We were most frequently visited by longtime friends: Cozcatl, lately and more properly known as Master Cozcatl; associates of mine from The House of Pochtea; one or several of Blood Glutton's old fellows-in-arms who had helped me secure the purple. But we also made many acquaintances among our higher-class neighbors in our Ixacualco quarter and the nobles we met at court—in particular a number of noble-women who had been captivated by Zyanya's charm. One of those was the First Lady of Tenochtitlan, which is to say Ahuitzotl's premier wife. When she came to visit, she often brought her eldest son, Cuauhtemoc, Swooping Eagle, the young lord who would be the likeliest successor to his father's throne. Though the Mexica succession was not immutably patrilineal, like that of some other nations, an eldest son was the first candidate considered by the Speaking Council on the death of a Uey-Tlatoani who left no surviving brother to succeed him. So Zyanya and I treated Cuautemoctzin and his mother with fitting deference; it does no harm to be on good terms with him whom you may someday be addressing as Revered Speaker.
From time to time during those years, a military messenger or a pochteatl's porter coming up from the south would make a side trip past our house to bring us a message from Beu Ribe The message was always the same: she was still unmarried, Tecuantepec was still Tecuantepec, the inn was still prospering, and even more so with the increased traffic to and from the Xoconochco. But the very sameness of that scant news was rather depressing, since Zyanya and I could only assume that Beu remained unmarried not from inclination but from a lack of suitors.
And that always recalled the exiled Motecuzoma to my mind, for I was sure—though I never said so, even to Zyanya—that he had been the Mexicatl officer of strange proclivities who had devastated Beu's life. Just as a matter of family loyalty, I suppose I might have felt animosity toward that Motecuzoma the Younger. Just from what Beu and Ahuitzotl had told me, I might have felt contempt for a man partly crippled both in his private parts and in his appetites. But not I or anyone could deny that he did a soldierly job of holding and developing the Xoconochco for us.
He located his army garrison practically on the border of Quautemalan, and he oversaw the design and building of a stout one, and the neighboring Quiche and Lacandon no doubt watched with dismay as its walls went up and the patrols marched about it. For those wretched people never made another foray outside their jungle, they never again threatened or blustered or, indeed, showed any other sign of ambition.
They lapsed back into being no worse than squalid and apathetic, and, as far as I am aware, they still are so.
Your own Spanish soldiers who first traveled into the Xoconochco expressed surprise on finding there, so far distant from Tenochtitlan, so many peoples unrelated to us Mexica—the Mame, Mixe, Comiteca, and such—who spoke our Nahuatl. Yes, that was the farthest land on which one could stand and say, "This is Mexica soil." It was also, despite its distance from The Heart of the One World, perhaps our most loyal province, and that was due in part to the fact that many of our people moved into the Xoconochco after its annexation.
Even before Motecuzoma's garrison was completed, other comers began to settle in the area and to build homes and market stalls and rudimentary inns and even houses of pleasure. They were Mexica and Acolhua and Tecpaneca immigrants seeking wider horizons and opportunities than they could find in the ever more crowded lands of The Triple Alliance. By the time the garrison was fully built and armed and manned, it threw its protective shadow over a town of estimable size. The town took the Nahuatl name of Tapachtlan, Place of Coral, and, though it never approached the size and splendor of its parent Tenochtitlan, it is still the biggest and busiest community east of the Tecuantepec isthmus.
Many of the newcome northerners, after staying a while in Tapachtlan or elsewhere in the Xoconochco, moved on farther yet. I have never journeyed quite so far, but I know that, east of the Quautemalan jungle, there are great fertile highlands and coast lands. And beyond them there is another isthmus, even more narrow than that of Tecuantepec, winding between the northern and southern oceans and extending no one can tell how far. Some insist that somewhere down there a river connects the two oceans. Your own Captain-General Cortes went looking for it, in vain, but some Spaniard may find it yet.
Though the onward-pressing emigrants consisted only of individual explorers, or at most of family groups, and though they settled only sparsely throughout those far lands, I am told that they have left their mark indelibly on the native peoples of those places. Tribes never originally or remotely related to any of us of The Triple Alliance now wear our faces; they speak our Nahuatl language, though in corrupt dialects; they have adopted and perpetuated many of our customs and arts and gods; they have even renamed their villages and mountains and rivers with Nahuatl names.
Several Spaniards who have traveled widely have asked me, "Was your Aztec Empire really so vast that it abutted upon the Inca Empire in the great continent to the south?" Although I do not fully comprehend the question, I always tell them, "No, my lords." I am uncertain of what an empire is, or a continent, or an Inca. But I do know that we Mexica—Aztecs, if you must—never pushed our border beyond the Xoconochco.
Not everybody's eyes and interests were fixed toward the south in those years. Our Uey-Tlatoani, for one, was not ignoring the other points of the compass. I rather welcomed the interruption of my increasingly domestic daily routine when one day Ahuitzotl called me to his palace to ask if I would undertake a diplomatic mission into Michihuacan.
He said, "You did so well for us in the Xoconochco and in Uaxyacac. Do you think you might now seek for us better relations with The Land of the Fishermen?"
I said I could try. "But why, my lord? The Purempecha allow our travelers and merchants unhindered passage across their country. They engage freely in trade with us. What more can we ask of them in the way of relations?"
"Oh, think of something. Anything that would justify your visiting their ruling Uandakuari, old Yquingare." I must have looked blank, for he leaned forward to explain. "Your supposedly diplomatic negotiations will be only a mask for your real mission. We want you to bring us their secret of making that superbly hard metal which defeats our obsidian weapons."
I took a long breath and, trying to sound reasonable instead of apprehensive, I said, "My lord, the artisans who know how to forge that metal are assuredly well guarded against any encounters with strangers who might tempt them to betray their secret."
"And the metal itself is kept locked away, out of sight of the inquisitive," said Ahuitzotl impatiently. "We know all that. But we also know of one exception to that policy. The Uandakuari's closest advisers and personal guards are always armed with weapons of that metal, to ward off any attempts on his life. Get into his palace and you have a chance of getting hold of a sword, a knife, something. That is all we need. If our own metalworkers can have but a specimen to study, they can find out the composition of it."
I sighed and said, "As my lord commands, an Eagle Knight must do." I thought over the difficulties of the task ahead and suggested, "If I am going there only to steal, I really need no complicated excuse of diplomatic negotiations. I could be merely an envoy-bringing from the Revered Speaker Ahuitzotl a friendly gift for the Revered Speaker Yquingare."
