Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  The Otomí men, as far as I am concerned, are neither improved nor impaired by their adornment. For a while, I did think it a shame that so many otherwise handsome women should obscure their beauty behind those webs and whorls and patterns they could never remove. However, as I became more accustomed to seeing the n'detade, I must confess that I began to regard it as a subtle beguilement. The very veiling made the females seem in a measure unapproachable, and therefore challenging, and therefore tantalizing—

  At the farthest northern extent of the Otomí lands was a riverside village called M'boshte, and one of the villagers was a young woman named R'zoono H'don we, which means Flower of the Moon. And flowery she was: every visible part of her blossoming with blue-drawn petals and leaves and fronds. Behind that artificial garden, she was fair of face and figure, excepting of course those disappointing calves. At first sight of her, I felt an urge to part her clothes and see how much of her was flower-petaled, then to make my way through the petals to the woman underneath.

  Flower of the Moon was attracted to me, too, and I suspect in much the same way: an urge to enjoy an oddity, since my height and breadth, oversized even among the Mexíca, made me rather a giant among the Otomí. She conveyed to me that she was at the time unattached to any other male; she had been recently widowed, when her husband died in the R'donte Sh'mboi, the River Slate, which trickled past the village. Since that water was only about a hand span deep and almost narrow enough for me to jump across, I suggested that her husband must have been a very small man to have drowned in it. She laughed at that, and made me understand that he had fallen and cracked his skull on the river's slate bed.

  So the one night which I spent in M'boshte I spent with Flower of the Moon. I cannot speak of other Otomí females, but that one was decorated on every exposable surface of her skin, everywhere but on her lips, her eyelids, her fingertips, and the nipples of her breasts. I remember thinking that she must have suffered excruciatingly when the local artist pricked the flower designs right to the margins of her tender tipíli membranes. For, in the course of that night, I got to see every blossom she wore. The act of copulation is called in Otomite agui n'degue, and it began—or at least Flower of the Moon preferred that I begin—by examining and tracing and fondling and, well, tasting every last petal of every single flower of her whole body's garden. I felt rather like a deer browsing through a sweet and abundant meadow, and I decided that deer must be happy animals indeed.

  When I prepared to depart in the morning, Flower of the Moon gave me to understand that she hoped I had made her pregnant, which her late husband had never done. I smiled, thinking she paid me a compliment. But then she conveyed her reason for hoping to bear my son or daughter. I was a big man, so the child should also grow to goodly size, so it would have an exceptional expanse of skin to be embellished with a prodigious number of n'detade drawings, so it would be a rarity that would make M'boshte the envy of every other Otomí community. I sighed, and went on my way.

  As long as my course lay beside the waters of the R'donte Sh'mboi, the land about was green with grass and leaves, dotted with the red and yellow and blue of many blossoms. However, three or four days later, the River Slate bent westward, away from my northering course, and took all the cool and colorful verdure with it. Ahead of me were still some gray-green mizquitin trees and silver-green clumps of yuca and a heavy undergrowth of various dusty-green bushes. But I knew that the trees and shrubs would gradually thin out and move farther apart as I moved on, until they would give way to the open and sun-baked and almost barren desert.

  For a moment I paused, tempted to turn with the river and stay in the temperate Otomí country, but I had no excuse for doing so. The only reason for my journey was to backtrack the Aztéca, and, as well as I knew, they had come from somewhere yonder—from that desert—or beyond, if there was anything beyond, So I filled my water bag from the river, and I inhaled a last deep breath of the river-cooled air, and I walked on northward. I turned my back on the living lands. I walked into the empty lands, into the burned lands, into the dead-bone lands.

  The desert is a wilderness which the gods torment, when they are not ignoring it utterly.

  The earth goddess Coatlicue and her family do nothing to add interest to the monotonous and almost uniformly level terrain of gray-yellow sand, gray-brown gravel, and gray-black boulders. Coatlicue does not deign to disturb that land with earthquakes. Chantico does not spurt volcanoes through it, nor Temazcaltoci spit any spouts of hot water and steam. The mountain god Tepeyolotl stays aloofly far away. I could, with the aid of my topaz, just make out the low profiles of mountains far to east and west, jagged mountains colored the gray-white of granite. But they remained always infinitely distant; they never came nearer to me nor I to them.

  Each morning, the sun god Tonatíu sprang angrily from his bed, without his accustomed dawn ceremony of selecting his bright spears and arrows for the day. Each evening, he plummeted into bed without donning his lustrous feather mantle or spreading wide his colorful flower quilts. In between the abrupt lifting and dropping of the nights' blessedly cool darkness, Tonatíu was merely a brighter yellow-white spot in the yellow-white sky—sultry, sullen, sucking all the breath from that land—burning his way across the parched sky as slowly and laboriously as I crept across the parched sands below.

  The rain god Tlaloc paid even less attention to the desert, though it was by then the season of rains. His casks of clouds often piled up, but only over the granite mountains far away to east and west. The clouds would belly and billow and tower high over the horizon, then darken with storm, and the tlalóque spirits would flail their blazing forked sticks, making a drumming that came to me as a faint mutter. But the sky above me and ahead of me remained forever that unrelieved yellow-white. Neither the clouds nor the tlalóque ventured into the oven heat of the desert. They let their rain spill only as distant gray-blue veils onto those distant gray-white mountains. And the goddess of running water, Chalchihuitlicue, was nowhere in evidence, never.

  The wind god Ehecatl blew now and then, but his lips were as parched as the desert earth, his breath as hot and dry, and he seldom made a sound, since he had practically nothing to blow against. Sometimes, though, he blew so hard that he whistled. Then the sand stirred and lifted and drove across the land in clouds as abrasive as the obsidian dust that sculptors use to wear away solid rock.

  The gods of living creatures have little to do in that hot, harsh, arid land; least of all Mixcoatl, the god of hunters. Of course I saw or heard the occasional coyote, because that beast seems able to forage a living anywhere. And there were some rabbits, probably put there only for the coyotes to live on. There were wrens, and owls not much bigger than the wrens, living in holes gouged in the cactuses, and always a scavenger vulture or two soaring in circles high above me. But every other desert inhabitant seemed to be of the vermin variety, living underground or under rocks—the venomous rattle-tailed snakes, lizards like whips, other lizards all warts and horns, scorpions almost as long as my hand.

  The desert likewise contains little to have interested our gods of growing things. I grant that even there, in the autumn, the nopali cactus puts forth its sweet red tonaltin fruits, and the gigantic quinametl cactus offers sweet purplish pitaaya fruits at the ends of its uplifted arms, but most of the desert cactuses grow only spikes and spines and hooks and barbs. Of trees there is only an occasional gnarled mizquitl, and the yuca of spearlike leaves, and the quaumatlatl which is curiously colored a light, bright green in its every part: leaves, twigs, branches, and even its trunk. The smaller shrubs include the useful chiyactic, whose sap is so like an oil that it makes an easily lighted campfire, and the quauxeloloni, whose wood is harder than copper, almost impossible to cut, so heavy that it would sink in water, if there were any water about.

  Only one kindly goddess dares to stroll through that forbidding desert, to reach among the fangs and talons of those touch-me-not plants, to sweeten their ill nature with her caress.
That is Xochiquetzal, goddess of love and flowers, the goddess best loved by my long-gone sister Tzitzitlini. Each spring, for a little while, the goddess beautifies every meanest shrub and cactus. During the rest of the year, it might seem to an ordinary traveler that Xochiquetzal has abandoned the desert to unenlivened ugliness. But I still, as I had done in my short-sighted childhood, looked closely at things that would not catch the eye of people with normal vision. And I found flowers in the desert in every season, on the long, thready vines that crept along the surface of the ground. They were miniature flowers, almost invisible unless they were sought, but they were flowers, and I knew that Xochiquetzal was there.

  Though a goddess may frequent the desert with ease and impunity, it is no comfortable environment for a human being. Everything that makes human life livable is either scarce or absent. A man trying to cross the desert, ignorant of its nature and unprepared for it, would soon come to his death—and not a quick or an easy one. But I, though I was making my first venture into that wasteland, I was not entirely ignorant or unprepared. During my schooldays, when we boys were taught to soldier, the Cuáchic Blood Glutton had insisted on including some instruction in how to survive in the desert.

  For example, I never lacked for water, thanks to his teachings. The most convenient source is the comitl cactus, which is why it is called the comitl, or jar. I would select a sizable one and lay a ring of twigs around it, and set them afire, and wait until the heat drove the comitl's moisture toward its interior. I then had only to slice off the top of the cactus, mash its inner pulp and squeeze the water from that into my leather bag. Also, each night, I cut down one of the tall, straight-trunked cactuses and laid it with its ends propped on rocks so that it sagged in the middle. By the morning, all its moisture would have collected in that middle, where I had only to cut out a plug and let the water trickle into my bag.

  I seldom had any meat to cook over my evening campfire, except an occasional lizard, sufficient for about two mouthfuls—and once a rabbit which had still been kicking when I drove off the vulture tearing at it. But meat is not indispensable to the sustenance of life. Throughout the year, the mizquitl tree is festooned with seed pods, new green ones as well as the withered brown ones left from the year before. The green pods can be cooked to tenderness in hot water and then mashed into an edible pulp. The dry seeds inside the old pods can be crushed between two rocks to the consistency of meal. That coarse powder can be carried like pinoli and, when no fresher food is available, mixed with water and boiled.

  Well, I survived, and I traveled in that dreadful desert for a whole year. But I need describe it no more, since every one-long-run was indistinguishable from every other. I will only add—in case you reverend friars cannot yet envision its vastness and emptiness—that I had been trudging through it for at least a month before I encountered another human being.

  From a distance, because it was dust-colored like the desert, I took it to be just a strangely shaped hummock of sand, but as I got closer I saw it was a seated human figure. Rather joyfully, since I had been so long alone, I gave a hail, but I heard no reply. As I continued to approach I called again, and still I got no answer, though by then I was close enough to see that the stranger's mouth was open wide enough to be screaming.

  Then I stood over the figure, a naked woman sitting on the sand and wearing a light powdering of it. If she had once been screaming, she was no more, for she was dead, with eyes and mouth wide. She sat with her legs out before her and parted, with her hands pressed flat on the ground as if she had died while trying strenuously to push herself erect. I touched her dusty shoulder; the flesh was yielding and not yet chill; she had not been dead for long. She stank of being unwashed, as no doubt I did too, and her long hair was so full of sand fleas that it might have writhed had it not been so matted. Nevertheless, given a good bath, she would have been handsome of face and figure, and she was younger than I was, with no marks of disease or injury, so I was puzzled as to the cause of her death.

  During the past month, I had got into the habit of talking to myself, for lack of anyone else, so then I said to myself, forlornly, "This desert is surely abandoned by the gods—or I am. I have the good fortune to meet what is perhaps the only other person in all this wasteland, and by good fortune it is a woman, who would have been ideal for a traveling companion, but by ill fortune she is a corpse. Had I come a day earlier, she might have been pleased to share my journey and my blanket and my attentions. Since she is dead, the only attention I can pay is to bury her before the vultures come flocking."

  I shed my pack and my water bag and began to scrape with my maquahuitl in the sand nearby. But I seemed to feel her eyes reproachfully on me, so I decided she might as well lie down restfully while I dug the grave. I dropped my blade and took the woman by her shoulders to ease her onto her back—and I got a surprise. She resisted my hands' pressure, she insisted on remaining in a sitting position, as if she had been a stuffed doll sewn to stay bent in the middle. I could not understand the body's reluctance; its muscles had not yet been stiffened, as I proved by lifting one of her arms and finding it quite limber. I tried again to move her, and her head lolled onto her shoulder, but her torso would not be budged. A mad thought came into my mind. Did desert people, when they died, perhaps grow roots that fixed them in place? Did they perhaps gradually turn into those giant but often very human-shaped quinametin cactuses?

  I stepped back to consider the incomprehensibly stubborn cadaver—and was surprised again when I felt a sharp stab between my shoulderblades. I whirled around to find myself in a half circle of arrows, all pointed at me. Each was poised on the taut string of a bow, and every bow was held by an angrily frowning man, and every man was clad in nothing but a greasy loincloth of ragged leather, a crust of body dirt, and some feathers in his lank hair. There were nine of the men. Admittedly, I had been preoccupied with my peculiar find, and they had taken pains to come noiselessly, but I should have smelled them long before they were upon me, for their stink was that of the dead woman multiplied by nine.

  "The Chichimeca!" I said to myself, or perhaps I said it aloud. I did say to them, "I just now happened upon this unfortunate woman. I was trying to be of help."

  Since I blurted that out in a hurry, hoping it would hold back their arrows, I spoke in my native tongue of Náhuatl. But I accompanied the words with gestures intended to be understandable even by savages, and even in that tense moment I was thinking that, if I lived long enough to say anything else, I should have the task of learning yet another foreign language. But, to my surprise, one of the men—the one who had jabbed me with his arrow point, a man about my own age and nearly of my height—said in easily understandable Náhuatl:

  "The woman is my wife."

  I cleared my throat and said condolingly, as one does when imparting bad news, "I regret to say she was your wife. She appears to have died a short while ago." The Chichimecatl's arrow—all nine arrows—stayed aimed at my middle. I hastened to add, "I did not cause her death. I found her thus. And I had no thought of molesting her, even if I had found her alive."

  The man laughed harshly, without humor.

  "In fact," I went on, "I was about to do her the favor of burying her, before the scavengers should get at her." I indicated the place where my maquahuitl lay.

  The man looked at the furrow I had begun, then up at a vulture already hovering overhead, then at me again, and his stern face softened somewhat. He said, "That was kindly of you, stranger," and he lowered his arrow and relaxed the bowstring.

  The other eight Chicimeca did likewise, and tucked their arrows into their tangled hair. One of the men went to pick up my maquahuitl and examine it appraisingly; another began to poke through the contents of my pack. Maybe I was about to be robbed of what little I carried, but at least it seemed that I would not immediately be killed as a trespasser. To maintain the mood of amiability, I said to the just-widowed husband:

  "I sympathize in your bereavement. Your wife was y
oung and comely. Of what did she die?"

  "Of being a bad wife," he said glumly. Then he said, "She was bitten by a rattle-tailed snake."

  I could make no connection between his two statements. I could only say, "Strange. She does not at all appear to have been ill."

  "No, she recovered from the venom," he growled, "but not before she had made her confession to Filth Eater, and with me at her side. The only bad deed she confessed to Tlazolteotl was her having lain with a man of another tribe. Then she had the misfortune not to die of the snakebite."

  He shook his head somberly. So did I. He continued:

  "We waited for her to recover her health, for it would be unseemly to execute an ailing woman. When she was well and strong again, we brought her here. This morning. To die."

  I gazed at the remains, wondering what mode of execution could have left the victim without any mark but staring eyes and silently screaming mouth.

  "Now we come to remove her," the widower concluded. "A good place of execution is not easy to find in the desert, so we do not desecrate this one by leaving our carrion to attract the vultures and coyotes. It was thoughtful of you, stranger, to have appreciated that fact." He laid a hand companionably on my shoulder. "But we will attend to the disposal, and then perhaps you will share our night's meal at our camp."

  "Gladly," I said, and my empty stomach rumbled. But what happened next nearly spoiled my appetite.