Aztec

by neetha Napew

  "It is good that you got to see her one last time," he said, with a sigh. "She died not long after. Mercifully, in my opinion, though Ahuítzotl was most annoyed, having paid so prodigally...."

  My vision returned to me, and I found that I was violently shaking the man and saying rather insanely, "I could never have eaten tapir meat in the jungle if I had known. But you knew all the time. How did you know?"

  He did not answer. He only said blandly, "It was believed that the tapir woman could not move that mass of bloated flesh. But somehow she toppled over, face forward, so that her tapir snout could not breathe, and she suffocated to death."

  "Well, it is now your turn to perish, you accursed foreseer of evils!" I think I was out of my mind with grief and revulsion and rage. "You will go back to the Mictlan you came from!" And I shoved into the throng of banquet guests, only dimly hearing him say:

  "The menagerie keepers still insist that the tapir woman could not have died without assistance. She was young enough to have lived in that cage for many, many more years—"

  I found Blood Glutton and rudely interrupted his conversation with his soldier friends: "I have need of a weapon, and no time to fetch one from our lodgings. Are you carrying your dagger?"

  He reached under his mantle to the back binding of his loincloth, and said, with a hiccup, "Are you to do the carving of the deer meat?"

  "No," I said. "I want to kill somebody."

  "So early in the party?" He brought out the short obsidian blade and squinted to see me better. "Are you killing anyone I know?"

  I said no again. "Only a nasty little man. Brown and wrinkled as a cacao bean. Small loss to anybody." I reached out my hand. "Please, the dagger."

  "Small loss!" Blood Glutton exclaimed, and withheld the knife. "You would assassinate the Uey-Tlatoani of Texcóco? Mixtli, you must be as drunk as the proverbial four hundred rabbits!"

  "Assuredly somebody is!" I snapped. "Cease your babbling and give me the blade!"

  "Never. I saw the brown man when he arrived, and I recognize that particular disguise." Blood Glutton tucked the knife away again. "He honors us with his presence, even if he chooses to do it in mummery. Whatever your fancied grievance, boy, I will not let you—"

  "Mummery?" I said. "Disguise?" Blood Glutton had spoken coolly enough to cool me somewhat.

  One of the soldier guests said, "Perhaps only we who have often campaigned with him are aware of it. Nezahualpili likes sometimes to go about thus, so he may observe his fellows at their own level, not from the dais of a throne. Those of us who have known him long enough to recognize him do not remark on it."

  "You are all lamentably sodden," I said. "I know Nezahualpili too, and I know, for one thing, that he has all his teeth."

  "A dab of oxitl to blacken two or three of them," said Blood Glutton, with another hiccup. "Lines of oxitl to feign wrinkles on a face darkened by walnut oil. And he has a talent for making his body appear crabbed and wizened, his hands gnarled like those of a very old man...."

  "But really he needs no masks or contortions," said the other. "He can simply sprinkle himself with dust of the road and seem a total stranger." The soldier hiccuped in his turn and suggested, "If you must slay a Revered Speaker tonight, young lord host, go after Ahuítzotl, and oblige all the rest of the world as well."

  I went away from them, feeling somewhat foolish and confused, on top of all my other feelings of anguish and anger and—well, they were many and tumultuous....

  I went looking again for the man who was Nezahualpili—or a sorcerer, or an evil god—no longer intending to knife him but to wring from him the answers to a great many more questions. I could not find him. He was gone, and so was my appetite for the banquet and the company and the merriment. I slipped out of The House of Pochtéa and went back to the hostel and began packing into a small bag only the essentials I would need for traveling. Tzitzi's little figurine of the love goddess Xochiquetzal came to my hand, but my hand flinched away as if it had been red hot. I did not put it into the bag.

  "I saw you leave and I followed you," said young Cozcatl from the doorway of my room. "What has happened? What are you doing?"

  I said, "I have no heart to tell of all that has happened, but it seems to be common gossip. You will hear it soon enough. And because of it I am going away for a time."

  "May I come with you?"

  "No."

  His eager face fell, so I said, "I think it best that I be alone for some while, to plan what is to become of the rest of my life. And I am not now leaving you a defenseless and masterless slave, as you once feared. You are your own master, and a rich one. You will have your share of our fortune, as soon as the elders convey it. I charge you to keep safe my share, and these other belongings of mine, until I return."

  "Of course, Mixtli."

  "Blood Glutton will be moving from his former barracks quarters. Perhaps you and he can buy or build a house—or a house apiece. You can resume your studies or take up some craft or set up in some business. And I will be back again, sometime. If you and our old protector still have the spirit for traveling, we can make other journeys together."

  "Sometime," he said sadly, then squared his shoulders. "Well, for this abrupt departure of yours, can I help you prepare?"

  "Yes, you can. In my shoulder bag and in the purse sewn into my loincloth I will carry an amount of small currency for expenses. But I also want to carry gold, in case I should come upon some exceptional find—and I wish to carry that gold dust secreted where any bandits will not easily find it."

  Cozcatl thought for a moment and said, "Some travelers melt their dust into nuggets, and hide those in their rectum."

  "A trick every robber knows too well. No, my hair has grown long, and I think I can make use of it. See, I have emptied all my quills of gold dust onto this cloth. Make a tidy packet of it, Cozcatl, and let us devise some way to secure it on the back of my neck, like a poultice, hidden by my hair."

  While I finished packing my bag, he folded the cloth meticulously over and over. It made a pliant wad no bigger than one of his own small hands, but it was so heavy that he needed both his hands to lift it. I sat and bowed my head and he laid it across my nape.

  "Now, to make it stay..." he muttered. "Let me see..."

  He fixed it in place with a stout cord tied to each end of the packet, run behind my ears and across the top of my head. That was further secured and hidden by my putting a folded cloth across my forehead, like the band of a tumpline, and tying it at the back. Many travelers wore such things to keep their hair and sweat out of their eyes.

  "It is quite invisible, Mixtli, unless the wind blows. But then you can always make a cowl of your mantle."

  "Yes. Thank you, Cozcatl. And"—I said it quickly; I had no wish to linger—"good-bye for now."

  I had no fear of the Weeping Woman or the many other malevolent presences haunting the darkness to waylay such incautious adventurers as myself. Indeed, I snorted wrathfully when I thought of Night Wind—and the dusty stranger I had met so frequently in other nighttimes. I stepped out of the city and onto the southbound Coyohuacan causeway again. Halfway along it, at the Acachinánco fort, the sentries were more than a little surprised to see someone out walking at that time of night. However, since I was still so festively dressed, they did not detain me on suspicion of my being a thief or fugitive. They merely asked a question or two to make sure I was not drunk, that I was well aware of what I was doing, then let me proceed.

  Farther on, I turned left onto the Mexicaltzínco branching of the causeway, went through that sleeping town and continued eastward, walking all night long. When the dawn began to come, and other early travelers on the road began to give me cautious greetings while eyeing me oddly, I realized that I must present an unusual spectacle: a man dressed very like a noble, with knee-laced sandals and a jeweled mantle clasp and an emerald nose ornament, but with a trader's pack and shoulder bag and a sweatband across his forehead. I removed and stowed the jewelry in my
bag, then turned my mantle inside out to conceal its embroidery. The packet on the nape of my neck was an annoying encumbrance for a time, but I eventually got used to it, and took it off only when I slept or bathed in privacy.

  That morning I pressed on eastward into the rising and fast-warming sun, feeling no fatigue or need to sleep, my mind still a turmoil of thoughts and recollections. (That is the most hurtful thing about sorrow: the way it invites the crowding-in of memories of happier times, for poignant comparison with one's present misery.) During most of that day I was backtracking the trail I had once marched, along the southern shore of Lake Texcóco, with the victorious army returning from the war in Texcala. But after a while that track diverged from mine, and I left the lakeside, and I was in country I had not seen before.

  * * *

  I wandered for more than a year and a half, and through many new lands, before I reached anything like a destination. During much of that time I remained so distraught that I could not now tell you, my lord scribes, all the things I saw and did. I think, if it were not that I still remember many of the words I learned of the languages of those far places, I should find it hard to retrace in memory even the general route I followed. But a few sights and events do still stand in my recollection, much as the few volcanoes of those eastward lands stand above the lower-lying ground around them.

  I strode quite boldly into Cuautexcalan, The Land of the Eagle Crags, the nation I had once entered with an invading army. No doubt, if I had announced myself as a Mexícatl, I would never have left it again. And I am just as glad not to have died in Texcala, for the people there have one religious belief so simplistic that it is ridiculous. They believe that when any noble dies, he lives a joyous afterlife; when any lesser person dies, he lives a wretched one. Dead lords and ladies merely shed their human bodies and come back as buoyant clouds or birds of radiant plumage or jewels of fabulous worth. Dead commoners come back as dung beetles or sneaking weasels or stinking skunks...

  Anyway, I did not die in Texcala, or get recognized as one of the hated Mexíca. Although the Texcalteca people have always been our enemies, they are physically no different from us, and they speak the same language, and I was easily able to imitate their accent, to pass as one of them. The only thing that did make me somewhat conspicuous in their land was my being a young and healthy man, alive and not maimed. That battle in which I was involved had decimated the population of males between the ages of puberty and senescence. Still, there was a new generation of boys growing up. They grew up learning bitter enmity to us Mexíca, and swearing vengeance against us, and they were full grown by the time you Spaniards came, and you know what form the vengeance took.

  However, at the time of my idly tramping through Texcala, all that was far in the future. My being one of the few adult and adequate males caused me no trouble. To the contrary, I was welcomed by numerous alluring Texcalteca widows whose beds had gone long unwarmed.

  From there, I drifted south to the city of Chololan, capital of the Tya Nuü and, in fact, the largest single remaining concentration of those Men of the Earth. It was evident that the Mixteca, as they were called by everyone but themselves, had once created and maintained an enviably refined culture. For example, there in Chololan I saw buildings of great antiquity, lavishly adorned with mosaics like petrified weaving, and the buildings could only have been the original models for the supposedly Tzapoteca-built temples at the Cloud People's Holy Home of Lyobaan.

  There is also a mountain at Chololan, which in those days bore on its top a magnificent temple to Quetzalcoatl, a temple most artfully embellished with colored carvings of the Feathered Serpent. You Spaniards have razed that temple, but apparently you hope to borrow some of the sanctity of the site, for I hear that you are building a Christian church in its place. Let me tell you: that mountain is no mountain. It is a manmade pyramid of sun-dried mud bricks, more bricks than there are hairs on a whole herd of deer, oversilted and overgrown since time before time. We believe it to be the oldest pyramid in all these lands; we know it to be the most gigantic ever built. It may look now like any other mountain bearing trees and shrubbery, and it may serve to elevate and exalt your own new church, but I should think your Lord God would feel uncomfortable on those heights so laboriously raised for the worship of Quetzalcoatl and no other.

  The city of Chololan was ruled by not one but two men, equal in power. They were called Tlaquiach, the Lord of What Is Above, and Tlalchiac, the Lord of What Is Below, meaning that they dealt separately with spiritual and material matters. I am told that the two were often at odds, even at blows, but at the time I arrived in Chololan they were at least temporarily united in some minor grudge against Texcala, the nation from which I had just come. I forget what the quarrel was about, but there also shortly arrived a deputation of four Texcalteca nobles, sent by their Revered Speaker Xicotenca to discuss and resolve the dispute.

  The Lords of What Is Above and What Is Below refused even to grant audience to the envoys. Instead, they ordered their palace guards to seize and mutilate them and send them home again at spear point. The four noblemen had the skin completely flayed from their faces before they went staggering and moaning back toward Texcala, their heads raw red meat with eyeballs, their faces mere flaps hanging down on their chests. I think all the flies of Chololan followed them northward out of the city. Since I could foresee only war resulting from that outrage, and since I did not care to be conscripted to fight in it, I also departed hastily from Chololan, only I went to the east.

  When I crossed another invisible border and was in the Totonaca country, I stopped for a day and a night in a village where the window of my inn gave me a view of the mighty volcano called Citlaltepetl, Star Mountain. I was satisfied to regard it from that respectful distance, using my topaz crystal to look upward from the green and flowered warmth of the village at that frosted and cloud-swept pinnacle.

  Citlaltepetl is the highest mountain in all The One World, so high that its snowcap covers the entire upper third of it—except when its crater overflows a gout of molten lava or burning cinders and makes the mountain for a while red-topped instead of white-topped. I am told that it is the first landmark visible to your ships coming hither from the sea. By day, their lookouts see the snowy cone or, by night, the glow of its crater, long before anything else of New Spain is to be seen. Citlaltepetl is as old as the world, but to this day, no man, native or Spaniard, has yet climbed all the way to the top of it. If anyone ever did, the passing stars would probably scrape him off his perch.

  I came to the other boundary of the Totonaca lands, the shore of the eastern ocean, at a pleasant bay called Chaichihuacuecan, which means The Place of Abundant Beautiful Things. I mention that only because it constituted a small coincidence, though I could not know it then. In another springtime, other men would set foot there, and claim the land for Spain, and plant in those sands a wooden cross and a flag the colors of blood and gold, and call that the place of the True Cross: Vera Cruz.

  That ocean shore was a much prettier and more welcoming one than the coast along the Xoconóchco. The beaches were not of black volcanic grit, but of powdery sands that were white or yellow, sometimes even coral pink in color. The ocean was not a green-black heaving turbulence, by a crystalline turquoise blue, gentle and murmurous. It broke upon the sands with only a whispery froth of white foam, and in many places it shelved away from the beach so shallowly that I could wade almost out of sight of the land before the water reached as high as my waist. At first the shore led me nearly directly south, but, over innumerable one-long-runs, that coast curves in a great arc. Almost imperceptibly I found that I was walking southeast, then due east, and eventually northeast. Thus, as I have said before, what we of Tenochtítlan call the eastern ocean is more properly the northern ocean.

  Of course, that shore is not all sand beaches fringed with palm trees; I should have found it monotonous if it had been. Along my long way, I several times encountered rivers debouching into the sea, and
would have to camp and wait for some fisherman or ferryman to appear and carry me across in his dugout canoe. In other places, I found the dry sands getting damp under my sandals, then wet, and turning into marshy, insect-infested swamps, where the graceful palm trees gave place to gnarled mangroves with knobby raised roots like old men's legs. To get past those swamps, I sometimes camped and waited for a passing fisher boat to take me around them offshore. But at other times I detoured inland until the swamps shallowed and dwindled into dry land on which I could circle around them.

  I remember getting a fright the first time I did that. The night caught me on the soggy fringe of one of those marshes and I had a hard time finding enough dry grass and sticks to make even a small campfire. In fact, it was so small and gave so little light that, when I lifted my eyes, I could see—among the moss-hung mangroves beyond—a fire rather brighter than mine, but burning with an unnatural blue flame.

  "The Xtabai!" I thought immediately, having heard many stories of the ghost woman who walks those regions, wrapped in a garment that emits an eerie light. According to the stories, any man who approaches her finds that the garment is only a hood to hide her head, and that the rest of her body is bare—and seductively beautiful. He is ineluctably tempted to come closer, but she keeps backing coyly away from him, and suddenly he discovers to his dismay that he has walked into a quicksand from which he cannot extricate himself. As he is sucked down by the sand, just before his head goes under, the Xtabai at last drops the cowl and reveals her face to be that of a wickedly grinning skull.

  Using my seeing crystal, I watched that distant, flickering blue flame for a while, the skin of my spine rippling, until at last I said to myself, "Well, I will not dare sleep while that thing lurks out there. But since I am forewarned, perhaps I can get a look at her and still be on my guard against stepping into the quicksand."