Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  Michihuácan was and is a vast and rich country, as rich as the domain of the Mexíca ever was. Its Uandákuari, or Revered Speaker, reigned over—or at least collected tribute from—a region stretching from the fruit orchards of Xichú in the eastern Otomí lands to the trading port of Patámkuaro on the southern ocean. And, though the Purémpecha were constantly on guard against military encroachment by us Mexíca, they did not balk at exchanging their riches for ours. Their traders came to our Tlaltelólco market. They even sent swift-messengers daily bearing fresh fish for the delectation of our nobles. In return, our traders were allowed to travel throughout Michihuácan unmolested, as I and my seven pretended porters did.

  Had we really been of a mind to barter along the way, we could have secured many valuable things: oyster-heart pearls; pottery of rich glazes; utensils and ornaments made of copper, silver, shell, and amber; the brilliant lacquerware that could be found nowhere else but in Michihuácan. Those lacquered objects, intense black etched with gold and colors, might take an artisan months or years to make, since they varied in size from simple trays to immense folding screens.

  We travelers could have acquired any local product except the mystery metal of which I have spoken. No outlander was ever allowed a glimpse of that; even the weapons made of it were kept locked in armories, to be distributed to the soldiery only when they were needed. Since our Mexíca armies had never yet won a single battle against those weapons, none of our warriors had even been able to snatch from the battlefield so much as a dropped Purémpe dagger.

  Well, I did no trading, but I and my men did partake of some of the native foods new to us or seldom available to us—the honey liquor of Tláchco, for example. The rugged mountain country around that town literally hummed all day long. I could imagine that I heard the vibration made by the men underground digging the local silver, but aboveground I definitely could hear the buzz of the swarms and clouds and skeins of wild bees among the numberless flowers on those heights. And while the men scratched for the buried silver, their women and children worked at collecting the golden honey of those bees. Some of it they merely strained clear and sold for sweetening. Some of it they let dry in the sun until it became crystalline and sweeter yet. Some of the honey they converted—by a method kept as secret as that of making the killer metal—into a drink they called chápari, which was far more delicious and far more potent in its effect than the sour octli we Mexíca knew so well.

  Since the chápari, like the metal, was never exported outside Michihuácan, I and my men drank as much as we could while we were there. We also feasted on Michihuácan’s lake and river fish, frogs’ legs and eels, whenever we spent a night in a travelers’ hostel. As a matter of fact, we got rather weary of aquatic fare after a while, but those people have peculiar strictures against killing practically every edible game animal. A Purémpe will not hunt deer because he believes them to be manifestations of the sun god, and that is because, to his eyes, the male deer’s antlers resemble the sun’s beams. Not even squirrels can be trapped or blowpiped, because the Purémpecha priests, as filthy and shaggy as ours, were called tiuímencha, and that word means “black squirrels.” So most of the meals we took at inns were, when not fish, either wild or domestic fowl.

  We were offered rather more of a choice after we had eaten. I believe I have mentioned the Purémpecha’s attitude regarding sexual practices. An outlander might call it vilely loose or tolerantly broadminded, depending on his own attitude, but it certainly catered to every conceivable taste. Each time we finished our meal at an inn, the landlord would inquire of me and then my bearers, “Will you have a male or female sweet?” I did not answer for my men; I was paying them enough that they could indulge as they chose. But, with Zyanya waiting back home, I was not inclined to sample the offerings of every new country I visited, as I had done in my bachelor days. I invariably replied to the innkeeper, “Neither, thank you,” and the innkeeper would persist, without a blink or a blush, “Would you prefer green fruit, then?”

  It may really have been necessary for a pleasure-seeking traveler to specify the precise kind of bedmate he wanted—grown woman or man, young girl or boy—for in Michihuácan it is sometimes hard for a stranger to tell which sex is which, because the Purémpecha observe another peculiar practice, or did in those days. The folk of every class higher than slaves depilated their body of every removable hair. They shaved or plucked or otherwise scoured clean all the hair from their head, the eyebrows from above their eyes, any slightest trace of fuzz from beneath their arms or between their legs. Men, women, and children, they had absolutely no hair but their eyelashes. And, in contrast to whatever lewdnesses they may have performed in the nighttime, they went about during the day modestly clothed in several layers of mantles or blouses, which was why it could be difficult to tell the females from the males.

  At first, I assumed that the smooth and glossy hairlessness of the Purémpecha represented either their singular notion of beauty or a passing affectation of fashion. But there may have been an obsessively sanitary reason for it. In my study of their language I discovered that Poré has at least eight different words for dandruff and about as many more for louse.

  We came to the seacoast at an immense blue harbor protected by enfolding arms of land from the battering of heavy seas and sea storms. There was situated the port village called Patámkuaro by its inhabitants and Acamepúlco by our visiting Mexíca traders, both the Poré and Náhuatl names given because of the great swales of cane and reed growing there. Acamepúlco was a fishing port in its own right, and also a market center for the peoples living along the coast to the east and west, who came in canoes to dispose of their own gleanings from the sea and the land: fish, turtles, salt, cotton, cacao, vanilla, other typical products of those Hot Lands.

  It was my intention that time not to hire but to buy four roomy, seagoing canoes, and for the eight of us to paddle them, so that we need have no witnesses in attendance. But that was more easily intended than accomplished. The familiar acáli of our home lake district was easily carved from the soft pine that grew there. But a sea canoe was made of the formidably heavy and hard mahogany, and it could take months to make. Almost all the canoes at Acamepúlco had been in use through generations of their owner families, and no family was inclined to sell one, since that would mean a suspension of all profitable fishing or hauling while a replacement was hacked to shape and burned hollow and rasped smooth. But I did finally acquire the four I needed, though it took frustrating days of negotiation, and a far greater outlay of gold dust than I had meant to spend.

  And to row them southeastward down the coast, two of us in each, was not so easy either. We all had some experience of lake canoeing, and those big inland lakes could sometimes be roughened by the wind, but we were unaccustomed to waters roiled by currents and tidal surges even in the calm weather that—I thank the gods—attended our sea voyage. Several of those staunch old warriors, whose stomachs had never been turned by all the nauseating horrors of war, were wretchedly sick for the first two or three days. I was not, perhaps because I had been to sea before. But we early learned not to hug the shore where the water’s motion was most violent and unpredictable. Though it made us all uneasy to be such a long swim from The One World, we stayed well out beyond the first billows of the breakers, only riding them in at sundown, to spend the nights gratefully on the soft and unheaving sands of the beach.

  That beach, as I had seen it do before, gradually darkened from gleaming white to dull gray and then to the sullen black of volcanic sands. And then that beach was interrupted by a suddenly jutting promontory: the mountain that walks in the water. Thanks to my topaz, I espied the mountain from afar, and, it being then late afternoon, I gave the order to make landfall on the beach.

  When we were seated around our campfire, I addressed my seven men, repeating the planned actions of our mission on the morrow, and adding, “Some of you may have reservations about raising your hand against a priest, even a priest of a
n alien god. Do not have. These priests will appear unarmed, and merely vexed at our intrusion, and helpless before our weapons. They are not. Given the least opportunity, they will slay every one of us, and carve us like boar meat, and eat us at their leisure. Tomorrow, when our work has been accomplished, we kill. We kill without mercy or we risk being killed. Remember that, and remember my signals.”

  When we pushed off through the combers again the next morning, we were no longer a young pochtécatl and his seven elder porters. We were a detachment of seven fearsome Mexíca warriors led by one not very old “old eagle” cuachic. We had undone the packs and donned the war regalia and armed ourselves with the weapons. I carried Blood Glutton’s cuachic insignia of shield and guidon staff, and wore his cuachic headdress. The only missing insigne of that rank was a bone through my nose, but my septum had never been pierced for such a thing. The seven soldiers were, like myself, all wearing clean white quilted armor. They had stuck feathers into their hair, which was drawn up into topknots, and had painted fierce many-colored designs on their faces. We each carried a maquáhuitl, a dagger, and a javelin.

  Our little fleet paddled boldly toward the mountain promontory, making no attempt at stealth, deliberately intending that the guardians there should see us come. And they did, they were waiting on the mountainside: at least twelve of the evil Zyú priests in their robes of ragged and patchy fur. We did not turn our canoes toward the beach to make an easy landing, but rowed on straight for them.

  I do not know whether it was the different season of the year, or whether it was because we approached from the western side of the mountain, but the ocean was in much less turmoil than it had been that time I and the Tzapotécatl boatman came upon it from the east. Nevertheless, the sea was still agitated enough that we unpracticed seafarers might well have splintered the boats and some of ourselves against the rocks, except that a number of the priests leapt down from boulder to boulder and waded into the water and drew our canoes into protected clefts. Of course they did it only because they knew and feared our Mexíca warrior costumes—which was what I had counted on.

  We wedged the craft securely there, and I left one soldier to guard them. Then I waved, the gesture including the priests as well as my men, and we all went bounding from rock to rock, through the thunders and spouts of surf, through the clouds and sheets of spray, onto the main slope of the mountain mass. The chief priest of the Sea God stood there, his arms folded across his chest to conceal the fact that he had no hands. He snarled something in his Huave dialect. When I merely raised my eyebrows, he tried Lóochi, and said with bluster:

  “What more you Mexíca come for now? We only keepers of god color, and you have that.”

  “Not all of it,” I said in the same tongue.

  He seemed slightly shaken by the brusque assurance with which I spoke, but he insisted, “We have no more.”

  “No, it is mine you have,” I said. “Some purple for which I paid much gold. Remember? On the day I did that.” With the flat of my maquáhuitl I slapped his arms apart so that the wrist stumps were visible. He knew me then, and his evil face became even uglier with impotent rage and hatred. The other priests on his either side spread to make a threatening ring about me and my warriors. There were two of them to each of us, but we held our javelins in a bristling circle. I said to the chief, “Lead us to the god’s cave.”

  His mouth worked for a moment, possibly trying other lies, before he said, “Your army emptied the cave of Tiat Ndik.”

  I motioned to the soldier next to me. He drove his javelin’s point deep into the belly of the priest standing at the chiefs left. The man shrieked, fell down, and rolled on the ground, clutching his abdomen and continuing to scream.

  I said, “That is to show we are in earnest. This is to show that we are in a hurry.” I gestured again, and the soldier jabbed again at the fallen man, that time skewering him through the heart and abruptly stopping his cries. “Now,” I said to the chief priest, “we will go to the grotto.”

  He swallowed and said no more; the demonstration had sufficed. With me and my javelin at his back, with my warriors prodding the remaining priests, he led the way over the jumbled rocks and down into the protected hollow and into the cave. I was much relieved to find that the god’s place had not been collapsed or buried by the earthquake. When we stood before the purple-daubed heap of stones simulating a statue, I indicated the leather flasks and dyed skeins of yarn heaped all about it, and said to the chief, “Tell your attendants to start carrying all this to our canoes.” He swallowed again, but said nothing. “Tell them,” I repeated, “or I cut next at your elbows, and then at your shoulders, and then elsewhere.”

  He hastily told them something in their language, and whatever he told them was convincing. With no words, but with many a murderous look at me, the unkempt priests began lifting and carrying the flasks and bales of yarn. My men accompanied them to the boats and back to the cave during the many trips it took them to shift the entire store of treasure. Meanwhile, I and the handless priest stayed by the statue, he immobilized by my javelin point held vertically pricking the underside of his jaw. I might have used the time to make him produce the packet of gold he had taken from me on that other occasion, but I did not. I preferred to leave the gold, wherever it was, as payment for what I was doing. It made me feel less like a plunderer and more like a trader concluding a slightly delayed but legitimate transaction.

  Not until the last of the flasks were being carried out of the cave did the chief priest speak again, with loathing in his voice: “You defiled holy place before. You angered Tiat Ndik so he sent the zyuüù to punish. He will do so again, or worse. This insult and loss he will not forgive. The Sea God will not let you go free with his purple.”

  “Oh, perhaps he will,” I said carelessly, “if I leave him a sacrifice of another color.” At that, I thrust my javelin upward and the point went all the way through jaw and tongue and palate into the man’s brain. He fell flat on his back, red blood fountaining from his mouth, and I had to brace my foot against his chin to yank the spear loose.

  I heard a concerted shout of consternation behind me. My soldiers were just then bunching all the other priests into the grotto, and they had seen their fallen chief. But I did not have to give any command or signal to my men. Before the priests could recover from their shocked surprise, to fight or flee, they were all dead.

  I said, “I promised a sacrifice to that heap of boulders there. Pile all the bodies on and around it.”

  When that was done, the god statue was no longer purple but shiny red, and the red was spreading over the floor of the whole cave. I do believe that Tiat Ndik must have been satisfied with the offering. We felt no earthquake on our way down to the canoes. Nothing interfered with our loading of the precious cargo or our launching of the then heavier boats. No Sea God churned up his element to prevent our paddling safely away, well out to sea and around the rock-littered waters at the tip of the promontory, out of the land of The Strangers. Without hindrance we rowed on eastward down the coast, and I never again set foot or laid eyes on the mountain that walks in the water.

  However, we all eight continued to wear our Mexíca battle costumes for the next few days, while we were still in Huave and Tzapotéca waters, while we passed Nozibe and other seaside villages—and the fishing boats whose puzzled crewmen timidly waved to us—until we were well past the Tecuantépec isthmus and offshore of the Xoconóchco cotton country. There we beached at night in a secluded spot. We burned our armor and other regalia, and buried all but a necessary few of our weapons, and remade our packs, to transport the leather flasks and dyed yarn.

  When we rowed away from there in the morning, we were dressed again as a pochtécatl and his porters. We landed later that day, quite openly, at the Mame village of Pijijía, and I sold our canoes—though at a pitifully low price, since the fisher folk there, as everywhere along the coast, already owned all the boats they needed. My men and I, after having been so long aflo
at, found that we lurched ludicrously when we tried to walk. So we spent two days in Pijijía to get reaccustomed to solid ground—and I had some interesting conversations with the Mame elders—before we took up our packs and moved on inland.

  You ask, Fray Toribio, why we had taken such trouble to make that long voyage first in the guise of traders, then as warriors, then as traders again.

  Well, the people of Acamepúlco knew that a trader had bought for himself and his porters four seagoing canoes, and the people of Pijijía knew that a similar group had sold similar canoes, and both peoples may have thought the circumstances odd. But those towns were so far distant from each other that they were unlikely ever to compare impressions, and they were both so far distant from the Tzapotéca and Mexíca capitals that I had little fear of their gossip’s ever reaching the ears of Kosi Yuela or Ahuítzotl.

  It was inevitable that the Zyú would soon discover the mass murder of their priests and the disappearance of their hoarded purple from the god’s cave. Though we had effectually silenced all the witnesses to the actual looting, there was every likelihood that other Zyú onshore had seen our approach to the sacred mountain or our departure from it. They would raise a clamor that would eventually be heard by the Bishósu Kosi Yuela and the Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl, and infuriate both of them. But the Zyú could only impute the atrocity to a bunch of battle-arrayed Mexíca warriors. Kosi Yuela might suspect Ahuítzotl of having played a trick to secure the treasure, but Ahuítzotl could honestly say he knew nothing of any Mexíca foragers in that area. I was wagering that the confusion would be such that the seagoing warriors could never be connected to the seagoing traders and that neither could ever be connected to me.