Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “Thank you, Head Nodder,” he said politely. “I had wondered what version the Mexíca teachers were expounding these days. Of history you know abysmally little, young lord, and what little you know is wrong in almost every particular.”

  I stood up again, my face as hot as if I had been slapped. “Lord Teacher, you requested a brief history. I can elaborate in more detail.”

  “Kindly spare me,” he said. “And in return I will do you the kindness of correcting just one of the details already proffered. The words Mexíca and Mexico did not derive from Metztli the moon.” He waved for me to be seated, and addressed the class as a whole:

  “Young lord and lady students, this illustrates what I have often told you before now. Be skeptical of the many versions of the world’s history you are likely to hear, for some are as full of impossible invention as they are of vanity. What is more, I have never met a historian—I have never met any sort of professional scholar who could put into his work the slightest trace of humor or ribaldry or jollity. I have never met one who did not consider his particular subject the most momentous and weighty of all studies. Now, I concede the importance of scholarly works—but need importance always wear the long face of stern solemnity? Historians may be serious men, and history may sometimes be so somber that it saddens. But it is people who make the history, and they often play pranks or cut capers while they are doing it. The true story of the Mexíca confirms that.”

  He spoke directly to me again. “Head Nodder, your Aztéca ancestors brought nothing to this valley: no ancient wisdom, no arts, no sciences, no culture. They brought nothing but themselves: a skulking, ignorant, nomad people who wore ragged animal skins crawling with vermin, and who worshiped a loathsomely pugnacious god of slaughter and bloodshed. That rabble was despised and repulsed by every other already developed nation hereabout. Would any civilized people welcome an invasion of uncouth beggars? The Aztéca did not settle on that island in the lakeside swamp because their god gave them any sign, and they did not go there joyfully. They went because there was nowhere else to go, and because no one else had cared to claim that pimple of land surrounded by marshes.”

  My classmates watched me from the corners of their eyes. I tried not to flinch under Neltitíca’s words.

  “They did not immediately build great cities, or anything else; they had to spend all their time and energy just in finding something to eat. They were not allowed to fish, for the lake’s fishing rights belonged to the nations about it. So for a long time your ancestors existed—just barely existed—by eating revolting things like worms and water insects, and the slimy eggs of those creatures, and the only edible plant that grew in that miserable swamp. It was mexíxin, the common cress or peppergrass, a scraggly and bitter-tasting weed. But if your forebears had nothing else, Head Nodder, they had a mordant sense of humor. They began to call themselves, with wry irony, the Mexíca.”

  The very name evoked another knowing snicker from the class. Neltitíca went on:

  “Eventually the Mexíca devised the chinámitl system of growing decent crops. But even then, they grew for themselves only a necessary minimum of staple foods like maize and beans. Their chinámpa were mainly used for growing more rare vegetables and herbs—tomatoes, sage, coriander, sweet potatoes—which their lofty neighbors could not be bothered to cultivate. And the Mexíca traded those delicacies for the necessities of life: the tools and building materials and cloth and weapons that the mainland nations would otherwise have been unwilling to give them. From then on, they made rapid progress toward civilization and culture and military might. But they never forgot that humble weed which had sustained them in the beginning, the mexíxin, and they never afterward abandoned the name they had adopted from it. Mexíca is a name now known and respected or feared throughout our world, but it means only …”

  He paused on purpose, and he smiled, and my face flamed again, as the entire class shouted in concert:

  “The Weed People!”

  “I understand, young lordlet, that you have essayed some learning of reading and writing on your own,” said the Lord Teacher of Word Knowing, somewhat sourly, as if he believed any such self-education impossible. “And I understand that you have brought examples of your work.”

  Respectfully, I handed him the long, pleated-together bark paper strip of which I was most proud. I had drawn it with extra care, and painted it in the vibrant colors Chimáli had given me. The Lord Teacher took the compacted book and began slowly to unfold its pages.

  It was an account of one famous incident in the history of the Mexíca, when they first arrived in this valley, and when the most powerful nation here was that of the Culhua. The Culhua leader, Coxcox, had declared a war against the people of Xochimílco, and invited the new-come Mexíca to fight as his allies. When the war was won and the Culhua warriors brought in their Xochimílca prisoners, the Mexíca brought none at all, and Coxcox denounced them as cowards. At that, the Mexíca warriors opened the bags they carried and dumped out a mountain of ears—all left ears—which they had sliced from the multitude of Xochimílca they had vanquished. Coxcox was astounded, and glad, and from then on the Mexíca were accounted fighters to be reckoned with.

  I thought I had done a very good job of picturing the incident, particularly in my meticulous rendering of the innumerable left ears and the expression of astonishment on the face of Coxcox. I waited, almost aglow with self-congratulation, for the Lord Teacher to praise my work.

  But he was frowning as he flipped the book’s pages apart, and he looked from one side to the other of the pleated strip, and he said at last, “In which direction am I supposed to read this?”

  Puzzled, I said, “In Xaltócan, my lord, we unfold the pages leftward. That is, so we may read each panel from left to right.”

  “Yes, yes!” he snapped. “We all customarily read from left to right. But your book gives no indication that we should do so.”

  “Indication?” I said.

  “Suppose you are bidden to write an inscription that must be read in some other direction—on a temple frieze or column, for instance, where the architecture requires that it be read from right to left, or even from top to bottom.”

  The possibility had never occurred to me, and I said so.

  He said impatiently, “When a scribe pictures two persons or two gods conversing, naturally they must be face to face. But there is one basic rule. The majority of all the characters must face in the direction the writing is to be read.”

  I think I gulped loudly.

  “You never grasped that simplest rule of picture writing?” he asked scathingly. “And you have the effrontery to show me this?” He tossed it back to me without even refolding it. “When you attend your first class in word knowing tomorrow, join that one yonder.”

  He pointed across the lawn to a class assembling about one of the pavilions, and my face fell and my pride evaporated. Even from a distance, I could make out that all the students were about half my size and age.

  It was mortifying to have to sit among infants—to begin at the very beginning in both my history and my word knowing classes—as if I had never been taught anything at all, as if I had never exerted myself to learn anything at all.

  So I was cheered to discover that the study of poetry, at least, was not graded into the Beginners, the Learners, the Somewhat Learned, and so on, with me at the very bottom of the class. There was only a single gathering of aspiring poets, and they included students much older as well as much younger than myself. Among them were both the young Prince Willow and his elder half brother Crown Prince Black Flower; there were other nobles ranging even to the very old; there were both girls and women of the nobility; there were more slaves than I had seen in any other class.

  It seems that it matters not who makes a poem, and it matters not what kind of poem: a tribute to some god or hero, a lengthy historical account, a love song, a lamentation, or a joking bit of banter. That poem is not judged according to the poet’s age, sex,
social standing, education, or experience. A poem merely is or is not. It lives or it never existed. It is made and remembered or it is forgotten so quickly that it might never have been made at all. In that class I was content to sit and listen, timorous of attempting any poetic ventures of my own. It was not until many, many years later that I happened to make a poem which I have since heard recited by strangers. So that one has lived, but it is a very small poem, and I would not call myself a poet on that account.

  What I recollect most vividly about my poetry class is the first time I attended it. Some distinguished visitor had been invited by the Lord Teacher to read his works, and he was just about to begin when I arrived and sat down on a grassy bank at the rear of the crowd. I could not see him too distinctly at that distance, but I could make out that he was medium tall and well built, that he was about the age of the Lady of Tolan, that he wore a richly embroidered cotton mantle held by a gold clasp, and no other adornments to designate his office or class. So I took him to be a professional poet of sufficient talent to have been rewarded with a pension and a place at court.

  He shuffled several sheets of bark paper in his hand and gave one sheet to a slave boy who sat crosslegged at his feet, holding a miniature drum on his lap. Then the visitor announced in a voice which, though soft-spoken, carried well, “With the Lord Teacher’s permission, my young lord and lady students, I will not recite today from my own works, but from those of a far greater and wiser poet. My father.”

  “Ayyo, with my permission and pleasure,” said the Lord Teacher, nodding benignly. The class also murmured a collective ayyo of approval, as if everyone there already knew the works of the poet-father he had mentioned.

  From what I have already told you of our picture writing, reverend friars, you will have realized that it was inadequate for setting down poetry. Our poems lived by oral repetition, or lived not at all. Anyone who heard and liked a poem would memorize it and retell it to someone else, who might in turn tell it again. To aid the hearers in that memorizing, a poem was usually constructed in such a manner that the syllables of its words had a regular rhythm, and in such a manner that the same word sounds regularly recurred at the ends of its separate lines.

  The papers the visitor carried bore only enough word pictures to assure that his memory did not falter and omit a line, to remind him here and there to stress a word or a passage his poet-father had thought worthy of special note. And the papers he handed to his drummer slave were marked only with brush strokes: many small dabs of paint, some larger ones, variously commingled and variously spaced. They told the slave the rhythm to beat out with his hand on the drum as accompaniment to the poet’s recital: sometimes murmurous, sometimes sharply emphasizing the words, sometimes a soft throb like a heart beating in the pauses between the lines.

  The poems the visitor recited and sang and chanted that day were all felicitously worded and sweetly cadenced, but they all were slightly tinged with melancholy, as when early autumn first steals in upon the summertime. After nearly a sheaf of years, and with no word pictures to aid my recollection, no drum to mark the beats and pauses, I still can repeat one of them:

  I made a song in praise of life,

  a world as bright as quetzal feather:

  to skies of turquoise, sunlight gold,

  to streams like jadestone, gardens blooming …

  But gold can melt and jadestone shatter,

  leaves turn brown and trees fall down,

  our flowers fade, their petals scatter.

  The sun sets soon, the night comes looming.

  See beauty fade, our loves grow cold,

  the gods desert, their temples weather …

  Why does my song pierce like a knife?

  When the recital was concluded, the respectfully attentive crowd of listeners stood up and broke apart. Some went strolling about by themselves, saying one or several of the poems over and over, to fix the words in their memory. I was one of those. Others milled about the visitor, kissed the earth to him, and regaled him with compliments and thanks. I was walking in circles on the grass, head bowed, repeating to myself that poem I have just repeated to you, when I was approached by young Prince Willow.

  “I overheard you, Head Nodder,” he said. “I too liked that poem best of all. And it made another poem waft into my own head. Would you oblige me by hearing it?”

  “I should be honored to be the first,” I said, and what he recited was this:

  You tell me then that I must perish

  like the flowers that I cherish.

  Nothing remaining of my name,

  nothing remembered of my fame?

  But the gardens I planted still are young—

  the songs I sang will still be sung!

  I said, “I think it is a good poem, Huéxotzin, and a true one. The Lord Teacher would most certainly give you an approving nod.” And I was not just slavishly flattering a prince, for you will have noticed that I have remembered that poem, too, all my life. “In fact,” I went on, “it might almost have been composed by the same great poet whose works we have heard today.”

  “Yya, come now, Head Nodder,” he chided me. “No poet of our time will ever match the incomparable Nezahualcóyotl.”

  “Who?”

  “Did you not know? Did you not recognize my father doing the recitation? He read the works of his father, my grandfather, the Revered Speaker Fasting Coyote.”

  “What? That man who recited was Nezahualpíli?” I exclaimed. “But he wore no insignia of his office. No crown, no feather mantle, no staff or banner …”

  “Oh, he has his eccentricities. Except on state occasions, my father never dresses like any other Uey-Tlatoáni. He believes that a man should display only tokens of his achievement. Medals won and scars collected, not baubles inherited or bought or married. But do you really mean you have not yet met him? Come!”

  However, it seemed that Nezahualpíli was averse also to having his people too openly manifest their regard for him. By the time the prince and I elbowed our way through the throng of students, he had already slipped away.

  The Lady of Tolan had not misled me when she warned that I would work hard at that school, but I will not bore you, reverend friars, with accounts of my daily schedule, and the mundane events of my days, and the sheaves of work I took back to my chambers at the end of each day. I will tell you that I learned arithmetic, and how to keep account books, and how to calculate the exchange of the various sorts of currency in use—all facilities that would be most useful to me in years to come. I learned about the geography of these lands, though at that time not much was known about any of the lands beyond our immediate own, as I would later discover by exploring for myself.

  I most enjoyed and profited from my studies in word knowing, getting ever more proficient at reading and writing. But I think I benefited almost as much from the classes in history, even when they refuted the Mexíca’s most cherished beliefs and boasts. The Lord Teacher Neltitíca gave generously of his time, even according private sessions to some of us. I remember one, when he sat down with me and a very young boy named Poyec, son of one of Texcóco’s numerous lords.

  “There is a grievous gap in Mexíca history,” said the teacher, “like the wide gap an earthquake can cleave in the solid earth.”

  He was preparing a poquíetl to smoke while he discoursed. This is a slender tube of some substance like bone or jadestone, ornamentally carved, with a mouthpiece at one end. Into the open other end is inserted a dry reed or rolled paper, firmly packed with the finely shredded dried leaves of the picíetl plant, sometimes mixed with herbs and spices for added flavor and fragrance. The user holds the tube between his fingers and sets fire to the far end of the reed or paper. It and its contents smolder slowly to ash, while the user lifts the mouthpiece at intervals to his lips to suck a breath of the smoke, inhale it, and puff it out again.

  When he had lit his with a coal from a brazier, Neltitíca said, “It was just a sheaf of years ago that the Mexí
ca’s then Revered Speaker Itzcóatl, Obsidian Snake, forged The Triple Alliance of the Mexíca, the Acólhua, and the Tecpanéca—with the Mexíca, of course, as the dominant partner. Having secured that eminence for his people, Obsidian Snake then decreed that all the books of bygone days should be burned, and new accounts written to glorify the Mexíca past, to give the Mexíca a spurious antiquity.”

  I looked at the blue smoke rising from the poquíetl, and murmured, “Books … burned …” It was hard to believe that even a Uey-Tlatoáni would have the heart to burn something as precious and irreplaceable and inviolable as books.

  “Obsidian Snake did it,” the Lord Teacher continued, “to make his people believe that they were and always have been the true custodians of art and science, and therefore to believe that it is their duty to impose civilization on every lesser people. But even the Mexíca cannot ignore the evidence that other and finer civilizations had existed here long before their coming. So they have concocted fanciful legends to account for such evidence.”

  Poyec and I thought about it, and the boy suggested, “You mean things like Teotihuácan? The Place Where the Gods Gathered?”

  “A good example, young Póyectzin. That city is now a tumbled and deserted and weed-grown ruin, but it obviously was once a greater and more populous city than Tenochtítlan can ever hope to be.”

  I said, “We were taught, Lord Teacher, that it was built by the gods when they all assembled to decide to create the earth and its people and all living things….”

  “Of course you were taught that. Any grand thing not done by the Mexíca must not be credited to any other mortal men.” He snorted a plume of smoke from his nostrils. “Although Obsidian Snake blotted out the Mexíca’s past history, he could not burn the libraries of our Texcóco and other cities. We do still have records telling what this valley was like long before the coming of the Aztéca-Mexíca. Obsidian Snake could not change all the history of The One World.”