Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  The man aboard was propelling it with a pole, the lake being too shallow to require the use of a paddle. He slid the canoe through the reeds to where I stood, then peered suspiciously at me and grunted a profanity and said, "You are not the—you are a stranger."

  And you are another ill-bred Aztecatl, I thought, but did not say aloud. I stepped into the boat before he could move it away, and said, "If you came for the frog sticker, he claims to be busy, and I believe he is. You will please convey me to the island."

  Except for a repetition of the profanity, he made no protest and evinced no curiosity and said not another word as he poled me across the water. He let me step ashore on the edge of the island, then went away—through one of what I then discovered were several canals cut through the island, its only other resemblance to Tenochtítlan. I strolled along the streets for a while. Besides a wide one circling the island's rim, there were only four others, two running the length of the island, two crossing it, all of them primitively paved with crushed oyster and clam shells. The houses and huts that crowded wall to wall along the streets and canals, though I suppose they had wooden frameworks, were plastered with a white surfacing also made of powdered shells.

  The island was oval-shaped and quite large, about the size of Tenochtítlan without its northern district of Tlaltelólco. It probably had as many buildings too, but, since they were only of one level, they did not contain anything like the teeming population of Tenochtítlan. From the center of the island I could see the rest of the surrounding lake, and could see that the lake was also surrounded in all directions by the same feculent marsh through which I had come. The Aztéca at least were not so degraded as to live in that dismal swamp, but they might as well have done. The intervening lake waters did not prevent the swamp's night mists and miasmas and mosquitoes from invading the island. Aztlan was a thoroughly unwholesome habitat, and I was glad that my ancestors had had the good sense to abandon it.

  I took the current inhabitants to be the descendants of those who had been too dull and listless to have left it in search of a better place to live. And, so far as I could tell, the descendants of the stay-behinds had not acquired any more initiative or enterprise in all the generations since. They seemed defeated and beaten down by their wretched surroundings, and resentful of them, but drearily resigned to them. The people on the streets gave me a glance of knowing me for a newcomer, and a newcomer certainly must have been a rarity there, but not one of them commented to another on my presence. Not one gave me greeting, or kindly inquired if I was as hungry as I doubtless looked, or even sneered at me for an unwelcome intruder.

  The night came on, and the streets began to empty of people, and the darkness was relieved only by the fitful gleams of hearth fires and coconut-oil lamps leaking out from the houses. I had seen enough of the city, and in any case could then see very little, which meant I was likely at any moment to walk off the verge of a canal. So I intercepted a latecomer trying to hurry by me unnoticed, and asked him where I could find the palace of the city's Revered Speaker.

  "Palace?" he repeated vacantly. "Revered Speaker?"

  I should have known that anything like a palace would be inconceivable to those hut dwellers. And I should have remembered that no Revered Speaker of the Aztéca had adopted that title until long after they had become the Mexíca. I amended my question:

  "I seek your ruler. Where does he reside?"

  "Ah, the Tlatocapili," said the man, and Tlatocapili means nothing more eminent than a tribal chief, like the leader of any barbarian desert rabble. The man gave me hurried directions, then said, "Now I am late for my meal," and vanished in the night. For a people marooned in the middle of nowhere, with so little of anything to occupy them, they seemed foolishly fond of pretending urgency and activity.

  Though the Aztéca of Aztlan spoke Náhuatl, they used many words that I suppose we Mexíca long ago discarded, and others that they obviously had adopted from neighbor tribes, for I recognized some of them as Kaita and corrupt Poré. On the other hand, the Aztéca were uncomprehending of many Náhuatl words I used—words that I suppose had come into the language after the migration, inspired by things and circumstances in the outside world of which those stay-at-homes knew nothing. After all, our language still changes to accommodate itself to new situations. Just in recent years, for example, it has added such words as cahuayo for horse, Crixtanoyotl for Christianity, Caxtilteca for Castilians and Spaniards in general, pitzome for pigs....

  The city's "palace" was at least a decently constructed house, faced with shining shell plaster, and of several rooms. I was met at the entrance by a young woman who said she was the wife of the Tlatocapili. She did not bid me enter, but nervously asked what I wanted.

  "I want to see the Tlatocapili," I said, with the last of my patience. "I have come a long way, especially to see him."

  "You have?" she said, biting her lip. "Few come to see him, and he cares to see even fewer. Anyway, he is not home yet."

  "May I come in and wait?" I asked testily.

  She thought it over, then stood aside, saying indecisively, "I suppose you may. But he will be hungry, and wanting to eat before anything else." I started to remark that I would not mind something of that sort myself, but she went on, "He desired to eat frogs' legs tonight, so he had to go to the mainland, since the lake is too salty for them. And the catch must have been scant, for he is very late coming home."

  I nearly backed out of the house again. But then I thought: can the punishment for ducking the Tlatocapili be any worse than spending the night trying to avoid him by wandering this vile island among the pestilent mosquitoes? I followed her through a room where a number of young children and very old folks sat eating a meal of swamp greens. They all goggled at me, but said nothing, and offered me no place at the cloth. She led me to an empty room, where I gratefully sat down on a rough icpali chair. I asked her:

  "How does one address the Tlatocapili?"

  "His name is Tlilectic-Mixtli."

  I almost fell off the low chair, the coincidence was so startling. If he was also Dark Cloud, what should I call myself? Certainly a man whom I had kicked into a pond would take me for an impudent mocker if I introduced myself with his name. Just then, from the outer room, came the noise of his arrival, and his timorous wife ran to welcome her lord and master. I slid my knife around to the back of my waistband, out of sight, and kept my right hand near it.

  I heard the murmur of the woman's voice, then the roar of the husband's: "A visitor to see me? To Mictlan with him! I am starving! Prepare these frogs, woman! I had to catch the cursed things twice!" His wife murmured meekly again, and he roared more loudly, "What? A stranger?"

  With a savage jerk, he tore aside the curtain at the doorway of the room where I sat. It was indeed the same young man; he still had some of the pond weeds in his hair and he was clotted with mud from his waist down. He glared for an instant, then bellowed, "You!"

  I bent from my chair to kiss the earth, but I made the gesture using my left hand, and I still had my right on the haft of my knife when I politely got to my feet. Then, to my great surprise, the young man burst into a peal of hearty laughter and leapt forward to fling his arms around me in a brotherly hug. His wife and several of the younger and older relatives peeked around the door frame, their eyes wide with wonder.

  "Welcome, stranger!" he shouted, and laughed some more. "By the splayed legs of the goddess Coyolxauqui, I am pleased to see you again. Just look what you did to me, man! When I finally got out of that sump, all the canoes had gone for the night. I had to wade home across the lake."

  I asked cautiously, "You found that amusing?"

  He laughed some more. "By the cold hole of the moon goddess's dry tipíli, yes! Yes, I did! In all my lifetime in this weary and wearisome backwater, it was the first occurrence not ordinary and expectable. I thank you for making one unusual thing happen at last in this abyss of monotony. How are you called, stranger?"

  I said, "My name is, er,
Tepetzalan," taking that of my father for the occasion.

  "Valley?" he said. "Tallest valley I ever saw. Well, Tepetzalan, do not fear any retaliation for your treatment of me. By the flabby teats of the goddess, it is a pleasure finally to meet a man with testicles under his loincloth. If my tribesmen have any, they display them only to their women." He turned to bark at his own woman, "There are frogs enough for my friend and myself. Prepare them while I steam away some of this muck. Friend Tepetzalan, perhaps you would also like a refreshing bath?"

  As we stripped at the steam house behind the residence—and I took note that his torso was as hairless as mine—the Tlatocapili said, "I presume you are one of our cousins from the far desert. No nearer neighbors speak our language."

  "One of your cousins, I think," I said. "But not from the desert. Do you know of the Mexíca nation? Of the great city Tenochtítlan?"

  "No," he said carelessly, as if his ignorance was nothing to be ashamed of. He even said, "Among the various miserable villages in these parts, Aztlan is the only city." I did not laugh, and he went on, "We pride ourselves on our self-sufficiency here, so we seldom go traveling or engage in traffic with any other tribes. We know only our closest neighbors, though we care not to mingle with them. To the north of these swamps, for instance, are the Kaita. Since you came from that direction, you must have recognized them as a paltry people. In the swamps south of here, there is only the single insignificant village of Yakóreke."

  I was pleased to hear that. If Yakóreke was the nearest community to the southward, then I was closer to home than I had reckoned. Yakóreke was an outpost village of the Nauyar Ixu lands subject to the Purémpecha nation. From anywhere in Nauyar Ixu it was not an impossibly long journey to Michihuácan, and beyond that country lay the lands of The Triple Alliance.

  The young man continued, "Eastward of these swamps are the high mountains, in which dwell peoples called the Cora and the Huichol. Beyond those mountains lies a desert wasteland where some of our poor relations have long lived in exile. Only once in a great while does one of them find his way here to the home of his forefathers."

  I said, "I know of your poor relations in the desert. But I repeat, I am not one of them. And I also know that not all of your distant relations are poor. Of those who left here so long ago to seek their fortune in the outside world, some of them did find a fortune, a fortune beyond your imagining."

  "I rejoice to hear it," he said indifferently. "My wife's grandfather will be even more pleased. He is Aztlan's Rememberer of History."

  That remark made me realize that, of course, the Aztéca could have no knowledge of picture writing. We Mexíca had attained it only long after the migration. So they could not possess any history books or other archives. If they relied on an old man to be the repository of their history, then he would be only the latest in a long line of old men who had handed that history down through the ages, one to another.

  The other Mixtli went on, "The gods know that this crack in the buttocks of the world is no joyous place to live. But we live here because it has everything we need for life. The tides bring us seafood to eat, without our even having to seek it. The coconut gives us sweets, and oil for our lamps, and its liquid is fermented into a most enjoyably intoxicating drink. Another kind of palm gives us fiber from which to weave cloth, another yields flour, another bears the coyacapuli fruit. We need not trade for any resource with any other tribes, and the swamps protect us from molestation by them...."

  He went on with his unenthusiastic listing of the awful Aztlan's natural advantages, but I had ceased listening. I felt slightly dazed, realizing how very remotely related I was to my "cousin" of the same name. It is possible that we two Mixtlis could have sat down and traced our lineage back to a common ancestor, but our divergent development had moved us far apart in more than distance. We were separated by an immeasurable disparity of education and outlook. That cousin Mixtli might as well have been living in the Aztlan of antiquity from which his ancestors had refused to stir, for Aztlan was still what it had been then: the abode of unadventurous sluggards. Ignorant of picture writing, they were equally ignorant of all it could teach: arithmetic, geography, architecture, commerce, conquest. They knew even less than the barbarian cousins they despised, the desert Chichimeca, who had at least ventured some way beyond Aztlan's constricted horizons.

  Because my forebears had left that hind end of nowhere and had found a place where the art of word knowing flourished, I had had access to the libraries of the knowledge and experience accumulated by the Aztéca-Mexíca in all the subsequent sheaves of years, not to mention the finer arts and sciences of even older civilizations. Culturally and intellectually, I was as superior to my cousin Mixtli as a god might be to me. But I decided I would refrain from flaunting that superiority. It was not his fault that he had been deprived of my advantages through the lethargy of his ancestors. I felt sorry for that cousin Mixtli. I would do what I could to coax him out of his benighted Aztlan into the enlightened modern world.

  His wife's grandfather, Canautli, the aged historian, sat with us while we dined. The old man was one of the persons I had earlier seen eating the unlovely swamp greens, and he watched rather wistfully as we two Mixtlis savored our dish of delicate frogs' legs. I think old Canautli paid more attention to our lip smacking and chop licking than he did to my discourse. Hungry though I was, I managed, between mouthfuls, to tell briefly what had become of the Aztéca who had departed Aztlan: how they had become known as the Tenochca, then as the Mexíca, then as the foremost lords of The One World. The old man and the young one occasionally shook their heads in mute admiration—or maybe disbelief—as I recounted one achievement and advancement and war triumph after another.

  The Tlatocapili interrupted once to murmur, "By the six fragments of the goddess, if the Mexíca have become all that grand, perhaps we ought to change the name of Aztlan." Meditatively, he tried two or three new names: "Place of the Mexíca. First Homeland of the Mexíca..."

  I went on to give a brief biography of the Mexíca's current Uey-Tlatoani, Motecuzóma, then a lyrical description of his capital city of Tenochtítlan. The old grandfather sighed and closed his eyes, as if to see it better in his imagination.

  I said, "The Mexíca could not have progressed so far and so fast if they had not availed themselves of the art of word knowing." Then I hinted heavily, "You too, Tlatocapili Mixtli, might make of Aztlan a grander city—make your people the equals of their Mexíca cousins—if you learned how to preserve the spoken word in lasting pictures."

  He shrugged and said, "We have not yet suffered by not knowing."

  Nevertheless, his interest seemed to quicken when I showed him—using a slender frog bone to scratch the hard earth of the floor—how simply his own name could be permanently graven.

  "Yes, that is a cloud shape," he conceded. "But how could it say Dark Cloud?"

  "Merely color it with a dark paint, gray or black. A single picture is capable of infinite useful variations. Paint that figure blue-green, for example, and you have the name Jadestone Cloud."

  "Is that so?" he said, and then, "What is jadestone?" And the gulf gaped again between us. He had never seen or even heard of the mineral held sacred by all civilized peoples.

  I muttered something about the night getting late, that I would tell more on the morrow. My cousin offered me a pallet for the night, if I did not object to sleeping in a room full of some other probable male relations of mine. I thanked him and accepted, and concluded my evening's discourse by explaining how I had come to Aztlan: tracking backward along my ancestors' route of march, trying to verify a legend. I turned to old Canautli and said:

  "Perhaps you would know, venerable Rememberer of History. When they left here, did they carry a sufficiency of supplies that they could have made provision for a necessary return?"

  He did not reply. The venerable Rememberer had fallen asleep.

  But the next day he said, "Your ancestors took almost nothing with them when
they left here."

  I had breakfasted together with the whole "palace family," on tiny fish and mushrooms grilled together, and some kind of hot herb drink. Then my namesake had gone out on some civic business, leaving me to converse with the aged historian. But that day, unlike the night before, it was Canautli who did most of the talking.

  "If all our Rememberers have spoken truly, those people who departed took only what belongings they could pack in a hurry, and only meager rations for the march. And they took the image of their villainous new god: a wooden image newly and roughly and hastily made, because of the urgency of their going. But that was untold sheaves of years ago. I daresay your people have built many finer statues to replace it since then. We of Aztlan have a different high deity, and only the one image of it. Oh, of course we recognize all the other gods, and have recourse to them when necessary. Tlazolteotl, for instance, cleanses us of our sins; Atlaua fills our fowlers' nets, and so on. But only one reigns supreme. Come, cousin, let me show you."

  He took me out of the house and along the city's shell streets. As we walked, his birdlike little black eyes flung an occasional look sideways from their nests of wrinkles, a shrewd and humorous glance at me, and he said:

  "Tepetzalan, you have been courteous, or at least discreet. You have not spoken your opinion of us, the remaining Aztéca. But permit me to guess. I would wager that you consider us the dregs that were left in Aztlan when the more worthy ones went away."

  True, that was my opinion. I might have said something to put a slightly better face on it, but he went on:

  "You believe that our forefathers were too lazy or listless or timid to raise their eyes to some beckoning vision of glory. That they feared the risk and so lost the opportunity. That your own ancestors, by contrast, ventured boldly forth from here in the certain knowledge that they were destined to be exalted above all other peoples of the world."