I need hardly say that no bandits or other villains dared to attack such a train. I need hardly describe the hospitality with which we were received and regaled at every stop along our route. I will recount only what happened when we spent one night at Coatzacoalcos, that market town on the northern coast of the narrowest land between the two great seas.

I and my party arrived near sunset on one of the town's apparently busiest market days, so we did not push into its center to be quartered as distinguished visitors. We merely made camp in a field outside the town, where other late-arriving trains were doing the same. The one that settled nearest ours was the train of a slave trader herding to market a considerable number of men, women, and children. After our company had eaten, I sauntered over to the slave camp, half thinking that I might find a suitable replacement for my late servant Star Singer, and that I might strike a good bargain if I bought one of the men before they went up for bidding in the town market on the morrow.

The pochtéatl told me he had acquired his human herd, by ones and twos, from such inland Olméca tribes as the Coatlicamac and Cupilco. His string of male slaves was literally a string: they traveled and rested and ate and even slept all linked together by a long rope threaded through each man's pierced nose septum. The women and girls, however, were left free to do the work of making the camp, laying the fires, doing the cooking, fetching water and wood and such. As I strolled about, idly eyeing the wares, one young girl carrying a jug and a gourd dipper shyly approached me and sweetly asked:

"Would my Lord Eagle Knight care for a refreshing drink of cool water? At the far side of the field, there is a clear river running to the sea, and I dipped this long enough ago that all the impurities have settled."

I looked at her across the gourd as I sipped. She was plainly a back-country girl, short and slender, not very clean, dressed in a knee-length blouse of cheap sackcloth. But she was not coarse or dark of complexion; in a soft and unformed adolescent way, she was quite pretty. She was not, like every other female in the neighborhood, chewing tzictle, and she was obviously not as ignorant as might have been expected.

"You addressed me in Náhuatl," I said. "How do you come to speak it?"

The girl put on a woebegone expression and murmured, "One does much traveling, being repeatedly bought and sold. It is at least an education of sorts. I was born to the Coatlicamac tongue, my lord, but I have learned some of the Maya dialects and the trade language of Náhuatl."

I asked her name. She said, "Ce-Malinali."

"One Grass?" I said. "That is only a calendar date, and only half a name."

"Yes," she sighed tragically. "Even the slave children of slave parents receive a seventh-birthday name, but I never did. I am less than a slave born of slaves, Lord Knight. I have been an orphan since my birth."

She explained. Her unknown mother was some Coatlicamatl drab, made pregnant by some unknown one of the many men who had straddled her. The woman had given birth in a farm furrow one day while working in the fields, as casually as she would have defecated, and had left the newborn infant there, as uncaringly as she would have left her excrement. Some other woman, less heartless, or perhaps herself childless, had found the abandoned baby before it perished, and had taken it home and given it succor.

"But who that kindly rescuer was, I no longer remember," said Ce-Malinali. "I was still a child when she sold me—for maize to eat—and I have been passed from owner to owner since then." She put on the look of one who has suffered long but persevered. "I know only that I was born on the day One Grass in the year Five House."

I exclaimed, "Why, that was the very day and year of my own daughter's birth in Tenochtítlan. She too was Ce-Malinali until she became Zyanya-Nochipa at the age of seven. You are small for your age, child, but you are precisely the age she—"

The girl interrupted excitedly, "Then perhaps you would buy me, Lord Knight, to be personal maid and companion to your young lady daughter!"

"Ayya," I mourned. "That other Ce-Malinali... she died... nearly three years ago...."

"Then buy me to be your house servant," she urged. "Or to wait upon you as your daughter would have done. Take me with you when you return to Tenochtítlan. I will do any kind of work or"—she demurely lowered her eyelashes—"any not daughterly service my lord might crave." I was drinking again from the dipper at that moment, and I spluttered the water. She said hastily, "Or you can sell me in Tenochtítlan, if my lord is perhaps beyond the age of such cravings."

I snapped, "Impudent little vixen, the women I crave I do not have to buy!"

She did not cringe at my words; she said boldly, "And I do not wish to be bought just for my body. Lord Knight, I have other qualities—I know it—and I yearn for the opportunity to make use of those qualities." She grasped my arm to emphasize her pleading. "I want to go where I will be appreciated for more than just my being a young female. I want to try my fortunes in some great city. I have ambitions, my lord, I have dreams. But they are vain if I am condemned to be forever a slave in these dreary provinces."

I said, "A slave is a slave, even in Tenochtítlan."

"Not always, not necessarily forever," she insisted. "In a city of civilized men, my worth and intelligence and aspirations could perhaps be recognized. A lord might elevate me to the status of concubine, and then even make me a free woman. Do not some lords free their slaves, when they prove deserving?"

I said they did; even I had once done so.

"Yes," she said, as if she had wrung some concession from me. She squeezed my arm, and her voice became wheedling. "You do not require a concubine, Lord Knight. You are a man stalwart and handsome enough that you need not buy your women. But there are others—old or ugly men—who must and do. You could sell me at a profit to one of those in Tenochtítlan."

I suppose I should have sympathized with the child. I too had once been young, and brimming with ambition, and I had yearned to try the challenge of the greatest city of them all. But there was something so hard and intense about the way in which Ce-Malinali tried to ingratiate herself that I found her less than appealing. I said, "You seem to have a very high opinion of yourself, girl, and a very low opinion of men."

She shrugged. "Men have always used women for their pleasure. Why should not one woman use men for her advancement? Although I do not like the act of sex, I can pretend to. Although I have not yet been often used, I have become quite good at it. If that talent can help lift me from slavery... well... I have heard that a concubine of a high lord may enjoy more privilege and power than his legitimate first lady. And even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca collects concubines, does he not?"

I laughed. "Little bitch, you have high ambitions indeed."

She said tartly, "I know I have more to offer than a hole between my legs that is still invitingly tight and tender. A man can buy a techíchi bitch and get that!"

I disengaged her grip on my arm. "Know this, girl. Sometimes a man may keep a dog just to have an affectionate companion. I discern no capacity for affection in you. A techíchi can also be a nourishing meal. You are not clean or appetizing enough to be cooked. You are articulate for one of your age and low origins. But you are only a backwoods brat with nothing to offer except windy boasts and ill-concealed greed and a pathetic notion of your own importance. You admit that you do not even like to employ that vaunted tight hole of yours, which is your only worth. If you exceed any of your sister slaves in any respect, it is merely in vainglorious presumption."