There came to my ears another grunt, and I came wide awake from my reverie, horrified, for I had not produced that grunt either. There also came to my nostrils a sort of urinous scent, and to my vision, dim though it was, a sense that a darker piece of the darkness was moving stealthily from behind me to the left side of me. The darkness grunted again, louder, and with an inquiring note. Though almost paralyzed, I thumbed the rawhide to make what I hoped was a growl of welcome. What else could I do?
From my left front there turned on me two flat, cold, yellow lights—and a sudden sharp wind sang past my cheek. I thought it was the jaguar's lethal hiccup. But the yellow lights blinked out, and there came a throat-tearing scream, like that of a female sacrifice clumsily knifed by an inept priest. The scream broke off and became a choked, bubbling noise, accompanied by the thrashing of a heavy body evidently tearing up all the shrubbery roundabout.
"I am sorry I had to let it get so close to you," said Blood Glutton at my side. "But I needed to see the gleam of its eyes to judge my aim."
"What is the thing?" I asked, for I could still hear in my ears that awful humanlike scream, and I feared we had got some wandering woman.
The thrashing sound ceased, and Blood Glutton went to investigate. He said triumphantly, "Right in the lung. Not bad for throwing by guess." Then he must have felt along the dead body, for I heard him mutter, "I will be damned to Mictlan," and I waited for him to confess that he had speared some poor blue Chinantecatl woman lost in the night woods. But all he said was, "Come and help me drag it up to the camp!" I did, and if it was a woman she weighed as much as I did and she had a cat's hind legs.
All those in the camp, of course, had bolted up out of their blankets at the frightful noise. Blood Glutton and I let drop our prey, and I could see it for the first time: a big tawny cat, but not a spotted one.
The old soldier panted, "I must be—losing my skill. Thought I made—a jaguar caller. But that is a cuguar, a mountain lion."
"No matter," I panted. "Meat just as good. Skin make you a good mantle."
Naturally there was no more sleeping in what remained of the night. Blood Glutton and I sat and rested, and preened in the admiration of the others, and I congratulated him on his prowess, and he congratulated me on my unflinching patience. Meanwhile, the slaves skinned the animal, and some of them scraped clean the inner surface of the hide, and others cut up the carcass into pieces of convenient carrying size. Cozcatl cooked breakfast for us all: a maize atóli that would give us energy for the day, but he also provided a treat to celebrate our successful hunt. He got out the eggs we had tenderly carried and hoarded since Nejapa. With a twig he pierced each one's shell, and twirled the twig to addle the yolk and white. Then he roasted them only briefly in the outer ashes of the fire, and we sucked out the warm, rich contents through the holes.
At the next two or three nights' stops, we feasted on the rather chewy but extremely tasty cat meat. Blood Glutton gave the cuguar's hide to the burliest slave, Ten, to wear as a cape so he could continuously supple it with his hands. But we had not taken the trouble to find and rub tanbark into the skin, so it soon began to stink so rancidly that we made Ten march a good distance apart from the rest of us. Also, since mountain climbing often necessitates the use of all four limbs, Ten seldom had his hands free to work the leather to softness. The sun stiffened it until poor Ten might as well have been wearing a varnished-hide door strapped to his back. But Blood Glutton stubbornly mumbled something about making himself a shield of it, and refused to let Ten get rid of it, and so it came with us all the rest of the way through the Tzempuula mountains.
* * *
I am glad that the Señor Bishop Zumárraga is not with us today, my lord scribes, for I must tell of a sexual encounter I know His Excellency would deem sordid and repulsive. He would probably turn purple again. In truth, even though more than forty-years have passed since that night, I myself am still made uneasy by the memory of it, and I would omit the episode, except that its recounting is necessary to the understanding of many and more significant incidents that later derived from it.
When the fourteen of us finally descended the last long foothills of the Tzempuula mountains, we came down again into Tzapoteca territory at a sizable city on the bank of a wide river. You now call it the Villa de Guadalcazar, but in those days the city, the river, and all the expanse of lands about it were called in the Lóochi language Layu Beezyu, or The Place of the Jaguar God. However, since that was a busy crossroads of several trade routes, most of its people spoke Náhuatl as a second language, and as often used the name our Mexíca travelers had given the place: Tecuantépec, or simply Jaguar Hill. No one then or now, except myself, seems ever to have thought it ludicrous to apply the name of Jaguar Hill to the broad flowing river as well, and to the exceptionally unhilly lands beyond.
The city was only about five one-long-runs from where the river spills into the great southern ocean, so it had attracted immigrant settlers from several other peoples of that coastal area: Zoque, Nexitzo, some Huave, and even displaced groups of the Mixteca. On its streets, one encountered quite a variety of complexions, physiques, costumes, and accents. But fortunately the native Cloud People predominated, so most of the city folk were as superlatively handsome and courtly as those of Záachila.
On the afternoon we arrived, as our little company stumbled wearily but eagerly across the rope bridge spanning the river, Blood Glutton said, in a voice hoarse from dust and fatigue, "There are some excellent hostels yonder in Tecuantépec."
"The excellent ones can wait," I rasped. "We will stop at the first one."
And so, tired and famished, as ragged and filthy and malodorous as priests, we lurched into the dooryard of the first inn we found on the river side of the city. And from that impulsive decision of mine—just as the wisps of smoke must uncoil from the twirl of a fire-drilling stick—there inevitably unfurled all the events of all the remaining roads and days of my life, and of Zyanya's life, and the lives of persons I have already mentioned, and of other persons I shall name, and even of one person who never had a name.
Know, then, reverend friars, that it began so:
When we had all of us, the slaves included, bathed and then steamed and then bathed again and then dressed in clean garments, we called for food. The slaves ate outside in the twilit dooryard, but Cozcatl, Blood Glutton, and I had a cloth laid for us in a torch-lighted and rush-carpeted inside room. We glutted ourselves on delicacies fresh from the nearby sea: raw oysters and boiled pink shrimps and a baked red fish of great size.
My stomach's hunger assuaged, I noticed the extraordinary beauty of the woman serving us, and I remembered that I was capable of other hungers. I also noticed something else out of the ordinary. The proprietor of the hostel was obviously of an immigrant race: a short, fat, oily-skinned man. But the serving woman to whom he brusquely snapped orders was obviously of the Ben Záa: tall and supple, with skin that glowed like amber and a face to rival that of her people's First Lady Pela Xila. It was unthinkable that she might be the landlord's wife. And, since she could hardly have been a born or bought slave in her own country, I assumed that some misfortune had forced her to indenture herself to the boorish and foreign-born innkeeper.
It was difficult to judge the age of any adult woman of the Cloud People—the years were so kind to them—especially one as sightly and graceful as that servant. If I had known that she was old enough to have a daughter of my own age, I might not have spoken to her. I might not have done it in any case, except that Blood Glutton and I were washing down our meal with copious drafts of octli. Whatever impelled me, when the woman next came near I made bold to look up at her and inquire: