So I delegated to Knight Nochéztli most of the workaday responsibilities of command, thereby relieving myself of having to deal with petty complaints, petitions, quarrels and other such exasperations, conserving my own time and attention for those things that only I could command and oversee in person. Foremost of those was a project I wished to commence while we were still comfortably encamped. That is why one day I summoned you, Verónica.
When you stood before me, looking alert and attentive but demure, your hands behind your back, I said what I had said to so many others before, "It is my intention to retake this One World from its unwelcome Spanish conquerors and occupiers and oppressors."
You nodded and I went on, "Whether we succeed or fail in this endeavor, it may be that, at some time in the future, the historians of The One World will be glad to have available a true record of the events of Tenamáxtzin's war. You can write and you have the materials for doing so. I should like you to start setting down in writing what may be the only record of this rebellion that will ever exist. Do you think you can do that?"
"I will do my best, my lord."
"Now, you witnessed only the conclusion of the battle at Tonalá. I will recount for you the circumstances and incidents leading up to it. This you and I can do at leisure, while we are camped here, allowing me to sort out in my own mind the sequence of events, and allowing you to get accustomed to writing at my dictation, and allowing both of us to review and amend any mistakes that may be made."
"I am fortunate in having a retentive memory, my lord. I think we will not make many mistakes."
"Let us hope not. However, we will not always have the luxury of our sitting together while I talk and you listen. This army has uncountable one-long-runs to march, uncountable enemies to confront, uncountable battles to be fought. I should wish to have them all on record—the marches, the enemies, the battles, the outcomes. Since I must lead the marching, find the enemies, be in the forefront of the battles, I clearly cannot always be describing for you what is occurring. Much of it you will have to see for yourself."
"I also possess good eyesight, my lord."
"I will choose a horse for you, and teach you to ride it, and keep you ever by my side—except in the thick of battle, when you will be posted at a safe distance. Thus you will see many things only from afar. You must try to understand what you are seeing, and then try to make coherent record of it. You will seldom have long, quiet intervals in which to sit down with quill and paper. You may seldom even have a place to sit down. So you must contrive some way to make quick notes—on the spot or on the run—that later you can elaborate when, as now, we are encamped for a time."
"I can do that, my lord. In fact—"
"Let me finish, girl. I was about to suggest that you use a method long favored by the traveling pochtéca merchants for keeping their accounts. You pluck the leaves of the wild grapevine and—"
"And scratch on them with a sharp twig. The white marks are as enduring as ink on paper. Your pardon, my lord. I already knew that. In fact, I have been doing that—here and now—as you have been speaking."
You brought your hands out from behind your back, holding grape leaves and a twig. The leaves bore minute scratches that you had made without even looking at what you were doing.
More than a little astonished, I said, "You can make sense of those marks? You can repeat some of the words I have spoken?"
"The marks, my lord, are only to nudge my memory. No one else could interpret them. And I do not pretend to have preserved your every word, but—"
"Prove it, girl. Read back to me something from this conversation." I reached out and indicated one of the leaves at random. "What was said there?"
It took you only a moment of study. " 'At some time in the future, the historians of The One World will be glad to have available—' "
"By Huitztli!" I exclaimed. "This is something most marvelous. You are something most marvelous. I have known only one other scribe in my lifetime, a Spanish churchman. He was not nearly so adept as you are, and he was a man approaching middle age. How old are you, Verónica?"
"I think I have ten or eleven years, my lord. I am not sure."
"Indeed? From the near maturity of your form, and even more from the refinement evidenced in your speech, I should have taken you to be three or four years older. How did you get so well educated at such a young age?"
"My mother was Church-schooled and convent-bred. She taught me from my earliest years. Just before she died, she placed me in the same nunnery."
"That explains your name, then. But if your mother was a slave, she could have been no ordinary Moro drudge."
"She was a mulata, my lord," you said, without embarrassment. "She disliked to talk much about her parentage—or my own. But children, of course, can divine much that is left unsaid. I surmised that her mother must have been a black, but her father a Spaniard of some fairly high position and prosperity, that he would pay to send a bastard daughter to school. Of my own father, she was so secretive that I have never been able even to conjecture."
"I have seen only your face," I said. "Let me see the rest of you. Undress for me, Verónica."
That took but a moment, because you wore only a single, flimsy, ankle-length, almost threadbare gown of Spanish style.
I said, "I once had all the gradations and degrees of mixed parentage described to me. But I have no experience of judging them on sight, except that I also once knew a girl who was, I believe, the product of a white mother and black father. As for you, Verónica, I would say that your grandmother's Moro blood shows only in your already budded breasts and dark nipples and already beginning tuft of ymáxtli down below. Your grandfather's Spanish blood, I would suppose, accounts for your delicate and very handsome facial features. But you do not have hairy armpits or legs, so your grandfather's Spanish white blood must have been later diluted. Also you are as clean and sweet-smelling as any female of my own race. It is easily apparent that your unknown father contributed some further and improving admixture to your nature."
"If it matters to you, my lord," you said boldly, "whatever else I am, I am also still a virgin. I have not yet been raped by any man and not yet been tempted to dally with any."
I paused to contemplate that forthright remark—you had said "tempted," you had said "not yet"—while I savored what I was looking at. And here I will honestly confide something. Even back then, at that tender age, Verónica, you were so womanly endowed, so physically beautiful and appealing—besides being intelligent and cultivated beyond your years—that you were a very real temptation to me. I might have asked you to become something more than just my companion and my scribe. But that notion flickered only briefly in my mind, because I was still mindful of the pledge I had made to the memory of Ixínatsi. In truth, though I would have rejoiced in a mutual intimacy, I dared not either tempt or cajole you to it, for I would have risked falling in love with you. And genuinely to love a woman was what I had sworn never to do again.
And, again in truth, it is as well that I did not, in view of what would later transpire between us.
And, still in truth, I did, nevertheless—inevitably, inescapably—come to love you dearly.