Many things have happened in my lifetime that have forever hung heavy in my heart. The death of Citláli was one of those occurrences. And I have known many regrettable losses, leaving voids in my heart that never would be filled again. The death of Citláli was one of those occurrences, too.
I have just now spoken of her as my lover, and of course, in the physical sense, she was certainly that. She was also most lovable and loving—and for a very long while I would be desolate, bereft of her dear presence—but in truth I never loved her unreservedly. I knew it then, and I know it even better now, because, at a later time in my life, I would love with all my heart. Even if I had been totally and utterly smitten with Citláli, I could not have brought myself to marry her. For one reason, she had been the wife of another before me. I had been a second-best, so to speak. For another reason, I could never have hoped for children of my own, not by her, not with the sad example of Ome-Ehécatl always in view.
Though I am sure that Citláli was well aware of my feelings—or my insufficiency of them—she never gave the least hint of that awareness. She had said, "I would do anything..." meaning that, if need be, she would die for me. And she had done just that, and more than that. With her successful accomplishment of my taunting farewell insult to the City of Mexíco, she had won for both Ehécatl and herself not only my gratitude, but also that of the gods.
As I have said, Ehécatl would have had no hope of escaping damnation to the eternal nothingness of Míctlan—and neither would Citláli, since she had given birth only to a child too dreadfully defective for any of our priests to have accepted it for sacrifice to any god. But now Citláli had contrived to make sacrifices of both mother and child—and at the same time to annihilate many of the alien white men. That deed, worthy of a warrior hero, was certain to please all our old-time gods, so she and Ehécatl were assured of an afterlife of ease and opulence. I knew they both would be happy during that eternity, and I could even hope that the gods would benignantly bestow on Ehécatl the eyes to see the splendors of whichever afterworld they had gone to.
XIII
Our people have a saying: that a man who goes he knows not where does not need to fear losing the road. My only aim was to get well away from the City of Mexíco before I turned northward into the unconquered lands. So, from Tlácopan, I took the roads that continued to lead me westward. In time, I found myself in Michihuácan, the homeland of the Purémpe people.
This nation was one of the few in The One World that had never been subsumed or put under tribute by the Mexíca. The chief reason for Michihuácan's sturdy independence in those days was that the Purémpe artisans and armorers knew the secret of compounding a brown metal so hard and sharp that, in battle, the blades made of it easily prevailed over the brittle obsidian weapons of the Mexíca. After just a few tries at subduing Michihuácan, the Mexíca were satisfied to settle for a truce, and thereafter the two nations engaged freely in trade—or almost freely; the Purémpecha never did let any other people of The One World learn the secret of their marvelous metal. Of course, that metal is no longer a secret; the Spaniards recognized it on sight as what they call bronce. And those brown blades could not prevail against the white men's even harder and sharper steel—nor their softer metal, the lead propelled by pólvora.
Nevertheless, even with inferior weaponry, the gallant Purémpecha fought more fiercely against the Spaniards than had any other nation thus invaded. As soon as those white men had conquered and secured what is now New Spain, one of the most cruel and rapacious of their captains, a man named Guzmán, led a force westward from the City of Mexíco—the same way I had just now come. His intent was to seize for himself as much land and as many subjects as his commander Cortés had acquired. Though the word Michihuácan means only "Land of the Fishermen," Guzmán soon found—as the Mexíca had found before him—that it could as well have been called Land of Defiant Warriors.
It cost Guzmán several thousand of his soldiers to advance—and advance only creepingly—across the lush fields and rolling hills of that eye-pleasing countryside. Of the Purémpecha, many more thousands fell, but there were always some remaining to go on fighting, undeterred. To slash and blast and burn his way to Michihuácan's northern border, where it abuts the land called Kuanáhuata, and to its western edge, which is the coast of the Western Sea, took Guzmán nearly fifteen years. (As I have mentioned, back when my mother, my uncle and I journeyed to the City of Mexíco, we often had to circle warily around parts of Michihuácan in which bloody battles were still being waged.) As a warrior myself, I must concede, considering what it had cost Guzmán in years and casualties, that he had fairly won the right to claim all that land and to give it a new name of his own choosing—New Galicia, honoring his home province back in Old Spain.
But he also did things inexcusable. He herded together the few Purémpe warriors he had taken prisoner alive and all the other Purémpe men and boys throughout New Galicia who might someday decide to turn warriors, and he shipped them off as slaves, over the Eastern Sea, to the island of Cuba and another island somewhere out there called Isla Española. Thus Guzmán could be sure that those men and boys, unable to speak the tongues of the islands' native slaves and the imported Moro slaves, would be helpless to foment any further defiance against their Spanish masters.
So it was that, by the time I arrived in Michihuácan, the population consisted entirely of females young and old, aged males and barely adolescent boys. I being the first adult-but-not-elderly man seen thereabouts in recent memory, I was regarded as a curiosity, and a welcome one. During my travel westward across what had been the Mexíca lands, I had had to request food and shelter in the villages and farmsteads I had come upon. The menfolk of those places always agreeably accorded me that hospitality, but I had had to ask. Here in Michihuácan, I was positively besieged with offers of food, drink, a place to sleep and "stay as long as you like, stranger." When I passed homesteads along the road, their womenfolk—because there were no menfolk—would actually run out from their doorways to tug at my mantle and invite me inside.
If I was a novelty to them, so were the Purémpecha a novelty to me—even though I had expected them to be the kind of people they were. That was because I had met a number of their elderly (hence surviving) men in the City of Mexíco—pochtéca merchants or messengers or mere vagabonds—at the Mesón de San José or in the marketplaces. The heads of those men were as bald as huaxolómi eggs, and, they told me, so was the head of every man, woman and child in Michihuácan, because the Purémpecha regarded sleek, shiny baldness as the crowning touch of human beauty. Still, my having seen those men with their heads shaved clean of everything but eyelashes had not made much impression on me; after all, they were old enough to be bald in any case. It was quite different when I got to Michihuácan, to see every single soul—from infants to children to grown women and grandmothers—as hairless as the old men among them.
Most of The One World's people, including myself, took pride in our hair and wore it long. We men let it grow to shoulder length, with a heavy fringe across our foreheads; women's hair might reach to their waists or below. But the Spaniards, deeming their beards and mustaches the only true symbols of virility, thought our men looked effeminate and our women slatternly. They even coined a word, balcarrota (roughly "a haystack"), with which to speak of our hairstyle, and spoke it disparagingly. They also—since they were continually accusing us of petty pilferage from their belongings—assumed that we hid such stolen items under all that hair. So Guzmán and the other Spanish lords of New Galicia doubtless highly approved of the Purémpe custom of total baldness.