Aztec

little that is readily chewable except the lips and cheeks and tongue.

Blood Glutton told our slaves, 'Take their maquahuime and destroy them. Go through their pouches and see if they carry anything worth our filching.'

Six took the swords and, one at a time, pounded them on a rock until their obsidian edges were all smashed to powder. Ten and Four searched the bandits' belongings, even inside the loincloths they wore. They carried nothing but the barest essentials of travel: fire-drilling sticks and moss tinder, tooth-brushing twigs and the like.

Blood Glutton said, 'Those hares on the fire look to be ready. Start carving them, Cozcatl.' He turned to bark at the Tya Nuu, 'And you! It is unmannerly to let us eat alone. You keep feeding as long as we do.'

All four of the wretches had several times regurgitated what they had already eaten, but they did as they were bidden, tearing with their teeth at the remaining gristle of what had been ears and noses. The sight was enough to spoil any appetite I might have had, or Cozcatl. But the stony old soldier and our twelve slaves fell to the broiled hare meat with alacrity.

Finally, Blood Glutton came to where Cozcatl and I sat, with our backs to the eaters, wiped his greasy mouth on his horny hand, and said, 'We could take the Mixteca along as slaves, but someone would constantly have to guard against their treachery. Not worth the trouble, in my opinion.'

I said, 'Then kill them, for all I care. They look very near dead right now.'

'No-o,' Blood Glutton said thoughtfully, sucking a back tooth. 'I suggest we let them go. Bandits do not employ swift-messengers or far-callers, but they do have some method of exchanging information about troops to be avoided and traders ripe for robbery. If these four go free to spread their story around, it ought to make any other such bands think twice before attacking us.'

'It certainly ought,' I said to the man who had not long ago described himself as an old bag of wind and bones.

So we retrieved the packs of Four, Six, and Ten, and the spare weapons of Blood Glutton, and continued on our way. The Tya Nuu did not immediately scamper to put even more distance between us. Sick and exhausted, they simply sat where we left them, too weak even to throw away the bloody, hairy, fly-covered skulls they still held on their laps.

That day's sundown found us in the middle of a green and pleasant but totally uninhabited valley: no village, no inn, no slightest man-made shelter to be seen. Blood Glutton kept us marching until we came to a rivulet of good water, and there he showed us how to make camp. For the first time on the journey, we used our drill and tinder to kindle a fire, and on it we cooked our own evening meal—or the slaves Ten and Three did. We took our blankets from our packs to make our own beds on the ground, all of us all too conscious that there were no walls about the camp or any roof over it, that we were no multitudinous and mutually protective army, that there was only the night and the creatures of the night all around us, and that the god Night Wind that night blew chill.

After we had eaten, I stood at the edge of our circle of firelight and looked out into the darkness: so dark that, even if I could have seen, I would have seen nothing. There was no moon and, if there were stars, they were imperceptible to me.

It was not like my one military campaign, when events had taken me and many others into a foreign land. To this place I had come on my own, and in this place I felt that I was a stray, and an inconsequential one, and reckless rather than fearless. During my nights with the army, there had always been a tumult of talk and noise and commotion, there had been the realization of a crowd about. But that night, behind me in the glow of our single campfire, there was only the occasional quiet word and the subdued sound of the slaves cleaning the utensils, putting wood on the flames and dry brush under our sleeping blankets, the sound of the dogs scuffling for the leavings of our meal.

Before me, in the darkness, there was no trace of activity or humanity. I might have been looking as far as the edge of the world and seeing not another human being or any evidence of another human's ever having been there. And out of the night before me, the wind brought to my ears only one sound, perhaps the loneliest sound one can hear: the barely audible faraway ululation of a coyote wailing as if he mourned for something lost and gone.

I have seldom in my life known loneliness, even when I was most solitary. But that night I did, when I stood—deliberately, to try whether I could endure it—with my back to the world's one patch of light and warmth and my face to the black and empty and uncaring unknown.

Then I heard Blood Glutton order, 'Sleep as you would at home or in any bedchamber, entirely undressed. Take off all your clothes or you will really feel the chill in the morning, believe me.'

Cozcatl spoke up, trying but failing to sound as if he were joking, 'Suppose a jaguar comes, and we have to run.'

With a straight face, Blood Glutton said, 'If a jaguar comes, boy, I guarantee that you will run without noticing whether you are dressed or not. Anyway, a jaguar will eat your garments with as much gusto as he eats little-boy meat.' Perhaps he saw Cozcatl's lower lip tremble, for the old soldier chuckled. 'Do not worry. No cat will come near a burning campfire, and I will see that it goes on burning.' He sighed and added, 'It is a habit left over from many campaigns. Every time the fire dims, I awaken. I will keep it fed.'

I found no great discomfort in rolling myself into my two blankets, with only some brittle scrub piled between my bare body and the hard, cold ground, because for the last month in my palace chambers I had been sleeping on Cozcatl's thinly cushioned pallet. During that same time, though, Cozcatl had been sleeping in my billowy, soft, warm bed, and evidently he had got accustomed to comfort. For that night, while snores and wheezes came from the other bundled forms about the fire, I heard him restlessly shifting and turning in his place on the ground, trying to find a reposeful position, and whimpering slightly when he could not. So finally I hissed over to him, 'Cozcatl, bring your blankets here.'

He came, gratefully, and with his blankets and mine we arranged a double thickness of both pallet and cover. Then, the activity having chilled both our naked bodies to violent shivering, we hastened to get into the improved bed, and huddled together like two nested dishes: Cozcatl's back arched into my front, my arms around him. Gradually our shivering abated, and Cozcatl murmured, 'Thank you, Mixtli,' and he soon was breathing the regular soft breaths of sleep.

But then I could not doze off. As my body warmed against his, so did my imagination. It was not like resting alongside a man, the way we soldiers had lain in windrows to keep warm and dry in Texcala. And it was not like lying with a woman, as I had last done on the night of the warrior's banquet. No, it was like the times I had lain with my sister, in the early days of our first exploring and discovering and experimenting with each other, when she had been no bigger than the boy was. I had grown much since then, in many respects, but Cozcatl's body, so small and tender, reminded me of how Tzitzitlini had felt, pressed against me, in the time when she too was a child. My tepuli stirred and began to push itself upward between my belly and the boy's buttocks. Sternly I reminded myself that Cozcatl was a boy, and only half my age.

Nevertheless, my hands also remembered Tzitzi and, without my commanding them, they moved reminiscently along the boy's body—the not yet muscular or angular shape, so much like a young girl's; the not yet toughened skin; the slight indentation of waist and the childishly pudgy abdomen; the soft, cloven backside; the slim legs. And there, between the legs, not the stiff or spongy protuberance of male parts, but a smooth, inviting inward declivity. His buttocks nestled in my groin, while my member burrowed between his thighs, against the furrow of soft scar tissue that could have been a closed tipili, and by then I was too much aroused to refrain from doing what I did next. Hoping I might do it without waking him, I began very, very gently to move.

'Mixtli?' the boy whispered, in a wondering way.

I stopped my movement and laughed, quietly but shakily, and whispered, 'Perhaps I should have brought along a woman slave after all.'

He shook his head and said sleepily, 'If I can be of that use...' and he wriggled backward even more intimately against me, and he tightened his thighs about my tepuli, and I resumed my movement.

When later we were both asleep, still nestled together, I dreamt a jeweled dream of Tzitzitlini, and I believe I did that thing once again during the night—in the dream with my sister, in reality with the little boy.

I think I can understand Fray Toribio's abrupt and flustered departure. He goes to teach a catechism class of young people, does he not?

I myself wondered if overnight I had become a cuilontli, and whether I would henceforward yearn only for small boys, but the worry did not long persist. At the end of the next day's march we came to a village named