Aztec

by Gary Jennings

When I and my troop shouldered our packs and took our leave, early the next morning, she and then each of the daughters held me tight and covered my face with tear-wet kisses and said a heartfelt thank-you. I looked back several times, until I could no longer make out the inn among the blurry jumble of other buildings.

  I did not know when I would be back, but I had sown seeds there, and from that time on, however far and long I wandered, I could never again be a stranger among the Cloud People, any more than the farthest climbing tendril of a vine can detach itself from its roots in the earth. That much I knew. What I could not know, or even dream, was what fruit those seeds would bear—of glad surprise and crushing tragedy, of wealth and loss, of joy and misery. It would be a long time before I tasted the first of those fruits, and a longer time before they all ripened in their turn, and on one of those fruits I have not yet fed entirely to its bitter core.

  As you know, reverend friars, this entire land of New Spain is lapped on either side by a great sea which extends from the shore to the horizon. Since the seas lie more or less directly east and west of Tenochtítlan, we Mexíca have generally referred to them as the eastern and western oceans. But, from Tecuantépec onward, the land mass itself bends eastward, so those waters are more accurately called there the northern and southern oceans, and the land is only a narrow, low-lying isthmus separating the two. I do not mean that a man can stand between the oceans and spit into whichever he chooses. The waist of the isthmus is something like fifty one-long-runs from north to south, about a ten-day journey, but an easy one, because most of the land between is so flat and featureless.

  However, on that journey, we were not crossing from one coast to the other. We traveled eastward over the misnamed Jaguar Hill flat plains, with the southern ocean always somewhere not far to our right, though never within sight of the trail. We had sea gulls hovering overhead more often than vultures. Except for the oppressive heat of those lowlands, the marching was easy, even monotonous, with nothing to look at but tall yellow grass and low gray scrub. We made good time, and there was an abundance of easily killable game for food—rabbits, iguanas, armadillos—and the climate was comfortable for nighttime camping, so we did not sleep in any of the villages of the Mixe people whose territory we were then traversing.

  I had good reason to push hard for our destination, the lands of the Maya, where I could finally start trading the goods we carried for more valuable goods to carry back to Tenochtítlan. My partners of course knew something of the extravagances in which I had lately indulged, but I did not confess to them all the details or the prices I had paid. So far, I had struck but one advantageous bargain along the way, when I sold the slave Four to his relatives, and that was a long while back. Since then I had made only two transactions, both of them costly and neither of any visible or immediate profit to us. I had bought Chimàli’s feather tapestry only for the sweet revenge of destroying it. At even greater price, I had bought a hostel for the pleasure of giving it away. If I was reticent with my partners, it was from some shame at not having yet shown myself a very shrewd pochtécatl.

  After several days of traveling quickly and easily across the dun-colored flats, we saw the pale blue of mountains begin to rise on our left, and gradually loom up in front of us, too, and darken to blue-green, and we were again climbing, that time into thick forests of pine and cedar and juniper. Thereabouts we began to encounter the crosses that have always been held holy by the several nations of the far south.

  Yes, my lords, their cross was practically identical to your Christian cross. Like it, a trifle longer in height than in breadth, the only difference being that the top and side arms bore a bulge at their ends rather like a clover leaf. To those peoples, the religious significance of the cross resided in its symbolizing the four points and center of the compass. But it had a practical use as well. Whenever we found a waist-high wooden cross implanted in some otherwise empty wilderness, we knew that it did not demand, “Be reverent!” but invited us to “Be glad!”—for it marked the presence nearby of good, clear, fresh water.

  The mountains got steeper and more rugged until they were as formidable as those back in Uaxyácac. But we were more experienced climbers by then, and we should not have found them too daunting, except that, in addition to the normal chill on the heights, we suffered a sudden attack of viciously cold weather. Well, even in those southern lands it was then midwinter, and the short-day god Tititl was exceptionally hard on us that year.

  We trudged along bundled in every kind of clothing we carried, and with our sandals tied on over swaddlings of rags around our feet and lower legs. But the obsidian winds penetrated even those coverings, and on the higher peaks the wind flung snow like tin splinters. We were glad then to have pine trees all about. We collected the sap oozing from them, and boiled it until its irritating oils were gone and it had thickened to the gummy black oxitl which repels both coldness and wetness. Then we undressed and slathered the oxitl over our entire bodies before bundling up again. Except for clear patches around our eyes and lips, we were as night-black as the blind god Itzcoliúqui is always pictured.

  We were then in the country of the Chiapa and, when we began to come upon their scattered mountain villages, our grotesque appearance caused some surprise. The Chiapa do not use the black oxitl, but are accustomed to smear themselves all over with jaguar or cuguar or tapir fat, for similar protection against bad weather. However, the people themselves were almost as dark as we were; not black, of course, but the darkest cacao-brown skin I had yet seen on an entire nation of beings. It was the Chiapa tradition that their longest-ago ancestors had emigrated from some original homeland far to the south, and their complexion tended to confirm the legend. They had apparently inherited the color of forebears who had been well baked by a much fiercer sun.

  We travelers would gladly have paid for just a touch of that sun. When we plodded through the valleys and hollows sheltered from the wind, we suffered only the numbness and lethargy of freezing cold. But when we crossed a mountain by way of a pass, the sharp wind whistled through it too, like arrows shot through a cave tunnel, none scattering, all striking. And when there was no pass, when we had to clamber all the way up and over a mountain, there would be snow or sleet pelting us at the top, or there would be old snow on the ground for us to wade and slither through. We were all miserable, but one of us was more miserable than the rest: the slave Ten had been stricken with some ailment.

  He had never uttered a word of complaint and never lagged behind, so we did not even suspect that he was feeling ill until the morning his tumplined pack, like a heavy hand, simply pushed him to his knees. He tried gamely to rise but could not, and collapsed full length on the ground. When we pulled loose the tumpline and unburdened him and turned him face up, we discovered that he was so hot with fever that his plastering of oxitl had literally cooked to a dry crust all over his body. Cozcatl asked solicitously if he was especially affected in any specific part. Ten replied, in his broken Náhuatl, that his head felt cloven by a maquáhuitl and that his body felt on fire and that every one of his joints ached, but that otherwise nothing in particular was bothering him.

  I asked if he had eaten of anything unusual, or if he had been bitten or stung by any venomous creature. He said he had eaten only the meals we all shared. And his only encounter with any creature had been with a notably innocuous one, seven or eight days before, when he tried to run down a rabbit for our evening stew. He would have had it, too, if it had not nipped him and bounded free. He showed me the pinch marks of the rodent teeth on his hand, then rolled away from me and vomited.

  Blood Glutton, Cozcatl, and I felt sorry that, if any of us had to be taken ill, it should be Ten, for we all liked him. He was the one slave who had been the most tractable and unflagging of all our porters. He had loyally helped to save us all from the Tya Nuü bandits. It was he who had oftenest volunteered for the somewhat unmanly task of cooking. He was the strongest among the slaves, after the hulking Four we had sold,
and had borne the heaviest pack from that time. He had also submissively carried the unwieldy and unwholesome cuguar pelt; indeed, he still had the thing, for Blood Glutton would not let it be discarded.

  We all rested, until Ten himself was the first to get to his feet. I felt his forehead and it seemed that the fever had abated. I looked more closely at his dark brown face and said, “I have known you for more than a sheaf of days, but I only now realize. You are of this Chiapa country, are you not?”

  “Yes, master,” he said weakly. “From the capital city of Chiapán. That is why I wish to press on. I hope you will be kind enough to sell me there.”

  So he hoisted his bundle, slipped the tumpline again around his head, and we all went on, but by twilight of that day he was staggering in a manner pitiful to behold. Still he insisted on keeping the pace, and refused all suggestions of another halt or a lightening of his load. He would not put it down until we found a valley out of the wind, with a cross marking an icy creek flowing turgidly through it, and there made camp.

  “We have killed no game lately,” said Blood Glutton, “and the dogs are long gone. But Ten should have some nourishing fresh food, not just atóli mush and windy beans. Have Three and Six each start twirling a drill. It should take them so long to get a fire going that I can make a catch of something.”

  He found a limber green withe, bent it into a hoop, tied to it a scrap of almost threadbare cloth to make a crude net, and went to try his skill in the creek. He came back after a while, saying, “Cozcatl could have done it. They were sluggish with the cold,” and exhibited a mess of silvery green fish, none longer than a hand or thicker than a finger, but enough of them to fill our stew pot. Looking at them, however, I was not sure I wanted them in the pot, and I said so.

  Blood Glutton waved away my objection. “Never mind that they are ugly. They are tasty.”

  “They are unnatural,” complained Cozcatl. “Every one of them has four eyes!”

  “Yes, very clever fish, these fish. They float just below the creek surface, their upper eyes watching for insects in the air, their lower eyes alert for prey under the water. Perhaps they will endow our ailing Ten with some of their own wide-awakeness.”

  If they did, it was only enough to prevent his getting the good night’s sleep he needed. I myself woke several times to hear the sick man thrashing and coughing and hawking up phlegm and mumbling incoherently. Once or twice I did make out what sounded like a word—“binkizáka”—and in the morning I drew Blood Glutton aside to ask him if he had any idea what it meant.

  “Yes, one of the few foreign words I know,” he said superciliously, as if he thereby conferred a favor on it. “The binkizáka are creatures half human, half animal, which haunt the mountain heights. I am told that they are the hideous and obnoxious offspring of women who have unnaturally mated with jaguars or monkeys or whatever. When you hear a noise like thunder in the mountains, but there is no storm, you are hearing the binkizáka making mischief. Personally, I believe the sounds are of landslides and rockfalls, but you know the ignorance of foreigners. Why do you ask? Have you heard strange noises?”

  “Only Ten talking in his sleep. I think he was in delirium. I think he is more ill than we supposed.”

  So, overriding his plaintive protests, we took Ten’s load and divided it amongst the rest of us, and left him only the mountain lion’s skin to carry that day. Unburdened, he walked well enough, but I could tell when he was seized by a chill, for he would bend that stiff old hide around his already thick swaddling of garments. Then the chill would pass, and the fever rack him, and he would doff the skin and even open his clothing to the cold mountain air. He also breathed with a gurgling noise, when he was not coughing, and what he coughed up was a sputum of exceptionally foul smell.

  We were climbing eastward up a mountain of considerable size, and arrived at its top to find our way interrupted. We stood on the brink of a canyon running out of sight to the north and south, the steepest-sided canyon I have ever seen. It was like a gash cut through the ranges by some angry god who had slashed down from the sky with a god-sized maquáhuitl, swinging it with all his god strength. It was a sight that was breathtakingly impressive, beautiful, and deceptive, all at the same time. Though a cold wind blew where we stood, it evidently never penetrated that canyon, for the nearly perpendicular rock walls were festooned with clinging flowers of all colors. At the very bottom were forests of flowering trees, and soft-looking meadows, and a silver thread which appeared, from where we stood, to be the merest brook.

  We did not try to descend into the inviting depths, but turned south and followed the canyon rim until it gradually began to slope downward. By dusk it had lowered us to the level of that “brook,” which was easily a hundred man’s-steps from bank to bank. I learned later that it is the River Suchiápa, the broadest, deepest, swiftest-flowing river in all of The One World. That canyon, cut by it through the Chiapa mountains, is also unique in The One World: five one-long-runs in length and, at its deepest, nearly half a one-long-run from brink to bottom.

  We had come down to a plateau where the air was warmer and the wind more gentle. We also came to a village, though a poor one. It was called Toztlan, and it was scarcely big enough to support a name, and the only meal the villagers could provide us was a hash made of boiled owl, which gags me even in recollection. But Toztlan did have a hut big enough for us all to sleep under shelter for the first time in several nights, and the village population did include a physician of sorts.

  “I am only an herb doctor,” he said apologetically, in faltering Náhuatl, after he had examined Ten. “I have given the patient a purge, and can do no more. But tomorrow you will arrive at Chiapán, and there you will find many famous pulse doctors.”

  I did not know what pulse doctoring might be, but, by the next day, I could only hope it would be an improvement on herb doctoring. Before we got to Chiapán, Ten had collapsed and was being carried on the cuguar hide he had carried for so long. We took turns, by fours, bearing the improvised litter by the leg-skins at its corners, while Ten lay upon it and writhed and—between spasms of coughing—complained to us that several binkizáka were sitting on his chest and preventing him from breathing.

  “One of them is gnawing on me, too. See?” And he held out his hand. What he showed was only the place where the harmless rabbit had nipped him, but, for some reason, that spot had ulcerated into an open sore. We carriers tried to tell him that we saw nothing sitting or eating upon him, and that his problem was only the thinness of the air on that high plateau. We ourselves had such difficulty in breathing that none of us could carry for long before we had to be relieved by another.

  Chiapán looked nothing like a capital of anything. It was merely one more village, situated on the bank of a tributary of the Suchiápa River, and I supposed it was the capital only by virtue of its being the largest village of all the villages in the Chiapa nation. A few of its buildings, too, were of wood or adobe, instead of their all being the usual stick-and-thatch huts, and there were the crumbling remnants of two old pyramids.

  Our little company came into town reeling with fatigue and calling for a doctor. A kindly passerby heeded our obviously urgent cries, and stopped to peer at the barely conscious Ten. He exclaimed, “Macoboö!” and shouted something else in his language which sent two or three other passersby off at a run. Then he made a beckoning gesture to us and trotted ahead to lead us to the abode of a physician who, we gathered from other gestures, had some command of the Náhuatl tongue.

  By the time we got there, we had been joined by an excitedly jabbering crowd. It seemed that the Chiapa do not, like us Mexíca, have entirely individual names. Though each person naturally has some distinguishing name, it is attached to a family name, like those of you Spaniards, which endures unchanging through all the generations of that family. The slave we called Ten was of the Macoboö family of Chiapán, and the helpful citizen, recognizing him, had shouted for someone to run and tell his relatives of h
is return to town.

  Ten was unhappily in no condition to recognize any of the other Macoboö who converged on us, and the doctor—though visibly gratified to find such a crowd clamoring at his door—could not let them all inside. When the four of us carrying Ten had laid him on the earthen floor, the aged physician commanded that the hut be cleared of everybody except himself, his crone of a wife who would assist him, the patient, and myself, to whom he would explain the treatment while he performed it. He introduced himself to me as Doctor Maäsh and, in not very good Náhuatl, told me the theory of pulse doctoring.

  He held the wrist of Ten Macoboö while he called out the name of each god, good and bad, in whom the Chiapa believe. As he explained it, when he shouted the name of the deity who was afflicting the patient, Ten’s heart would pound and his pulse quicken. Then the doctor, knowing which god was responsible for the ailment, would know exactly what sacrificial offering should be made to persuade that god to cease the molestation. He would also know the proper medicines to administer to repair whatever damage had been done by the god.

  So Ten lay there on the cuguar skin, his eyes closed in the sunken hollows of their sockets, and old Doctor Maäsh held his wrist, leaned over him, and shouted into his ear:

  “Kakál, the bright god!” then a pause for the pulse to respond, then, “Tótik, the dark god!” and a pause and “Téo, the love goddess!” and “Antún, the life god!” and “Hachakyúm, the mighty god!” and so on, through more Chiapa gods and goddesses than I can remember. At last he squatted back on his heels and muttered in apparent defeat, “The pulse is so feeble that I cannot be sure of the response to any name.”

  Ten suddenly croaked, without opening his eyes, “Binkizáka bit me!”

  “Aha!” said Doctor Maäsh, brightening. “It would not have occurred to me to suggest the lowly binkizáka. And here indeed is a hole in his hand!”