Free Jaguar Princess by Clare Bell Page A

back to the quay, for it had drifted quite a distance in the sluggish current of the canal.
    When the dugout hull grated against the stone, she lifted her head, peering toward the calmecac. Had anyone seen? Had anyone heard? Would Maguey Thorn come bustling out to seize her by the ear and drag her inside, scolding her and threatening to sell her?
    Mixcatl held her breath for a long time, but the calmecac didn’t stir. They were all busy.
    “Hey.” She started as Latosl tapped her back. She turned, wiping wet hair from her eyes. His shock of hair hid his eyes, but his mouth was frowning. “You scared me. You went right down and I thought you weren’t coming up again. Why didn’t you say that you couldn’t swim?”
    “I didn’t know,” Mixcatl said, still shaking as she watched the swirling canal. “I’ve never been in water, except for baths.”
    “Never been in…” Latosl rolled his eyes in disbelief. “By Tlaloc’s slimy green hair, I’ve never heard of a canal-side brat who couldn’t swim.” He got out, moored the barge securely and finished his task while Mixcatl wrung scummy canal water from her clothes and pulled strands of waterweed from her hair.
    Latosl paused before tipping the last jar. “You know, you could have gotten me in a lot of trouble, girl. If you had drowned, those calmecac people of yours would have fined my family or even made me a slave to pay for your loss.”
    “You didn’t tie up your boat,” Mixcatl retorted.
    “I never do,” Latosl replied. “I just hop off, dump the jars and pole away again. It’s much faster that way.” He squatted on the deck, long slender arms wrapped about bony knees, and fixed Mixcatl with an odd, intense gaze. “Why can’t you swim?”
    “I don’t know how.”
    “Someone should teach you,” said the boatboy. “You can’t live here in Tenochtitlan without knowing. It is too easy to fall into a canal.” He paused. “Maybe I can teach you.”
    She stared at him, still squeezing water out of a comer of her garment.
    “Think about it,” said Latosl, swinging back aboard the barge.
    Haw odd he is , thought Mixcatl, as the shape of the barge dwindled downstream. Not at all like Six-Wind, but nice in a different way .
    She stood on the dock, letting the breeze and the sun dry her clothes. When most of the dampness was gone, she gathered up her pots and went back inside.
    During the next few years Mixcatl was kept too busy by her duties to do much more than exchange a few words with the boatboy when he came. Even if she had the time, she used it to draw figures in the dust, for the images she had seen in the sacred book clamored to be recreated. Mixcatl was careful not to enter the school’s courtyard at all, even when she knew it was empty. She used other, more circuitous routes to make her way about the calmecac. She caught only brief glimpses of Six-Wind and he was always at the center of a throng of laughing, shouting boys.
    But his words stayed in her mind. She was strangely gifted, she knew that. And she had already used that power to harm. Was she, as he had said, a witch? And the skill in her hands and her eyes that brought back the wonderful images in the sacred book; was that bad? She went about with her head bowed and a tight feeling in her throat. Once she had thought that good and bad meant little to her and that it would be as easy for her to harm someone as to please them. But remembering Six-Wind’s fear and the way he had withdrawn from her brought a lump into her throat.
    When Mixcatl was ten, the head priest of the calmecac, an old man called Two-Rabbit Cactus Eagle, fell ill. Suddenly the atmosphere of the school seemed to change. The boys no longer went about in noisy shouting groups, but quietly, shepherded by the priests. Instead of classes, there were sessions of praying, and at night, strange bustlings up and down the corridors.
    Mixcatl had never seen Cactus Eagle. Maguey Thorn told her that he was a man so old that