[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  What made a man like that in the first place, though, I wondered – what produced a creature like my enemy, the captain of the otomies? Might it have been the sort of loss that Handy and his sons had suffered?

  9

  Snake and I returned to the house in Atlixco just before nightfall.

  I found Handy standing in the middle of his courtyard, with his best cloak – the one he had been presented with years before, after taking his second enemy captive – draped around his shoulders. He was fidgeting nervously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and fiddling absently with the hem of the cloak, like a man about to undertake some task that he feared might be beyond him.

  With him were two men I did not know.

  Handy introduced the younger of them as his son, Spotted Eagle. We studied one another coolly. I could make little of what I saw. Spotted Eagle was a typical Aztec youth, slim and muscular, his lips seemingly frozen into an angry pout and his eyes into a resentful glare, but still bearing the unblooded warrior’s telltale tuft of hair on the back of his closely shaved head.

  Handy’s other visitor turned out to be his brother-in-law Xochipepe, or ‘Flower Gatherer’.

  ‘Yaotl,’ I said, answering the other man’s unspoken question. ‘Friend of the family. Handy asked me to help.’

  Flower Gatherer’s appearance surprised me. For some reason I had imagined Star’s sister to be married to a man like Handy, a commoner, but a successful warrior in his day, a respected veteran with a captive or two to his credit, and now a stolid, reliable member of his community. Instead I saw a small, rough looking individual, with his bowed head shaved in a tonsure: a sign that he had never dragged a prisoner home from the battlefield and, given his age, surely never would. He was marked as a failure, in other words, condemned to menial work and poverty. His cloak was short, ragged and so threadbare it was almost translucent, and his grubby breechcloth was not much better.

  ‘You’re Goose’s husband?’

  I must have betrayed more surprise than I had intended to, because he looked up, scowled and barked back at me: ‘Sure I am. You another one who doesn’t think I’m good enough?’

  I took a step backward, almost bumping into Goose, who had emerged from the interior of the house with an armful of fresh bread. ‘No, I didn’t say that!’

  He scowled at me like a sulky child. ‘Why not? Everyone else does. Her parents’ – he glanced at his wife – ‘her sister, all of them. Just because I never got lucky on the battlefield.’

  ‘That’s enough, Flower Gatherer,’ Handy growled. ‘And you’ll leave Star out of this, if you know what’s good for you!’

  His brother-in-law glowered at him, but he lowered his head and said nothing else.

  Goose stood in the middle of the courtyard, still holding the tortillas. She looked wretched, her face drawn and her hair dishevelled. In a painfully obvious effort to change the subject she told her husband and Spotted Eagle: ‘That Red Macaw was here earlier, trying to poke his nose in.’

  ‘Him?’ A slight lift in Spotted Eagle’s voice suggested mild surprise. ‘I suppose you told him where to go?’

  ‘I did.’ Handy’s voice had an edge to it, reflecting the tension the man must be feeling. He clearly did not want to pursue the topic. ‘Has the sun gone down yet? Good. Gentle Heart and the other women should be here soon. I’m going to get the hammer, and Spotted Eagle, you had best come in and pay your respects to your grandfather and your grandmother.’ He turned, leaving his eldest boy to follow him, and they both went indoors.

  Flower Gatherer watched them go with a defiant curl of his lower lip. The three of us left outside stood in the courtyard, avoiding one another’s glances. None of us dared to speak until, for want of anything better to say, I posed a question that had been on the tip of my tongue since the morning: ‘Does either of you know what it is between Handy and Red Macaw?’

  ‘Not my quarrel,’ the man muttered. ‘You’ll have to ask him in there.’

  Goose said: ‘Why do you ask, Yaotl?’

  ‘I just want to know why I’m a better candidate to help with the burial than he is, that’s all. And he seemed to think he could help – in fact he almost insisted.’

  Goose said: ‘Don’t take it personally, but as far as Handy is concerned a half-wit with only one leg would be a better candidate than Red Macaw!’

  I could not resist trying to probe further. ‘He’s injured, isn’t he? What was it, an old war wound? Was that anything to do with it? Were they in the army together and…’

  ‘Yaotl,’ Goose interrupted me, ‘Look, I’m sure you mean well, but this isn’t going to do any good. And now really isn’t the time.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Besides, it’s too late,’ she added firmly. ‘I think they’re ready to start now.’ As Handy came out of the house, with a stone-headed hammer dangling from his fingers, I realised I could hear female voices from the far side of the courtyard wall at the back, and that the ritual was about to begin.

  Handy wielded the hammer himself. He grunted as he swung its head against the wall of his courtyard, his face twisting with effort and something that may have been rage. I wondered where his fury was directed: at the gods whose callous whim had snatched his wife and child away from him, turning what should have been a joyous day into an occasion for mourning; at Red Macaw for an offence no-one was prepared to name; or just at anything that might distract him for a moment from his grief?

  The hammer smashed into the frail adobe wall, each stroke landing with an echoing thud and raising a cloud of white dust. It took just four or five blows to make a hole big enough for a man to step through; or to carry a corpse through. The dead woman must not leave the house through the doorway, lest her spirit – the Divine Princess she was to become – return that way to torment her living relatives.

  As the last fragments of plaster clattered to the floor, the voices from beyond the wall grew louder. Shrill screams, yells, howling: they were war cries, but the voices uttering them were not men’s. Gentle Heart, the midwife, would have gathered her own army, mostly older women from the Pleasure House, fellow midwives and curers. These were the comrades in arms of the dead woman, come to escort her to her last resting-place on Earth.

  A face appeared in the hole: a young woman’s, one I did not recognise. As those behind her maintained their terrifying cries, she clambered over the rubble into the courtyard and surveyed the scene around her as if inspecting it.

  ‘The sun has descended to the Land of the Dead,’ she told Handy. Her voice was soft in contrast with the noise from the other side of the broken wall and hard to hear above it. ‘The little woman’s comrades, the Divine Princesses, are ready to receive her.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Handy replied shortly. ‘Where’s Gentle Heart?’

  The woman’s face darkened a little in embarrassment. ‘She’s unwell. She was taken ill this morning.’

  Goose said: ‘I’m not surprised. She didn’t sleep all night.’

  ‘But we need her!’ Handy cried desperately. He looked wildly at Goose and the stranger in turn. ‘She has to be here. Who’s going to lead us, if she can’t? Will you?’ His eyes settled on the face of the young woman in front of him.

  She looked away. ‘I don’t know how to. I was only taught the words I’ve just said.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Goose said.

  ‘You?’ Her brother in law stared at her.

  ‘I’ve taken part in one of these things before.’

  ‘But… Shouldn’t the midwife…’

  ‘She isn’t here! I am!’ Goose’s voice was hoarse with strain. ‘Handy, what does it matter? We have to do this. It’s the only thing left that I can still do for my sister. Now let’s in the name of all the gods get it over with!’

  Spotted Eagle had dragged a thick reed mat from the house, and now he tugged it along after him as he followed his father, leaving it by the entrance to the sweat bath while they scrambled into the dark, cramped space be
yond.

  I had been dreading the moment when the woman’s body was pulled out into the open. I was used to death and the bodies of the dead, but I remembered Star as she had been when I had seen her last: spirited, unafraid of anybody – even my elder brother, who intimidated almost everyone else he met – and laughing at the antics of her busy household. I had wanted to hold onto that image of her and not replace it with the sight of her as a corpse, but I had no choice now, because I had felt sorry for her husband and her sister, and I had agreed to help bear her to her grave. At least we were spared seeing her dead child: his body had been left in the sweat bath for now, to be disposed of separately, as was the custom.

  ‘They’ve not even covered her up,’ Flower Gatherer complained.

  Goose heard him. ‘It’s not the custom to wrap women who die in childbirth.’ She busied herself over the body, straightening the skirt and blouse it had been dressed in like a mother fussing over her daughter on the morning of her wedding. I wondered how much of this activity and the brisk tone of her voice was a mask for her grief. ‘We washed and clothed her, that’s all.’

  The dead woman’s parents were nowhere to be seen. I hoped they had managed to say their farewells before now, because they would not have another opportunity.

  Star’s sister and her mother had got her into a sitting position and since then the stiffness had set in. When her husband and son had manoeuvred her into the courtyard and set her upon the mat, she remained seated, with her eyes closed and her hair loose. Apart from her wide-open mouth she looked as if she were resting.

  I felt a thrill of horror as I noticed that she seemed to be trembling, but it was the shaking of the two men’s hands as they placed her on the mat that caused it. They laid her gently on her side so that she would not topple when we picked her up. Then, as if obeying a command, they both turned, stumbling away. Handy stood up and gasped. His son bent forward as if a heavy weight had dropped onto his shoulders.

  Handy turned towards his sister in law. ‘We’re ready,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Then we have to go as quickly as we can,’ the woman said. ‘You know where?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a crossroads in Atlixco we can use. It’s by our pyramid, and it has a shrine to the Divine Princesses. We’ll bury her there.’

  ‘Then let’s hurry. Every youth and sorcerer in the city will know what happened here by now. They’ll be gathering, waiting for their chance … Handy, do you understand?’

  She looked sharply at the commoner. His large frame seemed to have shrunk during the day, and now he appeared to have scarcely the strength left to stand, as he swayed silently back and forth, his gaze fixed on the floor. It seemed an age before he replied softly: ‘I heard you.’

  Star had to be buried in the place that was now her own: before one of the shrines to the Divine Princesses that stood at every crossroads. We had to get her there quickly because the body of a woman dead in childbirth drew the most desperate of thieves. Parts of it – the right middle finger and the hair in particular – would make a warrior invulnerable if he inserted them in his shield. To the youths in particular, still dreading their first venture onto the battlefield, such a charm was irresistible. Worse than the young warrior was the sorcerer, the thief: he would take the whole forearm, and carry it with him when he burgled a house, because it had the power to render the occupants unconscious.

  It was hard to have secrets in our crowded city; to keep them in the intimate world of a parish with its tangle of family ties and mixed loyalties was impossible. Goose knew, as we all did, that the moment word got around that a woman had died giving birth, the sorcerers and the young warriors would start to gather.

  This was why we had to hurry, and why Star would have an escort of midwives, mature women, many of them mothers themselves, who would fight to protect their charge.

  ‘We must go,’ she said quietly.

  Flower Gatherer and I stepped towards the mat. After a brief hesitation, Handy and his son did the same. Each of us grasped a corner, and at a word from Handy we took up our burden.

  Even with four men carrying her Star was heavy, and getting her through the hole in the wall was horrifyingly difficult. To have dropped her would have been unthinkable, but as we stumbled over the rubble created by her husband’s hammer blows, it was impossible to stop her from wobbling alarmingly.

  Somehow we pulled her from her home, intact, and then our ordeal began.

  Women shrieked around us, waving torches whose flames traced painfully bright shapes on the indigo sky. As we walked away from the house they closed in, surrounding us on all sides, leaving just enough room in their midst for the four men, the body, and Goose. Star’s sister did not fall into step with us, though. As we got under way she began to become more and more animated, darting back and forth, watching and calling to her comrades like a vigilant war captain encouraging his troops.

  Watching her, I recalled Handy with his hammer and Snake with his air of harsh indifference. I wondered how long these people could keep on holding their sense of loss at bay. Sooner or later the bitterness and the frenzy would wear off. How would they cope then, when the pain came rushing on them and they had nothing left to oppose it with?

  I had both hands hooked into my corner of the mat. The other men did the same. All our arms strained under the weight we bore, with our muscles and sinews standing out and our shoulders bowed. Every step was announced with a grunt.

  That walk to the crossroads still haunts my nightmares, but it is the women, not the pain in my shoulders or the strain in my back, whose memory brings me to wakefulness crying and soaked with sweat.

  It should have been reassuring to have an escort that few men in Mexico would dare to interfere with, but it was terrifying. High, ferocious cries tore the air around us: ‘Not so bloody brave now, are they?’ ‘Where are you, you men? Hiding in the shadows?’ ‘Come out here, come dancing out here, showing off your manhood now. Ha! You can show it to this pine torch!’ ‘If she doesn’t burn it off, I’ll bite it off!’

  ‘“Bloody, painful are the words of the women”,’ grunted Flower Gatherer, quoting an old saying.

  ‘It’s not their words that scare me,’ I muttered with feeling. ‘What if they really mean it?’

  There was nothing artificial about their rage: it was born of bitterness, anger and hate, and there could be no mistake about where it was directed. When women detached themselves from the crowd to hurl themselves into the surrounding darkness, brandishing torches or clawing the air with their fingernails, I knew the foe they sought need not be a sorcerer or a warrior. It was a man: any man at all. We four were exempt so long as we held onto the body of the dead woman, but I had no idea how safe we would be once we put her down. Men had a part to play in this ceremony, but it was the women’s night.

  Goose stayed in the midst of the crowd, prowling back and forth within the open space at its heart like a captive jaguar patrolling its cage. Every so often she would call out, although her voice was lower and her words more measured than the other women’s. She seemed almost subdued in comparison, as though her anger, having burned more intensely than the others’, was already starting to exhaust itself. Only once did she appear to give way to the hysteria that surrounded her: when a shrill voice near the back of the crowd suddenly cried out: ‘There’s one! Look, over there!’

  We all stopped. I could not turn without dropping my corner of Star’s mat but I could twist my head around, as did the other three men. It was hard to see exactly what was happening through the press of bodies behind us but at least two of the women had broken away, bearing torches, and were running back towards whatever it was one of them had seen. A moment later somebody pushed past me: it was Goose, racing to join in the pursuit, skirts flying, torch waving and spitting sparks, voice raised as she strove to make herself heard over the other women’s screams.

  The cries diminished with distance. A strange stillness descended over those of us who remained, as heads were t
urned and necks craned in an effort to follow the drama unfolding behind us. I could not see what the women were chasing. Then they vanished around a corner.

  There was a brief pause. I turned to look at Handy, Spotted Eagle and Flower Gatherer. All four of us were frowning in puzzlement, as we tried to work out what had happened, and whom the women had seen: a sorcerer, a warrior, or some poor innocent engaged on business of his own, who had just happened to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Around us, female voices began muttering and growling.

  ‘We’d better put her down for a moment,’ Handy said. ‘We don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to,’ I replied as I lowered my corner of the mat. ‘Whatever it is, it won’t be pretty!’

  There came a shout from somewhere out of sight, followed by a high-pitched, quivering cry: a triumphant sound, which was rapidly picked up and amplified by the crowd until the air seemed saturated by unearthly shrieks. I cringed, and with both hands now free I clapped them over my ears. The cries told me that the hunters, Goose and her followers, had caught something, and I shuddered at the thought of what they might be capable of in their fury.

  There was a disturbance in the crowd and then Star’s sister was beside me. Her face was flushed and the torchlight made the beads of sweat on her forehead gleam.

  ‘Here!’ she cried, and threw something at my feet.

  Handy, the other two men and I looked at it with a mixture of wonder and slowly gathering shock.