Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  Then she was seized by the other priests waiting at the pyramid summit, and was laid backward across the stump of stone there, and two of the priests whipped out their obsidian knives. While one rent the breast and tore out the still pulsing heart, the other sawed off the still blinking and mouthing head. In none of our other ceremonies was the sacrificial victim decapitated, and it had no religious significance even in the Xipe Totec rites, where the xochimíqui was beheaded only for a practical reason: it is easier to remove a dead person’s skin when the head and body are separated.

  The flaying was done out of sight of the crowd, the two pieces of the youth having been whisked inside the temple, and the priests were very deft at it. The head’s skin was slit up the back, from nape to crown, the scalp and face peeled off the skull and the eyelids cut away. The body was also slit up the back, from anus to neck stump, but the skin of arms and legs was carefully loosed as untorn empty tubes. If the xochimíqui had been a young woman, the padding of soft flesh inside her breasts and buttocks was left intact to preserve their rotundity. If it had been a young man, his tepúli and olóltin were left attached and dangling.

  The smallest priest of Xipe Totec—and there was always one small man among them—quickly doffed his robes and, naked, donned the two pieces of the costume. The body skin being still moist and slippery on the inside, it was not difficult for him to wriggle his own arms and legs into the corresponding tubes. The dead feet had been removed, for they would interfere with the priest’s dancing, but the dead hands were left attached to wave and flap alongside his own. The torso skin of course did not meet at the back, but it was there perforated for thongs which laced it tight around his body. The priest then put on the dead youth’s hair and face, positioned so that he could see through the empty eyeholes and sing through the slack lips, and it too was laced up the back. Any traces of blood on the outside of the costume were sponged off and the slit in the chest skin was sewn shut.

  All that took very little longer than it takes me to tell it to Your Excellency. It seemed to the onlookers that the dead Xipe Totec had scarcely left the altar stone then he reappeared alive in the temple doorway. He stood bent, pretending to be an old man, leaning for support on two glistening thighbones, the only other parts of the xochimíqui’s body utilized in the ceremony. As the drums roared to greet him, The Dear One Flayed slowly straightened up, like an old man becoming young again. He danced down the pyramid stairs and capered maniacally about the plaza, flourishing the slimy thighbones and using them to give a tap of blessing to everyone who could press close enough.

  Before the ceremony, the small priest always made himself drunk and delirious by eating many of the mushrooms called the flesh of the gods. He had to, for he had the most arduous part in the remainder of the proceedings. He was required to dance frantically and unceasingly, except during those periods when he collapsed unconscious, for five days and nights thereafter. Of course, his dance gradually lost its first wild abandon, as the skin he wore began to dry and tighten on him. Toward the close of the five days, it was so shrunken and crackly as to be really constrictive, and the sun and air had turned it to a sickly yellow color—for which reason it was called the Garment of Gold—and it smelled so horrible that no one then in the plaza would come near enough for Xipe Totec to bless him with a tap of a bone….

  His Excellency’s latest anguished departure impels me to remark—if it is not irreverent, lord scribes—that His Excellency has a remarkable faculty for joining us always to hear only those things that will most annoy or disgust him to hear.

  In later years I was to say, with deep regret, that I wished I had never denied Zyanya anything; that I ought to have let her do and see and experience everything that caught her interest and dilated her eyes with wonder; that I should never even once have thwarted her blithe enthusiasm for every smallest thing in the world about her. Still, I cannot reproach myself that I kept her from ever seeing the Xipe Totec ceremony.

  Whether or not I can claim any credit, no bad influences got into Zyanya’s milk. The baby Cocóton thrived on it, and grew, and grew ever more pretty, a miniature of her mother and aunt. I doted on her, but I was not the only one who did. When Zyanya and Béu one day took the baby with them to market, a Totonácatl passerby saw Cocóton smiling from the shawl sling in which Béu carried her, and asked the women’s permission to capture that smile in clay. He was one of those itinerant artists who turn out quantities of terra cotta figurines from molds and then tramp about the countryside to sell them cheaply to poor farm folk. On the spot, he adroitly did a little clay portrait of Cocóton, and later, after he had used it to make his mold for stamping out the duplicates, he came and presented Zyanya with the original. It was not really a perfect likeness, and he had put upon it the flared Totonáca headdress, but I instantly recognized my daughter’s broad and infectious smile, complete with dimples. I do not know how many copies he made, but for a long time you could see little girls everywhere playing with that doll. Even some adults bought it under the impression that it represented the laughing young god Xochipíli, Lord of Flowers, or the happy goddess Xilónen, Young Maize Mother. I should not be surprised if there are still some of those figurines here and there, still unbroken, but it would lacerate my heart if I found one now and saw again that smile of my daughter and my wife.

  Toward the close of the child’s first year of life, when she had grown her first little maize-kernel teeth, she was weaned in the age-old manner of Mexíca mothers. When she cried to be suckled, her lips would more and more often encounter not Zyanya’s sweet breast but a bitter leaf cupped over it: one of the astringent, mouth-puckering leaves of the sabila maguey. Gradually, Cocóton let herself be persuaded to take instead soft mushes like atóli, and eventually abandoned the nipple altogether. It was at that time that Béu Ribé announced that she was no longer needed by our family, that she would return to her inn, that Turquoise could easily take over the care of the infant when Zyanya was weary or occupied with other things.

  I again provided an escort for Béu: the same seven soldiers whom I had come to regard as my private little army, and I walked with her and them as far as the causeway.

  “We hope you will come again, sister Waiting Moon,” I said, though we had already spent most of that morning saying farewells, and Béu had been given many gifts, and both women had wept a good deal.

  “I will come whenever I am needed … or wanted,” she said. “Getting away from Tecuantépec this first time should make it easier for me in the future. But I think I shall not often be needed or ever wanted. I would rather not admit having been wrong, Záa, but honesty compels me. You are a good husband to my sister.”

  “It takes no great effort,” I said. “The best of husbands is that man who has the best of wives.”

  She said, with a touch of her former teasing manner, “How do you know? You have married only one. Tell me, Záa, do you never feel even a fleeting attraction to … to any other woman?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, laughing at myself. “I am human, and human emotions can be unruly, and there are many other alluring women. Like you, Béu. I can even be attracted to women less beautiful than Zyanya or you—merely out of curiosity about the possible other attributes under their clothes or behind their faces. But in nearly nine years my thoughts have never yet progressed to the deed, and to lie beside Zyanya quickly dispels the thoughts, so I do not blush for them.”

  I hasten to say, reverend friars, that my Christian catechists taught me different: that a wanton idea can be just as sinful as the most lascivious fornication. But I was then still a heathen; we all were. So the whims that I did not invite and did not commit did not trouble me any more than anybody else was troubled by them.

  Béu looked at me sidelong from her glorious eyes and said, “You are already an Eagle Knight. It only remains for you to be honored with the -tzin to your name. As a noble, you need not stifle even your most secret yearnings. Zyanya could not object to being the First Wife among
your others, if she approved of the others. You could have all the women you want.”

  I smiled and said, “I already do. She is most aptly named Always.”

  Béu nodded and turned and, without looking back, walked out of sight along the causeway.

  There were men working that day at the island end of the causeway Béu crossed, and others working along the length of it, as far as the midway fort of Acachinánco, and there were other laborers at work on the mainland to the southwest. The men were building the two ends of a new stone aqueduct to bring an increased supply of fresh water to the city.

  For a long time, the many communities and settled lands of the lake district had been so rapidly increasing in population that all three nations of The Triple Alliance were becoming intolerably overcrowded. Tenochtítlan, of course, was the worst affected, for the simple reason that it was an island incapable of expansion. That is why, when the Xoconóchco was annexed, so many city dwellers picked up their families and households and moved to settle there. And that voluntary migration gave the Uey-Tlatoáni the idea of encouraging other removals.

  By then, it had become evident that the Tapáchtlan garrison would forever discourage any further forays of enemies into the Xoconóchco, so Motecuzóma the Younger was relieved of his command there. As I have explained, Ahuítzotl had reasons for keeping his nephew at a distance. But he was also shrewd enough to go on making use of the man’s proven ability for organization and administration. He sent Motecuzóma next to Teloloápan, a flyspeck village between Tenochtítlan and the southern ocean, and commanded him to make of it another fortified and thriving community on the model of Tapáchtlan.

  For that, Motecuzóma was given another sizable army troop and a sizable number of civilians. Those were families and individuals who may or may not have been dissatisfied with life in Tenochtítlan or its environs, but when the Revered Speaker said, “You will go,” they went. And when Motecuzóma allotted them estimable landholdings in and around Teloloápan, they all settled down under his governorship, to make of that miserable village a respectable town.

  So, as soon as Teloloápan had a garrison built and was feeding itself with its own harvests, Motecuzóma the Younger was again relieved of command and sent to do the same thing elsewhere. Ahuítzotl ordered him to one petty village after another: Oztóman, Alahuíztlan—I forget all their names, but they were all situated on the farther borders of The Triple Alliance. As those remote colonies multiplied and each of them grew, they accomplished three things pleasing to Ahuítzotl. They drained away more and more of the excess population of our lake district—from Texcóco, Tlácopan, and other lake cities as well as from Tenochtítlan. They provided us with strong frontier outposts. And the continuing process of colonization kept Motecuzóma both profitably occupied and far from any possibility of intriguing against his uncle.

  But the emigrations and removals could only stop the increase of population in Tenochtítlan; there was never enough of an outpouring to lessen the crowding and elbowing of those who remained. The island-city’s chief need was of more fresh water. A steady supply of that had been arranged by the first Motecuzóma when he built the aqueduct from the sweet springs of Chapultépec, more than a sheaf of years before, about the same time he built the Great Dike to protect the city from windblown floods. But the flow from Chapultépec could not be persuaded to increase just because more was needed. That was proved; a number of our priests and sorcerers tried all their means of suasion, and all failed.

  It was then that Ahuítzotl determined to find a new source of water, and sent those same priests and sorcerers and a few of his Speaking Council wise men to scout other regions of the nearby mainland. By whatever means of divination, they did tap into a previously undiscovered spring, and the Revered Speaker at once began to plan a new aqueduct. Since that newfound stream near Coyohuácan gushed up more strongly than that of Chapultépec, Ahuítzotl even planned for it to make fountains spout in The Heart of the One World.

  But not everybody was so enthusiastic, and one who advised caution was the Revered Speaker Nezahualpíli of Texcóco, when he was invited by Ahuítzotl to inspect the new spring and the work just getting under way on the new aqueduct. I did not hear their conversation with my own ears; there was no reason for me to be present on that occasion; I was probably at home playing games with my baby daughter. But I can reconstruct the consultation of the two Revered Speakers from what I was told by their attendants long after the event.

  For one thing, Nezahualpíli warned, “My friend, you and your city may have to choose between having too little water and having too much of it,” and he reminded Ahuítzotl of some historical facts.

  This city is now and has for sheaves of years been an island surrounded by water, but it was not always so. When the earliest ancestors of us Mexíca came from the mainland to make their permanent habitation here, they walked here. It was no doubt a sloppy and uncomfortable march for them, but they did not have to swim. All the area that is now water between here and the mainland to the west, to the north, to the south, was in those days only a soggy swamp of mud and puddles and sawgrass, and this place was then merely the one dry and firm extrusion of land in that widespread marsh.

  Over the years of building a city here, those early settlers also laid firmer paths for easier access to the mainland. Perhaps their first paths were no more than ridges of packed earth, a trifle higher than the bog. But eventually the Mexíca sank double rows of pilings and tamped rubble between them, and on top of those foundations laid the stone pavings and parapets of the three causeways that still exist. Those causeways impeded the marsh’s draining its surface waters into the lake beyond, and the blocked swamp waters began perceptibly to rise.

  It made a considerable improvement over previous conditions. The water covered the stinking mud and the leg-slashing sawgrass and the standing puddles from which swarms of mosquitoes were endlessly being born. Of course, if the water had continued to mount, it could eventually have covered this island, too, and flooded into the streets of Tlácopan and other mainland cities. But the causeways were built with wooden-bridged gaps in them at intervals, and the island itself was trenched with its many canals for the passage of canoes. Those spillways allowed a sufficient overflow of the waters into Lake Texcóco on the island’s eastern side, so the artificially created lagoon rose only so high and no higher.

  “Or it has not yet,” Nezahualpíli said to Ahuítzotl. “But now you propose to pipe new water across from the mainland. It must go somewhere.”

  “It goes to the city for our people’s consumption,” Ahuítzotl said testily. “For drinking, bathing, laundering …”

  “Very little water is ever consumed,” said Nezahualpíli. “Even if your people drink it all the day long, they must urinate it as well. I repeat: the water must go somewhere. And where but into this dammed-in part of the lake? Its level could rise faster than it can drain out through your canals and causeway passages into Lake Texcóco beyond.”

  Beginning to swell and redden, Ahuítzotl demanded, “Do you suggest we ignore our newfound spring, that gift of the gods? That we do nothing to alleviate the thirst of Tenochtítlan?”

  “It might be more prudent. At least, I suggest you build your aqueduct in such a way that the flow of water can be monitored and controlled—and shut off if necessary.”

  Ahuítzotl said in a growl, “With your increasing years, old friend, you become increasingly a fearful old woman. If we Mexíca had always listened to those who told us what could not be done, we should never have done anything.”

  “You asked my opinion, old friend, and I have given it,” said Nezahualpíli. “But the final responsibility is yours, and”—he smiled—“your name is Water Monster.”

  The Aqueduct of Ahuítzotl was finished within a year or so after that, and the palace seers took great pains to choose a most auspicious day for its dedication and the first unloosing of its waters. I remember well the date of the day, Thirteen Wind, for it lived up t
o its name.

  The crowd began to gather long before the ceremony commenced, for it was almost as much of an event as the dedication of the Great Pyramid had been, twelve years earlier. But of course all those people could not be let onto the Coyohuácan causeway where the main rituals were to be performed. The mass of commonfolk had to clump together at the southern end of the city, and jostle and lean and peer for a glimpse of Ahuítzotl, his wives, his Speaking Council, the high nobles, priests, knights, and other personages who would come by canoe from the palace to take their places on the causeway between the city and the Acachinánco fort. Unfortunately, I had to be among those dignitaries, in full uniform and in the full company of Eagle Knights. Zyanya wanted also to attend, and to bring Cocóton with her, but again I dissuaded her.

  “Even if I could arrange for you to get close enough to see anything,” I said, as I wriggled into my quilted and feathered armor that morning, “you would be buffeted and drenched by the lake wind and spray. Also, in that crush of people, you might fall or faint, and the child could be trampled.”

  “I suppose you are right,” said Zyanya, sounding not much disappointed. Impulsively, she hugged the little girl to her. “And Cocóton is too pretty to be squeezed by anybody but us.”

  “No squeeze!” Cocóton complained, but with dignity. She slipped out of her mother’s arms and toddled off to the other side of the room. At the age of two years, our daughter had a considerable store of words, but she was no chattering squirrel; she seldom exercised more than two of her words at a time.

  “When Crumb was first born, I thought her hideous,” I said, as I went on dressing. “Now I think her so pretty that she cannot possibly get any more so. She can only deteriorate, and it is a pity. By the time we want to marry her off, she will look like a wild sow.”

  “Wild sow,” Cocóton agreed, from the corner.

  “She will not,” Zyanya said firmly. “A child, if it is pretty at all, reaches its utmost infant beauty at two, and goes on being lovely—with subtle changes, of course—until it reaches its utmost childhood beauty at six. Little boys stop there, but little girls—”