I shrugged. "I don't remember. In the marketplace, I guess. There is always talk like that among the indios. But it is harmless."

Don Julio gestured at the ruins. "You should be very proud of your ancestors. Look at the monuments they left. There are many more like this, and many others that are the size of cities."

"The priests say we should not be proud; that our ancestors were savages who sacrificed thousands of people and even ate some. They say we must be thankful that the Church has stopped this blasphemy."

He murmured his accord to what the priests said, but I had the impression that he was only giving the sort of respect everyone gives the Church, even if one disagrees.

We walked among the rains for a moment before he spoke. "The Aztecs did practice savage rites, and for those there is no excuse. But perhaps they would look at us Europeans, at our wars with each other and the Infidels, at the cruelty and violence, and ask if we should cast the first stone. But regardless of how we judge their actions, there is no doubt that they built a mighty civilization and left behind monuments that, like those of the pharaohs, will survive the sands of time. They knew more about the movement of the stars and planets than we do today and had a more accurate calendar than us.

"Your ancestors were master builders. Along the eastern coast was a nation of people who harvested rubber from trees at a time when Christ was born. They were the ancestors of the Aztecs, Toltecs, and other indio peoples. They left behind great monuments. Like the Aztecs, they intricately carved the stone of monuments. But with what? They had no iron or even bronze tools. How did they etch the stone?

"Like the Aztecs, they were people without carts or beasts of burden. Yet they hauled great blocks of stones weighing as much as hundreds of men, stones so heavy no cart and team of horses in Christendom could carry them. They transported them great distances, up mountains and down the other side, across rivers and lakes, many leagues from the source of the stone. How? The secret was no doubt revealed in those thousands of books burned by the frays."

"Perhaps there was an Archimedes among them," I said. Fray Antonio had spoken of the accomplishments of the indios who built pyramids that violated the heavens and compared them to Archimedes. "Perhaps in those days there was such a man who, if he had had a long enough pole and a place to stand, could have lifted the world. Omnis h.o.m.o naturaliter scire desiderat."

"Man naturally inclines to know more and more," Don Julio said, translating the Latin phrase. He stopped walking and locked eyes with me. There was a glint of humor in them. "You read Aztec picture writing, speak of an ancient Greek, quote Latin, and have knowledge of Spanish literature. You speak Spanish without an indio accent. A moment ago I lapsed into Nahuatl, and you spoke the language without even thinking about it. You are taller and lighter than most indios. These accomplishments are as mysterious as how these giant stones were moved over mountains."

Cursing my own stupid impulse to show off my knowledge, or Fray Antonio's knowledge to be more accurate, I had raised questions in the man's mind about me. Ay de mi! it had been three years since the murders and the hunt for me began, but this visit to a fair was bringing it back to me.

I fled the man called Don Julio, not looking back.

FIFTY-FIVE.

We left the next morning for the south, along a well-traveled, but frequently difficult to traverse road on which many of the fair merchants had already preceded us with their mule trains.

Besides Mateo, included in the band were two disreputable mestizos. These were stupid street sc.u.m who would be unwelcome in the meanest places in Veracruz-or quickly find their way to the gallows if they stayed around the town. Sancho and the mestizos were obviously a gang of banditos, the sort who laid-in-wait to ambush travelers, cutting throats for whatever was in the victim's pockets.

Again I wondered what had happened to the picaro poet to cause him to a.s.sociate with these dregs.

Sancho and Mateo were mounted on horses and the two mestizos on mules. The Healer and I brought up the rear on foot, leading the mule and the yellow dog. The terrain was often such that the mounted men had to get down and lead their animals. Along the way, Mateo began to hang back with me and the Healer. I didn't know if it was for companionship or to watch us, but I suspected he could not stand too much of the company of Sancho.

"You speak good Spanish," Mateo said, as we walked along. "The priests taught you well."

The priests were the ones who taught indios, so it was a natural a.s.sumption to make. I did not take the statement to refer to Fray Antonio. It was just conversation on his part, not machination about my background, I hoped. He still had not given any hint that he knew my true ident.i.ty. But as hard as I tried, my Spanish came across as better than most indios. I tried to speak the language in a loutish manner, but it was difficult when I was required to carry on a conversation rather than just make short responses. I had tried not to reveal to Mateo that my Spanish was as good as his own. I had made that mistake with Don Julio and was determined to keep up the mascarada.

I kept wondering if he knew who I was-and which of us he was protecting. The other question I knew the answer to: He would be the one to chop off my head after I performed the mysterious task for them. I had seen how quickly his sword can separate a man's head from his body.

I soon discovered that there were two things that Mateo loved most to do-besides making love and fighting duels-drinking and talking.

As we went along, he frequently imbibed from a goatskin and told many tales. Por Dios! This picaro caballero had had more adventures than Sinbad suffered setting out from Basra, and Odysseus sailing from Troy.

"He's like a songbird," the Healer said, when we were alone. "He likes to hear the music of his own words."

Mateo's tales were of his adventures as a sailor and soldier for the king.

"I've fought the French, English, Low Country rebels, and heathen Turks. Blasphemous Protestants, heretic Dutch, and Infidel Moors have all tasted my blade. I fought from the back of a horse, from the deck of a ship, and climbing a castle wall. I've killed a hundred men and loved a thousand women."

And told a million tales, I thought. I had great curiosity as to why the picaro autor of plays and books had ended up with Sancho, a common cutthroat, but it was not a subject I could broach.

They were a strange pair. I knew from personal experience that Mateo was lethal. And I could tell that Sancho was a killer. But the difference between them was that of a fine Toledo blade and an ax. Mateo was a picaro, a braggart, a swordsman, and an adventurer. But he was also a writer and actor, neither of which he appeared to excel at, but which gave him a rough quality as a scholar and gentleman.

Sancho had nothing of the scholar or gentleman about him. He was coa.r.s.e and crude and pugnacious, filthy of word and body, arrogant and a bully.

And there was something else about him, something that didn't settle right in my mind, yet I could not figure out exactly what it was. His appearance bothered me. He appeared to be powerfully built... yet at times he seemed more fleshy than muscular, almost in a feminine sense. Years ago I heard Fray Antonio and Fray Juan talk about harem guards the Moors used called eunuchs, men whose cojones had been cut off. They said that the men grew soft and fleshy like a woman, even developing b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I supposed that the same thing happened to africano slaves who were castrated.

Despite his brutal manner and threats, Sancho had that feminine softness I imagined eunuchs had.

"As a boy younger than you, I sailed in the fleet of Medina Sidonia, who commanded the great Armada that fought the English in the northern waters. We were beaten by the weather, the wind howled like a mad dog, driving my ship ash.o.r.e. I washed ash.o.r.e and spent the next years in the guise of a French boy who had run away from his Scottish master. I joined a traveling group of actors on the road, first as a helper with their trunks and later as an actor and writer of plays.

"The English theater is not as brilliant as our Spanish one. They had a few modestly competent playwrights, one Will Shakespeare, another named Christopher Marlowe, but they lacked the genius of Spanish masters like Lope de Vega and Mateo Rosas de Oquendo. History will remember Mateo Rosas and sing his praise along with Homer long after the names of others have been blown away as dust."

I never knew if he was joking or boasting... or just plain drunk. His own peculiar "modesty" caused Mateo to often refer to himself as if he was talking about an entirely different person.

"I was captured by the Moors, by the Bey of Algiers himself, black heathen infidel devil that he be. I was tortured and starved until I made my escape."

I had heard this story before about an author whose name was sung more alongside that of Homer than Mateo's. Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, had been captured by the Bey of Algiers and spent time in a Moorish prison. I had once spoken Cervantes's name in the presence of Mateo years prior and had nearly gotten my head lopped off. Only the devil knows why I do such stupid things, but I decided to demonstrate a little innocent knowledge to test a suspicion that Mateo borrowed other men's ideas just as casually as he did their purses and women.

"The priests at the church who taught me Spanish used to speak of another author of books and plays who had been captured-"

I suddenly found myself lying on the ground with a ringing in my head. Mateo had delivered a blow to my head.

"Never speak the name of this person in my presence," he said. "In a prison cell after enduring heinous tortures and deprivations, I revealed to this swine the story I would write about a knight-errant upon my return to Spain, the story of my life. He stole my life and published it before I got back-except, of course, he purloined my grandest accomplishments and held them up to ridicule, depicting my life before the entire world as the lunatic folly of a ridiculous buffoon. He stole my life, Chico. Eh, I admit I've done things the world deems dishonorable. Yes, I have helped myself to the coffers of the rich, drunk the wine of life to the bottom of the bottle, gambled my days, my years, my youth, my fears, my hopes, my dreams, my very soul far into manana's dawn-and never looked back. I've killed men and seduced women. But some things I have never done. I have never stolen from a friend. I have never stolen a man's life. Now the world sings the praise of this thief, and none knows the name of poor Mateo Rosas de Oquendo." Mateo gave me a kick. "Now do you understand?"

Monte Alban crowned hills nearly fifteen hundred feet above the valley of Oaxaca and the city of that name. The hills were bare, almost bald of trees, and did not distract from the majesty of the ancient stone edifices.

Like other temple cities in New Spain, the example of Teotihuacan, the Place of the G.o.ds, had been followed in building Monte Alban, a city dedicated to worship. The ancient stone structures were laid out in a rectangular plaza on the leveled mountaintop; about half a league long, the terraced plaza had pyramid temples, an observatory, ball court, and palaces.

Like so many of the holy places of my indio ancestors, Monte Alban was shrouded in mystery, a place of the G.o.ds, which more people visited than actually resided in. It was not Aztec, but Zapotec. South of the Valley of Mexico, the Zapotecs were not defeated by the Aztecs until about fifty years before Cortes's conquest. Beaten in battle, but not completely conquered, the Zapotecs and Aztecs were at each other's throats right up to the time of the conquest.

Today Monte Alban was devoid of life, the droppings of pack animals pa.s.sing through and gra.s.s that had been crushed underfoot the only signs that anything but time had trespa.s.sed on the sacred grounds. At these ghostly stone cities of my ancestors, I got a sense of the forlorn, as if the people had left behind some of their sadness when they abandoned the city to snakes and tarantulas.

After the conquest, the people of the Oaxaca area traded masters as Cortes was granted tribute rights from indios. Granted the t.i.tle of Marques del Valle de Oaxaca and over twenty thousand tribute-paying indios, his actual feudal holdings came to be the size of some European kingdoms.

We made camp and later I walked among the ruins with the Healer. I felt a familiar chill breeze, the wind that I had felt in a cave below the Temple of the Sun in Teotihuacan.

"The G.o.ds are not pleased," the Healer said. "No good will come of this. These men have come here not to praise the G.o.ds but to offend them."

FIFTY-SIX.

The Healer and I camped away from the others. We were not alone on the hillside. A merchant from the fair had camped some distance from us with his peculiar merchandise: four prost.i.tutes. He had rented them out at the fair and was returning to Oaxaca with his merchandise. I heard Sancho tell the man that he would use one of the putas.

While I knelt beside our fire preparing the midday meal for the two of us, I watched Mateo and Sancho walk to an enormous temple pyramid, the largest in the city. The pyramid glowed golden under the high sun. They carefully examined a side of the structure. I could not see a door where they stood. The sound of their voices, but not their words, carried to me. From their gestures and words, I had the impression that they were in disagreement upon how to enter the temple. And I made out the words "black powder."

I looked over at the Healer, who was quietly leaning back against a tree, smoking his pipe. His eyes were half-closed and his face as impa.s.sive as a pond on a windless day. I felt bad about misleading him, but there had been no other choice. Since arriving at Monte Alban, the "simple task" the espanols had planned for me was becoming clear in my mind.