I said I had not.

"You will. We grow it now in our dooryards. The flower is so called because its unopened bud is the shape of a human heart. The woman of a household will pluck only a single bud at a time, because that one flower, as it unfolds, will perfume the entire house. But another distinction of the heart flower is. that it originally grew wild, in the mountains you see yonder, and grew nowhere else but in these mountains of Uaxyacac. Like us Ben Záa, it came into existence right here, and like us, it flourishes still. The heart flower is a joy to see and to smell, as it always has been. The Ben Záa are a strong and vigorous people, as they always have been."

I echoed what Cozcatl had said, "A beautiful people."

"Yes, as beautiful as they are vivacious," said the old man with no affected modesty. "The Cloud People have kept themselves so, by keeping themselves pure Cloud People. We purge any impurity which crops up or creeps in."

I said, "What? How?"

"If a child is born malformed or intolerably ugly, or gives evidence of being deficient of brain, we see that it does not live to grow up. The unfortunate infant is denied its mother's teat, and it dwindles and dies in the gods' good time. Our old people also are discarded, when they become too unsightly to be seen, or too feeble to care for themselves, or when their minds begin to decay. Of course, the old folks' immolation is generally voluntary, and done for the public good. I myself, when I feel my vigor or my senses begin to wane, I shall make my farewells and go away to the Holy Home and never be seen again."

I said, "It sounds rather an extreme measure."

"Is it extreme to weed a garden? To prune dead branches from an orchard?"

"Well..."

He said sardonically, "You admire the effect but you deplore the means. That we choose to discard the useless and the helpless, who would otherwise be a burden on their fellows. That we choose to let the defective die, and thus avert their begetting still more defectives. Young moralist, do you also condemn our refusal to breed mongrels?"

"Mongrels?"

"We have been repeatedly invaded by the Mixteca and Olméca in times past, and by the Mexíca in more recent times, and we suffer creeping infiltrations from lesser tribes around our borders, but we have never mixed with any of them. Though outlanders move among us and even live among us, we will always forbid the mingling of their blood with ours."

I said, "I do not see how that could be managed. Men and women being what they are, you can hardly allow social intercourse with foreigners and hope to prevent the sexual."

"Oh, we are human," he conceded. "Our men willingly sample the women of other races, and some of our own women wantonly go astraddle the road. But any of the Cloud People who formally takes an outlander for husband or wife is, at that moment, no longer one of the Cloud People. That fact is usually enough to discourage marriage with aliens. But there is another reason why such marriages are uncommon. Surely you yourself can see it."

I shook my head uncertainly.

"You have traveled among other peoples. Now look at our men. Look at our women. In what nation outside Uaxyacac could they find partners so nearly ideal for each other?"

I already had looked, and the question was unanswerable. Granted, I had in my time known exceedingly well-favored examples of other peoples: my own beautiful sister Tzitzi, who was of the Mexíca; the Lady of Tolan, who was of the Tecpanéca; pretty little Cozcatl, who was of the Acolhua. And granted, not every single specimen of the Tzapoteca was unfaultably imposing. But I could not deny that the majority of those people were of such superb face and figure as to make the majority of other peoples seem little better than early and failed experiments of the gods.

Among the Mexíca, I was reckoned a rarity for my height and musculature; but almost every man of the Tzapoteca was as tall and strongly built as I, and had both strength and sensitivity in his face. Almost every woman was amply endowed with womanly curves, but was lithe as a willow wand; and her face was fashioned for goddesses to imitate: large and luminous eyes, straight nose, a mouth made for kissing, unblemished and almost translucent skin. Zyanya was a shapely vessel of burnished copper, brimming with honey, set in the sun. The men and women alike stood proud and moved gracefully and spoke their liquid Lóochi in soft voices. The children were exquisite and lovably well behaved. I am rather glad that I could not step outside myself to see how I compared in such company. But the other foreigners I saw in Uaxyacac—most of them immigrant Mixteca—alongside the Cloud People looked lumpy and mud-colored and imperfectly put together. Still, I am not entirely credulous. So, as we say, I took with my little finger the old interpreter Red River's tale of how his people had been created; spontaneously, and whole, and splendid. I could not believe that the Cloud People had sprouted from those mountains full-formed, like the heart flower. No other nation ever claimed such a nonsensically impossible origin. Every people must come from somewhere else, must they not?

But I could believe, from the evidence of my own eyes, that the Tzapoteca had haughtily balked at interbreeding with any outlanders, that they had preserved only their prime bloodlines, even when it meant remorselessness toward their own loved ones. Wherever and however the Cloud People truly originated, they had ever since refused to become a nation of less than the best. I could believe that, because there I was, walking among them: the admirable men and the desirable women. Ayyo, the eminently, irresistibly, excruciatingly desirable women!

* * *

As is our practice here, Your Excellency, the lord scribe has just read back to me the last sentence I spoke, to remind me where we left off at our last session. Dare I suppose that Your Excellency joins us today expecting to hear how I ravished the entire female population of Záachila?

No?

If, as you say, it would not surprise you to hear it, but you do not wish to, then let me really surprise Your Excellency. Though we spent several days in and around Záachila, I did not once touch a woman there. Uncharacteristic of me, yes, as Your Excellency remarks. But I do not claim to have enjoyed any sudden redemption from my libertine ways. Rather, I was then afflicted by a new perversity. I did not want any of the women who could be had, because they could be had. Those women were adorable and seductive and doubtless skillful—Blood Glutton wallowed in lechery all the time we were there—but their very availability made me decline them. What I wanted, what I desired and lusted for was a real woman of the Cloud People: meaning some woman who would recoil in horror from a foreigner like me. It was a dilemma. I wanted what I could not possibly have, and I would settle for nothing less. So I had none, and I can tell Your Excellency nothing about the women of Záachila.

Permit me to tell you a little about Uaxyacac instead. That land is a chaos of mountains, peaks, and crags; mountains shouldering between mountains; mountains overlaid on mountains. The Tzapoteca, content in their mountain protection and isolation, have seldom cared to venture outside those ramparts, just as they have seldom welcomed anyone else inside. To other nations, they long ago became known as "the closed people."

However, the first Uey-Tlatoani Motecuzóma was determined to extend the Mexíca trade routes southward and ever farther southward, and he chose to do so by force, not by diplomatic negotiation. Early in the year in which I was born, he had led an army into Uaxyacac and, after causing much death and devastation, finally succeeded in taking its capital by siege. He demanded unhindered passage for the Mexíca pochtéa and, of course, laid the Cloud People under tribute to The Triple Alliance. But he lacked supply lines to support an occupying force, and so, when he marched home with the bulk of his army, he left only a token garrison in Záachila to enforce the collection of the levy. As soon as he was out of sight, the Tzapoteca quite naturally slaughtered the garrison warriors, and resumed their former way of life, and never paid so much as a cotton rag of tribute.