Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  We were married.

  The quiet music suddenly boomed loud and exultant, and a shout went up from the assembled guests, as all the ceremonial stiffness relaxed into conviviality. Servants dashed about the hall, dispensing to all the separate dinner cloths platters of tamaltin and new jugs of octli and chocolate. Every guest was expected to gobble and guzzle until the torches burned out at dawn or until the males among them fell over unconscious and were borne home by their women and slaves. Zyanya and I would eat but daintily, and then would be led discreetly—everybody pretending we were invisible—to our wedding chamber, which was an upstairs suite in the palace, lent to us by Ahuítzotl. But at that point I departed from custom.

  "Excuse me one moment, my dear," I whispered to Zyanya, and stepped down from the dais into the room, the Revered Speaker and the priest regarding me with puzzled eyes and open mouths showing half-chewed tamaltin.

  In my long life, no doubt I have been hated by many persons; I do not know how many. I have never cared enough even to try remembering and counting them. But I had then, that night, in that room, one mortal enemy, one enemy sworn and implacable and already bloody-handed. Chimali had mutilated and murdered others close to me. His next victim, even before myself, would be Zyanya. That he should attend our wedding was his threat of it and his defiance of my doing anything to stop it.

  As I walked in search of him, winding my way among the quadrangles of seated guests, their chattering dwindled to a wondering silence. Even the musicians lowered their instruments to pay attention. The room's silence was finally broken by the crowd's collective gasp, when I swung backhanded and knocked away the golden goblet Chimali was raising to his mouth. It rang musically as it bounced off his own wall painting.

  "Do not drink too much," I said, and everyone heard. "You will want a clear head in the morning. At dawn, Chimali, in the wood of Chapultepec. Just the two of us, but any kind and number of weapons you like. To the death."

  He gave me a look compounded of loathing, contempt, and some amusement, then glanced about at his goggling neighbors. A private challenge he could have refused, or set conditions to, or even warded off by abasing himself. But that challenge had been prefaced by an insulting blow; it had been seen and heard by every leading citizen of Tenochtítlan. He shrugged, then reached for someone else's cup of octli, raised it in wry salute to me, and said clearly, "Chapultepec. At dawn. To the death." He drained the drink, stood up, and stalked out of the ballroom.

  When I returned to the dais, the crowd began its buzz and chatter again behind me, though sounding somewhat subdued and aghast. Zyanya gazed at me with bewildered eyes, but to her credit she asked no question, she made no complaint about my having turned a gladsome occasion into something otherwise. The priest, however, gave me a baleful frown and began:

  "Most inauspicious, young—

  "Be silent!" snarled the Revered Speaker, and the priest shut his mouth. To me, Ahuítzotl said through his teeth, "Your sudden entry into responsible manhood and espousal has deranged you."

  I said, "No, my lord. I am sane and I have sound reason for—"

  "Reason!" he interrupted, still without raising his voice, which made him sound more irate than any bellowing could. "Reason for making a public scandal of your own wedding feast? Reason for disrupting a ceremony arranged for you as if you were our own son? Reason for assaulting our personal courtier and invited guest?"

  "I am sorry if I have offended my lord," I said, but added obdurately, "My lord would think even less of me if I pretended not to notice an enemy taunting me with his presence."

  "Your enemies are your business. Our palace artist is ours. You threaten to kill him. And—look yonder—he has still one whole wall of this room to decorate."

  I said, "He may well finish it yet, Lord Speaker. Chimali was a much more accomplished fighter than I when we were together in The House of Building Strength."

  "So, instead of losing our palace artist, we lose the counselor on whose advice and the plaintiff on whose behalf we are preparing to march into alien country." Still in that measured, menacing low voice, he said, "Take warning now, and a warning from the Uey-Tlatoani named Water Monster is not to be taken lightly. If either of you dies tomorrow—our valued painter Chimali or the Mixtli who has occasionally given us valuable counsel—it will be Mixtli who is held to blame. It will be Mixtli who pays, even if he is the dead one."

  Slowly, so that I should not mistake his meaning, he turned his beetling glare from me to Zyanya.

  She said in a small voice, "We should be praying, Záa."

  And I said honestly, fervently, "I am praying."

  Our chambers contained every necessary furnishing except a bed, which would not be provided until the fourth day after the ceremony. The intervening days and nights we were supposed to spend fasting—refraining both from nourishment and from consummation of our union—meanwhile praying to our various favorite gods that we would be good for each other and good to each other, that our marriage might be a happy one.

  But I was silently engaged in a rather different kind of prayer. I was asking, of whatever gods there might be, only that Zyanya and I survive the morrow to have a marriage. I had put myself in some precarious situations before, but never one where, no matter what I did, I could not possibly triumph. If, through prowess or sheer good fortune or because my tonáli decreed it, I should succeed in killing Chimali, then I would have two choices. I could return to the palace and let Ahuítzotl execute me for having instigated the duel. Or I could flee and leave Zyanya to take the punishment, doubtless a terrible one. The third foreseeable circumstance was that Chimali would kill me, through his superior skill at weaponry or because I withheld my own killing blow or because his tonáli was the stronger. In which case, I would be beyond Ahuítzotl's punishment and he would exercise his wrath on my dear Zyanya. The duel must result in one of those three eventualities, and every one of them was unthinkable. But no, there was one other possibility: suppose I simply failed to appear in the wood of Chapultepec at dawn....

  While I thought about the unthinkable, Zyanya was quietly unpacking the little luggage we had brought. Her cry of delight roused me from my gloomy reverie. I lifted my head from my hands to see that she had found in one of my panniers the old clay figurine of Xochiquetzal, that which I had preserved ever since my sister's misfortune.

  "The goddess who watched while we were married," Zyanya said, smiling.

  "The goddess who fashioned you for me," I said. "She who governs all love and beauty. I meant her statuette to be a surprise gift."

  "Oh, it is," she said loyally. "You are forever surprising me."

  "Not all my surprises have been pleasant ones for you, I fear. Like my challenge to Chimali tonight."

  "I did not know his name, but it seems I have seen the man before. Or someone very like him."

  "You saw the man himself, though I imagine he did not look quite such an elegant courtier on the earlier occasion. Let me explain, and I hope you will understand why I had to mar our wedding ceremony, why I could not postpone doing what I did—and what I must yet do."

  My instant explanation of the Xochiquetzal figurine, a few moments before—that I had intended it as a memento of our wedding—was the first outright lie I had ever told Zyanya. But when I told her of my earlier life, I committed some small lies of omission, I began with Chimali's first betrayal of me, when he and Tlatli had declined to help save Tzitzitlini's life, and I left some gaps in my account of why my sister's life had been in peril. I told how Chimali, Tlatli, and I had met again in Texcóco and, omitting some of the uglier details, how I had connived to avenge my sister's death. How, out of some mercy or some weakness, I had been satisfied to let the vengeance fall on Tlatli alone, and let Chimali escape. How he had since repaid that favor by continuing to molest me and mine. At the last I said, "And you yourself told me how he pretended to aid your mother when—"

  Zyanya gasped. "He is the traveler who attended—who murdered my mother and
your..."

  "He is," I said, when she paused discreetly there. "And so it happened that, when I saw him sitting arrogantly at our wedding feast, I determined that he should murder no more."

  She said, almost fiercely, "Indeed you must face him. And best him, no matter what the Revered Speaker said, or what he does. But may the guards not prevent your leaving the palace at dawn?"

  "No. Ahuítzotl does not know of all that I have told you, but he knows this is a matter of honor. He will not hold me back. He will hold you instead. And that is what troubles my heart—not what may happen to me, but how you may suffer for my impetuosity."

  Zyanya seemed to resent that remark. "Do you think me less brave than yourself? Whatever happens on the dueling ground, and whatever comes of it afterward, I shall willingly await. There! I have said it. If you stay your hand now, Záa, you are only using me as an excuse. I could not live with you after that."

  I smiled ruefully. So the fourth and final choice was closed to me. I shook my head and took her tenderly into my arms. "No," I said with a sigh. "I will not stay my hand."

  "I never thought you would," she said, as matter-of-factly as if, in marrying me, she had married an Eagle Knight. "Now there remains not much time before sunrise. Lie here and let me pillow your head. Sleep while you can."

  It seemed I had just laid my head on her soft breast when there was a hesitant scratching at the door and Cozcatl's voice called, "Mixtli, the sky pales. It is time."

  I stood up, ducked my head in a basin of cold water, and rearranged my rumpled clothes.

  "He has already departed for the acáli landing," Cozcatl told me. "Perhaps he intends to spring upon you from ambush."

  "Then I will need only weapons for close fighting, not for throwing," I said. "Bring a spear, a dagger, and a maquahuitl."

  Cozcatl hurried off, and I spent a bittersweet few moments saying good-bye to Zyanya, while she spoke words meant to embolden me and reassure me that all would be well. I kissed her one last time and went downstairs to where Cozcatl waited with the arms. Blood Glutton was not present. Since he had been the Master Cuáchic teaching both me and Chimali at The House of Building Strength, it would have been unseemly for him to proffer advice or even moral support to either of us, whatever his own feelings about the duel's outcome.

  The palace guards made no move to prevent our going out the gate that led through the Snake Wall into The Heart of the One World. Our sandaled footsteps on the marble paving echoed back and forth from the Great Pyramid and numerous lesser buildings. The plaza looked even more than usually immense in its early morning opal light and emptiness, there being no other people in it except a few priests shambling to their sunrise duties. We left by the opening in the western side of the Snake Wall and went through streets and over canal bridges to the edge of the island nearest the mainland, and at the boat landing I commandeered one of the canoes reserved for palace use. Cozcatl insisted on rowing me across the not very wide expanse of water, to save me tiring my muscles.

  Our acáli bumped the bank at the foot of the bluff called Chapultepec, at the point where the aqueduct vaulted from the hill toward the city. High above our heads, the carved visages of the Revered Speakers Ahuítzotl, Tixoc, Axayácatl, and the first Motecuzóma stared from the otherwise rough natural rock. Another canoe was already there, its tie rope held by a palace page, who pointed to a rise of ground to one side of the cliff and said politely, "He awaits you in the wood, my lord."

  I told Cozcatl, "You stay here with the other arms bearer. You will soon know whether I have further need of you or not." I stuck the obsidian dagger in the waist of my loincloth, took the obsidian-edged sword in my right hand and the obsidian-pointed spear in my left. I went to the top of the rise and looked down into the wood.

  Ahuítzotl had begun to make a parkland of what had formerly been a forest wilderness. That project would not be completed for several years yet—the baths and fountains and statuary and such—but already the forest had been thinned to leave standing only the incalculably ancient, towering ahuehuelque cypresses and the carpet of grass and wild flowers growing beneath them. That carpet was quite invisible, and the mighty cypresses appeared to stand magically rootless in the pale blue ground mist rising as Tonatíu arose. Chimali would have been equally invisible to me, had he chosen to crouch somewhere in that mist.

  Instead, I saw as soon as I raised my topaz to my eye, he had elected to strip off his garments and lie naked along the length of a thick cypress limb which stretched horizontally from its tree, about half again my height above ground level. Chimali's outstretched right arm, clutching the haft of a maquahuitl, was also laid along the limb and pressed close to it. For a moment I was puzzled. Why such an easily seen ambuscade? Why was he unclothed?

  Then I grasped his intention, and I must have grinned like a coyote. At the reception the night before, Chimali had not seen me make that one use of my seeing crystal, and obviously no one had thought to inform him of the new and artificial improvement to my vision. He had doffed his colorful clothes so that his skin would blend with the brown of the cypress bough. He believed that there he would be invisible to his old friend Mole, his fellow student Fogbound, while I went groping and searching for him among the trees. He had only to lie there in safety until, in my halting and squinting progress, I finally passed beneath. Then he would hack downward with the maquahuitl, a single stroke, and I would be dead.

  For an instant, I felt it was almost unfair of me to have taken advantage of my crystal to descry his whereabouts. But then I thought: he must have been much pleased by my stipulation that we two meet alone. After disposing of me, he could dress and go back to the city, and tell how we had met bravely face to face, and what a savage and knightly duel we had fought, before he finally overpowered me. If I knew Chimali, he would even inflict a few minor cuts on himself to make the story more credible. So I had no more compunction about what I was going to do. I tucked the topaz back inside my mantle, dropped my maquahuitl to the ground and, both hands on the shaft of my leveled spear, went down into the misty wood.

  I walked slowly and warily, as he would expect of the inept fighter Fogbound, my knees bent, my eyes narrowed to slits, like a mole's. Of course, I did not go directly to his tree, but began quartering the wood from well to one side of it. Every time I approached a tree, I would reach far forward and jab my spear clumsily around the opposite side of its trunk before moving farther. However, I had made mental note of Chimali's lurking place and the position of the limb on which he lay. As I neared the spot, I began gradually to raise my spear from the horizontal until I was carrying it upright in front of me, point uppermost, as Blood Glutton had taught me to carry it in the jungle, to discourage jaguars lying in wait to pounce. With my weapon in that position, I insured that he could not slash down at me from my front; he would have to wait until the spear point and I had passed a little way under him, and then strike at the back of my head or neck.

  I approached his tree as I had all the others, crouched and slowly stalking, continuously turning my frowning, peering face from side to side, keeping my squinted gaze always level, never once looking up. The moment I came under his limb, I jabbed upward two-handed, with all my strength.

  I had a heart-stopping moment then. The spear point never touched him; it stopped short of meeting any flesh; it hit with a thunk! against the wood of the limb and sent a numbing shock through both my arms. But Chimali must, at that same instant, have been swinging his maquahuitl, thus simultaneously loosing his grip on the limb and putting himself off balance. For the blow I gave the limb shook him off it; he landed just behind me, flat on his back. The breath whooshed from his lungs as the maquahuitl jumped from his hand. I whirled and clubbed him in the head with the butt end of my spear shaft, and he lay still.

  I bent over him to note that he was not dead, but that he would be unconscious for some little while yet. So I simply picked up his sword and went back over the rise, retrieving my own dropped sword on the way
, and rejoined the two young arms bearers. Cozcatl gave a small cheer when he saw me carrying my opponent's weapon: "I knew you would slay him, Mixtli!"

  "I did not," I said. "I left him insensible, but if he wakes he will have suffered nothing worse than a bad headache. If he wakes. I told you once, long ago, that when the time came for Chimali's execution you would decide the manner of it." I plucked my dagger from my waistband and handed it to him. The page watched us with horrified fascination. I waved Cozcatl toward the wood. "You will easily find where he lies. Go, and give him what he deserves."

  Cozcatl nodded and marched over the rise and out of sight. The page and I waited. His face was discolored and contorted, and he kept swallowing in an endeavor not to be sick. When Cozcatl returned, before he got close enough to speak, we could see that his dagger was no longer a glittery black, it was a gleaming red.

  But he shook his head as he approached, and said, "I let him live, Mixtli."

  I exclaimed, "What? Why?"

  "I overheard the Revered Speaker's threatening words last night," he said apologetically. "With Chimali helpless before me, I was much tempted, but I did not kill him. Since he still lives, the Lord Speaker cannot vent too much anger on you. I took from Chimali only these."

  He held out one clenched hand and opened it so I could see the two mucously glistening globules and the flabby pink thing, raggedly cut off about halfway down its length.

  I said to the miserable and retching page, "You heard. He lives. But he will require your help to return to the city. Go and stanch his bleeding and wait for him to awaken."