Jaguar Princess

by Clare Bell

  There will be none. Wise Coyote reminded himself bitterly. Though I have other wives, they are concubines and their sons may not inherit the office of Speaker-King. Even if Ant Flower has not grown too old to bear another child, her grief has turned her from me.

  The cloud shadows on the grass chased one another up and down the hillside. Wise Coyote had stayed long enough, but he could not make himself leave. This place felt right to him. The wind from the lake cooled his forehead, the noise from the palace and the lower gardens was diminished by distance. Wildflowers rippled down the hillsides into the hollow, and to one side a swift stream ran.

  Wise Coyote wondered if his grief would ease if he stayed here long enough. Perhaps the wind would steal the misery and toss it away into the sky. Or the sun would warm it until it dwindled and diminished, like a pool of evaporating water.

  This place feels sacred, he thought. But not to any of the gods of blood and fire. It is too quiet for them. Perhaps here is where I might find the faith I have sought—in Tloque Nahaque.

  He resolved then that he would build a temple in this vale to the God of the Near and By. A small simple structure, to be laid out with his own hands. Each stone would be set reverently, without the noise and clamor that accompanied construction projects. At the decision, he smiled wryly at himself.

  Men rage at the death of their sons; women weep. And I will mourn as I always have, by building.

  He caught sight of another shadow on the grass, turned and saw his son, fourteen-year-old Huetzin.

  “I followed you up the path, lord father,” the boy stammered. “Please don’t be angry.”

  Wise Coyote opened his arms, but his son did not run to his embrace. A weak feeling in his legs made Wise Coyote sink until he knelt on the ground. After the Prodigy died, all his sons had come to fear their father. His lips wanted to form the words he knew were a lie. It was 1Ihuicamina who killed your half brother, Huetzin, not me.

  The boy knelt down before Wise Coyote, trembling. “If I displease you, lord father, will I also be killed? That is what my brothers say.”

  Wise Coyote felt as though a spear of ice had gone through him, but he only closed his eyes and said, “If you feared you would die because you displeased me, why did you follow me up the path?”

  The boy grew more frightened and Wise Coyote thought he would jump up and flee. But he stayed and looked his father in the face. “You are sad. It is hard to be alone when you are sad. I thought I would go with you…even if you had me killed for daring.”

  Again Wise Coyote held out his arms and this time Huetzin came into his embrace. He held the boy closely, stroking his hair. “Where is the little carved bird you made so long ago?” he asked gently.

  “I broke it. I smashed it between two stones. There must have been an evil spirit inside it to have caused so much trouble.”

  Wise Coyote held Huetzin by the shoulders. “The trouble was not caused by your carving or the words you spoke. If you would please me, carve another.”

  “But it won’t be the same, lord father. Every piece I make is different.”

  “Because you are so gifted. I am grateful for your talent and so should you be. Only those who have no art except boasting and warmaking are cursed with kingship.”

  “That is not true,” said the boy softly. “You are tlatoani.”

  Wise Coyote cursed his glibness and his sarcasm. The boy was not trying to flatter him, he only spoke what he knew.

  “I saw you studying the ground as if you planned to build,” Huetzin said.

  “I am thinking of a temple. Just a small one.”

  “To your gentle god?”

  “Yes,” said Wise Coyote, thinking that this was one of the few times that the word “gentle” had not been meant as an insult.

  Huetzin looked up at him eagerly. “I will carve something for your temple, if you wish. Tell me what your gentle god looks like.”

  “You may carve any image you wish,” said Wise Coyote. “The Lord of the Near and By is invisible to human eyes.”

  Huetzin looked puzzled. “He has no image, like the rain god Tlaloc? He carries no symbols, such as Smoking Mirror? He is a strange god, father.”

  A strange god, perhaps, for a strange man, thought Wise Coyote. Aloud, he said, “Perhaps you will worship with me. There will be no blood shed in my small temple to Tloque Nahaque.”

  “No sacrifices?”

  “Just flowers.”

  Huetzin smiled. “It will be nicer than watching the rites of other gods. But I thought all divine ones needed blood to live, father.”

  “A few do not. There is Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. And Tloque Nahaque.” Wise Coyote got to his feet. “The best offering to those gods is the work of your hands and mind.”

  “I will go and think about what to carve,” Huetzin said, his eyes shining. Wise Coyote imagined that the boy was already sculpting in his mind, drawing shape from stone. He knew how much joy came from artistry, for he had the same feeling himself when he drew out plans for a building project or wrote a hymn to Tloque Nahaque.

  Wistfully he watched Huetzin run away down the path. He envied the boy the freedom to create, uninterrupted by the duties or griefs of kingship. Then he walked through the grass and stooped at the spot where he would lay the cornerstone of his temple.

  The day after she had made the drawings for Six-Wind, Mixcatl arose early, collected the pisspots from the rooms and carried them out to the slopjars in back of the school. As she finished dumping the last one, she heard the dip of a barge pole. She turned to see the refuse barge sliding along the stone dock built alongside the canal.

  Usually she didn’t see the boat. When she did, it was manned by a grumpy old man. This morning a boy stood amidst the squat clay refuse jars, the barge pole in his hands. Mixcatl immediately compared him with Six-Wind. While the young scholar was sturdy and direct, this boatboy seemed lanky and easygoing. He was much taller than Six-Wind, dark, bony and unkempt. A shock of tangled hair nearly covered his eyes, which seemed to watch Mixcatl with a languid amusement. He wore a ragged loincloth and ratty sandals, but what she noticed immediately about him was the black mark on the right half of his upper lip.

  As the barge scraped the dock, the boy jumped off and moored it. Despite his thin frame and sleepy eyes, he showed a surprising lightness and grace in his movements. And strength too, for he heaved up the slop vessels belonging to the calmecac and dumped them into the squat containers aboard the barge.

  Mixcatl had always wondered what happened to the night soil and garbage in the clay jars she put out on the quay.

  “Where do you take this?” she asked, shading her eyes against the midmorning sun as she squinted at him.

  “To the floating gardens, the chinampas, where farmers put it on dung piles. When it is well rotted, they put it on the corn.” The boy cocked his head, his wide mouth spreading in a grin. “What is your name? Are you a student in the calmecac?”

  Mixcatl gave a little sigh, wishing that she could be. “No. I am a slave.”

  The boatboy shrugged his shoulders as if that didn’t matter and Mixcatl felt a growing friendliness toward him. She asked a few more questions and learned that the old man she had seen before was the boy’s grandfather, who had become too feeble to pole the boat and dump the refuse. The boy’s name was Latosl, and, like Mixcatl, he had no other name, nor did he have a birth-sign.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked with childlike directness and tapped the right side of her upper lip.

  “This?” said Latosl as he let down an empty jar and touched the black mark. The expression on his face and the slight hesitation in his movement made Mixcatl realize she had spoken heedlessly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “I was bom with it.” He squatted down so that Mixcatl could examine his face. At first Mixcatl thought that it was a raised birthmark, of the type she had seen on other children. When she looked, she saw that it
was a black area of skin, no different in texture from the coppery skin of Latosl’s cheek.

  “I won’t tease you about it,” Mixcatl said solemnly. “I know how it feels to be made fun of. People think I am ugly.”

  Latosl paused in his work and eyed her. “People don’t speak to a night-soil hauler either. But I don’t care. Anyway, you are not ugly. A bit different, perhaps.” His face darkened and his hand made a sweeping motion toward the calmecac and its surroundings. “They are the ugly ones.”

  Mixcatl protested, thinking of Speaking Quail and Six-Wind. When she tried to tell Latosl, he waved her away impatiently and there was a look on his face as if he had said more than he should have.

  He leaped back aboard the barge and pushed off, leaving Mixcatl with unanswered questions. Who were the “ugly ones” and what did he mean by those words? She shrugged as she scrubbed out the empty containers and returned them to their places. She should not worry about what Latosl said. He was only a barge boy, after all, and she had other things to think about.

  Even though Mixcatl thought she had dismissed Latosl from her mind, she found herself on the stone quay behind the school when the barge pulled in the following morning. She watched as he poled the boat, admiring and envying his skill. His copper skin glowed in the brilliant sunlight. His limbs were sinewy and he moved with a controlled grace that seemed unusual for one of his age or class.

  The black mark on his upper lip reminded her of the black patch on a puma’s muzzle just behind the whiskers. The way he moved and his graceful spareness made Mixcatl think of the long-legged cat of the mountains. The Aztecs called the puma Red Dog, as if they had no interest in distinguishing the wily and secretive animal from their own yapping curs. Mixcatl felt her lip curl in scorn. Her own language had a better name for the puma, the right name, the one the cat would answer to.

  And then she caught herself. How did she know these things? The only time she had seen a live puma was in the marketplace, in a cage. The imprisoned beast was starved and mangy, not at all like the animal in the wild. There were more images in Mixcatl’s head of beasts she knew she had never seen; the red-gold coat of the puma, the spotted rosettes of the jaguar, the blue-gray of the jaguarundi, the markings of the ocelot. Where had they come from, she wondered, and as she pondered, Latosl sprang out of the refuse barge.

  “So, you are here again,” said the boatboy with a grin as he dumped the first slop jar.

  “Can I help you?” Mixcatl asked.

  “You look strong. Try lifting that one.” Latosl pointed to a smaller clay vessel at the end of the row. Mixcatl seized the jar and hoisted it, carried it to the end of the quay and put one foot on the barge.

  “Ai, no I It’s not moored,” Latosl yelped in dismay, but Mixcatl was already straddling a widening gap between boat and quay. She had managed to shove the jar aboard, but the distance was too great now for her to jump back to the dock or scramble onto the barge. Her legs would only spread so wide. Latosl was trying to counter the barge’s drift with his pole, but the boat was heavy and stubborn. With a dismayed cry, Mixcatl fell into the canal.

  She went right down to the bottom, her toes sinking in among the cold slimy waterweed. With a panicked kick, she launched herself to the surface, gasped a breath and sank again. This time she flailed and kicked, fighting to stay afloat, but it was no use. She felt herself being dragged under again, her mouth filling with water, drowning her scream.

  Something bumped her. Something straight, smooth and growing right out of the water like a tree. Latosl’s barge pole. She grabbed it, hugged it and struggled to climb hand over hand out of the water, or at least to the surface, where she could regain her breath.

  The pole started to slant and Mixcatl clung with all her strength, shuddering with a fear she did not understand. The pole ground against the boat’s hull. She felt herself being lifted, squinted out of one closed eye and saw the boatboy dragging the pole and her over the side of the barge. At last she felt his hands close about her arms and she was swung onto the deck.

  She collapsed and lay in a sodden puddle, giving thanks for the dry deck, the warm sunlight and the air that entered so easily into her lungs instead of choking and drowning her. While she rested, she felt Latosl poling his boat back to the quay, for it had drifted quite a distance in the sluggish current of the canal.

  When the dugout hull grated against the stone, she lifted her head, peering toward the calmecac. Had anyone seen? Had anyone heard? Would Maguey Thorn come bustling out to seize her by the ear and drag her inside, scolding her and threatening to sell her?

  Mixcatl held her breath for a long time, but the calmecac didn’t stir. They were all busy.

  “Hey.” She started as Latosl tapped her back. She turned, wiping wet hair from her eyes. His shock of hair hid his eyes, but his mouth was frowning. “You scared me. You went right down and I thought you weren’t coming up again. Why didn’t you say that you couldn’t swim?”

  “I didn’t know,” Mixcatl said, still shaking as she watched the swirling canal. “I’ve never been in water, except for baths.”

  “Never been in…” Latosl rolled his eyes in disbelief. “By Tlaloc’s slimy green hair, I’ve never heard of a canal-side brat who couldn’t swim.” He got out, moored the barge securely and finished his task while Mixcatl wrung scummy canal water from her clothes and pulled strands of waterweed from her hair.

  Latosl paused before tipping the last jar. “You know, you could have gotten me in a lot of trouble, girl. If you had drowned, those calmecac people of yours would have fined my family or even made me a slave to pay for your loss.”

  “You didn’t tie up your boat,” Mixcatl retorted.

  “I never do,” Latosl replied. “I just hop off, dump the jars and pole away again. It’s much faster that way.” He squatted on the deck, long slender arms wrapped about bony knees, and fixed Mixcatl with an odd, intense gaze. “Why can’t you swim?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Someone should teach you,” said the boatboy. “You can’t live here in Tenochtitlan without knowing. It is too easy to fall into a canal.” He paused. “Maybe I can teach you.”

  She stared at him, still squeezing water out of a comer of her garment.

  “Think about it,” said Latosl, swinging back aboard the barge.

  Haw odd he is, thought Mixcatl, as the shape of the barge dwindled downstream. Not at all like Six-Wind, but nice in a different way.

  She stood on the dock, letting the breeze and the sun dry her clothes. When most of the dampness was gone, she gathered up her pots and went back inside.

  During the next few years Mixcatl was kept too busy by her duties to do much more than exchange a few words with the boatboy when he came. Even if she had the time, she used it to draw figures in the dust, for the images she had seen in the sacred book clamored to be recreated. Mixcatl was careful not to enter the school’s courtyard at all, even when she knew it was empty. She used other, more circuitous routes to make her way about the calmecac. She caught only brief glimpses of Six-Wind and he was always at the center of a throng of laughing, shouting boys.

  But his words stayed in her mind. She was strangely gifted, she knew that. And she had already used that power to harm. Was she, as he had said, a witch? And the skill in her hands and her eyes that brought back the wonderful images in the sacred book; was that bad? She went about with her head bowed and a tight feeling in her throat. Once she had thought that good and bad meant little to her and that it would be as easy for her to harm someone as to please them. But remembering Six-Wind’s fear and the way he had withdrawn from her brought a lump into her throat.

  When Mixcatl was ten, the head priest of the calmecac, an old man called Two-Rabbit Cactus Eagle, fell ill. Suddenly the atmosphere of the school seemed to change. The boys no longer went about in noisy shouting groups, but quietly, shepherded by the priests. Instead of classes, there were sessions of praying, and at night, strange bustlings up and down the c
orridors.

  Mixcatl had never seen Cactus Eagle. Maguey Thorn told her that he was a man so old that scraggly gray hairs had sprouted from his chin. He knew all that went on in the calmecac, even down to the doings of the drudges and the slaves. He even knew about her, Mixcatl was told. If he had not given his consent for her to stay, it would not have mattered what Maguey Thorn or Speaking Quail thought about her.

  From the sadness that fell over the school, Mixcatl knew that Cactus Eagle was valued by everyone there. Even Maguey Thorn, who was the first to spread a juicy piece of gossip about anyone, spoke of him with nothing but respect. And the sadness deepened as the old man grew worse.

  At night Mixcatl watched through the belled curtain by the light of a bonfire as priests and students together knelt in the courtyard. They prayed fervently and shed their own blood in sacrifice, using agave thorns to pierce their fingers, earlobes and lips. Mixcatl could smell the blood, mixed with the odors of sweat and black body-paint. As the praying grew more frenzied, some slashed their palms with obsidian blades and made cuts on their arms so that the blood ran freely and dripped into bowls carved from lava. Mixcatl had watched without feeling more than a slight tinge of revulsion, for she was no stranger to the sight of wounds and bleeding. When the supplicants set the vessels into the fire, she shivered and crept away, unable to bear the acrid smell of burning blood.

  She retreated to the kitchen, with its great raised firepit. No one was there, for they were all at the old man’s side or in the courtyard, praying. The fire had died down to coals and Mixcatl knelt on the adobe brick, warmed by the heat radiating through. She stared at the glowing embers as if in a trance. Then she noticed that the great tiles that surrounded the firepit were blackened by soot. A few twigs lay near her feet, spilled from the kindling used to light the fire that morning. Mixcatl’s hand groped among them and picked one up.

  She looked at the twig, then touched its end to the sooty tile. It made a mark, for the tile was of fired white clay. Idly she drew a squiggle, then a few lines that crossed each other, but they dissatisfied her and she rubbed them out. In her mind the images of the sacred book still flickered, begging to come out. She knew that despite her sharp memory, she could not keep all of the details. Some had already started to fade.