Aztec

'The interior support. Any sculpture of clay or wax must be supported by an armature, just as a pulpy cactus is supported by its interior woody framework. For a statue of a human figure, what better armature than its own original skeleton?'

'What indeed?' I said. 'But tell me, how do you procure the original skeletons?'

Chimali said, 'The Lady Jadestone Doll provides them, from her private kitchen.'

'From her kitchen?'

Chimali looked away from me. 'Do not ask me how she has persuaded her cooks and kitchen slaves. But they flay the skin and scoop the bowels and carve the flesh from the—from the model—without dismembering it. Then they boil the remainder in great vats of lime water. They have to stop the boiling before the ligaments and sinews of the joints are dissolved, so there are still some scraps of meat we have to scrape off. But we do get the skeleton entire. Oh, a finger bone or a rib may come loose, but...'

'But unfortunately,' said Tlatli, 'even the complete skeleton gives me no indication of how the body's exterior was padded and curved. I can guess at a man's figure, but a woman's is different. You know, the breasts and hips and buttocks.'

'They were sublime,' I muttered, remembering Something Delicate. 'Come to my chambers. I will give you another drawing which shows your model in her entirety.'

In my apartment, I ordered Cozcatl to make chocolate for us all. Tlatli and Chimali roamed through the three rooms, uttering exclamatory noises about their finery and luxury, while I leafed through my assortment of drawings and extracted one that showed Something Delicate full length.

'Ah, completely nude,' said Tlatli. 'That is ideal for my purposes.' He might have been passing judgment on a sample of good marl clay.

Chimali also looked at the picture of the dead woman and said, 'Truly, Mole, your drawings are skillfully detailed. If you would leave off doing only lines, and learn to work with the lights and shadows of paint, you could be a real artist. You too could give beauty to the world.'

I laughed harshly. 'Like statues built on boiled skeletons?'

Tlatli sipped at his chocolate and said defensively, 'We did not kill those people, Mole. And we do not know why the young queen wants them preserved. But consider. If they were merely buried or burned, they would disintegrate into mold or ashes. We at least make them endure. And yes, we do our best to make them objects of beauty.'

I said, 'I am a scribe. I do not prettify the world. I only describe it.'

Tlatli held up the picture of Something Delicate. 'You did this, and it is quite a beautiful thing.'

'From now on, I will draw nothing but word pictures. I have done the last portrait I shall ever do.'

'That one of the Lord Joy,' Chimali guessed. He glanced about to make sure my slave was not within hearing. 'You must know you are putting Pactli at risk of the kitchen lime vats.'

'I devoutly hope so,' I said. 'I will not let my sister's death go unpunished.' I flung Chimali's own words back at him: 'It would be a weakness, a sullying of what we felt for each other.'

The two had the grace at least to lower their heads for some moments of silence before Tlatli spoke:

'You will put us all at hazard of discovery, Mole.'

'You are already at hazard. I have long been. I might have told you that before you came.' I gestured in the direction of their studio. 'But would you have believed what is down there?'

Chimali protested, 'Those are only city commoners and slaves. They might never be missed. Pactli is a Crown Prince of a Mexica province!'

I shook my head. 'The husband of that woman in the drawing—I hear he has gone quite mad, searching to discover what became of his beloved wife. He will never be sane again. And even slaves do not just disappear. The Revered Speaker has his guardsmen already seeking and making inquiries about the several mysteriously missing persons. Discovery is only a matter of time. That time may be tomorrow night, if Pactli is prompt.'

Visibly sweating, Tlatli said, 'Mole, we cannot let you—'

'You cannot stop me. And if you try to flee, if you try to warn Pactli or Jadestone Doll, I will hear of it instantly, and I will go instantly to the Uey-Tlatoani.'

Chimali said, 'He will have your life along with everyone else's. Why do this to me and Tlatli, Mole? Why do it to yourself?'

'My sister's death is not upon Pactli's head alone. I was involved, you were involved. I am prepared to atone with my own life, if that is my tonali. You two must take your chances.'

'Chances!' Tlatli flung up his hands. 'What chances?'

'One very good one. I suspect the lady herself has the sense not to kill a prince of the Mexica. I suspect she will toy with him for a while, perhaps a long while, then send him home with his lips sealed by a pledge.'

'Yes,' Chimali said thoughtfully. 'She may court danger, but not suicide.' He turned to Tlatli. 'And while he is here, you and I can finish the statues already on order. Then we can plead urgent work elsewhere—'

Tlatli gulped the dregs of his chocolate. 'Come! We will work night and day. We must be finished with everything on hand, we must have reason to ask leave to depart, before our lady wearies of our prince.'

On that note of hope, they dashed from my chambers.

I had not lied to them, but I had neglected to mention one detail of my arrangements. I had spoken truly when I suggested that Jadestone Doll might balk at killing an invited prince. That was a very real possibility. And for that reason, for this particular guest, I had made one small change in the usual wording of the invitation. As we say in our language, of one who deserves retribution, 'he would be destroyed with flowers.'

The gods supposedly know all our plans, and know their ends before their beginnings. The gods are mischievous, and they delight to potter with the plans of men. They usually prefer to complicate those plans, as they might snarl a fowler's net, or to frustrate them so the plans come to no result whatever. Very seldom do the gods intervene to any worthier purpose. But I do believe, that time, they looked at my plan and said among themselves, 'This dark scheme contrived by Dark Cloud, it is so ironically good, let us make it ironically even better.'

The next midnight, I kept my ear close against the inside of my door until I heard Pitza and the guest arrive and enter the apartment across the corridor. Then I cracked my door slightly to hear better. I expected some exclamation of profanity from Jadestone Doll when she first compared Pactli's brutish face with my idealized portrait. What I had not expected was what I did hear: the girls' piercing scream of real shock, and then her hysterical shrieking of my name: 'Fetch! Come here at once? Fetch!'

That seemed rather an extreme reaction in anyone meeting even the abhorrent Lord Joy. I opened my door and stepped out, to find a spear-carrying guard stationed just outside it, and another across the hall beside my lady's door. Both of them respectfully snapped their spears to the vertical as I emerged, and neither tried to prevent my entering the other apartment.

The young queen was standing just inside. Her face was twisted and unlovely, and nearly white with shock. But it gradually went nearly purple with fury as she began screaming at me, 'What kind of comedy is this, you son of a dog? Do you think you can make filthy jokes at my expense?'

She went on like that, in full voice. I turned to Pitza and the man she had brought—and, for all my mixed feelings, I could not help bursting out into loud and sustained laughter. I had forgotten about Jadestone Doll's drug-caused nearsightedness. She must have come running through all the rooms and halls of her apartment, to embrace the eagerly awaited Lord Joy, and she must have got right upon the visitor before her vision allowed her to see him clearly. That truly would have been enough of a shock to force a scream from one who had never seen him before. His presence was a staggering surprise to me too, but I laughed instead of screaming, for I had the advantage of recognizing the shriveled, hunched, cacao-brown old man.

I had worded the letter to Pactli in such a way as to assure that he could not arrive unobserved. But I had no idea how or why the old vagabond had come instead of Pactli, and it did not seem the time to ask. Besides, I could not stop laughing. 'Disloyal! Unforgivable! Despicable!' the girl was crying, over my guffaws, and Pitza was trying to fade into the nearest draperies, and the cacao man was waving my fawnskin letter and saying, 'But that is your own signature, is it not, my lady?' She broke off her vilification of me to snarl at him, 'Yes! But can even you believe it was addressed to a miserable, half-naked beggar? Now shut your toothless mouth!' She whirled back to me. 'It has to be a joke, since it convulses you so. Confess to it and you will merely be beaten raw. Keep on laughing like that and I swear—'

'And of course, my lady,' the man persisted, 'I recognize in the body of the letter the picture writing of my old