I shuddered and went on to the next apartment. The tequani there seemed not to be asleep, for its one eye was open. Where the other eye should have been was a smooth plane of skin. The head was hairless and even neckless, its skin sloping directly into its narrow shoulders and thence into a spreading, cone-shaped torso which sat on its swollen base as solidly as a pyramid, for it had no legs. Its arms were normal enough, except that the fingers of both hands were fused together, like the flippers of a green turtle.
'This one is called the tapir woman,' said the brown man, and I made a motion for him to speak more softly. 'Oh, we need not mind our manners,' he said. 'She is probably sound asleep. The one eye is permanently overgrown and the other has lost its lids. Anyway, these tequantin soon get accustomed to being publicly discussed.'
I had no intention of discussing that pitiable object. I could see why it was named for the prehensile-snouted tapir: its nose was a trunklike blob that hung pendulously to hide its mouth, if it had a mouth. But I should not have recognized it for a female, had I not been told. The head was not a woman's, nor even a human's. Any breasts were indistinguishable in the doughy rolls of flesh that composed its immovable pyramid of body. It stared back at me with its one never-closable eye.
'The jawless dwarf was born in his sad condition,' said my guide. 'But this one was a grown woman when she was mutilated in some sort of accident. It is supposed, from the lack of legs, that the accident involved some cutting instrument, and, from the look of the rest of her, that it also involved a fire. Flesh does not always burn in a fire, you know. Sometimes it merely softens, stretches, melts, so it can be shaped and molded like—'
My sick stomach heaved, and I said, 'In the name of pity. Do not talk in front of it. In front of her.'
'Her!' the man grunted, as if amused. 'You are ever the gallant with women, are you not?' He pointed at me almost accusingly. 'You have just come from the embrace of a beautiful her.' He pointed at the tapir woman. 'Now how would you like to couple with this other thing you describe as her?'
The very thought made my nausea uncontainable. I doubled over, and there in front of the monstrous living heap, I vomited up everything I had eaten and drunk that night. When I was finally empty and had recovered my breath, I threw an apologetic glance at that staring eye. Whether the eye was awake or merely watering, I do not know, but a single tear rolled down from it. My guide was gone, and I did not see him again, as I went back through the menagerie and let myself out.
But there was still another unpleasantness in store for me that night, which by then was early morning. When I reached the portal of Ahuitzotl's palace, the guard said, 'Excuse me, Tequiua Mixtli, but the court physician has been awaiting your return. Will you please see him before you go to your room?'
The guard led me to the apartment of the palace doctor, where I knocked and found him awake and fully dressed. The guard saluted us both and went back to his post. The physician regarded me with an expression compounded of curiosity, pity, and professional unction. For a moment I thought he had waited up to prescribe a remedy for the queasiness I still felt. But he said, 'The boy Cozcatl is your slave, is he not?'
I said he was, and asked if he had been taken ill.
'He has suffered an accident. Not a mortal one, I am happy to say, but not a trivial one either. When the plaza crowd began to disperse, he was noticed lying unconscious beside the Battle Stone. It may be that he stood too close to the duelists.'
I had not given Cozcatl a thought since I had appointed him to keep watch for any sign of a lurking Chimali. I said, 'He was cut, then, Lord Doctor?'
'Badly cut,' he said, 'and oddly cut.' He kept his gaze on me as he picked up a stained cloth from a table, opened its folds, and held it out for me to see what it contained: an immature male member and its sac of ololtin, pale and limp and bloodless.
'Like an earlobe,' I muttered.
'What?' said the physician.
'You say it is not a mortal wound?'
'Well, you or I might consider it so,' the doctor said drily. 'But the boy will not die of it, no. He lost an amount of blood, and it appears from bruises and other marks on his body that he was roughly handled, perhaps by the jostling mob. But he will live, and let us hope that he will not much mourn the loss of what he never had a chance to learn the value of. The cut was a clean one. It will heal over, in no more time than it takes him to recover from the loss of blood. I have arranged that the wound, in closing, will leave a necessary small aperture. He is in your apartment now, Tequiua Mixtli, and I took the liberty of placing him in your softer bed, rather than on his pallet.'
I thanked the doctor and hurried upstairs. Cozcatl was lying on his back in the middle of my thickly quilted bed, the top quilt drawn over him. His face was flushed with a slight fever and his breathing was shallow. Very gently, not to wake him, I edged the covering down off him. He was naked except for the bandage between his legs, held in place by a swathing of tape around his hips. There were bruises on his shoulder where a hand had clutched him while the knife was wielded. But the doctor had mentioned 'other marks,' and I saw none—until Cozcatl, probably feeling the chill of the night air, murmured in his sleep and rolled over to expose his back.
'Your vigilance and loyalty will not go unrewarded,' I had told the boy, little suspecting what that reward would be. The vengeful Chimali had indeed been in the crowd that day, but I had been almost all the time in such prominent places that he could make no sneak attack on me. So he had seen and recognized and assaulted my slave instead. But why injure such a small and comparatively valueless servant?
Then I recalled the curious expression on the doctor's face, and I realized that he had been thinking what Chimali must also have thought. Chimali had assumed that the boy was to me what Tlatli had been to him. He had struck at the child, not to deprive me of an expendable slave, but to mutilate my supposed cuilontli, in the way best calculated to shock me, to mock me.
All of that went through my mind when I saw, slapped in the middle of Cozcatl's slender back, the familiar red handprint of Chimali, only for once not in Chimali's own blood.
Since it was then so late, or so early, that the open skylight in the ceiling was beginning to pale—and since both my head and my stomach still hurt so horrendously—I sat by Cozcatl's sickbed, not even trying to doze, trying instead to think.
I remembered the vicious Chimali in the years before he became vicious, in the years when he was still my friend. He had himself been of just about Cozcatl's age on that memorable evening when I led him home across Xaltocan, wearing the pumpkin on his head to hide his tufted hair. I remembered how he had commiserated with me when he went off to the calmecac and I did not, and how he once had given me that gift of his specially concocted paints—
Which led me to think about that other unexpected bequest I had received just a few days ago. Everything in it was of great value, except for one thing which had no apparent value whatever, at least here in Tenochtitlan. That was the bundle containing unfinished obsidian rocks, which were easily and cheaply obtainable from their nearby source, the canyon bed of The River of Knives, no long journey northeast of here. However, those rough chunks would be almost as prized as jadestone in the nations farther south, which had no such sources of obsidian from which to fashion their tools and weapons. That one 'worthless' bundle made me recall some of the ambitions I had entertained and the ideas I had evolved in my long-ago days as an idly dreaming farm boy on the chinampa of Xaltocan.
When the morning was full light, I quietly washed myself, cleaned my teeth, and changed into fresh garments. I went downstairs, found the palace steward, and requested an early interview with the Uey-Tlatoani. Ahuitzotl was gracious enough to grant it, and I had not long to wait before I was ushered into his presence in that trophy-hung throne room.
The first thing he said was, 'We hear that your small slave got in the way of a swinging blade yesterday.'
I said, 'So it seems, Revered Speaker, but he will recover.' I had no intention of denouncing Chimali, or demanding a search for him, or even of mentioning his name. It would have necessitated some heretofore undisclosed revelations about the last days of Ahuitzotl's daughter—revelations involving Cozcatl and myself as well as Chimali. They could rekindle Ahuitzotl's paternal anguish and anger, and he might very well execute me and the boy before he even sent soldiers looking for Chimali.
He said, 'We are sorry. Accidents are not infrequent among the spectators of the duels. We will be glad to assign you another slave while yours is incapacitated.'
'Thank you, Lord Speaker, but I really require no attendant. I came to request a different sort of favor. Having come into a small inheritance, I should like to invest it all in goods, and try my success at being a merchant.'
