Gary Jennings - Aztec

"Confinement?"

"While she waited for the baby's arrival."

I said weakly, "She had a baby?"

Zyanya regarded me with some concern. "The physician said you are not to trouble your mind. I will tell you everything when you are stronger."

"May the gods damn me to Mictlan!" I erupted, with more vigor than I would have thought I could summon. "It must be my baby, must it not?"

"Well..." she said, and drew a deep breath. "You were the only man with whom she had lain since our father died. I am sure she knew how to take the proper precautions. Because, when I was born, she suffered extremely, and the doctor warned her that I must be the last child. Hence my name. But so many years had passed... she must have believed she was past the age of conceiving. Anyway"—Zyanya twisted her fingers together—"yes, she was pregnant by a Mexícatl outlander, and you know the Cloud People's feeling about such relations. She would not ask to be attended by a physician or midwife of the Ben Záa."

"She died of neglect?" I demanded. "Because your stiff-necked people refused to assist—?"

"They might have refused, I do not know, but she did not ask. A young Mexícatl traveler had been staying at the inn for a month or more. He was solicitous of her condition, and he won her confidence, and finally she told him all the circumstances, and he sympathized as wholeheartedly as any woman could have done. He said he had studied at a calmécac school, and that there had been a class in the rudimentary arts of doctoring. So when her time came, he was here to help."

"What help, if she died?" I said, silently cursing the meddler.

Zyanya shrugged in resignation. "She had been warned of the danger. It was a long labor and a difficult birth. There was a great deal of blood and, while the man tried to stanch the bleeding, the baby strangled in its navel string."

"Both dead?" I cried.

"I am sorry. You insisted on knowing. I hope I have not given you cause for a relapse."

I swore again, "To Mictlan with me! The child... what was it?"

"A boy. She planned—if they had lived—she said she would name him Záa Nayazu, after you. But of course there was no naming ceremony."

"A boy. My son," I said, gritting my teeth.

"Please try to be calm, Záa," she said, addressing me for the first time with warm familiarity. She added, compassionately, "There is no one to blame. I doubt that any of our doctors could have done better than the kindly stranger. As I say, there was much blood. We cleaned the hut, but some traces were indelible. See?"

She swung aside the doorway's cloth curtain to admit a shaft of light. It showed, on the wooden doorpost, the ingrained stain where a man had slapped it to leave his signature of a bloody hand.

I did not suffer a relapse. I continued to mend, my brain gradually clearing of its cobwebs and my body regaining its weight and strength. Béu Ribé and Zyanya continued to wait upon me alternately, and of course I was careful nevermore to say anything to either of them that could be construed as paying court. Indeed, I marveled at their tolerance in having taken me in at all, and in lavishing so much care upon me, considering that I had been the primary cause of their mother's untimely death. As for my entertaining any hope of winning and wedding either girl—although I sincerely and perversely still loved them equally—that had become unthinkable. The possibility of their ever having been my stepdaughters was a matter of mere speculation. But that I had sired their short-lived half brother was an unalterable fact.

The day came when I felt well enough to be on my way. The physician examined me and pronounced my pupils again normal in size. But he insisted that I give my eyes some time to get used to full daylight again, and that I do so by going outdoors only a little longer each day. Béu Ribé suggested that I would be more comfortable if I passed that time of adjustment at the inn, since there happened to be a room empty there right then. So I acceded, and Zyanya brought me some of her late father's clothes. For the first time in I do not know how many days, I again donned a loincloth and mantle. The sandals provided were far too small for me, so I gave Zyanya a tiny pinch of my gold dust and she ran to the market to procure a pair of my size. And then, with faltering steps—I was really not so strong as I had thought—I left that haunted hut for the last time.

It was not hard to see why the inn had become a favored stopping place for pochtéa and other travelers. Any man with good sense and good eyesight would have pleasured in putting up there, simply for the privilege of being near the beautiful, almost twin hostesses. But the hostel also provided clean and comfortable accommodations, and meals of good quality, and a staff of attentive and courteous servants. Those improvements the girls had made deliberately; but they had also, without conscious calculation, permeated the air of the whole establishment with their own smiling good spirits. With servants enough to do the scullery and drudgery work, the girls had only supervisory duties, so they dressed always in their best and, to enhance their twin-beauty impact on the eye, always in matching colors. Though at first I resented the way the inn's guests leered at and jested with the innkeepers, I later was grateful that they were so occupied with flirtation that they did not—as I did—one day notice something even more striking about the girl's garb.

"Where did you get those blouses?" I asked the sisters, out of the hearing of the other tradesmen and travelers.

"In the market," said Béu Ribé "But they were plain white when we bought them. We did the decoration ourselves."

The decoration consisted of a pattern bordering the blouses' bottom hems and square-cut necklines. It was what we called the pottery pattern—what I have heard some of your Spanish architects, with a seeming amazement of recognition, call the Greek fret pattern, though I do not know what a Greek fret is. And that decoration was done not in embroidery thread, but in painted-on color, and the color was a rich, deep, vibrant purple.

I asked, "Where did you get the color to do it with?"

"Ah, that," said Zyanya. "It is nice, is it not? Among our mother's effects we found a small leather flask of a dye of this color. It was given to her by our father, shortly before he disappeared. There was only enough of the dye to do these two blouses, and we could think of no other use for it." She hesitated, looked slightly chagrined, and said, "Do you think we did wrong, Záa, in appropriating it for a frivolity?"

I said, "By no means. All things beautiful should be reserved only to persons of beauty. But tell me, have you yet washed those blouses?"

The girls looked puzzled. "Why, yes, several times."

"The color does not run, then. And it does not fade."

"No, it is a very good dye," said Béu Ribé, and then she told me what I had been delicately prying to find out. "It is why we lost our father. He went to the place which is the source of this color, to buy a great quantity of it, and make a fortune from it, and he never came back."

I said, "That was some years ago. Would you have been too young to remember? Did your father mention where he was going?"

"To the southwest, along the coast," she said, frowning in concentration. "He spoke of the wilderness of great rocks, where the ocean crashes and thunders."

"Where there lives a hermit tribe called The Strangers," added Zyanya. "Oh, he also said—do you remember, Béu?—he promised to bring us polished snail shells and to make necklaces for us."

I asked, "Could you lead me near to where you think he went?"

"Anyone could," said the older sister, gesturing vaguely westward. "The only rocky coastline in these parts is yonder."