"Come back," she said drowsily, and smiled her Zyanya smile, and closed her Zyanya eyes.
Downstairs, Turquoise sniffled and Star Singer several times blew his nose as we said our good-byes, and I charged them with the management of the household and reminded them that until my return they were to obey Cozcatl and Quequelmíqui as their lord and lady. I paused once more on my way out of town, at The House of Pochtéa, and left there a message to be carried by the next merchant train going in the direction of Tecuantépec. The folded paper was to advise Béu Ribé—in the least hurtful word pictures I could compose—of her sister's death and the manner of it.
It did not occur to me that the normal flow of Mexíca commerce had been considerably disrupted, and that my message would not soon be delivered. Tenochtítlan's fringe of chinampa had been underwater for four days, at the season when the crops of maize, beans, and other staples were just sprouting. Besides drowning those plants, the water had also invaded the warehouses kept stocked for emergencies and ruined all the dried foods stored in them. So, for many months, the Mexíca pochtéa and their porters were occupied solely with supplying the destitute city. That kept them constantly traveling, but did not take them far afield, and that is why Waiting Moon did not learn of Zyanya's death until more than a year after it happened.
I was also constantly traveling during that time, wandering like a milkweed puff wherever the winds might blow me, or wherever some scenic vista beckoned me closer, or wherever a path meandered so tantalizingly that it was forever seeming to say, "Follow me. Just around the next bend there is a land of heart's-ease and forgetfulness." There never was such a place, of course. A man can walk to the end of all the roads there are, and to the end of his days, but he can nowhere lay down his past and walk away from it and never look back.
Most of my adventures during that time were of no special account, and I sought to do no trading nor to burden myself with acquisitions, and if there were fortuitous discoveries to be made—like the giant tusks I found that other time I tried to walk away from woe—I passed them unseeing. The one rather memorable adventure that I did have, I fell into quite by accident, and it happened in this way:
I was near the west coast, in the land of Nauyar Ixu, one of the remote northwestern provinces or dependencies of Michihuácan. I had wandered up that way just to see a volcano that had been in violent eruption for almost a month and threatened never to stop. The volcano is called Tzeboruko, which means to snort with anger, but it was doing more than that: it was roaring with rage, like the overflow of a war going on down below in Mictlan. Gray-black smoke billowed from it, shot with jacinth flashes of fire, and towered up to the sky, and had been doing that for so many days that the whole sky was dirty and the whole of Nauyar Ixu in day-long twilight. From that cloud constantly rained down a soft, warm, pungent gray ash. From the crater came the incessant angry growl of the volcano goddess Chantico, and gouts of fiery-red lava, and what looked from a distance like pebbles being tossed up and out, though they were of course immense hurled boulders.
Tzeboruko sits at the head of a river valley, and its outpour found its easiest course along that riverbed. But the water was too shallow to chill and harden and stop the molten rock; the water simply shrieked to an instant boil when they met, and then steamed away before the onslaught. As each successive wave of hot, glowing lava vomited from the crater, it would surge down the mountainside and down the valley, then flow more slowly, then merely ooze as it cooled and darkened. But its hardening provided a smoother slide for the next gush, which would run farther before it stopped. So by the time I arrived to see the spectacle, the molten rock had, like a long red tongue, lapped far down the retreating river. The heat of liquefied rock and sizzling steam was so intense that I could get nowhere near the mountain itself. Nobody could, and nobody else wanted to. Most of the people living thereabouts were glumly packing their household belongings to get farther away. I was told that past eruptions had sometimes devastated the entire river valley as far as the seacoast, perhaps twenty one-long-runs away.
And so did that one. I have tried to convey the fury of the eruption, reverend scribes, just so you will believe me when I tell how it finally flung me right off The One World and out into the unknown.
Having nothing else to do, I spent some days ambling along beside the river of lava—or as close as I could walk beside its scorching heat and unbreathable fumes—while it implacably boiled away the river water and filled its bed from bank to bank. The lava moved like a wave of mud, at about the pace of a man's slow walk, so, when each night I made camp on higher ground and ate from my provisions and rolled into my blanket or hung my gishe between two trees, I would wake in the morning to find that the moving rock had so far outdistanced me that I would have to hurry to catch up with its forward edge. But the mountain Tzeboruko, though it diminished behind me, continued to spew, so I kept on accompanying its outpour just to see how far the lava would go. And after some days it and I arrived at the western ocean.
The river valley there squeezes between two highlands and debouches into a long, deep crescent of beach embracing a great bay of turquoise water. There was a settlement of reed huts on the beach, but no people anywhere about; clearly the fisher folk, like those farther inland, had prudently decamped; but someone had left a small seagoing acáli drawn up on the beach, complete with its paddle. It gave me the notion of paddling out into the bay to watch, from a safe distance, when the seething rock met the sea. The shallow river had been unable to resist the lava's advance, but I knew the inexhaustible waters of the ocean would stop it. The encounter, I thought, would be something worth seeing.
It did not happen until the next day, and by then I had put my traveling pack in the canoe, and paddled out beyond the breakers, and I sat in the very middle of the bay. I could see through my topaz how the evilly smoldering lava spread and crept across the beach, advancing toward the waterline on a broad front. Not much was visible inland, except that I could just make out—through the obscuring smoke and falling ash—the pinkish flare and occasional brighter yellow twinkle of Tzeboruko still vomiting from the bowels of Mictlan.
Then the undulant, glowing-red muck on the beach seemed to hesitate and gather itself so that, instead of creeping forward, it launched itself ferociously into the ocean. During the days previous, up the river, when the hot rock and cold water had met, the sound had been an almost human screech and a hissing gasp. At the seaside, the sound was the thunderous bellow of an unexpectedly wounded god, a shocked and outraged god. It was a tumult compounded of two noises: an ocean heated to boiling so suddenly that it exploded into steam, and a lava chilled to hardness so suddenly that it exploded into fragments all along its leading edge. The steam towered up like a cliff made of cloud, and a hot spray came drizzling down on me, and my acáli jolted backward so abruptly that I nearly fell out of it. I clutched at its wooden sides, and so dropped the paddle overboard.
The canoe continued its backward swoop, as the ocean recoiled from the suddenly unfriendly land. Then the sea recovered from its apparent surprise, and sloshed toward the beach again. But the molten rock was still advancing; the thunder was uninterrupted and the cloud clawed upward as if trying to reach the sky where clouds belong; and the affronted ocean recoiled again. That whole vast bay surged seaward and landward again more times than I could count, for I was quite dizzied by the rocking and yawing of my canoe. But I was aware that each revulsion took me farther from land than each resurgence took me back. In the swirling waters about my curvetting canoe, fish and other sea creatures floated on the surface, most of them belly up.