Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  "The right course, perhaps," I said, "But Motecuzóma will love your brother no better than he loved your father."

  The next thing I remember was looking at the window and exclaiming, "Where has the time gone? It is late at night—and I am woefully inebriated."

  "Take the guest chamber yonder," said the prince. "We must be up tomorrow to hear all the palace poets read their eulogies."

  "If I sleep now I shall have a horrendous head in the morning," I said. "With your leave, I will first go for a walk in the city and let Night Wind blow some of the vapors from my brain."

  My mode of walking was probably a sight to see, but there was nobody to see it. The night streets were even emptier than usual, for every resident of Texcóco was in mourning and indoors. And the priests had evidently sprinkled copper filings in the pine-splint torches on the street corner poles, for their flames burned blue, and the light they cast was dim and somber. In my muddled state, I somehow got the impression that I was repeating a walk I had walked once before, long ago. The impression was heightened when I saw ahead of me a stone bench under a red-flowering tapachini tree. I sank down on it gratefully, and sat for a while, enjoying being showered by the tree's scarlet petals blown loose by the wind. Then I became aware that on either side of me was seated another man.

  I turned left and squinted through my topaz, and saw the same shriveled, ragged, cacao-colored man I had seen so often in my life. I turned to my right, and saw the better-dressed but dusty and weary man I had seen not quite so often before. I suppose I should have started up with a loud cry, but I only chuckled drunkenly, aware that they were illusions induced by all the octli I had imbibed. Still chuckling, I addressed them both:

  "Venerable lords, should you not have gone underground with your impersonator?"

  The cacao man grinned, showing the few teeth he had. "There was a time when you believed us to be gods. You supposed that I was Huehueteotl, Oldest of Old Gods, he who was venerated in these lands long before all others."

  "And that I was the god Yoali Ehecatl," said the dusty man. "The Night Wind, who can abduct unwary walkers by night, or reward them, according to his whim."

  I nodded, deciding to humor them even if they were only hallucinations. "It is true, my lords, I was once young and credulous. But then I learned of Nezahualpili's pastime of wandering the world in disguise."

  "And that made you disbelieve in the gods?" asked the cacao man.

  I hiccuped and said, "Let me put it this way. I have never met any others except you two."

  The dusty man murmured obscurely, "It may be that the real gods appear only when they are about to disappear."

  I said, "You had better disappear, then, to where you belong. Nezahualpili cannot be very happy, walking the dismal road to Mictlan while two embodiments of himself are still above-ground."

  The cacao man laughed. "Perhaps we cannot bear to leave you, old friend. We have so long followed your fortunes in your various embodiments: as Mixtli, as Mole, as Head Nodder, as Fetch!, as Záa Nayazu, as Ek Muyal, as Su-kuru—

  I interrupted, "You remember my names better than I do."

  "Then remember ours!" he said, rather sharply. "I am Huehueteotl and this is Yoali Ehecatl."

  "For mere apparitions," I grumbled, "you are cursedly persistent and insistent. I have not been this drunk for a long time. It must have been seven or eight years ago. And I remember... I said then that someday, somewhere I would meet a god, and I would ask him. I would ask him this. Why have the gods let me live so long, while they have struck down every other person who ever stood close to me? My dear sister, my beloved wife, my infant son and treasured daughter, so many close friends, even transient loves..."

  "That is easily answered," said the ragged apparition who called himself The Oldest of Old Gods. "Those persons were, so to speak, the hammers and chisels used for the sculpturing of you, and they got broken or discarded. You did not. You have weathered all the blows and the chipping and the abrasion."

  I nodded with the solemnity of inebriation and said, "That is a drunken answer, if ever I heard one."

  The dusty apparition who called himself Night Wind said, "You of all people, Mixtli, know that a statue or monument does not come already shaped from the limestone quarry. It must be hewn with adzes and ground with obsidian grit and hardened by exposure to the elements. Not until it is carved and toughened and polished is it fit for use."

  "Use?" I said harshly. "At this dwindling end of my roads and my days, of what use could I possibly be?"

  Night Wind said, "I mentioned a monument. All it does is stand upright, but that is not always an easy thing to do."

  "And it will not get easier," said The Oldest of Old Gods. "This very night, your Revered Speaker Motecuzóma has made one irreparable mistake, and he will make others. There is coming a storm of fire and blood, Mixtli. You were shaped and hardened for only one purpose. To survive it."

  I hiccuped again and asked, "Why me?"

  The Oldest said, "A long time ago, you stood one day on a hillside not far from here, undecided whether to climb. I told you then that no man has ever yet lived out any life except his one chosen own. You chose to climb. The gods chose to help you."

  I laughed a horrible laugh.

  "Oh, you could not have appreciated their attentions," he admitted, "any more than the stone recognizes the benefits conferred by hammer and chisel. But help you they did. And you will now requite their favors."

  "You will survive the storm," said Night Wind.

  The Oldest went on, "The gods have helped you to become a knower of words. Then they helped you to travel in many places and to see and learn and experience much. That is why, more than any other man, you know what The One World was like."

  "Was?" I echoed.

  The Oldest made a sweeping gesture with his skinny arm. "All this will disappear from sight and touch and every other human sense. It will exist only in memory. You have been charged with remembering."

  "You will endure," said Night Wind.

  The Oldest gripped my shoulder and said, with infinite melancholy, "Someday, when all that was is gone... never to be seen again... men will sift the ashes of these lands, and they will wonder. You have the memories and the words to tell of The One World's magnificence, so it will not be forgotten. You, Mixtli! When all the other monuments of all these lands have fallen, when even the Great Pyramid falls, you will not."

  "You will stand," said Night Wind.

  I laughed again, scoffing at the absurd idea of the ponderous Great Pyramid ever falling down. Still trying to humor the two admonitory phantasms, I said, "My lords, I am not made of stone. I am only a man, and a man is the frailest of monuments."

  But I heard no reply or reproof. The apparitions had gone as quickly as they had come, and I was talking to myself.

  From some distance behind my bench, the street lamp flickered its moody blue flames. In that mournful lighting, the red tapachini blossoms that fluttered down onto me were dark, a crimson color, like a drizzle of drops of blood. I shuddered, for I felt a feeling I had experienced only once before—when for the first time I had stood at the edge of the night and the edge of the darkness—the feeling of being utterly alone in the world, and desolate, and forlorn. The place where I sat was only a tiny island of dim blue light, and all about that place there was nothing but darkness and emptiness and the low moaning of the night wind, and the wind moaned, "Remember...."

  * * *

  When I was awakened by a street-lamp tender making his rounds at dawn, I laughed at my unbecomingly drunken behavior and my even more foolish dream. I limped back to the palace, stiff from having slept on the cold stone bench, expecting to find the whole court still asleep. But there was great excitement there, everyone up and dashing frantically about, and a number of armed Mexíca soldiers inexplicably posted at the building's various portals. When I found Prince Willow and he glumly told me the news, I began to wonder if my nighttime encounter really had been a dream. For
the news was that Motecuzóma had done a base and unheard-of thing.

  As I have said, it was an inviolable tradition that solemn ceremonies like the funeral of a high ruler would not be marred by assassination or other such treacheries. As I have also said, the Acolhua army had been all but disbanded by the late Nezahualpili, and the token few troops still under arms were in no state of readiness to repel invaders. As I have also said, Motecuzóma had sent to the funeral his Snake Woman Tlacotzin and his army commander Cuitlahuac. But I have not said, because I did not know, that Cuitlahuac had brought with him a war acáli carrying sixty hand-picked Mexíca warriors, who he had secretly debarked outside Texcóco.

  During that night, while in my drunken confusion I was conversing with my hallucinations or with myself, Cuitlahuac and his troops had routed the palace guards, had taken over the building, and the Snake Woman had summoned all its occupants to hear a proclamation. The Crown Prince Black Flower would not be crowned his father's successor. Motecuzóma, as chief ruler of The Triple Alliance, had decreed that the crown of Texcóco would go instead to the lesser prince Cacama, Maize Cob, the twenty-year-old son of one of Nezahualpili's concubines who, not incidentally, was Motecuzóma's youngest sister.

  Such a display of duress was unprecedented, and it was reprehensible, but it was incontestable. However admirable Nezahualpili's pacificatory policy might have been in principle, it had left his people sadly unprepared to resist the Mexíca's meddling in their affairs. Crown Prince Black Flower put up a furious show of black indignation, but that was all he could do. Commander Cuitlahuac was not a bad man, despite his being Motecuzóma's brother and his following Motecuzóma's orders. He expressed his condolences to the deposed prince, and advised him to go quietly away somewhere, before Motecuzóma should get the very practical notion of ordering him imprisoned or eliminated.

  So Black Flower departed that same day, accompanied by his personal courtiers and servants and guards and quite a number of other nobles equally infuriated by the turn of events, all of them loudly vowing revenge for having been betrayed by their longtime ally. The rest of Texcóco could only seethe in impotent outrage, and prepare to witness the coronation of Motecuzóma's nephew as Cacamatzin, Uey-Tlatoani of the Acolhua.

  I did not stay for that ceremony. I was a Mexícatl, and no Mexícatl was very popular in Texcóco right then, and indeed I was not very proud of being a Mexícatl. Even my old schoolmate Willow was eyeing me pensively, probably wondering if I had spoken a veiled threat when I told him, "Motecuzóma will love your brother no better than he loved your father." So I left there and returned to Tenochtítlan, where the priests were jubilantly arranging special rites in almost every temple to celebrate "our Revered Speaker's clever stratagem." And Cacamatzin's buttocks had barely warmed the Texcóco throne before he was announcing a reversal of his father's policy: calling a new muster of Acolhua troops to help his uncle Motecuzóma mount still another offensive against the eternally beleaguered nation of Texcala.

  And that war too was unsuccessful, mainly because Motecuzóma's new and young and bellicose ally, though personally selected by him and related by blood to him, was not of much help to him. Cacama was neither loved nor feared by his subjects, and his call for volunteer soldiers went absolutely ignored. Even when he followed his call with a stern order of conscription, only a comparatively few men responded, and did so reluctantly, and proved remarkably listless in battle. Others of the Acolhua, who would otherwise eagerly have taken up arms, pleaded that they had grown old or ill during Nezahualpili's years of peace, or that they had fathered large families they could not leave. The truth was that they were still loyal to the Crown Prince who should have been their Revered Speaker.

  On leaving Texcóco, Black Flower had removed to another of the royal family's country residences, somewhere in the mountains well to the northeast, and had begun making of it a fortified garrison. Besides the nobles and their families who had voluntarily gone into exile with him, many other Acolhua joined that company: knights and warriors who had formerly served under his father. Still other men, who could not permanently leave their homes or occupations in the domains of Cacama, did slip away at intervals to Black Flower's mountain redoubt, for training and practice with the other troops. All those facts were unknown to me at the time, as they were unknown to most people. It was a well-kept secret that Black Flower was preparing, slowly but carefully, to wrest his throne from the usurper, even if that should mean his having to fight the entire Triple Alliance.

  Meanwhile, Motecuzóma's disposition, poisonous at the best of times, was not being improved. He suspected that he had fallen much in the esteem of other rulers by his domineering intervention in the affairs of Texcóco. He felt humiliated by his latest failure to humble Texcala. He was not much pleased with his nephew Cacama. Then, as if he had not enough to worry and annoy him, even more troublesome things began to occur.

  Nezahualpili's death might almost have been the signal for the fulfillment of his gloomiest predictions. In the month of The Tree is Raised next following his funeral, a swift-messenger from the Maya lands arrived with the disturbing news that the strange white men had come again to Uluumil Kutz, and not two of them that time, but a hundred. They had come in three ships, and moored off the port town of Kimpech on the western shore of the peninsula, and rowed to the beach in their big canoes. The people of Kimpech, those who had survived the decimation of the small pocks, resignedly let them land without fuss or opposition. But the white men boldly entered a temple and, without even gestures of requesting permission, began to strip the temple of its golden ornamentation. At that, the local populace put up a fight.

  Or they tried to, said the messenger, for the weapons of the Kimpech warriors shattered on the white men's metal bodies, and the white men shouted a war cry, "Santiago!" and they fought back with the sticks they carried, which were not mere staves or clubs. The sticks spat thunder and lightning like the god Chak at his angriest, and many Maya fell dead at a great distance from the spitting sticks. Of course, we all know now that the messenger was trying to describe your soldiers' steel armor and far-killing harquebuses, but at the time his story sounded demented.

  However, he brought two articles to substantiate his wild tale. One was a bark paper tally of the dead: more than a hundred of the Kimpech men, women, and children; forty and two of the outlanders—an indication that Kimpech had put up a brave fight against those terrible new weapons. At any rate, the defense had repelled the invaders. The white men had retreated to their canoes, thence to their ships, which had spread their wings and disappeared again beyond the horizon. The other article brought by the messenger was the face of one of the dead white men, flayed from its head, complete with hair and beard, and dried taut on a willow hoop. I later had an opportunity to see it myself, and it much resembled the faces of the men I had met—in its limelike skin, at least—but the hair of scalp and face was of an even more odd color: as yellow as gold.

  Motecuzóma rewarded the messenger for bringing him that trophy, but, after the man had gone, he reportedly did much cursing about what fools the Maya were—"Imagine, attacking visitors who might be gods!"—and in great agitation he closeted himself with his Speaking Council and his priests and his seers and sorcerers. But I was not summoned to join the conference and, if it came to any conclusions, I did not hear of them.

  However, a little more than a year later, in the year Thirteen Rabbit, the year when I turned my sheaf of years, the white men came again from beyond the horizon, and that time Motecuzóma did call me to a private audience.

  "For a change," he said, "this report was not brought by a Maya of sloping forehead and constricted brain. It was brought by a group of our own pochtéa who happened to be trading along the coast of the eastern sea. They were in Xicalanca when six of the ships came, and they had the good sense not to panic nor to let the townsfolk panic."

  I remembered Xicalanca well: that town so beautifully situated between blue ocean and green lagoon, in
the Olméca country.

  "So there was no fighting," Motecuzóma went on, "although the white men this time numbered two hundred and forty, and the natives were much affrighted. Our staunch pochtéa took command of the situation, and kept everyone calm, and even persuaded the ruling Tabascoob to greet the newcomers. So the white men made no trouble, they ravaged no temples, they stole nothing, they did not even molest any women, and they went away again after spending the day admiring the town and sampling the native foods. Of course, nobody could communicate in their language, but our merchants managed with signs to suggest some bartering. The white men had come ashore with not much to trade. But they did, in exchange for some quills of gold dust, give these!"

  And Motecuzóma, with the gesture of a street sorcerer magically producing sweets for a crowd of children, whipped from under his mantle several strings of beads. Though they were made of various materials in various colors, they were identical in the numbers of small beads separated at intervals by larger beads. They were strings of prayers like the string I had acquired from Jeronimo de Aguilar seven years earlier. Motecuzóma smiled a smile of vindication, as if he expected me suddenly to grovel and concede, "You were right, my lord, the strangers are gods."

  Instead, I said, "Clearly, Lord Speaker, the white men all worship in the same manner, which indicates that they all come from the same place of origin. But we already supposed that much. This tells us no new thing about them."

  "Then what about this?" And from behind his throne, with that same air of triumph, he brought out what looked like a tarnished silver pot. "One of the visitors took that from off his own head and traded it for gold."

  I examined the thing. It was no pot, for its rounded shape would have prevented its standing upright. It was of metal, but of a kind grayer than silver and not so shiny—it was steel, of course—and at its open side were affixed some leather straps, evidently to be secured beneath the wearer's chin.