stump of stone there, and two of the priests whipped out their obsidian knives. While one rent the breast and tore out the still pulsing heart, the other sawed off the still blinking and mouthing head. In none of our other ceremonies was the sacrificial victim decapitated, and it had no religious significance even in the Xipe Totec rites, where the xochimiqui was beheaded only for a practical reason: it is easier to remove a dead person's skin when the head and body are separated.
The flaying was done out of sight of the crowd, the two pieces of the youth having been whisked inside the temple, and the priests were very deft at it. The head's skin was slit up the back, from nape to crown, the scalp and face peeled off the skull and the eyelids cut away. The body was also slit up the back, from anus to neck stump, but the skin of arms and legs was carefully loosed as untorn empty tubes. If the xochimiqui had been a young woman, the padding of soft flesh inside her breasts and buttocks was left intact to preserve their rotundity. If it had been a young man, his tepuli and ololtin were left attached and dangling.
The smallest priest of Xipe Totec—and there was always one small man among them—quickly doffed his robes and, naked, donned the two pieces of the costume. The body skin being still moist and slippery on the inside, it was not difficult for him to wriggle his own arms and legs into the corresponding tubes. The dead feet had been removed, for they would interfere with the priest's dancing, but the dead hands were left attached to wave and flap alongside his own. The torso skin of course did not meet at the back, but it was there perforated for thongs which laced it tight around his body. The priest then put on the dead youth's hair and face, positioned so that he could see through the empty eyeholes and sing through the slack lips, and it too was laced up the back. Any traces of blood on the outside of the costume were sponged off and the slit in the chest skin was sewn shut.
All that took very little longer than it takes me to tell it to Your Excellency. It seemed to the onlookers that the dead Xipe Totec had scarcely left the altar stone than he reappeared alive in the temple doorway. He stood bent, pretending to be an old man, leaning for support on two glistening thighbones, the only other parts of the xochimiqui's body utilized in the ceremony. As the drums roared to greet him, The Dear One Flayed slowly straightened up, like an old man becoming young again. He danced down the pyramid stairs and capered maniacally about the plaza, flourishing the slimy thighbones and using them to give a tap of blessing to everyone who could press close enough.
Before the ceremony, the small priest always made himself drunk and delirious by eating many of the mushrooms called the flesh of the gods. He had to, for he had the most arduous part in the remainder of the proceedings. He was required to dance frantically and unceasingly, except during those periods when he collapsed unconscious, for five days and nights thereafter. Of course, his dance gradually lost its first wild abandon, as the skin he wore began to dry and tighten on him. Toward the close of the five days, it was so shrunken and crackly as to be really constrictive, and the sun and air had turned it to a sickly yellow color—for which reason it was called the Garment of Gold—and it smelled so horrible that no one then in the plaza would come near enough for Xipe Totec to bless him with a tap of a bone—
His Excellency's latest anguished departure impels me to remark—if it is not irreverent, lord scribes—that His Excellency has a remarkable faculty for joining us always to hear only those things that will most annoy or disgust him to hear.
In later years I was to say, with deep regret, that I wished I had never denied Zyanya anything; that I ought to have let her do and see and experience everything that caught her interest and dilated her eyes with wonder; that I should never even once have thwarted her blithe enthusiasm for every smallest thing in the world about her. Still, I cannot reproach myself that I kept her from ever seeing the Xipe Totec ceremony.
Whether or not I can claim any credit, no bad influences got into Zyanya's milk. The baby Cocoton thrived on it, and grew, and grew ever more pretty, a miniature of her mother and aunt. I doted on her, but I was not the only one who did. When Zyanya and Beu one day took the baby with them to market, a Totonacatl passerby saw Cocoton smiling from the shawl sling in which Beu carried her, and asked the women's permission to capture that smile in clay. He was one of those itinerant artists who turn out quantities of terra cotta figurines from molds and then tramp about the countryside to sell them cheaply to poor farm folk. On the spot, he adroitly did a little clay portrait of Cocoton, and later, after he had used it to make his mold for stamping out the duplicates, he came and presented Zyanya with the original. It was not really a perfect likeness, and he had put upon it the flared Totonaca headdress, but I instantly recognized my daughter's broad and infectious smile, complete with dimples. I do not know how many copies he made, but for a long time you could see little girls everywhere playing with that doll. Even some adults bought it under the impression that it represented the laughing young god Xochipili, Lord of Flowers, or the happy goddess Xilonen, Young Maize Mother. I should not be surprised if there are still some of those figurines here and there, still unbroken, but it would, lacerate my heart if I found one now and saw again that smile of my daughter and my wife.
Toward the close of the child's first year of life, when she had grown her first little maize-kernel teeth, she was weaned in the age-old manner of Mexica mothers. When she cried to be suckled, her lips would more and more often encounter not Zyanya's sweet breast but a bitter leaf cupped over it: one of the astringent, mouth-puckering leaves of the sabila maguey. Gradually, Cocoton let herself be persuaded to take instead soft mushes like atoli, and eventually abandoned the nipple altogether. It was at that time that Beu Ribe announced that she was no longer needed by our family, that she would return to her inn, that Turquoise could easily take over the care of the infant when Zyanya was weary or occupied with other things.
I again provided an escort for Beu: the same seven soldiers whom I had come to regard as my private little army, and I walked with her and them as far as the causeway.
'We hope you will come again, sister Waiting Moon,' I said, though we had already spent most of that morning saying farewells, and Beu had been given many gifts, and both women had wept a good deal.
'I will come whenever I am needed... or wanted,' she said. 'Getting away from Tecuantepec this first time should make it easier for me in the future. But I think I shall not often be needed or ever wanted. I would rather not admit having been wrong, Zaa, but honesty compels me. You are a good husband to my sister.'
'It takes no great effort,' I said. 'The best of husbands is that man who has the best of wives.'
She said, with a touch of her former teasing manner, 'How do you know? You have married only one. Tell me, Zaa, do you never feel even a fleeting attraction to... to any other woman?'
'Oh, yes,' I said, laughing at myself. 'I am human, and human emotions can be unruly, and there are many other alluring women. Like you, Beu. I can even be attracted to women less beautiful than Zyanya or you—merely out of curiosity about the possible other attributes under their clothes or behind their faces. But in nearly nine years my thoughts have never yet progressed to the deed, and to lie beside Zyanya quickly dispels the thoughts, so I do not blush for them.'
I hasten to say, reverend friars, that my Christian catechists taught me different: that a wanton idea can be just as sinful as the most lascivious fornication. But I was then still a heathen; we all were. So the whims that I did not invite and did not commit did not trouble me any more than anybody else was troubled by them.
Beu looked at me sidelong from her glorious eyes and said, 'You are already an Eagle Knight. It only remains for you to be honored with the -tzin to your name. As a noble, you need not stifle even your most secret yearnings. Zyanya could not object to being the First Wife among your others, if she approved of the others. You could have all the women you want.'
I smiled and said, 'I already do. She is most aptly named Always.'
Beu nodded and turned and, without looking back, walked out of sight along the causeway.
There were men working that day at the island end of the causeway Beu crossed, and others working along the length of it, as far as the midway fort of Acachinanco, and there were other laborers at work on the mainland to the southwest. The men were building the two ends of a new stone aqueduct to bring an increased supply of fresh water to the city.
For a long time, the many communities and settled lands of the lake district had been so rapidly increasing in population that all three nations of The Triple Alliance were becoming intolerably overcrowded. Tenochtitlan, of course, was the worst affected, for the simple reason that it was an island incapable of expansion. That is why, when the Xoconochco was annexed, so many city dwellers picked up their families and households and moved to settle there. And that voluntary migration gave the Uey-Tlatoani the idea of encouraging other removals.
By then, it had become evident that the Tapachtlan garrison would forever discourage any further forays of enemies into the Xoconochco, so Motecuzoma the Younger was relieved of his command there. As I have explained, Ahuitzotl had reasons for keeping his nephew at a distance. But he was also shrewd enough to go on making use of the man's proven ability for organization and administration. He sent Motecuzoma next to Teloloapan, a flyspeck
