Oh, not that we regarded any least aspect of our marriage as insignificant. Early on, I asked Zyanya how she did that twinkling contraction of her tipíli's little circlet of muscles, which made our act of love so extraordinarily exciting. She blushed with shy pleasure and murmured, "You might as well ask how I wink my eyes. It simply happens when I will it. Does it not happen with every woman?"

"I have not known every woman," I said, "and I have no wish to, now that I have the best of all."

But Your Excellency is not interested in such homely details. I think I might best make you see and appreciate Zyanya by comparing her to the plant we call the metl—though of course the metl is nothing like as beautiful as she was, and it does not love or speak or laugh.

The metl, Your Excellency, is that man-high green or blue plant you have taught us to call the maguey. Bountiful and generous and handsome to look at, the maguey must be the most useful plant that grows anywhere. Its long, curved, leathery leaves can be cut and laid overlapping to make a watertight roof for a house. Or the leaves can be crushed to a pulp, pressed, and dried into paper. Or the leaf fibers can be separated and spun into any kind of cord from rope to thread. The thread can be woven into a rough but serviceable cloth. The hard, sharp spines that outline each leaf can serve as needles, pins, or nails. They served our priests as instruments with which to torture and mutilate and mortify themselves.

The leaf shoots that grow nearest the earth are white and tender, and can be cooked to make a delicious sweet. Or they can be dried to make fuel for a long-burning, smokeless hearth fire, and the resultant clean white ash is used for everything from surfacing bark paper to making soap. Cut away the central leaves of the maguey, scoop out its heart, and in the hollow will collect the plant's clear sap. It is tasty and nutritious to drink. Smeared on the skin, it prevents wrinkles, rashes, and blemishes; our women used it extensively for that. Our men preferred to let the maguey juice sit and ferment into the drunk-making octli, or pulque, as you call it. Our children liked the clear sap boiled down to a syrup, when it is almost as thick and sweet as bees' honey.

In brief, the maguey offers every part and particle of its being for the good of us who grow and tend it. And Zyanya, besides being incomparably more, was rather like that. She was good in every part, in every way, in every action, and not just to me. Though of course I enjoyed the best of her, I never knew another person who did not love and esteem and admire her. Zyanya was not only Always, she was everything.

But I must not waste Your Excellency's time with sentimentality. Let me return to telling things in the order in which they happened.

After our escape from the murderous Zyu and our survival of the earthquake, it took me and Zyanya fully seven days to return to Tecuantépec by the overland route. Whether the quake had annihilated the savages or made them assume that it had annihilated us, I do not know, but no one pursued us, and we were not otherwise bothered in our crossing of the mountains, except by occasional thirst and hunger. I had long ago lost my burning crystal to the robbers on the isthmus, and I carried no fire-drilling device, and we did not ever get quite hungry enough to eat raw meat. We found sufficient wild fruits and berries and birds' eggs, all of which we could eat raw, and they also provided enough moisture to sustain us between the infrequent mountain springs. At night, we piled up billows of dry leaves and slept in them intertwined for mutual warmth and other mutual comforting.

We were both perhaps a bit thinner when we arrived again in Tecuantépec; we were certainly ragged and barefoot and footsore, our sandals having worn out on the mountain rocks. We trudged into the inn yard wearily and gratefully, and Béu Ribé ran out to greet us, her face expressing a mixture of concern, exasperation, and relief.

"I thought you had disappeared, like our father, and would never come back!" she said, half laughing, half scolding, as she ardently hugged first Zyanya then me. "The moment you were out of sight, I told myself it was a foolish venture, and a dangerous..."

Her voice faltered, as she looked from one to the other of us, and once again I saw that smile lose its wings. She brushed her hand lightly across her face, and repeated, "Foolish... dangerous..." Her eyes widened when they looked more closely at her sister, and they moistened when they looked at me.

Though I have lived many years and known many women, I still do not know how one of them can so instantly and surely perceive when another has lain with a man for the first time, when she has made the irreversible change from maiden to woman. Waiting Moon regarded her younger sister with shock and disappointment, and me with anger and resentment.

I said hastily, "We are going to be married."

Zyanya said, "We hope you will approve, Béu. You are, after all, the head of the family."

"Then you might have said something before!" the older girl said, in a strangled voice. "Before you—" She seemed to choke on that. Then her eyes were no longer moist but blazing. "And not just any outlander, but a brutish Mexícatl who lusts and ruts without discrimination. If you had not been so conveniently available, Zyanya"—her voice got even louder and uglier—"he would probably have come back with a filthy Zyu female dangling from his insatiable long—"

"Béu!" Zyanya gasped. "I have never heard you speak so. Please! I know this seems sudden, but I assure you, Záa and I love each other."

"Sudden? Sure?" Waiting Moon said wildly, and turned to rage at me. "Are you sure? You have not sampled every last woman in the family!"

"Béu!" Zyanya begged again.

I tried to be placative, but sounded only craven. "I am not a noble of the pípiltin. I can marry only one wife." That earned me a glance from Zyanya not much more tender than her sister's glare. I quickly added, "I want Zyanya for my wife. I would be honored, Béu, if I might call you sister."

"Very well! But just to tell the sister good-bye. Then begone and take your—your choice with you. Thanks to you, she has here not honor, not respectability, not name, not home. No priest of the Ben Záa will marry you."

"We know that," I said. "We will go to Tenochtítlan for the ceremony." I put firmness into my voice. "But it will be no shameful or clandestine thing. We will be wed by one of the high priests of the court of the Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexíca. Your sister has chosen an outlander, yes, but no worthless vagabond. And marry me she will, with your blessing or without it."

There was a long interval of tense silence. Tears trickled down the girls' almost identically beautiful, almost identically uneasy faces, and sweat trickled down mine. We three stood like the corners of a triangle bound by invisible straps of óli drawing more and more impossibly taut. But before anything snapped, Béu relaxed the strain. Her face wilted and her shoulders slumped and she said:

"I am sorry. Please forgive me, Zyanya. And brother Záa. Of course you have my blessing, my loving good wishes for your happiness. And I beg that you will forget the other words I spoke." She tried to laugh at herself, but the laugh cracked in the middle. "It was sudden, as you say. So unexpected. It is not every day I lose... a beloved sister. But now come inside. Get clean and fed and rested."

Waiting Moon has hated me from that day to this.

Zyanya and I stayed another ten days or so at the inn, but keeping a discreet distance between us. As before, she shared a room with her sister and I inhabited one of my own, and she and I were careful not to make any public displays of affection. While we recovered from our abortive expedition, Béu seemed to recover from the displeasure and melancholy our return had caused. She helped Zyanya choose from her personal belongings, and from their mutual possessions, the comparatively few and dear and irreplaceable things she would carry away with her.