hundred twenty and one beans. The difference may sound trifling, but it mounts proportionately each month, and on substantial sums it can mount alarmingly.
I demanded a recalculation from the very start of Wayay's giving credit to the inn. Ayya, he squawked as he must have done when he awoke from that disastrous mushroom rapture of his priesthood days. But, when I suggested that we refer the matter to Tecuantepec's bishosu for adjudication, he gritted his teeth and redid the arithmetic, with me closely monitoring. There were many other details to be argued, such as the inn's expenses and profits over the four years he had been running it. But finally, as dawn was breaking, we agreed on a lump sum due him, and I agreed to pay in currency of gold dust, copper and tin snippets, and cacao beans. Before I did so, I said:
'You have forgotten one small item. I owe you for the lodging of my own train.'
'Ah, yes,' said the fat old fraud. 'Honest of you to remind me.' And he added that to the accounting.
As if suddenly remembering, I said, 'Oh, one other thing.'
'Yes?' he said expectantly, his chalk poised to add it in.
'Subtract four years' wages due the woman Gie Bele.'
'What?' He stared at me aghast. She stared too, but in dazzled admiration. 'Wages?' he sneered. 'The woman was bound over to me as a tlacotli.'
'If your accounting had been honest, she would not have been. Look at your own revised arithmetic. The Bishosu might have awarded you a half interest in this property. You have not only swindled Gie Bele, you have also enslaved a free citizen.'
'All right, all right. Let me count. Two cacao beans a day—
'Those are slave wages. You have had the services of the inn's former proprietress. Certainly worth a freeman's wage of twenty beans a day.' He clutched his hair and howled. I added, 'You are a barely tolerated alien in Tecuantepec. She is of the Ben Zaa, and so is the Bishosu. If we go to him...'
He immediately ceased his tantrum and began frantically to scribble, dripping sweat onto the bark paper. Then he did howl.
'More than twenty and nine thousand! There are not that many beans on all the cacao bushes in all the Hot Lands!'
'Translate it to gold-dust quills,' I suggested. 'It will not sound so big a sum.'
'Will it not?' he bellowed, when he had done the figuring. 'Why, if I accede to the wage demand, I have lost my very loincloth on the entire transaction. To subtract that amount means you pay me less than half the original amount I paid out as a loan!' His voice had gone up to a squeak and he sweated as if he were melting.
'Yes,' I said. 'That agrees with my own figures. How will you have it? All in gold? Or some in tin? In copper?' I had fetched my pack from the room I had not yet occupied.
'This is extortion!' he raged. 'This is robbery!'
There was also a small obsidian dagger in the pack. I took it out and held its point against Wayay's second or third chin.
'Extortion and robbery it was,' I said in my coldest voice. 'You cheated a defenseless woman of her property, then made her drudge for you during four long years, and I know to what desperate straits she had come. I hold you to the arithmetic you yourself have just now done. I will pay you the amount you last arrived at—'
'Ruination!' he bawled. 'Devastation!'
'You will write me a receipt, and on it you will write that the payment voids all your claim on this property and this woman, now and forever. You will then, while I watch, tear up that old pledge signed by her husband. You will then take whatever personal possessions you have, and depart these premises.'
He made one last try at defiance: 'And if I refuse?'
'I march you to the Bishosu at knife point. The punishment for theft is the flower-garland garrotte. I do not know what you would suffer beforehand, as a penalty for enslaving the free-born, since I do not know the refinements of torture in this nation.'
Slumping in final defeat, he said, 'Put away the knife. Count out the currency.' He raised his head to snap at Gie Bele, 'Bring me fresh paper—' then winced and made his tone unctuous, 'Please, my lady, bring me paper and paints and a writing reed.'
I counted quills of gold dust and stacks of tin and copper onto the cloth between us, and there was little but lint left in the pack when I was done. I said, 'Make the receipt to my name. In the language of this place I am called Zaa Nayazu.'
'Never was an ill-omened man better named,' he muttered, as he began to make the word pictures and columns of number glyphs. And he wept as he worked at it, I swear.
I felt Gie Bele's hand on my shoulder and I looked up at her. She had labored all the day before and then had endured a sleepless night, not to mention other things, but she stood straight, and her glorious eyes shone, and her whole face glowed.
I said, 'This will not take long. Why do you not go back and fetch the girls? Bring them home.'
When my partners woke and came for breakfast, Cozcatl looked rested and bright again, but Blood Glutton looked somewhat drawn. He ordered a meal consisting mainly of raw eggs, then said to the woman, 'Send me the landlord, too. I owe him ten cacao beans.' He added, 'Spendthrift lecher that I am, and at my age.'
She smiled and said, 'For that entertainment—for you—no charge, my lord,' and went away.
'Huh?' grunted Blood Glutton, staring after her. 'No inn gives that commodity free.'
I reminded him, 'Cynical old grouch, you said there are no first times. Perhaps there are.'
'You may be crazy, and so may she, but the innkeeper—'
'As of last night, she is the innkeeper.'
'Huh?' he blurted again. He said huh? twice more, once when his breakfast platter was brought by the surpassingly lovely girl of my own age, and again when his big cup of frothy chocolate was brought by the surpassingly lovely younger girl with the streak of pale lightning in her black hair.
'What has happened here?' Blood Glutton asked bewilderedly. 'We stop at a rundown hostel, an inferior establishment of one greasy Zoque and one slave woman...'
'And overnight,' said Cozcatl, sounding equally amazed, 'Mixtli turns it into a temple full of goddesses.'
Our party stayed a second night at the inn, and when all was quiet, Gie Bele stole into my room, more radiant in her newfound happiness than she had been before, and that time the lovingness of our embrace was not at all dissembled, or forced, or in any other way distinguishable from an act of true and mutual love.
When I and my troop shouldered our packs and took our leave, early the next morning, she and then each of the daughters held me tight and covered my face with tear-wet kisses and said a heartfelt thank-you. I looked back several times, until I could no longer make out the inn among the blurry jumble of other buildings.
I did not know when I would be back, but I had sown seeds there, and from that time on, however far and long I wandered, I could never again be a stranger among the Cloud People, any more than the farthest climbing tendril of a vine can detach itself from its roots in the earth. That much I knew. What I could not know, or even dream, was what fruit those seeds would bear—of glad surprise and crushing tragedy, of wealth and loss, of joy and misery. It would be a long time before I tasted the first of those fruits, and a longer time before they all ripened in their turn, and on one of those fruits I have not yet fed entirely to its bitter core.
* * *
As you know, reverend friars, this entire land of New Spain is lapped on either side by a great sea which extends from the shore to the horizon. Since the seas lie more or less directly east and west of Tenochtitlan, we Mexica have generally referred to them as the eastern and western oceans. But, from Tecuantepec onward, the land mass itself bends eastward, so those waters are more accurately called there the northern and southern oceans, and the land is only a narrow, low-lying isthmus separating the two. I do not mean that a man can stand between the oceans and spit into whichever he chooses. The waist of the isthmus is something like fifty one-long- runs from north to south, about a ten-day journey, but an easy one, because most of the land between is so flat and featureless.
However, on that journey, we were not crossing from one coast to the other. We traveled eastward over the misnamed Jaguar Hill flat plains, with the southern oceans always somewhere not far to our right, though never within sight of the trail. We had sea gulls hovering overhead more often than vultures. Except for the oppressive heat of those lowlands, the marching was easy, even monotonous, with nothing to look at but tall yellow grass and low gray scrub. We made good time, and there was an abundance of easily killable game for food—rabbits, iguanas,
