Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  Only Béu asked the question: “Where are you going, Záa?”

  “In search of a legend,” I said, and I told them the story that Nezahualpíli had not long ago told to Motecuzóma in my hearing, and I concluded, “I will retrace that long march our forefathers made in the time when they still called themselves the Aztéca. I will go northward, following their route as nearly as I can construe it and as far as I can trace it … all the way to their homeland of Aztlan, if such a place still exists or ever did. And if those wanderers truly did bury armories of weapons and stores at intervals, I will find them too, and map their locations. Such a map could be of great military value to Motecuzóma. Try to impress that upon him when you report to him, Qualánqui.” I smiled ruefully. “He may welcome me with flowers instead of a flower garland when I return.”

  “If you return,” said Béu.

  I could not smile at that. I said, “It seems my tonáli forces me always to return, but every time a little more alone.” I paused, then said between my teeth, “Someday, somewhere, I will meet a god and I will ask him: Why do the gods never strike me down, when I have done so much to deserve their anger? Why do they instead strike down every undeserving one who has ever stood close to me?”

  The four elderly men appeared slightly uneasy at having to hear my bitter lament, and they seemed relieved when Béu said, “Old friends, would you be kind enough to take your leave, that Záa and I may exchange a few private words?”

  They got up, making a cursory gesture of kissing the earth to us, and, when they went off toward their quarters, I said brusquely, “If you are going to ask to accompany me, Béu, do not ask.”

  She did not. She was silent for a considerable time, her eyes downcast to her nervously twining fingers. Finally she said, and her first words seemed totally irrelevant, “On my seventh birthday I was named Waiting Moon. I used to wonder why. But then I knew, and I have known for years now, and I think Waiting Moon has waited long enough.” She raised her beautiful eyes to mine, and somehow she had made them entreating instead of mocking for a change, and somehow she even managed a maidenly blush. “Let us now at last be married, Záa.”

  So that was it, I said to myself, remembering again how she had surreptitiously collected that mud I had made. Earlier, and for only a brief time, I had wondered if she fashioned an image of me in order to curse it with misfortune, and if that was what had deprived me of Nochípa. But that suspicion had been a fleeting one, shaming me even to think of it. I knew Béu had loved my daughter dearly, and her weeping had demonstrated a sorrow as genuine as my tearless own. So I had forgotten the mud doll—until her own words revealed that she had made it, and why. Not to blight my life but merely to weaken my will, so that I could not reject her pretendedly impulsive but transparently long-planned proposal. I did not immediately reply; I waited while she proffered her carefully marshaled arguments. She said first:

  “A moment ago, Záa, you remarked that you are ever more and more alone. So am I, you know. We both are, now. We have no one left but each other.”

  And she said, “It was acceptable that I should live with you while I was known to be the guardian and companion of your motherless daughter. But now that Nochípa … now that I am no longer the resident aunt, it would be unseemly for an unmarried man and woman to share the same house.”

  And she said, with another blush, “I know there could never be a replacement for our beloved Nochípa. But there could be … I am not too old …”

  And there she let her voice fade away, in a very good simulation of modesty and inability to say more. I waited, and held her eyes, until her blushing face glowed like copper being heated, and then I said:

  “You need not have troubled with conjuration and cajolery, Béu. I intended to ask you the same thing this very night. Since you seem agreeable, we will be married tomorrow, as early as I can awaken a priest.”

  “What?” she said faintly.

  “As you remind me, I am now most utterly alone. I am also a man of estimable estate and, if I die without an heir, my property is forfeit to the nation’s treasury. I should prefer that it not go to Motecuzóma. So tomorrow the priest will draw a document affirming your inheritance as well as the paper attesting our marriage.”

  Béu slowly got to her feet and looked down at me, and she stammered, “That is not what … I never gave a thought to … Záa, I was trying to say …”

  “And I have spoiled the performance,” I said, smiling up at her. “All the blandishments and persuasions were unnecessary. But you need not count them wasted, Béu. Tonight may have been good practice for some future use, when perhaps you are a wealthy but lonely widow.”

  “Stop it, Záa!” she exclaimed. “You refuse to hear what I am earnestly trying to tell you. It is hard enough for me, because it is not a woman’s place to say such things….”

  “Please, Béu, no more,” I said, wincing. “We have lived too long together, too long accustomed to our mutual dislike. Saying sweet words at this late date would strain either of us, and probably astound all the gods. But at least, from tomorrow on, our detestation of each other can be formally consecrated and indistinguishable from that of most other married—”

  “You are cruel!” she interrupted. “You are immune to any tender sentiment, and heedless of a hand reaching out to you.”

  “I have too often felt the hard back of your tender hand, Béu. And am I not about to feel it again? Are you not going to laugh now and tell me that your talk of marriage was just another derisive prank?”

  “No,” she said. “I meant it seriously. Did you?”

  “Yes,” I said, and raised high my cup of octli. “May the gods take pity on us both.”

  “An eloquent proposal,” she said. “But I accept it, Záa. I will marry you tomorrow.” And she ran for her room.

  I sat on, moodily sipping my octli and eyeing the inn’s other patrons, most of them pochtéca on their way home to Tenochtítlan, celebrating their profitable journeys and safe return by getting eminently drunk, in which pursuit they were being encouraged by the hostel’s numerous available women. The innkeeper, already aware that I had engaged a separate room for Béu, and seeing her depart alone, came sidling to where I sat, and inquired:

  “Would the Lord Knight care for a sweet with which to conclude his meal? One of our charming maátime?”

  I grunted, “Few of them look exceptionally charming.”

  “Ah, but looks are not everything. My lord must know that, since his own beautiful companion seems cool toward him. Charm can reside in other attributes than face and figure. For example, regard that woman yonder.”

  He pointed to what must surely have been the least appealing female in the establishment. Her features and her breasts sagged like moist clay. Her hair, from having been so often bleached and recolored, was like wire grass dried to kinky hay. I grimaced, but the innkeeper laughed and said:

  “I know, I know. To contemplate that woman is to yearn for a boy instead. At a glance, you would take her for a grandmother, but I know for a fact that she is scarcely thirty. And would you believe this, Lord Knight? Every man who has ever once tried Quequelyéhua always demands her on his next visit here. Her every patron becomes a regular, and will accept no other maátitl. I do not indulge, myself, but I have it on good authority that she knows some extraordinary ways to delight a man.”

  I raised my topaz and took another, more searching look at the draggle-haired, bleary-eyed sloven. I would have wagered that she was a walking pustule of the nanáua disease, and that the effeminate innkeeper knew it, and that he took malicious pleasure in trying to peddle her to the unsuspecting.

  “In the dark, my lord, all women look alike, no? Well, boys do too, of course. So it is other considerations that matter, no? The highly accomplished Quequelyéhua probably already has a waiting line for tonight, but an Eagle Knight can demand precedence over mere pochtéca. Shall I summon Quequelyéhua for you, my lord?”

  “Quequelyéhua,” I repeate
d, as the name evoked a memory. “I once knew a most beautiful girl named Quequelmíqui.”

  “Ticklish?” said the innkeeper, and giggled. “From her name, she must have been a diverting consort too. But this one should be far more so. Quequelyéhua, the Tickler.”

  Feeling rather sick at heart, I said, “Thank you for the recommendation, but no, thank you.” I took a large drink of my octli. “That thin girl sitting quietly in the corner, what of her?”

  “Misty Rain?” said the innkeeper, indifferently. “They call her that because she weeps all the time she is, er, functioning. A newcomer, but competent enough, I am told.”

  I said, “Send that one to my room. As soon as I am drunk enough to go there myself.”

  “At your command, Lord Eagle Knight. I am impartial in the matter of other people’s preferences, but sometimes I am mildly curious. May I ask why my lord chooses Misty Rain?”

  I said, “Simply because she does not remind me of any other woman I have known.”

  The marriage ceremony was plain and simple and quiet, at least until its conclusion. My four old stalwarts stood as our witnesses. The innkeeper prepared tamáltin for the ritual meal. Some of the inn’s earlier-rising patrons served as our wedding guests. Since Quaunáhuac is the chief community of the Tlahuíca people, I had procured a priest of the Tlahuíca’s principal deity, the good god Quetzalcóatl. And the priest, observing that the couple standing before him were somewhat past the first greening of youth, tactfully omitted from his service the usual doleful warnings to the presumably innocent female, and the usual cautionary exhortations to the presumably lusting male. So his harangue was mercifully brief and bland.

  But even that perfunctory ritual elicited some emotion from Béu Ribé, or she pretended it did. She wept a few maidenly tears and, through the tears, smiled tremulous smiles. I must admit that her performance enhanced her already striking beauty, which, as I have never denied, was equal to and almost indistinguishable from the sublime loveliness of her late sister. Béu was dressed most enticingly and, when I looked at her without the clarification of my crystal, she appeared still as youthful as my forever twenty-year-old Zyanya. It was for that reason that I had made repeated use of the girl Misty Rain throughout the night. I would not risk Béu’s making me want her, even physically, so I drained myself of any possibility of becoming aroused against my will.

  The priest finally swung his smoking censer of copáli around us for the last time. Then he watched while we fed each other a bite of steaming tamáli, then he knotted the corner of my mantle to a corner of Waiting Moon’s skirt hem, then he wished us the best of fortune in our new life.

  “Thank you, Lord Priest,” I said, handing him his fee. “Thank you especially for the good wishes.” I undid the knot that tied me to Béu. “I may need the gods’ help where I am now going.” I slung my traveling pack on my shoulder and told Béu good-bye.

  “Good-bye?” she repeated, in a sort of squeak. “But Záa, this is our wedding day.”

  I said, “I told you I would be leaving. My men will see you safely home.”

  “But—but I thought—I thought surely we would stay here at least another night. For the …” She glanced about, at the watching and listening guests. She blushed hotly and her voice rose, “Záa, I am now your wife!”

  I corrected her, “You are married to me, as you requested, and you will be my widow and my heiress. Zyanya was my wife.”

  “Zyanya has been ten years dead!”

  “Her dying did not sever our bond. I can have no other wife.”

  “Hypocrite!” she raged at me. “You have not been celibate for these ten years. You have had other women. Why will you not have the one you just now wed? Why will you not have me?”

  Except for the innkeeper, who was smirking lewdly, most of the people in the room stood fidgeting and looking uncomfortable. So did even the priest, who nerved himself to say, “My lord, it is customary, after all, to seal the vows with an act of … well, to know each other intimately….”

  I said, “Your concern does you credit, Lord Priest. But I already know this woman far too intimately.”

  Béu gasped. “What a horrid lie to tell! We have never once—”

  “And we never will. Waiting Moon, I know you too well in other ways. I also know that the most vulnerable moment in a man’s life occurs when he couples with a woman. I will not chance arriving at that moment to have you disdainfully reject me, or break into your mocking laughter, or diminish me by any other of the means you have been so long practicing and perfecting.”

  She cried, “And what are you doing to me this moment?”

  “The very same,” I agreed. “But this once, my dear, I have done it first. Now the day latens, and I must be on my way.”

  When I left, Béu was dabbing at her eyes with the crumpled corner of her skirt that had been our marriage knot.

  It was not necessary for me to begin retracing my ancestors’ long-ago long march from its terminus in Tenochtítlan, nor from any of the places they had earlier inhabited in the lake district, since those sites could hold no undiscovered secrets of the Aztéca. But, according to the old tales, one of the Aztéca’s next-earlier habitations, before they found the lake basin, had been somewhere to the north of the lakes: a place called Atlitalácan. So, from Quaunáhuac, I traveled northwest, then north, then northeast, circling around and staying well outside the domains of The Triple Alliance, until I was in the sparsely settled country beyond Oxitípan, the northernmost frontier town garrisoned by Mexíca soldiers. In that unfamiliar territory of infrequent small villages and infrequent travelers between them, I began inquiring the way to Atlitalácan. But the only replies I got were blank looks and indifferent shrugs, because I was laboring under two difficulties.

  One was that I had no idea what Atlitalácan was, or what it had been. It could have been an established community at the time the Aztéca stayed there, but which had since ceased to exist. It could have been merely a hospitable place for camping—a grove or meadow—to which the Aztéca had given that name only temporarily. My other difficulty was that I had entered the southern part of the Otomí country, or, to be accurate, the country to which the Otomí peoples had grudgingly removed when they were gradually ousted from the lake lands by the successively arriving waves of Culhua, Acólhua, Aztéca, and other Náhuatl-speaking invaders. So, in that amorphous border country, I had a language problem. Some of the folk I accosted spoke a passable Náhuatl, or the Pore of their other neighbors to the west. But some spoke only Otomíte, in which I was by no means fluent, and many spoke a bastard patchwork of the three languages. Although my persistent questioning of villagers and farmers and wayfarers enabled me eventually to acquire a working vocabulary of Otomíte words, and to explain my quest, I still could find no native who could direct me to the lost Atlitalácan.

  I had to find it myself, and I did. Fortunately, the place-name itself was a clue—Atlitalácan means “where the water gushes”—and I came one day to a neat and cleanly little village named D’ntado Dehé, which in Otomíte means approximately the same thing. The village was built where it was because a sweet-water spring bubbled from the rocks there, and it was the only spring within a considerably extensive arid area. It seemed a likely place for the Aztéca to have stopped, since an old road came into the village from the north and proceeded southward from it in the general direction of Lake Tzumpánco.

  The meager population of D’ntado Dehé naturally regarded me askance, but one elderly widow was too poor to indulge too many misgivings, and she rented me a few days’ lodging in the nearly empty food-storage loft under the roof of her one-room mud hut. During those days I tried smilingly to ingratiate myself with the taciturn Otomí, and to coax them into conversation. Failing in that, I prowled the outskirts of the village in a widening spiral, seeking whatever supplies my forefathers might have secreted there, even though I suspected that any such random search would be futile. If the Aztéca had hidden stores and arms along t
heir line of march, they must have made sure the deposits could not be dug up by the local residents or any later passersby. They must have marked the caches with some obscure sign recognizable only by themselves. And none of their Mexíca descendants, including me, had any notion of what that sign might have been.

  But I cut a long, stout pole, and sharpened the end of it, and with it I prodded deep into every feature of the local terrain that might conceivably not have been there since the world was first created: suspiciously isolated hills of earth, oddly uncleared thickets of scrub growth, the fallen-in remains of ancient buildings. I do not know whether my behavior moved the villagers to amusement or to pity of the alien madman or to simple curiosity, but at last they invited me to sit down and explain myself to their two most venerable elders.

  Those old men answered my questions in as few and simple words as possible. No, they said, they had never heard of any such place as Atlitalácan, but if the name meant the same as D’ntado Dehé, then D’ntado Dehé was doubtless the same place. Because yes, according to their fathers’ fathers’ fathers, a long time ago a rough, ragged, and verminous tribe of outlanders had settled at the spring—for some years of residence—before moving on again and disappearing to the southward. When I delicately inquired about possible diggings and deposits therein, the two aged men shook their heads. They said n’yéhina, which means no, and they said a sentence that they had to repeat several times before I laboriously made sense of it :

  “The Aztéca were here, but they brought nothing with them, and they left nothing when they went.”

  Within not many days, I had left the regions where the last vestiges of even mongrel Náhuatl or Poré were spoken, and was well into the territory inhabited solely by Otomí speaking only Otomíte. I did not travel an unswervingly fixed course, for that would have required me to climb trackless hills and scale formidable cliffs and fight my way through many cactus thickets, which I was sure the migrant Aztéca had not done. Instead, as they surely had done, I followed the roads, where there were any, and the more numerous well-trodden footpaths. That made my journey a meandering one, but always I bore generally northward.