Aztec Autumn

insensibility. With an effort, I opened my gummed-together eyelids.

Even my dulled, dimmed eyes could descry that they were seeing two human hands squeezing a sponge, and behind the hands was the extremely beautiful face of a young woman. The water was as fresh, cool and sweet as her face. Dully, I supposed that I had attained Tonatiucan or Tlalocan or some other of the gods' blissful afterworlds, and that this was one of that god's attendant spirits waking me to welcome me. If so, I was exceedingly glad to be dead.

Anyway, dead or not, I was slowly recovering my vision, and also the ability to move my head slightly, to see the spirit the better. She was kneeling close beside me and she wore nothing but her long black hair and a maxtlatl, a man's loincloth. She was not alone; other spirits had convened to help welcome me. Behind her, I could now see, stood several other female spirits of various sizes and apparently various ages, all wearing the same costume—or lack of it.

But, I dully wondered, was I being welcomed? Though the lovely spirit was gently rousing and refreshing me with water, she regarded me with a not very kindly look and addressed me in a tone of mild vexation. Curiously, the spirit spoke not my Nahuatl tongue, as I would have expected in an afterlife arranged by one of the Azteca gods. She spoke the Pore of the Purempe people, but a dialect new to me, and it took a while for my dull brain to comprehend what she was repeating over and over:

'You have come too soon. You must go back.'

I laughed, or intended a laugh. I probably squawked like a seagull. And my voice was raw and raspy when I summoned up enough Pore to say, 'Surely you can see... I came not by choice. But where... so providentially... have I come to?'

'You truly do not know?' she asked, less severely.

I shook my head, only feebly, but I should not have done that, for it rocked me back into insensibility. As my mind went reeling and fading away into darkness, though, I heard her say:

'Iya omekuacheni uarichehuari.'

It means, 'These are The Islands of the Women.'

A long while back, when I described what Aztlan was like in the days of my childhood, I remarked that our fishermen took from the Western Sea every sort of edible and useful and valuable thing except those things that are called, in all the languages of The One World, 'the hearts of oysters.' By ancient tradition, and by agreement throughout the Azteca dominions, the collection of the Western Sea's oyster-heart pearls has always been done exclusively by the fishermen of Yakoreke, the seaside community situated twelve one-long-runs south of Aztlan.

Oh, now and again, an Aztecatl fisherman elsewhere, dredging up shellfish just to sell as food, would have the good fortune to find in one of his oysters that lovely little pebble of a heart. No one bade him throw it back into the sea, or forbade him to keep or sell it, for a perfect pearl is as precious as a solid gold bead of equal size. But it was the Yakoreke men who knew how to find those oyster-hearts in quantity, and they kept that knowledge a secret, handing it down from fisher fathers to fisher sons, none ever confiding it to any outsider.

Nevertheless, over the sheaves of years, outsiders had learned a few tantalizing things about that pearl-gathering process. One thing everyone knew was that just once each year all the sea-fishers of Yakoreke set out in their several acaltin, each canoe heavily laden with some kind of freight, the nature of which was hidden by coverings of mats and blankets. The natural presumption would have been that the men carried some secret sort of oyster bait. Whatever it was, they carried it out of sight of land. That, in itself, was a feat so bold that no envious fisherman from any other place, in all the sheaves of years, had ever dared to try to follow them to their secret oyster ground.

This much else was known: the Yakoreke men would stay out there, wherever they went, for the space of nine days. On the ninth day, their waiting families—and pochteca traders gathering there from all over The One World—would sight the fleet of acaltin coming landward from the horizon. And the canoes came no longer heaped with shrouded freight, nor even laden with oysters. Each man brought home only a leather pouch full of the oysters' hearts. The merchants waiting to buy those pearls knew better than to ask where the men had got them, or how. And so did the fishermen's womenfolk.

So much was known; outsiders had to conjecture the rest, and they made up various legends to fit the circumstances. The most credible supposition was that there had to be some land out there west of Yakoreke—islands, maybe, surrounded by shoal waters—because it would be impossible for any fishermen to dredge up oysters from the great depths of the open sea. But why did the men go out only once a year? Perhaps they kept slaves on those islands, collecting oyster-hearts all year round, and saving them until their masters came at an appointed time, bearing goods to trade for the pearls.

And the fact that the fishermen told their secret only to their sons, not to the females of Yakoreke, inspired another touch to the legend. Those supposed slaves on those supposed islands must be females themselves, and the Yakoreke women must never know, lest they jealously prevent their menfolk from going there. Thus grew the legend of The Islands of the Women. All my young life I had heard that legend and variants of it—but, like everyone else of good sense, I had always dismissed the tales as mythical and absurd. For one reason, it was foolish to believe that an isolated populace all female could have perpetuated itself over so many lifetimes. But now, by pure chance, I had found that those islands did and do exist in fact. I would not have survived if they did not.

The islands are four, in a line, but only the middle two, the largest, have sufficient fresh water to allow of population, and they are populated entirely by women. I counted at that time one hundred and twelve of them. I should more accurately say females instead of women, since they included infants under a year old, small children, nubile girls, young women, mature women and old women. The most ancient was the one they called Kuku, or Grandmother, she whom they all obeyed as if she had been their Revered Speaker. I made a point of looking at all the children—they wore not even a maxtlatl—and the very youngest of them, the very newest born, were of the female sex.

Once I had convinced the women that I had indeed come to their islands inadvertently, unknowing of their existence—not even believing in them—their Kuku gave me leave to stay awhile, long enough to regain my strength and to carve for myself a new canoe paddle, both of which I would need to get back to the mainland. The young woman who had first succored me with a spongeful of water was commanded to see to my sustenance, and to see that I behaved myself, and she seldom let me out of her sight during the first days of my stay.

Her name was Ixinatsi, which is the Pore word for that tiny chirping insect called a cricket. The name was apt, for she was as perky and sprightly and good-humored as is that little cricket creature. To the casual eye, Ixinatsi would have seemed just another Purempe woman, though of a countenance unusually gorgeous to look at and a demeanor never less than vivacious. Any observer could admire her sparkling eyes, glossy hair, luminous complexion, beautifully rounded, firm breasts and buttocks, shapely legs and arms, dainty hands. But only I and the gods who made her would ever know that Cricket was in fact very different—darlingly and deliciously different—from all other women. However, I am getting ahead of my chronicle.

As old Kuku had bidden her, Cricket cooked for me—all kinds of fish, and garnished the dishes with a yellow flower called tiripetsi; the flower, she said, possesses curative properties. Between meals she plied me with raw oysters and mussels and scallops—in much the same way that some of our mainland peoples forcibly feed their techichi dogs before slaughtering them for food. When the comparison occurred to me, it made me uneasy. I wondered if the women were manless because they were man-eaters, and I inquired, which made Ixinatsi laugh.

'We have no men, for eating or for anything else,' she said, in that dialect of Pore which I was hurrying to learn. 'I feed you, Tenamaxtli, to make you healthy again. The more quickly you get strong, the more quickly you can go away.'

Before I went away, though, I wished to know more about those legendary islands, besides the obvious fact that they were no baseless legend. I could surmise for myself that the women had had Purempe ancestors, but that those ancestors had departed from their native Michihuacan long, long ago. The women's altered language was evidence of that. So was the fact that they did not follow the very old Purempe fashion of shaving their heads bald. When Cricket was not busy gorging me with food, she had no qualms about answering my many questions. The first thing I asked was about the women's houses, which were not houses at all.

The islands, in addition to their being fringed with coconut palms, are heavily forested with hardwood trees on their upper slopes. But the women live all day in the open and at night, to sleep, they crawl into crude shelters underneath the many fallen trees. They had dug small caves under them or, where a trunk leaned at an angle, they