The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  His bearing changed when I told him that he himself must accompany me to Tenochtitlán. “You’re an Aztecatl,” I said. “You have made the journey. You know Moctezuma. The—”

  “I’ll send Tlacho to guide you,” he broke in. “He’s an Aztecatl and knows the best way to Tenochtitlán.’’

  “It is you who will be my guide,” I said, speaking not unkindly, even softly, in the words of Nahuatl, his na tive tongue. “We will leave as soon as possible.”

  There was no further argument. Chalco bowed gracefully, made the gesture of kissing the earth at my feet, touched the beak of his jaguar mask.

  “We can go now,” he said without the least trace of anger, in a servile voice. “Do you wish to go by litter or on the back of the black beast?”

  “On foot,” I said, “and as a trader.”

  “That is wise. As the god Kukulcán, you would never reach Tenochtitlán. Thousands would swarm about you. Soon you could not move for people. You would be trampled to death under loving feet. Even worse, every lord, every cacique, of every town and village you passed through would suddenly cease to rule. You would be the supreme god of all. There would be great confusion, battles, death.”

  I thought it best not to divulge my plans to the popu lace, dreading the thought of their tears and lamenta tions.

  I warned the Council of Elders to beware of ships that might appear in my absence, to greet all strangers po litely, supply them with any food they might need, exchange presents, but under no circumstances to let them set foot in the city.

  I asked Ah den Yaxche to tell his granddaughter that she had my permission to ride the stallion while I was away. I also requested him to keep an eye on Don Luis and the fifty Azteca, of whom I was suspicious, to see that they and the rest of the prisoners kept diligently at work.

  We left the harbor at noon and reached the mainland before nightfall, anchoring in a cove protected from a heavy wind. The same crew that I had on the campaign against Tikan sailed with us. The wind held us back as we sailed north along the coast of Yucatán, so we did not turn west until three days later.

  We were headed for Ixtlilzochitl, a trading center that Chalco had passed through with his Azteca porters. We carried as presents for Moctezuma a bag of pearls of the finest orient, jewels that the emperor was reported to covet.

  On a morning of intense heat, the air filled with in sects, we entered a winding estuary where the water was a clear blue, showing a sandy bottom at a depth of two fathoms. The trading village lay at the head of the es tuary. Here we dropped anchor and furled our sails.

  I turned the ship over to the nacom, Flint Knife, with the same instructions I had given to the three elders about any white men he might encounter. To keep the hold clean, the sails dry, to wash down the decks every day.

  The dwarf begged to stay aboard until I returned, but since he was a man of some sagacity, I wanted him with me.

  Two days later we were ready to leave but were de layed by a week of torrential rain.

  At last, on a clear day of terrible heat, we took the trail for the land of the Azteca, ten porters carrying our supplies. The pearls, because of their value, were strapped to our waists. We carried black staves, the in signia of the merchant trade, although we had nothing to trade.

  I had left my mask on the Santa Margarita, but Chalco wore his until we had slogged through a sickly yellow marsh infested with water snakes and the village lay well behind us.

  What I expected to see hidden behind his jaguar mask, I do not know. I had never formed any idea of what he looked like, nor had I tried. Possibly a nose like the head of a stone club, a slanting forehead. Surely, the small and predatory eyes of a jungle cat lurked there.

  He wrapped his mask in plantain leaves and set about stowing it away in one of the packs. When he had fin ished, he turned and said something.

  In my amazement, I failed to hear.

  Before me stood a man much younger than I had thought, whose face was neither tattooed nor scarified as I had expected. It was the face of an artisan, a goldsmith or a painter of books or of one who could carve the deli cate golden hummingbirds that many of our nobles wore around their necks.

  Yes, the mask had hidden the sensitive face of an artisan. Without it Chalco was a different person, no longer the haughty and mysterious high priest.

  He smiled a modest, almost bashful smile that I am compelled to say seemed engaging. Small wonder that he wore a mask with catlike eyes and terrifying fangs.

  We left the hot salt marshes and were traveling fast when we came upon a herd of young deer. We had plentiful supplies of maize cakes and dried fish, but Chalco insisted upon killing two of the animals. It was not this that held us up, but the ritual afterwards.

  The porters laid the deer out in the grass, straightened their crumpled legs, and placed maguey leaves around the bodies in the four directions. It was an apology for the act of killing, made to the animals who were dead in the name of the living, honoring the law which decreed that all life was sacred, kin one to the other—the leaves of the maguey, the deer, ourselves.

  “We are cousins of the deer,” Chalco said, “and drink the same water that they drink.”

  Coming from a man who had argued that it was better to sacrifice a hundred prisoners than fifty, these words surprised and puzzled me.

  CHAPTER 14

  WE TRAVELED OUT OF THE LOW COUNTRY IN GOOD ORDER NOW THAT the salt marshes lay behind us.

  In two days we covered more than twelve leagues, but this pace proved too fast for the dwarf ’s short legs and we had to rest for a day in the village of Socochima. I myself was glad to rest, for after months of a soft life in the palace, doing little more strenuous than lifting books and walking from one room to the other, I was ill condi tioned.

  In addition to blistered feet and aching muscles, I was discomfited by crowds of curious villagers, who were not content until they had viewed me from all sides, loudly commented on my height, white skin, and long blond hair, and finally touched my garments or my bare skin.

  I was further annoyed.

  I had become used to people approaching me with downcast eyes, bowing in a gesture of kissing the earth, and backing away when they were dismissed. I was somewhat surprised at myself for feeling this way, but it did not lessen my annoyance at the lack of reverence these people showed.

  Beyond the village of Socochima, we began to climb and in five days entered a pass through high mountains. There it rained and then hailed, and a bitter wind blew from the heights.

  We changed into warmer clothes, which Chalco had wisely brought along, and thus kept from freezing. The dwarf complained bitterly at the cold and sulked, groaning that he wished to return to the ship. I had a notion to send him back, but fortunately thought better of it.

  At the end of the pass we came to Xocotlán and were now in the heart of the Azteca, Chalco informed us.

  The lord of the province was Ozintec, a young man with red-tinted hair hanging to his waist. He greeted Chalco warmly, apparently having known him before, but his gaze quickly fastened upon me.

  “What price do you wish for the giant?” he asked Chalco.

  “He is not for sale,” Chalco said.

  “You will sell him to the emperor, though.”

  “He is not for sale.”

  “The dwarf ?”

  “Equally, Lord Ozintec.”

  The dwarf said in Spanish, “I think the bastardo would like to sell us.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Let’s strangle him,” the dwarf said. “I will do it to night when he sleeps. Then we’ll return to the Santa Margarita and engage in no more tramping for a year or so.”

  Socochima had two small temples on a plaza facing each other. Beside them were piles of human skulls, arranged neatly in rows. I made a guess, as we left the plaza, that there were more than ten thousand of these whitened skulls stacked in the sun.

  The next day we made better time, having left the mountains for good
and finding ourselves on a plateau. Two snow-crested peaks rose up on the far horizon. We were on our way to the city of Texcála, Chalco said.

  “The city is a vassal of Moctezuma, but not a friend. The people hate him and strive for his downfall.”

  The journey to Texcála was uneventful, and we saw no one except Azteca runners, who passed us on their way to Tenochtitlán, carrying parcels of fish for the em peror’s table.

  We had encountered the runners many times since leaving the coast. They ran in relays, two men in a team, three leagues at a stretch, passing their parcels from one team to another. They made the long journey in two short days.

  “We’ll at least have fresh-caught fish when we sit down at Moctezuma’s table,” the dwarf said, trying to make a joke. “If we ever manage to see him, which I doubt.”

  That night before we reached Texcála, while we were sitting around our campfire, I asked Chalco how he planned to introduce me to the emperor.

  “I have been traveling as a common trader, but I shouldn’t be a trader when I meet and talk to Mocte zuma.”

  Chalco took a moment to think. “Not in the guise of a pochtéca, no, but I can’t introduce you as the god Kukulcán. I would not be believed. The emperor would think me a wild man and forthwith put me in a cage. And you as well.”

  “He must have heard of me,” I said.

  “If he has, it is with disbelief.”

  “Why?” the dwarf shouted angrily. “He is a god. He was welcomed into the City of the Seven Serpents as a god.”

  “Because of you,” Chalco said. “You prepared the way. The priests saw momentous things in the stars. People were tired of the quarreling elders. They prayed for the return of the god and were ready to receive him. The Azteca are not. They are flushed with their own importance. They rule all that they see, even the lands they do not see. They call themselves ‘We of the One and Only World’ and they believe this fanciful idea.”

  “How then is he to be introduced?” the dwarf wanted to know.

  “He will be an important lord from a far-off Mayan province come to pay tribute.”

  I had not been pleased with my first change of fortune—from a god to a trader—and was not pleased now to be merely a lord of a remote country. Yet I saw the sense of his words and did not bring up the subject again, though the dwarf never ceased to bedevil Chalco about it.

  In the morning we started through the vast country of Texcála. A good trail led us past two towering volca noes, both snow crested, one of them giving off smoke.

  We arrived at a village on the outskirts of Tenochtitlán after three days of hard travel. Here we rested for a day, bathed in a hot spring, changed our travel-worn clothes, and made up for the meals we had not eaten since the last of the deer.

  On the next morning, in the bright sunshine, we started down a raised causeway toward Tenochtitlán.

  The city shimmered white in the distance, a brilliant white since it rose up from a vast green lake and a myr iad of winding canals. Canals ran along either side of the causeway and from time to time we crossed them on wooden bridges.

  The dwarf paused in amazement.

  “I have seen the great places in many parts of this world,” he said, “in Egypt and the cities of Venice, Constantinople, and Rome, but never have I seen a city of such magnificence.”

  The causeway swarmed with people going into the city on foot. There were so many traveling that little at tention was paid to the dwarf or to me, which was a boon to us both.

  We reached a second broad causeway, this one at right angles to the road we were on, and here we saw hundreds of canoes, laden with produce, on their way to the marketplace. People walking along the causeway were talking to friends in the passing canoes.

  Not far beyond this crossing, where two temples stood opposite each other, we entered a narrow street and at once stepped out into an enormous square. Later, during my days in Tenochtitlán, I paced off its four sides and found that they came to a total of more than three thousand feet. This plaza was enclosed by solid ranks of buildings, richly decorated with sculpture and bas-reliefs of all descriptions.

  In the very center of this enclosure stood a pyramid, taller than the Temple of Kukulcán, with crenelated walls of many shades of red, blue, and yellow, with stairs on all four sides that faced the four directions of the world and led upward to a pair of small temples.

  The dwarf and I were left in front of this pyramid, beside a pool where silver-sided fish were swimming about. Promising to return shortly, Chalco disappeared with the ten porters at his heels and all but three of our pearls in his possession.

  We soon attracted a crowd bemused by my height and the dwarf ’s shortness. A girl of five or six, black eyed and brown skinned, came up and handed me a flower. In return I gave her one of the pearls I had withheld from Chalco.

  There were flowers everywhere—growing beside the pool, in baskets strung along the front of the temple, in the doorways of the buildings that enclosed the great square. Among the hundreds who passed, many men carried a bunch of flowers, and all the women had flowers in their hair. As we came along the causeway, I had seen dozens of canoes filled with roses.

  I could not remember ever having seen a flower in the City of the Seven Serpents, except in the hair of the slain young man, an Aztecatl. Certainly the men did not carry them, nor did the women.

  When I returned to the island, I would see that not one building or temple was without flowers. The nobles who lived in the palaces and the peasants in their huts would plant them. The priests would learn to tend them. Our soil was rich, the sun strong.

  Ya! We would have gardens throughout the city. They would rival, they would surpass, the gardens in Tenochtitlán, I said to myself.

  Yet as I gazed out over the swarms of white-clad Indians at the offices and sanctuaries that surrounded the great square, my spirits sank. Ornately carved and beautifully painted, rising side by side in splendid, unbroken rows, these buildings stood in sharp contrast to the square that faced the Temple of Kukulcán, the disorderly jumble of broken pillars and crumbling walls so recently snatched from the jungle.

  “To rebuild our city,” I said to the dwarf, “will take years. Many years. Unless we can double and triple the number of workers.”

  The dwarf did not answer. His gaze was fixed upon a passing litter in which a young lord lay stretched out, while servants fanned him with feathered whisks. He wore a gold nose plug, gold rings on his fingers, even his thumbs. From his ears dangled loops of gold, and his hair, knotted on top of his head, was bound with gold pins that glittered as he bounced along.

  The dwarf glanced at me. His face shone with the first light I had seen there in days.

  “He, he,” he said and grinned at some thought of his own.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE MORNING PASSED, A COLD SUN MOVED OVERHEAD, STILL CHALCO did not return.

  The dwarf was hungry, not having eaten a bite since breakfast. Vendors strolled everywhere through the crowds selling maize cakes and pink frijoles, but I had nothing to buy them with except a valuable pearl. To stay his hunger he drank from a fountain we found in front of the temple, the water pouring ice cold from the mouth of a stone goddess.

  When Chalco did return, his tunic showing signs of a hearty meal, his face was flushed with excitement.

  “Fortune smiles on us,” he said, as if he could scarcely believe the news he carried. “This is the day, the one day in the entire month, when the emperor hears petitions. Not for another month does he meet with visitors from the various parts of his empire. But I have managed to convince Lord Tlaloc, a cousin of the emperor who is in charge of these matters, that you cannot wait for a month. Important affairs in your country require your lordly attention.”

  Without further words, he herded us across the square to a door guarded by four stone serpents.

  “Speak to the emperor in Nahuatl,” he instructed me. “You speak it hesitantly, but well enough to be under stood.”

&
nbsp; Two lords in feathered regalia met us and led the way along a winding passage, across a bridge that spanned a stretch of black water and a wharf where scows were anchored, into an alcove lit by rows of votive torches.

  “You are to make a low bow,” Chalco went on. “Touch the palms of your hands on the floor, then raise them and touch your forehead. Do this three times.”

  “And you,” he said to the dwarf, “remain hidden until you are called. Whereupon step forward and present this gift.”

  Chalco handed him the bag of pearls. “Say that the pearls are a gift from Lord Zamabac. If you forget the name, as you are apt to do, say any name that comes to mind, like Tlacolhtecuhtli, for instance. If you can’t think of a name, say nothing and bow yourself out of sight, remembering never to show your back to the em peror.”

  “Lord of the Morning,” Chalco said, turning to me, “address the emperor as Great Speaker or Revered Speaker of the One World, for these are titles he likes and is known by. Also you might take notice of his beard. It is an unusual occurrence among the Azteca for men to be so endowed. Moctezuma’s is luxuriant, but he keeps it neatly trimmed and it’s as dark as a starless sky. He is very proud of it. You might say, ‘Great Speaker, Lord of the Beard.’ This will create a favorable im pression.”

  Cantú cleared his throat. “When I was a student in Salamanca, it was said that if a beard were a sign of in telligence, then a goat would be wiser than our great King Carlos.”

  Cantú laughed, but he was uncomfortable. No more, however, than I.

  The alcove was gray with smoke and reeked of in cense. I could hear voices on the far side of the door, earnest voices speaking in the strange language of the Mexica, so like and so unlike the language of the Maya.

  “Oh, yes,” said Chalco, “as a sign of respect to the emperor, remove your sandals. It is also customary to appear before him poorly dressed, but you are already in a very ragged state.”