"I am honored," said Tiptoe, "to be of service to the Lady Améyatl."
My cousin leaned to kiss me on the cheek, but only briefly and lightly, not to repel me with the prisoner-smell of her body or breath, and went away with Tiptoe. I turned again to G'nda Ké.
"I have already slain two of the palace guards. I assume that everyone else currently employed here likewise served Yeyac without demur during his false reign."
"True. There were a number who disdainfully refused to do so, but they left long ago to seek employment elsewhere."
"I charge you, then, have those loyal servants found and brought back here. I charge you also, dispose of the present retinue. All of them. I cannot be bothered with the slaughtering of so many menials. I am sure that you, being a serpent yourself, must know of some venom that can poison them all, and expeditiously."
"But of course," she said, as tranquilly as if I had asked for a soothing syrup.
"Very well. Wait until Améyatl has been well fed—doubtless the first decent meal she will have had during her captivity. Then, when the domestics gather for their evening repast, see to it that their atóli has been well dosed with your poison. After they are dead, Pakápeti will take charge of the kitchens until we can find reliable servants and slaves."
"As you command. Now, would you have these menials die in agony or with ease, quickly or lingeringly?"
"I do not give a putrid pochéoa how they die. Just see that they do."
"Then G'nda Ké chooses to do it mercifully, for kindness comes naturally to her. She will dose their meal with the tlapatl weed that makes its victims die in madness. In their delirium, they will see glorious colors and wondrous hallucinations, until they see no longer. But now, Tenamáxtli—tell G'nda Ké—is she also to partake of this final, fatal repast?"
"No. I still have use for you. Unless Améyatzin overrules me, when she regains her strength. She may demand that I dispose of you, and in some highly imaginative, not kindly manner."
"Do not blame G'nda Ké for your cousin's mistreatment," said the woman as she followed me to the royal chambers that had once been Mixtzin's and then Yeyac's. "It was her own brother who decreed that she be so inhumanly confined. G'nda Ké was merely ordered to keep barred the door. Even G'nda Ké could hardly overrule him."
"You lie, woman! You lie more often and more easily than you change your precious footwear." To one of the hovering manservants I gave orders to place hot coals and water buckets in the royal steam room, and to do it instantly. To the Yaki woman, as I began to discard my Spanish apparel, I went on, "With your poisons and your magics—ayya, even with your reptilian eye—you could have slain Yeyac at any time. I know you worked your evil charm to aid him in his alliance with the Spaniards."
"Mere mischief, dear Tenamáxtli," she said airily. "G'nda Ké's usual mischief. Delightedly setting men against men. Merely to while away the time until you and she were together again, and could really ravage and rampage."
"Together!" I snorted. "I had rather be yoked with the terrible underworld goddess Mictlancíuatl."
"Now you are telling an untruth. Look at yourself." I was nude by now, waiting impatiently for the servant to report that my steam room was ready. "You are pleased to be again with G'nda Ké. You are wantonly, seductively showing your naked body—and a superb one it is. You are deliberately tempting her."
"I am deliberately regarding her as inconsequential, of no account. Whatever you see and whatever you think concerns me no more than if you were a slave or a woodworm in the wall's paneling."
Her face went so dark at the insult that her cold eyes glittered out from it like chips of ice. The servant returned and I followed him to the steam room, saying to the Yaki woman, "Remain here."
After a prolonged and thorough and voluptuous steaming and sweating and scraping and toweling, I emerged, still nude, to find that G'nda Ké had been joined in the main room by the warrior Nochéztli. They stood apart and eyed one another, he warily, she sneeringly. Before he could speak, she did, and with malice:
"So, Tenamáxtli, this is why you cared not if G'nda Ké saw you naked. Nochéztli I know to have been one of the late Yeyac's favorite cuilóntin, and he tells me now that he stands henceforth at your right hand. Ayya, so you keep sweet Tiptoe in your company merely as a disguise. G'nda Ké would never have suspected it of you."
"Ignore the woodworm," I told Nochéztli. "Have you something to report?"
"The assembled army awaits your inspection, my lord. They have been waiting for quite some time."
"Let them wait," I said as I began rummaging through the Uey-Tecútli's wardrobe of formal cloaks, headdresses and other regalia. "It is what is expected of an army, and what an army expects—long tediums and boredoms only occasionally briskened by killings and dyings. Go and make sure they wait."
While I dressed—now and then commanding the sullen G'nda Ké to assist me in affixing some jeweled ornament or fluffing up a feathered crest—I told her:
"I may have to throw away half that army. When you and I parted at the Lake of Rushes, you said you would be traveling in furtherance of my cause. Instead, you came here to Aztlan, just as did your bitch ancestress of the same name, sheaves of sheaves of years ago. And you did exactly as she did—fomented dissension among the populace, set comradely warriors at odds, turned brother against—"
"Hold now, Tenamáxtli," she interrupted. "G'nda Ké is not guilty of every wrong done hereabouts in your absence. It must have been years ago that your uncle and mother returned from the City of Mexíco, and were ambushed by Yeyac, a crime still unknown to almost everybody else in Aztlan. How long he waited to dispatch the co-regent Káuri, G'nda Ké does not know, or how much more time went by before he so cruelly banished his own sister and claimed the mantle of Revered Governor. G'nda Ké knows only that all those things had occurred before she arrived here."
"At which time you goaded Yeyac into collaboration with the Spaniards at Compostela. The white men I have sworn to exterminate! And you lightly dismiss your meddling as 'mere mischief.' "
"Ayyo, entertaining, to be sure. G'nda Ké enjoys meddling in men's affairs. But think, Tenamáxtli. She has in fact done you a valuable favor. As soon as your new cuilóntli—"
"Damn you, woman, to nethermost Míctlan! I do not consort in intimacy with cuilóntin. I spared Nochéztli from the sword only so he could expose all of Yeyac's other followers and fellow conspirators."
"And when he does, you will weed them out—warriors and civil folk alike—the traitors, the unreliables, the weaklings, the fools—everyone who would rather obey a Spanish overlord than risk spilling his own blood. You will be left with a smaller but better army, and with a populace wholeheartedly committed to supporting your cause, the cause for which that army will wholeheartedly fight."
"Yes," I had to concede, "there is that aspect to appreciate."
"And all because G'nda Ké came to Aztlan and made mischief."
I said drily, "I should have preferred to manage all those ruses and intrigues on my own. Because, when I have, as you put it, plucked Aztlan clean of weeds—ayya!—you will be the one person remaining whom I dare not trust."
"Believe me or do not, as you will. But insofar as she can be to any male person, G'nda Ké is your friend."