"Her!" the man grunted, as if amused. "You are ever the gallant with women, are you not?" He pointed at me almost accusingly. "You have just come from the embrace of a beautiful her." He pointed at the tapir woman. "Now how would you like to couple with this other thing you describe as her?"
The very thought made my nausea uncontainable. I doubled over, and there in front of the monstrous living heap, I vomited up everything I had eaten and drunk that night. When I was finally empty and had recovered my breath, I threw an apologetic glance at that staring eye. Whether the eye was awake or merely watering, I do not know, but a single tear rolled down from it. My guide was gone, and I did not see him again, as I went back through the menagerie and let myself out.
But there was still another unpleasantness in store for me that night, which by then was early morning. When I reached the portal of Ahuítzotl's palace, the guard said, "Excuse me, Tequiua Mixtli, but the court physician has been awaiting your return. Will you please see him before you go to your room?"
The guard led me to the apartment of the palace doctor, where I knocked and found him awake and fully dressed. The guard saluted us both and went back to his post. The physician regarded me with an expression compounded of curiosity, pity, and professional unction. For a moment I thought he had waited up to prescribe a remedy for the queasiness I still felt. But he said, "The boy Cozcatl is your slave, is he not?"
I said he was, and asked if he had been taken ill.
"He has suffered an accident. Not a mortal one, I am happy to say, but not a trivial one either. When the plaza crowd began to disperse, he was noticed lying unconscious beside the Battle Stone. It may be that he stood too close to the duelists."
I had not given Cozcatl a thought since I had appointed him to keep watch for any sign of a lurking Chimali. I said, "He was cut, then, Lord Doctor?"
"Badly cut," he said, "and oddly cut." He kept his gaze on me as he picked up a stained cloth from a table, opened its folds, and held it out for me to see what it contained: an immature male member and its sac of olóltin, pale and limp and bloodless.
"Like an earlobe," I muttered.
"What?" said the physician.
"You say it is not a mortal wound?"
"Well, you or I might consider it so," the doctor said drily. "But the boy will not die of it, no. He lost an amount of blood, and it appears from bruises and other marks on his body that he was roughly handled, perhaps by the jostling mob. But he will live, and let us hope that he will not much mourn the loss of what he never had a chance to learn the value of. The cut was a clean one. It will heal over, in no more time than it takes him to recover from the loss of blood. I have arranged that the wound, in closing, will leave a necessary small aperture. He is in your apartment now, Tequiua Mixtli, and I took the liberty of placing him in your softer bed, rather than on his pallet."
I thanked the doctor and hurried upstairs. Cozcatl was lying on his back in the middle of my thickly quilted bed, the top quilt drawn over him. His face was flushed with a slight fever and his breathing was shallow. Very gently, not to wake him, I edged the covering down off him. He was naked except for the bandage between his legs, held in place by a swathing of tape around his hips. There were bruises on his shoulder where a hand had clutched him while the knife was wielded. But the doctor had mentioned "other marks," and I saw none—until Cozcatl, probably feeling the chill of the night air, murmured in his sleep and rolled over to expose his back.
"Your vigilance and loyalty will not go unrewarded," I had told the boy, little suspecting what that reward would be. The vengeful Chimali had indeed been in the crowd that day, but I had been almost all the time in such prominent places that he could make no sneak attack on me. So he had seen and recognized and assaulted my slave instead. But why injure such a small and comparatively valueless servant?
Then I recalled the curious expression on the doctor's face, and I realized that he had been thinking what Chimali must also have thought. Chimali had assumed that the boy was to me what Tlatli had been to him. He had struck at the child, not to deprive me of an expendable slave, but to mutilate my supposed cuilóntli, in the way best calculated to shock me, to mock me.
All of that went through my mind when I saw, slapped in the middle of Cozcatl's slender back, the familiar red handprint of Chimali, only for once not in Chimali's own blood.
Since it was then so late, or so early, that the open skylight in the ceiling was beginning to pale—and since both my head and my stomach still hurt so horrendously—I sat by Cozcatl's sickbed, not even trying to doze, trying instead to think.
I remembered the vicious Chimali in the years before he became vicious, in the years when he was still my friend. He had himself been of just about Cozcatl's age on that memorable evening when I led him home across Xaltócan, wearing the pumpkin on his head to hide his tufted hair. I remembered how he had commiserated with me when he went off to the calmécac and I did not, and how he once had given me that gift of his specially concocted paints—
Which led me to think about that other unexpected bequest I had received just a few days ago. Everything in it was of great value, except for one thing which had no apparent value whatever, at least here in Tenochtítlan. That was the bundle containing unfinished obsidian rocks, which were easily and cheaply obtainable from their nearby source, the canyon bed of The River of Knives, no long journey northeast of here. However, those rough chunks would be almost as prized as jadestone in the nations farther south, which had no such sources of obsidian from which to fashion their tools and weapons. That one "worthless" bundle made me recall some of the ambitions I had entertained and the ideas I had evolved in my long-ago days as an idly dreaming farm boy on the chinampa of Xaltócan.
When the morning was full light, I quietly washed myself, cleaned my teeth, and changed into fresh garments. I went downstairs, found the palace steward, and requested an early interview with the Uey-Tlatoani. Ahuítzotl was gracious enough to grant it, and I had not long to wait before I was ushered into his presence in that trophy-hung throne room.
The first thing he said was, "We hear that your small slave got in the way of a swinging blade yesterday."
I said, "So it seems, Revered Speaker, but he will recover." I had no intention of denouncing Chimali, or demanding a search for him, or even of mentioning his name. It would have necessitated some heretofore undisclosed revelations about the last days of Ahuítzotl's daughter—revelations involving Cozcatl and myself as well as Chimali. They could rekindle Ahuítzotl's paternal anguish and anger, and he might very well execute me and the boy before he even sent soldiers looking for Chimali.
He said, "We are sorry. Accidents are not infrequent among the spectators of the duels. We will be glad to assign you another slave while yours is incapacitated."
"Thank you, Lord Speaker, but I really require no attendant. I came to request a different sort of favor. Having come into a small inheritance, I should like to invest it all in goods, and try my success at being a merchant."
I thought I saw his lip curl. "A merchant? A stall in the Tlaltelólco market?"
"No, no, my lord. A pochtéatl, a traveling merchant." He sat back on his bearskin and regarded me in silence. What I was asking was a promotion in civil status approximately equal to what I had been given in military rank. Though the pochtéa were all technically commoners like myself, they were of the highest class of commoners. They could, if fortunate and clever in their trading, become richer than most pípiltin nobles, and command almost as many privileges. They were exempt from many of the common laws and subject mainly to their own, enacted and enforced by themselves. They even had their own chief god, Yacatecutli, the Lord Who Guides. And they jealously restricted their numbers; they would not admit as a pochtéatl just anybody who applied to be one. "You have been awarded a rank of command soldier," Ahuítzotl said at last, rather grumpily. "And you would neglect that to put a pack of trinkets on your back and thick-soled walking sandals on your feet? Need we remind you, young man, we Mexíca are historically a nation of valiant warriors, not wheedling tradesmen."