Gary Jennings - Aztec

He remained obdurate. "The god would never allow. The purple cannot be sold." After a moment he added, "Sometimes we not eat fish, Yellow Eye."

He smiled and pointed to where the four other priests stood around a driftwood fire. It was broiling two fresh-cut human thighs, spitted on my own spear. There was no sign of the rest of the boatman. Forcing my face to give no indication of the trepidation I felt, I took from my loincloth the wadded packet of gold dust and dropped it on the ground between me and the chief priest.

"Open it carefully," I said, "lest the wind get at it." As he knelt and began to unfold the cloth, I went on, "If I were to fill my canoe with your purple, I could bring back the boat almost as full of gold. But I offer this amount of gold for only as many flasks as I can carry in my own two arms."

He had the cloth open then, and the heap of dust gleamed in the sunset light, and his four brother priests approached to ogle it over his crouching figure. He let some of the dust run through his fingers, then, holding the cloth in both hands, he bounced it gently to judge its weight. Without looking up at me, he said, "You give this much gold for the purple. How much you give for the girl?"

"What girl?" I said, though my heart lurched.

"Her behind you."

I flicked only a quick glance backward. Zyanya stood directly behind me, looking unhappy, and a little way behind her stood six or seven more men of the Zyu, eagerly craning to see around her and me, to eye the gold. The priest was still kneeling and weighing the packet between his hands when I turned again and swung my maquahuitl. The packet and his clutching hands dropped to the ground, though the priest barely swayed, staring in shock at the blood gushing from the stumps of his wrists.

The lesser priests and the fishermen rushed to converge—whether to grab for the liberated gold or to aid their chief, I do not know—but in that same instant I whirled, seized Zyanya's hand, plunged through the closing circle of men, and dragged her after me in a headlong run along the ridge and down its eastern side. We were briefly out of sight of the milling Zyu, and I made an abrupt left swerve to dodge among some boulders higher than our heads. The Zyu would give chase, and they would expect us to bolt for our canoe. But even if we could have reached and launched it, I had no experience of rowing a seagoing craft; the pursuers could probably have caught us merely by wading after us.

Some number of them did go running and shouting past our temporary hiding place—running in the direction of the beach, as I had hoped. "Uphill now!" I said to Zyanya, and she wasted no breath in asking why, but climbed along with me. Most of that promontory was bare rock, and we had to pick our way carefully through clefts and crevices, so that we should not be visible to those below. Higher up, the mountain sprouted trees and shrubbery in which we could more effectively lose ourselves, but that green haven was still a long climb distant, and I worried that the local birds would give away our position. At every step we seemed to startle into flight a whole flock of sea gulls or pelicans or cormorants.

But then I noticed that the birds were rising not just from around us, but from all parts of the mountain—land birds as well: parakeets, doves, rock wrens—twittering and flying about aimlessly. And there were not just birds; animals normally furtive or nocturnal were also strangely in evidence: armadillos, iguanas, rock snakes—even an ocelot loped past without giving us a glance—and all the animals, like us, were moving uphill. Then, though the dusk had still a while to last before dark, I heard a coyote's mournful keening from somewhere on the heights, and not far ahead of us a sinuous skein of bats came spewing from some cranny—and I knew what was coming: one of the convulsions so common to that coast.

"Hurry," I panted to the girl. "Up there. Where the bats are coming from. Must be a cave. Dive for it."

We found it just as the last bats departed, or we might have missed it altogether: a tunnel in the rock wide enough for us to wriggle into, side by side. How deep it went, I never found out, but somewhere far within there would have been a great cavern, for the bats had been a countless multitude and, as we lay together in the rock tunnel, we could smell from the farther interior an occasional whiff of their guano droppings. Suddenly everything was quiet outside our burrow; the birds must have flown far away and the animals gone safely to ground; even the usually ever-screeching tree cicadas were silent.

The first shock was sharp but also soundless. I heard Zyanya whisper fearfully, "Zyuüú," and I clasped her protectively tight against me. Then we heard a long, low, rumbling growl from somewhere far inland. One of the volcanoes in that range was belching, if not erupting, and violently enough to quake the earth as far as the coast.

The second and third shocks, and I do not know how many more, came with such increasing rapidity that they all blended into a dizzying motion of simultaneous rocking, tilting, and bucking. The girl and I might have been wedged inside a hollow log careering down a Whitewater river. The noise was so deafeningly loud and prolonged that we might equally have been inside one of the drums which tear out the heart, it being beaten by a demented priest. The noise was of our mountain falling to pieces, contributing more of itself to that rubble of immense boulders already around it in the sea.

I wondered whether Zyanya and I would be among the rubble—after all, the bats had elected not to stay—but we could not have squeezed out of the tunnel then, even if we had panicked, because it was being so fiercely shaken. Once we managed to cringe a bit farther backward inside it, when the tunnel mouth suddenly darkened; a gigantic chunk of the mountaintop had rolled right across it. Happily for us, it kept on rolling and let the twilight in again, though with a cloud of dust that set us to choking and coughing.

Then my mouth went even drier, as I heard a muted thunder from behind us, from inside the mountain. That vast hollow cavern of the bats was crumbling inward, its dome roof plummeting down in pieces and probably bringing with it all the weight of the mountain above it. I waited for our tunnel to be tilted backward and chute us both feet-first down into that all-crushing collapse of the immediate world. I wrapped my arms and legs around Zyanya, and held her even more tightly, in the pitiful hope that my body might give her some protection when we both slid down into the grinding bowels of the earth.

But our tunnel held firm, and that was the last alarming shock. Slowly the upheaval and uproar quieted, until we heard no more than a few sounds outside our burrow: the trickly sounds of small stones and pebbles belatedly following the bigger rocks downhill. I stirred, intending to stick my head out and see what was left of the mountain, but Zyanya held me back.

"Do not yet," she warned. "There are often aftershocks. Or there may be a boulder still teetering right above us, ready to fall. Wait a while." Of course she was right to caution prudence, but she confessed only a little later that that was not her sole reason for holding on to me.

I have mentioned the effects of an earthquake on the human physiology and emotions. I know Zyanya could feel my bulgingly erect tepúli against her small belly. And, even with the cloth of her blouse and my mantle between us, I could feel the nuzzling of her nipples against my chest.

At first she murmured, "Oh, no, Záa, we must not..."

Then she said, "Záa, please do not. You were my mother's lover...."

And she said, "You were my little brother's father. You and I cannot..."

And, though her breathing quickened, she kept on saying, "It is not right..." until she thought to say, with the last of her breath, "But you did pay dearly to buy me from those savages..." after which she only panted silently until the whimpers and moans of pleasure began. Then, a bit later, she asked in a whisper, "Did I do it right?"