Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  "You also said I would speak truly of such things."

  He shrugged. "You seemed bright enough, for a brat, that it was safe to predict you would grow up passably intelligent. A man who is forced by weak eyesight to regard everything in this world at close range, and with good sense, is also usually inclined to describe the world as it really is."

  "You are a cunning old trickster," I said, smiling. "But what has all that to do with my being summoned to Texcóco?"

  "Every ruler and prince and governor is surrounded by servile attendants and self-seeking wise men who will tell him what he wants to hear, or what they want him to hear. A man who will tell only the truth is a rarity among courtiers. I believed that you would become such a rarity, and that your faculties would be better appreciated at a court rather nobler than that of Xaltócan. So I dropped a word here and there..."

  "You," I said unbelievingly, "have the ear of a man like Nezahualpili?"

  He gave me a look that somehow made me feel again much smaller than he was. "I told you long ago—have I not proved it yet?—that I also speak true, and to my own detriment, when I could easily pose as an omniscient messenger of the gods. Nezahualpili is not so cynical as you, young Mole. He will listen to the lowliest of men, if that man speaks the truth."

  "I apologize," I said, after a moment. "I should be thanking you, old man, not doubting you. And I truly am grateful for—"

  He waved that away. "I did not do it entirely for you. I usually get full value for my discoveries. Simply see to it that you give faithful service to the Uey-Tlatoani, and we shall both have earned our rewards. Now go."

  "But go where? No one has told me where or to whom I am to announce myself. Do I just cross over this hill and hope to be recognized?"

  "Yes. The palace is on the other side, and you are expected. Whether the Speaker himself will recognize you, next time you meet, I could not say."

  "We have never met," I complained. "We cannot possibly know each other."

  "Oh? Well, I advise you to ingratiate yourself with Tolana-Teciuapil, the Lady of Tolan, for she is the favorite of Nezahualpili's seven wedded wives. At last count he also had forty concubines. So over there at the palace are some sixty sons and fifty daughters of the Revered Speaker. I doubt that even he knows the latest tally. He may take you to be a forgotten by-blow from one of his wanderings abroad, a son just now come home. But you will be hospitably welcomed, young Mole, never fear."

  I turned, then turned back again. "Could I first be of some service to you, venerable one? Perhaps I could assist you to the top of the hill?"

  He said, "I thank you for the kind offer, but I will loiter here yet a while. It is best that you climb and breast the hill alone, for all the rest of your life awaits you on the other side."

  That sounded portentous, but I saw a small fallacy in it, and I smiled at my own perspicacity. "Surely my life awaits, whichever way I go from here, and whether I go alone or not."

  The cacao man smiled too, but ironically. "Yes, at your age, many possible lives await. Go whichever way you choose. Go alone or in company. The companions may walk with you a long way or a little. But at the end of your life, no matter how crowded were its roads and its days, you will have learned what all must learn. And that will be too late for any starting over, too late for anything but regret. So learn it now. No man has ever yet lived out any life but one, and that one his chosen own, and most of that alone." He paused, and his eyes held mine. "Now then, Mixtli, which way do you go from here, and in what company?"

  I turned and kept on up the hill, alone.

  I H S

  S.C.C.M.

  Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

  Most Virtuous Majesty, our Sagacious Monarch: from the City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this Feast Day of the Circumcision in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.

  With heavy heart but submissive hand, your chaplain again forwards to Your Imperial Majesty, as again commanded, yet another collection of the writings dictated to date by our still-resident Aztec—or Asmodeus, as Your Majesty's servant is increasingly inclined to think of him.

  This humble cleric can sympathize with Your Majesty's wry comment that the Indian's chronicle is "considerably more informative than the fanfarronadas we hear incessantly from the newly entitled Marqués, the Señor Cortés himself, who is currently favoring us with his attendance at Court." And even a grieved and morose Bishop can perceive Your Majesty's wry joke when you write that "the Indian's communications are the first we have received from New Spain not attempting to wheedle a title, or a vast allotment of the conquered lands, or a loan."

  But, Sire, we stand aghast when you report that your royal self and your courtiers are "entirely rapt and enthralled at the reading aloud of these pages." We trust we do not take lightly our pledges as a subject of Your Most Eminent Majesty, but our other sacred oaths oblige us to warn most solemnly, ex officio et de fides, against any further indiscriminate dissemination of this foul history.

  Your Astute Majesty can hardly have failed to notice that the earlier pages have treated—casually, without remorse or repentance—of such sins as homicide, prolicide, suicide, anthropophagy, incest, harlotry, torture, idolatry, and breach of the Commandment to honor father and mother. If, as it has been said, one's sins are wounds of one's soul, this Indian's soul is bleeding at every pore.

  But, in the case the more sly insinuations somehow escaped Your Majesty's attention, allow us to point out that the scurrilous Aztec has dared to suggest that his people boast of some vague lineal descent from a Lord and Lady Pair, a pagan parody of Adam and Eve. He also suggests that we Christians ourselves are idolatrous of a whole pantheon comparable to the seething host of demons his people worshiped. With equal blasphemy, he has implied that such Holy Sacraments as Baptism, and Absolution through Confession, and even the petitioning for Grace before a meal, were observed in these lands, antedating and independent of any knowledge of Our Lord and His bestowal of the Sacraments. Perhaps his most vile sacrilege is to aver, as Your Majesty will shortly read, that one of the previous heathen rulers of these people was born of a virgin!

  Your Majesty makes an incidental inquiry in this latest letter. Though we ourself have sat in on the Indian's storytelling sessions from time to time—and will continue to do so, time permitting, to put to him specific questions or to demand elaboration on some of his comments we have read—we must deferentially remind Your Majesty that the Bishop of Mexíco has other pressing duties which preclude our personally verifying or disproving any of this prattler's boasts and asseverations.

  However, Your Majesty asks information regarding one of his more outrageous assertions, and we sincerely hope that the query is merely another of our jovial sovereign's good-humored jests. In any case, we must reply: No, Sire, we know nothing of the properties the Aztec ascribes to the root called barbasco. We cannot confirm that it would be "worth its weight in gold" as a commodity of Spanish commerce. We know nothing about it that would "silence the chatter of the ladies of the Court." The very suggestion that Our Lord God could have created a vegetable efficacious in averting the conception of Christian human life is repugnant to our sensibilities and an affront to—

  Pardon the ink blot, Sire. Our agitation afflicts our pen hand. But satis superque...

  As Your Majesty commands, the friars and the young lay brother will continue setting down these pages until—in time, we pray—Your Majesty commands that they be relieved of their pitiable duty. Or until they themselves can no longer bear the task. We think we are not breaching the confidence of the Confessional if we merely remark that in these last months the brothers' own confessions have become phantasmatical in the extreme, and bloodcurdling to hear, and necessitating the most exigent penances for absolution.

  May Our Redeemer and Master, Jesus Christ, be always Your Majesty's consolation and defense against all the wiles of our Adversary, is the constant
prayer of Your S.C.C.M.'s chaplain.

  (ecce signum) Zumárraga

  QUARTA PARS

  The other side of the hill was even more beautiful than the side facing Lake Texcóco. The slope was gentle, the gardens undulated downward and away below me, variously formal and informal, glinting with ponds and fountains and bathing pools. There were long sweeps of green lawn, on which grazed a number of tame deer. There were shady groves of trees, and an occasional tree standing alone which had been clipped and pruned into the living statue of some animal or bird. Toward the bottom of the hill there were many buildings, large and small, but all most handsomely proportioned and set at comfortable distances from one another. I believed I could even make out richly dressed persons moving about on the walkways between the buildings—anyway, there were moving dots of brilliant colors. The Xaltócan palace of the Lord Red Heron had been a commodious building, and impressive enough, but the Texcotzinco palace of the Uey-Tlatoani Nezahualpili was an entire, self-contained, pastoral dry.

  The top of the hill, where I stood, was wooded with the "oldest of the old" cypress trees, some of them so big around that perhaps twelve men with arms outstretched could not have encircled their trunks, and so tall that their gray-green feathery leaves merged into the azure of the sky. I looked about and, though they were cleverly concealed by shrubbery, I espied the big clay pipes that watered those gardens and the city below. As well as I could judge, the pipes led away in the distance to an even higher mountain to the southeast, whence no doubt they brought the water from some pure spring and distributed it by letting it seek its own level.

  Because I could not resist lingering to admire the various gardens and parklands through which I descended, it was getting well on toward sundown when I finally emerged among the buildings at the bottom of the hill. I wandered along the flower-bordered white gravel paths, meeting many people: richly mantled noblemen and women, knights in plumed headgear, distinguished-looking elderly gentlemen. Every one of them graciously gave me a word or a nod of greeting, as if I belonged there, but I was shy of asking any of those fine folk exactly where I did belong. Then I came upon a young man of about my own age, who seemed not to be occupied with any urgent business. He stood beside a young buck deer that was just beginning to sprout antlers, and he was idly scratching the nubs between its ears. Perhaps ungrown antlers are itchy; at any rate, the deer appeared to be enjoying the attention.

  "Mixpantzinco, brother," the young man greeted me. I supposed that he was one of Nezahualpili's offspring, and took me for another. But then he noticed the basket I carried, and said, "You are the new Mixtli."

  I said I was, and returned his greeting.

  "I am Huexotl," he said; the word means Willow. "We already have at least three other Mixtlis around here, so we will have to think of a different name for you."

  Feeling in no great need of yet another name, I changed the subject. "I have never seen deer walk among people like this, uncaged, unafraid."

  "We get them when they are fawns. The hunters find them, usually when a doe has been killed, and they bring them here. There is always a wet nurse about, with full breasts but no baby to tend at the moment, and she gives suck to the fawn. I think they will all grow up believing they are people. Have you just arrived, Mixtli? Would you like to eat? To rest?"

  I said yes, yes, and yes. "I really do not know what I am supposed to do here. Or where to go."

  "My father's First Lady will know. Come, I will take you to her."

  "I thank you, Huexotzin," I said, calling him Lord Willow, for I had obviously guessed right: he was a son of Nezahualpili and therefore a prince.

  As we walked through the extensive palace grounds, the deer ambling along between us, the young prince identified for me the many edifices we passed. One immense building of two floors ran around three sides of a gardened central court. The left wing, Willow told me, contained the rooms of himself and all the other royal children. In the right wing dwelt Nezahualpili's forty concubines. The central portion contained apartments for the Revered Speaker's counselors and wise men who were always with him, whether he resided in his city or country palace; and for other tlamatintin: philosophers, poets, men of science whose work the Speaker was encouraging. In the grounds about were dotted small, marble-pillared pavilions to which a tlamatini could retire if he wanted to write or invent or predict or meditate in solitude.

  The palace proper was a building as huge and as beautifully ornamented as any palace in Tenochtítlan. Two floors high and at least a thousand man's-feet in frontage, it contained the throne room, the Speaking Council chambers, ballrooms for court entertainments, quarters for the guardsmen, the hall of justice where the Uey-Tlatoani regularly met with those of his people who had troubles or complaints to lay before him. There were also Nezahualpili's own apartments and those of his seven wedded wives.

  "All together, three hundred rooms," said the prince. Then he confided, with a grin, "And all sorts of concealed passages and stairways. So my father can visit one wife or another without the others' getting envious."

  We dismissed the deer and entered the great central doorway, a knight-sentry on either side snapping to attention, spears vertical, as we passed them. Willow led me through a spacious hall hung with featherwork tapestries, then up a broad stone staircase and along a gallery carpeted with rushes, to the elegantly appointed chambers of his stepmother. So the second person I met was that Tolana-Teciuapil whom the old man on the hill had mentioned, the First Lady and noblest of all the noblewomen of the Acolhua. She was conversing with a beetle-browed young man, but she turned to give us an inviting smile and a gesture to enter.

  Prince Willow told her who I was, and I bent to make the motion of kissing the earth. The Lady of Tolan, with her own hand, gently lifted me from my kneeling position and, in turn, introduced me to the other young man: "My eldest son, Ixtlil-Xochitl." I immediately dropped to kiss the earth again, for this third person I had met so far was the Crown Prince Black Flower, ordained heir to Nezahualpili's throne of Texcóco. I was beginning to feel a little giddy, and not just from bobbing up and down. Here was I, the son of a common quarrier, meeting three of the most eminent personages in The One World, and all three in a row. Black Flower nodded his black eyebrows at me, then he and his half brother departed from the room.

  The First Lady looked me up and down, while I covertly studied her. I could not guess her age, though she must have been well along into middle age, at least forty, to have a son as old as the Crown Prince Black Flower, but her face was unlined and lovely and kindly.

  "Mixtli, is it?" she said. "But we already have so many Mixtlis among the young folk and, oh, I am so bad at remembering names."

  "Some call me Tozani, my lady."

  "No, you are much bigger than a mole. You are a tall young man, and you will be taller yet. I shall call you Head Nodder."

  "As you will, my lady," I said, with an inward sigh of resignation. "That is also my father's nickname."

  "Then we will both be able to remember it, will we not? Now, come and I will show you your quarters."

  She must have pulled a bell rope or something, because when we stepped out of the room there was waiting a litter chair borne by two burly slaves. They lowered it for her to get in and sit down, then lofted her along the gallery, down the stairs (keeping the chair carefully horizontal), out of the palace, and into the deepening dusk. Another slave ran ahead carrying a pitch-pine torch, and still another ran behind, carrying the lady's banner of rank. I trotted alongside the chair. At the three-sided building that Willow had already pointed out to me, the Lady of Tolan led me inside, up the stairs and around several corners, far into the left wing.

  "There you are," she said, swinging open a door made of hides stretched on a wooden frame and varnished stiff. It was not just leaned in place, but pivoted in sockets top and bottom. The slave carried the torch inside to light my way, but I stuck only my head in, saying uncertainly, "It seems to be empty, my lady."


  "But of course. This is yours."

  "I thought, in a calmécac, all the students were bunched together in a common sleeping room."

  "I daresay, but this is an annex of the palace, and this is where you will live. My Lord Husband is contemptuous of those schools and their teacher priests. You are not here to attend a calmécac."

  "Not attend—! But, my lady, I thought I came to study—!"

  "And so you shall, very hard indeed, but in company with the palace children, those of Nezahualpili and his nobles. Our children are not taught by unwashed zealot priests, but by my Lord Husband's own chosen wise men, every teacher already noted for his own work in whatever it is he teaches. Here you may not learn many sorceries or invocations to the gods, Head Nodder, but you will learn real, true, useful things that will make you a man of worth to the world."

  If I was not already gaping at her by then, I was the next moment, when I saw the slave go about with his torch, lighting beeswax candles stuck in wall sconces. I gasped, "A whole room just for myself?" Then the man went through an arch into another room, and I gasped, "Two of them? Why, my lady, this is almost as big as my family's whole house!"

  "You will get used to comfort," she said, and smiled. She almost had to push me inside. "This is your room for studying. That one yonder is your sleeping chamber. Beyond it is the sanitary closet. I expect you will want to use that one first, to wash after your journey. Just pull the bell rope, and your servant will come to assist you. Eat well and have a good sleep, Head Nodder. I will see you soon again."

  The slave followed her out of the room and shut the door. I was sorry to see such a kind lady leave, but I was also glad, for now I could scurry around my apartment, veritably like a mole, peering nearsightedly at all its furnishings and appointments. The study room had a low table and a cushioned low icpali chair to sit on, and a wickerwork chest that I could keep my clothes and books in, and a lava-rock heating brazier already laid with mizquitl logs, and a sufficiency of candles so that I could study comfortably even after dark, and a mirror of polished tezcatl—the rare clear crystal that gave a definitive reflection, not the cheaper dark kind in which one's face was only dimly visible. There was a window opening, with a split-cane covering that could be rolled up and dropped shut by means of a string arrangement.