Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

It was not hard to see why the inn had become a favored stopping place for pochtéa and other travelers. Any man with good sense and good eyesight would have pleasured in putting up there, simply for the privilege of being near the beautiful, almost twin hostesses. But the hostel also provided clean and comfortable accommodations, and meals of good quality, and a staff of attentive and courteous servants. Those improvements the girls had made deliberately; but they had also, without conscious calculation, permeated the air of the whole establishment with their own smiling good spirits. With servants enough to do the scullery and drudgery work, the girls had only supervisory duties, so they dressed always in their best and, to enhance their twin-beauty impact on the eye, always in matching colors. Though at first I resented the way the inn's guests leered at and jested with the innkeepers, I later was grateful that they were so occupied with flirtation that they did not—as I did—one day notice something even more striking about the girl's garb.

  "Where did you get those blouses?" I asked the sisters, out of the hearing of the other tradesmen and travelers.

  "In the market," said Béu Ribé "But they were plain white when we bought them. We did the decoration ourselves."

  The decoration consisted of a pattern bordering the blouses' bottom hems and square-cut necklines. It was what we called the pottery pattern—what I have heard some of your Spanish architects, with a seeming amazement of recognition, call the Greek fret pattern, though I do not know what a Greek fret is. And that decoration was done not in embroidery thread, but in painted-on color, and the color was a rich, deep, vibrant purple.

  I asked, "Where did you get the color to do it with?"

  "Ah, that," said Zyanya. "It is nice, is it not? Among our mother's effects we found a small leather flask of a dye of this color. It was given to her by our father, shortly before he disappeared. There was only enough of the dye to do these two blouses, and we could think of no other use for it." She hesitated, looked slightly chagrined, and said, "Do you think we did wrong, Záa, in appropriating it for a frivolity?"

  I said, "By no means. All things beautiful should be reserved only to persons of beauty. But tell me, have you yet washed those blouses?"

  The girls looked puzzled. "Why, yes, several times."

  "The color does not run, then. And it does not fade."

  "No, it is a very good dye," said Béu Ribé, and then she told me what I had been delicately prying to find out. "It is why we lost our father. He went to the place which is the source of this color, to buy a great quantity of it, and make a fortune from it, and he never came back."

  I said, "That was some years ago. Would you have been too young to remember? Did your father mention where he was going?"

  "To the southwest, along the coast," she said, frowning in concentration. "He spoke of the wilderness of great rocks, where the ocean crashes and thunders."

  "Where there lives a hermit tribe called The Strangers," added Zyanya. "Oh, he also said—do you remember, Béu?—he promised to bring us polished snail shells and to make necklaces for us."

  I asked, "Could you lead me near to where you think he went?"

  "Anyone could," said the older sister, gesturing vaguely westward. "The only rocky coastline in these parts is yonder."

  "But the exact place of the purple must be a well-kept secret.

  No one else has found it since your father went looking. You might remember, as we went along, other hints he let drop."

  "That is possible," said the younger sister. "But Záa, we have the hostel to manage."

  "For a long time, while you were tending me, you alternated as innkeepers. Surely one of you can take a holiday." They exchanged a glance of uncertainty, and I persisted, "You will be following your father's dream. And he was no fool. There is a fortune to be made from the purple dye." I reached out to a potted plant nearby and plucked two twigs, one short, one long, and held them in my fist so that equal lengths protruded. "Here, choose. The one who picks the short twig earns herself a holiday, and earns a fortune we will all three share."

  The girls hesitated only briefly, then raised their hands and picked. That was some forty years ago, my lords, and to this day I could not tell you which of the three of us won or lost in the choosing. I can only tell you that Zyanya got the shorter twig. Such a trivially tiny pivot is was, but all our lives turned on it in that instant.

  * * *

  While the girls cooked and dried pinoli meal, and ground the mixed chocolate powder for our provisions, I went to Tecuantépec's marketplace to buy other traveling necessities. At an armorer's workshop, I hefted and swung various weapons, finally selecting a maquahuitl and a short spear that felt best to my arm.

  The smith said, "The young lord prepares to meet some hazard?"

  I said, "I am going to the land of the Chontaltin. Have you heard of them?"

  "Ayya, yes. That ugly people who live up the coast. Chontaltin is of course a Náhuatl word. We call them the Zyu, but it means the same: The Strangers. Actually, they are only Huave, one of the more squalid and bestial Huave tribes. The Huave have no real land of their own, which is why everywhere they are called The Strangers. We tolerate their living in small groups here and there, on lands fit for no other use."

  I said, "Up in the mountains, I once stayed overnight in one of their villages. Not a very sociable people."

  "Well, if you slept among them and woke alive, you met one of the more gracious tribes. You will not find the Zyu of the coast so hospitable. Oh, they may welcome you warmly—rather too warmly. They like to roast and eat passersby, as a change from their monotonous diet of fish."

  I agreed that they sounded delightful, but asked what was the easiest and most expeditious way to reach them.

  "You could go directly southwest from here, but there are mountains in the way. I suggest that you follow the river south to the ocean, then go west along the beaches. Or at our fishing port of Nozibe, you might find a boatman who will take you even more quickly by sea."

  So that is what Zyanya and I did. Had I been traveling alone, I would not have been so particular about choosing an easy route. However, I was to discover that the girl was a hardy traveling companion. She never spoke a word of complaint about bad weather, about camping in the open, about eating cold food or none, about being surrounded by wilderness or wild beasts. But that first trip outbound was an agreeable and leisurely one. It was a single day's journey, a pleasant stroll, down the flat riverside plains to the port of Nozibe. That name means only Salty, and the "port" was only a scattering of palm-leaf roofs on poles, where the fishermen could sit in shade. The beach was littered with swathes of netting spread for drying or mending; there were dugout canoes coming or going through the breakers, or drawn up on the sand.

  I found a fisherman who, rather reluctantly, admitted that he had occasionally visited the Zyu stretch of the coast, and had sometimes supplemented his own catch by purchasing some of theirs, and spoke a smattering of their language. "But they only grudgingly allow me to call," he warned. "A totally unknown foreigner would approach at his own peril." I had to offer an extravagant price before he would agree to paddle us along the shore to that country and back, and to interpret for me there—if I was given any chance to say anything. Meanwhile, Zyanya had found an unoccupied palm shelter and spread on the soft sand the blankets we had brought from the inn, and we slept that night chastely far apart.

  We pushed off at dawn. The boat stayed close inshore, just clear of the line of breaking water, and the boatman paddled in morose silence while Zyanya and I chatted gaily, pointing out to each other the jeweled sights of the landward scenery. The stretches of beach were like powdered silver prodigally spilled between the turquoise sea and the emerald coconut palms, from which frequently burst flocks of ruby and gold birds. As we progressed westward, however, the bright sand gradually darkened through gray to black, and beyond the green palms reared a range of volcanoes. Some of them smoked sullenly. Violent eruptions and earthquakes, Zyanya said, were freque
nt occurrences along that coast.

  In midafternoon our boatman broke his silence. "There is the Zyu village at which I call," and he waved with his oar, as our canoe turned toward a huddle of huts on the black beach.

  "No!" Zyanya exclaimed, suddenly and excitedly. "You told me, Záa, that I might remember other things my father said. And I do! He mentioned the mountain that walks in the water!"

  "What?"

  She pointed ahead of the boat's prow. About one-long-run beyond the Zyu village, the black sands ended abruptly at a formidable crag of mountain, an outcrop of the range inland. It stood like a wall across the beach and extended far into the ocean. Even from our distance I could see, through my crystal, plumes and spouts of seawater dashing nigh and white against the mountain's skirts of giant boulders.

  "See the great rocks the mountain has shed!" said Zyanya. "That is the place of the purple! That is where we must go!"

  I corrected her, "That is where I must go, my girl."

  "No," said the boatman, shaking his head. "The village is dangerous enough."

  I took up my maquahuitl and held it where he could see it, and I thumbed its edge of obsidian, and I said, "You will put the girl ashore here. Tell the villagers that she is not to be molested, that we will return for her before dark. Then you and I will make for the mountain that walks in the water."

  He grumbled and predicted dire things, but he turned through the surf to the shore. I assumed that the Zyu men were out fishing, for only a few women emerged from the huts as we grounded. They were filthy creatures, bare-breasted and barefooted, wearing only ragged skirts, and they listened to what the boatman told them, and they gave ugly looks to the pretty girl being stranded among them, but they made no untoward movement as long as I had them in sight. I was not happy about leaving Zyanya there, but it was preferable to taking her farther into peril.

  When the boatman and I were out from the shore again, even a landsman like myself could see that any landing on the seaward slope of the mountain was impossible. Its rubble of boulders, many of them as big as the smaller palaces of Tenochtítlan, extended forbiddingly far about it. The ocean broke among those rocks into vertical cliffs and towers and columns of white water. Those lifted incredibly high, and hung there poised, and then tumbled down with a roar like all the thunders of Tlaloc booming at once, and then slithered to sea again, making whirlpools that gulped and sucked so powerfully that even a few of the house-sized boulders could be seen to shake.

  The ocean's turmoil extended so far that it took all the boatman's skill to bring us safely to the beach just east of the mountain. But he did it, and, when we had dragged the dugout up the sand out of reach of the tumultuous surf, when we had finished coughing and spitting out the salt water we had swallowed, I sincerely congratulated him:

  "If you can so bravely best that vicious sea, you have little to fear from any of these contemptible Zyu."

  That seemed to embolden him to some degree, so I gave him my spear to carry and motioned for him to follow me. We strode along the beach to the mountain wall and found a slope we could climb. That brought us to the ridge of the mountain about halfway between sea level and its summit, and from the ridge we could see uninterrupted beach continue on the westward side. But we turned left along the ridge until we stood on the promontory above that spreading fringe of great rocks and the fury of great waters. I was at the place of which Zyanya's father had spoken, but it seemed an unlikely place to find a precious purple dye—or fragile snails, for that matter.

  What I did find was a group of five men climbing the ridge toward us from the direction of the ocean. They were obviously Zyu priests, for they were as unwashed, tangle-haired, and slovenly as any Mexíca priests, with the added inelegance that they wore not ragged robes but ragged animal skins, whose rancid smell reached us before the men did. They all five looked unfriendly, and when the foremost barked something in his native language, it sounded unfriendly.

  "Tell them and tell them quickly," I said to my boatman, "that I come offering gold to buy some of their purple dye."

  Before he could speak, one of the men grunted, "No need him. I talk enough Lóochi. I priest of Tiat Ndik, Sea God, and this his place. You die for put foot here."

  I tried to convey, in the simplest Lóochi words, that I would not have intruded on holy terrain if I could have made my proposal in any other place or manner. I begged his indulgence of my presence and his consideration of my offer. Though his four subordinates continued to glare at me murderously, the chief priest seemed slightly mollified by my obsequious approach. At any rate, his next threat on my life was not quite so blunt:

  "You go away now, Yellow Eye, maybe you go alive."

  I tried to suggest that, since I had already profaned those holy precincts, it would take only a little longer for us to exchange my gold for his purple.

  He said, "Purple holy for Sea God. No price can buy." And he repeated, "You go away now, maybe you go alive."

  "Very well. But before I go, would you at least satisfy my curiosity? What do snails have to do with the purple dye?"

  "Chachi?" He echoed the Lóochi word for snails, uncomprehending, and turned for interpretation to my boatman, who was perceptibly quaking with fright.

  "Ah, the ndik diok," said the priest, enlightened. He hesitated, then turned and beckoned for me to follow. The boatman and the other four Zyu stayed atop the ridge while the chief priest and I clambered down toward the sea. It was a long descent, and the thundering walls and spouts of white water broke higher and higher around us, and showered a drizzle of cold spume down upon us. But we came at last into a sheltered depression among the massive boulders, and in it was a pool where the water merely sloshed back and forth, while the rest of the ocean boomed and pounded outside.

  "Holy place of Tiat Ndik," said the priest. "Where the god lets us hear his voice."

  "His voice?" I said. "You mean the ocean's noise?"

  "His voice!" the man insisted. "To hear, must put head under."

  Not taking my eyes off him and keeping my maquahuitl at the ready, I knelt and lowered my head until I had one ear under the sloshing water. At first I could hear my own heart making a pulse beat in my ear, and that is an eerie sound, but then there came a much stranger one, beginning softly but getting louder. It could have been someone whistling under the water—if anyone could whistle under water—and whistling a melody more subtle than any earthly musician could play. Even now, I cannot liken it to any other sound I ever heard in my life. I later decided it must be a wind which, following the chinks and crevices among the rocks, was simultaneously made to warble and was deflected under the water. Its telltale bubbles no doubt came up somewhere else, and the pool revealed only the unearthly music of it. But there at that moment, and in those circumstances, I was ready enough to take the priest's word that it was the voice of a god.

  Meanwhile, he was moving around the pool and studying it from various points, and finally he bent to plunge his arm in to the shoulder. He worked for a moment, then brought up his hand and opened it for me to see, saying "Ndik diok." I daresay the creature is some relation to the familiar land snail, but Zyanya's father had been mistaken to promise her a necklace of polished shells. The slimy slug carried no shell on its back, and had no other distinction that I could see.

  But then the priest bent his head close to the slug in his palm and blew hard upon it. That evidently annoyed the creature, for it either urinated or defecated into his hand: a little smear of pale yellow matter. The priest carefully replaced the sea snail on its underwater rock, then held his cupped palm out for me to observe, and I shrank from the stink of that pale yellow substance. But, to my surprise, the smear in his hand began to change color: to a yellow-green, to a green-blue, to a blue-red that deepened and intensified until it was a vibrant purple.

  Grinning, the man reached out and rubbed the substance onto my mantle front. The brilliant smudge still smelled abominable, but I knew it for the dye that would never fade or w
ash away. He gestured again for me to follow him, and we climbed the tumbled rocks while, with a combination of hand signs and his laconic Lóochi, the priest explained about the ndik diok:

  The men of the Zyu collected the snails and provoked their exudations only twice a year, on holy days selected by some complicated divination. Though there were thousands of the sea snails clinging among the rocks, each gave only a minute quantity of that substance. So the men had to go far out among those cataclysms of crashing water, and dive into them, to pry the slugs loose, make them excrete onto a hank of cotton thread or into a leather flask, then replace the creatures unharmed. The snails had to be kept alive for the next time of extraction, but the men were not so indispensable; in each of those half-yearly rituals, some four or five divers were drowned or dashed to death upon the rocks.

  "But why go to all that trouble, and sacrifice so many of your people, and then refuse to profit from it?" I asked, and managed to make the priest understand. He beckoned again, and led me farther into a clammy grotto, and said proudly:

  "Our Sea God whose voice you heard. Tiat Ndik."

  It was a crude and lumpy statue, since it consisted only of piled round rocks: a big boulder for the abdomen, a smaller for the chest, a yet smaller one for the head. But that whole worthless heap of inanimate rock was colored the glowing purple. And all about Tiat Ndik were stacked flasks full of the dye, and hanks of yarn colored with it: a buried treasure of incalculable value.

  When we had climbed as far as the ridge again, the red-hot disk of Tonatíu was just sinking into the far western ocean and boiling up a steam of clouds. Then the disk was gone, and for an instant we saw Tonatíu's light shining through the sea out there where it thins at the brink of the world—a brief, bright flash of emerald green, no more. The priest and I made our way back toward where we had left the others, while he continued explaining: that the offerings of the purple dye were essential, or Tiat Ndik would entice no more fish to the nets of the Zyu.