"That was most unseemly," I chided her, my voice now coming out as a growl. "Why would you do such a thing?"
She said forthrightly, "I hoped to tempt you."
"Tempt me?" I piped, like a wee child. "To what?"
"To prepare for the day when you will wear the maxtlatl. Would you not like to learn, before that day, how to perform like a man?"
"Perform?" I grunted. "Perform what?"
"The private act that a man and woman do together. I confess, I should very much like to learn. I thought we might teach one another."
"But—why me?" I said in a thin peep.
She smiled mischievously. "Because, like me, you have not yet learned. But that one touch I gave you, just now, tells me that you are full-grown and able. So am I. I shall undress and you will see."
"I
"No. No, I am not. Yeyac did once grab at me. As you did. But I repulsed him. I have no interest in cuilonyotl lovemaking."
Her face cleared and she smiled and said, "Then let us get on with the right sort of lovemaking." And she let her skirt drop to the floor.
"The right sort?" I repeated, like a parrot. "But that is the sort by which babies are made."
"Only when babies are wanted," she said. "Do you think I am a baby myself? I am a grown woman, and I have learned from other grown women how to avoid pregnancy. I daily take a dose of the powdered tlatlaohuehuetl root."
I had no notion of what that might be, but I took her at her word. Still—again to my credit, I think—I tried one last argument:
"You will want to be married one day, Ameyatl. And you will wish to marry a pili of your own rank. And he will expect you to be a virgin." My voice went up into a squeak again, as she began slowly, almost teasingly, to unwind the felted tochomitl garment that wrapped her loins. "I am told that a female, after even one single time of lovemaking, is
She sighed as if much exasperated by my nervous maundering. "I told you, Tenamaxtli, I have been taught by other women. If ever I do have a wedding night, I shall be prepared. There is an astringent ointment to make me tighter than a virgin only eight years old. And a certain sort of pigeon's egg to insert inside me. Unnoticed by my husband, it will break at the proper moment."
My voice gone gruff again, I said, "You certainly seem to have given this considerable thought before you invited me to—"
"Ayya,
I found that she had spoken truthfully, also, about her being different in that place, too. The earlier times that I had seen her naked, there had been only a small, barely defined crease at her groin. The tipili there now was rather more than a crease, and within it were marvels.
Ayyo, yes!" And, of course, after a while she abandoned all calm, and I was no longer nervous, and we were both crying inarticulate noises of rapture and delight.
The thing I remember best, about that coupling and all the subsequent others, is how well Patzcatl-Ameyatl personified her name. It means "Fountain of Juice," and when we lay together, that is what she was. I have known many women since then, but have found none who was so copious of juices. That first time, my first mere touch of her started her tipili exuding its water-clear but lubricant fluid. Soon we were both—and the pallet, too—slick and shiny with it. When we finally got to the act of penetration, Ameyatl's virginity-protecting chitoli membrane gave way without resistance. She was virginally tight, but there was no forcing or frustration at all. My tepuli was welcomed by those juices, and it glided right in. On later occasions, Ameyatl started her fountaining as soon as she unwound her tochomitl—and later still, as soon as she entered my room. And sometimes, still later, when we were both fully dressed and in the company of others and were behaving with impeccable propriety, she would cast me a certain look that said, "I see you, Tenamaxtli... and I am moist beneath my clothes."
That is why, on my thirteenth birthday, I was secretly a little amused when Ameyatl's father, my uncle, inelegantly but with good intentions, bade me accompany him to the foremost house of auyanime in Aztlan. and selected for me an auyanimi of prime quality. Smug young sprig that I was, I thought I already knew everything a man could know about the act of ahuilnema with a female. Well, I soon discovered—with delight, with several moments of real surprise, even now and then with mild shock—that there were a great many things I did not know, things that my cousin and I would never once have thought to try.
For example, I was briefly taken aback when the girl did to me with her mouth what I thought only cuilontli males did between themselves, because it was what Yeyac had once tried to do to me. But my tepuli was more mature now, and the girl so expertly excited it that I erupted with glorious gratification. Then she showed me how to do the same to her xacapili. I learned that that inconspicuous pearl, though so much tinier than a man's organ, can likewise be mouthed and tongued and suckled until, all by itself, it impels a female to virtual convulsions of joy. On learning this, I began to suspect that no woman ever actually
When I left the girl the next morning and returned to the palace, Ameyatl was impatiently waiting for me, and urgently hustled me off to where we could converse in private. Though she knew where I had spent the night, and what I had been doing all the night long, she was neither jealous nor distressed. Quite the contrary. She was almost aquiver to find out if I had learned any novel or exotic or voluptuously wicked things to impart to her. When I grinned and said that I certainly had, Ameyatl would that instant have dragged me off to her room or mine. But I pleaded for time to rest and recover and revitalize my own juices and energies. My cousin was no little annoyed at having to wait, but I assured her that she would much more enjoy the new things she would learn when I had regained the vigor necessary to teach them.
And so she did, and so did I, and we went on enjoying one another at every possible private moment during the next five years or so. We never were caught in the act, never even suspected, as far as I knew, by her father or brother or my mother. But neither were we ever really in love. Each of us simply happened to be the other's most convenient and ever-willing utensil. Just as on my thirteenth birthday, Ameyatl never evinced any displeasure or indignation on the few times when surely she was aware that I had sampled the charms of a servant wench or a slave girl. (
Nor was I heartbroken when, in her twenty-first year, Ameyatl had to forsake me and take a husband. As with most marriages between young pipiltin, this one was arranged by the fathers involved, Mixtzin and Kevari, tlatocapili of Yakoreke, the community nearest ours to the southward. Ameyatl was formally betrothed to become the wife of Kevari's son Kauri, who was about her own age. It was obvious to me (and to Canautli, our Rememberer of History) that my uncle was thus allying our people and Yakoreke's as a subtle step toward making Aztlan again—as it long ago had been—the capital city of all the surrounding territories and peoples.
I did not know whether Ameyatl and Kauri had even got to know one another very well, not to say love one another, but they would have been obliged to obey their fathers' wishes in any case. Besides, in my view, Kauri was a passably personable and acceptable mate for my cousin, so my only emotion on the day of the ceremony was some slight apprehension. However, after the priest of Xochiquetzal had tied the corners of their separate mantles in the wedding knot, and all the traditional festivities were over, and the couple had retired to their finely furnished quarters in the palace, none of us wedding guests heard any scandalized uproar from there. I assumed, with relief, that the tight-making ointment and the tucked-inside pigeon's egg, as prescribed by Ameyatl's old-crone advisers all those years before, had sufficed to satisfy Kauri that he had wed an untarnished virgin. And no doubt she had further convinced him with a maidenly show of ineptitude at the act she had so artfully been practicing during those years.
Ameyatl and Kauri were married only shortly before the day that I and my mother Cuicani and Uncle Mixtzin departed for the City of Mexico. And I deemed that my uncle showed perspicacity in appointing not his son and presumptive heir Yeyac, but his clever daughter and her husband to govern in his place. It would be a long, long time before I would see Ameyatl again, and then in circumstances that neither of us could remotely have imagined when she waved good-bye to us wayfarers that day.
something
"What would you have us do, Tenamaxtli? Set the city aflame? Stone does not readily catch fire. And we are but three. The whole of the all-powerful Mexica nation was unable to stand against these white men. Well? What would you have us do?"
I stammered witlessly, "I... I..." then paused to collect my thoughts, and after a moment I said:
"The Mexica were taken by surprise because they were invaded by a people never previously known to exist. It was that surprise and the ensuing confusion that caused the downfall of the Mexica. They simply did not recognize the white men's capabilities and cunning and lust for conquest. Now all of The One World does. What we still do not know is in what way the Spaniards may be vulnerable. They must have a weak point somewhere, a soft underbelly where they can be attacked and gutted."
Mixtzin made a gesture encompassing the city about us, saying, "Where is it? Show it to me. I will gladly join you in the disemboweling. You and I against all of New Spain."