Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  It was obvious, as I approached, that my Ixacuálco quarter of the city had been among the districts hit hardest by that first spate from the aqueduct. I could see the high-water mark still wet on the buildings, as high as my head, and here and there an adobe house sat askew. The hard-packed clay of my street was slippery with a film of mud; there were puddles and rubbish and even some valuable objects apparently dropped by people in flight. There were at that moment no other people to be seen—no doubt they were indoors, unsure whether the flood wave would come again—but the street’s unaccustomed emptiness made me uneasy. I was too tired to run, but I shuffled as rapidly as possible, and my heart lifted when I saw my house still standing, unmarked except for the deposit of slime on its entry stairs.

  Turquoise flung open the front door, exclaiming, “Ayyo, it is our lord master! All thanks to Chalchihuítlicué for sparing you!”

  Wearily but with feeling, I said I wished that particular goddess in Míctlan.

  “Do not speak so!” pleaded Turquoise, tears running down the wrinkles of her face. “We feared that we had lost our master also!”

  “Also?” I gasped, an invisible band tightening painfully around my chest. The elderly slave woman broke into violent weeping and could not reply. I dropped the things I was carrying and seized her by the shoulders. “The child?” I demanded. She shook her head, but whether in denial or grief I could not tell. I shook her fiercely and said, “Speak, woman!”

  “It was our lady Zyanya,” said another voice from behind her, that of the manservant Star Singer, who came to the doorway wringing his hands. “I saw the whole thing. I tried to stop her.”

  I did not let go of Turquoise or I should have fallen. I could only manage to say, “Tell me, Star Singer.”

  “Know then, my master. It was yesterday, at dusk, the time when the street torch lighters would ordinarily have been coming. But of course they did not; the street was a seething cataract. Only one man came—being swept along and bludgeoned against the torch poles and the house stairs. He kept trying to find his footing or to seize onto something that would stop his progress. But, even when he was still distant, I could see that he was already crippled and he could not—”

  As harshly as I could, in my agony and weakness, I said, “What has all this to do with my wife? Where is she?”

  “She was at this front window,” he said, pointing, and went on with infuriating deliberation. “She had been here the whole day, worrying and waiting for your return, my lord. I was with her when the man came flailing and thrashing down the street, and she cried out that we must save him. I was naturally not eager to venture into that raging water, and I told her, ‘My lady, I can recognize him from here. It is only an old derelict who sometimes of late has worked on the garbage canoes which serve this quarter. He is not worth anyone’s trouble.’ ”

  Star Singer paused, swallowed, and said huskily, “I can make no complaint if my lord beats me or sells me or slays me, for I should have gone to save the man. Because my lady gave me a look of wrath and went herself. To the door and down the stairs, while I watched from this window, and she leaned into the flood and caught him.”

  He paused and gulped again, and I rasped, “Well? If they were both safe …?”

  Star Singer shook his head. “That is what I do not understand. Of course, my lord, the stairs were wet and slippery. But what it looked like—it looked as if my lady spoke to the man, and started to let go of him, but then … but then the waters took them. Took them both, for he was clutching to her. I could see only a tumbling bundle as they were swept together out of my sight. But at that I did run out, and plunged into the current after them.”

  “Star Singer almost drowned, my lord,” said Turquoise, sniffling. “He tried, he really did.”

  “There was no sign of them,” he resumed, miserably. “Toward the end of the street, a number of old adobe houses had fallen—perhaps on them, I thought. But it was getting too dark to see, and I was knocked nearly insensible by a floating timber. I seized the doorpost of a sturdy house and clung there all the night.”

  “He came home when the waters went down this morning,” said Turquoise. “Then we both went out and searched.”

  “Nothing?” I croaked.

  “We found only the man,” said Star Singer. “Half buried under some fallen rubble, as I had suspected.”

  Turquoise said, “Cocóton has not yet been told about her mother. Will my lord go up to her now?”

  “And tell her what I cannot believe myself?” I moaned. I summoned some last reserve of energy to straighten my sagging body and said, “No, I will not. Come, Star Singer. Let us search again.”

  Beyond my house the street gently sloped downward as it approached the canal-crossing bridge, so the houses down there had naturally been more violently struck by the wall of water. Also, they were the less impressive houses on the street, built of wood or adobe. As Star Singer had said, they were houses no longer; they were heaps of half-broken, half-dissolved bricks of mud and straw, splintered planks, and oddments of furniture. The servant pointed to a crumple of cloth among them and said:

  “There lies the wretch. No loss at all. He lived by selling himself to the men of the garbage boats. Those who could not afford a woman could use him, and he charged only a single cacao bean.”

  He lay face down, a thing of filthy rags and mud-matted long gray hair. I used my foot to turn him over, and I looked at him for the last time. Chimáli looked back at me with empty eye sockets and gaping mouth.

  Not then, but some while later, when I could think, I thought about Star Singer’s words: that the man had lately been aboard the scows serving our neighborhood. I wondered: had Chimáli only recently discovered where I lived? Had he come haunting, hoping, blindly groping for one more opportunity to work mischief on me or mine? Had the flood given him the chance to inflict the most hurtful possible injury, and then to put himself beyond my vengeance forever? Or had the whole tragedy been a ghastly and gleeful contrivance of the gods? They do seem to find amusement in arranging concurrences of events that would otherwise be unlikely, inexplicable, beyond belief.

  I would never know.

  And at that moment I knew only that my wife was gone, that I could not accept her being gone, that I had to search. I said to Star Singer, “If the cursed man is here, so must Zyanya be. We will move every one of these millions of bricks. I will start on it, while you go for more hands to help. Go!”

  Star Singer scampered away, and I leaned over to lift and fling aside a wooden beam, but I kept on leaning and pitched forward on my face.

  It was late afternoon when I came back to consciousness, and in my own bed, with both the servants bending solicitously over me. The first thing I asked was, “Did we find her?” When both the heads shook in rueful negation, I snarled, “I told you to move every brick!”

  “Master, it cannot be done,” whimpered Star Singer. “The water rises again. I returned and found you just in time, or you would have been face down in it.”

  “We were wondering whether to rouse you,” said Turquoise, in obvious anxiety. “The word has been spoken by the Revered Speaker. The whole city must be vacated before it is all under water.”

  And so that night I sat sleepless on a hillside among a multitude of sleeping fugitives. “Long walk,” Cocóton had commented, on the way. Since only the first people to leave Tenochtítlan had found accommodations on the mainland, the later arrivals had simply stopped wherever there was room to lie down in the countryside. “Dark night,” said my daughter appropriately. We four had not even a sheltering tree, but Turquoise had thought to bring blankets. She and Star Singer and Cocóton lay rolled in theirs, snugly asleep, but I sat up, with my blanket about my shoulders, and I looked down at my child, my Crumb, the precious and only remnant of my wife, and I mourned.

  Some time ago, my lord friars, I tried to describe Zyanya by comparing her to the bounteous and generous maguey plant, but there is one thing I forgot to tell you abo
ut the maguey. Once in its lifetime, just once, it puts up a single spear which bears an abundance of sweet-scented yellow flowers, and then the maguey dies.

  I tried hard that night to take comfort from the unctuous assurances our priests always spoke: that the dead do not repine or grieve. Death, said the priests, is merely one’s awakening from a dream of having lived. Perhaps so. Your Christian priests say much the same thing. But that was small comfort to me, who had to remain behind in the dream, alive, alone, bereft. So I passed that night remembering Zyanya and the too-brief time we had together before her dream ended.

  I still remember….

  Once, when we were on that journey into Michihuácan, she saw an unfamiliar flower growing from a cleft in a cliff, some way above our heads, and she admired it, and she said she wished she had one like it to plant at home, and I could easily have climbed up and plucked it for her….

  And once—oh, it was no particular occasion—she woke in love with the day, and that was not unusual for Zyanya—and she made a small song, and then a melody for it, and she went about softly singing it to fix it in her memory, and she asked me if I would buy her one of those jug flutes called the warbling waters, upon which she could play her song. I said I would, the next time I met a musician acquaintance and could persuade him to make me one. But I forgot, and she—seeing I had other things on my mind—she never reminded me.

  And once …

  Ayya, the many times …

  Oh, I know she never doubted that I loved her, but why did I let slip even the least opportunity to demonstrate it? I know she forgave my occasional thoughtless lapses and trivial neglects; she probably forgot them on the instant, which I never have been able to do. Through all the years of my life since then, I have been reminded of this or that time when I might have done such and such, and did not, and will never have the chance again. Meanwhile, the things I would prefer to remember persist in eluding me. If I could recall the words of that small song she made when she was happiest, or even just the melody of it, I could hum it sometimes to myself. Or if I knew what it was she called after me, when the wind took her words, that last time we parted….

  When all of us fugitive inhabitants finally returned to the island, so much of the city was in ruins that the rubble earlier heaped along our street was indistinguishable from what had fallen afterward. Laborers and slaves were already shoving the wreckage about, salvaging the unbroken and reusable limestone blocks, leveling the rest as a foundation to rebuild upon. So Zyanya’s body was never found, nor any trace of her, not so much as one of her rings or sandals. She vanished as utterly and irretrievably as that small song she once made. But, my lords, I know she is still here somewhere—though two new cities in succession have since then been built over her undiscovered grave. I know it, because she did not take with her the jadestone chip to insure her passage to the afterworld.

  Many times, late at night, I have walked these streets and softly called her name. I did it in Tenochtítlan and I do it still in this City of Mexíco; an old man sleeps little at night. And I have seen many apparitions, but none of them hers.

  I have encountered only unhappy or malevolent spirits, and I could not mistake any of them for Zyanya, who was happy all her life and who died while trying to do a kindness. I have seen and recognized many a dead warrior of the Mexíca; the city teems with those woebegone specters. I have seen the Weeping Woman; she is like a drifting wisp of fog, woman-shaped; and I have heard her mournful wail. But she did not frighten me; I pitied her, because I too have known deprivation; and when she could not howl me down, she fled my words of solace. Once, it seemed to me that I met and conversed with two wandering gods, Night Wind and The Oldest of Old Gods. Anyway, that is who they claimed to be, and they did me no harm, deeming that I have had harm enough in my life.

  Sometimes, on streets absolutely dark and deserted, I have heard what could have been Zyanya’s merry laugh. That might be a product of my senile imagination, but the laugh has each time been accompanied by a glint of light in the darkness, very like the pale streak in her black hair. And that might be a trick of my feeble eyesight, for the vision has each time disappeared when I fumbled my topaz to my eye. Nevertheless, I know she is here, somewhere, and I need no evidence, however much I yearn for it.

  I have considered the matter, and I wonder. Do I meet only the doleful and misanthropic denizens of the night because I am so like them myself? Is it possible that persons of better character and gladder heart might more readily perceive the more gentle phantasms? I beg you, my lord friars, if one of you good men should encounter Zyanya some night, would you let me know? You will recognize her at once, and you will not be affrighted by a wraith of such loveliness. She will still seem a girl of twenty, as she did then, for death at least spared her the diseases and desiccation of age. And you will know that smile, for you will be unable to resist smiling in return. If she should speak …

  But no, you would not comprehend her speech. Just have the kindness to tell me that you saw her. For she still walks these streets. I know it. She is here and will be always.

  I H S

  S. C. C. M.

  Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty,

  the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

  ROYAL and Redoubtable Majesty, our King Paramount: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this day of St. Paphnutius, Martyr, in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.

  It is typically thoughtful of Our Condolent Sovereign that you commiserate with Your Majesty’s Protector of the Indians, and that you ask for more details of the problems and obstacles we daily confront in that office.

  Heretofore, Sire, it was the practice of the Spaniards who were granted landholdings in these provinces to appropriate also the many Indians already living thereon, and to brand their cheeks with the “G” for “guerra,” and to claim them as prisoners of war, and cruelly to treat and exploit them as such. That practice has at least been ameliorated to the extent that an Indian can no longer be sentenced to slave labor unless and until he is found guilty of some crime by either the secular or the ecclesiastical authorities.

  Also, the law of Mother Spain is now more strictly applied in this New Spain, so that an Indian here, like a Jew there, has the same rights as any Christian Spaniard, and cannot be condemned for a crime without due process of charge, trial, and conviction. But of course the testimony of an Indian, like that of a Jew—even of converts to Christianity—cannot be allowed equal weight against the testimony of a lifelong Christian. Hence, if a Spaniard desires to acquire as a slave some robust red man or personable red woman, all he need do, in effect, is to lodge against that Indian any accusation that he has the wit to invent.

  Because we beheld the conviction of many Indians on charges that were moot at best, and because we feared for the souls of our countrymen who were apparently aggrandizing themselves and their estates by sophistical means unbecoming to Christians, we were saddened and we felt moved to action. Wielding the influence of our title as Protector of the Indians, we have succeeded in persuading the judges of the Audiencia that all Indians to be branded henceforth must be registered with our office. Therefore the branding irons are now kept locked in a box which must be opened with two keys, and one of the keys resides in our possession.

  Since no convicted Indian can be branded without our cooperation, we have consistently refused to cooperate in those cases that are flagrant abuses of justice, and those Indians have perforce been reprieved. Such exercise of our office as Protector of the Indians has earned us the odium of many of our countrymen, but that we can bear with equanimity, knowing that we act for the ultimate good of all involved. However, the economic welfare of all New Spain might suffer (and the King’s Fifth of its riches be diminished) if we too adamantly obstructed the recruitment of the slave labor on which depends the prosperity of these colonies. So now, when a Spaniard is desirous of acquiring some Indian for a bondsman, he does not invoke the secular arm; h
e charges the Indian with being a Christian convert who has committed some lapsus fidei. Since our prelacy as Defender of the Faith takes precedence over all our other offices and concerns, we do not in those cases withhold the brand.

  Thus we simultaneously accomplish three things that we trust will find favor in Your Majesty’s sight. Primus, we effectually prevent the misfeasance of the civil law. Secundus, we steadfastly uphold Church dogma as it regards lapsed converts. Tertius, we do not impede the maintenance of a steady and adequate labor supply.

  Incidentally, Your Majesty, the brand on the convict’s cheek is no longer the demeaning “G,” which imputes the dishonor of defeat in war. We now apply the initials of the slave’s designated owner (unless the convict is a comely woman whom the owner prefers not to deface). Besides being a mark to identify property and runaways, such a branding eventually serves also to mark those slaves who are hopelessly rebellious and unfit for work. Many such intractable malcontents, having passed through several changes of ownership, now bear numerous and overlapping initials upon their faces, as if their skin were a palimpsest manuscript.

  There is touching evidence of Your Compassionate Majesty’s goodness of heart, in this same latest letter, when you say of our Aztec chronicler, anent the death of his woman, “Although of inferior race, he seems a man of human emotions, capable of feeling happinesses and hurts quite as keenly as we do.” Your sympathy is understandable, since Your Majesty’s own abiding love for your young Queen Isabella and your baby son Felipe is a tender passion remarked and much admired by all.

  However, we respectfully suggest that you expend not too much pity on persons whom Your Majesty cannot know as well as we do, and especially not on one who, over and over again, shows himself undeserving of it. This one may in his time have felt an occasional emotion or entertained an occasional human thought which would do no discredit to a white man. But Your Majesty will have noticed that, though he professes to be now a Christian, the old dotard maundered much about his dead mate’s still wandering the world—and why?—because she did not have a certain green pebble by her when she died! Also, as Your Majesty will perceive, the Aztec was not long cast down by his bereavement. In these ensuing pages of the narrative, he again ramps like a colossus, and behaves in his old accustomed ways.