I had carried with me, on purpose, a cheap jadestone pendant. I gave that to her, and she gave me her hand to help me clamber through the window—for her husband was in the other room, laid out drunk—and we gave each other a more than generous measure of enjoyment. I returned to the inn reassured of two things. First, that I had lost none of my capacity to want and to please a woman. Second, that a capable and willing woman—in my estimation, and I had some basis for comparison—was better equipped for such enjoyments than even the prettiest and most irresistible boy.
Oh, Cozcatl and I often slept together after that first time, whenever we stayed at an inn where the accommodations were limited, or when we camped in the open and chose to bundle together for mutual comfort. But my subsequent sexual employment of him was infrequent, done only on those occasions when, as Blood Glutton had said, I really hungered for such a service and there was no other or preferable partner. Cozcatl devised various means of satisfying me, probably because he would have become bored with an always passive participation. I will not speak further of those things, and in any case we eventually ceased doing them, but he and I never ceased being the closest of friends during all the years of his life, until the day he decided to stop living.
* * *
The dry-season weather remained fine for traveling, with clement days and brisk nights, though as we got farther south the nights became almost warm enough for us to sleep outdoors without blankets, and the middays became so very warm that we wished we could doff everything else we wore and carried.
It was a lovely land we crossed. Some mornings we would wake in a field of flowers on which the dew of first dawn still glittered, a field of flashing jewels extending to the horizon in all directions. The flowers might be of profuse varieties and colors, or they might be all the same: sometimes those tall ones whose big, shaggy, yellow blooms turn always to face the sun.
As the dawn gave way to day, our company might move through any kind of terrain imaginable. Sometimes it would be a forest so luxuriantly leafed as to discourage the growth of all underbrush, and its floor would be a carpet of soft grass in which the tree trunks stood as neatly spaced as in a nobleman's park planted by a master gardener. Or we might wade through cool seas of feathery fern. Or, invisible to each other, we would shoulder through banks of gold and green reeds or silver and green grasses that grew higher than our heads. Occasionally we would have to climb a mountain and, from its top, there would be a view of other and farther mountains, dimming in color from the nearby green to the hazy dove-blue of distance.
Whichever man was in the lead would often be startled by the sudden signs of unsuspected life all about us. A rabbit would crouch as still as a stump until our leader almost trod upon him, and then would break his immobility and bound away. Or the leading man might similarly stir a pheasant into booming flight, almost brushing his face. Or he would flush coveys of quail or dove, or a swift-runner bird that would dash away on foot in its peculiar stretched-out stride. Many times an armored armadillo would shuffle out of our way, or a lizard would flicker across our path—and, as we got ever farther south, the lizards became iguanas, some of them as long as Cozcatl was tall, and crested and wattled, and brilliantly colored red and green and purple.
Almost always, there was a hawk circling silently far over our heads, keeping keen watch for any small game our passage might frighten into movement and vulnerability—or a vulture circling silently, hoping we would discard something edible. In the woods, flying squirrels glided from high branches to lower ones, seeming as buoyant as the hawks and vultures, but not as silent; they chittered angrily at us. In forest or meadow, there forever fluttered or hovered about us bright parakeets and gemlike hummingbirds and the stingless black bees and multitudes of butterflies of extravagant coloring.
Ayyo, there was always color—color everywhere—and the middays were the most colorful of times, for they blazed like coffers of treasure newly opened, full of every stone and metal prized by men and gods. In the sky, which was turquoise, the sun flared like a round shield of beaten gold. Its light shone on ordinary boulders and rocks and pebbles, and transformed them into topaz or jacinths or the opals we called firefly stones; or silver or amethysts or tezcatl, the mirror stone; or pearls, which of course are not really stones but the hearts of oysters; or amber, which also is not a stone but foam made solid. All the greenery around us would turn to emerald and greenstone and jadestone. If we were in a forest, where the sunlight was dappled by the emerald foliage, we would unconsciously walk with care and delicacy, so as not to tread upon the precious golden disks and dishes and platters strewn underfoot.
At twilight the colors all began to lose their vibrancy. The hot colors cooled, even the reds and yellows subdued themselves into blue, then purple and gray. At the same time, a colorless mist would begin to rise from the clefts and hollows of the land about us, until its separate billows merged into a blanket from which we kicked tufts and fluffs as we plodded through it. The bats and night birds would begin to dart about, snatching invisible insects on the wing, and managing magically never to collide with us or any tree branches or each other. When full darkness came, we were sometimes still aware of the country's beauty, even though we could not see it. For on many nights we went to sleep inhaling the heady perfume of those moon-white blossoms that only at night open their petals and breathe out their sweet sighs.
If the end of a day's march coincided with our arrival at some Tya Nuü community, we would spend the night under a roof and within walls—which might be of adobe brick or wood in the more populous places, or mere reed and thatch in the smaller ones. We could usually purchase decent food, sometimes even choice delicacies peculiar to that neighborhood, and hire women to cook and serve it. We could buy hot water for baths and occasionally even rent the use of a family's steam house, where such a thing existed. In the sufficiently large communities, and for a trifling payment, Blood Glutton and I could usually find a woman apiece, and sometimes we could also procure a female slave for our men to share around among them.
On as many nights, however, the dark caught us in the empty land between populated places. Though all of us had by then got accustomed to sleeping on the ground, and had got over any uneasiness about the black void around us, those nights were naturally less enjoyable. Our evening meal might consist only of beans and atóli mush, and water to drink. But that was not so much a privation as was the lack of a bath: having to go to bed crusted with the day's dirt and itching from insect bites and stings. Sometimes, though, we were fortunate enough to camp beside a stream or pond in which we could manage at least a cold-water dip. And sometimes, too, our meal included the meat of a boar or some other wild animal, usually provided by Blood Glutton, of course.
But Cozcatl had taken to carrying the old soldier's bow and arrows and idly shooting at tress and cactus along the way, until he had become fairly proficient with the weapon. Since he was boyishly inclined to let fly at just about anything that moved, he usually brought down creatures that were too small to feed us all—a single pheasant or ground squirrel—and once he sent our entire company scattering for the several horizons when he punctured a brown-and-white-striped skunk, with consequences you can imagine. But one day, scouting out ahead of the train, he flushed a deer from its daytime bed, and put an arrow into it, and chased the wounded animal until it staggered and fell and died. He was awkwardly carving at it with his little flint knife when we caught up to him, and Blood Glutton said: