"Nine in the third place: The noble man works dryly, dryly all day long; at dusk he remains watchful as if in danger. Peril, but no blame."
Divining the gods and foretelling fortune and disaster were a priest's proper duties, and they affected the direction of people's hearts and the army's morale even more. Xolotl bowed his head before the altar, carefully pondering his path. The cruel and fierce southern campaign of divine war, meanwhile, was moving toward an even more savage climax.
Early the next morning, Royal Legion Commander Kuakehu led five thousand vanguard warriors south into Cloud Valley, charging straight for the Mountain Pass Fortress a hundred and fifty li away. The Mountain Pass Fortress, true to its name, was a small stone city built in a narrow mountain pass. It lay at the boundary between the two valleys of God Stone City and Yodzocahi, and was the final checkpoint before heading south to Yodzocahi.
As the ancestral origin from which the Mixtec first rose, Cloud Valley on the high plateau was in fact diagonally cut into three northern and southern sections by three groups of Cloud Mountain Range running from northwest to southeast. The northern valley, centered on God Stone City, was called God Stone Valley. The central valley, centered on Yodzocahi, was called Cloud mountain/God Mountain Valley. As for the final southeastern valley, it was the Zapotecs' Oaxaca (Huaxyacac) Valley—that is, the "Divine Tree Valley"!
The three Cloud Valley regions, from north to south, shared one continuous vein and had almost simultaneously nurtured the earliest tribes and city-states. And this was also why the Mixtec and Zapotec tribes were closely related, both calling themselves the People of the Clouds: their ancestors, two thousand years ago, had truly been one family!
Not even two days after the