Aztec

'Let them see!' she almost screamed. 'They will be lying here on other nights!' Her face was wet with tears, and I finally understood that she was not so resigned to whoredom as she had tried to pretend. I grimaced at the girls and made a violent gesture. Looking frightened, they whisked out through the door curtain. But Gie Bele did not notice, and cried again, as if demanding the utmost debasement of herself, 'Let them see what they will be doing!'

'You want others to see, woman?' I growled at her. 'Let them see the better, then!'

Instead of sprawling atop her, I turned onto my back, lifting her at the same time, and set her kneeling astride me, and I impaled her to the hilt of myself. After that first painful moment, Gie Bele slowly relaxed against me and lay quiescent in my embrace, though I could feel her tears continuing to trickle onto my bare chest. Well, it happened quickly and powerfully for me, and she certainly felt the spurt inside her, but she did not pull away as any other bought woman would then have done.

By then, her own body was wanting satisfaction, and I think she would not have noticed if the girls had been still in the hut, would not have given thought to the detailed demonstration provided by our position, or the damp noise of suction made by her rocking back and forth the length of my tepuli. When Gie Bele came to climax, she reared up and leaned back, her distended nipples pointing high, her long hair brushing my legs, her eyes shut tight, her mouth open in a mewing cry like that of a jaguar kitten. Then she collapsed again onto my chest, her head beside mine, and she lay so limp that I would have thought she had died, except that she breathed in short gasps.

After a little, when I had myself recovered, slightly more sober for the experience, I became aware of another head near me on my other side. I turned to see immense brown eyes, wide behind their luxuriant dark lashes: the winsome face of one of the daughters. At some point she had reentered the hut and knelt beside the pallet and was regarding me intently. I drew the quilt over the nakedness of myself and her still-motionless mother.

'Nu shisha skaru...' the girl began to whisper. Then, seeing that I did not comprehend, she spoke softly in a broken Nahuatl, and giggled when she told me guiltily, 'We watched through the cracks in the wall.' I groaned in shame and embarrassment; I still burn when I think of it. But then she said thoughtfully, seriously, 'Always I supposed it would be a bad thing. But your faces were good, like happy.'

Though I was in no philosophic mood, I told her quietly, 'I do not think it is ever really a bad thing, But it is much better when you do it with someone you love.' I added, 'And in private, without mice watching from the walls.'

She started to say something more, but suddenly her stomach grumbled, more loudly than her voice had spoken. She looked pathetically mortified, and tried to pretend it had not happened, and drew a little away from me.

I exclaimed, 'Child, you are hungry!'

'Child?' She petulantly tossed her head. 'I have near your age, which is old enough for—for that. I am not a child.'

I shook her drowsing mother and said, 'Gie Bele, when did your daughters last eat a meal?'

She stirred and said meekly, 'I am allowed to feed on the leftovers at the inn, but I cannot bring much home.'

'And you asked for three cacao beans!' I said angrily.

I could have remarked that it might more rightly have been myself asking a fee, for performing to an audience, or instructing the young. But I groped for my castoff loincloth and the purse I kept sewn into it. 'Here,' I said to the daughter, and caught her hands and poured into them perhaps twenty or thirty beans. 'You and your sister go and buy food. Buy fuel for the fire. Anything you like, and as much as you can carry.'

She looked at me as if I had filled her hands with emeralds. Impulsively, she bent over and kissed my cheek, then bounded up and out of the hut again. Gie Bele raised up on one elbow to look down at my face.

'You are kind to us—and after I behaved so. Please, would you let me be kinder to you now?'

I said, 'You gave me what I came to buy. I am not trying now to buy your affection.'

'But I want to give it,' she insisted, and began to give me an attention which may be exclusive to the Cloud People.

It really is much better when it is done lovingly—and in private. And she truly was so attractive that a man could hardly get enough of her. But we were up and dressed again when the girls returned, laden with comestibles: one entire and enormous plucked fowl, a basket of vegetables, many other things. Chattering cheerfully to each other, they set about building up the brazier fire, and the younger daughter courteously asked if her mother and myself would dine with them.

Gie Bele told them that we had both eaten at the inn. Now, she said, she would guide me back there and find some chore to occupy her there during what remained of the night, for if she slept she would surely oversleep the sunrise. So I bade the girls good night and we left them to what may have been, for all I knew, their first decent meal in four years. As the woman and I walked hand in hand through streets and alleys seeming darker even than before, I thought about the famished girls, their widowed and desperate mother, the greedy Zoque creditor... and at last I said abruptly:

'Would you sell me your house, Gie Bele?'

'What?' She started so that our hands came unlinked. 'That dilapidated hut? Whatever for?'

'Oh, to rebuild into something better, of course. If I continue trading, I shall certainly pass this way again, perhaps often, and a place of my own would be preferable to a crowded inn.'

She laughed at the absurdity of my lie, but pretended to take it seriously, asking, 'And where in the world would we live?'

'In some place much finer. I would pay a good price, enough to enable you to live comfortably. And,' I said firmly, 'with no necessity for the girls or you to go astraddle the road.'

'What—what would you offer to pay?'

'We will settle that right now. Here is the inn. Please to put lights in the room where we dined. And writing materials—paper and chalk will do. Meanwhile, tell me which is the room of that fat eunuch. And stop looking frightened; I am being no more imbecilic than usual.'

She gave me a wavering smile and went to do my bidding, while I took a lamp to find the proprietor's room, and interrupted his snoring with a hard kick to his massive rear end.

'Get up and come with me,' I said, as he spluttered with outrage and sleepy bewilderment. 'We have business to transact.'

'It is the middle of the night. You are drunk. Go away.'

I had almost to lift him to his feet, and it took a while to convince him that I was sober, but I finally hauled him—still struggling to knot his mantle—to the room Gie Bele had lighted for us. When I half-dragged him in, she started to sidle out.

'No, stay,' I said. 'This concerns all three of us. Fat man, fetch out all the papers pertinent to the ownership of this hostel and the debt outstanding against it. I am here to redeem the pledge.'

He and she stared at me in equal astonishment, and Wayay, after spluttering some more, said, 'This is why you rout me from my bed? You want to buy this place, you presumptuous pup? We can all go back to bed. I do not intend to sell.'

'It is not yours to sell,' I said. 'You are not its owner, but the holder of a lien. When I pay the debt and all its accrual, you are a trespasser. Go, bring the documents.'

I had the advantage of him then, when he was still befogged with sleep. But by the time we settled down to the columns of number dots and flags and little trees, he was again as acute and exacting as he had ever been in his careers of priest and currency changer. I will not regale you, my lords, with all the details of our negotiations. I will only remind you that I did know the craft of working with numbers, and I knew the craftiness possible to that craft.

What the late explorer husband had borrowed, in goods and currency, added up to an appreciable sum. However, the premium he had agreed to pay for the privilege of the loans should not have been excessive, except for the lender's cunning method of compounding it. I do not remember all the figures there involved, but I can give a simplified illustration. If I lend a man a hundred cacao beans for one month, I am entitled to the repayment of a hundred and ten. For two months, he repays a hundred and twenty beans. For three months, a hundred and thirty, and so on. But what Wayay had done was to add the ten-bean premium at the end of the first month, and then on that total of a hundred and ten to calculate the next premium, so that at the end of two months he was owed a