Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  Nor was I heartbroken when, in her twenty-first year, Améyatl had to forsake me and take a husband. As with most marriages between young pípiltin, this one was arranged by the fathers involved, Mixtzin and Kévari, tlatocapíli of Yakóreke, the community nearest ours to the southward. Améyatl was formally betrothed to become the wife of Kévari’s son Kauri, who was about her own age. It was obvious to me (and to Canaútli, our Rememberer of History) that my uncle was thus allying our people and Yakóreke’s as a subtle step toward making Aztlan again—as it long ago had been—the capital city of all the surrounding territories and peoples.

  I did not know whether Améyatl and Kduri had even got to know one another very well, not to say love one another, but they would have been obliged to obey their fathers’ wishes in any case. Besides, in my view, Káuri was a passably personable and acceptable mate for my cousin, so my only emotion on the day of the ceremony was some slight apprehension. However, after the priest of Xochiquétzal had tied the corners of their separate mantles in the wedding knot, and all the traditional festivities were over, and the couple had retired to their finely furnished quarters in the palace, none of us wedding guests heard any scandalized uproar from there. I assumed, with relief, that the tight-making ointment and the tucked-inside pigeon’s egg, as prescribed by Améyatl’s old-crone advisers all those years before, had sufficed to satisfy Káuri that he had wed an untarnished virgin. And no doubt she had further convinced him with a maidenly show of ineptitude at the act she had so artfully been practicing during those years.

  Améyatl and Káuri were married only shortly before the day that I and my mother Cuicáni and Uncle Mixtzin departed for the City of Mexíco. And I deemed that my uncle showed perspicacity in appointing not his son and presumptive heir Yeyac, but his clever daughter and her husband to govern in his place. It would be a long, long time before I would see Améyatl again, and then in circumstances that neither of us could remotely have imagined when she waved good-bye to us wayfarers that day.

  V

  SO I STOOD in what had been The Heart of The One World, my knuckles white from clenching tight in my hand the topaz that had belonged to my late father, my eyes probably fiery, and I demanded of my uncle and mother that we do something to avenge that Mixtli’s death. My mother merely sniffled miserably again. But Mixtzin regarded me with sympathy tempered by skepticism, and asked sardonically:

  “What would you have us do, Tenamáxtli? Set the city aflame? Stone does not readily catch fire. And we are but three. The whole of the all-powerful Mexíca nation was unable to stand against these white men. Well? What would you have us do?”

  I stammered witlessly, “I… I…” then paused to collect my thoughts, and after a moment I said:

  “The Mexíca were taken by surprise because they were invaded by a people never previously known to exist. It was that surprise and the ensuing confusion that caused the downfall of the Mexíca. They simply did not recognize the white men’s capabilities and cunning and lust for conquest. Now all of The One World does. What we still do not know is in what way the Spaniards may be vulnerable. They must have a weak point somewhere, a soft underbelly where they can be attacked and gutted.”

  Mixtzin made a gesture encompassing the city about us, saying, “Where is it? Show it to me. I will gladly join you in the disemboweling. You and I against all of New Spain.”

  “Please do not mock me, uncle. I quote to you a bit of one of your own poems. ‘Never forgive… at last you lunge and reach for the throat.’ The Spaniards surely have a pregnability somewhere. It has only to be found.”

  “By you, nephew? In these last ten years, no other man of any of the defeated nations has found a penetrable crack in the Spanish armor. How will you?”

  “I have at least made a friend among the enemies. That one called a notarius, who speaks our tongue. He invited me to come and talk to him at any time. Perhaps I can pry from him some useful hint of—”

  “Go then. Talk. We will wait here.”

  “No, no,” I said. “It is bound to take me a long time to gain his full confidence—to hope for any helpful disclosures. I ask your permission, as my uncle and my Uey-Tecútli, to remain here in this city for as long as that may require.”

  My mother murmured dolefully, “Ayya ouíya…” and Mixtzin pensively rubbed his chin.

  At last he asked, “Where will you live? How will you live? The cacao beans in our purses are negotiable only in the native markets. For any other purchase or payment, I have already been told that things called coins are necessary. Gold and silver and copper pieces. You have none and I have none to leave with you.”

  “I shall seek some kind of work to do, and be paid for it. Perhaps that notarius can assist me. Also—remember—the tlatocapíli Tototl said that two of his scouts from Tépiz are still here somewhere. They must have a roof over them by now, and may be willing to share it with a onetime neighbor.”

  “Yes.” Mixtzin nodded. “I remember. Tototl told me their names. Netzlin and his wife Citláli. Yes, if you can find them…”

  “Then I may stay?”

  “But, Tenamáxtli,” my mother whimpered. “Suppose you should come to accept and adopt the white men’s ways…”

  I snorted and said, “Not likely, Tene. Here I shall be as the worm in a coyacapúli fruit. Making it nourish me only until it is dead itself.”

  We inquired of passersby whether there was any place we might spend the night, and one of them directed us to the House of Pochtéca, a meeting hall and warehouse for the traveling merchants who brought their wares to the city. But there was a steward at the door, and he apologetically but firmly declined to let us enter.

  “The building is reserved to the use of pochtéca only,” he said, “which you obviously are not, since you bear no bundles and lead no train of tamémime porters.”

  “All we seek is a place to sleep,” growled Uncle Mixtzin.

  “The thing is,” explained the steward, “the original House of Pochtéca was almost of the size and grandeur of a palace, but it suffered the same demolition as the rest of the city. This replacement is but small and poor by comparison. There simply is no room for anyone not a member.”

  “Then where, in this warmly hospitable city, do visitors find lodging?”

  “There is an establishment the white men call a meson. It is provided by the Christian Church, to house and feed itinerant or indigent persons. The Mesón de San José.” And he told us how to find it.

  My uncle said, through his teeth, “By Huitzli, another of their trifling santosl” but we went there.

  The mesón was a large adobe structure that was an annex to an even larger and much more substantial building called the Colegio de San José. I learned later that the word colegio means much the same as our calmécac—a school for advanced students, taught by priests, though in this case Christian priests, of course.

  The mesón, like the colegio, was in the charge of what we took to be priests, until some others converging on the building told us that these were only friars, a lowly grade of the Christian clergy. We arrived about sundown, just as some of those friars were spooning food from huge cooking vats into bowls held by the many people who got in line for it. Most of those people were not travel-stained like ourselves, but only ragged and defeated-looking inhabitants of the city itself. Evidently they were so impoverished that they depended on the friars for their sustenance as well as shelter, because none made any offer of any kind of payment when his bowl was filled, and the friars gave no sign of expecting payment

  Under the circumstances, I would have expected the charity fare to be some cheap and filling gruel like atóli. But what was poured into our bowls was, surprisingly, duck soup, thick with meat, hot and tasty. Each of us also was handed a warm, globular, brown, crusty thing. We watched what others did with theirs, and saw that they were eating them in bites and using them to sop up their soup, just as we always had done with our round, thin, flat tláxcaltin.

  “Our maize
-flour tláxcaltin the Spaniards call tortillas” said a scrawny man who had been in the line with us. “And this bread of theirs they call a bolillo. It is made of flour from a kind of grass they call wheat, which they deem superior to our maize, and which can be grown in places where maize cannot.”

  “Whatever it is,” my mother said timidly, “it is good.”

  She had been right to speak with timidity, for Uncle Mixtzin instantly and sharply told her, “Sister Cuicáni, I wish to hear no approving words about anything to do with these white people!”

  The scrawny man told us his name, Pochotl, and sat with us while we all dined, and continued helpfully to inform us:

  “It must be that the Spaniards have only few and puny ducks in their own country, for here they devour ducks in preference to all other meats. Of course, our lakes support such multitudes of these birds, and the Spaniards have such a strange but effective means of slaughtering diem—”He paused and held up a hand. “There. Did you hear that? Twilight is when the flocks come homing to the water, and the Spanish fowlers kill them by the hundreds every evening.”

  We had heard several claps of what might have been distant thunder, off to the eastward, and it went on rumbling for a time.

  “That is why,” Pochotl went on, “duck meat is so abundant that it can even be fed free to us paupers. Myself, I would prefer pitzóme meat, if I could afford to buy it.”

  Uncle Mixtzin said, with a snarl, “We three are not paupers!”

  “You are newcomers, I assume. Just stay awhile, then.”

  “What is a pitzóme?” I asked. “I never heard the word before.”

  “An animal. Brought by the Spaniards, and bred by them in great numbers. It is very like our familiar wild boar, only tame and much fatter. Its meat, called by them puerco, is as tender and savory as a well-cooked human haunch.” My mother and I both winced at that, but Pochotl took no notice. “Indeed, so close is the similarity of pitzóme and human meat that many of us believe the Spaniards and those animals must be blood relations, that the white men and their pitzóme both propagate their kind by mutual copulation.”

  Now the friars were waving all of us out of the big bare room where we had been eating, up the stairs to the sleeping quarters. It was the first time in my recollection that I had ever gone to bed without steaming or bathing myself, or at least taking a swim in the nearest available water. Upstairs were two separate big rooms, one each for men and women, so my uncle and I went one way and my mother the other, looking unhappy at being parted from us.

  “I hope we see her safe and sound in the morning,” muttered Mixtzin. “Yya, I hope we see her at all. These white priests may well have a rule that giving a woman a meal entitles them to the use of the woman.”

  To soothe him, I said, “There were women being fed down there who are rather younger and more tempting than Tene.”

  “Who knows what tastes these aliens may have, if, as that man said, they are thought to couple even with sows? I would put nothing past them.”

  That man, Pochotl—so scrawny as to belie his name, which means a certain tree, a very bulky one—was again joining us, taking the straw pallet next to mine, whence he continued to regale us with information about the City of Mexíco and its Spanish masters.

  “This,” he said, “was once an island entirely surrounded by the waters of Lake Texcóco. But now that lake has dwindled so much that its nearer shore is fully one-long-run eastward from the city—except for the canals that must repeatedly be dredged to provide access for the freight acáltin. The causeways that link the city to the mainland used to cross expanses of clear lake water, but now, as you must have seen yourselves, those expanses are more weed than water. The other lakes, too, back then were interconnected with Lake Texcóco and with each other. In effect, one single great lake. A man could row an acáli from the island of Tzumpánco in the north to the flower gardens of Xochimflco in the south, some twenty one-long-runs—or twenty leagues, as the Spanish would say. Now that man would have to plod through the wide bogs that have put those shrunken lakes far apart from each other. Some people say the trees were responsible.”

  “The trees?!” exclaimed my uncle.

  “This valley is ringed by mountains, all around the horizon. And all those mountains bore thick forests—were almost furred with forests—before the white men came.”

  Mixtzin said slowly, remembering, “Ye-es, you are right. It did strike me, on this visit, that the mountains look more brown than green.”

  “Because they are barren of trees,” said Pochotl. “The Spaniards chopped them down—all of them—for timbers and lumber and firewood. Truly, that could well have angered Chicomecóatl, the goddess of green growing things. She may have taken revenge by persuading the god Tlaloc to send his rain only meagerly and sporadically, as he has been doing, and by persuading Tonatíu to blaze more hotly, as he has been doing. Whatever the reason, our weather gods have behaved most peculiarly ever since the coming of the Crixtanóyotl deities.”

  “Excuse me, friend Pochotl,” I said, changing the subject. “I hope to find employment here. Not to make any fortune, but work that will pay me enough to live on. Can I expect to do that?”

  The scrawny man looked me up and down. “Have you any skills, young man? Can you write the white men’s language? Are you talented at any craft? Do you possess any artistic ability?”

  “None of those. No.”

  “Good,” he said bleakly. “Then you will not balk at hard labor. Hefting stone blocks and baskets of mortar for the new buildings. Or drudging as a tamémi porter. Or mucking out silt and excrement and trash from the canals. Whether such work will enable you to live depends, of course, on how skimpily you can live.”

  “Well,” I said, gulping, “I had hoped for something rather more…”

  Uncle Mixtzin interrupted, “Friend Pochotl, you are a well-spoken man. I take you to have some intelligence, even education. And clearly you do not love the white men. Why, then, do you subsist on their charity?”

  “Because I do have skills,” said Pochotl with a sigh. “I was a master worker in gold and silver. Delicate jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, labrets, diadems, anklets—things for which the Spaniards have no use. They want their gold and silver melted down into featureless ingots, for sending home to their king, or for stamping into crude coins. Barbarians! Their other metals, what they call iron and steel, copper and bronze, they entrust to brawny smiths, to forge into horseshoes, armor plates, swords and the like.”

  Mixtzin asked, “You could not do that?”

  “Any muscular lout could do that. I think such strongarm work beneath me. Also, I do not care to callus and gnarl my artist’s fingers. Someday, somehow, there may again be decent work for them to do.”

  I was only half listening to them. I sat cross-legged on my rancid pallet—it smelled of numberless earlier unwashed occupants—and contemplated the extremely unappealing careers the scrawny man had suggested for me. I had sworn to myself that I would do anything the gods might require in the furtherance of my vengeance against the white men, and I would keep that oath. The prospect of hard and ill-paid labor did not affright me. But the whole object of my staying in this city was to search out some hitherto unnoticed weakness in the Spaniards’ grip on The One World, some flaw in their system of governing and controlling New Spain, some blind spot in their allegedly all-seeing preparedness against any kind of overthrow. It seemed unlikely that I could do much successful spying while spending most of my time among other laborers at the bottom of a canal ditch, or bent under the tumpline of a tamémi porter. Well, maybe the notarius Alonso de Molina could provide for me some better line of work, where I would have more opportunity for employing my eyes and ears and instincts.

  Now Pochotl was telling my uncle, “The white men have brought us several new and very flavorsome foods. Their chicken, for instance, yields a much more tender and juicy meat than does our bigger huaxolómi fowl that they call the gallipavo. And they grow a cane fr
om which they extract a powder called sugar, much sweeter than honey or coconut syrup. And they brought a new kind of bean called an haba, and other vegetables called cabbage, artichoke, lettuce and radish. Good eating, for those who can afford to buy them, or still have a plot of ground in which to grow them. But I think the Spaniards found here many more things new to them. They are ecstatic over our xitómatl and chili and chocólatl and ahuácatl, which they say do not exist in their Old Spain. Oh, and also they are learning how to take pleasure in smoking our picíetl.”

  Gradually I became aware of other voices around me in the dark room, other people staying awake to converse as Mixtzin and the scrawny man were doing. Most of those voices were speaking Náhuatl, and not saying anything much worth my listening to. But other conversations were in languages incomprehensible; they could have been conveying the wisdom of the world, or the deepest secrets of the gods, for all I could make out At that time, I was unable to sort out the nationalities of those various speakers. But after a few more nights in the guest house, I would learn something interesting—that almost every man of them, except those native to this City of Mexíco itself, had come to this San José mesón from somewhere north of the city, often far north.

  It stood to reason. As I have said, all the nations and peoples south of the City of Mexíco—also to the east—had early succumbed to the Spanish conquest, and by now had well adapted to the presence and puissance of the Spaniards, in all their social and commercial dealings with them. So any visitors from the south or east would be envoys or swiftmessengers or pochtéca bringing goods to the city to sell or barter, or coming here to buy merchandise imported from Old Spain. Those visitors, then, would be lodging at the House of Pochtéca, where we three had been turned away—or, not impossibly, they would even be guests in some high-ranking Spaniard’s mansion or palace.