“He had to go away, do you understand? They’d have killed him if he’d stayed-after what happened.”
“I know.” She was still talking about the merchants. In spite of everything I wondered whether she really did believe her son had fled their wrath after what had happened to his offering at the festival.
“I know what people think of him. But he’s not a monster. He can be so kind. He has so much love, if only people would try to understand him. He’s just a boy, a bit wild, with no father to guide him. His father would have taken him in hand. They’d have gone on trading expeditions together, to the Mayans or the Zapotecs or the Yopi. I think that’s what Shining Light always wanted, you know, to be like his father, a hero for his people …” She broke off with a sob.
In the moonlight she was a vague shape in my arms. I could smell her faint, clean woman’s scent better than I could see her.
I touched her hair. “Lily …”
My touch broke the spell. All of a sudden she collected herself. “It’s getting late. It’s going to be a cold night. I’m sorry-I did not mean to burden you with my family’s troubles.”
She got up stiffly. I reached for her again, catching the hem of her skirt with my fingers. She hesitated a moment too long.
She knelt beside me for a long time, saying little, absorbed in her own thoughts.
At last she said: “Do you remember Quauhtenanco?”
“I remember the Merchants coming home.” The whole of Mexico, or so it had seemed at the time, had gone out to greet the victorious merchants, lining the causeway between the southern shore of the lake and the city to cheer the little group on for the last stretch of their journey.
“I couldn’t believe he was lost.” There was no need to ask who she meant. “They sent runners ahead, of course, so we knew who had come back alive and who hadn’t, but I kept telling myself there must have been a mistake. So I stood there at the side of the causeway, staring at their faces as they came past, while everybody was shouting and cheering and telling me how proud I must be.”
“I was there too.” At the head of the crowd had been the Fire Priests, the great lords and the Constables. I had been there too, among the priests, my formal cape billowing around me as I blew lustily into my shell trumpet to add to the noise.
“They’d almost all gone by before I saw him.”
“‘Saw him?’” I repeated, confused. “You mean your husband? But I thought …”
“He looked so old,” she went on, as if I had not interrupted her. “He was carrying this trophy-only a feather banner, but from the way he stooped under it, it might have been a block of granite. I couldn’t see his face. It was his cloak I recognized-it was torn and dirty, but I’d have known it anywhere, because I’d embroidered it myself.”
I knew what she was going to say after that. I had seen him too, shuffling along at the end of that line of gaunt, grimy, exhausted men until he heard a voice he knew, somehow making itself heard over the crowd’s roar, and he had paused, raised his head and smiled.
“I had little Shining Light in my arms, and I held him up and shouted myself hoarse before I realized-but when I saw it was my father, wearing my husband’s cloak …”
“You wished he’d died instead.”
“I wished I’d died, so I would never have known what it was to feel like that! I waited four years for my husband to come back to me,and for just a moment I let myself believe he had-can you imagine what that was like?”
“Your father just walked on, didn’t he? He had to follow the procession. I saw. He couldn’t meet your eyes.”
“Four years,” she said again. “And so many years since then.”
“There’s been nobody else?”
“No. There might have been-I’ve had offers.” She uttered what might have passed for a laugh. “I’m a wealthy widow, what do you expect? One of the old men you saw the other day, even he’s …” She ended the sentence with a shudder. “But it never seemed to matter, being alone. I had the family business to look after, you see, I had Shining Light-but now there’s nothing.”
Clear, unblinking eyes searched my face.
“Do you understand me?” she whispered.
I wanted to answer her but my mouth was suddenly dry. I felt desire and a kind of fear, both at once.
Then we held each other again, but this time it was different.
It was not like being with a pleasure girl. To feel my own heat returned was like watching a flame reflected in an obsidian mirror: a thing known but strange, unpredictable, elusive, uncontainable.
Afterward she giggled like a young girl.
“You didn’t learn how to do that in the House of Tears!”
“It was a skill they didn’t teach.”
Our priests were celibate, pledged to the gods, but they sometimes strayed. The Emperor, Montezuma, had been a priest, and it was hard to imagine that a man like him, with all his wives and concubines, had never had a girl in all the time he had been at the Priest House.
I had strayed myself, letting my feet wander toward the market when the madness overcame me. It did not matter, so long as you were discreet, and if you came back laden with shame and sure that your betrayal showed as plainly as blood smeared on the face of a statue, then that was between you and the gods. It was different if you were caught, naturally.
“So, are you going to tell me about her, then?” the woman wheedled in my ear.
“Not much to tell.”
I thought of my visits to the market, of hastily arranged, fleetingencounters that I would promptly try to forget. It was always the market-it was too dangerous to visit the beautiful, lithe creatures from the official pleasure houses, who danced with the warriors and were reserved for them. I knew solid peasant girls, slaves too clumsy to dance and die at the festivals and foreign women stranded, lost and hungry in the midst of a strange, vast city.
“There was one girl in particular,” I recalled dreamily. “She was a foreigner. She called herself ‘Turquoise Maize Flower.’ She said she was a Huaxtec, and she dressed as one-you know, the brightly embroidered blouse and skirt and her hair braided in colored cloths wound with feathers. I don’t know whether she really was one, though.” The Huaxtecs were a famously hot-blooded race, and I had always suspected Maize Flower had merely been playing on their reputation for inventiveness on the sleeping mat. “I was calling on her regularly at one time. It all ended in tears, of course.”
I spoke casually, but what I felt in that moment was horror.
Remembering the last time I had seen the girl and what she had told me then was like being accused of a crime I had committed years ago, and thought I had got away with. It was like looking down and noticing for the first time that the road I had been carelessly ambling along was bordered on both sides by deep chasms that would swallow me as soon as I put a foot wrong.
“Yaotl? What’s the matter?”
My muscles had stiffened, involuntarily pushing her away. She must have felt the cold sweat that suddenly came over me.
“It’s nothing,” I said hoarsely. “Just something I remembered. I’m sorry. I can’t talk now-my ribs hurt.”
I saw again the faces I had pictured earlier that evening, before I had followed Lily across the courtyard. I knew whose they were now, and wished I did not.
I lay still in her arms and tried to stop myself from shivering. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Eventually I slept.
EIGHT FLOWER
1
I sat up with a start.
It was morning. The screen had been drawn back and sunlight streamed through the open doorway, around a dark figure whose shadow fell across my sleeping mat.
I stared stupidly at the shape for what seemed like hours, lying with my head on one side, waiting for sleep to wear off, before realizing there was someone else in my room.
“Who …?”