Jaguar Princess

by Clare Bell

  But, as the king left his creation and eased down the heavy leather-hinged door behind him, he had no illusions that what he had built was anything but a cage.

  He knew that Huetzin, Nine-Lizard and the girl herself suspected what was going on, even though he took pains to keep the two scribes confined in their quarters. The coming and going of workers, foremen and large pieces of lumber wasn’t something that could be hidden long. Even care and muffling could not disguise the noises that echoed down the stone hallways.

  He had hoped that both scribes would turn all of their energies to working on the history. He assigned one of his servants the task of getting them anything they needed from the library, although they were no longer permitted to visit it freely.

  Each time Wise Coyote inspected the day’s work, he noticed that Mixcatl was starting to lag behind Nine-Lizard in the amount she produced. He thought at first that it was resentment, but soon Nine-Lizard told him the truth. Even though the girl stayed indoors and the deer were far away, she still had bouts of her peeling sickness. She fought them off by painting, on the tiles that Huetzin had given Nine-Lizard to take to her. At first she had tried to drive off the attacks by concentrating on making glyphs, but somehow that did not release the intensity of feeling she needed to stave off the threatened change.

  While the cage was being built. Wise Coyote wanted her to suppress her ability, for he did not know what he would do with her if she changed before he was ready. But after the box was prepared and ready, he began to feel impatient. If the girl learned to contain her nature and never release it, she might be safe, but useless.

  After several days had passed, with the box standing open and empty. Wise Coyote visited the scribes’ quarters. He chose to come in the late afternoon, for that was when the two glyph-painters rested from their efforts and turned their attention to other things. For Mixcatl that was tile-painting, and she was sitting, working intently, trying to capture the form and shading of an earthenware pot that stood on the table before her.

  So absorbed was she that when Wise Coyote entered the room she did not turn her head. He glanced at her subject. It was not an especially pretty pot, shaped for utility rather than elegance. Then he glanced at her painting and was astonished at how she had transformed the crude everyday object into an image on the tile. No, it was more than an image. She had caught the gleam of sunlight on the glaze, the shadow under the earthenware handle. She had put in colors that seemed ridiculous on first glance, yet when he looked at the pot again, he could see that they were there.

  As he watched, he almost forgot the reason that he had come. Somehow this girl had managed to capture the very pot-ness of the pot and express it in a unique and startling way. To some eyes, he knew, the attempt would be ugly; to others, juvenile. But Wise Coyote had strayed often enough from the paths of established tradition in many arts to recognize the gift of genius, even if he did not understand the form it took.

  He made himself wait until she rested her brush. “Mixcatl, I have prepared a better place for you to paint,” he said. “Bring your work with you and come.”

  Gathering up brushes, paints, pot and tile, she obeyed, walking after him down the hall. He saw her slow her pace at the sight of the box.

  “Here you can work without interruption,” he said, beckoning her through the propped-open hatch. He followed her inside and watched as she studied the interior. “You see, there is plenty of space, mats to sit on. Put your pot on here”—he tapped a low table—“and see if you have enough light to paint by.”

  With a doubtful glance at him, she began working on the tile once again. He sat down nearby.

  “Tlatoani, this will be difficult. I was working by the sun and the torch gives a different kind of light. But I will try.”

  Her first brushstrokes were tentative and unsure, but as she kept working, she became absorbed. As he stayed, watching her, he saw that it was more than just the expression of her gift that made her work so intensely. Whenever her concentration or her brush faltered, the change began to creep over her again. When she caught the inspiration once more, the change retreated.

  Despite himself, Wise Coyote could not help but admire the strength of will and the power of art that pushed away the beast’s savagery. Yet he knew by the shaking of Mixcatl’s body that her mind had become a battleground in a war between her innermost nature and her artist’s soul.

  He knew what he must do, even though he hated himself for it.

  Taking hold of the tile, he pulled it from her hands.

  Her eyes turned to him, unbelieving, accusing, panic growing in their depths. Her voice was shaky. “No! This is the only way I can keep it from happening.”

  She grabbed for another tile in the stack behind her, but Wise Coyote caught her wrist. “No. Do not fight the change. Let it come.”

  “No! I will run wild. I am afraid of what I might do.”

  “You are safe in this chamber.”

  “No! Give me back my tile. Please. It is the only way. I am afraid. I will lose myself. Please.”

  “You will not lose yourself. You will find your true nature, which you have been fighting for so long.”

  “You do not understand,” she whispered, her eyes wide and staring. “A beast knows no beauty.”

  “That does not matter now,” said Wise Coyote, forcing the words from his mouth. “I need the beast.”

  He took away the brush she clutched, tossed the tile with a clatter onto a low table. She lunged after it, but he caught her. “Mixcatl, I will not let you hide any longer,” he hissed.

  She went rigid, staring at him in terrified disbelief while rage kindled in her eyes. Suddenly she drew back her lips in a snarl. “Then, curse you, have it!”

  The change came on much faster than he had ever seen it. Before she finished speaking, her canine teeth had elongated, the entire shape of her face seemed to go fluid and start shifting. The hand that struck him was already welding itself into a paw.

  He spun her, wrapped both arms around her in an armlock, but he could feel her body already expanding, pushing out against his grasp with a steely new strength.

  Pulling her arms up behind her, he grabbed a blanket from a nearby pallet and flung it over her head, bundling her in it. She struggled wildly and he knew that she could overcome him. In a burst of panic, he thrust her away, scrambled through the hatch, knocked away the prop and slammed the door down.

  Fierce scratching and shrieking came from within as he fumbled frantically with the clumsy wooden latch. It fastened and he backed away, clapping both his hands against his ears to block out the muffled screaming. There were crashing and shattering sounds from inside and he knew she had destroyed the pot and her tile painting.

  Trying not to think about what he had done, the king hurried away.

  Much later, Wise Coyote returned, walking down the halls of blue tile that darkness had changed to slate. He halted as he neared the chamber, for his mind would not call it a cage. The drop-hatch lifted and Nine-Lizard climbed out. The old man’s cloak and loincloth were soaked with sweat and pink smears that were a mixture of salve and blood. Through the hatchway. Wise Coyote could hear the girl’s cries, made hoarse by exhaustion. Nine-Lizard let the door fall and slam, cutting off the sounds.

  The old scribe straightened up, tried to take a step and nearly fell from weakness and shaking. Wise Coyote went to him, escorted him to a nearby mat, despite his protests that he was able to walk. The king lit a brazier overhead and then sat down opposite, watching red and slate shadows play across the ugly bearded face. Nine-Lizard mopped his forehead and cheeks with a corner of his soiled robe, then lifted his gaze to Wise Coyote. His eyes, the king saw, were rimmed with red and bruised with exhaustion.

  “How does she fare?” he asked quietly.

  “I cannot ease the pain of the change as I have done before,” Nine-Lizard answered in a croaking voice.

  “The ointment?”

  “Does no good when there is almost n
o skin left on which to smear it.”

  Wise Coyote felt a shiver run through him, too strong to suppress. He started to his feet, wanting, yet dreading, to peer through the peephole he had made in the box so that he could watch what happened to Mixcatl.

  Despite his weakness and trembling, Nine-Lizard reached out and halted him. “Do not try, my king. She looks like the priests of Xipe have flayed her.”

  “I have already seen…,” Wise Coyote began, then fell silent. “So it is much worse.”

  Nine-lizard gave him an unreadable look. “For her, worse. For you, perhaps…better.” He paused. “This is what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  The king glowered across at the wizened, almost monkeylike, face before him. He wanted to grab Nine-Lizard by his curly stained beard and shake him until what was left of his teeth fell out. Instead, he only clenched his fists. “Yes,” he said in a low voice. “Only I wish that she would not have to suffer so for it.”

  “If you had truly felt that way, my king, you would have given her to the Jaguar’s Children before the change worked its full power on her. I have no doubt that they could have eased her through it. I have not the skill.”

  Again anger surged in Wise Coyote, but he held it back, knowing that the bitterness that Nine-lizard spoke was only the truth. Instead he only said, “You know my reasons for what I do. I will take responsibility for whatever happens. I only ask that you do not cease your efforts until…”

  “Mixcatl is dead or you have a jaguar goddess to parade before the tyrant of Tenochtitlan,” retorted Nine-Lizard. He gave a deep, shuddering sigh and put a hand to his forehead. “I will not abandon her, tlatoani, but I do need a little time to recover from the task.” He slumped, burying his face in his hands. Wise Coyote touched him lightly on the shoulder and rose from the mat.

  He could not make himself walk back down the shadowed halls and away from the chamber. He stood, staring at the heavy drop-door and hearing the muffled groans that seeped between the massive boards he had used to build the box. He put a hand on the bar that raised the door. “Let me go in,” he found himself saying, and the urgency in his voice startled him. “If she is exhausted, she is no longer dangerous. Perhaps I may be able to soothe her into sleep.”

  He had already raised and propped the door and was ducking through it when Nine-Lizard’s cry came from behind him. “Tlatoani, no!”

  The interior of the wood-sided chamber had been cushioned and padded with rugs and blankets. Several clay lamps burned, high up in brackets, where Mixcatl could not reach them in her frenzies of throwing herself against the walls.

  She lay hunched on her side upon a pallet of blankets. Shuddering, she faced the wall. Her back was deeply raw and oozing. A long curled sheet of white parchmentlike material—was it her own skin?—lay alongside her on the bed. It must have just come off. Wise Coyote realized, feeling nausea claim his stomach and rise in his throat. Otherwise Nine-Lizard would have taken it away.

  Hoping that shadows from the flickering lamps would hide the rest of her. Wise Coyote bent over the pallet. He had meant to come in, take the girl in his arms and soothe her as best he could, but he realized that much of her body was like raw meat and that it would cause unbearable pain to touch her. Faltering, uncertain, sickened, he instead took the piece of skin off the bed and dropped it into a basket where similar parchmentlike curls rested.

  She stirred. The motion was abrupt, animal-like. Instinctively he backed away, knowing that seeing this was too much for even a warrior hardened in battle or a king used to witnessing sacrifices. She came up and off the bed in a fluid, feral move and flung herself on him.

  Whether it was a maddened attack or desperate embrace, he did not know. He had only fragmented impressions; teeth gleaming beneath a split, swollen upper lip, patches of stubble growing in the stripped and oozing flesh, hands whose fingers seemed to have become grotesquely shortened and thickened while the nails narrowed and curved, an entire torso that seemed to have deepened through the chest. Then he was down, his hands slipping and sliding on the raw flesh as he straggled to keep the clawlike nails from his face. For an instant he was literally face to face with her, his cheek thrust against hers in the parody of an embrace. With a horror that threatened to turn to gibbering madness, he felt as well as saw the change continue, the bones of her jaws thrusting forward, her nose widening and flattening.

  But when he pulled away, he saw the worst sight of all—her eyes. They were not distorted or bloody, as he might have feared by witnessing what else the change had wrought in her. He thought—he almost hoped—to see eyes blank with unknowing, staring with fever or colored with the savage amber flame of the jaguar.

  Though the color had changed and the pupils had begun to narrow into slits, they were still a woman’s eyes. And he knew that those eyes saw; they knew; they cried out in mute pain and fixed him with the desperate question he could not answer.

  Why did you force this to happen?

  Rage born of shame gave his arms the strength to thrust her away. Shedding flecks of blood and shreds of skin, she came at him again as he scrambled back toward the hatchway. His hand went for the obsidian dagger at his waistband, but he had only half drawn it when she was across him. The drop-door started to fall, and he thought Nine-lizard had knocked the prop away from outside, but before it was down, she forced herself into the gap and wiggled through.

  A hoarse shout and thump from outside showed that she had got past Nine-lizard; then there was the sound of running feet echoing down the corridor.

  Shaking as he had seldom done since childhood. Wise Coyote stumbled to his feet and pushed his way through the hatch, his hand tight on the hilt of the dagger.

  He found Nine-Lizard on his back, bruised and winded, but not seriously hurt.

  “She’s gone,” the old scribe said tightly. “She knew I tried to drop the door on her.”

  Wise Coyote looked down the hall, where the echoes of those footsteps still rang.

  “No!” Nine-Lizard clutched his arm.

  “I said I would take responsibility for whatever happened,” Wise Coyote said harshly. “If I must kill her myself, I will. Perhaps that will be my punishment. Stay here, old man. You have endured enough tonight.”

  Flinging his cloak about him. Wise Coyote strode down the shadowed hall after the footsteps.

  17

  HEEDLESS OF THE pain from her skin-stripped limbs, Mixcatl reeled down the stone hallways of Tezcotzinco. She staggered and crashed into the walls, fighting to stay upright and make her legs carry her, even though they had somehow shifted so that her feet were becoming longer, her upper thighs shorter and more powerful, her shins elongated. In the black and white images of her memory. Wise Coyote’s face loomed, grimacing with surprise, then repulsion. Then Nine-Lizard, crying out with despair as she rushed him, then shot past him. The images whirled and swung, making her clasp her head with strangely clumsy hands and howl aloud.

  Then came the prey smell. It enveloped her, seized her, dragged her down the hallway as if a chain had been cast around her neck. It should have been gone, she thought. Had not Huetzin said he would move the deer? But, outside this great cage of stone, prey wandered on the wide lawns. The scent crept through the chinks, beneath the hangings to entrance her with its blood-richness.

  It was this smell, she knew, that had tormented and teased her until she could no longer withstand the urgency of the transformation. Saliva ran in her mouth, her belly cramped in the demands of hunger. Finding no exit from the cage of stone that had once been the palace, she flung herself angrily against the walls, as if she could batter a way through. The dull burning in her flesh sharpened to knifing pain each time she collided, but the intensity of her need swallowed up the pain.

  And then she halted, going down on still-changing hands and feet, feeling the slight pressure of a breeze on the sensitized flesh of her face. Creeping, she rounded a comer and her night-keen eyes caught the edge of moonlight falling between a doorhanging a
nd the stone threshold it covered. With one bound she was through.

  The rough fabric against her raw flesh made her cry aloud with pain as it slid from her back and along the beginnings of a tail growing from the base of her spine. She tumbled from the patio down into the garden, came up into a crouch. Ahead, outlined in the hazy moonlight, were two long-legged shapes. Two heads lifted and two pairs of ears spread wide.

  With taut slowness, she began the stalk, keeping the wind that blew from the deer at the side of her face so that the intoxicating smell kept coming to her. Now she could see the glint of their eyes, the sheen of moonlight off their coats, outline of proudly lifted heads, muzzles swiveling suspiciously.

  They were stupid. Tame. So easy. So easy. She quivered and something behind her lashed as she crept forward in the first steps of her final rush at the deer.

  A hoarse man-cry froze her in midleap. A heavy blow struck her back, sending her crashing back down onto the lawn. Whirling, she reared upright, forelimbs lifted, teeth bared. Again Wise Coyote’s face loomed in her memory, now strangely blurred and distorted. But the face before her was not the man she had struggled with a short time ago.

  Huetzin!

  It was not his name that sounded in her mind now, for she had lost all names and their meaning, even her own. It was the smell of him, the memory of his touch and his voice that came forward to battle the wild rage that sent her charging toward him for daring to interrupt her kill.

  The realization only slowed her leap, for the animal in her was now dominant. She landed on the man, bearing him to the ground. She saw his face as he caught sight of her, his eyes staring in terror, his mouth wide open. Again came the instinct to take him by the throat and squeeze hard until no breath was left.

  The eyes rolled up, the face went slack, the limbs flaccid. The human fear smell that had added to her intoxication faded. It would be easy now to tear into his belly and sate the growing tyranny of her hunger. But, as with the boy in the plaza, something that had been forced into a corner inside her now screamed out in protest and she backed away, circling in confusion.