The leaf shoots that grow nearest the earth are white and tender, and can be cooked to make a delicious sweet. Or they can be dried to make fuel for a long-burning, smokeless hearth fire, and the resultant clean white ash is used for everything from surfacing bark paper to making soap. Cut away the central leaves of the maguey, scoop out its heart, and in the hollow will collect the plant's clear sap. It is tasty and nutritious to drink. Smeared on the skin, it prevents wrinkles, rashes, and blemishes; our women used it extensively for that. Our men preferred to let the maguey juice sit and ferment into the drunk-making octli, or pulque, as you call it. Our children liked the clear sap boiled down to a syrup, when it is almost as thick and sweet as bees' honey.
In brief, the maguey offers every part and particle of its being for the good of us who grow and tend it. And Zyanya, besides being incomparably more, was rather like that. She was good in every part, in every way, in every action, and not just to me. Though of course I enjoyed the best of her, I never knew another person who did not love and esteem and admire her. Zyanya was not only Always, she was everything.
But I must not waste Your Excellency's time with sentimentality. Let me return to telling things in the order in which they happened.
After our escape from the murderous Zyu and our survival of the earthquake, it took me and Zyanya fully seven days to return to Tecuantepec by the overland route. Whether the quake had annihilated the savages or made them assume that it had annihilated us, I do not know, but no one pursued us, and we were not otherwise bothered in our crossing of the mountains, except by occasional thirst and hunger. I had long ago lost my burning crystal to the robbers on the isthmus, and I carried no fire-drilling device, and we did not ever get quite hungry enough to eat raw meat. We found sufficient wild fruits and berries and birds' eggs, all of which we could eat raw, and they also provided enough moisture to sustain us between the infrequent mountain springs. At night, we piled up billows of dry leaves and slept in them intertwined for mutual warmth and other mutual comforting.
We were both perhaps a bit thinner when we arrived again in Tecuantepec; we were certainly ragged and barefoot and footsore, our sandals having worn out on the mountain rocks. We trudged into the inn yard wearily and gratefully, and Beu Ribe ran out to greet us, her face expressing a mixture of concern, exasperation, and relief.
'I thought you had disappeared, like our father, and would never come back!' she said, half laughing, half scolding, as she ardently hugged first Zyanya then me. 'The moment you were out of sight, I told myself it was a foolish venture, and a dangerous...'
Her voice faltered, as she looked from one to the other of us, and once again I saw that smile lose its wings. She brushed her hand lightly across her face, and repeated, 'Foolish... dangerous...' Her eyes widened when they looked more closely at her sister, and they moistened when they looked at me.
Though I have lived many years and known many women, I still do not know how one of them can so instantly and surely perceive when another has lain with a man for the first time, when she has made the irreversible change from maiden to woman. Waiting Moon regarded her younger sister with shock and disappointment, and me with anger and resentment.
I said hastily, 'We are going to be married.'
Zyanya said, 'We hope you will approve, Beu. You are, after all, the head of the family.'
'Then you might have said something before!' the older girl said, in a strangled voice. 'Before you—' She seemed to choke on that. Then her eyes were no longer moist but blazing. 'And not just any outlander, but a brutish Mexicatl who lusts and ruts without discrimination. If you had not been so conveniently available, Zyanya'—her voice got even louder and uglier—'he would probably have come back with a filthy Zyu female dangling from his insatiable long—'
'Beu!' Zyanya gasped. 'I have never heard you speak so. Please! I know this seems sudden, but I assure you, Zaa and I love each other.'
'Sudden? Sure?' Waiting Moon said wildly, and turned to rage at me. 'Are you sure? You have not sampled every last woman in the family!'
'Beu!' Zyanya begged again.
I tried to be placative, but sounded only craven. 'I am not a noble of the pipiltin. I can marry only one wife.' That earned me a glance from Zyanya not much more tender than her sister's glare. I quickly added, 'I want Zyanya for my wife. I would be honored, Beu, if I might call you sister.'
'Very well! But just to tell the sister good-bye. Then begone and take your—your choice with you. Thanks to you, she has here not honor, not respectability, not name, not home. No priest of the Ben Zaa will marry you.'
'We know that,' I said. 'We will go to Tenochtitlan for the ceremony.' I put firmness into my voice. 'But it will be no shameful or clandestine thing. We will be wed by one of the high priests of the court of the Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexica. Your sister has chosen an outlander, yes, but no worthless vagabond. And marry me she will, with your blessing or without it.'
There was a long interval of tense silence. Tears trickled down the girls' almost identically beautiful, almost identically uneasy faces, and sweat trickled down mine. We three stood like the corners of a triangle bound by invisible straps of oli drawing more and more impossibly taut. But before anything snapped, Beu relaxed the strain. Her face wilted and her shoulders slumped and she said:
'I am sorry. Please forgive me, Zyanya. And brother Zaa. Of course you have my blessing, my loving good wishes for your happiness. And I beg that you will forget the other words I spoke.' She tried to laugh at herself, but the laugh cracked in the middle. 'It was sudden, as you say. So unexpected. It is not every day I lose... a beloved sister. But now come inside. Get clean and fed and rested.'
Waiting Moon has hated me from that day to this.
Zyanya and I stayed another ten days or so at the inn, but keeping a discreet distance between us. As before, she shared a room with her sister and I inhabited one of my own, and she and I were careful not to make any public displays of affection. While we recovered from our abortive expedition, Beu seemed to recover from the displeasure and melancholy our return had caused. She helped Zyanya choose from her personal belongings, and from their mutual possessions, the comparatively few and dear and irreplaceable things she would carry away with her.
Since I was again without so much as a cacao bean, I borrowed a small quantity of trade currency from the girls, for traveling expenses, and an additional sum which I sent by messenger to Nozibe, to be delivered to whatever family that ill-fated boatman might have left bereaved. I also reported the incident to the bishosu of Tecuantepec, who said he would in turn inform the Lord Kosi Yuela of that latest savagery committed by the despicable Zyu Huave.
On the eve of our departure, Beu surprised us with a festive party, such as she would have done to celebrate if Zyanya had been marrying a man of the Ben Zaa. It was attended by all the inn's current patrons and by invited guests from among the city folk. There were hired musicians to play, and splendidly costumed dancers doing the genda lizaa, which is the traditional 'spirit of kinship' dance of the Cloud People.
With at least a semblance of good feeling having been restored among the three of us, Zyanya and I bade farewell to Beu the next morning, with solemn kisses. We did not go immediately or directly toward Tenochtitlan. She and I each carrying a pack, we headed straight north across the flatland isthmus, the way I had come to Tecuantepec. And, since I had someone other than myself to think of, I was especially wary of villains lurking on the road. I carried my maquahuitl ready to my hand, and kept a sharp lookout wherever the terrain might have concealed an ambush.
We had not walked more than one-long-run when Zyanya remarked simply, but with an excited anticipation in her voice, 'Just think. I am going farther from home than I have ever been.'
Those few words made my heart swell, and made me love her the more. She was venturing into what was for her a vast unknown, and doing it trustingly, because she was in my keeping. I glowed with pride, and with thankfulness that her tonali and mine had brought us together. All the other people in my life were left over from yesterday or yesteryear, but Zyanya was someone fresh and new, not made commonplace by familiarity.
'I never believed,' she said, spreading wide her arms, 'that there could be so much land of nothing but land!'
Even viewing the lackluster vista of the isthmus, she could thus exclaim, and make me smile and share her enthusiasm. It was to be like that through all our todays and tomorrows together. I would have the privilege of introducing her to things prosaic to me but new and foreign to her. And she, in her unjaded enjoyment of them, would make me see them, too, as if they were sparklingly novel and exotic.
'Look at this bush, Zaa. It is alive, aware! And it is afraid, poor thing. See? When I touch a twig, it folds all its leaves and flowers tight shut, and reveals thorns like white fangs.'
