Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  "She has never even seen me unclothed," he blurted. "And she is a virgin, innocent of all knowledge about the relations between a man and a woman."

  I said, "It will be Zyanya's responsibility, as her mistress, to sit her down for a woman-to-woman talk. I am sure Zyanya will enlighten her on the more intimate aspects of marriage."

  "That will be a kindness," said Cozcatl. "But after that, would you also speak to her, Mixtli? You have known me longer and—well, better than has Zyanya. You could tell Quequelmíqui more specifically of my limitations as a conjugal partner. Would you do that?"

  I said, "I will do my best, Cozcatl, but I warn you. A virginally innocent girl suffers doubts and trepidations about taking even a commonplace husband of ordinary physical attributes. When I tell her bluntly what she can expect from this marriage—and what she cannot—it may further affright her."

  "She loves me," Cozcatl said ringingly. "She has given her promise. I know her heart."

  "Then you are unique among men," I said drily. "I know only this much. A woman thinks of marriage in terms of flowers and birdsong and butterfly flutterings. When I speak to Ticklish in terms of flesh and organs and tissues, it will at best disillusion her. At worst, she may fly in panic from ever marrying you or anybody. You would not thank me for that."

  "But I would," he said. "Quequelmíqui deserves better than an appalling surprise on her wedding night. If she decides to refuse me, I had rather it be now than then. Oh, it would destroy me, yes. If the good and loving Quequelmíqui will not have me, neither will any other woman, ever. I shall enlist in some army troop and go off to war somewhere and perish in it. But whatever happens, Mixtli, I would not hold it against you. No, I plead that you do me this favor."

  So, when he departed, I told Zyanya of his news and his request. She called Ticklish from the kitchen, and the girl came blushing and trembling and twisting her fingers in her blouse hem. We both embraced her and congratulated her on having captured the affection of such a fine young man. Then Zyanya put a motherly arm around her waist and led her upstairs, while I sat down with my paint pots and bark paper. When I had written the document of manumission, I nervously smoked a poquietl—several of them, before Ticklish came downstairs again.

  She had been blushing before; now she glowed like a brazier; she was quivering even more visibly. Her agitation may have made her look prettier than she usually was, but it was truly the first time I had noticed that she was in fact a most attractive girl. I suppose one never pays much attention to the familiar furnishings of one's house until someone from outside compliments a piece.

  I handed her the paper and she said, "What is this, my master?"

  "A document which says that the free woman Quequelmíqui must nevermore call anyone master. Try instead to think of me as a family friend, for Cozcatl has asked that I explain some things to you."

  I plunged right in, with not much delicacy, I fear. "Most men, Ticklish, have a thing called a tepúli—

  She interrupted, though without raising her bowed head. "I know what that is, my lord. I had brothers in my family. My lady mistress says a man puts it inside a woman... here." She pointed modestly at her lap. "Or he does if he has one. Cozcatl told me how he lost his."

  "And thereby lost his ability ever to make you a mother. He is also deprived of some of the pleasures of marriage. But he has not been deprived of his desire that you enjoy those pleasures, or his ability to give them to you. Though he has no tepúli to link you and him together, there are other means of doing the act of love."

  I turned slightly away, to spare us both the unease of my seeing her blushes, and I tried to speak in the flat, bored tone of a schoolmaster. Well, the basic instructions can be told in a schoolmasterish voice, but—when I began to dwell on the numerous stimulating and satisfying things that can be done to a woman's breasts and tipíli and especially the sensitive xacapili, by means of fingers and tongue and lips and even eyelashes—well, I could not help remembering all the nuances and refinements I myself had employed and enjoyed, in times recent and past, and my voice tended to become unsteady. So I hurried to conclude:

  "A woman can find those delights nearly as satisfying as the more usual act. Many would rather be thus satisfied than merely impaled. Some even do those things with other women, and give no thought to the absence of a tepúli."

  Ticklish said, "It sounds..." and so quaveringly that I turned to look at her. She sat with her body tensed to rigidity, her eyes and fists tight closed. "It feels..." Her whole body jerked. "Won-der-ful..!" The word was long-drawn, as if wrung from her. It took a while for her fists to unclench and her eyes to open. She lifted them to me, and they were like smoky lamps. "Thank you for... for telling me those things."

  I remembered how Ticklish used to giggle without provocation. Could it be possible that she was excitable in other ways without being touched or even undressed?

  I said, "I can no longer command you, and this is an impertinence you may refuse. But I should like to see your bosom."

  She looked at me with wide-eyed innocence, and she hesitated, but then slowly she raised her blouse. Her breasts were not large, but they were well formed, and their nipples swelled just from the touch of my gaze upon them, and their areolas were dark and large, almost too big for a man's mouth to encompass. I sighed, and signaled that she could go. I hoped I was in error, but I very much feared that Ticklish would not always be satisfied with less than real copulation, and that Cozcatl risked being eventually the unhappiest kind of husband.

  I went upstairs and found Zyanya standing in the doorway of the nursery, no doubt contemplating additions and improvements to its facilities. I did not say anything of my misgivings about the wisdom of Cozcatl's marriage. I merely remarked:

  "When Ticklish leaves, we will be one servant short. Turquoise cannot manage the household and look after you as well. Cozcatl picked an untimely moment to declare his intentions. Most unfortunate for us."

  "Misfortune!" Zyanya exclaimed brightly. "You said once, Záa, that if I needed help, we might persuade Béu to join us here. The departure of Ticklish is a very minor misfortune, thank the gods, but it provides an excuse. We will need another woman around the house. Oh, Záa, let us ask her!"

  "An inspired notion," I said. I was not exactly palpitant at the prospect of having the embittered Béu about, especially during such a nervous time as that, but whatever Zyanya wanted I would get for her. I said, "I will send an invitation so imploring that she cannot refuse."

  I sent it by the same seven soldiers who had once marched south with me, so that Waiting Moon would have a protective escort if she did agree to come to Tenochtítlan. And she did, without protest or reluctance. Nevertheless, it took her some time to make all the arrangements for leaving the inn's management to her servants and slaves. Meanwhile, Zyanya and I provided a grand wedding ceremony for Cozcatl and Ticklish, and they went off together to live in his house.

  It was well into winter when the seven warriors delivered Béu Ribé to our door. By that time, I was honestly as anxious and as pleased to see her as Zyanya was. My wife had got large—alarmingly so, in my opinion—and had begun to suffer aches and irritabilities and other symptoms of distress. Although she peevishly kept assuring me that those things were quite natural, they worried me and kept me hovering about her and trying to do helpfulnesses for her, all of which made her more peevish yet.

  She cried, "Oh, Béu, thank you for coming! I thank Uizye Tao and every other god that you have come!" And she fell into her sister's arms as if embracing a deliverer. "You may have saved my life! I am being pampered to death!"

  Béu's luggage was put in the guest chamber prepared for her, but she spent most of that day with Zyanya in our room, from which I was forcibly excluded, to mope about the rest of the house and fret and feel discarded. Toward twilight, Béu came downstairs alone. While we took chocolate together, she said, almost conspiratorially:

  "Zyanya will soon be at that stage of her pregnancy when you
must forgo your... your husbandly rights. What will you do during that while?"

  I nearly told her it was none of her business, but I said only, "I imagine I will survive."

  She persisted, "It would be unseemly if you were to resort to a stranger."

  Affronted, I stood up and said stiffly, "I may not enjoy enforced continence, but—

  "But you could hope to find no acceptable substitute for Zyanya?" She tilted her head as if seriously expecting an answer. "In all of Tenochtítlan you could find no one as beautiful as she is? And so you sent to faraway Tecuantépec for me?" She smiled and stood and came very close to me, her breasts brushing my front. "I look so very much like Zyanya that you might deem me a satisfactory substitute, am I not right?" She toyed with my mantle clasp, as if she would mischievously undo it. "But, Záa, although Zyanya and I are sisters, and physically so similar, we are not necessarily indistinguishable. In bed, you might find us very different...."

  Firmly I put her away from me. "I wish you a pleasant stay in this house, Béu Ribé. But, if you cannot hide your dislike of me, will you at least refrain from demonstrating it in such maliciously insincere coquetry? Cannot we both manage simply to ignore each other?"

  When I strode away, her face was as flushed as if I had surprised her in some indecent act, and she was rubbing her face as if I had slapped her for it.

  * * *

  Señor Bishop Zumárraga, it is an honor and a flattery to have you join us once again. Your Excellency is just in time to hear me announce—as proudly as I announced it those many years ago—the birth of my beloved daughter.

  All my apprehensions, I am happy to say, proved unfounded. The child evinced intelligence even before she emerged into this life, for she waited prudently in the womb until after the lifeless nemontemtin days had passed, and made her appearance on the day Ce-Malinali, or One Grass, of the first month of the year Five House. I was then thirty and one years old, somewhat overage to be starting a family, but I preened and strutted just as preposterously as younger men do—as if I had alone conceived and carried and been delivered of the infant.

  While Béu stayed at Zyanya's bedside, the physician and the mid-wife came to tell me that the child was a female and to answer all my anxious questions. They seemed to think me demented when I wrung my hands and said, "Speak the truth. I can bear it. Is it really two girls in one body?" No, they said, it was not any kind of twins, but a single daughter. No, she was not of extraordinarily great size. No, she was not monstrous in any respect and she appeared unmarked by any portents. When I pressed the doctor as to the acuity of her eyesight, he replied in some exasperation that newborn babies are not notable for eagle vision, or for boasting about it if they have it. I must wait until she could talk and tell me herself.

  They gave me the child's navel string, then went back into the nursery to dip One Grass in cold water, to swaddle her and to subject her to the midwife's cautionary and instructive harangue. I went downstairs and, with unsteady fingers, wrapped the moist string around a ceramic spindle wheel and, mouthing a few silent prayers and thanks to the gods, buried it under the stones of the kitchen hearth. Then I hurried upstairs again to wait impatiently to be admitted for my first look at my daughter.

  I kissed my wanly smiling wife and, with my topaz, examined the dwarf face cuddled in the bend of her elbow. I had seen the new offspring of other parents, so I was not shocked, but I was a bit disappointed to find that ours was in no way superior. She was as red and wrinkled as a chopini chili pod, as bald and ugly as an aged Purémpe. I tried to feel a proper rush of love for her, but without success. I was assured by all present that it was indeed my daughter, a new fragment of humankind, but I would have been equally prepared to believe them if they had confessed that it was a newborn, still-hairless howler monkey. It had the howl, at any rate.

  I need hardly say that the child day by day appeared more human, and that I viewed her with more appreciative and affectionate regard. I called her Cocóton, a common nickname for girl children; it means the crumb fallen from a larger piece of bread. It was not long before Cocóton began to manifest a resemblance to her mother, and necessarily her aunt, which is to say that no baby could have become more quickly more beautiful. Her hair grew in, in ringlets. Her eyelashes appeared, and they had the same abundance, in miniature, as the hummingbird-wing lashes of Zyanya and Béu. Her eyebrows grew in, and they had the same winglike uptilt as those of Zyanya and Béu. She began to smile more frequently than she howled, and her smile was that of Zyanya, compelling all about her to reflect it. Even Béu, who in recent years had been so dour, was influenced often to smile that same radiant smile again.

  Zyanya was soon up and about, though her activities were for a time centered only on Cocóton, who insisted that her milk-animal be frequently available. Béu's presence made it unnecessary for me to watch over the welfare of Zyanya and our baby, and I was often ignored by both women, even by the baby, when now and then I proffered uninvited suggestions or attentions. Nevertheless, I did occasionally insist on being obeyed, simply as the man of the household. When Cocóton was nearly two months old, and was no longer so frequently needful of her milk supplier, Zyanya began to show signs of restlessness.

  She had been pent in the house for months, getting no farther outdoors than our rooftop garden, to bask in the beams of Tonatíu and the breezes of Ehecatl. She would like to venture farther outside, she said, and reminded me that the ceremony honoring Xipe Totec was soon to be held in The Heart of the One World. She wanted to attend. I positively forbade it.

  I said, "Cocóton was born unmarked and unmonstrous and with seemingly unimpaired eyesight, thanks to her tonáli, or ours, or the gods' good will. Let us not now put her at hazard. As long as she is nursing, we must take care that evil influences do not get into your milk, through your being frightened or upset by some shocking sight. I cannot think of anything more likely to horrify you than the Xipe Totec celebration. We will go anywhere else you ask, my love, but not to that."

  Oh, yes, Your Excellency, I had often seen the honoring of Xipe Totec, for it was one of the most important religious rituals observed by us Mexíca and by many other peoples. The ceremony was impressive, I might say unforgettable, but even in those days I could scarcely believe that any participant or onlooker enjoyed it. Though it has now been many years since I last saw Xipe Totec die and come back to life, I still can hardly bear to describe the manner of it—and my revulsion owes nothing to my having become Christian and civilized. However, if Your Excellency is so interested and insistent...

  Xipe Totec was our god of seedtime, and that came in our month of Tlacaxipe Ualiztli, which can be translated as The Gentle Flaying. It was the season when the dead stumps and stalks of last year's harvests were burned off or cleared away or turned under, so the earth was clean and ready to receive its new planting. Death making way for life, you see, as it does even for Christians, when at every seedtime the Lord Jesus dies and is reborn. Your Excellency need not make noises of protest. The impious similarity goes no further.

  I will not describe all the public preliminaries and accompaniments: the flowers and music and dancing and colors and costumes and processions and the thunder of the drum which tears out the heart. I will make this as mercifully brief as I can.

  Know, then, that a young man or girl was selected beforehand to act the honored role of Xipe Totec, which means The Dear One Flayed. The personifier's sex was less important than the requirement that he or she be grown to full stature but be still a virgin. Usually it was a foreigner of noble birth, captured in some war when still a child and saved especially to represent the god when grown. Never was a slave purchased for the purpose, because Xipe Totec merited and demanded and was provided a young person of the highest available class.

  For some days before the ceremony, the youth was housed in the temple of Xipe Totec and was treated with every kindness, lavished with every pleasure of food and drink and entertainment. Also, once the youth's virginity had
been acceptably substantiated, it was quickly disposed of. He or she was allowed unlimited sexual license—encouraged to it, even forced to it when necessary—for it was a vital part of playing the god of springtime fertility. If the xochimíqui was a young man, he could name all the girls and women of the community whom he had ever desired, unwed or not. Assuming those women consented, as did many even of the married ones, they would be brought to him. If the xochimíqui was a girl, she could name and summon all the men she wanted, and spread herself for them.

  Sometimes, however, the youth selected for the honor of godhood would be averse to that aspect of the performance. If it was a young woman, and she tried to decline the opportunity to wallow, she would be forcibly deflowered by the high priest of Xipe Totec. In the case of a determinedly chaste young man, he would be tied down and straddled by a female temple attendant. If, once introduced to the pleasure, the young person was still recalcitrant, he or she would have to endure repeated violation by the temple women or priests and, when those were sated, by any commonfolk who might desire to take a turn. There was always a sufficiency of those, the devout who slavered to couple with a god or goddess, the merely lecherous, the curious, the childless women or impotent men who hoped to be impregnated or rejuvenated by the deity. Yes, Your Excellency, there occurred every sexual excess Your Excellency's fancy can envision—except the coupling of god and man or goddess and woman. Such acts, being the very contravention of fertility, would have been repugnant to Xipe Totec.

  On the day of the ceremony, after the attending crowd had been entertained by many performances of dwarfs and jugglers and tocotine and such, Xipe Totec made his public appearance. The young girl or man was dressed as the god, in a costume combining dry old maize husks and bright new sprigs of greenery, in a wide-spreading fan crown of the most colorful feathers, in a flowing mantle and gilded sandals. The youth was carried many times about The Heart of the One World in an elegant litter chair, with much pageantry and deafening music, while he or she scattered seeds and maize kernels over the cheering and chanting throng. Then the procession came to Xipe Totec's low pyramid in one corner of the plaza, and all the drumming and music and singing stopped, and the crowd hushed, as the young personifier of the god was set down at the foot of the temple's staircase.