Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  It was my turn to be surprised. The two bounded to their feet, wild-eyed with distress. Then I understood their panic, and I could not help laughing. They obviously thought that, if I could order them summarily scoured, I could as easily order them castrated for having taken advantage of the local women. Still laughing, I shook my head and made other placative gestures. I pointed again to the girl’s crotch and my own, saying “tipíli” and “tepúli.” Then I pointed to my nose and said “yacatl.” The two heaved sighs of relief and nodded to each, other in comprehension. One of them pointed a shaking finger to his own nose and said “nariz.” They sat down again and I began to learn the last new language I would ever need to know.

  That first session did not end until well after dark, when they began to doze between words. No doubt their vigor had been sapped by their bath, perhaps the first bath in their lives, so I let them stumble to their quarters and to sleep. But I had them up early the next morning and, after one whiff of them, gave them the choice of washing themselves or again being forcibly scrubbed. Though they looked amazed and displeased that anybody should have to suffer such a thing twice in his lifetime, they chose to do it themselves. They did it every morning thereafter, and learned to do it sufficiently well that I could bear to sit with them all day long without too much discomfort. So our sessions lasted from morning to night; we even traded words while we ate the meals brought to us by the palace servants. I might also mention that the guests eventually began to eat the meat dishes, once I was able to explain from what animals they came.

  Sometimes to reward my instructors’ cooperation, sometimes to bolster them when they got tired and querulous, I would give them a refreshing cup or two of octli. I had brought, among Motecuzóma’s “gifts for the gods,” several jars of the finest grade of octli, and it was the only one of his many gifts I ever presented to them. On first tasting it, they made faces and called it “sour beer,” whatever that might be. But they soon acquired a liking for it, and one night I deliberately made the experiment of letting them drink as much as they wanted. I was interested to note that they got as disgustingly drunk as any of our own people could do.

  As the days passed and my vocabulary enlarged, I learned numerous things, and the most important was this. The outlanders were not gods but men, ordinary men, however extraordinary in appearance. They did not pretend to be gods, nor even any kind of spirit attendants preparing the way for the arrival of godly masters. They seemed honestly bewildered and mildly shocked when I made guarded mention of our people’s expectation of gods someday returning to The One World. They earnestly assured me that no god had walked this world in more than one thousand and five hundred years, and they spoke of that one as if he were the only god. They themselves, they said, were only mortal men who, in this life and afterward, were sworn devotees of that god. While they lived in this world, they said, they were also obedient subjects of a King, who was likewise a man but a most exalted man, clearly their equivalent of a Revered Speaker.

  As I shall later tell, Your Excellency, not all of our people were disposed to accept the outlanders’ assertion—or mine—that they were mere men. But after my earliest association with them I never doubted that, and in time I was of course proved right. So, Your Excellency, I will henceforth speak of them not as outlanders or aliens or strangers of mysterious beings, but as men.

  The man with the pimples and sores was Gonzalo Guerrero, a carpenter by trade. The man with the pitted face was Jerónimo de Aguilar, a professional scribe like the reverend friars here. It may even be that some of you could have known him at some time, for he told me that his earliest ambition had been to be a priest of his god, and that he had studied for some time in a calmécac or whatever you call your schools for priests.

  The two had come, they said, from a land to the eastward, well out of sight beyond the ocean horizon. I had of course already surmised that, and I was not much further enlightened when they told me the land was called Cuba, and that Cuba was only one colony of a much greater and still more distant eastern land called Spain or Castile, from which seat of power their King ruled all his far-flung Spanish dominions. That Spain or Castile, they said, was a land in which all men and women were white of skin, except for a few inferior persons called Moors, whose skins were totally black. I might have found that last statement so incredible as to make me suspicious of everything else the men told me. But I reflected that in these lands there was born the occasional freakish white tlacaztáli. In a land of all white people, why should not the freaks be black?

  Aguilar and Guerrero explained that they had come to our shores purely by misadventure. They had been among some hundreds of men and women who had left Cuba in twelve of the big floating houses—ships, they called them—under the command of a Captain Diego de Nicuesa, who was taking them to populate another Spanish colony of which he was to be governor, some place called Castilla de Oro, somewhere far to the southeast of here. But the expedition had run into misfortune, which they were inclined to blame on the coming of the ill-omened “hairy comet.”

  A fierce storm had scattered the ships, and the one carrying them was finally blown onto sharp rocks which punctured and overturned and sank it. Only Aguilar and Guerrero and two other men had managed to flee the flooding vessel in a sort of large canoe carried upon the ship for such emergencies. To their surprise, the canoe had not been long afloat when the ocean threw it upon the beach of this land. The other two occupants of the canoe drowned in the turbulent breakers, and Aguilar and Guerrero might have died there too, had not “the red men” come running to help them to safety.

  Aguilar and Guerrero expressed gratitude for their having been rescued, and hospitably received, and well fed and entertained. But they would be even more grateful, they said, if we red men would guide them back to the beach and their canoe. Guerrero the carpenter was sure he could repair any damage it had sustained, and make oars to propel it with. He and Aguilar were both sure that, if their god gave them fair weather, they could row eastward and find Cuba once more.

  “Shall I let them go?” asked Ah Tutál, to whom I was translating as the interviews progressed.

  I said, “If they can find the place called Cuba from here, then they should have no trouble finding Uluümil Kutz again from there. And you have heard: their Cuba seems to be teeming with white men eager to plant new colonies everywhere they can reach. Do you want them swarming here, Lord Mother?”

  “No,” he said worriedly. “But they might bring a physician who could cure the strange disease that is spreading among us. Our own have tried every remedy they know, but daily more persons fall ill and already three have died.”

  “Perhaps these men themselves would know something about it,” I suggested. “Let us look at one of the sufferers.”

  So Ah Tutál led me and Aguilar to a hut in the town, and inside, where a doctor stood muttering and rubbing his chin and frowning down at a pallet where a young girl lay tossing in fever, her face shiny with sweat, her eyes glazed and unseeing. Aguilar’s whiteness went rather pink when he recognized her as one of the females who had visited his and Guerrero’s quarters.

  He said slowly, so that I should understand, “I am sorry to tell you that she has the small pocks. You see? The eruptions are beginning to grow on her forehead.”

  I translated that to the physician, who looked professionally mistrustful, but said, “Ask him what his people do to treat it.”

  I did, and Aguilar shrugged and said, “They pray.”

  “Evidently a backward people,” grunted the doctor, but added, “Ask him to which god.”

  Aguilar said, “Why, they pray to the Lord God!”

  That was of no help, but I thought to ask, “Do you pray to that god in some manner which we might imitate?”

  He tried to explain, but the explanation was of a complexity beyond my grasp of the language. So he indicated that it could more easily be demonstrated, and the three of us—Ah Tutál, the physician, and I—hurried after him bac
k to the palace courtyard. He ran to his quarters while we stayed at a distance, and he came back to us with something in each hand.

  One of the things was a small box with a tight-fitting cover. Aguilar opened it to show its contents: a considerable number of small disks that appeared to have been cut from heavy white paper. He attempted another explanation, from which I gathered that he had illicitly kept or stolen the box as a memento of his days in the priest school. And I further understood that the disks were a special sort of bread, the most holy and potent of all foods, because a person who ate one of them partook of the strength of that almighty Lord God.

  The other object was a string of many small beads irregularly interspersed among numerous larger ones. All the beads were of a blue substance that I had never seen before: as blue and hard as turquoise but as transparent as blue water. Aguilar started another complex explanation, of which I heard only the information that each bead represented a prayer. Naturally I was reminded of the practice of placing a jadestone chip in the mouth of someone dead, and I thought the prayer beads might be similarly and beneficially employed by the not yet dead. So I interrupted Aguilar to ask urgently:

  “Do you put the prayers in the mouth, then?”

  “No, no,” he said. “They are held in the hands.” Then he gave a cry of protest as I snatched the box and beads from him.

  “Here, Lord Physician,” I said to the doctor. I broke the string and gave him two of the beads, and I translated what little I had comprehended of Aguilar’s instructions: “Take the girl’s hands and clench each hand around one of these prayers….”

  “No, no!” Aguilar wailed. “Whatever you are doing, it is wrong! There is more to prayer than just—”

  “Be quiet!” I snapped, in his language. “We have not time for more!”

  I fumbled some of the papery little bits of bread from the box and put one in my mouth. It tasted like paper, and it dissolved on my tongue without my having to chew it. I felt no instant surge of god strength, but at least I realized the bread could be fed to the girl even in her half-conscious condition.

  “No, no!” Aguilar shouted yet again, when I ate the thing. “This is unthinkable! You cannot receive the Sacrament!”

  He regarded me with the same expression of horror that I see right now on Your Excellency’s face. I am sorry for my impulsive and shocking behavior. But you must remember that I was only an ignorant pagan then, and I was concerned only with hurrying to save a girl’s life. I pressed some of the little disks into the doctor’s hand and told him:

  “This is god food, magic food, and easy to eat. You can force them into her mouth without the risk of choking her.”

  He went off at a run, or as much of a run as his dignity would permit….

  In much the way that His Excellency has just now done.

  I clapped Aguilar companionably on the shoulder and said, “Forgive me for taking the matter out of your hands. But if the girl is cured, you will get the credit, and you will be much honored by these people. Now let us find Guerrero and sit and talk some more about your people.”

  There were still many things I wished to learn from Jerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero. And, since by then we could converse with fair comprehension, albeit haltingly, they were equally curious about things in these lands. They asked some questions that I pretended not to understand: “Who is your King? Does he command great armies? Does he possess great riches of gold?” And some questions that I truly did not understand: “Who are your Dukes and Counts and Marquises? Who is the Pope of your Church?” And some questions that I daresay no one could answer: “Why do your women have no hair down there?” So I warded off their questions by asking my own, and they answered all of them with no perceptible hesitation or suspicion or guile.

  I could have stayed with them for at least a year, improving my grasp of their language and constantly thinking of new things to ask. But I made the precipitate decision to leave their company when, two or three days after our visit to the ailing girl, the physician came to me and silently beckoned. I followed him to that same hut, and looked down at the girl’s dead face, hideously bloated beyond recognition and flushed to a gruesome purple color.

  “All her blood vessels burst and her tissues swelled,” said the doctor, “including those inside her nose and mouth. She died in an agony of simply trying to breathe.” He added disparagingly, “The god food you gave me worked no magic.”

  I asked, “And how many sufferers have you cured, Lord Physician, without recourse to that magic?”

  “None,” he sighed, and his pomposity deflated. “Nor have any of my colleagues saved a single patient. Some die like this, of strangulation. Some die with a gush of blood from the nose and mouth. Some die in raving delirium. I fear that all will die, and die miserably.”

  Looking at the ruin of what had been quite a pretty child, I said, “She told me, this very girl, that only a vulture could take pleasure from the white men. She must have had a true premonition. The vultures will now be pleased to gorge on her carrion, and her dying was somehow the doing of the white men.”

  When I returned to the palace and reported to Ah Tutál, he said emphatically, “I will no longer have the diseased and unclean strangers here!” I could not make out whether his crossed eyes glared at me or past me, but they were undeniably angry. “Do I let them go away in their canoe, or do you take them to Tenochtítlan?”

  “Neither,” I said. “And do not kill them either, Lord Mother, at least until you receive permission from Motecuzóma. I would suggest that you get rid of them by giving them into slavery. Give them to the chiefs of tribes well distant from here. The chiefs should feel flattered and honored by such gifts. Not even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca has a white slave.”

  “Um … yes …” Ah Tutál said thoughtfully. “There are two chiefs I particularly dislike and distrust. It would not grieve me should the white men bring misery on them.” He regarded me more kindly. “But you were sent all this way, Knight Ek Muyal, to find the outlanders. What will Motecuzóma say when you return empty-handed?”

  “Not quite empty-handed,” I said. “I will take back at least the box of god food and the little blue prayers, and I have learned many things to tell to Motecuzóma.” A sudden thought struck me. “Oh, yes, Lord Mother, there could be one other thing to show him. If any of your females who lay with the white men should prove pregnant, and if they do not fall victim to the small pocks—well, if there are offspring, send them to Tenochtítlan. The Revered Speaker can put them on display in the city menagerie. They ought to be monsters unique among monsters.”

  Word of my returning to Tenochtítlan must have preceded me by several days, and Motecuzóma must certainly have been simmering with impatience to know what news—or what visitors—I might be bringing. But he was the same old Motecuzóma, and I was not ushered immediately into his presence. I had to stop in the corridor outside his throne room, and change from my Eagle Knight costume into the sackcloth of a supplicant, and then do the ordained adulatory ritual of kissing the earth all the way across the chamber to where he sat between the gold and silver gongs. Despite his cool and unhurried reception of me, though, he was obviously determined to be the first to hear my report—perhaps the only one to hear—for the other members of his Speaking Council were not present. He did allow me to dispense with the formality of speaking only when queried, and I told him all that I have thus far told you, reverend friars, and a few other things I had learned from your two countrymen:

  “As best I can calculate, Lord Speaker, it was about twenty years ago that the first floating houses, called ships, set out from that distant land of Spain to explore the ocean to the west of it. They did not then reach our coast because it seems there are a great many islands, large and small, between here and Spain. There were people already resident on those islands and, from the description, I take them to have been something like the barbaric Chichiméca of our northern lands. Some of those islanders fought to repel
the white men, some of them meekly allowed the incursion, but all by now have been made subject to those Spaniards and their King. During the past twenty years, then, the white men have been occupied with settling colonies on those islands, and plundering their resources, and trading between the islands and their Spanish homeland. Only a few of their ships, moving from one island to another, or idly exploring, or blown astray by the wind, have until now even glimpsed these lands. We might hope that the islands will keep the white men busy for many more years, but I beg leave to doubt it. Even the biggest island is only an island, therefore limited in riches worth taking and land worth populating. Also, the Spaniards seem insatiable both in their curiosity and in their rapacity. They are already seeking beyond the islands for new discoveries and new opportunities. Soon or later, their seeking will bring them to these lands. It will be as the Revered Speaker Nezahualpíli foretold: an invasion, for which we had best prepare.”

  “Prepare!” snorted Motecuzóma, probably stung by the memory of Nezahualpíli’s having supported that prophecy by winning the tlachtli contest. “That aged fool prepares by sitting down and sitting still. He will not even help me war against the insufferable Texcaltéca.”

  I did not remind him of what else Nezahualpíli had said: that all our peoples should cease the perpetuation of old enmities and unite against that impending invasion.

  “Invasion, you said,” Motecuzóma went on. “You also said that those two outlanders came without weapons and totally defenseless. It would imply an unusually peaceable invasion, if any.”

  I said, “What weapons might have gone down with their flooded ship, they did not confide. They may need no weapons at all—not weapons of the sort we know—if they can inflict a killing disease to which they themselves are casually indifferent.”