by Simon Levack
At the entrance to Montezuma’s Palace we were directed towards the Zoo.
The Emperor shared the vast, rambling complex that was his residence when he was in Mexico with many other creatures, both human and animal, and some that might have been said to be something in between.
At any one time Montezuma would give house room to enough servants and guests of varying ranks, from the Emperor of Tetzcoco to the most newly admitted of the Eagle Warriors, to fill the ranks of a small army Some three hundred of the Palace staff worked full time looking after a select group of their fellow residents: the inmates of the Zoo and the aviary. Here, in stout cages that in many cases were bigger than most houses in Mexico, the Emperor kept specimens of every kind of bird and animal he and his subjects could get their hands on. Everything with feathers on it from eagles and vultures down to finches and sparrows had a perch here. There were ponds for brilliantly coloured ducks and flamingos to paddle in, whole trees full of fruit for parrots and toucans to destroy and avocados to keep the resplendent quetzal happy and encourage him to grow his magnificent long green tail feathers. What the eagles and vultures ate scarcely bore thinking about, but it was probably the same as the jaguars, cougars, bears and coyotes, who lived in another section of the Zoo with smaller meat-eaters such as foxes and ocelots. Their diet included man: the torsos of sacrificial victims.
There were snakes here too, kept in pots that had been lined with feathers so that they could lay their eggs in them without breaking them.
‘You can tell where we’re going,’ my brother remarked. ‘You can hear them from here!’ The birds twittered, cawed or screamed, the jaguars and their cousins howled and roared, and I could imagine, even though I could not hear it yet, the hissing of the snakes.
Not all the specimens made a noise. There was no sound at all from the humans. For another section of the Zoo held its most curious exhibits: men and women born with the wrong number of fingers and toes or their joints reversed or no eyes in their heads or some other deformity that marked them out as someone the gods had noticed and decided to have some fun with.
‘I hope the Emperor isn’t looking at those brothers joined at the hip,’ Lion said glumly. ‘They bother me, I don’t mind admitting. Twins are unlucky enough, but those two …’ He shuddered.
‘Not this evening, my Lord,’ our escort assured him. ‘He’s with his newest guest. Please come this way.’ The growling noise from where the meat-eaters lived was growing louder, and now it came with a rank animal smell, like a cross between a temple, just after a victim’s blood has been smeared on the door posts, and a dog kennel.
‘Change your cloak in here, if you will, my Lord,’ our guide said. He ignored me. My brother could not appear before Montezuma in his fine cotton cloak and his sandals. As I had neither cloak nor sandals of any description, I simply waited for him to reappear, barefoot and in an old, patched and frayed piece of maguey fibre that ended almost indecently far above his knees.
‘I don’t think I want to know what happened to the last person who wore this,’ he muttered, as we waited to be admitted. ‘I just hope his end was quick!’
Something was fluttering about in my stomach. I tried to calm it. The last time I had been shown into the Emperor’s presence, I had been threatened with death.
Our escort motioned us forward.
‘Remember – don’t look at his face!’ he hissed.
Between us and the room where Montezuma was waiting stood a single guard, a Shorn One, an elite warrior who blocked the entrance and our view of what lay beyond completely because he and the doorway were about the same size and shape. He stepped aside, at the same time hissing: ‘The Guardian of the Waterfront and a slave, my Lord!’
As I prostrated myself on the floor, I wondered why the announcement had been delivered in a whisper.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the room gave directly on to a garden. Pale evening light flowed through a wide opening, and made a striped pattern on the floor that puzzled me until I realized that the entrance to the garden must be barred. Against what, I could not tell, but I thought I heard something out there making a rustling noise.
Montezuma the Younger sat in front of the opening, looking out. Almost all of his body was hidden from me by the tall back of the wicker chair that had been placed there for him, and most of what I could see was an irregular shadow against the pale background of the garden. However, where the light fell on his face, with its delicate features and neat little beard, and on the hand resting on the arm of the chair nearest to me, it picked him out eerily, as though he were outlined in silver thread.
A man stood beside and just behind the chair. He must be the interpreter, I thought, since Montezuma was not given to speaking directly with any but the most exalted of his subjects.
Suddenly sound erupted from my brother.
‘My Lord!’ he cried ritually. ‘O Lord! My great Lord!’
Absolute silence followed him. Even the rustling in the garden stopped.
A small noise came from Montezuma. I was not sure whether there were any words in it but its meaning was clear enough for the interpreter to turn to us and say: ‘The Emperor says shut up!’
Lion gulped audibly.
I knelt, with my face pressed to the floor and wondering whether I could breathe more quietly if I somehow managed to use just one nostril at a time, until a faint creaking noise from the Emperor’s chair told me he had relaxed a little. A moment later I thought I heard the rustling sound I had noted earlier. It was louder now, somehow more confident, as though whatever made it had decided to push its way into the open rather than skulking cautiously in the bushes.
‘Ah.’ The voice was undeniably the Emperor’s, and to hear it so full of contentment was such a relief that I could not help risking a peek at whatever was happening out in the garden beyond him. It took me a moment to spot it.
‘Here he comes.’
I twisted my neck awkwardly, so that I could look up without meeting Montezuma’s eyes if he should chance to look round.
The garden looked as if no one had tended it in years. The plants were tall and unkempt and, except for an area just on the far side of the bars that was empty apart from a few artfully placed tree trunks and branches, so densely crowded together that if anybody had wanted to weed the place, they would have had to do it by starting a fire in the dry season. Foliage and ornament were not the point here. There was something else: something that I could just make out as a pale shape among the dark stalks and leaves beyond the clearing.
It moved. It became a long, white form, sliding along the ground so smoothly that I took it for a snake until I saw that it moved upon feet. One foot was advanced at a time, the paw put deliberately and silently in place before another was lifted, and the legs were bent as tensely as a bow, keeping the body as close to the floor as it could be without scraping along it. It was stalking something. Its sharp-pointed, triangular ears were erect and its eyes, strangely pale against its white face, were wide open.
I saw its prey only in the instant of its death.
It was a small dog. The keepers had tethered it by a long rope to a peg in the middle of the clearing, although they need not have bothered. It was one of the little fat hairless creatures we kept for food, born and bred for the pot, and any instinct that it might have had to survive, to run away or turn and fight for its life, had been lost many generations before. It simply had no idea what was going to happen until the moment when the jaguar sprang.
The creature became a white streak. Only when its great claws clapped together around it did its victim at last react. The dog let out a single yip and shot into the air, escaping momentarily until it reached the end of its rope and was cruelly snatched back to earth. Before it landed a paw swiped it out of the air, slamming into it with a blow that knocked it sideways and snapped its neck at the same time.
The great head stooped and picked its meal up. It held it aloft, and for a moment those strange p
ale eyes looked straight into the Emperor’s. It seemed to know that it was the only creature in Mexico that might do that and live.
It growled surprisingly softly. It shook the dog once and dropped it contemptuously.
As it began to feed, I heard a long sigh from the man in the chair.
‘You may watch,’ the interpreter said solemnly. ‘You may never see this again.’
I could not have taken my eyes off the animal in any case. My brother exhaled loudly. I guessed he had been holding his breath for a long time.
Then we heard the Emperor’s voice again. When he was speaking half to himself he did not seem to mind being overheard.
‘A white jaguar. Such a perfect creature. The most noble of beasts, and the colour of the East, the direction of light, and life!’
‘It is a beautiful animal, my Lord,’ ventured my brother.
There was a pause. Montezuma mumbled something and his interpreter translated it: ‘Indeed. They come from the country around Cuetlaxtlan, near the shore of the Divine Sea. When he was Chief Minister it amused the great Lord Tlacaelel – your master’s father, Yaotl – to punish the people of that city for rebelling against us by making them send white jaguar pelts in tribute in place of spotted ones. He thought it would take up so much of their time to find anything so rare that they would never be able to foment another revolt!’ There was more mumbling from the chair. ‘I told them I would remit some of their annual tribute if they could furnish me with a live specimen. And here he is!’
Hearing my own name fall from the Emperor’s lips – or at least his interpreter’s – shocked me into speaking up. ‘My Lord, why have you shown us this?’
There was another long pause, during which the figure in the chair showed no sign of movement. Then he began to speak again, his interpreter picking it up before he had finished: ‘This white jaguar is surely the emperor of all beasts. He fears nothing, and nothing is his equal. Yet he is almost blind! If you saw him in daylight you would see that his eyes are pink. He cannot bear the Sun, and can only come out at night.
‘I could have you killed as easily as that dog, Yaotl. You know that. Even your famous brother – I only have to command it and you will both be dead on the floor before me. But that power – without understanding, without knowing what is to come, what is that power? I am as blind as the white jaguar, who for all his strength would be dead if he had not been captured as a cub and brought here!’
There was a long silence. ‘My Lord,’ I asked eventually, ‘what do you want?’
Neither Montezuma nor the interpreter spoke at first. The Emperor seemed engrossed in watching his favourite pet devouring his food. Only when the contented growls and sounds of grinding teeth began to diminish did he start mumbling again. What he said was as indistinct as ever, but there was one word that I understood: the name ‘Skinny’.
‘Last night,’ the interpreter said, ‘a man named Skinny, a featherworker, died in the canal between Pochtlan and Amantlan. This morning two of Pochtlan’s parish policemen found you at his house. I am told that their canoe capsized while they were taking you to the Governor of Tlatelolco and you took advantage of the confusion to escape.’
I could not restrain myself. ‘I didn’t escape! I was kidnapped!’
My brother groaned. The interpreter looked uncertainly at the figure in the chair, and then leaned towards me.
‘Interrupt me again,’ he advised me in a confidential tone, ‘and you’re likely to end up like that dog!’
‘Sorry …’ I swallowed. I had forgotten myself, but at least I could see what had happened. Shield must have taken the Otomi captain’s warning to heart.
‘Now,’ the interpreter went on, ‘the Emperor requires you to tell him what you know about Skinny and his work.’
I told them the same story I had told Upright and Shield. It took a little while, because I kept hesitating, afraid that some mistake or inconsistency might prompt a question that would reveal what I had really been up to in Tlatelolco. I did not want Montezuma to know about my son. I had no idea what he might do if he did know but I thought Nimble, wherever he was, probably had enough to contend with, without coming to the Emperor’s notice.
As darkness gathered, even the animal noises and bird calls from the other parts of the Zoo came to an end, and apart from my own voice the only sounds were the soft padding of the jaguar’s paws as he left the remains of the dog and a faint creaking as the Emperor shifted in his chair.
After I had finished he asked me, through the interpreter, what I thought I had seen, on the night I had gone to meet Kindly and encountered an apparition in the form of Quetzalcoatl.
‘I saw a man dressed as a god,’ I said confidently. ‘The costume he was wearing had gone missing from Kindly’s house two nights before, and that was when the vision was first seen.’
‘Why was the thief wearing it?’
‘It’s a good disguise. Most people who saw it would run away rather than challenge what they thought was a god.’
The Emperor and the interpreter were now only indistinct shadows, and the mumblings of one and the other’s speech had become harder to distinguish as well, so that they seemed to blend together, as though the two men shared a single voice. I was not sure whether it was the Emperor’s voice or the interpreter’s that replied to me.
‘You are wrong. The thief wore the costume because he wanted to. The raiment of a god has power of its own. The man who wears it takes the form of the god, and his attributes. He becomes the god.’
I tried to remember what Stammerer, the featherworker’s apprentice from the temple in Amantlan, had told me. The costume was like an idol, to be prayed to and handled with care.
‘My Lord, may I ask – did Skinny make the costume for you?’
I could easily tell where the reply came from this time. The Emperor’s high-pitched giggle was unmistakable. ‘For me to wear? No. At my command – yes.’ There was a pause, and then it was the interpreter’s voice again. ‘What I will tell you now is not to be repeated, not even within the walls of this palace. If it is, both of you will die, and your families will die, and your houses – your parents’, and that mansion of yours, Lion – will be demolished. It will be death to mention your names. Nobody in Mexico will remember anything about either of you. Is that understood?’
It seemed reasonably clear to me. I glanced at my brother, but he had not dared to lift his face off the floor since we had been shown in here. I heard a muffled ‘Yes’ from him and hastily said the same.
‘You know how the city has been disturbed in recent times. You know of the omens that have been reported. Some I have seen myself: the fire in the sky, the lake boiling over and flooding on a day when the air was still, the temple that burned for no reason, the men …’ Both the Emperor and the interpreter seemed to hesitate at this point. ‘The pale men, riding on the backs of deer, that I saw in a vision.
‘You know that these men exist.’
I had heard the rumours – some of them from the Emperor himself, on the last occasion when I had been in his presence. From the lands of the Mayans on the eastern shore of the Divine Sea had come tales of bizarre and sinister happenings: the appearance of creatures like men with pale skins and hair all over their faces, accompanied by other, still more fearsome monsters with four legs and great savage brutes of dogs like tame coyotes. I had heard something of the tales that had preceded their arrival too: the stories from the islands in the Divine Sea, of how the people there had been hunted and enslaved by the pale men and fallen victim to strange and horrible diseases that had come with them. I had even seen something of the newcomers’ magic myself, things that had been washed up on the coast a few years before: cloth finer and stronger than the best cotton and a marvellous sword made of a metal harder than bronze.
‘We do not know who or what these men are. We do not know that they are men. Perhaps they are gods. We have heard it said that one of them is our predecessor, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the last K
ing of Tollan. Quetzalcoatl, who fled his realm hundreds of years ago,’ the interpreter added, to emphasize the obvious: that for the ancient ruler to have returned after all this time, he must be divine. ‘We had to prepare for the possibility that there are gods among these strangers, or that they are emissaries of the gods. We caused gifts to be prepared for them. Among them was the finery that a god would array himself in.’
So the costume had been made for Quetzalcoatl himself! I said nothing, but my mind was running ahead of the interpreter’s words now. Even while he was explaining the measures that had been adopted to keep the making of the costume and the other gifts secret, I was working out why such pains had been taken, and why I had been summoned here, into the Emperor’s presence, to learn about a piece of lost property.
If the Emperor truly believed that one of the pale-faced, bearded strangers might be Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, then he knew what that must imply: that a power higher than his own, no less than the King of the Toltecs, the semi-divine race from whom he claimed descent, might soon be among us. Then his own rule would be on sufferance, subject to the strangers’ scrutiny, to be judged and pronounced upon. How Montezuma might view such a prospect I could only guess, but I did not need to be much of a politician to understand how damaging the mere rumour of it might be to his authority, not just in Mexico itself but throughout the Empire.
