I said, "I think it is a good poem, Huexotzin, and a true one. The Lord Teacher would most certainly give you an approving nod." And I was not just slavishly flattering a prince, for you will have noticed that I have remembered that poem, too, all my life. "In fact," I went on, "it might almost have been composed by the same great poet whose works we have heard today."

"Yya, come now, Head Nodder," he chided me. "No poet of our time will ever match the incomparable Nezahualcoyotl."

"Who?"

"Did you not know? Did you not recognize my father doing the recitation? He read the works of his father, my grandfather, the Revered Speaker Fasting Coyote."

"What? That man who recited was Nezahualpili?" I exclaimed. "But he wore no insignia of his office. No crown, no feather mantle, no staff or banner..."

"Oh, he has his eccentricities. Except on state occasions, my father never dresses like any other Uey-Tlatoani. He believes that a man should display only tokens of his achievement. Medals won and scars collected, not baubles inherited or bought or married. But do you really mean you have not yet met him? Come!"

However, it seemed that Nezahualpili was averse also to having his people too openly manifest their regard for him. By the time the prince and I elbowed our way through the throng of students, he had already slipped away.

The Lady of Tolan had not misled me when she warned that I would work hard at that school, but I will not bore you, reverend friars, with accounts of my daily schedule, and the mundane events of my days, and the sheaves of work I took back to my chambers at the end of each day. I will tell you that I learned arithmetic, and how to keep account books, and how to calculate the exchange of the various sorts of currency in use—all facilities that would be most useful to me in years to come. I learned about the geography of these lands, though at that time not much was known about any of the lands beyond our immediate own, as I would later discover by exploring for myself.

I most enjoyed and profited from my studies in word knowing, getting ever-more proficient at reading and writing. But I think I benefited almost as much from the classes in history, even when they refuted the Mexíca's most cherished beliefs and boasts. The Lord Teacher Neltitica gave generously of his time, even according private sessions to some of us. I remember one, when he sat down with me and a very young boy named Poyec, son of one of Texcóco's numerous lords.

"There is a grievous gap in Mexíca history," said the teacher, "like the wide gap an earthquake can cleave in the solid earth."

He was preparing a poquietl to smoke while he discoursed. This is a slender tube of some substance like bone or jadestone, ornamentally carved, with a mouthpiece at one end. Into the open other end is inserted a dry reed or rolled paper, firmly packed with the finely shredded dried leaves of the picíetl plant, sometimes mixed with herbs and spices for added flavor and fragrance. The user holds the tube between his fingers and sets fire to the far end of the reed or paper. It and its contents smolder slowly to ash, while the user lifts the mouthpiece at intervals to his lips to suck a breath of the smoke, inhale it, and puff it out again.

When he had lit his with a coal from a brazier, Neltitica said, "It was just a sheaf of years ago that the Mexíca's then Revered Speaker Itzcoatl, Obsidian Snake, forged The Triple Alliance of the Mexíca, the Acolhua, and the Tecpanéca—with the Mexíca, of course, as the dominant partner. Having secured that eminence for his people, Obsidian Snake then decreed that all the books of bygone days should be burned, and new accounts written to glorify the Mexíca past, to give the Mexíca a spurious antiquity."

I looked at the blue smoke rising from the poquietl, and murmured, "Books... burned..." It was hard to believe that even a Uey-Tlatoani would have the heart to burn something as precious and irreplaceable and inviolable as books.

"Obsidian Snake did it," the Lord Teacher continued, "to make his people believe that they were and always have been the true custodians of art and science, and therefore to believe that it is their duty to impose civilization on every lesser people. But even the Mexíca cannot ignore the evidence that other and finer civilizations had existed here long before their coming. So they have concocted fanciful legends to account for such evidence."

Poyec and I thought about it, and the boy suggested, "You mean things like Teotihuacan? The Place Where the Gods Gathered?"

"A good example, young Poyectzin. That city is now a tumbled and deserted and weed-grown ruin, but it obviously was once a greater and more populous city than Tenochtítlan can ever hope to be."

I said, "We were taught, Lord Teacher, that it was built by the gods when they all assembled to decide to create the earth and its people and all living things...."

"Of course you were taught that. Any grand thing not done by the Mexíca must not be credited to any other mortal men." He snorted a plume of smoke from his nostrils. "Although Obsidian Snake blotted out the Mexíca's past history, he could not burn the libraries of our Texcóco and other cities. We do still have records telling what this valley was like long before the coming of the Aztéca-Mexíca. Obsidian Snake could not change all the history of The One World."

"And those unaltered histories," I asked, "—how far back do they go?"

"Not nearly far enough. We do not pretend to have accounts dating back to the Lord and Lady Pair. You know the legends. Those two were the very first inhabitants of this earth, and then all the other gods, and then a race of giants." Neltitica took a few meditative puffs at his poquietl. "That legend about the giants, you know, may be true. An old and weathered bone was dug up by a farmer and is still preserved in Texcóco—I have seen it—and the surgeons say it is most definitely a thighbone. And it is as long as I am tall."

Little Poyec laughed uneasily and said, "I should not care to meet the man whose thigh it was."

"Well," said the Lord Teacher, "gods and giants are things for the priests to ponder. My interest is the history of such men, especially the first men in this valley, the men who built such cities as Teotihuacan and Tolan. Because all we have, we inherited from them. All we know, we learned from them." He took a last puff of smoke and removed from the holder the burned-down stub of his picíetl reed. "We may never know why they disappeared, or when, though the fire-charred beams of their ruined buildings suggest that they were driven out by marauders. Probably the savage Chichimeca, the Dog People. We can read but little of the surviving wall paintings and carvings and picture writings, and none of those things tells even the name of that vanished people. But the things are so artfully executed that we respectfully refer to their makers as the Toltéca, the Master Artisans, and for sheaves of years we have been trying to equal their achievements."

"But," said Poyec, "if the Toltéca have been so long gone, I do not see how we could have learned from them."

"Because a few individuals would have survived, even when the mass of them, as a nation, disappeared. These would have been some survivors who took to the high crags or the deep forests. And those diehard Toltéca would have endured in hiding—even preserving some of their books of knowledge perhaps—hoping to hand on their culture through their children and children's children, as they intermarried with other tribes. Unfortunately, the only other peoples in this area at that time were utter primitives: the stolid Otomí, the frivolous Purémpecha, and of course the ever-present Dog People."