Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  I think it was also on my third day at sea that the last visible mountain peak of The One World disappeared below the horizon to the east. The current had carried me entirely out of sight of land, and there was nothing firm anywhere, and that was the first such experience I had ever had in my life. I wondered if I might eventually be cast up on The Islands of the Women, of which I had heard storytellers tell, though none ever claimed to have been there in person. According to the legends, those were islands inhabited entirely by females, who spent all their time in diving for oysters and extracting the pearl hearts from those oysters which had grown hearts. Only once a year did the women ever see men, when a number of men would canoe out from the mainland to trade cloth and other such supplies for the collected pearls—and, while there, to couple with the women. Of the babies later born of the brief mating, the island women kept only the female infants and drowned the males. Or so said the stories. I meditated on what would happen if I should land on The Islands of the Women uninvited and unexpected. Would I be immediately slain or subjected to a sort of mass rape in reverse?

  As it happened, I found not those mythical islands nor any others. I merely drifted miserably across those endless waters. The ocean ringed me about on every side, and I was most unhappy, feeling like an ant at the very bottom and center of a blue urn whose sides were slippery and unclimbable. The nights were not so unnerving, if I put away my topaz so I could not see the overwhelming profusion of stars. In the dark I could pretend I was somewhere safe—anywhere solid—in a mainland forest or even inside my own house. I could pretend that the rocking boat was a gishe bed of rope-slung netting, and thus sleep soundly.

  During the days, however, I could not pretend that I was anywhere but in the exact middle of that appalling blue, hot, shadeless vastness. Fortunately for my sanity, there were a few other things to see by daylight besides that unending, uncaring expanse of water. Some of those other things were not particularly comforting to contemplate either, but I forced myself to look at them with my crystal, and to examine them as closely as circumstances permitted, and to speculate on the nature of them.

  A few of the things I saw, I knew what they were, though I had never seen them before. There was the blue and silver swordfish, bigger than I am, which likes to leap straight up from the water and dance for a moment on its tail. There was the even bigger sawfish, flat and brown, with elongated fins along its sides like the wavy skin flaps of a flying squirrel. I recognized both of those by their wicked beaks, which the warriors of some coastal tribes use for weapons. I dreaded the moment when one of those big fish would stave in my acáli with its sword or saw, but none ever did.

  Other things I saw while adrift on that western ocean were totally unfamiliar to me. There were countless small creatures with long fins which they used like wings, to spurt from the water and glide prodigious distances. I would have thought them a kind of water insect, but one landed in my canoe, and I seized and ate him instantly, and he tasted like a fish. There were immense blue-gray fish which regarded me with intelligent eyes and a fixed grin, but they seemed more sympathetic than menacing. Numbers of them would accompany my acáli for long periods, and entertain me by doing water acrobatics in practiced unison.

  But the fish that filled me with the most awe and apprehension were the biggest of all: great gray ones which came once in a while to bask on the surface of the sea—one or two or crowds of them, and they might loll roundabout me for half a day—as if they craved a breath of fresh air and a touch of sun, which is most unfishlike behavior. What was even more unfishlike about them was that they were more huge than any other living creature I have ever seen. I do not blame you, reverend friars, if you disbelieve me, but each of those monsters was long enough to span the plaza outside the window there, and each was of a breadth and bulk to match its length. Once, when I was in the Xoconóchco, years before the time of which I now speak, I was served a meal of a fish called the yeyemichi, and the cook told me that the yeyemichi was the most tremendous fish in the sea. If what I ate on that occasion was indeed a small slice from one of those swimming Great Pyramids I was later to meet in the western ocean, well, I am heartily sorry now that I did not seek out and meet and express my admiration for the heroic man—or the army of men—who caught and beached the thing.

  Any two of those mighty yeyemichtin, as they playfully nudged each other, could have crushed my acáli and me without even noticing. But they did not, and no other such mishap befell me, and on the sixth or seventh day of my involuntary voyage—just in time: I had licked my bowl dry of the last trace of fish water; I was gaunt and blistered and flaccid—a rain came sweeping like a gray veil across the ocean behind my craft, and caught up with me and swept over me. I was much refreshed by that, and filled my bowl and drank it empty two or three times. But then I began to worry a little, for the rain had brought with it a wind that put waves on the sea. My canoe bounced and jostled about like a mere chip of wood, and very soon I was using my bowl to bail out the water that sloshed in over the sides. But I took some heart from the fact that the rain and wind had come from behind me—from the southwest, I judged, remembering where the sun had been at the time—so at least I was not being blown farther out to sea.

  Not that it mattered much where I sank at last, I thought wearily, for it appeared that I would have to sink eventually. Since the wind and rain continued without a pause, and the ocean continued to dance my acáli about, I could not sleep or even rest, but had to keep emptying out the water that slopped in. I was already so weak that my bowl felt as heavy as a great stone jar every time I dipped and filled and poured it overside.

  Though I could not sleep, I gradually slipped into a sort of stupor, so I cannot now say how many days and nights passed thus, but evidently during all of them I continued the bailing as if it had become an unbreakable habit. I do recall that, toward the end, my movements dragged slower and slower, and the level of water in the boat was rising more rapidly than I could lower it. When finally I felt the canoe's bottom grate on the floor of the sea, and I knew that it had sunk at last, I could only mildly wonder at my not feeling the water close about me or the fishes playing in my hair.

  I must have lost consciousness then, for when I again came to myself, the rain was gone and the sun was shining brightly, and I looked about me, marveling. I had sunk indeed, but not to any great depth. The water was only up to my waist, for the canoe had grounded just short of a gravelly beach that stretched out of sight, in both directions, with no sign of human habitation. Still weak and limp and moving slowly, I stepped out of the submerged acáli, dragging my soaked pack with me, and waded ashore. There were coconut palms beyond the beach, but I was too feeble to climb or even shake one, or to look for any other sort of food. I did make the effort of emptying out the contents of my pack to dry in the sun, but then I crept to the palm shade and went unconscious again.

  I awoke in darkness, and it took me a few moments to realize that I was not still bobbing about on the sea surface. Where I was, I had no idea, but it seemed that I was no longer alone, for all about me I heard a mysterious and unnerving noise. It was a clicking that came from nowhere and everywhere, no single click very loud, but all of them together making a crackling like an invisible brush fire advancing upon me. Or it could have been multitudes of people trying to steal upon me, but not very stealthily, for they were either trampling every loose pebble on the beach or snapping every twig among the beach litter.

  I started up, and at my movement the clicking instantly ceased, but when I lay back again that sinister crepitation resumed. Every time I moved during the remainder of that night, it stopped, then started again. I had not used my burning crystal to light a fire while I was still conscious and the sun was still up, so I had no means of making a torch. I could do nothing but lie uneasily awake and wait for something to leap upon me—until the first dim light of dawn showed me the source of the noise.

  At first sight, it made my flesh creep. The entire beach, except
for a clearing around the spot where I lay, was covered with green-brown crabs the size of my hand, clumsily twitching and slithering over the sand and each other. They were countless, and they were of a kind that I had never seen before. Crabs are never appealingly pretty creatures, but all that I had previously seen had at least been symmetrical. Those were not; their two front claws did not match. One claw was a large, unwieldy lump, mottled brilliant red and blue; the other claw was plain crab-colored and it was narrow, like a split twig. Each crab was using its narrow claw like a drumstick to beat upon the big claw as upon a drum, tirelessly and not at all musically.

  The dawn seemed to be the signal for them to cease their ridiculous ceremony; the numberless horde thinned out as the crabs scrabbled to their burrows in the sand. But I managed to catch a number of them, feeling that they owed me something for having made me quake so long awake and anxious in the dark. Their bodies were small and contained too little meat to be worth digging out of the shell, but their big drum claws, which I roasted over a fire before cracking them open, provided quite a savory breakfast.

  Full fed for the first time in recent memory, and feeling a bit more alive, I stood up from my fire to take stock of my situation. I was back again on The One World, and certainly still on its western coast, but I was incalculably farther north than I had ever previously been. As always, the sea stretched to the western horizon, but it was oddly much less boisterous than the seas I had known farther south: no tumbling breakers or even a lively froth of surf, but only a gentle lapping at the shore. In the other direction, eastward, beyond the shoreline palms and other trees, there rose a range of mountains. They looked formidably high, but they were pleasantly green with forests, not like the ugly volcanic ranges of dun and black rock where I had recently been. I had no way of knowing how far I had been carried north by the ocean current and then by the rainstorm. But I did know that if I merely walked southward down the beach I would sometime get back to that bay near Tzeboruko, and from there I would be in familiar country. By staying on the beach, too, I would not have to worry about food and drink. I could live entirely on the drummer crabs and coconut liquid, if nothing else offered.

  But the plain fact was that I had had quite enough of the cursed ocean, and I wanted to get out of sight of it. Those mountains inland were foreign to me, and possibly inhabited by savage people or wild animals of breeds I had never encountered before. Still, they were but mountains, and I had traveled in many other mountains, and I had lived well enough off the provender they offered. Most appealing to me at that moment, though, was the knowledge that the mountains would provide a variety of scenery, which no sea or seaside can ever do. So I stayed on that beach only to rest and regain my strength during two or three days. Then I repacked my pack and turned to the east, and headed for the first foothills of those mountains.

  It was midsummer then, which was fortunate for me, for even at that season the nights were frigid in those heights. The few clothes and the single blanket I carried were much worn by then, and had not been improved by their long soaking in salt water. But had I ventured into those mountains in winter I would really have suffered, for I was told by the natives that the winters brought numbing cold and heavy snows that piled head-high.

  Yes, I finally met some people, though not until I had been among the mountains for many days, by which time I was wondering if The One World had been totally depopulated by Tzeboruko's eruption or some other disaster while I was away at sea.

  Very peculiar people they were, too, those people I met. They were called Rarámuri—I assume they still are—a word that means Fast of Feet, and with good reason, as I shall tell. I encountered the first of them when I was standing on a clifftop, resting from a breathtaking climb and admiring a breathtaking view. I was looking down into an awesomely deep chasm, its sheer sides feathered with trees. Through its bottom ran a river, and that river was fed by a waterfall that hurtled from a notched mountaintop on the other side of the canyon from where I stood. The fall must have been almost half of one-long-run—straight down—a mighty column of white water at the top, a mighty plume of white mist at the bottom. I was looking at that spectacle when I heard a hail:

  "Kuira-ba!"

  I started, because it was the first human voice I had heard in so long, but it sounded cheerful enough, so I took the word to be a greeting. It was a young man who had shouted, and he smiled as he came along the cliff edge toward me. He was handsome of face, in the way that a hawk is handsome, and he was well built, though shorter than myself. He was decently clad, except that he was barefoot—but so was I by that time, my sandals having long ago shredded away. Besides his clean deerskin loincloth, he wore a gaily painted deerskin mantle, of a style new to me; it had wrist-length sleeves set into it, for extra warmth.

  As he came up to me, I returned his salute of "Kuira-ba." He indicated the cataract I had been admiring, and grinned as proudly as if he owned it, and said, "Basa-seachic," which I took to mean Falling Water, since a waterfall was unlikely to be named anything else. I repeated the word, and said it with feeling, to convey that I thought the water a most marvelous water, falling most impressively. The young man pointed to himself and said, "Tes-disora," obviously his name—and meaning Maize Stalk, I later learned. I pointed to myself, said "Mixtli," and pointed to a cloud in the sky. He nodded, tapped his mantled chest, and said, "Rarámurime," then indicated me and said, "Chichimecame."

  I shook my head emphatically, slapped my bare chest and said, "Mexícatl!" at which he only nodded again, indulgently, as if I had specified one of the numberless tribes of the Chichimóca dog people. Not then, but eventually, I realized that the Rarámuri had never even heard of us Mexíca—of our civilized society, Our knowledge and power and far-flung dominions—and I think they would have cared little if they had heard. The Rarámuri have a comfortable life in their mountain fastnesses—well fed and watered, content with their own company—so they seldom travel far. Hence they know no other peoples except their near neighbors, of whom the occasional raider or forager or simple wanderer happens into their country, as I had done.

  To the north of their territory live the dread Yaki, and no sane people desire close acquaintance with them. I remembered having heard of the Yaki from that scalpless elder pochtéatl. Tes-disora, when later I was able to understand his language, told me more: "The Yaki are wilder than the wildest beasts. For loincloths, they wear the hair of other men. They tear the scalp from a man while he yet lives, before they butcher and dismember and devour him. If they kill him first, you see, they count his hair not worth keeping and wearing. And the hair of a woman counts not at all. Any women they catch are only good for eating—after they have been raped until they split up the middle and are of no more use for raping."

  In the mountains south of the Rarámuri live more peaceable tribes, related to them by fairly similar languages and customs. Along the western seacoast live tribes of fishermen, who almost never venture inland. All of those peoples are, if not what could be called civilized, at least cleanly of body and tidy of dress. The only really slovenly and squalid neighbors of the Rarámuri are the Chichimeca tribes in the deserts to the east.

  I was as sunburned as any desert-dwelling Chichimecatl, and was as nearly naked. In Rarámuri eyes, I could only be one of that trash breed, though perhaps an unusually enterprising one, to have toiled my way to the mountain heights. I do think that Tes-disora might at least have taken notice, at our first meeting, of the fact that I did not stink. Thanks to the mountains' abundance of water, I had been able to bathe every day, and, like the Rarámuri, I continued to do so. But, despite my evident gentility, despite my insistence that I was of the Mexíca, despite my reiterated glorification of that far-off nation, I never persuaded one single person of the Rarámuri that I was not just a "Chichimecame" fugitive from the desert.

  No matter. Whatever they believed me to be, or whatever they thought I was pretending to be, the Rarámuri made me welcome. And I lingered among them for
a time, simply because I was intrigued by their way of life and enjoyed sharing it. I stayed with them long enough to learn their language sufficiently to be able to converse, at least with the help of many gestures on my part and theirs. Of course, during my first encounter with Tes-disora, all our communication was done by gestures.

  After we had exchanged names, he used his hands to indicate a shelter over his head—meaning a village, I assumed—and said, "Guaguey-bo," and pointed southward. Then he indicated Tonatíu in the sky, calling him "Tatevari," or Grandfather Fire, and made me understand that we could reach the village of Guaguey-bo in a journey of three suns. I made gestures and faces of gratitude for the invitation, and we went in that direction. To my surprise, Tes-disora set off at a lope, but, when he saw that I was winded and tired and disinclined to run, he dropped back and thereafter matched my walking pace. His lope was evidently his accustomed way of crossing mountains and canyons alike, for, even though I am long-legged, at a walk it took us five days, not three, to reach Guaguey-bo.

  Early in the march, Tes-disora gave me to understand that he was one of his village's hunters. I gestured to ask why, then, he was empty-handed. Where had he left his weapons? He grinned and motioned for me to stop walking, to crouch quietly in the underbrush. We waited there in the forest for only a little while, then Tes-disora nudged me and pointed, and I dimly saw a dappled shape move among the trees. Before I could raise my crystal, Tes-disora suddenly sprang from his crouch and away, as if he had been an arrow I had shot from a bow.