Now it was I who bellowed "arrgh!"—in disgust—and frantically wiped at the stickiness befouling my hair, eyebrows, lashes and cheeks. Yeyac rolled away from me and, when he could cease his gasping and catch his breath, said, "Ayya, do not go on behaving like a timid child. That is only omícetl. It is the spurting of the omícetl that gives such sublime pleasure. Also, omícetl is what creates babies."

"I do not want any babies!" I croaked, wiping even more desperately.

"Fool of a cousin! The omícetl does that only to females. Exchanged between men it is an expression of—of deep affection and mutual passion."

"I have no affection for you, Yeyac, not any more."

"Come, now," he said, wheedlingly. "In time you will learn to like our playing together. You will yearn for it."

"No. The priests are right to forbid such play. And Uncle Mixtzin seldom agrees with any priest, but I wager he would, if I told him about this."

"Ayya—touchy, touchy," Yeyac said again, but not jovially this time.

"No fear. I will not tell. You are my cousin, and I would not see you beaten. But you are nevermore to touch my parts or show me yours. Do your exercises elsewhere. Now kiss the earth to that."

Looking disappointed and disgruntled, he slowly bent down to touch a finger to the stone floor and then to his lips, the formal gesture signifying that I-swear-to-it.

And he kept that promise. Not ever again did he try to fondle me or even let me see him except when he was fully clothed. He evidently found other boys who were not, like me, averse to learning what he taught, because when the Mexícatl warrior in charge of our House of Building Strength assigned students to the tedious duty of standing guard in remote places, I noticed that Yeyac and three or four boys of varying ages were always eager to step forward. And Yeyac may have been right in what he had said about the priests. There was one who, whenever he wanted something carried to his room, would always ask Yeyac to do it, and then neither of them would be seen again for a long while.

But I did not hold that against Yeyac, or hold any lingering resentment about his behavior with me. True, relations between the two of us were strained for some time, but they gradually relaxed to mere coolness and perhaps overpolite politeness. Eventually I, at least, quite forgot the episode—until much, much later, when something occurred to make me remember it. And meanwhile, my tepúli grew on its own, without requiring any outside assistance, as the years passed.

Over those years, we Aztéca got accustomed to the crowded pantheon of gods the Mexíca had brought with them and raised temples to. Our people began to join in the rites for this or that god—at first, I think, just to show courtesy and respect to the Mexíca now residing among us. But, in time, our Aztéca seem to have found that they were deriving something—security? uplift? solace? I do not know—from sharing in the worship of those gods, even some of the ones they might otherwise have found repellent, such as the war god Huitzilopóchtli and the frog-faced water goddess Chalchihuítlicué. Nubile girls prayed to Xochiquétzal, the Mexíca's goddess of love and flowers, that they might snare a desirable young man and make a good marriage. Our fishermen, before setting out to sea, besides uttering their usual prayers to Coyolxaúqui for a bounteous catch, prayed also that Ehécatl, the Mexíca's wind god, would not raise a gale against them.

No person was expected, as are Christians, to confine his or her devotion to any particular god. Nor were people punished, as Christians are, if they switched their allegiance at whim from one deity to another, or impartially among many of them. Most of our folk still reserved their truest adoration for our longtime patron goddess. But they saw no harm in giving some, too, to the Mexíca deities—partly because those newcome gods and goddesses provided them with so many new holidays and impressive ceremonies and causes for song and dance. The people were not even much deterred by the fact that many of those deities demanded compensation in the form of human hearts and blood.

We never, during those years, engaged in any wars to provide us with foreign prisoners for sacrifice. But, surprisingly, there was never any lack of persons—Aztéca as well as Mexíca—to volunteer to die and thereby nourish and please the gods. Those were the people convinced by the priests that if they simply lolled about and waited to die of old age or in some other ordinary way, they risked an instant plunge into the depths of Míctlan, the Dark Place, there to suffer an eternal afterlife devoid of delight, diversion, sensation, even misery, an afterlife of absolute nothingness. To the contrary, said the priests, anyone undergoing the Flowery Death, so-called, would instantly be wafted to the lofty realm of the sun god, Tonatíu, there to enjoy a blissful and ever-lasting afterlife.

That is why numerous slaves offered themselves to the priests, to be sacrificed to any god—the slaves cared not which—believing they would thus be improving their lot. But flagrant gullibility was not limited to the slaves. A young male freeman would volunteer to be slain, after which his body would be flayed of its entire skin, and that would be donned by a priest to imitate and honor Xipe Totec, the god of seedtime. A freeborn young maiden would volunteer to have her heart torn out, to represent the mother-goddess Teteoínan's dying while giving birth to Centéotl, the maize god. Parents even volunteered their infant children to be suffocated in sacrifice to Tlaloc, the rain god.

Myself, I never felt the least inclination to self-immolation. No doubt influenced by my irreverent Uncle Mixtzin, I never cared much for any god, and cared even less for priests. Those dedicated to the Mexíca's new-brought deities, I found especially detestable, because, as a mark of their high calling, they performed various mutilations on their own bodies and, worse, never washed themselves or their garments. For some while after their arrival in Aztlan, they had worn rough work clothes and, like every other worker, cleaned themselves after a day of hard labor. But later, when they were excused from the work teams and donned their priestly gowns, they never so much as took a dip in the lake—let alone enjoyed a really good purification in a steam hut—and very soon were repulsively filthy, the air around them almost visibly mephitic. If I had ever taken the trouble to meditate on my cousin Yeyac's curious sexual tastes, I probably would have done no more than wonder, with a shudder, how he could possibly bring himself to embrace such an abhorrent thing as a priest.

However, as I have said, it was a long time—fully five years—before I again had occasion to think, and then only briefly, of Yeyac's having made advances to me. I was now twelve years old, my voice just beginning to change, alternating between rumble and squeak, and I was looking forward to putting on my own loincloth of manhood before long. And what happened, absurdly enough, happened just as it had the other time.

As I keep remarking, the gods derive their merriest entertainment from putting us mortals in situations that could seem to be mere coincidence. I was in my room at the palace, my back to the door, when again a hand stole under my mantle, gave my genitals an affectionate squeeze—and propelled me to another prodigious leap.

"Yya ouíya, not again!" I squealed, as I went up in the air and came down again, and spun to face my molester.

"Again?" she said, herself surprised.

It was my other cousin, Améyatl. If I have not earlier mentioned that she was beautiful, well, she was. At sixteen, she was more fair of face and form than any other girl or woman I had seen in all of Aztlan, and, at that age, probably at her veriest pinnacle of beauty.