Aztec

by neetha Napew

  After what seemed like a sheaf of years of misery, I heard faint sounds from the southward, from my right. The main bodies of Acolhua troops would be preparing to move, some into ambuscade, some into the very teeth of the Texcalteca. What I heard was a chaplain chanting the traditional prayer before battle, though only snatches of it were audible to me so far away:

  "Oh, mighty Huitzilopóchtli, god of battles, a war is being mounted... Choose now, oh great god, those who must kill, those who must be killed, those who must be taken as xochimíque that you may drink their hearts' blood— Oh, lord of war, we beg you to smile upon those who will die on this field or on your altar... Let them proceed straight to the house of the sun, to live again, loved and honored, among the valiants who have preceded them—"

  Ba-ra-ROOM! Stiff as I was, I started violently at the combined thunder of the massed "drums which tear out the heart." Not even the muffling rain all about could mute their earthquake rumble to anything less than bone-shaking. I hoped the fearsome noise would not frighten the Texcala troops into flight before they could be lured into Nezahualpili's surprise envelopment. The roar of drums was joined by the long wails and honks and bleats of the conch trumpets, then the whole noise began slowly to diminish, as the musicians led the decoy part of the army away from me, along the line of march toward the river and the waiting enemy.

  What with the rainclouds practically within arm's reach overhead, the day did not begin with anything like a sunrise, but it was by then perceptibly lighter. Light enough, anyway, for me to see that the shrub behind which I had sat hunched all night was only a wizened, nearly leafless huixachi, which would not adequately have hidden a ground squirrel. I would have to seek a better place to lurk, and I still had plenty of time to do so. I got up creakily, carrying my maquahuitl and dragging my spear so it was not visible above the surrounding scrub, and I moved off in a sort of crouching lope.

  What I could not tell you, even to this day, reverend friars, not even if you were to put me to the Inquisitorial persuasions, is why I went in the direction I did. To find other concealment, I could have moved backward or to either side, and still have been within hailing distance of the others of my company. But where I went was forward, eastward, toward the place where the battle would soon commence. I can only presume that something inside me was telling me, "You are on the fringe of your first war, Dark Cloud, perhaps the only war you will ever be engaged in. It would be a pity to stay on the fringe, a pity not to experience as much of it as you can."

  However, I did not get near the river where the Acolhua confronted the Texcalteca. I did not even hear sounds of battle until the Acolhua, as Nezahualpili had hoped, rushed after them in full force. Then I heard the bellow and whoop of war cries, the shrieks and curses of wounded men, and, above all, the whistling of arrows and warbling of flung javelins. All our mock weapons at school, harmlessly blunted, had made no distinctive noise. But what I heard now were real missiles, pointed and bladed with keen obsidian, and, as if they exulted in their intent and ability to deal death, they sang as they flew through the air. Ever afterward, whenever I drew a history that included a battle, I always pictured the arrows, spears, and javelins accompanied by the curly symbol that means singing.

  I never got closer than the noise of the battle—first coming from my right front, where the armies had met at the river, then progressing farther to my right, as the Acolhua fled and the Texcalteca gave chase. Then Nezahualpili's signal drums abruptly boomed for the corridor to close its walls, and the tumult of battle sounds multiplied and increased in volume: the brittle clash of weapons against weapons, the thuds of jaguar grunts, eagle screams, owl hoots. I could envision the Acolhua trying to restrain their own blows and thrusts, while the Texcalteca desperately fought with all their strength and skill, and with no compunction against killing.

  I wished I could see it, for it would have been an instructive exhibition of the Acolhua's fighting skills. By the nature of the battle, theirs had to be the greater art. But there was rolling land between me and the battle site, and shrubbery and clumps of trees, and the gray curtain of rain, and of course my own nearsightedness. I might have tried to go nearer, but I was interrupted by a hesitant tap on my shoulder.

  Still in my protective crouch, I whirled and leveled my spear, and almost skewered Cozcatl before I recognized him. The boy stood, also hunched over, with a warning finger to his lips. With the breath I had gasped in, I hissed out, "Cozcatl, curse you! What are you doing here?"

  He whispered, "Following you, master. I have been near you all the night. I thought you might need a better pair of eyes."

  "Impertinent pest! I have not yet—

  "No, master, not yet," he said. "But now, yes, you do. One of the enemy approaches. He would have seen you before you could see him."

  "What? An enemy?" I hunkered even lower.

  "Yes, master. A Jaguar Knight in full regalia. He must have fought his way out of the ambush." Cozcatl risked raising his head far enough for a quick look. "I think he hopes to circle around and fall upon our men again from an unexpected direction."

  "Look again," I said urgently. "Tell me exactly where he is and where he is headed."

  The little slave bobbed up and down again and said, "He is perhaps forty longpaces to your left front, master. He is moving slowly, bent over, though he does not appear to be wounded, merely cautious. If he continues as he goes, he will pass between two trees that stand ten long paces directly to your front."

  With those directions, a blind man could have managed the interception. I said, "I am going to those trees. You stay here and keep a discreet eye on him. If he notices my movement, you will know it. Give me a shout and then run for the rear."

  I left my spear and my overmantle lying there, and took only my maquahuitl. Squirming almost as close to the ground as a snake does, I moved ahead until the trees loomed out of the rain. The two trees stood amid an undergrowth of high grass and low shrubs, through which an almost imperceptible deer trail had been lightly trampled. I had to assume that the fugitive Texcaltecatl was following that trail. I heard no warning call from Cozcatl, so I had got into position unobserved. I squatted on my heels at the base of one tree, keeping it between me and the man's approach. Holding my maquahuitl with both fists, I brought it back behind my shoulder, parallel to the ground, and held it poised.

  Through the drizzle sound of the rain, I heard only the faintest rustle of grass and twigs. Then a muddy foot in a muddy sandal, its sole rimmed with jaguar claws, was set down on the ground directly in front of my hiding place. A moment later, the second foot stood beside it. The man, now sheltered between the trees, must have risked standing fully upright to look about and get his bearings.

  I swung the obsidian-edged sword as I had once swung at a nopali trunk, and the knight seemed to hang in the air for an instant before he crashed full length on the ground. His feet in their sandals stayed where they were, severed above the ankles. I was on him in one bound, kicking away the maquahuitl he still grasped, and laying the blunt point of my own against his throat, and panting the ritual words spoken by a captor to his captive. In my time, we did not say anything so crude as, "You are my prisoner." We always said courteously, as I said to the fallen knight, "You are my beloved son."

  He snarled viciously, "Then bear witness! I curse all the gods and all their get!" But that outburst was understandable. After all, he was a knight of the elite Jaguar order, and he had been cut down—in his own one moment of carelessness—by a young, obviously new and untried soldier of the lowly yaoquizqui rank. I knew that, had we met face to face, he could have minced me at his leisure, sliver by sliver. He knew it too, and his face was purple and his teeth grated together. But at last his rage ebbed to resignation, and he replied with the traditional words of surrender, "You are my revered father."

  I lifted my weapon from his neck and he sat up, to gaze stonily at the blood gushing from his leg stumps and at his two feet still standing patiently, almost unbloodied,
side by side on the deer trail ahead of him. The knight's jaguar costume, though rain-drenched and mud-smeared, was still a handsome thing. The dappled skin which depended from the fierce helmet head was fashioned so that the animal's front legs served as sleeves, coming down the man's arms so that the claws rattled at his wrists. His fall had not broken the strap which held his brightly feathered round shield to his left forearm.

  There was another rustling in the brush, and Cozcatl joined us, saying quietly but proudly, "My master has taken his first war prisoner, all unaided."

  "And I do not want him to die," I said, still panting—from excitement, not exertion. "He is bleeding badly."

  "Perhaps the stumps could be tied off," the man suggested, in the heavily accented Náhuatl of Texcala.

  Cozcatl quickly unbound the leather thongs of his sandals and I tied one tightly around each of my prisoner's legs, just below the knee. The bleeding dwindled to an oozing. I stood up between the trees and looked and listened, as the knight had done. I was somewhat surprised at what I heard—which was not much. The uproar of battle to the south had diminished to no more than a hubbub like that of a crowded marketplace, a babble interspersed with shouted commands. Obviously, during my little skirmish, the main battle had been concluded.

  I said to the glum warrior, meaning it for condolence, "You are not the only captive, my beloved son. It appears that your whole army has been defeated." He only grunted. "Now I will take you to have your wounds tended. I think I can carry you."

  "Yes, I weigh less now," he said sardonically.

  I bent down with my back to him and took his shortened legs under my arms. He looped his arms around my neck, and his blazoned shield covered my chest as if it had been my own. Cozcatl had already brought my mantle and spear; now he collected my wicker shield and my blood-stained maquahuitl. Tucking those things under his arms, he picked up an amputated foot in either hand and followed me as I moved off through the rain. I trudged toward the murmurous noise to the south, where the fighting had finally wound down, and where I supposed our army would be disentangling the resultant confusion. Halfway there, I met the members of my own company, as Blood Glutton was collecting them from their various overnight stations to march them back to the main body of the army.

  "Fogbound!" shouted the cuáchic. "How dared you desert your post? Where have you—?" Then his roaring stopped, but his mouth stayed open, and his eyes opened almost as wide. "May I be damned to Mictlan! Look what my most treasured student has brought! I must inform the commander Xococ!" And he dashed away.

  My fellow soldiers regarded me and my trophy with awe and envy. One of them said, "I will help you carry him, Fogbound."

  "No!" I gasped, the only breath I could spare. No one else would claim a share of the credit for my exploit.

  And so I—bearing the sullen Jaguar Knight, trailed by the jubilant Cozcatl, escorted by Xococ and Blood Glutton proudly striding on either side of me—finally came to the main body of both armies, at the place where the battle had ended. A tall pole bore the flag of surrender which the Texcalteca had raised: a square of wide gold mesh, like a gilded piece of fishnet.

  The scene was not of celebration or even tranquil enjoyment of victory. Most of those warriors of both sides who had not been wounded, or were only trivially wounded, lay about in postures of extreme exhaustion. Others, both Acolhua and Texcalteca, were not lying still but writhing and contorting, as they variously screamed or moaned a ragged chorus of "Yya, yyaha, yya ayya ouíya," while the physicians moved among them with their medicines and ointments, and the priests with their mumbles. A few ablebodied men were assisting the doctors, while others went about collecting scattered weapons, dead bodies, and detached parts of bodies: hands, arms, legs, even heads. It would have been difficult for a stranger to tell which of the men in that wasteland of carnage were the victors and which the vanquished. Over all hung the commingled smell of blood, sweat, body dirt, urine, and feces.

  Weaving as I walked, I peered about, looking for someone in authority to whom I might deliver my captive. But the word had got there before me. I was suddenly confronted by the chief of all the chiefs. Nezahualpili himself. He was garbed as a Uey-Tlatoani should be—in cloak—but under that he wore the feathered and quilted armor of an Eagle Knight, and it was spattered with blood spots. He had not just stood aloof in command, but had joined in the fighting himself. Xococ and Blood Glutton respectfully dropped several steps behind me as Nezahualpili greeted me with a raised hand.

  I eased my captive down to the ground, made a tired gesture of presentation, and said, with the last of my breath, "My lord, this—this is my—well-beloved son."

  "And this," the knight said with irony, nodding up at me, "this is my revered father. Mixpantzinco, Lord Speaker.

  "Well done, young Mixtli," said the commander. "Ximopanolti, Jaguar Knight Tlaui-Colotl."

  "I greet you, old enemy," said my prisoner to my lord. "This is the first time we have met outside the frenzy of battle."

  "And the last time, it appears," said the Uey-Tlatoani, kneeling down companionably beside him. "A pity. I shall miss you. Those were some wondrous duels we had, you and I. Indeed, I looked forward to the one that would not be inconclusively ended by the intervention of our underlings." He sighed. "It is sometimes as saddening to lose a worthy foe as to lose a good friend."

  I listened to that exchange in some amazement. It had not earlier occurred to me to notice the device worked in feathers on my prisoner's shield: Tlaui-Colotl. The name, Armed Scorpion, meant nothing to me, but obviously it was famous in the world of professional soldiers. Tlaui-Colotl was one of those knights of whom I have spoken: a man whose renown was such that it devolved upon the man who finally bested him.

  Armed Scorpion said to Nezahualpili: "I slew four of your knights, old enemy, to fight free of your cursed ambush. Two Eagles, a Jaguar, and an Arrow. But if I had known what my tonáli had in store"—he threw me a look of amused disdain—"I would have let one of them take me."

  "You will fight other knights before you die," the Revered Speaker told him, consolingly. "I will see to that. Now let us ease your injuries." He turned and shouted to a doctor working on a man nearby.

  "Only a moment, my lord," said the doctor. He was bent over an Acolhuatl warrior whose nose had been sliced off, but fortunately recovered, though somewhat mashed and muddy from having been much trodden upon. The surgeon was sewing it back onto the hole in the soldier's face, using a maguey thorn for a needle and one of his own long hairs for a thread. The replacement looked more hideous than the hole. Then the doctor hastily slathered the nose with a paste of salted honey, and came scurrying to my prisoner.

  "Undo those thongs on his legs," he said to a soldier assistant, and to another, "Scoop out from the fire yonder a basin of the hottest coals." Armed Scorpion's stumps began slowly to bleed again, then to spurt, and they were gushing by the time the assistant came bearing a wide, shallow bowl of white-hot embers, over which small flames flickered.

  "My lord physician," Cozcatl said helpfully, "here are his feet."

  The doctor grunted in exasperation. "Take them away. Feet cannot be stuck back on like blobs of noses." To the wounded man he said, "One at a time or both at once?"

  "As you will," Armed Scorpion said indifferently. He had never once cried out or whimpered with pain, and he did not then, as the doctor took one of his stumps in each hand and plunged both their raw ends into the dish of glowing coals. Cozcatl turned and fled the sight. The blood sizzled and made a pink cloud of stinking steam. The flesh crackled and made a blue smoke that was less offensive. Armed Scorpion regarded the process as calmly as did the physician, who lifted the now charred and blackened leg ends out of the coals. The searing had sealed off the slashed vessels, and no more blood flowed. The doctor liberally applied to the stumps a healing salve: beeswax mixed with the yolks of birds' eggs, the juice of alder bark and of the barbasco root. Then he stood up and reported, "The man is in no danger of dying, my lord,
but it will be some days before he recovers from the weakness of having lost so much blood."

  Nezahualpili said, "Let there be a noble's litter prepared for him. The eminent Armed Scorpion will lead the column of captives." Then he turned to Xococ, regarded him coldly, and said:

  "We Acolhua lost many men today, and more will die of their injuries before we see home again. The enemy lost about the same, but the surviving prisoners are almost as many as our surviving warriors. To the number of thousands. Your Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl should be pleased at the work we have done for him and his god. If he and Chimalpopoca of Tlácopan had sent genuine armies of full strength, we might well have gone on to vanquish the entire land of Texcala." He shrugged. "Ah, well. How many captives did your Mexíca take?"

  Knight Xococ shuffled his feet, coughed, pointed to Armed Scorpion, and mumbled, "My lord, you are looking at the only one. Perhaps the Tecpanéca took a few stragglers, I do not know yet. But of the Mexíca"—he motioned at me—"only this yaoquizqui..."

  "No longer a yaoquizqui, as you well know," Nezahualpili said tartly. "His first capture makes him an iyac in rank. And this single captive—you heard him say he slew four Acolhua knights today. Let me tell you: Armed Scorpion has never troubled to count his victims of lesser rank than knight. But he has probably accounted for hundreds of Acolhua, Mexíca, and Tecpanéca in his time."

  Blood Glutton was sufficiently impressed to murmur, "Fogbound is a hero in truth."

  "No," I said. "It was not really my sword stroke, but a stroke of fortune, and I could not have done it without Cozcatl, and—"

  "But it happened," Nezahualpili said, silencing me. To Xococ he continued, "Your Revered Speaker may wish to reward the young man with something higher than iyac rank. In this engagement he alone has upheld the Mexíca reputation for valor and initiative. I suggest that you present him in person to Ahuítzotl, along with a letter which I myself will write."

  "As you command, my lord," said Xococ, almost literally kissing the earth. "We are very proud of our Fogbound."