When a man made that throwing movement, all the inner reeds slid out of the one held in his hand, to become a long, tapering, curving line whose tip met the tips of all the others thrown. The dancing women were embowered by a fragile dome of the reeds, and the watching crowd again went "Hoo-oo-ooo" in admiration. Then, with an adroit flick of their wrists, the men made all those reeds slide back inside each other and into their hands. The cunning trick was done again and again, in varying patterns, as when the men formed two lines and each threw his long reed to meet that of the man opposite, and the reeds made an arched tunnel through which the women danced....

When the Reed Dance was done, there came a comic interlude. Into the firelit square crept and limped all those old folk who suffer from an ailment of the bones and joints. This affliction keeps them always more or less bent and crippled, but for some reason it is especially painful to them during the rainy months. So those old men and women struggled to that ceremony to dance before Tlaloc in hope that, come the wet season, he would this time take pity and ease their aching.

They were understandably serious in their intent, but the dance was bound to be grotesque, and the spectators began to titter, then to laugh aloud, until the dancers themselves recognized their ridiculousness. One after another started to play the clown, exaggerating the absurdity of his or her limp or hobble. Eventually they were hopping on all fours like frogs, or lurching sideways like crabs, or hunching their scrawny old necks at each other like cranes in the mating season—and the watching crowd roared and rocked with laughter. The aged dancers got so carried away and so prolonged their hideous, hilarious capering that the priests had to clear them almost forcibly from the scene. It may interest Your Excellency to know that those suppliant exertions never influenced Tlaloc to benefit a single cripple—quite the contrary, many of them were permanently bedridden from that night on—but those old fools still capable would keep coming back to dance again year after year.

Next came the dance of the auyanime, those women whose bodies were reserved to the service of soldiers and knights. The dance they did was called the quequezcuicatl, "the ticklish dance," because it roused such sensations among its watchers, male and female, young and old, that they often had to be restrained from rushing in among the dancers and doing something really outrageously irreverent. The dance was so explicit in its movements that—though only the auyanime danced, and apart even from each other—you would swear they had invisible, naked male companions with whom...

Yes, well, after the auyanime had left the plaza—panting, perspiring, their hair tousled, their legs weak and wobbly—there came, to the hungry rumble of the god drum, a boy and a girl, each about four years old, in an ornate litter chair carried by priests. Because the late and unlamented Revered Speaker Tixoc had been lax in his waging of war, there had been no captive children from some other nation available for that night's sacrifice, so the priests had to buy the youngsters from two local slave families. The four parents sat well down front on the plaza and watched proudly as their babies were paraded several times past them in their several circuits of the square. The parents and the children had reason to be proud and pleased, for the little boy and girl had been purchased long enough beforehand to have been well cared for and well fed. They were now plump and perky, waving merrily to their parents and to everyone else in the crowd who waved at them. They were better dressed than they could ever have hoped to be, for they were costumed to represent the tlalóque spirits which attend upon the rain god. Their little mantles were of the finest cotton, a blue-green color patterned with silver raindrops, and they wore on their shoulder blades cloud-white wings of paper.

As had happened at every previous ceremony in honor of Tlaloc, the children were unaware of the behaviour expected of them. They were so delighted by the excitement, the colors, the lights and music that they bounced with laughter and beamed about them as radiantly as the sun. That, of course, was just the opposite of what they were meant to do. So, as usual, the priests carrying their chair had to reach up surreptitiously and pinch their bottoms. The children were at first puzzled, then pained. The boy and girl began to complain, then to weep, then to wail, as was proper. The more bawling, the more thunderstorms to come. The more tears, the more rain. The crowd joined in the crying, as was expected and encouraged, even for grown men and crusty warriors, until the hills roundabout echoed with the groaning and sobbing and beating of breasts. Every other drum and musical instrument now augmented the throbbing of the god drum and the ululation of the crowd, as the priests set down the litter chair on the far side of that stone tub of water by the pyramid. So unbelievably loud was the combined noise that probably not even the chief priest could hear the words he chanted over the two children when he lifted them and held them up one at a time to the sky, that Tlaloc might see and approve of them.

Then two assistant priests approached, one with a small pot, the other with a brush. The chief priest bent over the boy and girl and, though no one could hear, we all knew he was telling the children that they were now to don masks so the water would not get into their eyes while they swam in the sacred tank. They were still sniffling, not smiling, their cheeks wet with tears, but they did not protest when the priest brushed liquid óli liberally over their faces, leaving only their flower-bud lips uncoated. We could not see their expression when the priest turned from them again to chant, still unheard, the final appeal that Tlaloc accept their sacrifice, that in exchange he send a substantial rainy season, and so on.

The assistants lifted the boy and girl one last time, and the chief priest swiftly daubed the sticky liquid across their lower faces, covering mouths and nostrils, and the assistants dropped the children into the tank, where the cool water instantly congealed the gum. You see, the ceremony required that the sacrifices die in the water, but not of it. So they did not drown, they suffocated slowly behind the thick, unremovable, untearable óli masks, while they flailed desperately in the tank, and sank and rose and sank again, and the crowd wailed in mourning, and the drums and instruments continued their god-shouting cacophony. The children splashed and struggled ever more feebly, until first the girl, then the boy, ceased to move and hung only dimly visible just under the water, and on the surface their white wings floated, widespread, unmoving.

Cold-blooded murder, Your Excellency? But they were slave children. The boy and girl would otherwise have led brute lives, perhaps mated when they were grown, and begotten more brutes. When they came to die, they would have died to no purpose whatever, and they would have languished for a dreary eternity in the darkness and nothingness of Mictlan. Instead, they died to the honor of Tlaloc, and to the benefit of us who went on living, and their death earned them a happy life ever after in the lush green afterworld of Tlalocan.

Barbaric superstition, Your Excellency? But that next rainy season was as bountiful as even a Christian could have implored, and it gave us a handsome harvest.

Cruel? Heartrending? Well, yes... Yes, I at least remember it so, for that was the last happy holy day that Tzitzitlini and I were ever to enjoy together.

* * *

When Prince Willow's acáli came to fetch me again, it did not reach Xaltócan until well after midday, because it was then the season of high winds, and the oarsmen had had a turbulent crossing. It was just as rough going back—the lake was roiled into choppy waves from which the wind tore and flung a stinging spray—so we did not dock at Texcóco until the sun was halfway to bed.