by Simon Levack
“You failed the test?” she inquired gently.
“I passed the test! I passed it every year from when I was seven years old!
“Let me tell you what happens. You have to remember that this is all done during a fast, when there is nothing to eat but a few maize cakes at noon. Now, at twilight we make an offering before the hearth in the Priest House. It’s nothing much—dough balls, tomatoes, peppers, something like that. The important thing is that whatever we offer has to be round. It has to be something that will roll about the moment you so much as look at it, because that’s part of the test. You have to pile the offerings up in front of the fire and if they don’t stay just where you put them—if they roll over, or worse if the pile collapses—then you’re in trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“I’ll come to that—there’s a lot more to it. When that part’s all over, you strip and make a blood offering.”
I remembered drawing the thorns through my earlobes, feeling the old, numb scar tissue reopening and watching the blood, the water of life so precious to the gods, as it ran over my shoulders and arms.
“Then you run to the lake. It’s the middle of the night and the water’s as cold as the Land of the Dead, but you all have to jump in, from the youngest to the eldest. There was always a lot of shouting and splashing about, and some people tried to tell me it was to attract the gods’ attention or frighten away the lake monster, but I think we were really just trying to stop ourselves freezing to death.
“Then it’s back to the Priest House, to sit and shiver until noon. You’re allowed to sleep, but in the night it’s too cold for sleep, and in the morning the prospect of food keeps your eyes open.
“They feed you at midday—nothing but a few maize cakes, as I said, with some tomato sauce, and that’s part of the test too. You’ve failed the moment you spill or splatter a drop. You try it, when your fingers are numb with cold and your hands are trembling, and all you want is to shovel those maize cakes down your throat and then go to sleep.”
“We owe so much to our priests,” said Lily. I gave her a sharp look, but from her dreamy expression I could tell she meant it.
“You haven’t heard the half of it! You don’t go to sleep in the afternoon, you go to work. You get sent out to Citlaltepec to gather reeds.”
“I think I’ve heard about this. Isn’t that when the priests attack passersby?”
“On the way back, yes, if they’re stupid enough to be out on the road. Hardly surprising, is it? You have a gang of priests, half starved, exhausted, and facing five days and nights of this misery, all in the name of keeping the crops watered, and they come across some ungrateful bastard with a full belly and a warm cloak who thinks his maize and beans just spring out of the ground by themselves—of course they’re going to beat the crap out of him!”
I paused, surprised by my own excitement, the quickness and shallowness of my own breathing and the look on Lily’s face. Her skin had colored a little under the ointment and she was watching me steadily with her lips slightly parted. She was imagining herself as one of us, I thought, feeling our hunger and fatigue and nervous exhaustion, and the release we had got from those few joyous moments of licensed violence.
“Was that part of the test, as well?”
“I suppose it must have been. If you could vent all that anger on some stranger and come back to the temple in good order, ready to start again in the evening, then you might stand a chance … Oh, and one final thing. Whoever is last back to the Priest House …”
“Fails the test?”
“That’s right.”
“So what happens if you fail?”
“Someone will denounce you. They’ll point to the chilli that rolled into the fire, the tomato stain on your breechcloth, your head nodding on your chest when you should be attending to your duties. You’ll be hauled up before a senior priest and made to pay a fine—to your accuser.”
“To your accuser?” She stared. “But that’s mad! You’d all be accusing each other all the time!”
“Why, yes, of course we were. How else do you think we passed the time? It was a game; it was the only thing that made the whole thing bearable.” I could not help smiling at the memory: how we would run back from the lake, too cold, wet, tired and absorbed in our own wretchedness to notice what was going on around us, and yet how soon the squabbling would start the moment we were settled on our mats in the Priest House. Pale eyes would probe the gloom, ready to pick up the slightest lapse, and soon harsh, triumphant cries, spirited denials and bitter recriminations would shatter the strained silence. I remembered how especially sweet it had felt to secure a fine from the man who had denounced you the day before. “The amount you paid depended on how wealthy you were, so it was the great lords’ sons who were denounced most often. Since my father was a commoner and we had no money anyway, I used to do rather well.” By the time the festival began I would have a bundle of cotton capes and fine jewels wrapped up in my cloak, all things of no real use to me except as tokens of my triumph over my fellow priests.
I had known and savored that triumph every year I was a priest, except the last.
“Of course, the fifth day was different.”
I closed my eyes, as if that would keep out the sights of the last day before the festival in my final year at the Priest House. I had to stop myself clapping my hands over my ears in an effort to shut out the sounds as well.
From a long way off, I heard Lily asking me a question.
When I opened my eyes again, they would not meet hers, but were fixed on her hands, which were kept still by gripping her knees through her skirt.
“It had stopped being a game by the fifth day. It was serious. There were no fines and the rich fared the same as the poor. Make a mistake during the first four days and it would cost you nothing more than a couple of cloaks and a bit of ridicule, and you knew you’d get them back in the morning. On the last day it would cost you everything.
“They’d drum you out of the priesthood. They’d drag you by the hair and the ends of your breechcloth to the edge of the lake, throw you in and push you under till you were half drowned, you couldn’t see, you were puking salt water. Men who’d been your friends since childhood would be the first to kick you in the head, and the last as well. Then they’d leave you, and if you were lucky, sooner or later someone would go and tell your family where you were.”
And sooner or later, I reminded myself, your family would come and take you home, and that had been the worst humiliation and the harshest punishment of all.
4
What was your mistake?” the woman asked.
It was years since I had dared ask myself that question, but now the words slipped out painlessly, like a splinter that has worked its way to the surface of your skin.
“I didn’t think I’d made a mistake. I’d been tested over so many years by then that the fifth day didn’t frighten me. There would always be one or two who failed—novices, children whose fathers should never have pledged them to the Priest House in the first place, or old ones who were simply past it—and I remember feeling a bit sorry for some of them, after it was all over for them. But I felt confident enough. Maybe too confident.
“And it was such a small thing! Just one of those tiny green tomatoes, and all I had to do was add it to the pile in front of the fire. I did it, too, without disturbing any of the others, but just as I was about to let go, something stung the back of my neck.
“I don’t know what it was, but it felt like touching the edge of an obsidian razor, or being scratched by the sharpened end of a reed or a cactus spine. It didn’t really hurt, but it made me snatch my fingers back, and, well …”
My fists clenched involuntarily at the memory.
“I didn’t see that tomato roll. I turned round to face the others, to ask what was going on—who had scratched me, or thrown or blown something at me—and then I saw it in their faces. They were all looking past me at the offerings i
n front of the fire, and I don’t think anyone in that room was breathing.”
I had not turned back to look at the offerings again. There had been no need. The shock and then the certainty I had seen in the faces around me had told me enough.
I had not thought to argue, fight or flee when they came for me. I had just waited, like the most compliant of victims, sitting passively before the fire that it had been my life’s work to tend.
“You never knew who distracted you?”
I lifted my eyes to Lily’s face to find that it was blurred by tears. When I had blinked them away I saw, to my surprise, that her eyes too were glistening.
“No, and I don’t know how—a clay ball blown through a reed, the sharp end of a goose quill, a small stone—Lily, I don’t even know for sure that it was a human act. Suppose it was a god? I think that was what I believed at the time, and that’s why I didn’t protest.”
And it would be just like the Smoking Mirror, who was said to look with particular favor on slaves, to choose such a perverse way of setting the course that would make me, eventually, one of his creatures. But men and women were a tool the gods used, and in my heart I knew that whatever had touched me that evening, all those years ago, had been propelled by a human hand.
I could not sleep. I tossed and turned on my mat, kept awake by the pain of my wounds and questions that had lodged in my head and were refusing to leave.
What had really happened the day I had been expelled from the Priest House? I had always accepted it. It had been my fate, ordained by the highest gods, Two Lord and Two Lady, as they had presided over my naming day; if not that, then I had just been another victim of Tezcatlipoca’s caprice. Talking about it now had shaken me, stirring up long-buried memories that would not be put down again until I had looked at them afresh.
Had there been a man with a reason to hate me?
I pictured a face, stained all over with soot, with long, matted hair and temples streaked with fresh sacrificial blood: a priest’s face, unrecognizable as an individual’s. Only the eyes, white against the black-painted skin, might have enabled me to put a name to it, but another vision distracted me from them: another face, seemingly hovering behind the first, less distinct, pale, or perhaps tinted with yellow ocher.
I sat up, as if that would bring the faces into clearer focus.
“I know you,” I muttered.
A noise from outside the room dispelled the vision and sent me, in spite of my pain and the stiffness in my limbs, scrambling toward the doorway.
The Moon and the stars shone through the fine haze made by hearths and temple fires, and my breath was a glowing cloud in front of me as I peered outside. I drew my blanket around me and shivered. There would be a hard frost in the morning.
I heard the noise again: a faint rustling, the sound a skirt might make as its wearer gathered it up to walk quietly across the courtyard.
A slight figure slipped from the shadows, crossed a pool of light and vanished into the darkness again.
Few Aztecs would go out in the dark alone. To come across almost any creature of the night—an owl, a weasel, a coyote, a skunk—was to stare your own death in the face; and worst of all were the monsters we conjured out of our own heads. Not many would willingly venture into streets haunted by a headless torso whose chest opened and shut with a sound like splitting wood, by men without heads or feet who rolled, moaning, along the ground, and by fleshless skulls with legs.
I, however, had been a priest. At night I had patrolled the hills around the lake, with my torch, my censer, my conch-shell trumpet and my bundles of fir branches to burn as offerings. It had been my task to face and drive away these monsters, so that my people could sleep soundly on their reed mats. The night no longer held any terrors for me.
Hoping I was still hardened enough against the cold to stop my teeth chattering, I discarded my blanket and followed the woman across the courtyard.
Hiding in the shadows, as she had, I saw a pale, unsteady light in the room nearest to where I had seen her vanish. She had gone to the most important room in the house—the kitchen, where the hearth was.
I stepped up to the door.
The hearth was much more than a cooking fire: the three hearthstones were sacred, a shrine both to the Old, Old God of the fire, and to the Lord of the Vanguard, the merchants’ own god. A merchant’s traveling staff, wrapped in stiff, heavily stained paper, was propped against the wall behind the hearth. The woman knelt in front of it, with her head bowed so that her face was hidden and the flames cast a huge hunchbacked shadow on the wall behind her.
She had something in her right hand. It glittered in the firelight as she lifted it to her right ear. It was a sliver of obsidian, the sharpest kind of blade we knew.
Its polished surface flashed once as she cut into the earlobe.
The woman’s blood ran over the obsidian, quenching its sparkle like water tipped on glowing embers.
With her left hand, Lily held a little clay bowl up to the side of her head. She held it there for a moment, before stretching her hand out over the fire and tipping the pooled blood into the flames. She shook the bowl once to get the last drops out, and put it aside.
Then she took a strip of plain white paper and laid it against her wounded ear. She pressed on it to squeeze out more of her blood, so that when she took it away again it showed black in the poor light of the hearth. She looked at the sodden, limp scrap for a long moment, and then stood up.
I knew what she was going to do. She had sacrificed her blood to the fire-god; now it was the turn of her own personal god, the patron and protector of the merchants. His offerings were not burned. The merchant’s mother was not about to throw his gift of her blood into the fire. Instead, she went to the traveling staff propped against the wall and solemnly wound the paper around its middle, adding one more bloodied layer to its binding. She spoke to her god.
Lily’s voice was too low for me to distinguish more than a few words, but I heard enough before I came away, treading as softly as when I had approached.
It was not the words themselves which had impressed me. “Only a boy,” she had said, and “Keep him safe”: not much of a prayer, addressed to the god all merchants entrusted their safety to.
If anything was going to move the Lord of the Vanguard, I thought, it was not the words of Lily’s prayer, but the desolate, dry sobs that had forced themselves out between them.
5
Are you awake?”
Moonlight fell through the doorway across the floor. The woman’s elongated shadow lay in the midst of it, the head just touching the edge of my mat.
“Yes.” I had jumped so visibly on hearing her speak that there was no point in pretending otherwise.
Her skirt was like a dark cloud against the light on the floor, and when she turned toward me her toenails glinted like faint stars.
“Why did you follow me across the courtyard?”
“I didn’t know it was you.”
She came up to the head of the mat, so that I was looking up at her face, hooded by shadows. I hauled myself up on my haunches.
“You might have been anybody,” I added. “You might have been my master’s steward or Curling Mist, come back to finish what they started. Why were you so furtive, anyway?”
She knelt beside me, bowing her head as she had before the fire.
“I didn’t want my father or the servants or … or you to see me. I didn’t want you to hear me praying.”
I recognized the woman I had first met, the day my master had sent me to inquire about Shining Light. Her voice was low and guttural, as if there were some obstruction in her throat, and the strands of her hair caught by the moonlight shook a little, but there was the same composure, the same reluctance to show or share a sorrow that she could never quite successfully conceal.
I should have challenged her then. I should have confronted her with the truth: that her son had not left the city, that he and Curling Mist and Nimble, his boy, had
conspired against my life, and that I was sure she was a part of it all, because I did not believe her story about meeting the youth at the ball court to pay off Shining Light’s debts. That is what I should have said.
I did not, because all of a sudden I had forgotten my terrors and suspicions, and remembered only what I had heard and seen that evening: the woman’s bleak little prayer, her trembling hands wrapping the traveling staff in paper soaked in her own blood, the grief and fear that seemed real even if she had been lying to me.
“You really don’t think he’s coming back, do you?”
“No … yes … I don’t think so.” I barely heard the words, but then she gave a loud sniff.
The sound was so childish that I could not help myself: I reached out for her, extending my arms to her at the same time as she turned toward me to hide her face in my bony shoulder.
Even racked by tears, she was discreet, muffling her sobs against my chest until at last they subsided and she lay quietly across me. I murmured what I thought were soothing words and stroked her hair awkwardly.
“He had to go away, do you understand? They’d have killed him if he’d stayed—after what happened.”
“I know.” She was still talking about the merchants. In spite of everything I wondered whether she really did believe her son had fled their wrath after what had happened to his offering at the festival.
“I know what people think of him. But he’s not a monster. He can be so kind. He has so much love, if only people would try to understand him. He’s just a boy, a bit wild, with no father to guide him. His father would have taken him in hand. They’d have gone on trading expeditions together, to the Mayans or the Zapotecs or the Yopi. I think that’s what Shining Light always wanted, you know, to be like his father, a hero for his people …” She broke off with a sob.