Clash of Star-Kings Read Online Free

underneath the thin meniscus of confidence in his ability to prosper as a modern man was a deep certainty, part pleasure and part pain, that his future lay not in an office or an apartment but in the small huts of the Indians, warm only in love and history.
    There was, of course, never any doubt in his mind that the Indians in question were the Moxtomi. The Tenocha Indians were infinitely the more numerous, incomparably the more powerful, and there was even a vigorous movement among them to give official status to their language, the Nahua dialect, which they called
Meshika
. The fact that Luis knew very well that his maternal grandmother had been a Moxtomí did not blind him to the probable fact that the blood of the Tenocha flowed in his veins as well as a heritage on both familial sides. But who and what, after all, were the Tenocha? Who else but the Aztecs! And were they not themselves the seed of a pre-Spanish Conquest? They were themselves aliens here on the upper slopes of the great valley. The Moxtomí, the last and furthest-flung of the Toltecs — it was to them that this land rightfully belonged.
    And all the while Luis’s feet led him up through the stone-strewn and balsam-scented paths.
    But his mind was elsewhere and on a multitude of things.
    He wasn’t going up to El Pueblo de San Juan Bautista Moxtomí merely to enjoy the friendly presence of such acquaintances as, say, Tío Santiago Tue, or Domingo Deuh, who was more of Luis’s own age. There were
things
he wanted to discuss with them, a variety of exciting things, and he wanted their opinions. There, up ahead, a huddle of brown brushwood and adobe, he saw the pueblo. It was still a good way off. Luis began to form his thoughts into mental conversation.
    “There are soldiers in town, Uncle Santiago, soldiers from ‘Mexico’ with horses and rifles. Why, do you suppose? I don’t really think that this time they’ve come to expel any Indios from Indio lands; their business seems to lie only in Los Remedios
municipalidad
. But there’s a further question, you see —
what
business? It has to do with Monte Sagrado, I’m sure … everyone is sure of that. Some say that they’re here to keep order at the feria of the Holy Hermit. Some say there’s going to be, I don’t know, some kind of trouble with the procession. You know that not everyone in town is the
Heremito’
s friend — particularly not in the
Barrio Occidental —
that’s a mean, tough neighborhood; you know that. Today I heard a saying I haven’t heard in a long time:
Scratch a Nahua and you find a Nagual
…. What do you think that really means?
    “And others are saying, Tío Santi, that the soldiers are here for another reason altogether. They say that the government is going to take away the Tlaloc that’s in the cave under the Monte and take it to ‘Mexico’ — I don’t know why. And there’s talk that this would be a bad thing, that if they do this the Tlaloc will be angry and that there will never be any rain again in the whole Valley. Some are angry about this and some are just excited and of course some don’t care at all.”
    The turn in the path at this point brought Luis face to face with a view which might alone make the fortune of a hotelier. To his left the great Valley of Mexico sloped downward like a precious bowl, and he could see the farms and fields below the rim of forest. Very far below him, and seeming quite small, was his native hateful town of Los Remedios, a huddle of red-tiled roofs at the foot of Monte Sagrado — so high it seemed from down there — yet from here a mere hummock, apparent only because crowned with the church. More fields, more forests, dwindling, dwindling … a tiny wisp of smoke: the
mas o menos
steam locomotive panting its way uphill from Amecameca. And, to the left of the misty huddle which was Amecameca, from here the land fell away abruptly into another valley and another state and another and altogether different climate. To