Aztec

by neetha Napew

  With Nezahualpili as battle chief, all was organization and efficiency. Huge feather banners designated the main contingents among the thousands of Acolhua and the puny hundreds from Tenochtítlan and Tlácopan. Multicolored cloth flags marked the separate companies of men under the command of various knights. Smaller guidons marked the smaller units led by the cuáchictin under-officers. There were still other flags around which mustered the noncombatant forces: those responsible for transporting food, water, armor, and spare arms; the physicians and surgeons and priests of various gods; the marching bands of drummers and trumpeters; the battlefield clean-up detachments of Swallowers and Swaddlers.

  Although I told myself that I would be fighting for Nezahualpili, and although I was ashamed at the poor participation of the Mexíca in that war, they were my countrymen, after all. So I went to volunteer my services to their leader, the one and only Mexícatl commander on the field, an Arrow Knight named Xococ. He looked me up and down and said grudgingly, "Well, inexperienced though you may be, you at least appear more physically fit than anybody in this command but me. Report to the Cuáchic Extli-Quani."

  Old Extli-Quani! I was so pleased to hear his name again that I fairly ran to the guidon where he stood bellowing at a group of unhappy-looking young soldiers. He wore a headdress of feathers and a splinter of bone through the septum of his nose, and held a shield painted with the symbols denoting his name and rank. I knelt and brushed the ground in a perfunctory gesture of kissing the earth, then flung an arm around him as if he had been a long-lost relative, crying delightedly, "Master Blood Glutton! I rejoice to see you again!"

  The other soldiers goggled. The elderly cuáchic flushed dark red and roughly thrust me away, spluttering, "Unhand me! By the stone balls of Huitzilopóchtli, but this man's army has changed since I was last afield. Doddering old growlers, pimply striplings, and now this! Are they enlisting cuilóntin now? To kiss the enemy to death?"

  "It is I, Master!" I cried. "The commander Xococ told me to join your company." It took me a moment to realize that Blood Glutton must have taught hundreds of schoolboys in his time. It took him a moment to search his memory and find me in some remote corner of it.

  "Fogbound, of course!" he exclaimed, though not with such glee as I had evinced. "You are in my company? Are your eyes cured, then? You can see now?"

  "Well, no," I had to admit.

  He stamped ferociously on a small ant. "My first active duty in ten years," he muttered, "and now this. Maybe cuilóntin would be preferable. Ah, well, Fogbound, fall in with the rest of my trash."

  "Yes, Master Cuáchic," I said with military crispness. Then I felt a tug at my mantle and I remembered Cozcatl, who had been at my heels all that time. "What orders have you for young Cozcatl?"

  "For whom?" he said, puzzled, looking around. Not until he looked down did his gaze light on the light boy. "For him?" he exploded.

  "He is my slave," I explained. "My body servant."

  "Silence in the ranks!" Blood Glutton bawled, both to me and to his soldiers, who had begun to giggle. The old cuáchic walked in a circle for a time, composing himself. Then he came and stuck his big face into mine. "Fogbound, there are a few knights and nobles who rate the services of an orderly. You are a yaoquizqui, a new recruit, the lowest rank there is. Not only do you present yourself complete with servant, but what you bring is this runt of an infant!"

  "I cannot leave Cozcatl behind," I said. "But he will never be a nuisance. Cannot you assign him to the chaplains or some other rear guard where he can be useful?"

  Blood Glutton growled, "And I thought I had escaped from that school to a nice restful war. All right. Runt, you report to that black and yellow guidon yonder. Tell the quartermaster that Extli-Quani ordered you to scullery duty. Now, Fogbound," he said sweetly, persuasively, "if the Mexíca army is arranged to your satisfaction, let us see if you remember anything of battle drill." I and all the other soldiers jumped when he bellowed, "You misbegotten rabble—FOUR ABREAST—MAKE RANKS!"

  I had learned at The House of Building Strength that training to be a warrior was far different from my childhood play at being one. Now I learned that both the playing and the training were pale imitations of the real thing. To mention just one hardship that the tellers of glorious war stories omit, there is the dirt and the smell. At play or in school, after a day of hard exercise, I had always had the pleasant relief of a bath and a good sweat in the steam house. Here, there were no such facilities. At the end of a day of drilling we were filthy, and we stayed that way, and we stank. So did the open pits dug for our excretory functions. I loathed my own odor of dried sweat and unwashed garments as much as I did the ambient miasma of feet and feces. I regarded the uncleanliness and stench as the nastiest aspect of war. At that time, anyway, before I had been to war.

  Another thing. I have heard old soldiers complain that, even in the nominally dry season, a warrior can rely on it that Tlaloc will mischievously make any and every battle the more difficult and miserable, with rain drenching a man from above and mud dragging at his feet below. Well, that was the rainy season, and Tlaloc sent unremitting rain during the several days we spent practicing with our weapons and rehearsing the various maneuvers we would be expected to perform on the battlefield. It was still raining, and our mantles were dead weights, and our sandals were ponderous lumps of mud, and our mood was foul, when at last we set out for Texcala.

  That city was thirteen one-long-runs to the east-southeast. In decent weather, we could have traveled there in two days of forced march. But we would have arrived breathless and fatigued, to face an enemy who had had nothing to do but rest while they waited for us. So, considering the circumstances, Nezahualpili ordered that we make the journey more leisurely, and stretch it over four days, so that we should arrive comparatively unwearied.

  For the first two days we tramped directly east, so that we had to climb and cross only the lower slopes of the volcanic range which, farther south, became the steep peaks called Tlaloctgpetl, Ixtacciuatl, and Popocatepetl. Then we turned southeast and headed directly toward Texcala city. The whole way, we went slogging through mud, except when we were slipping and sliding on wet rock terrain. That was the farthest I had ever been abroad, and I should have liked to see the landscape. But, even if my circumscribed vision had not prevented that, the perpetual veil of rain did. On that journey I saw little more than the slowly trudging mud-caked feet of the men in front of me.

  We did not march encumbered by our battle armor. Besides our customary garb, we carried a heavy garment called a tlamaitl, which we wore in cold weather and rolled up in at night. Each man also carried a pouch of pinoli, ground maize sweetened with honey, and a leather bag of water. Each morning before starting to march, and again at the midday rest stop, we mixed the pinoli and water to make a nourishing if not very filling meal of atóli mush. At each night's halt, we would have to wait for the heavier-burdened supply forces to catch up to us. But then the commissary troops would provide every man with a substantial meal of hot food, including a cup of thick, nutritious, spirit-lifting hot chocolate.

  Whatever his other duties, Cozcatl always brought my evening meal with his own hands, and often managed to get me a larger than standard portion or to slip me a stolen fruit or sweet. Some of the other men of Blood Glutton's company grumbled or sneered at the way I was coddled, so I weakly tried to refuse the extras Cozcatl brought.

  He admonished me, "Do not act noble and deny yourself, master. You are not depriving your fellows in these forward columns. Do you not know that the best-fed men are the ones who stay farthest back from the fighting? The porters and cooks and message carriers. They are also the most boastful about their service. I only wish that I could somehow sneak a pot of hot water up here. Forgive me, master, but you smell atrocious."

  Late in the wet, gray afternoon of the fourth day, when we were still at least one-long-run from Texcala, our forward scouts espied the waiting Texcalteca forces, and hurried back to report to Nezahual
pili. The enemy were waiting, in strength, on the other side of a river we should have to cross. In dry weather the river was probably no more than a shallow trickle, but after all those days of steady rain it was a formidable barrier. Though still no more than hip high at its deepest, it was swift-running and broader than arrow range from bank to bank. The enemy's plan was obvious. While we waded across the river, we should be slow-moving targets, unable either to use our weapons or to dodge the enemy's. With their arrows and atlatl-flung javelins, the Texcalteca expected to decimate and demoralize us before we ever reached the farther side of the river.

  It is told that Nezahualpili smiled and said, "Very well. The trap has been so nicely prepared by the enemy and Tlaloc alike, we must not disappoint them. In the morning we will fall into it."

  He gave orders for our army to halt for the night where it was, still well distant from the river, and for all commanding knights and under-officers to gather about him and hear their instructions. We mere soldiers sat or squatted or stretched out on the soggy ground, while the commissary workers began preparing our evening meal, an ample one, for we would have no time to eat even atóli in the morning. The armorers unpacked and laid the stacks of spare weapons handy for distribution as needed the next day. The drummers tightened their drumheads, made slack by dampness. The physicians and chaplain-priests prepared their medicines and operating instruments, their incense and books of incantations, so that they were ready either to attend tomorrow's injured or to hear, on behalf of Filth Eater, the confessions of the dying.

  Blood Glutton returned from the command conference as we were being served our food and chocolate. He said, "When we have done eating, we will don our battle costume and arm ourselves. Then, when the dark has come, we will move to our assigned positions, and there we will sleep in place, for we must be early awake."

  As we ate, he told us Nezahualpili's plan. At dawn, a full third of our army, in trim formation, complete with drums and conch trumpets, would march boldly up to and into the river as if ignorant of any danger waiting on the other side. When the enemy let fly its missiles, the attackers would scatter and splash about, to give an impression of surprised confusion. When the rain of missiles got intolerable, the men would turn and flee the way they had come, in seemingly undisciplined rout. Nezahualpili's belief was that the Texcalteca would be deceived by that disarray and would incautiously give chase, so excited by their apparent easy triumph that they would give no thought to its possibly being a ruse.

  Meanwhile, the remainder of Nezahualpili's army would have been waiting, concealed in rocks, shrubbery, trees on both sides of the long line of march leading to the river. Not a man of them would show himself or use a weapon until our "retreating" forces had enticed the entire Texcala army across the river. The Texcalteca would be running along a corridor between hidden walls of warriors. Then Nezahualpili, watching from a high place, would give the nod to his drummers, and the drums would give a signal crash of noise. His men on both sides of the ambuscade would rise up, and the walls of the corridor would close together, trapping the enemy between them.

  A gray-haired old soldier of our company asked, "And where will we be stationed?"

  Blood Glutton grunted unhappily. "Almost as far back and safe as the cooks and priests."

  "What?" exclaimed the elderly veteran. "Tramp all this way and not get close enough even to hear the clash of obsidian?"

  Our cuáchic shrugged. "Well, you know how shamefully few we are. We can hardly blame Nezahualpili for denying us a share of the battle, considering that he is fighting Ahuítzotl's war for him. Our Knight Xococ pleaded that we might at least march in the front, into the river, and be the bait for the Texcalteca—we would be the likeliest to be killed—but Nezahualpili refused us even that chance at glory."

  I personally was glad enough to hear it, but the other soldier was still disgruntled. "Do we just sit here like lumps, then, and wait to escort the victorious Acolhua and their captives back to Tenochtítlan?"

  "Not quite," said Blood Glutton. "We may get to take a prisoner or two ourselves. Some of the trapped Texcalteca may break out past the closing walls of Acolhua warriors. Our Mexíca and Tecpanéca companies will be fanned out to either side, north and south, as a net to snare any who do elude the ambush."

  "Be lucky if we snare so much as a rabbit," grumbled the gray-haired soldier. He stood up and said to the rest of us. "All you yaoquizque fighting for the first time, know this. Before you get into your armor, go off in the bushes and evacuate yourselves good and empty. You will have loose bowels once the drums begin, and no chance to wriggle out of that tight quilting."

  He went away to take his own advice, and I followed. As I squatted, I heard him mumbling nearby, "Almost forgot this thing," and I glanced over. He took from his pouch a small object wrapped in paper. "A proud new father gave it to me to bury on the battleground," he said. "His new son's navel string and little war shield." He dropped the packet at his feet, stamped it into the mud, then squatted to urinate and defecate on it.

  Well, I thought to myself, so much for that little boy's tonáli. I wondered if my own natal shield and string had been likewise disposed of.

  While we lesser soldiers struggled into the quilted cotton body armor, the knights were donning their flamboyant costumes, and they were splendid to see. There were three orders of knighthood: the Jaguar and the Eagle, to one of which a warrior might get elected for having distinguished himself in war, and the Arrow, to which belonged those who had achieved expert marksmanship and many killings with that most inaccurate of missiles.

  A Jaguar Knight wore a real jaguar skin as a sort of cloak, with the big cat's head as a helmet. Its skull was removed, of course, but its front teeth were glued in place, so that its upper fangs curved down the knight's forehead and its lower hooked upward over his chin. His body armor was tinted like a jaguar's hide: tawny with dark brown markings. An Eagle Knight wore for a helmet an oversized eagle head made of wood and molded paper, covered with real eagle feathers, the open beak hooking forward above his forehead and below his chin. His body armor was also covered with eagle feathers, his sandals had artificial talons projecting beyond their toes, and his feather mantle was more or less shaped like folded wings. An Arrow Knight wore a helmet shaped like the head of whatever bird he chose—so long as it was of a lesser breed than the eagle—and his armor was covered with the same feathers that he preferred for fletching his arrows.

  All the knights carried wooden, leather, or wickerwork shields covered with feathers, and those feathers were worked into colorful mosaic designs, each knight's design being his own name symbols. Many knights had become known for their bravery and prowess, so it was an act of daring for them to go into battle flaunting their symbols on their shields. They were sure to be sought out for attack by some enemy soldier, himself eager to enhance his own name as "the man who bested the great Xococ" or whomever. We yaoquizque carried unadorned shields, and our armor was uniformly white—until it got uniformly muddy. We were allowed no blazonings, but some of the older men tucked feathers into their hair or streaked their faces with paint to proclaim at least that they were not fighting their first campaign.

  Once armored, I and numerous other novice soldiers went farther to the rear, to the priests, who yawned as they heard our necessarily hasty confessions to Talzolteotl, and then gave us a medicine to prevent our showing cowardice in the coming battle. I really did not believe that anything swallowed into the stomach could quell a fear that exists in the recalcitrant head and feet, but I obediently took my sip of the potion: fresh rainwater in which was mixed white clay, powdered amethyst, leaves of the cannabis plant, flowers of the dogbane, the cacao bush, and the bell orchid. When we returned to group around Xococ's flag, the Mexícatl knight said:

  "Know this. The object of tomorrow's battle is to secure prisoners for sacrifice to Huitzilopóchtli. We are to strike with the flat of our weapons, to stun, to take men alive." He paused, then said ominously, "However, whi
le this is for us merely a War of Flowers, for the Texcalteca it is not. They will fight for their lives, and fight to take ours. The Acolhua will suffer most—or win the most glory. But I want all of you, my men, to remember: if you should encounter a fleeing enemy, your orders are to capture him. His orders are to kill you."

  With that not very inspiriting speech, he led us out into the rainy darkness—each of us armed with a spear and a maquahuitl—northward at a right angle off the previous line of march, dropping off companies of men at intervals along the way. Blood Glutton's company was the first to be detached, and, when the other Mexíca had plodded on, the cuáchic gave us one last bit of instruction:

  "Those of you who have fought before, and have previously taken an enemy prisoner, you know you must take the next one unaided, or you will be accounted unmanly. However, you new yaoquizque, if you have a chance at taking your first captive, you are allowed to call for the help of as many as five of your fellow recruits, and you will all share equally in credit for the capture. Now follow me.... Here is a tree. You there, soldier, you climb and hide in its branches—You there, crouch in that jumble of rocks... Fogbound, you get behind this bush..."

  And so we were sown in a long line stretching northward, our separate posts a hundred strides or more apart. Even when daylight came, none of us would be within sight of the next man, but we would all be within calling distance. I doubt that many of us slept that night, except perhaps the hardened old veterans. I know I did not, for my shrub offered concealment only if I hunkered on my heels. The rain continued to drizzle down. My overmantle soaked through, and then my cotton armor, until it hung so clammy and heavy that I thought I might never be able to stand erect when the time came.