But, unlike us Mexíca, the Cloud People believed, as do you Christians, that all those gods and goddesses were subordinate to one great overlord who had created the universe and who ruled everything in it. Like your angels and saints and such, those lesser gods could not exercise their several separate holy functions—indeed, they could not have existed—without the permission and supervision of that topmost god of all creation. The Tzapotéca called him Uizye Tao, which means The Almighty Breath.
The austerely grand temples are only the upper level of Lyobáan. They were specially positioned over openings in the earth which lead to natural caves and tunnels and caverns in the ground beneath, the favored burial places of the Tzapotéca for ages untold. To that city have always been brought their dead nobles, high priests, and warrior heroes, to be ceremonially interred in richly decorated and furnished rooms directly under the temples.
But there was and is room for commoners as well, in still deeper crypts. Red River told us that there was no known end to the caves, that they interconnect and run on underground for countless one-long-runs, that stone festoons hang from their ceilings and stone pedestals thrust up from their floors, that there are stone curtains and draperies of weird and wonderful but natural design: as beautiful as frozen waterfalls or as awesome as the Mexíca’s imagined portals of Míctlan.
“And not only the dead come to the Holy Home,” he said. “As I have already told you, when I feel my life is no longer of use, I shall walk here to disappear.”
According to him, any man or woman, commoner or noble, who was crippled by old age, or weighed down by suffering or sorrow, or was tired of life for any reason, could make application to the priests of Lyobáan for voluntary live burial in the Holy Home. He or she, provided with a pine-splinter torch but with nothing for sustenance, would be let into one of the cave openings and it would be closed behind him. He would then wander through the maze of passages until his light or his strength gave out, or until he found a seemly cavern, or until he reached a spot where instinct told him some family ancestor had already laid himself down and found it a pleasant place to die. There the newcomer would compose himself and wait calmly for his spirit to depart for whatever other destination awaited it.
One thing about Lyobáan puzzled me: that those holiest of holy temples were set upon ground-level stone platforms and were not elevated upon high pyramids. I asked the old man why.
“The ancients built for solidity, to resist the zyuüù,” he said, using a word I did not know. But in the next moment both Cozcatl and I knew it, for we felt it, as if our guide had summoned it especially for our instruction.
“Tlalolíni,” said Cozcatl, in a voice which shook like everything else around us.
We who speak Náhuatl call it tlalolíni, the Tzapotéca call it zyuüù, you call it earthquake. I had felt the land move before, on Xaltócan, but there the movement was a mild jiggling up and down, and we knew it was just the island’s way of settling itself more comfortably on the unstable lake bottom. At the Holy Home the movement was different: a rolling sway from side to side, as if the mountain had been a small boat on a tossing lake. Just as I sometimes have felt on rough waters, I felt a queasiness in my stomach. Several pieces of stone dislodged themselves from high up on one building and came bouncing down to roll a little way across the ground.
Red River pointed to them and said, “The ancients built stoutly, but seldom do many days pass in Uaxyácac without a zyuüù, mild or severe. So now we generally build less ponderously. A house of saplings and thatch cannot much harm its inhabitants if it collapses upon them, and it can be easily rebuilt.”
I nodded, my insides still so disquieted that I was afraid to open my mouth. The old man grinned knowingly.
“It affected your belly, yes? I will wager it has affected another organ besides.”
So it had. For some reason, my tepúli was erect, engorged to such length and thickness that it actually ached.
“No one knows why,” said Red River, “but the zyuüù affects all animals, most notably the human ones. Men and women get sexually aroused, and occasionally, in a turbulent quake, aroused to the extreme of doing immodest things, and in public. When the tremor is really violent or prolonged, even small boys may involuntarily ejaculate, and small girls come to a shuddering climax, as if they had been the most sensual adults, and of course they are bewildered by the occurrence. Sometimes, long before the ground moves, the dogs and coyotes start to whine or howl, the birds flit about. We have learned to judge from their behavior when a truly dangerous tremor is about to come. Our miners and quarriers run to safer ground, the nobles evacuate their stone palaces, the priests abandon their stone temples. Even when we are forewarned, though, a major convulsion can cause much damage and death.” To my surprise, he grinned again. “We must nevertheless concede that the zyuüù usually gives more lives than it takes. After any severe tremor, when three-quarters of a year have passed, a great many babies are born within just a few days of each other.”
I could well believe it. My rigid member felt like a club thrusting from my crotch. I envied Blood Glutton, who was probably making that a day to be forever remembered in that auyanicáli. If I had been anywhere in the city streets of Záachilà, I might have fractured the truce between the Mexíca and Tzapotéca by stripping and violating the first woman I met….
No, no need to elaborate on that. But I might tell Your Excellency why I think an earth tremor arouses only fear in the lesser animals, but fear and sexual excitement in humans.
On the first night our company camped outdoors, at the beginning of that long journey, I had first realized and felt the fearsome impact of the darkness and emptiness and loneliness of the nighttime wilderness, and afterward I had been seized by a compelling urge to copulate. Human animals or lower animals, we feel fear when we confront any aspect of nature we can neither comprehend nor control. But the lesser creatures do not know that what they fear is death, for they do not know so well what death is. We humans do. A man may staunchly face an honorable death on the battlefield or the altar. A woman may risk an honorable death in childbirth. But we cannot so courageously face the death that comes as indifferently as a thumb and finger snuffing out a lamp wick. Our greatest fear is of capricious, meaningless extinction. And in the moment of our feeling that greatest fear, our instinctive impulse is to do the one most life-preserving thing we know how to do. Something deep in our brain cries to us in desperation, “Ahuilnéma! Copulate! It cannot save your life, but it may make another.” And so a man’s tepúli rears itself, a woman’s tipíli opens invitingly, their genital juices begin to flow….
Well, that is only a theory, and only my own. But you, Your Excellency, and you, reverend friars, should eventually have opportunity to verify or disprove it. This island of Tenochtítlan-Mexíco sits even more uneasily than Xaltócan upon the ooze of the lake floor, and it shifts its position now and then, sometimes violently. Soon or later, you will feel a convulsive quake of the earth. See for yourselves, then, what you feel in your reverend parts.
There was really no reason for our party to have lingered in Záachilà and its environs for as many days as we did, except that it was a most pleasant place for us to rest before we undertook the long and grueling climb through the mountains beyond—and except for the fact that Blood Glutton, belying his grizzled years, seemed determined to leave not a single one of the accessible Tzapotéca beauties neglected. I confined myself to seeing the local sights. I did not even exert myself to seek trade bargains; for one reason, the most prized local commodity, the famous dye, was out of stock.
You call that dye cochineal, and you may know that it is obtained from a certain insect, the nochéztli. The insects live in millions on immense, cultivated plantations of the one special variety of nopáli cactus on which they feed. The insects mature all at the same season, and their cultivators brush them off the cactus into bags and kill them, either by dipping the bags in boiling water or hanging them in a steam house or l
eaving them in the hot sun. Then the insects are dried until they are like wrinkled seeds, and are sold by weight. Depending on how they were killed—boiled, steamed, or baked—they yield when crushed a dye of jacinth yellow-red or a bright scarlet or that particular luminous carmine which is obtainable from no other source. I tell all this because the Tzapotéca’s latest crop had been bought in its entirety by an earlier and northbound Mexícatl trader, that one with whom I had conversed way back in the Xochimílca country, and there was no more dye to be had that year, for even the most pampered insects cannot be hurried.
I did remember what that same trader had told me: of a new and even more rare purple dye which was somehow mysteriously connected with snails and a people called The Strangers. I asked of the interpreter Red River and several of his merchant friends what they might know of the matter, but all I got from anybody was a blank look and an echo: “Purple? Snails? Strangers?” So I made only one trading transaction in Záachilà, and it was not the sort that a typically tightfisted pochtécatl would have made.
Old Red River arranged for me to pay a courtesy call on Kosi Yuela, the Bishósu Ben Záa, which means the Revered Speaker of the Cloud People, and that ruling lord kindly treated me to a tour of his palace so I might admire its luxurious furnishings. Two of those inspired my acquisitive interest. One was the Bishósu’s queen, Pela Xila, a woman to make a man salivate, but I contented myself with kissing the earth to her. When I saw the other thing, however—a beautifully worked feather tapestry—I determined to have it.
“But that was made by one of your own countrymen,” said my host. He sounded slightly peeved that I should stand staring at a Mexícatl artifact instead of exclaiming over the products of his own Cloud People: the interestingly mottled draperies in the throne room, for instance—colored by having been tied in knots and dyed, then retied and redyed, several times over.
Nodding at the tapestry, I said, “Let me hazard a guess, my lord. The feather-work artist was a wayfarer named Chimáli.”
Kosi Yuela smiled. “You are right. He stayed in these parts for some time, making sketches of the mosaics of Lyobáan. And then he had nothing with which to pay the innkeeper, except that tapestry. The landlord accepted it, though unhappily, and later came to complain to me. So I reimbursed him, for I trust that the artist will eventually return and redeem the thing.”
“I am sure he will,” I said, “for I have long known Chimáli. Therefore I may see him before you do. If you would allow it, my lord, I shall be glad to pay his debt and assume the pledge myself.”
“Why, that would be kind of you,” said the Bishósu. “A most generous favor to your friend and to us as well.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I merely repay your kindness to him. And anyway”—I remembered the day I had led a frightened Chimáli home with him wearing a pumpkin head—“it will not be the first time I have helped my friend out of a temporary difficulty.”
Chimáli must have lived well during his stay at the hostel; it cost me quite a stack of tin and copper snippets to settle his bill. But the tapestry was easily worth ten or twenty times that much. Today it would probably be worth a hundred times as much, since almost all our feather works have been destroyed, and no more have been made in recent years. Either the feather artists were also destroyed, or they have lost all heart for the creation of beauty. So it may be that Your Excellency has never seen one of those shimmering pictures.
The work was more delicate, difficult, and time-consuming than any mode of painting, sculpture, or goldsmithery. The artist began with a cloth of the finest cotton, tightly stretched over a panel of wood. On the cloth he lightly drew the lines of the picture he envisioned. Then, painstakingly, he filled in all the spaces with colored feathers, using only the soft, plumed shaft part, the quill cut away. He attached each of the thousands and thousands of feathers, one by one, with a minute dab of liquid óli. Some so-called artists were uncaring slovens who used only white birds’ feathers which they tinted with paints and dyes as required, and trimmed their shapes to fit the more intricate places in the design. But a true artist used only naturally colored feathers, and carefully chose exactly the right hue from all their gradations of colors, and used large or small, straight or curved feathers as the picture demanded. I say “large,” but there was seldom a feather in any of those works bigger than a violet’s petal, and the smallest would be about the size of a human eyelash. An artist might have to delve and compare and select from among a stock of feathers that would fill this room we sit in.
I do not know why Chimáli had that one time forsaken his paints, but he had chosen the feather medium to do a woodland scene, and he had done it masterfully. In a sunny forest glade, a jaguar lay resting among flowers, butterflies, and birds. Every pictured bird was done in the feathers of its species, though every jay, for instance, would have required Chimáli’s winnowing from the tiniest blue feathers of perhaps hundreds of real jays. The greenery was not just masses of green feathers; it seemed that every individual blade of grass and leaf of tree was a separate feather of a subtly different green. I counted more than thirty minuscule feathers composing just one small brown and yellow butterfly. Chimáli’s signature was the only part of the picture done in a single unmodulated color—in the feathers of the scarlet macaw—and the handprint was modestly small, less than half life size.
I took the tapestry to our lodgings, and gave it to Cozcatl, and told him to leave just the scarlet hand affixed. When he had peeled off every other feather of the picture, I heaped them all, inextricably mixed, onto the cloth backing. I bundled and tied it tightly, and took it again to the palace. Kosi Yuela was absent, but his queen Pela Xila received me and I left the wadded parcel with her, saying:
“My lady, in case the artist Chimàli should come back this way before I meet him, have the goodness to give him this. Tell him it is a token—that all his other debts will be similarly repaid.”
The only way southward out of Záachilà was up and over the mountain range called Tzempuúlá, and that is the way we went, through interminable day after day. Unless you have climbed mountains, Your Excellency, I do not know how to convey to you what mountain climbing is like. I do not know how to make you feel the muscle strain and fatigue, the bruises and scrapes, the streaming sweat and the grit it collects, the giddiness of the heights and the unquenchable thirst of the hot daytimes, the ceaseless need of vigilance in placing each foot, the occasional slip and its heart-stopping instant of fright, the two backslides for every three steps upward, the almost equally arduous and perilous descent—and then no easily negotiable flat land, but another mountain….
There was a trail, true, so we did not lose our way. But it had been made by and for the lean, tough men of the Cloud People, which is not to say that even they enjoyed traveling it. Nor was it any long-trodden and permanently firm path, for every mountain is continuously falling to pieces. In places the trail led across the rubble of rock slides, which shifted ominously beneath our sandals and threatened at any moment to avalanche entirely out from under us. In other places the trail was a gully worn by erosion and bottomed with an ankle-turning debris of crumbled rottenstone. In others it was a cramped spiral staircase of rock, each step just big enough for one’s toes to get purchase. In others it was a mere shelf slung on a mountain flank, with a sheer rock wall on one side seeming eager to push us all into the equally sheer abyss on the other side.
Many of the mountains were so high that our route took us sometimes above the timberline. Up there, except for the infrequent lichen patch on a rock, a few weeds growing from a cranny, or a stunted and wind-gnarled evergreen, there was no vegetation, and little soil for any to take root in. Those summits had been eroded down to bare rock; we might have been clambering along an exposed rib of the earth’s skeleton. As we toiled up and over those peaks, we gasped as if competing with each other for what little and insubstantial air there was.
The days were still warm, too warm for such rigorous exercise. But
the nights, at those heights, were cold enough to make the marrow in our bones hurt. Had it been practical, we would have traveled by night so the exertion would keep us warm, and slept by day instead of struggling along under our packs, sweating and panting and nearly fainting. But no human being could have moved among those mountains in the darkness without breaking at least a leg and probably his neck.
Only twice during that stage of our journey did we come upon communities of people. One was Xalápan, a village of the Huave tribe, who are a dull-skinned, ill-favored, and ungracious people. They received us surlily and demanded an exorbitant payment for putting us up, but we paid it. The meal they gave us was abominable: a greasy stew of suety opossum meat, but it did help piece out our own diminishing provisions. The huts they vacated for our use were smelly and verminous, but at least kept off the mountains’ night wind. At the other village, Nejápa, we were much more cordially made welcome, and treated with warm hospitality, and well fed, and even were sold some eggs from the local flocks, to carry when we moved on. Unfortunately, the people there were Chinantéca, who, as I mentioned long ago, were afflicted with what you call the pinto disease. Though we knew there was no chance of an outsider’s being infected—except perhaps if we lay with their women, and none of us was tempted to that—just the sight of all those blue-blotched bodies made us feel almost as itchy and uncomfortable in Nejápa as we had in Xalápan.
On the many other stretches, we tried to pace ourselves, according to the rough map I carried, so that our night’s camping could be done in a hollow between two mountains. We would usually find there at least a trickle of fresh water and a growth of mexíxin cress or swamp cabbage or other edible greens. But, more important, in the lower land a slave did not have to grind the fire drill for half the night, as he did on the thin-aired heights, before he generated enough heat to ignite his tinder moss and get a campfire going. However, since none of us but Blood Glutton had ever traveled that route before, and since even he could not accurately remember all the ups and downs of it, the darkness too often caught us while we were climbing or descending a mountainside.
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