Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  Perhaps others have been lured to their deaths by the light, but the Xtabai itself is innocuous enough. I never have discovered why a noisome air should burn when ordinary air does not. But on several later occasions I again encountered the blue fire, always with the same stench, and, the last time I took the trouble to investigate, I found another material as extraordinary as the burnable air. Near the Xtabai flame I stepped into some kind of sticky muck and instantly thought, "This time the quicksand has got me." But it had not; I easily stepped out of it and carried a palmful of the odd substance back to my campfire.

  It was black, like the oxitl we extract from pine sap, only more slimy than gummy. When I held it to my fire to examine it, a gobbet of it fell into the flames, causing them to flare higher and hotter. Rather pleased at that accidental discovery, I fed my whole handful to the fire and, without my having to add another stick, it burned brightly all night. Thereafter, whenever I had to make camp anywhere near a swamp, I did not bother to look for dry wood; I looked for the black muck oozing up from the ground, and always it made a hotter fire and a brighter light than any of the oils we are accustomed to use in our lamps.

  I was then in the lands of the people we Mexíca indiscriminately called the Olméca, simply because that was the country which supplied most of our óli. The people themselves, of course, recognize various nations among them—Coatzacoali, Coatlicamac, Cupilco, and others—but the people are all very much alike: every grown man goes about stooped under the weight of his name, and every woman and child goes about constantly chewing. I had better explain.

  Of the trees native to that country, there are two kinds which, when their bark is slashed, dribble a sap that solidifies to some degree. One tree produces the óli that we use in its more liquid form for a glue, and in its harder, elastic form for our tlachtli balls. The other kind of tree produces a softer, sweet-tasting gum called tzictli. It has absolutely no use except to be chewed. I do not mean eaten; it is never swallowed. When it loses its flavor or resiliency, it is spit out and another wad thrust in the mouth, to be chewed and chewed and chewed. Only women and children do that; for a man it would be considered an effeminacy. But I thank the gods that the habit has not been introduced elsewhere, for it makes the Olméca women, who are otherwise quite attractive, look as vapid and mindless as a lumpy-faced manatee everlastingly munching river weeds.

  The men may not chew tzictli, but they have developed an impediment of their own which I think just as imbecilic. At some time in the past, they started wearing name badges. On his chest a man would display a pendant of whatever material he could afford, anything from sea shell to gold, bearing his name symbols for any passerby to read. Thus a stranger asking a question of another stranger could address him by name. Unnecessary perhaps, but in those days the name badge was no worse than an encouragement to politeness.

  Over the years, however, that simple pendant has been ponderously elaborated. To it now is added a symbol of the wearer's occupation: a bunch of feathers, say, if he is in that trade; and an indication of his rank in the nobility or commonalty: additional badges with the name symbols of parents and grandparents and even more distant forebears; and baubles of gold, silver, or precious stones to boast his wealth; and a tangle of colored ribbons showing that he is unmarried, married, widowed, the father of how many progeny; plus a token of his military prowess: perhaps several other disks bearing the names of communities in whose defeat he has taken part. There may be much more of that frippery, hanging from his neck nearly to his knees. So nowadays every Olmecatl man is bowed down and almost hidden by his agglomeration of precious metals, jewels, feathers, ribbons, shells, coral. And no stranger ever has to ask a question of another; every man wears the answer to just about everything anyone might want to know from or about him.

  Those eccentricities notwithstanding, the Olméca are not all fools who have dedicated their lives to tapping the sap of trees. They are also justly acclaimed for their arts, ancient and modern. Scattered here and there along the coastal lands are the deserted old cities of their forebears, and some of the relics remaining are astonishing. I was particularly impressed by the stupendous statues carved of lava rock, now buried to their necks or chins in the ground and much overgrown. All that is visible of them is their heads. They wear most lifelike expressions of alert truculence, and all wear helmets that resemble the leather head-protectors of our tlachtli ball players, so the carvings may represent the gods who invented that game. I say gods, not men, because any one of those heads, not to mention the unimaginable body underground, is far too immense to fit inside the typical house of a human being.

  There are also many stone friezes and columns and such, incised with naked male figures—some very naked and very male—which appear to be dancing, or drunk, or convulsed, so I assume that the Olméca's ancestors were a merry people. And there are jadestone figurines of superb finish and precise detailing, though it would be difficult to separate the older of those from the newer, for there are still many artisans among the Olméca who do incredible work in gemstone carving.

  In the land called Cupilco, in its capital city of Xicalanca—beautifully situated on a long, narrow spit of land with a pale blue ocean lapping on one side and a pale green lagoon lapping at the other—I found a smith named Tuxtem whose specialty was the making of tiny birds and fishes, no bigger than a finger joint, and every infinitesimal feather or scale on those creatures was alternately of gold and silver. I later brought some of his work to Tenochtítlan, and those Spaniards who have seen and admired them—a few pieces yet remain—say that no smith anywhere in what they call the Old World has ever done anything as masterful.

  I continued following the coast, which led me completely around that Maya peninsula of Uluumil Kutz. I have already described that drear land to you in brief, my lords, and I will not waste words in describing it at any greater length, except to mention that on its western coast I remember only one town of a size big enough to be called a town: Kimpech; and on its northern coast another: Tihó; and on its eastern coast another: Chaktemal.

  I had by then been gone from Tenochtítlan for more than a year. So I began, in a general way, to head homeward again. From Chaktemal I struck inland, due west, across the width of the peninsula. I carried adequate atóli and chocolate and other traveling rations, plus a quantity of water. As I have said, that is an arid land of maliferous climate, and it has no definable rainy season. I made the crossing early in what would be your month of July, which was the eighteenth month of the Maya year, the one called Kumkti—Thunderclap—not because it brought storms or the least mizzle of rainfall, but because that month is so dry that the already sere lands make an artificial thunder of groaning and crunching as they shrink and shrivel.

  Maybe that summer was even more severely hot and parched than usual, because it provided me with a strange and, as it proved, a valuable discovery. One day I came to a small lake of what looked like that black muck I had earlier found in the Olméca swamps and utilized to fuel my campfires. But when I picked up and threw a stone into the lake, it did not go in; it bounced on the surface as if the lake had been made of congealed óli. Hesitantly, I set foot on the black stuff and found it just slightly yielding to my weight. It was chapopotli, a material like hard resin, but black. Melted, it was used to make bright-burning torches, to fill cracks in buildings, as an ingredient of various medicines, as a paint that would keep out water. But I had never seen an entire lake of it before.

  I sat down on the bank to have a bite to eat while I contemplated that find. And, even as I sat there, the Kumku heat—which was still making the country all about me snap and rumble—also fractured the chapopotli lake. Its surface cracked in all directions as if overlaid with a spider web, then it broke up into jagged black chunks, and those were heaved about, and among them were thrown up some lengthy brown-black things which might have been the limbs and branches of a long-buried tree.

  I congratulated myself that I had not ventured out upon th
e lake just in time to get tossed and probably injured in its convulsions. But, by the time I had finished eating, all was quiet again. The lake was no longer flat; it was a chopped-up jumble of shiny black fragments, but it looked unlikely to be further agitated, and I was curious about those objects it had cast up. So I cautiously stepped out on the lake again and, when it did not swallow me, picked my way among the black lumps and shards, and found that the thrown-up things were bones.

  Having been discolored by their interment, they were no longer white, as old bones usually are, but they were of a size inconceivable, and I was reminded that our lands were once inhabited by giants. However, though I recognized here a rib, there a thighbone, I also recognized that they were from no human giant, but from some monster animal. I could only suppose that the chapopotli had long ago been liquid, and that some creature had unwarily stepped into it and been caught and sucked down, and that over the ages the liquid had solidified to its present consistency.

  I found two bones even more gigantic than the others—or at first I thought they were bones. Each was as long as I was tall, and cylindrical, but as thick as my thigh at one end, tapering to a blunt point no bigger than my thumbtip at the other end. And each would have been even longer except that it had grown in a gradual curve and recurve, like a very hesitant spiral. They, like the bones, were stained brown-black from the chapopotli in which they had been entombed. I puzzled over them for some time before I knelt and, with my knife, scraped at the surface of one until I uncovered its natural color: a shining, mellow, pearly white. Those things were teeth—long teeth like a boar's tusks. But, I thought to myself, if that trapped animal had been a boar, it had indeed been a boar fit for the age of giants.

  I stoop up and considered the things. I had seen labrets and nose plugs and similar bangles carved from the teeth of bears and sharks and the tusks of ordinary-sized boars, and they sold for as much as goldwork of the same weight. What, I wondered, could a master carver like the late Tlatli do with the material of teeth such as these?

  The country there was sparsely inhabited—not surprisingly, in view of its bleakness. I had to wander into the greener, sweeter land of Cupilco before I came upon a village of some obscure Olméca tribe. The men were all óli tappers by occupation, but that was not the season for collecting sap, so they were sitting about idle. I did not have to offer much in payment for four of the burliest of them to work as porters for me. I almost lost them, though, when they realized where we were headed. The black lake, they said, was both a holy and a fearsome place, and a place to be avoided; so I had to increase the promised pay before they would go on. When we got there and I pointed out the tusks, they made haste to hoist them, two men to a tooth, and then we all got away from there as quickly as possible.

  I led them back through Cupilco and to the ocean shore and along that spit of land to the capital city of Xicalanca and to the workshop of that master smith Tuxtem. He looked surprised, and not much pleased, when my porters tottered in with their queer loglike burdens. "I am not a woodcarver," he said at once. But I told him what I believed the things to be, and how fortuitously I had found them, and what rarities they must be. He touched the spot I had scraped on the one tusk, and his hand lingered there, and he caressed it, and a gleam came into his eyes.

  I dismissed the weary porters, with thanks and a trifle of extra payment. Then I told the artist Tuxtem that I wanted to hire his services, but that I had only the most general idea of what I wanted him to do with my find:

  "I want carvings I can sell in Tenochtítlan. You may cut up the teeth as you see fit. From the larger pieces, perhaps you can carve figurines of Mexíca gods and goddesses. From the smaller pieces, perhaps you can make poquietl tubes, combs, ornamental dagger handles. Even the tiniest fragments can make labrets and the like. But I leave it to you, Master Tuxtem, and to your artistic judgment."

  "Of all the materials in which I have worked in my life," he said solemnly, "this is unique. It affords an opportunity and a challenge which I shall surely never find again. I will think long and deeply before I even abstract a small sample on which to experiment, with tools and finishing substances...." He paused, then said almost defiantly, "I had better tell you this. Of myself and my work, what I demanded is simple: only the best. This will not be the work of a day, young Lord Yellow Eye, or a month."

  "Of course not," I agreed. "If you had said it was, I would have taken the trophies and gone. In any case, I do not know when I will again pass through Xicalanca, so you may take all the time you require. Now, as to your fee..."

  "I am doubtless foolish to say this, but I would deem it the highest price I have ever been paid if only you promise to make it known that the pieces were sculptured by me, and tell my name."

  "Foolish of your head, Master Tuxtem, though I say it with admiration of your heart's integrity. Either you set a price, or I make this offer. You take a twentieth part, by weight, of the finished works you do for me, or of the raw material to finish as you please."

  "A munificent share." He bowed his head in agreement. "Had I been the most grasping of men, I should not have dared to ask such extravagant payment."

  "And do not fear," I added. "I shall choose the buyers of those works as carefully as you choose your tools. They will be only persons worthy to own such things. And every one of them will be told: this was made by the Master Tuxtem of Xicalanca."

  Dry though the weather had been on the peninsula of Uluumil Kutz, it was the rainy season in Cupilco, which is an uncomfortable time to walk through those Hot Lands of almost jungle growth. So I again kept to the open beaches as I made my way west, until I came to the town of Coatzacoalcos, what you now call Espiritu Santo, which was the terminus of the north-south trade route across the narrow isthmus of Tecuantépec. I thought to myself: that isthmus is almost all level land, not heavily forested, with a good road, so it would be an easy journey even if I got frequently rained upon. And at the other side of the isthmus was a hospitable inn, and my lovely Gie Bele of the Cloud People, and the prospect of a most refreshing rest before I continued on to Tenochtítlan.

  So at Coatzacoalcos I turned south. Sometimes I walked in company with pochtéa trains or with individual traders, and we passed many others going in the opposite direction. But one day I was traveling alone, and the road was empty, when I topped a rise and saw four men seated under a tree on the other side. They were ragged, brutish-looking men, and they slowly, expectantly got to their feet as I approached. I remembered the bandits I had met once before, and I put my hand to the obsidian knife in my loincloth band. There was really nothing more I could do but walk on, and hope to walk past them with an exchange of greetings. But those four did not put up any pretense of inviting me to partake of a meal, or ask to share my own rations, or even speak. They simply closed in on me.

  * * *

  I came awake. Or awake enough to know that I lay unclothed on a pallet, with one quilt under me and another covering my nakedness. I was in a hut apparently empty of any other furnishings, and dark except for glints of daylight leaking through the sapling walls and the straw thatch. A middle-aged man knelt at my bedside and, from his first words, I took him to be a physician.

  "The patient wakes," he said to someone behind him. "I feared he might never recover from that long stupor."

  "Then he will live?" asked a female voice.

  "Well, at least I can begin to treat him, which would have been impossible if he had remained insensible. I would say that he came to you barely in time."

  "We almost turned him away, he looked so frightful. But then, through the blood and the dirt, we recognized him as Záa Nayazu."

  That did not sound right. At that moment, I somehow could not quite remember my name, but I believed it was something less melodious than the lilting sound spoken by that female voice.

  My head hurt atrociously, and felt as if its contents had been removed and a red-hot boulder substituted, and my body was sore all over. My memory was blank of many othe
r things besides my real name, but I was sufficiently conscious to realize that I had not just fallen ill of something; I had in some way been injured. I wanted to ask how, and where I was, and how I had come there, but I could not make my voice work.

  The doctor said to the woman I could not see, "Whoever the robbers were, they intended to give him a killing blow. Had it not been for that thick bandage he already wore, his neck would have snapped or his skull shattered like a gourd. But the blow did give his brain a cruel shaking. That accounted for the copious bleeding from the nose. And now that his eyes are open—observe—the pupil of one is larger than the other."

  A girl leaned over the physician's shoulder and stared down at my face. Even in my dazed condition, I took note that her own face was lovely to behold, and that the black hair framing it had one pale lock streaking back from her forehead. I had a vague remembrance of having seen her before, and, to my puzzlement, I also seemed to find something familiar even in looking up at the underside of the thatched roof.

  "The unequal pupils," said the girl. "That is a bad sign?"

  "Extremely so," said the doctor. "An indication that something is wrong inside the head. So, besides trying to strengthen his body and heal the cuts and bruises, we must take care that his brain rests free of exertion or excitement. Keep him warm and keep the hut dim. Give him the broth and the medicine whenever he is awake, but on no account let him sit up, and try to prevent him even from talking."