by Simon Levack
TRIBUTE OF DEATH
a novel by
SIMON LEVACK
First published by Lulu.com 2007
Copyright © Simon Levack 2007. All rights reserved.
This Amazon Kind Edition copyright © Simon Levack 2011. All rights reserved.
Author’s website: www.simonlevack.com
This book is fiction. All characters and situations depicted herein are imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
For Sarah and Isaac, with love
Acknowledgement
This fourth of Yaotl’s adventures was the hardest to write. As ever, thanks are due to my agent, Jane Gregory and her team at Gregory & Co, for making sure I did not let the standard slip.
Rather belatedly I also want to thank my friends, the Forest Writers of Walthamstow, without whose support, encouragement and suggestions this book and its predecessors would have been quite different and not nearly so good.
And where would I be without my wife? Sarah can always be relied upon to tell me candidly exactly what is wrong with anything I write!
Certainly it is our mortality, we who are women, for it is our battle, for at this time our mother, Cihuacoatl, Quilaztli, exacteth the tribute of death.
The Florentine Codex, Book VI
I should rather carry a shield in battle three times, than give birth once.
Euripides, Medea
Author’s Note
Tribute of Death is the fourth novel featuring Cemiquiztli Yaotl and set in the Mexico of the early Sixteenth Century, in the final years before the coming of the Conquistadors. At this time the region was dominated by the people we call Aztecs, but whose name for themselves was Mexica. They had made their home in the central Mexican highlands, on the site of modern Mexico City, building an impregnable fortress-city on an island in the middle of a lake. They called the city Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and used it as a base to conquer and subdue most of their neighbours.
We tend to think of the Aztecs – when we think of them at all – in rather grand, dramatic terms. All too often, they are presented as builders of pyramids and temples, practitioners of grisly sacrificial rites and players in the final tragedy that saw their civilisation overturned and their magnificent island city devastated.
Of course, the Aztecs were all these things; but they were also men and women with food to prepare, children to bring up, errands to run, debts to pay and relatives to squabble with. Domestic concerns probably loomed larger in their minds than the great and terrible events that were unfolding around them: in that, of course, they were no different from us.
The story I have tried to tell in this book has less to do with the great and terrible events and more with the daily lives of ordinary Aztecs, and with one aspect, in particular, which was sharply at odds with anything we are familiar with: their view of childbirth. For in giving birth – in risking her life to bring forth a child – a mother was likened to a warrior, hazarding everything to seize and drag home an enemy captive on the battlefield. And just as a flowery death in war or on the sacrificial stone of an enemy’s temple transformed the soul of the warrior, so strange and terrifying things were thought to befall the woman who died in childbirth.
Much of the action in this story takes place in a calpolli, or parish, named Atlixco. Although there was a place called Atlixco, the precise geography of the one in my book is imaginary; I believe an Aztec would have recognised it as typical of his city, however.
A Note on Nahuatl
The Aztec language, Nahuatl, is easy to pronounce, but is burdened with spellings based on Sixteenth Century Castilian. This note should help:
c is pronounced as in 'cecil' before e or i but as in 'cat' or 'cot' before o or a.
ch and x are both pronounced like English 'sh'.
hu and uh are both pronounced like English 'w'.
qu is pronounced like English 'k' as in 'kettle' before e but like English 'qu' as in 'quack' before a.
tl is pronounced as in English but where it occurs at the end of a word the 'l' is hardly sounded.
I have used as few Nahuatl words as possible and favoured clarity at the expense of strict accuracy in choosing English equivalents. Hence, for example, I have rendered huey tlatoani as ‘emperor’, cihuacoatl as ‘chief minister’, calpolli as ‘parish’, octli as ‘sacred wine’ and maquahuitl as ‘sword’, and been similarly cavalier in choosing English replacements for most of the frequently recurring personal names. In referring to the Aztec emperor at the time when this story is set I have used the most familiar form of his name, Montezuma, although Motecuhzoma would be more accurate.
Finally I have called the people of Mexico-Tenochtitlan ‘Aztecs’, although their own name for themselves was Mexica, ‘Mexicans’.
The name of the principal character in the novel, Yaotl, is pronounced ‘YAH-ot’.
The Aztec Calendar
The Aztecs lived in a world governed by religion and magic, and their rituals and auguries were in turn ordered by the calendar.
The solar year, which began in our February, was divided into eighteen twenty-day periods (often called ‘months’). Each month had its own religious observances associated with it; often these involved sacrifices, some of them human, to one or more of the many Aztec gods. At the end of the year were five ‘useless days’ that were considered profoundly unlucky.
Parallel to this ran a divinatory calendar of 260 days divided into twenty groups of thirteen days (sometimes called ‘weeks’). The first day of each ‘week’ would bear the number 1 and one of twenty names – Reed, Jaguar, Eagle, Vulture and so on. The second day would bear the number 2 and the next name in the sequence. On the fourteenth day the number would revert to 1 but the sequence of names continued seamlessly, with each combination of names and numbers repeating itself every 260 days.
A year was named after the day in the divinatory calendar on which it began. For mathematical reasons these days could bear only one of four names – Reed, Flint Knife, House and Rabbit – combined with a number from 1 to 13. This produced a cycle of fifty-two years at the beginning and end of which the solar and divinatory calendars coincided. The Aztecs called this period a ‘bundle of years’.
Every day in a bundle of years was the product of a unique combination of year, month and date in the divinatory calendar, and so had, for the Aztecs, its own individual character and religious and magical significance.
The Aztec name for the year in which this book is set is Thirteen Rabbit. In our calendar, it is the spring of 1518.
TWELVE VULTURE
1
It was a fine evening at the beginning of the year Thirteen Rabbit, after the winter rains had ceased but before the time for planting maize and amaranth. A few stars were out, sparkling frostily in the clear sky. In front of a little palace a girl kneeled to prepare chocolate, while I watched her and thought about fate.
On the day I was born, a soothsayer had told my parents that I would prosper and grow rich. This was on account of that day being One Death, which was sacred to Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, the god who fixed our destinies and ruled our daily lives.
When I grew up, I learned exactly why the seer had thought that particular god would favour me. He would have consulted the Book of Days, the long screenfold volume which had every possible combination of day, month and year inscribed on its stiff bark paper pages. On the strength of his advice I had become a priest, which was a rare thing for a commoner’s child but which my father had obviously thought a promising way to the fortune and renown that were my due.
As a priest I often had to look at the Book of Days myself, committing the pictures in it to memory: the gly
phs for the days, months and years, and the harsh, angular, stylised images of the gods who presided over each of them. I knew exactly what the soothsayer had seen, and in his place would have made the same prediction. Nonetheless, on this evening in Thirteen Rabbit, as my eyes lingered over the sight of slim brown fingers gently turning a gourd bowl, then tipping it delicately until the warm, foaming contents spilled into another vessel, I asked myself what that learned man had actually done, all those years ago. Perhaps he had not looked my future up in a book after all. Why go to the trouble, when all he had needed to do was to take a few sacred mushrooms and give himself a vision of me as I was now, idling away my time on a marble patio, with half my attention on the game I was supposed to be playing and half on the girl and the rich aroma rising from those bowls. That, I thought contentedly, ought to have told him all he needed to know.
My opponent’s peevish voice roused me from my reverie.
‘Are you going to make your throw or do you intend spending the entire evening eyeing up that young woman?’
A torch, flickering behind me, caught the tiny hairs on the girl’s arm, so that they glittered as she skimmed foam off the top of one of the bowls with a spoon and shook it into a third vessel. With my last, wistful glance, I caught what may have been the tiniest hint of a smile flickering across her beautiful face before I turned reluctantly back to the cross-shaped mat spread out in front of me.
‘All right. Here we go… Oh, not again!’ Four beans spilled out of my fist to fall, every one of them, white side up beside the mat. Nothing. I could not move.
The game was patolli: a race around a cross-shaped board where the first player to get all his counters back to where he started from was the winner. It resembled life, the centre and arms of the board representing the world’s five directions, the fifty-two points on it standing for a full bundle of years, which however long a man actually lived was thought of as his natural time on Earth. It was seen as a means of revealing what the gods had in store for us, although as often as not we played it for fun or money.
‘Bad luck, Yaotl,’ the other player chuckled, as he gathered the beans for his own throw. He managed a four, his beans all landing with their black faces showing, which, since he had just one counter left on the board exactly four points from home, meant he had won. ‘Your divine patron isn’t with you tonight, is he?’
I grinned in spite of myself. ‘I thought you told me it was a game of skill! But it’s funny you should mention Tezcatlipoca. I was just thinking about all the tricks the god has chosen to play on me and what a funny one this one has turned to be!’ I glanced about me, deliberately taking in all our surroundings, from the elegant house behind us to the girl who was now taking the foam she had skimmed off the surface of the chocolate and spreading it carefully over little clay cups full of the stuff. ‘Do you think this is what he had in mind for us all along?’
I had served the god as a priest; but in my time I had also been a thief, then one of the water-folk, raking scum off the surface of the lake for a living, as well as a drunk, a prisoner and a slave. To the best of my knowledge no soothsayer had ever predicted any of that.
‘You mean this place?’ To my surprise, my opponent seemed to take me seriously. The weather-beaten face that the elderly merchant turned towards me wore a frown. ‘I shouldn’t count on it if I were you. There’s a reason why they use this game to foretell the future. Anything can happen! And remember, none of this is really ours. What the god or even the king gives us can be taken away, just like… that!’ To illustrate his point he threw all the beans in the air.
We tracked them with our eyes as they dropped to the floor. They bounced and spun across the marble and for a few moments it was not clear what they were going to do. Even after they had come to rest, it was hard to take in what had happened. Then we both stared at them in shocked silence.
We saw the dark sides of two beans and the white side of a third, but it was the fourth that we both noticed, for it lay poised on its edge.
I had never seen such a thing before. It was so rare that if it happened during the course of a game, the player whose throw it was would win all the stakes.
Eventually I said weakly: ‘I see what you mean!’
The old man’s response was a whispered curse. ‘Well, bugger me! How come that never happens when I’m playing for serious money?’
Then the girl announced that the chocolate was ready. At the same time, a soft footstep just behind me told me that my opponent’s daughter had come out to join us.
2
The chocolate was perfect: neither too warm nor too cold, the froth whipped up until it would tremble but not break under my breath, the flavouring delicate, hinting at vanilla and honey and little marigold flowers. Yet when I sipped it that evening it seemed to have lost a little of its savour.
Icnoyo, the old merchant whose name meant ‘Kindly’, was telling his daughter about his last throw. The beans still lay where they had fallen, although the one that had landed on its edge had eventually toppled over. ‘Can you believe it? I was just trying to remind Yaotl here how unpredictable life is and what happens? In all the years I’ve been playing this game I’ve never seen anything like it!’
The woman sipped her chocolate while she thought about her reply. Watching her was part of what had darkened my mood. Her name was Oceloxochitl – ‘Tiger Lily’ – and her handsome face and the hands that held her cocoa bowl might have made her father’s point for him, if she had arrived a few moments before she did. Not all the lines that creased her forehead had been put there by age, although she was, like me, well into her middle years. Pain had etched some of them, stretched the skin a little more tightly over her high cheekbones and added a few extra streaks of grey to her dark hair. And she held the vessel clamped between her wrists because her bandaged fingers were still too tender to be of any use, and she was too proud or stubborn to let anyone else hold it for her.
The men who had hurt her, just a few days before, had been acting in the name of Cacamatzin, ‘Lord Maize Ear’, the king of Tetzcoco. But they had not been obeying his orders, and it had been the king who had rescued Lily, and me, from them. The lordly residence we were now living in belonged to him; it was near his retreat, on the beautiful wooded hill called Tetzcotzinco, overlooking the great lake that dominated the valley of Mexico. So we were drinking the king’s chocolate, prepared by his servants, and as Kindly had pointed out to me, none of it was ours.
This was doubly true for me. My relationship with Lily and her father was a complex one. The woman and I were connected by loss – mine, of someone I barely recalled, years before; Lily’s sharper, more immediate and irreparable: the loss of her son. What we knew of one another’s suffering had thrown us together, and the repercussions of it, unexpected, hideously violent and culminating in the wounds she was still recovering from, had made us inseparable.
We had briefly been lovers and we both knew we might be again. However, I was still a slave. Lily had bought me out of a marketplace in Mexico, the great capital city of the Aztecs, where we both came from, to save me from a particularly hideous form of human sacrifice. The man who had put me up for sale, my former master, was Tlilpotonqui, lord Feathered In Black, who just happened to be the Aztec chief minister, the most powerful man in the world after the emperor Montezuma himself, and for reasons of his own he had been very much looking forward to watching my death throes. So Lily and her father, the old merchant, had brought me to lord Maize Ear’s kingdom to escape lord Feathered In Black’s fury.
As I thought about the dangers and torments that had befallen us, it occurred to me that here was a fine example indeed of the whimsical god of chance up to his usual tricks. All our lives had been imperilled and preserved so many times lately that I had lost count, and now even my status was in doubt. You could usually tell an Aztec’s rank and occupation merely by looking at him: cotton and feathers for a lord; black-painted skin and unkempt hair for a priest; the soldier’s mantle,
breechcloth and jewellery, the emblems whose design told you exactly how many war captives he had taken. But if that soothsayer really had looked into my future and seen a vision of me now, there was no telling what he might have made of it. Did I look like a modestly dressed lord, or merely like a middle-aged, undernourished slave who had got above himself?
Lily set her cup down awkwardly before replying to her father. ‘I don’t understand why you were playing patolli with Yaotl in the first place, since he doesn’t have a cocoa bean to his name.’ Then she added, with a resigned sigh: ‘All right, Yaotl, just how much do you owe him?’
I glanced down at the tally I had drawn, with a piece of charcoal, on the stone floor next to me. ‘Um… five large cloaks, two small ones and seven bags of cocoa beans.’
She rolled her eyes in despair. ‘Don’t you ever learn?’
Kindly grinned. ‘I’m trying to teach him! Double or quits next time, Yaotl?’
‘Maybe.’ I looked uncertainly at Lily, who had not been sleeping well. ‘It’s getting late.’
‘It is,’ she confirmed. ‘I think we should finish the chocolate and go indoors before the raccoons and foxes come out.’
‘Suit yourselves,’ her father said. ‘I don’t think you’ll see a fox or a raccoon up here, though. Even a centipede would have trouble getting past the guards at the bottom of this hill.’ Lord Maize Ear lived in fear of assassination by one of his brothers, who had his own designs on the throne, and his retreat at Tetzcoctzinco was ringed day and night by fierce warriors. Lily and I both enjoyed the peace and quiet this gave us, though her father, who liked company, found it unnerving.
