The remainder of the ra-rajípuri runners comprised every other fit male of Guagüey-bo, from adolescents to men much older than myself, and they went along to help sustain the runners in spirit. Numerous of them had gone on ahead, as early as that morning. They were men who could run remarkably fast for a short time but tended to weaken over long distances. They posted themselves at intervals along the course between the two villages. As the chosen runners came by, those sprinters would speed alongside them, to inspire the racers to their best efforts over each of those intervals.
Others of the nonracers carried small pots of glowing coals and torches of pine splints, the latter to be fired after dark to light the racers’ way throughout the night. Still other men carried spare strings of dried jípuri, spare sacks of pinóli and water. The youngest and oldest carried nothing; their task was to keep up a continuous shouting and chanting of inspiriting encouragement. All the men were painted on the face, bare chest, and back with dots and circles and spirals of the vivid yellow urá pigment. I was adorned only on my face, for, unlike the others, I was allowed to wear my sleeved mantle.
As Grandfather Fire settled toward the designated mountain in late afternoon, the Si-ríame came smiling to the door of her house, wearing her regalia of jaguar skins, holding in one hand her silver-knobbed staff and in the other the yellow-painted wooden ball the size of a man’s head. She stood there, glancing sideways at the sun, while the racers and all their companions stood nearby, perceptibly leaning forward in eagerness to be off. At the moment Grandfather Fire touched the mountaintop, the Si-ríame smiled her broadest and threw the ball from her threshold among the bare feet of the waiting six racers. Every inhabitant of Guagüey-bo gave an exultant shout, and the six runners were away, playfully kicking the ball from one to another as they went. The other participants followed at a respectful distance, and so did I. The Si-ríame was still smiling when I last saw her, and little Vi-rikóta was jumping up and down as gaily as a dying candle flame.
I had fully expected the whole crowd of runners to outdistance me in a moment, but I should have guessed that they would not put all their energy into a headlong rush at the very start of the run. They set off at a moderate lope which even I could sustain. We went along the canyon riverside, and the cheering of the village women, children, and old folks faded behind us, and our own shouters began whooping and bellowing. Since the runners naturally avoided having to kick the ball uphill whenever possible, we continued along the canyon’s bottom until its sides sloped and lowered sufficiently for us to climb easily out of it and into the forest to the south.
I am proud to report that I stayed with the racers for what I estimate to have been a full third of the way from Guagüey-bo to Guacho-chí. Perhaps the credit should go to the jípuri I had chewed before starting, for several times I found myself running faster than I ever have done in my life before or since that race. Those were the times when we came up to the posted sprinters and did our best to match their bursts of speed. And several times we passed the sprinters from Guacho-chí—they standing, not yet running—stationed to await the coming of their own racers from the opposite direction. Those competitors shouted cheerfully scornful names at us as we went by them—“Laggards!” and “Limpers!” and the like—especially at me, because by then I was trailing the rest of the Guagüey-bo contingent.
Running full tilt through closely spaced trees and along ravine floors strewn with ankle-twisting rocks was something to which I was unaccustomed at the best of times, but I managed well enough as long as I had light to see. When the glow of afternoon began to diminish, I had to run with my topaz held to my eye, and that forced me to slow my pace considerably. As the twilight got darker, I saw the guide lights bloom out ahead of me, where the torch bearers were firing their bundles of splints. But of course none of those men would drop back to waste his light on a nonracer, so I was left farther and farther behind the running crowd, and its cries dimmed away.
Then, as full darkness closed around me, I saw a red gleam on the ground just ahead. The kindly Rarámuri had not totally forgotten or dismissed their outlander companion Su-kurú. One of the torch bearers, after lighting his torch, had carefully set down his little clay pot of embers where I was sure to find it. So there I stopped, and laid and lit a campfire, and settled down to spend the night. I will admit that, despite my ingestion of the jípuri, I was sufficiently tired to have toppled over and slept, but I felt ashamed even to think of it, when every other male in the vicinity was exerting himself to the utmost. Also, I would have been intolerably humiliated, and so would my host village, if, when the rival runners from Guacho-chí came along that trail, they had found “a Guagüey-bo man” lying there asleep. So I ate some of my pinóli and washed it down with a drink from my water pouch and chewed on some of the jípuri I had brought, and that revived me nicely. I sat up all night, throwing an occasional stick on the fire to keep myself comfortable but not so warm that I might become drowsy.
I should be seeing the Guacho-chí runners twice before I again saw Tes-disóra and my other former companions. After the two contingents had passed each other at the midpoint of the course, the rival runners would appear from the southeast and reach my campfire at just about the exact middle moment of the night. Then they would arrive at Guagüey-bo and turn and come back from the northwest and pass me again in the morning. The returning Tes-disóra and his fellows would not reach me—so I could again join their run and go home with them—until the midday sun was overhead.
Well, my calculation of the first encounter was correct. With the aid of my topaz I kept watch of the stars and, according to them, it was the middle of the night when I saw bobbing blobs of firelight coming from the southeast. I decided to pretend that I was one of Guagüey-bo’s posted sprinters, so I was on my feet, looking alert, before the first of the ball-kicking runners came in sight, and I began to shout, “Laggards! Limpers!” The racers and their torch bearers did not shout back; they were too busy keeping their eyes on the wooden ball, which had lost whatever paint it had worn and was looking rather splintery and shredded. But the company of other Guacho-chí runners returned my taunts, yelling, “Old woman!” and “Warm your weary bones!” and such—and I realized that my having laid a fire made me, in Rarámuri estimation, seem something less than manly. But it was too late then to douse the fire, and they all dashed past and became again just wavery red lights, dwindling to the northwestward.
After another long time, the sky in the east lightened, and finally Grandfather Fire made his reappearance, and more time passed while—as slowly as any aged human grandfather—he crept a third of the way up the sky. It was breakfast time and, by my calculations, time for the Guacho-chí men to be returning on their homeward run. I faced the northwest, where I had last seen them. Since in daylight there would be no torches to signal their coming, I strained my ears to hear them before they were in sight. I heard nothing, I saw nothing.
More time passed. In my mind I went over my reckoning, to find where I had miscalculated, but I could perceive no error. More time passed. I searched my mind, to remember whether or not Tes-disóra had ever said anything about the racers’ taking different routes on their return runs. More time passed, and the sun was almost directly overhead, when I heard a hail:
“Kuira-bá!”
It was a man of the Rarámuri, wearing only a runner’s loincloth and waist pouches and yellow designs on his bare skin, but he was no one I recalled ever having seen before, so I took him to be one of Guacho-chí’s outpost sprinters. Evidently he took me to be a Guagüey-bo counterpart, for, when I had returned his greeting, he approached me with a friendly but anxious smile and said:
“I saw your fire last night, so I left my station and came here. Tell me confidentially, friend, how did your people arrange to detain our runners in your village? Were your women all waiting stripped naked and lying compliant?”
“It is a vision pleasant to entertain,” I said. “But they were not, to my knowledge
. I was wondering myself, is it possible that your men are returning by some other way?”
He started to say, “It would be the first time ever—” when he was interrupted. We both heard another shout of “Kuira-bá!” and turned to see the approach of Tes-disóra and his five fellow racers. They were lurching and reeling with fatigue, and the ball they perfunctorily kicked among them had been worn down to about the size of my fist.
“We—” said Tes-disóra to the man from Guacho-chí, and had to pause to gulp for air. Then he painfully panted, “We have not yet—met your runners. What trickery—?”
The man said, “This sprinter of yours and I were just asking each other what might have become of them.”
Tes-disóra stared at the two of us, his chest heaving. Another man gasped, in a voice of disbelief, “They have—not yet—passed here?”
As the whole company of Guagüey-bo runners straggled up to join us, I said, “I asked the stranger if they might have taken a different course. He asked me if your women might have contrived to detain them in your village.”
There was a general shaking of heads. Then the heads moved more slowly, as the men looked at one another in bewilderment.
Somebody said, softly, worriedly, “Our village.”
Somebody else said, more loudly, with more anxiety, “Our women.”
And the stranger said, his voice quavering, “Our best men.”
Then there was realization in all their eyes, and shock and anguish, and it was in the eyes of the Guacho-chí man as well. All those eyes turned bleakly to the northwest and, in the brief breathless moment before the men suddenly left me, all of them running harder than ever, someone among them said just one word:
“Yaki!”
No, I did not follow them to Guagüey-bo. I never went back there again. I was an outlander, and it would have been presumptuous of me to join the Rarámuri men in bewailing their bereavement. I realized what they would find: that the Yaki marauders and the Guacho-chí runners had arrived in Guagüey-bo at about the same time, and the runners would have been too tired to have put up much of a fight against the savages. The Guacho-chí men would all have suffered having the scalps torn from their heads before they died. What the Si-ríame and young Vi-rikóta and the other Guagüey-bo women would have endured before they died I did not even want to think about. I presume that the surviving Rarámuri men eventually repopulated their villages by dividing themselves and the Guacho-chí women between the two, but I will never know.
And I never saw a Yaki, not then or to this day. I would have liked to—if I could have managed it without the Yaki seeing me—for they must be the most fearsome human animals in existence, and wonderful to look upon. In all my years I have known only one man who did meet the Yaki and did live to tell of it, and he was that elder of The House of Pochtéca who had no top to his head. Nor have any of you Spaniards yet encountered a Yaki. Your explorers of these lands have not yet ventured that far north and west. I think I might almost pity even a Spaniard who goes among the Yaki.
When the stricken men went running, I stood still and watched them disappear in the forest. I stayed looking toward the northwest for a while after they were out of sight, saying a silent farewell. Then I squatted down and made a meal of my remaining pinóli and water, and chewed a jípuri to keep me awake during the rest of the day. I dumped earth on the last embers of my campfire, then stood erect, glanced at the sun for direction, and strode off to the south. I had enjoyed my stay with the Rarámuri, and I grieved at having it end so. But I wore good clothing of deerskin and sandals of boar hide, and I had leather pouches in which to carry food and water, and I had a flint blade at my waist, and I still had my seeing crystal and my burning crystal. I had left nothing behind in Guagüey-bo, unless you count the days that I lived there. But of them I brought away and have kept the memory.
I H S
S. C. C. M.
Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty,
the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:
SUBLIME and Most August Majesty: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this St. Ambrose’s Day in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.
In our last letters, Sire, we expatiated upon our activities as Protector of the Indians. Let us here dwell upon our primary function as Bishop of Mexíco, and our task of propagating the True Faith among these Indians. As Your Percipient Majesty will discern from the next following pages of our Aztec’s chronicle, his people have always been contemptibly superstitious, seeing omens and portents not only where reasonable men see them—in the eclipse of the sun, for example—but also in everything from simple coincidences to commonplace phenomena of nature. That tendency to superstition and credulity has both helped and hindered our continuing campaign to turn them from devil-worship to Christianity.
The Spanish Conquistadores, in their first slashing sweep through these lands, did an admirable work of casting down the major temples and idols of the heathen deities, and putting in their place crosses of the Christ and statues of the Virgin. We and our colleagues of the cloth have affirmed and maintained that overthrow by erecting more permanent Christian edifices at those sites which heretofore were shrines to the demons and demonesses. Because the Indians stubbornly prefer to congregate for worship in their old accustomed places, they now find in those places not such bloodthirsty beings as their Huichilobos and Tlalóque, but the Crucified Jesus and His Blessed Mother.
To cite a few of many instances: the Bishop of Tlaxcála is building a Church of Our Lady atop that gigantic pyramid mountain in Cholula—so remindful of Shinar’s overweening Tower of Babel—where formerly the Feathery Snake Quetzalcóatl was adored. Here in the capital of New Spain, our own nearly completed Cathedral Church of St. Francis is deliberately located (as nearly as Architect García Bravo can determine) on the site of what was once the Aztecs’ Great Pyramid. I believe the church walls even incorporate some of the stones of that toppled monument to atrocity. On the point of land called Tepeyáca, across the lake just to the north of here, where lately the Indians worshiped one Tónantzin, a sort of Mother Goddess, we have put a shrine to the Virgin Mother instead. At the request of Captain-General Cortés, it has been given the same name as that shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe situated in his home province of Extremadura in Spain.
To some it might appear unseemly that we should thus locate our Christian tabernacles on the ruins of heathen temples whose rubble is still blood-drenched by unholy sacrifice. But in actuality we only emulate the very earliest Christian evangels, who placed their altars where the Romans, Greeks, Saxons, &c. had been wont to worship their Jupiters and Pans and Eostras, &c.—in order that those devils might be driven away by the divine presence of Christ Sacrificed, and that the places which had been given to abomination and idolatry might become places of sanctification, where the people could be more readily induced by the ministers of the True God to offer the adoration due to His Divinity.
Therein, Sire, we are much abetted by the Indians’ superstitions. In other undertakings we are not; for, besides being much bound by their superstitions, they are as hypocritical as Pharisees. Many of our apparent converts, even those professing themselves devout believers in our Christian Faith, yet live in superstitious dread of their old demons. They judge themselves to be only prudent in reserving some of their reverence for Huichilobos and the rest of that horde; doing so, they explain in all solemnity, to ward off any possibility of the demons’ jealously wreaking revenge for having been supplanted.
We have mentioned our success, during our first year or so in this New Spain, at finding and destroying many thousands of idols which the Conquistadores had overlooked. When at last there were no more to be seen, and when the Indians swore to our patrolling Inquisitors that there were no more to be dug up from any hiding places, we nevertheless suspected that the Indians were still and privily venerating those proscribed old deities. So we preached most strongly, and had all our priests and missionaries d
o the same, commanding that no idol, not the least and smallest, not even an ornamental amulet, should remain in existence. Whereupon, confirming our suspicions, the Indians began to come again, meekly bringing to us and to other priests great numbers of clay and pottery figures, and in our presence renouncing them and breaking them to bits.
We took much satisfaction in that renewed discovery and destruction of so many more of the profane objects—until, after some while, we learned that the Indians were only seeking to mollify us or to make mock of us. The distinction is unimportant, since we would have been equally outraged by the imposture in either case. It seems that our stern sermons had provoked quite an industry among the Indian artisans: the hasty manufacture of those figurines for the sole purpose that they might be shown to us and broken before us in seeming submission to our admonitions.
At the same time, to our even greater distress and affront, we learned that numerous real idols—that is to say, antique statues, not counterfeits—had been hidden from our searching friars. And where do you suppose they had been hidden, Sire? Inside the foundations of the shrines and chapels and other Christian monuments built for us by Indian laborers! The deceitful savages, secreting their impious images in such sacrosanct places, believed them to be safe from disclosure. Worse, they believed that they could in those places go on worshiping those concealed monstrosities while they seemed to be paying homage to the cross or the Virgin or whatever saint was there visibly represented.
Our revulsion at those unwelcome revelations was only a little mitigated by our having the satisfaction of telling our congregations—and our taking some pleasure in seeing them cringe when they heard it—that the Devil or any other Adversary of the True God suffers untold anguish at being in proximity to a Christian cross or other embodiment of the Faith. Thereafter, without further prompting, the Indian masons who had contrived those coverts resignedly revealed the idols, and more of them than we could have found unaided.
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