Jaguar Princess

by Clare Bell

  His grin was infectious and sunny, almost banishing her unease. She found herself smiling back at him. “I wouldn’t mind at all and I am sure that Nine-Lizard would welcome the company of a fellow artist.”

  She turned and hurried out, leaving Huetzin alone in the library.

  Mixcatl had time to return to her quarters, compose herself and become involved in the painting project once again before Huetzin arrived.

  The images in the library had shaken her, not Huetzin himself. She found it easy to greet him and introduce him to Nine-lizard.

  “I am pleased to know you,” said the old scribe, rising stiffly from his paintpots to clasp hands with the new arrival. Even though he wiped his hands, he didn’t get all the pigment off his fingers and Huetzin ended up with a cobalt-blue streak on his palm.

  “No apologies,” Wise Coyote’s son said, raising one hand before Mixcatl could burst out with an apology for the old man. “We have traded. I wear your paint and you wear my stonedust.” It was true, for Nine-lizard had acquired a jade-colored smudge on the back of his hand. “May I see the work in progress?” Huetzin asked.

  Nine-Lizard invited him to bend down over the page. Huetzin studied it with a critical eye. “I am a sculptor, but my father also trained me in the art of interpreting glyphs. It is good work, beautiful, clear and easily read. What are you using as references?”

  “Some older books that were sent with us from IIhuicamina’s court. We are coming to the end of what we can do with those, however.”

  “Then it is fortunate that Mixcatl met me in the library. In my father’s name, I am pleased to invite you to make full use of it.”

  “Then I will accept your gracious offer,” said Nine-lizard, with a sparkle in his eyes that showed that he was greatly pleased. Mixcatl knew that he had been chafing at being restricted to the materials that had been sent with them and he also had grumbled about how far from the truth the Aztec writings strayed.

  “I would also like to make another invitation,” said Huetzin. “Would either or both of you like to visit my workshop this afternoon?”

  Nine-lizard declined politely, for he wanted a rest after working so hard that morning. Mixcatl eagerly accepted and soon she was following Huetzin down the path through the garden.

  Beneath the wide-spread branches of a huge tree lay a small but well-built house, walled with stone and roofed with tile. Nearby stood a canvas-covered pavillion and inside several workbenches, stools and mats. They were all covered with the gritty dust of stone-carving. Statues in various stages of completion stood on the workbenches, surrounded by stone-chisels and rasps. Mixcatl identified one freestanding figure as the rain god Tlaloc. Others were animals; birds with heads tucked under their wings, a coyote sitting upright, ears pricked forward, tail wrapped about his feet.

  Fascinated, Mixcatl put out a hand to touch the statue, then drew it back, fearing that Huetzin might object.

  “You may touch and handle anything you like,” he said. “You are an artist; you know how to be careful.”

  Gently she ran her fingers down the smooth slope of the coyote’s back. Turning to the workbench, she picked up a small bird carved in. serpentine, turned it in her hands, marveling at the shape Huetzin had drawn from the stone. She felt it and smelled it, enjoying the delicate odor arising from the sun-warmed rock. The sight and feel of the piece in her hand reminded her of a dream she had once had, to break free of the boundaries of glyphs and paint the sweep of an entire landscape.

  She smiled to herself, a little sadly. To draw a picture that conveyed no specific information was a waste of time. Better that effort be spent in the mastery of difficult glyphs and the ability to combine them. Yet her hand itched for brush and paper with an urge that she knew was foolish. One of the first things she had been taught as a scribe was that beauty alone was useless; true worth must emerge from the flawless execution of a line of glyphs.

  Yet was the urge so foolish? She looked around at the statues surrounding her. Huetzin sculpted to serve a purpose; to create temple statuary that honored the Aztec gods. But he also found the freedom to explore shapes in stone, to create beauty for its own sake.

  She found Huetzin looking at her, a puzzled expression on his face. “You look unhappy,” he said softly. “I did not mean to bring you to a place that would cause you sorrow.”

  Mixcatl swallowed. How could she explain it all to him? And even worse, how could she admit that the sight of his works had given birth not only to joy and amazement but to a deep envy and a wish to paint as freely as Huetzin sculpted. She fought the urge to turn and run from the workshop, back to the palace where she could shut herself up with the codex and forget anything else.

  “Tell me what troubles you,” Huetzin said, putting his hand on hers. She looked up, realizing that he had spoken to her not as adult to a child or a master to a novice but as one gifted spirit to another.

  She struggled to find the words. “Did anyone ever say to you that it was…foolish to use stone just for…pretty things?”

  “Do you think it is foolish of me?” Huetzin sounded a little disappointed, although Mixcatl thought that it would be impossible for anything to quench his sunny nature for long.

  “No,” she protested, fearing that she had been rude. “I think your birds and animals are wonderful.”

  “As a matter of fact, many people have told me that this”—Huetzin took a stone dove in his hand and stroked it with his fingertips—“is nothing but a child’s toy and that I should spend all my time working on my commissions.”

  Mixcatl touched the dove. He had polished it to silky smoothness.

  “But you didn’t listen to them, did you?”

  Huetzin smiled. “I did for a while. And I became very unhappy. Then my father came and asked why there were no more little birds and animals in my workshop. Do not be bound by what others say, he told me. Make your creatures again because they are beautiful in my eyes.”

  Mixcatl sighed. “I wish…”

  “To carve in stone? I could teach you, but it is a long and painstaking art.”

  “No, my skill is with the brush, not the chisel. I just wish I could do with paints what you do in stone.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  The question startled Mixcatl. She stared at him, wide-eyed. At last she said, “I dare not waste the blank pages that we brought with us. They are for the history.”

  Huetzin looked thoughtful. “My father may have some old ones that he has not used. I could ask him.”

  Mixcatl protested. “Paper is too valuable to be used for just…scribbling.”

  Huetzin took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “If my animals are not just child’s toys, then your painting would be more than ‘scribbling.’ Still, if you feel uncomfortable about using paper, there are some clay tiles left over from building my little house. They aren’t very large, but they are smooth.”

  The forbidden dream suddenly seemed within reach. “I shouldn’t,” she said. “It would ruin my training as a scribe. That is what Nine-Lizard would say.”

  Huetzin laughed, not mockingly but gently. “I would think the worse of Nine-Lizard if he did. Perhaps it is your own fear that puts such words upon his lips.” He paused. “And as for destroying your training by allowing yourself a little freedom outside it, well look at me. Have I lost any of the care and precision needed to carve within the forms required by temple statuary?”

  Mixcatl gazed at the painstakingly carved figure of Tlaloc and admitted that no, he had not.

  “I think now that making my creatures has turned me into a better sculptor than before. I have the discipline if I need it. When I do not, I can put it away.”

  “So you think that letting myself paint as I want will make me a better scribe, not worse?” She bent her brows at him.

  Huetzin shrugged his shoulders, but his eyes sparkled. “It cannot harm. If you fear Nine-Lizard’s scolding, you could bring your paints here.”

  “Perha
ps I could,” said Mixcatl, half to herself. “I have plenty.”

  With a warm smile at her, Huetzin drew a stool up to the low bench where the coyote figure was sitting and began work upon it once again. To Mixcatl, his manner spoke more eloquently than words. She was free to accept or reject his offer, but she did not have to make an immediate decision.

  She knelt on a nearby mat and watched Huetzin as he dipped a strip of leathery material into a pot of water and set it into a rough-cut groove that marked the junction between the coyote’s neck and shoulder. With two hands, he began to work it back and forth. Slowly the leather rasp turned a whitish blue from the stone powder worn away while the cut became smoother and deeper.

  “What sort of hide can wear stone?” Mixcatl asked when Huetzin paused to wipe the sweat from his face.

  “The skin of a great winged fish that lives in the western sea. It bears a sting so that it is not easily caught, but the rasps I cut from the skin are worth the price I have to pay.”

  He resumed his work. Mixcatl could see now how the flexible rasp could be drawn through the tightest of gaps or over large areas of stone, grinding and polishing until the worked surface became glossy. The work went very slowly and she could see how one might have to develop a great deal of patience to coax images from stone. But Huetzin seemed supremely happy as his hands shaped the figure. He seemed to fall into a hypnotic state, and Mixcatl along with him.

  With a start she realized that the sun was going down and that she had been away from the palace all afternoon. Huetzin rose, dusted off his hands and began putting his tools away.

  “Go to your evening meal,” he said. “I will be here tomorrow afternoon, if you wish to come.”

  She said nothing in answer as she turned away, but she found that a smile was on her lips and rejoicing in her heart. She would bring paints tomorrow and sit under the tree.

  In the days that followed, Mixcatl spent her mornings with Nine-Lizard, working on the history. Often they visited the library and consulted the books stored there. In the afternoons, Mixcatl took her paints to Huetzin’s workshop and experimented on the clay tiles he gave her.

  At first she only reproduced glyphs, for despite her impatience with the tightly restricted forms, they were all she knew and she was afraid to abandon them. Then, one day, with her heart beating hard, she deliberately painted color over the black boundary line of a glyph and found herself free on the surface of the tile. At first she wanted to paint Huetzin, but, despite her ability to capture shapes, she knew instinctively that the human face and figure were far too demanding for her at this stage.

  Instead she chose a much simpler subject: a large dock leaf that hung down near her mat. Carefully she outlined the shape of the leaf, the veins, the stem. She chose and mixed colors to suggest the changing hues of sunlight and shadow on the leaf. It was so new a task and so difficult for her at first that she took many days to finish the leaf, trying different color blends, discarding tiles when dissatisfied with the results, often putting aside her brush and sighing with frustration.

  And then, one day, when she stared at the tile and image on it, she knew that the leaf was finished and that any more work would destroy it. She set it to dry in the sunlight, went for a walk, and when she returned, she looked at it with mixed joy and despair. She compared it with the glyphs she had painted earlier. They were made of black lines, each area filled in with a single flat color, not shaded and blended as she had done with the leaf. She looked at the tile and realized that what she had done could be condemned as perverted, juvenile. Look how she had let the greens and yellows run together, mixing to create a smearing of colors across the dock leaf. No scribe-painter would be permitted such an excess. The colors must be pure, even and contained tightly within the black boundaries.

  Her hands trembled and she put the tile over her knee to break it. Something made her gaze once again to the dock leaf and she realized with a shock that the wash of changing hues over the surface was real, that the irregularities in the leaf edge were there, that it had browned a little bit and that there were indeed some shades of violet in the dark veins and in the areas where shadow fell. She had not made an icon of the leaf but an image that was so real it was as if the leaf had grown in the tile.

  A shadow fell along the grass near her. She had become so caught up in her painting that she had not noticed that the sounds of carving had ceased. She looked up and saw the sculptor’s steady gaze, fixed on her tile.

  “Huetzin, I do not know what I have done,” she said helplessly. “Should I break it and start again?”

  He knelt down beside her, studying the tile and the leaf from which it was drawn. There was a startled look in his eyes, then they narrowed. For an instant Mixcatl felt a cold fear such as the one she had felt when her image of Tezcatlipoca had been discovered long ago in the calmecac. Would he react in disgust, fear, puzzlement, disbelief?

  His face showed none of the expressions she feared. Only a look of rapt fascination with perhaps a touch of bewilderment.

  “I do not know what you have done, either,” he murmured.

  “That is what I saw when I looked at the leaf,” she said.

  “That is why it is so different. You looked at what you painted. You did not make it up out of your mind or from what you have been taught.”

  “That is what you do when you make your little birds and animals,” Mixcatl stated, then halted uncertainly. “Isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps I do, a little. I watch a coyote and a coyote comes from my hands. But my beast does not look as if he could leap off the pedestal. Your leaf looks as if it could blow right off the tile.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  Huetzin spread his hands. “There is no good or bad to this. It is what you see.”

  Mixcatl stared down at her tile. “I should break it.”

  “No. Give it to me instead,” said Huetzin. “Perhaps it will teach me your way of seeing.”

  Mixcatl stared at him, feeling more confused than ever. “I think I need to go back and work on the document,” she said quickly. “Take the tile, Huetzin. Put it in your house. Perhaps I will look at it again later.” She placed the piece in his hands and ran away up the path.

  13

  WISE COYOTE WAS holding court in Texcoco, his capital city, when word came from his palace at Tezcotzinco that both scribes had settled in. They were progressing well on the history for Ilhuicamina. The young woman Seven-Flower Mixcatl had shown no strange behavior, skin-peeling or anything else that the servants had been told to watch for.

  Having finished with the duties of rulership for the day. Wise Coyote retired to his private chambers. He meant to work on the plans for the first temple to Hummingbird on the Left, but he found himself getting distracted by thoughts of Mixcatl.

  Her face and that of the Olmec jaguar-baby statuette seemed to drift about in his mind. One was repulsively ugly; the other had a strange, almost compelling beauty. How could they both be the same? Yet gradually the two images came together, as if one mask had been laid atop another. From that fusion emerged the magnificent yet terrifying visage of the great cat.

  Wise Coyote broke free of the dreamy trancelike state he had fallen into and sat up, thinking. If the girl had the divine power that he hoped and feared lay within her, she could be a danger not only to him but to his household.

  His children were safe, for they either lived in estates of their own or resided in the city. The only exception was his sculptor son, Huetzin, but he didn’t live at Tezcotzinco. His house and workshop stood near the palace grounds, but he rarely set foot beyond. He did come once in a while to use the palace library.

  Wise Coyote started to rise from his kneeling position, clenching a fist. He should have sent word to Huetzin, warning him, telling him to stay away.

  He sank down again, running a hand across his face. What good would a warning have done? Declaring something to be forbidden always had the opposite effect of increasing interest in it. Bet
ter to just let things be. Huetzin had always been totally engrossed in his art, rarely seeing or speaking to anyone other than his immediate family. He was always pleasant, but somehow always preoccupied, and any woman who was attracted to him because of his appearance or his paternity soon turned away.

  Woman? Wise Coyote caught himself. Why did he think Mixcatl’s womanhood would matter? Her potential power, not her sex, was the real concern. Or was it?

  No. The girl herself—the shape of her body, her face, the jungle mystery in her eyes—had kindled a fascination in him. It burned like lust and would not be quenched. He wanted not only the abilities Mixcatl might have, but her body, perhaps even her spirit.

  Any man who stood in his way…even his own son…

  Again he caught himself, startled at the surge of possessiveness that knotted his hands once again into fists. Deliberately he opened his palms, stroking them lightly with his fingertips. Even though his queen had turned cold to him, he had many other wives and was used to being able to sate his desires.

  He stared down at the documents on the low table before him. On top was a map of Texcoco, drawn by his own hand on stretched deerskin. It showed the city center, with its many existing buildings and temples. Reluctantly, Wise Coyote laid his forefinger in the most crowded area. Ilhuicamina had demanded that the temple to Hummingbird be raised here. It did not matter how many other houses, public buildings or shrines to other gods had to be demolished in order to clear the site.

  He laid his palm up against his forehead, thinking of how much time, aggravation and wealth he would have to spend to mollify the angered priests of other gods, landlords, nobles, shopkeepers and others who would be displaced. He pressed harder. Why, by the love of Tloque Nahaque, was he doing this? Because of an infatuation with an exotic face? Or a hope that was rapidly becoming an obsession.

  He sighed, took off his turquoise coronet and ran his fingers through his hair. He might bear the title of tlatoani, but he was as much a slave to Ilhuicamina as the lowest ditch digger in Tenochtitlan. He would be building this temple whether or not he had been granted the loan of the two scribes.