But our tunnel held firm, and that was the last alarming shock. Slowly the upheaval and uproar quieted, until we heard no more than a few sounds outside our burrow: the trickly sounds of small stones and pebbles belatedly following the bigger rocks downhill. I stirred, intending to stick my head out and see what was left of the mountain, but Zyanya held me back.

"Do not yet," she warned. "There are often aftershocks. Or there may be a boulder still teetering right above us, ready to fall. Wait a while." Of course she was right to caution prudence, but she confessed only a little later that that was not her sole reason for holding on to me.

I have mentioned the effects of an earthquake on the human physiology and emotions. I know Zyanya could feel my bulgingly erect tepúli against her small belly. And, even with the cloth of her blouse and my mantle between us, I could feel the nuzzling of her nipples against my chest.

At first she murmured, "Oh, no, Záa, we must not..."

Then she said, "Záa, please do not. You were my mother's lover...."

And she said, "You were my little brother's father. You and I cannot..."

And, though her breathing quickened, she kept on saying, "It is not right..." until she thought to say, with the last of her breath, "But you did pay dearly to buy me from those savages..." after which she only panted silently until the whimpers and moans of pleasure began. Then, a bit later, she asked in a whisper, "Did I do it right?"

If there is anything good to be said for an earthquake, I will remark that its singular excitation enables a virgin girl to enjoy her defloration, which is not always otherwise the case. Zyanya so delighted in hers that she would not let me go until we had indulged twice more, and such was my own earthquake invigoration that we never even uncoupled. After each climax, my tepúli would naturally shrink, but each time Zyanya would tighten some little circlet of muscles down there and hold me from withdrawal, and somehow ripple those tiny muscles to tantalize my member so that it began to swell again inside her.

We might have gone on even longer without a pause, but the mouth of our tunnel had by then darkened to a queer reddish gray, and I wanted a look at our situation before it was full night, so we wriggled out and stood up. It was long after sunset, but the volcano or the earthquake had sent its cloud of dust so high into the sky that it still caught the rays of Tonatíu, from Mictlan or wherever he was by then. The sky, which should have been dark blue, was a luminous red, and it made red the streak in Zyanya's hair. It also reflected down enough light that we could see about us.

The ocean appeared to be absolutely boiling and frothing around a much greater area of rocks. The way we had come up the mountain was no longer recognizable: in places heaped with new rubble, in places cracked open into deep, wide chasms. Above and beyond where we stood, there was a sunken, shadowed hollow in the mountainside, where it had fallen inward into the bat cavern.

"It may be," I mused, "that the rockslides crushed all our pursuers, and maybe their village as well. If it did not, they are sure to blame us for this disaster, and follow us even more vengefully."

"Blame us?" exclaimed Zyanya.

"I defiled the holy place of their highest god. They will presume that I caused his anger." I thought about it, and wondered, and said, "Perhaps I did." Then I came back to practicality. "But if we stay and sleep in our hiding place here, and then arise early and push on before dawn, I think we can outdistance any pursuit. When we get back over the ranges to Tecuantépec—

"Will we get back, Záa? We have no provisions, no water..."

"I still have my maquahuitl. And I have crossed worse mountains than any between here and Tecuantépec. When we get back... Zyanya, could we be married?"

She may have been startled by the abruptness of my proposal, but not by the fact of it. She said quietly, "I would suppose that I had answered that before you asked. It may be immodest of me to say so, but I cannot entirely reproach the zyuüú for... what happened."

I said sincerely, "I thank the zyuüú, for making it possible. I had long wanted you, Zyanya."

"Well, then!" she said, and smiled brightly and spread her arms in a gesture of it-is-done. I shook my head, meaning it is not so easily done, and her smile faded to some anxiety.

I said, "For me, you are a treasure greater than I could ever have hoped to find. For you, I am not." She started to speak, and I shook my head again. "If you marry me, you are forever an exile from your Cloud People. To be expelled from such a close and proud and admirable kinship, that is no small sacrifice."

She thought for a moment, then asked, "Would you believe me if I say you are worth it?"

"No," I said. "For I am better acquainted with my worth—or my unworthiness—than even you could possibly be."

She nodded as if she had expected some such answer. "Then I can only say that I love the man Záa Nayazu more than I love the Cloud People."

"But why, Zyanya?"

"I think I have loved you ever since... but we will not speak of yesterdays. I say only that I love you today and I will love you tomorrow. Because the yesterdays are gone. Todays and tomorrows are all the days that ever can be. And on every one of them I will say I love you. Could you believe that, Záa? Could you say the same?"

I smiled at her. "I can and I can and I do. I love you, Zyanya."

She smiled in return and said, somewhat mischievously, "I do not know why we had to argue it out. It seems we were fated anyway, by your tonáli, or mine, or both." And she pointed from her breast to mine. The dye that the priest had smeared on me had been still damp when we had lain together. We each bore an identical purple stain, she on her blouse, I on my mantle.

I laughed. Then I said, half ruefully, "I have been long in love with you, Zyanya, and now we are pledged to be man and wife, and I never yet thought to ask the meaning of your name."

When she told me, I thought she was jesting, and only her solemn insistence finally made me believe her.

As you surely have perceived by now, my lords, all our people of all nations bore names that were borrowed from some thing in nature, or some natural quality, or some combination of those. It is evidenced in my own name of Dark Cloud and in others I have spoken: Something Delicate, Blood Glutton, Evening Star, Flame Flower. So it was hard for me to believe that a girl could have a name that did not signify any thing at all. Zyanya is only a simple and common word, and it means nothing in the world but always.

Always.

I H S

S.C.C.M.

Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

Most Laudable Majesty, our Mentor and Monarch: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, on this St. Prosper's Day in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.

Annexed herewith as usual, Sire, is the latest outpouring of our resident Aztec, which is also as usual: little of vis but much of vomitus. It is evident from Your Majesty's most recent letter that our Sovereign still finds this history sufficiently beguiling as to be worth five good men's continued subjection to the hearing and transcribing of it.

Your Dedicated Majesty may also be interested to hear of the safe return of the Dominican missionaries we sent into the southern region called Oaxaca, to appraise our Aztec's claim that the Indians there have for long worshiped an omnipotent god of gods, whimsically known as the Almighty Breath, and also that they utilized the cross as a holy symbol.