When we pushed off through the combers again the next morning, we were no longer a young pochtéatl and his seven elder porters. We were a detachment of seven fearsome Mexíca warriors led by one not very old "old eagle" cuáchic. We had undone the packs and donned the war regalia and armed ourselves with the weapons. I carried Blood Glutton's cuáchic insignia of shield and guidon staff, and wore his cuáchic headdress. The only missing insigne of that rank was a bone through my nose, but my septum had never been pierced for such a thing. The seven soldiers were, like myself, all wearing clean white quilted armor. They had stuck feathers into their hair, which was drawn up into topknots, and had painted fierce many-colored designs on their faces. We each carried a maquahuitl, a dagger, and a javelin.
Our little fleet paddled boldly toward the mountain promontory, making no attempt at stealth, deliberately intending that the guardians there should see us come. And they did, they were waiting on the mountainside: at least twelve of the evil Zyu priests in their robes of ragged and patchy fur. We did not turn our canoes toward the beach to make an easy landing, but rowed on straight for them.
I do not know whether it was the different season of the year, or whether it was because we approached from the western side of the mountain, but the ocean was in much less turmoil than it had been that time I and the Tzapotecatl boatman came upon it from the east. Nevertheless, the sea was still agitated enough that we unpracticed seafarers might well have splintered the boats and some of ourselves against the rocks, except that a number of the priests leapt down from boulder to boulder and waded into the water and drew our canoes into protected clefts. Of course they did it only because they knew and feared our Mexíca warrior costumes—which was what I had counted on.
We wedged the craft securely there, and I left one soldier to guard them. Then I waved, the gesture including the priests as well as my men, and we all went bounding from rock to rock, through the thunders and spouts of surf, through the clouds and sheets of spray, onto the main slope of the mountain mass. The chief priest of the Sea God stood there, his arms folded across his chest to conceal the fact that he had no hands. He snarled something in his Huave dialect. When I merely raised my eyebrows, he tried Lóochi, and said with bluster:
"What more you Mexíca come for now? We only keepers of god color, and you have that."
"Not all of it," I said in the same tongue.
He seemed slightly shaken by the brusque assurance with which I spoke, but he insisted, "We have no more."
"No, it is mine you have," I said. "Some purple for which I paid much gold. Remember? On the day I did that." With the flat of my maquahuitl I slapped his arms apart so that the wrist stumps were visible. He knew me then, and his evil face became even uglier with impotent rage and hatred. The other priests on his either side spread to make a threatening ring about me and my warriors. There were two of them to each of us, but we held our javelins in a bristling circle. I said to the chief, "Lead us to the god's cave."
His mouth worked for a moment, possibly trying other lies, before he said, "Your army emptied the cave of Tiat Ndik."
I motioned to the soldier next to me. He drove his javelin's point deep into the belly of the priest standing at the chief's left. The man shrieked, fell down, and rolled on the ground, clutching his abdomen and continuing to scream.
I said, "That is to show we are in earnest. This is to show that we are in a hurry." I gestured again, and the soldier jabbed again at the fallen man, that time skewering him through the heart and abruptly stopping his cries. "Now," I said to the chief priest, "we will go to the grotto."
He swallowed and said no more; the demonstration had sufficed. With me and my javelin at his back, with my warriors prodding the remaining priests, he led the way over the jumbled rocks and down into the protected hollow and into the cave. I was much relieved to find that the god's place had not been collapsed or buried by the earthquake. When we stood before the purple-daubed heap of stones simulating a statue, I indicated the leather flasks and dyed skeins of yarn heaped all about it, and said to the chief, "Tell your attendants to start carrying all this to our canoes." He swallowed again, but said nothing.
"Tell them," I repeated, "or I cut next at your elbows, and then at your shoulders, and then elsewhere."
He hastily told them something in their language, and whatever he told them was convincing. With no words, but with many a murderous look at me, the unkempt priests began lifting and carrying the flasks and bales of yarn. My men accompanied them to the boats and back to the cave during the many trips it took them to shift the entire store of treasure. Meanwhile, I and the handless priest stayed by the statue, he immobilized by my javelin point held vertically pricking the underside of his jaw. I might have used the time to make him produce the packet of gold he had taken from me on that other occasion, but I did not. I preferred to leave the gold, wherever it was, as payment for what I was doing. It made me feel less like a plunderer and more like a trader concluding a slightly delayed but legitimate transaction.
Not until the last of the flasks were being carried out of the cave did the chief priest speak again, with loathing in his voice: "You defiled holy place before. You angered Tiat Ndik so he sent the zyuüú to punish. He will do so again, or worse. This insult and loss he will not forgive. The Sea God will not let you go free with his purple."
"Oh, perhaps he will," I said carelessly, "if I leave him a sacrifice of another color." At that, I thrust my javelin upward and the point went all the way through jaw and tongue and palate into the man's brain. He fell flat on his back, red blood fountaining from his mouth, and I had to brace my foot against his chin to yank the spear loose.
I heard a concerted shout of consternation behind me. My soldiers were just then bunching all the other priests into the grotto, and they had seen their fallen chief. But I did not have to give any command or signal to my men. Before the priests could recover from their shocked surprise, to fight or flee, they were all dead.
I said, "I promised a sacrifice to that heap of boulders there. Pile all the bodies on and around it."
When that was done, the god statue was no longer purple but shiny red, and the red was spreading over the floor of the whole cave. I do believe that Tiat Ndik must have been satisfied with the offering. We felt no earthquake on our way down to the canoes. Nothing interfered with our loading of the precious cargo or our launching of the then heavier boats. No Sea God churned up his element to prevent our paddling safely away, well out to sea and around the rock-littered waters at the tip of the promontory, out of the land of The Strangers. Without hindrance we rowed on eastward down the coast, and I never again set foot or laid eyes on the mountain that walks in the water.
However, we all eight continued to wear our Mexíca battle costumes for the next few days, while we were still in Huave and Tzapoteca waters, while we passed Nozibe and other seaside villages—and the fishing boats whose puzzled crewmen timidly waved to us—until we were well past the Tecuantépec isthmus and offshore of the Xoconóchco cotton country. There we beached at night in a secluded spot. We burned our armor and other regalia, and buried all but a necessary few of our weapons, and remade our packs, to transport the leather flasks and dyed yarn.
When we rowed away from there in the morning, we were dressed again as a pochtéatl and his porters. We landed later that day, quite openly, at the Mame village of Pijijia, and I sold our canoes—though at a pitifully low price, since the fisher folk there, as everywhere along the coast, already owned all the boats they needed. My men and I, after having been so long afloat, found that we lurched ludicrously when we tried to walk. So we spent two days in Pijijia to get reaccustomed to solid ground—and I had some interesting conversations with the Mame elders—before we took up our packs and moved on inland.