But this I must tell you, Sire; as I wept, my tears ran down my cheeks, and from my bowed head they fell upon the heaps of white bones lying at the feet of the monarchs of this icy hell. And as my tears fell upon the bones, they turned into fire, and a wall of flame rose between the Ice Lords and me, and as their snowy raiment burst into flame they moaned and cried out and shrank back as before a living plague or a murdered beast, while the fire curled and licked and spread like red branches through the white cloister until the entire cavern flamed like the corposant of the fatidic ships that sail the seas without crew or rudder.
I obeyed my one certain impulse; I picked up those burning bones and clasped them to my breast; in an instant the clothing in which the bloody sorcerers had dressed me upon the pyramid, crests and mantle, breechclout and sandals, bags and jewels, was reduced to ashes; but see as I saw, oh, Sire, how the fire stopped as it approached my sailor’s clothing, my own clothes, those in which I had set sail from your shores, Sire, in search of these adventures, embarked, yes, because of old Pedro’s faith in the existence of a world beyond the ocean, but also because of my own triple faith in risk, survival, and the passion of man that now, though not before, linked resignation to the hazards of danger and life upon the earth; see, the flames, as if from a sacred covering, fall back as they touch my worn doublet and torn breeches.
I ran far from the flaming chamber of ice, but the entire cavern was a conflagration of red tongues and yellow lances, and the very river of Hell was a current of fire, and I ran upon it, for as long as I clutched to my chest the bones stolen from the Lords of Death, the fire did not touch me, it was solid ground, even where it flowed like water, and the bones were writhing in my embrace, and were bathed in blood, and were forming into new constellations of shapes, and finally the bones spoke, and I looked at them, incredulous: in my arms I was carrying bones that were no longer bones but covered with flesh that now had human shape and form; and they leaped from my grasp, stood, and ran ahead and behind and beside me; they led me with their hands, and guided me with their voices, they thanked me, and called me giver of life, we thank you, they told me, we thank you, do not look back, seek the Serpent of Clouds in the heavens, look upward, look toward the mouth of the volcano, do not look back, the fire has revealed the eyes of death, save yourself, save us …
I felt that powerful arms held me and soft hands caressed me and I knew that my swiftness was not my own but that of the fleeing heap of bones-become-humans who were supporting me and carrying me far away, up toward a sky that was closer every moment. I looked for the constellation that ruled the firmament: the Milky Way of lost sailors that here they call the Serpent of Clouds: the beloved constellation of well-being, the pilgrim’s faithful compass, an epistle written upon the night … And dizzily searching for the Serpent of Clouds, I thus escaped the fierce eyes of the howling ocelot, the sunken, hollow eyes of the women dead in childbirth, the banners of darkness, and the conch shell of the false light of those regions: their laments and curses whistled past my ears; my eyes were fixed on the nocturnal sky, exhausted, soon to perish, soon to cede its brilliant reign to the solitary star of morning: Venus.
And I saw Venus as I collapsed into the high snow on the volcano through whose crater we had escaped. I sat there, my head buried between my knees and my arms about my legs, not daring to look at the companions of my dream, for surely I had not entered the icy domain of death at all, but lost on the high mountain paths and overwhelmed with fatigue I had reached the summit and had passed the night here, dreaming. I looked at Venus and closed my eyes. A thousand needles prickled behind my hooded eyes. I opened them.
Sire: I was in the midst of a group of twenty young people, ten boys and ten girls, totally naked and indifferent to the cold on the peak and the intemperate dawn: masters of their own bodies, and of their bodies’ warmth. They looked at me as they caressed and kissed one another and worshipped their own nakedness, and each woman felt her pleasure in each man, and in each woman each man saw his own perfection. Young, in their prime, strong, and beautiful, these boys and girls lay in pairs around me, and smiled at me; they were as if newly born, breathing with the security that nothing could harm them. Their smiles were my reward: I understood. Their beautiful cinnamon-colored bodies, smooth, full, slim, narrow-waisted, were enough to express the gratitude that shone from them.
Smiling, they whispered among themselves: I could hear their birdlike sounds, and laughter.
One youth spoke: “Young Lord, you have been awaited. With fear by some. With hope by many more, but by no one as eagerly as by us. It was spoken. You were to come to rescue our bones and return us to life. We thank you.”
A long while I observed them in silence, not daring to speak, and even less to propose a question to which, I knew, I now had no right until the following morning.
Finally I said to them: “I do not know whether my journey ends here, or whether I must travel farther.”
“Now you will travel with us,” said one young girl.
“We will lead you where you must go,” said a young man.
“From now on, we will be your guides,” said a third.
And then they all stood and offered me their hands: I arose and followed them down the slopes, still dizzy from my experiences of this night, drunk with conflicting sensations. And suddenly, Sire, I stopped, immobilized by a marvel greater than any I had known till now, first astounded and then amused as I realized how slow I had been in reacting to this, the supreme marvel. I burst out laughing, laughing at myself really, as I realized what I had just realized: Sire, in a tone much sweeter than ours, never losing the singing-bird tones, these boys and girls born of the bones wrested from the Lords of Death, the cinnamon color of all the inhabitants of this land, from their very first words — I realized it only now — were speaking in our own tongue, the tongue, Sire, of our Spanish lands.
DAY OF THE LAGOON
Long was our road, as long as the dawn of this my fourth day, guided now not by the spider’s thread of the Lady who had abandoned me, but by my new companions, the twenty naked, cinnamon-colored young people who spoke our tongue. I did not dare, Sire, ask them the explanation of this new mystery; the hours of my time in the new world were growing short, and I preferred to ponder for myself the riddles of my pilgrimage, perhaps to resolve them in my spirit, or wait until events revealed their meaning to me rather than waste one of the few questions — only four now — to which I was entitled.
My companions did not speak, and in the early light of dawn our silent ascent was interrupted only by the sound of our feet, league after league, upon the stony earth defended by formations of strange plants grouped like the phalanxes of a vegetal army, the only growth capable of surviving on this high, arid plain, armored plants with leaves like broad sword blades beginning at the level of the ground and spreading upward like a mournful cluster of daggers searching for the light of the sun: intensely green leaves ending in sharp points from which peered the face of their own death; the points of those green daggers of the high plain were dried at the tips into yellowed, frayed, fibrous harbingers of the plant’s extinction.
As the sun grew stronger, my companions ripped from the earth rocks as sharp as the points of those desert lances and slashed the base of the plants: from the wounds flowed a thick liquid that each caught in his cupped hands; they told me to do the same; we drank. Then they plucked from the leaves of some tall, thorny shrubs a green fruit covered with fine prickly hair, peeled and ate them, and I plucked one of the same fruits. Thus we assuaged our thirst and hunger; and when we were satisfied, it was as if the senses dulled by the intensity of the night in the volcano had suddenly been awakened from sleep, as if our eyes were seeing anew. I wiped from my lips and chin the juices of that savory fruit my companions called “prickly pear,” and from the heights where we had climbed, I saw the marvel this morning held in store for me.