Hunger's Brides (7 page)

“Cinteotl …” she whispered, backing away and pulling me with her. Seated on a rough wooden throne, not crucified but bleeding from scores of wounds—as from volleys of arrows—was a black Christ. Not black—the blood was black, the skin stained a deep mahogany like Xochitl's. His head was lowered, and in a gesture of great weariness the fingers of his left hand ran through a dust-brown wig of what must have been human hair.

But what Amanda stared at—almost
through
—was the ear of corn held upright in his other hand: as of a king, bloodied, with a sceptre of corn.

I let her drag me back up the aisle, and once she knew I would follow she ran like a deer. Only the stone wall at the west end of the churchyard made her stop and wait for me. The moment passed like the shadow of a cloud, and we burst into nervous laughter. Later we helped Father Juan plant some pine seedlings along the fence. One day, he said, they would grow and shelter the church from the wind. As we worked he told us of his plans to raise funds for a statue of Our Mother Coatlalocpeuh to stand guard at the church entrance.

Later that afternoon as Father Juan continued to work in the churchyard, Xochitl told us Cinteotl was the son of the Mother of the Corn. So was that Cinteotl or Christ all bloody in there?

“Maybe a double,” she said, the triangles of her eyes narrowing as she watched Father Juan still digging in the churchyard. “Maybe ask
him.”

We set out again the next day. From Chimalhuacan the road got smoother and rose only gradually. We were moving across the lower
slopes of Popocatepetl and heading north towards Iztaccihuatl. The air was cooler, and we travelled mostly in the shade of the enormous pines and cedars that flanked the road, thicker at the base than our little cart was long. We persuaded Xochitl to let us take down the awning.

Leaning back against the corn sacks, Amanda and I rode quietly for a while, a little stunned by the great white peaks leaning in over the trees. From Nepantla they had been actors alone up on the stage of the horizon. Now they loomed like enormous attendants bent over three small creatures in a crate, or so it felt as we rolled along.

We had crossed over into a land of giants. Everything towered far above. The axis of this new country was the two volcanoes, so still as to make the sky around them race with clouds and wheeling birds. There were more birds here. Hawks and vultures, as there were back in Nepantla, but also falcons and eagles. Xochitl said we were just big enough now not to be carried off by one. She looked into my wide eyes and laughed. “And tomorrow, Ixpetz, you will have a sunburn on your chin from so much looking up.” Her laugh—hup!—came out in a little swoop, pulling up. It made you want to laugh too. She was almost chatty, a real swallow's beak, maybe because the road was smoother, less painful for her hip.

Did I know the story about the volcanoes as lovers?

“Muchi oquicac in nacel!”
I said.
Every one of my nits knows that one!
Even this earned a smile, and she looked younger by years. Amanda was just as wide-eyed as I was at the change in her. But this was Xochitl's land.

“Is it true, Xochita, what Grandfather said about Cortés sending men up there for ice?”

“The Speaker himself sent relays of runners every day.”

“The Speaker?”

“Lord Moctezuma.”

“Did they see each other, you think?”

“Who?”

“Cortés's men and Moctezuma's. Going for ice.”

“Our people saw
them
. The Speaker was watching from the day their ships landed. He sent his artists to paint them. From hiding places all along the road.”

“Someone told you?”

“I saw it. The ships and men. The horses …”

“You're not
that
old, Xochita.”

She smiled again. “No, bold-tongue, in a book.”

“You read
books?”

“Ours, not yours. It was my family's place to keep the painted books.
Intlil, intlapal in ueuetque…
.
†
My ancestor was the wizard Ocelotl.”

“Your ancestor was
a
jaguar?”

“There are limits, Ixpetz, even for the young.”

“I'm sorry….” I felt a flush rushing to my cheeks.

From the way she smiled I could tell she was not angry. “And
your
ancestor also, daughter,” she said, squinting one eye at Amanda. “One bold tongue is enough.”

Xochitl talked lightly on, her face mobile and relaxed, its triangles tilting this way and that. I snuggled in against Amanda to watch the mountains as we listened. The keeper of the painted books, it seemed, was himself part of that book, and in speaking it the keeper kindled a fire in the hearer's mind. Whereas the book itself was only the ashes of the fire the morning after, cool and delicate and precious, but not the same. To one who loved to sketch, how beautiful this notion of a book not written but painted.

“Up there—you see, near that big rock? There is a hidden opening. Some of the old wizards escaped through it and under the volcanoes, when the sea and fire descended on our people.”
†
Her eyes scanned the hills. “Every few years now, early morning or dusk, one of the old ones is seen, wearing the ancient dress and speaking words of jade, the old songs of heart and blood….”

She glanced around to get her bearings. As she looked away, my eyes followed the windings of the braid coiled tightly at her nape. The strands of grey and black through the thick white coils were like the graving lines of fine chisels in soft stone.

“Here the ground is holy,” she said quietly. “The words are simple but we lose what it is like….” She seemed reluctant to go on.

“What is it like, Mother?”

Her eyes had not left the mountains. I thought she wouldn't answer. I wondered where exactly she had fallen from the horse and if maybe she was remembering this.

“Here, Amanda, every step you take, you walk in halls of jade.”

We lay back quietly, propped against each other and the sacks of maize. I was getting drowsy. The road wove in and out among those trees that had been too large to cut down and uproot. We watched the
sky pivoting on its axis. Once, these volcanoes had
been
the East; now they could be in any direction at all.

I slept. And dreamed of being carried off on enormous wings … by a bird with an eagle's head and talons, and the long white neck of a swan.

I awoke just before Amanda did. A light rain tickled my face. The sun, not far above the western hills, seemed lower than we were, as if the last light rose past us to strike the peaks far above, still radiantly lit. Quietly we watched the soft rain beat traces of silver through the sunbeams where they slanted up among the boughs.

The trees were thinning. We were entering the town of Amecameca, less than a league from Grandfather's hacienda. María and Josefa were standing up in the lead cart, gawping shamelessly at the refinements of the largest settlement we had ever seen, and would traverse in under five minutes. Xochitl pointed out the school. “For girls like you.” She looked at me with a crooked smile.

Then we were off the main road. The track bent sharply east. A gold light poured over our shoulders and cast ahead of us the shadow of a giant with two tiny heads—for Amanda and I were standing now, behind the driver. As we clung to his backrest, Xochitl clung grimly to our skirts to keep us from pitching headlong out. Across the ditch on the left and beyond a windbreak of oaks were orchard rows of apple and peach and pomegranate converging in the distance as they ran. Workers stopped and doffed their hats as Grandfather cantered grandly past. Close to the road, one woman squinted at Xochitl and waved with a little flutter.

I looked back. She stood there still, the sun setting red beside her through folds of road dust.

Closer to the house were plots of squash, and beans and tomatoes. We crossed a small stone bridge over a brook that fed the irrigation ditches. At the far end of the bridge stood a little guard post, empty now, as was the watchtower that topped the house. The house itself was framed by two tall African tulip trees, and in each orange blossom glowed the sunset's radiant echo.

As in Nepantla, the house was laid out on one floor. Here, though, the roof was not flat but shingled and pitched to shed rain—and, Grandfather promised, sometimes snow.

The western wall above the veranda was a pocked grey-white. The watchtower and the chapel belfry still blushed the softest rose in the faltering light. Workmen in white cotton breeches and shirts took form
round the carts as if exhalations risen of the dusk. We heard the quiet murmurs, “… don Pedro … doña Isabel …” They formed a brigade to relay the sacks and tools to the sheds. No one questioned that Isabel should work beside the men. A woman went with a taper and lit the lanterns strung along the veranda. Amanda and I chafed to explore the house, which was still dark. We were not to go in until Josefa and María had safely swept it out, and they looked in no hurry even to start.

Grandfather was soon relinquishing his burdens to the men, but when one tried to help Xochitl she refused—a tight urgency in the shake of her head. I distinctly heard one man call her Mother in Nahuatl. I wanted to call out to them—She's not as old as she looks!
—
then bethought myself. It looked more like respect than consideration of her age. And I noticed the workers themselves were careful not to let this regard be noticed by don Pedro or his daughter.

It was full dark now and enthusiastically supported by my sisters, who were sick already of sweeping (though they'd hardly started), we begged to sleep around the firepit. Xochitl was in the kitchen struggling to bring enough order for breakfast in the morning. Isabel was back from the sheds and briskly sweeping out Grandfathers room.

Grandfather helped us light the fire, a fragrant heap of pine and mesquite, a waver of flame soon reflecting in eight black beady eyes over blankets pulled up to our chins—how chilly the nights were up here.

“A story please, Abuelo.
Please?”
He obliged us grandly and continued even after my sisters had nodded off, though weariness crumpled his great round face and bedraggled his big mane. In repayment for his putting my sisters to sleep, I offered to tell him about the wizard Ocelotl. But as I quickly realized that he knew much more than I, I asked instead the difference between priests and wizards. It was complicated, he said, but a priest has words and laws, and a wizard has visions. I wanted to go get Xochitl so they might tell us together about Ocelotl.

“It's late,” Grandfather said. I didn't think she would mind.
“Mira, Angelita, que te lo cuenta.”
A warning in his tone stopped me. “This Martín Ocelotl, and his twin—”

“Twin?”

“And his twin, Andrés Mixcoatl, led an Indian uprising. It began right here in these mountains.” The brothers were incarnations of the gods MirrorSmoke and FeatherSerpent, or so people here claimed. For this they fell afoul, Grandfather said, of a horror called the Inquisition and
were finally condemned. Mixcoatl burned. “But Ocelotl …” he concluded mysteriously, “Ocelotl disappeared into the night.”

He had his second wind. The firelight glowed softly on his face. Now there came tale after tale of golden cities and fiery mountains, blue hummingbirds and eagle knights, wizards and jaguars, curses and troths. Of the magic traps the Mexica wizards set for the Conquistadors, but who, not knowing Mexica magic, rode right on as if through gossamer.

Through half-lidded eyes I saw Amanda's eyes blinking, slow … close—flutter, stop. Then the threads unravelled and we were lofted up and up towards the mountains, Amanda and I, and softly stretched on sleep's stone ledges. By hummingbirds.

The next day we ran everywhere together, exploring. We scrambled up to the watchtower, and to our delight found a little bronze cannon, battered and so long out of use there was a nest in it. To the south, beyond the belfry of our chapel, faint blue smoke smudged up from the town. Beyond the house to the east bristled fields of maize, then what might be the grey-green of
agave
, and then a glimmer of water. From there, deep forest rose in ranks of pikes sharply up to the snow line. It felt like mid-morning, yet the sun had still not cleared the volcanoes. They were right there, right over us. That first day we must have stared up at them for an hour.

We had come up to get a commanding (even superior) view over the house, towards which our eyes finally condescended. I kept the sketch I made during those early days when it all seemed so new. The firepit around which we had slept stood near the centre, and next to it a well. A wide, shady arcade ran right around the courtyard, except for the main portal on the eastern side, between the kitchen and the library. At the four corners, full rain barrels bulged beneath waterspouts set in the eaves. On the north, near the kitchen, was a tiled basin in the shape of a cross.