Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  We did not try to descend into the inviting depths, but turned south and followed the canyon rim until it gradually began to slope downward. By dusk it had lowered us to the level of that "brook," which was easily a hundred man's-steps from bank to bank. I learned later that it is the River Suchiapa, the broadest, deepest, swiftest-flowing river in all of The One World. That canyon, cut by it through the Chiapa mountains, is also unique in The One World: five one-long-runs in length and, at its deepest, nearly half a one-long-run from brink to bottom.

  We had come down to a plateau where the air was warmer and the wind more gentle. We also came to a village, though a poor one. It was called Toztlan, and it was scarcely big enough to support a name, and the only meal the villagers could provide us was a hash made of boiled owl, which gags me even in recollection. But Toztlan did have a hut big enough for us all to sleep under shelter for the first time in several nights, and the village population did include a physician of sorts.

  "I am only an herb doctor," he said apologetically, in faltering Náhuatl, after he had examined Ten. "I have given the patient a purge, and can do no more. But tomorrow you will arrive at Chiapan, and there you will find many famous pulse doctors."

  I did not know what pulse doctoring might be, but, by the next day, I could only hope it would be an improvement on herb doctoring. Before we got to Chiapan, Ten had collapsed and was being carried on the cuguar hide he had carried for so long. We took turns, by fours, bearing the improvised litter by the leg-skins at its corners, while Ten lay upon it and writhed and—between spasms of coughing—complained to us that several binkizaka were sitting on his chest and preventing him from breathing.

  "One of them is gnawing on me, too. See?" And he held out his hand. What he showed was only the place where the harmless rabbit had nipped him, but, for some reason, that spot had ulcerated into an open sore. We carriers tried to tell him that we saw nothing sitting or eating upon him, and that his problem was only the thinness of the air on that high plateau. We ourselves had such difficulty in breathing that none of us could carry for long before we had to be relieved by another.

  Chiapan looked nothing like a capital of anything. It was merely one more village, situated on the bank of a tributary of the Suchiapa River, and I supposed it was the capital only by virtue of its being the largest village of all the villages in the Chiapa nation. A few of its buildings, too, were of wood or adobe, instead of their all being the usual stick-and-thatch huts, and there were the crumbling remnants of two old pyramids.

  Our little company came into town reeling with fatigue and calling for a doctor. A kindly passerby heeded our obviously urgent cries, and stopped to peer at the barely conscious Ten. He exclaimed, "Macoboo!" and shouted something else in his language which sent two or three other passersby off at a run. Then he made a beckoning gesture to us and trotted ahead to lead us to the abode of a physician who, we gathered from other gestures, had some command of the Náhuatl tongue.

  By the time we got there, we had been joined by an excitedly jabbering crowd. It seemed that the Chiapa do not, like us Mexíca, have entirely individual names. Though each person naturally has some distinguishing name, it is attached to a family name, like those of you Spaniards, which endures unchanging through all the generations of that family. The slave we called Ten was of the Macoboo family of Chiapan, and the helpful citizen, recognizing him, had shouted for someone to run and tell his relatives of his return to town.

  Ten was unhappily in no condition to recognize any of the other Macoboo who converged on us, and the doctor—though visibly gratified to find such a crowd clamoring at his door—could not let them all inside. When the four of us carrying Ten had laid him on the earthen floor, the aged physician commanded that the hut be cleared of everybody except himself, his crone of a wife who would assist him, the patient, and myself, to whom he would explain the treatment while he performed it. He introduced himself to me as Doctor Maash and, in not very good Náhuatl, told me the theory of pulse doctoring.

  He held the wrist of Ten Macoboo while he called out the name of each god, good and bad, in whom the Chiapa believe. As he explained it, when he shouted the name of the deity who was afflicting the patient, Ten's heart would pound and his pulse quicken. Then the doctor, knowing which god was responsible for the ailment, would know exactly what sacrificial offering should be made to persuade that god to cease the molestation. He would also know the proper medicines to administer to repair whatever damage had been done by the god.

  So Ten lay there on the cuguar skin, his eyes closed in the sunken hollows of their sockets, and old Doctor Maash held his wrist, leaned over him, and shouted into his ear:

  "Kakal, the bright god!" then a pause for the pulse to respond, then, "Totik, the dark god!" and a pause and "Teo, the love goddess!" and "Antun, the life god!" and "Hachakyum, the mighty god!" and so on, through more Chiapa gods and goddesses than I can remember. At last he squatted back on his heels and muttered in apparent defeat, "The pulse is so feeble that I cannot be sure of the response to any name."

  Ten suddenly croaked, without opening his eyes, "Binkizaka bit me!"

  "Aha!" said Doctor Maash, brightening. "It would not have occurred to me to suggest the lowly binkizaka. And here indeed is a hole in his hand!"

  "Excuse me, Lord Doctor," I ventured. "It was not any of the binkizaka. It was a rabbit that bit him."

  The physician raised his head so he could scowl down his nose at me. "Young man, I was holding his wrist when he said 'binkizaka,' and I know a pulse when I feel it. Woman!" I blinked, but he was addressing his wife. He afterward explained to me that he told her, "I shall need to confer with an expert in the lesser beings. Go fetch Doctor Kame."

  The crone scuttled out of the hut, elbowing through the craning crowd, and in a few moments we were joined by another elderly man. The Doctors Kame and Maash huddled and muttered, then took turns holding Ten's flaccid wrist and roaring "Binkizaka!" into his ear. Then they huddled and consulted some more, then nodded in agreement. Doctor Kame barked, another order to the old woman and she departed again in a hurry. Doctor Maash told me:

  "It is profitless to sacrifice to the binkizaka, since they are half beasts and do not understand the rites of propitiation. This being an emergency case, my colleague and I have decided on the radical measure of burning the affliction out of the patient. We have sent for the Sun Slab, the most holy treasure of our people."

  The woman came back with two men, carrying between them what looked at first glance like a simple square of rock. Then I saw that its upper surface was inlaid with jadestone in the form of a cross. Yes, very similar to your Christian cross. In the four spaces between the arms of the cross, the rock had been bored completely through, and in each of those holes was a chunk of chipilotl quartz. But—and this is important for the understanding of what followed, my lords—each of those quartz crystals had been ground and polished so it was of perfectly round circumference and smoothly convex on both its upper and lower sides. Each of those transparent panes in the Sun Slab was like a flattened ball, or an extremely symmetrical clam.

  While the two men stood holding the Sun Slab over the prostrate Ten, the old woman took a broom and, with his handle, poked holes in the thatch of the roof, each hole admitting a beam of the afternoon sun, until finally she punched a hole that let a beam right down on the patient. The two doctors tugged at the cuguar pelt to adjust Ten's position relative to the sunbeam and the Sun Slab. Then occurred a thing most marvelous, and I crept closer to see better.

  Under the doctors' direction, the two men holding the heavy stone slab tilted it so the sun shone through one of the shaped quartz crystals and made a round spot of light on Ten's ulcerated hand. Then, moving the stone back and forth in the sunbeam, they made that round spot of light concentrate down to one intense dot of light, aimed directly upon the sore. The two doctors held the limp hand steady, the two men held the dot of light steady, and—believe me or not, as you will—a wisp of smoke came fr
om the ugly sore. In another moment, there was a sizzling noise and a small flame was there, almost invisible in the brightness of that intensified light. The doctors gently moved the hand about, so that the sun-made flame went all over the ulcer.

  At last, one of them said a word. The two men carried the Sun Slab out of the hut, the old woman began trying with her broomstick to rearrange the straw of the roof, and Doctor Maash motioned for me to lean and look. The ulcer had been as completely and cleanly seared as if it had been done with a fire-hot copper rod. I congratulated the two physicians—sincerely, since I had never seen the like before. I also congratulated Ten on having borne the burning without a sound.

  "Sad to say, he did not feel it," said Doctor Maash. "The patient is dead. We might have saved him, if you had told me of the binkizaka's involvement and saved me the unnecessary routine of going through all the major gods." Even in his ragged Náhuatl, his tone came through as tartly critical. "You are all alike, when you need medical treatment. Keep a stubborn silence about the most important symptoms. Insist that a physician must first guess the affliction, then cure it, or he has not earned his fee."

  "I shall be pleased to pay all fees, Lord Doctor," I said, just as tartly. "Would you be pleased to tell me what you have cured?"

  We were interrupted by a small, wizened, dark-skinned woman who slipped into the hut at that moment and shyly said something in the local language. Doctor Maash grumpily translated:

  "She offers to pay all medical expenses, if you will consent to sell her the body instead of eating it, as you Mexíca customarily do with dead slaves. She is—she was his mother."

  I ground my teeth and said, "Kindly inform her that we Mexíca do no such thing. And I freely give her son back to her. I only regret that we could not have delivered him alive."

  The woman's woebegone face became a little less so as the physician spoke. Then she asked another question.

  "It is our custom," he translated, "to bury our dead upon the pallet on which they died. She would like to buy from you this smelly skin of a mountain lion."

  "It is hers," I said, and for some reason I lied: "Her son killed the beast." I made the doctor earn his fee as an interpreter if for nothing else, for I told the whole story of the hunt, only casting Ten in Blood Glutton's role, and making it sound as if Ten had gallantly saved my life at peril of his own. By the end of the story, the woman's dark face was glowing with maternal pride.

  She said something else, and the disgruntled doctor translated: "She says, if her son was so loyal to the young lord, then you must be a good and deserving man. The Macoboo are indebted to you forever."

  At that, she called in four more men from outside, presumably Macoboo kinsmen, and they carried Ten away on the accursed pelt that he would not now ever be rid of. I emerged from the hut behind them, to find that my partners had been eavesdropping. Cozcatl was sniffling, but Blood Glutton said sarcastically:

  "That was all very noble. But has it occurred to you, good young lord, that this so-called trading expedition has given away rather more of value than it has yet acquired?"

  "We have just now acquired some friends," I said.

  And so we had. The Macoboo family, which was a big one, insisted that we be their guest during our stay in Chiapan, and lavished on us both hospitality and adulation. There was nothing we could ask that would not be given, as freely as I had given the dead slave back to them. I believe the first thing Blood Glutton requested, after a good bath and a hearty meal, was one of the comelier female cousins; I know I was given a handsome one for my own use. But the first favor I asked was that the Macoboo find me a Chiapan resident who spoke and understood Náhuatl. And when such a man was produced, the first thing I said to him was:

  "Those quartz crystals in the Sun Slab, could they not be used instead of the tedious drill and tinder for lighting fires?"

  "Why, of course," he said, surprised that I should find it necessary to inquire. "We have always used them so. I do not mean the ones in the Sun Slab, for the Sun Slab is reserved for ceremonial purposes. Perhaps you noticed that its crystals are as big as a man's fist. Clear quartz of that size is so rare that naturally the priests appropriate it and proclaim it holy. But a mere fragment will serve for fire lightings, when it is properly shaped and polished."

  He reached under his mantle and extracted from the waist of his loincloth a crystal of that same clamshell convexity, but not much bigger than my thumbnail.

  "I need hardly remark, young lord, that it only functions as a burning instrument when the god Kakal shines his sunlight through it. But even at night it has a second use—for looking closely at small things. Let me show you."

  He demonstrated how it could be held at just the proper distance between eye and object—we used the embroidery on my mantle hem for the purpose—and I almost jumped when the pattern loomed so large to my sight that I could count the colored threads of it.

  "Where do you get these things?" I asked, trying to keep my voice from sounding overeager.

  "Quartz is a fairly common stone in these mountains," he was frank to admit. "Whenever anybody stumbles upon a good clear bit, he saves it until it can be brought here to Chiapan. Here live the Xibalba family, and only that family has known through all its generations the secret of fashioning the rough stone into these useful crystals."

  "Oh, it is no profound secret," said the current Master Xibalba. "Not like a knowledge of sorcery or prophecy." My interpreter had introduced us, and did the translating as the crystalsmith casually went on, "It is mainly a matter of knowing the proper curvature to impart, and then merely having the patience to grind and polish each crystal exactly so."

  Hoping I sounded equally casual, I said, "They make interesting novelties. Useful, too. I wonder that I have not yet seen them copied by the craftsmen of Tenochtítlan."

  My interpreter remarked that there had probably never before been any reason for the Sun Slab to have been exhibited in the presence of anyone from Tenochtítlan. Then he translated Master Xibalba's next comment:

  "I said, young lord, that there is no great secret to making the crystals. I did not say it is easy, or easily imitated. One must know, for example, how to keep the stone precisely centered for the grinding. It was my greatest-grandfather Xibalba who first learned how."

  He said that with pride. He might seem casual about the secrets of his craft, but I was sure that he would never reveal them to any but his own progeny. That suited me perfectly; let the Xibalba remain the only keepers of the knowledge; let the crystals remain inimitable; let me buy up enough of them—

  Pretending hesitation, I said, "I think... I believe... I might just possibly be able to sell such things for curiosities in Tenochtítlan or Texcóco. I could not quite be sure... but yes, perhaps to scribes, for greater accuracy in doing their detailed word pictures..."

  The master's eyes gleamed mischievously as his comment was relayed to me. "How many, young lord, do you think you believe you might possibly but not quite require?"

  I grinned and dropped the pretense. "It would depend on how many you can provide and the price you ask."

  "You see here my entire stock of working material as of this day." He waved at the one wall of his workroom which was all shelves, from thatch to ground; on every shelf, nestled in bolls of cotton, were the rough quartz stones. They were distinctive only for the angular, six-sided shapes in which they came from the earth, and they ranged in size from that of a finger joint to that of a small maize cob.

  "Here is what I paid for the stock," the artisan went on, handing me a bark paper bearing numerous columns of numbers and symbols. I was mentally adding up the total when he said, "From this stock I can make six twenties of finished crystals of varying sizes."

  I asked, "How long would that take?"

  "One month."

  "Twenty days?" I exclaimed. "I should have thought one crystal would take that long!"

  "We Xibalba have had sheaves of years in which to practice," he said. "And I
have seven apprentice sons to help me. I also have five daughters, but of course they are not allowed to touch the rough stones, lest they ruin them, being females."

  "Six twenties of crystals," I mused, repeating his provincial mode of counting. "And what would you charge for that many?"

  "What you see there," he said, indicating the bark paper.

  Puzzled, I spoke to the interpreter. "Did I not understand correctly? Did he not say that this is what he paid? For the rough rock?" The interpreter nodded, and through him I again addressed the crystalsmith:

  "This makes no sense. Even a street vendor of tortillas asks more for the bread than she paid for the maize." Both he and the translator smiled indulgently and shook their heads. "Master Xibalba," I persisted, "I came here prepared to bargain, yes, but not to steal. I tell you honestly, I would be willing to pay eight times this price, and happy to pay six, and overjoyed to pay four."

  His answer came back, "And I would be obliged to refuse."

  "In the name of all your gods and mine, why?"

  "You proved yourself a friend of the Macoboo. Hence you are a friend of all the Chiapa, and we Xibalba are Chiapa born. No, protest no more. Go. Enjoy your stay among us. Let me get to work. Return in one month for your crystals."

  "Then our fortune is already made!" Blood Glutton exulted, as he played with the sample crystal the artisan had given me. "We need not travel any farther. By the great Huitztli, you can sell these things back home for any price you ask!"

  "Perhaps," I said. "But we have a month to wait for them, and we have a surplus of goods we still can trade, and I have a personal reason for wanting to visit the Maya."