Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  “Please, Tenamáxtli, no more,” she said sadly. “In my sleep I confronted all those obstacles in my dreams, one after another. And you are right They are formidable. Nevertheless, little Ehécatl is all that I have left of Netzlin and our life together. That little I wish to keep.”

  “Very well, then,” I said. “If you must persist in this folly, I insist on helping you to do so. You will need a friend and an ally against those obstacles.”

  She looked at me unbelievingly. “You would encumber yourself with both of us impediments?”

  “For as long as I can, Citláli. Mind you, I do not speak of marriage or of permanence. There will come a time when I expect to be doing—other things.”

  “That plan of which you have spoken. To drive the white men out of The One World.”

  “Yes, that. But, for right now, I had already decided to move out of the mesón and seek private lodgings. I will stay here with you—if you agree—and contribute my savings to the household. I think I need no further classes in my study of Spanish, and I know I want no more in the study of Christianity. I will continue to do my work with the Cathedral’s notarius, to keep on earning those wages. In my free time I will occupy Netzlin’s concesión stall in the market I see there is a supply of baskets yet to be sold, and when you regain your strength, you can make more. There will be no need for you ever to leave Ehécatl’s side. In the evenings, you can assist me in my experiments at making pólvora.”

  “It is more than I could have hoped for, and you are kind to offer it, Tenamáxtli.” But she looked vaguely troubled.

  “You have been kind to me, Citláli ever since we met. And already helpful, I believe, in that matter of the pólvora. Have you some objection to my offer?”

  “Only that I, too, have no intention of marrying anyone. Or to be anyone’s woman. Even if that is the price of survival.”

  I said stiffly, “I suggested no such thing. Nor did I expect you to infer it.”

  “Forgive me, dear friend.” She reached out a hand and held mine. “I am sure you and I could easily become… and I know the powdered root that safeguards against… but it does not always avert mishaps … Ayya, Tenamáxtli, I am trying to say that I very well might yearn someday to have you—but not to chance having another deformed child like—”

  “I understand, Citláli. I promise, we shall live together as chastely as brother and sister, bachelor and spinster.”

  Which is what we did, and for quite a long time, during which many things occurred, of which I shall try to tell in sequence.

  That first day, I removed my belongings—and the sloshing axixcali pot—from the Mesón de San José, never to go there again. I also took away with me the artificer Pochotl, and led him to the Cathedral, and introduced him to the notarius Alonso, and highly recommended him as the one man best qualified to devise all those sacramental baubles that were wanted. Before Alonso, in turn, led him off to meet the clerics who would instruct and supervise him, I told Pochotl where I would be living from now on, and then told him in an undertone:

  “I will, of course, be seeing you here at the Cathedral, and will be much interested in your progress with this work. But I trust you will report to me at my new lodgings your progress in that other work.”

  “I will, to be sure. If all goes well for me here, I shall be immeasurably indebted to you, Cuatl Tenamáxtli.”

  And that very night I began my attempts at concocting pólvora. All the traveling the axixcáli had endured had not dissolved or disturbed the little whitish crystals that, true to Citláli’s word, had formed in the bottom of the pot. I gingerly extracted those from the xitli, and set them to dry on a piece of bark paper. Then, simply at a venture, I set the pot itself on the hearth fire until the remaining urine came to a boil. It produced a fearful stink and made Citláli exclaim, in mock horror, that she was sorry she had let me move into the house. However, my venture proved worthwhile; when all the xitli had boiled away, it left still more of the little crystals.

  While all of those were drying, I went off to the market and easily found lumps of charcoal and of the yellow azufre for sale, and brought home with me a quantity of each. While I pounded those lumps into powder with the heel of my Spanish boot, Citláli, though still abed, ground the xitli crystals on a métlatl stone. Then, on my piece of bark paper, I thoroughly mixed the black, yellow and white grains together in equal measure. For the sake of caution against accident, I took the paper to the muddy alley outside the house. A number of the neighborhood children, already attracted by the stench I had inflicted on the locality, watched with curiosity as I touched an ember from the hearth to that powder mixture. And then they cheered, though the result was no thunder or lightning, merely a small, sparkly fizzle and a cloud of smoke.

  I was not too disappointed to make a gracious bow to the children in thanks for their applause. I had already perceived, in the pinch of pólvora I had got from the young soldier-fowler, that the mixture was not compounded equally of black, white and yellow. But I had to start somewhere, and this first attempt had been a success in one important respect. Its cloud of blue smoke smelled exactly like the smoke that had erupted from the arcabuces at the lakeside. So the crystal derived from female urine must be the third ingredient of pólvora. Now I had only to try various proportions of those ingredients to achieve the proper balance. My chief problem, obviously, would be the procurement of enough of those xitli crystals. I half thought of asking the gathered children to run home and bring me all their mothers’ axixcéltin. But I dismissed that idea; it would cause questions from the neighbors—the first, probably, being their asking why a demented man was at large in their streets.

  Some months went by, during which I kept boiling urine at every opportunity, until I think the neighborhood in general had got used to the smell, but I personally was getting thoroughly sick of it Anyway, that labor did yield the crystals, though still in minute quantities, making it difficult for me to try differing measures of the white powder and the other two colors. I kept track of all my experiments, recording them on a piece of paper that I was careful not to misplace—listing them like this: two parts black, two yellow, one white; and three parts black, two yellow, one white; and so on. But no mixture I tried gave any more heartening result than the very first, when the proportions had been one and one and one. That is to say, most mixtures provided only a sparkle, fizzle and smoke, and some gave no result at all.

  Meanwhile, I had explained to the notarius Alonso why I was ceasing to attend the classes at the Colegio. He agreed with me that my fluency in Spanish would be best improved, henceforward, by my actually speaking and hearing it, rather than studying the rules of it He was not so approving, however, of my retirement from Tete Diego’s teachings about Christianity.

  “You could be imperiling the salvation of your immortal soul, Juan Británico,” he said solemnly.

  I asked, “Would not God count it a good deed that I hazard my salvation in order to support a helpless widow woman?”

  “Well…” he said, uncertain. “But only until she is able to support herself, Cuatl Juan. Then you must resume your preparation for Confirmatión.”

  At intervals thereafter, he would inquire as to the health and condition of the widow, and every time I could tell him honestly that she was still housebound, having to care for her crippled child. Thereafter, too, I believe Alonso kept me employed long beyond the time that I was really of any use to him—finding ever more obscure, even dull and valueless pages of word-pictures made far away and long ago, for me to help him translate—just because he knew that my wages went mostly for the upkeep of my little household.

  Whenever I was not occupied with that, I visited the several workrooms that the Cathedral had provided for Pochotl. His clerical employers had first tested his skill by giving him a very small amount of gold in a lump, to see what he might do with it. I forget what it was that he created, but it made the priests ecstatic. From then on, they allowed him increasing quantities of
gold and silver, and gave him instructions as to what to make—candlesticks and censers and various urns—and left the actual design of those things to him, and were vastly pleased with every one of them.

  So now Pochotl was master of a smelter room where all the metals he used were melted and refined; a forging room where the coarser metals—iron, steel, brass—were hammered into shape; a room of mortars and crucibles in which the precious metals were liquefied; a room of workbenches, all strewn with tools of the utmost delicacy. And of course he had many assistants, some of them who had previously also been jewel-artificers in Tenochtítlan. But most of the helpers were slaves—and most of those were Moros, because those people are immune to the hottest heat—who did the heavy drudgery requiring not much skill.

  Naturally, Pochotl was as happy as if he had been transported alive to the blissful afterworld of Tonatíucan—“Have you noticed, Tenamáxtli, how I am becoming enviably fat again, now that I am well paid and well fed?”—and he enjoyed showing me his every new production, and he took pleasure in my admiring them as much as the priests did. But there at the Cathedral he and I never spoke of his other work; that project we discussed only when he came to the house, to ask questions about various parts of the arcabuz that I had sketched for him:

  “Is this piece supposed to move like so? Or like so?”

  And in time he began to bring actual metal pieces to show, for my approval or comment

  “It is a good thing,” he said, “that you got me appointed to the Cathedral’s enterprise at the same time you asked me to build this weapon. Just the making of the arcabuz’s long, hollow tube would have been impossible without the tools I now have. And only today, I was trying to bend a thin metal strip into that spiral you called a spring, and fumbling at it, when I was unexpectedly interrupted by a certain Padre Diego. He startled me by speaking to me in Náhuatl.”

  “I know the man,” I said. “Caught you, did he? And he would hardly believe a spring to be any kind of church decoration. Did he scold you for neglecting your proper work?”

  “No. But he did ask what I was fooling with. Cunningly, I told him that I had had an idea for an invention, and I was struggling to bring it into reality.”

  “An invention, eh?”

  “That is what Padre Diego said, too, and he laughed in ridicule. He said, “That is no invention, maestro. It is a contrivance that has been familiar to us civilized folk for ages and ages.’ And then—can you guess what he did, Tenamáxtli?”

  “He recognized it as a piece of an arcabuz,” I groaned. “Our secret project is exposed and thwarted.”

  “No, no. Not at all. He went away somewhere and came back, bringing me a whole handful of different sorts of springs. The spiral coil that I require to spin the grooved wheel.” He showed me the spring. “Also the flat kind that bends back and forth, which I need for snapping what you called the cat’s-paw.” He showed me that one, too. “In brief, I now know how to make those things, but I do not need to. The good priest made me a gift of them.”

  I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. “Marvelous!” I exclaimed. “For once, the coincidence-loving gods have been gracious. I must say, Pochotl, you are having more success than I.” And I told him of my discouraging experiments with the pólvora.

  He thought for a moment, then suggested, “Perhaps you are not experimenting under the right conditions. From what you have described as the workings of the arcabuz, I think you cannot judge the efficacy of the pólvora until you pack it into a tightly constricted space before you touch fire to it.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But I have only pinches of the powder to work with. It will be a long time before I can fabricate enough of it to pack into anything.”

  However, the very next day the gods of coincidence arranged another happy furtherance of my project.

  As I had promised Citláli, I was spending some part of every day at the late Netzlin’s market stall. That required little of me except to be there standing among the baskets whenever a customer wished to buy one, because Citláli had told me the price she expected to be paid for each one—in cacao beans or snippets of tin or maravedí coins—and the customer could judge the quality without my needing to point it out. He or she could even pour water into any of Citláli’s baskets to test it; they were all so tightly woven that they would not leak water, let alone seeds or meal or whatever else they were destined to contain. Since there was nothing else for me to do, between customers, I spent the time conversing with passersby or smoking picíetl with other stall-keepers or—as I was doing on the day of which I speak—pouring onto my stall’s shopboard small mounds of charcoal, azufre and xitli powders, so I could morosely meditate on them and their infinite number of possible combinations.

  “Ayya, Cuatl Tenamáxtli!” boomed a hearty voice in a pretense of dismay. “Are you going into competition with my wares?”

  I looked up. It was a man named Peloloá, a pochtécatl trader whom I knew from previous encounters. He regularly came to the City of Mexíco, bringing the two prime products of his native Xoconóchco, that coastal Hot Land far to the south, whence had come most of our cotton and salt since long before the white men set foot in The One World.

  “By Iztociuatl!” he exclaimed, invoking the goddess of salt, as he pointed at my pathetic pile of white grains on the shopboard. “Are you intending to trounce me at my own trader?”

  “No, Cuatl Peloloá,” I said, smiling ruefully. “This is not a salt that anyone would wish to buy.”

  “You are right,” he said, touching a few grains to his tongue, before I could stop him and tell him it was purely essence of urine. Then he surprised me, saying, “It is only the bitter first-harvest. What the Spaniards call salitre. It sells so cheaply that it would hardly pay you a living.”

  “Ayyo,” I breathed. “You recognize this substance?”

  “But of course. Who from the Xoconóchco would not?”

  “Do you boil women’s urine in the Xoconóchco, then?”

  He looked blank and said, “What?”

  “Nothing. No matter. You called the powder ‘first-harvest.’ What does that mean?”

  “What it says. Some people think we simply dip a scoop into the sea and strain the salt directly from it. Not so. The making of salt is a more complicated process. We dike off the shallows of our lagoons and let them dry, yes, but then those chunks and lumps and flakes of dry matter must be rid of their many impurities. First, in fresh water, they are sieved clean of sand and shells and weeds. Then, again in fresh water, the substance is boiled. From that initial boiling come crystals that are also sieved out. Those are the first-harvest crystals—salitre—exactly what you have there, Tenamáxtli, only yours has been pulverized. To get to the goddess’s invaluable real salt takes several more stages of refinement.”

  “You said this salitre sells, but cheaply.”

  “The Xoconóchco farmers buy it merely to spread it on their cotton fields. They claim it enhances the ground’s fertility. The Spanish employ salitre in some manner in their tanneries. I know not what use you might be thinking of making of it—”

  “Tanning!” I lied. “Yes, that is it. I contemplate adding fine leather goods to my stock here. I was only puzzled as to where to get the salitre.”

  “I shall be glad to bring you a whole tamémi load, on my next trip north,” said Peloloá. “Cheap it is, but I shall charge you nothing at all. You are a friend.”

  I raced home to announce the good news. But in my excitement, I did it awkwardly. I dashed through the doorway curtain, shouting:

  “You can cease urinating now, Citláli!”

  My inelegant entrance threw her into such a paroxysm of laughter that it was a while before she could gasp out, “I once—called you—preposterous. I was wrong. You are—totally xolopítli!” And it was a while longer before I could gather my wits and rephrase my announcement, and tell her what great good fortune had befallen me.

  Citláli said shyly, and she was seldom shy, “Per
haps we should make a small celebration. To show gratitude to the salt goddess Iztocíuatl.”

  “A celebration? Of what sort?”

  Still shyly, and blushing now, she said, “I have been taking the powdered root tlatlaohuéhuetl throughout the past month. I believe we need worry about no mishap if we were to give its vaunted impregnability a trial.”

  I looked at her—“with new eyes,” I was about to say, but that would not be true. During all this time that we had been sleeping apart, on pallets in the separate rooms, I had been desiring her, but virtuously had given no sign of it Also, it had been so very long since I had lain with a female—the tiny brown Rebeca—that I might soon have resorted to the services of a maátitl. Citláli must have taken my brief hesitation as reluctance, for now she said boldly, with laughter, and made me laugh, too:

  “Niez tlalqua ayquic axitlinéma.” Which means, “I promise not to urinate.”

  And so we embraced laughing, which, I now learned for the first time, is the very best way to begin.

  All this while, Ome-Ehécatl had been growing, from a babe in arms, to an infant that crawled, to a weanling learning wobblily to walk. I kept expecting Ehécatl to the any day, and no doubt Citláli did, too, because a child afflicted with a physical deformity so evident at birth usually has other defects that are not visible, and dies very young. During Ehécatl’s infancy, the only other deficiency that became apparent was the child’s never learning to speak, and possibly that indicated deafness as well. That may have troubled Citláli more than it did me; I was frankly pleased that the child never cried, either.

  Anyway, its brain appeared to function well enough. While learning to walk, Ehécatl also learned to make its way most adroitly around the house and learned early on to veer clear of the cooking hearth. Whenever Citláli decided to give the child some outdoor exercise, she would stand it in the street and point it and give it a gentle shove. Ehécatl would dauntlessly toddle straight along the middle of that street, confident that its mother had made sure nothing was in the way. Of course, Citláli was always gentle and kindly toward everyone, but I believe she also had maternal feelings, even for such an offspring as Ehécatl. She kept the child clean, and tidy of dress—and well fed, though at first it had difficulty in finding her teat and, later, in wielding a spoon. The other neighborhood children rather surprised me with their attitude. They seemed to regard Ehécatl as a kind of plaything—not human like themselves, certainly, but not as inert as a straw or clay doll—and played almost affectionately with the child, without ever being abusive or derisive. All in all, while getting to live for more years than such monstrosities usually do, Ehécatl passed those years as pleasantly as an incurable cripple could ever have hoped to do.