Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗

"Oh, that," she said negligently. "Akuareni. Yes, the men come to do that once a year."

I said, "So that is what you meant when you first spoke to me. You told me I had come too soon."

"Yes. The men come from that mainland village to which you are going. They come for just one day in the eighteen months of the year. They come with loaded freight canoes, and we select what we need, and we trade our kinucha for them. One kinu for a good comb made of bone or tortoiseshell, two kinucha for an obsidian knife or a braided fishing line—"

"Ayya!" I interrupted. "You are being outrageously cheated! Those men exchange those pearls for countless times that value, and the next buyers trade them for another profit, and the next and the next. By the time the pearls have passed through all the hands between here and some city market..."

Cricket shrugged her moon-radiant bare shoulders. "The men could have the kinucha for no payment at all, if Xaratanga should choose to let them learn to dive. But the trading brings us what we need and want, and what more could we ask? Then, when the trading is all done, Kuku gathers those women who want to have a daughter—even those who may not be so eager, if Kuku says it is their turn—and Kuku selects the more robust of the men. The women lie in a row on the beach, and the men do that akuareni we must endure if we are to have daughters."

"You keep saying daughters. There must be some boys born."

"Yes, some. But the goddess New Moon ordained that these be The Islands of the Women, and there is only one way to keep them so. Any male children, being forbidden by the goddess, are drowned at birth."

Even in the dark, she must have seen the expression on my face, but she misinterpreted it, hastening to add:

"That is not a waste, as you may think. They become nourishment for the oysters, and that is a very worthwhile use for them."

Well, as a male myself, I could hardly applaud that merciless weeding out of the newborn. On the other hand, like most god-commanded doings, it had the purity of stark simplicity. Keep the islands a female preserve by feeding the oysters on whose hearts the islanders depend.

Cricket went on, "My daughter is almost of an age to commence diving. So I expect Kuku will order me to do akuareni with one of the men when they come next time."

At that I did speak up. "You make it sound as enjoyable as being attacked by a sea monster. Does none of you ever lie with a man just for the pleasure of it?"

"Pleasure?!" she exclaimed. "What pleasure can there be in having a pole of flesh painfully stuck inside you and painfully moved back and forth a few times and then painfully pulled out? During that while, it is like being constipated in the wrong place."

I muttered, "Gallant and gracious men you women invite for consorts," then said aloud, "My dear Ixinatsi, what you describe is rape, not the loving act it should be. When it is done with love—and you yourself have spoken of the loving heart—it can be an exquisite pleasure."

"Done how with love?" she asked, sounding interested.

"Well... the loving can start long before a pole of flesh is involved. You know that you have a loving heart, but you may not know that you also have a kinu. It is infinitely more capable of being loved than that of the most emotional oyster. It is there."

I pointed to the place, and she seemed immediately to lose interest.

"Oh, that," she said again. She unwound her single garment and shifted to move her abdomen into a moonbeam, and with her fingers she parted the petals of her tipili, and looked incuriously at her pearl-like xacapili, and said, "A child's plaything."

"What?"

"A girl learns very young that that little part of her is sensitive and excitable, and she makes much use of it. Yes—as you are doing now with your fingertip, Tenamaxtli. But, as a girl matures, she grows bored with that childish practice and finds it unwomanly. Also, our Kuku has taught us that such activity depletes one's strength and endurance. Oh, a grown woman does it once in a while. I do it myself—exactly as you are doing it to me this moment—but only for relief when I feel tense or ill-humored. It is like scratching an itch."

I sighed. "Itching and push-pull and constipation. What awful words you use to speak of the feeling that can be the most sublime of feelings. And your aged Kuku is wrong. Lovemaking can invigorate you to much greater strength and satisfaction in every other thing you do. But never mind that. Just tell me. When I fondle you there, is it like your own scratching of an itch?"

"N-no," she admitted, with a break in her voice. "I feel... whatever I feel... it is very different..."

Trying to suppress my own arousal, so I could speak as soberly as an examining ticitl, I asked, "But it feels good?"

She said softly, "Yes."

When I kissed her nipples, she whispered, "Yes."

As I kissed farther down the sleek-pelted, moon-glistening length of her body, she said almost inaudibly, "Yes."

I kissed to where my hand was, then moved my hand out of the way. She started and gasped, "No! You cannot... that is not how... oh, yes, it is! Yes, you can! And I... oh, I can!"

It took a while for Cricket to recover, and she breathed as if she had just come up from the sea depths when she said, "Uiikiiki! Never... when I myself... it has never been like that!"

"Let us make up for the long neglect," I suggested, and I did things that took her to those depths—or heights—twice again before I even let her know that I had a pole of flesh available when it should be wanted. And when it was, I was embraced and enfolded and engulfed by a creature as lithe and sinuous and pliant and nimble as any sea-cuguar cavorting in its own element.

Then it was that I discovered something absolutely novel about Ixinatsi—and I would have sworn that no woman could ever again surprise me in any way. It was not until we lay together that I discovered it, because her delightful difference from all other women resided in her most intimate parts. Manifestly, when the unborn Cricket was being fashioned by the gods, while she was still within her mother's womb, the kindly goddess of love and flowers and connubial happiness must have said:

"Let me endow this girl-child Ixinatsi with one small uniqueness in her female organs, so that when she grows to womanhood she can perform akuareni with mortal men as joyously and voluptuously as I myself might do." It was indeed only a small alteration that the goddess effected in Cricket's body, but ayyo!—I can attest that it added an incredible piquancy and exuberance when she and I joined in the conjugal act.

The love goddess is called Xochiquetzal by us Azteca, but is known as Petsikuri by the Purempecha, including these island women. Whatever her name, what she had done was this. She had set Cricket's tipili opening just a little farther back between her thighs than is the case in ordinary women. Thus her tipili's inner recess did not simply extend straight upward inside her body, but upward and forward. When she and I coupled face-to-face, and I slid my tepuli into her, it gently flexed to fit that curve. So, when it was fully sheathed inside her, my tepuli's crown was pointing back toward me, or, rather, toward the back of her belly's navel button.

In our Nahuatl language, a woman's body is often respectfully referred to as a xochitl, a "flower," and her navel as the yoloxochitl, or "bud center" of that flower. When I was inside Ixinatsi, then, my tepuli literally became the "stalk" of that bud, that flower. Just to realize, in my mind, that she and I were so very intimately conjoined—not to mention the vivid sensations involved—heightened my ardor to a degree I could never have believed possible.