Zyanya seemed to resent that remark. "Do you think me less brave than yourself? Whatever happens on the dueling ground, and whatever comes of it afterward, I shall willingly await. There! I have said it. If you stay your hand now, Záa, you are only using me as an excuse. I could not live with you after that."
I smiled ruefully. So the fourth and final choice was closed to me. I shook my head and took her tenderly into my arms. "No," I said with a sigh. "I will not stay my hand."
"I never thought you would," she said, as matter-of-factly as if, in marrying me, she had married an Eagle Knight. "Now there remains not much time before sunrise. Lie here and let me pillow your head. Sleep while you can."
It seemed I had just laid my head on her soft breast when there was a hesitant scratching at the door and Cozcatl's voice called, "Mixtli, the sky pales. It is time."
I stood up, ducked my head in a basin of cold water, and rearranged my rumpled clothes.
"He has already departed for the acáli landing," Cozcatl told me. "Perhaps he intends to spring upon you from ambush."
"Then I will need only weapons for close fighting, not for throwing," I said. "Bring a spear, a dagger, and a maquahuitl."
Cozcatl hurried off, and I spent a bittersweet few moments saying good-bye to Zyanya, while she spoke words meant to embolden me and reassure me that all would be well. I kissed her one last time and went downstairs to where Cozcatl waited with the arms. Blood Glutton was not present. Since he had been the Master Cuáchic teaching both me and Chimali at The House of Building Strength, it would have been unseemly for him to proffer advice or even moral support to either of us, whatever his own feelings about the duel's outcome.
The palace guards made no move to prevent our going out the gate that led through the Snake Wall into The Heart of the One World. Our sandaled footsteps on the marble paving echoed back and forth from the Great Pyramid and numerous lesser buildings. The plaza looked even more than usually immense in its early morning opal light and emptiness, there being no other people in it except a few priests shambling to their sunrise duties. We left by the opening in the western side of the Snake Wall and went through streets and over canal bridges to the edge of the island nearest the mainland, and at the boat landing I commandeered one of the canoes reserved for palace use. Cozcatl insisted on rowing me across the not very wide expanse of water, to save me tiring my muscles.
Our acáli bumped the bank at the foot of the bluff called Chapultepec, at the point where the aqueduct vaulted from the hill toward the city. High above our heads, the carved visages of the Revered Speakers Ahuítzotl, Tixoc, Axayácatl, and the first Motecuzóma stared from the otherwise rough natural rock. Another canoe was already there, its tie rope held by a palace page, who pointed to a rise of ground to one side of the cliff and said politely, "He awaits you in the wood, my lord."
I told Cozcatl, "You stay here with the other arms bearer. You will soon know whether I have further need of you or not." I stuck the obsidian dagger in the waist of my loincloth, took the obsidian-edged sword in my right hand and the obsidian-pointed spear in my left. I went to the top of the rise and looked down into the wood.
Ahuítzotl had begun to make a parkland of what had formerly been a forest wilderness. That project would not be completed for several years yet—the baths and fountains and statuary and such—but already the forest had been thinned to leave standing only the incalculably ancient, towering ahuehuelque cypresses and the carpet of grass and wild flowers growing beneath them. That carpet was quite invisible, and the mighty cypresses appeared to stand magically rootless in the pale blue ground mist rising as Tonatíu arose. Chimali would have been equally invisible to me, had he chosen to crouch somewhere in that mist.
Instead, I saw as soon as I raised my topaz to my eye, he had elected to strip off his garments and lie naked along the length of a thick cypress limb which stretched horizontally from its tree, about half again my height above ground level. Chimali's outstretched right arm, clutching the haft of a maquahuitl, was also laid along the limb and pressed close to it. For a moment I was puzzled. Why such an easily seen ambuscade? Why was he unclothed?
Then I grasped his intention, and I must have grinned like a coyote. At the reception the night before, Chimali had not seen me make that one use of my seeing crystal, and obviously no one had thought to inform him of the new and artificial improvement to my vision. He had doffed his colorful clothes so that his skin would blend with the brown of the cypress bough. He believed that there he would be invisible to his old friend Mole, his fellow student Fogbound, while I went groping and searching for him among the trees. He had only to lie there in safety until, in my halting and squinting progress, I finally passed beneath. Then he would hack downward with the maquahuitl, a single stroke, and I would be dead.
For an instant, I felt it was almost unfair of me to have taken advantage of my crystal to descry his whereabouts. But then I thought: he must have been much pleased by my stipulation that we two meet alone. After disposing of me, he could dress and go back to the city, and tell how we had met bravely face to face, and what a savage and knightly duel we had fought, before he finally overpowered me. If I knew Chimali, he would even inflict a few minor cuts on himself to make the story more credible. So I had no more compunction about what I was going to do. I tucked the topaz back inside my mantle, dropped my maquahuitl to the ground and, both hands on the shaft of my leveled spear, went down into the misty wood.
I walked slowly and warily, as he would expect of the inept fighter Fogbound, my knees bent, my eyes narrowed to slits, like a mole's. Of course, I did not go directly to his tree, but began quartering the wood from well to one side of it. Every time I approached a tree, I would reach far forward and jab my spear clumsily around the opposite side of its trunk before moving farther. However, I had made mental note of Chimali's lurking place and the position of the limb on which he lay. As I neared the spot, I began gradually to raise my spear from the horizontal until I was carrying it upright in front of me, point uppermost, as Blood Glutton had taught me to carry it in the jungle, to discourage jaguars lying in wait to pounce. With my weapon in that position, I insured that he could not slash down at me from my front; he would have to wait until the spear point and I had passed a little way under him, and then strike at the back of my head or neck.
I approached his tree as I had all the others, crouched and slowly stalking, continuously turning my frowning, peering face from side to side, keeping my squinted gaze always level, never once looking up. The moment I came under his limb, I jabbed upward two-handed, with all my strength.
I had a heart-stopping moment then. The spear point never touched him; it stopped short of meeting any flesh; it hit with a thunk! against the wood of the limb and sent a numbing shock through both my arms. But Chimali must, at that same instant, have been swinging his maquahuitl, thus simultaneously loosing his grip on the limb and putting himself off balance. For the blow I gave the limb shook him off it; he landed just behind me, flat on his back. The breath whooshed from his lungs as the maquahuitl jumped from his hand. I whirled and clubbed him in the head with the butt end of my spear shaft, and he lay still.
I bent over him to note that he was not dead, but that he would be unconscious for some little while yet. So I simply picked up his sword and went back over the rise, retrieving my own dropped sword on the way, and rejoined the two young arms bearers. Cozcatl gave a small cheer when he saw me carrying my opponent's weapon: "I knew you would slay him, Mixtli!"