Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  "Do not bother, boy. Let it lie for the coyotes and vultures. See, you pierced it through the guts. So the contents of its bowels spilled into the body cavity, and all the meat will have been foully tainted." Cozcatl looked crestfallen, but nodded when the old warrior instructed him, "Whatever the animal, aim to hit it here or here, in the heart or the lungs. That gives it a more merciful death and yields us a usable meat." The boy learned the lesson, and eventually did provide us with one meal of good venison from a doe he killed properly and cleanly.

  At every evening's halt, whether in village or wilderness, I let Blood Glutton, Cozcatl, and the slaves make camp or make arrangements for our stay. The first thing I did was to get out my paints and bark papers and set down my account of that day's progress: a map of the route, as accurate as I could make it, with guiding landmarks, the nature of the terrain, and so on; plus a description of any extraordinary sights we had seen or any noteworthy events which had occurred. If there was not time for me to do all that before the light failed utterly, I would finish it early the next morning while the others broke camp. I always made sure to set down the chronicle as soon as possible, while I remembered every pertinent thing. The fact that, in those younger years, I so assiduously exercised my memory may account for the fact that, now in my dwindling years, I still remember so much so clearly... including a number of things I might wish had dimmed and disappeared.

  On that journey, too, as on later ones, I added to my word knowing. I strove to learn the new words of the lands we traveled through, and the way those words were strung together by the people who spoke them. As I have said, my native Náhuatl was already the common tongue of the trade routes, and in almost every smallest village the Mexíca pochtéa could find someone who spoke it adequately. Most traveling merchants were satisfied to find such an interpreter, and to do all their dealing through him. A single trader in his career might have to barter with the speakers of every tongue spoken outside the Triple Alliance lands. That trader, occupied with all the concerns of commerce, was seldom inclined to bother learning any foreign language, let alone all of them.

  I was so inclined, and I seemed to have a facility for picking up new languages without much difficulty. That was possibly because I had been studying words all my life, possibly because of my early exposure to the different dialects and accents of the Náhuatl spoken on Xaltócan, in Texcóco, Tenochtítlan and even, briefly, in Texcala. The twelve slaves of our train spoke their own several native tongues, in addition to the fragmentary Náhuatl they had absorbed during their captivity, so I began my learning of new words from them, by pointing at this and that object along our route of march.

  I do not pretend that I became fluent and voluble in every one of the foreign languages we encountered during that expedition. Not until after many more travels could I say that. But I picked up enough of the speech of the Tya Nuü, Tzapoteca, Chiapa, and Maya that I could at least make myself understood in almost every place. That ability to communicate also enabled me to learn local customs and manners, and to conform to them, hence to be more hospitably accepted by each people. Aside from making my trip a more enjoyable experience, that mutual acceptance also secured for me some better trades than if I had been the usual "deaf and dumb" trader bargaining through an interpreter.

  I offer one example. When we crossed the ridge of a minor mountain range, our ordinarily oafish slave named Four began to exhibit an uncharacteristic liveliness, even a sort of happy agitation. I questioned him in what I had learned of his language, and he told me that his natal village of Ynochixtlan lay not far ahead of us. He had left there some years ago, to seek his fortune in the outside world, had been captured by bandits, had been sold by them to a Chalca noble, had been resold several times more, had eventually been included in an offering of tribute to The Triple Alliance, and so had ended on the block-at the slave market where Blood Glutton had found him.

  I would have known all that soon enough, without knowing anything of his language. For on our arrival in Ynochixtlan we were met by Four's father, mother, and two brothers bounding out to greet the long-lost wanderer with tears and cheers. They and the village's tecutli—or chagoola, as a petty ruler is called in those parts—pleaded with me to sell the man back to them. I expressed my sympathy with their feelings, but I pointed out that Four was the biggest of all our porters and the only one who could carry our heavy sack of raw obsidian. At that, the chagoola proposed to purchase the man and the obsidian, undeniably of use in that country where the toolmaking rock did not exist. He suggested, as a fair trade, a quantity of the woven shawls which were the unique product of that village.

  I admired the shawls shown me, for they were truly handsome and practical garments. But I had to tell the villagers that I was only a third of the way to the end of my journey, that I was not yet seeking to trade, for I did not care to acquire new goods which I should have to haul all the way south and then home again. I might have been argued out of that stand, for I had privately determined to leave Four with his family even if I had to give him away, but, to my pleased surprise, his mother and father sided with me.

  "Chagoola," they said respectfully to their village chief. "Regard the young trader. He has a kindly face, and he is sympathetic. But our son is his legal property, and he surely paid a high price for such a son as ours. Would you haggle over the freedom of one of your own people?"

  I hardly had to say anything more. I simply stood there, looking kindly and sympathetic, while the vociferous Four family made their own Chagoola seem the hardhearted bargainer. Finally, shamefaced, he agreed to open the village treasury and to pay me in currency instead of goods. For the man and the sack, he gave me cacao beans and tin and copper bits, far less trouble to carry and much more easily negotiable than obsidian chunks. In sum, I received a fair price for the rock, plus twice the price I had paid for the slave. When the exchange was made, and Four was again a free citizen of Ynochixtlan, the entire village rejoiced and declared a holiday and insisted on giving us lodging for the night, and a veritable feast, complete with chocolate and octli, and all free of charge.

  The celebration was still going on when we travelers retired to our assigned huts. As he undressed for bed, Blood Glutton belched and said to me, "I always thought it demeaning even to recognize the speech of foreigners as a human language. And I thought you a witless time-waster, Mixtli, when you took pains to learn barbaric new words. But now I have to admit..." He gave another full-bellied belch, and fell asleep.

  It may be of interest to you, young Señorito Molina, in your capacity of interpreter, to know that when you learned Náhuatl you probably learned the easiest of all our native tongues. I do not mean to scorn your achievement—you speak Náhuatl admirably, for a foreigner—but if ever you essay others of our languages, you will find them considerably more difficult.

  To cite an instance, you know that our Náhuatl accents almost every word on its next to last syllable, as your Spanish seems to me to do. That may be one reason why I did not find your Spanish insuperable, though it is in other ways so different from Náhuatl. Now, our nearest neighbors of another tongue, the Purémpecha, accent almost every word on the syllable third from the last. You may have observed it in their still-existing place-names: Patzkuaro and Keretaro and the like. The Otomí's language, spoken north of here, is even more bewildering because it may accent its words anywhere. I would say that, of all the languages I have heard, including your own, Otomite is the most cursedly hard to master. Just to illustrate, it has separate words for the laughter of a man and of a woman.

  All my life, I had been acquiring or enduring different names. Now that I had become a traveler and was addressed in many tongues, I acquired still more names, for of course Dark Cloud was everywhere differently translated. The Tzapoteca people, for example, rendered it as Záa Nayazu. Even after I had taught the girl Zyanya to speak Náhuatl as fluently as I, she always called me Záa. She could easily have pronounced the word Mixtli, but she invariably called
me Záa, and made of its sound an endearment, and, from her lips, it was the name I most preferred of all the names I ever wore—

  But of that I will tell in its place.

  I see you making additional little marks where you have already written, Fray Caspar, trying to indicate the way the syllables rise and fall in that name Záa Nayazu. Yes, they go up and down and up, almost like singing, and I do not know how that could accurately be rendered in your writing any better than in ours.

  Only the Tzapoteca's language is spoken so, and it is the most melodious of all the languages in The One World, just as the Tzapoteca men are the most handsome men, and their women the most sublime women. I should also say that the commonplace word Tzapoteca is what other people call them, from the tzapote fruit which grows so abundantly in their land. Their own name for themselves is more evocative of the heights on which most of them live: Ben Záa, the Cloud People.

  They call their language Lóochi. Compared to Náhuatl, it has a stock of only a few different sounds, and the sounds are compounded into words much shorter than those of Náhuatl. But those few sounds have an infinity of meanings, according as they are spoken plain or lilted upward or pitched downward. The musical effect is not just sweet sounding; it is necessary for the words' comprehension. Indeed, the lilt is so much a working part of the language that a Tzapotecatl can dispense with the spoken noise and convey his meaning—to the extent of a simple message at least—by humming or whistling only the melody of it.

  That was how we knew when we approached the lands of the Cloud People, and that was how they knew, too. We heard a shrill, piercing whistle from a mountain overlooking our path. It was a lengthy warble such as no bird would make, and, after a moment, it was repeated from somewhere ahead of us, the same in every trill. After another moment, the whistle was almost inaudibly but identically repeated from far, far ahead of us.

  "The Tzapoteca lookouts," explained Blood Glutton. "They relay whistles, instead of shouting as our far-callers do."

  I asked, "Why are there lookouts?"

  "We are now in the land called Uaxyqacac, and the ownership of this land has long been disputed by the Mixteca and the Olméca and the Tzapoteca. In some places they mingle or live amicably side by side. In other places they harry and raid one another. So all newcomers must be identified. That whistled message has by now probably gone all the way to the palace at Záachila, and it doubtless tells their Revered Speaker that we are Mexíca, that we are pochtéa, how many we are, and maybe even the size and shape of the bales we carry."

  Perhaps one of your Spanish soldiers on horseback, traveling swiftly and far across our lands each day, would find every village in which he stopped for the night to be distinctly different from the village of the night before. But we, traveling slowly on foot, had discerned no abrupt changes from settlement to settlement. Aside from noticing that, south of the town of Quaunahuac, everybody seemed to go barefoot except when dressed up for some local festival, we saw no great differences between one community and the next. The physical appearance of the people, their costumes, their architecture—those things all changed, yes, but the change was usually gradual and only at intervals perceptible. Oh, we might observe here and there, especially in tiny settlements where all the inhabitants had been interbreeding for generations, that one people differed slightly from others in being just a bit shorter or taller, lighter or darker of complexion, more jovial or sour of disposition. But in general the people tended to blend indistinguishably from one place to the next.

  Everywhere the working men wore no garment but a white loincloth, and covered themselves with a white mantle when at leisure. The women all wore the familiar white blouse and skirt and, presumably, the standard undergarment. The people's dress-up clothes did have their whiteness enlivened by fancy embroidery, and the patterns and colors of that decoration did vary from place to place. Also, the nobles of different regions had different tastes in feather mantles and headdresses, in noseplugs and earrings and labrets, in bracelets and anklets and other adornments. But such variances were seldom remarkable by passers-through like ourselves; it would take a lifelong resident of one village to recognize, on sight, a visitor from the next village along the road.

  Or such had been our experience through all our journey until we entered the land of Uaxyacac, where the first warbling whistle of the uniquely lovely language Lóochi gave notice that we were suddenly among a people unlike any we had yet encountered.

  We spent our first night in Uaxyacac at a village called Texitla, and there was nothing especially noteworthy about the village itself. The houses were built, like those we had been accustomed to for some time past, of vine-tied upright saplings and roofed with straw thatch. The bath and steam huts were of baked clay, like all the others we had recently seen. The food we purchased was much the same as that which we had been served on many evenings previous. What was different was the people of Texitla. Never until then had we entered a community where the people were so uniformly good to look at, and where even their everyday garb was festive with bright colors.

  "Why, they are beautiful!" Cozcatl exclaimed.

  Blood Glutton said nothing, for he had of course been in those parts before. The old campaigner merely looked smug and proprietorial, as if he had personally arranged the existence of Texitla purposely to astound me and Cozcatl.

  And Texitla was no isolated enclave of personable people, as we discovered when we arrived at the populous capital city of Záachila, and as we confirmed during our passage through the rest of Uaxyacac. That was a land where all the people were comely, and their manner as bright as their dress. The Tzapoteca's delight in brilliant colors was understandable, for that was the country where the finest dyes were produced. It was also the northernmost range of the parrots, macaws, toucans, and other tropical birds of resplendent plumage. The reason for the Tzapoteca themselves being such remarkable specimens of humanity was less evident. So, after a day or two in Záachila, I said to an old man of the city:

  "Your people seem so superior to others I have known. What is their history? Where did they come from?"

  "Come from?" he said, as if disdainful of my ignorance. He was one of the city dwellers who spoke Náhuatl, and he regularly served as an interpreter for passing pochtéa, and it was he who taught me the first words I learned of Lóochi. His name was Gíigu Nashinyi, which means Red River, and he had a face like a weathered cliff. He said:

  "You Mexíca tell how your ancestors came from some place far to the north of what is now your domain. The Chiapa tell how their forebears originated somewhere far distant to the south of what is now their land. And every other people tell of their origins in some other place than where they now live. Every other people except us Ben Záa. We do not call ourselves by that name for any idle reason. We are the Cloud People—born of the clouds and trees and rocks and mountains of this land. We did not come here. We have always been here. Tell me, young man, have you yet seen or smelled the heart flower?"

  I said I had not.

  "You will. We grow it now in our dooryards. The flower is so called because its unopened bud is the shape of a human heart. The woman of a household will pluck only a single bud at a time, because that one flower, as it unfolds, will perfume the entire house. But another distinction of the heart flower is. that it originally grew wild, in the mountains you see yonder, and grew nowhere else but in these mountains of Uaxyacac. Like us Ben Záa, it came into existence right here, and like us, it flourishes still. The heart flower is a joy to see and to smell, as it always has been. The Ben Záa are a strong and vigorous people, as they always have been."

  I echoed what Cozcatl had said, "A beautiful people."

  "Yes, as beautiful as they are vivacious," said the old man with no affected modesty. "The Cloud People have kept themselves so, by keeping themselves pure Cloud People. We purge any impurity which crops up or creeps in."

  I said, "What? How?"

  "If a child is born malformed or intolerably ug
ly, or gives evidence of being deficient of brain, we see that it does not live to grow up. The unfortunate infant is denied its mother's teat, and it dwindles and dies in the gods' good time. Our old people also are discarded, when they become too unsightly to be seen, or too feeble to care for themselves, or when their minds begin to decay. Of course, the old folks' immolation is generally voluntary, and done for the public good. I myself, when I feel my vigor or my senses begin to wane, I shall make my farewells and go away to the Holy Home and never be seen again."

  I said, "It sounds rather an extreme measure."

  "Is it extreme to weed a garden? To prune dead branches from an orchard?"

  "Well..."

  He said sardonically, "You admire the effect but you deplore the means. That we choose to discard the useless and the helpless, who would otherwise be a burden on their fellows. That we choose to let the defective die, and thus avert their begetting still more defectives. Young moralist, do you also condemn our refusal to breed mongrels?"

  "Mongrels?"

  "We have been repeatedly invaded by the Mixteca and Olméca in times past, and by the Mexíca in more recent times, and we suffer creeping infiltrations from lesser tribes around our borders, but we have never mixed with any of them. Though outlanders move among us and even live among us, we will always forbid the mingling of their blood with ours."

  I said, "I do not see how that could be managed. Men and women being what they are, you can hardly allow social intercourse with foreigners and hope to prevent the sexual."