Aztec

the way back to our home. She laughed and said, 'This is ridiculous,' when I insisted on lifting her onto the chair cushions. 'But does it mean that you are pleased, Zaa?'

'Pleased?' I exclaimed. 'Pleased!'

At our house, Turquoise looked worried to see me assisting the protesting Zyanya up the short flight of stairs. But I shouted to her, 'We are going to have a baby!' and she shrieked with joy. At the noise, Ticklish came running from somewhere, and I commanded, 'Ticklish, Turquoise, go this instant and give the nursery a good cleaning. Make all the necessary preparations. Run and buy whatever is lacking. A cradle. Flowers. Put flowers everywhere!'

'Zaa, will you hush?' said Zyanya, half amused, half embarrassed. 'It will be months yet. The room can wait.'

But the two slave women had already dashed obediently, exuberantly up the stairs. And, over her protests, I helped Zyanya up there too, and insisted she lie down for a rest after her exertion of visiting the palace. I went downstairs to congratulate myself with a drink of octli and a smoke of picietl, and to sit in the twilight and gloat in solitude.

Gradually, though, my excitement subsided into more serious meditation, and I began to perceive the several reasons why Zyanya had been somewhat hesitant about telling me of the coming event. She had said it would occur about the turn of the year. Counting backward on my fingers, I realized that our child must have been conceived during that night in old Yquingare's palace. I chuckled at that. No doubt Zyanya was a bit discomfited by that fact. She would have preferred that the child had its beginning in more sedate circumstances. Well, I thought it far better to conceive a child in a paroxysm of rapture, as we had done, than in a torpid acquiescence to duty or conformity or inevitability, as most parents did.

But I could not chuckle at the next thought that came to me. The child could be handicapped from the moment of his birth, because it was possible that he would inherit my weakness of vision. Granted, he would not have to stumble and grope through as many years as I had done before I discovered the seeing crystal. But I pitied an infant who would have to learn how to hold a topaz to his eye even before he learned how to get a spoon to his mouth, and his being pathetically unable to toddle about on his infant excursions without it, and his being cruelly called Yellow Eye or the like by his playmates....

If the child was a girl, that close-sightedness would not be such a disadvantage. Neither her childhood games nor her adult occupations would be strenuous or dependent on the keenness of her physical senses. Females were not competitive with each other until they reached the age when they vied for the most desirable husbands, and then it would be less important how my daughter saw than how she looked. But—agonizing thought—suppose she both saw and looked like me! A son would be pleased to inherit my head-nodder height. A girl would be desolated, and she would hate me, and I would probably be revolted by the sight of her. I imagined our daughter looking exactly like that tremendous milk woman....

And that gave rise to another worry. During the many days prior to the night of the child's conception, Zyanya had been in intimate proximity to the monstrous Lady Pair! It was well attested that countless children had been born deformed or deficient when their mothers were affected by far less gruesome influences. Worse yet, Zyanya had said 'some time about the turn of the year.' And right then fell the five nemontemtin! A child born during those nameless and lifeless days was so ill-omened that its parents were expected, even encouraged, to let it die of malnourishment. I was not so superstitious as to do that. But then, what kind of burden or monster or evildoer might that child grow up to be...?

I smoked picietl and drank octli until Turquoise came and saw my condition and said, 'For shame, my lord master!' and summoned Star Singer to help me to bed.

'I will be a shambling ruin before the time arrives,' I said to Zyanya the next morning. 'I wonder if all fathers have such worrisome apprehensions.'

She smiled and said, 'Not nearly as many as a mother does, I think. But a mother knows she can do absolutely nothing but wait.'

I sighed and said, 'I see no other course for me, either. I can only devote my every moment to caring for you and tending you and seeing that no slightest harm or affliction—'

'Do that and I will be a ruin!' she cried, as if she meant it. 'Please, my darling, do find something else to occupy you.'

Stung and deflated by the rejection, I slouched off to take my morning bath. But, after I had come downstairs and breakfasted, a diversion did present itself, in the person of a caller, Cozcatl.

'Ayyo, how could you have heard already?' I exclaimed. 'But it was thoughtful of you to come calling so quickly.'

My greeting seemed to bewilder him. He said, 'Heard of what? Actually I came to—'

'Why, that we are going to have a baby!' I said.

His face went briefly bleak before he said, 'I am happy for you, Mixtli, and for Zyanya. I call on the gods to bless you with a well-favored child.' Then he mumbled, 'It is only that the coincidence flustered me for a moment. Because I came this morning to ask your permission to marry.'

'To marry? But that is news as marvelous as my own!' I shook my head. 'Imagine... the boy Cozcatl, of an age to take a wife. Sometimes I do not notice how the years have gone. But what do you mean, ask my permission?'

'My intended wife is not free to marry. She is a slave.'

'So?' I still did not comprehend. 'Surely you can afford to buy her freedom.'

'I can,' he said. 'But will you sell her? I want to marry Quequelmiqui, and she wants to marry me.'

'What?'

'It was through you that I first met her, and I confess that many of my visits here have been something of a pretext, so that she and I could have a little time together. Most of our courtship has been conducted in your kitchen.'

I was astounded. 'Ticklish? Our little maid? But she is barely adolescent!'

He reminded me gently, 'She was when you bought her, Mixtli. The years have gone.'

And so they had, I thought. Ticklish could be only a year or two younger than Cozcatl, and he was—let me see—he had turned twenty and two. I said magnanimously:

'You have my permission and my congratulations and my felicitations, Cozcatl. But buy her? Most certainly not. She is but the first of our wedding gifts to you. No, no, I will hear no protest; I insist on it. Had she not been schooled by you, the girl would never have been worth consideration as a wife. I remember her when she first came here. Giggling.'

'Then I thank you, Mixtli, and so will she. I also want to say'—he looked flustered again—'I have of course told her about myself. About the wound I suffered. She understands that we can never have children, like you and Zyanya.'

It was then that I realized how my own abrupt announcement must have dashed his own exultation. All unknowingly and unintentionally, I had been heartless. But before I could frame words of apology, he continued:

'Quequelmiqui swears that she loves me and will accept me for what I am. But I must be sure that she fully realizes—the extent of my inadequacy. Our kitchen caresses have never got to the point of...'

He was floundering in embarrassment, so I tried to help. 'You mean you have not yet—'

'She has never even seen me unclothed,' he blurted. 'And she is a virgin, innocent of all knowledge about the relations between a man and a woman.'

I said, 'It will be Zyanya's responsibility, as her mistress, to sit her down for a woman-to-woman talk. I am sure Zyanya will enlighten her on the more intimate aspects of marriage.'

'That will be a kindness,' said Cozcatl. 'But after that, would you also speak to her, Mixtli? You have known me longer and—well, better than has Zyanya. You could tell Quequelmiqui more specifically of my limitations as a conjugal partner. Would you do that?'

I said, 'I will do my best, Cozcatl, but I warn you. A virginally innocent girl suffers doubts and trepidations about taking even a commonplace husband of ordinary physical attributes. When I tell her bluntly what she can expect from this marriage—and what she cannot—it may further affright her.'

'She loves me,' Cozcatl said ringingly. 'She has given her promise. I know her heart.'

'Then you are unique among men,' I said drily. 'I know only this much. A woman thinks of marriage in terms