We were offered rather more of a choice after we had eaten. I believe I have mentioned the Purémpecha's attitude regarding sexual practices. An outlander might call it vilely loose or tolerantly broadminded, depending on his own attitude, but it certainly catered to every conceivable taste. Each time we finished our meal at an inn, the landlord would inquire of me and then my bearers, "Will you have a male or female sweet?" I did not answer for my men; I was paying them enough that they could indulge as they chose. But, with Zyanya waiting back home, I was not inclined to sample the offerings of every new country I visited, as I had done in my bachelor days. I invariably replied to the innkeeper, "Neither, thank you," and the innkeeper would persist, without a blink or a blush, "Would you prefer green fruit, then?"
It may really have been necessary for a pleasure-seeking traveler to specify the precise kind of bedmate he wanted—grown woman or man, young girl or boy—for in Michihuácan it is sometimes hard for a stranger to tell which sex is which, because the Purémpecha observe another peculiar practice, or did in those days. The folk of every class higher than slaves depilated their body of every removable hair. They shaved or plucked or otherwise scoured clean all the hair from their head, the eyebrows from above their eyes, any slightest trace of fuzz from beneath their arms or between their legs. Men, women, and children, they had absolutely no hair but their eyelashes. And, in contrast to whatever lewdnesses they may have performed in the nighttime, they went about during the day modestly clothed in several layers of mantles or blouses, which was why it could be difficult to tell the females from the males.
At first, I assumed that the smooth and glossy hairlessness of the Purémpecha represented either their singular notion of beauty or a passing affectation of fashion. But there may have been an obsessively sanitary reason for it. In my study of their language I discovered that Poré has at least eight different words for dandruff and about as many more for louse.
We came to the seacoast at an immense blue harbor protected by enfolding arms of land from the battering of heavy seas and sea storms. There was situated the port village called Patamkuaro by its inhabitants and Acamepulco by our visiting Mexíca traders, both the Poré and Náhuatl names given because of the great swales of cane and reed growing there. Acamepulco was a fishing port in its own right, and also a market center for the peoples living along the coast to the east and west, who came in canoes to dispose of their own gleanings from the sea and land: fish, turtles, salt, cotton, cacao, vanilla, other typical products of those Hot Lands.
It was my intention that time not to hire but to buy four roomy, seagoing canoes, and for the eight of us to paddle them, so that we need have no witnesses in attendance. But that was more easily intended than accomplished. The familiar acáli of our home lake district was easily carved from the soft pine that grew there. But a sea canoe was made of the formidably heavy and hard mahogany, and it could take months to make. Almost all the canoes at Acamepulco had been in use through generations of their owner families, and no family was inclined to sell one, since that would mean a suspension of all profitable fishing or hauling while a replacement was hacked to shape and burned hollow and rasped smooth. But I did finally acquire the four I needed, though it took frustrating days of negotiation, and a far greater outlay of gold dust than I had meant to spend.
And to row them southeastward down the coast, two of us in each, was not so easy either. We all had some experience of lake canoeing, and those big inland lakes could sometimes be roughened by the wind, but we were unaccustomed to waters roiled by currents and tidal surges even in the calm weather that—I thank the gods—attended our sea voyage. Several of those staunch old warriors, whose stomachs had never been turned by all the nauseating horrors of war, were wretchedly sick for the first two or three days. I was not, perhaps because I had been to sea before. But we early learned not to hug the shore where the water's motion was most violent and unpredictable. Though it made us all uneasy to be such a long swim from The One World, we stayed well out beyond the first billows of the breakers, only riding them in at sundown, to spend the nights gratefully on the soft and unheaving sands of the beach.
That beach, as I had seen it do before, gradually darkened from gleaming white to dull gray and then to the sullen black of volcanic sands. And then that beach was interrupted by a suddenly jutting promontory: the mountain that walks in the water. Thanks to my topaz, I espied the mountain from afar, and, it being then late afternoon, I gave the order to make landfall on the beach.
When we were seated around our campfire, I addressed my seven men, repeating the planned actions of our mission on the morrow, and adding, "Some of you may have reservations about raising your hand against a priest, even a priest of an alien god. Do not have. These priests will appear unarmed, and merely vexed at our intrusion, and helpless before our weapons. They are not. Given the least opportunity, they will slay every one of us, and carve us like boar meat, and eat us at their leisure. Tomorrow, when our work has been accomplished, we kill. We kill without mercy or we risk being killed. Remember that, and remember my signals."
When we pushed off through the combers again the next morning, we were no longer a young pochtéatl and his seven elder porters. We were a detachment of seven fearsome Mexíca warriors led by one not very old "old eagle" cuáchic. We had undone the packs and donned the war regalia and armed ourselves with the weapons. I carried Blood Glutton's cuáchic insignia of shield and guidon staff, and wore his cuáchic headdress. The only missing insigne of that rank was a bone through my nose, but my septum had never been pierced for such a thing. The seven soldiers were, like myself, all wearing clean white quilted armor. They had stuck feathers into their hair, which was drawn up into topknots, and had painted fierce many-colored designs on their faces. We each carried a maquahuitl, a dagger, and a javelin.
Our little fleet paddled boldly toward the mountain promontory, making no attempt at stealth, deliberately intending that the guardians there should see us come. And they did, they were waiting on the mountainside: at least twelve of the evil Zyu priests in their robes of ragged and patchy fur. We did not turn our canoes toward the beach to make an easy landing, but rowed on straight for them.
I do not know whether it was the different season of the year, or whether it was because we approached from the western side of the mountain, but the ocean was in much less turmoil than it had been that time I and the Tzapotecatl boatman came upon it from the east. Nevertheless, the sea was still agitated enough that we unpracticed seafarers might well have splintered the boats and some of ourselves against the rocks, except that a number of the priests leapt down from boulder to boulder and waded into the water and drew our canoes into protected clefts. Of course they did it only because they knew and feared our Mexíca warrior costumes—which was what I had counted on.
We wedged the craft securely there, and I left one soldier to guard them. Then I waved, the gesture including the priests as well as my men, and we all went bounding from rock to rock, through the thunders and spouts of surf, through the clouds and sheets of spray, onto the main slope of the mountain mass. The chief priest of the Sea God stood there, his arms folded across his chest to conceal the fact that he had no hands. He snarled something in his Huave dialect. When I merely raised my eyebrows, he tried Lóochi, and said with bluster: