Aztec

open, and generally to nauseate anyone else present.

At that, their manners were no worse than the old man's. When the rest of us had been served the delectable white fish that are found nowhere but in the Lake Patzkuaro, he said with a toothless grin, 'Eat. Enjoy. Can take nothing but milk myself.'

'Milk?' Zyanya repeated, in polite inquiry. 'Milk of the doe, my lord?'

Then her winglike eyebrows went up. A very large, very bald woman came in, knelt beside the Uandakuari, lifted her blouse and presented to him a very large breast which, if it had had a countenance, could have been her hairless head. During the rest of the meal, when Yquingare was not asking for particulars of the Lady Pair's origin and acquisition, he was sucking noisily at first one noselike nipple, then the other.

Zyanya avoided looking at him again; so did the Crown Prince; and they merely pushed their food around on their gold-and-lacquer plates. The twins ate heartily, because they always did, and I ate heartily because I was paying less attention to the vulgarity of Yquingare than I was to another thing about him. On first entering the room, I had noticed that the guards held spears whose blades were of a coppery hue, but an oddly dark-colored copper. I had then perceived that both the Uandakuari and his son wore short daggers of the same metal, hung in thong loops at their waists.

The old man was addressing to me a rambling, roundabout speech, which I suspected was going to end in his asking whether I could also procure for him a set of conjoined adolescent twin males, when Zyanya, as if she could listen to no more, interrupted to ask, 'What is this delicious drink?'

The Crown Prince, appearing delighted with the interruption, leaned across the cloth to tell her that it was chapari, a product of bees' honey, a most potent product, and that she had better not drink too much of it on her first trial.

'How wonderful!' she exclaimed, draining her lacquered cup. 'If honey can be so intoxicating, why are not bees always drunk?' She hiccuped and sat thinking, evidently about bees, for when the Uandakuari tried to resume his driveling inquiry, Zyanya said loudly, 'Perhaps they are. Who could tell?' And she poured another cup for herself and for me, somewhat oversloshing them.

The old man sighed, took one last suck at his nurse's slobbered teat, and gave it a loud dismissing slap to signal that the dreadful meal was done. Zyanya and I hastily drank our second cups of chapari. 'Now,' said Yquingare, munching his mouth so that his nose and chin several times chomped together. His son jumped around behind him to haul him to his feet.

'A moment, my lord,' I said, 'while I give the Lady Pair a word of instruction.'

'Instruction?' he said suspiciously.

'To comply,' I said, smirking like a practiced pimp. 'Lest, as virgins, they be annoyingly coy.'

'Ah?' he rasped, smirking back. 'Virgins as well, are they? Compliance, yes, by all means compliance.'

Zyanya and Tzimtzicha gave me identical looks of contempt as I led the twins aside and imparted the instructions, the urgent instructions I had just devised. It was difficult, for I had to speak fast, and in their native language of Coatlicamac, and they were so very stupid. But finally they both nodded a sort of dim comprehension and, with a shrug of hope and despair, I shoved them toward the Uandakuari.

Unprotesting, they accompanied him up one staircase; helped him to climb it, in fact, looking like a crab helping a toad. Just before they reached the balcony, the toad turned and called something to his son, in Pore, so hoarsely that I caught not a word. Tzimtzicha nodded obediently to his father, then turned to ask if I and my lady were ready to retire. She only hiccuped, so I said we were; it had been a long day. We followed the Crown Prince to the stairs on the other side of the hall.

Thus it happened that, there in Tzintzuntzani, for the first and only time in our married life, Zyanya and I slept with somebody besides each other. But please to remember, reverend friars, that we were both a bit drunk on the powerful chapari. Anyway, it was not exactly what it sounds, and I will do my best to explain.

Before leaving home, I had tried to tell Zyanya about the Purempecha's predilection for inventive, voluptuous, and even perverse sexual practices. We had agreed that we would not evince surprise or disgust, whatever hospitality of that nature our hosts might offer us, but would decline it as graciously as possible. Or we thought we had so agreed. By the time the hospitality was provided, and we recognized it for what it was, we were already partaking. And we did not then recoil because—though she and I could never afterward decide whether it was wicked or innocuous—it was undeniably delightful.

As he led us toward the upper floor, Tzimtzicha turned and gave me an imitation of my own pimplike smirk, and inquired, 'Will the knight and his lady wish separate rooms? Separate beds?'

'Certainly not,' I said, and I said it in a chilly voice, before he might next suggest, 'Separate partners?' or some other indecency.

'A conjugal chamber then, my lord,' he said, agreeably enough. 'But sometimes,' he went on, casually, conversationally, 'after a hard day's travel, even the most devoted couple may be fatigued. The court of Tzintzuntzani would think itself remiss if its guests should feel, ahem, too tired to indulge each other, even for a single night. Hence we offer a facility called atanatanarani. It enhances the adequacy of a man, the receptiveness of a woman, perhaps to an extreme they have never before enjoyed.'

The word atanatanarani, as best I could unravel its elements, meant only 'a bunching together.' Before I could inquire how a bunching together could enhance anything, he had bowed us into our chambers, backed himself out, and slid shut the lacquered door.

The lamplighted room contained the biggest, deepest, softest bed of piled quilts I had ever seen. There also awaited us two elderly slaves: one male, one female. I eyed them with apprehension, but they merely asked our permission to draw our baths. Adjoining the bedroom was a separate sanitary closet for each of us, complete with its own bathing trough and already hot steam room. My servant helped me sponge myself in the bath and afterward briskly pumiced me in the steam room, but he did nothing else, nothing untoward. I assumed that the slaves, the bathing and steaming were what the Crown Prince had meant by 'a facility called atanatanarani.' If so, it was but a civilized amenity, nothing obscene, and it had worked well. I felt refreshed and tingly-skinned and more than 'adequate,' as Tzimtzicha had put it, to 'indulge' my wife.

Her slave and mine bowed out, and she and I emerged from the sanitary closets to find the main chamber dark. The windows' draperies had all been closed and the oil lamps extinguished. So it took us a moment to find each other in that big room, and another moment to find even that immense bed. It was a warm night; only the topmost quilt had been turned back; we slid under it and lay side by side, sprawled on our backs, content for the moment just to enjoy the cloud-softness under us.

Zyanya murmured sleepily, 'Do you know, Zaa, I still feel as drunk as a bee.' Then she gave a sudden small twitch and gasped, 'Ayyo, you are eager! You took me by surprise.'

I had been about to exclaim the same thing. I reached down to where a small hand was gently touching me —her hand, I had supposed—and said in amazement, 'Zyanya!' just as she said:

'Zaa, I can feel... it is a child down there. Playing with my... playing with me.'

'I have one, too,' I said in awe. 'They were waiting for us, under the quilt. What do we do?'

I expected her to say, 'Kick!' or 'Scream!' or to do both those things herself. Instead, she gave another small gasp, and then a honey-drugged giggle, and repeated my question: 'What do we do? What is yours doing?'

I told her.

'So is mine.'

'It is not unpleasant.'

'No. Decidedly not.'

'They must be trained for this.'

'But not for their own satisfaction. This one, anyway, is far too young.'

'No. To enhance our pleasure, as the prince said.'

'They might be punished if we rebuffed them.'

I make those exchanges sound cool and dispassionate. They were not. We were speaking to each other in husky voices and in phrases broken by our involuntary gasps and movements.

'Is yours a boy or a girl? I cannot reach far enough to—'

'I cannot either. Does it matter?'

'No. The head is smooth, but the face feels as if it might be beautiful. The eyelashes are long enough to—ah! yes!—with the eyelashes!'

'They are well trained.'