Aztec

"Hear me and know. When our people first came here to this lake region, when we were still the Aztéca, our great god Huitzilopóchtli bade our priests look for a place where there stood a nopali, and upon it an eagle perched, eating a snake...."

Well, Your Excellency, so much for history. I ca

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Now, it may be that I have here and there in my narrative left a gap that Your Excellency would like bridged, or there may be questions Your Excellency would wish to put to me, or further details Your Excellency would desire on one subject or another. But I beg that they be postponed for a time, and that I be allowed a respite from this employment. I ask Your Excellency's permission now to take my leave of you and the reverend scribes and this room in what was once The House of Song. It is not because I am weary of speaking, or because I have said all that might be told, or because I suspect you may be weary of hearing me speak. I ask to take my leave because last night, when I went home to my hut and sat down beside my wife's pallet, something astounding occurred. Waiting Moon told me that she loved me! She said that she loved me and that she always had and that she still does. Since Béu never in her life said any such thing before, I think she may be approaching the end of her long dying, and that I ought to be with her when it comes. Forlorn things though we are, she and I, we are all we have—Last night, Béu said she had loved me ever since our first meeting, long ago, in Tecuantépec, in the days of our greenest youth. But she lost me the first time and she lost me forever, she said, when I decided to go seeking the purple dye, when she and her sister Zyanya did the choosing of the twigs to see which of the girls would accompany me. She had lost me then, she said, but she had never ceased to love me, and never encountered another man she could love. When she made that astonishing revelation last night, an unworthy thought went through my mind. I thought: if it had been you, Béu, who went with me, who married me soon after, then it would be Zyanya whom now I would still have with me. But that thought was chased away by another: would I have wanted Zyanya to suffer as you have suffered, Béu? And I pitied the poor wreckage lying there, saying she loved me. She sounded so sad that I endeavored to make light of it. I remarked that she had chosen some odd ways in which to manifest her love, and I told how I had seen her dabbling in the magic art, making a mud image of me, as witch women do when they would work harm upon a man. Béu said, and she sounded sadder yet, that she had made it to do me no hurt; that she had waited long and in vain for us to share a bed; that she had made the image that she might sleep with it and possibly enchant me into her embrace and into love of her. I sat silent beside her pallet, then, and I thought over many things past, and I realized how undiscerning and impervious I have been during all the years Béu and I have known each other; how I have been more unseeing and crippled than Béu is at this moment in her utter blindness. It is not a woman's place to a

As you have probably already divined, my lords, the cause of her long dying has been The Being Eaten by the Gods, and I have described what that is like, so I would prefer not to tell you what the gods have left uneaten of the woman who was once as beautiful as Zyanya. I merely sat beside her, and we were both silent. I do not know what she was thinking, but I was remembering the years we have lived together, yet never together, and what a waste they have been—of each other, and of love, which is the most unpardonable waste there is. Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that ca