Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  On a long journey, allowing for both the arduous trails and the easy, a train of laden men could count on averaging about five one-long-runs between dawn and dark. We covered only half that distance on our first day's march, merely crossing the long causeway to Coyohuacan on the southern mainland, and halting well before sundown to spend the night there, for the next day's march would be no easy one. As you know, this lake region lies in a bowl of land. To get out of it in any direction means climbing to and over its rim. And the mountains to the south, beyond Coyohuacan, are the most precipitous of all those ringing the bowl.

  Some years ago, when the first Spanish soldiers came to this country, and when I had first attained some grasp of their language, one of them—watching a file of tamémime trudging along with burdens on their backs and tumplines around their foreheads—asked me, "Why in God's name did not you stupid brutes ever think to use wheels?"

  I was not then very familiar with "God's name," but I knew very well what "wheels" were. When I was a small child, I had a toy armadillo made of clay, which I pulled about on a string. Since the armadillo's legs naturally could not walk, the toy was mounted on four little wooden wheels to make it mobile. I told of that to the Spaniard and he demanded, "Then why the Devil did none of you use wheels for transport, like those on our cannons and caissons?" I thought it a foolish question, and I said so, and I got a blow in the face for my insolence.

  We knew the utility of round wheels, for we moved extremely heavy things like the Sun Stone by rolling them on logs placed under and ahead of them. But such rollers would have been ineffectual for lighter work, and there were in these lands no animals like your horses and mules and oxen and donkeys, to pull wheeled vehicles. Our only beasts of burden were ourselves, and a hard-muscled tamémi can carry nearly half his own weight for a long distance without strain. If he put that load on wheels, to pull or push it, he would simply be burdened by the extra weight of the wheels, and they would be even more of a hindrance in rough terrain.

  Now you Spaniards have laid out many roads, and your animals do the work while your teamsters ride or walk unladen, and I grant that a procession of twenty heavy wagons drawn by forty horses is a fine spectacle. Our little train of three merchants and twelve slaves surely did not look so impressive. But we transported all our wares and most of the provisions for the journey on our own backs and legs, with at least two advantages: we had no voracious draft animals to feed and care for, and our exertions made us the stronger each day.

  Indeed, the hard-driving Blood Glutton made us all endure more than necessary exertions. Even before we left Tenochtítlan, and at every night's halt along the way, he led the slaves—and Cozcatl and myself, when we were not otherwise occupied—in practice with the spears we all carried. (He himself carried a formidable personal armory of long spear, javelin and throwing stick, maquahuitl and short knife, a bow and a quiver full of arrows.) It was not difficult for Blood Glutton to convince the slaves that they would be better treated by us than by any bandits who might "liberate" them, and that they had good reason to help us repel any bandits who might attack, and he showed them how.

  After stopping the night in a Coyohuacan inn, we marched early again the next morning because, said Blood Glutton, "We must get across the badlands of Cuicuilco before the sun rises high." That name means The Place of Sweet Singing, and perhaps it was once such a place, but it is no longer. It is now a barren of gray-black rock, of waves and ripples and billows of pock-marked rock. From its appearance it could have been a foaming river cascade turned hard and black by the curse of some sorcerer. In actuality, it is a dried flow of lava from the volcano Xitli, which has been dead for so many sheaves of years that only the gods know when it erupted and obliterated The Place of Sweet Singing. That obviously was a city of some size, but there is no knowing what people built it and lived there. The only remaining visible edifice is a pyramid, half buried under the far edge of the lava plain. It is not square-sectioned like most in these lands. The Cuicuilco pyramid, or what can be seen of it, is a conical stack of round terraces.

  The bleak black plain, whatever sweetness and song it may once have had, is now no place to linger in the daytime, for its porous lava rock sucks in the sun's heat and exhales it doubly or trebly hot. Even in the cool of that early morning long ago, that wasteland was no pleasant place to traverse. Nothing, not so much as a weed grows there, and no bird chirps, and the only sound we heard was the clangor of our footsteps, as if we walked across the great empty water jars of departed giants.

  But at least, during that part of the day's journey, we walked upright. The rest of that day we all spent either hunched forward as we toiled up a mountainside, or leaning backward as we clumped down its other face, then bent forward again to climb the next mountain. And the next and the next. Of course, there was nothing perilous or even really difficult in our crossing of those first ranges, for we were in the region where all trade routes from the south converged on Tenochtítlan, and multitudes of earlier travelers had picked out the easiest paths and stamped them firm. Still, for one as inexperienced as myself, it was a sweat-wringing, back-aching, lung-straining drudgery. When we finally stopped for the night at a hostel in a high-valley village of the Xochimilca, even Blood Glutton was weary enough to make us go through only a perfunctory weapons practice. Then he and the others ate and flopped down on their pallets.

  I would have, too, except that a homecoming pochtéa train was also staying the night there, and a part of its journey had been along some of the ways I intended to take, so I held my sagging eyelids open while I conversed with the pochtéatl in charge, a middle-aged but leather-tough man. His train was one of the major companies, with perhaps a hundred porters and as many supporting Mexíca warriors, so I am sure he looked on ours with tolerant contempt. But he was kindly disposed toward a beginner. He let me unfold my crude maps, and he corrected them in numerous particulars where they were vague or in error, and he marked the location of useful watering places and the like. Then he said:

  "I made a profitable trade for a quantity of the precious carmine dye of the Tzapoteca, but I heard a rumor of an even more rare coloring. A purple. Something newly discovered."

  I said, "There is nothing new about purple."

  "A rich laid permanent purple," he said patiently. "One that will not fade or turn an ugly green. If such a dye really exists, it will be reserved for only the highest of the nobility. It will be more valuable than emeralds or the feathers of the quetzal tototl."

  I nodded. "A really permanent purple never has been known before. It would indeed command any price one asked. But you did not seek to pursue the rumor?"

  He shook his head. "One disadvantage of a ponderous train. It cannot feasibly be diverted from the known routes of march, or portions of it detached at random. There is too much of substance at stake to go chasing the insubstantial."

  "My little troop can go where it will," I hinted.

  He looked at me for a time, then shrugged. "It may be a long while before I go to those parts again." He leaned over my map and tapped a spot near the coast of the great southern ocean. "It was here, in Tecuantépec, that a Tzapotecatl merchant told me of the new dye. Not that he told me much. He mentioned a ferocious and unapproachable people called the Chontaltin. That word means only The Strangers, and what kind of people would call themselves The Strangers? My informant also mentioned snails. Snails! I ask you: snails and strangers—does that make sense? But if you care to take your chances on such fragmentary evidence, young man, I wish you good fortune."

  The next evening we came to the town which was and still is the handsomest and most hospitable in the Tlahuica lands. It is situated on a high plateau, and its buildings are not huddled close together but set well apart and screened from each other by trees and shrubbery and other rich verdure, for which reason the town is called Surrounded by Forest, or Quaunahuac. That melodious name your thick-tongued countrymen have contorted into the ridiculous and derogatory Cuernavaca, or
Cow-Horn, and I hope they will never be forgiven for that.

  The town, the surrounding mountains, the crystal air, the climate there, they are all so inviting that Quaunahuac was always a favorite summering place for the wealthier nobles of Tenochtítlan. The first Motecuzóma built for himself a modest country palace nearby, and other Mexíca rulers afterward enlarged and added to that palace until, in size and luxury, it rivaled any in the capital, and far outdid them all in the extent of its beauteous gardens and grounds. I understand that your Captain-General Cortés has appropriated the palace for his own señorial residence. Perhaps I may be excused, my lord friars, if I remark spitefully that his having settled in Quaunahuac would be the only legitimate reason for debasing the name of the place.

  Though our little train had arrived there well before sundown, we could not resist the temptation to stay and rest the night amid Quaunahuac's flowers and fragrances. But we rose again before the sun did, and pressed on, to put the remainder of that mountain range behind us.

  In each stopping place where we lodged in a travelers' hostel, we three leaders of the train—myself, Cozcatl, and Blood Glutton—were given separate and moderately comfortable sleeping cubicles, while the slaves were squeezed into a large dormitory room already carpeted with other snoring porters, and our bales of goods were put into guarded safe-rooms, and our dogs were let to forage in the garbage heaps of the kitchen yards.

  During five days of travel, we were still within the area where the southern trade routes radiated out from Tenochtítlan, or into it, so there were many inns conveniently situated for overnight stops. In addition to providing shelter, storage, hot baths, and passable meals, each hostel also provided women for hire. Not having had a woman for a month or so, I might have been interested, except that all those maátime were extremely homely, and in any case they neglected even to flirt with me, but concentrated their winks and suggestive gestures on the men of homecoming trains.

  Blood Glutton explained, "They hope to seduce the men who have been long on the road, who have forgotten what a really pretty woman looks like, and who cannot wait until they get to the beauties of Tenochtítlan. You and I may be hungry enough to take a maátitl on our return, but for now I suggest we do not waste the energy and expense. There are women where we are going, and they sell their favors for a mere trinket, and many of them are lovely. Ayyo, wait until you feast your eyes and other senses on the women of the Cloud People!"

  On the sixth morning of our journey, we emerged from the area where the trade roads converged. Sometime on that same morning, we crossed an invisible boundary and entered the impoverished lands of the Mixteca, or the Tya Nuü, as they called themselves, Men of the Earth. While that nation was not inimical to the Mexíca, neither was it inclined to take measures for the protection of traveling pochtéa, nor to put up inns and shelters for them, nor to prevent its own people from taking what criminal advantage they could of merchant trains.

  "We are now in the country where we can likeliest expect to meet bandits," Blood Glutton warned. "They lurk hereabouts in hope of ambushing traders either coming from or going to Tenochtítlan."

  "Why here?" I asked. "Why not farther north, where the trade routes come together and the trains are more numerous?"

  "For that precise reason. Back yonder, the trains are often traveling in company and are too big to be attacked by anything smaller than an army. Out here, the southbound trains have parted company and the homecoming ones have not yet met and mingled. Of course, we are small game, but a bunch of robbers will not ignore us on that account."

  So Blood Glutton moved out alone to march far ahead of the rest of us. Cozcatl told me he could only intermittently see the old soldier as a distant dot when we were crossing an extremely wide and flat place clear of trees or brush. But our scout shouted no warning, and the morning passed, with us marching along a still distinct but stiflingly dusty road. We tugged our mantles up to cover nose and mouth, but still the dust made our eyes water and our breathing laborious. Then the road climbed a knoll and we found Blood Glutton waiting for us, sitting halfway up it, his weapons laid neatly side by side on the dusty grass, ready for use.

  "Stop here," he said quietly. "They will already know you are coming, from the dust cloud, but they cannot yet have counted you. There are eight of them, Tya Nuü, and not delicate types, crouched right in the road where it passes through a clump of trees and undergrowth. We will give them eleven of us. Any fewer would not have raised such a dust. They would suspect a trick, and be harder to handle."

  "To handle how?" I asked. "What do you mean: give them eleven of us?"

  He motioned for silence, went to the top of the rise, lay down and crawled out of sight for a moment, then crawled backward again, stood up and came to rejoin us.

  "Now there are only four of them to be seen," he said, and snorted scornfully. "An old trick. It is midday, so the four are pretending to be humble Mixteca travelers, resting in the tree shade and preparing a midday bite to eat. They will courteously invite you to partake, and when you are all friends together, sitting companionably about the fire, your weapons laid aside, the other four hidden roundabout will close in—and yya ayya!"

  "What do we do, then?"

  "The very same thing. We will imitate their ambush, but from a farther surround. I mean some of us will. Let me see. Four and Ten and Six, you are the biggest and the handiest with arms. Drop your packs, leave them here. Bring only your spears and come with me." Blood Glutton himself picked up his maquahuitl and let his other weapons lie. "Mixtli, you and Cozcatl and the rest march right on into the trap, as if you had not been forewarned. Accept their invitation to stop and rest and eat. Just do not appear too stupid and trusting, or that too would give them cause for suspicion."

  Blood Glutton quietly gave the three armed slaves instructions I could not hear. Then he and Ten disappeared around one side of the knoll, Four and Six around the other. I looked at Cozcatl and we smiled to give each other confidence. To the remaining nine slaves I said, "You heard. Simply do what I command, and speak not a word. Let us go on."

  We went in single file over the rise and down its other side. I raised an arm in greeting when we sighted the four men. They were feeding sticks to a just-kindled fire.

  "Welcome, fellow travelers!" one of them called as we approached. He spoke Náhuatl and he grinned amiably. "Let me tell you, we have come many one-long-runs along this cursed road, and this is the only patch of shade. Will you share it with us? And perhaps a bite of our humble fare?" He held up two dead hares by their long ears.

  "We will rest, and gladly," I said, motioning for the rest of my train to dispose themselves as they liked. "But those two scrawny animals will scarcely feed the four of you. I have others of our porters out hunting right now. Perhaps they will bring back the makings of a more sumptuous meal, and you will share with us."

  The speaker changed his grin for a hurt look and said reproachfully, "You take us for bandits. So you quickly speak of your numbers. That sounds unfriendly, and it is we who should be wary: only four against your eleven. I suggest that we all put aside our weapons."

  Pretending purest innocence, he unslung and tossed away from him the maquahuitl he carried. His three companions grunted and did the same. I smiled friendlily, leaned my spear against a tree, and gestured to my men. They likewise ostentatiously put their weapons out of reach. I sat down across the fire from the four Mixteca, two of whom were threading the long-legged carcasses onto green sticks and propping them across the flames.

  "Tell me, friend," I said to the apparent leader. "What is the road like, from here southward? Is there anything we should beware of?"

  "Indeed, yes!" he said, his eyes glinting. "Bandits do abound. Poor men like us have nothing to fear from them, but I daresay you are carrying goods of value. You might do well to hire us to go with you for your protection."

  I said, "I thank you for the offer, but I am not rich enough to afford a retinue of guards. I will make do with m
y porters."

  "Porters are no good as guards. And without guards you will surely be robbed." He said that flatly, stating a fact, but then spoke with a mock wheedle in his voice. "I have another suggestion. Do not risk your goods on the road. Leave them with us for safekeeping, while you go on unmolested."

  I laughed.

  "I think, young friend, we can persuade you that it would be in your best interest."

  "And I think, friend, that now is the time for me to call in my porters from their hunting."

  "Do that," he sneered. "Or allow me to call for you."

  I said, "Thank you."

  For an instant he looked a little puzzled. But he must have decided that I was expecting to escape his trap through sheer bluster. He gave a loud hail, and at the same moment he and his three companions lunged for their weapons. At that moment, too, Blood Glutton, Four, Six, and Ten all stepped simultaneously into the road, but from different places in the trees roundabout. The Tya Nuü froze in surprise, all on their feet, all with their maquahuime raised, like so many statues of warriors posed in action.

  "A good hunt, Master Mixtli!" boomed Blood Glutton. "And I see we have guests. Well, we bring enough and to spare." He dropped what he was carrying, and so did the slaves with him. They each threw down a severed human head.

  "Come, friends, I am sure you recognize good meat when you see it," Blood Glutton said jovially to the remaining bandits. They had edged into a defensive position, all of them with their backs to the same big tree, but they looked rather shaken. "Drop the weapons, and do not be bashful. Come, eat hearty."

  The four nervously looked about. All the rest of us were armed by then. They jumped when Blood Glutton raised his voice to a bellow: "I said drop the blades!" They did. "I said come!" They approached the lumps lying on the ground at his feet. "I said eat!" They winced as they picked up the relics of their late comrades and turned to the fire. "No, not cook!" roared the relentless Blood Glutton. "The fire is for the hares and the hares are for us. I said eat!"