Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  Two palace guards strode ahead, their hands conspicuously empty of weapons, but I knew them both to be expert at hand-to-hand unarmed combat. I carried nothing but the emblazoned shield identifying me as an Eagle Knight, and the folded letter of introduction signed by the Uey-Tlatoani Ahuítzotl. I walked beside Zyanya's four-bearer chair, and acted my role of tame husband, directing her attention to this or that landmark. Behind us came the eight-manned litter of the twins, and their spare bearers who took turn about at the heavy chair's carrying poles. That specially built litter was not just a seat, but a sort of small hut on poles, roofed above and curtained on its two open sides. The tail of the procession comprised the numerous slaves laden with our packs and panniers and provisions.

  Three or four days on the westering trade road brought us to a village called Zitakuaro, where a guardpost on its outskirts marked the frontier of Michihuácan. There we halted while the Purémpecha border guards respectfully scanned the letter I presented, and then only prodded but did not open our various packs. They did look somewhat amazed when they peered into the oversized litter chair and found two identical bald girls riding side by side in what appeared to be a most uncomfortable position. But the guards did not comment. They waved courteously for me and my lady and our party to pass on through Zitakuaro.

  After that, we were not again stopped or challenged, but I commanded that the curtains be kept closed on the Lady Pair's litter, so that they should not be visible to the people who eyed our passing. I knew that a swift-messenger would already have informed the Uandakuari of our approach, but I wanted to keep his gift a mystery and undescribed, insofar as possible, until we got to his palace and surprised him with it. Zyanya thought me cruel, to make the twins ride all that way without seeing anything of the new country in which they would live. So, every time I showed her something of interest, she would stop our train until the road was clear of passersby, and then herself go back to lift the twins' curtain and show them whatever it was. She kept doing that all the way across Michihuácan, rather to my exasperation, since Left and Right were utterly apathetic and incurious about their surroundings.

  The trip would have been tedious for me had it not been for the presence of Zyanya; I was glad she had persuaded me to let her come. She even made me forget, now and then, the hazardous task I was to undertake at our destination. Every time our train rounded a bend in the road or breasted the crown of a hill, Zyanya would see something new to her, and she would exclaim over it, and listen with childlike intensity as I explained it to her.

  The first thing that excited Zyanya's attention, of course, was the preponderance of glossily hairless people. I had told her of that custom, but telling is no substitute for seeing. Until gradually she got used to it, she would stare at a passing youth and murmur, "That one is a boy. No, a girl..." And I must admit that her curiosity was reciprocated. The Purémpecha were accustomed to seeing other people unshorn—foreign travelers, their own lower classes, and perhaps stubborn eccentrics—but they had never seen a lovely woman with a wealth of long hair and a vivid white strand streaking through it. So they also stared and murmured.

  There were other things to see besides the people. The part of Michihuácan which we were then traversing has mountains, as does every other land, but there they seem always to sit on the horizon as a mere frame for the level or gently rolling country they enclose. Some of that territory is forested, some is grown up in meadows of useless but lovely grass and wild flowers. But much of it consists of wide-spreading, bountifully producing farms. There are immeasurable swales of maize, beans, chilis, orchards of ahuacatin and of sweeter fruits. Here and there in the fields stand the adobe cribs in which seed and produce are stored—conical bins, rather resembling the Lady Pair's tapering heads.

  In those regions, even the humblest dwellings are good to look at. All made of wood, since wood is so abundant there, they are put together without mortar or tie ropes but with ingeniously tight notches in the planks and beams. Every house has a high, peaked roof, its eaves deeply overswooping the house all around, the better to give cool shade in the hot season and to shed rain in the wet, and some of the roofs are fancifully made so that their four corners turn upward in perky ornamental points. That was the season of swallows, and there are nowhere more swallows than in Michihuácan—flitting, fluttering, flickering, gliding all about—no doubt because those capacious roof eaves make such fine nesting places for them.

  With its woods and waters, Michihuácan is a hospitable home for all sorts of birds. The rivers reflect the bright flashing colors of jays and flycatchers and fisher birds. In the forests the carpenter birds make a constant tattoo of drumming and drilling. In the lake shallows stand big white and blue herons, and the even bigger kuinko. That bird has a bill shaped like a spoon, an ungainly shape, and gawky long legs. But the kuinko is superb in its sunset-colored plumage, and when a flock of them all take wing at once it is like watching the wind made pink and visible.

  The single greatest concentration of Michihuácan's population lived in the multitude of villages ringing the big Lake of Rushes, Patzkuaro, or perched on the many small islands in that lake. Although every village derived most of its sustenance from netting the waters' fish and fowl, every village was bidden by the Uandakuari to produce or provide one special, local commodity or service which it traded to all the others. One community made hammered copperware, another wove cloth, another braided rushes into matting, another made lacquerware, and so on. The village named for the lake, Patzkuaro, was the marketplace for those various things. One island in mid-lake, Xarakuaro, was built up with temples and altars, and was the ceremonial center for the residents of every village. Tzintzuntzani, Where There Are Hummingbirds, was the capital and heart of all that activity, so itself produced nothing but the decisions and orders and rulings that governed the whole nation. It consisted entirely of palaces and was entirely inhabited by nobles and their families, their courtiers, priests, servants, and such.

  As our train approached Tzintzuntzani, the first man-made object we could see, from several one-long-runs down the road, was the ancient iyakata, as a pyramid is called in Poré, looming on the heights east of the nobles' palaces. Old beyond imagining, not tall but extravagantly elongated, that iyakata—a curious blend of square and round edifices—was still an awe-inspiring pile of stone, though it had long ago lost all its slab sheathing and gesso and coloring, and was much crumbled and overgrown with verdure.

  The numerous palaces of Where There Are Hummingbirds, being all built of wood, might have been accounted less imposing than the stone palaces of Tenochtítlan, but they had their own kind of grandeur. Under the spreading eaves of their high-peaked, curly-cornered roofs, they were all two floors high, and the upper floor was completely encircled by an outside gallery. The ponderous cedar trunks upholding those buildings, the columns and banisters, the many beams visible under the eaves, all those things were elaborately worked and carved into curls and fretwork. Wherever artists could reach, the rich lacquers had been laboriously hand-applied. Every palace was lavishly ornamented, glowing with color and gold leaf, but of course the Uandakuari's palace made all the others look trivial.

  Swift-messengers had kept Yquingare apprised of our progress, so our arrival was expected, and a crowd of nobles and their ladies waited to receive us. Our company had earlier veered off to the lakeside and, separating for privacy, we had all bathed and changed into our finest garments. We came, feeling fresh and looking proud, into the palace forecourt—a walled garden overhung by tall shade trees—where I ordered the litter chairs set down. I dismissed our guards and bearers, and they were led off to be quartered with the servants. Only Zyanya, the Lady Pair, and myself went on through the garden to the tremendous palace building. In the general confusion of the greeters milling all about us, the twins' odd way of walking went unremarked.

  In a welcoming murmur and chatter, not all of which I could comprehend, we were ushered between the palace's cedar-trunk portals on
to the cedar-slab terrace, then through the great open door, then through a short corridor and into Yquingare's reception hall. It was immensely long and wide, and two floors high: like the interior court of Ahuítzotl's palace, only roofed over. Stairways on each side climbed to an encircling inside balcony off which the upper rooms opened. The Uandakuari sat on a throne that was only a low chair, but the long walk from the entrance to where he sat was clearly designed to make every visitor feel like a supplicant.

  Big as it was, the hall was quite crowded with elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen, but they all pressed back on both sides to make an aisle for us. I, then Zyanya, then the Lady Pair, in slow procession walked solemnly toward the throne, and I raised my topaz just long enough to get a good look at Yquingare. I had seen him only once before, at the dedication of the Great Pyramid, and in those days I had not seen clearly. He had been old then, and was older now: a shriveled little wisp of a man. It might have been his hairlessness that had inspired the fashion among his people, but he did not have to use an obsidian razor to maintain his. He was as toothless as he was bald, and nearly voiceless: he bade us welcome in a faint rustle, like the sound of a small seedpod shaking. Though I was glad to be ridding myself of the lumpish Lady Pair, I felt some compunction at giving even a freak into the tendril fingers of that gnarled and withered old weed.

  I handed over Ahuítzotl's letter, and the Uandakuari handed it in turn to his oldest son, peevishly commanding him to read it aloud. I had always thought of princes as being young men; that Crown Prince Tzimtzicha, if he had let his hair grow, would have been gray-headed; but his father still wheezed orders at him as if he had not yet donned a loincloth under his mantle.

  "A gift for me, eh?" croaked the father, when the son had finished reading the letter in Poré. He fixed his bleary eyes on Zyanya, standing beside me, and smacked his gums. "Ah. Could be a novelty, yes. Shave off all but that one white lock..."

  Zyanya, horrified, took a step backward. I hastened to say, "Here is the gift, my Lord Yquingare," and reached for the Lady Pair. I stood them directly before the throne and tore their one-piece purple garment from neck to hem. The assembled crowd gave a gasp at my destroying such a precious piece of cloth—then gave another gasp as the garment fell to the floor and the twins stood naked.

  "By the feathered balls of Kurikauri!" breathed the old man, using the Poré name for Quetzalcoatl. He went on saying something, but his voice was lost in his courtiers' hubbub of astonished exclamation, and I could only make out that he was drooling down his chin. The gift was an obvious success.

  All present, including the Uandakuari's several surviving crone wives and concubines, were given an opportunity to come jostling for a close look at the Lady Pair. Some men, and a few women too, boldly reached out a hand and fondled some part of one girl or the other. When everybody's lubricious curiosity was satisfied, Yquingare rasped a command that cleared the reception hall of all but himself, us visitors, the Crown Prince, and a few stolid guards stationed in the corners.

  "Nourishment now," the old man said, rubbing his dry hands together. "Must prepare to give a good account of myself, eh?"

  The prince Tzimtzicha relayed the order to one of the guards, who departed. In a moment, servants began coming in to lay a dinner cloth right there, and—when Zyanya had reclothed the twins with their torn dress—we all six sat down. I gathered that the Crown Prince would not ordinarily have been allowed to eat at the same time as his father, but he was fluent in Náhuatl and was occasionally needed as interpreter when the old man or myself mishandled one another's language. Meanwhile, Zyanya helped feed the Lady Pair with a spoon. They were otherwise inclined to eat even the foam of chocolate with their fingers, messily, and to chew with their mouths open, and generally to nauseate anyone else present.

  At that, their manners were no worse than the old man's. When the rest of us had been served the delectable white fish that are found nowhere but in the Lake Patzkuaro, he said with a toothless grin, "Eat. Enjoy. Can take nothing but milk myself."

  "Milk?" Zyanya repeated, in polite inquiry. "Milk of the doe, my lord?"

  Then her winglike eyebrows went up. A very large, very bald woman came in, knelt beside the Uandakuari, lifted her blouse and presented to him a very large breast which, if it had had a countenance, could have been her hairless head. During the rest of the meal, when Yquingare was not asking for particulars of the Lady Pair's origin and acquisition, he was sucking noisily at first one noselike nipple, then the other.

  Zyanya avoided looking at him again; so did the Crown Prince; and they merely pushed their food around on their gold-and-lacquer plates. The twins ate heartily, because they always did, and I ate heartily because I was paying less attention to the vulgarity of Yquingare than I was to another thing about him. On first entering the room, I had noticed that the guards held spears whose blades were of a coppery hue, but an oddly dark-colored copper. I had then perceived that both the Uandakuari and his son wore short daggers of the same metal, hung in thong loops at their waists.

  The old man was addressing to me a rambling, roundabout speech, which I suspected was going to end in his asking whether I could also procure for him a set of conjoined adolescent twin males, when Zyanya, as if she could listen to no more, interrupted to ask, "What is this delicious drink?"

  The Crown Prince, appearing delighted with the interruption, leaned across the cloth to tell her that it was chápari, a product of bees' honey, a most potent product, and that she had better not drink too much of it on her first trial.

  "How wonderful!" she exclaimed, draining her lacquered cup. "If honey can be so intoxicating, why are not bees always drunk?" She hiccuped and sat thinking, evidently about bees, for when the Uandakuari tried to resume his driveling inquiry, Zyanya said loudly, "Perhaps they are. Who could tell?" And she poured another cup for herself and for me, somewhat oversloshing them.

  The old man sighed, took one last suck at his nurse's slobbered teat, and gave it a loud dismissing slap to signal that the dreadful meal was done. Zyanya and I hastily drank our second cups of chápari. "Now," said Yquingare, munching his mouth so that his nose and chin several times chomped together. His son jumped around behind him to haul him to his feet.

  "A moment, my lord," I said, "while I give the Lady Pair a word of instruction."

  "Instruction?" he said suspiciously.

  "To comply," I said, smirking like a practiced pimp. "Lest, as virgins, they be annoyingly coy."

  "Ah?" he rasped, smirking back. "Virgins as well, are they? Compliance, yes, by all means compliance."

  Zyanya and Tzimtzicha gave me identical looks of contempt as I led the twins aside and imparted the instructions, the urgent instructions I had just devised. It was difficult, for I had to speak fast, and in their native language of Coatlicamac, and they were so very stupid. But finally they both nodded a sort of dim comprehension and, with a shrug of hope and despair, I shoved them toward the Uandakuari.

  Unprotesting, they accompanied him up one staircase; helped him to climb it, in fact, looking like a crab helping a toad. Just before they reached the balcony, the toad turned and called something to his son, in Poré, so hoarsely that I caught not a word. Tzimtzicha nodded obediently to his father, then turned to ask if I and my lady were ready to retire. She only hiccuped, so I said we were; it had been a long day. We followed the Crown Prince to the stairs on the other side of the hall.

  Thus it happened that, there in Tzintzuntzani, for the first and only time in our married life, Zyanya and I slept with somebody besides each other. But please to remember, reverend friars, that we were both a bit drunk on the powerful chápari. Anyway, it was not exactly what it sounds, and I will do my best to explain.

  Before leaving home, I had tried to tell Zyanya about the Purémpecha's predilection for inventive, voluptuous, and even perverse sexual practices. We had agreed that we would not evince surprise or disgust, whatever hospitality of that nature our hosts might offer us, but would decline i
t as graciously as possible. Or we thought we had so agreed. By the time the hospitality was provided, and we recognized it for what it was, we were already partaking. And we did not then recoil because—though she and I could never afterward decide whether it was wicked or innocuous—it was undeniably delightful.

  As he led us toward the upper floor, Tzimtzicha turned and gave me an imitation of my own pimplike smirk, and inquired, "Will the knight and his lady wish separate rooms? Separate beds?"

  "Certainly not," I said, and I said it in a chilly voice, before he might next suggest, "Separate partners?" or some other indecency.

  "A conjugal chamber then, my lord," he said, agreeably enough. "But sometimes," he went on, casually, conversationally, "after a hard day's travel, even the most devoted couple may be fatigued. The court of Tzintzuntzani would think itself remiss if its guests should feel, ahem, too tired to indulge each other, even for a single night. Hence we offer a facility called atanatanarani. It enhances the adequacy of a man, the receptiveness of a woman, perhaps to an extreme they have never before enjoyed."

  The word atanatanarani, as best I could unravel its elements, meant only "a bunching together." Before I could inquire how a bunching together could enhance anything, he had bowed us into our chambers, backed himself out, and slid shut the lacquered door.

  The lamplighted room contained the biggest, deepest, softest bed of piled quilts I had ever seen. There also awaited us two elderly slaves: one male, one female. I eyed them with apprehension, but they merely asked our permission to draw our baths. Adjoining the bedroom was a separate sanitary closet for each of us, complete with its own bathing trough and already hot steam room. My servant helped me sponge myself in the bath and afterward briskly pumiced me in the steam room, but he did nothing else, nothing untoward. I assumed that the slaves, the bathing and steaming were what the Crown Prince had meant by "a facility called atanatanarani." If so, it was but a civilized amenity, nothing obscene, and it had worked well. I felt refreshed and tingly-skinned and more than "adequate," as Tzimtzicha had put it, to "indulge" my wife.