Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  I also found it useful to invent a number of what I might call summary symbols, into which were compressed an entire procession of words. For example, I would put down just one little circle, representing an open mouth, for the lengthy preface with which every man or woman began every least remark to the Uey-Tlatoáni: “In your august presence, mixpantzínco, my Lord Revered Speaker Nezahualpíli …” If anyone talked alternately of recent and past events, I differentiated between them by drawing alternately the simple symbols that represented a baby and a vulture. The baby, you see, stood for “new” and identified the recent events. The vulture, being bald-headed, stood for “old” and identified the past events.

  Ah, well. All this reminiscing may be of some professional interest to fellow scribes like yourselves, reverend friars, but in truth I speak of those things because I am loath to speak of other things—like my next summons to the chambers of the Lady Jadestone Doll.

  “I require a new face,” she said, though we both knew that it was not any face she required. “And I do not wish to wait while you collect a new series of drawings. Let me look again at those you have already done.” I brought them to her and she went rapidly through the papers, giving each a mere glance, until she stopped and said, “This one. Who is he?”

  “Some slave I have seen about the palace,” I told her. “I believe he is employed as a litter bearer.”

  “Fetch!” she commanded, handing me her emerald ring.

  “My lady,” I protested. “A slave?”

  “When I am in urgent appetite, I am not overly fastidious,” she said. “Besides, slaves are often very good. The wretches dare not refuse to comply with the most debasing demands made of them.” She smiled that cloyingly sweet smile of hers. “And the more spineless a man is, the more reptilian contortions he can squirm himself into.”

  Before I could raise any more objections, Jadestone Doll led me to a wall alcove and said, “Now look at this. The second god I have ordered from that so-called master sculptor Pixquitl.”

  “That is no god,” I said, aghast, as I stared at the new statue. “That is the gardener Xali-Otli.”

  She said in a cold voice, warningly, “As far as you and everyone in Texcóco are concerned, that is an obscure god worshiped by my family in Tenochtítlan. But never mind that. You at least recognized the face. I will wager no one else would, except perhaps his mother. That old Pixquitl is hopelessly incompetent. I have sent for those Mexíca artists I spoke of. They will be here immediately after the festival of Ochpanítztli. Go and tell Pixquitl that I wish a separate and private studio prepared for them and supplied with all the materials they will require. Then find that slave. Give him the ring and the usual instructions.”

  When I again confronted the sculptor, he said grumpily, “I can only insist that again I did my best with the drawing given me. At least this time she also gave me a skull to work with.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, yes, it is much easier to sculpture a good likeness when one has the actual underlying bones on which to mold the clay.”

  Not wanting to believe what I should have realized much earlier, I stammered, “But—but, Master Pixquitl—no one could possibly possess the skull of a god.”

  He gave me a long look from his heavy-lidded old eyes. “All I know is that I was given the skull of a newly dead adult male, and that the skull’s structure approximated the facial features of the drawing I was also given, and I was told that the drawing was that of some minor god. I am not a priest, to question the god’s authenticity, and I am not a fool, to question an imperious queen. I do the work I am bidden to do, and so far I have kept my own skull intact. Do you understand?”

  I nodded numbly. I finally did understand, and only too well.

  The master went on, “I will prepare the studio for the new artists soon to arrive. But I must say, I do not envy anyone thus employed by the Lady Jadestone Doll. Not myself. Not them. Not you.”

  I did not envy my situation either—procurer to a murderess—but I was already far too deeply involved to see any means of extricating myself. I went and found the slave, whose name was Niez-Hueyotl, in the pathetically overweening manner of slave names: I Will Be of Greatness. Apparently he did not live up to it, for it was not long before Jadestone Doll summoned me again.

  “You were right, Fetch!” she said. “A slave can be a mistake. That one actually began to fancy himself a human being.” She laughed. “Well, he will be a god before long, which is more than he could ever have expected. But this makes me realize something. My Lord Husband may eventually begin to wonder why I have statues of only gods in my chambers. I should have at least one goddess. In your last showing of drawings, I saw one of a comely woman. Go and bring that picture here.”

  I did, though sick at heart. I was sorry I had let the young queen glimpse that sketch. I had made it for no ulterior reason, but impulsively, out of admiration for the woman, when she had attracted my own attention. Indeed, she caught many men’s eyes, and lit those eyes with speculation or longing. But Nemalhuíli was already a married woman, the wife of a prosperous feather worker in the Texcóco craftsmen’s market. Her beauty was not just in her lively and luminous face. Her gestures were always fluid and gentle, her carriage was proud, her lips had a smile for everyone. Nemalhuíli exuded an unquenchable happiness. And her name was apt; it meant Something Delicate.

  Jadestone Doll studied her picture and, to my relief, said, “I cannot send you to her, Fetch! That would be a breach of good manners, and might cause an undesirable commotion. I will send one of my slave women.”

  But that did not, as I had hoped, end my involvement. The next I heard from the young queen was, “The woman Nemalhuíli will be here tonight. And this will be the first time—would you believe it?—that I have ever indulged with one of my own sex. I want you to attend, with your drawing materials, and record this adventure so that I may see later the various things we shall be doing.”

  Of course I was dismayed at the idea, for three reasons. First and foremost, I was angry at myself, for having inadvertently involved Something Delicate. Though I knew her only by sight and reputation, I held a high regard for her. Second, and selfishly, I could never after that night claim that I did not know for certain what sort of things happened in my lady’s chambers. Third, I felt some revulsion at the prospect of being forced to witness an act that should be private. But there was no way I could refuse, and I must admit that among my emotions was a perverse curiosity. I had heard the word patlachúia, but I could not imagine how two females could perform together.

  Something Delicate arrived, looking as cheerful and lightsome as ever, though understandably a bit bewildered at that clandestine midnight appointment. It was summer and the air outside was not at all chilly, but she wore a square cape over her shoulders. Perhaps she had been instructed to muffle her face in the cloak on the way to the palace.

  “My lady,” she said courteously, inquiringly, glancing from the young queen to me, where I sat with a sheaf of bark papers on my lap. There had been no way for me discreetly to conceal my presence, since my eyesight required me to sit close if I was to record whatever occurred.

  “Pay no attention to the scribe,” said Jadestone Doll. “Pay attention only to me. First, I must be assured that your husband knows nothing of this visit.”

  “Nothing, my lady. He was sleeping when I left. Your maid told me to tell him nothing, and I did not, for I thought you might somehow have need of me for—well, for something of no concern to men.”

  “Precisely so,” said her hostess, simpering with satisfaction. When the woman’s eyes again slid sideways to me, Jadestone Doll snapped, “I said ignore this one. He is furniture. He does not see or hear. He does not exist.” Then she dropped her voice to a coaxing murmur. “I have been told that you are one of the most beautiful women in Texcóco. As you see, my dear, so am I. It occurred to me that we might enjoyably compare our beauties.”

  At that, with her own hands, she reac
hed out and raised the cape so that its central slit lifted over Nemalhuíli’s head. The visitor naturally looked surprised, at having a queen personally take her cape. But then her expression changed to shocked bafflement as Jadestone Doll next raised her long blouse and lifted it over her head, leaving her bare from the waist up.

  Only her wide eyes moved. They flicked once more to me, like those of a frightened doe at bay, beseeching help from one of the hunters pressing in. But I pretended not to see, I made my face impassive, I kept my gaze apparently intent on the drawing I had just begun, and I do not think Something Delicate looked at me again. From that moment, she evidently managed to do as she had been told: to believe that I was not present or even existent. I think, if the poor woman had not been able to blot me from her consciousness, she would have died that night of shame.

  While the woman stood barebreasted, as rigid as if she were already a statue, Jadestone Doll removed her own blouse—slowly, seductively—she might have been doing it to arouse an unresponsive man. Then she stepped close, until their two bodies were all but touching. Something Delicate was perhaps ten years older than the girl queen, and about a hand’s breadth taller.

  “Yes,” said Jadestone Doll, “your breasts are beautiful. Except”—she pretended to pout—“your nipples are timid, they hold themselves folded so neatly. Can they not swell and thrust like mine?” She stood on tiptoe, leaned her upper body a little forward and exclaimed, “Why, look, they touch exactly! Our bosoms fit together so perfectly, my dear. Might not the rest of us?”

  And she pressed her lips to the lips of Something Delicate. The woman did not close her eyes or change expression in the least, but Jadestone Doll’s cheeks hollowed. After a moment, she drew her face back just far enough to say delightedly, “There! Your nipples can grow, I knew it! Do you not feel them unfolding against mine?” She leaned forward for another probing kiss, and that time Something Delicate did close her eyes, as if in fear that something unintended might show in them.

  They stood like that, immobile, long enough for me to capture a picture of them: Jadestone Doll still on tiptoe, the two of them touching nowhere but at lips and breasts. Then the girl reached to the waist of the woman’s skirt, and deftly undid the fastening of it, so that it dropped rustling to the floor. I was close enough to see the just perceptible ripple of the woman’s muscles as she tightened her long legs protectively together. After a moment, Jadestone Doll undid her own skirt and let it fall around her feet. She had worn nothing underneath it, so she was now entirely naked except for her golden sandals. But when she pressed the entire length of her body against that of Something Delicate, she realized that the woman, like any decent woman, still wore an undergarment.

  Jadestone Doll stepped away and gazed at her with mingled amusement, fondness, and mild annoyance, and she said sweetly, “I shall not remove your final modest covering, Something Delicate. I shall not even ask you to do so. I shall make you want to.”

  The girl queen took the woman’s hand and tugged, so that she walked, and they crossed the room to the big, soft, canopied bed. They lay on top of it, with no covering over them, and I moved closer with my chalks and papers.

  Well, yes, Fray Jerónimo, there is more. After all, I was there, I saw everything, I have forgotten nothing. But of course you may be excused from hearing of it, if that is your wish.

  I might say to you remaining reverend scribes that I have seen rape in my time. I have seen soldiers, ours and yours, violently assault their women captives. But in all my life I have never seen a female so violated in her soul as well as in her sexual parts—so insidiously, thoroughly, ruinously, and horrifyingly violated—as was Something Delicate by Jadestone Doll. And what has made it remain in my memory, more stark than any remembered rape of a woman by a man, is that the adolescent girl manipulated the married woman, never once by force or command, but by gentle touches and caresses that at last brought Something Delicate to a point of paroxysm after which she was no longer responsible for her behavior.

  It might be appropriate here for me to mention that, in our language, when we speak of seducing a woman, we say, “I caress her with flowers….”

  Something Delicate lay supine and determinedly indifferent for a while, and only Jadestone Doll did anything. She used just her lips and tongue and the very tips of her fingers. She used them on the woman’s closed eyelids and their lashes, on the woman’s earlobes, the hollow of her throat, the cleft between her breasts, the length and breadth of her exposed body, the dimple of her navel, up and down her legs. Repeatedly she used the tip of her finger or tongue to trace slow spirals around one of the woman’s breasts before at last tweaking or licking the hardened upright nipple. The girl did not again press any passionate kiss upon Something Delicate, but she kept coming back from her other activities merely to flick her tongue teasingly across the woman’s closed mouth. And gradually the woman’s own lips, like her teats, became swollen and ruddy. Her pale-copper skin, at first smooth, began to prickle all over with gooseflesh, and then to tremble in places.

  Jadestone Doll occasionally would have to stop her fondlings and clutch tight to the woman, her body writhing. Something Delicate, even with her eyes closed, could not help feeling and knowing what was happening to the girl. Only a stone statue could have remained unaffected by it, and even the most virtuous, reluctant, frightened woman is no statue. The next time the young queen helplessly began to shudder, Something Delicate made a sort of cooing noise, as a mother might make to a distressed child. She moved her hands to lift Jadestone Doll’s head from her bosom, brought it up to her own, and for the first time herself implanted a kiss. Her lips forced the girl’s open, and her cheeks hollowed deeply, and a muffled whimper came from both the crushed-together mouths, and both bodies palpitated together, and the woman dropped one of her hands to rip away her undergarment from between them.

  After that, Something Delicate again lay still, and closed her eyes again, and bit the back of her hand, which did not prevent a sob escaping her. Jadestone Doll, when her panting had abated, again was the only one moving on the rumpled bed. But the woman was now also naked, vulnerable in every part, and the girl had more places to which to give attention. For a while, Something Delicate kept her legs pressed tight together. But slowly, little by little, as if she had nothing to do with it, the woman let her muscles slacken and her legs relax, and they parted a little, and a little more….

  Jadestone Doll burrowed her head between them, seeking what she had once described to me as “the little pink pearl.” That went on for some time, and the woman, as if being tortured, made many and various small noises, and finally a violent movement. When she recovered, she must have decided that, having now abandoned herself so far, no further abandonment could further abase her. Because Something Delicate began doing to Jadestone Doll what the girl was still doing to her. That occasioned a variety of couplings. Sometimes they would be clasped in embrace like a man and a woman, kissing mouth to mouth while their pelvises rubbed together. Sometimes they would lie reversed on the bed, each hugging the other’s hips while she used her tongue as a miniature but much more nimble simulacrum of a man’s member. Sometimes they would lie so that their thighs overlapped and only their lower bodies touched, straining to bring their little pink pearls into contact and mutual friction.

  In that posture, they reminded me of the legend which tells how the race of humankind came into being. It was said that, after the eras when the earth was inhabited first by gods and then by giants, the gods decided to bequeath the world to human beings. Since there were then no such things, the gods had to create them, and they did: making a few men and an equal number of women. But the gods designed them badly, for those early humans had bodies that ended below the waist in a kind of smooth knob. According to the legend, the gods intended modestly to conceal the people’s genitals, though that is hard to believe, since the gods and goddesses are hardly notorious for their own sexual modesty.

  At any rate, those ea
rly people were able to hop about on the stumps of their bodies, and to enjoy all the beauties of the world they had inherited, but they could not enjoy each other. And they wanted to, because, concealed or no, their separate sexes mightily attracted each other. Happily for the future of mankind, those early people contrived a way to overcome their handicap. They bounded high, a man and a woman together, and in midair merged their lower bodies, the way some insects mate on the wing. Exactly how they managed that coupling, the legend does not tell, nor how the women delivered the babies thus conceived. But they did, and the next generation was complete with legs and accessible genital organs. Watching Jadestone Doll and Something Delicate in that position where they were rubbing their tipíli parts urgently together, I could not help but think of those first humans and their determination to copulate despite their having nothing to do it with.

  I should mention that the woman and the girl, whatever intricate positions they assumed, and however avidly they fondled one another, did not thrash and bounce about as much as a man and a woman do when engaged in that act. Their movements were sinuous, not angular; graceful, not gross. Many times, however invisibly busy some parts of both of them undoubtedly were, the two appeared to me to be as still as if they slept. Then one or both would shiver, or stiffen, or jerk, or writhe. I lost count, but I know that Something Delicate and Jadestone Doll each came to many more climaxes that night than either could have achieved with the most virile and enduring man.

  In between those small convulsions, though, they stayed in their several poses long enough for me to make many drawings of their bodies, separately or intertwined. If some of the pictures were smudged or drawn with a trembly line, it was not the fault of the models, except insofar as their doings agitated the artist. I was no statue, either. Several times, watching them, I was racked by sympathetic shudderings, and twice my own unruly member …