Aztec Autumn a-2

by Gary Jennings

  "But why," asked Améyatl, "would she have sought to foment such alien passions and warlike ambitions among our peaceable people? What profit to her?"

  "You will not be flattered to hear this, great-granddaughter. Most of the earlier Rememberers simply attributed it to the natural contrariness of all women."

  Améyatl only wrinkled her pretty nose at him, so Canaútli grinned toothlessly and went on:

  "You should be glad to learn, then, that I hold a slightly different theory. It is a known fact that the Yaki men are as inhumanly cruel to their own women as they are to every non-Yaki human being alive. It is my belief that that one woman was obsessed with having every man treated as she must have been treated by those of her own nation. To set all the men of The One World to butchering one another in war, and bloodily sacrificing one another to the lip-smacking satisfaction of this or that god."

  "As almost every community in The One World does now," said Yeyac. "And as the Mexíca priests and warriors would teach us to do. Except that we are on good terms with all our neighbors. We would have to march far beyond the mountains to wage a battle or take a prisoner for sacrifice. Nevertheless, the despicable G'nda Ké did indeed succeed."

  "Well, she very nearly did not," said Canaútli. "She convinced hundreds of Aztlan's people to emulate her in worshiping the bloody-handed god Huitzilopóchtli. But other hundreds sensibly refused to be converted. In time, she had split the Aztéca into two factions so inimical—as I said, even brothers against brothers—that she and her followers crept away to take up residence in seven caverns in the mountains. There they armed themselves, and practiced at the skills of war, and awaited the Yaki woman's command to go forth and commence conquering other peoples."

  "And surely," said softhearted Améyatl, "the first to suffer would have been the still-peaceable dissidents of Aztlan."

  "Most assuredly. However. However, by good fortune, Aztlan's tlatocapíli of the time was about as irascible and fractious and intolerant of fools as is your own father Mixtzin. He and his loyal city guard went to the mountains and surrounded the misbelievers and slew many of them. And to the survivors he said, 'Take your contemptible new god and your families and begone. Or be slain to the last man, last woman, last child, last infant in the womb.' "

  "And they went," I said.

  "They did. After sheaves of years of wandering, and new generations of them being born, they came at last to another island in another lake, where they espied the symbol of their war god—an eagle perched on a nopáli cactus—so there they settled. They called the island Tenochtítlan, 'Place of the Tenoch,' which was, in some forgotten local dialect, the word for the nopáli cactus. And, for what reason I have never troubled to inquire, they renamed themselves the Mexíca. And in the course of many more years they thrived, they fought and overwhelmed their neighbors, and then nations farther afield." Canaútli shrugged his bony old shoulders, resignedly. "Now, for good or ill, Tenamáxtli, through the efforts of your uncle and that other Mexícatl, also named Mixtli—we are reconciled again. We shall see what comes of it. And now I tire of remembering. Go, children, and leave me."

  We started away, but I turned back to ask, "That Yaki woman—G'nda Ké—whatever became of her?"

  "When the tlatocapíli stormed the seven caves, she was among the first slain. But she was known to have coupled with several of her male followers. So there is no doubt that her blood still runs in the veins of many Mexíca families. Perhaps in all of them. That would account for their still being as warlike and sanguinary as she was."

  I will never know why Canaútli refrained from telling me right then: that I myself very likely contained at least a drop of that Yaki woman's blood, that I could certainly claim to be Aztlan's foremost example of an Aztéca-Mexíca "family connection" since I had been born of an Aztécatl mother and sired by that Mexícatl Mixtli. Maybe the old man hesitated because he deemed it his granddaughter's place to disclose or withhold that family secret.

  And I really do not know, either, why she did withhold it. When I was a child, the population of Aztlan was so small and close-knit that my illegitimacy had to have been widely known. An ordinary woman of the macehuáli class would have been severely censured and probably chastised if she had borne a bastard. But Cuicáni, being sister to the then tlatocapíli and later the Uey-Tecútli, hardly had to fear gossip and scandal. Still, she kept me in ignorance of my paternity until that horrific day in the City of Mexíco. I can only suspect that she must have hoped, during all the intervening years, that that other Mixtli would someday return to Aztlan, and to her embrace, and that he would rejoice in finding that the two of them had a son.

  To be honest, I do not even know why I never, in childhood or later, evinced any inquisitiveness about my parentage. Well, Yeyac and Améyatl had a father but no mother; I had a mother but no father. I must have reasoned that a situation so self-evident could only be normal and commonplace. Why ponder on it?

  My mother would occasionally make a motherly proud remark—"I can see, Tenamáxtli, that you will grow up to be a handsome man, strong of features, just like your father." Or, "You are getting very tall for your age, my son. Well, so was your father much taller than most other men." But I paid little heed to such comments; every mother fondly believes that her hatchling will prove an eagle.

  Of course, if anyone at all had ever voiced an insinuating hint, I would have been prodded to ask questions about that absent father. But I was the nephew and the son of the lord and the lady occupying Aztlan's palace; no one with good sense would ever have risked Mixtzin's displeasure. Neither was I ever taunted by playmates nor neighbor children. And, at home, Yeyac and Améyatl and I lived together in amity and harmony, more like half brothers and sister than like cousins. Or so we did, I should say, until a certain day.

  IV

  Yeyac was then fourteen years old and I was seven, newly named and newly attending school. We were living in the splendid new palace by then, each of us young ones glorying in having his or her own sleeping room, and being childishly jealous of our separate privacies. So I was vastly surprised when one day, about twilight, Yeyac stepped into my room, uninvited and without asking permission. It happened that he and I were alone in the building—except for any servants who may have been working in the kitchen or elsewhere downstairs—because our elders, Mixtzin and Cuicáni, had gone to the city's central square to watch Améyatl participate in a public dance being performed by all the girls of The House of Learning Manners.

  What mainly surprised me was that Yeyac entered, quietly, while my back was turned to the room door, so I did not even know he was there until his hand reached under my mantle, between my legs, and—as if weighing them—gently bounced my tepúli and olóltin. As startled as if a claw-clacking crab had got under my mantle, I gave a prodigious jump in the air. Then I whirled and stared at Yeyac, bewildered and disbelieving. My cousin had not only breached my privacy, he had handled my private parts.

  "Ayya, touchy, touchy!" he said, half smirking. "Still the little boy, eh?"

  I spluttered, "I was not aware... I did not hear..."

  "Do not look so indignant, cousin. I was but comparing."

  "Doing what?" I said, mystified.

  "I daresay mine must have been as puny as yours when I was your age. How would you like, small cousin, to have what I have got now?"

  He raised his mantle, unloosed his máxtlatl loincloth, and there emerged—sprang forth, actually—a tepúli like none I had ever seen before. Not that I had seen many, only those in evidence when I and my playmates frolicked naked in the lake. Yeyac's was much longer, thicker, erect, engorged and almost glowing red at its bulbous tip. Well, his full name was Yeyac-Chichiquíli, I reminded myself—Long Arrow—so perhaps the name-bestowing old seer had been truly prescient in this case. But Yeyac's tepúli looked so swollen and angry that I asked, sympathetically:

  "Is it sore?

  He laughed a loud laugh. "Only hungry," he said. "This is the way a man's is supposed
to be, Tenamáxtli. The bigger, the better. Do not you wish you possessed the like?"

  "Well," I said hesitantly, "I expect I will. When I am of age. Like you."

  "Ah, but you should start exercising it now, cousin, because it improves and enlarges, the more it is employed. That way, you can be sure to have an impressive organ when you are man-grown."

  "Employ it how?"

  "I will show you," he said. "Take mine in your grasp." And he took my hand and put it there, but I yanked it back again, saying severely:

  "You have heard the priest warn that we should not play with those parts of ourselves. You are in the same cleanliness class as I at The Learning Manners House."

  (Yeyac was one of those older boys who had had to start, along with us really young ones, at the most elementary school level. And now, though he had worn the máxtlatl for a year or more, he had not yet qualified to go on to a calmécac.)

  "Manners!" he snorted scornfully. "You really are an innocent. The priests warn us against pleasuring ourselves, only because they hope that sometime we will pleasure them."

  "Pleasure?" I said, more befuddled than ever.

  "Of course the tepúli is for pleasure, imbecile! Did you think it was only to make water with?"

  "That is all mine has ever done," I said.

  Yeyac said impatiently, "I told you—I will show you how to have pleasure with it. Watch. Take mine in your hand and do this to it." He was briskly rubbing his own clasped hand up and down the length of his tepúli. Now he let go of it, hugged me to him and closed my hand on it—though mine only barely encircled the girth of it.

  I imitated, as well as I could, what he had been doing. He closed his eyes, and his face got almost as red as his tepúli bulb, and his breathing became quick and shallow. After a while of nothing else happening, I said, "This is very boring."

  "And you are very awkward," he said, his voice quavery. "Tighter, boy! And faster! And do not interrupt my concentration."

  After another while I said, "This is extremely boring. And how is my doing this supposed to benefit mine?"

  "Pochéoa!" he growled, which is a mildly dirty word. "All right. We will exercise them both at once." He let me take my hand away, but with his own resumed the stroking of his tepúli. "Lie down here on your pallet. Lift up your mantle."

  I complied, and he lay down beside me, but opposite—that is, with his head near my crotch and my head near his.

  "Now," he said, still vigorously stroking himself. "Take mine in your mouth—like this." And, to my amazement and incredulity, he did just that with my small thing. But I said vehemently:

  "I most certainly will not. I know your japeries, Yeyac. You will make water in my mouth."

  He made a noise like "arrgh!" in a rage of frustration, but without releasing my tepúli from his mouth, or breaking the rhythm of his hand stroking his own, close before my face. For a moment, I feared that he might be angry enough to bite my thing right off. But all he did was keep his lips tight about it, and suck at it and wiggle his tongue all over it. I confess that I felt sensations that were not at all unpleasant. It even seemed that he might be right—that my small organ was actually lengthening under these ministrations. But it did not stiffen like his, it merely let itself be played with, and that did not go on for long enough for me to get bored again. Because suddenly Yeyac's whole body convulsed, and he widened his mouth to gobble into it also my sac of olóltin, and sucked hard at all those parts of mine. Then his tepúli gushed a stream of white matter, liquid but thick, like coconut-milk syrup, that splashed all over my head.

  Now it was I who bellowed "arrgh!"—in disgust—and frantically wiped at the stickiness befouling my hair, eyebrows, lashes and cheeks. Yeyac rolled away from me and, when he could cease his gasping and catch his breath, said, "Ayya, do not go on behaving like a timid child. That is only omícetl. It is the spurting of the omícetl that gives such sublime pleasure. Also, omícetl is what creates babies."

  "I do not want any babies!" I croaked, wiping even more desperately.

  "Fool of a cousin! The omícetl does that only to females. Exchanged between men it is an expression of—of deep affection and mutual passion."

  "I have no affection for you, Yeyac, not any more."

  "Come, now," he said, wheedlingly. "In time you will learn to like our playing together. You will yearn for it."

  "No. The priests are right to forbid such play. And Uncle Mixtzin seldom agrees with any priest, but I wager he would, if I told him about this."

  "Ayya—touchy, touchy," Yeyac said again, but not jovially this time.

  "No fear. I will not tell. You are my cousin, and I would not see you beaten. But you are nevermore to touch my parts or show me yours. Do your exercises elsewhere. Now kiss the earth to that."

  Looking disappointed and disgruntled, he slowly bent down to touch a finger to the stone floor and then to his lips, the formal gesture signifying that I-swear-to-it.

  And he kept that promise. Not ever again did he try to fondle me or even let me see him except when he was fully clothed. He evidently found other boys who were not, like me, averse to learning what he taught, because when the Mexícatl warrior in charge of our House of Building Strength assigned students to the tedious duty of standing guard in remote places, I noticed that Yeyac and three or four boys of varying ages were always eager to step forward. And Yeyac may have been right in what he had said about the priests. There was one who, whenever he wanted something carried to his room, would always ask Yeyac to do it, and then neither of them would be seen again for a long while.

  But I did not hold that against Yeyac, or hold any lingering resentment about his behavior with me. True, relations between the two of us were strained for some time, but they gradually relaxed to mere coolness and perhaps overpolite politeness. Eventually I, at least, quite forgot the episode—until much, much later, when something occurred to make me remember it. And meanwhile, my tepúli grew on its own, without requiring any outside assistance, as the years passed.

  Over those years, we Aztéca got accustomed to the crowded pantheon of gods the Mexíca had brought with them and raised temples to. Our people began to join in the rites for this or that god—at first, I think, just to show courtesy and respect to the Mexíca now residing among us. But, in time, our Aztéca seem to have found that they were deriving something—security? uplift? solace? I do not know—from sharing in the worship of those gods, even some of the ones they might otherwise have found repellent, such as the war god Huitzilopóchtli and the frog-faced water goddess Chalchihuítlicué. Nubile girls prayed to Xochiquétzal, the Mexíca's goddess of love and flowers, that they might snare a desirable young man and make a good marriage. Our fishermen, before setting out to sea, besides uttering their usual prayers to Coyolxaúqui for a bounteous catch, prayed also that Ehécatl, the Mexíca's wind god, would not raise a gale against them.

  No person was expected, as are Christians, to confine his or her devotion to any particular god. Nor were people punished, as Christians are, if they switched their allegiance at whim from one deity to another, or impartially among many of them. Most of our folk still reserved their truest adoration for our longtime patron goddess. But they saw no harm in giving some, too, to the Mexíca deities—partly because those newcome gods and goddesses provided them with so many new holidays and impressive ceremonies and causes for song and dance. The people were not even much deterred by the fact that many of those deities demanded compensation in the form of human hearts and blood.

  We never, during those years, engaged in any wars to provide us with foreign prisoners for sacrifice. But, surprisingly, there was never any lack of persons—Aztéca as well as Mexíca—to volunteer to die and thereby nourish and please the gods. Those were the people convinced by the priests that if they simply lolled about and waited to die of old age or in some other ordinary way, they risked an instant plunge into the depths of Míctlan, the Dark Place, there to suffer an eternal afterlife devoid of delight, divers
ion, sensation, even misery, an afterlife of absolute nothingness. To the contrary, said the priests, anyone undergoing the Flowery Death, so-called, would instantly be wafted to the lofty realm of the sun god, Tonatíu, there to enjoy a blissful and ever-lasting afterlife.

  That is why numerous slaves offered themselves to the priests, to be sacrificed to any god—the slaves cared not which—believing they would thus be improving their lot. But flagrant gullibility was not limited to the slaves. A young male freeman would volunteer to be slain, after which his body would be flayed of its entire skin, and that would be donned by a priest to imitate and honor Xipe Totec, the god of seedtime. A freeborn young maiden would volunteer to have her heart torn out, to represent the mother-goddess Teteoínan's dying while giving birth to Centéotl, the maize god. Parents even volunteered their infant children to be suffocated in sacrifice to Tlaloc, the rain god.

  Myself, I never felt the least inclination to self-immolation. No doubt influenced by my irreverent Uncle Mixtzin, I never cared much for any god, and cared even less for priests. Those dedicated to the Mexíca's new-brought deities, I found especially detestable, because, as a mark of their high calling, they performed various mutilations on their own bodies and, worse, never washed themselves or their garments. For some while after their arrival in Aztlan, they had worn rough work clothes and, like every other worker, cleaned themselves after a day of hard labor. But later, when they were excused from the work teams and donned their priestly gowns, they never so much as took a dip in the lake—let alone enjoyed a really good purification in a steam hut—and very soon were repulsively filthy, the air around them almost visibly mephitic. If I had ever taken the trouble to meditate on my cousin Yeyac's curious sexual tastes, I probably would have done no more than wonder, with a shudder, how he could possibly bring himself to embrace such an abhorrent thing as a priest.