Aztec

by neetha Napew

I said, "I do not see how that could be managed. Men and women being what they are, you can hardly allow social intercourse with foreigners and hope to prevent the sexual."

  "Oh, we are human," he conceded. "Our men willingly sample the women of other races, and some of our own women wantonly go astraddle the road. But any of the Cloud People who formally takes an outlander for husband or wife is, at that moment, no longer one of the Cloud People. That fact is usually enough to discourage marriage with aliens. But there is another reason why such marriages are uncommon. Surely you yourself can see it."

  I shook my head uncertainly.

  "You have traveled among other peoples. Now look at our men. Look at our women. In what nation outside Uaxyacac could they find partners so nearly ideal for each other?"

  I already had looked, and the question was unanswerable. Granted, I had in my time known exceedingly well-favored examples of other peoples: my own beautiful sister Tzitzi, who was of the Mexíca; the Lady of Tolan, who was of the Tecpanéca; pretty little Cozcatl, who was of the Acolhua. And granted, not every single specimen of the Tzapoteca was unfaultably imposing. But I could not deny that the majority of those people were of such superb face and figure as to make the majority of other peoples seem little better than early and failed experiments of the gods.

  Among the Mexíca, I was reckoned a rarity for my height and musculature; but almost every man of the Tzapoteca was as tall and strongly built as I, and had both strength and sensitivity in his face. Almost every woman was amply endowed with womanly curves, but was lithe as a willow wand; and her face was fashioned for goddesses to imitate: large and luminous eyes, straight nose, a mouth made for kissing, unblemished and almost translucent skin. Zyanya was a shapely vessel of burnished copper, brimming with honey, set in the sun. The men and women alike stood proud and moved gracefully and spoke their liquid Lóochi in soft voices. The children were exquisite and lovably well behaved. I am rather glad that I could not step outside myself to see how I compared in such company. But the other foreigners I saw in Uaxyacac—most of them immigrant Mixteca—alongside the Cloud People looked lumpy and mud-colored and imperfectly put together. Still, I am not entirely credulous. So, as we say, I took with my little finger the old interpreter Red River's tale of how his people had been created; spontaneously, and whole, and splendid. I could not believe that the Cloud People had sprouted from those mountains full-formed, like the heart flower. No other nation ever claimed such a nonsensically impossible origin. Every people must come from somewhere else, must they not?

  But I could believe, from the evidence of my own eyes, that the Tzapoteca had haughtily balked at interbreeding with any outlanders, that they had preserved only their prime bloodlines, even when it meant remorselessness toward their own loved ones. Wherever and however the Cloud People truly originated, they had ever since refused to become a nation of less than the best. I could believe that, because there I was, walking among them: the admirable men and the desirable women. Ayyo, the eminently, irresistibly, excruciatingly desirable women!

  * * *

  As is our practice here, Your Excellency, the lord scribe has just read back to me the last sentence I spoke, to remind me where we left off at our last session. Dare I suppose that Your Excellency joins us today expecting to hear how I ravished the entire female population of Záachila?

  No?

  If, as you say, it would not surprise you to hear it, but you do not wish to, then let me really surprise Your Excellency. Though we spent several days in and around Záachila, I did not once touch a woman there. Uncharacteristic of me, yes, as Your Excellency remarks. But I do not claim to have enjoyed any sudden redemption from my libertine ways. Rather, I was then afflicted by a new perversity. I did not want any of the women who could be had, because they could be had. Those women were adorable and seductive and doubtless skillful—Blood Glutton wallowed in lechery all the time we were there—but their very availability made me decline them. What I wanted, what I desired and lusted for was a real woman of the Cloud People: meaning some woman who would recoil in horror from a foreigner like me. It was a dilemma. I wanted what I could not possibly have, and I would settle for nothing less. So I had none, and I can tell Your Excellency nothing about the women of Záachila.

  Permit me to tell you a little about Uaxyacac instead. That land is a chaos of mountains, peaks, and crags; mountains shouldering between mountains; mountains overlaid on mountains. The Tzapoteca, content in their mountain protection and isolation, have seldom cared to venture outside those ramparts, just as they have seldom welcomed anyone else inside. To other nations, they long ago became known as "the closed people."

  However, the first Uey-Tlatoani Motecuzóma was determined to extend the Mexíca trade routes southward and ever farther southward, and he chose to do so by force, not by diplomatic negotiation. Early in the year in which I was born, he had led an army into Uaxyacac and, after causing much death and devastation, finally succeeded in taking its capital by siege. He demanded unhindered passage for the Mexíca pochtéa and, of course, laid the Cloud People under tribute to The Triple Alliance. But he lacked supply lines to support an occupying force, and so, when he marched home with the bulk of his army, he left only a token garrison in Záachila to enforce the collection of the levy. As soon as he was out of sight, the Tzapoteca quite naturally slaughtered the garrison warriors, and resumed their former way of life, and never paid so much as a cotton rag of tribute.

  That would have brought new Mexíca invasions which would have laid waste the country—Motecuzóma was not named Wrathful Lord without reason—except for two things.

  The Tzapoteca were wise enough to keep their promise that Mexíca merchants could traverse their land unmolested. And in that same year Motecuzóma died. His successor, Axayácatl, was sufficiently conscious of the difficulties of defeating and holding such a faraway country, that he sent no more armies. So there was no love, but mutual truce and trade between the two nations, during the twenty years before my arrival and for some years afterward.

  Uaxyacac's ceremonial center and most revered city is the ancient Lyobaan, a short journey eastward of Záachila, which old Red River one day took me and Cozcatl to see. (Blood Glutton stayed behind to disport himself in an auyanicali, a house of pleasure.) Lyobaan means Holy Home, but we Mexíca have long called the city Mictlan, because those Mexíca who have seen it believe it is truly the earthly entrance to that dark and dismal afterworld.

  It is a sightly city, very well preserved for its great age. There are many temples of many rooms, one of those rooms being the biggest I have ever seen anywhere with a roof not supported by a forest of columns. The walls of the buildings, both inside and out, are adorned with deeply carved patterns, like petrified weaving, endlessly repeated in mosaics of white limestone intricately fitted together. As Your Excellency hardly needs to be told, those numerous temples at the Holy Home were evidence that the Cloud People, like us Mexíca and like you Christians, paid homage to a whole host of deities. There was the virgin moon goddess Béu, and the jaguar god Beezye, and the dawn goddess Tangu Yu, and I know not how many more.

  But, unlike us Mexíca, the Cloud People believed, as do you Christians, that all those gods and goddesses were subordinate to one great overlord who had created the universe and who ruled everything in it. Like your angels and saints and such, those lesser gods could not exercise their several separate holy functions—indeed, they could not have existed—without the permission and supervision of that topmost god of all creation. The Tzapoteca called him Uizye Tao, which means The Almighty Breath.

  The austerely grand temples are only the upper level of Lyobaan. They were specially positioned over openings in the earth which lead to natural caves and tunnels and caverns in the ground beneath, the favored burial places of the Tzapoteca for ages untold. To that city have always been brought their dead nobles, high priests, and warrior heroes, to be ceremonially interred in richly decorated and furnished rooms directly under the temples.r />
  But there was and is room for commoners as well, in still deeper crypts. Red River told us that there was no known end to the caves, that they interconnect and run on underground for countless one-long-runs, that stone festoons hang from their ceilings and stone pedestals thrust up from their floors, that there are stone curtains and draperies of weird and wonderful but natural design: as beautiful as frozen waterfalls or as awesome as the Mexíca's imagined portals of Mictlan.

  "And not only the dead come to the Holy Home," he said. "As I have already told you, when I feel my life is no longer of use, I shall walk here to disappear."

  According to him, any man or woman, commoner or noble, who was crippled by old age, or weighed down by suffering or sorrow, or was tired of life for any reason, could make application to the priests of Lyobaan for voluntary live burial in the Holy Home. He or she, provided with a pine-splinter torch but with nothing for sustenance, would be let into one of the cave openings and it would be closed behind him. He would then wander through the maze of passages until his light or his strength gave out, or until he found a seemly cavern, or until he reached a spot where instinct told him some family ancestor had already laid himself down and found it a pleasant place to die. There the newcomer would compose himself and wait calmly for his spirit to depart for whatever other destination awaited it.

  One thing about Lyobaan puzzled me: that those holiest of holy temples were set upon ground-level stone platforms and were not elevated upon high pyramids. I asked the old man why.

  "The ancients built for solidity, to resist the zyuüú," he said, using a word I did not know. But in the next moment both Cozcatl and I knew it, for we felt it, as if our guide had summoned it especially for our instruction.

  "Tlalolíni," said Cozcatl, in a voice which shook like everything else around us.

  We who speak Náhuatl call it tlalolíni, the Tzapoteca call it zyuüú, you call it earthquake. I had felt the land move before, on Xaltócan, but there the movement was a mild jiggling up and down, and we knew it was just the island's way of settling itself more comfortably on the unstable lake bottom. At the Holy Home the movement was different: a rolling sway from side to side, as if the mountain had been a small boat on a tossing lake. Just as I sometimes have felt on rough waters, I felt a queasiness in my stomach. Several pieces of stone dislodged themselves from high up on one building and came bouncing down to roll a little way across the ground.

  Red River pointed to them and said, "The ancients built stoutly, but seldom do many days pass in Uaxyicac without a zyuüú, mild or severe. So now we generally build less ponderously. A house of saplings and thatch cannot much harm its inhabitants if it collapses upon them, and it can be easily rebuilt."

  I nodded, my insides still so disquieted that I was afraid to open my mouth. The old man grinned knowingly.

  "It affected your belly, yes? I will wager it has affected another organ besides."

  So it had. For some reason, my tepúli was erect, engorged to such length and thickness that it actually ached.

  "No one knows why," said Red River, "but the zyuüú affects all animals, most notably the human ones. Men and women get sexually aroused, and occasionally, in a turbulent quake, aroused to the extreme of doing immodest things, and in public. When the tremor is really violent or prolonged, even small boys may involuntarily ejaculate, and small girls come to a shuddering climax, as if they had been the most sensual adults, and of course they are bewildered by the occurrence. Sometimes, long before the ground moves, the dogs and coyotes start to whine or howl, the birds flit about. We have learned to judge from their behavior when a truly dangerous tremor is about to come. Our miners and quarriers run to safer ground, the nobles evacuate their stone palaces, the priests abandon their stone temples. Even when we are forewarned, though, a major convulsion can cause much damage and death." To my surprise, he grinned again. "We must nevertheless concede that the zyuüú usually gives more lives than it takes. After any severe tremor, when three-quarters of a year have passed, a great many babies are born within just a few days of each other."

  I could well believe it. My rigid member felt like a club thrusting from my crotch. I envied Blood Glutton, who was probably making that a day to be forever remembered in that auyanicali. If I had been anywhere in the city streets of Záachila, I might have fractured the truce between the Mexíca and Tzapoteca by stripping and violating the first woman I met...

  No, no need to elaborate on that. But I might tell Your Excellency why I think an earth tremor arouses only fear in the lesser animals, but fear and sexual excitement in humans.

  On the first night our company camped outdoors, at the beginning of that long journey, I had first realized and felt the fearsome impact of the darkness and emptiness and loneliness of the nighttime wilderness, and afterward I had been seized by a compelling urge to copulate. Human animals or lower animals, we feel fear when we confront any aspect of nature we can neither comprehend nor control. But the lesser creatures do not know that what they fear is death, for they do not know so well what death is. We humans do. A man may staunchly face an honorable death on the battlefield or the altar. A woman may risk an honorable death in childbirth. But we cannot so courageously face the death that comes as indifferently as a thumb and finger snuffing out a lamp wick. Our greatest fear is of capricious, meaningless extinction. And in the moment of our feeling that greatest fear, our instinctive impulse is to do the one most life-preserving thing we know how to do. Something deep in our brain cries to us in desperation, "Ahuilnema! Copulate! It cannot save your life, but it may make another." And so a man's tepúli rears itself, a woman's tipíli opens invitingly, their genital juices begin to flow...

  Well, that is only a theory, and only my own. But you, Your Excellency, and you, reverend friars, should eventually have opportunity to verify or disprove it. This island of Tenochtítlan-Mexíco sits even more uneasily than Xaltócan upon the ooze of the lake floor, and it shifts its position now and then, sometimes violently. Soon or later, you will feel a convulsive quake of the earth. See for yourselves, then, what you feel in your reverend parts.

  There was really no reason for our party to have lingered in Záachila and its environs for as many days as we did, except that it was a most pleasant place for us to rest before we undertook the long and grueling climb through the mountains beyond—and except for the fact that Blood Glutton, belying his grizzled years, seemed determined to leave not a single one of the accessible Tzapoteca beauties neglected. I confined myself to seeing the local sights. I did not even exert myself to seek trade bargains; for one reason, the most prized local commodity, the famous dye, was out of stock.

  You call that dye cochineal, and you may know that it is obtained from a certain insect, the nocheztli. The insects live in millions on immense, cultivated plantations of the one special variety of nopali cactus on which they feed. The insects mature all at the same season, and their cultivators brush them off the cactus into bags and kill them, either by dipping the bags in boiling water or hanging them in a steam house or leaving them in the hot sun. Then the insects are dried until they are wrinkled seeds, and are sold by weight. Depending on how they were killed—boiled, steamed, or baked—they yield when crushed a dye of jacinth yellow-red or a bright scarlet or that particular luminous carmine which is obtainable from no other source. I tell all this because the Tzapoteca's latest crop had been bought in its entirety by an earlier and northbound Mexícatl trader, that one with whom I had conversed way back in the Xochimilca country, and there was no more dye to be had that year, for even the most pampered insects cannot be hurried.

  I did remember what that same trader had told me: of a new and even more rare purple dye which was somehow mysteriously connected with snails and a people called The Strangers. I asked of the interpreter Red River and several of his merchant friends what they might know of the matter, but all I got from anybody was a blank look and an echo: "Purple? Snails? Strangers?" So I made only one trading transaction
in Záachila, and it was not the sort that a typically tightfisted pochtéatl would have made.

  Old Red River arranged for me to pay a courtesy call on Kosi Yuela, the Bishosu Ben Záa, which means the Revered Speaker of the Cloud People, and that ruling lord kindly treated me to a tour of his palace so I might admire its luxurious furnishings. Two of those inspired my acquisitive interest. One was the Bishosu's queen, Pela Xila, a woman to make a man salivate, but I contented myself with kissing the earth to her. When I saw the other thing, however—a beautifully worked feather tapestry—I determined to have it.

  "But that was made by one of your own countrymen," said my host. He sounded slightly peeved that I should stand staring at a Mexícatl artifact instead of exclaiming over the products of his own Cloud People: the interestingly mottled draperies in the throne room, for instance—colored by having been tied in knots and dyed, then relied and redyed, several times over.

  Nodding at the tapestry, I said, "Let me hazard a guess, my lord. The feather-work artist was a wayfarer named Chimali."

  Kosi Yuela smiled. "You are right. He stayed in these parts for some time, making sketches of the mosaics of Lyobaan. And then he had nothing with which to pay the innkeeper, except that tapestry. The landlord accepted it, though unhappily, and later came to complain to me. So I reimbursed him, for I trust that the artist will eventually return and redeem the thing."

  "I am sure he will," I said, "for I have long known Chimali. Therefore I may see him before you do. If you would allow it, my lord, I shall be glad to pay his debt and assume the pledge myself."

  "Why, that would be kind of you," said the Bishosu. "A most generous favor to your friend and to us as well."

  "Not at all," I said. "I merely repay your kindness to him. And anyway"—I remembered the day I had led a frightened Chimali home with him wearing a pumpking head—"it will not be the first time I have helped my friend out of a temporary difficulty."