by Clare Bell
“Sometimes we try to avoid the worst signs by waiting several days after a child is born before naming him,” Speaking Quail explained. “And sometimes by hard work, dedication and devotion, a person might escape the fate decreed by the signs.”
“What about someone like me, who has no sign?” Mixcatl asked.
“You must either discover it or accept that your fate is unknown. Perhaps by adopting a favorable sign, you may be able to influence the portents of the tonalpoualli.” He put his chin on his hand as if thinking and then said, “Certainly you would be more comfortable among your peers if you did so. There would be the expense of a ceremony, but I feel that our school should bear it.”
Mixcatl heard his words with mixed feelings. Almost the only thing she had retained was her name. Now she was being asked to give it up, or at least preface it with an Aztec one. It was hard to imagine responding to “Seven-Flower.”
“I will take the calendar name to please you and to make it easier to enter the House of Scribes,” she said at last.
“You are not comfortable with the idea. Well, you do not need to decide now. You have a few days to think about it. Perhaps there is another sign that would be more appropriate. If so, I can help you to find one.”
“I will think about it. Thank you. Speaking Quail,” she said solemnly. The thought of a new name as well as a new life made her feel anxious, but she knew that she had to accept both if she wanted to fulfill her dream of becoming a glyph-painter.
A day later, she and Speaking Quail explored various signs and their meanings, deciding at last that Seven-Flower was, after all, the most suitable. A diviner-priest from a nearby temple was called and asked to confirm the choice and give the blessings of the gods. He sacrificed a turkey that Speaking Quail provided. Mixcatl herself only had to be there briefly and was not required to witness the offering.
Within a second day, as Seven-Flower Mixcatl, she bid farewell to the calmecac and was escorted to the House of Scribes to begin her new life.
6
AN EARLY MORNING breeze blew in through the stone window of the House of Scribes, stirring the cloaks of the slave-scribes as they slept. Wrapped in her new mantle, Mixcatl woke up on her rush mat, thinking she was still in the calmecac. Then she remembered that the school was no longer her home. She groped along her mat and found the rest of her clothes; short skirt, loose sleeveless blouse. All were made of undyed cotton cloth, as was proper for the dress of a slave-apprentice. To Mixcatl, who had worn nothing but rough maguey-fiber cloth in the calmecac, the garments seemed the height of luxury.
She put on her new clothes and went to the window. The sky over Tenochtitlan was rose and gray, with a storm lowering to the east over Lake Texcoco. She could smell rain in the air and hoped that she would be allowed outside so she could feel the heavy drops splash down onto her face. She stayed at the sill, leaning on her elbows and looking out over the city. To the other apprentices and scribes she answered to the name Seven-Flower, but had not given up thinking of herself as Mixcatl.
The House of Scribes lay within the complex of buildings used by the priests who kept the records and the calendar. It had three levels, thus raising it above most of the other buildings that only had one or two. The slaves lived on the highest level and it made Mixcatl breathless to look down from the window onto the rooftops of the city. She could see the twin pyramids of Left-Handed Hummingbird and the rain god Tlaloc, their peaks rising above the wall enclosing their sacred precinct. The house of the Speaker-King, built of whitewashed stone, glowed cream and pink in the early dawn. She could see into the courtyards of other noble houses and could even catch a glimpse of the calmecac.
Other slaves were starting to yawn and stretch. Mixcatl went with them down to the hall adjoining the kitchen, where she was given a bowl of corn porridge flavored with sage. As was customary, she ate with her fingers, then washed her hands and prepared herself for her first day at the House of Scribes.
She hoped she would be given paper and brushes, but instead she was taken down to a covered courtyard with a group of younger or newer slaves and put to the task of making paper. The Master of Scribes wanted every new apprentice to understand the complete process of creating a pictographic manuscript, from making the folded paperboard to the last flourish on the glyphs.
Although disappointed that she couldn’t start painting immediately, Mixcatl soon became interested in the method used to produce the blank fan-folded sheets that made up a book. The process began with bark from a wild fig tree, brought to the House of Scribes by merchants who traded outside the city. The bark was soaked in stone troughs, then placed on wooden planks and beaten into flat sheets.
The work was harder than the tasks she had done at the calmecac. After a noon meal she went to her sleeping mat with aching arms and shoulders. She woke from the midday sleep groggy and cross, not wanting to walk to the calmecac, where Speaking Quail waited to give her the first lesson in her instruction about the Aztec faith. Rubbing her arms and trying not to envy the other apprentices who stayed indoors and busied themselves with lighter tasks, she put on a rush raincape, sandals, and set out for the calmecac.
Speaking Quail met her at the courtyard entrance and guided her inside to his study. When she had shaken her wet hair out of her eyes, she settled herself on a mat and looked at the teacher with anticipation.
“You must understand,” began Speaking Quail, a little awkwardly, “that I usually teach rhetoric and the art of composition. There are others who teach religion and who do it much better.”
Mixcatl tilted her head to one side, looking at him gravely as he continued, “However, none of the religious teachers have the flexibility, nor the sympathy, to fit their instruction to your needs. For that reason, and because I feel responsible for your situation, I have chosen to teach you myself.” He paused. “It will be a new experience for both of us, I imagine. I hope it will be a pleasant one. You note that I do not have an agave plant within my quarters. I feel I will not need to use the thorns.”
He winked as Mixcatl allowed herself a chuckle.
“First,” he said, “tell me what you have already observed and we will see if we can build upon that.”
Carefully Mixcatl told him what she had seen and interpreted about the Aztec religion. She told him of the priest she had passed in the halls whose oily hair and stale blood smell had repulsed her. She spoke about the bloodletting rituals she had observed, from Six-Wind pricking his finger to the priests and tutors who gashed their bodies during the vigil for Two-Rabbit Cactus Eagle. She spoke of the text she had overheard when she had inadvertently come into the courtyard, the story about Plumed Serpent and his downfall at the hands of Tezcatlipoca. Smoking Mirror. She left nothing out, speaking honestly of her reactions and feelings to what she had seen.
“I have only pieces,” she said to Speaking Quail, looking at him directly. “Some of them frighten me and make me feel sad. Perhaps if you tell me more, I will feel better.”
A troubled look came into her teacher’s face. “If you are seeking comfort by learning our religion,” he said softly, “you will find little. It is difficult, even harsh, and I would do you no favor by trying to soften it. The knowledge that you must absorb before you can train as a glyph-painter is not easy to understand or accept, especially for you.”
Mixcatl swallowed. “Because I am a slave?”
“Because you are an outsider who is starting instruction late in childhood. And because you will soon be a woman.” He hesitated. “There are goddesses, rituals and ceremonies set aside for women. At first I thought of sending you to a priestess, for their doctrines are less demanding.” He sighed. “I decided not to, because although you are still young, you already show a sharpness of mind that could place you beside my older students. Watering down your course of instruction would not prepare you for the demands made by the House of Scribes.”
Though Mixcatl understood his words, she sensed an uneasiness that lay beneath them. So
ftly she said, “Speaking Quail, are you afraid of what you must teach me?”
His eyes widened in surprise, then closed briefly. “To be honest with you, yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you have come to me…unspoiled…as none of my other students have been. It is only your foreign background and the mistaken assumption that you were backward and fit only for menial tasks that has kept you from being forced to follow our religion.” He paused. “Have you noticed that none of the boys in my classes ever ask questions?”
Mixcatl shook her head.
“They listen, recite and learn by heart. That is all that is asked of them. The agave thorns are for the restless, the disobedient or the slow, but not for the questioners. In this school there are none.”
“You forgot Six-Wind,” said Mixcatl, and watched a smile creep onto Speaking Quail’s face.
“Six-Wind is not our typical student. His family comes from Texcoco and has affiliations with that royal family. But your point is valid. There are a few students who question or doubt, but most do not, because they have been punished to discourage it.”
“Why?” asked Mixcatl again.
“That is a question that I am not really qualified to discuss in depth. Perhaps we will approach it again toward the end of our lessons.”
“You are teaching me differently from the other students, aren’t you?”
Speaking Quail gave her a gentle smile that had a touch of sadness in it. “Yes, I am. The uncritical way we usually teach would not work with you. Not just because you are stubborn, but because you have somehow learned to think for yourself, something rare, and, as you already know, dangerous.” He paused. “My method is one my superiors would not look kindly upon, so I ask that we keep these discussions between ourselves.”
“I promise,” she answered. “You will let me ask questions?”
“Some,” agreed Speaking Quail. “Now then, we had best begin.”
Using pictographic texts to illustrate his teaching, he began describing the world as he understood it. There were four worlds, or “suns,” before this one, he said. In each world humankind appeared, only to be wiped out by catastrophe at the end. The present world was that of the Fifth Sun. The previous sun was the Water Sun, whose age had ended in a cataclysmic flood. The present age was the Earthquake Sun, which had begun on the date One-Earthquake. It would end when earthquakes destroyed the land. The Monsters of Twilight, the Tzitzmime, who hide behind the western sky and await the final hour, would then swarm out and devour all who remained.
He spoke the text in high Nahuatl, using the book only to prompt his memory. Despite the gloom and grimness of the revelations, Mixcatl found a certain lyric beauty in the words themselves, as if the very language used to depict the death and destruction of the world had rebelled and spoke secretly of beauty and hope.
Speaking Quail showed Mixcatl a cross-shaped glyph he called “ollin.” This, he said, represented the Aztec picture of the world. The uppermost bar of the equal-armed cross represented the east while north stood to the right, west below and south on the left. Tenochtitlan, the capital, stood exactly in the center of the cross.
Mixcatl realized that this map might hold the answer to a question that had puzzled her ever since she had begun to hear about Aztec gods.
“Is that why your sun god is called Hummingbird on the Left?” she asked.
“A good question,” Speaking Quail replied. “The literal translation of Hummingbird’s full Nahuatl name means ‘the reborn warrior from the south.’ We believe that warriors who fall in battle are rebom as hummingbirds. South is represented by the left bar of the glyph ‘ollin,’ thus his title.” He smiled. “You are running ahead of me, little scholar. You will hear more of Hummingbird in future lessons. This one is ended and you should return to the House of Scribes before you are missed at the evening meal.”
Thanking him, she dressed once again in her rush cape and left the calmecac.
Each morning at the House of Scribes, Mixcatl worked making paper, pounding the fibrous fig-tree bark on a board set across her knees. The beater was a scored stone lashed into a forked stick. She learned how to use beaters with coarser or finer scoring to control the texture of the paper, and when she had mastered that, she was shown how to mix and apply the chalky varnish that stiffened and smoothed the sheets. Great care was needed at every step of the process, or else the paper would be too rough for the artist’s brush. Often the instructor stripped Mixcatl’s sheet from her board and told her to begin again.
Her days fell into a routine of rising early, eating sage-flavored porridge, then laboring in the courtyard until the noon meal. After eating, everyone slept away the hottest and most humid part of the day before resuming work. For the other students this was a time for visiting or light tasks. For Mixcatl, it meant a walk back to the calmecac so that Speaking Quail could continue her religious instruction.
“Now I will tell you of the origins of our world and the gods in it,” Speaking Quail said as Mixcatl shed her raincloak and settled herself on the mat.
Showing her the glyphs on the book in his lap, he told of how, at the world’s beginning, the Earth-Father and the Sky-Mother gave birth to all the gods and how they came to the ancient Toltec city of Teotihuacan where they lit an enormous brazier. In those days there was no sun and the sky was twilight from one horizon to the other. During the gathering, a little god who was covered with boils plunged into the brazier as a sacrifice and emerged as the blazing disk of the sun. But, though the sun was wondrous in its brightness, it could not move. Only when the gods sacrificed themselves, giving their lives to feed the sun, did it gather strength and began its present path across the heavens.
Mixcatl sat in a daze, her imagination filled by images of the solar disk rising from flames and the gods spilling their blood to nourish the newborn sun.
“Each day, the task begun at the sun’s birth must be continued or else the sun will falter in its course and cast the world into darkness,” Speaking Quail recited solemnly. “Every day we must feed the sun with its food, ‘the precious water,’ the chalchiuatl, human blood. We exist so that the blood that runs within us can nourish the sun. That is our first and most sacred duty. And what is true for the sun is true for everything else; the earth, the sky, the rains, and all else in the world. Nothing is born, nothing endures, without sacrifice.”
Mixcatl listened. Was this dependence on blood sacrifice spoken of by her own people? She felt echoes of things that sounded familiar, yet there were also jarring discords. She didn’t know. She had been taken too early, before her disparate early memories could coalesce into a whole. At least now she was beginning to understand why Six-Wind had dripped blood from his ringer onto a leaf when he feared she was a witch, and why the priests in the calmecac had gashed their breasts and arms during rites for Cactus Eagle.
“Nothing is born, nothing endures, without sacrifice,” she recited gravely after Speaking Quail.
“To fail in that duty betrays the gods and all of mankind.”
She swallowed and spoke the words after her teacher.
“May I ask a question,” she said as she watched Speaking Quail studying his text and preparing himself to interpret more of the glyphs written upon it.
Speaking Quail nodded.
“Even if you know sacrifice is necessary, isn’t it difficult to kill another person? To do that, wouldn’t you have to hate them or look down upon them? How would you feel if you had to sacrifice me?”
The teacher clasped his hands and was silent for a short time. “You have asked me the most difficult question of all and one that still wars with my deepest feelings. Some priests delight in bloodhunger and look upon a victim as an enemy to be slain. I disagree. To me a sacrifice is a messenger to the gods and as such is cloaked with divine dignity. To me there is no dislike or bloodlust between sacrificer and victim. Both are joined in a unity beyond fear or hatred.
“When a true warrior takes a prisoner for
sacrifice, he says, ‘Here is my well-beloved son.’ And the captive, if he understands, replies, ‘Here is my well-beloved father.’ “
“So both are joined together to prevent the ending of the world.” Mixcatl ended for him. She paused, knitting her brows as she looked at her teacher. “I think I understand, but it is difficult.”
“As difficult as it would be for one friend to see another die on the altar,” answered the teacher softly.
He fell silent, letting Mixcatl wrestle with what she had learned. She knew that sacrifice was a subject that few except the chosen nobles and clergy had to think deeply about, although everyone had to accept it as part of life. She sensed that had she been given the usual education of an Aztec girl, she would have never been allowed to think about such things, only to accept them unquestioningly. In a way, such an education would have been easier. But Speaking Quail was right when he said that sort of learning would never satisfy her.
She came out of her daze, for he had begun to speak once again.
“Let me connect this with something we learned in our previous lesson,” he said. “Do you recall the representation of the world embodied in the glyph ‘ollin,’ or movement?”
She nodded as he showed her the cross-shaped glyph in the text.
“Each of the four directions rules one of the signs we spoke of previously. Acatl, or Reed, belongs to the east; Tecpatl, or Flint Knife, belongs to the north; Calli, or House, to the west; Tochtli, or Rabbit, to the south. Remember that east is the upper limb of the cross and you will have little difficulty orienting yourself.
“Because of the way the sacred calendar is constructed, a year can only begin on a day that has one of those four signs. Since each sign can have thirteen days, the combination of thirteen and four yields fifty-two possible beginnings to the year. Thus time as we understand it is bound together in fifty-two-year bundles.”
