Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  I knew that Citláli’s chief worry about the child was the question of its afterlife, whether Ehécatl went there young or old. Citláli probably had some concern for her own afterlife, as well. No person erf The One World is necessarily damned to the nothingness of Míctlan after death—as Christians are to hell—simply because he or she has been born, has lived and has died. Still, to assure that one does not get plunged to Míctlan, one should have done something in one’s lifetime to merit residing afterward in the sun god’s Tonatíucan or one of the other beneficent gods’ similarly appetizing after-worlds.

  A child’s only hope of doing that is to sacrifice itself—that is, have its parents sacrifice it—to appease the hunger and the vanity of one god or another. But no priest would have accepted a useless object like Ehécatl as an offering to even the least of gods. A grown man can best attain his desired afterworld by dying in battle or on the altar of a god, or doing some deed noteworthy enough to please the gods. A grown woman can also the in sacrifice to a god, and some have done deeds as praiseworthy as any man’s, but most have deserved their places in Tonatíucan or Tlélocan, or wherever, simply by being the mothers of children whose tonáli has destined them to be warriors or sacrifices or mothers. Ome-Ehécatl could never be any of those things, which is why I say Citláli must have had some anxiety about her own prospects after death.

  XI

  SOME MONTHS AFTER ourearlier encounter in the market, the pochtécatl Pololoá came again from the Xoconóchco, and brought along one tamémi laden with nothing but a big sack of the “first-harvest” salitre, and grandly presented that to me, and even bade the porter continue carrying it as far as my house. And there I began devoting every free moment to trying the black, white and yellow powders in mixtures of varying proportions, and noting down every experiment I made. I now had a good deal more free time than before, because both Pochotl and I had been dismissed from our duties at the Cathedral.

  “It is because the Church has a new pope at Rome,” the notarius Alonso explained in a tone of apology. “The old Papa Clemente Séptimo has died and been succeeded by the Papa Paulo Tercero. We have just been informed of his accession and his first directives to all the world’s Catholic Christian clergy.”

  I said, “You do not sound pleased by the news, Cuatl Alonso.”

  He grimaced sourly. “The Church commands that every priest be celibate and chaste and honorable—or at least that he pretend to be. That certainly should apply to the pope, the highest priest of all. But it is well known that while he was still just the Padre Farnese, he began his climb through the Church hierarchy by what the coarser folk call ‘lamiendo el culo del patron.’ That is to say, he put his own sister, Giulia the Beautiful, to bed with the earlier Papa Alessandro Sexto, thereby winning for himself substantial preferments. And this Papa Paulo himself has by no means been celibate during his life. He has numerous children and grandchildren. And one of those, a grandson, Paulo has already—immediately on attaining the papacy—made a cardinal at Rome. And that grandson is only fourteen years old.”

  “Interesting,” I said, though I did not find it very much so. “But what has this to do with us here?”

  “Among his other directives, Papa Paulo has decreed that every diocese commence to conserve on its expenditures. That means we can no longer finance even such a small luxury as your work with me on the codices. Also, the pope has addressed Bishop Zumárraga specifically in the matter of what he calls ‘squandering’ gold and silver on ‘fripperies.’ All the precious metals the Church has acquired here in New Spain he decrees must be shared among less fortunately endowed bishoprics. Or so he says.”

  “You do not believe him?”

  Alonso blew out a long breath. “Doubtless I am predisposed to distrust him, because of what I know of his personal life. Nevertheless, it sounds to me as if Papa Paulo is appropriating his own private King’s Fifth from the treasures of New Spain. Anyway, that is why Pochotl must leave off his wondrous jewelsmithing for us, and you your help with the translations.”

  I smiled at him. “You and I both know, Cuatl Alonso, that for a long while you have been merely—and compassionately—inventing work for me to do. But I have some savings put by. I think that I and the widow and orphan I support will not suffer much hardship from my leaving this post.”

  “I shall be sorry to see you go, Juan Británico. But I strongly recommend, now that you will not be occupied here, that you put those hours to good advantage by resuming your Christian studies under Padre Diego.”

  “It is thoughtful and caring of you to tell me that,” I said, and meant it, but I made no promise.

  He sighed, then said, “I should like to bestow on you a small gift, by way of saying farewell.” He took up a bright object that was holding down the papers on his table. “Everybody owns a thing like this nowadays—I mean every Spaniard—but this particular one was given to me by that poor wretched heretic whom you and I saw executed outside the Cathedral here.”

  Ayyo, I thought, a gift to him from my own father, and now from him to me. Alonso handed it over, a piece of crystal the size of my palm, circular and smoothly polished. I still had that other crystal that my father had involuntarily bequeathed, tucked safely among my belongings. But that was a yellow topaz, and this was clear quartz. Also, this one was differently shaped, being gently rounded on both surfaces.

  “That old man recounted how he discovered these objects, somewhere in the southern lands,” said Alonso, “and made them popular utensils among all his people. They are now much used by us Spaniards—very useful things they are, indeed—but they seem to have been forgotten by you indios.”

  “Useful?” I asked. “How?”

  “Observe.” He took it from me and held it in a shaft of sunlight from the window. In his other hand he took a piece of bark paper and held it so the sunlight came through the crystal onto the paper. Moving the paper and crystal back and forth, he gradually brought that spot of light down to a bright point on the paper. And, after a very brief moment, the paper began to emit smoke there—then, amazingly, broke into a small but real flame. Alonso blew it out and handed the crystal back to me. “A burning-glass,” he said. “We also call it a lente, from the shape of it, like the bean of the same name. With it, a person can kindle a fire without any need for steel and pirita, or without the drudgery of drill-stick and block. When the sun is shining, anyway. I trust you will find it useful, too.”

  I certainly would, I was thinking exultantly. It was like a gift from the gods. No—a gift from my father Mixtli, now surely a dweller in Tonatíucan. He must have been watching me from that afterworld as I struggled to master the making of pólvora—and must know why I was doing so—and decided to make the struggle easier for me. Even long gone and far removed from mortal concerns, my father Mixtli must be in accord with my intention to rid The One World of its alien masters. And this was his way of telling me so, from beyond the immeasurable distances that separate us living from the dead.

  I said nothing of that to Alonso de Molina, of course, but only, “I thank you very much, indeed. I will think of you every time I make use of the lente.” And then I said goodbye.

  Pochotl was no more woebegone than I at being dismissed from the Cathedral roster of workers. He had cannily invested the wages he had been paid, having built for himself a more than decent house and workshop in one of the better colaciones of the city set aside for native settlement. His house was, in fact, right on the edge of the Traza reserved for the Spaniards. And such numbers of those Spaniards had been dazzled by the articles Pochotl had crafted for the Cathedral that he was already being solicited to do private commissions.

  “The white men are finally striving to emulate us in culture and refinement and good taste,” he said. “Have you noticed, Tenamáxtli? They no longer even smell so bad as before. They have acquired our habit of bathing, though perhaps not so frequently or thoroughly as we do. And now they have learned to appreciate the kind of jewelry that I have
always done—much finer and more ingenious works than those of their own clumsy artificers. So they bring me their gold, their silver, their gems, and tell me what they want—a necklace, a finger ring, a sword hilt—and leave me to determine the design. None yet has been less than overjoyed at the results or failed to pay me handsomely. And none has yet remarked on my always somehow having a bit of the metal left over to keep for my own.”

  “I am mightily glad for you,” I said. “I only hope that you have some time free few—”

  “Ayyo, yes. The arcabuz is almost complete. I have finished the metal works of it, and now have only to mount those properly in the wooden stock. I was much aided, odd though it may seem, by the order of my dismissal from the Cathedral. The bishop bade me empty and clean my workrooms, and he set guards to make sure that I did not carry off any of the valuables with which I had been entrusted. And I did not, but I did take the opportunity, seeing the soldiers’ weapons up close, to ogle every detail of the way those arcabuces are put together. Now—how are you faring in the making of the pólvora?”

  I was still engaged in the seemingly never-to-end process of trying different mixtures of the powders, and I will not recount all the dreary time and infuriating attempts I had to endure. I will merely say that I finally achieved success—with a mixture that was two-thirds salitre and one-third comprising equal measures of charcoal and azufre.

  When, one afternoon, I used my new lente to bring a dot of sunlight down to ignite that little heap of grayish powder—what would prove to be the ultimate and conclusive trial—the alley outside our house was empty of any of the local children. They all had got even more bored than I by the repeated puny fizzles. On this occasion, however, the powder absolutely spewed sparks, and only a modest puff of the acrid blue smoke. But, most important, it uttered that angry sound like a muted snarl—what I had heard when the young soldier let me pull the gatillo and fire his arcabuz. At last, I knew how to make pólvora, and could make it in significant quantities. After doing a small, private victory dance and giving silent but heartfelt thanks to the war god Huitzilopóchtli—and to my revered late father Mixtli—I hurried off to Pochotl’s house to announce my grand achievement

  “Yyo ayyo, I stand in awe of you!” he exclaimed. “Now, as you can see, I too am very nearly done.” He gestured at his workbench, bearing the metal components I had already examined, and now also the wooden stock that he was shaping. “While I finish my work, I suggest that you do what I suggested before: test the pólvora in some kind of firmly constricted container.”

  “I intend to,” I said. “Meanwhile, Pochotl, make for the arcabuz also some round lead balls for it to discharge. They must be of a size to ram down into the hollow tube, but must fit snugly in there.”

  I went again to the market and begged a lump of common clay from a potter there. I took it home and, while Citláli watched pridefully, poured onto that a very modest measure of pólvora, rolled the clay tightly around it to make a ball about the size of a nopáli fruit, punched a tiny hole in that with a quill, then set the ball to dry near the hearth. The next day, it was as hard as any pot, and I took it out to the alley.

  This being something new to them, the local children did gather around again, and were equally interested by the lente I was about to use. But I waved them off to a respectful distance—and also put an arm up to shield my face—before I touched the crystal’s hot spot to the quill-hole. I am glad that I took those precautions, because the ball disappeared on the instant, with a flash that was dazzling even in the daylight, a cloud of the pungent blue smoke, a noise almost as loud as was made by the arcabuz I had once discharged—and a spray of sharp fragments that stung my raised arm and bare chest. Two or three of the children uttered small yelps, but none of us was more than slightly nicked. Rather too late, it occurred to me that there might have been a roving patrol somewhere near enough to have beard the report No one came to investigate, but I decided to do my experimenting, from then on, well away from the city.

  So, a few days later, carrying a pólvora-packed hard pottery ball as big as my fist, and some of the powder carried loose in a pouch, I took a ferry acáli at the western edge of the island and crossed to the mainland bluff called Chapultépec, Grasshopper Hill. I could easily have walked there; this part of the lake was only about knee-deep, green-brown and fetid. The rocky front of the bluff had formerly, so I was told, been carved with gigantic faces, the many-times-magnified visages of four of the Revered Speakers of the Mexíca. But the faces were gone, because Spanish soldiers had boisterously used them for practice in firing the immense, wheel-mounted, big-mouthed thunder-tubes called culebrinas and falconetes. The bluff was now just a rocky-fronted bluff again, its only notable feature being the aqueduct that jutted out from it, carrying the water from Chapultépec’s springs to the city.

  All about, the parkland that the last Motecuzóma had laid out—with gardens and fountains and statues—likewise had been obliterated. There existed now only grass, wildflowers, underbrush and, here and there, the great, towering oldest-of-old trees, the ahuehuétquin cypresses, too invulnerably tough for even the Spaniards to chop down. The only people I saw anywhere around were the slaves who were at work every day, repairing the ever-occurring leaks and fractures in the aqueduct. I had to trudge but a short way inland to find myself alone, and to find a spot of ground clear of underbrush, on which to place the object I carried.

  This time, I had made the clay ball with a flattened base, and had put there the quill-hole, so the hole was on a level with the ground when I set down the thing. I opened my pouch, and starting from that quill-hole, I dribbled a thin stream of the pólvora to a considerable distance and around the root spread of a big cypress. There, safe behind the tree’s trunk, I took out my burning-glass, held it in a sunbeam that had made its way through the foliage, and kindled a small flame at the very end of my powder train. As I had hoped, the loose pólvora began sparking and snarling, and the sparks danced merrily back the way I had come. I realized that this would not always be a practical way to ignite my experimental balls; any breath of wind would interrupt its progress; but that day no wind did. The sparking went around the cypress’s bole and out of my sight, but I could still smell the distinctive sharp odor of the pólvora trail’s burning.

  Then, though I had anticipated it, or at least fervently hoped for it, there erupted such a roar of noise that I jumped in spite of myself. The tree that shielded me seemed to rock, too. Countless birds burst from the greenery all about, screeching and cawing, and the underbrush rustled violently to the scampering of unseen animals. I heard the whizzing sound of the pottery shards flying in all directions, and a few of them going thunk against the limbs of my sheltering tree, while leaves and twigs cut loose by them came fluttering down, and the blue smoke spread its pungent miasma far and wide in the windless air.

  From somewhere in the distance, I heard human shouts, too. So, as soon as there was no more patter of things falling roundabout, I left my tree and went to where the ball had been. A patch of the earth as big as a petatl mat was scorched black, and the nearby bushes were charred to shriveling. At the edge of the clearing, a rabbit lay dead; it had been pierced right through by one of the shards.

  The shouts were getting nearer and more excited. I only then remembered that the Spaniards had built, on the heights of Grasshopper Hill, a fort-and-stockade structure they called the Castillo, and that it was always full of soldiers, because that was where new army recruits were trained. Even the rawest recruit would, of course, have recognized the sound of a pólvora explosion and—it having come from the depths of a usually uninhabited forest—would dash out with his comrades to find out where and how it had happened, and by whose doing. I did not want to leave any evidence for those soldiers. I had no time to try to erase the burn mark, but I did pick up the rabbit before I scurried off toward the lakeside.

  That night, Pochotl visited the house, with an oily rolledup mantle under his arm and a many-creased grin
on his face. With the sly, secretive mien of a conjuror, he laid the bundle on the floor and very slowly unrolled it, while Citláli and I watched bright-eyed. There it was: the replica arcabuz, and very authentic it looked.

  “Ouiyo ayyo,” I murmured, genuinely pleased and genuinely admiring of Pochotl’s artistry. Citláli smiled from one to the other of us, pleased for us both.

  Pochotl handed me the key for winding the spring inside. I inserted it in its place, turned it and heard the ratcheting noise I had heard once before. Then, with my thumb, I pulled back the cat’s-paw holding its flake of false-gold, and it clicked and stayed back. Then, with my forefinger, I tugged the gatillo. The cat’s-paw snapped down, the false-gold struck the grooved wheel just as the wheel was spun by its wound-up spring—and the resultant sparks sprayed right across the little cazoleta pan as they were supposed to do.

  “Of course,” said Pochotl, “the crucial test will be to try it fully charged with pólvora and one of these.” He handed me a pouch of the heavy lead balls. “But I advise you to go far away from here, Tenamáxtli, to do that. The word is already abroad. An unaccountable blast was heard today by the Chapultépec garrison.” He winked at me. “The white men fear—as well they might—that someone besides themselves possesses some quantity of the pólvora. The street patrols are stopping and searching every indio carrying pots or baskets or any other possibly suspicious container.”