The heart is where the spirit dwells," I told the priest, my son, who will wear the headdress of high priest when I die, "making its presence known by the rhythmic beating. Now, before Mictlantecuhtli grabs me and drags me down to the Dark Place, take your obsidian knife and open my chest. Rip out my heart and offer my blood and flesh to our warriors."

I instructed him as the hummingbird had me—my heart was to be put in a nest made of actual hummingbird feathers. My spirit would dwell in the feather nest, and no significant decision was to be made for the tribe without consulting me.

"I will speak to the high priest and, through him, to the rest of the tribe."

That night, with my heart carried high in a totem, my warriors made war upon the Settled People and captured many warriors to sacrifice and women to breed.

We retreated to the top of our hill and cut out the hearts of the warriors. We nourished the gods with their blood, and I gave my people another instruction, spoken to my son, the high priest.

"The blood belongs to the gods, but the flesh of the warriors belongs to the tribesman who captured him. Have a feast to celebrate the victory and the death of the warrior and feed his family and friends the flesh of the warrior."

Thus began the blood covenant between the Mexicas and the gods. In exchange for blood, the gods give victory and food to nourish our bodies.

There was only one way to supply the blood.

War.

FORTY-SIX

I watched from the heart nest at the top of a totem as my people grew in strength and numbers. When several generations of my people had been born and died, we were no longer known as a small herd of mongrel people, but as a tribe with a name.

Mexicas were still a tribe without land, but now we had enough strength to demand women and food from lesser tribes. We were known as quarrelsome, cruel, unfaithful to our word; women stealers, and eaters of flesh.

Our reputation earned us more tribute than our arms because we were still a small tribe. Now four thousand campfires strong, with four different clans, we could gather a thousand warriors. Not a great number in a land where mighty kings could put a hundred times that many into battle, but we were growing.

I, Huitzilopochtli, was carried in a totem at the head of the tribe when it moved or its warriors went into battle. The Chosen One, a witch-priestess, carried the feather nest concealed inside a larger, colorful feather nest. Behind her came four priests carrying totems of each of the four clans. All other totems were inferior to mine.

Because of our reputation as fierce warriors, we were invited to join in war with others. Northern tribes, of which we were the smallest, had been hired by the Toltec king to make war on his enemies. To the Toltecs, we were crude barbarians, only worthy of fighting their battles—and dying for them.

In their days of conquest and expansion, the Toltecs were mighty warriors, but now lived off the hundreds of thousands of people who pay tribute to them or work as slaves in their fields. They had grown soft and fat. Rather than risking their own lives, they hired the barbarians from the north to do battle.

The war we came to fight was begun by Huemac, Big Hand, the Toltec king, because another tribe could not fulfill his demand that they send him a woman four hands wide in the buttocks. The tribe brought him a woman, but Huemac was not satisfied with the size and made war upon them. It was said the tribe had the finest carvers of jade in the One World, and that the woman's bottom was an excuse to enslave the carvers and steal their land.

The land of the enemy was in Anáhuac, the Heart of the One World. We were to get a share of the land after we killed the people who occupied it.

We Mexicas proudly marched behind the larger tribes commanded by the Toltec king to Tula, where we would join his army in the war upon the jade carvers.

Tula was not a city, but a paradise on earth. It was built after the gods had driven the people from Teotihuacan. With that great city abandoned by mortals, Tula became the queen of cities of the One World. Although its king ruled Anáhuac, the Heart of the One World, the fabled valley that we Mexicas had yet to set our eyes upon, Tula was not in the valley. It lay just outside the valley to the north, in the path of the tribes that for ten generations had been pushing south to escape the angry gods that were turning the northern region into a lifeless desert.

The Toltec kings of Tula were the richest and most powerful in the One World. They built Tula to resemble Teotihuacan, but they also populated the city with fabulous palaces as majestic as temples and lush gardens that flowed along the streets like rivers of flowers.

It was said that all the wealth of the One World came to Tula. From the tribute paid by those conquered or frightened by the bristling power of Tula's spears, came a portion of everything made or grown by the other Settled People. Common peasants lived in the city in more luxury than the high priest of our tribe.

Tula was so beautiful that Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, left Teotihuacan to reside there. And it was from Tula that Quetzalcóatl left, shamed by having known his sister, promising to return one day to reclaim the kingdom.

The Song of Quetzalcóatl, related by even our barbarian storytellers, speaks of the wonders of Tula, a paradise on earth where cotton grows in bright colors—red and yellow, green and azure—and the earth is a horn of plenty yielding food and fruit that could feed giants: Mangos and melons the size of a man's head, ears of maize so fat a grown man could not put his arms around one, cocoa beans for chocolate so plentiful that one just reached down and picked them off the ground.

Unlike we Mexicas who had no talents except for war, the Toltecs of Tula were the wonder of the One World—scribes, jewelers, stone cutters, carpenters, masons, potters, spinners, weavers, and miners.

This is the first great city my people and I have cast our eyes upon. We have heard that there are other cities, not as grand as Tula, but fabled in their own right. One was near the Eastern Sea where the People of the Rising Sun had lived. These people were stone giants from the stars. When they returned to the stars, they left behind statues of themselves that were as big as temples.

¡Ayya ouiya! We Mexicas had yet to find our place under the sun god. But I knew it was our destiny to someday have a city that put even Tula to shame. But for now, when we first saw Tula, we thought we were looking at the Eastern Heaven.

As our tribe marched by the great city, even I, their war god, was awed by the palaces and great temples honoring the Plumed Serpent and other gods. We have never seen anything like the grandeur of Tula, buildings with high, jeweled walls and people in rich clothing and jewelry.

Nor had they seen the Mexicas.

As we poor nomads from the north marched by, all of our possessions on our backs, our small children in arms, the people of Tula laughed. They called us crude barbarians and poked fun at our animal skins.

I remembered that ridicule on another day.

After we passed the city, the army of the Toltec king marched behind us. It was a proud and colorful army. The common warriors wore quilted cotton armor, deerskin sandals, and wooden helmets painted bright colors. But, ayyo, the rich and nobles: their capes were of bright bird feathers, headgear trimmed with gold or silver; over their quilted cotton armor were plates of silver. The army marched with great discipline to the beat of drums and the blast of conch shells. Their weapons were not the crude clubs that we barbarians carried, but slender javelins and obsidian swords. But only the barbarians had bows and arrows; the civilized tribes considered the weapon too clumsy to use.

A proud and colorful army. But not a fighting army.

The Toltecs brought up the rear because they pushed us barbarians into the front of battle where many were killed or wounded. When the fighting reached their ranks, the Toltec nobles, who should have been leading their own men into battle, sent their common soldiers in first. The nobles entered the fighting only after most of the enemy were wounded or tired.

My totem was carried high into the battle. Our warriors in animal skins and crude weapons were the best fighters, but we were heavily outnumbered by the enemy and received no help from our Toltec masters. There was a great slaughter of barbarians as wave after wave of enemy fell upon us, another line of soldiers taking the place of each line we decimated. Finally, the enemy began to break. When it did, the Toltec army, fresh, fed, and rested, surged by us to complete the rout.

Ayyo. My Mexica stood in the battlefield, splattered with the blood of the enemy, and watched as the Toltecs cheated us out of our victory.

When it was over, we had few prisoners to sacrifice, and no captured women to give birth to new warriors to replace our fallen comrades.

The gods would not be pleased by our meager sacrifice. Nor would they be satisfied by the Toltec offering. The greedy Toltecs sacrificed only a few prisoners, the wounded who would have died anyway. The common soldiers they kept as slaves, and the nobles they held for ransom.

The Toltec king "rewarded" us with inferior blankets, rancid maize, and bent spears. We were told before the battle that we could get a share of the land in the Anáhuac valley taken from the enemy, but the king and his nobles took all of the fertile land for themselves. We were given the side of a mountain, rough ground, too rocky to grow enough maize to fill our bellies.

The Heart of the One World was a great, green valley with five lakes. The dirt was soft and moist. Maize, beans, and squash grew as if the gods themselves had planted the seed. We Mexicas and other barbarians stared down at the fertile valley from our rattlesnake-infested rocks. And we looked back to Tula, just beyond the valley.

"Call a council of the Dog People," I told my high priest. "We must repay the treachery of the Toltecs, or they will treat us as whipped curs."

A dozen nomadic tribes had come from the north to fight for the Toltec king and claim their share of the spoils. We gathered together and swarmed upon Tula. There were no hired warriors to face us. The warriors of Tula had grown fat and lazy, and we slaughtered many—and took more as prisoners for the sacrificial block. Our vengeance was without mercy; we raped and burned the city.

When the barbaric horde left the city, it was no more. In a few generations, the winds and vines would cover the city, and Tula would forever be nothing more than a legend.

When it came to dividing up the spoils of land and prisoners, we Mexicas found that our barbarian allies were no more honorable than the Toltecs had been. The other tribes claimed that we did not deserve a significant portion of the spoils because our tribe was small and had contributed little to the victory. My totem had been carried into the thick of the fighting, and I knew that lies were told about our warriors. But I had foreseen the treachery.

When the council of tribes made the accusation that we had done little to bring about the victory, our Revered Speaker, who spoke my words to Mexicas and others, called forth warriors who carried sacks.

The warriors came forward and dumped the contents of the sacks on the ground in front of the other council members.

"These are proof of our contribution to the victory."

Knowing that there would be treachery, I had instructed the Revered Speaker to have our warriors cut an ear from each enemy they killed and each prisoner they took.

Two thousand bloody ears were on the ground.

FORTY-SEVEN

We had repaid the treachery of the Toltecs and obtained land in the Anáhuac, but we had not fulfilled our destiny as masters of the One World.

Because we were the smallest of the northern tribes, our share of the valley, a portion next to Lake Texcoco, was the smallest. Maize and other food would grow on the fertile areas, but nearly half of that given to us was lake marsh upon which nothing grew but reeds and water flowers.

The Mexicas had been given the marsh to ensure that we did not grow and prosper as fast as other tribes. Although it was not long before that the other tribes were barbarians like us, who traded animal skins for cotton clothes; we were still hated by even our allies. They resented the way we sacrificed our prisoners to appease the gods rather than having them work our land and build our homes.

They claimed horror that we ate the bodies of sacrificed warriors to enhance the power of our own fighting men and that our greatest warriors cut off the skin at the tip of their pene and offer it to the gods as an extra sacrifice.

Blood-thirsty cannibals, they called us, and refused to marry their daughters to us.

But we prospered despite the poor quality of the land given us. Because we were next to the lake, we learned to fish and to trap ducks. Soon we were trading those items for food stuffs grown on higher ground. In a generation, our population doubled from plentiful food and raids that brought back women of other tribes.

To keep the gods appeased with blood, we carried on small wars constantly. Our neighbors in the valley were too powerful for us to attack. Instead, we sent our warriors outside the valley to attack other tribes.

As we were gaining our strength, a larger tribe gained domination over the valley. The Atzcapotazalco were a powerful tribe and we had to pay tribute to them.

Because we were now Settled People, I told the Revered Speaker it was time to build a temple to house my heart. No longer would it be carried on a totem.

It took over a year to build and when it was complete, my people had a special festival to honor me. The tribute collector for the Atzcapotazalco was the lord of Culhuacan. He was ambitious to be master of the valley himself and sought allies.

My people persuaded him to send one of his daughters to be honored at the festival by being wed to a god. Although we were still a small and unimportant tribe, our fighting prowess was known. To bind us to him, he sent his favorite daughter.

To receive the daughter of a great lord was an homage to us Mexicas. To pay our respects to her and her father, we prepared her in our usual custom.

When the lord of Culhuacan came to enjoy our festival, we proudly showed him what we had done to his daughter.

She had been skinned like a deer to remove her outer coating, from her feet to her head. The carcass had been tossed aside and the skin was slipped into by a small-built male priest in tribute to the nature goddess.

¡Ayya ouiya! Rather than being pleased at the honor paid his daughter, the lord of Culhuacan went into a rage and called upon his warriors to attack us. We Mexicas were the finest warriors in the One World, but compared to the other tribes, we were still small in number. The Atzcapotazalco attacked us in great numbers. We were masters of the lake with our boats, and we used them to flee the onslaught. On the lake were two small islands, rocky islets, that no one cared about. Because they had no place else to go, my people landed on them.

When my totem was brought ashore on one of the islands, I saw an eagle atop a cactus, holding a snake in its beak.

It was a sign, a message from the gods that we had chosen the right place.

I called the island Tenochtitlan, Place of the High Priest Tenoch.

We could not return to the land that had belonged to us because the Atzcapotazalco had seized it as their own, and half of our people were taken prisoner and enslaved.

But I told my people that they had arrived at the place where their destinies would be fulfilled. I was shocked by the sacrilege of the Atzcapotazalcos. Like the other tribes in the valley, they did not honor their gods as they should; and they had insulted the Mexica god. We vowed revenge but knew that it would have to come when we were strong enough to overpower the enemy.

The islands were easy to defend and hard to attack. The lake gave us a bounty in fish, frogs, and fowl that could be traded for maize and beans.

By observing how tiny islets formed from trees in the shallow lake, we learned the chinampa method of farming atop the water. Large reed baskets, each longer and wider than the height of a tall man, were anchored to the bottom of the lake and filled with dirt. Crops grew in the rich dirt. Over time, the chinampas greatly increased the size of the islets themselves.

As Huitzilopochtli, the tribal god of war, it was my duty to instruct my Mexica people on how to fulfill their destiny now that they had arrived at the place Tenoch had prophesied. We would be a warrior society, with all efforts of our people directed toward creating the finest warriors in the One World.

Women were to be rewarded for becoming pregnant. Women who died in pregnancy were to be rewarded the same as warriors who died on the battlefield: They were to go to the paradise of the Eastern Heaven. From birth, male children would be inducted into warrior cults. They would be given swords and shields while still wet from their mother's blood and would grow up knowing no other life than that of a warrior.

FORTY-EIGHT

Mounted atop a high temple, I watched as generations were born and died and Tenochtitlan developed into a proud city. Through marriage and military assistance, my people had grown powerful but were still surrounded by larger empires. And we chaffed under the heel of the Atzcapotazalco Empire, of which we were still a vassal.

The basket farming had increased the size of Tenochtitlan until it was a large city. Through marriage and other inducements, we had also gained some land along the lake.

The warrior society I had ordained had created the finest fighting force in the One World. Despite its small size, the army of the Mexica was faster, had greater endurance, and were better fighters than any other tribe.

The gods had rewarded us, and we rewarded them. To gain the blood that was needed to appease the gods, our warriors needed constant warfare. Because that cannot be done with our neighbors, we hired our warriors out as mercenaries.

The Mexica name had become feared as it should. We did not retreat in battle. We would pursue an enemy until they dropped. When our warriors marched beyond the reach of our supplies, they marched prisoners with them and ate them to sustain their strength.

I, too, had learned lessons from the past. When an ambitious prince of Azapotzalco, Maxtla, rose to king by murdering his brother and other contenders, he aggravated other tribes by murdering their leaders and demanding more tribute. I instructed our Revered Speaker that we would need allies to go to war against the powerful empire.

With Texcoco and Tlacopan as our allies, we made war upon the Azapotzalco.

Maxtla believed he was a great warrior and maker of war, but he had never fought the Mexica way. After he discovered the power of our army, he sued for peace. My Revered Speaker held a feast to discuss the ending of the war. During the course of the meal, Maxtla asked what meat it was that he was eating.

"Ambassador stew," my Revered Speaker told him. "We are eating the man you sent with your overture of peace."

The peace negotiations were a failure.

The Azapotzalco were defeated. Maxtla fled the battle even while his warriors were fighting. At the sight of him running, they threw down their weapons and fled. My Mexica warriors found Maxtla hiding in a temazcalli, a mud hut used for steam baths.

They piled wood around the hut and baked him inside.

When the war was over, we Mexicas were the most powerful tribe in the One World. We were still in the spring of our bloom, but the rewards of empire were soon pouring into Tenochtitlan.

We had never been numerous people, and we lost many young men in war. We would never be able to control a great empire with a large army as all others before us had done. Instead, we spread out, conquered, and controlled with a reign of terror.

We defeated enemy armies, terrified their people, and then withdrew, leaving behind an administrator with a small force of warriors. The duty of the administrator was little more than collecting the annual tribute we assessed for the region. The local people were free to follow whatever lifestyle they wished—as long as the tribute was paid. When it was not, or our administrator was harmed or disobeyed, our army quickly subdued the rebellious people and punished them harshly.

Tenochtitlan became the greatest city in the One World. Not only did our armies march, but our merchants became travelers who brought back to the city the finest luxuries to be found in one corner of the One World to the other. If our merchants were harassed or murdered, the retribution was swift and harsh. When women of another city insulted our merchants by lifting their skirts and displaying their naked buttocks, we killed the inhabitants and razed the city.

Ayya, we had fulfilled our destiny. But our strategy was so successful, we found few enemies to fight. As the war god of my people, I knew that did not bode well for them. We needed a constant supply of war prisoners to sacrifice so we could continue to fulfill the covenant that had brought us food and prosperity.

I found a solution in the Flower Wars. These were friendly wars fought with our own allies. Their finest warriors would meet our finest in battle. Little effort was made to kill. Instead, the goal was to capture warriors so they could be sacrificed and then honored by having their captors cook and eat their remains.

But not even the Flower Wars were always able to satisfy our need for blood. We suffered a burning drought in which the rain god refused to water our crops, and the sun god blazed down until the crops shriveled and died. When the Revered Speaker came to meditate for guidance at my temple, I told him he must pour a river of blood to appease the gods. The gods had given us an empire, and they wanted their reward.

War had to be waged against even friends to obtain the necessary prisoners, but that year over twenty thousand sacrifices were made. An almost endless line of prisoners went all the way out to the causeways that led across the lake. The priests atop the temple who cut the still-beating hearts out and threw them into Chac-Mool's bowl were soaked in blood from head to foot. A river of blood ran down the temple steps.

The whole Mexica nation feasted on the flesh of the defeated warriors.

The gods were pleased. The rains came and the sun shined.

All was well with the Mexica people. It had taken us nearly twenty generations, but we had risen to hegemony over the One World.

But there was always one god who could never be satisfied. Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, would not be satisfied with just blood. When he left Tula and sailed over the Eastern Sea, he had declared that he would be returning to claim his kingdom.

Although my people enjoyed the opulence of the masters of the One World, they always knew that someday Quetzalcóatl would return.

And the kingdom he would claim was the one they possessed.

FORTY-NINE

We left Teotihuacan, left the dream, and I returned to being a servant boy to a traveling magician. The time I had been with the Healer turned into a year and then into another. After my experience with the potion of the flower weaver, I continued to learn the way of the indios, the dialects, the nuances of walk and talk and even thinking. The day came when the Healer paid me the compliment I had long waited for.

"You no longer smell like a white man," he said.

Besides knowledge of my indio ancestors' history, I gained respect for them. Aztec history was a bloody one, but besides war, the indios made astronomical discoveries, perfected a calendar, published innumerable books in the picture writing that resembled the hieroglyphics of the Egypt of the pharaohs, and made amazing discoveries in health and medicine. Tenochtitlan was said to be a clean, fresh-smelling city in which waste was hauled away in boats to be used as fertilizer. The floating gardens that took root and created man-made islands and temples larger than any on earth were marvels of engineering.

It was true that there were aspects of the Aztecs that were not to be admired. Their practice of the blood covenant was cruel and barbaric. But it was not any more brutal than the practices of the largest and most respected European empire in history: the Roman Empire. Not even the great Aztec sacrificial ceremony where twenty thousand people were killed overshadows the savageness and cruelty of the Roman arenas. The arenas were not just places where thousands of gladiators fought to the death, but many thousands of innocent Christians and other dissenters were murdered by professional warriors or torn apart by wild animals—all for the amusement of crowds.

The Aztecs were no more hated by the indio states they demanded tribute from than the Romans were hated by the peoples they had subjugated. The fray told me that the Romans crucified ten thousand Jews at one time after they rebelled against Roman tyranny and payment of tribute to Rome. Whole cities were decimated.

Even in my own enlightened time, how many thousands were sacrificed because of some unspoken blood covenant the Inquisition had with God? Is being burned alive at the stake less barbaric than having a knife plunged into your chest and your heart ripped out?

Ayya, I would not be the first to cast a stone at my Aztec ancestors.

There was more to the story of the Aztecs, the return of Quetzalcóatl, and the attack by gods astride great animals, but that must wait for another time. But there was one custom of my indio ancestors that I found more repugnant than ripping out beating hearts. Aztec priests often slit their pene so that they could not have relations with women. And if they did have relations despite the cut, their virile juice spilled onto the ground. And many of their warriors cut off a piece of the skin at the front of their pene and offered the skin in sacrifice.

Eh, you think it was just a dream? This tale of Huitzilopochtli and blood, that I had walked with the gods? Perhaps so, but I carried away from that "dream" a mark placed upon me by the gods: The skin at the tip of my pene was severed. I had made the sacrifice of an Aztec warrior.

I learned more than indio ways and legends from the Healer. Besides practical facts about the plants and animals of New Spain, information that I could use if I ever had to survive from what I could find on the land, watching his wise and smooth manners gave me insights into dealing with people. Fray Antonio had dealt bluntly with people he had controversies with, often as a battering ram, driven by his passions. The Healer was a man of cleverness and cunning. Had he not deprived a master liar and thief of two reales? How he caught a thief with a snake trap gave me fresh perception about how greed can snarl a criminal. Later in life I would use the same trick. He called it "the snake trap."

In a village where we had stopped to heal local ailments, someone stole the Healer's prize pipe, the one that fed the belly of Chac-Mool. Only a fool would steal from a sorcerer, but fool he may have been. The Healer had had the pipe long before I was born. I could tell from the quiet intensity of his eyes that he was more upset about the loss than his impassive facial features revealed.

To catch the thief, he told me, he would use a snake trap.

"What's a snake trap?" I asked him.

"A snake trap is two eggs and a ring. The ring is attached upright to a piece of wood. Close to a snake hole, an egg is placed on each side of the ring. When the snake sees the egg, it swallows the first one. Snakes, like people, are greedy, and rather than stealing just one egg, as soon as the egg is worked down its body a little, it slips through the ring and swallows the second egg. It is now trapped because it can't go any farther forward or backward because the ring won't slip past either egg until they digest."

"You can't get a man to slip through a ring for an egg."

He twittered. "Not for an egg, but perhaps for tobacco to smoke in the pipe he stole."

The Healer placed a pouch of tobacco in our campsite at the spot where the pipe had been taken. He smeared red chili powder on the underside of some of the tobacco leaves.

"The thief already has his head through the ring, he did that when he slipped into our camp to steal my pipe. Now we shall see if instead of backing out of the ring, he takes the tobacco."

We left our camp for the cacique's hut, where those requiring the Healer's services had gathered. After an hour I went back to the camp under the pretense of getting something. The tobacco was gone. I ran and told the Healer.

Moments later the cacique ordered every person in the village out into the street and instructed them to hold up their hands.

One man had red powder on his hands. We found the pipe under the straw bedding in his hut.

We left the thief to his fellow villagers for punishment. I got another lesson in the Aztec Ways when the Healer explained how a punishment would be devised.

"Our people believe that a crime should be punished with the same instrument that the crime was committed with. If a man murders another with a knife, the killer will be stabbed with a knife, the same one if possible; that returns the evil the killer gave to the knife back to the killer himself."

Tobacco theft presented a less clear choice of punishment than murder. I wondered what punishment the cacique and village elders would devise.

They consulted in a circle while they drank pulque—and smoked the ever-present tobacco, of course.

Finally, they came to a conclusion.

The thief was tied to a tree and a cloth sack placed over his head. A small hole was cut in the sack and one by one the men of the village went up to the sack with their burning pipes and blew smoke into the hole.

At first I heard the tied man coughing. The coughing became a gasping hack. When it began to sound like a death rattle, I left and returned to our camp.

FIFTY

I was to learn that there was a dark side to Aztec magic, a side as gruesome and bloody as anything imagined by Huitzilopochtli, evil so perverse, it was uncontrollable, even by the wielders. The fray used to accuse me of finding trouble like a bee finds pollen. Because of the tragic consequences that would follow, this was a time when I wished that I had not found trouble.

My introduction to the dark side of magic came when I encountered someone else I had also met at the treasure fleet fair.

We had come to a small town during the time of día de los muertos, the Day of the Dead festivities. This was a day the indios remembered their dead with food and drink and much gaiety in the cemetery where their dead are buried.

There are actually two days of the dead. The first day is called el día de los angelitos, the Day of the Little Angels, a day set aside for honoring children who have died. The next day honors adults.

After we unloaded the donkey and made camp, I wandered around the town, watching the festivities. The town square was crowded with people and music and fun. The town was much smaller than Veracruz, hardly more than a large village, but many people had come from the countryside to participate. Children ran around with candy "toys" in the shape of skulls, coffins, and other macabre items. Street vendors sold pan de muerto, the bread of the dead, small loafs with a decoration of cross and bones.

We celebrated the Day of the Dead in Veracruz and I knew its history from Fray Antonio. When the Spanish conquered the indios, they discovered that the Aztecs celebrated their dead children and adults in late summer. The celebration was similar to the All Souls Day and All Saints Day that the Church celebrated in November. The clever priests, wanting to ensure that it is a Christian holiday and not a pagan one that gets celebrated, moved the Aztec holiday to merge it with the Christian festivities.

The celebrations are partly done in the privacy of home, where altars are constructed for the dead, and partly at the graveyard, where friends and family hold candlelight vigils and el llorón, the weeping. Sometimes the vigils continue throughout the night; in other places church bells toll at midnight to call people home.

Many Spaniards are shocked by the macabre nature of this Aztec-Christian festival. They miss the point of the celebration. The indios believe that they can communicate their love to their departed loved ones by expressing the love at the deceased's grave site and in the home.

Like most festivals and fairs, the celebration enjoyed a carnival atmosphere. Late afternoon there would be a parade, with many people in costumes, like a máscara, but the costumes would emphasize skeletons, bishops, and devils.

In the center of the square, indios were putting on a play. Not the kind the picaro Mateo would recognize as a comedia, but one the indios understood well. The performers were men dressed as knights of the two great Aztec warrior orders, the Jaguar Knights and the Eagle Knights. Entrance into these noble orders was reserved for only those warriors who excelled on the field of battle, killing and taking prisoners.

Both sets of knights wore the traditional capes of bright feathers and heavy, quilted cotton armor, but each order had its own unique headdress. The Jaguar Knights wore headdresses of actual jaguar skins, a snarling face and teeth on top of the head with the rest of the dressed hide falling down the back. The Eagle Knights wore the head and feathers of eagles, the great, obsidian-sharp beaks of the birds of prey gaped open in a scream, their talons hanging down from around the neck of the warrior.

The jaguar and the eagle were appropriate symbols for the two greatest warrior castes of the Aztec Empire—the great cat ruled the ground, and the eagle was the king of the skies.

A tall religious monument, a tribute to some saint or another, was in the center of the square, and the mock battle took place around it. Lépero youths had climbed on the monument, and I dashed through the battling knights to climb up to get the best view. One of the léperos, believing I was an indio invading his territory, kicked at me. I grabbed his foot and dragged him off the monument. I took his place and glared at the others with Veracruz street toughness. No one else bothered me.

The knights fought with wooden swords and shields, swinging hard at each other, blocking, swinging again. The only purpose seemed to be battering each other since the swords could not inflict a serious injury.

Watching the mock battle, I spotted a person I had conflicted with at the treasure fleet fair: the caster of bones. The evil-looking creature was standing at the inner edge of the circle of people watching the fighting. His black hair hung down almost to his waist. Encrusted with dirt and grease, the hair was dirtier and no doubt smellier than a stable floor.

As the fighting went on, I noticed a curious phenomena: The combatants would continue until blood was drawn, usually a small cut on the hand, face, or legs that were bare from the knees down. The moment blood was seen, the victor and the bleeder would leave the battle. The curious thing was that each time it occurred, the victor looked to the magician. In return he got a nod of approval.

"Mestizo. Your heart will be ripped out on the sacrificial block when the jaguars rise."

That anonymous threat came to mind as I watched the magician giving silent blessing to the victors. Unlike the Healer, who had an aura of wisdom and knowledge of secret ways, the magician reeked of evil and malice.

I was staring at him, glaring at him, when he suddenly looked up and caught me. I jerked back and looked away. I felt like I had just locked eyes with a snake. I sneaked another look at him, and he was still staring at me.

He had an evil eye that could burn through stone. I did not know if he recognized me from the fair or he had seen the contempt on my face when he caught me staring down a moment before. I was sure that he would not recognize me. Over two years had passed since the fair, and I had barely spoken to him at the time.

Whatever the reason, I had caught his attention; and that was unwelcome in my life. I got down from the statue base and slipped through the warriors to get away. As I was hurrying from the battling knights, a fray on a mule rode into the square. Behind him an indio rode another mule, dragging something behind on the ground with a rope. When they reached the area where the mock battle was taking place, they rode into it, scattering the warriors. It was then that I could see what the indio was dragging.

A body.

The priest stopped his mule and shouted to the crowd. "This man," he pointed down at the body, "died yesterday and was not buried with the rites of the Church. He was put into the ground with the blasphemy of pagan rites."

He paused to let his words sink in.

"I only learned of the disgrace because there are indios among you who are true to the Lord and tell me when such heresy occurs. His body has been dug up. It will be dragged through every street in this community for all to see what will happen to them when they offend God and the servants of the Church who serve Him.

"Afterward, the body will be chopped up and fed to dogs."

I had heard Fray Antonio speak of this crude practice by village priests. He said that most of the priests were less angry that the sinner had gotten buried without the proper rites than they were about not receiving payment for the last rites and Christian burial.

As the fray and the indio whose mule was dragging the body rode by the dark magician, the reader-of-bones gave the two a look of such pure hate and malice that it frightened me.

I left the area, hoping I would not run into the dice man again.

As night was falling, I roamed the village to enjoy the celebration of the dead. When it was dark, people crowded into the cemetery to be near their departed loved ones. The graveyard blazed with hundreds of candles as people drank and danced, laughed and talked. They formed family groups at grave sites, passing around tamales, tortillas, pulque, and those hot peppers the Aztecs called chili.

I was not a part of a family group, but I enjoyed just strolling around, enjoying their joy. People were drunk and happy. At least most were happy. I watched a young woman arguing with her husband, who was very drunk. He was so drunk that he could hardly stand up. It brought to mind what the fray had told me was the difference between the way the Spanish drank and the indios drank: a Spaniard drinks to get a feeling of joy and well-being. An indio drinks until he passes out.

This young woman called her husband a stupid goat for getting so drunk and hit him. The blow sent him stumbling backward and he fell onto his backside. People nearby cheered and clapped the woman's action.

She stamped away, almost knocking me down. When she did, a handkerchief fell from her pocket. I grabbed the handkerchief and followed after her. She was out of the cemetery before I caught up with her and gave it back.

"Your husband is very drunk."

"I don't care if he drinks," she said. "He spent all the money I earned in a month of washing clothes. That is what I care about."

"It is a sin for him to get drunk and leave such a beautiful wife alone and unprotected. There are men who would take advantage of such stupidity."

She brushed hair from her forehead. "I have never seen you before."

I shrugged. "I am a wandering sorcerer. I am here today and shall be gone tomorrow."

"What kind of magic do you have?"

"Love magic. I keep it here." I touched the front of my pants. "Would you like to see it?"

Eh, where did I get the courage to say such things? I was seventeen years old and had never bedded a woman. But since my failure with the cacique's wife, I had practiced a great deal with my hand and was eager to see if my performance had improved.

She smiled and patted her own front. "I have a skull sewn onto my underwear today for my husband, but he is too drunk to see it. Or appreciate it."

We went to a grassy area to practice my magic—and see her skull.

She lay on her back on the warm grass. I knelt down beside her and leaned down to nuzzle her with my lips. Ayya ouiya. She jerked me down atop her and ravaged my mouth with her lips and tongue. When I was getting to like the lush wetness of her mouth, she rolled me over. Her mouth went back to my lips and her hand down my pants.

My garrancha was expanding to monstrous proportions—growing so hard, so fast, it hurt, which seemed to amuse the woman to no end. She giggled at the enormity of my erection—her fingers gripping it iron hard, tight as a vise.

She slipped a hand around my head, and as she kissed me open-mouthed, she began pulling down my pants.

Even at my tender age I was certain that rape was the man's job and not the woman's. I struggled to get up and mount her, so I could jab my pene in and pump it at least once before it exploded. "I want to—"

She swallowed my words with her mouth. Getting my pants down, her skirt went up and she straddled me. She rubbed her wet tipíli back and forth against my erection. As she slid back and forth on my virile part, she burst open her blouse. She bent down and guided a breast to my mouth. As she did, her legs spread farther apart and my pene suddenly slipped into her love opening.

All the lust of my pubescent youth was boiling up in me. My hips bucked up and down like a horse that had never felt a saddle.

She rode me, tightening her muscles around my member, gyrating on it erotically, with each twist and turn lengthening the stroke. Up and down, up and down, on my achingly long garrancha. She increased pressure, tempo, and heat with each rise and fall.

I began to lose control. And then my pene exploded inside her. It triggered something in her that at the time I did not understand, and her movements and moans became more frantic. She leaned forward, arching her back like a bent bow, but pumping with everything she had. Lights blazed in my eyes, thunder detonated in my ears, and the earth shook volcanically. My body erupted in turn, not an orgasm of the groin but of the entire corpus—of the entire planet. My entire being was breaking loose, coming apart, taking me on a Homeric odyssey I had never known I would make.

I might have other women subsequently—assuming I lived long enough—but this was my first. Come what may, she owned me body and soul. My soul had broken free, cut loose, its moorings forever slipped.

At which point she grabbed me by my backside and flipped me over on top of her. She pulled my hips forward, tilting them so that the top of my pelvis was rubbing what I would later learn to be what the poet Ovid called "the Venus Butterfly."

Her ministrations caused my garrancha to erupt into a long blade again. It went back inside of her, with me atop her. I pumped like el diablo was burning my buttocks, and she began exploding again.

Now she was delirious, her head rolling back and forth, her tongue lolling out of her head. Her hips were grinding desperately, her breath catching in her throat, and she was groaning. Raising her knees, clamping her legs over my shoulders, lifting her buttocks off of the ground, she pumped powerfully. Her nipples hard and swollen bit into my chest, and when I started to yelp, she grabbed me around the back of the neck and muted my groans with all-consuming kisses.

Only God knew what the next day would bring.

But in a sense I didn't care. I was just a boy and had had my first glimpse of bliss.

I had seen the elephant, soared with eagles, heard the owl—and touched the face of God.

If anyone had asked me, I was already dead.

¡Ay de mí! before the night was over, someone wanted me dead.