Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  My father sighed patiently and reached into his bag.

  "No, no," the man said to him. "I do not prophesy riches or fame for your son. I do not promise him the hand of a beautiful princess or the founding of a distinguished lineage. The boy Mixtli will see the truth, yes. Unfortunately, he will also tell the truth he sees. And that more often brings calumny than reward. For such an ambiguous prediction, my lord, I ask no gratuity."

  "Take this anyway," said my father, pressing on him a single cacao bean. "Just do not predict anything more for us, old man."

  In the center of the city there was little commercial traffic, but all the citizens not occupied with urgent business were beginning to congregate in the grand plaza for the ceremony of which my father had heard. He asked some passerby what it was to be, and the man said, "Why, the dedication of the Sun Stone, of course, to celebrate the annexation of Tlaltelólco." Most of the people gathered were commoners like ourselves, but there were also enough pípiltin there to have populated a sizable city of nobody but nobles. Anyway, my father and I had arrived early on purpose. Although there were already more people in the plaza than there are hairs on a rabbit, they nowhere near filled the vast area. We had room to move about and view the various sights to be seen.

  In those days, Tenochtítlan's central plaza—In Cem-Anáhuac Yoyótli, The Heart of the One World—was not of the mind-stunning splendor I would see on later visits. The Snake Wall had not yet been built to enclose the area. The Revered Speaker Axayácatl was still living in the palace of his late father Motecuzóma, while a new one was being built for him diagonally across the plaza. The new Great Pyramid, begun by that First Motecuzóma, was still unfinished. Its sloping stone walls and serpent-banistered staircases ended well above our heads, and from inside could be seen poking the top of the earlier, smaller pyramid that was being thus enclosed and enlarged.

  But the plaza was already awesome enough to a country boy like me. My father told me that he had once crossed it in a straight line and paced it off, placing foot before foot, and that it measured almost exactly six hundred of his feet. That whole immense space—some six hundred man's-feet from north to south and from east to west—was paved with marble, a stone whiter even than Xaltócan's limestone, and it was polished as smooth and shiny as a tezcatl mirror. Many people there that day, if their sandals were soled with one of the more slippery kinds of leather, had to take them off and walk barefoot.

  The city's three broadest avenues, each wide enough for twenty men to walk abreast, began there at the plaza and led out of it, north, west, and south, to become the three equally wide causeways going all the way to the mainland. The plaza itself was not then so full of temples and altars and monuments as it would be in later years. But there were already modest teocaltin containing statues of the chief gods. There was already the elaborate rack on which were displayed the skulls of the more distinguished xochimíque who had been sacrificed to one or another of those gods. There was the Revered Speaker's private ball court in which were played special ritual games of tlachtli.

  There was also The House of Song, which contained comfortable quarters and practice studios for those foremost musicians, singers, and dancers who performed at religious festivals in the plaza. The House of Song was not, like all the other edifices on the plaza, entirely obliterated with the rest of the city. It was restored and is now, until your cathedral Church of San Francisco shall be completed, your Lord Bishop's temporary diocesan headquarters and residence. It is in one of the rooms of that House of Song that we now sit, my lord scribes.

  My father correctly supposed that a seven-year-old would hardly be enraptured by religious or architectural landmarks, so he took me to the sprawling building at the southeast corner of the plaza. That housed the Uey-Tlatoani's collection of wild animals and birds, and it too was not yet so extensive as it would be in later years. It had been begun by the late Motecuzóma, whose notion was to put on public display a specimen of the land and air creatures to be found in all the parts of all these lands. The building was divided into countless rooms—some mere cubicles, some large chambers—and troughs from a nearby canal kept a continuous flow of water flushing out the rooms' waste matter. Each room opened onto the viewers' passageway, but was separated from it by netting or in some cases stout wooden bars. There was an individual room for each creature, or for those several kinds of creatures that could live together amicably.

  "Do they always make so much noise?" I shouted to my father, over the roaring and howling and screeching.

  "I do not know," he said. "But right now some of them are hungry, because they have deliberately not been fed for some time. There will be sacrifices at the ceremony, and the remains will be disposed of here, as meat for the jaguar and cuguar cats, and the coyotin wolves and the tzopilotin vultures."

  I was eyeing the largest animal native to our lands—the ugly and bulky and sluggish tapir; it waggled its prehensile snout at me—when a familiar voice said, "Master quarrier, why do you not show the boy the tequani hall?"

  It was the bent brown man we had earlier met in the street. My father gave him an exasperated look and demanded, "Are you following us, old nuisance?"

  The man shrugged. "I merely drag my ancient bones here to see the Sun Stone dedication." Then he gestured to a closed door at the far end of the passage and said to me, "In there, my boy, are sights indeed. Human animals far more interesting than these mere brutes. A tlacaztali woman, for instance. Do you know what a tlacaztali is? A person dead white all over, skin and hair and all, except for her eyes, which are pink. And there is a dwarf with only half a head, who eats—"

  "Hush!" my father said sternly. "This is a day for the boy to enjoy. I will not sicken him with the sight of those pitiful freaks."

  "Ah, well," said the old man. "Some do enjoy viewing the deformed and the mutilated." His eyes glittered at me. "But they will still be there, young Mixtli, when you are grown mature and superior enough to mock and tease them. I daresay there will be even more curiosities in the tequani hall by then, no doubt even more entertaining and edifying to you."

  "Will you be silent?" bellowed my father.

  "Pardon, my lord," said the hunched old man, hunching himself even smaller. "Let me make amends for my impertinence. It is almost midday and the ceremony will soon begin. If we go now and get good places, perhaps I can explain to you and the boy some things you might not otherwise understand."

  The plaza was now full to overflowing, and the people were shoulder to shoulder. We would never have got anywhere close to the Sun Stone, except that more and more nobles were now haughtily arriving at the last moment, borne in gilded and upholstered litter chairs. The crowds of commoners and lower classes parted without a murmur to let them through, and the brown man audaciously eeled along behind them, with us behind him, until we were almost as far forward as the front ranks of real notables. I would still have been hemmed in without a view, but my father hoisted me to one shoulder. He looked down at our guide and said, "I can lift you up too, old man."

  "I thank you for your thoughtfulness, my lord," said that one, half smiling, "but I am heavier than I look."

  The focus of all eyes was the Sun Stone, set for the occasion on a terrace between the two broad staircases of the unfinished Great Pyramid. But it was shrouded from our sight with a mantle of shining white cotton. So I occupied myself with admiring the arriving nobles, for their litter chairs and their costumes were something to behold. The men and women alike wore mantles entirely woven of feathers, some varicolored, some of just one coruscating hue. The ladies' hair was tinted purple, as was customary on such a day, and they held their hands high to display the bangled and festooned rings on their fingers. But the lords wore many more ornaments than their ladies. All had diadems or tassels of gold and rich feathers on their heads. Some wore gold medallions on neck chains, gold bracelets and armlets and anklets. Others wore ornate plugs of gold or jewels piercing earlobes or nostrils or lower lips, or all of those.
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  "Here comes the High Treasurer," said our guide. "Ciuacoatl, the Snake Woman, second in command to the Revered Speaker himself."

  I looked, eager to see a snake woman, which I assume must be a creature like those "human animals" which I had not been allowed to look at. But it was just another píli, and a man at that, distinguished only for being even more gorgeously attired than most of the other nobles. The labret he wore was so heavy that it dragged his lower lip down in a pout. But it was a cunning labret: a miniature serpent of gold, so fashioned that it wriggled and flickered its tiny tongue in and out as the Lord Treasurer bobbed along in his chair.

  Our guide laughed at me; he had seen my disappointment. "The Snake Woman is merely a title, boy, not a description," he said. "Every High Treasurer has always been called Ciuacoatl, though probably none of them could tell you why. My own theory is that it is because both snakes and women coil tight around any treasures they may hold."

  Then the crowd in the plaza, which had been murmurous, quieted all at once; the Uey-Tlatoani himself had appeared. He had somehow arrived unseen or had been hidden somewhere beforehand, for now he suddenly stood beside the veiled Sun Stone. Axayácatl's visage was obscured by labret, nose plug, and ear plugs, and shadowed by the sunburst crown of scarlet macaw plumes that arched completely over his head from shoulder to shoulder. Not much of the rest of his body was visible either. His mantle of gold and green parrot feathers fell all the way to his feet. His chest bore a large and intricately worked medallion, his loincloth was of rich red leather, on his feet he wore sandals apparently of solid gold, laced as high as his knees with gilded straps.

  By custom, all of us in the plaza should have greeted him with the tlalqualiztli: the gesture of kneeling, touching a finger to the earth and then to our lips. But there was simply no room for that; the crowd made a sort of loud sizzle of combined kissing sounds. The Revered Speaker Axayácatl returned the greeting silently, nodding the spectacular scarlet feather crown and raising aloft his mahogany and gold staff of office.

  He was surrounded by a hoard of priests who, with their filthy black garments, their dirt-encrusted black faces, and their blood-matted long hair, made a somber contrast to Axayácatl's sartorial flamboyance. The Revered Speaker explained to us the significance of the Sun Stone, while the priests chanted prayers and invocations every time he paused for breath. I cannot now remember Axayácatl's words, and probably did not understand them all at the time. But the gist was this. While the Sun Stone actually pictured the sun Tonatíu, all honor paid to it would be shared with Tenochtítlan's chief god Huitzil-opochtli, Southern Hummingbird.

  I have already told how our gods could wear different aspects and names. Well, Tonatíu was the sun, and the sun is indispensable, since all life on earth would perish without him. We of Xaltócan and the peoples of many other communities were satisfied to worship him as the sun. However, it seemed obvious that the sun required nourishment to keep him strong, encouragement to keep him at his daily labors—and what could we give him more vitalizing and inspiriting than what he gave us? That is to say, human life itself. Hence the kindly sun god had the other aspect of the ferocious war god Huitzilopóchtli, who led us Mexíca in all our battle forays to procure prisoners for that necessary sacrifice. It was in the stern guise of Huitzil-opóchtli that he was most revered here in Tenochtítlan, because it was here that all our wars were planned and declared and the warriors mustered. Under yet another name, Tezcatlipóca, Smoldering Mirror, the sun was the chief god of our neighbor nation of the Acolhua. And I have come to suspect that innumerable other nations I have never visited—even nations beyond the sea across which you Spaniards came—must likewise worship that selfsame sun god, only calling him by some other name, according as they see him smile or frown.

  While the Uey-Tlatoani went on speaking, and the priests kept chanting in counterpoint, and a number of musicians began to play on flutes, notched bones, and skin drums, my father and I were privately getting the history of the Sun Stone from our cacao-brown old guide.

  "Southeast of here is the country of the Chalca. When the late Motecuzóma made a vassal nation of it, twenty and two years ago, the Chalca were of course obliged to make a noteworthy tribute offering to the victorious Mexíca. Two young Chalca brothers volunteered to make a monumental sculpture apiece, to be placed here at The Heart of the One World. They chose similar stones, but different subjects, and they worked apart, and no one but each brother ever saw what he carved."

  "Their wives sneaked a look, surely," said my father, who had that sort of wife.

  "No one ever got a look," the old man repeated, "during all those twenty and two years they worked to sculpture and paint the stones—in which time they grew middle-aged and Motecuzóma went to the afterworld. Then they muffled their finished works separately in swathings of fiber mats, and the lord of the Chalca conscripted perhaps one thousand sturdy porters to haul the stones here to the capital."

  He waved toward the still-shrouded object on the terrace above us. "As you see, the Sun Stone is immense: more than twice the height of two men—and ponderously heavy: the weight of three hundred and twenty men together. The other stone was about the same. They were brought over rough trails and no trails at all. They were rolled on log rollers, dragged on wooden skids, ferried over rivers on mighty rafts. Just think of the labor and the sweat and the broken bones, and the many men who fell dead when they could no longer stand the pull or the lashing whips of the overseers."

  "Where is the other stone?" I asked, but was ignored.

  "At last they came to the lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco, which they crossed on rafts, to the major causeway running north to Tenochtítlan. From there it was a broad way and a straight one, no more than two one-long-runs to the plaza here. The artists sighed with relief. They had worked so hard, so many other men had worked so hard, but those monuments were within sight of their destination...."

  The crowd around us made a noise. The twenty or so men whose lifeblood would that day consecrate the Sun Stone were in line, and the first of them was mounting the pyramid steps. He appeared to be no captured enemy warrior, just a stocky man about my father's age, wearing only a clean white loincloth, looking haggard and unhappy, but he went willingly, unbound and without any guards impelling him. There on the terrace he stood and looked stolidly out over the crowd, while the priests swung their smoking censers and did ritual things with their hands and staffs. Then one priest took hold of the xochimíqui, gently turned him, and helped him lie back on a block in front of the veiled monument. The block was a single knee-high stone, shaped rather like a miniature pyramid, so, when the man lay propped on it, his body arched and his chest thrust upward as if eager for the blade.

  He lay lengthwise to our view, his arms and legs held by four assistant priests, and behind him stood the chief priest, the executioner, holding the wide, almost trowel-shaped black obsidian knife. Before the priest could move, the pinioned man raised his dangling head and said something. There were other words among those on the terrace, then the priest handed his blade to Axayácatl. The crowd made noises of surprise and puzzlement. That particular victim, for some reason, was to be granted the high honor of being dispatched by the Uey-Tlatoani himself.

  Axayácatl did not hesitate or fumble. As expertly as any priest, he stabbed the knife point into the man's chest on the left side, just under the nipple and between two ribs, then made a slash with the knife edge, then rotated the wide blade sideways to separate the ribs and open the wound wider. With his other hand he reached into the wet red opening, seized the un-scratched and still-beating heart, and tore it loose from its enlacement of blood vessels. Not until then did the xochimíqui utter his first sound of pain—a blubbering sob—and the last sound of his life.

  As the Revered Speaker held high the glistening, dripping, purple-red object, a priest somewhere jerked some hidden string, the shroud fell away from the Sun Stone, and the crowd gave a concerted "Ay-y-yo-o!" of admiration. Axayácatl t
urned, reached up, and ground the victim's heart into the very center of the circular stone, into the mouth of Tonatíu carved there. He mashed and rubbed the heart until it was only a smear on the stone and nothing was left in his hand. I have been told by priests that a heart's donor usually lived long enough to see what became of his heart. But that one could not have seen much. When Axayácatl was finished, the blood and ground meat were scarcely visible, because the carved sun face was already painted a color very like that of heart's blood.

  "That was cleanly done," said the bent man at my father's side. "I have often seen a heart go on beating so vigorously that it jumps from the executioner's fingers. But I think this particular heart had already been broken."

  Now the xochimíqui lay unmoving, except that his skin twitched here and there, like the skin of a dog tormented by flies. The priests rolled his carcass from the stone and let it tumble unceremoniously off the terrace, while a second victim plodded up the stair. Axayácatl honored no more of the xochimíque, but left the rest to the priests. As the procession went on—each man's extracted heart being used to anoint the Sun Stone—I peered closely at the massive object, so I might describe it to my friend Tlatli, who, even way back then, had begun practicing to be a sculptor by whittling bits of wood into doll figures.

  Yyo ayyo, reverend friars, if you could but have seen the Sun Stone! Your faces show disapproval of the dedication ceremony, but if you had ever once seen the stone, you would know it to have been worth all its cost in toil and years and human lives.

  The carving alone was beyond belief, for that was porphyry, a stone as hard as granite. In the center was the face of Tonatíu, eyes staring, mouth agape, and on either side of his head were claws grasping the human hearts which were his provender. Surrounding that were the symbols of the four eras of the world which preceded the era in which we now live, and a circle comprising the symbols of our twenty day-names, and a circle of the alternating symbols of jadestone and turquoise, the gems held in highest esteem of all found in our lands. Around that, again, a circle of the day's sun rays alternating with the night's stars. And, girdling the whole, two sculptures of the Fire Serpent of Time, their tails at the top of the stone, their bodies making the round of it, and their heads meeting at the bottom. In one stone, that one artist had captured all of our universe, all of our time.