Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  I told her.

  “So is mine.”

  “It is not unpleasant.”

  “No. Decidedly not.”

  “They must be trained for this.”

  “But not for their own satisfaction. This one, anyway, is far too young.”

  “No. To enhance our pleasure, as the prince said.”

  “They might be punished if we rebuffed them.”

  I make those exchanges sound cool and dispassionate. They were not. We were speaking to each other in husky voices and in phrases broken by our involuntary gasps and movements.

  “Is yours a boy or a girl? I cannot reach far enough to—”

  “I cannot either. Does it matter?”

  “No. The head is smooth, but the face feels as if it might be beautiful. The eyelashes are long enough to—ah! yes!—with the eyelashes!”

  “They are well trained.”

  “Oh, exquisitely. I wonder if each is trained just to … I mean …”

  “Let us trade, and find out.”

  The two children did not object to changing places under the quilt, and their performance was not diminished by it. Perhaps my new one’s mouth was a trifle more warm and wet, having just come from …

  Well, not to linger too long on that episode, Zyanya and I were soon in a frenzy, ravenously kissing, clutching, and clawing at each other; doing other things above the waist while the children were even busier below. When I could hold back no longer, we coupled like jaguars mating, and the children, squeezed out from between us, swarmed all over our bodies, tiny fingers here, tiny tongues there.

  It happened not once, but more times than I can remember. Whenever Zyanya and I paused to rest, the children would snuggle for a time against our panting and perspiring bodies. Then very delicately they would insinuate themselves again, and start to tease and fondle. They would move back and forth from her to me, sometimes individually, sometimes together, so that for a while I would be attended by both of them and my wife—then both they and I would concentrate on her. It did not end until she and I were simply capable of no more, and we collapsed in the slumber of surfeit. We never did find out the sex or age or appearance of our accomplices. When I was awakened very early in the morning they were gone.

  What woke me was a scratching at the door. Only half conscious, I got up and opened it. I saw nothing but the predawn darkness of the balcony and the great well of the hall beyond, but then a finger scratched at my bare leg. I started and looked down, and there were the Lady Pair, as naked as myself. They were on all fours—on all eights, I should say; the crab again—and they were both grinning lasciviously up at my crotch.

  “Happy thing,” said Left.

  “His too,” said Right, jerking her pointed head—in the direction of the old man’s room, I assumed.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded, as ferociously as I could in a whisper.

  One of their eight extremities reached up and put Yquíngare’s dagger in my hand. I peered at the dark metal, even darker in that gloom, and ran my thumb along it. Hard and sharp it was, indeed.

  “You did it!” I said, feeling a rush of gratitude, almost affection, for the monster crouching at my feet.

  “Easy,” said Right.

  “He put clothes beside bed,” said Left.

  “He put that in me,” said Right, poking my tepúli and making me jump again. “Happy.”

  “I get bored,” said Left. “Nothing to do. Only be jiggled. I reach to clothes, feel around, find knife.”

  “She hold knife while I have happy,” said Right. “I hold knife while she have happy. She hold knife while—”

  “And now?” I interrupted.

  “Finally he snore. We bring knife. Now we go wake him. Have more happy.”

  As if they could hardly wait, before I could even thank them, the twins scuttled crabwise along the dark balcony. So I silently gave thanks instead to the apparently invigorating properties of mammalian milk, and went back inside the chamber to wait for sunrise.

  The courtiers of Tzintzuntzaní did not appear to be early risers. Only Crown Prince Tzímtzicha joined Zyanya and me for breakfast. I told the elderly prince that I and my company might as well be on our way. It seemed obvious that his father was enjoying his gift; we would not loiter about and make him interrupt his enjoyment just to entertain uninvited guests.

  The prince said blandly, “Well, if you feel you must go, we will not detain you. Except for one formality. A search of yourselves, your guards and slaves, your possessions and packs and whatever else you are taking away. No insult intended, I assure you. Even I must endure it whenever I leave here to travel anywhere.”

  I shrugged as indifferently as one can when a cluster of armed guards is closing in to ring one about. Discreetly and respectfully, but thoroughly, they patted the clothed parts of me and Zyanya, all over, then politely asked us to step out of our sandals for a moment. In the forecourt garden, they did the same to all our men, had all our packs emptied out, even fingered among the cushions of the litter chairs. Other people were up and about by then, most of them the children of the palace, who watched the proceedings with bright and knowing eyes. I looked at Zyanya. She was looking closely at the children, trying to see which of them … When she caught me smiling at her, she blushed darker than the small blade of metal—its wooden handle removed—which I was carrying at the back of my neck, hidden under my hair.

  The guards reported to Tzímtzicha that we were taking away nothing we had not come with. His watchfulness changed abruptly to friendliness and he said, “Then of course we insist that you take something, as a reciprocal gift for your Uey-Tlatoáni.” He handed me a small leather sack, which I later found to contain a quantity of the finest quality oyster-heart pearls. “And,” he went on, “something even more precious. It will just fit in that outsized litter of yours. I do not know what my father will do without it, his most prized possession, but it is his command.”

  At which he gave us the tremendous, bald, and big-breasted woman who had nursed the old man at the previous night’s meal.

  She was at least twice as heavy as the twins together had been, and all the way home the bearers cursed their lot in life. Every one-long-run or so, the whole train had to stop and stand fidgeting while the mammal unashamedly milked herself with her fingers to relieve the pressure. Zyanya laughed the whole way back, even laughed when we presented the gift to Ahuítzotl and he ordered me garrotted on the spot. But when I hastened to tell him what that milk-animal apparently could do for the wizened old Yquíngare, Ahuítzotl looked contemplative and canceled the order that I be strangled, and Zyanya laughed the more—so that even the Revered Speaker and I joined in the laughter.

  If Ahuítzotl ever did get any invigoration out of the milk woman, she was a more valuable plunder than the killer-metal dagger turned out to be. Our Mexíca metalsmiths studied it intently, and scratched deep into it, and took filings from it, and at last concluded that it was made by puddling melted copper and melted tin together. But try as they might, they never could get the proportions right, or the temperature, or something, and they never did succeed in duplicating the metal.

  However, since no tin existed in these lands except for those miniature hatchet-shaped scraps we used for trade currency—and since those came up the trade routes from some unknown country far, far to the south, passed from hand to hand—Ahuítzotl was at least able to order an immediate and continuing confiscation of all of them. So the tin disappeared from circulation as currency, and since we had no other use for it, I suppose Ahuítzotl simply stacked it away somewhere out of sight.

  In a way, it was a selfish gesture: if we Mexíca could not have the mystery metal, no one could. But the Purémpecha already owned enough weapons made of it to discourage Tenochtítlan’s declaring war on them ever again, and the stopping of the tin supply prevented them from making enough additional weapons that they could ever be emboldened to declare war on us. So I suppose I can claim that my mission into Mic
hihuácan was not totally without result.

  At the time we returned from Michihuácan, Zyanya and I had been man and wife for some seven years; and I daresay our friends looked on us as an old married couple; and she and I had come to regard our life as fixed in its course and impervious to change or disruption; and we were happy enough with each other that we were satisfied to have it so. But the gods willed otherwise, and Zyanya made it known to me in this way:

  We had been one afternoon visiting the First Lady at the palace. On our way out, we saw in a hallway that milk-animal woman we had brought from Tzintzuntzaní. I suspect that Ahuítzotl simply let her live on in the palace as a general servant, but on that occasion I made some humorous remark about his “wet nurse,” expecting Zyanya to laugh. Instead she said, rather sharply for her:

  “Záa, you must not make vulgar jokes about milk. About mother’s milk. About mothers.”

  I said, “Not if it gives you offense. But why should it?”

  Shyly, anxiously, apprehensively, she said, “Some time about the turn of the year, I … I will be … I will be a milk animal myself.”

  I stared at her. It took me a moment to comprehend and, before I could respond, she added, “I have suspected for some little time, but two days ago the physician confirmed it. I have been trying to think of a way to tell you in soft and sweet words. And now”—she sniffled unhappily—“I just snap it at you. Záa, where are you going? Záa, do not leave me!”

  I had gone off at an undignified run, but only to procure a palace litter chair so she would not have to walk the way back to our home. She laughed and said, “This is ridiculous,” when I insisted on lifting her onto the chair cushions. “But does it mean that you are pleased, Záa?”

  “Pleased?“ I exclaimed. “Pleased!”

  At our house, Turquoise looked worried to see me assisting the protesting Zyanya up the short flight of stairs. But I shouted to her, “We are going to have a baby!” and she shrieked with joy. At the noise, Ticklish came running from somewhere, and I commanded, “Ticklish, Turquoise, go this instant and give the nursery a good cleaning. Make all the necessary preparations. Run and buy whatever is lacking. A cradle. Flowers. Put flowers everywhere!”

  “Záa, will you hush?” said Zyanya, half amused, half embarrassed. “It will be months yet. The room can wait.”

  But the two slave women had already dashed obediently, exuberantly up the stairs. And, over her protests, I helped Zyanya up there too, and insisted she lie down for a rest after her exertion of visiting the palace. I went downstairs to congratulate myself with a drink of octli and a smoke of picíetl, and to sit in the twilight and gloat in solitude.

  Gradually, though, my excitement subsided into more serious meditation, and I began to perceive the several reasons why Zyanya had been somewhat hesitant about telling me of the coming event. She had said it would occur about the turn of the year. Counting backward on my fingers, I realized that our child must have been conceived during that night in old Yquíngare’s palace. I chuckled at that. No doubt Zyanya was a bit discomfited by that fact. She would have preferred that the child had its beginning in more sedate circumstances. Well, I thought it far better to conceive a child in a paroxysm of rapture, as we had done, than in a torpid acquiescence to duty or conformity or inevitability, as most parents did.

  But I could not chuckle at the next thought that came to me. The child could be handicapped from the moment of his birth, because it was possible that he would inherit my weakness of vision. Granted, he would not have to stumble and grope through as many years as I had done before I discovered the seeing crystal. But I pitied an infant who would have to learn how to hold a topaz to his eye even before he learned how to get a spoon to his mouth, and his being pathetically unable to toddle about on his infant excursions without it, and his being cruelly called Yellow Eye or the like by his playmates….

  If the child was a girl, that close-sightedness would not be such a disadvantage. Neither her childhood games nor her adult occupations would be strenuous or dependent on the keenness of her physical senses. Females were not competitive with each other until they reached the age when they vied for the most desirable husbands, and then it would be less important how my daughter saw than how she looked. But—agonizing thought—suppose she both saw and looked like me! A son would be pleased to inherit my head-nodder height. A girl would be desolated, and she would hate me, and I would probably be revolted by the sight of her. I imagined our daughter looking exactly like that tremendous milk woman….

  And that gave rise to another worry. During the many days prior to the night of the child’s conception, Zyanya had been in intimate proximity to the monstrous Lady Pair! It was well attested that countless children had been born deformed or deficient when their mothers were affected by far less gruesome influences. Worse yet, Zyanya had said “some time about the turn of the year.” And right then fell the five nemontémtin! A child born during those nameless and lifeless days was so ill-omened that its parents were expected, even encouraged, to let it die of malnourishment. I was not so superstitious as to do that. But then, what kind of burden or monster or evildoer might that child grow up to be …?

  I smoked picíetl and drank octli until Turquoise came and saw my condition and said, “For shame, my lord master!” and summoned Star Singer to help me to bed.

  “I will be a shambling ruin before the time arrives,” I said to Zyanya the next morning. “I wonder if all fathers have such worrisome apprehensions.”

  She smiled and said, “Not nearly as many as a mother does, I think. But a mother knows she can do absolutely nothing but wait.”

  I sighed and said, “I see no other course for me, either. I can only devote my every moment to caring for you and tending you and seeing that no slightest harm or affliction—”

  “Do that and I will be a ruin!” she cried, as if she meant it. “Please, my darling, do find something else to occupy you.”

  Stung and deflated by the rejection, I slouched off to take my morning bath. But, after I had come downstairs and breakfasted, a diversion did present itself, in the person of a caller, Cozcatl.

  “Ayyo, how could you have heard already?” I exclaimed. “But it was thoughtful of you to come calling so quickly.”

  My greeting seemed to bewilder him. He said, “Heard of what? Actually I came to—”

  “Why, that we are going to have a baby!” I said.

  His face went briefly bleak before he said, “I am happy for you, Mixtli, and for Zyanya. I call on the gods to bless you with a well-favored child.” Then he mumbled, “It is only that the coincidence flustered me for a moment. Because I came this morning to ask your permission to marry.”

  “To marry? But that is news as marvelous as my own!” I shook my head. “Imagine … the boy Cozcatl, of an age to take a wife. Sometimes I do not notice how the years have gone. But what do you mean, ask my permission?”

  “My intended wife is not free to marry. She is a slave.”

  “So?” I still did not comprehend. “Surely you can afford to buy her freedom.”

  “I can,” he said. “But will you sell her? I want to marry Quequelmíqui, and she wants to marry me.”

  “What?”

  “It was through you that I first met her, and I confess that many of my visits here have been something of a pretext, so that she and I could have a little time together. Most of our courtship has been conducted in your kitchen.”

  I was astounded. “Ticklish? Our little maid? But she is barely adolescent!”

  He reminded me gently, “She was when you bought her, Mixtli. The years have gone.”

  And so they had, I thought. Ticklish could be only a year or two younger than Cozcatl, and he was—let me see—he had turned twenty and two. I said magnanimously:

  “You have my permission and my congratulations and my felicitations, Cozcatl. But buy her? Most certainly not. She is but the first of our wedding gifts to you. No, no, I will hear no protest; I insist on it.
Had she not been schooled by you, the girl would never have been worth consideration as a wife. I remember her when she first came here. Giggling.”

  “Then I thank you, Mixtli, and so will she. I also want to say”—he looked flustered again—“I have of course told her about myself. About the wound I suffered. She understands that we can never have children, like you and Zyanya.”

  It was then that I realized how my own abrupt announcement must have dashed his own exultation. All unknowingly and unintentionally, I had been heartless. But before I could frame words of apology, he continued:

  “Quequelmíqui swears that she loves me and will accept me for what I am. But I must be sure that she fully realizes—the extent of my inadequacy. Our kitchen caresses have never got to the point of …”

  He was floundering in embarrassment, so I tried to help. “You mean you have not yet—”

  “She has never even seen me unclothed,” he blurted. “And she is a virgin, innocent of all knowledge about the relations between a man and a woman.”

  I said, “It will be Zyanya’s responsibility, as her mistress, to sit her down for a woman-to-woman talk. I am sure Zyanya will enlighten her on the more intimate aspects of marriage.”

  “That will be a kindness,” said Cozcatl. “But after that, would you also speak to her, Mixtli? You have known me longer and—well, better than has Zyanya. You could tell Quequelmíqui more specifically of my limitations as a conjugal partner. Would you do that?”

  I said, “I will do my best, Cozcatl, but I warn you. A virginally innocent girl suffers doubts and trepidations about taking even a commonplace husband of ordinary physical attributes. When I tell her bluntly what she can expect from this marriage—and what she cannot—it may further affright her.”

  “She loves me,” Cozcatl said ringingly. “She has given her promise. I know her heart.”

  “Then you are unique among men,” I said drily. “I know only this much. A woman thinks of marriage in terms of flowers and birdsong and butterfly flutterings. When I speak to Ticklish in terms of flesh and organs and tissues, it will at best disillusion her. At worst, she may fly in panic from ever marrying you or anybody. You would not thank me for that.”