Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  I thought I had done a very good job of picturing the incident, particularly in my meticulous rendering of the innumerable left ears and the expression of astonishment on the face of Coxcox. I waited, almost aglow with self-congratulation, for the Lord Teacher to praise my work.

  But he was frowning as he flipped the book's pages apart, and he looked from one side to the other of the pleated strip, and he said at last, "In which direction am I supposed to read this?"

  Puzzled, I said, "In Xaltócan, my lord, we unfold the pages leftward. That is, so we may read each panel from left to right."

  "Yes, yes!" he snapped. "We all customarily read from left to right. But your book gives no indication that we should do so."

  "Indication?" I said.

  "Suppose you are bidden to write an inscription that must be read in some other direction—on a temple frieze or column, for instance, where the architecture requires that it be read from right to left, or even from top to bottom."

  The possibility had never occurred to me, and I said so.

  He said impatiently, "When a scribe pictures two persons or two gods conversing, naturally they must be face to face. But there is one basic rule. The majority of all the characters must face in the direction the writing is to be read."

  I think I gulped loudly.

  "You never grasped that simplest rule of picture writing?" he asked scathingly. "And you have the effrontery to show me this?" He tossed it back to me without even refolding it. "When you attend your first class in word knowing tomorrow, join that one yonder."

  He pointed across the lawn to a class assembling about one of the pavilions, and my face fell and my pride evaporated. Even from a distance, I could make out that all the students were about half my size and age.

  It was mortifying to have to sit among infants—to begin at the very beginning in both my history and my word knowing classes—as if I had never been taught anything at all, as if I had never exerted myself to learn anything at all.

  So I was cheered to discover that the study of poetry, at least, was not graded into the Beginners, the Learners, the Somewhat Learned, and so on, with me at the very bottom of the class. There was only a single gathering of aspiring poets, and they included students much older as well as much younger than myself. Among them were both the young Prince Willow and his elder half brother Crown Prince Black Flower; there were other nobles ranging even to the very old; there were both girls and women of the nobility; there were more slaves than I had seen in any other class.

  It seems that it matters not who makes a poem, and it matters not what kind of poem: a tribute to some god or hero, a lengthy historical account, a love song, a lamentation, or a joking bit of banter. That poem is not judged according to the poet's age, sex, social standing, education, or experience. A poem merely is or is not. It lives or it never existed. It is made and remembered or it is forgotten so quickly that it might never have been made at all. In that class I was content to sit and listen, timorous of attempting any poetic ventures of my own. It was not until many, many years later that I happened to make a poem which I have since heard recited by strangers. So that one has lived, but it is a very small poem, and I would not call myself a poet on that account.

  What I recollect most vividly about my poetry class is the first time I attended it. Some distinguished visitor had been invited by the Lord Teacher to read his works, and he was just about to begin when I arrived and sat down on a grassy bank at the rear of the crowd. I could not see him too distinctly at that distance, but I could make out that he was medium tall and well built, that he was about the age of the Lady of Tolan, that he wore a richly embroidered cotton mantle held by a gold clasp, and no other adornments to designate his office or class. So I took him to be a professional poet of sufficient talent to have been rewarded with a pension and a place at court.

  He shuffled several sheets of bark paper in his hand and gave one sheet to a slave boy who sat crosslegged at his feet, holding a miniature drum on his lap. Then the visitor announced in a voice which, though soft-spoken, carried well, "With the Lord Teacher's permission, my young lord and lady students, I will not recite today from my own works, but from those of a far greater and wiser poet. My father."

  "Ayyo, with my permission and pleasure," said the Lord Teacher, nodding benignly. The class also murmured a collective ayyo of approval, as if everyone there already knew the works of the poet-father he had mentioned.

  From what I have already told you of our picture writing, reverend friars, you will have realized that it was inadequate for setting down poetry. Our poems lived by oral repetition, or lived not at all. Anyone who heard and liked a poem would memorize it and retell it to someone else, who might in turn tell it again. To aid the hearers in that memorizing, a poem was usually constructed in such a manner that the syllables of its words had a regular rhythm, and in such a manner that the same word sounds regularly recurred at the ends of its separate lines.

  The papers the visitor carried bore only enough word pictures to assure that his memory did not falter and omit a line, to remind him here and there to stress a word or a passage his poet-father had thought worthy of special note. And the papers he handed to his drummer slave were marked only with brush strokes: many small dabs of paint, some larger ones, variously commingled and variously spaced. They told the slave the rhythm to beat out with his hand on the drum as accompaniment to the poet's recital: sometimes murmurous, sometimes sharply emphasizing the words, sometimes a soft throb like a heart beating in the pauses between the lines.

  The poems the visitor recited and sang and chanted that day were all felicitously worded and sweetly cadenced, but they all were slightly tinged with melancholy, as when early autumn first steals in upon the summertime. After nearly a sheaf of years, and with no word pictures to aid my recollection, no drum to mark the beats and pauses, I still can repeat one of them:

  I made a song in praise of life,

  a world as bright as quetzal feather:

  to skies of turquoise, sunlight gold,

  to streams like jadestone, gardens blooming...

  But gold can melt and jadestone shatter,

  leaves turn brown and trees fall down,

  our flowers fade, their petals scatter.

  The sun sets soon, the night comes looming.

  See beauty fade, our loves grow cold,

  the gods desert, their temples weather...

  Why does my song pierce like a knife?

  When the recital was concluded, the respectfully attentive crowd of listeners stood up and broke apart. Some went strolling about by themselves, saying one or several of the poems over and over, to fix the words in their memory. I was one of those. Others milled about the visitor, kissed the earth to him, and regaled him with compliments and thanks. I was walking in circles on the grass, head bowed, repeating to myself that poem I have just repeated to you, when I was approached by young Prince Willow.

  "I overheard you, Head Nodder," he said. "I too liked that poem best of all. And it made another poem waft into my own head. Would you oblige me by hearing it?"

  "I should be honored to be the first," I said, and what he recited was this:

  You tell me then that I must perish

  like the flowers that I cherish.

  Nothing remaining of my name,

  nothing remembered of my fame?

  But the gardens I planted still are young—

  the songs I sang will still be sung!

  I said, "I think it is a good poem, Huexotzin, and a true one. The Lord Teacher would most certainly give you an approving nod." And I was not just slavishly flattering a prince, for you will have noticed that I have remembered that poem, too, all my life. "In fact," I went on, "it might almost have been composed by the same great poet whose works we have heard today."

  "Yya, come now, Head Nodder," he chided me. "No poet of our time will ever match the incomparable Nezahualcoyotl."

  "Who?"

  "Did you not know?
Did you not recognize my father doing the recitation? He read the works of his father, my grandfather, the Revered Speaker Fasting Coyote."

  "What? That man who recited was Nezahualpili?" I exclaimed. "But he wore no insignia of his office. No crown, no feather mantle, no staff or banner..."

  "Oh, he has his eccentricities. Except on state occasions, my father never dresses like any other Uey-Tlatoani. He believes that a man should display only tokens of his achievement. Medals won and scars collected, not baubles inherited or bought or married. But do you really mean you have not yet met him? Come!"

  However, it seemed that Nezahualpili was averse also to having his people too openly manifest their regard for him. By the time the prince and I elbowed our way through the throng of students, he had already slipped away.

  The Lady of Tolan had not misled me when she warned that I would work hard at that school, but I will not bore you, reverend friars, with accounts of my daily schedule, and the mundane events of my days, and the sheaves of work I took back to my chambers at the end of each day. I will tell you that I learned arithmetic, and how to keep account books, and how to calculate the exchange of the various sorts of currency in use—all facilities that would be most useful to me in years to come. I learned about the geography of these lands, though at that time not much was known about any of the lands beyond our immediate own, as I would later discover by exploring for myself.

  I most enjoyed and profited from my studies in word knowing, getting ever-more proficient at reading and writing. But I think I benefited almost as much from the classes in history, even when they refuted the Mexíca's most cherished beliefs and boasts. The Lord Teacher Neltitica gave generously of his time, even according private sessions to some of us. I remember one, when he sat down with me and a very young boy named Poyec, son of one of Texcóco's numerous lords.

  "There is a grievous gap in Mexíca history," said the teacher, "like the wide gap an earthquake can cleave in the solid earth."

  He was preparing a poquietl to smoke while he discoursed. This is a slender tube of some substance like bone or jadestone, ornamentally carved, with a mouthpiece at one end. Into the open other end is inserted a dry reed or rolled paper, firmly packed with the finely shredded dried leaves of the picíetl plant, sometimes mixed with herbs and spices for added flavor and fragrance. The user holds the tube between his fingers and sets fire to the far end of the reed or paper. It and its contents smolder slowly to ash, while the user lifts the mouthpiece at intervals to his lips to suck a breath of the smoke, inhale it, and puff it out again.

  When he had lit his with a coal from a brazier, Neltitica said, "It was just a sheaf of years ago that the Mexíca's then Revered Speaker Itzcoatl, Obsidian Snake, forged The Triple Alliance of the Mexíca, the Acolhua, and the Tecpanéca—with the Mexíca, of course, as the dominant partner. Having secured that eminence for his people, Obsidian Snake then decreed that all the books of bygone days should be burned, and new accounts written to glorify the Mexíca past, to give the Mexíca a spurious antiquity."

  I looked at the blue smoke rising from the poquietl, and murmured, "Books... burned..." It was hard to believe that even a Uey-Tlatoani would have the heart to burn something as precious and irreplaceable and inviolable as books.

  "Obsidian Snake did it," the Lord Teacher continued, "to make his people believe that they were and always have been the true custodians of art and science, and therefore to believe that it is their duty to impose civilization on every lesser people. But even the Mexíca cannot ignore the evidence that other and finer civilizations had existed here long before their coming. So they have concocted fanciful legends to account for such evidence."

  Poyec and I thought about it, and the boy suggested, "You mean things like Teotihuacan? The Place Where the Gods Gathered?"

  "A good example, young Poyectzin. That city is now a tumbled and deserted and weed-grown ruin, but it obviously was once a greater and more populous city than Tenochtítlan can ever hope to be."

  I said, "We were taught, Lord Teacher, that it was built by the gods when they all assembled to decide to create the earth and its people and all living things...."

  "Of course you were taught that. Any grand thing not done by the Mexíca must not be credited to any other mortal men." He snorted a plume of smoke from his nostrils. "Although Obsidian Snake blotted out the Mexíca's past history, he could not burn the libraries of our Texcóco and other cities. We do still have records telling what this valley was like long before the coming of the Aztéca-Mexíca. Obsidian Snake could not change all the history of The One World."

  "And those unaltered histories," I asked, "—how far back do they go?"

  "Not nearly far enough. We do not pretend to have accounts dating back to the Lord and Lady Pair. You know the legends. Those two were the very first inhabitants of this earth, and then all the other gods, and then a race of giants." Neltitica took a few meditative puffs at his poquietl. "That legend about the giants, you know, may be true. An old and weathered bone was dug up by a farmer and is still preserved in Texcóco—I have seen it—and the surgeons say it is most definitely a thighbone. And it is as long as I am tall."

  Little Poyec laughed uneasily and said, "I should not care to meet the man whose thigh it was."

  "Well," said the Lord Teacher, "gods and giants are things for the priests to ponder. My interest is the history of such men, especially the first men in this valley, the men who built such cities as Teotihuacan and Tolan. Because all we have, we inherited from them. All we know, we learned from them." He took a last puff of smoke and removed from the holder the burned-down stub of his picíetl reed. "We may never know why they disappeared, or when, though the fire-charred beams of their ruined buildings suggest that they were driven out by marauders. Probably the savage Chichimeca, the Dog People. We can read but little of the surviving wall paintings and carvings and picture writings, and none of those things tells even the name of that vanished people. But the things are so artfully executed that we respectfully refer to their makers as the Toltéca, the Master Artisans, and for sheaves of years we have been trying to equal their achievements."

  "But," said Poyec, "if the Toltéca have been so long gone, I do not see how we could have learned from them."

  "Because a few individuals would have survived, even when the mass of them, as a nation, disappeared. These would have been some survivors who took to the high crags or the deep forests. And those diehard Toltéca would have endured in hiding—even preserving some of their books of knowledge perhaps—hoping to hand on their culture through their children and children's children, as they intermarried with other tribes. Unfortunately, the only other peoples in this area at that time were utter primitives: the stolid Otomí, the frivolous Purémpecha, and of course the ever-present Dog People."

  "Ayya," said young Poyec. "The Otomí have not yet learned even the art of writing. And the Chichimeca to this day still eat their own excrement."

  "But even among barbarians there can be a handful of extraordinary specimens," said Neltitica. "We must assume that the Toltéca chose carefully their mates, and that their children and grandchildren did likewise, and thus at least a few superior bloodlines would have been maintained. It would have been a sacred family trust, to hand down from father to son what each remembered of the ancient Toltéca knowledge. Until finally, from the north, there began to come to this valley new peoples—also primitives, but capable of recognizing and appreciating and utilizing that hoard of knowledge. New peoples with the will to fan that long-guarded ember again to flame."

  The Lord Teacher paused to fit a new reed into his holder. Many men smoked the poquietl because, they said, its fumes kept their brains clear and healthy. I took up the practice myself when I was older, and found it a great aid to cogitation. But Neltitica smoked more than any man I ever met, and that habit may have accounted for his exceptional wisdom and long life.

  He went on, "The first comers from the north were the Culhua. Then the Aco
lhua, my own forebears and yours, Poyectzin. Then all the other lake settlers: the Tecpanéca, the Xochimilca, and so on. Then, as now, they called themselves by different names, and only the gods know where they originally came from, but all those migrants arrived here speaking one or another dialect of the Náhuatl language. And here in this lake basin, they began to learn, from the descendants of the vanished Toltéca, what remained of the Toltéca's ancient arts and crafts."

  "It could not all have been done in a day," I said. "Or in a sheaf of years."

  "No, and perhaps not in many sheaves of years," said Neltitica. "But when learning must be done largely from elusive scraps of information, and by trial and error, and by the imitation of relics—well, the more people engaged in sharing the learning, the faster it is accomplished by all. Fortunately, those Culhua and Acolhua and Tecpanéca and all the rest could communicate in a common language, and they all worked together. Meanwhile, they gradually ousted the lesser peoples from this region. The Purémpecha moved west, the Otomí and Chichimeca drifted north. The Náhuatl-speaking nations remained, and they grew in knowledge and ability at about the same pace. It was only after those peoples had attained some measure of civilization that they ceased to be mutually supportive and began to vie for ascendancy over each other. It was then that the still-primitive Aztéca arrived."

  The Lord Teacher turned his eyes on me.

  "The Aztéca, or Mexíca, settled into a society that was already well developed, but a society that was beginning to separate into rival fragments. And the Mexíca managed to survive until Coxcox of the Culhua condescended to appoint one of his nobles named Acamapichtli to be their own first Revered Speaker. Acamapichtli introduced them to the art of word knowing, then to all the other knowledge already salvaged and shared by the longer-settled nations. The Mexíca were avid to learn, and we know what use they made of that learning. They played off the other rival factions of these lands, one against another, shifting their allegiance from one to another, until finally they themselves had achieved military supremacy over all the rest."