Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “Hurry,” I panted to the girl. “Up there. Where the bats are coming from. Must be a cave. Dive for it.”

  We found it just as the last bats departed, or we might have missed it altogether: a tunnel in the rock wide enough for us to wriggle into, side by side. How deep it went, I never found out, but somewhere far within there would have been a great cavern, for the bats had been a countless multitude and, as we lay together in the rock tunnel, we could smell from the farther interior an occasional whiff of their guano droppings. Suddenly everything was quiet outside our burrow; the birds must have flown far away and the animals gone safely to ground; even the usually ever-screeching tree cicadas were silent.

  The first shock was sharp but also soundless. I heard Zyanya whisper fearfully, “Zyuüù,” and I clasped her protectively tight against me. Then we heard a long, low, rumbling growl from somewhere far inland. One of the volcanoes in that range was belching, if not erupting, and violently enough to quake the earth as far as the coast.

  The second and third shocks, and I do not know how many more, came with such increasing rapidity that they all blended into a dizzying motion of simultaneous rocking, tilting, and bucking. The girl and I might have been wedged inside a hollow log careering down a white-water river. The noise was so deafeningly loud and prolonged that we might equally have been inside one of the drums which tear out the heart, it being beaten by a demented priest. The noise was of our mountain falling to pieces, contributing more of itself to that rubble of immense boulders already around it in the sea.

  I wondered whether Zyanya and I would be among the rubble—after all, the bats had elected not to stay—but we could not have squeezed out of the tunnel then, even if we had panicked, because it was being so fiercely shaken. Once we managed to cringe a bit farther backward inside it, when the tunnel mouth suddenly darkened; a gigantic chunk of the mountaintop had rolled right across it. Happily for us, it kept on rolling and let the twilight in again, though with a cloud of dust that set us to choking and coughing.

  Then my mouth went even drier, as I heard a muted thunder from behind us, from inside the mountain. That vast hollow cavern of the bats was crumbling inward, its dome roof plummeting down in pieces and probably bringing with it all the weight of the mountain above it. I waited for our tunnel to be tilted backward and chute us both feet-first down into that all-crushing collapse of the immediate world. I wrapped my arms and legs around Zyanya, and held her even more tightly, in the pitiful hope that my body might give her some protection when we both slid down into the grinding bowels of the earth.

  But our tunnel held firm, and that was the last alarming shock. Slowly the upheaval and uproar quieted, until we heard no more than a few sounds outside our burrow: the trickly sounds of small stones and pebbles belatedly following the bigger rocks downhill. I stirred, intending to stick my head out and see what was left of the mountain, but Zyanya held me back.

  “Do not yet,” she warned. “There are often aftershocks. Or there may be a boulder still teetering right above us, ready to fall. Wait a while.” Of course she was right to caution prudence, but she confessed only a little later that that was not her sole reason for holding on to me.

  I have mentioned the effects of an earthquake on the human physiology and emotions. I know Zyanya could feel my bulgingly erect tepúli against her small belly. And, even with the cloth of her blouse and my mantle between us, I could feel the nuzzling of her nipples against my chest.

  At first she murmured, “Oh, no, Záa, we must not …”

  Then she said, “Záa, please do not. You were my mother’s lover….”

  And she said, “You were my little brother’s father. You and I cannot …”

  And, though her breathing quickened, she kept on saying, “It is not right …” until she thought to say, with the last of her breath, “But you did pay dearly to buy me from those savages …” after which she only panted silently until the whimpers and moans of pleasure began. Then, a bit later, she asked in a whisper, “Did I do it right?”

  If there is anything good to be said for an earthquake, I will remark that its singular excitation enables a virgin girl to enjoy her defloration, which is not always otherwise the case. Zyanya so delighted in hers that she would not let me go until we had indulged twice more, and such was my own earthquake invigoration that we never even uncoupled. After each climax, my tepúli would naturally shrink, but each time Zyanya would tighten some little circlet of muscles down there and hold me from withdrawal, and somehow ripple those tiny muscles to tantalize my member so that it began to swell again inside her.

  We might have gone on even longer without a pause, but the mouth of our tunnel had by then darkened to a queer reddish gray, and I wanted a look at our situation before it was full night, so we wriggled out and stood up. It was long after sunset, but the volcano or the earthquake had sent its cloud of dust so high into the sky that it still caught the rays of Tonatíu, from Míctlan or wherever he was by then. The sky, which should have been dark blue, was a luminous red, and it made red the streak in Zyanya’s hair. It also reflected down enough light that we could see about us.

  The ocean appeared to be absolutely boiling and frothing around a much greater area of rocks. The way we had come up the mountain was no longer recognizable: in places heaped with new rubble, in places cracked open into deep, wide chasms. Above and beyond where we stood, there was a sunken, shadowed hollow in the mountainside, where it had fallen inward into the bat cavern.

  “It may be,” I mused, “that the rockslides crushed all our pursuers, and maybe their village as well. If it did not, they are sure to blame us for this disaster, and follow us even more vengefully.”

  “Blame us?“ exclaimed Zyanya.

  “I defiled the holy place of their highest god. They will presume that I caused his anger.” I thought about it, and wondered, and said, “Perhaps I did.” Then I came back to practicality. “But if we stay and sleep in our hiding place here, and then arise early and push on before dawn, I think we can outdistance any pursuit. When we get back over the ranges to Tecuantépec—”

  “Will we get back, Záa? We have no provisions, no water….”

  “I still have my maquáhuitl. And I have crossed worse mountains than any between here and Tecuantépec. When we get back … Zyanya, could we be married?”

  She may have been startled by the abruptness of my proposal, but not by the fact of it. She said quietly, “I would suppose that I had answered that before you asked. It may be immodest of me to say so, but I cannot entirely reproach the zyuüù for … what happened.”

  I said sincerely, “I thank the zyuüù, for making it possible. I had long wanted you, Zyanya.”

  “Well, then!” she said, and smiled brightly and spread her arms in a gesture of it-is-done. I shook my head, meaning it is not so easily done, and her smile faded to some anxiety.

  I said, “For me, you are a treasure greater than I could ever have hoped to find. For you, I am not.” She started to speak, and I shook my head again. “If you marry me, you are forever an exile from your Cloud People. To be expelled from such a close and proud and admirable kinship, that is no small sacrifice.”

  She thought for a moment, then asked, “Would you believe me if I say you are worth it?”

  “No,” I said. “For I am better acquainted with my worth—or my unworthiness—than even you could possibly be.”

  She nodded as if she had expected some such answer. “Then I can only say that I love the man Záa Nayàzú more than I love the Cloud People.”

  “But why, Zyanya?”

  “I think I have loved you ever since … but we will not speak of yesterdays. I say only that I love you today and I will love you tomorrow. Because the yesterdays are gone. Todays and tomorrows are all the days that ever can be. And on every one of them I will say I love you. Could you believe that, Záa? Could you say the same?”

  I smiled at her. “I can and I can and I do. I love you, Zyanya.”


  She smiled in return and said, somewhat mischievously, “I do not know why we had to argue it out. It seems we were fated anyway, by your tonáli, or mine, or both.” And she pointed from her breast to mine. The dye that the priest had smeared on me had been still damp when we had lain together. We each bore an identical purple stain, she on her blouse, I on my mantle.

  I laughed. Then I said, half ruefully, “I have been long in love with you, Zyanya, and now we are pledged to be man and wife, and I never yet thought to ask the meaning of your name.”

  When she told me, I thought she was jesting, and only her solemn insistence finally made me believe her.

  As you surely have perceived by now, my lords, all our people of all nations bore names that were borrowed from some thing in nature, or some natural quality, or some combination of those. It is evidenced in my own name of Dark Cloud and in others I have spoken: Something Delicate, Blood Glutton, Evening Star, Flame Flower. So it was hard for me to believe that a girl could have a name that did not signify any thing at all. Zyanya is only a simple and common word, and it means nothing in the world but always.

  Always.

  I H S

  S. C. C. M.

  Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty,

  the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

  MOST Laudable Majesty, our Mentor and Monarch: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, on this St. Prospers Day in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.

  Annexed herewith as usual, Sire, is the latest outpouring of our resident Aztec, which is also as usual: little of vis but much of vomitus. It is evident from Your Majesty’s most recent letter that our Sovereign still finds this history sufficiently beguiling as to be worth five good men’s continued subjection to the hearing and transcribing of it.

  Your Dedicated Majesty may also be interested to hear of the safe return of the Dominican missionaries we sent into the southern region called Oaxaca, to appraise our Aztec’s claim that the Indians there have for long worshiped an omnipotent god of gods, whimsically known as the Almighty Breath, and also that they utilized the cross as a holy symbol.

  Brother Bernardino Minaya and his companion friars do attest that they saw in that country many seemingly Christian crosses—at any rate, crosses of the shape called in heraldry the croix botonée—but that they serve no religious purpose, being regarded only pragmatically, inasmuch as they mark sources of fresh water. Therefore, Your Majesty’s vicar is inclined to view those crosses with Augustinian skepticism. In our appreciation, Sire, they are but one more manifestation of the Adversary’s spiteful cunning. Clearly, in anticipation of our arrival in New Spain, the Devil made haste to teach some numbers of these heathens a profane imitation of various Christian beliefs and rites and sacred objects, in the hope of frustrating and confounding our later introduction of the True Faith.

  Also, as well as the Dominicans could gather (they being hampered by linguistic difficulties), the Almighty Breath is not a god but a high wizard (or priest, as our chronicler would have it) who holds dominion over the subterranean crypts in the ruins of that city called Mitla, formerly considered by the natives their Holy Home. The friars, apprised by us of the pagan interments and sinfully suicidal immolations of live volunteers at that place, forced the wizard to allow them access to those crypts.

  Like Theseus venturing into the Labyrinth of Daedalus, they unwound a cord behind them as they went by torchlight through the branching caves and tortuous underground passages. They were assailed by the stench of decayed flesh; they trod on the bones of countless placidly seated skeletons. Unhappily, and unlike Theseus, they lost their courage before they had gone many leagues. When they were confronted by giant, overfed rats and snakes and other such vermin, their determination dissolved in horror, and they departed in an almost undignified rout.

  Once outside, they commanded, despite the Indians’ lamentations and protests, that the tunnel entrances be permanently caved in and collapsed and sealed by the rolling of many boulders over them, “to wall up and hide forever that back door of Hell,” as Fray Bernardino phrases it. The action was of course well warranted, and even long overdue, and not to be disparaged, since it is reminiscent of the sainted Catherine of Siena, who prayed that her own impeccable body might be splayed forever across the Pit, so that no more poor sinners would ever fall in. Nevertheless, we regret that we may now never know the full extent of that underground network of caverns, and may never recover the treasures which the ranking personages of that people no doubt took with them to their tombs. Worse, we fear that the Dominicans’ impetuous action may have done little to make the Indians of that area more receptive to the Faith or more loving toward us who bring it.

  We regret also to report that we ourself are not much better beloved by our own fellow Spaniards here in New Spain. Your Majesty’s officers in the Crown Archive of the Indies have perhaps already received communications from persons complaining of our “interference” in secular matters. God knows they complain enough to us, particularly the landholders who employ great numbers of Indian laborers on their farms and ranches and plantations. Those lords-proprietors have even made a play upon our name, and now irreverently refer to us as Bishop Zurriago, “the Scourge.” This is because, Sire, we have dared to denounce from the pulpit their practice of working their Indians literally to death.

  “And why should we not?” they demand. “There are still some fifteen thousand red men to every white one in these lands. What harm in our reducing that dangerous disparity, especially if we can wring useful work from the wretches while we do it?”

  The Spaniards who hold that attitude claim that they have good religious justification for it, viz.: because we Christians rescued these savages from their devil worship and inevitable damnation, because we brought them hope of salvation, therefore the Indians should be eternally obligated to us their redeemers. Your Majesty’s chaplain cannot deny that there is logic in the argument, but we do feel that the Indians’ obligation should not require them to die indiscriminately and arbitrarily—of beatings, brandings, starvation rations, and other mistreatments—certainly not before they have been baptized and fully confirmed in the Faith.

  Since the cadastral and census records of New Spain are still necessarily haphazard and incomplete, we can offer only rough calculations of the number of the native population, past and present. But there is reason to believe that approximately six million red men formerly lived within the confines of what is now New Spain. The battles of the Conquest of course took a considerable toll of them. Also, at that time and in the nine years since, an estimated two and a half million more of the Indians under Spanish authority have died of various diseases, and only God knows how many more in the yet unconquered regions, and they continue to die in great numbers everywhere.

  It has apparently pleased Our Lord to make the red race peculiarly vulnerable to certain afflictions which, it seems, were not heretofore endemial in these lands. While the pestilence of the great pocks was previously known here (and not surprisingly, in view of the people’s general licentiousness), it appears that the plagues of the buboes, the cholera morbus, the small pocks, the pease pocks, and the measles were not. Whether those diseases began to occur only coincidentally with the overthrow of these peoples, or are a chastisement visited upon them by God in His judgment, they ravage the Indians with far more virulence than Europeans have ever suffered.

  Still, that loss of lives, while of distressing magnitude, is at any rate of natural cause, an inscrutable Act of God, and not of our countrymen’s doing nor amenable to their amelioration of it. We can, however, call a halt to our countrymen’s deliberate killing of the red men, and we must do so. Your Majesty gave us another office besides those of Bishop and Inquisitor, and we will uphold that title of Protector of the Indians, even if it means bearing also the hateful title of Scourge bestowed by our fellows.

  That the Indians profit us, as cheap and expendable labor, must be a secondary con
sideration to our saving of their pagan souls. Our success in that noble task is diminished by every Indian who dies not yet a Christian. If too many should perish thus, the good name of the Church would suffer. Besides, if these Indians all die, who then would build our cathedrals and churches and chapels and monasteries and convents and cloisters and shrines and houses of retreat and other Christian edifices, and who would constitute the bulk of our congregations, and who would work and contribute and tithe to support the servants of God in New Spain?

  May Our Lord God preserve Your Most Renowned Majesty, executor of so many holy works, that you may enjoy the fruits thereof in His High Glory.

  (ecce signum) Zumárraga

  SEPTIMA PARS

  DOES Your Excellency join us today to hear what my married life was like?

  I think you will find the account rather less crowded with incident—and, I should hope, less abrasive to Your Excellency’s sensibilities—than the tempestuous times of my younger manhood. Although I must regretfully report that the actual ceremony of my wedding to Zyanya was clouded by storm and tempest, I am happy to say that most of our married life afterward was sunny and calm. I do not mean that it was ever dull; with Zyanya I experienced many further adventures and excitements; indeed, her very presence brought excitement into my every day. Also, in the years following our marriage, the Mexíca were at the peak of their power and were wielding it with vigor, and I was occasionally involved in happenings that I now recognize as having been of some small importance. But at the time, they were to me and Zyanya—and doubtless to the majority of commonfolk like ourselves—only a sort of busy-figured wall painting in front of which we lived out our private lives and our own small triumphs and our inconsequential little happinesses.

  Oh, not that we regarded any least aspect of our marriage as insignificant. Early on, I asked Zyanya how she did that twinkling contraction of her tipíli’s little circlet of muscles, which made our act of love so extraordinarily exciting. She blushed with shy pleasure and murmured, “You might as well ask how I wink my eyes. It simply happens when I will it. Does it not happen with every woman?”