I will never know what became of him. Perhaps some monster sea creature rose from the night waters to snatch him from where he sat, and did it so silently that I never woke. Perhaps he was stricken with some one of the seizures not uncommon in old men—for even tíciltin die—and, flailing in its grip, inadvertently threw himself over the acáli's side. But it is more likely that Ualíztli simply fell asleep and toppled over, paddle in hand, and got a mouthful of water before he could call for help, and so drowned—how long ago and how far away I had no idea.
There was nothing I could do but sit and wait for the day's first light. I could not even use the remaining paddle, because I did not know how long the acáli had been adrift or in which direction the land lay. Usually, at night, there was an onshore wind, and we had so far kept our course in the dark by keeping that wind always on the paddler's right cheek. But the wind god Ehécatl seemed to have chosen this worst possible night to be whimsical; the breeze was only light, and puffed at my face first on one side, then the other. In air so gently moving, I should have been able to hear the sea's surf, but I heard nothing. And the canoe was rocking more than was usual—that was probably what had waked me—so I feared that I had been carried some distance away from the solid, safe shore.
The first glimmer of day showed me that that was what had happened, and had happened to a distressing degree. The land was nowhere in sight. The glimmer at least enabled me to know which way was east, and I seized up my paddle and began stroking furiously, frantically, in that direction. But I could not hold a steady course; I had been caught in one of those tidal currents the fishermen had told of. Even when I could keep the prow of the acáli pointed east toward land, that current moved me sideways. I tried to take some comfort from the fact that it was carrying me south, not back northward again or—horrible to contemplate—carrying me west and farther out to sea, out where nobody had ever gone and returned from.
All that day I paddled, struggling mightily to keep moving east of south, and all the next day, and the next, until I lost count of the days. I paused only to take an occasional drink of water and bite of food, and ceased for longer spells when I got absolutely fatigued or knotted with cramp or desperate for sleep. Still, however often I awoke and resumed paddling, no land appeared on the eastern horizon... and never did. Eventually my store of food and water ran out. I had been improvident. I should earlier have speared fish that I could have eaten, even raw, and from which I could have wrung drinkable juices. By the time my provisions were gone, I was too weak to waste any energy in fishing; I put what strength I had left into my futile paddling. And now my mind began to wander, and I found that I was mumbling aloud to myself:
"That vicious woman G'nda Ké did not really die. Why should she have done, after living unkillable all those sheaves and sheaves of years?"
And, "She once threatened that I would never be rid of her. Since she lived only to do evil, she might easily live as long as evil does, and that must be until the end of time."
And, "Now she has taken her revenge on us who watched her seeming to die—a quick revenge on Ualíztli, a lingering revenge on me. I wonder what appalling thing she has done to that poor innocent tícitl back in Bakúm..."
And at last, "Somewhere she is gloating at my plight, at my pitifully trying to stay alive. May she be damned to Míctlan, and may I never meet her there. I shall entrust my fate to the gods of wind and water, and hope I shall have merited Tonatíucan when I die..."
At that, I threw away my paddle and stretched out in the acáli to sleep while I waited for the inevitable.
I said that, to this day, I almost wish the voyage had continued as uneventfully as it had begun. The good Tícitl Ualíztli would not have been lost, I would soon have seen Aztlan and dear Améyatl again, and then Nochéztli and my army, and then have got on with my war. But if things had happened so, I would not have been impelled into the most extraordinary of all my life's adventures, and I would not have met the extraordinary young woman I have most loved in all my life.
XXV
I did not exactly sleep. The combination of my being unutterably weary, weakened by hunger, blistered by the sun, parched with thirst—and withal, too dispirited to care—simply sank me into an insensibility that was relieved only by an occasional bout of delirium. During one of those, I raised my head and thought I saw a distant smudge of land, off where the sea met the sky. But I knew that could not be, because it lay on the southern horizon, and there is no land mass in the southern stretches of the Western Sea. It had to be only a taunting apparition born of my delirium, so I was grateful when I subsided again into insensibility.
The next unlikely occurrence was that I felt water splashing on my face. My dull mind did not respond with alarm, but dully accepted that my acáli had been swamped by a wave, and that I would shortly be entirely underwater, and drowned, and dead. But the water continued just to splash my face, stopping my nostrils so that I involuntarily opened my dry, cracked, gummed-together lips. It took a moment for my dulled senses to register that the water was sweet, not salt. At that realization, my dull mind began to fight its way upward through the layers of 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 Tonatíucan or Tlálocan 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 Náhuatl tongue, as I would have expected in an afterlife arranged by one of the Aztéca gods. She spoke the Poré of the Purémpe 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 Poré to say, "Surely you can see... I came not by choice. But where... so providentially... have I come to?"