HOSHI’TIWA stared in shock at the visitor.
He had come to the workshop with so heavy a waterskin I on his back that he walked stooped over, looking at the ground. The waterskin, fashioned from the hide of a doe, was strung from his forehead by a tumpline, and the man sweated and puffed as he shuffled across the workshop floor to where the water urn stood in the corner.
The man was a water-carrier, and Hoshi’tiwa would soon learn that such men were both necessary and despised at Center Place. As he filled the urn, Tupa watched with a careful eye, and when he was done, she checked the measure of liquid and then paid him in six cacao beans, meticulously counted out.
Hoshi’tiwa looked on in astonishment. Tupa was buying water!
After the man had left, Tupa announced that the delivery was less this time, and therefore it was necessary to begin rationing water until such time as it was plentiful again. One of the older potters was put in charge of monitoring the workers’ visits to the urn, and how much they took.
While everyone made cries of protest, Hoshi’tiwa silently returned to work. Although rationing water was a concept she could not grasp— back home water was freely available from the nearby stream—she saw it was but one more misery in the nightmare she now lived.
That evening after supper, a kindly older woman, whose hair was not fully gray but whose face was lined with maturity, asked Hoshi’tiwa why she kept to herself.
Hoshi’tiwa looked into the honest square face. Although the woman’s chin was scored with the blue tattoo of the Mountain Lion Clan, Hoshi’tiwa saw a resemblance to her own mother, and so she said, “I am makai-yó.”
The woman, whose name was Yani, gasped softly. Her hand flew to her mouth. Behind her fingers she whispered a magic spell and then she traced a good-luck sign in the air. She glanced fearfully at Tupa, who gulped nequhtli in the corner while waxing nostalgic over the three husbands she had outlived.
Yani had encountered only one makai-yó in her life, years ago, a girl who had been caught in a sexual embrace with a son of nobility. The girl was dragged into the main plaza where, before all the people, she was stripped naked, declared makai-yó, and then led to the stone altar, where she had been tied down and, while alive and conscious, had her heart cut from her breast, still beating, for all the world to see.
The girl’s lover, Yani recalled with tears, had simply been sent back to his home city in the south.
She saw now with relief that Tupa had not heard Hoshi’tiwa’s admission; otherwise, the workshop would be turned upside down and everything within ritualistically cleansed with fire.
“What happened to you, child?” Yani asked, her heart moved with compassion, because that innocent girl of long ago had been her own daughter.
Hoshi’tiwa told the woman her story, adding, “I am now makai-yó because of Moquihix’s deception. He spoke a falsehood so that I could never run away and return to my clan. I am a prisoner here now, though no ropes bind me and no guards watch me. But I do not wish to stay in this terrible place.”
“Terrible?” said Yani. “This place is not terrible. It is wondrous. People from the far corners of the land come here to speak to the gods, to find medicines and clothing, to join with distant relatives. Center Place is the heart of our people, Hoshi’tiwa.”
“But it is run by the Toltecs.”
“It was not always so, and,” Yani lowered her voice, “perhaps it will not always be so. I love Center Place. I was born here. My mother taught me her craft in this very workshop, as her mother taught her. But I am the end of the line, for I have no children. Yet I am content. My bowls and my pitchers are my children.”
Her words horrified Hoshi’tiwa, who vowed that she was not going to grow old with only bowls and pitchers for children.
And in the next moment, to her surprise—for what had he to do with children?—the memory of Lord Jakál on the first dawn of the Morning Star, when she had thought he was a priest, suddenly came to her mind.
His face: She had read so many things there—sadness, yearning, loneliness. Hoshi’tiwa recalled that Noseless had said Lord Jakál was unhappy and melancholy. When she felt her heart move for him, she reminded herself that Jakál was an eater of man-corn; he was a cannibal.
And he worshipped the Morning Star. This explained something about her captors. While her own people worshipped the sun and guided their lives according to its predictable and benevolent cycle, the Toltecs guided their lives by a star that wandered, that went this way and that in the sky, that disappeared for periods at a time, a star the people could never be sure would return! This explained their devious and untrustworthy nature.
And yet, Lord Jakál had sung to the Morning Star so beautifully….
Laying a cautioning hand on Hoshi’tiwa’s arm, Yani said quietly, “A word of advice, Daughter. Do not let these others here know that you are makai-yó.” She looked over each shoulder at the women and girls engaged in grooming and gossip, and lowered her voice. “If they were to find out, things would go very badly for you.”