More time passed. In my mind I went over my reckoning, to find where I had miscalculated, but I could perceive no error. More time passed. I searched my mind, to remember whether or not Tes-disora had ever said anything about the racers' taking different routes on their return runs. More time passed, and the sun was almost directly overhead, when I heard a hail:

"Kuira-ba!"

It was a man of the Rarámuri, wearing only a runner's loincloth and waist pouches and yellow designs on his bare skin, but he was no one I recalled ever having seen before, so I took him to be one of Guacho-chi's outpost sprinters. Evidently he took me to be a Guaguey-bo counterpart, for, when I had returned his greeting, he approached me with a friendly but anxious smile and said:

"I saw your fire last night, so I left my station and came here. Tell me confidentially, friend, how did your people arrange to detain our runners in your village? Were your women all waiting stripped naked and lying compliant?"

"It is a vision pleasant to entertain," I said. "But they were not, to my knowledge. I was wondering myself, is it possible that your men are returning by some other way?"

He started to say, "It would be the first time ever—" when he was interrupted. We both heard another shout of "Kuira-ba!" and turned to see the approach of Tes-disora and his five fellow racers. They were lurching and reeling with fatigue, and the ball they perfunctorily kicked among them had been worn down to about the size of my fist.

"We—" said Tes-disora to the man from Guacho-chi, and had to pause to gulp for air. Then he painfully panted, "We have not yet—met your runners. What trickery—?"

The man said, "This sprinter of yours and I were just asking each other what might have become of them."

Tes-disora stared at the two of us, his chest heaving. Another man gasped, in a voice of disbelief, "They have—not yet—passed here?"

As the whole company of Guaguey-bo runners straggled up to join us, I said, "I asked the stranger if they might have taken a different course. He asked me if your women might have contrived to detain them in your village."

There was a general shaking of heads. Then the heads moved more slowly, as the men looked at one another in bewilderment.

Somebody said, softly, worriedly, "Our village."

Somebody else said, more loudly, with more anxiety, "Our women."

And the stranger said, his voice quavering, "Our best men."

Then there was realization in all their eyes, and shock and anguish, and it was in the eyes of the Guacho-chi man as well. All those eyes turned bleakly to the northwest and, in the brief breathless moment before the men suddenly left me, all of them running harder than ever, someone among them said just one word: "Yaki!"

No, I did not follow them to Guaguey-bo. I never went back there again. I was an outlander, and it would have been presumptuous of me to join the Rarámuri men in bewailing their bereavement. I realized what they would find: that the Yaki marauders and the Guacho-chi runners had arrived in Guaguey-bo at about the same time, and the runners would have been too tired to have put up much of a fight against the savages. The Guacho-chi men would all have suffered having the scalps torn from their heads before they died. What the Si-riame and young Vi-rikota and the other Guaguey-bo women would have endured before they died I did not even want to think about. I presume that the surviving Rarámuri men eventually repopulated their villages by dividing themselves and the Guacho-chi women between the two, but I will never know.

And I never saw a Yaki, not then or to this day. I would have liked to—if I could have managed it without the Yaki seeing me—for they must be the most fearsome human animals in existence, and wonderful to look upon. In all my years I have known only one man who did meet the Yaki and did live to tell of it, and he was that elder of The House of Pochtéa who had no top to his head. Nor have any of you Spaniards yet encountered a Yaki. Your explorers of these lands have not yet ventured that far north and west. I think I might almost pity even a Spaniard who goes among the Yaki.

When the stricken men went running, I stood still and watched them disappear in the forest. I stayed looking toward the northwest for a while after they were out of sight, saying a silent farewell. Then I squatted down and made a meal of my remaining pinoli and water, and chewed a jipuri to keep me awake during the rest of the day. I dumped earth on the last embers of my campfire, then stood erect, glanced at the sun for direction, and strode off to the south. I had enjoyed my stay with the Rarámuri, and I grieved at having it end so.

But I wore good clothing of deerskin and sandals of boar hide, and I had leather pouches in which to carry food and water, and I had a flint blade at my waist, and I still had my seeing crystal and my burning crystal. I had left nothing behind in Guaguey-bo, unless you count the days that I lived there. But of them I brought away and have kept the memory.

I H S

S.C.C.M.

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

Sublime and Most August Majesty: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this St. Ambrose's Day in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.

In our last letters, Sire, we expatiated upon our activities as Protector of the Indians. Let us here dwell upon our primary function as Bishop of Mexíco, and our task of propagating the True Faith among these Indians. As Your Percipient Majesty will discern from the next following pages of our Aztec's chronicle, his people have always been contemptibly superstitious, seeing omens and portents not only where reasonable men see them—in the eclipse of the sun, for example—but also in everything from simple coincidences to commonplace phenomena of nature. That tendency to superstition and credulity has both helped and hindered our continuing campaign to turn them from devil-worship to Christianity.

The Spanish Conquistadores, in their first slashing sweep through these lands, did an admirable work of casting down the major temples and idols of the heathen deities, and putting in their place crosses of the Christ and statues of the Virgin.

We and our colleagues of the cloth have affirmed and maintained that overthrow by erecting more permanent Christian edifices at those sites which heretofore were shrines to the demons and demonesses. Because the Indians stubbornly prefer to congregate for worship in their old accustomed places, they now find in those places not such bloodthirsty beings as their Huichilobos and Tlaloque, but the Crucified Jesus and His Blessed Mother.

To cite a few of many instances: the Bishop of Tlaxcala is building a Church of Our Lady atop that gigantic pyramid mountain in Cholula—so remindful of Shinar's overweening Tower of Babel—where formerly the Feathery Snake Quetzalcóatl was adored. Here in the capital of New Spain, our own nearly completed Cathedral Church of St. Francis is deliberately located (as nearly as Architect Garcia Bravo can determine) on the site of what was once the Aztecs' Great Pyramid. I believe the church walls even incorporate some of the stones of that toppled monument to atrocity. On the point of land called Tepeyáca, across the lake just to the north of here, where lately the Indians worshiped one Tonantzin, a sort of Mother Goddess, we have put a shrine to the Virgin Mother instead. At the request of Captain-General Cortés, it has been given the same name as that shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe situated in his home province of Extremadura in Spain.

To some it might appear unseemly that we should thus locate bur Christian tabernacles on the ruins of heathen temples whose rubble is still blood-drenched by unholy sacrifice. But in actuality we only emulate the very earliest Christian evangels, who placed their altars where the Romans, Greeks, Saxons, etc. had been wont to worship their Jupiters and Pans and Eostras, etc.—in order that those devils might be driven away by the divine presence of Christ Sacrificed, and that the places which had been given to abomination and idolatry might become places of santification, where the people could be more readily induced by the ministers of the True God to offer the adoration due to His Divinity.