Aztec Autumn

by neetha Napew

  Naturally, Pochotl was as happy as if he had been transported alive to the blissful afterworld of Tonatíucan—"Have you noticed, Tenamáxtli, how I am becoming enviably fat again, now that I am well paid and well fed?"—and he enjoyed showing me his every new production, and he took pleasure in my admiring them as much as the priests did. But there at the Cathedral he and I never spoke of his other work; that project we discussed only when he came to the house, to ask questions about various parts of the arcabuz that I had sketched for him:

  "Is this piece supposed to move like so? Or like so?"

  And in time he began to bring actual metal pieces to show, for my approval or comment.

  "It is a good thing," he said, "that you got me appointed to the Cathedral's enterprise at the same time you asked me to build this weapon. Just the making of the arcabuz's long, hollow tube would have been impossible without the tools I now have. And only today, I was trying to bend a thin metal strip into that spiral you called a spring, and fumbling at it, when I was unexpectedly interrupted by a certain Padre Diego. He startled me by speaking to me in Náhuatl."

  "I know the man," I said. "Caught you, did he? And he would hardly believe a spring to be any kind of church decoration. Did he scold you for neglecting your proper work?"

  "No. But he did ask what I was fooling with. Cunningly, I told him that I had had an idea for an invention, and I was struggling to bring it into reality."

  "An invention, eh?"

  "That is what Padre Diego said, too, and he laughed in ridicule. He said, 'That is no invention, maestro. It is a contrivance that has been familiar to us civilized folk for ages and ages.' And then—can you guess what he did, Tenamáxtli?"

  "He recognized it as a piece of an arcabuz," I groaned. "Our secret project is exposed and thwarted."

  "No, no. Not at all. He went away somewhere and came back, bringing me a whole handful of different sorts of springs. The spiral coil that I require to spin the grooved wheel." He showed me the spring. "Also the flat kind that bends back and forth, which I need for snapping what you called the cat's-paw." He showed me that one, too. "In brief, I now know how to make those things, but I do not need to. The good priest made me a gift of them."

  I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. "Marvelous!" I exclaimed. "For once, the coincidence-loving gods have been gracious. I must say, Pochotl, you are having more success than I." And I told him of my discouraging experiments with the pólvora.

  He thought for a moment, then suggested, "Perhaps you are not experimenting under the right conditions. From what you have described as the workings of the arcabuz, I think you cannot judge the efficacy of the pólvora until you pack it into a tightly constricted space before you touch fire to it."

  "Perhaps," I said. "But I have only pinches of the powder to work with. It will be a long time before I can fabricate enough of it to pack into anything."

  However, the very next day the gods of coincidence arranged another happy furtherance of my project.

  As I had promised Citláli, I was spending some part of every day at the late Netzlin's market stall. That required little of me except to be there standing among the baskets whenever a customer wished to buy one, because Citláli had told me the price she expected to be paid for each one—in cacao beans or snippets of tin or maravedí coins—and the customer could judge the quality without my needing to point it out. He or she could even pour water into any of Citláli's baskets to test it; they were all so tightly woven that they would not leak water, let alone seeds or meal or whatever else they were destined to contain. Since there was nothing else for me to do, between customers, I spent the time conversing with passersby or smoking picíetl with other stall-keepers or—as I was doing on the day of which I speak—pouring onto my stall's shopboard small mounds of charcoal, azufre and xitli powders, so I could morosely meditate on them and their infinite number of possible combinations.

  "Ayya, Cuatl Tenamáxtli!" boomed a hearty voice in a pretense of dismay. "Are you going into competition with my wares?"

  I looked up. It was a man named Peloloá, a pochtécatl trader whom I knew from previous encounters. He regularly came to the City of Mexíco, bringing the two prime products of his native Xoconóchco, that coastal Hot Land far to the south, whence had come most of our cotton and salt since long before the white men set foot in The One World.

  "By Iztocíuatl!" he exclaimed, invoking the goddess of salt, as he pointed at my pathetic pile of white grains on the shopboard. "Are you intending to trounce me at my own trade?"

  "No, Cuatl Peloloá," I said, smiling ruefully. "This is not a salt that anyone would wish to buy."

  "You are right," he said, touching a few grains to his tongue, before I could stop him and tell him it was purely essence of urine. Then he surprised me, saying, "It is only the bitter first-harvest. What the Spaniards call salitre. It sells so cheaply that it would hardly pay you a living."

  "Ayyo," I breathed. "You recognize this substance?"

  "But of course. Who from the Xoconóchco would not?"

  "Do you boil women's urine in the Xoconóchco, then?"

  He looked blank and said, "What?"

  "Nothing. No matter. You called the powder 'first-harvest.' What does that mean?"

  "What it says. Some people think we simply dip a scoop into the sea and strain the salt directly from it. Not so. The making of salt is a more complicated process. We dike off the shallows of our lagoons and let them dry, yes, but then those chunks and lumps and flakes of dry matter must be rid of their many impurities. First, in fresh water, they are sieved clean of sand and shells and weeds. Then, again in fresh water, the substance is boiled. From that initial boiling come crystals that are also sieved out. Those are the first-harvest crystals—salitre—exactly what you have there, Tenamáxtli, only yours has been pulverized. To get to the goddess's invaluable real salt takes several more stages of refinement."

  "You said this salitre sells, but cheaply."

  "The Xoconóchco farmers buy it merely to spread it on their cotton fields. They claim it enhances the ground's fertility. The Spanish employ salitre in some manner in their tanneries. I know not what use you might be thinking of making of it—"

  "Tanning!" I lied. "Yes, that is it. I contemplate adding fine leather goods to my stock here. I was only puzzled as to where to get the salitre."

  "I shall be glad to bring you a whole tamémi load, on my next trip north," said Peloloá. "Cheap it is, but I shall charge you nothing at all. You are a friend."

  I raced home to announce the good news. But in my excitement, I did it awkwardly. I dashed through the doorway curtain, shouting:

  "You can cease urinating now, Citláli!"

  My inelegant entrance threw her into such a paroxysm of laughter that it was a while before she could gasp out, "I once—called you—preposterous. I was wrong. You are—totally xolopítli!" And it was a while longer before I could gather my wits and rephrase my announcement, and tell her what great good fortune had befallen me.

  Citláli said shyly, and she was seldom shy, "Perhaps we should make a small celebration. To show gratitude to the salt goddess Iztocíuatl."

  "A celebration? Of what sort?"

  Still shyly, and blushing now, she said, "I have been taking the powdered root tlatlaohuéhuetl throughout the past month. I believe we need worry about no mishap if we were to give its vaunted impregnability a trial."

  I looked at her—"with new eyes," I was about to say, but that would not be true. During all this time that we had been sleeping apart, on pallets in the separate rooms, I had been desiring her, but virtuously had given no sign of it. Also, it had been so very long since I had lain with a female—the tiny brown Rebeca—that I might soon have resorted to the services of a maátitl. Citláli must have taken my brief hesitation as reluctance, for now she said boldly, with laughter, and made me laugh, too:

  "Niez tlalqua ayquic axitlinéma." Which means, "I promise not to urinate."

  And so we embraced
laughing, which, I now learned for the first time, is the very best way to begin.

  All this while, Ome-Ehécatl had been growing, from a babe in arms, to an infant that crawled, to a weanling learning wobblily to walk. I kept expecting Ehécatl to die any day, and no doubt Citláli did, too, because a child afflicted with a physical deformity so evident at birth usually has other defects that are not visible, and dies very young. During Ehécatl's infancy, the only other deficiency that became apparent was the child's never learning to speak, and possibly that indicated deafness as well. That may have troubled Citláli more than it did me; I was frankly pleased that the child never cried, either.

  Anyway, its brain appeared to function well enough. While learning to walk, Ehécatl also learned to make its way most adroitly around the house and learned early on to veer clear of the cooking hearth. Whenever Citláli decided to give the child some outdoor exercise, she would stand it in the street and point it and give it a gentle shove. Ehécatl would dauntlessly toddle straight along the middle of that street, confident that its mother had made sure nothing was in the way. Of course, Citláli was always gentle and kindly toward everyone, but I believe she also had maternal feelings, even for such an offspring as Ehécatl. She kept the child clean, and tidy of dress—and well fed, though at first it had difficulty in finding her teat and, later, in wielding a spoon. The other neighborhood children rather surprised me with their attitude. They seemed to regard Ehécatl as a kind of plaything—not human like themselves, certainly, but not as inert as a straw or clay doll—and played almost affectionately with the child, without ever being abusive or derisive. All in all, while getting to live for more years than such monstrosities usually do, Ehécatl passed those years as pleasantly as an incurable cripple could ever have hoped to do.

  I knew that Citláli's chief worry about the child was the question of its afterlife, whether Ehécatl went there young or old. Citláli probably had some concern for her own afterlife, as well. No person of The One World is necessarily damned to the nothingness of Míctlan after death—as Christians are to hell—simply because he or she has been born, has lived and has died. Still, to assure that one does not get plunged to Míctlan, one should have done something in one's lifetime to merit residing afterward in the sun god's Tonatíucan or one of the other beneficent gods' similarly appetizing afterworlds.

  A child's only hope of doing that is to sacrifice itself—that is, have its parents sacrifice it—to appease the hunger and the vanity of one god or another. But no priest would have accepted a useless object like Ehécatl as an offering to even the least of gods. A grown man can best attain his desired afterworld by dying in battle or on the altar of a god, or doing some deed noteworthy enough to please the gods. A grown woman can also die in sacrifice to a god, and some have done deeds as praiseworthy as any man's, but most have deserved their places in Tonatíucan or Tlálocan, or wherever, simply by being the mothers of children whose tonáli has destined them to be warriors or sacrifices or mothers. Ome-Ehécatl could never be any of those things, which is why I say Citláli must have had some anxiety about her own prospects after death.

  XI

  Some months after our earlier encounter in the market, the pochtécatl Pololoá came again from the Xoconóchco, and brought along one tamémi laden with nothing but a big sack of the "first-harvest" salitre, and grandly presented that to me, and even bade the porter continue carrying it as far as my house. And there I began devoting every free moment to trying the black, white and yellow powders in mixtures of varying proportions, and noting down every experiment I made. I now had a good deal more free time than before, because both Pochotl and I had been dismissed from our duties at the Cathedral.

  "It is because the Church has a new pope at Rome," the notarius Alonso explained in a tone of apology. "The old Papa Clemente Séptimo has died and been succeeded by the Papa Paulo Tercero. We have just been informed of his accession and his first directives to all the world's Catholic Christian clergy."

  I said, "You do not sound pleased by the news, Cuatl Alonso."

  He grimaced sourly. "The Church commands that every priest be celibate and chaste and honorable—or at least that he pretend to be. That certainly should apply to the pope, the highest priest of all. But it is well known that while he was still just the Padre Farnese, he began his climb through the Church hierarchy by what the coarser folk call 'lamiendo el culo del patron.' That is to say, he put his own sister, Giulia the Beautiful, to bed with the earlier Papa Alessandro Sexto, thereby winning for himself substantial preferments. And this Papa Paulo himself has by no means been celibate during his life. He has numerous children and grandchildren. And one of those, a grandson, Paulo has already—immediately on attaining the papacy—made a cardinal at Rome. And that grandson is only fourteen years old."

  "Interesting," I said, though I did not find it very much so. "But what has this to do with us here?"

  "Among his other directives, Papa Paulo has decreed that every diocese commence to conserve on its expenditures. That means we can no longer finance even such a small luxury as your work with me on the codices. Also, the pope has addressed Bishop Zumárraga specifically in the matter of what he calls 'squandering' gold and silver on 'fripperies.' All the precious metals the Church has acquired here in New Spain he decrees must be shared among less fortunately endowed bishoprics. Or so he says."

  "You do not believe him?"

  Alonso blew out a long breath. "Doubtless I am predisposed to distrust him, because of what I know of his personal life. Nevertheless, it sounds to me as if Papa Paulo is appropriating his own private King's Fifth from the treasures of New Spain. Anyway, that is why Pochotl must leave off his wondrous jewelsmithing for us, and you your help with the translations."

  I smiled at him. "You and I both know, Cuatl Alonso, that for a long while you have been merely—and compassionately—inventing work for me to do. But I have some savings put by. I think that I and the widow and orphan I support will not suffer much hardship from my leaving this post."

  "I shall be sorry to see you go, Juan Británico. But I strongly recommend, now that you will not be occupied here, that you put those hours to good advantage by resuming your Christian studies under Padre Diego."

  "It is thoughtful and caring of you to tell me that," I said, and meant it, but I made no promise.

  He sighed, then said, "I should like to bestow on you a small gift, by way of saying farewell." He took up a bright object that was holding down the papers on his table. "Everybody owns a thing like this nowadays—I mean every Spaniard—but this particular one was given to me by that poor wretched heretic whom you and I saw executed outside the Cathedral here."

  Ayyo, I thought, a gift to him from my own father, and now from him to me. Alonso handed it over, a piece of crystal the size of my palm, circular and smoothly polished. I still had that other crystal that my father had involuntarily bequeathed, tucked safely among my belongings. But that was a yellow topaz, and this was clear quartz. Also, this one was differently shaped, being gently rounded on both surfaces.

  "That old man recounted how he discovered these objects, somewhere in the southern lands," said Alonso, "and made them popular utensils among all his people. They are now much used by us Spaniards—very useful things they are, indeed—but they seem to have been forgotten by you indios."

  "Useful?" I asked. "How?"

  "Observe." He took it from me and held it in a shaft of sunlight from the window. In his other hand he took a piece of bark paper and held it so the sunlight came through the crystal onto the paper. Moving the paper and crystal back and forth, he gradually brought that spot of light down to a bright point on the paper. And, after a very brief moment, the paper began to emit smoke there—then, amazingly, broke into a small but real flame. Alonso blew it out and handed the crystal back to me. "A burning-glass," he said. "We also call it a lente, from the shape of it, like the bean of the same name. With it, a person can kindle a fire without any need for steel
and pirita, or without the drudgery of drill-stick and block. When the sun is shining, anyway. I trust you will find it useful, too."

  I certainly would, I was thinking exultantly. It was like a gift from the gods. No—a gift from my father Mixtli, now surely a dweller in Tonatíucan. He must have been watching me from that afterworld as I struggled to master the making of pólvora—and must know why I was doing so—and decided to make the struggle easier for me. Even long gone and far removed from mortal concerns, my father Mixtli must be in accord with my intention to rid The One World of its alien masters. And this was his way of telling me so, from beyond the immeasurable distances that separate us living from the dead.

  I said nothing of that to Alonso de Molina, of course, but only, "I thank you very much, indeed. I will think of you every time I make use of the lente." And then I said good-bye.

  Pochotl was no more woebegone than I at being dismissed from the Cathedral roster of workers. He had cannily invested the wages he had been paid, having built for himself a more than decent house and workshop in one of the better colaciones of the city set aside for native settlement. His house was, in fact, right on the edge of the Traza reserved for the Spaniards. And such numbers of those Spaniards had been dazzled by the articles Pochotl had crafted for the Cathedral that he was already being solicited to do private commissions.

  "The white men are finally striving to emulate us in culture and refinement and good taste," he said. "Have you noticed, Tenamáxtli? They no longer even smell so bad as before. They have acquired our habit of bathing, though perhaps not so frequently or thoroughly as we do. And now they have learned to appreciate the kind of jewelry that I have always done—much finer and more ingenious works than those of their own clumsy artificers. So they bring me their gold, their silver, their gems, and tell me what they want—a necklace, a finger ring, a sword hilt—and leave me to determine the design. None yet has been less than overjoyed at the results or failed to pay me handsomely. And none has yet remarked on my always somehow having a bit of the metal left over to keep for my own."