Free Clash of Star-Kings by Avram Davidson

plate for pancakes. “She’s quoting from the Popol Vuh. It means, ‘Eat, eat; later we’ll talk.’”
    Later, however, they were too full to talk. And it was even later that they finally and leisurely returned home, full and contented and quite at ease, entering through the same back door to the back patio they had left by, and found Evans lying on their doorstep, stiff and bloody and with his heart torn out and missing.

VI
    The front and back patios alike contained a profusion of flowers and fruit and nut trees (there was also an adobe chicken coop, the inhabitants of which tended to vanish away on the eves of feast days), but there was also a multitude of such herbs as lent themselves to domestic cultivation; and these Señora Josefa picked and dried and sometimes distilled, as part of her craft and trade. She gave away as much as she sold and had a fair-sized following among the poor, who referred to her as
la doctora;
often as not there were several of them sitting on the bench in the front patio waiting for advice and supply, neither of which would cost them a
centavo
.
    This morning, however, the bench was deserted except for a middle-aged and unkempt-looking woman who kept clutching her knee and groaning. As Señora Josefa and Mariana knew very well that she suffered from nothing more than a hangover and a general (and very un-Mexican) disinclination either to work or to wash, and as they were otherwise engaged, she was allowed to go on sitting for the moment. The sisters were in the kitchen going about their work and discussing this and that with their neighbor, Señora Carmela, who was poor but honorable, in low voices.
    “And your tenants?” inquired La Carmela.
    “They know nothing,” said Sra. Mariana.
    “She has appeared disturbed, the fat pretty one….”
    “Yes, because her small cat-beast has not been encountered.”
    “How sad,” said Carmela, adding, “if there were four or five children, there would be no time to be disturbed over cat-beasts.”
    Sra. Mariana sighed. “They stay up half the night reading books.”
    “There is still the other half of the night,” La Carmela pointed out.
    But Sra. Mariana was not to be diverted.
    “It would be a disgrace for us all to have this matter exposed before the eyes of foreigners,” Sra. Mariana said, heavily. “Woe of me … it seems like a bad dream….”
    “ ‘Life is a dream and the dream is but a dream itself. Everything passes, everything passes, but he who has God lacks nothing,’ ” quoted Sra. Josefa. Carmela was crossing herself when they heard the screams in the back patio.
    The shortest way there, in theory at least, was out of the kitchen by way of the dining room and thence into the sewing room and then by way of the storeroom onto a small piazza from which two steps descended onto the back patio. But their passage, accompanied by cries of dismay and assurance, was impeded by the presence in the storeroom of an assortment of items such as sacks of corn kernels for nixtamal and corncobs for fuel, bales of wool and a stack of sheepskins — the screams continued — they about-faced, running out of the storeroom, through the sewing room, into Señora Mariana’s bedroom, and, via the dining room and hall, out into the front patio (where the sole “patient” was listening with ears, eyes, and open mouth) and thence to the metal gate which separated it from the back one. Unfortunately, it was not only closed but stuck — this required that it be seized by main force and lifted up about two inches so as to clear the bottom sill…. Unfortunately, also, this had to be done quite carefully in order to avoid lifting it up about two and a quarter inches — which would bring it in contact with the electric wiring whose insulation had rubbed off in one or two places — the screams from the back patio were joined by screams from the front one —
    The “patient,” who had enjoyed it all tremendously, arose and carefully pushed the