I looked at her across the gourd as I sipped. She was plainly a back-country girl, short and slender, not very clean, dressed in a knee-length blouse of cheap sackcloth. But she was not coarse or dark of complexion; in a soft and unformed adolescent way, she was quite pretty. She was not, like every other female in the neighborhood, chewing tzictle, and she was obviously not as ignorant as might have been expected.
"You addressed me in Náhuatl," I said. "How do you come to speak it?"
The girl put on a woebegone expression and murmured, "One does much traveling, being repeatedly bought and sold. It is at least an education of sorts. I was born to the Coatlicamac tongue, my lord, but I have learned some of the Maya dialects and the trade language of Náhuatl."
I asked her name. She said, "Ce-Malinali."
"One Grass?" I said. "That is only a calendar date, and only half a name."
"Yes," she sighed tragically. "Even the slave children of slave parents receive a seventh-birthday name, but I never did. I am less than a slave born of slaves, Lord Knight. I have been an orphan since my birth."
She explained. Her unknown mother was some Coatlicamatl drab, made pregnant by some unknown one of the many men who had straddled her. The woman had given birth in a farm furrow one day while working in the fields, as casually as she would have defecated, and had left the newborn infant there, as uncaringly as she would have left her excrement. Some other woman, less heartless, or perhaps herself childless, had found the abandoned baby before it perished, and had taken it home and given it succor.
"But who that kindly rescuer was, I no longer remember," said Ce-Malinali. "I was still a child when she sold me—for maize to eat—and I have been passed from owner to owner since then." She put on the look of one who has suffered long but persevered. "I know only that I was born on the day One Grass in the year Five House."
I exclaimed, "Why, that was the very day and year of my own daughter's birth in Tenochtítlan. She too was Ce-Malinali until she became Zyanya-Nochipa at the age of seven. You are small for your age, child, but you are precisely the age she—"
The girl interrupted excitedly, "Then perhaps you would buy me, Lord Knight, to be personal maid and companion to your young lady daughter!"
"Ayya," I mourned. "That other Ce-Malinali... she died... nearly three years ago...."
"Then buy me to be your house servant," she urged. "Or to wait upon you as your daughter would have done. Take me with you when you return to Tenochtítlan. I will do any kind of work or"—she demurely lowered her eyelashes—"any not daughterly service my lord might crave." I was drinking again from the dipper at that moment, and I spluttered the water. She said hastily, "Or you can sell me in Tenochtítlan, if my lord is perhaps beyond the age of such cravings."
I snapped, "Impudent little vixen, the women I crave I do not have to buy!"
She did not cringe at my words; she said boldly, "And I do not wish to be bought just for my body. Lord Knight, I have other qualities—I know it—and I yearn for the opportunity to make use of those qualities." She grasped my arm to emphasize her pleading. "I want to go where I will be appreciated for more than just my being a young female. I want to try my fortunes in some great city. I have ambitions, my lord, I have dreams. But they are vain if I am condemned to be forever a slave in these dreary provinces."
I said, "A slave is a slave, even in Tenochtítlan."
"Not always, not necessarily forever," she insisted. "In a city of civilized men, my worth and intelligence and aspirations could perhaps be recognized. A lord might elevate me to the status of concubine, and then even make me a free woman. Do not some lords free their slaves, when they prove deserving?"
I said they did; even I had once done so.
"Yes," she said, as if she had wrung some concession from me. She squeezed my arm, and her voice became wheedling. "You do not require a concubine, Lord Knight. You are a man stalwart and handsome enough that you need not buy your women. But there are others—old or ugly men—who must and do. You could sell me at a profit to one of those in Tenochtítlan."
I suppose I should have sympathized with the child. I too had once been young, and brimming with ambition, and I had yearned to try the challenge of the greatest city of them all. But there was something so hard and intense about the way in which Ce-Malinali tried to ingratiate herself that I found her less than appealing. I said, "You seem to have a very high opinion of yourself, girl, and a very low opinion of men."
She shrugged. "Men have always used women for their pleasure. Why should not one woman use men for her advancement? Although I do not like the act of sex, I can pretend to. Although I have not yet been often used, I have become quite good at it. If that talent can help lift me from slavery... well... I have heard that a concubine of a high lord may enjoy more privilege and power than his legitimate first lady. And even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca collects concubines, does he not?"
I laughed. "Little bitch, you have high ambitions indeed."
She said tartly, "I know I have more to offer than a hole between my legs that is still invitingly tight and tender. A man can buy a techíchi bitch and get that!"
I disengaged her grip on my arm. "Know this, girl. Sometimes a man may keep a dog just to have an affectionate companion. I discern no capacity for affection in you. A techíchi can also be a nourishing meal. You are not clean or appetizing enough to be cooked. You are articulate for one of your age and low origins. But you are only a backwoods brat with nothing to offer except windy boasts and ill-concealed greed and a pathetic notion of your own importance. You admit that you do not even like to employ that vaunted tight hole of yours, which is your only worth. If you exceed any of your sister slaves in any respect, it is merely in vainglorious presumption."
She raged at me. "I can go yonder to the river and wash myself clean—make myself appetizing—and you would not reject me! In fine clothes I can pass for a fine lady! I can pretend affection, and make even you believe it genuine!" She paused, then sneered, "What other woman has ever done otherwise with you, my lord, when she aspired to be something more than a receptacle for your tepúli?"
My fingers twitched to punish her impertinence, but the grubby slave was too nearly grown to be spanked like a child, and too young to be whipped like an adult. So I only put my hands on her shoulders, but I held her hard enough to hurt, and I said between my teeth:
"It is true that I have known other females like you: venal and deceitful and perfidious. But I have known others who were not. One of them was my daughter, born to the same name you wear, and had she lived she would have made it a name to be proud of." I could not suppress my rising anger, and my voice rose with it: "Why did she die, and you live?"
I shook that Ce-Malinali so fiercely that she dropped the water jar. It broke with a crash and a splash, but I paid no heed to that portent of misfortune. I shouted so loudly that heads turned throughout the camp, and the slave trader came running to beg that I not mishandle his merchandise. I think, in that moment, I had been briefly granted the vision of a far-seer, and it had shown me a glimpse of the future, because what I shouted was this:
"You will make that name vile and filthy and contemptible, and all people will spit when they speak it!"
I note Your Excellency's impatience at my dwelling on an encounter that must seem meaningless. But the episode, though brief, was not trivial. Who that girl was, and who she became in womanhood, and what was the ultimate outcome of her precocious ambitions—all those things are of utmost significance. But for that child, Your Excellency might not now be our excellent Bishop of Mexíco.