Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “We are pleasantly surprised to see that you have returned intact, Pochtécatl Mixtli,” he said gruffly. “Was your expedition a success, then?”

  “I believe it was profitable, Revered Speaker,” I replied. “When the pochtéca elders have evaluated my cargo, you can judge for yourself from your treasury’s share. Meanwhile, my lord, I hope you may find this chronicle of interest.”

  At which I handed to one of his attendants the travel-battered books I had so faithfully compiled. They contained much the same account I have given you, reverend friars, except that they omitted such nonessentials as my encounters with women, but included considerably more description of terrain and communities and peoples, also many maps I had drawn.

  Ahuítzotl thanked me and said, “We and our Speaking Council will examine them most attentively.”

  I said, “In the event that some of your advisers may be old and weak of eye, Lord Speaker, they would find this helpful,” and I handed over one of the crystals. “Of these I brought a number to sell, but the biggest and most brilliant I bring as a gift to the Uey-Tlatoáni.”

  He did not seem much impressed until I asked his permission to approach and demonstrate to him how it could be employed for close scrutiny of word pictures or of anything else. Then I led him to an open window and, using a scrap of bark paper, showed him how it could also be used for starting fires. He was enthralled and he thanked me profusely.

  Long afterward, I was told that Ahuítzotl carried his fire-making stone on every war campaign in which he took part, but that he delighted more in making a less practical peacetime use of it. That Revered Speaker is remembered to this day for his irascible temper and capricious cruelties; his name has become part of our language: any troublesome person is now called an ahuítzotl. But it seems the tyrant had a streak of childish prankishness as well. In conversation with any one of his most staid and dignified wise men, he would maneuver him toward a window. Then, unnoticed, Ahuítzotl would hold his burning crystal so that it aimed the sun’s painfully hot dot onto some tender place like the back of the man’s bare knee—and the Revered Speaker would bellow with laughter to see the old sage leap like a young rabbit.

  From the palace, I went back to the hotel to collect Cozcatl and Blood Glutton, both also newly clean and well dressed, and our two bundles of goods. Those we took to The House of Pochtéca, and we were immediately shown into the presence of the three elders who had helped send us on our way. While cups of magnolia-scented chocolate were handed around, Cozcatl unfolded our bigger bale for the inspection of its contents.

  “Ayyo!“ said one of the old men. “You have brought a respectable fortune in plumes alone. What you must do is to get the richer nobles to bid for them in gold dust, until the price is as high as it will go, and only then let the Revered Speaker know of the existence of this trove. Simply to maintain his own supremacy of adornment, he will pay more than the highest price bid.”

  “As you advise, my lords,” I concurred, and motioned for Cozcatl to open the smaller bundle.

  “Ayya!“ said another of the old men. “Now here, I fear, you have been overly impetuous.” He dolefully fingered two or three of the crystals. “These are nicely shaped and polished but, I regret to tell you, jewels they are not. These are bits of mere quartz, a more common stone even than jadestone, and with no religious associations to give it the adventitious worth of jadestone.”

  Cozcatl could not suppress a giggle, nor Blood Glutton a knowing smirk. I myself smiled as I said, “But observe, my lords,” and I showed them the two properties of the crystals, and instantly they were in a ferment of excitement.

  “Unbelievable!” said one of the elders. “You have brought something absolutely new to Tenochtítlan!”

  “Where did you find them?” said another. “No, do not even think of answering. Forgive me for asking. A treasure unique should be the discoverer’s alone.”

  The third said, “We will offer the bigger ones to the higher nobles and—”

  I interrupted to point out that all the crystals, big and small, performed equally well as object enlargers and fire starters, but he impatiently hushed me.

  “That matters not. Each pili will want a crystal of a size befitting his rank and his sense of self-importance. I suggest that you sell each by its weight, and start the bidding at eight times their weight in gold. With the pípiltin topping each other’s bids, you will get considerably more.”

  I gasped in astonishment. “But my lords, that could earn us more than my weight in gold! Even after the shares paid to the Snake Woman and to this honorable society … and even divided three ways … it would put all three of us among the wealthiest men in Tenochtítlan!”

  “You object to that?”

  I stuttered, “It—it scarcely seems right. To profit so richly from our very first venture … and from common quartz, as you remark … and from a product I can supply in quantity. Why, I can provide a burning crystal for every humblest household in all the domains of The Triple Alliance.”

  One of the elders said sharply, “Perhaps you can, but if you have good sense you will not. You have said that the Revered Speaker now possesses one of these magic stones. As of now, only one hundred twenty and six other nobles can own a similar crystal. My boy, they will bid outrageously, even if these things were made of compacted mud! Later, you can go and get more, for sale to still other nobles, but never more than these few at a time.”

  Cozcatl was beaming happily and Blood Glutton was near to drooling. I said, “I will certainly not persist in objecting to the prospect of substantial wealth.”

  “Oh, you three will be spending some of it without delay,” said another of the elders. “You have mentioned the shares due to the Tenochtítlan treasury and to our god Yacatecútli. Perhaps you are unaware of our tradition that every homecoming pochtécatl—if he comes home with an estimable profit—lays a banquet for all the other pochtéca who are in the city at the time.”

  I looked to my partners and they nodded without hesitation, so I said, “With the greatest of pleasure, my lords. But we are new to this …”

  “Happy to be of help,” said the same man. “Let us set it for the night of the day after tomorrow. We will throw open the facilities of this building for the occasion. We will also arrange for the provision of food, drink, musicians, dancers, female company, and of course we will see to the invitation of all the qualified and accessible pochtéca, while you may invite any other guests you like. Now”—he roguishly tilted his head—“this banquet can be one of modesty or extravagance, according to your taste and generosity.”

  I again silently consulted my partners, then said expansively, “It is our first. It should betoken our success. If you will be so kind, I should like to ask that every dish, every drink, every appointment be of the finest available, and regardless of the cost. Let this banquet be one to be remembered.”

  I, at least, remember it vividly.

  Hosts and guests, we all were dressed in our finest. Having become full-fledged and successful pochtéca, Cozcatl, Blood Glutton, and myself were entitled to wear certain gold and jeweled ornaments to mark our new station in life. But we confined ourselves to a modest few baubles. I wore only the bloodstone mantle clasp given me by the Lady of Tolan long ago, and a single small emerald in my right nostril. But my mantle was of the finest cotton, richly embroidered; my sandals were of alligator hide, laced to the knee; my hair, which I had let grow long during the journey, was caught up at the nape with a braided circlet of red leather.

  In the building’s courtyard, the carcasses of three deer sizzled and turned on spits over an immense bed of coals, and all the other foods provided were of comparable quality and quantity. Musicians played, but not too loudly to overwhelm the conversation. There was a bevy of beautiful women circulating among the crowd and, every so often, one of them would perform a graceful dance to the music. Three slaves of the establishment were appointed to do nothing but serve us three partners, and, when not occ
upied at that, they stood and waved vast feather fans over us. We were introduced to the other arriving pochtéca, and heard accounts of their own more notable excursions and acquisitions. Blood Glutton had invited four or five of his old-soldier comrades, and he and they were soon convivially drunk. Cozcatl and I knew no one in Tenochtítlan to invite, but one unexpected guest turned out to be an old acquaintance of mine.

  A voice at my side said, “Mole, you never cease to amaze me.” I turned to see the shriveled, cacao-skinned, gap-toothed man who had appeared at other signal moments in my life. On that occasion he was less grubby and better dressed, at least wearing a mantle over his loincloth.

  I said with a smile, “Mole no longer,” and raised my topaz and took a really clear look at him. Somehow, on doing that, I sensed that there was something about him more familiar than his merely being recognizable.

  He grinned almost evilly, saying, “I find you variously a nonentity, a student, a scribe, a courtier, a pardoned villain, a warrior hero. And now a prosperous merchant—gloating with a golden eye.”

  I said, “It was your own suggestion, venerable one, that I go and travel abroad. Why should I not enjoy my own banquet celebrating my own successful enterprise?”

  “Your own?” he asked mockingly. “As all your past achievements have been your own? Unaided? Single-handed?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, hoping with that disclaimer to parry the darker implications of his questions. “You will meet here my partners in this endeavor.”

  “This endeavor. Would it have been possible without that unexpected gift of goods and capital you invested in the journey?”

  “No,” I said again. “And I fully intend to thank the donor, with a share of—”

  “Too late,” he interrupted. “She is dead.”

  “She?” I echoed vacantly, for I had of course been thinking of my former patron, Nezahualpíli of Texcóco.

  “Your late sister,” he told me. “That mysterious gift was Tzitzitlíni’s bequest to you.”

  I shook my head. “My sister is dead, old man, as you have just remarked. And she certainly never had any such fortune to leave to me.”

  He went on, unheeding, “The Lord Red Heron of Xaltócan also died during your travels in the south. He called to his deathbed a priest of the goddess Tlazoltéotl, and such a sensational confession as he made could hardly be kept secret. Doubtless several of your distinguished guests here know the story, though they would be too polite to speak of it to you.”

  “What story? What confession?”

  “How Red Heron concealed his late son Pactli’s atrocity in the matter of your sister.”

  “It was never adequately concealed from me,” I said, with a snarl. “And you of all people know how I avenged his killing of her.”

  “Except that Pactli did not kill Tzitzitlíni.”

  That staggered me; I could only gape at the man.

  “The Lord Joy tortured and mutilated her, with fire and knife and vicious ingenuity, but it was not her tonáli to die of that torment. So Pactli spirited her off the island, with his father’s connivance and with at least the mute acquiescence of the girl’s own parents. Those things Red Heron confessed to Filth Eater, and when the priest made them publicly known they caused an uproar on Xaltócan. It grieves me to tell you also that your father’s body was found on a quarry floor, where evidently he jumped from the brink. Your mother has simply and cowardly fled. No one knows where, which is fortunate for her.” He started to turn away, saying indifferently, “I think that is all the news of occurrences since you left. Now shall we enjoy—?”

  “You wait!” I said fiercely, clutching the shoulder knot of his mantle. “You walking fragment of Míctlan’s darkness! Tell me the rest! What became of Tzitzitlíni? What did you mean about that gift having come from her?”

  “She bequeathed to you the entire sum she received—and Ahuítzotl paid a handsome price—when she sold herself to his menagerie here in Tenochtítlan. She would not or could not tell whence she came or who she was, so she was popularly known as the tapir woman.”

  Except that I still clutched his shoulder, I might have fallen. For a moment, everything and everybody about me disappeared, and I was looking down a long tunnel of memory. I saw again the Tzitzitlíni I had so adored: she of the lovely face and shapely form and willowy movement. Then I saw that revolting, immobile object in the menagerie of monstrosities, and I saw myself vomiting at the horror of it, and I saw the single sorrowful tear trickling from its one eye.

  My voice sounded hollow in my ears, as if I really did stand in a long tunnel, when I said accusingly, “You knew. Vile old man, you knew before Red Heron ever confessed. And you made me stand before her—and you mentioned the woman I had just lain with—and you asked me how would I like to—” I choked, nearly vomiting again at the recollection.

  “It is good that you got to see her one last time,” he said, with a sigh. “She died not long after. Mercifully, in my opinion, though Ahuítzotl was most annoyed, having paid so prodigally….”

  My vision returned to me, and I found that I was violently shaking the man and saying rather insanely, “I could never have eaten tapir meat in the jungle if I had known. But you knew all the time. How did you know?”

  He did not answer. He only said blandly, “It was believed that the tapir woman could not move that mass of bloated flesh. But somehow she toppled over, face forward, so that her tapir snout could not breathe, and she suffocated to death.”

  “Well, it is now your turn to perish, you accursed foreseer of evils!” I think I was out of my mind with grief and revulsion and rage. “You will go back to the Míctlan you came from!” And I shoved into the throng of banquet guests, only dimly hearing him say:

  “The menagerie keepers still insist that the tapir woman could not have died without assistance. She was young enough to have lived in that cage for many, many more years….”

  I found Blood Glutton and rudely interrupted his conversation with his soldier friends: “I have need of a weapon, and no time to fetch one from our lodgings. Are you carrying your dagger?”

  He reached under his mantle to the back binding of his loincloth, and said, with a hiccup, “Are you to do the carving of the deer meat?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to kill somebody.”

  “So early in the party?” He brought out the short obsidian blade and squinted to see me better. “Are you killing anyone I know?”

  I said no again. “Only a nasty little man. Brown and wrinkled as a cacao bean. Small loss to anybody.” I reached out my hand. “Please, the dagger.”

  “Small loss!” Blood Glutton exclaimed, and withheld the knife. “You would assassinate the Uey-Tlatoáni of Texcóco? Mixtli, you must be as drunk as the proverbial four hundred rabbits!”

  “Assuredly somebody is!” I snapped. “Cease your babbling and give me the blade!”

  “Never. I saw the brown man when he arrived, and I recognize that particular disguise.” Blood Glutton tucked the knife away again. “He honors us with his presence, even if he chooses to do it in mummery. Whatever your fancied grievance, boy, I will not let you—”

  “Mummery?” I said. “Disguise?” Blood Glutton had spoken coolly enough to cool me somewhat.

  One of the soldier guests said, “Perhaps only we who have often campaigned with him are aware of it. Nezahualpíli likes sometimes to go about thus, so he may observe his fellows at their own level, not from the dais of a throne. Those of us who have known him long enough to recognize him do not remark on it.”

  “You are all lamentably sodden,” I said. “I know Nezahualpíli too, and I know, for one thing, that he has all his teeth.”

  “A dab of oxitl to blacken two or three of them,” said Blood Glutton, with another hiccup. “Lines of oxitl to feign wrinkles on a face darkened by walnut oil. And he has a talent for making his body appear crabbed and wizened, his hands gnarled like those of a very old man….”

  “But really he needs no masks
or contortions,” said the other. “He can simply sprinkle himself with dust of the road and seem a total stranger.” The soldier hiccuped in his turn and suggested, “If you must slay a Revered Speaker tonight, young lord host, go after Ahuítzotl, and oblige all the rest of the world as well.”

  I went away from them, feeling somewhat foolish and confused, on top of all my other feelings of anguish and anger and—well, they were many and tumultuous….

  I went looking again for the man who was Nezahualpíli—or a sorcerer, or an evil god—no longer intending to knife him but to wring from him the answers to a great many more questions. I could not find him. He was gone, and so was my appetite for the banquet and the company and the merriment. I slipped out of The House of Pochtéca and went back to the hostel and began packing into a small bag only the essentials I would need for traveling. Tzitzi’s little figurine of the love goddess Xochiquétzal came to my hand, but my hand flinched away as if it had been red hot. I did not put it into the bag.

  “I saw you leave and I followed you,” said young Cozcatl from the doorway of my room. “What has happened? What are you doing?”

  I said, “I have no heart to tell of all that has happened, but it seems to be common gossip. You will hear it soon enough. And because of it I am going away for a time.”

  “May I come with you?”

  “No.”

  His eager face fell, so I said, “I think it best that I be alone for some while, to plan what is to become of the rest of my life. And I am not now leaving you a defenseless and masterless slave, as you once feared. You are your own master, and a rich one. You will have your share of our fortune, as soon as the elders convey it. I charge you to keep safe my share, and these other belongings of mine, until I return.”