"I swear by Santiago, I am sick of fucking bald cunts!"
And the other voice said—
Ayya!
You startled me, Your Excellency. You leap with such agility for a man well into his age of never. I frankly envy your—
With all respect, Your Excellency, I regret that I cannot retract the words or apologize for them, since they were not my words. I memorized them that day only in the way a parrot does: by repeating the sounds of them. A parrot might innocently caw such sounds even in your cathedral church, Your Excellency, because a parrot cannot know what they signify. The most intelligent parrot could not possibly know, because a female parrot does not possess what you could properly call a—
Very well, Your Excellency, I will belabor the matter no further, and I will refrain from repeating the exact sounds made by the other outlander. But he said, in effect, that he likewise missed and longed for the services of a good Castilian whore, abundantly hairy in her nether parts. And that was all I could stay to overhear, without being sick from the smell and making my presence known. I hastened back to the throne room, gulping fresh air as I went, and there I told the chief Ah Tutaclass="underline"
"You assuredly did not overstate the fact of their fragrance, Lord Mother. I must see them and try to speak with them, but I should definitely prefer to do that in the open."
He said, "I can have their next meal drugged, and extract them from their den while they sleep."
"No need," I said. "My guardsmen can drag them out right now."
"You would lay hands on the gods?"
"If they summon the lightning and strike us all dead," I said, "we will at least know they are gods."
They did nothing of the sort. Though they struggled and squealed as they were forcibly brought from their quarters into the open courtyard, the two outlanders were not nearly so displeased as were my guardsmen, who could scarcely suppress their retching and gagging. And when the brawny captors released their grip, the two did not leap angrily about or make threatening noises or perform any recognizable sorceries. They fell to their knees before me, and they began to babble piteously, and they made strange gestures with their hands, first clasping them before their faces, then moving them in a repeated pattern. Of course I know now that they were reciting over their clenched hands a prayer in the Christian Latin language, and that they were frantically sketching the sign of the Christian cross from forehead to heart to shoulders.
Also, it did not take me long to divine that they had stayed hidden in the safety of their quarters because they had been affrighted by the Xiu's well-intentioned disposition of their two dead companions. If the outlanders had been terrified by the Xiu, who are a people of gentle mien and simple costume, I could understand their being scared half to death when suddenly confronted by me and my Mexíca—grim-faced big men, clearly warriors, fearsomely arrayed in our battle dress of helmets and plumes and obsidian weapons.
For a time, I only stared at them through my seeing crystal, which made them quail even more abjectly. Though I am now well accustomed and resigned to the unappealing appearance of white men, I was not at that time, and I was both intrigued and repelled by the lime-whiteness of their facial skin—because in our One World white was the color of death and mourning. No human being was that color, except the infrequent tlacaztali freak. Those two at least had humanly brown eyes and black or dark brown hair, but it was uncommonly curly, and the hair atop their heads merged into equally dense growths on their cheeks, upper lips, chins, and throats. The rest of them was concealed by what seemed an inordinate amount of clothing. I am now acquainted with shirts and doublets and pantaloons and gauntlets and jackboots and such things, but I still regard them as excessively clumsy, restrictive, and probably uncomfortable, in comparison with our men's simple and unencumbering everyday costume of loincloth and mantle.
"Undress them," I commanded my guards, who grumbled and glared at me before they complied. The two outlanders again struggled and squealed, and even more loudly, as if they were being flayed of their skin instead of cloth and leather. It was we watchers who might better have complained, since each layer that was removed let free a new and more ghastly wave of fetor. And when their boots were pulled off—yya ayya!—when their boots came off, everyone else in the palace yard, myself included, retreated so hastily and so far that the two outlanders stood cringing naked at the center of an extremely wide and distant circle of onlookers.
I have earlier spoken superciliously of the filth and squalor of the Chichimeca desert dwellers, but I have explained that their dirtiness was a result of the circumstances in which they lived, and that they did bathe and comb and delouse themselves whenever they were able. The Chichimeca were garden flowers by comparison with the white men, who seemed to prefer their repulsiveness and to fear cleanliness as a mark of weakness or effeminacy. Of course, I speak of the white soldiers only, Your Excellency, all of whom, from the lowliest troopers to their Commander Cortés, shared that gross eccentricity. I am not so well acquainted with the bathing habits of the better-bred later arrivals, such as Your Excellency, but I early noticed that all such gentlemen liberally employ perfumes and pomades to give the sweet-smelling impression of being frequent bathers.
The two outlanders were not giants, as Ah Tutal's description might have led me to expect. Only one of them was actually bigger than I was, though the other was about my own size, meaning that they were indeed larger than the average male of these lands. But they stood hunched and quivering as if awaiting the lash of a whip, and they cupped their hands over their genitals like a pair of maiden's dreading ravishment, so the bigness of their bodies was less than impressive. Rather, they looked pitifully flimsy, for their body skin was even whiter than that of their faces.
I said to Ah Tutal, "I shall never be able to get close enough to interrogate them, Lord Mother, until they are washed. If they will not do it, it must be done to them."
He said, "Having now smelled them undressed, Knight Ek Muyal, I must decline the loan of my bathing troughs or steam houses. I should have to destroy and rebuild them."
"I quite agree," I said. "Simply bid your slaves bring water and soap and do it right here."
Although the chiefs slaves used tepid water, smooth ash soap, and soft bathing sponges, the objects of their attention fought and screeched as if they were being greased for the cooking spit, or scalded in the way boars are made tender for the scraping off of their bristles. While that uproar was going on, I spoke to a number of the Tihó girls and women who had spent a night or more with the outlanders. The females had learned a few words of their language, and told them to me, but they were only new words for the tepúli, the sexual act—words not very useful for a formal interrogation. The women also confided to me that the strangers' members were of a size proportionate to their big bodies, hence were admirably immense in erection, compared to the more familiar organs of the Xiu men. Any woman would delight in having such a massive tepúli at her service, they said, were it not so rancid with a lifetime's accumulation of curds that a woman might vomit at sight or scent of it. As one girl remarked, "Only a female vulture could really enjoy coupling with such creatures."