Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  Of course that made me remember the warning words of Doctor Maash, when he had administered the snakebite treat-met, and I lay awake through most of the rest of the night, suffering an agony of apprehension. I waited for Ix Ykoki to go into convulsions, or to stiffen slowly and grow cold beside me, and I wondered what kind of punishment the Tzotxil dealt out to murderers of their women. But Ix Ykoki did nothing more alarming man to snore all night through her great nose and in the morning she bounded jauntily from the bed, her crossed eyes bright.

  I was happy that I had not slain the girl, but the fact also perturbed me. If the bungling old pulse doctor who told us that our own teeth were now poisonous had merely been repeating one of his people's stupid superstitions, there was every likelihood that Cozcatl and I were not at all protected against the venomous snakes—or that Blood Glutton ever had been. I so advised my partners, and thereafter we watched even more closely where we put our feet and hands as we made our way through the jungle.

  A little later, I made the acquaintance of another physician, of the kind I had wanted for so long and had come so far to see: one of those Maya doctors famed for their ability to treat ailments of the eye. His name was Ah Chel, and he was also of the Tzotxil tribe, and Tzotxil means Bat People, which I took as a good omen, since bats are the creatures which see best in the darkness. Doctor Ah Chel had two other assets which recommended him to me: he spoke an adequate Náhuatl, and he was not himself cross-eyed. I think I would have been somewhat distrustful of a cross-eyed eye doctor.

  He indulged in no pulse feeling or god calling or other mystic means of diagnosis. He began straightforwardly by putting into my eyes drops of juice from the herb camopalxhuitl, to enlarge my pupils so he could look inside them. While we waited for the drug to take effect, I talked—perhaps just to ease my own nervousness—and told him of that sham Doctor Maash, and the circumstances of Ten's illness and death.

  "Rabbit fever," said Doctor Ah Chel, nodding. "Be glad that none of the rest of you handled that diseased rabbit. The fever does not kill of itself, but it weakens the victim so that he succumbs to another ailment which fills the lungs with a thick liquid. Your slave might still have lived if you had brought him down from the heights to a place where he could have breathed air more thick and rich. But now let us have a look at you."

  And he produced a clear crystal, indubitably one of Master Xibalba's and he peered closely into each of my eyes, then sat back and said flatly, "Young Ek Muyal, there is nothing afflicting your eyes."

  "Nothing?" I exclaimed. I wondered if, after all, Ah Chel was as much a pretender as Maash. Between my teeth I said, "There is nothing wrong except that I can see with clarity no farther than the reach of my arm. You call that nothing?"

  "I mean there is no disease or disturbance of your vision which I or anyone can treat."

  I swore one of Blood Glutton's imprecations, and I hoped it made the great god Huitzilopóchtli wince in his private parts. Ah Chel gestured for me to hear him out.

  "You see things blurred because of the shape of your eyes, and they were born to be that way. An uncommonly shaped eyeball distorts vision in the same way as this uncommonly shaped piece of quartz. Hold this crystal between your eye and a flower, and you see the flower plain. But hold the crystal between your eye and a distant garden, and that garden is just a blur of colors."

  I said miserably, "There is no medicine, no surgery...?"

  "I am sorry to say there is not. If you had the blinding disease caused by the black fly, yes, I might wash that away with medications. If you were afflicted with what we call the white veil, yes, I could cut that out and give you better vision, though not perfect. But there is no operation which can make the eyeball smaller, not without destroying it entirely. We will never know a remedy for your condition, any more than any man will ever know the secret place where the aged alligators go to die."

  Even more miserably, I mumbled, "Then I must live all the rest of my life in a fog, squinting like a mole?"

  "Well," he said, sounding not very sympathetic to my self-pity, "you can also live the rest of your life thanking the gods that you are not utterly blinded by the veil or the fly or something else. You will see many who are." He paused, then said pointedly, "They will never see you."

  I was so cast down by the physician's verdict that I passed the remainder of our time in Tamoan Chan in rather a glum humor, and I fear I was not very good company for my partners. When a guide from the Pokomam tribe of the far eastern jungle took us to see the marvelous lakes of Tziskao there, I looked at them as coldly as if the Maya rain god Chak had created them to affront me personally. Those are some sixty bodies of water, ranging from small ponds to estimable lakes in size, and they have no connecting straits between them, and they have no visible inlet streams, yet they never diminish in the dry season or overflow in the wet. But the really noteworthy thing about them is that no two of all those lakes are of the same color.

  From the high ground where we stood overlooking six or seven of the waters, our guide pointed and said proudly, "Behold, young traveler Ek Muyal! That one is dark green-blue, that one is the color of turquoise, that one is as bright green as an emerald, that one is dull green like jadestone, that one is the pale blue of the winter sky...."

  I grumbled, "They might be as red as blood, for all I could tell." And that of course was simply not true. The truth was that I was seeing everything and everybody through the dark of my own despondency.

  For a brief while, I courted optimism by trying some experiments with Master Xibalba's burning crystal I carried. I already knew that it was of use for seeing close things even closer and clearer, so I endeavored to make it help me see far things as well. I tried holding it close to my eye while I looked at a tree, then holding it at arm's length, then holding it at varying distances between. No use. When aimed at objects more than a hand span beyond it, the quartz only made them more indistinct than my unaided eye did, and the experiments only made me more depressed.

  Even when dealing with the Maya buyers of our trade goods, I was sour and sullen, but fortunately there was enough demand for our wares that my unwinning demeanor was tolerated. I brusquely refused the offers of pelts of jaguar and ocelot and other animals, the feathers of macaw and toucan and other birds. What I wanted was gold dust or metal currency, but such things were not much circulated in those uncivilized lands. So I let it be known that I would trade our goods—the fabrics and garments, the jewelry and trinkets, the manufactured medicines and cosmetics—only for the plumes of the quetzal tototl.

  In theory, any fowler who acquired those leg-long, emerald-green feathers was obliged, on pain of death, to present them immediately to his tribal chief, who would use them either for personal adornment or as currency in his dealing with other chiefs of the Maya and the more powerful rulers of other nations. But in practice, as I hardly need say, the fowlers gave their chiefs only a share of those rarest of feathers, and kept the rest for their own enrichment. Since I positively refused to trade for anything but the quetzal tototl plumes, the customers had to go off to do hasty trades among their fellows... and quetzal tototl plumes I got.

  As we gradually dispensed with our goods, I sold off the slaves who had carried them. In that land of the lazy, not even the nobles had much work to which to put slaves, still less could afford to own them. But every tribal chief was eager to boast a superiority over rival chiefs, and a holding of slaves—though they might be only a drain on his treasury and his larder—constituted a legitimate boast. So, for good gold dust, I sold ours variously and impartially to the chiefs of the Tzotxil, the Quiche, and the Tzeltal, two slaves apiece, and only the remaining two accompanied our return to the Chiapa country. One carried the large but unweighty bale of feathers, the other's load consisted of those few trade items we had not yet disposed of.

  As he had promised, the artisan Xibalba had his finished crystals waiting for me when we got back to Chiapan—in all, a hundred twenty and seven of them, of varied sizes
—and, thanks to my sale of the slaves, I was able to pay him in pure gold-dust currency, as I had promised. While he carefully wrapped each crystal separately in cotton, then bundled them all together in cloth to make a tidy package, I said to him, by way of the interpreter:

  "Master Xibalba, these crystals make a looked-at object look bigger. Have you ever contrived a kind of crystal that would make objects appear smaller?"

  "Oh, yes," he said, smiling. "Even my greatest-grandfather probably tried his hand at fashioning other things than burning crystals. We all have. I do myself, just for amusement."

  I told him how limited was my vision, and added, "A Maya doctor told me that my eyes behave as if I am always looking through one of the enlarging quartzes. I wondered, if I could find such a thing as a reducing crystal, and if I looked through it..."

  He regarded me with interest, and rubbed his chin, and said, "Hm," and went through the back of his workshop to his house. He returned with a wooden tray of shallow compartments, each holding a crystal. They were of all different shapes; some were even miniature pyramids.

  "I keep these only for curiosities," said the artisan. "They are of no practical use, but some have amusing properties. This one, for instance." He lifted out a short bar of three flat sides. "It is not quartz, but a transparent kind of limestone. And I do not grind this stone; it cleaves naturally in flat planes. Hold it yonder, in the sun, and see the light it throws on your hand."

  I did, half expecting to flinch from a burn. Instead I exclaimed, "The mist of water jewels!" The sunlight passing through the crystal to my hand was transformed; it was a colored band, ranging from dark red at one extreme, through yellow and green and blue, to the deepest purple; it was a tiny simulacrum of the colored bow one sees in the sky after a rain. "But you are not looking for playthings," said the man. "Here." And he gave me a crystal of which both surfaces were concave; that is to say, it was like two dishes with their bottoms cemented together.

  I held it over the embroidered hem of my mantle, and the pattern shrank to half its width. I raised my head, still holding the crystal before me, and looked at the artisan. The man's features, blurred before, were suddenly sharp and distinct, but his face was so small that he might that instant have leapt away from me and out the door and entirely across the plaza.

  "It is a marvel," I said, shaken. I put down the crystal and rubbed at my eye. "I could see you... but so far away."

  "Ah, then that one diminishes too powerfully. They have different strengths. Try this one."

  It was concave only on one side; the other face was perfectly flat. I raised the thing cautiously...

  "I can see," I said, and I said it like a prayer of thanksgiving to the most beneficent of gods. "I can see far and near. There are spots and ripples, but everything else is as clear and sharp as when I was a child. Master Xibalba, you have done something the celebrated Maya physicians admit they cannot. You have made me see again!"

  "And all those sheaves of years... we thought these things useless..." he murmured, sounding rather awed himself. Then he spoke briskly. "So it requires the crystal of one plane surface and an inner curve. But you cannot go about forever holding the thing out in front of you like that. It would be like peering through a knothole. Try bringing it close against your eye."

  I did, and cried out, and apologized: "It hurt as if my eye was being drawn from its socket."

  "Still too powerful. And there are spots and ripples, you say. So I must seek a stone more perfect and unflawed than the finest quartz." He smiled and rubbed his hands together. "You have set me the first new task the Xibalba have had in generations. Come back tomorrow."

  I was full of excitement and expectation, but I said nothing to my companions, in case that hopeful experiment too should come to nothing. They and I again resided with the Macoboo, to our great comfort and the great gratification of the two female cousins, and we stayed for six or seven days. During that time, I visited the Xibalba workshop several times daily, while the master labored over the most scrupulously exact crystal he had ever been asked to make. He had procured a wonderfully clear chunk of jewel-grade topaz, and had begun by shaping it into a flat disk of a circumference that covered my eye from brow to cheekbone. The crystal was to remain flat on its outer side, but the inner concavity's precise thickness and curvature could be determined only by the experiment of my looking through it every time the master ground it down a little more.

  "I can keep thinning it and increasing the arc of curve little by little," he said, "until we reach the exact reducing power you require. But we must know when we reach it. If ever I grind away too much, the thing is ruined."

  So I kept going back for trials, and when my one eye got bloodshot from the strain, we would change to my other, and then back again. But finally, to my inexpressible joy, there came the day, and the moment in that day, when I could hold the crystal against either eye, and see through it perfectly. Everything in the world was clear and crisply outlined, from a book held in reading position to the trees on the mountain horizon beyond the city. I was in ecstasy, and Master Xibalba was nearly so, with pride in his unprecedented creation.

  He gave the crystal one final gleaming polish, with a wet paste of some fine red clay. Then he smoothed the crystal's edge and mounted it in a sturdy circlet of copper hammered to hold it securely, and that circlet had a short handle with which I could hold the crystal to either eye, and the handle was tied to a leather thong so I could keep it always about my neck, ready for use and safe from loss. I took the finished instrument to the Macoboo house, but showed it to no one, and waited for an opportunity to surprise Blood Glutton and Cozcatl.

  When the twilight was turning to night, we sat in the door-yard with our hostess, the late Ten's mother, and a few others of the family, all of us elder males having a smoke after our evening meal. The Chiapa do not smoke the poquietl. Instead, they use a clay jar punctured with several holes; this they pack with picíetl and fragrant herbs and set to smoldering; then each participant inserts a long, hollow reed into one of the jar's holes and all enjoy a community smoke.

  "Yonder approaches a handsome girl," murmured Blood Glutton, pointing his reed down the street.

  I could barely make out a distant suggestion of something pale moving in the dusk, but I said, "Ask me to describe her."

  "Eh?" grunted the old soldier, and he lifted his eyebrows at me, and he sarcastically used my former nickname. "Very well, Fogbound, describe her—as you see her."

  I put my crystal to my left eye and the girl came sharply into view, even in that poor light. Enthusiastically, like a slave trader at the block, I enumerated all the visible details of her physique—skin complexion, length of her hair plaits, the shapeliness of her bare ankles and feet, the regular features of her face, which was handsome indeed. I added that the embroidery on her blouse was of the so-called pottery pattern. "She also wears," I concluded, "a thin veil over her hair, and under it she has trapped a number of live fireflies. A most fetching adornment." Then I burst out laughing at the expression on the faces of my two partners.

  Since I could use only one eye at a time, there was a certain flatness, a lack of depth to everything I looked at. Nevertheless, I could again see almost as clearly as I had when I was a child, and that sufficed for me. I might mention that the topaz was of the pale-yellow color; when I looked through it I saw everything seemingly sunlighted even on gray days; so perhaps I saw the world as rather prettier than others did. But, as I discovered when I looked into a mirror, the use of the crystal did not make me any prettier, since the eye behind it appeared much smaller than the uncovered one. Also, because it was natural for me to hold the crystal in my left hand while my right was occupied, for some time I suffered from headache. I soon learned always to hold the topaz to alternate eyes, and the headache went away.

  I know, reverend scribes, that you must be amused at my fulsome babbling about an instrument that is no novelty to you. But I never saw another such device until many yea
rs later, until my first encounter with the earliest arriving Spaniards. One of the chaplain friars who came with the Captain-General Cortés wore two such crystals, one for each eye, held in a leather strap which was tied around his head.

  But to me and the crystalsmith, my device was an unheard-of invention. In fact, he refused all payment for his labor and even for the topaz, which must have been most costly. He insisted that he was well repaid by his own pride in his achievement. So, since he would take nothing from me, I left with the Macoboo family a quantity of quetzal tototl plumes to be delivered to him when I was long enough gone that he could not refuse them—and I left a sufficiency to make the Master Xibalba perhaps the richest man in Chiapan, as I felt he deserved to be.

  At night I looked at stars.

  From having been for so long so deeply dejected, I was suddenly and understandably buoyant of spirit, and I announced to my partners, "Now that I can see, I should like to see the ocean!"

  They were so pleased with the change in me that they did not demur when we left Chiapan going southward rather than westward, and had to make our way over and through yet another jumble of rugged mountains, and mountains that were slumbering volcanoes. But we came through them without untoward incident, and came down to the oceanside Hot Land inhabited by the Mame people. That flat region is called the Xoconóchco, and the Mame occupy themselves with the production of cotton and salt for trade with other nations. The cotton is grown on the wide, fertile stretch of loam between the rocky mountains and the sandy beaches. In what was then late winter, there was nothing distinctive about those fields, but I later visited the Xoconóchco in the hottest season, when the cotton bolls are so big and profuse that even the green plants bearing them are invisible, and the whole countryside seems to be heavily blanketed by snow, even while it swelters under the sun.

  The salt is made year-round, by diking the shallow lagoons along the coast and letting their waters dry, then sifting the salt from the sand. The salt, being also as white as snow, is not hard to distinguish from the sand, for all the beaches of the Xoconóchco are a dull black; they consist of the grit and dust and ashes belched by those volcanoes inland. Even the foam of the surf of that southern sea is not white, but is colored a dirty gray by the endlessly roiled dark sand.