“You know what this is, Amanda,” he said, “do you not?”
She nodded shyly.
“Can you show me the Fire-Bow?” he asked her, swinging the lantern behind his back. What was this about? The thing was right there in his left hand.
But Amanda had not misunderstood him. She pointed up at the sky, and though it was a mass of stars, I was fairly sure she was pointing out Orion.
“Not those two?” Abuelo asked, pointing towards the constellation of Gemini. She shook her head. There spread across his face an immense smile of satisfaction. He turned to me excitedly. “As I thought, Angelina. There has been a confusion. Many have written that the Fire-Bow for the Mexica was in los astillejos, which we know today as Castor and Pollux. But the confusion was ours, since none other than Nebrija translates los astillejos directly from the Latin to mean not Gemini but Orion. And can you not see it there, clearly, a fire-bow in Orion’s belt and sword?”
He held up the little bow and drill as if to impose them on the stars.
Still smiling with pleasure he offered her the bow. “You know how,” he said without a doubt in the world. He produced from a pocket in his vest a bit of paper in a tight fan-fold between his thumb and forefinger. As if it were a delicacy to eat he offered it to me, which eased the sting I’d felt at being passed over for the main honour. He explained that, in days gone by, papers folded just so had served as the ceremonial tinder. “And to drill this first fire, señoritas, was once the very greatest of occasions.”
And so we bent to the task as he guided us in how to work, very ceremoniously, together. By then my sisters had left off their sweeping and come to join us at the fire and together we prevailed upon Abuelo to let us sleep around the firepit, just this one night. The stories began. His first, as I recall, he left unfinished. And for this I blame my sisters’ wide eyes and gasps of horror. For, pointing confidently at Orion now, Abuelo invited us to see the sky as he believed the first people here had—sitting perhaps on this very spot—as a chest cavity, a great carcass of night, the shell of its darkness cracked open, and at its heart the fire-bow drilling the first sparks of light and—
And that was all. He’d decided we were too young to hear the rest.
I was speechless the next day to hear Xochitl tell me Amanda wouldn’t be coming to the firepit again. She would say no more. I simply could not imagine it was Abuelo, who had singled Amanda out for the honours just the night before. I ran to him to protest. He looked very grim. I believe he was hearing of it for the first time himself. He would say only that it hadn’t been his idea. So it must have been Isabel—who didn’t answer me at all. But why should she care?
The truth was that she didn’t. Keeping Amanda from the firepit, keeping Amanda from being hurt, was not her concern.
†windmills
†sideboard, credenza
†‘afterthought,’ brother of Prometheus, ‘forethought’
WALKING FISH
I tilted my face to the morning sky. Up from the pale thread that limned the peaks there fanned overhead a gradient of soft hues, and in its velvets and peacock plumes glinted brilliants of ruby and crystal, glimmers of ice blue and apple green … But I had no time to waste on sunrises. I ran to meet Amanda in the kitchen.
And then we did go. No earthly power could hold us, nor unearthly frog plagues, nor blood-spate, nor vicious cattle lice. We passed the first two streams that boiled and battered down the mountain. A little farther along and just before the third, the string of boulders where we crossed the river was wet and slippery with muddy brown water roaring and seething in places over the rocks. A day or two earlier we couldn’t have crossed. At the trout pool we had a twinge of disappointment, but also what I took to be our first good omen. The water was too muddy to renew our acquaintance with the trout, but we did see an otter trundling off up the bank, and sideways in its mouth a big fish bobbing like a trout moustache. Amanda ran ahead of me up the long bridge of Ixayac’s nose, each steep step a grimace in the muscles of her calves.
The face we saw in the features of the place—the nose and forehead, the eye-hollows and pine-topped brows—only emerged when we were far enough along the bridge to have left the surrounding trees behind. I finally caught up to her at the umbral. After three days in bed I felt faint, eyeing the handholds to the first bench.
“I’ll follow you … up … in a minute.”
“We go together,” she said, puffing but pacing still in her eagerness to go on. She waited with me a moment, then picked up both our satchels. She slung them over her back, their straps crossed like bandoleers, and climbed ahead of me to the top….
Back at last.
The sky was not so cloudless as on our first day up. In arroyos and valleys all the way along the east side of the lake, mist hung in wisps and shrouds like a row of tars in winding sheets tipped for committal to the deep. Through cloud rifts, quicksilver beads fell in showers. White birds, brilliant in the sun, sailed against storm clouds of blue-black and charcoal. Yet for all the beauty of the scene, we didn’t sit, didn’t bounce our heels against the ledge, didn’t scan the valley for more than a minute. The anticipation of exploring, which we had once thought to prolong for a day, had become an agony.
The bench was as deep as our courtyard was across … maybe thirty varas, I thought, gauging one against the length of my arm. Amanda pronounced its depth to be twelve matl,† making its width thirty on each side. Popocatepetl smouldered sullenly across from us—next to us—way up yet just to the right. Straight overhead, from the snow line, thin plumes of waterfalls stepped like cloud ladders down the face of Iztaccihuatl. One chute would stop and disappear, to be relieved by another a little over and farther down—until the last plunged into a cleft of rock ten times our height above us, to re-emerge as a small, calm stream from the thicket directly at our feet.
The only way in was to wade up, ducking under the bushes overarching the stream. The water had been ice not an hour ago, yet the shock we expected did not come. It was not at all cold. We waded swiftly in to our knees and then, to get under the thicket, frog-walked over large smooth stones.
We might so easily have been disappointed. After ten days of frantic anticipation, what place could live up to such feverish visions?
Ixayac could.
So many first impressions we never discussed. The splash and sparkle of water, the shelter and hush, as if from the rasp and rush of breaths—indrawn, checked, endlessly prolonged. Blackberry bushes in bloom, and among them a hummingbird’s soft throstling. Tiny frogs creaked, shy yet urgent. From the upper bench down, a fine spray of mist drifted, fog from a cauldron of rainbows. The faintest echo whispered from the rock wall behind the waterfall—did she murmur something, a word … did I? We straightened, searched each other’s eyes in disbelief. A minute ago we had been high on the open flank of two great mountains, yet now we crouched, enclosed, in a nest of calm. Ixayac was the heart of the earth. It throbbed. Soft as a bird in the palm of god.
Amanda’s almond eyes welled for an instant but then she smiled like a maniac, and hugged me hard. I felt the strength in her.
Up on the right was the old temazcal. A few grey stones had tumbled from its sides. We set to work restacking them. The largest were too heavy to lift alone. When we were done the walls came to our shoulders. We plastered the chinks with reddish mud and laid pine boughs across. I streaked her cheek and wheeled away with no hope of outrunning her. By the time she had thoroughly smeared my hair and dragged me into the pool, the sun was barely two palm-widths above the horizon. As soon as Amanda noticed, still wet we started packing up. It was hard to leave.
Just before taking the handholds back down we stopped at the edge and gazed out, like emperors come to a balcony to gratify the fawning multitudes. The mists had burned clear. After the heavy rains, the lake’s expanses of blues and greens were hedged at each river mouth with frail blooms of mud. Yet in the pale blue around the city, its floating gardens still gleamed an emerald gr
een. The air was clearer than ever, and I was sure I could see the cathedral tower, and even the scaffolding of the corrupt construction works that so scandalized Abuelo and never seemed to cease.
And there, the falcon again—two! One hovered, while the other folded into a dive on a flight of rock doves wobbling along like paper ash on the warm afternoon air. The dive scattered them—a blow struck through smoke—sending them to ground. The two falcons swept overhead screaming, talons empty, caught a draft above us and—wings motionless—went soaring up the face.
The stream at our feet tumbled over the precipice, then reappeared briefly where it glided into the stand of pine well below. The river Panoaya emerged from the far side of the woods and began a long muddy arc, bending past the maguey and our reading spot and out into the valley beyond. At this height the maguey field was a scatter of pineapple tops across a chopping block, the vanes of the windmills spinning like the wheels of small sleepy toys. We were looking toward the hacienda, yet though we had a sweeping view to the south and west and north, our view of the house itself was blocked by a little rise. It dawned on us what this meant: even here on the upper bench no one could see us from the hacienda, even had they ten Galilean telescopes.
It meant Ixayac was ours.
Next morning, we lit the lamps then made a tremendous commotion grinding corn and mixing paste for the day’s tortillas. Performing with incomparable industry, we pretended not to notice Xochitl limping sleepily in from the pantry where the hammocks were slung. At the end of the counter she stood with her arms crossed until we acknowledged her.
She took her time assembling our lunch, an especially large one. Then instead of letting us bolt off, she wanted to talk. Placing her hands over Amanda’s satchel, Xochitl made us both sit across the narrow table from her. She asked if we had stuck close together, as she had warned us to do. She asked about the trout pool. She asked about the temazcal. We answered proudly that we had replaced the stones and made a roof with fresh pine boughs. We told her how we had sealed the walls with mud.
So had we remembered to bring materials to make a fire today in the bath? “Mother, I packed them last night.” I’d rarely seen Amanda impatient. Palms flat on the table she leaned as if to get up.
“Look at you two,” Xochitl chided, “panting to go. Like you had drunk a potion of jimsonweed.” Had we even seen the axolotl?
“The what?”
“Walking fish,” Amanda said. It had legs like a dog but also fins.
This was like guessing at proverbs again in the mule cart from Nepantla. A salamander. Xochitl looked doubtful. There were many kinds; this was a special one that breathed water but also air.
“Xochita, they all do that.”
If she was going to be such a sceptic, I could be difficult too.
“They are not all sacred. And,” she added, less sharply, “they are not all gold.”
Was it just loneliness, or that she would have liked to come with us? With her hip, clearly it was impossible. Even to get across the river meant leaping from rock to rock. It felt cruel even to consider offering.
“Normally, Ixpetz, they are in lakes, not streams,” Xochitl continued. “Ocelotl brought them there.”
“Why did he, Mother?”
The walking fish was a double, but a double of water and sky.
“It is a favourite of the god Xolotl…. But no, you are impatient to go.”
“Xochita!”
Her smile showed in all the triangles of her face except her lips, pressed together in a firm, straight line.
“We’ll look for them, Mother,” Amanda said. “How do they look?”
“Big.”
“How big—as a dog?” Amanda asked, excited.
“As your forearm, sometimes, but also hard to see. They hide well in a marsh. But up there you will find them before long.”
They could be of many different colours. Pure white with red eyes, or black and white like our Spanish clowns, by which I took her to mean a harlequin,12 or blue or grey-green. Or gold. Ocelotl had brought them up to our special place, to the Heart of the Earth, but only the golden ones. For among the axolotl of this colour some went on to become spotted, like the jaguar himself. Then, a very few of these transformed yet again. They lost their fins and walked out on the land like lizards. I searched Xochitl’s face for the slightest sign she was teasing us and could find none.
But all colours, she added, had the one quality sacred to Xolotl. God of twins and strange births.
“Twins?”
“Ssh, Ixpetz—what quality, Mother?”
I hadn’t been shushed by Amanda much and was sure I wouldn’t grow to like it. But what Xochitl told us next made me forget my annoyance. She wasn’t joking now.
“It is timid, but has a magic even Ocelotl lacks, a power even the jaguar cannot match.”
“Xochi, please.”
“Axolotl has the power to remake itself. If I cut off its tail, it makes another. Or a leg, or a claw. I have seen this myself. Ocelotl believed even a heart or a head, if the stars were right, but this I am not sure I believe….”
We lifted the pine boughs from the roof of the temazcal and laid them aside, thinking to replace them once the fire burned down—if we could ever get it lit. But after striking flint to fire-stone about four hundred times the tinder finally caught. We fed it dried branches and ringed the fire with large smooth stones. Tomorrow we’d leave nothing to chance—bringing not just pirita and flint but steel, and a lens for the sun and even a fire-bow. We were half-frantic with so many things to do at once—light a fire, explore, search for the axolotl … and I had a surprise of my own for Amanda, but it had to wait till after our bath.
What first? We scouted the perimeter of the pool in case axolotls had been everywhere under our noses yesterday. We found only frogs. Then to make sure more treasures were not just waiting out there for us—yet other pools teeming with axolotls, schools of them basking like otters on the banks—we set off, each of us, to explore our own side of the bench. I quickly gave this up. If there was treasure on my side, it was buried deep under any one of a hundred stunted pines, which, aside from a huge wasp’s nest on a branch overhanging the blackberry bushes, was all I found. No other pools, no golden salamanders.
On the far side Amanda staggered out of the trees, the belly of her huipil bursting with pine cones.
“For the fire,” she called, pointing to the temazcal with her chin.
“Like copalli!” I called back, delighted, and rushed to help her.
We tossed the cones beside the fire, which had begun to burn down, then hardly breaking stride we went up to the hot spring. We had thought we might jump in for a minute on our way up to the second bench, but so hot was the steaming water that it was taking us forever to ease in. I was sweating like mad and sticky all over, though standing only ankle deep, the hem of my dress in my hands, ready to pull it over my head. And yet I couldn’t force myself any deeper. Amanda, naked beside me, was not sweating half so much but she couldn’t get in either.
“Ya!—estoy harta. Let’s go up and see. We can do this later.”
“We shouldn’t be running everywhere, Ixpetz.”
“What do we do, then.”
All of a sudden I felt drained.
“We sweat,” she said. With her huipil and skirt in one hand, she led me down to the temazcal. We replaced the pine boughs and threw in the pine cones one by one like incense. We squatted naked on the dirt, soon slicked to mud with sweat. Standing now and then, heads bent beneath the boughs, we smoothed the sweat down our own thighs and belly, and across each other’s back as if smoothing out a dress for ironing. We made mud masks and with them still on made forays into the hot spring, eventually immersing ourselves almost to our hips. Any higher and the heat seemed so thick we couldn’t breathe with it. Each time we returned to the temazcal we brought water cupped in our palms and threw it on the hot stones. The steam started up at us in searing waves. Tomorrow we must bring a bowl up f
or this, and something to drink from.
We tried the spring one last time, but unable to bear it a minute more we waded on half-scalded legs into the pool below the icy waterfall. At the shallow end, where the hot spring ran in, the water was warmest, but step by step we pushed a little deeper, colder, farther up. How very similar then were the sensations of ice and fire.
At the deep end of the pool, beside the little waterfall, was a black slate ledge warmed by the sun. We lay on it to dry off, our chins propped on the edge, and peered into the water. We could just reach the surface with our fingertips. In the lee of a heap of rocks the water eddied softly, disturbed only by the trickles running from our hair. We babbled mindlessly about this or that, almost as though talking to ourselves, while keeping a weather eye out for axolotls.
“Sacred to Xolotl,” said Amanda, digging an elbow into my ribs.
“Prized by Ocelotl,” I muttered back.
Soon we were setting each other trebalenguas.†
“The salamanders Xochitl says sacred to Xolotl, and brought to Ixayac from Xochimilco by the wizard Ocelotl, are they striped, spotted or speckled?”
“Are they walking fish or water dogs?” Amanda shot back in Nahuatl. “Or are they otter?”
“Ixpetz now asks NibbleTooth if the axolotls—speckled, striped or sometimes spotted, salamanders sacred to Xochitl—were sent by sorcery to Ixayac from Xochimilco by the wizard Ocelotl—”
“You said sacred to Xochitl—sacred to Xolotl.”
“Alright but say it faster now, NibbleTooth. Like this …” Here was something I could do with a quickness even Amanda could not match.
Eventually the surface of the water grew still, and a pair of explorers very much like we two looked up at us from under high cowls of stiff, dark hair. But what struck me then, aside from their exotic head-dress, was not how like us they were, but how like each other—the one’s eyes larger and rounder, the other’s chin a little squarer. Only natural that I knew Amanda’s face better than my own—I saw mine only when hazard brought me before a mirror. It was a station I rarely took up willingly since I had always found Isabel’s features there, in a sense, before my own. Now, as we stared down, the strange thing was that Amanda could look so much like me, yet not at all like Isabel. Here was another gift from Amanda for me to treasure—
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