Clash of Star-Kings

by Avram Davidson

  “So I knew that they were neither coyotes nor men, but Naguales. Sister — woe of me! Sorcerers and were-coyotes! Brujas and brujos, witches and warlocks! God alone knows what troubles and evils will come upon us now that they dare to show themselves again in the open!”

  The sisters each took hold of one of the other’s hands and, as with their free hands they crossed themselves repeatedly, they chanted:

  “May we not die of fright,

  May we not die without confession,

  May that fright fall into the ocean,

  May those that cause that fright fall into the mountains,

  May it seize only the wicked and the infidel and the malevolent!”

  They gazed at one another in silence a moment. Already they were beginning to feel somewhat better, and a righteous and determined anger was beginning to replace the fear in their faces. “So,” said Señora Mariana, grimly, “they are up to their old tricks once more, are they? Worshippers of evil demons! And to pick this day! Oh, the malevolent ones! Oh, how the Naguales hate the Holy Hermit and his blessed catafalque! Oh, how they hate the priests! Aren’t the witches always trying to destroy the good Hermit? — and who knows that they might not have harmed him more than once if he did not trick them by slipping away in the night and vanishing off to Rome to serve mass there before daybreak! Well!” She rose to her feet and seized her scissors. “I’m not going to rest a minute, I’m cutting rue and rosemary, both so good against witches — and cordones de San Francisco: may it bind them hand and foot! And even the little rosebuds, like drops of blood from the Sacred Heart — we will dip them all in holy water and place them all around….”She paused a second at the doorway and looked back at her sister. “For Heaven’s sake, Josefa,” she cried, “don’t just sit there doing nothing: Pray!”

  • • •

  It was quite different keeping house in the United States, Sarah thought, for the manyeth time. There it was all so simple. There was hot and cold running water, O-cello sponge mops, detergents, Comet Cleanser, Campbell’s Soup … all the conveniences of modern science. Here there was nothing but a barrel of water so cold that it burned like fire and a sort of concrete sink without a pipe (there was a pipe, elsewhere in the patio, but it lacked a sink) and a fiber pad. You had to dip the dirty dish all greasy cold into the ice-cold water and scrub it with the pad and your fingers froze and then you put the dish, which looked no cleaner at all, in the sink and dipped some more melted snow out of the barrel and poured it out and it ran and splashed all over your legs — “Ow!” screamed Sarah. “OW — OW!” The dish slipped and shattered.

  Sarah swore. If it weren’t for the few bits of flowers and herbiage still left in the patio she would have wept….

  No use telling Jacob. Not him. That stinker. That bastard. Would he offer to light a fire and try to make hot water, let alone once help her? No. He wouldn’t. Not him. She knew his rotten, selfish moods … just let her put her head in the door of his workroom and tell him about mean, selfish, ungrateful Lupita and he would, without doubt, yell at her! As though it were her fault they had only five pesos left and he had to meet a deadline with the damned story he was working on. He wouldn’t care that tootsie little Evans had run away or been catnapped or something! And here she had thought Mexico was going to be such a fun thing, all loyal smiling hardworking native servant girls and lovely tropical beaches like Puerto Vallarte in that picture with Liz Taylor. Tropical! Here she stood, risking frostbite and only a few sprigs of herbs and a few stalks of little purple flowers and one bush with tiny-tiny rosebuds on it —

  At which, in stomped Señora Mariana and, without so much as looking at Sarah, began to cut all the rest of the green stuff and the flowers! The grease congealed, Sarah’s fingers got stiffer and redder and colder. “All right for you, Richard Burton!” She wept….

  II

  Luis Lorenzo Santangel knew well the networks of little paths which led through the woods and rocks above even the highest pastures, led eventually to the small milpas where grew the life-sustaining corn of the Moxtomi Indians, who raised no cattle, not even so much as a goat. Milk, they held — and it seemed logical — was for infants; and if it came ever to pass that the small brown tetas of a Moxtomi mother had no milk for her infant, why, there was always the milky pulque, good for young and old alike. And, if despite this benevolent liquor made from the fermented nectar of the maguey cactus the infant died, why, how sad — only not very sad — it was destinado that the tiny soul become a tiny angel in Heaven.

  The townspeople were, as a matter of course, scornful towards the Moxtomi, calling them cerrados — closed ones — because their minds were closed to all things modern and innovating. They laughed at the Moxtomi, so meek and so mild, at their bare feet and naked legs and blue-black serapes, their ignorance of proper Castilian speech and at their poverty and pagan ways. Townspeople had, over the course of centuries, alienated the greater part of the Moxtomí ejido, the communal tribal lands: no wonder the Moxtomí were so poor! Had the church done anything to prevent this? No. Small wonder, then, that these poor, good Indios were more than half pagan.

  Most of all, perhaps, the townspeople scorned the Moxtomí because of their dark Indian skins, unlightened by a single drop of Spanish blood.

  This was not the least of the reasons why Luis felt himself to be so close to these Indians and considered them his friends. Why — it was not a week ago that Don Eliseo, the unlicensed veterinarian, come to inject the cows of Luis’s father, had asked, “Is this your oldest son?” And Francisco Santangel had answered, grudgingly, hastily, “Yes…. But you can tell that he doesn’t take after my side of the family because he is so dark.” He always spoke like that of his son … his own son. And it was true that Luis was the darkest child of the family. He was the best behaved child at home, and the least favored. He was the brightest student at school, and the most neglected. Fathers and mothers did not favor him as a suitor for their daughters unless the daughters in question were themselves too dark or too poor or too old or ugly or of too ruinous a reputation to hope for a suitor of lighter complexion. Luis, nevertheless, had finished school and, moreover, had even taught himself English — and what might he hope for in the way of a career?

  He might hope for the crumbs of the table, the jobs left over after the fairer applicants had been placed — regardless of their other qualifications in comparison to Luis. This was the ineradicable stain in the Mexican garment, the fatal inheritance of the Conquistadores and their Conquest, and he hated it. He even hated “La Conquistadora,” the Virgin de los Remedios, because she had come over with Cortez’s men and remained the patroness of the Spaniards. Other “true” Mexicans, dark as or darker than Luis, even though they might be less acutely sensitive, would tend to favor the Virgin of Guadalupe, who had no European origins, who had appeared shortly after the Conquest to the humble Indian convert Juan Diego: others might. Not Luis. He didn’t speak of it, but in his heart, deeply, he hated the Roman Catholic Church as much as he hated the Spaniards and his family.

  For a while more he would still try to swim upstream and ignore the snubs. There was a faint possibility that he might be able, nonetheless, to make his way successfully in the modern world. And yet — still if he failed — what then? Would he be content to live as a failure in the world which had refused him success? No. No, never. Rather than that, he would defy them all and shame them forever. He would do what no one of Christian education and secular, modern training, of even partly Spanish blood, had ever done: leave this corrupt civilization behind forever. Burn his modern clothes. And put on the homespun and the blue-black serape of the Moxtomi, ask for a dark-skinned daughter of the pueblo and an allotment of the shrunken ejido land. Already he knew much of the Moxtomi language; he would perfect his knowledge; they would initiate him into the sacred secrets which the townsmen did not know and, indeed, scarcely knew existed. And he would dance the holy dances and perform the sacred ceremonies and sing the chants to the Great Ol
d Ones….

  Only not yet.

  His heart had begun to beat faster at the prospect, as it had used to at the prospect of a woman before he had ever really had one. But the joy of making a woman part of himself was a transient joy and this other anticipated pleasure would be a permanent joy. And so he hesitated. For, with every delight there is a sorrow, and the delightsome life of the Moxtomi Indians had a very sorrowful side, indeed. Almost every bit of it had its roots in poverty and this poverty was due entirely to the loss of the greater part of the ejido lands. He told himself that he might not do it, after all…. But underneath the thin meniscus of confidence in his ability to prosper as a modern man was a deep certainty, part pleasure and part pain, that his future lay not in an office or an apartment but in the small huts of the Indians, warm only in love and history.

  There was, of course, never any doubt in his mind that the Indians in question were the Moxtomi. The Tenocha Indians were infinitely the more numerous, incomparably the more powerful, and there was even a vigorous movement among them to give official status to their language, the Nahua dialect, which they called Meshika. The fact that Luis knew very well that his maternal grandmother had been a Moxtomí did not blind him to the probable fact that the blood of the Tenocha flowed in his veins as well as a heritage on both familial sides. But who and what, after all, were the Tenocha? Who else but the Aztecs! And were they not themselves the seed of a pre-Spanish Conquest? They were themselves aliens here on the upper slopes of the great valley. The Moxtomí, the last and furthest-flung of the Toltecs — it was to them that this land rightfully belonged.

  And all the while Luis’s feet led him up through the stone-strewn and balsam-scented paths.

  But his mind was elsewhere and on a multitude of things.

  He wasn’t going up to El Pueblo de San Juan Bautista Moxtomí merely to enjoy the friendly presence of such acquaintances as, say, Tío Santiago Tue, or Domingo Deuh, who was more of Luis’s own age. There were things he wanted to discuss with them, a variety of exciting things, and he wanted their opinions. There, up ahead, a huddle of brown brushwood and adobe, he saw the pueblo. It was still a good way off. Luis began to form his thoughts into mental conversation.

  “There are soldiers in town, Uncle Santiago, soldiers from ‘Mexico’ with horses and rifles. Why, do you suppose? I don’t really think that this time they’ve come to expel any Indios from Indio lands; their business seems to lie only in Los Remedios municipalidad. But there’s a further question, you see — what business? It has to do with Monte Sagrado, I’m sure … everyone is sure of that. Some say that they’re here to keep order at the feria of the Holy Hermit. Some say there’s going to be, I don’t know, some kind of trouble with the procession. You know that not everyone in town is the Heremito’s friend — particularly not in the Barrio Occidental — that’s a mean, tough neighborhood; you know that. Today I heard a saying I haven’t heard in a long time: Scratch a Nahua and you find a Nagual…. What do you think that really means?

  “And others are saying, Tío Santi, that the soldiers are here for another reason altogether. They say that the government is going to take away the Tlaloc that’s in the cave under the Monte and take it to ‘Mexico’ — I don’t know why. And there’s talk that this would be a bad thing, that if they do this the Tlaloc will be angry and that there will never be any rain again in the whole Valley. Some are angry about this and some are just excited and of course some don’t care at all.”

  The turn in the path at this point brought Luis face to face with a view which might alone make the fortune of a hotelier. To his left the great Valley of Mexico sloped downward like a precious bowl, and he could see the farms and fields below the rim of forest. Very far below him, and seeming quite small, was his native hateful town of Los Remedios, a huddle of red-tiled roofs at the foot of Monte Sagrado — so high it seemed from down there — yet from here a mere hummock, apparent only because crowned with the church. More fields, more forests, dwindling, dwindling … a tiny wisp of smoke: the mas o menos steam locomotive panting its way uphill from Amecameca. And, to the left of the misty huddle which was Amecameca, from here the land fell away abruptly into another valley and another state and another and altogether different climate. To Luis’s right the land rose unmarked by man except by the meager milpitas of the Moxtomí, rivulets and gorges and woods and great riven boulders: the Pass of Cortes like a line of demarcation between the gigantic sleeping woman in her white shroud which was Ixtaccihuatl and the looming cone of glistening ice-clad Popocatepetl.

  Luis gazed and sighed and resumed his walk and his cerebral conversation. “Domingo Deuh, my friend, have you and your people seen the lights which are said to have been shining and moving about on los volcanes? I myself think that I have, once or twice, but I am not entirely sure — perhaps they were stars peeping out from behind clouds, or aeroplanes passing high and silently between the mountains and myself. Still, many others and some of them sober and serious witnesses have claimed to have seen them, and in such a manner that neither stars nor aeroplanes could account for them. Do you know anything of this? Have your people formed an opinion?

  “And what of the smokes from Popo? Mountain-climbers have come down with reports of such. Did they lie? Were they mistaken? Has the long-slumbering Smoking Mountain begun to stir again? Or have interlopers descended to dynamite the sulfur inside the crater and carry it away to sell without having to pay taxes on it? And are these smokes only from their blasting, or from fires started, by their thievery?”

  Ahead, dogs began to bark. Luis selected a stout stick, advanced the short remaining way, running over in his mind his concluding sentences. “Are none of these reports true, my friends of the Moxtomi? I would like to speak to you about them, and you to speak of them to me … keeping in mind what you have told me, that there is a meaning to be gained from falsehood, as well as from truth — ”

  The lean and hungry dogs of the hamlet came hurtling and howling at him; he flourished his stick, stooped and rose, making the gesture of throwing a stone at them. “Sucsé!” he cried. “Cuidado!” They retreated, still glaring at him with shining, hungry eyes, but still leapt up and down and barked frenziedly — much more so than usual. He wondered at this —

  But not when he saw the uproar in the hamlet itself. The people, usually so quiet and sedate (though never of course so subdued up here as when down below in the lands where Castellano was spoken), were gathered in the open, waving their arms and all but shouting at each other, now and then leaving one group to walk rapidly — or even run! — to another. Luis stopped stock-still for a moment, astonished; then walked on, hailing them. His first syllables were almost drowned out in the hubbub; his final ones fell upon so absolute a silence that they faltered and stopped.

  They whirled around and looked at him, and he could see the shutters falling behind their eyes, the masks sliding down over their faces. He did not seem to see anyone precisely walk off, the gathering seemed to sink away, somehow, to be absorbed into the houses and alleys and as ants from a disturbed area will appear to melt away into the clods of the field. And, by the time he had walked over to Tío Santiago Tuc and Domingo Deuh, who awaited him gravely and sedately … and totally expressionlessly … no other man or woman was beside them. This so disturbed him and his thoughts that he was long in speaking again, and all the while the black eyes in the brown faces (one smooth and young, the other graven and old) looked into an invisible hole between his eyes and through it and out beyond again.

  He had come for nothing; this was clear, certain. He might just as well have been the tax collector, for all that any trace of confidence was visible. But he would not give up: it was more than that he wanted to discuss specifics, he would (he felt) oblige them to remember and to restore the atmosphere of that especial relationship which had previously been between them. He knew it would be useless to ask them, directly, why they were agitated before he arrived and why they were now behaving to him as they were. So he be
gan to speak as had been in his mind to, all the long way up, in hopes that not only might he get meaningful answers, but that, in the course of conversation, the stiffness between them would melt away and the former easiness return.

  Soldiers in town: why? How would we know, Señor?

  Trouble with the procession? Up here, we hear nothing.

  Take away the Tlaloc? Oh … Ah … Mmmm … (sigh) …

  Lights on the volcanoes? We are ignorant Indios …

  Smoke on Popo? Popo? Smoke? We see nothing.

  And a silence fell, and Luis, overcome with disappointment, slumped … winced … sighed. Suddenly, a small, a very small sign of a smile appeared on the face of old Tío Santi. He patted Luis on the shoulder, took him by the arm, urged him along, did not even let him look back to see if Domingo Deuh was following. Luis relaxed into a wonderful feeling of relief … more than relief … of happiness. It had all been merely a test! And he had, somehow, ¿quien sabe? passed it: and now the old man was about to reveal everything to him…. It had been a shock, though!

  The two of them stooped and entered a hut and sat down on their haunches. Old Tue said something in Moxtomi, patted Luis again on the shoulder, and left the hut. And the two old women and the very young girl bestirred themselves. He peered about, allowing his eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness, saw only the ordinary accoutrements of a poor Indian household, and a number of sober-faced babies, and waited for the old man to return.

  “Long walk … you,” the older old woman said, speaking in a deliberately debased Moxtomí, as though he were incapable of understanding anything better.

  He said, in his best command of the language, “Has Tata Santiago very far to go before he returns?”

  “Yes, very far — you. Tired. Hungry. Eat — eat,” she said, as though not understanding, and gave him tortillas with beans and a bit of chili. The other old woman poured him some stale pulque. And the girl began to roast a handful of squash seeds over the tiny charcoal fire. It was not until he had dutifully cracked the last of these that it occurred, belatedly, to Luis, that old Tue was not coming back at all! And he ceased, suddenly, to be the bewildered friend of the humble and dispossessed autochthones and became, totally, the outraged Mexican male upon whom an insult disparaging his machismo — his maleness — has been put.