Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  In the divinatory calendar, each year contained two hundred sixty days, those days named by appending the numbers one through thirteen to each of twenty traditional signs: rabbit, reed, knife, and so on—and each solar year was itself named according to the ceremonial number and sign of its first day. As you can perceive, our solar and ritual calendars were forever overlapping each other, one lagging behind or forging ahead of the other. But, if you care to do the arithmetic involved, you will find that they balanced out at an equal number of days over a total of fifty and two of the ordinary solar years. The year of my birth was called Thirteen Rabbit, for example, and no later year bore that same name until my fifty-second came around.

  So, to us, fifty and two was a significant number—a sheaf of years, we called it—since that many years were simultaneously recognized by both calendars, and since that many years were more or less what the average man could expect to live, barring accident, illness, or war. The stone staircase winding up Texcotzínco Hill, with its thirteen steps between landings, denoted the thirteen ritual numbers, and with its fifty and two steps between terraces, denoted a sheaf of years. When I eventually got to the top of the hill I had counted five hundred and twenty steps. All together, they denoted two of the ceremonial years of two hundred sixty days apiece, and likewise stood for ten sheaves of fifty and two years. Yes, most ingenious.

  When the rain stopped, I continued my climb. I did not go up all the rest of those stairs in one headlong dash, though I am sure I could have, in those days of my young strength. I halted at each remaining landing only long enough to see if I could identify the god or goddess whose statue stood there. I knew perhaps half of them: Tezcatlipóca, the sun, chief god of the Acólhua; Quetzalcóatl, of whom I have spoken; Ometecútli and Omecíuatl, our Lord and Lady Pair….

  I stopped longer in the gardens. There on the mainland the soil was ample and the space unlimited, and Nezahualpíli was evidently a man who loved flowers, flowers everywhere. The hillside gardens were laid out in neat beds, but the terraces were not trammeled by walls. So the flowers spilled generously over the edges, and the trailing varieties dangled their brilliant blooms almost as far down the hill as the next lower terrace. I know I saw every flower I had ever previously seen in my life, besides countless kinds that I never had, and many of those must have been expensively transplanted from far countries. I also gradually realized that the numerous lily ponds, the reflecting pools, the fish ponds, the chuckling brooks and cascades were a watering system fed by the fall of gravity from some source atop the hill.

  If the Lord Strong Bone was climbing behind me, I never caught sight of him. But, in one of the higher terrace gardens, I came upon another man, lolling on a stone bench. As I approached near enough to see him fairly clearly—the wrinkled cacao nut-brown skin, the ragged loincloth that was his only garment—I remembered having met him before. He stood up, at least to the extent of his hunched and shrunken stature. I had grown taller than he was.

  I gave him the traditionally polite greeting, but then said, probably more rudely than I intended it to sound, “I thought you were a Tlaltelólco beggar, old man. What do you here?”

  “A homeless man is at home anywhere in the world,” he said, as if it were something to be proud of. “I am here to welcome you to the land of the Acólhua.”

  “You!” I exclaimed, for the grotesque little man was even more of an excrescence in that luxuriant garden than he had been in the motley market crowd.

  “Were you expecting to be greeted by the Revered Speaker in person?” he asked, with a mocking, gap-toothed grin. “Welcome to the palace of Texcotzínco, young Mixtli. Or young Tozáni, young Malínqui, young Poyaútla, as you like.”

  “Long ago you knew my name. Now you know all my nicknames.”

  “A man with a talent for listening can hear even things not yet spoken. You will have still other names in time to come.”

  “Are you really a seer, then, old man?” I asked, unconsciously echoing my father’s words of years before. “How did you know I was coming here?”

  “Ah, your coming here,” he said. “I pride myself that I had some small part in arranging that.”

  “Then you know a good deal more than I do. I would be grateful for a bit of explanation.”

  “Know, then, that I never saw you before that day in Tlaltelólco, when I overheard the mention that it was your naming day. Out of mere curiosity, I took the opportunity for a closer look at you. When I inspected your eyes, I detected their imminent and increasing loss of distant vision. That affliction is sufficiently uncommon that the distinctive shape of the afflicted eyeball affords an unmistakeable sign diagnostic. I could say with certainty that you were fated to see things close and true.”

  “You also said I would speak truly of such things.”

  He shrugged. “You seemed bright enough, for a brat, that it was safe to predict you would grow up passably intelligent. A man who is forced by weak eyesight to regard everything in this world at close range, and with good sense, is also usually inclined to describe the world as it really is.”

  “You are a cunning old trickster,” I said, smiling. “But what has all that to do with my being summoned to Texcóco?”

  “Every ruler and prince and governor is surrounded by servile attendants and self-seeking wise men who will tell him what he wants to hear, or what they want him to hear. A man who will tell only the truth is a rarity among courtiers. I believed that you would become such a rarity, and that your faculties would be better appreciated at a court rather nobler than that of Xaltócan. So I dropped a word here and there …”

  “You,” I said unbelievingly, “have the ear of a man like Nezahualpíli?”

  He gave me a look that somehow made me feel again much smaller than he was. “I told you long ago—have I not proved it yet?—that I also speak true, and to my own detriment, when I could easily pose as an omniscient messenger of the gods. Nezahualpíli is not so cynical as you, young Mole. He will listen to the lowliest of men, if that man speaks the truth.”

  “I apologize,” I said, after a moment. “I should be thanking you, old man, not doubting you. And I truly am grateful for—”

  He waved that away. “I did not do it entirely for you. I usually get full value for my discoveries. Simply see to it that you give faithful service to the Uey-Tlatoáni, and we shall both have earned our rewards. Now go.”

  “But go where? No one has told me where or to whom I am to announce myself. Do I just cross over this hill and hope to be recognized?”

  “Yes. The palace is on the other side, and you are expected. Whether the Speaker himself will recognize you, next time you meet, I could not say.”

  “We have never met,” I complained. “We cannot possibly know each other.”

  “Oh? Well, I advise you to ingratiate yourself with Tolána-Tecíuapil, the Lady of Tolan, for she is the favorite of Nezahualpíli’s seven wedded wives. At last count he also had forty concubines. So over there at the palace are some sixty sons and fifty daughters of the Revered Speaker. I doubt that even he knows the latest tally. He may take you to be a forgotten by-blow from one of his wanderings abroad, a son just now come home. But you will be hospitably welcomed, young Mole, never fear.”

  I turned, then turned back again. “Could I first be of some service to you, venerable one? Perhaps I could assist you to the top of the hill?”

  He said, “I thank you for the kind offer, but I will loiter here yet a while. It is best that you climb and breast the hill alone, for all the rest of your life awaits you on the other side.”

  That sounded portentous, but I saw a small fallacy in it, and I smiled at my own perspicacity. “Surely my life awaits, whichever way I go from here, and whether I go alone or not.”

  The cacao man smiled too, but ironically. “Yes, at your age, many possible lives await. Go whichever way you choose. Go alone or in company. The companions may walk with you a long way or a little. But at the end of your life, no matter how cr
owded were its roads and its days, you will have learned what all must learn. And that will be too late for any starting over, too late for anything but regret. So learn it now. No man has ever yet lived out any life but one, and that one his chosen own, and most of that alone.” He paused, and his eyes held mine. “Now then, Mixtli, which way do you go from here, and in what company?”

  I turned and kept on up the hill, alone.

  I H S

  S. C. C. M.

  Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty,

  the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

  MOST Virtuous Majesty, our Sagacious Monarch: from the City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this Feast Day of the Circumcision in the Year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred twenty and nine, greeting.

  With heavy heart but submissive hand, your chaplain again forwards to Your Imperial Majesty, as again commanded, yet another collection of the writings dictated to date by our still-resident Aztec—or Asmodeus, as Your Majesty’s servant is increasingly inclined to think of him.

  This humble cleric can sympathize with Your Majesty’s wry comment that the Indian’s chronicle is “considerably more informative than the fanfarronadas we hear incessantly from the newly entitled Marqués, the Señor Cortés himself, who is currently favoring us with his attendance at Court.” And even a grieved and morose Bishop can perceive Your Majesty’s wry joke when you write that “the Indian’s communications are the first we have received from New Spain not attempting to wheedle a title, or a vast allotment of the conquered lands, or a loan.”

  But, Sire, we stand aghast when you report that your royal self and your courtiers are “entirely rapt and enthralled at the reading aloud of these pages.” We trust we do not take lightly our pledges as a subject of Your Most Eminent Majesty, but our other sacred oaths oblige us to warn most solemnly, ex officio et de fides, against any further indiscriminate dissemination of this foul history.

  Your Astute Majesty can hardly have failed to notice that the earlier pages have treated—casually, without remorse or repentance—of such sins as homicide, prolicide, suicide, anthropophagy, incest, harlotry, torture, idolatry, and breach of the Commandment to honor father and mother. If, as it has been said, one’s sins are wounds of one’s soul, this Indian’s soul is bleeding at every pore.

  But, in case the more sly insinuations somehow escaped Your Majesty’s attention, allow us to point out that the scurrilous Aztec has dared to suggest that his people boast of some vague lineal descent from a Lord and Lady Pair, a pagan parody of Adam and Eve. He also suggests that we Christians ourselves are idolatrous of a whole pantheon comparable to the seething host of demons his people worshiped. With equal blasphemy, he has implied that such Holy Sacraments as Baptism, and Absolution through Confession, and even the petitioning for Grace before a meal, were observed in these lands, antedating and independent of any knowledge of Our Lord and His bestowal of the Sacraments. Perhaps his most vile sacrilege is to aver, as Your Majesty will shortly read, that one of the previous heathen rulers of these people was born of a virgin!

  Your Majesty makes an incidental inquiry in this latest letter. Though we ourself have sat in on the Indian’s storytelling sessions from time to time—and will continue to do so, time permitting, to put to him specific questions or to demand elaboration on some of his comments we have read—we must deferentially remind Your Majesty that the Bishop of Mexíco has other pressing duties which preclude our personally verifying or disproving any of this prattler’s boasts and asseverations.

  However, Your Majesty asks information regarding one of his more outrageous assertions, and we sincerely hope that the query is merely another of our jovial sovereign’s good-humored jests. In any case, we must reply: No, Sire, we know nothing of the properties the Aztec ascribes to the root called barbasco. We cannot confirm that it would be “worth its weight in gold” as a commodity of Spanish commerce. We know nothing about it that would “silence the chatter of the ladies of the Court.” The very suggestion that Our Lord God could have created a vegetable efficacious in averting the conception of Christian human life is repugnant to our sensibilities and an affront to

  Pardon the ink blot, Sire. Our agitation afflicts our pen hand. But satis superque …

  As Your Majesty commands, the friars and the young lay brother will continue setting down these pages until—in time, we pray—Your Majesty commands that they be relieved of their pitiable duty. Or until they themselves can no longer bear the task. We think we are not breaching the confidence of the Confessional if we merely remark that in these last months the brothers’ own confessions have become phantasmatical in the extreme, and bloodcurdling to hear, and necessitating the most exigent penances for absolution.

  May Our Redeemer and Master, Jesus Christ, be always Your Majesty’s consolation and defense against all the wiles of our Adversary, is the constant prayer of Your S.C.C.M.’s chaplain,

  (ecce signum) Zumárraga

  QUARTA PARS

  THE other side of the hill was even more beautiful than the side facing Lake Texcóco. The slope was gentle, the gardens undulated downward and away below me, variously formal and informal, glinting with ponds and fountains and bathing pools. There were long sweeps of green lawn, on which grazed a number of tame deer. There were shady groves of trees, and an occasional tree standing alone which had been clipped and pruned into the living statue of some animal or bird. Toward the bottom of the hill there were many buildings, large and small, but all most handsomely proportioned and set at comfortable distances from one another. I believed I could even make out richly dressed persons moving about on the walkways between the buildings—anyway, there were moving dots of brilliant colors. The Xaltócan palace of the Lord Red Heron had been a commodious building, and impressive enough, but the Texcotzínco palace of the Uey-Tlatoáni Nezahualpíli was an entire, self-contained, pastoral city.

  The top of the hill, where I stood, was wooded with the “oldest of the old” cypress trees, some of them so big around that perhaps twelve men with arms outstretched could not have encircled their trunks, and so tall that their gray-green feathery leaves merged into the azure of the sky. I looked about and, though they were cleverly concealed by shrubbery, I espied the big clay pipes that watered those gardens and the city below. As well as I could judge, the pipes led away in the distance to an even higher mountain to the southeast, whence no doubt they brought the water from some pure spring and distributed it by letting it seek its own level.

  Because I could not resist lingering to admire the various gardens and parklands through which I descended, it was getting well on toward sundown when I finally emerged among the buildings at the bottom of the hill. I wandered along the flower-bordered white gravel paths, meeting many people: richly mantled noblemen and women, knights in plumed headgear, distinguished-looking elderly gentlemen. Every one of them graciously gave me a word or a nod of greeting, as if I belonged there, but I was shy of asking any of those fine folk exactly where I did belong. Then I came upon a young man of about my own age, who seemed not to be occupied with any urgent business. He stood beside a young buck deer that was just beginning to sprout antlers, and he was idly scratching the nubs between its ears. Perhaps ungrown antlers are itchy; at any rate, the deer appeared to be enjoying the attention.

  “Mixpantzínco, brother,” the young man greeted me. I supposed that he was one of Nezahualpíli’s offspring, and took me for another. But then he noticed the basket I carried, and said, “You are the new Mixtli.”

  I said I was, and returned his greeting.

  “I am Huexotl,” he said; the word means Willow. “We already have at least three other Mixtlis around here, so we will have to think of a different name for you.”

  Feeling in no great need of yet another name, I changed the subject. “I have never seen deer walk among people like this, uncaged, unafraid.”

  “We get them when they are fawns. The hunters find them, usually when a doe has been killed, and they bring the
m here. There is always a wet nurse about, with full breasts but no baby to tend at the moment, and she gives suck to the fawn. I think they all grow up believing they are people. Have you just arrived, Mixtli? Would you like to eat? To rest?”

  I said yes, yes, and yes. “I really do not know what I am supposed to do here. Or where to go.”

  “My father’s First Lady will know. Come, I will take you to her.”

  “I thank you, Huéxotzin,” I said, calling him Lord Willow, for I had obviously guessed right: he was a son of Nezahualpíli and therefore a prince.

  As we walked through the extensive palace grounds, the deer ambling along between us, the young prince identified for me the many edifices we passed. One immense building of two floors ran around three sides of a gardened central court. The left wing, Willow told me, contained the rooms of himself and all the other royal children. In the right wing dwelt Nezahualpíli’s forty concubines. The central portion contained apartments for the Revered Speaker’s counselors and wise men who were always with him, whether he resided in his city or country palace; and for other tlamatíntin: philosophers, poets, men of science whose work the Speaker was encouraging. In the grounds about were dotted small, marble-pillared pavilions to which a tlamatíni could retire if he wanted to write or invent or predict or meditate in solitude.

  The palace proper was a building as huge and as beautifully ornamented as any palace in Tenochtítlan. Two floors high and at least a thousand man’s-feet in frontage, it contained the throne room, the Speaking Council chambers, ballrooms for court entertainments, quarters for the guardsmen, the hall of justice where the Uey-Tlatoáni regularly met with those of his people who had troubles or complaints to lay before him. There were also Nezahualpíli’s own apartments and those of his seven wedded wives.