She laughed at the absurdity of my lie, but pretended to take it seriously, asking, "And where in the world would we live?"

"In some place much finer. I would pay a good price, enough to enable you to live comfortably. And," I said firmly, "with no necessity for the girls or you to go astraddle the road."

"What—what would you offer to pay?"

"We will settle that right now. Here is the inn. Please to put lights in the room where we dined. And writing materials—paper and chalk will do. Meanwhile, tell me which is the room of that fat eunuch. And stop looking frightened; I am being no more imbecilic than usual."

She gave me a wavering smile and went to do my bidding, while I took a lamp to find the proprietor's room, and interrupted his snoring with a hard kick to his massive rear end.

"Get up and come with me," I said, as he spluttered with outrage and sleepy bewilderment. "We have business to transact."

"It is the middle of the night. You are drunk. Go away."

I had almost to lift him to his feet, and it took a while to convince him that I was sober, but I finally hauled him—still struggling to knot his mantle—to the room Gie Bele had lighted for us. When I half-dragged him in, she started to sidle out.

"No, stay," I said. "This concerns all three of us. Fat man, fetch out all the papers pertinent to the ownership of this hostel and the debt outstanding against it. I am here to redeem the pledge."

He and she stared at me in equal astonishment, and Wáyay, after spluttering some more, said, "This is why you rout me from my bed? You want to buy this place, you presumptuous pup? We can all go back to bed. I do not intend to sell."

"It is not yours to sell," I said. "You are not its owner, but the holder of a lien. When I pay the debt and all its accrual, you are a trespasser. Go, bring the documents."

I had the advantage of him then, when he was still befogged with sleep. But by the time we settled down to the columns of number dots and flags and little trees, he was again as acute and exacting as he had ever been in his careers of priest and currency changer. I will not regale you, my lords, with all the details of our negotiations. I will only remind you that I did know the craft of working with numbers, and I knew the craftiness possible to that craft.

What the late explorer husband had borrowed, in goods and currency, added up to an appreciable sum. However, the premium he had agreed to pay for the privilege of the loans should not have been excessive, except for the lender's cunning method of compounding it. I do not remember all the figures there involved, but I can give a simplified illustration. If I lend a man a hundred cacao beans for one month, I am entitled to the repayment of a hundred and ten. For two months, he repays a hundred and twenty beans. For three months, a hundred and thirty, and so on. But what Wáyay had done was to add the ten-bean premium at the end of the first month, and then on that total of a hundred and ten to calculate the next premium, so that at the end of two months he was owed a hundred twenty and one beans. The difference may sound trifling, but it mounts proportionately each month, and on substantial sums it can mount alarmingly.

I demanded a recalculation from the very start of Wáyay's giving credit to the inn. Ayya, he squawked as he must have done when he awoke from that disastrous mushroom rapture of his priesthood days. But, when I suggested that we refer the matter to Tecuantépec's bishosu for adjudication, he gritted his teeth and redid the arithmetic, with me closely monitoring. There were many other details to be argued, such as the inn's expenses and profits over the four years he had been running it. But finally, as dawn was breaking, we agreed on a lump sum due him, and I agreed to pay in currency of gold dust, copper and tin snippets, and cacao beans. Before I did so, I said:

"You have forgotten one small item. I owe you for the lodging of my own train."

"Ah, yes," said the fat old fraud. "Honest of you to remind me." And he added that to the accounting.

As if suddenly remembering, I said, "Oh, one other thing."

"Yes?" he said expectantly, his chalk poised to add it in.

"Subtract four years' wages due the woman Gie Bele."

"What?" He stared at me aghast. She stared too, but in dazzled admiration. "Wages?" he sneered. "The woman was bound over to me as a tlacotli."

"If your accounting had been honest, she would not have been. Look at your own revised arithmetic. The Bishosu might have awarded you a half interest in this property. You have not only swindled Gie Bele, you have also enslaved a free citizen."

"All right, all right. Let me count. Two cacao beans a day—

"Those are slave wages. You have had the services of the inn's former proprietress. Certainly worth a freeman's wage of twenty beans a day." He clutched his hair and howled. I added, "You are a barely tolerated alien in Tecuantépec. She is of the Ben Záa, and so is the Bishosu. If we go to him..."

He immediately ceased his tantrum and began frantically to scribble, dripping sweat onto the bark paper. Then he did howl.

"More than twenty and nine thousand! There are not that many beans on all the cacao bushes in all the Hot Lands!"

"Translate it to gold-dust quills," I suggested. "It will not sound so big a sum."

"Will it not?" he bellowed, when he had done the figuring. "Why, if I accede to the wage demand, I have lost my very loincloth on the entire transaction. To subtract that amount means you pay me less than half the original amount I paid out as a loan!" His voice had gone up to a squeak and he sweated as if he were melting.

"Yes," I said. "That agrees with my own figures. How will you have it? All in gold? Or some in tin? In copper?" I had fetched my pack from the room I had not yet occupied.

"This is extortion!" he raged. "This is robbery!"

There was also a small obsidian dagger in the pack. I took it out and held its point against Wáyay's second or third chin.

"Extortion and robbery it was," I said in my coldest voice. "You cheated a defenseless woman of her property, then made her drudge for you during four long years, and I know to what desperate straits she had come. I hold you to the arithmetic you yourself have just now done. I will pay you the amount you last arrived at—"

"Ruination!" he bawled. "Devastation!"

"You will write me a receipt, and on it you will write that the payment voids all your claim on this property and this woman, now and forever. You will then, while I watch, tear up that old pledge signed by her husband. You will then take whatever personal possessions you have, and depart these premises."

He made one last try at defiance: "And if I refuse?"

"I march you to the Bishosu at knife point. The punishment for theft is the flower-garland garrotte. I do not know what you would suffer beforehand, as a penalty for enslaving the free-born, since I do not know the refinements of torture in this nation."

Slumping in final defeat, he said, "Put away the knife. Count out the currency." He raised his head to snap at Gie Bele, "Bring me fresh paper—" then winced and made his tone unctuous, "Please, my lady, bring me paper and paints and a writing reed."

I counted quills of gold dust and stacks of tin and copper onto the cloth between us, and there was little but lint left in the pack when I was done. I said, "Make the receipt to my name. In the language of this place I am called Záa Nayazu."