Aztec

"This endeavor. Would it have been possible without that unexpected gift of goods and capital you invested in the journey?"

"No," I said again. "And I fully intend to thank the donor, with a share of—"

"Too late," he interrupted. "She is dead."

"She?" I echoed vacantly, for I had of course been thinking of my former patron, Nezahualpili of Texcóco.

"Your late sister," he told me. "That mysterious gift was Tzitzitlini's bequest to you."

I shook my head. "My sister is dead, old man, as you have just remarked. And she certainly never had any such fortune to leave to me."

He went on, unheeding, "The Lord Red Heron of Xaltócan also died during your travels in the south. He called to his deathbed a priest of the goddess Tlazolteotl, and such a sensational confession as he made could hardly be kept secret. Doubtless several of your distinguished guests here know the story, though they would be too polite to speak of it to you."

"What story? What confession?"

"How Red Heron concealed his late son Pactli's atrocity in the matter of your sister."

"It was never adequately concealed from me," I said, with a snarl. "And you of all people know how I avenged his killing of her."

"Except that Pactli did not kill Tzitzitlini."

That staggered me; I could only gape at the man.

"The Lord Joy tortured and mutilated her, with fire and knife and vicious ingenuity, but it was not her tonáli to die of that torment. So Pactli spirited her off the island, with his father's co

"You wait!" I said fiercely, clutching the shoulder knot of his mantle. "You walking fragment of Mictlan's darkness! Tell me the rest! What became of Tzitzitlini? What did you mean about that gift having come from her?"

"She bequeathed to you the entire sum she received—and Ahuítzotl paid a handsome price—when she sold herself to his menagerie here in Tenochtítlan. She would not or could not tell whence she came or who she was, so she was popularly known as the tapir woman."

Except that I still clutched his shoulder, I might have fallen. For a moment, everything and everybody about me disappeared, and I was looking down a long tu

My voice sounded hollow in my ears, as if I really did stand in a long tu

"It is good that you got to see her one last time," he said, with a sigh. "She died not long after. Mercifully, in my opinion, though Ahuítzotl was most a

My vision returned to me, and I found that I was violently shaking the man and saying rather insanely, "I could never have eaten tapir meat in the jungle if I had known. But you knew all the time. How did you know?"

He did not answer. He only said blandly, "It was believed that the tapir woman could not move that mass of bloated flesh. But somehow she toppled over, face forward, so that her tapir snout could not breathe, and she suffocated to death."

"Well, it is now your turn to perish, you accursed foreseer of evils!" I think I was out of my mind with grief and revulsion and rage. "You will go back to the Mictlan you came from!" And I shoved into the throng of banquet guests, only dimly hearing him say:

"The menagerie keepers still insist that the tapir woman could not have died without assistance. She was young enough to have lived in that cage for many, many more years—"

I found Blood Glutton and rudely interrupted his conversation with his soldier friends: "I have need of a weapon, and no time to fetch one from our lodgings. Are you carrying your dagger?"

He reached under his mantle to the back binding of his loincloth, and said, with a hiccup, "Are you to do the carving of the deer meat?"

"No," I said. "I want to kill somebody."

"So early in the party?" He brought out the short obsidian blade and squinted to see me better. "Are you killing anyone I know?"

I said no again. "Only a nasty little man. Brown and wrinkled as a cacao bean. Small loss to anybody." I reached out my hand. "Please, the dagger."

"Small loss!" Blood Glutton exclaimed, and withheld the knife. "You would assassinate the Uey-Tlatoani of Texcóco? Mixtli, you must be as drunk as the proverbial four hundred rabbits!"

"Assuredly somebody is!" I snapped. "Cease your babbling and give me the blade!"

"Never. I saw the brown man when he arrived, and I recognize that particular disguise." Blood Glutton tucked the knife away again. "He honors us with his presence, even if he chooses to do it in mummery. Whatever your fancied grievance, boy, I will not let you—"

"Mummery?" I said. "Disguise?" Blood Glutton had spoken coolly enough to cool me somewhat.

One of the soldier guests said, "Perhaps only we who have often campaigned with him are aware of it. Nezahualpili likes sometimes to go about thus, so he may observe his fellows at their own level, not from the dais of a throne. Those of us who have known him long enough to recognize him do not remark on it."

"You are all lamentably sodden," I said. "I know Nezahualpili too, and I know, for one thing, that he has all his teeth."

"A dab of oxitl to blacken two or three of them," said Blood Glutton, with another hiccup. "Lines of oxitl to feign wrinkles on a face darkened by walnut oil. And he has a talent for making his body appear crabbed and wizened, his hands gnarled like those of a very old man...."

"But really he needs no masks or contortions," said the other. "He can simply sprinkle himself with dust of the road and seem a total stranger." The soldier hiccuped in his turn and suggested, "If you must slay a Revered Speaker tonight, young lord host, go after Ahuítzotl, and oblige all the rest of the world as well."

I went away from them, feeling somewhat foolish and confused, on top of all my other feelings of anguish and anger and—well, they were many and tumultuous....

I went looking again for the man who was Nezahualpili—or a sorcerer, or an evil god—no longer intending to knife him but to wring from him the answers to a great many more questions. I could not find him. He was gone, and so was my appetite for the banquet and the company and the merriment. I slipped out of The House of Pochtéa and went back to the hostel and began packing into a small bag only the essentials I would need for traveling. Tzitzi's little figurine of the love goddess Xochiquetzal came to my hand, but my hand flinched away as if it had been red hot. I did not put it into the bag.