Hunger's Brides by W. Paul Anderson

knew it really would be all right.
    Though
miztli
† often hunted during the day, jaguars rarely did, and there was a much better place for them, where the deer and the pigs came for salt. “Which is why—listen carefully now—you follow the south bank of the river, and do not follow the first stream up or the second. The third. Where it joins the river is a deep pool. There is a place to cross over. Then look to Iztaccihuatl. You see straight above you a line of waterfalls. The highest is at the snow line.” We were to repeat it now for her. First me, then Amanda.
    â€œIt was a place for the women of our family,” said Xochitl. “It is the Heart of the Earth, of the goddess of the earthquake. And of our grandmother, Toci. Among the men, only Ocelotl knew the way.”
    â€œHis mist has not scattered,” said Amanda, which meant he was respected. Xochitl nodded in approval and told us the Heart of the Earth was the jaguar’s tutor. His pelt is on her throne.
    â€œDid Ocelotl go there for visions?” I asked, casually.
    She wasn’t easily fooled.
    â€œCould be, Ixpetz. But I think mostly he slept. Beside the spring youwill see the stones he used for his
temazcal
. † It is for my daughters now, who have made my hair white and my face very wide.”
    Just as we were turning to go, Xochitl called to us. “Here … There is enough for breakfast and lunch. But when you look down to the hills and the sun is two palm-widths above—start down. Never later.”
    We set out at a fast walk, which threatened at every step to break into a trot. I held Amanda’s hand tight to keep her from breaking away altogether.
    â€œDid you hear, Amanda? She didn’t even tell us to keep it to ourselves!” Amanda nodded proudly. But if she had, I asked, wouldn’t we have been right to take it as a grievous insult? And wasn’t it beautiful about the Heart of the Earth, and …
    And so we went as we would each time, to what became
our
special place. East through the corn, shooing deer, which would cheekily stop again after clearing the fence—a high fence whose lowest rails we ducked through—in one soaring, effortless bound. So calmly they hung at the top of their arc that it seemed they might nod off up there in the air. They were like her, tense in stillness and in flight utterly at peace.
    Ten minutes above the river, the path reared up more steeply. The stream by which we had found our way slowly fell away to the left. For half an hour we climbed a long incline of uniform width, pitched as steeply as the stairs up to the hacienda’s watchtower. On either side sloped away banks of shale and what seemed almost to be coal but with a glassy sheen. To our fancy, this incline appeared as a nose, one we followed to the place Amanda named
Ixayac
. Its Face.
    The top of the incline ended in a sheer wall five times our height, but up the surface of which a zigzag of handholds and footholds stood out as clearly as rungs. Amanda scrambled up without hesitation, and I clambered gratefully after her. This climb, I saw, was what would keep us safe from anything on four legs following us.

    We stood on a deep bench, the lower of two. Each of its brows sprouted a score or so of stunted pines. The stream ran out of a thicket in front of us and dropped away a little distance to the left. Amanda walked right up to the edge where the stream fell. I inched up cautiously behind her. It smashed and frayed and tumbled its way into a deep hollow of rubble and shale. From there it ran more smoothly along the north cheek of the incline before disappearing into the trees.
    We sat down on the ledge. A stone’s throw out from us, three grey rock doves flapped a broad arc across our field of view. Eventually I let my feet swing out into space, though not quite so freely as Amanda did. The world we looked out upon could have been another continent. But this
was
the other