Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “I have not known every woman,” I said, “and I have no wish to, now that I have the best of all.”

  But Your Excellency is not interested in such homely details. I think I might best make you see and appreciate Zyanya by comparing her to the plant we call the metl—though of course the metl is nothing like as beautiful as she was, and it does not love or speak or laugh.

  The metl, Your Excellency, is that man-high green or blue plant you have taught us to call the maguey. Bountiful and generous and handsome to look at, the maguey must be the most useful plant that grows anywhere. Its long, curved, leathery leaves can be cut and laid overlapping to make a watertight roof for a house. Or the leaves can be crushed to a pulp, pressed, and dried into paper. Or the leaf fibers can be separated and spun into any kind of cord from rope to thread. The thread can be woven into a rough but serviceable cloth. The hard, sharp spines that outline each leaf can serve as needles, pins, or nails. They served our priests as instruments with which to torture and mutilate and mortify themselves.

  The leaf shoots that grow nearest the earth are white and tender, and can be cooked to make a delicious sweet. Or they can be dried to make fuel for a long-burning, smokeless hearth fire, and the resultant clean white ash is used for everything from surfacing bark paper to making soap. Cut away the central leaves of the maguey, scoop out its heart, and in the hollow will collect the plant’s clear sap. It is tasty and nutritious to drink. Smeared on the skin, it prevents wrinkles, rashes, and blemishes; our women used it extensively for that. Our men preferred to let the maguey juice sit and ferment into the drunk-making octli, or pulque, as you call it. Our children liked the clear sap boiled down to a syrup, when it is almost as thick and sweet as bees’ honey.

  In brief, the maguey offers every part and particle of its being for the good of us who grow and tend it. And Zyanya, besides being incomparably more, was rather like that. She was good in every part, in every way, in every action, and not just to me. Though of course I enjoyed the best of her, I never knew another person who did not love and esteem and admire her. Zyanya was not only Always, she was everything.

  But I must not waste Your Excellency’s time with sentimentality. Let me return to telling things in the order in which they happened.

  After our escape from the murderous Zyú and our survival of the earthquake, it took me and Zyanya fully seven days to return to Tecuantépec by the overland route. Whether the quake had annihilated the savages or made them assume that it had annihilated us, I do not know, but no one pursued us, and we were not otherwise bothered in our crossing of the mountains, except by occasional thirst and hunger. I had long ago lost my burning crystal to the robbers on the isthmus, and I carried no fire-drilling device, and we did not ever get quite hungry enough to eat raw meat. We found sufficient wild fruits and berries and birds’ eggs, all of which we could eat raw, and they also provided enough moisture to sustain us between the infrequent mountain springs. At night, we piled up billows of dry leaves and slept in them intertwined for mutual warmth and other mutual comforting.

  We were both perhaps a bit thinner when we arrived again in Tecuantepec; we were certainly ragged and barefoot and footsore, our sandals having worn out on the mountain rocks. We trudged into the inn yard wearily and gratefully, and Béu Ribé ran out to greet us, her face expressing a mixture of concern, exasperation, and relief.

  “I thought you had disappeared, like our father, and would never come back!” she said, half laughing, half scolding, as she ardently hugged first Zyanya then me. “The moment you were out of sight, I told myself it was a foolish venture, and a dangerous …”

  Her voice faltered, as she looked from one to the other of us, and once again I saw that smile lose its wings. She brushed her hand lightly across her face, and repeated, “Foolish … dangerous …” Her eyes widened when they looked more closely at her sister, and they moistened when they looked at me.

  Though I have lived many years and known many women, I still do not know how one of them can so instantly and surely perceive when another has lain with a man for the first time, when she has made the irreversible change from maiden to woman. Waiting Moon regarded her younger sister with shock and disappointment, and me with anger and resentment.

  I said hastily, “We are going to be married.”

  Zyanya said, “We hope you will approve, Béu. You are, after all, the head of the family.”

  “Then you might have said something before!” the older girl said, in a strangled voice. “Before you—” She seemed to choke on that. Then her eyes were no longer moist but blazing. “And not just any outlander, but a brutish Mexícatl who lusts and ruts without discrimination. If you had not been so conveniently available, Zyanya”—her voice got even louder and uglier—“he would probably have come back with a filthy Zyú female dangling from his insatiable long—”

  “Béu!“ Zyanya gasped. “I have never heard you speak so. Please! I know this seems sudden, but I assure you, Záa and I love each other.”

  “Sudden? Sure?” Waiting Moon said wildly, and turned to rage at me. “Are you sure? You have not yet sampled every last woman in the family!”

  “Béu!“ Zyanya begged again.

  I tried to be placative, but sounded only craven. “I am not a noble of the pípiltin. I can marry only one wife.” That earned me a glance from Zyanya not much more tender than her sister’s glare. I quickly added, “I want Zyanya for my wife. I would be honored, Béu, if I might call you sister.”

  “Very well! But just to tell the sister good-bye. Then begone and take your—your choice with you. Thanks to you, she has here not honor, not respectability, not name, not home. No priest of the Ben Záa will marry you.”

  “We know that,” I said. “We will go to Tenochtítlan for the ceremony.” I put firmness into my voice. “But it will be no shameful or clandestine thing. We will be wed by one of the high priests of the court of the Uey-Tlatoáni of the Mexíca. Your sister has chosen an outlander, yes, but no worthless vagabond. And marry me she will, with your blessing or without it.”

  There was a long interval of tense silence. Tears trickled down the girls’ almost identically beautiful, almost identically uneasy faces, and sweat trickled down mine. We three stood like the corners of a triangle bound by invisible straps of óli drawing more and more impossibly taut. But before anything snapped, Béu relaxed the strain. Her face wilted and her shoulders slumped and she said:

  “I am sorry. Please forgive me, Zyanya. And brother Záa. Of course you have my blessing, my loving good wishes for your happiness. And I beg that you will forget the other words I spoke.” She tried to laugh at herself, but the laugh cracked in the middle. “It was sudden, as you say. So unexpected. It is not every day I lose … a beloved sister. But now come inside. Get clean and fed and rested.”

  Waiting Moon has hated me from that day to this.

  Zyanya and I stayed another ten days or so at the inn, but keeping a discreet distance between us. As before, she shared a room with her sister and I inhabited one of my own, and she and I were careful not to make any public displays of affection. While we recovered from our abortive expedition, Béu seemed to recover from the displeasure and melancholy our return had caused. She helped Zyanya choose from her personal belongings, and from their mutual possessions, the comparatively few and dear and irreplaceable things she would carry away with her.

  Since I was again without so much as a cacao bean, I borrowed a small quantity of trade currency from the girls, for traveling expenses, and an additional sum which I sent by messenger to Nozibe, to be delivered to whatever family that ill-fated boatman might have left bereaved. I also reported the incident to the bishósu of Tecuantépec, who said he would in turn inform the Lord Kosi Yuela of that latest savagery committed by the despicable Zyú Huave.

  On the eve of our departure, Béu surprised us with a festive party, such as she would have done to celebrate if Zyanya had been marrying a man of the Ben Záa. It was attended by all the in
n’s current patrons and by invited guests from among the city folk. There were hired musicians to play, and splendidly costumed dancers doing the genda lizáa, which is the traditional “spirit of kinship” dance of the Cloud People.

  With at least a semblance of good feeling having been restored among the three of us, Zyanya and I bade farewell to Béu the next morning, with solemn kisses. We did not go immediately or directly toward Tenochtítlan. She and I each carrying a pack, we headed straight north across the flatland isthmus, the way I had come to Tecuantépec. And, since I had someone other than myself to think of, I was especially wary of villains lurking on the road. I carried my maquáhuitl ready to my hand, and kept a sharp lookout wherever the terrain might have concealed an ambush.

  We had not walked more than one-long-run when Zyanya remarked simply, but with an excited anticipation in her voice, “Just think. I am going farther from home than I have ever been.”

  Those few words made my heart swell, and made me love her the more. She was venturing into what was for her a vast unknown, and doing it trustingly, because she was in my keeping. I glowed with pride, and with thankfulness that her tonáli and mine had brought us together. All the other people in my life were left over from yesterday or yesteryear, but Zyanya was someone fresh and new, not made commonplace by familiarity.

  “I never believed,” she said, spreading wide her arms, “that there could be so much land of nothing but land!”

  Even viewing the lackluster vista of the isthmus, she could thus exclaim, and make me smile and share her enthusiasm. It was to be like that through all our todays and tomorrows together. I would have the privilege of introducing her to things prosaic to me but new and foreign to her. And she, in her unjaded enjoyment of them, would make me see them, too, as if they were sparklingly novel and exotic.

  “Look at this bush, Záa. It is alive, aware! And it is afraid, poor thing. See? When I touch a twig, it folds all its leaves and flowers tight shut, and reveals thorns like white fangs.”

  She might have been a young goddess lately born of Teteoínan, mother of the gods, and newly sent down from the skies to get acquainted with the earth. For she found mystery and wonderment and delight in every least detail of the world—including even me, even herself. She was as spirited and sportive as the never still light that lives inside an emerald. I was continually to be surprised by her unexpected attitudes toward things I took for granted.

  “No, we will not undress,” she said, our first night on the road. “We will make love, oh yes, but clothed, as we did in the mountains.” I naturally protested, but she was firm, and she explained why. “Let me save that one last small modesty until after our wedding, Záa. And our being naked then, for the very first time together, should make it all so new and different that we might never have done it before.”

  I repeat, Your Excellency, that a full account of our married life would be most undramatic, because feelings like contentment and happiness are much harder to convey in words than are mere events. I can only tell you that I was then twenty and three years old, and Zyanya was twenty, and lovers of that age are capable of the most extreme and enduring attachment they ever will know. In any event, that first love between us never diminished; it grew in depth and intensity, but I cannot tell you why.

  Now that I think back, though, Zyanya may have come close to putting it into words, on that long-ago day we set out together. One of the comical swift-runner birds scampered along beside us, the first she had ever seen, and she said pensively, “Why should a bird prefer the ground to the sky? I would not, if I had wings to fly with. Would you, Záa?”

  Ayyo, her spirit did have wings, and I partook of that joyous buoyancy. From the first, we were comrades who shared an ever unfolding adventure. We loved the adventure and we loved each other. No man and woman could ever have asked anything more of the gods than what they had given to me and Zyanya—except perhaps the promise of her name: that it be for always.

  On the second day, we caught up to a northbound company of Tzapotéca traders, whose porters were laden with tortoiseshell of the hawkbill turtle. That would be sold to the Olméca artisans, to be heated and twisted and fashioned into various ornaments and inlays. The traders made us welcome to their company and, though Zyanya and I could have traveled faster on our own, for safety’s sake we fell in with them and accompanied them to their destination, the crossroad trading town of Coátzacoálcos.

  We had scarcely arrived in the marketplace there—and Zyanya had begun excitedly flitting among the goods-piled stalls and ground cloths—when a familiar voice bawled at me, “You are not dead, then! Did we throttle those bandits for nothing?”

  “Blood Glutton!” I exclaimed happily. “And Cozcatl! What brings you to these far parts?”

  “Oh, boredom,” said the old warrior in a bored voice.

  “He lies. We were worried about you,” said Cozcatl, who was no longer a little boy, but had grown to adolescence, all knees and elbows and gawky awkwardness.

  “Not worried, bored!“ insisted Blood Glutton. “I ordered a house built for me in Tenochtítlan, but the supervising of stonemasons and plasterers is not the most edifying work. Also they hinted that they could do better without my ideas. And Cozcatl found his school studies somewhat tame after all his adventures abroad. So the boy and I decided to track you and find out what you have been doing for these two years.”

  Cozcatl said, “We could not be sure we were on the right trail—until we first came here and found four men trying to sell some valuables. We recognized your bloodstone mantle clasp.”

  “They could not satisfactorily account for their possession of the articles,” said Blood Glutton. “So I hauled them before the market tribunal. They were tried, convicted, and dispatched by the flower garland. Ah, well, they doubtless deserved it for some other misdeed. Anyway, here is your clasp, your burning crystal, your nose trinket …”

  “You did well,” I said. “They robbed and beat me. They thought me dead.”

  “So did we, but we hoped you were not,” said Cozcatl. “And we had no other demands on our time. So we have just been exploring up and down this coast ever since. And you, Mixtli, what have you been doing?”

  “Also exploring,” I said. “Seeking treasure, as usual.”

  “Find any?” growled Blood Glutton.

  “Well, I found a wife.”

  “A wife.” He hawked and spat on the ground. “And we feared you had only died.”

  “The same old grouch.” I laughed. “But when you see her …”

  I looked about the square and called her name and in a moment she came, looking as queenly as Pela Xila or the Lady of Tolan, but infinitely more beautiful. In just that little time, she had purchased a new blouse and skirt and sandals, and changed from her travel-stained garb, and bought what we called a living jewel—a many-colored iridescent beetle —to fix in that lightning streak of white hair. I think I gazed as admiringly as did Cozcatl and Blood Glutton.

  “You were right to chide me, Mixtli,” the old man conceded. “Ayyo, a maiden of the Cloud People. She is indeed a treasure beyond price.”

  “I recognize you, my lady,” Cozcatl said gallantly to her. “You were the younger goddess at that temple disguised as an inn.”

  When I had made introductions all around—and my two old friends, I do believe, had fallen instantly in love with Zyanya—I said, “We are well met. I was on my way to Xicalánca, where yet another treasure waits for me. I think the four of us can transport it and I need not hire porters.”

  So we went on, by leisurely stages, through those lands where the women all chewed like manatees and the men all walked bent by their names, to Cupílco’s capital city, and to the workshop there of the Master Tuxtem, and he brought out the items he had fashioned of the giant teeth. Since I knew something of the quality of the material I had given him to work with, I was not quite as taken by surprise as were Zyanya, Cozcatl, and Blood Glutton, when we saw what he had done with it.

&
nbsp; As I had requested, there were figurine gods and goddesses of the Mexíca, some of them standing as tall as the length of my forearm, and there were engraved dagger handles and combs, which I had also suggested. But in addition there were skulls as big as those of young children, intricately etched with scenes from old legends. There were artfully worked little boxes with fitted lids, and copáli perfume vials with stoppers of the same material. There were chest medallions and mantle clasps and whistles and brooches, in the shape of tiny jaguars and owls and exquisite little naked women and flowers and rabbits and laughing faces.

  On many of those things the detail was so fine that it could be properly appreciated only by scrutiny through my close-viewing crystal. Seen thus, even the tipíli was visible on a naked-girl ornament no bigger than a maguey thorn. As instructed, Tuxtem had not wasted a fragment or sliver: there were also nose plugs and ear plugs and labrets and dainty ear picks and toothpicks. All those things, large and small, shone mellow-white, as if they possessed an interior light of their own, as if they had been carved from the moon. And they were as gratifying to touch as they were to look at, the artisan having polished their surfaces as smooth as the skin of Zyanya’s breasts. Like her skin, they invited, “Touch me, caress me, fondle me.”

  “You promised, young Lord Yellow Eye,” said Tuxtem, “that only worthy persons would ever own any of these things. Permit me the presumption of choosing the first worthy of them.”

  At which he stooped to kiss the earth to Zyanya, then rose and hung around her neck a delicate, sinuous chain of hundreds of links, the which must have cost him incalculable time to carve from a single length of hard tooth. Zyanya smiled radiantly and said, “The Master Tuxtem does me honor, in truth. There can never again be such works as these. They should be reserved to your gods.”