Hunger's Brides (35 page)

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 for 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—

“Wait,” I said, leaping up.
My surprise
. I had almost forgotten.

A specialty of our region has become all but indispensable to the
women of Mexico. It is a cream made from a butter of avocado and wild honey, widely thought to stay the ravages of time, or at least those of our sun and the high mountain air. We of course cared for nothing of this yet—but oh the glorious feel and fragrance on the skin. Seeing what I'd brought, Amanda's almond eyes grew round as owls'.

Giggling we smeared it over each other, an aromatic lard. Scarcely had I finished Amanda but we were batting away the first wasps. In no time at all, we stood aswirl in them.

“Spin,” I yelled, spinning like a top to keep them from landing. We ran up to our thighs into the water but still they buzzed around. One landed now on her.

The only thing left to do was plunge headlong into the coldest water we had ever felt. And yet we waited: the game began….

From that day forward, after the
temazcal
, after the masks and the hip-deep dip in the hot spring, we would bring out the honey cream and slather each other as fast as we could. Then as the wasps swirled we held still, held still, there at the edge by the most supremely icy spot, beneath a waterfall not half an hour old, so recently was it snow. Nothing but a peltful of wasps could ever have persuaded us to jump—and there we stood until we imagined—or did it?—it did it did it did, the first one began to sting