Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  Obsidian makes a wicked-looking arrowhead or spear or sword edge, as shiny as quartz crystal but as black as the afterworld Míctlan. Properly flaked, the stone is so keen that it can cut as subtly as a grass-blade sometimes does, or cleave as deep as any bludgeon ax. The stone’s one weakness is its brittleness; it can shatter against a foe’s shield or against his opposing sword. But, in the hands of a trained fighter, the obsidian-edged maquáhuitl can slash a man’s flesh and bone as cleanly as if he were a clump of weeds—and in all-out war, as Blood Glutton never ceased reminding us, the enemy are but weeds to be mowed.

  Just as our practice arrows, javelins, and spears were tipped with óli gum, so were our mock maquáhuime made harmless. The stave was of light, soft wood, so the sword would break before it dealt a too punishing blow. And instead of obsidian chips, the edges were outlined only with tufts of feather down. Before any two students fought a sword duel, the Master would wet those tufts with red paint, so that every blow received would register as vividly as a real wound, and the mark would last almost as long. In a very short time, I was cross-hatched with wound marks, face and body, and I was quite embarrassed to be seen in public. Then it was that I requested a private audience with our cuachic. He was a tough old man, hard as obsidian, and probably uneducated in anything besides war, but he was no stupid clod.

  I stooped to make the gesture of kissing the earth and, still kneeling, said, “Master Blood Glutton, you already know that my eyesight is poor. I fear you are wasting time and patience in trying to teach me to soldier. If these marks on my body were real wounds, I should have been dead long since.”

  “So?” he said coolly. Then he squatted to my level. “Fogbound, I will tell you of a man I once met down in Quautemálan, the country of The Tangled Wood. Those people, as perhaps you know, are all timorous of death. This particular man scampered from every least suspicion of danger. He avoided the most natural risks of existence. He burrowed away in snug security. He surrounded himself with physicians and priests and sorcerers. He ate only the most nutritious foods, and he seized eagerly on every life-preserving potion he heard of. No man ever took better care of his life. He lived only to go on living.”

  I waited for more, but he said no more, so I asked, “What became of him, Master Cuachic?”

  “He died.”

  “That is all?”

  “What else ever becomes of any man? I no longer remember even his name. No one remembers anything at all about him, except that he lived and then he died.”

  After another silence, I said, “Master, I know that if I am slain in war my dying will nourish the gods, and they will amply reward me in the afterworld, and perhaps my name will not be forgotten. But might I not be of some service in this world for a while before I achieve my dying?”

  “Strike just one telling blow in battle, my boy. Then, even if you are slain the next moment, you will have done something with your life. More than all those men who merely drudge to exist until the gods tire of watching their futility and sweep them off to oblivion.” Blood Glutton stood up. “Here, Fogbound, this is my own maquáhuitl. It long served me well. Just feel the heft of it.”

  I will admit that I experienced a thrill when for the first time I held a real sword, not a toy weapon of corkwood and feathers. It was most atrociously heavy, but its very weight said, “I am power.”

  “I see that you lift it and swing it with one hand,” observed the Master. “Not many boys your age could do that. Now step over here, Fogbound. This is a sturdy nopáli. Give it a killing stroke.”

  The cactus was an old one, of nearly tree size. Its spiny green lobes were like paddles, and its barked brown trunk was as thick as my waist. I swung the maquáhuitl experimentally, with my right hand only, and the obsidian edge bit into the cactus wood with a hungry tchunk! I wiggled the blade loose, took the handle in both hands, swung the sword far back behind me, then struck with all my force. I had expected the blade to cut rather more deeply, but I was truly surprised when it slashed cleanly all the way through the trunk, splashing its sap like colorless blood. The nopáli came crashing down, and the Master and I both had to leap nimbly away to avoid the falling mass of sharp spines.

  “Ayyo, Fogbound!” Blood Glutton said admiringly. “Whatever attributes you lack, you do have the strength of a born warrior.”

  I flushed with pride and pleasure, but I had to say, “Yes, Master, I can strike and kill. But what of my dim vision? Suppose I were to strike the wrong man. One of our own.”

  “No cuachic in command of novice warriors would ever put you in a position to do so. In a War of Flowers, he might assign you to the Swaddlers who carry the ropes to bind enemy prisoners that they may be brought back for sacrifice. Or in a real war, you might be assigned to the rear-guard Swallowers whose knives give merciful release to those comrades and foes left lying wounded when the battle has swept on past them.”

  “Swallowers and Swaddlers,” I muttered. “Hardly heroic duties to win me reward in the afterworld.”

  “You spoke of this world,” the Master sternly reminded me, “and of service, not heroism. Even the humblest can serve. I remember when we marched into the insolent city of Tlaltelólco, to annex it to our Tenochtítlan. That city’s warriors battled us in the streets, of course, but its women, children, and old dodderers stood upon the housetops and threw down at us large rocks, nests full of angry wasps, even handfuls of their own excrement.”

  Right here, my lord scribes, I had better make clear that, among the different kinds of wars we Mexíca fought, the battle for Tlaltelólco had been an exceptional case. Our Revered Speaker Axayácatl simply found it necessary to subjugate that haughty city, to deprive it of independent rule, and forcibly to make its people render allegiance to our one great island capital of Tenochtítlan. But, as a general rule, our wars against other peoples were not for conquest—at least not in the sense that your armies have conquered all of this New Spain and made it an abject colony of your Mother Spain.

  No, we might defeat and humble another nation, but we would not obliterate it from the earth. We fought to prove our own might and to exact tribute from the less mighty. When a nation surrendered and acknowledged fealty to us Mexíca, it was given a tally of its native resources and products—gold, spices, óli, whatever—that henceforth it would annually deliver in specified quantities to our Revered Speaker. And it would be held subject to conscription of its fighting men, when and if they should be needed to march alongside us Mexíca.

  But that nation would retain its name and sovereignty, its own ruler, its accustomed way of life, and its preferred form of religion. We would not impose on it any of our laws, customs, or gods. Our war god Huitzilopóchtli, for example, was our god. Under his care the Mexíca were a people set apart from others and above them, and we would not share that god or let him be shared. Quite the contrary. In many defeated nations we discovered new gods or novel manifestations of our known gods, and, if they appealed to us, our armies brought home copies of their statues for us to set in our own temples.

  I must tell you, too, that there existed nations from which we never were able to wring tribute or fealty. For instance, contiguous to us in the east there was Cuautexcálan, The Land of the Eagle Crags, usually called by us simply Texcála, The Crags. For some reason, you Spaniards choose to call that land Tlaxcála, which is laughable, since that word means merely tortilla.

  Texcála was completely ringed by countries all allied to us Mexíca, hence it was forced to exist like a landlocked island. But Texcála adamantly refused ever to submit in the least degree, which meant that it was cut off from importing many necessities of life. If the Texcaltéca had not, however grudgingly, traded with us the sacred copáli resin in which their forestland was rich, they would not even have had salt to flavor their food.

  As it was, our Uey-Tlatoáni severely restricted the amount of trading between us and the Texcaltéca—always in expectation of bringing them to submission—so the stubborn Texcaltéca perpetua
lly suffered humiliating deprivations. They had to eke out their meager crop of cotton, for example, meaning that even their nobles had to wear mantles woven of only a trace of cotton mixed with coarse hemp or maguey fiber; garments which, in Tenochtítlan, would have been worn only by slaves or children. You can well understand that Texcála harbored an abiding hatred for us Mexíca and, as you well know, it eventually had dire consequences for us, for the Texcaltéca, and for all of what is now New Spain.

  “Meanwhile,” said Master Blood Glutton to me on that day we conversed, “right now our armies are disastrously embroiled with another recalcitrant nation to the west. The Revered Speaker’s attempted invasion of Michihuácan, The Land of the Fishermen, has been repulsed most ignominiously. Axayácatl expected an easy victory, since those Purémpecha have always been armed with copper blades, but they have hurled our armies backward in defeat.”

  “But how, Master?” I asked. “An unwarlike race wielding soft copper weapons? How could they stand against us invincible Mexíca?”

  The old soldier shrugged. “Unwarlike the Purémpecha may be, but they fight fiercely enough to defend their Michihuácan homeland of lakes and rivers and well-watered farmlands. Also, it is said they have discovered some magic metal that they mix into their copper while it is still molten. When the mixture is forged into blades, it becomes a metal so hard that our obsidian crumples like bark paper against it.”

  “Fishermen and farmers,” I murmured, “defeating the professional soldiers of Axayácatl….”

  “Oh, we will try again, you may wager on it,” said Blood Glutton. “This time Axayácatl wanted only access to those waters rich in food fish, and those fruitful valleys. But now he will want the secret of that magic metal. He will challenge the Purémpecha again, and when he does, his armies will require every man who can march.” The Master paused, then added pointedly, “Even stiff-jointed old cuáchictin like me, even those who can serve only as Swallowers and Swaddlers, even the crippled and the fogbound. It behooves us to be trained and hardened and ready, my boy.”

  As it happened, Axayácatl died before he could mount another invasion into Michihuácan, which is part of what you now call New Galicia. Under subsequent Revered Speakers, we Mexíca and the Purémpecha managed to live in a sort of wary mutual respect. And I hardly need remind you, reverend friars, that your own most butcherlike commander, Beltrán de Guzmán, is to this day still trying to crush the diehard bands of Purémpecha around Lake Chapálan and in other remote corners of New Galicia that yet refuse to surrender to your King Carlos and your Lord God.

  I have been speaking of our punitive wars, such as they were. I am sure that even your bloodthirsty Guzmán can understand that kind of warfare, though I am also sure he could never conceive of a war—like most of ours—which left the defeated nation still surviving and independent. But now let me speak of our Wars of Flowers, because those seem incomprehensible to any of you white men. “How,” I have heard you ask, “could there have been so many unprovoked and unnecessary wars between friendly nations? Wars that neither side even tried to win?”

  I will do my best to explain.

  Any kind of war was, naturally, pleasing to our gods. Each warrior, dying, spilled his lifeblood, the most precious offering a human could make. In a punitive war, a decisive victory was the objective, and so both sides fought to kill or be killed. The enemy were, as my old Master put it, weeds to be mowed. Only a comparatively few prisoners were taken and kept for later ceremonial sacrifice. But whether a warrior died on the battlefield or on a temple altar, his was accounted a Flowery Death, honorable to himself and satisfying to the gods. The only problem was—if you look at it from the gods’ point of view—that punitive wars were not frequent enough. While they provided much god-nourishing blood and sent many soldiers to be afterworld servants of the gods, such wars were only sporadic. The gods might have to wait and fast and thirst for many years between. That displeased them, and in the year One Rabbit, they let us know it.

  That was some twelve years before my birth, but my father remembered it vividly and often told of it with much sad shaking of his head. In that year, the gods sent to this whole plateau the harshest winter ever known. Besides freezing cold and biting winds which untimely killed many infants, sickly elders, our domestic animals, and even the animals of the wild, there was a six-day snowfall which killed every winter crop in the ground. There were mysterious lights visible in the night skies: wavering vertical bands of cold-colored lights, what my father described as “the gods striding ominously about the heavens, nothing of them visible but their mantles woven of white and green and blue heron feathers.”

  And that was only the beginning. The spring brought not just an end to the cold but a scorching heat; the rainy season ensued, but it brought no rain; the drought killed our crops and animals as dead as the snows had done. Nor was even that the end. The following years were equally merciless in their alternate cold and heat and dearth of rain. In the cold our lakes froze over; in the heat they shrank, they became tepid, they became bitter salt, so that the fish died and floated belly up and fouled the air with their stench.

  Five or six years continued thus: what the older folk of my youth still referred to as the Hard Times. Yya ayya, they must have been terrible times indeed, for our people, our proud and upstanding macehuáltin, were reduced to selling themselves into slavery. You see, other nations beyond this plateau, in the southern highlands and in the coastal Hot Lands, they had not been laid waste by the climatic catastrophe. They offered shares of their own still-bounteous harvests for barter, but that was no generosity, for they knew that we had little to trade except ourselves. Those other peoples, especially those inferior to us and inimical to us, were only too pleased to buy “the swaggering Mexíca” for slaves, and to demean us further by paying only cruel and miserly prices.

  The standard trade was five hundred ears of maize for a male of working age or four hundred for a female of breeding age. If a family had one sellable child, that boy or girl would be relinquished so the rest of the household might eat. If a family had only infants, the father would sell himself. But for how long could any household subsist on four or five hundred ears of maize? And when those were eaten, who or what remained to be sold? Even if the Good Times were suddenly to come again, how could a family survive without a working father? Anyway, the Good Times did not come….

  That was during the reign of the First Motecuzóma and, in attempting to alleviate his people’s misery, he depleted both the national and his personal treasury, then emptied all the capital’s storehouses and granaries. When the surplus was gone, when everything was gone except the still-grinding Hard Times, Motecuzóma and his Snake Woman convened their Speaking Council of elders, and even called in seers and sayers for advice. I cannot vouch for it, but it is said that the conference went thus:

  One hoary sorcerer, who had spent months in studying the thrown bones and consulting sacred books, solemnly reported, “My Lord Speaker, the gods have made us hungry to demonstrate that they are hungry. There has not been a war since our last incursion into Texcála, and that was in the year Nine House. Since then, we have made only sparse blood offerings to the gods. A few prisoners kept in reserve, the occasional lawbreaker, now and then an adolescent or a maiden. The gods are quite plainly demanding more nourishment.”

  “Another war?” mused Motecuzóma. “Even our hardiest warriors are by now too feeble even to march to an enemy frontier, let alone breach it.”

  “True, Revered Speaker. But there is a way to arrange a mass sacrifice …”

  “Slaughter our people before they starve to death?” Motecuzóma asked sardonically. “They are so gaunt and dried-up that the whole nation probably would not yield a cupful of blood.”

  “True, Revered Speaker. And in any case, that would be such a mendicant gesture that the gods probably would not accept it. No, Lord Speaker, what is necessary is a war, but a different kind of war….”

  That, or so I have
been told, and so I believe, was the origin of the Flowery Wars, and this is how the first of them was arranged:

  The mightiest and most centrally situated powers in this valley constituted a Triple Alliance: we the Mexíca with our capital on the island of Tenochtítlan, the Acólhua with their capital at Texcóco on the lake’s eastern shore, and the Tecpanéca with their capital at Tlácopan on the western shore. There were three lesser peoples to the southeast: the Texcaltéca, of whom I have already spoken, with their capital at Texcála; the Huéxotin with their capital at Huexotzínco; and the once mighty Tya Nuü—or Mixtéca, as we called them—whose domain had shrunken until it consisted of little more than their capital city of Cholólan. The first were our enemies, as I have said; the latter two had long ago been made our tribute payers and, like it or not, our occasional allies. All three of those nations, however, like all three of ours in the Alliance, were being devastated by the Hard Times.

  After Motecuzóma’s conference with his Speaking Council, he conferred also with the rulers of Texcóco and Tlácopan. Those three together drafted and sent a proposal to the three rulers in the cities of Texcála, Cholólan, and Huexotzínco. In essence it said something like this:

  “Let us all make war that we may all survive. We are diverse peoples, but we suffer the same Hard Times. The wise men say that we have only one hope of enduring: to sate and placate the gods with blood sacrifices. Therefore, we propose that the armies of our three nations meet in combat with the armies of your three nations, on the neutral plain of Acatzínco, safely far to the southeast of all our lands. The fighting will not be for territory, nor for rule, nor for slaughter, nor for plunder, but simply for the taking of prisoners to be granted the Flowery Death. When all participating forces have captured a sufficiency of prisoners for sacrifice to their several gods, this will be mutually made known amongst the commanders and the battle will end forthwith.”