by Simon Levack
To earn true renown as an Aztec warrior, you had to have captured at least four of the enemy. Then you were counted among the great: you could bind your hair up with bands with eagle-feather tassels, wear long labrets and leather earplugs and sit in the Eagle House, chatting on equal terms with men like my distinguished brother. All this was yours if you took four captives.
The Prick had taken three, the last of them many years before. In return he had been given a red cotton cape with an orange border, a richly embroidered breechcloth, a few other tokens and a job. The Emperor had graciously allowed him to become the overseer of my master’s household and then, since he failed to distinguish himself any further, had forgotten all about him.
For as long as I had known him, the steward had been an embittered, vicious bully. Fortunately, like most bullies, he was terrified of a higher power, be it human or divine. The last time he had touched me it had been to beat me mercilessly for running away, but this was my patron god’s name-day. I might pay for it later, but for the moment I was safe with the steward and his superstitious fear. It was said that anyone who chid or beat a slave on One Death would be punished by pustulating sores.
‘You have a visitor.’ He had retreated to the wall by the doorway, which was as far away from me as he could get without leaving the room. I noticed that he had something draped over one arm.
I scrambled to my feet. ‘A visitor?’ For a moment I dared to believe it was Lion, come to renew his offer to buy my freedom, and that my master might be disposed to accept it. ‘Who is it?’
‘No one I know,’ he said, dashing my hopes. ‘He turned up just now, while his Lordship was preparing to sacrifice to the god. He’s in the big courtyard, where they’ve set the idol up.’
I hugged myself under my cloak and shivered, still chilly from having lain on the cold hard floor. I looked through the doorway into the gathering gloom. ‘I’d better go.’
‘Wait!’
I turned curiously towards the steward as he stretched his arm towards me. Draped over it was a length of cloth, its colours still bright, freshly laundered if not brand new.
‘Master said you were to have this. We didn’t have time to give you a bath, but you have to have a new cloak, he said.’
I took it wonderingly, and as I dropped my old, soiled mantle and tied the new one on, I marvelled once again at Tezcatlipoca’s bizarre sense of humour. The cloth was only maguey fibre – even on this day I was forbidden cotton – and the arm that had proffered it had been as stiff as a beam; but what a grand joke the Lord of the Here and Now must have thought this, making men who would curse and beat me on one day give me presents on the next.
Silently I followed the steward to the great courtyard in the middle of my master’s palace.
I was not going to be able to meet my visitor for a while. The edges of the space were packed with members of the Chief Minister’s household and guests, and it was as much as I could do to squeeze in among them to find a place from where I could see what was happening. One or two looked at me curiously, but they made way for me when they recognized me: something else that could have happened on no other day than this.
The middle of the courtyard had been kept clear. Off to one side, the musicians were still playing the accompaniment to a hymn. There were the drummers, trumpeters blowing into conch-shells and the flute players, whose instrument was Tezcatlipoca’s favourite. Around me the crowd swayed in time to the beat of the drums and the flutes’ thin, nasal piping.
My master stood with his back to me. He held himself upright still and from behind might have passed for a much younger man, but he was recognizable tonight by his regalia: the white cloak with the black feather border that was the mark of his exalted office.
In front of old Black Feathers stood the god.
Tezcatlipoca lived most of the year in a shrine inside the house, close to the principal hearth, but today they had brought him out, the better for us all to see him and pay him his due.
He had been in my master’s family for generations, and was beginning to look his age, with his paint chipped and faded in places and cracks opening up in the wood he had been carved from. All the same he had lost none of his power. From the tall white plumes that crowned his head to the black disc of the scrying-glass in his left hand and the deer hoof, symbol of his terrifying swiftness, tied to his right foot, he was a faithful representation of the Lord of the Here and Now. When I looked at the broad dark stripe running across his face, so very like a frown, at the flint-tipped arrows in his right hand and at the very real blood smeared over half his face, I found it hard not to tremble. Men had fashioned this monstrous image, but the power that lived in it belonged to the god, and the tiny eyes boring through the cloud of sweet-smelling, resinous smoke veiling his immobile face held all of Tezcatlipoca’s ferocity and malice.
My master had gone to great lengths to appease him today, judging by the fresh flowers heaped in front of the idol and the equally fresh blood, whose reek overpowered the flowers’ scent. The headless bodies of sacrificial quails lay on the ground around him, their precious water of life spilling on to the earth-covered floor to make a rich dark paste.
The old man was coming to the end of a song. Old Black Feathers was a priest as well as head of the household, and the words he was intoning must have been so familiar to him that he could have mumbled them in his sleep. Yet there was something in the way he spoke them – a real fervour, such as I had not heard in his voice in years – that told me he genuinely needed Tezcatlipoca’s help tonight.
‘I make offerings
Of Flowers and Feathers
To the Giver of Life.
He puts the eagle shields
On the arms of the men,
There where the war rages,
In the midst of the plain.
As our sons,
As our flowers,
Thus you, warrior of the shaven head,
Give pleasure to the Giver of Life …’
He groaned his way through the verses as if wringing them from within his own heart.
I knew that they had been composed by his own long-dead sister, Macuilxochitl, many years before. Was that a coincidence, I wondered, or was he deliberately setting out to remind the god of everything his family had done to honour him, as if asking him to return the favour?
‘Laying it on a bit thick tonight, isn’t he?’ I muttered.
The man next to me in the crowd looked at me curiously. He was shorter than I was, slightly stooped, and his hair was grey and thinning. He wore a plain cloak that did not quite reach his knees and his hair was loose and unadorned. He looked like a commoner, but I assumed he was a merchant, concealing his wealth as they always did, or perhaps a craftsman – a lapidary or a goldsmith or a featherworker. My master was not given to inviting people to his house unless they were likely to have something he wanted: knowledge or money or a skill he could use.
I noticed he had been giving his blood to the gods; his cheeks and neck were covered with it, and some was still glistening.
‘If he is, it’s hardly surprising. We all have to appease the gods tonight. Why else do you think we’re all standing out here? Haven’t you heard?’
‘No.’
My reply took him aback. ‘Have you been asleep all day or something?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ve not heard what happened last night.’
It was my turn to stare. Surely, he could not mean my master was beseeching the god to help him because of what we had been doing the previous night. I could see why he might have done, because our adventures on the lake had added a last twist to the crazy turns his fortunes had taken lately. However, there was no way old Black Feathers would have let that become public knowledge.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said carefully.
The man had been whispering, but now he lowered his voice until it was almost inaudible beneath the musicians’ thumping and squealing and my master’s entreaty to th
e god.
‘You must be the only person in Mexico who hasn’t heard! A god has been seen, in the streets, in the north of the city, in Tlatelolco. Several people saw him – I saw him myself! It was Quetzalcoatl, it was the Feathered Serpent!’
He looked at me expectantly.
If he expected me to gasp or groan or cry out or start tearing at my hair and skin or do whatever else people are meant to when seized by fear of the gods and the anticipation of their own doom, he was disappointed.
‘Really?’ I said.
I had reached my own understanding with the gods many years before. They had given their own blood and bodies to form the first humans and make the Sun and the Moon rise. To sustain them and recompense them for their sacrifice, we offered them the hearts and lives of great and beautiful warriors. Because we did that, we claimed the right to address them on their own terms. Whimpering with fright would not make the crops grow, stop the lake flooding or deflect the spears of our enemies; making sacrifices and demanding that the gods accept them and do as we asked just might.
Which is not to say that I took no notice of omens or that most of the city was not transfixed by them. Almost anything, from seeing a rabbit run into your house to dreaming about your teeth falling out, could be taken as a portent. In recent years, more strange things than ever had been seen: strange lights in the sky, temples bursting into unquenchable flames for no reason, the lake boiling and rising on a day when the air was still. Perhaps that was why everyone was so jittery about this latest apparition. Looking around me, it seemed to me that the crowd in the Chief Minister’s courtyard was unusually large, and unusually silent and attentive, even for Aztecs.
‘So what happened, exactly?’ I asked.
‘You’re a cool one,’ my neighbour grumbled. ‘What happened? Why, the god was seen up there, just after midnight. Lots of people saw the same thing. When Lord Feathered in Black heard about it, he summoned us all here.’ As Chief Minister my master was ultimately responsible for what went on in the streets of the city, and gods roaming around on the loose were clearly something he had to know about. I wondered whether he had been as sceptical about what he had heard as I was.
‘You say lots of people saw it?’ The streets of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were usually deserted at night. There were too many malignant spirits about. Nobody wanted to risk seeing an owl, a sure portent of your own death, or meeting the Divine Princesses, the ghosts of mothers dead in childbirth who avenged themselves on men by bringing sickness upon them.
‘I think there was a feast,’ my neighbour said defensively. ‘Maybe some of the guests …’
‘Maybe some of the guests had had a few too many sacred mushrooms. They might have seen anything!’
‘Do you want to hear about this or not?’ He took my silence as assent. ‘The god was running – or trying to run. He was staggering along the side of a canal, and shouting – cursing. It was like he was drunk.’
‘What made everyone think he was Quetzalcoatl?’
‘He looked like him! He had a serpent’s face, all smooth and glittery, and the rest of him was covered in feathers – feathers sprouting from his head and down his back and even from his pendant and the shield he was carrying, great long green feathers everywhere. You should have seen it!’ he went on, breathlessly. ‘The most beautiful quetzal feathers ever, like nothing I’ve ever seen – and I’m a featherworker!’
I was still cautious. The description sounded too accurate: too much like the images that decorated countless shrines and temples. ‘Did you really see all this?’
‘I’m telling you, I was there! He was right in front of me – as close as you are now.’
‘You weren’t a guest at this feast you mentioned, I suppose?’ The more I heard, the more convinced I was it was the sacred mushrooms talking.
‘No,’ he said, plainly nettled. ‘Look, I was as sober as I am now, all right?’
I sighed; I had really not meant to start a row. ‘All right. I’m sorry, it just sounds incredible. Weren’t you scared?’
‘Scared? Look,’ he said, with a perverse note of pride, ‘I’m not ashamed to say it – I was so scared I wet myself!’
‘So you were wandering around in Tlatelolco by yourself …’
‘I was walking by the canal that separates Pochtlan from Amantlan – you know it?’ I did: I could picture the broad waterway, edged on both sides by landing stages and the whitewashed walls of houses and courtyards, most of them large and well kept, since Pochtlan and Amantlan were two of the richest parishes in the city. ‘I heard the commotion on the other side – someone shouting, and running feet. It was too dark to see much in the way of detail from the other side of the water.’ The only light would have been the stars and the flickering glow of the temple fires burning at the tops of nearby pyramids. ‘All I could see was someone moving in the same direction as I was. I remember wondering if he was going to cross the bridge in front of me – then he did!’ I heard the man swallow nervously. ‘I was so frightened I couldn’t even run. I just watched him staggering across that little wooden bridge – I don’t know if he was drunk but he was definitely unsteady on his feet – and the next thing I knew, I was face to face with a god!’
Face to face with a god. In the man’s expression, in his staring eyes and bared teeth, I saw something of the terror he must have felt. He was telling the truth, I had no doubt of that. To have learned from others that they had seen what he had and that it had not been just a bad dream could only have added to his fear.
I was about to ask him what had happened next – where the god had gone, whether he had fainted or run away – when an urgent tugging at the hem of my cloak interrupted me.
‘Your visitor, slave,’ the Prick hissed.
My visitor would not come into the courtyard. The steward had to lead me out to him. He did so with ill grace, flapping the ground at his heels with the hem of his long cotton cloak in the hope of stirring some dust up into my face as I walked in his footsteps. By the time we got to the foot of the broad flight of steps leading from the terrace at the front of my master’s house to the canal that ran by it, he was muttering audibly.
‘Not much longer to go. Just you wait till tomorrow, you uppity little sod … Here you are.’
In the failing evening light the paved space at the front of the house bore a pale, colourless glow, as did the house opposite. The canal between them was a broad band of pure black. In the middle of it danced a shimmering patch of yellow light, the reflected glow of the fire on top of a nearby pyramid.
My visitor had contrived to stand so that his body was silhouetted against the patch of light, and all I saw of him at first was the angular shape of a tall man half turned towards me.
‘Yaotl?’
‘Here he is,’ the steward said unenthusiastically.
‘Thank you,’ my visitor said, and then, when the other man showed no sign of going away, added pointedly, ‘That will be all.’
I heard the steward’s cloak rustle as he turned on his heel and stalked back into the house. The moment he was out of sight I turned to the shadowy figure standing by the canal.
‘Thanks very much. Do you have any idea what that is going to cost me in the morning?’
The stranger laughed.
‘Shut up!’ I snapped. ‘You don’t have to put up with that oaf every day of your life. He’s bad news when he’s annoyed – and nothing annoys a flunky like him more than being ordered about by a complete stranger. Who are you, anyway?’
The laughter dried up quickly. ‘Sorry, but I thought it was funny – I mean, I should have known better, because we’re in the same position – but I have to give you a message, and it’s urgent and very private.’
‘“The same position”? So you’re a slave, too?’ I warmed towards him a little. To have seen the steward off as he had took some nerve, even if it was my hide that was likely to pay for it. By now, also, I was intrigued. ‘Whose slave? And what are you doing running errands
on One Death? Shouldn’t you be having a rest?’
‘I volunteered. I’m new, you see – only sold myself a little while ago. My name’s Chihuicoyo.’ It meant ‘Partridge’. ‘I haven’t even spent all the money I was given yet, so by rights I shouldn’t be working, but my master needed me in a hurry, and you like to make a good impression, don’t you?’
I understood that. A valued slave might be given a position of responsibility, overseeing other slaves, or even get his freedom on easy terms. If he ingratiated himself enough with his master’s wife and the old man died off at a convenient time, then of course the possibilities were endless …
‘So when Icnoyo sent for me to give you a message, I didn’t think I ought to refuse.’
I stared at the man.
It was hard to make out any details in the poor light; just a short cloak that hung from his shoulder in the stiff way that cheap maguey fibre cloth does. ‘All I could see of his face was a pair of glittering eyes, narrow like most Aztecs’, and some strands of hair. He wore his hair shorter than I did, I realized, but so did most people: I kept mine hanging loose over my shoulders to cover my ears, mutilated as they were by years of penitential bloodletting as a priest.
It was not his appearance which made me stare, though. It was shock.
‘Did you say “Icnoyo”?’ I asked weakly.
Once, when I was a youngster in the House of Tears, one of the older boys gave me a piece of amber which, it turned out, he had been rubbing with a piece of cloth so as to wake up the spirit inside it. It had given me a shock and him a good laugh.
This slave’s words jolted me now as much as that piece of amber had.
Icnoyo, an old merchant with an unlikely name – it meant ‘Kindly’ – was Lily’s father, and the grandfather of Shining Light. To hear from the old man this evening, when I thought I had done with his household and had only to worry about my own troubles and the horrible dilemma I would be faced with in the morning, was the last thing I would have looked for.
‘That’s right,’ the slave confirmed. ‘Kindly was very anxious to get this to you straight away. I had to give it to you in person, nobody else. He said it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else, but you’d know what to do with it.’