wave would come again—but the street's unaccustomed emptiness made me uneasy. I was too tired to run, but I shuffled as rapidly as possible, and my heart lifted when I saw my house still standing, unmarked except for the deposit of slime on its entry stairs.
Turquoise flung open the front door, exclaiming, 'Ayyo, it is our lord master! All thanks to Chalchihuitlicue for sparing you!'
Wearily but with feeling, I said I wished that particular goddess in Mictlan.
'Do not speak so!' pleaded Turquoise, tears running down the wrinkles of her face. 'We feared that we had lost our master also!'
'Also?' I gasped, an invisible band tightening painfully around my chest. The elderly slave woman broke into violent weeping and could not reply. I dropped the things I was carrying and seized her by the shoulders. 'The child?' I demanded. She shook her head, but whether in denial or grief I could not tell. I shook her fiercely and said, 'Speak, woman!'
'It was our lady Zyanya,' said another voice from behind her, that of the manservant Star Singer, who came to the doorway wringing his hands. 'I saw the whole thing. I tried to stop her.'
I did not let go of Turquoise or I should have fallen. I could only manage to say, 'Tell me, Star Singer.'
'Know then, my master. It was yesterday, at dusk, the time when the street torch lighters would ordinarily have been coming. But of course they did not; the street was a seething cataract. Only one man came—being swept along and bludgeoned against the torch poles and the house stairs. He kept trying to find his footing or to seize onto something that would stop his progress. But, even when he was still distant, I could see that he was already crippled and he could not—'
As harshly as I could, in my agony and weakness, I said, 'What has all this to do with my wife? Where is she?'
'She was at this front window,' he said, pointing, and went on with infuriating deliberation. 'She had been here the whole day, worrying and waiting for your return, my lord. I was with her when the man came flailing and thrashing down the street, and she cried out that we must save him. I was naturally not eager to venture into that raging water, and I told her, 'My lady, I can recognize him from here. It is only an old derelict who sometimes of late has worked on the garbage canoes which serve this quarter. He is not worth anyone's trouble.'
Star Singer paused, swallowed, and said huskily, 'I can make no complaint if my lord beats me or sells me or slays me, for I should have gone to save the man. Because my lady gave me a look of wrath and went herself. To the door and down the stairs, while I watched from this window, and she leaned into the flood and caught him.'
He paused and gulped again, and I rasped, 'Well? If they were both safe...?'
Star Singer shook his head. 'That is what I do not understand. Of course, my lord, the stairs were wet and slippery. But what it looked like—it looked as if my lady spoke to the man, and started to let go of him, but then... but then the waters took them. Took them both, for he was clutching to her. I could see only a tumbling bundle as they were swept together out of my sight. But at that I did run out, and plunged into the current after them.'
'Star Singer almost drowned, my lord,' said Turquoise, sniffling. 'He tried, he really did.'
'There was no sign of them,' he resumed, miserably. 'Toward the end of the street, a number of old adobe houses had fallen—perhaps on them, I thought. But it was getting too dark to see, and I was knocked nearly insensible by a floating timber. I seized the doorpost of a sturdy house and clung there all the night.'
'He came home when the waters went down this morning,' said Turquoise. 'Then we both went out and searched.'
'Nothing?' I croaked.
'We found only the man,' said Star Singer. 'Half buried under some fallen rubble, as I had suspected.'
Turquoise said, 'Cocoton has not yet been told about her mother. Will my lord go up to her now?'
'And tell her what I cannot believe myself?' I moaned. I summoned some last reserve of energy to straighten my sagging body and said, 'No, I will not. Come, Star Singer. Let us search again.'
Beyond my house the street gently sloped downward as it approached the canal-crossing bridge, so the houses down there had naturally been more violently struck by the wall of water. Also, they were the less impressive houses on the street, built of wood or adobe. As Star Singer had said, they were houses no longer; they were heaps of half-broken, half-dissolved bricks of mud and straw, splintered planks, and oddments of furniture. The servant pointed to a crumple of cloth among them and said:
'There lies the wretch. No loss at all. He lived by selling himself to the men of the garbage boats. Those who could not afford a woman could use him, and he charged only a single cacao bean.'
He lay face down, a thing of filthy rags and mud-matted long gray hair. I used my foot to turn him over, and I looked at him for the last time. Chimali looked back at me with empty eye sockets and gaping mouth.
Not then, but some while later, when I could think, I thought about Star Singer's words: that the man had lately been aboard the scows serving our neighborhood. I wondered: had Chimali only recently discovered where I lived? Had he come haunting, hoping, blindly groping for one more opportunity to work mischief on me or mine? Had the flood given him the chance to inflict the most hurtful possible injury, and then to put himself beyond my vengeance forever? Or had the whole tragedy been a ghastly and gleeful contrivance of the gods? They do seem to find amusement in arranging concurrences of events that would otherwise be unlikely, inexplicable, beyond belief. I would never know.
And at that moment I knew only that my wife was gone, that I could not accept her being gone, that I had to search. I said to Star Singer, 'If the cursed man is here, so must Zyanya be. We will move every one of these millions of bricks. I will start on it, while you go for more hands to help. Go!'
Star Singer scampered away, and I leaned over to lift and fling aside a wooden beam, but I kept on leaning and pitched forward on my face.
It was late afternoon when I came back to consciousness, and in my own bed, with both the servants bending solicitously over me. The first thing I asked was, 'Did we find her?' When both the heads shook in rueful negation, I snarled, 'I told you to move every brick!'
'Master, it cannot be done,' whimpered Star Singer. 'The water rises again. I returned and found you just in time, or you would have been face down in it.'
'We were wondering whether to rouse you,' said Turquoise, in obvious anxiety. 'The word has been spoken by the Revered Speaker. The whole city must be vacated before it is all under water.'
And so that night I sat sleepless on a hillside among a multitude of sleeping fugitives. 'Long walk,' Cocoton had commented, on the way. Since only the first people to leave Tenochtitlan had found accommodations on the mainland, the later arrivals had simply stopped wherever there was room to lie down in the countryside. 'Dark night,' said my daughter appropriately. We four had not even a sheltering tree, but Turquoise had thought to bring blankets. She and Star Singer and Cocoton lay rolled in theirs, snugly asleep, but I sat up, with my blanket about my shoulders, and I looked down at my child, my Crumb, the precious and only remnant of my wife, and I mourned.
Some time ago, my lord friars, I tried to describe Zyanya by comparing her to the bounteous and generous maguey plant, but there is one thing I forgot to tell you about the maguey. Once in its lifetime, just once, it puts up a single spear which bears an abundance of sweet-scented yellow flowers, and then the maguey dies.
I tried hard that night to take comfort from the unctuous assurances our priests always spoke: that the dead do not repine or grieve. Death, said the priests, is merely one's awakening from a dream of having lived. Perhaps so. Your Christian priests say much the same thing. But that was small comfort to me, who had to remain behind in the dream, alive, alone, bereft. So I passed that night remembering Zyanya and the too-brief time we had together before her dream ended. I still remember—
Once, when we were on that journey into Michihuacan, she saw an unfamiliar flower growing from a cleft in a cliff, some way above our heads, and she admired it, and she said she wished she had one like it to plant at home, and I could easily have climbed up and plucked it for her....
And once—oh, it was no particular occasion—she woke in love with the day, and that was not unusual for Zyanya—and she made a small song, and then a melody for it, and she went about softly singing it to fix it in her memory, and she asked me if I would buy her one of the those jug flutes called the warbling waters, upon which she could play her song. I said I would, the next time I met a musician acquaintance and could persuade him to make me one. But I forgot, and she—seeing I had other things on my mind—she never reminded me. And once...
