And then I perceived that my head was really between a woman's breasts, and ample ones. My sense of touch and feeling was unaffected by the drug. The Si-riame had caught up to me, had thrown open her jaguar blouse, had clasped me to her bosom, and we were rising together toward the clouds. One part of me, I might say, was rising faster than the rest. My tepúli had already been earlier aroused, but it was getting even longer, thicker, harder, throbbing with urgency, as if an earthquake had occurred without my notice. The Si-riame gave a happy laugh—I tasted her laughter, refreshing as raindrops, and her words tasted like kisses:
"That is the best blessing of the god-light, Su-kuru—the heat and glow it adds to the act of ma-rakame. Let us combine our god-given fires."
She unwound her jaguar skirt and lay naked upon it, or as naked as a woman of the Rarámuri could get, for there truly was a triangle of hair pointing from her lower abdomen down between her thighs. I could see the shape of that enticing little cushion, and the curly texture of it, but the blackness of it was, like all other colors at that moment, not a color but an aroma. I leaned close to inhale it, and it was a warm, humid, musky scent....
At our first coupling, that ymáxtli felt crinkly and tickly against my bare belly, as if I were thrusting my lower body among the fronds of a luxuriant fern. But soon, so quickly did our juices flow, the hair became wet and yielding and, if I had not known it was there, I would not have known it was there. However, since I did know—that my tepúli was penetrating more than flesh, that it was held for the first time by a densely hair-tufted tipíli—the act had a new savor for me. No doubt I sound delirious in the telling of it, but delirious is what I was.
I was made giddy by being at a great height, whether it was reality or illusion; by the oddity of sensing a woman's words and moans and cries in my mouth, not my ears; by the sensing of her skin's every surface and curve and gradation of color as a subtly distinct fragrance. Meanwhile, each of those sensations, as well as our every move and touch, was enriched by the effect of the jipuri.
I suppose also I felt a tinge of danger, and danger makes every human sense more acute, every emotion more vivid. Men do not ordinarily fly upward to a height, they more often fall down from one, and that is often fatal. But the Si-riame and I stayed suspended, with no discernible floor or other support beneath us. And being unsupported we were also unencumbered by any support, so we moved as freely and weightlessly as if we had been under water but still able to breathe there. That freedom in all dimensions enabled some pleasurable positions and coilings and intertwinings that I would otherwise have thought impossible. At one point the Si-riame gasped some words, and the words tasted like her ferned tipíli: "I believe you now. That you could have done more sins than you could tell." I have no idea how often she came to climax and how many times I ejaculated during the time the drug held us aloft and enraptured, but, for me, it was many more than I had ever enjoyed in such a short time.
The time seemed too short. I became aware that I was hearing, not tasting the sounds when she sighed, "Do not worry, Su-kuru, if you do not ever excel as a runner."
I was seeing colors again, not scenting them; and smelling odors, not hearing them; and I was descending from the heights of both altitude and exaltation. I did not plummet, but came down as slowly and lightly as a feather falling. The Si-riame and I were again inside her house, side by side on our discarded and rumpled garments of jaguar and deerskin. She lay on her back, fast asleep, with a smile on her face. The hair of her head was a tumbled mass, but the ymáxtli on her lower belly was no longer crisp and curly and black; it was matted and lightened in color by the white of my omícetl. There was another dried spill in the cleft between her heavy breasts, and others elsewhere.
I felt similarly encrusted with her emanations and my own dried perspiration. I was also terribly thirsty; the inside of my mouth felt as furred as if It had grown ymáxtli; I later learned to expect that effect always after chewing jipuri. Moving carefully and quietly, not to disturb the sleeping Si-riame, I got up and dressed to go and seek a drink of water outside the house. Before departing, I took one final appreciative look through my topaz at the handsome woman relaxed on the jaguar skins. It was the first time, I reflected, that I had ever had sexual relations with any sovereign ruler. I felt rather smugly pleased with myself.
But not for long. I emerged from the house to find the sun still up and the celebrations still going on. When, after drinking heartily, I raised my eyes from the dipper gourd, I looked into the accusing eyes of the girl I had earlier been-chasing. I smiled as guiltlessly as I could, and said:
"Shall we run again? I can now partake at will of the jipuri. I have been properly initiated."
"You need not boast of it," she said between her teeth. "Half a day and a whole night and almost another day of initiation."
I gaped stupidly, for it was hard for me to realize that so much time had been compressed into what had seemed so little. And I blushed as the girl went on accusingly:
"She always gets the first and the best ma-rakame of the god-enlightened, and it is not fair! I do not care if I am called rebellious and irreverent. I have said before and I say again that she only pretended to receive the god-light from the Grandfather and the Mother and the Brother. She lied to be chosen as the Si-riame, only so she can claim first right to every ma-tuane she happens to favor."
That somewhat lessened my self-esteem in having coupled with an annointed ruler: learning that the ruler was in no way superior to any common woman gone astraddle the road. My self-esteem further suffered when, during the remainder of my stay, the Si-riame did not again command my attendance on her. Evidently she wanted only "the first and the best" that a male initiate could give under the influence of the drug. But at least I was eventually able to mollify the angry girl, after I had slept and recuperated my energies. Her name, I learned, was Vi-rikota, meaning Holy Land, which is also the name of that country east of the mountains where the jipuri cactus is gathered. The celebration went on for many days longer, and I persuaded Vi-rikota to let me chase her again, and since I had taken care not to overindulge in food or tesguino, I caught her almost fairly, I believe.
We plucked some of the dried jipuri from one of the storage strings and went together to a secluded and pleasant glade in the forested canyon. We had to chew quite a lot of the less potent cactus to approximate the effects I had enjoyed in the Si-riame's house, but after a while I felt my senses again exchanging their functions. That time the colors of butterflies and flowers around us began to sing.
Vi-rikota, of course, also wore a medallion of ymáxtli between her legs—in her case a less crisp, more fluffy cushion—and that was still a novelty to me, so it again provoked me to extraordinary enterprise. But she and I never quite achieved the ecstasy I had known during my initiation. We never had the illusion of ascending skyward, and we were conscious at all times of the soft grass on which we lay. Also, Vi-rikota was really very young, and small even for her age, and a female child simply cannot spread her thighs far enough that a man's big body can get close enough to penetrate her to the full length of his tepúli. All else aside, our coupling had to be less memorable than what the Si-riame and I had done together, because Vi-rikota and I did not have access to the fresh, green, five-petaled, real god-light jipuri.
Nevertheless, that young female and I suited each other well enough that we consorted with no other partners during the remainder of the festival, and we indulged many times in the ma-rakame, and I felt a genuine regret at parting from her when the tes-guinapuri concluded. We parted only because my original host Tes-disora insisted, "It is time now for the serious running, Su-kuru, and you must see it. The ra-rajipuri, the race between the best runners of our village and those of Guacho-chi."