It was full dark by then, and there were not many other people abroad on that blustery night, but the streets were lighted. Every house seemed supplied with lamps of coconut oil or ahuacatl oil or fish oil or whatever fuel the householders could afford. Their light spilled out through the houses' window openings, even those closed by lattice shutters or cloth curtains or oiled-paper shades. In addition, there was a torchlight set at most of the street corners: high poles with copperwork baskets of blazing pine splinters on top, from which the wind blew sparks and occasional gobbets of burning pitch. Those poles were set in sockets drilled through the fists of standing or squatting stone statues of various gods.
I had not walked far before I began to tire; I was carrying so many bundles, and I was being so buffeted by the wind. It was with relief that I saw a streetside stone bench set in the darkness under a red-flowering tapachini tree. I sank down on it gratefully, and sat for a while, enjoying being showered by the tree's scarlet petals blown loose by the wind. Then I became aware that the bench seat under me was ridged with a carved design. I had only to begin tracing it with my fingers—not even to peer at it in the dark—to know that it was picture writing, and to know what it said.
'A resting place for the Lord Night Wind,' I quoted aloud, smiling to myself.
'You were reading exactly the same thing,' said a voice from the darkness, 'when we met at another bench some years ago.'
I gave a start of surprise, then squinted to make out the figure at the other end of the seat. Again he was wearing a mantle and sandals of good quality, though travel-worn. Again he was so covered with the dust of the road that his coppery, features were indistinct. But now I was probably just as dusty, and I had grown considerably, and I marveled that he could have recognized me. When I had recovered my voice, I said:
'Yes, Yanquicatzin, it is a surpassing coincidence.'
'You should not address me as Lord Stranger,' he growled, as surly as I remembered him. 'Here you are the stranger.'
'True, my lord,' I said. 'And here I have learned to read more than the simple symbols on roadside benches.'
'I should hope so,' he said drily.
'It is thanks to the Uey-Tlatotoi Nezahualpili,' I explained. 'At his generous invitation, I have enjoyed many months of higher schooling in his court classrooms:'
'And what do you do to earn such favors?'
'Well, I would do anything, for I am grateful to my benefactor, and eager to repay him. But I have yet to meet the Revered Speaker, and nobody else gives me anything but schoolwork to do. It makes me uncomfortable, to feel that I am only a parasite.'
'Perhaps Nezahualpili has merely been waiting. To see you prove yourself trustworthy. To hear you say you would do anything.'
'I would. Anything he might ask.'
'I daresay he will ask something of you eventually.'
'I hope so, my lord.'
We sat for some time in silence, except for the sound of the wind moaning between the buildings, like Chocaciuatl the Weeping Woman forever wandering. Finally the dusty man said sarcastically:
'You are eager to be of use at the court, but here you sit and the palace is yonder.' He waved down the street. I was being dismissed as curtly as the other time.
I stood up, gathered my bundles, and said with some pique, 'As my impatient lord suggests, I go. Mixpantzinco.'
'Ximopanolti,' he drawled indifferently.
I stopped under the torch pole at the next corner and looked back, but the light did not reach far enough to illuminate the bench. If the travel-stained stranger still sat there, I could not make out his form. All I could see was a little red whirl of tapachini petals being danced along the street by the night wind.
I finally found the palace, and found the slave boy Cozcatl waiting to show me to my quarters. That palace at Texcoco was far larger than the one at Texcotzinco—it must have contained a thousand rooms—since there was not so much space in the central city for its necessary annexes to sprawl and spread around it. Still, the Texcoco palace grounds were extensive and, even in the middle of his capital city, Nezahualpili evidently would not be denied his gardens and arbors and fountains and the like.
There was even a living maze, which occupied land enough for ten families to have farmed. It had been planted by some long-ago royal ancestor, and had been growing ever since, though kept neatly clipped. It was now an avenue of parallel, impenetrable thorn hedges, twice man-high, which twisted and forked and doubled upon itself. There was only a single opening in the hedge's green outer wall, and it was said that anyone entering there would, after long meandering, find his way to a little grassy glade in the center of the maze, but that the return route was impossible to retrace. Only the aged chief gardener of the palace knew the way out, a secret handed down in his family and traditionally kept secret even from the Uey-Tlatoani. So no one was allowed to enter there without the old gardener for a guide—except as a punishment. The occasional convicted lawbreaker was sentenced to be delivered alone and naked into the maze, at spearpoint if necessary. After a month or so, the gardener would go in and bring out whatever remained of the starved and thorn-torn and bird-pecked and worm-eaten body.
The day after my return, I was waiting for a class to begin, when young Prince Willow approached me. After welcoming me back to court, he said casually, 'My father would be pleased to see you in the throne room at your convenience, Head Nodder.'
At my convenience! How courteously the highest noble of the Acolhua summoned to his presence this lowly foreigner who had been battening on his hospitality. Of course I left the classroom and went immediately, almost running along the buildings' galleries, so that I was quite breathless when at last I dropped to one knee at the threshold of the immense throne room, made the gesture of kissing the earth, and said, 'In your august presence, Revered Speaker.'
'Ximopanolti, Head Nodder.' When I remained bowed in my position of humility, he said, 'You may rise, Mole.' When I stood, but stayed where I was, he said, 'You may come here, Dark Cloud.' As I did so, slowly and respectfully, he said, smiling, 'You have as many names as a bird which flies over all the nations of The One World and which is called differently by every people.' With a fly whisk he was wielding he indicated one of several icpaltin chairs ranged in a semicircle before the throne and said, 'Be seated.'
Nezahualpili's own chair was no more grand or impressive than the stubby-legged one on which I sat, but it was raised on a dais so that I had to look up at him. He sat with his legs not formally crossed under him or knees up in front of him, but languidly stretched out to the front and crossed at the ankles. Though the throne room was hung with feather-work tapestries and panel paintings, there were no other furnishings except the throne, those low chairs for visitors—and, directly in front of the Uey-Tlatoani, a low table of black onyx on which reposed, facing him, a gleaming white human skull.
'My father, Fasting Coyote, set that there,' said Nezahualpili, noticing my eyes upon it. 'I do not know why. It may have been some vanquished enemy over whom he delighted to gloat. Or some lost beloved he could never stop mourning. Or he may have kept it for the same reason I do.'
I asked, 'And what is that, Lord Speaker?'
'There come to this room envoys bearing threats of war or offering treaties of peace. There come plaintiffs laden with grievances, petitioners asking favors. When those persons address me, their faces may contort with anger or sag with misery or smile in feigned devotion. So, while I listen to them, I look not at their faces, but at the skull.'
I could only say, 'Why, my lord?'
'Because there is the cleanest and most honest face of man. No paint or disguise, no guile or grimace, no sly wink or ingratiating smile. Only a fixed, ironic grin, a mockery of every living man's concern for urgencies. When any visitor pleads that I make a ruling here and now, I temporize, I dissimulate. I smoke a poquietl or two, while I look long at that skull. It reminds me that the words I speak may well outlast my own flesh, may long stand as firm decrees—and to what effect on those then living? Ayyo, that skull has often served to caution me against an impatient or impulsive decision.' Nezahualpili looked from the skull to me, and laughed. 'When the head lived, for all I know, it was that of a babbling idiot, but dead and silent it is a wise counselor indeed.'
I said, 'I think, my lord, that no counselor would be of use except to a man wise enough to heed counsel.'
