Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “Yya ouiya ayya!” my mother wailed. “This ruins everything!”

  “I do not understand,” my father muttered. “She was always such a good girl. I cannot believe …”

  “Perhaps,” the priest said blandly to them, “you would care to volunteer your daughter for the sacrifice instead.”

  I said to the priest, through my teeth, “Where is she?”

  He said indifferently, “When the examining women found her unsatisfactory, we naturally reported to the governor’s palace that another candidate must be sought. At which, the palace requested that Nine Reed Tzitzitlíni be delivered there this morning for an interview with—”

  “Pactli!” I blurted.

  “He will be desolated,” said my father, sadly shaking his head.

  “He will be infuriated, you fool!” spat my mother. “We will all suffer his wrath, because of your slut of a daughter!”

  I said, “I shall go to the palace immediately.”

  “No,” the priest said firmly. “The court no doubt appreciates your concern, but the message was most specific: that only the daughter of this family would be admitted. Two of our temple women are escorting her there. None of the rest of you is to seek audience until and unless you are summoned.”

  Tzitzi did not come home that day. And no one else came to call, since the whole island by then must have been aware of our familial disgrace. Not even the festival-organizing women came to collect my mother to do her day’s sweeping. That evidence of her ostracism, by women whom she had expected soon to be looking down upon, made her even more than ordinarily vociferous and shrill. She passed the dreary day in scolding my father for his having let his daughter “run wild,” and in scolding me for having doubtless introduced my sister to some “evil friends” of mine, and letting one of them debauch her. The accusation was ludicrous, but it gave me an idea.

  I slipped out of the house and went to seek Chimáli and Tlatli. They received me with some embarrassment and with awkward words of commiseration.

  I said, “One of you can help Tzitzitlíni, if you will.”

  “If there is anything we can do, of course we will,” said Chimáli. “Tell us, Mole.”

  “You know for how many years the insufferable Pactli has been besieging my sister. Everyone knows it. Now everyone knows that Tzitzi preferred someone else over him. So the Lord Joy has been made to seem lovesick and besotted, for having pursued a girl who despised him. Simply to salve his wounded pride, he will take out his humiliation on her, and he can do it in some horrible manner. One of you could prevent his doing that.”

  “How?” asked Tlatli.

  “Marry her,” I said.

  No one will ever know what a heart pang it cost me to say that, for what I meant was, “I give her up. Take her away from me.” My two friends reeled slightly, and looked at me with goggling astonishment.

  “My sister has erred,” I went on. “I cannot deny it. But you both have known her since we all were children, and you surely know that she is no promiscuous wanton. If you can forgive her misstep, and believe that she did it only to avert the unwelcome prospect of marrying the Lord Joy, then you know that you could find no more chaste and faithful and upstanding wife for yourself. I need not add that she is probably the most beautiful you would ever find.”

  The two exchanged an uneasy look. I could hardly blame them. That radical proposal must have hit them with the stunning abruptness of lightning thrown by Tlaloc.

  “You are Tzitzi’s only hope,” I said urgently. “Pactli now has her in his power, as a supposed maiden suddenly found to be not so. He can accuse her of having gone astraddle the road. He can even make the lying claim that she was his betrothed and that she was deliberately unfaithful to him. That would be tantamount to adultery, and he could persuade the Lord Red Heron to condemn her to death. But he can not do that to a woman legitimately married or spoken for.”

  I looked hard into the eyes of Chimáli, then Tlatli. “If one of you were to step forward and publicly ask for her hand …” They dropped their eyes from mine. “Oh, I know. It would take some bravery, and it would subject you to some derision. You would be taken for the one who had despoiled her in the first place. But marriage would atone for that, and it would rescue her from anything Pactli might do. It would save her, Chimáli. It would be a noble deed, Tlatli. I beg and entreat you.”

  They both looked at me again, and there was now real chagrin in their faces. Tlatli spoke for them both:

  “We cannot, Mole. Not either of us.”

  I was grievously disappointed and hurt, but, more than that, I was puzzled. “If you said you will not, I might understand. But … you cannot?”

  They stood side by side before me, stocky Tlatli and reedy Chimáli. They looked pityingly at me, then turned to each other, and I could not tell what was in their mutual gaze. Tentatively, uncertainly, each reached out a hand and took the other’s, their fingers intertwining. Standing there, now linked, forced by me to confess a bond I had never remotely suspected, they looked at me again. The look proclaimed a defiant pride.

  “Oh,” I said, demolished. After a moment, I said, “Forgive me. When you declined, I should not have persisted.”

  Tlatli said, “We do not mind your knowing, Mole, but we would not care to have it common gossip.”

  I tried again. “Then would it not be to your advantage for one of you to make a marriage? I mean simply go through the motions of the ceremony. Afterwards …”

  “I could not,” said Chimáli with quiet obstinacy, “and I would not let Tlatli. It would be a weakness, a sullying of what we feel for each other. Look at it this way, Mole. Suppose someone asked you to marry one of us.”

  “Well, that would be contrary to all law and custom, and scandalous. But it would be just the opposite if one of you took Tzitzi to wife. Only in name, Chimáli, and later—”

  “No,” he said, and then added, perhaps sincerely, “We are sorry, Mole.”

  “So am I,” I sighed as I turned and left.

  But I determined that I would come back to them and press my proposal. I had to convince one of them that it would be to the benefit of us all. It would deliver my sister from danger, it would quell any possible conjectures about the relationship between Tlatli and Chimáli, and about the relationship between Tzitzi and me. They could openly bring her with them when they came to Texcóco, and secretly bring her to me, for me. The more I thought about it, the more the plan seemed ideal for everybody concerned. Chimáli and Tlatli could not continue to refuse the marriage on the selfish excuse that it would somehow tarnish their own love. I would persuade them—if necessary by the brutal threat of exposing them as cuilóntin. Yes, I would come back to Tlatli and Chimáli.

  But as things turned out, I did not. It was already too late.

  That night, again, Tzitzi did not come home.

  In spite of everything, I slept, and I did not dream of vultures, but of Tzitzi and myself and the immense jar which held the household water supply and which bore Chimáli’s handprint in blood. In my dream, I was back at that time during the lifeless days when Tzitzi had sought an excuse for us to get out of the house together. She had overturned and broken the water jar. The water sluiced all about the floor, and splashed up as far as my face. I awoke in the night to find my face wet with tears.

  The summons from the governor’s palace came the next morning, and it was not, as one would expect, for the head of the house, my father Tepetzálan. The messenger announced that the Lords Red Heron and Joy requested the immediate presence of my mother. My father sat meek and silent, his head bowed, avoiding my eyes, the whole time we awaited her return.

  When she came back, her face was pale and her hands were unsteady as they unwound the shawl from around her head and shoulders, but her manner was surprisingly inspirited. She was no longer the woman irate at having been deprived of a title, and she was not at all the bereaved mother. She told us, “It seems we have lost a daughter, but we have not lost everythi
ng.”

  “Lost her how?” I asked.

  “Tzitzi never arrived at the palace,” said my mother, without looking at me. “She slipped away from the temple women escorting her, and she ran away. Of course, poor Páctlitzin is nearly demented by the whole course of events. When the women reported her flight, he ordered a search of the entire island. A fowler reports his canoe missing. You remember”—she said to my father—“how your daughter once threatened to do just that. To steal an acáli and flee to the mainland.”

  “Yes,” he said dully.

  “Well, it seems she has done so. There is no telling in which direction she went, so Pactli has reluctantly given up the search. He is as heartbroken as we are.” That was so patently a lie that my mother hurried on before I could speak. “We must regard the departed Tzitzitlíni as lost to us for good. She has fled as she said she would. Forever. It is no one’s doing but her own. And she will not dare to show her face on Xaltócan again.”

  I said, “I do not believe any of this.” But she ignored me and went on, addressing my father:

  “Like Pactli, the governor shares our grief, but he does not hold us to blame for the misbehavior of our wayward daughter. He said to me: ‘I have always respected Head Nodder.’ And he said to me: ‘I would like to do something to help assuage his disillusion and bereavement.’ And he said to me: ‘Do you suppose Head Nodder would accept a promotion to become Chief Quarrier in charge of all the quarries?’ ”

  My father’s bowed head jerked up, and he exclaimed, “What?”

  “Those are the words Red Heron spoke. In charge of all the quarries of Xaltócan. He said: ‘It cannot make up for the shame the man has suffered, but it may demonstrate my regard for him.’ ”

  I said again, “I do not believe any of this.” The Lord Red Heron had never before spoken of my father as Head Nodder, and I doubted that he even knew of Tepetzálan’s nickname.

  Still ignoring my interjections, my mother said to my father, “We have been unfortunate in our daughter, but we are fortunate in having such a tecútli. Any other might have banished us all. Consider—Red Heron’s own son has been mocked and insulted by our own daughter—and he offers you this token of compassion.”

  “Chief Quarrier …” my father mumbled, looking rather as if he had been hit on the head by one of his own quarry stones. “I would be the youngest ever….”

  “Will you accept it?” my mother asked.

  My father stammered, “Why—why—it is small recompense for losing a loved daughter, however errant she …”

  “Will you accept it?” my mother repeated, more sharply.

  “It is a hand extended in friendship,” my father maundered on. “To refuse that—after my lord has once been insulted—it would be another insult, and even more….”

  “Will you accept it?”

  “Why—yes. I must. I will accept it. I could not do otherwise. Could I?”

  “There!” said my mother, much pleased. She dusted her hands together as if she had just completed some disagreeably dirty task. “We may not ever be nobles, thanks to the wench whose name I will never again pronounce, but we are one step higher in the macehuáltin. And since the Lord Red Heron is willing to overlook our disgrace, so will be everyone else. We can still hold our heads high, not hang them in shame. Now,” she concluded briskly, “I must go out again. The women of the delegation are waiting for me to join them in sweeping the temple pyramid.”

  “I will walk partway with you, my dear,” said my father. “I think I will take a look at the western quarry while the workers are on holiday. I have long suspected that the Master Quarrier in charge there has overlooked a significant stratum….”

  As they went together out the door, my mother turned back to say, “Oh, Mixtli, will you pack your sister’s belongings and stow them somewhere? Who knows, she may someday send a porter for them.”

  I knew she never would or could, but I did as I was bidden, and packed into baskets everything I could recognize as a possession of hers. Only one thing I did not pack and hide: her little bedside figurine of Xochiquétzal, goddess of love and flowers, the goddess to whom young girls prayed for a happy married life.

  Alone in the house, alone with my thoughts, I translated my mother’s story into what I was sure had happened in fact. Tzitzi had not escaped from her guardian women. They had duly delivered her to Pactli at the palace. He, in a fury—and in what manner I tried not to imagine—had put my sister to death. His father might have been fully in accord with the execution, but he was a notably fair-minded man, and he could not have condoned a killing in cold blood, done without due process of trial and condemnation. The Lord Red Heron would have had the choice, then, of bringing his own son to trial or of covering up the whole affair. So he and Pactli—and, I suspected, Pactli’s long-time conspirator, my mother—had concocted the story of Tzitzi’s escape and flight in a stolen canoe. And, to smooth things over even more neatly, to discourage questions or a renewed search for the girl, the governor had thrown a sop to my father.

  After stowing Tzitzi’s belongings, I packed those of my own which I had brought with me from Texcóco. The last thing I tucked into my portable wicker basket was the figurine of Xochiquétzal. Then I shouldered the basket and left the house, never to come back again. When I walked down toward the lakeshore, a butterfly accompanied me for a while, and several times fluttered in circles around my head.

  I was fortunate enough to find a fisherman who was irreverently determined to go on working during the Ochpanítztli festival, and who was even then preparing to paddle out to await the twilight rising of the lake’s whitefish. He agreed to row me all the way to Texcóco, for a payment considerably in excess of what he could have earned from a whole night’s fishing.

  On the way, I asked him, “Have you heard of any fisherman or fowler losing a canoe recently? Of anyone’s acáli having floated away or been stolen?”

  “No,” he said.

  I looked back at the island, sunlit and peaceful in the summer afternoon. It sprawled on the lake water as it always had and always would, except that it would never again know “the sound of small bells ringing”—or give another thought to such a small deprivation. The Lord Red Heron, the Lord Joy, my mother and father, my friends Chimáli and Tlatli, all the other inhabitants of Xaltócan, they had already agreed to forget.

  I had not.

  “Why, Head Nodder!” exclaimed the Lady of Tolan, the first person I encountered on my way to my apartment in the palace. “You have come back early from your holiday at home.”

  “Yes, my lady. Xaltócan no longer feels like home to me. And I have many things to do here.”

  “Do you mean you were homesick for Texcóco?” she said, smiling. “Then we must have made you learn to like us here. I am delighted to think so, Head Nodder.”

  “Please, my lady,” I said huskily, “do not call me that anymore. I have seen enough of head nodding.”

  “Oh?” she said, her smile fading as she studied my face. “Whatever name you prefer, then.”

  I thought of the several things I had to do, and I said to her, “Tliléctic-Mixtli is the name I was given from the book of divination and prophecies. Call me what I am. Dark Cloud.”

  I H S

  S. C. C. M.

  Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty,

  the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

  MOST High and Mighty Majesty, our Sovereign Liege: from the City of Mexico, capital of New Spain, this day of the Feast of the Dolors in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.

  We regret that we cannot include, with these latest collected pages of manuscript, the pictures which Your Majesty requests in your most recent letter: “those pictures of persons, especially of female persons, drawn by the storyteller and referred to in this chronicle.” The aged Indian himself, when questioned as to their whereabouts, laughs at the idea that such trivially indecent jottings should have been worth keeping all these year
s, or that, even if they had been of any value, they could have survived all these years.

  We refrain from deploring the obscenities those drawings were intended to record, since we are certain that the pictures, even if available, would have conveyed nothing to Your Majesty. We know that our Imperial Sovereign’s sense of appreciation is accustomed to works of art like those of the Master Matsys, whose painting of Erasmus, for example, is unmistakably recognizable as Erasmus. The persons portrayed in the daubs made by these Indians are seldom recognizable even as human beings, except in a few of the more representational wall frescoes and reliefs.

  Your Most Lofty Majesty has earlier bidden your chaplain to secure “writings, tablets, or other records” to substantiate the tales told in these pages. But we assure you, Sire, that the Aztec exaggerates wildly when he speaks of writing and reading, drawing and painting. These savages never created or possessed or preserved any mementos of their history aside from some plicate paper folders, skins and panels bearing multitudes of primitive figures such as children might scribble. These would be inscrutable to any civilized eye, and were of use to the Indians only as mnemonic aids for their “wise men,” who utilized the scrawls to jog their memory as they repeated the oral history of their tribe or clan. A dubious sort of history at best.

  Before your servant’s arrival in this land, the Franciscan friars, sent here five years previous by His Holiness the late Pope Adrian, had already combed every part of the country adjacent to this capital city. Those good brothers had collected, from every still-standing edifice that might be considered an archival depository, many thousands of the Indian “books,” but had made no disposition of them, pending higher directive.

  Wherefore, as Your Majesty’s delegated Bishop, we ourself examined the confiscated “libraries,” and found not one item that contained anything but tawdry and grotesque figures. Most of those were nightmarish: beasts, monsters, false gods, demons, butterflies, reptiles, and other things of like vulgar nature. Some of the figures purported to represent human beings, but—as in that absurd style of art which the Bolognese call caricatura—the humans were indistinguishable from pigs, asses, gargoyles, or anything else the imagination might conceive.