Clash of Star-Kings Read Online Free Page A

Luis’s right the land rose unmarked by man except by the meager
milpitas
of the Moxtomí, rivulets and gorges and woods and great riven boulders: the Pass of Cortes like a line of demarcation between the gigantic sleeping woman in her white shroud which was Ixtaccihuatl and the looming cone of glistening ice-clad Popocatepetl.
    Luis gazed and sighed and resumed his walk and his cerebral conversation. “Domingo Deuh, my friend, have you and your people seen the lights which are said to have been shining and moving about on
los volcanes?
I myself think that I have, once or twice, but I am not entirely sure — perhaps they were stars peeping out from behind clouds, or
aeroplanes
passing high and silently between the mountains and myself. Still, many others and some of them sober and serious witnesses have claimed to have seen them, and in such a manner that neither stars nor
aeroplanes
could account for them. Do you know anything of this? Have your people formed an opinion?
    “And what of the smokes from Popo? Mountain-climbers have come down with reports of such. Did they lie? Were they mistaken? Has the long-slumbering Smoking Mountain begun to stir again? Or have interlopers descended to dynamite the sulfur inside the crater and carry it away to sell without having to pay taxes on it? And are these smokes only from their blasting, or from fires started, by their thievery?”
    Ahead, dogs began to bark. Luis selected a stout stick, advanced the short remaining way, running over in his mind his concluding sentences. “Are none of these reports true, my friends of the Moxtomi? I would like to speak to you about them, and you to speak of them to me … keeping in mind what you have told me, that there is a meaning to be gained from falsehood, as well as from truth — ”
    The lean and hungry dogs of the hamlet came hurtling and howling at him; he flourished his stick, stooped and rose, making the gesture of throwing a stone at them.
“Sucsé!”
he cried.
“Cuidado!”
They retreated, still glaring at him with shining, hungry eyes, but still leapt up and down and barked frenziedly — much more so than usual. He wondered at this —
    But not when he saw the uproar in the hamlet itself. The people, usually so quiet and sedate (though never of course so subdued up here as when down below in the lands where Castellano was spoken), were gathered in the open, waving their arms and all but shouting at each other, now and then leaving one group to walk rapidly — or even run! — to another. Luis stopped stock-still for a moment, astonished; then walked on, hailing them. His first syllables were almost drowned out in the hubbub; his final ones fell upon so absolute a silence that they faltered and stopped.
    They whirled around and looked at him, and he could see the shutters falling behind their eyes, the masks sliding down over their faces. He did not seem to see anyone precisely walk off, the gathering seemed to sink away, somehow, to be absorbed into the houses and alleys and as ants from a disturbed area will appear to melt away into the clods of the field. And, by the time he had walked over to Tío Santiago Tuc and Domingo Deuh, who awaited him gravely and sedately … and totally expressionlessly … no other man or woman was beside them. This so disturbed him and his thoughts that he was long in speaking again, and all the while the black eyes in the brown faces (one smooth and young, the other graven and old) looked into an invisible hole between his eyes and through it and out beyond again.
    He had come for nothing; this was clear, certain. He might just as well have been the tax collector, for all that any trace of confidence was visible. But he would not give up: it was more than that he wanted to discuss specifics, he would (he felt)
oblige
them to remember and to restore the atmosphere of that especial relationship which had previously been between them. He knew it would be useless to ask them, directly, why they