Aztec

interpreter:

'Master Xibalba, these crystals make a looked-at object look bigger. Have you ever contrived a kind of crystal that would make objects appear smaller?'

'Oh, yes,' he said, smiling. 'Even my greatest-grandfather probably tried his hand at fashioning other things than burning crystals. We all have. I do myself, just for amusement.'

I told him how limited was my vision, and added, 'A Maya doctor told me that my eyes behave as if I am always looking through one of the enlarging quartzes. I wondered, if I could find such a thing as a reducing crystal, and if I looked through it...'

He regarded me with interest, and rubbed his chin, and said, 'Hm,' and went through the back of his workshop to his house. He returned with a wooden tray of shallow compartments, each holding a crystal. They were of all different shapes; some were even miniature pyramids.

'I keep these only for curiosities,' said the artisan. 'They are of no practical use, but some have amusing properties. This one, for instance.' He lifted out a short bar of three flat sides. 'It is not quartz, but a transparent kind of limestone. And I do not grind this stone; it cleaves naturally in flat planes. Hold it yonder, in the sun, and see the light it throws on your hand.'

I did, half expecting to flinch from a burn. Instead I exclaimed, 'The mist of water jewels!' The sunlight passing through the crystal to my hand was transformed; it was a colored band, ranging from dark red at one extreme, through yellow and green and blue, to the deepest purple; it was a tiny simulacrum of the colored bow one sees in the sky after a rain. 'But you are not looking for playthings,' said the man. 'Here.' And he gave me a crystal of which both surfaces were concave; that is to say, it was like two dishes with their bottoms cemented together.

I held it over the embroidered hem of my mantle, and the pattern shrank to half its width. I raised my head, still holding the crystal before me, and looked at the artisan. The man's features, blurred before, were suddenly sharp and distinct, but his face was so small that he might that instant have leapt away from me and out the door and entirely across the plaza.

'It is a marvel,' I said, shaken. I put down the crystal and rubbed at my eye. 'I could see you... but so far away.'

'Ah, then that one diminishes too powerfully. They have different strengths. Try this one.'

It was concave only on one side; the other face was perfectly flat. I raised the thing cautiously...

'I can see,' I said, and I said it like a prayer of thanksgiving to the most beneficent of gods. 'I can see far and near. There are spots and ripples, but everything else is as clear and sharp as when I was a child. Master Xibalba, you have done something the celebrated Maya physicians admit they cannot. You have made me see again!'

'And all those sheaves of years... we thought these things useless...' he murmured, sounding rather awed himself. Then he spoke briskly. 'So it requires the crystal of one plane surface and an inner curve. But you cannot go about forever holding the thing out in front of you like that. It would be like peering through a knothole. Try bringing it close against your eye.'

I did, and cried out, and apologized: 'It hurt as if my eye was being drawn from its socket.'

'Still too powerful. And there are spots and ripples, you say. So I must seek a stone more perfect and unflawed than the finest quartz.' He smiled and rubbed his hands together. 'You have set me the first new task the Xibalba have had in generations. Come back tomorrow.'

I was full of excitement and expectation, but I said nothing to my companions, in case that hopeful experiment too should come to nothing. They and I again resided with the Macoboo, to our great comfort and the great gratification of the two female cousins, and we stayed for six or seven days. During that time, I visited the Xibalba workshop several times daily, while the master labored over the most scrupulously exact crystal he had ever been asked to make. He had procured a wonderfully clear chunk of jewel-grade topaz, and had begun by shaping it into a flat disk of a circumference that covered my eye from brow to cheekbone. The crystal was to remain flat on its outer side, but the inner concavity's precise thickness and curvature could be determined only by the experiment of my looking through it every time the master ground it down a little more.

'I can keep thinning it and increasing the arc of curve little by little,' he said, 'until we reach the exact reducing power you require. But we must know when we reach it. If ever I grind away too much, the thing is ruined.'

So I kept going back for trials, and when my one eye got bloodshot from the strain, we would change to my other, and then back again. But finally, to my inexpressible joy, there came the day, and the moment in that day, when I could hold the crystal against either eye, and see through it perfectly. Everything in the world was clear and crisply outlined, from a book held in reading position to the trees on the mountain horizon beyond the city. I was in ecstasy, and Master Xibalba was nearly so, with pride in his unprecedented creation.

He gave the crystal one final gleaming polish, with a wet paste of some fine red clay. Then he smoothed the crystal's edge and mounted it in a sturdy circlet of copper hammered to hold it securely, and that circlet had a short handle with which I could hold the crystal to either eye, and the handle was tied to a leather thong so I could keep it always about my neck, ready for use and safe from loss. I took the finished instrument to the Macoboo house, but showed it to no one, and waited for an opportunity to surprise Blood Glutton and Cozcatl.

When the twilight was turning to night, we sat in the door-yard with our hostess, the late Ten's mother, and a few others of the family, all of us elder males having a smoke after our evening meal. The Chiapa do not smoke the poquietl. Instead, they use a clay jar punctured with several holes; this they pack with picietl and fragrant herbs and set to smoldering; then each participant inserts a long, hollow reed into one of the jar's holes and all enjoy a community smoke.

'Yonder approaches a handsome girl,' murmured Blood Glutton, pointing his reed down the street.

I could barely make out a distant suggestion of something pale moving in the dusk, but I said, 'Ask me to describe her.'

'Eh?' grunted the old soldier, and he lifted his eyebrows at me, and he sarcastically used my former nickname. 'Very well, Fogbound, describe her—as you see her.'

I put my crystal to my left eye and the girl came sharply into view, even in that poor light. Enthusiastically, like a slave trader at the block, I enumerated all the visible details of her physique—skin complexion, length of her hair plaits, the shapeliness of her bare ankles and feet, the regular features of her face, which was handsome indeed. I added that the embroidery on her blouse was of the so-called pottery pattern. 'She also wears,' I concluded, 'a thin veil over her hair, and under it she has trapped a number of live fireflies. A most fetching adornment.' Then I burst out laughing at the expression on the faces of my two partners.

Since I could use only one eye at a time, there was a certain flatness, a lack of depth to everything I looked at. Nevertheless, I could again see almost as clearly as I had when I was a child, and that sufficed for me. I might mention that the topaz was of the pale-yellow color; when I looked through it I saw everything seemingly sunlighted even on gray days; so perhaps I saw the world as rather prettier than others did. But, as I discovered when I looked into a mirror, the use of the crystal did not make me any prettier, since the eye behind it appeared much smaller than the uncovered one. Also, because it was natural for me to hold the crystal in my left hand while my right was occupied, for some time I suffered from headache. I soon learned always to hold the topaz to alternate eyes, and the headache went away.

I know, reverend scribes, that you must be amused at my fulsome babbling about an instrument that is no novelty to you. But I never saw another such device until many years later, until my first encounter with the earliest arriving Spaniards. One of the chaplain friars who came with the Captain-General Cortes wore two such crystals, one for each eye, held in a leather strap which was tied around his head.

But to me and the crystalsmith, my device was an unheard-of invention. In fact, he refused all payment for his labor and even for the topaz, which must have been most costly. He insisted that he was well repaid by his own pride in his achievement. So, since he would take nothing from me, I left with the Macoboo family a quantity of quetzal tototl plumes to be delivered to him when I was long enough gone that he could not refuse them—and I left a sufficiency to make the Master Xibalba perhaps the richest man in Chiapan, as I felt he deserved to be.

At night I looked at stars.

From having been for so long so deeply dejected, I was suddenly and understandably buoyant of spirit, and I announced to my partners, 'Now that I can see, I should like to see the ocean!'

They were so pleased with the change in me that they did not demur when we left Chiapan going southward rather than westward, and had to make our way over and through yet another jumble of rugged mountains, and