Whenever I was not occupied with that, I visited the several workrooms that the Cathedral had provided for Pochotl. His clerical employers had first tested his skill by giving him a very small amount of gold in a lump, to see what he might do with it. I forget what it was that he created, but it made the priests ecstatic. From then on, they allowed him increasing quantities of gold and silver, and gave him instructions as to what to make—candlesticks and censers and various urns—and left the actual design of those things to him, and were vastly pleased with every one of them.
So now Pochotl was master of a smelter room where all the metals he used were melted and refined; a forging room where the coarser metals—iron, steel, brass—were hammered into shape; a room of mortars and crucibles in which the precious metals were liquefied; a room of workbenches, all strewn with tools of the utmost delicacy. And of course he had many assistants, some of them who had previously also been jewel-artificers in Tenochtítlan. But most of the helpers were slaves—and most of those were Moros, because those people are immune to the hottest heat—who did the heavy drudgery requiring not much skill.
Naturally, Pochotl was as happy as if he had been transported alive to the blissful afterworld of Tonatíucan—"Have you noticed, Tenamáxtli, how I am becoming enviably fat again, now that I am well paid and well fed?"—and he enjoyed showing me his every new production, and he took pleasure in my admiring them as much as the priests did. But there at the Cathedral he and I never spoke of his other work; that project we discussed only when he came to the house, to ask questions about various parts of the arcabuz that I had sketched for him:
"Is this piece supposed to move like so? Or like so?"
And in time he began to bring actual metal pieces to show, for my approval or comment.
"It is a good thing," he said, "that you got me appointed to the Cathedral's enterprise at the same time you asked me to build this weapon. Just the making of the arcabuz's long, hollow tube would have been impossible without the tools I now have. And only today, I was trying to bend a thin metal strip into that spiral you called a spring, and fumbling at it, when I was unexpectedly interrupted by a certain Padre Diego. He startled me by speaking to me in Náhuatl."
"I know the man," I said. "Caught you, did he? And he would hardly believe a spring to be any kind of church decoration. Did he scold you for neglecting your proper work?"
"No. But he did ask what I was fooling with. Cunningly, I told him that I had had an idea for an invention, and I was struggling to bring it into reality."
"An invention, eh?"
"That is what Padre Diego said, too, and he laughed in ridicule. He said, 'That is no invention, maestro.It is a contrivance that has been familiar to us civilized folk for ages and ages.' And then—can you guess what he did, Tenamáxtli?"
"He recognized it as a piece of an arcabuz," I groaned. "Our secret project is exposed and thwarted."
"No, no. Not at all. He went away somewhere and came back, bringing me a whole handful of different sorts of springs. The spiral coil that I require to spin the grooved wheel." He showed me the spring. "Also the flat kind that bends back and forth, which I need for snapping what you called the cat's-paw." He showed me that one, too. "In brief, I now know how to make those things, but I do not need to. The good priest made me a gift of them."
I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. "Marvelous!" I exclaimed. "For once, the coincidence-loving gods have been gracious. I must say, Pochotl, you are having more success than I." And I told him of my discouraging experiments with the pólvora.
He thought for a moment, then suggested, "Perhaps you are not experimenting under the right conditions. From what you have described as the workings of the arcabuz, I think you cannot judge the efficacy of the pólvora until you pack it into a tightly constricted space before you touch fire to it."
"Perhaps," I said. "But I have only pinches of the powder to work with. It will be a long time before I can fabricate enough of it to packinto anything."
However, the very next day the gods of coincidence arranged another happy furtherance of my project.
As I had promised Citláli, I was spending some part of every day at the late Netzlin's market stall. That required little of me except to be there standing among the baskets whenever a customer wished to buy one, because Citláli had told me the price she expected to be paid for each one—in cacao beans or snippets of tin or maravedí coins—and the customer could judge the quality without my needing to point it out. He or she could even pour water into any of Citláli's baskets to test it; they were all so tightly woven that they would not leak water, let alone seeds or meal or whatever else they were destined to contain. Since there was nothing else for me to do, between customers, I spent the time conversing with passersby or smoking picíetl with other stall-keepers or—as I was doing on the day of which I speak—pouring onto my stall's shopboard small mounds of charcoal, azufre and xitli powders, so I could morosely meditate on them and their infinite number of possible combinations.
"Ayya,Cuatl Tenamáxtli!" boomed a hearty voice in a pretense of dismay. "Are you going into competition with mywares?"
I looked up. It was a man named Peloloá, a pochtécatl trader whom I knew from previous encounters. He regularly came to the City of Mexíco, bringing the two prime products of his native Xoconóchco, that coastal Hot Land far to the south, whence had come most of our cotton and salt since long before the white men set foot in The One World.
"By Iztocíuatl!" he exclaimed, invoking the goddess of salt, as he pointed at my pathetic pile of white grains on the shopboard. "Are you intending to trounce me at my own trade?"
"No, Cuatl Peloloá," I said, smiling ruefully. "This is not a salt that anyone would wish to buy."
"You are right," he said, touching a few grains to his tongue, before I could stop him and tell him it was purely essence of urine. Then he surprised me, saying, "It is only the bitter first-harvest. What the Spaniards call salitre.It sells so cheaply that it would hardly pay you a living."
"Ayyo," I breathed. "You recognize this substance?"
"But of course. Who from the Xoconóchco would not?"
"Do you boil women's urine in the Xoconóchco, then?"
He looked blank and said, "What?"
"Nothing. No matter. You called the powder 'first-harvest.' What does that mean?"
"What it says. Some people think we simply dip a scoop into the sea and strain the salt directly from it. Not so. The making of salt is a more complicated process. We dike off the shallows of our lagoons and let them dry, yes, but then those chunks and lumps and flakes of dry matter must be rid of their many impurities. First, in fresh water, they are sieved clean of sand and shells and weeds. Then, again in fresh water, the substance is boiled. From that initial boiling come crystals that are also sieved out. Those are the first-harvest crystals—salitre—exactly what you have there, Tenamáxtli, only yours has been pulverized. To get to the goddess's invaluable realsalt takes several more stages of refinement."