For a moment the two old men stood perfectly still, like two stone statues embracing each other, the Healer with the feather in his hand, the naualli with his hand on the hilt of the knife. They slowly moved apart, and as they did, the Healer went down to his knees and the naualli moved away from him.

I made it up to the top and onto my feet. I charged the naualli but stopped and watched him in amazement. Instead of crouching in a knife fighter's stance to meet my attack, he pranced away, ripping off the girl face. He grinned gaily and danced and laughed.

Holding the knife again high in the air, he plunged it into his own heart.

I now realized why the Healer had been shaking a feather in the man's face. He had yoyotli or some other dream dust from a flower weaver on the feather.

The Healer lay on the ground on his back. His shirt was b.l.o.o.d.y. I knelt beside him with a heavy heart. "I will go for help," I said, but I knew it was useless.

"No, my son, stay with me. It is too late. This morning I heard the call of the uactli, the bird of death."

"No-"

"I will go now to the place where my ancestors have gone. I am old and tired and it is a long trip." He slowly faded, his breath leaving him as I held him in my arms and cried.

He had once told me that he had come from the stars. I believed that. There had been an otherworldliness to him. I had no doubt that he had journeyed to earth from the stars, and it would be to the stars that he returned.

Like the fray, he had been a father to me. As his son, it was my duty to prepare him for his journey.

I had to leave him to get help to move his body to a proper place for the burial I would give him. When I returned to the camp, both Don Julio and Mateo were there.

"I received a message from an indio," Don Julio said. "He had been sent by the Healer a couple of days ago. The message was that the naualli had died trying to attack you. I got here and found out Mateo knew nothing of it."

"That's because it just happened," I said. I told them about the fight with the naualli, and the feather that had "killed" the magician.

"How could the old man know about the fight before it ever happened?" Mateo asked.

I shrugged and smiled with sadness. "The birds told him."

The Healer would not go to Mictlan, the Dark Place of the underworld. He had died in battle as a warrior. He would go to the paradise of the Eastern Heaven.

With the help of the dream diviner, I prepared the Healer's body, dressing him in his finest clothes, his cape of rare feathers and his wondrous headpiece. I built a high pile of wood and laid the Healer's body atop the pile. Alongside the body, I placed a supply of maize, beans, and cocoa beans to sustain him on his journey to the Eastern Heaven.

His yellow dog had never left his side during all of the preparations. I killed the dog as gently as I could and laid him at the Healer's feet so the dog could guide him.

When the preparations were done, I lit the wood. I stood by as the pyre roared. The fire burned and the smoke raised into the night. I stayed until the last wisp of smoke, the last essence of the Healer, had risen to the stars.

Don Julio and Mateo came to the funeral place in the morning. Mateo led a horse that Don Julio indicated I was to ride.

"You are coming with us," the don said. "You have been a thief and a liar, a young rogue, old in the wrong ways of men. Now it is time for you to live another life, that of a gentleman. Get on your horse, Don Cristo. You are going to learn the ways of a caballero."

PART FOUR.

While I swam in a sea of knowledge, I lived in a world of ignorance and fear.

-Cristo the b.a.s.t.a.r.do

SEVENTY-ONE.

So began the next phase of my life, the polishing of the scabrous soul of a lepero street urchin into a Spanish gentleman.

"You will learn how to ride a horse, fight with a sword, shoot a musket, eat with a fork, and dance with a lady. Perhaps along the way you will teach me a few things," Don Julio said. "Hopefully, none which will cause my head to be impaled upon a city gate."

And who was to be my teacher? Who else but a man who boasted he had killed a hundred men, loved a thousand women, stormed castle walls, bloodied the decks of ships, and wrote ballads and plays that made grown men weep?

Mateo did not suffer the new a.s.signment with great pleasure. We were both banished to the don's hacienda and forbidden to enter the capital. No doubt the don reasoned that neither of us was ready to present ourselves in the City of Mexico.

Furthermore, neither of us were certain of the don's motives. It seemed evident Mateo was exiled to the hacienda because it was still not safe for him to show his face in the capital-the judge who wanted to hang him was still in power. I did not know why he sent me to the hacienda with a new identify-as his cousin.

"He likes you," Mateo said. "Don Julio has suffered much as a converso. He sees something in you beyond the lying, thieving lepero I know you to be."

Both of us had the suspicion that besides the desire to reward us for striking a lethal blow against the Jaguar Knights, the don had ulterior motives. We questioned whether he had an a.s.signment so hazardous that those performing it would need new ident.i.ties and be completely in his thrall, an a.s.signment so dangerous no one else would accept.

Don Julio owned two great houses, one on a hacienda fifty leagues south of the City of Mexico and the other in the city itself. I was to learn that when he wasn't traveling, he spent most of his time at the hacienda while his wife remained in the City of Mexico.

Under the encomiendas, indios had to pay tribute granted to the conquistadors. They were often worked and branded as slaves. These grants slowly evolved into the hacienda system as conquistador blood lines died out, the vast grants were broken up, or tribute was replaced by land holdings. Many haciendas were as large as encomienda grants, having villages or even small towns within their borders. Other than the actual branding of indios and the direct payment of tribute, the old system had faded in name only. Indios paid tribute to the hacienda owner in the form of cheap labor. The indio was tied to the land. The land fed the family, clothed them, protected them. And the land belonged to a Spaniard. In essence, the feudal nature of the European baronial estates, in which n.o.bles were served by peasants who worked the land, had been transferred to New Spain.

Few hacienda owners actually lived on their vast estates. Most, like Don Julio's wife, lived all or most of the year in the City of Mexico so they could enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of life in one of the grand capitals of the world. The unusual relationship between Don Julio and his wife, where they lived apart most of the time, was not discussed. I eventually discovered why the scholarly don would want to stay away from the tempestuous woman.

Don Julio's hacienda stretched a full day's ride in every direction. Popocatepetl, Smoking Mountain, and Iztaccihuatl, White Lady-two great volcano mountains that pierce the very heavens with their snow-capped cones-were both in view from the window of my room at the great house. When I sat and watched them, I was always reminded of the enchanting tale of love and tragedy from Aztec lore that the Healer taught me.

Iztaccihuatl was the legendary daughter of an Aztec king whose kingdom was under siege. Needing the enemy vanquished, he a.s.sembled all of his warriors at the foot of the great temple of Huitzilopochtli, the war G.o.d.

"Iztaccihuatl is the most beautiful maiden in the land," he told the warriors. "He of you who is the bravest in the battle will claim her as his wife."

Popocatepetl was the bravest and strongest of all the warriors. And he had long loved Iztaccihuatl, but only from a distance, for he was of common stock, his father a simple farmer. He was so low in the social order that he had to avert his eyes when the princess was near him.

Iztaccihuatl was aware of his love, and the two had met secretly in a garden near her quarters when Popocatepetl had been a palace guard.

In the battle that ensued, Popocatepetl was the mightiest warrior, turning the tide of the battle and driving the enemy from the walls of the city. Because of his bravery, he pursued the enemy beyond the walls and back to their own land.

While he was gone, jealous suitors got the ear of the king. Iztaccihuatl was his only daughter and for her to marry a common soldier, the son of a fanner, was an insult to them. They convinced the king to send a.s.sa.s.sins to kill Popocatepetl. When the a.s.sa.s.sins left the palace, the king told Iztaccihuatl that Popocatepetl had died in battle.

The grief-stricken princess died of love lost before Popocatepetl arrived back, having defeated the a.s.sa.s.sins. When Popocatepetl found his love dead because of treachery, he slew the king and all the n.o.bles. Then he built a great temple in the middle of a field and laid the body of his beloved atop it. He set a torch over her body so that she would always have light and warmth. He built another temple for his own body and placed a torch above where he laid down to rest, joining his love in death.

An eon pa.s.sed, the temples grew into tall mountains and snow encrusted them for an eternity, but the fires within still burned.

I have never forgotten the girl in the coach who saved my life in Veracruz. When I look at White Lady, the mountain resembling the head, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and feet of a sleeping woman, I wonder about what sort of woman the girl Elena had become....

The hacienda was not a fertile basin, although year round a river flowed through it. Wheat, maize, beans, peppers, and squash were raised near the river, maguey for pulque, and indio products grew in the more arid areas. Cattle roamed wherever they could find graze. Cattle were raised mostly for their hides because it was not economical to ship the meat great distances, even salted. Chickens and pigs were raised for the dinner pot, deer and rabbit hunted.

The great house was located at the top of a hill, a mound the shape of a monk's bald pate. At the bottom of the hill, a small indio village, about sixty jacals-mud-walled huts-sprawled along the riverbank. There were no slaves on the property.