I hiccuped and said, "Let me put it this way. I have never met any others except you two."

The dusty man murmured obscurely, "It may be that the real gods appear only when they are about to disappear."

I said, "You had better disappear, then, to where you belong. Nezahualpili cannot be very happy, walking the dismal road to Mictlan while two embodiments of himself are still above-ground."

The cacao man laughed. "Perhaps we cannot bear to leave you, old friend. We have so long followed your fortunes in your various embodiments: as Mixtli, as Mole, as Head Nodder, as Fetch!, as Záa Nayazu, as Ek Muyal, as Su-kuru—

I interrupted, "You remember my names better than I do."

"Then remember ours!" he said, rather sharply. "I am Huehueteotl and this is Yoali Ehecatl."

"For mere apparitions," I grumbled, "you are cursedly persistent and insistent. I have not been this drunk for a long time. It must have been seven or eight years ago. And I remember... I said then that someday, somewhere I would meet a god, and I would ask him. I would ask him this. Why have the gods let me live so long, while they have struck down every other person who ever stood close to me? My dear sister, my beloved wife, my infant son and treasured daughter, so many close friends, even transient loves..."

"That is easily answered," said the ragged apparition who called himself The Oldest of Old Gods. "Those persons were, so to speak, the hammers and chisels used for the sculpturing of you, and they got broken or discarded. You did not. You have weathered all the blows and the chipping and the abrasion."

I nodded with the solemnity of inebriation and said, "That is a drunken answer, if ever I heard one."

The dusty apparition who called himself Night Wind said, "You of all people, Mixtli, know that a statue or monument does not come already shaped from the limestone quarry. It must be hewn with adzes and ground with obsidian grit and hardened by exposure to the elements. Not until it is carved and toughened and polished is it fit for use."

"Use?" I said harshly. "At this dwindling end of my roads and my days, of what use could I possibly be?"

Night Wind said, "I mentioned a monument. All it does is stand upright, but that is not always an easy thing to do."

"And it will not get easier," said The Oldest of Old Gods. "This very night, your Revered Speaker Motecuzóma has made one irreparable mistake, and he will make others. There is coming a storm of fire and blood, Mixtli. You were shaped and hardened for only one purpose. To survive it."

I hiccuped again and asked, "Why me?"

The Oldest said, "A long time ago, you stood one day on a hillside not far from here, undecided whether to climb. I told you then that no man has ever yet lived out any life except his one chosen own. You chose to climb. The gods chose to help you."

I laughed a horrible laugh.

"Oh, you could not have appreciated their attentions," he admitted, "any more than the stone recognizes the benefits conferred by hammer and chisel. But help you they did. And you will now requite their favors."

"You will survive the storm," said Night Wind.

The Oldest went on, "The gods have helped you to become a knower of words. Then they helped you to travel in many places and to see and learn and experience much. That is why, more than any other man, you know what The One World was like."

"Was?" I echoed.

The Oldest made a sweeping gesture with his skinny arm. "All this will disappear from sight and touch and every other human sense. It will exist only in memory. You have been charged with remembering."

"You will endure," said Night Wind.

The Oldest gripped my shoulder and said, with infinite melancholy, "Someday, when all that was is gone... never to be seen again... men will sift the ashes of these lands, and they will wonder. You have the memories and the words to tell of The One World's magnificence, so it will not be forgotten. You, Mixtli! When all the other monuments of all these lands have fallen, when even the Great Pyramid falls, you will not."

"You will stand," said Night Wind.

I laughed again, scoffing at the absurd idea of the ponderous Great Pyramid ever falling down. Still trying to humor the two admonitory phantasms, I said, "My lords, I am not made of stone. I am only a man, and a man is the frailest of monuments."

But I heard no reply or reproof. The apparitions had gone as quickly as they had come, and I was talking to myself.

From some distance behind my bench, the street lamp flickered its moody blue flames. In that mournful lighting, the red tapachini blossoms that fluttered down onto me were dark, a crimson color, like a drizzle of drops of blood. I shuddered, for I felt a feeling I had experienced only once before—when for the first time I had stood at the edge of the night and the edge of the darkness—the feeling of being utterly alone in the world, and desolate, and forlorn. The place where I sat was only a tiny island of dim blue light, and all about that place there was nothing but darkness and emptiness and the low moaning of the night wind, and the wind moaned, "Remember...."

* * *

When I was awakened by a street-lamp tender making his rounds at dawn, I laughed at my unbecomingly drunken behavior and my even more foolish dream. I limped back to the palace, stiff from having slept on the cold stone bench, expecting to find the whole court still asleep. But there was great excitement there, everyone up and dashing frantically about, and a number of armed Mexíca soldiers inexplicably posted at the building's various portals. When I found Prince Willow and he glumly told me the news, I began to wonder if my nighttime encounter really had been a dream. For the news was that Motecuzóma had done a base and unheard-of thing.

As I have said, it was an inviolable tradition that solemn ceremonies like the funeral of a high ruler would not be marred by assassination or other such treacheries. As I have also said, the Acolhua army had been all but disbanded by the late Nezahualpili, and the token few troops still under arms were in no state of readiness to repel invaders. As I have also said, Motecuzóma had sent to the funeral his Snake Woman Tlacotzin and his army commander Cuitlahuac. But I have not said, because I did not know, that Cuitlahuac had brought with him a war acáli carrying sixty hand-picked Mexíca warriors, who he had secretly debarked outside Texcóco.

During that night, while in my drunken confusion I was conversing with my hallucinations or with myself, Cuitlahuac and his troops had routed the palace guards, had taken over the building, and the Snake Woman had summoned all its occupants to hear a proclamation. The Crown Prince Black Flower would not be crowned his father's successor. Motecuzóma, as chief ruler of The Triple Alliance, had decreed that the crown of Texcóco would go instead to the lesser prince Cacama, Maize Cob, the twenty-year-old son of one of Nezahualpili's concubines who, not incidentally, was Motecuzóma's youngest sister.

Such a display of duress was unprecedented, and it was reprehensible, but it was incontestable. However admirable Nezahualpili's pacificatory policy might have been in principle, it had left his people sadly unprepared to resist the Mexíca's meddling in their affairs. Crown Prince Black Flower put up a furious show of black indignation, but that was all he could do. Commander Cuitlahuac was not a bad man, despite his being Motecuzóma's brother and his following Motecuzóma's orders. He expressed his condolences to the deposed prince, and advised him to go quietly away somewhere, before Motecuzóma should get the very practical notion of ordering him imprisoned or eliminated.