Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “Yes, that would be a potent weapon indeed,” Motecuzóma said. “A weapon heretofore reserved to the gods. And yet you insist they are not gods.” Meditatively he regarded the little box and its contents. “They carry with them a god-given food.” He fingered some of the blue beads. “They carry with them prayers made palpable, and made of a mysterious stone. Yet you insist they are not gods.”

  “I do, my lord. They get drunk as men do, they lie with women as men do—”

  “Ayyo!” he interrupted triumphantly. “Exactly the reasons why the god Quetzalcóatl went away from here when he did. According to all the tales, he once succumbed to intoxication and committed some sexual misdeed, and in shame he abdicated his rule of the Toltéca.”

  “Also according to all the tales,” I said drily, “in the days of Quetzalcóatl these lands were everywhere perfumed by flowers, and every wind blew a sweet fragrance. The aroma of the two men I met would suffocate the wind god.” I patiently insisted, “The Spaniards are but men, my lord. They differ from us only in being white of skin, and hairy, and perhaps larger in their average size.”

  “The statues of the Toltéca at Tolan are much larger than any of us,” Motecuzóma said stubbornly, “and whatever colors they were painted are no longer perceptible. For all we know, the Toltéca were white of skin.” I exhaled a loud sigh of exasperation, but he paid it no heed. “I will set our historians to a close scrutiny of every ancient archive. We will find out what the Toltéca did look like. Meanwhile, I will have our highest priests put this god food in a finely made container and bear it reverently to Tolan and set it within reach of those sculptured Toltéca….”

  “Lord Speaker,” I said. “In conversation with those two white men, I several times mentioned the name of the Toltéca. It meant nothing at all to them.”

  He snapped his gaze up from the god bread and the beads, and he smiled a really victorious smile. “There you are, then! The name would not mean anything to a genuine Toltécatl. We call them the Master Artisans because we do not know what they called themselves!”

  He was right, of course, and I was embarrassed. I could think of no retort except to mumble, “I doubt that they called themselves Spaniards. That word—their whole language—has no relation to any languages I have encountered anywhere in these lands.”

  “Eagle Knight Mixtli,” he said, “those white men could be as you say—human beings, mere men—and still be Toltéca, descendants of those who vanished so long ago. That King of whom they told you could be the self-exiled god Quetzalcóatl. He could be ready now to return as he promised, waiting beyond the sea only until his Toltéca subjects tell him that we are amenable to his return.”

  “Are we amenable, my lord?” I asked impudently. “Are you amenable? The return of Quetzalcóatl would unseat every ruler now ruling, from Revered Speakers to the lowliest tribal chiefs. He would rule supreme.”

  Motecuzóma put on an expression of pious humility. “A returned god will no doubt be grateful to those who have preserved and even improved his dominions, and he will no doubt make evident his gratitude. If he should grant only that I be a voice among his Speaking Council, I would be more highly honored than any other mortal ever has been.”

  I said, “Lord Speaker, I have erred before. I may err now in supposing the white men to be no gods or forerunners of any god. But might you not err more gravely in supposing that they are?”

  “Suppose? I do not suppose!” he said sternly. “I do not say yes a god comes, or no he does not, as you so impertinently presume to do!” He stood erect and almost shouted, “I am the Revered Speaker of the One World, and I do not say this or that, yes or no, gods or men, until I have pondered and observed and waited to make certain!”

  I took his standing up as my dismissal. I backed away from the throne, repeatedly kissing the earth as prescribed, and I left the chamber, and I tore off the sackcloth robe, and I went home.

  As to the question—gods or men?—Motecuzóma had said he would wait until he was certain, and that is what he did. He waited, and he waited too long, and even when it could no longer matter, he was still not really certain. And because he waited in uncertainty, he died at last in disgrace, and the last command he tried to give his people began uncertainly, “Mixchía—!” I know; I was there; and I heard that last word Motecuzóma ever spoke in his life: “Wait—!”

  Waiting Moon did nothing to spoil my homecoming that time. There was by then some natural gray in her hair, but she had dyed or cut whatever remained of that offending strand of bleached white. And although Béu had ceased trying to make herself into a simulacrum of her dead sister, she had nevertheless made herself into quite a different person from the one I had known for nearly half a sheaf of years, ever since we first met in her mother’s Tecuantépec hut. During all those years, every time we had been in each other’s company, it seemed we had quarreled or fought or at best maintained only an uneasy truce. But she seemed to have decided that henceforth we would act the roles of an ageing couple, long and amicably married. I do not know whether it was a result of my having so thoroughly chastised her, or whether it was meant for the admiration of our neighbors, or whether Béu Ribé had resigned herself to the age of never and had said to herself, “Never any more open animosities between us.”

  Anyway, her new attitude made it easier for me to settle down and adapt to living in a house and a city again. Always before, even in the days when my wife Zyanya or my daughter Nochípa still lived, every time I had come home it was with the expectation of sometime leaving again on a new adventure. But the latest homecoming made me feel that I had come home to stay for the remainder of my life. Had I been younger, I should have rebelled at that prospect, and soon have found some reason to depart, to travel, to explore. Or had I been a poorer man, I should have had to bestir myself, just to earn a living. Or had Béu been her former harridan self, I should have seized any excuse to get away—even leading a troop to war somewhere. But, for the first time, I had no reason or necessity to go on running and seeking down all the roads and all the days. I could even persuade myself that I deserved the long rest and the easy life that my wealth and my wife could provide. So I gradually eased into a routine which, while neither demanding nor rewarding, at least kept me occupied and not too bored. I could not have done that, but for the change in Béu.

  When I say she had changed, I mean only that she had succeeded in concealing her lifelong dislike and contempt of me. She has never yet given me reason to think that those feelings ever abated, but she did stop letting them show, and that small sham has been enough for me. She ceased being proud and assertive, she became bland and docile in the manner of most other wives. In a way, I rather missed the high-spirited woman she had been, but that twinge of regret was outweighed by my relief at not having to contend with her former willful self. When Béu submerged her once distinctive personality and assumed the near invisibility of a woman all deference and solicitude, I was enabled to treat her with equal civility.

  Her dedication to wifeliness did not include the slightest hint that I might finally use her for the one wifely service of which I had refrained from availing myself. She never suggested that we consummate our marriage in the accepted way; she never again flaunted her womanhood or taunted me to try it; she never complained of our sleeping in separate chambers. And I am glad she did not. My refusing any such advances would have disturbed the new equanimity of our life together, but I simply could not have made myself embrace her as a wife. The sad fact was that Waiting Moon was as old as I, and she looked her age. Of the beauty that had once been equal to Zyanya’s, little remained except the beautiful eyes, and those I seldom saw. In her new role of subservience, Béu tried always to keep them modestly downcast, in the same way that she kept her voice down.

  Her eyes had used to flash brilliantly at me, and her voice had used to be tart or mocking or spiteful. But in her new guise she spoke only quietly and infrequently. As I left the house of a morning, she might ask, “Whe
n would you like your meal waiting, my lord, and what would it please you to eat?” When I left the house in the evening, she might caution me, “The night grows chill, my lord, and you risk catching cold if you do not wear a heavier mantle.”

  I have mentioned my daily routine. That was it: I left my house at morning and evening, to pass the time in the only two ways I could think of.

  Each morning I went to The House of pochtéca and spent the greater part of the day there, talking and listening and sipping the rich chocolate handed around by the servants. The three elders who had interviewed me in those rooms, half a sheaf of years before, were of course long dead and gone. But they had been replaced by numerous other men just like them: old, fat, bald, complacent and assured in their importance as fixtures of the establishment. Except that I was not yet either bald or fat and did not feel like an elder, I suppose I could have passed for one of them, doing little but basking in remembered adventures and present affluence.

  Occasionally the arrival of a merchant train afforded me the opportunity to make a bid for its cargo, or for whatever part of it I fancied. And before the day was out I could usually engage another pochtécatl in a round of bargaining, and end by selling him my merchandise at a profit. I could do that without ever setting down my cup of chocolate, without ever seeing what it was I had bought and sold. Occasionally there would be a young and newly aspiring trader in the building, making preparations to set out on his first journey somewhere. I would detain him for as long as it might take to give him the benefit of all my experience on that particular route, or for as long as he would listen without fidgeting and pleading urgent errands.

  But on most days there were few persons present except myself and various retired pochtéca who had no place they would rather be. So we sat together and traded stories instead of merchandise. I listened to them tell tales of the days when they had fewer years and less wealth, but ambitions illimitable; the days when they themselves did the traveling, when they did the daring of risks and dangers. Our stories would have been interesting enough, even unadorned—and I had no need to exaggerate mine—but since the old men all tried to outdo each other in the uniqueness and variety of their experiences, in the hazards they had faced and bested, the narrow escapes they had enjoyed, the notable acquisitions they had so cunningly made … well, I noticed that some of the men present began to embroider their adventures after the tenth or twelfth telling….

  In the evenings I left my house to seek not company but solitude, in which I could reminisce and repine and yearn unobserved. Of course, I would not have objected if that solitude had been interrupted by one longed-for encounter. However, as I have told, that has never happened yet. So it was only with wistful hope, not with expectation, that I walked the nearly empty night streets of Tenochtítlan, from end to end of the island, remembering how here had occurred a certain thing and there another.

  In the north was the causeway to Tepeyáca, across which I had carried my baby daughter when we fled from the flooding city to safety on the mainland. At that time Nochípa could speak only two-word sentences, but some of them had said much. And on that occasion she had murmured, “Dark night.”

  In the south was the causeway to Coyohuácan and all the lands beyond, the causeway I had crossed with Cozcatl and Blood Glutton on my very first trading expedition. In the splendor of that day’s dawn the mighty volcano Popocatépetl had watched us go, and had seemed to say, “You depart, my people, but I remain….”

  In between were the island’s two vast plazas. In the more southerly one, The Heart of the One World, stood the Great Pyramid, so massive and solid and eternal of aspect that a viewer might assume it had towered there for as long as Popocatépetl had towered on the distant horizon. It was difficult for even me to believe that I was older than the completed pyramid, that it had been only an unfinished stump the first time I saw it.

  In the more northerly plaza, Tlaltelólco’s wide-spreading market area, I had walked for the first time holding tightly to my father’s hand. There he had generously paid the extravagant price to buy me my first taste of flavored snow, while he told the vendor, “I remember the Hard Times.…” It was then that I had first met the cacao-colored man, he who so accurately foretold my life to come.

  That recollection was slightly disturbing, for it reminded me that all the future he had foreseen for me was in my past. Things I had once looked forward to had become memories. I was nearing the full sheaf of my years, and not many men lived more than those fifty and two. Then was there to be no more future for me? When I told myself that I was at last rightfully enjoying the idle life I had labored so long to earn, perhaps I was just refusing to confess that I had outlived my usefulness, that I had outlived every person I ever loved or who ever loved me. Was I only taking up space in this world until I should be summoned to some other one?

  No! I refused to believe that, and for confirmation I looked up to the night sky. Again a smoking star hung there, as a smoking star had hung over my reunion with Motecuzóma at Teotihuácan, and then over my meeting with the girl Ce-Malináli, and then over my meeting with the white visitors from Spain. Our astronomers could not agree: whether it was the same comet returning in a different shape and brightness and in a different corner of the sky, or whether it was a new comet each time. But, after the one that accompanied me on my last journey southward, some smoking star appeared in the night sky again in both of the two subsequent years, and each time was visible for nearly a month of nights. Even the usually imperturbable astronomers had to agree that it was an omen, that three comets in three years defied any other explanation. So something was going to happen in this world and, good or bad, it ought to be worth waiting for. I might or might not have any part to play in the event, but I would not resign from this world just yet.

  Various things did happen during those years, and each time I wondered: is this what the smoking stars portended? The happenings were all remarkable in one respect or another, and some of them were lamentable, but none seemed quite momentous enough to have justified the gods’ sending us such ominous warnings.

  For example, I had been only a few months returned from my meeting with the Spaniards, when word came from Uluümil Kutz that the mysterious disease of the small pocks had swept like an ocean wave over the entire peninsula. Among the Xiu, the Tzotxil, the Quiché, and all the other Maya-descendant tribes, something like three of every ten persons had died—among them my host, the Lord Mother Ah Tutál—and almost every survivor would live the rest of his or her life disfigured by the pock marks.

  However uncertain Motecuzóma was about the nature and intention of those god-or-men visitors from Spain, he was not eager to expose himself to any god disease. For once, he acted promptly and decisively, putting a strict prohibition on any trade with the Maya lands. Our pochtéca were forbidden to go there, and our southern frontier guards were instructed to turn back all produce and merchandise coming from there. Then the rest of The One World waited in apprehension for some months longer. But the small pocks were successfully contained within the unfortunate Maya tribes and did not—not then—afflict any other peoples.

  Some more months passed, and one day Motecuzóma sent a messenger to fetch me to the palace, and again I wondered: does this mean that the smoking stars’ prophecy has been fulfilled? But, when I made the customary supplicant-in-sackcloth entrance to the throne room, the Revered Speaker looked only annoyed, not stricken with fear or wonder or any of the other larger emotions. Several of his Speaking Council, standing about the room, appeared rather amused. I myself must have looked puzzled when he said:

  “This madman calls himself Tliléctic-Mixtli.”

  Then I realized that he was not speaking of me, but to me, and was pointing at a glum-faced, shabbily dressed stranger held firm in the grip of two palace guards. I raised my seeing crystal for a look, and recognized the man as no stranger, and I smiled first at him, then at Motecuzóma, and I said:

  “Tliléctic-Mixtli is his
name, my lord. The name Dark Cloud is not at all uncommon among—”

  “You know him!” Motecuzóma interrupted, or accused. “Some relative of yours, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps of yours as well, Lord Speaker, and perhaps of equal nobility.”

  He blazed, “You dare compare me to this filthy and witless beggar? When the court guards apprehended him, he was demanding audience with me by reason of his being a visiting dignitary. But look at him! The man is mad!”

  I said, “No, my lord. Where he comes from, he is indeed the equivalent of yourself, except that the Aztéca do not use the title Uey-Tlatoáni.”

  “What?” said Motecuzóma, surprised.

  “This is the Tlatocapíli Tliléctic-Mixtli of Aztlan.”

  “Of where?” cried Motecuzóma, astounded.

  I turned my smile again to my namesake. “Did you bring the Moon Stone, then?”

  He gave an abrupt, angry nod and said, “I begin to wish I had not. But the Stone of Coyolxaúqui lies yonder in the plaza, watched by the men who survived the labor of helping me roll it and raft it and drag it….”

  One of the guards holding him mumbled audibly, “That cursed great rock has torn up half the paving of the city between here and the Tepeyáca causeway.”

  The newcomer resumed, “Those remaining men and I are near dead of fatigue and hunger. We hoped for a welcome here. We would have been satisfied with common hospitality. But I have been called a liar for speaking only my own name!”

  I turned back to Motecuzóma, who was still staring in unbelief. I said, “As you perceive, Lord Speaker, the Lord of Aztlan is himself capable of explaining his name. Also his rank and his origin and anything else you might wish to know about him. You will find the Aztéca Náhuatl a trifle antiquated, but easily comprehensible.”

  Motecuzóma came alert with a start, and expressed apologies and greetings—“We will converse at your convenience, Lord of Aztlan, after you have dined and rested”—and gave orders to the guards and counselors that the visitors be fed and clothed and quartered as befitted dignitaries. He motioned for me to stay when the crowd left the throne room, then said: