Hunger's Brides by W. Paul Anderson Page A

continent fixed in the imagination of the Europeans I had read. This was the great glittering lake they had seen or heard or dreamt about. It snaked its way north up the valley until it lost itself in the blue-grey of distance. And there was the white city on the lake, plotted, unlike any city in Europe, on a grid perfectly aligned to the cardinal directions and without defensive walls. Grandfather said Cortés’s soldiers wept—as if they had had been overtaken by a dream of death and now stared out upon a warriors’ heaven. A city without walls to defend or overcome … imagine it.
    Just then, Amanda pointed out the small wedge of a falcon stooping on the doves. In three heartbeats it fell through them—an axe head splitting a block. In a tangle of esses, two doves flew on.
    I had thought it far off, this place I’d read so much about. Before the Conquest, Tenochtitlan was a vast island city, an ivory eye—or, with its grid of streets, a white sunflower framed in leaves of an iridescent green. These were the
chinampas
, or floating gardens. The island was tethered to the shore by the mooring cables of long causeways running through shades of blue. The city was bone white, but its temples were painted in the gaudy hues of parrot plumes and jewels. And the pyramids of ruby and emerald and sapphire were as the flower’s jewelled nectary. The pyramids were gone now and the
chinampas
much reduced, but the air was still clear enough to see the bell tower of what could only be the cathedral, and beside it the Viceroy’s palace.
    We sat on the ledge, swinging our feet, attempting little verses on what we saw. We decided there and then, like children nursing a candy, to make no further explorations until our next visit, so as to draw out the pleasure of discovery. After just an hour, we were ready to start down.
    At the river we stopped to watch in wonder the enormous trout that converged at the bottom of the pool. There seemed to be a vent, some kind of spring at which they jostled and fed. And then it was dusk, which fell swiftly up the mountain. Amanda and I hurried through the cactus field, the richness of the day steeping quietly in us.
    Near the hacienda stood a small enclosure, just back from the river where it winds through the cactus plot. Four bare poles under a thatchof maguey spikes, and a killing floor of smooth stone slabs. Incised in the floor was a channel to run blood straight into the water, which could be sluiced clean with just a bucket or two. The floor had always been here, and on it may once have stood an altar. It was useful now for slaughtering livestock so as not to attract scavengers to the house.
    My heart sank to see Isabel look up as she and a workman butchered a lamb. This might befall a lamb if it were to break a leg, or perhaps come home late.
    Isabel sent Amanda on to the house. I stood silently as they finished in the gloom. She had fetched up her skirts and tucked them between her thighs, and was plastered to her elbows in a black mud. I saw finally that it was blood, as she squatted there like some vengeful idol to the beauty of dusk.
    She washed up, sending the workman ahead with the meat. She had not asked, and seemed not to listen to my mumbled evasions as to where we had been till such an hour. After administering a spanking with her customary efficiency and power she asked if I remembered yet. Grandfather’s seventieth birthday. Which I must have known he attached significance to, and today of all days to leave him alone when he counted on me….
    I blurted, “If I was so late, why didn’t
you
read for him?”
    My ear rang and buzzed for an hour from a slap more impulsively delivered than the spanking.
    â€œCome in when you’ve stopped.”
    That night I tossed and turned and ground my teeth—to be gone again, up to Ixayac—or anywhere. The place where my true life was. Not this, not here. This was not
my
life.
    What kept