Aztec Autumn

'Best you address me by my pagan name—Ixtalatl—for I am no longer fit to be a Christian. I have sinned most irredeemably. I am... afflicted with chahuacocoliztli.' That long word means 'the shameful disease caused by adultery.' He went on, still sniffling, 'Not only does my heart leak. So does my tepuli. For some time now, I have not dared to embrace my good wife, and she keeps plaintively asking why.'

'Ayya,' I murmured sympathetically. 'Then you have lain with one of those importunate Purempe women. Well, a ticitl of our own people—or probably even a Spanish medico—can alleviate the ailment. And any priest of our kindly goddess Tlazolteotl can absolve you of the transgression.'

'As a Christian convert, I cannot resort to the goddess Filth Eater.'

'Then go and confess to Padre Vasco. He told me that the sin of adultery is not exactly unknown here in Utopia. Surely he has forgiven others, and has let them continue being Christians.'

Erasmo muttered guiltily, 'As a man, I am too ashamed to confess to the padre.'

'Then why, may I ask, are you confessing to me?'

'Because she wants to meet you.'

'Who?' I exclaimed, mystified. 'Your wife?'

'No. The adulterous woman.'

Now I was nonplussed. 'Why in the name of all the gods should I consent to meet a slut of polluted tipili?'

'She asked for you by name. By your pagan name. Tenamaxtli.'

'It must be Pakapeti,' I said, even more confounded, because if Tiptoe had been diseased when she and I so often and so enjoyably coupled, I too would be hurting and leaking by now. And there had hardly been time since then for some other male passerby to have—

'Her name is not Pakapeti,' said Erasmo, and astounded me again by announcing, 'Here she comes now.'

This was too coincidental to be coincidence. The woman must have been observing our approach from some nearby hiding place, and now stepped forward to meet us. She was no one I had ever seen before, and I hoped I would never again see such a cold and gloating smile as she was smiling at me. Erasmo, speaking Nahuatl, not Pore, said without enthusiasm:

'Cuatl Tenamaxtli, this is G'nda Ke, who expressed a fervent wish to meet you.'

I spoke no courteous salutation to her, saying only, 'G'nda Ke is not a Purempe name. And you have abundant hair on your head.'

Clearly she understood Nahuatl, for she said, 'G'nda Ke is Yaki,' and gave a haughty toss of her dead-black mane.

Erasmo mumbled, 'I must go. My wife...' and scampered back toward his home.

'If you are a Yaki,' I said to the woman, 'you are far from home.'

'G'nda Ke has been many years away from that home.'

That was the way she talked, not ever saying 'I' or 'me.' She spoke always as if she were standing apart from her own physical presence. She appeared to be no older than myself, and she was fair of face and form; I could understand how easily she must have seduced Erasmo. But whether G'nda Ke smiled, frowned or wore no expression whatever, her visage never ceased to seem gloating. It implied that she possessed some private, secret, unclean bit of knowledge with which she could damage or even damn to Mictlan any person she chose. There was one other feature of her face that was only rarely seen among our people.

'You have a profusion of freckles,' I said, not caring if I was being rude, because I supposed it was a manifestation of her detestable disease.

'G'nda Ke is freckled all over her body,' she said with a gloating grin, as if inviting me to have a look.

I ignored that, and asked, 'What brought you so far south from the Yaki lands? Are you on a quest of some sort?'

'Yes.'

'What do you seek?'

'You.'

I laughed, without humor. 'I did not realize that my attractiveness had such a long reach. Anyway, you found Erasmo instead.'

'Only to find you.'

I laughed again. 'Erasmo has good reason to wish you had never found him.'

She said indifferently, 'Erasmo does not matter. G'nda Ke hopes that he will convey the disease to every other Mexicatl here. They deserve the agony and the shame. They are as flabby and cowardly as their forebears who refused to leave Aztlan with me.'

My memory stirred. And, I think, so did the roots of my back hair. I recalled how my great-grandfather, Canautli the Rememberer, had told of the long-ago Yaki woman—and yes, her name had been G'nda Ke—who turned some of the peaceable early Azteca into the bellicose Mexica who battled their way to greatness.

'That was sheaves of sheaves of years ago,' I said, certain that she did not need my explaining of what 'that' was. 'If you did not die then, as reported, Yaki woman, how old must you be?'

'That does not matter either. What matters is that you, too, Tenamaxtli, have left Aztlan. And now you are of a disposition to accept G'nda Ke's gift of her other disease.'

I blurted, 'By Huitzli, I want none of your afflictions!'

'Ayyo, but you do! You just spoke the word—the name of him—Huitzilopochtli, god of war. For that is G'nda Ke's other disease, and one she will happily help you spread through all The One World. War!'

I could only stare at her. I had not lately partaken of chapari, so this awful creature was hardly a drunken hallucination.

'You will recruit no warriors here, Tenamaxtli. Do not be tempted to loiter in this easeful Utopia. Your tonali has destined you to a harder life, and a more glorious one. Go north. You and G'nda Ke will meet again, probably many times, along the way. Wherever you need her, she will be there, to help infect others with the sublime disease that you and she share.'

She had been walking backward away from me as she spoke, and was now at some distance, so I shouted, 'I need you not! I want you not! I can make war without you! Go back to the Mictlan you came from.'

Just before she disappeared around a corner of one of the village houses, she spoke a last time, not loudly but audibly, and ominously:

'Tenamaxtli, no man can ever repulse or elude a woman bent on spite and malice. You will never be rid of this one while she still lives and hates and schemes.'

Padre Vasco said, 'I never even heard of the Yaki.'

I told him, 'They abide in the very farthest northwest corner of The One World. In forests and mountain ranges far beyond the desert wastes that our people call the Dead-Bone Lands. The Yaki are reputed to be the fiercest, most bloodthirsty of savages, loathing every other human being, including their own nearest relatives. I am quite ready to give credence to that reputation, after meeting my first Yaki yesterday. If the women are all like her, the men must be fiends indeed.'

It was because I liked and admired Vasco de Quiroga that I had troubled to revisit his capital village of Santa Cruz Patzcuaro. Leaving out any mention of the Yaki woman's warlike aspirations—those she had expressed yesterday as well as those imputed to her in Canautli's tales of long ago—I recounted to the padre what else I knew of her evil doings and intentions.

'It happened in a time before imagining,' I said, 'but the happenings were never forgotten. The words were repeated from one aged Rememberer to the next. How that mysterious Yaki woman insinuated herself into our serene Aztlan, preaching the worship of an alien god, and thereby setting brother against brother.'

'Hmmm,' mused the padre. 'Lilith comes to Cain and Abel.'

'Pardon?' I said.

'Nothing. Go on, my son.'

'Well, either she did not die, all those ages ago, and became a demoness immortal, or she spawned a long line of demoness daughters. For there is most certainly just such a Yaki woman trying to disrupt your Utopia. This G'nda Ke is far more of a menace to your colonists here than any number of Purempe women merely hungry for a