Ticklish said, "Ayyo, what a lovely idea!"

Cozcatl said, "We will do it willingly—no, gratefully. It will be the one time we shall have had a family."

I said, "The child gives no trouble. The slave Turquoise tends to her routine needs. You will have to provide nothing but the security of your presence... and a show of affection from time to time."

"Of course we will!" Ticklish exclaimed, and there were tears in her eyes.

I went on, "I have already explained to Cocóton—meaning I lied to her—about her mother's absence these past several days. I said that her Tene is out marketing, buying the necessities she and I will need for a long journey we must undertake. The child only nodded and said, 'Long journey,' but it means little to her at her age. However, if you keep reminding Cocóton that her Tete and Tene are traveling in far places... well, I hope she will have got used to being without her mother by the time I return, so that she will not be too dismayed when I tell her that her Tene has not returned with me."

"But she would get used to being without you, too," Cozcatl warned.

"I suppose so," I said resignedly. "I can only trust that, when I do come back, she and I can get reacquainted again. In the meantime, if I know that Cocóton is well cared for, and is loved..."

"She will be!" Ticklish said, laying a hand on my arm. "We will live here with her for as long as need be. And we will not let her forget you, Mixtli."

They went away, to prepare for the moving in of what possessions they had saved from the ruins of their own house, and that same night I put together a light and compact traveling pack. Early the next morning I went into the nursery and woke Cocóton, and told the sleepy little girl:

"Your Tene asked me to say good-bye for us both, Small Crumb, because... because she cannot leave our train of porters, or they will scatter and run away like mice. But here is a good-bye kiss from her. Did not that taste exactly like her kiss?" Surprisingly, it did, to me at least. "Now, Cocóton. With your fingers, lift Tene's kiss from your lips and hold it in your hand, like that, so your Tete can kiss you, too. There. Now take mine and hers, and hold them both tight in your hand while you go to sleep again. When you get up, put them safely away and keep the kisses to return to us when we come back."

"Come back," she said drowsily, and smiled her Zyanya smile, and closed her Zyanya eyes.

Downstairs, Turquoise sniffled and Star Singer several times blew his nose as we said our good-byes, and I charged them with the management of the household and reminded them that until my return they were to obey Cozcatl and Quequelmíqui as their lord and lady. I paused once more on my way out of town, at The House of Pochtéa, and left there a message to be carried by the next merchant train going in the direction of Tecuantépec. The folded paper was to advise Béu Ribé—in the least hurtful word pictures I could compose—of her sister's death and the manner of it.

It did not occur to me that the normal flow of Mexíca commerce had been considerably disrupted, and that my message would not soon be delivered. Tenochtítlan's fringe of chinampa had been underwater for four days, at the season when the crops of maize, beans, and other staples were just sprouting. Besides drowning those plants, the water had also invaded the warehouses kept stocked for emergencies and ruined all the dried foods stored in them. So, for many months, the Mexíca pochtéa and their porters were occupied solely with supplying the destitute city. That kept them constantly traveling, but did not take them far afield, and that is why Waiting Moon did not learn of Zyanya's death until more than a year after it happened.

I was also constantly traveling during that time, wandering like a milkweed puff wherever the winds might blow me, or wherever some scenic vista beckoned me closer, or wherever a path meandered so tantalizingly that it was forever seeming to say, "Follow me. Just around the next bend there is a land of heart's-ease and forgetfulness." There never was such a place, of course. A man can walk to the end of all the roads there are, and to the end of his days, but he can nowhere lay down his past and walk away from it and never look back.

Most of my adventures during that time were of no special account, and I sought to do no trading nor to burden myself with acquisitions, and if there were fortuitous discoveries to be made—like the giant tusks I found that other time I tried to walk away from woe—I passed them unseeing. The one rather memorable adventure that I did have, I fell into quite by accident, and it happened in this way:

I was near the west coast, in the land of Nauyar Ixu, one of the remote northwestern provinces or dependencies of Michihuácan. I had wandered up that way just to see a volcano that had been in violent eruption for almost a month and threatened never to stop. The volcano is called Tzeboruko, which means to snort with anger, but it was doing more than that: it was roaring with rage, like the overflow of a war going on down below in Mictlan. Gray-black smoke billowed from it, shot with jacinth flashes of fire, and towered up to the sky, and had been doing that for so many days that the whole sky was dirty and the whole of Nauyar Ixu in day-long twilight. From that cloud constantly rained down a soft, warm, pungent gray ash. From the crater came the incessant angry growl of the volcano goddess Chantico, and gouts of fiery-red lava, and what looked from a distance like pebbles being tossed up and out, though they were of course immense hurled boulders.

Tzeboruko sits at the head of a river valley, and its outpour found its easiest course along that riverbed. But the water was too shallow to chill and harden and stop the molten rock; the water simply shrieked to an instant boil when they met, and then steamed away before the onslaught. As each successive wave of hot, glowing lava vomited from the crater, it would surge down the mountainside and down the valley, then flow more slowly, then merely ooze as it cooled and darkened. But its hardening provided a smoother slide for the next gush, which would run farther before it stopped. So by the time I arrived to see the spectacle, the molten rock had, like a long red tongue, lapped far down the retreating river. The heat of liquefied rock and sizzling steam was so intense that I could get nowhere near the mountain itself. Nobody could, and nobody else wanted to. Most of the people living thereabouts were glumly packing their household belongings to get farther away. I was told that past eruptions had sometimes devastated the entire river valley as far as the seacoast, perhaps twenty one-long-runs away.

And so did that one. I have tried to convey the fury of the eruption, reverend scribes, just so you will believe me when I tell how it finally flung me right off The One World and out into the unknown.

Having nothing else to do, I spent some days ambling along beside the river of lava—or as close as I could walk beside its scorching heat and unbreathable fumes—while it implacably boiled away the river water and filled its bed from bank to bank. The lava moved like a wave of mud, at about the pace of a man's slow walk, so, when each night I made camp on higher ground and ate from my provisions and rolled into my blanket or hung my gishe between two trees, I would wake in the morning to find that the moving rock had so far outdistanced me that I would have to hurry to catch up with its forward edge. But the mountain Tzeboruko, though it diminished behind me, continued to spew, so I kept on accompanying its outpour just to see how far the lava would go. And after some days it and I arrived at the western ocean.