Hunger's Brides by W. Paul Anderson

pitching headlong out. Across the ditch on the left and beyond a windbreak of oaks were orchard rows of apple and peach and pomegranate converging in the distance as they ran. Workers stopped and doffed their hats as Grandfather cantered grandly past. Close to the road, one woman squinted at Xochitl and waved with a little flutter.
    I looked back. She stood there still, the sun setting red beside her through folds of road dust.
    Closer to the house were plots of squash, and beans and tomatoes. We crossed a small stone bridge over a brook that fed the irrigation ditches. At the far end of the bridge stood a little guard post, empty now, as was the watchtower that topped the house. The house itself was framed by two tall African tulip trees, and in each orange blossom glowed the sunset’s radiant echo.
    As in Nepantla, the house was laid out on one floor. Here, though, the roof was not flat but shingled and pitched to shed rain—and, Grandfather promised, sometimes snow.
    The western wall above the veranda was a pocked grey-white. The watchtower and the chapel belfry still blushed the softest rose in the faltering light. Workmen in white cotton breeches and shirts took formround the carts as if exhalations risen of the dusk. We heard the quiet murmurs, “… don Pedro … doña Isabel …” They formed a brigade to relay the sacks and tools to the sheds. No one questioned that Isabel should work beside the men. A woman went with a taper and lit the lanterns strung along the veranda. Amanda and I chafed to explore the house, which was still dark. We were not to go in until Josefa and María had safely swept it out, and they looked in no hurry even to start.
    Grandfather was soon relinquishing his burdens to the men, but when one tried to help Xochitl she refused—a tight urgency in the shake of her head. I distinctly heard one man call her Mother in Nahuatl. I wanted to call out to them—She’s not as old as she looks!
—
then bethought myself. It looked more like respect than consideration of her age. And I noticed the workers themselves were careful not to let this regard be noticed by don Pedro or his daughter.
    It was full dark now and enthusiastically supported by my sisters, who were sick already of sweeping (though they’d hardly started), we begged to sleep around the firepit. Xochitl was in the kitchen struggling to bring enough order for breakfast in the morning. Isabel was back from the sheds and briskly sweeping out Grandfathers room.
    Grandfather helped us light the fire, a fragrant heap of pine and mesquite, a waver of flame soon reflecting in eight black beady eyes over blankets pulled up to our chins—how chilly the nights were up here.
    â€œA story please, Abuelo.
Please?”
He obliged us grandly and continued even after my sisters had nodded off, though weariness crumpled his great round face and bedraggled his big mane. In repayment for his putting my sisters to sleep, I offered to tell him about the wizard Ocelotl. But as I quickly realized that he knew much more than I, I asked instead the difference between priests and wizards. It was complicated, he said, but a priest has words and laws, and a wizard has visions. I wanted to go get Xochitl so they might tell us together about Ocelotl.
    â€œIt’s late,” Grandfather said. I didn’t think she would mind.
“Mira, Angelita, que te lo cuenta.”
A warning in his tone stopped me. “This Martín Ocelotl, and his twin—”
    â€œTwin?”
    â€œAnd his twin, Andrés Mixcoatl, led an Indian uprising. It began right here in these mountains.” The brothers were incarnations of the gods MirrorSmoke and FeatherSerpent, or so people here claimed. For this they fell afoul, Grandfather said, of a horror called the Inquisition andwere finally condemned. Mixcoatl burned. “But Ocelotl …” he concluded mysteriously, “Ocelotl disappeared into the