utterances. (In the next pages, if you can believe it even when you read it, Sire, he uses the noble Castilian language as an excuse to speak words which surely have never before been deliberately inflicted on the ears of any other Bishop anywhere!) Perhaps our Liege will now take cognizance that, when this creature so brazenly makes jape of Your Majesty's vicar, there can be no question but that, by extension, he makes jape of Your Majesty as well, and not at all unintentionally. Perhaps, Sire, you will at last agree that the day is considerably overdue when we might dispense with the employment of this depraved old barbarian whose unwelcome presence and unwholesome disclosures we have now endured for more than a year and a half.
Please to forgive the brevity and acrimony and unmannerly curtness of this communication, Your Majesty. We are at present too vexed and discomposed to write at greater length or with the mansuetude fitting to our holy office.
May all the goodness and virtue that shine from Your Radiant Majesty continue to illumine the world. Such is the prayer of Your S.C.C.M.'s devoted (if chastened) chaplain,
UNDECIMA PARS
Ayyo! After so long neglect, Your Excellency joins us once again. But I believe I can divine the reason. I am now about to speak of those new-come gods, and gods clearly are of interest to a man of God. We are honored by your presence, my Lord Bishop. And not to demand too much of Your Excellency's valuable time, I will hasten my tale to that encounter with those gods. I will only digress to tell of a meeting with one small and lesser being on the road, for that being was later to prove not small at all.
I left Tenochtitlan on the day after the day I had returned to it, and I left in style. Since the fearsome smoking star was not in evidence in the daytime, the streets were crowded with people, and they ogled my parade of departure. I wore my ferociously beaked helmet and feathered armor of an Eagle Knight, and I carried my shield bearing the feather-worked symbols of my name. However, as soon as I had crossed the causeway, I entrusted those things to the slave who carried my flag of rank and my other regalia. I put on more comfortable clothing for the journey, and did not again dress in all my finery except when we came to one or another important community along the way, where I wished to impress the local ruler with my own importance.
The Uey-Tlatoani had provided a gilded and bejeweled litter in which I rode whenever I tired of walking, and another litter full of gifts for me to present to the Xiu chief Ah Tutal, besides other gifts which I was to present to the gods—if gods they proved to be, and if they did not scorn such offerings. In addition to my litter bearers and the porters carrying our travel provisions, I was accompanied by a troop of Motecuzoma's tallest, most robust and imposing palace guards, all of then formidably armed and magnificently garbed.
I need hardly say that no bandits or other villains dared to attack such a train. I need hardly describe the hospitality with which we were received and regaled at every stop along our route. I will recount only what happened when we spent one night at Coatzacoalcos, that market town on the northern coast of the narrowest land between the two great seas.
I and my party arrived near sunset on one of the town's apparently busiest market days, so we did not push into its center to be quartered as distinguished visitors. We merely made camp in a field outside the town, where other late-arriving trains were doing the same. The one that settled nearest ours was the train of a slave trader herding to market a considerable number of men, women, and children. After our company had eaten, I sauntered over to the slave camp, half thinking that I might find a suitable replacement for my late servant Star Singer, and that I might strike a good bargain if I bought one of the men before they went up for bidding in the town market on the morrow.
The pochteatl told me he had acquired his human herd, by ones and twos, from such inland Olmeca tribes as the Coatlicamac and Cupilco. His string of male slaves was literally a string: they traveled and rested and ate and even slept all linked together by a long rope threaded through each man's pierced nose septum. The women and girls, however, were left free to do the work of making the camp, laying the fires, doing the cooking, fetching water and wood and such. As I strolled about, idly eyeing the wares, one young girl carrying a jug and a gourd dipper shyly approached me and sweetly asked:
'Would my Lord Eagle Knight care for a refreshing drink of cool water? At the far side of the field, there is a clear river running to the sea, and I dipped this long enough ago that all the impurities have settled.'
I looked at her across the gourd as I sipped. She was plainly a back-country girl, short and slender, not very clean, dressed in a knee-length blouse of cheap sackcloth. But she was not coarse or dark of complexion; in a soft and unformed adolescent way, she was quite pretty. She was not, like every other female in the neighborhood, chewing tzictle, and she was obviously not as ignorant as might have been expected.
'You addressed me in Nahuatl,' I said. 'How do you come to speak it?'
The girl put on a woebegone expression and murmured, 'One does much traveling, being repeatedly bought and sold. It is at least an education of sorts. I was born to the Coatlicamac tongue, my lord, but I have learned some of the Maya dialects and the trade language of Nahuatl.'
I asked her name. She said, 'Ce-Malinali.'
'One Grass?' I said. 'That is only a calendar date, and only half a name.'
'Yes,' she sighed tragically. 'Even the slave children of slave parents receive a seventh-birthday name, but I never did. I am less than a slave born of slaves, Lord Knight. I have been an orphan since my birth.'
She explained. Her unknown mother was some Coatlicamatl drab, made pregnant by some unknown one of the many men who had straddled her. The woman had given birth in a farm furrow one day while working in the fields, as casually as she would have defecated, and had left the newborn infant there, as uncaringly as she would have left her excrement. Some other woman, less heartless, or perhaps herself childless, had found the abandoned baby before it perished, and had taken it home and given it succor.
'But who that kindly rescuer was, I no longer remember,' said Ce-Malinali. 'I was still a child when she sold me—for maize to eat—and I have been passed from owner to owner since then.' She put on the look of one who has suffered long but persevered. 'I know only that I was born on the day One Grass in the year Five House.'
I exclaimed, 'Why, that was the very day and year of my own daughter's birth in Tenochtitlan. She too was Ce-Malinali until she became Zyanya-Nochipa at the age of seven. You are small for your age, child, but you are precisely the age she—'
The girl interrupted excitedly, 'Then perhaps you would buy me, Lord Knight, to be personal maid and companion to your young lady daughter!'
'Ayya,' I mourned. 'That other Ce-Malinali... she died... nearly three years ago....'
'Then buy me to be your house servant,' she urged. 'Or to wait upon you as your daughter would have done. Take me with you when you return to Tenochtitlan. I will do any kind of work or'—she demurely lowered her eyelashes—'any not daughterly service my lord might crave.' I was drinking again from the dipper at that moment, and I spluttered the water. She said hastily, 'Or you can sell me in Tenochtitlan, if my lord is perhaps beyond the age of such cravings.'
I snapped, 'Impudent little vixen, the women I crave I do not have to buy!'
She did not cringe at my words; she said boldly, 'And I do not wish to be bought just for my body. Lord Knight, I have other qualities—I know it—and I yearn for the opportunity to make use of those qualities.' She grasped my arm to emphasize her pleading. 'I want to go where I will be appreciated for more than just my being a young female. I want to try my fortunes in some great city. I have ambitions, my lord, I have dreams. But they are vain if I am condemned to be forever a slave in these dreary provinces.'
I said, 'A slave is a slave, even in Tenochtitlan.'
'Not always, not necessarily forever,' she insisted. 'In a city of civilized men, my worth and intelligence and aspirations could perhaps be recognized. A lord might elevate me to the status of concubine, and then even make me a free woman. Do not some lords free their slaves, when they prove deserving?'
I said they did; even I had once done so.
'Yes,' she said, as if she had wrung some concession from me. She squeezed my arm, and her voice became wheedling. 'You do not require a concubine, Lord Knight. You are a man stalwart and handsome enough that you need not buy your women. But there are others—old or ugly men—who must and do. You could sell me at a profit to one of those in Tenochtitlan.'
I suppose I should have sympathized with the child. I too had once been young, and brimming with ambition, and I had yearned to try the challenge of the greatest city of them all. But there was something so hard and intense about the way in which Ce-Malinali tried to ingratiate herself that I found her less than appealing. I said, 'You seem
