Leaving Home

The pochteca knew the road north. They had been walking it for two hundred years before the ships came - not two hundred unbroken years, but two hundred years of returning, of the road being a road, of the knowledge living in the family and the guild and the markers scratched into stone at intervals that a person who knew how to look could find. I was not pochteca. But I had trained in the obsidian cave with a man who had trained with someone who had, once, and the road was in the family in the way that knowledge passes: obliquely, attached to a story that seems like it is about something else.

I did not wait for dawn. There is a particular advantage to not waiting for dawn that I had not fully understood before that night: the road at night is a different road than the road by day. By day you are visible; the story other people tell about you is the loudest story. By night you navigate by what the land itself offers - the dead in the soil, the angle of the stars, the pressure of the living things that recognize something in you and keep their distance. I had been traveling short distances in darkness since the embrace. This was the first time I understood what that kind of navigation becomes when the distance is not a few hours but a continent.

I carried six skulls and no questions I was ready to answer.

That is not quite true. I carried one question. The one about Telpochtli - whether he had fled before I reached the cave or after, whether he had sent word through the dead that I missed or had chosen not to, whether he was already north somewhere on the same road I was walking. I had turned back twice in the days before I finally left, because I kept thinking: if he was still in the city I would know. I went back to the cave twice. The cave was empty both times. The dead there gave me nothing - not silence, which would have meant they were withholding, but absence, which meant there was nothing left to withhold.

I do not know what happened to him. I have not known for five centuries. I stopped asking the dead about it somewhere in the second decade of the road, because the dead can only tell you what they themselves knew, and the dead I had access to had not seen him any more than I had. After a hundred years I stopped hoping the road would cross his. After two hundred I stopped reconstructing scenarios. By the third century it had become what all the truly old questions become: not a wound but a weight, neither comfortable nor unbearable, just present.

I went north with what the road gave me. Scrub and stone and the dry smell of a country that was not trying to be anything other than what it was. My dead spoke differently here - not in Nahuatl, not in any language I had yet, but in the register below language that the very old dead speak in: images, pressures, weights. The further north I walked the older the dead became, and the older the dead the more they used the register below language. By the time I was three weeks north of Tenochtitlan I was being navigated by something I can only describe as the memory of the ground itself.

The pochteca markers helped when I found them. Mostly I traveled by what called.

What you carry when you leave is not always what you think you are carrying. I thought I was carrying grief - the burning city, the three hundred reduced to six skulls in a bundle, the knowledge that the world I had been made in was gone. I was carrying that. But I was also carrying the tongue and the training and the understanding of the dead that Telpochtli had put in me over a decade, and that was not grief. That was something else. A root system. Something that was going to keep drawing on the water underground no matter what happened to the tree above.

I did not know then what it would grow into.

Silencio. The road does not explain itself. You walk it. You discover what you are carrying by what you cannot put down.