Had we really been of a mind to barter along the way, we could have secured many valuable things: oyster-heart pearls; pottery of rich glazes; utensils and ornaments made of copper, silver, shell, and amber; the brilliant lacquerware that could be found nowhere else but in Michihuácan. Those lacquered objects, intense black etched with gold and colors, might take an artisan months or years to make, since they varied in size from simple trays to immense folding screens.
We travelers could have acquired any local product except the mystery metal of which I have spoken. No outlander was ever allowed a glimpse of that; even the weapons made of it were kept locked in armories, to be distributed to the soldiery only when they were needed. Since our Mexíca armies had never yet won a single battle against those weapons, none of our warriors had even been able to snatch from the battlefield so much as a dropped Purémpe dagger.
Well, I did no trading, but I and my men did partake of some of the native foods new to us or seldom available to us—the honey liquor of Tlachco, for example. The rugged mountain country around that town literally hummed all day long. I could imagine that I heard the vibration made by the men underground digging the local silver, but aboveground I definitely could hear the buzz of the swarms and clouds and skeins of wild bees among the numberless flowers on those heights. And while the men scratched for the buried silver, their women and children worked at collecting the golden honey of those bees. Some of it they merely strained clear and sold for sweetening. Some of it they let dry in the sun until it became crystalline and sweeter yet. Some of the honey they converted—by a method kept as secret as that of making the killer metal—into a drink they called chápari, which was far more delicious and far more potent in its effect than the sour octli we Mexíca knew so well.
Since the chápari, like the metal, was never exported outside Michihuácan, I and my men drank as much as we could while we were there. We also feasted on Michihuácan's lake and river fish, frogs' legs and eels, whenever we spent a night in a travelers' hostel. As a matter of fact, we got rather weary of aquatic fare after a while, but those people have peculiar strictures against killing practically every edible game animal. A Purémpe will not hunt deer because he believes them to be manifestations of the sun god, and that is because, to his eyes, the male deer's antlers resemble the sun's beams. Not even squirrels can be trapped or blowpiped, because the Purémpecha priests, as filthy and shaggy as ours, were called tiuimencha, and that word means "black squirrels." So most of the meals we took at inns were, when not fish, either wild or domestic fowl.
We were offered rather more of a choice after we had eaten. I believe I have mentioned the Purémpecha's attitude regarding sexual practices. An outlander might call it vilely loose or tolerantly broadminded, depending on his own attitude, but it certainly catered to every conceivable taste. Each time we finished our meal at an inn, the landlord would inquire of me and then my bearers, "Will you have a male or female sweet?" I did not answer for my men; I was paying them enough that they could indulge as they chose. But, with Zyanya waiting back home, I was not inclined to sample the offerings of every new country I visited, as I had done in my bachelor days. I invariably replied to the innkeeper, "Neither, thank you," and the innkeeper would persist, without a blink or a blush, "Would you prefer green fruit, then?"
It may really have been necessary for a pleasure-seeking traveler to specify the precise kind of bedmate he wanted—grown woman or man, young girl or boy—for in Michihuácan it is sometimes hard for a stranger to tell which sex is which, because the Purémpecha observe another peculiar practice, or did in those days. The folk of every class higher than slaves depilated their body of every removable hair. They shaved or plucked or otherwise scoured clean all the hair from their head, the eyebrows from above their eyes, any slightest trace of fuzz from beneath their arms or between their legs. Men, women, and children, they had absolutely no hair but their eyelashes. And, in contrast to whatever lewdnesses they may have performed in the nighttime, they went about during the day modestly clothed in several layers of mantles or blouses, which was why it could be difficult to tell the females from the males.
At first, I assumed that the smooth and glossy hairlessness of the Purémpecha represented either their singular notion of beauty or a passing affectation of fashion. But there may have been an obsessively sanitary reason for it. In my study of their language I discovered that Poré has at least eight different words for dandruff and about as many more for louse.
We came to the seacoast at an immense blue harbor protected by enfolding arms of land from the battering of heavy seas and sea storms. There was situated the port village called Patamkuaro by its inhabitants and Acamepulco by our visiting Mexíca traders, both the Poré and Náhuatl names given because of the great swales of cane and reed growing there. Acamepulco was a fishing port in its own right, and also a market center for the peoples living along the coast to the east and west, who came in canoes to dispose of their own gleanings from the sea and land: fish, turtles, salt, cotton, cacao, vanilla, other typical products of those Hot Lands.
It was my intention that time not to hire but to buy four roomy, seagoing canoes, and for the eight of us to paddle them, so that we need have no witnesses in attendance. But that was more easily intended than accomplished. The familiar acáli of our home lake district was easily carved from the soft pine that grew there. But a sea canoe was made of the formidably heavy and hard mahogany, and it could take months to make. Almost all the canoes at Acamepulco had been in use through generations of their owner families, and no family was inclined to sell one, since that would mean a suspension of all profitable fishing or hauling while a replacement was hacked to shape and burned hollow and rasped smooth. But I did finally acquire the four I needed, though it took frustrating days of negotiation, and a far greater outlay of gold dust than I had meant to spend.
And to row them southeastward down the coast, two of us in each, was not so easy either. We all had some experience of lake canoeing, and those big inland lakes could sometimes be roughened by the wind, but we were unaccustomed to waters roiled by currents and tidal surges even in the calm weather that—I thank the gods—attended our sea voyage. Several of those staunch old warriors, whose stomachs had never been turned by all the nauseating horrors of war, were wretchedly sick for the first two or three days. I was not, perhaps because I had been to sea before. But we early learned not to hug the shore where the water's motion was most violent and unpredictable. Though it made us all uneasy to be such a long swim from The One World, we stayed well out beyond the first billows of the breakers, only riding them in at sundown, to spend the nights gratefully on the soft and unheaving sands of the beach.
That beach, as I had seen it do before, gradually darkened from gleaming white to dull gray and then to the sullen black of volcanic sands. And then that beach was interrupted by a suddenly jutting promontory: the mountain that walks in the water. Thanks to my topaz, I espied the mountain from afar, and, it being then late afternoon, I gave the order to make landfall on the beach.
When we were seated around our campfire, I addressed my seven men, repeating the planned actions of our mission on the morrow, and adding, "Some of you may have reservations about raising your hand against a priest, even a priest of an alien god. Do not have. These priests will appear unarmed, and merely vexed at our intrusion, and helpless before our weapons. They are not. Given the least opportunity, they will slay every one of us, and carve us like boar meat, and eat us at their leisure. Tomorrow, when our work has been accomplished, we kill. We kill without mercy or we risk being killed. Remember that, and remember my signals."