What woke me was a scratching at the door. Only half conscious, I got up and opened it. I saw nothing but the predawn darkness of the balcony and the great well of the hall beyond, but then a finger scratched at my bare leg. I started and looked down, and there were the Lady Pair, as naked as myself. They were on all fours—on all eights, I should say; the crab again—and they were both grinning lasciviously up at my crotch.
"Happy thing," said Left.
"His too," said Right, jerking her pointed head—in the direction of the old man's room, I assumed.
"What are you doing here?" I demanded, as ferociously as I could in a whisper.
One of their eight extremities reached up and put Yquingare's dagger in my hand. I peered at the dark metal, even darker in that gloom, and ran my thumb along it. Hard and sharp it was, indeed.
"You did it!" I said, feeling a rush of gratitude, almost affection, for the monster crouching at my feet.
"Easy," said Right.
"He put clothes beside bed," said Left.
"He put that in me," said Right, poking my tepúli and making me jump again. "Happy."
"I get bored," said Left. "Nothing to do. Only be jiggled. I reach to clothes, feel around, find knife."
"She hold knife while I have happy," said Right. "I hold knife while she have happy. She hold knife while—"
"And now?" I interrupted.
"Finally he snore. We bring knife. Now we go wake him. Have more happy."
As if they could hardly wait, before I could even thank them, the twins scuttled crabwise along the dark balcony. So I silently gave thanks instead to the apparently invigorating properties of mammalian milk, and went back inside the chamber to wait for sunrise.
The courtiers of Tzintzuntzani did not appear to be early risers. Only Crown Prince Tzimtzicha joined Zyanya and me for breakfast. I told the elderly prince that I and my company might as well be on our way. It seemed obvious that his father was enjoying his gift; we would not loiter about and make him interrupt his enjoyment just to entertain uninvited guests.
The prince said blandly, "Well, if you feel you must go, we will not detain you. Except for one formality. A search of yourselves, your guards and slaves, your possessions and packs and whatever else you are taking away. No insult intended, I assure you. Even I must endure it whenever I leave here to travel anywhere."
I shrugged as indifferently as one can when a cluster of armed guards is closing in to ring one about. Discreetly and respectfully, but thoroughly, they patted the clothed parts of me and Zyanya, all over, then politely asked us to step out of our sandals for a moment. In the forecourt garden, they did the same to all our men, had all our packs emptied out, even fingered among the cushions of the litter chairs. Other people were up and about by then, most of them the children of the palace, who watched the proceedings with bright and knowing eyes. I looked at Zyanya. She was looking closely at the children, trying to see which of them... When she caught me smiling at her, she blushed darker than the small blade of metal—its wooden handle removed—which I was carrying at the back of my neck, hidden under my hair.
The guards reported to Tzimtzicha that we were taking away nothing we had not come with. His watchfulness changed abruptly to friendliness and he said, "Then of course we insist that you take something, as a reciprocal gift for your Uey-Tlatoani." He handed me a small leather sack, which I later found to contain a quantity of the finest quality oyster-heart pearls. "And," he went on, "something even more precious. It will just fit in that outsized litter of yours. I do not know what my father will do without it, his most prized possession, but it is his command."
At which he gave us the tremendous, bald, and big-breasted woman who had nursed the old man at the previous night's meal.
She was at least twice as heavy as the twins together had been, and all the way home the bearers cursed their lot in life. Every one-long-run or so, the whole train had to stop and stand fidgeting while, the mammal unashamedly milked herself with her fingers to relieve the pressure. Zyanya laughed the whole way back, even laughed when we presented the gift to Ahuítzotl and he ordered me garrotted on the spot. But when I hastened to tell him what that milk-animal apparently could do for the wizened old Yquingare, Ahuítzotl looked contemplative and canceled the order that I be strangled, and Zyanya laughed the more—so that even the Revered Speaker and I joined in the laughter.
If Ahuítzotl ever did get any invigoration out of the milk woman, she was a more valuable plunder than the killer-metal dagger turned out to be. Our Mexíca metalsmiths studied it intently, and scratched deep into it, and took filings from it, and at last concluded that it was made by puddling melted copper and melted tin together. But try as they might, they never could get the proportions right, or the temperature, or something, and they never did succeed in duplicating the metal.
However, since no tin existed in these lands except for those miniature hatchet-shaped scraps we used for trade currency—and since those came up the trade routes from some unknown country far, far to the south, passed from hand to hand—Ahuítzotl was at least able to order an immediate and continuing confiscation of all of them. So the tin disappeared from circulation as currency, and since we had no other use for it, I suppose Ahuítzotl simply stacked it away somewhere out of sight.
In a way, it was a selfish gesture: if we Mexíca could not have the mystery metal, no one could. But the Purémpecha already owned enough weapons made of it to discourage Tenochtítlan's declaring war on them ever again, and the stopping of the tin supply prevented them from making enough additional weapons that they could ever be emboldened to declare war on us. So I suppose I can claim that my mission into Michihuácan was not totally without result.
* * *
At the time we returned from Michihuácan, Zyanya and I had been man and wife for some seven years; and I daresay our friends looked on us as an old married couple; and she and I had come to regard our life as fixed in its course and impervious to change or disruption; and we were happy enough with each other that we were satisfied to have it so. But the gods willed otherwise, and Zyanya made it known to me in this way:
We had been one afternoon visiting the First Lady at the palace. On our way out, we saw in a hallway that milk-animal woman we had brought from Tzintzuntzani. I suspect that Ahuítzotl simply let her live on in the palace as a general servant, but on that occasion I made some humorous remark about his "wet nurse," expecting Zyanya to laugh. Instead she said, rather sharply for her:
"Záa, you must not make vulgar jokes about milk. About mother's milk. About mothers."
I said, "Not if it gives you offense. But why should it?"
Shyly, anxiously, apprehensively, she said, "Some time about the turn of the year, I... I will be... I will be a milk-animal myself."
I stared at her. It took me a moment to comprehend and, before I could respond, she added, "I have suspected for some little time, but two days ago the physician confirmed it. I have been trying to think of a way to tell you in soft and sweet words. And now"—she sniffled unhappily—"I just snap it at you. Záa, where are you going? Záa, do not leave me!"
I had gone off at an undignified run, but only to procure a palace litter chair so she would not have to walk the way back to our home. She laughed and said, "This is ridiculous," when I insisted on lifting her onto the chair cushions. "But does it mean that you are pleased, Záa?"
"Pleased?" I exclaimed. "Pleased!"