Aztec Autumn

expect you to be a virgin.' My voice went up into a squeak again, as she began slowly, almost teasingly, to unwind the felted tochomitl garment that wrapped her loins. 'I am told that a female, after even one single time of lovemaking, is not a virgin, and that the fact is manifest on her wedding night. In which case you would be fortunate if you were accepted as a wife by even a—'

She sighed as if much exasperated by my nervous maundering. 'I told you, Tenamaxtli, I have been taught by other women. If ever I do have a wedding night, I shall be prepared. There is an astringent ointment to make me tighter than a virgin only eight years old. And a certain sort of pigeon's egg to insert inside me. Unnoticed by my husband, it will break at the proper moment.'

My voice gone gruff again, I said, 'You certainly seem to have given this considerable thought before you invited me to—'

'Ayya, will you be quiet? Are you afraid of me? Cease your blithering, idiot cousin, and come here!' And she lay back on my pallet and drew me down beside her, and I surrendered utterly.

I found that she had spoken truthfully, also, about her being different in that place, too. The earlier times that I had seen her naked, there had been only a small, barely defined crease at her groin. The tipili there now was rather more than a crease, and within it were marvels. Marvels.

I am sure that anyone observing our inexperienced fumblings, even a totally disinterested cuilontli, would have been overcome with laughter. In my unreliable voice, which wavered through every tone from reed flute to conch trumpet to turtleshell drum, I kept stammering inanities like 'Is this the right way?' and 'What do I do with this?' and 'Would you prefer that I do this... or this?' Ameyatl, more calmly, was saying things like 'If you gently spread it open with your fingers, as if it were an oyster shell, you will come upon a little tiny pearl, my xacapili...' and, not calmly at all, 'Yes! There! Ayyo, yes!' And, of course, after a while she abandoned all calm, and I was no longer nervous, and we were both crying inarticulate noises of rapture and delight.

The thing I remember best, about that coupling and all the subsequent others, is how well Patzcatl-Ameyatl personified her name. It means 'Fountain of Juice,' and when we lay together, that is what she was. I have known many women since then, but have found none who was so copious of juices. That first time, my first mere touch of her started her tipili exuding its water-clear but lubricant fluid. Soon we were both—and the pallet, too—slick and shiny with it. When we finally got to the act of penetration, Ameyatl's virginity-protecting chitoli membrane gave way without resistance. She was virginally tight, but there was no forcing or frustration at all. My tepuli was welcomed by those juices, and it glided right in. On later occasions, Ameyatl started her fountaining as soon as she unwound her tochomitl—and later still, as soon as she entered my room. And sometimes, still later, when we were both fully dressed and in the company of others and were behaving with impeccable propriety, she would cast me a certain look that said, 'I see you, Tenamaxtli... and I am moist beneath my clothes.'

That is why, on my thirteenth birthday, I was secretly a little amused when Ameyatl's father, my uncle, inelegantly but with good intentions, bade me accompany him to the foremost house of auyanime in Aztlan. and selected for me an auyanimi of prime quality. Smug young sprig that I was, I thought I already knew everything a man could know about the act of ahuilnema with a female. Well, I soon discovered—with delight, with several moments of real surprise, even now and then with mild shock—that there were a great many things I did not know, things that my cousin and I would never once have thought to try.

For example, I was briefly taken aback when the girl did to me with her mouth what I thought only cuilontli males did between themselves, because it was what Yeyac had once tried to do to me. But my tepuli was more mature now, and the girl so expertly excited it that I erupted with glorious gratification. Then she showed me how to do the same to her xacapili. I learned that that inconspicuous pearl, though so much tinier than a man's organ, can likewise be mouthed and tongued and suckled until, all by itself, it impels a female to virtual convulsions of joy. On learning this, I began to suspect that no woman ever actually needed a man—that is to say, his tepuli—since another woman, or even a child, could give her that same sort of joy. When I said so, the girl laughed, but agreed, and told me that that lovemaking between females is called patlachuia.

When I left the girl the next morning and returned to the palace, Ameyatl was impatiently waiting for me, and urgently hustled me off to where we could converse in private. Though she knew where I had spent the night, and what I had been doing all the night long, she was neither jealous nor distressed. Quite the contrary. She was almost aquiver to find out if I had learned any novel or exotic or voluptuously wicked things to impart to her. When I grinned and said that I certainly had, Ameyatl would that instant have dragged me off to her room or mine. But I pleaded for time to rest and recover and revitalize my own juices and energies. My cousin was no little annoyed at having to wait, but I assured her that she would much more enjoy the new things she would learn when I had regained the vigor necessary to teach them.

And so she did, and so did I, and we went on enjoying one another at every possible private moment during the next five years or so. We never were caught in the act, never even suspected, as far as I knew, by her father or brother or my mother. But neither were we ever really in love. Each of us simply happened to be the other's most convenient and ever-willing utensil. Just as on my thirteenth birthday, Ameyatl never evinced any displeasure or indignation on the few times when surely she was aware that I had sampled the charms of a servant wench or a slave girl. (Very few times, and I kiss the earth to that. None of those compared with my dear cousin.) And I would not have felt betrayed if ever Ameyatl had done the same. But I know she did not. She was a noble, after all, and she would never have hazarded her reputation with anyone she could not have trusted as she did me.

Nor was I heartbroken when, in her twenty-first year, Ameyatl had to forsake me and take a husband. As with most marriages between young pipiltin, this one was arranged by the fathers involved, Mixtzin and Kevari, tlatocapili of Yakoreke, the community nearest ours to the southward. Ameyatl was formally betrothed to become the wife of Kevari's son Kauri, who was about her own age. It was obvious to me (and to Canautli, our Rememberer of History) that my uncle was thus allying our people and Yakoreke's as a subtle step toward making Aztlan again —as it long ago had been—the capital city of all the surrounding territories and peoples.

I did not know whether Ameyatl and Kauri had even got to know one another very well, not to say love one another, but they would have been obliged to obey their fathers' wishes in any case. Besides, in my view, Kauri was a passably personable and acceptable mate for my cousin, so my only emotion on the day of the ceremony was some slight apprehension. However, after the priest of Xochiquetzal had tied the corners of their separate mantles in the wedding knot, and all the traditional festivities were over, and the couple had retired to their finely furnished quarters in the palace, none of us wedding guests heard any scandalized uproar from there. I assumed, with relief, that the tight-making ointment and the tucked-inside pigeon's egg, as prescribed by Ameyatl's old-crone advisers all those years before, had sufficed to satisfy Kauri that he had wed an untarnished virgin. And no doubt she had further convinced him with a maidenly show of ineptitude at the act she had so artfully been practicing during those years.

Ameyatl and Kauri were married only shortly before the day that I and my mother Cuicani and Uncle Mixtzin departed for the City of Mexico. And I deemed that my uncle showed perspicacity in appointing not his son and presumptive heir Yeyac, but his clever daughter and her husband to govern in his place. It would be a long, long time before I would see Ameyatl again, and then in circumstances that neither of us could remotely have imagined when she waved good-bye to us wayfarers that day.

  V

So I stood in what had been The Heart of The One World, my knuckles white from clenching tight in my hand the topaz that had belonged to my late father, my eyes probably fiery, and I demanded of my uncle and mother that we do something to avenge that Mixtli's death. My mother merely sniffled miserably again. But Mixtzin regarded me with sympathy tempered by skepticism, and asked sardonically:

'What would you have us do, Tenamaxtli? Set the city aflame? Stone does not readily catch fire. And we are but three. The whole of the all-powerful Mexica nation was unable to stand against these white men. Well? What would you have us do?'

I stammered witlessly, 'I... I...' then paused to collect my thoughts, and after a moment I said:

'The Mexica were taken by surprise because they were invaded by a people never previously known to exist. It was that surprise and the ensuing confusion that caused the downfall of the Mexica. They simply did not recognize the white men's capabilities and cunning and lust for conquest. Now all of The One World does. What we still do not know is in what way the Spaniards may be vulnerable. They must have a weak point somewhere, a soft