She might have been a young goddess lately born of Teteoinan, mother of the gods, and newly sent down from the skies to get acquainted with the earth. For she found mystery and wonderment and delight in every least detail of the world—including even me, even herself. She was as spirited and sportive as the never still light that lives inside an emerald. I was continually to be surprised by her unexpected attitudes toward things I took for granted.
'No, we will not undress,' she said, our first night on the road. 'We will make love, oh yes, but clothed, as we did in the mountains.' I naturally protested, but she was firm, and she explained why. 'Let me save that one last small modesty until after our wedding, Zaa. And our being naked, then, for the very first time together, should make it all so new and different that we might never have done it before.'
I repeat, Your Excellency, that a full account of our married life would be most undramatic, because feelings like contentment and happiness are much harder to convey in words than are mere events. I can only tell you that I was then twenty and three years old, and Zyanya was twenty, and lovers of that age are capable of the most extreme and enduring attachment they ever will know. In any event, that first love between us never diminished; it grew in depth and intensity, but I cannot tell you why.
Now that I think back, though, Zyanya may have come close to putting it into words, on that long-ago day we set out together. One of the comical swift-runner birds scampered along beside us, the first she had ever seen, and she said pensively, 'Why should a bird prefer the ground to the sky? I would not, if I had wings to fly with. Would you, Zaa?'
Ayyo, her spirit did have wings, and I partook of that joyous buoyancy. From the first, we were comrades who shared an ever unfolding adventure. We loved the adventure and we loved each other. No man and woman could ever have asked anything more of the gods than what they had given to me and Zyanya—except perhaps the promise of her name: that it be for always.
On the second day, we caught up to a northbound company of Tzapoteca traders, whose porters were laden with tortoise-shell of the hawkbill turtle. That would be sold to the Olmeca artisans, to be heated and twisted and fashioned into various ornaments and inlays. The traders made us welcome to their company and, though Zyanya and I could have traveled faster on our own, for safety's sake we fell in with them and accompanied them to their destination, the crossroad trading town of Coatzacoalcos.
We had scarcely arrived in the marketplace there—and Zyanya had begun excitedly flitting among the goods-piled stalls and ground cloths—when a familiar voice bawled at me, 'You are not dead, then! Did we throttle those bandits for nothing?'
'Blood Glutton!' I exclaimed happily. 'And Cozcatl! What brings you to these far parts?'
'Oh, boredom,' said the old warrior in a bored voice.
'He lies. We were worried about you,' said Cozcatl, who was no longer a little boy, but had grown to adolescence, all knees and elbows and gawky awkwardness.
'Not worried, bored!' insisted Blood Glutton. 'I ordered a house built for me in Tenochtitlan, but the supervising of stonemasons and plasterers is not the most edifying work. Also they hinted that they could do better without my ideas. And Cozcatl found his school studies somewhat tame after all his adventures abroad. So the boy and I decided to track you and find out what you have been doing for these two years.'
Cozcatl said, 'We could not be sure we were on the right trail—until we first came here and found four men trying to sell some valuables. We recognized your bloodstone mantle clasp.'
'They could not satisfactorily account for their possession of the articles,' said Blood Glutton. 'So I hauled them before the market tribunal. They were tried, convicted, and dispatched by the flower garland. Ah, well, they doubtless deserved it for some other misdeed. Anyway, here is your clasp, your burning crystal, your nose trinket...'
'You did well,' I said. 'They robbed and beat me. They thought me dead.'
'So did we, but we hoped you were not,' said Cozcatl. 'And we had no other demands on our time. So we have just been exploring up and down this coast ever since. And you, Mixtli, what have you been doing?'
'Also exploring,' I said. 'Seeking treasure, as usual.'
'Find any?' growled Blood Glutton.
'Well, I found a wife.'
'A wife.' He hawked and spat on the ground. 'And we feared you had only died.'
'The same old grouch.' I laughed. 'But when you see her...'
I looked about the square and called her name and in a moment she came, looking as queenly as Pela Xila or the Lady of Tolan, but infinitely more beautiful. In just that little time, she had purchased a new blouse and skirt and sandals, and changed from her travel-stained garb, and bought what we called a living jewel—a many-colored iridescent beetle—to fix in that lightning streak of white hair. I think I gazed as admiringly as did Cozcatl and Blood Glutton.
'You were right to chide me, Mixtli,' the old man conceded. 'Ayyo, a maiden of the Cloud People. She is indeed a treasure beyond price.'
'I recognize you, my lady,' Cozcatl said gallantly to her. 'You were the younger goddess at that temple disguised as an inn.'
When I had made introductions all around—and my two old friends, I do believe, had fallen instantly in love with Zyanya—I said, 'We are well met. I was on my way to Xicalanca, where yet another treasure waits for me. I think the four of us can transport it and I need not hire porters.'
So we went on, by leisurely stages, through those lands where the women all chewed like manatees and the men all walked bent by their names, to Cupilco's capital city, and to the workshop there of the Master Tuxtem, and he brought out the items he had fashioned of the giant teeth. Since I knew something of the quality of the material I had given him to work with, I was not quite as taken by surprise as were Zyanya, Cozcatl, and Blood Glutton, when we saw what he had done with it.
As I had requested, there were figurine gods and goddesses of the Mexica, some of them standing as tall as the length of my forearm, and there were engraved dagger handles and combs, which I had also suggested. But in addition there were skulls as big as those of young children, intricately etched with scenes from old legends. There were artfully worked little boxes with fitted lids, and copali perfume vials with stoppers of the same material. There were chest medallions and mantle clasps and whistles and brooches, in the shape of tiny jaguars and owls and exquisite little naked women and flowers and rabbits and laughing faces.
On many of those things the detail was so fine that it could be properly appreciated only by scrutiny through my close-viewing crystal. Seen thus, even the tipili was visible on a naked-girl ornament no bigger than a maguey thorn. As instructed, Tuxtem had not wasted a fragment or sliver: there were also nose plugs and ear plugs and labrets and dainty ear picks and toothpicks. All those things, large and small, shone mellow-white, as if they possessed an interior light of their own, as if they had been carved from the moon. And they were as gratifying to touch as they were to look at, the artisan having polished their surfaces as smooth as the skin of Zyanya's breasts. Like her skin, they invited, 'Touch me, caress me, fondle me.'
'You promised, young Lord Yellow Eye,' said Tuxtem, 'that only worthy persons would ever own any of these things. Permit me the presumption of choosing the first worthy of them.'
At which he stooped to kiss the earth to Zyanya, then rose and hung around her neck a delicate, sinuous chain of hundreds of links, the which must have cost him incalculable time to carve from a single length of hard tooth. Zyanya smiled radiantly and said, 'The Master Tuxtem does me honor, in truth. There can never again be such works as these. They should be reserved to your gods.'
'I believe only in the believable,' he said. 'A beautiful young woman with lightning in her hair and a Loochi name which I know to mean Always, she is a much more credible goddess than most.'
Tuxtem and I divided the articles as we had agreed, and then separated my share into four bundles. The working of the pieces had made them rather less in bulk and weight than the original tusks had been, so the resultant packages were wieldy enough that I and my three companions could carry them unaided by porters. We took them first to an inn there in Xicalanca, and engaged rooms, and rested, cleaned ourselves, and dined, and slept.
The next day, I selected one item from among our new acquisitions: a small knife sheath, etched with the scene of Quetzalcoatl paddling away from that shore on his raft of entwined snakes. Then I dressed in my best and, while Cozcatl and Blood Glutton escorted Zyanya to show her the sights of Xicalanca, I went to the palace and requested an audience with Cupilco's ruling noble, the Tabascoob, as he was called there. From that title—I do not
