Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  I need hardly say that no bandits or other villains dared to attack such a train. I need hardly describe the hospitality with which we were received and regaled at every stop along our route. I will recount only what happened when we spent one night at Coatzacoalcos, that market town on the northern coast of the narrowest land between the two great seas.

  I and my party arrived near sunset on one of the town's apparently busiest market days, so we did not push into its center to be quartered as distinguished visitors. We merely made camp in a field outside the town, where other late-arriving trains were doing the same. The one that settled nearest ours was the train of a slave trader herding to market a considerable number of men, women, and children. After our company had eaten, I sauntered over to the slave camp, half thinking that I might find a suitable replacement for my late servant Star Singer, and that I might strike a good bargain if I bought one of the men before they went up for bidding in the town market on the morrow.

  The pochtéatl told me he had acquired his human herd, by ones and twos, from such inland Olméca tribes as the Coatlicamac and Cupilco. His string of male slaves was literally a string: they traveled and rested and ate and even slept all linked together by a long rope threaded through each man's pierced nose septum. The women and girls, however, were left free to do the work of making the camp, laying the fires, doing the cooking, fetching water and wood and such. As I strolled about, idly eyeing the wares, one young girl carrying a jug and a gourd dipper shyly approached me and sweetly asked:

  "Would my Lord Eagle Knight care for a refreshing drink of cool water? At the far side of the field, there is a clear river running to the sea, and I dipped this long enough ago that all the impurities have settled."

  I looked at her across the gourd as I sipped. She was plainly a back-country girl, short and slender, not very clean, dressed in a knee-length blouse of cheap sackcloth. But she was not coarse or dark of complexion; in a soft and unformed adolescent way, she was quite pretty. She was not, like every other female in the neighborhood, chewing tzictle, and she was obviously not as ignorant as might have been expected.

  "You addressed me in Náhuatl," I said. "How do you come to speak it?"

  The girl put on a woebegone expression and murmured, "One does much traveling, being repeatedly bought and sold. It is at least an education of sorts. I was born to the Coatlicamac tongue, my lord, but I have learned some of the Maya dialects and the trade language of Náhuatl."

  I asked her name. She said, "Ce-Malinali."

  "One Grass?" I said. "That is only a calendar date, and only half a name."

  "Yes," she sighed tragically. "Even the slave children of slave parents receive a seventh-birthday name, but I never did. I am less than a slave born of slaves, Lord Knight. I have been an orphan since my birth."

  She explained. Her unknown mother was some Coatlicamatl drab, made pregnant by some unknown one of the many men who had straddled her. The woman had given birth in a farm furrow one day while working in the fields, as casually as she would have defecated, and had left the newborn infant there, as uncaringly as she would have left her excrement. Some other woman, less heartless, or perhaps herself childless, had found the abandoned baby before it perished, and had taken it home and given it succor.

  "But who that kindly rescuer was, I no longer remember," said Ce-Malinali. "I was still a child when she sold me—for maize to eat—and I have been passed from owner to owner since then." She put on the look of one who has suffered long but persevered. "I know only that I was born on the day One Grass in the year Five House."

  I exclaimed, "Why, that was the very day and year of my own daughter's birth in Tenochtítlan. She too was Ce-Malinali until she became Zyanya-Nochipa at the age of seven. You are small for your age, child, but you are precisely the age she—"

  The girl interrupted excitedly, "Then perhaps you would buy me, Lord Knight, to be personal maid and companion to your young lady daughter!"

  "Ayya," I mourned. "That other Ce-Malinali... she died... nearly three years ago...."

  "Then buy me to be your house servant," she urged. "Or to wait upon you as your daughter would have done. Take me with you when you return to Tenochtítlan. I will do any kind of work or"—she demurely lowered her eyelashes—"any not daughterly service my lord might crave." I was drinking again from the dipper at that moment, and I spluttered the water. She said hastily, "Or you can sell me in Tenochtítlan, if my lord is perhaps beyond the age of such cravings."

  I snapped, "Impudent little vixen, the women I crave I do not have to buy!"

  She did not cringe at my words; she said boldly, "And I do not wish to be bought just for my body. Lord Knight, I have other qualities—I know it—and I yearn for the opportunity to make use of those qualities." She grasped my arm to emphasize her pleading. "I want to go where I will be appreciated for more than just my being a young female. I want to try my fortunes in some great city. I have ambitions, my lord, I have dreams. But they are vain if I am condemned to be forever a slave in these dreary provinces."

  I said, "A slave is a slave, even in Tenochtítlan."

  "Not always, not necessarily forever," she insisted. "In a city of civilized men, my worth and intelligence and aspirations could perhaps be recognized. A lord might elevate me to the status of concubine, and then even make me a free woman. Do not some lords free their slaves, when they prove deserving?"

  I said they did; even I had once done so.

  "Yes," she said, as if she had wrung some concession from me. She squeezed my arm, and her voice became wheedling. "You do not require a concubine, Lord Knight. You are a man stalwart and handsome enough that you need not buy your women. But there are others—old or ugly men—who must and do. You could sell me at a profit to one of those in Tenochtítlan."

  I suppose I should have sympathized with the child. I too had once been young, and brimming with ambition, and I had yearned to try the challenge of the greatest city of them all. But there was something so hard and intense about the way in which Ce-Malinali tried to ingratiate herself that I found her less than appealing. I said, "You seem to have a very high opinion of yourself, girl, and a very low opinion of men."

  She shrugged. "Men have always used women for their pleasure. Why should not one woman use men for her advancement? Although I do not like the act of sex, I can pretend to. Although I have not yet been often used, I have become quite good at it. If that talent can help lift me from slavery... well... I have heard that a concubine of a high lord may enjoy more privilege and power than his legitimate first lady. And even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca collects concubines, does he not?"

  I laughed. "Little bitch, you have high ambitions indeed."

  She said tartly, "I know I have more to offer than a hole between my legs that is still invitingly tight and tender. A man can buy a techíchi bitch and get that!"

  I disengaged her grip on my arm. "Know this, girl. Sometimes a man may keep a dog just to have an affectionate companion. I discern no capacity for affection in you. A techíchi can also be a nourishing meal. You are not clean or appetizing enough to be cooked. You are articulate for one of your age and low origins. But you are only a backwoods brat with nothing to offer except windy boasts and ill-concealed greed and a pathetic notion of your own importance. You admit that you do not even like to employ that vaunted tight hole of yours, which is your only worth. If you exceed any of your sister slaves in any respect, it is merely in vainglorious presumption."

  She raged at me. "I can go yonder to the river and wash myself clean—make myself appetizing—and you would not reject me! In fine clothes I can pass for a fine lady! I can pretend affection, and make even you believe it genuine!" She paused, then sneered, "What other woman has ever done otherwise with you, my lord, when she aspired to be something more than a receptacle for your tepúli?"

  My fingers twitched to punish her impertinence, but the grubby slave was too nearly grown to be spanked like a child, and too young to be whipped l
ike an adult. So I only put my hands on her shoulders, but I held her hard enough to hurt, and I said between my teeth:

  "It is true that I have known other females like you: venal and deceitful and perfidious. But I have known others who were not. One of them was my daughter, born to the same name you wear, and had she lived she would have made it a name to be proud of." I could not suppress my rising anger, and my voice rose with it: "Why did she die, and you live?"

  I shook that Ce-Malinali so fiercely that she dropped the water jar. It broke with a crash and a splash, but I paid no heed to that portent of misfortune. I shouted so loudly that heads turned throughout the camp, and the slave trader came running to beg that I not mishandle his merchandise. I think, in that moment, I had been briefly granted the vision of a far-seer, and it had shown me a glimpse of the future, because what I shouted was this:

  "You will make that name vile and filthy and contemptible, and all people will spit when they speak it!"

  I note Your Excellency's impatience at my dwelling on an encounter that must seem meaningless. But the episode, though brief, was not trivial. Who that girl was, and who she became in womanhood, and what was the ultimate outcome of her precocious ambitions—all those things are of utmost significance. But for that child, Your Excellency might not now be our excellent Bishop of Mexíco.

  I had forgotten her myself by the time I fell asleep that night, under the ill-omened smoking star that hung in the black sky above. The next day I and my company moved on, beyond Coatzacoalcos, and kept to the coast, passing through the cities of Xicalanca and Kimpech, and at last we came to the place where the presumed gods waited, in the town called Tihó, capital of the Xiu branch of the Maya people, at the northern extremity of the Uluumil Kutz peninsula. On arrival, I was attired in all the splendor of my Eagle Knight regalia, and of course we were respectfully received by the personal guard troops of the Xiu chief Ah Tutal, and we were conducted through the streets of the all-white city in solemn procession to his palace. It was not much of a palace; one does not expect much grandeur among any of the remnant Maya. But its one-floor, thatched-roof buildings of adobe brick were, like the rest of the town, brightly whitewashed with lime, and the palace buildings were arranged in a square around a commodious inner court.

  Ah Tutal, a superbly cross-eyed gentleman of about my age, was properly impressed by the magnificence of the gifts sent him by Motecuzóma, and I was properly feasted with a welcoming banquet, and while we ate he and I conversed on matters like his health and mine and that of all our various living friends and relations. We could not have cared a little finger for such trivial exchanges; the purpose was to measure my grasp of the local dialect of the Maya tongue. When we had more or less determined the extent of my Xiu vocabulary, we got to the reason for my visit.

  "Lord Mother," I said to him, for that ludicrous title is the proper way of addressing the chief of any community in those parts. "Tell me. Are they gods, these new-come strangers?"

  "Knight Ek Muyal," said the Mother, using the Maya version of my name, "when I sent word to your Revered Speaker, I was sure they must be. But now..." He made a face of uncertainty.

  I asked, "Could either of them be the long-gone god Quetzalcóatl who promised to return, the god you call in these lands Kukulkan?"

  "No. At any rate, neither of the outlanders has the form of a feathered serpent." Then he sighed and shrugged and said, "In the absence of any marvelous aspect, how does one recognize a god? These two are passably human in appearance, though much hairier and larger than normal. They are bigger than you are."

  I said, "According to tradition, other gods have adopted human bodies for a visit to the mortal world. They might understandably choose bodies of intimidating appearance."

  Ah Tutal went on, "There were four in the strangely built canoe that was washed ashore on the beach north of here. But when they were brought in litters to Tihó, we discovered that two of them were dead. Can gods be dead?"

  "Dead..." I mused. "Could it be that they were not yet alive? Perhaps they were spare bodies the two live ones like to carry about with them, to slip into when they desire a change."

  "That never occurred to me," Ah Tutal said uncomfortably. "Certainly their other habits and appetites are most peculiar, and their language is beyond our understanding. Would not gods who take the trouble to appear human also take the trouble to speak human language?"

  "There are many human languages, Lord Mother. They may have chosen to speak one that is not comprehensible in this region, but I may recognize it from my travels elsewhere."

  "Lord Knight," the chief said, a trifle peevishly, "you have as many arguments as any priest. But can you argue any reason why the two beings refuse to bathe?"

  I thought about it. "In water, you mean?"

  He gave me a look of wondering if Motecuzóma had sent his court fool as his emissary. He said, enunciating with careful precision, "Yes, in water. What else would I mean by bathing?"

  I gave a polite cough and said, "How do you know the gods are not accustomed to bathing in pure air? Or in even purer sunlight?"

  "Because they stink!" said Ah Tutal, triumphantly and disgustedly at the same time. "Their bodies smell of old odors and sweats and rancid breath and encrusted dirt. If that were not bad enough, they seem content to empty their bladders and bowels out the back window of their rooms, and content to let that ordure pile up out there, and content to live with the appalling stench of it. The two seem as unacquainted with cleanliness as they are unacquainted with freedom and the good foods we provide."

  I said, "What do you mean: unacquainted with freedom?"

  Ah Tutal pointed through one of the lopsided windows of his throne room, indicating another low building on the opposite side of the court. "They are in there. They stay in there."

  I exclaimed, "Surely you do not keep gods in captivity?"

  "No, no, no! It is their own choice. I told you they behave most eccentrically. They have not emerged since their first arrival here, when they were allotted those quarters."

  I said, "Forgive the question, Lord Mother. But were they perhaps rudely treated when they first came?"

  Ah Tutal looked offended and said icily, "From the very first, they have been treated with cordiality, consideration, even reverence. As I said, two were dead when they got here—or convinced our best physicians that they were dead. So naturally, in accordance with civilized custom, we paid the dead every funeral honor and devotion, including the ceremonial cooking and eating of their most estimable parts and organs. It was at that time that the two live gods scuttled to their quarters, and they have sullenly stayed in there ever since."

  I hazarded a guess. "Perhaps they were annoyed that you so hastily disposed of what might have been their extra bodies."

  Ah Tutal threw up his hands in exasperation and said, "Well, their self-imposed seclusion would by now have starved the bodies they are wearing, if I did not regularly send to them servants bearing food and drink. Even so, the two eat only sparingly—of the fruits and vegetables and grains, not of any meat, not even delicacies like tapir and manatee. Knight Ek Muyal, I have tried assiduously to ascertain their preferences in all things, but I confess I am baffled. Take the matter of women—"

  I interrupted, "Then they use women as mortal men do?"

  "Yes, yes, yes," he said impatiently. "According to the women, they are human and male in every particular except their excessive hairiness. And I daresay any god equipped like a man is going to employ that equipment as a man does. If you think about it, Lord Knight, there are not a great many other ways for even a god to use it."

  "You are right, of course, Lord Mother. Do go on."

  "I have kept sending in women and girls, two at a time, but the outlanders have retained none of them for more than two or three consecutive nights. They keep putting them out again—for me to send others in, I suppose, so I do. None of our women seems to satisfy either of them for long. If they are hoping and hinting for some particular
or peculiar kind of woman, I have no way of knowing what it would be or where to get it. I tried sending in two pretty boys one night, and the guests made a frightful commotion and beat the boys and threw them out. By now, there are not many dispensable women left in Tihó or the surrounding countryside for me to try on them. They have already had the wives and daughters of just about every Xiu except myself and others of the nobility. Furthermore, I am risking a rebellion of all our women, since I must use brute force to propel even the lowliest female slave into that fetid den. The women say that the most unnatural and the worst thing about the strangers is that even their private parts are overgrown with hair, and that the outlanders smell even more awful in that crotch of their bodies than in the reek of their breath or their armpits. Oh, I know that your Revered Speaker claims to consider me highly favored and honored to be the host of two gods, or whatever they are. But I wish Motecuzóma were here, so he could try his own skill at being custodian of two such pestiferous guests. I tell you, Knight Ek Muyal, I am beginning to find the honor more of a trial and a nuisance! And how long is it to go on? I no longer want them here, but I dare not turn them out. I thank all the other gods that I chose to house those two clear across the palace square, but even so, at the wind god's caprice, I get a whiff of those unwelcome beings and it nearly knocks me to the ground. In another day or so, the stink will need no wind to help it crawl this far. Right now, some of my courtiers are dreadfully ill of a disease the physicians say they have never encountered before. I personally think we are all beginning to be poisoned by smelling those unclean strangers. And I strongly suspect the reason for Motecuzóma's having sent me so many rich gifts. He hopes to bribe me to keep those two, and to keep them well downwind of his clean city. And I will say moreover—"