Aztec

by neetha Napew

  As it did so, Tonatíu drew the dark covers of night over his bed, and the sky went purple. The mountains to the west, directly ahead of us, looked suddenly as sharply outlined and dimensionless as if they had been cut from black paper. Above them, there was a shy twinkle and then a bold spark of light: After Blossom again assuring us that this was only one more of many nights, not the last and everlasting one.

  "Open wide your eyes now, son Mixtli!" called my father from his place at the oars.

  As if After Blossom had been a signal fire, a second light appeared, this one low beneath the jagged line of black mountains. Then there came another point of light, and another, and twenties upon twenties more. And thus I saw Tenochtítlan for the first time in my life: not a city of stone towers, rich woodwork, and bright paint, but a city of light. As the lamps and lanterns and candles and torches were lit—in window openings, on the streets, along the canals, on building terraces and cornices and rooftops—the separate pinpoints of light became clusters, the clusters blended to form lines of light, the lines drew the outlines of the city.

  The buildings themselves, from that distance, were dark and indistinct of contour, but the lights, ayyo, the lights! Yellow, white, red, jacinth, all the various colors of flame—here and there a green or blue one, where some temple's altar fire had been sprinkled with salt or copper filings. And every one of those shining beads and clusters and bands of light shone twice, each having its brilliant reflection in the lake. Even the stone causeways that vault from the island to the mainland, even those wore lanterns on posts at intervals along their reach across the water. From our acáli, I could see only the two causeways going north and south from the city. Each looked like a slender bright-jeweled chain across the throat of night, with the city displayed between them, a splendid bright-jeweled pendant on the night's bosom.

  "Tenochtítlan, Cem-Anahiuac Tlali Yoloco," murmured my father. "It is truly The Heart and Center of the One World." I had been so transfixed with enchantment that I had not noticed him join me at the forward edge of our freighter. "Look long, son Mixtli. You may experience this wonder and many other wonders more than once. But, of first times, there is always and forever only one."

  Without blinking or moving my eyes from the splendor we were all too slowly approaching, I lay prone on a fiber mat and stared and stared until, I am ashamed to say, my eyelids closed of themselves and I fell asleep. I have no recollection of what must have been considerable noise and bustle and commotion when we landed, nor of my father's carrying me to a nearby inn for boatmen, where we stayed the night.

  I awoke on a pallet on the floor of an unremarkable room, where my father and a few other men lay still snoring on pallets of their own. Realizing that we were in an inn, and where that inn was, I leapt to lean out the window opening—and for a moment felt dizzy at seeing my altitude above the stone pavement below. It was the first time I had ever been inside a building atop a building. Or that is what I thought it was, until my father later showed me, from the outside, that our room was on the upper floor of the inn.

  I lifted my eyes to the city beyond the dockside area. It shone, it pulsated, it glowed white in the early sunlight. It made me proud of my own home island, because what buildings were not constructed of white limestone were plastered white with gesso, and I knew that most of the material had come from Xaltócan. Of course the buildings were frescoed and inlaid with bands and panels of vividly colored paints and mosaics, but the dominant effect was of a city so white, so nearly silver, that it almost hurt my eyes.

  The lights of the night before were all extinguished now. Only a still-smoldering temple fire somewhere sent a trail of smoke into the sky. But now I saw a new marvel: from the top of every roof, every temple, every palace in the city, from every highest eminence projected a flagpole, and from every staff flew a banner. They were not squared or triangular like battle ensigns; they were pennants many times longer than they were broad. And they were all white, except for the colored insignia they bore. Some of those I recognized—that of the city itself, of the Revered Speaker Axayácatl, of some gods—but others were unfamiliar to me: the symbols of local nobles and special city gods, I supposed.

  The flags of your white men are always swatches of cloth, often impressive in their elaborate blazonings, but still mere rags which either hang limp on their staffs or flutter and snap peevishly like a country woman's washing hung to dry on cactus spines. By contrast, those incredibly long banners of Tenochtítlan were woven of feathers—feathers from which the quills had been removed and only the lightest down used for the weaving. They were not painted or dyed. The flags were intricately woven of the feathers' natural colors: egret feathers for the white grounds of the flags, and for the designs the various reds of macaws and cardinals and parakeets, the various blues of jays and herons, the yellows of toucans and tanagers. Ayyo, I tell you true, I kiss the earth, there were all the colors and iridescences that can come only from living nature, not from man-mixed paint pots.

  But most marvelous, those banners did not sag or flap, they floated. There was no wind that morning. Just the movement of people on the streets, and acaltin in the canals stirred enough air current to support those tremendous but almost weightless pennants. Like great birds unwilling to fly away, content to drift dreamily, the banners hung full-spread on the air. The thousands of feather banners undulated gently, soundlessly, magically, over all the towers and pinnacles of that magic island-city.

  By daring to lean perilously far out the window opening, I could see, away to the southeast, the two volcano peaks called Popocatepetl and Ixtacciuatl, The Incense-Burning Mountain and The White Woman. Though it was the start of the dry season and the days were warm, both the mountains were capped with white—the first snow I had ever seen—and the smoldering incense deep inside Popocatepetl wafted a blue plume of smoke that floated over him as lazily as the feather banners floated over Tenochtítlan. I hurried from the window to wake my father. He must have been weary and wanting sleep, but he arose without complaint, with a smile of understanding at my eagerness to be out and away.

  The unloading and delivery of our barge's cargo being the responsibility of its freightmaster, my father and I had the day to ourselves. He had one errand—to make some purchase my mother had ordered; I forget what—so we first wended our way northward into Tlaltelólco.

  As you know, reverend friars, that portion of the island—what you now call Santiago—is separated from this southern part only by a broad canal crossed by several bridges. But Tlaltelólco was for many years an independent city, with its own ruler, and it brashly kept trying to outdo Tenochtítlan as chief city of the Mexíca. Tlaltelólco's delusions of superiority were for a long time humorously tolerated by our Revered Speakers. But when that city's late ruler Moquihuix had the effrontery to build a temple pyramid higher than any in the four quarters of Tenochtítlan, the Uey-Tlatoani Axayácatl was justifiably annoyed. He ordered his sorcerers to harass that now intolerable neighbor.

  If the stories are true, a carved stone face on one wall of Moquihuix's throne room suddenly spoke to him. The remark was so insulting to his manhood that Moquihuix snatched up a war club and pulverized the carving. Then, when he went to bed with his First Lady, the lips of her tipíli parts also spoke to him, impugning his virility. Those occurrences, besides making Moquihuix impotent even with his concubines, much affrighted him, but still he would not cede allegiance to the Revered Speaker. So, earlier in that same year in which I made my naming-day visit, Axayácatl had taken Tlaltelólco by force of arms. He himself, Axayácatl, personally threw Moquihuix off the top of his upstart pyramid and dashed out his brains. And, just those few months later, by the time my father and I saw Tlaltelólco—though it was still a fine city of temples and palaces and pyramids—it was satisfied to be the fifth "quarter" of Tenochtítlan, the city's marketplace appendage.

  Its immense open market area seemed to me to be as big as our whole island of Xaltócan, and richer, and more full of
people, and far noisier. Walkway aisles separated the area into squares where the merchants laid out their wares on benches or groundcloths, and every square or a square of squares was allotted to a different kind of merchandise. There were sections for goldsmiths and silversmiths, for feather workers, for sellers of vegetables and condiments, of meat and live animals, of cloth and leather goods, of slaves and dogs, of pottery and copperware, of medicines and cosmetics, of rope and cord and thread, of raucous birds and monkeys and other pets. Ah, well, that market has been restored, and you have doubtless seen it. Though my father and I got there early in the morning, the place was already thronged with customers. Most were macehualtin like us, but there were lords and ladies too, imperiously pointing at the wares they wanted and leaving the haggling of price to their accompanying servants.

  We were fortunate in arriving early, or at least I was, for there was one stall in the market which sold a commodity so perishable that it would be gone before midmorning, the most distinctive delicacy among all the foods for sale. It was snow. It was brought the ten one-long-runs from the crest of Ixtacciuatl, by relays of swift-messengers racing through the cool of the night, and the merchant kept it in thick clay jars under heaps of fiber mats. One serving of it cost twenty cacao beans. That was an entire day's wage for the average workman anywhere in the Mexíca nation. For four hundred beans you could buy a passably strong and healthy slave for life. So snow was more expensive, by weight, than anything else in the Tlaltelólco market, even the most costly jewelry of the goldsmiths' stalls. Few but the nobles could afford a taste of that rare refreshment. Nevertheless, said the snow man, he always sold out his morning's supply before it melted.

  My father made a token grumble. "I remember the Hard Times. In the year One Rabbit, the sky snowed snow for six days in a row. Snow was not just free for the taking, it was a calamity." But of course he relented and said to the vendor, who could hardly have cared less, "Well, since it is the boy's naming day..."

  He unslung his shoulder bag and counted out the twenty cacao beans. The merchant examined each of them to make sure it was not a carved wood counterfeit or a hollowed-out bean weighted with dirt. Then he uncovered one of his jars, scooped out a spoonful of the precious delicacy, patted it into a cone made of a curled leaf, poured over it a dollop of some sweet syrup, and handed it to me.

  I took a greedy bite and nearly dropped it, so surprised was I at its coldness. It made my lower teeth and my forehead ache, but it was the most delicious thing I had eaten in my young life. I held it out for my father to taste. He lapped it once with his tongue, and obviously savored it as much as I did, but pretended he wanted no more. "Do not bite it, Mixtli," he said. "Lick it so it will last longer."

  When he had bought whatever it was my mother wanted and had sent a porter carrying it to our boat, he and I went south again toward the center of the city. Although many of the ordinary buildings of Tenochtítlan were two and even three floors tall—and most of them made even taller for being set on pillars to avoid dampness—the island itself is nowhere more than two men's height above the waters of Lake Texcóco. So there were in those days almost as many canals as streets cutting up and down and across the city. In places a canal and a street ran side by side; the people walking could converse with the people afloat. At some corners we would see crowds of people bustling back and forth in front of us; at others we would see canoes gliding past. Some of those were passenger craft for hire, to whisk busy persons about the city more rapidly than they could walk. Others were the private acaltin of nobles, and those were much painted and decorated, and held awnings aloft to ward off the sun. The streets were of hard-packed smooth clay surfacing; the canals had masonry banks. In the many places where a canal's waters were almost at street level, its footbridges could be swiveled to one side while a boat passed.

  Just as the network of canals made Lake Texcóco practically a part of the city, so did the three main avenues make the city part of the mainland. Where those broad streets left the island they became wide stone causeways, along which a man could walk to any of five different cities on the mainland to the north, west, and south. There was another span which was not a walkway but an aqueduct. It supported a trough of curved tiles, wider and deeper than a man's two arms could stretch, and this still brings to the city sweet water from the spring of Chapultepec on the mainland to the southwest.

  Since all the roads of the land and all the water routes of the lakes converged here at Tenochtítlan, my father and I watched a constant parade of the commerce of the Mexíca nation, and of other nations as well. Everywhere about us were porters trudging under the weight of loads heaped on their backs and supported by forehead tumplines. Everywhere there were canoes of all sizes, piled high with produce going to and from the Tlaltelólco market, or the tribute from subordinate peoples going to the palaces, the treasury, the national warehouses.

  Just the multicolored baskets of fruit would give an idea of the extent of the trade. There were guavas and custard apples from the Otomí lands to the north, pineapples from the Totonaca lands on the eastern sea, yellow papayas from Michihuácan to the west, red papayas from Chiapan far to the south, and from the nearer-south Tzapoteca lands the tzapotin marmalade plums which gave that region its name.

  Also from the Tzapoteca country came bags of the dried little insects which yield the several brilliant red dyes. From nearby Xochimilco came flowers and plants of more kinds than I could believe existed. From the far southern jungles came cages full of colorful birds, or bales of their feathers. From the Hot Lands both east and west came bags of cacao for the making of chocolate, and the black orchid pods that make vanilla. From the southeastern coastland of the Olméca came the product which gave that people their name: óli, strips of elastic gum to be braided into the hard balls used in our game of tlachtli. Even the rival nation of Texcala, perennial enemy of us Mexíca, sent its precious copali, the aromatic resin for making perfumes and incense.

  From everywhere came packs and panniers of maize and beans and cotton; and bundles of squawking live huaxolome (the big, black, red-wattled birds you call gallipavos) and baskets of their eggs; and cages of the barkless, hairless, edible techíchi dogs; and haunches of deer and rabbit and boar venison; and jars of the clear sweet-water sap of the maguey plant, or the thicker white fermentation of that juice, the drunk-making drink called octli....

  My father was pointing out to me all those things, and telling me their names, when a voice interrupted him: "For just two cacao beans, my lord, I will tell of the roads and the days that lie beyond your son Mixtli's name day."

  My father turned. At his elbow, and not much taller than his elbow, stood a man who himself looked rather like a cacao bean. He wore a tattered and dirty loincloth, and his skin was the color of cacao: a brown so dark it was almost purple. His face was creased and wrinkled like the bean. He might have been much taller at some time, but he had become bent and crouched and shrunken with an age no one could have estimated. Come to think of it, he must have looked much as I do now. He held out one monkey hand, palm up, and said again, "Only two beans, my lord."

  My father shook his head and said politely, "To learn of the future, I go to a far-seer."

  "Did you ever visit one of those seers," the bent man asked, "and have him recognize you instantly as a master quarrier from Xaltócan?"

  My father looked surprised and blurted, "You are a seer. You do have the vision. Then why—?"

  "Why do I go about in rags with my hand out? Because I tell the truth, and people little value the truth. The seers eat the sacred mushrooms and dream dreams for you, because they can charge more for dreams. My lord, there is lime dust ingrained in your knuckles, but your palms are not callused by a laborer's hammer or a sculptor's chisel. You see? The truth is so cheap I can even give it away."

  I laughed and so did my father, who said, "You are an amusing old trickster. But we have much to do elsewhere—"

  "Wait," said the man insistently. He bent down
to peer into my eyes, and he did not have to bend far. I stared straight back at' him.

  It could be assumed that the mendicant old fraud had been lurking near us when my father bought me the flavored snow, and had overheard the mention of my significant seventh birthday, and had taken us for spendthrift rustics in the big city, easily to be gulled. But much later, when events made me strain to recall the exact words he spoke...

  He searched my eyes and murmured, "Any seer can look far along the roads and the days. Even if he sees something that will truly come to pass, it is safely remote in distance and time, it neither avails nor threatens the seer himself. But this boy's tonáli is to look closely at the things and doings of this world, and see them near and plain, and know them for what they signify."

  He stood up. "It will seem at first a handicap, boy, but that kind of near-seeing could make you discern truths the far-seers overlook. If you were to take advantage of the talent, it could make you rich and great."

  My father sighed patiently and reached into his bag.

  "No, no," the man said to him. "I do not prophesy riches or fame for your son. I do not promise him the hand of a beautiful princess or the founding of a distinguished lineage. The boy Mixtli will see the truth, yes. Unfortunately, he will also tell the truth he sees. And that more often brings calumny than reward. For such an ambiguous prediction, my lord, I ask no gratuity."

  "Take this anyway," said my father, pressing on him a single cacao bean. "Just do not predict anything more for us, old man."