Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  The work was more delicate, difficult, and time-consuming than any mode of painting, sculpture, or goldsmithery. The artist began with a cloth of the finest cotton, tightly stretched over a panel of wood. On the cloth he lightly drew the lines of the picture he envisioned. Then, painstakingly, he filled in all the spaces with colored feathers, using only the soft, plumed shaft part, the quill cut away. He attached each of the thousands and thousands of feather, one by one, with a minute dab of liquid óli. Some so-called artists were uncaring slovens who used only white birds' feathers which they tinted with paints and dyes as required, and trimmed their shapes to fit the more intricate places in the design. But a true artist used only naturally colored feathers, and carefully chose exactly the right hue from all their gradations of colors, and used large or small, straight or curved feathers as the picture demanded. I say "large," but there was seldom a feather in any of those works bigger than a violet's petal, and the smallest would be about the size of a human eyelash. An artist might have to delve and compare and select from among a stock of feathers that would fill this room we sit in.

  I do not know why Chimali had that one time forsaken his paints, but he had chosen the feather medium to do a woodland scene, and he had done it masterfully. In a sunny forest glade, a jaguar lay resting among flowers, butterflies, and birds. Every pictured bird was done in the feathers of its species, though every jay, for instance, would have required Chimali's winnowing from the tiniest blue feathers of perhaps hundreds of real jays. The greenery was not just masses of green feathers; it seemed that every individual blade of grass and leaf of tree was a separate feather of a subtly different green. I counted more than thirty minuscule feathers composing just one small brown and yellow butterfly. Chimali's signature was the only part of the picture done in a single unmodulated color—in the feathers of the scarlet macaw—and the handprint was modestly small, less than half life size.

  I took the tapestry to our lodgings, and gave it to Cozcatl, and told him to leave just the scarlet hand affixed. When he had peeled off every other feather of the picture, I heaped them all, inextricably mixed, onto the cloth backing. I bundled and tied it tightly, and took it again to the palace. Kosi Yuela was absent, but his queen Pela Xila received me and I left the wadded parcel with her, saying:

  "My lady, in case the artist Chimali should come back this way before I meet him, have the goodness to give him this. Tell him it is a token—that all his other debts will be similarly repaid."

  The only way southward out of Záachila was up and over the mountain range called Tzempuula, and that is the way we went, through interminable day after day. Unless you have climbed mountains, Your Excellency, I do not know how to convey to you what mountain climbing is like. I do not know how to make you feel the muscle strain and fatigue, the bruises and scrapes, the streaming sweat and the grit it collects, the giddiness of the heights and the unquenchable thirst of the hot daytimes, the ceaseless need of vigilance in placing each foot, the occasional slip and its heart-stopping instant of fright, the two backslides for every three steps upward, the almost equally arduous and perilous descent—and then no easily negotiable flat land, but another mountain—

  There was a trail, true, so we did not lose our way. But it had been made by and for the lean, tough men of the Cloud People, which is not to say that even they enjoyed traveling it. Nor was it any long-trodden and permanently firm path, for every mountain is continuously falling to pieces. In places the trail led across the rubble of rock slides, which shifted ominously beneath our sandals and threatened at any moment to avalanche entirely out from under us. In other places the trail was a gully worn by erosion and bottomed with an ankle-turning debris of crumbled rottenstone. In others it was cramped spiral staircase of rock, each step just big enough for one's toes to get purchase. In others it was a mere shelf slung on a mountain flank, with a sheer rock wall on one side seeming eager to push us all into the equally sheer abyss on the other side.

  Many of the mountains were so high that our route took us sometimes above the timberline. Up there, except for the infrequent lichen patch on a rock, a few weeds growing from a cranny, or a stunted and wind-gnarled evergreen, there was no vegetation, and little soil for any to take root in. Those summits had been eroded down to bare rock; we might have been clambering along an exposed rib of the earth's skeleton. As we toiled up and over those peaks, we gasped as if competing with each other for what little and insubstantial air there was.

  The days were still warm, too warm for such rigorous exercise. But the nights, at those heights, were cold enough to make the marrow in our bones hurt. Had it been practical, we would have traveled by night so the exertion would keep us warm, and slept by day instead of struggling along under our packs, sweating and panting and nearly fainting. But no human being could have moved among those mountains in the darkness without breaking at least a leg and probably his neck.

  Only twice during that stage of our journey did we come upon communities of people. One was Xalapan, a village of the Huave tribe, who are a dull-skinned, ill-favored, and ungracious people. They received us surlily and demanded an exorbitant payment for putting us up, but we paid it. The meal they gave us was abominable: a greasy stew of suety opossum meat, but it did help piece out our own diminishing provisions. The huts they vacated for our use were smelly and verminous, but at least kept off the mountains' night wind. At the other village, Nejapa, we were much more cordially made welcome, and treated with warm hospitality, and well fed, and even were sold some eggs from the local flocks, to carry when we moved on. Unfortunately, the people there were Chinanteca, who, as I mentioned long ago, were afflicted with what you call the pinto disease. Though we knew there was no chance of an outsider's being infected—except perhaps if we lay with their women, and none of us was tempted to that—just the sight of all those blue-blotched bodies made us feel almost as itchy and uncomfortable in Nejapa as we had in Xalapan.

  On the many other stretches, we tried to pace ourselves, according to the rough map I carried, so that our night's camping could be done in a hollow between two mountains. We would usually find there at least a trickle of fresh water and a growth of mexixin cress or swamp cabbage or other edible greens. But, more important, in the lower land a slave did not have to grind the fire drill for half the night, as he did on the thin-aired heights, before he generated enough heat to ignite his tinder moss and get a campfire going. However, since none of us but Blood Glutton had ever traveled that route before, and since even he could not accurately remember all the ups and downs of it, the darkness too often caught us while we were climbing or descending a mountainside.

  On one such night, Blood Glutton said, "I am sick of eating dog meat and beans, and after tonight we will have only three more dogs anyway. This is jaguar country. Mixtli, you and I will stay awake and try to spear one."

  He searched the woods around our camping spot until he found a dead and hollow log, and he hacked off a piece of it, a cylinder about the length of his forearm. He appropriated the castoff skin of one of the little dogs which slave Ten was at that moment broiling over the fire, and stretched the hide over one end of the piece of log, where he tied it with a string, as if he were making a crude drum. Then he jabbed a hole in the center of the dogskin drumhead. Through that he ran a long, thin string of rawhide and knotted it so it would not slip through the skin. The rawhide hung down inside the drum, and Blood Glutton inserted his hand into the open end. When he pinched the dangling strip and ran his horny thumbnail down along it, the drumhead amplified the scratching sound into a rasping grunt exactly like that of a jaguar.

  "If there is a cat anywhere about," said the old soldier, "his native curiosity will bring him to investigate our firelight. But he will approach from downwind, and not very near. So you and I will also go downwind until we find a comfortable spot in the wood. You will sit and do the thrumming, Mixtli, while I will be concealed within easy spear range. The drifting wood-smoke should sufficiently cover our sce
nt, and your calling should make him curious enough to come right upon us."

  I was not exactly rapturous at the prospect of being the bait for a jaguar, but I let Blood Glutton show me how to work his device, how to make the noises at random and irregular intervals: short grunts and longer growls. When we had finished our meal, Cozcatl and the slaves rolled into their blankets, while Blood Glutton and I went off into the night.

  When the campfire was just a glimmer in the distance, but we could still faintly smell its smoke, we stopped in what Blood Glutton said was a clearing. It could have been a cavern of the Holy Home, for all I could see. I sat down on a boulder and he went crunching off somewhere behind me and, when all was quiet, I stuck my hand up inside the drum and began thumbnailing the rawhide string—a grunt, a pause, a grunt and a rumble, a pause, three gruff grunts....

  It sounded so very like a big cat, moodily grumbling as he prowled, that my own back hair prickled. Without really wanting to, I recalled some of the stories I had heard from experienced jaguar hunters. The jaguar, they said, never had to stalk very near its prey. It had the ability to hiccup violently, and its breath would render a victim numb and faint and helpless, even at a distance. A hunter using arrows would always have four of them in hand, because the jaguar was also notorious for being able to dodge an arrow and, insultingly, catch it in his teeth and chew it to splinters. Hence a hunter would have to discharge four arrows in a flurry, hoping that one of them would take effect, because it was a well-known fact that he could get off no more than four arrows before the cat's hiccups overwhelmed him.

  I tried to divert my thoughts by doing some variations and improvisations in my thumb rasping—quick grunts like amused chuckles, long-drawn groans such as a yawning cat might make. I began to believe that I was getting really adept at that art, especially when I somehow produced a grunt after I had let go the rawhide, and I wondered if I might introduce the device as a new musical instrument, and myself as the world's only master of it, at some ceremonial festival....

  There came to my ears another grunt, and I came wide awake from my reverie, horrified, for I had not produced that grunt either. There also came to my nostrils a sort of urinous scent, and to my vision, dim though it was, a sense that a darker piece of the darkness was moving stealthily from behind me to the left side of me. The darkness grunted again, louder, and with an inquiring note. Though almost paralyzed, I thumbed the rawhide to make what I hoped was a growl of welcome. What else could I do?

  From my left front there turned on me two flat, cold, yellow lights—and a sudden sharp wind sang past my cheek. I thought it was the jaguar's lethal hiccup. But the yellow lights blinked out, and there came a throat-tearing scream, like that of a female sacrifice clumsily knifed by an inept priest. The scream broke off and became a choked, bubbling noise, accompanied by the thrashing of a heavy body evidently tearing up all the shrubbery roundabout.

  "I am sorry I had to let it get so close to you," said Blood Glutton at my side. "But I needed to see the gleam of its eyes to judge my aim."

  "What is the thing?" I asked, for I could still hear in my ears that awful humanlike scream, and I feared we had got some wandering woman.

  The thrashing sound ceased, and Blood Glutton went to investigate. He said triumphantly, "Right in the lung. Not bad for throwing by guess." Then he must have felt along the dead body, for I heard him mutter, "I will be damned to Mictlan," and I waited for him to confess that he had speared some poor blue Chinantecatl woman lost in the night woods. But all he said was, "Come and help me drag it up to the camp!" I did, and if it was a woman she weighed as much as I did and she had a cat's hind legs.

  All those in the camp, of course, had bolted up out of their blankets at the frightful noise. Blood Glutton and I let drop our prey, and I could see it for the first time: a big tawny cat, but not a spotted one.

  The old soldier panted, "I must be—losing my skill. Thought I made—a jaguar caller. But that is a cuguar, a mountain lion."

  "No matter," I panted. "Meat just as good. Skin make you a good mantle."

  Naturally there was no more sleeping in what remained of the night. Blood Glutton and I sat and rested, and preened in the admiration of the others, and I congratulated him on his prowess, and he congratulated me on my unflinching patience. Meanwhile, the slaves skinned the animal, and some of them scraped clean the inner surface of the hide, and others cut up the carcass into pieces of convenient carrying size. Cozcatl cooked breakfast for us all: a maize atóli that would give us energy for the day, but he also provided a treat to celebrate our successful hunt. He got out the eggs we had tenderly carried and hoarded since Nejapa. With a twig he pierced each one's shell, and twirled the twig to addle the yolk and white. Then he roasted them only briefly in the outer ashes of the fire, and we sucked out the warm, rich contents through the holes.

  At the next two or three nights' stops, we feasted on the rather chewy but extremely tasty cat meat. Blood Glutton gave the cuguar's hide to the burliest slave, Ten, to wear as a cape so he could continuously supple it with his hands. But we had not taken the trouble to find and rub tanbark into the skin, so it soon began to stink so rancidly that we made Ten march a good distance apart from the rest of us. Also, since mountain climbing often necessitates the use of all four limbs, Ten seldom had his hands free to work the leather to softness. The sun stiffened it until poor Ten might as well have been wearing a varnished-hide door strapped to his back. But Blood Glutton stubbornly mumbled something about making himself a shield of it, and refused to let Ten get rid of it, and so it came with us all the rest of the way through the Tzempuula mountains.

  * * *

  I am glad that the Señor Bishop Zumárraga is not with us today, my lord scribes, for I must tell of a sexual encounter I know His Excellency would deem sordid and repulsive. He would probably turn purple again. In truth, even though more than forty-years have passed since that night, I myself am still made uneasy by the memory of it, and I would omit the episode, except that its recounting is necessary to the understanding of many and more significant incidents that later derived from it.

  When the fourteen of us finally descended the last long foothills of the Tzempuula mountains, we came down again into Tzapoteca territory at a sizable city on the bank of a wide river. You now call it the Villa de Guadalcazar, but in those days the city, the river, and all the expanse of lands about it were called in the Lóochi language Layu Beezyu, or The Place of the Jaguar God. However, since that was a busy crossroads of several trade routes, most of its people spoke Náhuatl as a second language, and as often used the name our Mexíca travelers had given the place: Tecuantépec, or simply Jaguar Hill. No one then or now, except myself, seems ever to have thought it ludicrous to apply the name of Jaguar Hill to the broad flowing river as well, and to the exceptionally unhilly lands beyond.

  The city was only about five one-long-runs from where the river spills into the great southern ocean, so it had attracted immigrant settlers from several other peoples of that coastal area: Zoque, Nexitzo, some Huave, and even displaced groups of the Mixteca. On its streets, one encountered quite a variety of complexions, physiques, costumes, and accents. But fortunately the native Cloud People predominated, so most of the city folk were as superlatively handsome and courtly as those of Záachila.

  On the afternoon we arrived, as our little company stumbled wearily but eagerly across the rope bridge spanning the river, Blood Glutton said, in a voice hoarse from dust and fatigue, "There are some excellent hostels yonder in Tecuantépec."

  "The excellent ones can wait," I rasped. "We will stop at the first one."

  And so, tired and famished, as ragged and filthy and malodorous as priests, we lurched into the dooryard of the first inn we found on the river side of the city. And from that impulsive decision of mine—just as the wisps of smoke must uncoil from the twirl of a fire-drilling stick—there inevitably unfurled all the events of all the remaining roads and days of my life, and of Zyanya's life, and t
he lives of persons I have already mentioned, and of other persons I shall name, and even of one person who never had a name.

  Know, then, reverend friars, that it began so:

  When we had all of us, the slaves included, bathed and then steamed and then bathed again and then dressed in clean garments, we called for food. The slaves ate outside in the twilit dooryard, but Cozcatl, Blood Glutton, and I had a cloth laid for us in a torch-lighted and rush-carpeted inside room. We glutted ourselves on delicacies fresh from the nearby sea: raw oysters and boiled pink shrimps and a baked red fish of great size.

  My stomach's hunger assuaged, I noticed the extraordinary beauty of the woman serving us, and I remembered that I was capable of other hungers. I also noticed something else out of the ordinary. The proprietor of the hostel was obviously of an immigrant race: a short, fat, oily-skinned man. But the serving woman to whom he brusquely snapped orders was obviously of the Ben Záa: tall and supple, with skin that glowed like amber and a face to rival that of her people's First Lady Pela Xila. It was unthinkable that she might be the landlord's wife. And, since she could hardly have been a born or bought slave in her own country, I assumed that some misfortune had forced her to indenture herself to the boorish and foreign-born innkeeper.

  It was difficult to judge the age of any adult woman of the Cloud People—the years were so kind to them—especially one as sightly and graceful as that servant. If I had known that she was old enough to have a daughter of my own age, I might not have spoken to her. I might not have done it in any case, except that Blood Glutton and I were washing down our meal with copious drafts of octli. Whatever impelled me, when the woman next came near I made bold to look up at her and inquire: