Текст книги "Aztec"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

I was not exactly rapturous at the prospect of being the bait for a jaguar, but I let Blood Glutton show me how to work his device, how to make the noises at random and irregular intervals: short grunts and longer growls. When we had finished our meal, Cozcatl and the slaves rolled into their blankets, while Blood Glutton and I went off into the night.

When the campfire was just a glimmer in the distance, but we could still faintly smell its smoke, we stopped in what Blood Glutton said was a clearing. It could have been a cavern of the Holy Home, for all I could see. I sat down on a boulder and he went crunching off somewhere behind me and, when all was quiet, I stuck my hand up inside the drum and began thumbnailing the rawhide string—a grunt, a pause, a grunt and a rumble, a pause, three gruff grunts....

It sounded so very like a big cat, moodily grumbling as he prowled, that my own back hair prickled. Without really wanting to, I recalled some of the stories I had heard from experienced jaguar hunters. The jaguar, they said, never had to stalk very near its prey. It had the ability to hiccup violently, and its breath would render a victim numb and faint and helpless, even at a distance. A hunter using arrows would always have four of them in hand, because the jaguar was also notorious for being able to dodge an arrow and, insultingly, catch it in his teeth and chew it to splinters. Hence a hunter would have to discharge four arrows in a flurry, hoping that one of them would take effect, because it was a well-known fact that he could get off no more than four arrows before the cat's hiccups overwhelmed him.

I tried to divert my thoughts by doing some variations and improvisations in my thumb rasping—quick grunts like amused chuckles, long-drawn groans such as a yawning cat might make. I began to believe that I was getting really adept at that art, especially when I somehow produced a grunt after I had let go the rawhide, and I wondered if I might introduce the device as a new musical instrument, and myself as the world's only master of it, at some ceremonial festival....

There came to my ears another grunt, and I came wide awake from my reverie, horrified, for I had not produced that grunt either. There also came to my nostrils a sort of urinous scent, and to my vision, dim though it was, a sense that a darker piece of the darkness was moving stealthily from behind me to the left side of me. The darkness grunted again, louder, and with an inquiring note. Though almost paralyzed, I thumbed the rawhide to make what I hoped was a growl of welcome. What else could I do?

From my left front there turned on me two flat, cold, yellow lights—and a sudden sharp wind sang past my cheek. I thought it was the jaguar's lethal hiccup. But the yellow lights blinked out, and there came a throat-tearing scream, like that of a female sacrifice clumsily knifed by an inept priest. The scream broke off and became a choked, bubbling noise, accompanied by the thrashing of a heavy body evidently tearing up all the shrubbery roundabout.

"I am sorry I had to let it get so close to you," said Blood Glutton at my side. "But I needed to see the gleam of its eyes to judge my aim."

"What is the thing?" I asked, for I could still hear in my ears that awful humanlike scream, and I feared we had got some wandering woman.

The thrashing sound ceased, and Blood Glutton went to investigate. He said triumphantly, "Right in the lung. Not bad for throwing by guess." Then he must have felt along the dead body, for I heard him mutter, "I will be damned to Mictlan," and I waited for him to confess that he had speared some poor blue Chinantecatl woman lost in the night woods. But all he said was, "Come and help me drag it up to the camp!" I did, and if it was a woman she weighed as much as I did and she had a cat's hind legs.

All those in the camp, of course, had bolted up out of their blankets at the frightful noise. Blood Glutton and I let drop our prey, and I could see it for the first time: a big tawny cat, but not a spotted one.

The old soldier panted, "I must be—losing my skill. Thought I made—a jaguar caller. But that is a cuguar, a mountain lion."

"No matter," I panted. "Meat just as good. Skin make you a good mantle."

Naturally there was no more sleeping in what remained of the night. Blood Glutton and I sat and rested, and preened in the admiration of the others, and I congratulated him on his prowess, and he congratulated me on my unflinching patience. Meanwhile, the slaves skinned the animal, and some of them scraped clean the inner surface of the hide, and others cut up the carcass into pieces of convenient carrying size. Cozcatl cooked breakfast for us all: a maize atóli that would give us energy for the day, but he also provided a treat to celebrate our successful hunt. He got out the eggs we had tenderly carried and hoarded since Nejapa. With a twig he pierced each one's shell, and twirled the twig to addle the yolk and white. Then he roasted them only briefly in the outer ashes of the fire, and we sucked out the warm, rich contents through the holes.

At the next two or three nights' stops, we feasted on the rather chewy but extremely tasty cat meat. Blood Glutton gave the cuguar's hide to the burliest slave, Ten, to wear as a cape so he could continuously supple it with his hands. But we had not taken the trouble to find and rub tanbark into the skin, so it soon began to stink so rancidly that we made Ten march a good distance apart from the rest of us. Also, since mountain climbing often necessitates the use of all four limbs, Ten seldom had his hands free to work the leather to softness. The sun stiffened it until poor Ten might as well have been wearing a varnished-hide door strapped to his back. But Blood Glutton stubbornly mumbled something about making himself a shield of it, and refused to let Ten get rid of it, and so it came with us all the rest of the way through the Tzempuula mountains.

* * *

I am glad that the Señor Bishop Zumárraga is not with us today, my lord scribes, for I must tell of a sexual encounter I know His Excellency would deem sordid and repulsive. He would probably turn purple again. In truth, even though more than forty-years have passed since that night, I myself am still made uneasy by the memory of it, and I would omit the episode, except that its recounting is necessary to the understanding of many and more significant incidents that later derived from it.

When the fourteen of us finally descended the last long foothills of the Tzempuula mountains, we came down again into Tzapoteca territory at a sizable city on the bank of a wide river. You now call it the Villa de Guadalcazar, but in those days the city, the river, and all the expanse of lands about it were called in the Lóochi language Layu Beezyu, or The Place of the Jaguar God. However, since that was a busy crossroads of several trade routes, most of its people spoke Náhuatl as a second language, and as often used the name our Mexíca travelers had given the place: Tecuantépec, or simply Jaguar Hill. No one then or now, except myself, seems ever to have thought it ludicrous to apply the name of Jaguar Hill to the broad flowing river as well, and to the exceptionally unhilly lands beyond.

The city was only about five one-long-runs from where the river spills into the great southern ocean, so it had attracted immigrant settlers from several other peoples of that coastal area: Zoque, Nexitzo, some Huave, and even displaced groups of the Mixteca. On its streets, one encountered quite a variety of complexions, physiques, costumes, and accents. But fortunately the native Cloud People predominated, so most of the city folk were as superlatively handsome and courtly as those of Záachila.

On the afternoon we arrived, as our little company stumbled wearily but eagerly across the rope bridge spanning the river, Blood Glutton said, in a voice hoarse from dust and fatigue, "There are some excellent hostels yonder in Tecuantépec."

"The excellent ones can wait," I rasped. "We will stop at the first one."

And so, tired and famished, as ragged and filthy and malodorous as priests, we lurched into the dooryard of the first inn we found on the river side of the city. And from that impulsive decision of mine—just as the wisps of smoke must uncoil from the twirl of a fire-drilling stick—there inevitably unfurled all the events of all the remaining roads and days of my life, and of Zyanya's life, and the lives of persons I have already mentioned, and of other persons I shall name, and even of one person who never had a name.

Know, then, reverend friars, that it began so:

When we had all of us, the slaves included, bathed and then steamed and then bathed again and then dressed in clean garments, we called for food. The slaves ate outside in the twilit dooryard, but Cozcatl, Blood Glutton, and I had a cloth laid for us in a torch-lighted and rush-carpeted inside room. We glutted ourselves on delicacies fresh from the nearby sea: raw oysters and boiled pink shrimps and a baked red fish of great size.

My stomach's hunger assuaged, I noticed the extraordinary beauty of the woman serving us, and I remembered that I was capable of other hungers. I also noticed something else out of the ordinary. The proprietor of the hostel was obviously of an immigrant race: a short, fat, oily-skinned man. But the serving woman to whom he brusquely snapped orders was obviously of the Ben Záa: tall and supple, with skin that glowed like amber and a face to rival that of her people's First Lady Pela Xila. It was unthinkable that she might be the landlord's wife. And, since she could hardly have been a born or bought slave in her own country, I assumed that some misfortune had forced her to indenture herself to the boorish and foreign-born innkeeper.

It was difficult to judge the age of any adult woman of the Cloud People—the years were so kind to them—especially one as sightly and graceful as that servant. If I had known that she was old enough to have a daughter of my own age, I might not have spoken to her. I might not have done it in any case, except that Blood Glutton and I were washing down our meal with copious drafts of octli. Whatever impelled me, when the woman next came near I made bold to look up at her and inquire:

"How is it that a woman of the Ben Záa labors for an uncouth inferior?"

She glanced around to make sure the innkeeper was not that moment in the room. Then she knelt to murmur in my ear, to answer my question with a question, and a most surprising question, spoken in Náhuatl:

"Young Lord Pochtéatl, will you want a woman for the night?" My eyes must have goggled, for she blushed deep marigold and lowered her own eyes. "The landlord will provide you with a common maátitl who has straddled the road from here to the fishermen's beach on the coast. Allow me, young lord, to offer myself instead. My name is Gie Bele, which in your language is Flame Flower."

I must still have gaped foolishly, for she stared straight at me and said, almost fiercely, "I will be a maátitl for pay, but I am not yet. This would be the first time since my husband's death that I have ever... not even with a man of my own people..."

I was so touched by her embarrassed urgency that I stammered, "I—I would be pleased."

Gie Bele glanced about again. "Do not let the innkeeper know. He exacts a part of the payment to his women, and I would be beaten for cheating him of a customer. I will be waiting outside at first dark, my lord, and we will go to my hut."

She hastily gathered up our empty dishes and left the room, as the proprietor bustled self-importantly into it. Blood Glutton, who of course had overheard our exchange, gave me a sidelong look and said sarcastically:

"The first time ever. I wish I had a cacao bean for every time a female has said that to me. And I would lop off one of my testicles for every time it proved to be the truth."

The innkeeper came over to us, smirking and rubbing his fat hands together, to ask if we would like a sweet with which to conclude our meal. "Perhaps a sweet to be enjoyed at leisure, my lords, while you rest upon your pallets in your rooms."

I said no. Blood Glutton glared at me, then bellowed at the stout man, "Yes, I will sample the fare! By Huitztli, I will have his, too!" He jerked his thumb at me. "Send them both to my room. And mind you, the two tastiest you can serve up."

The landlord murmured admiringly, "A lord of noble appetite," and scurried away. Blood Glutton still glared at me, and said in exasperation:

"You drooling imbecile. It is the second trick a female learns in that trade. You will arrive at her hut to find she still has her man, probably two or three of them, all strapping fishermen, and all pleased to meet this new fish she has hooked. They will rob you and stamp you flat as a tortilla."

Cozcatl said shyly, "It would be a pity if our expedition should end untimely in Tecuantépec."

I would not listen. I was besotted by more than the octli. I believed the woman to be the kind I had wanted but had been unable to approach in Záachila: the chaste kind who would not sully herself with me. Even if, as Gie Bele had implied, I was only to be her first of many future paying lovers, I would still be the first. And yet, fuddled though I may have been by drink and desire and even imbecility, I had sense enough to wonder: why me?

"Because you are young," she said, when we met outside the inn. "You are young enough that you cannot have known many women of the kind who would make you unclean. You are not as handsome as my late husband, but you could almost pass for one of the Ben Záa. Also you are a man of property, who can afford to pay for his pleasure." When we had walked a little way in silence, she asked in a small voice, "You will pay me?"

"Of course," I said thickly. My tongue was as swollen by the octli as my tepúli was swollen with anticipation.

"Someone must be my first," she said, as if stating a fact of life. "I am glad it is you. I only wish they all might be like you. I am a destitute widow with two daughters, so now we are accounted no better than slaves, and my girls will never have decent husbands of the Cloud People. Had I known what their lives held in store, I would have withheld my milk when they were infants, but it is too late now to prefer them dead. If we are to survive, I must do this—and they must learn to, as well."

"Why?" I managed to ask. Because I was walking somewhat weavingly, she took my arm to guide me, and we made our way through the dark alleys of the city's poorer residential area.

Gie Bele waved her free hand back over her shoulder and said sadly, "The hostel was once ours. But my husband was bored by the life of an innkeeper and he was always going off adventuring—hoping to find a fortune that would set us free of it. He found some rare and odd things, but never anything of value, while we went ever deeper into debt to the trader who lent and exchanged currencies. On his last expedition, my husband sought a thing he was much excited about. So, to borrow the necessary funds, he put up our inn as a pledge." She shrugged. "Like a man who pursues the flicker of the Xtabai swamp ghost, he never came back. That was four years ago."

"And now that trader is the innkeeper," I muttered.

"Yes. He is a man of the Zoque, named Wáyay. But the property was not enough to redeem our entire debt. The Bishosu of this city is a kindly man, but when the claim was laid before him he had no choice. I was bound over, to work from sunrise to sunset. I can be thankful that my girls were not. They earn what they can—doing sewing, embroidery, laundry—but most people who can pay for such work have daughters or slaves of their own to do it."

"For how long must you serve this Wáyay?"

She sighed. "Somehow the debt never seems to decrease. I would try to quell my revulsion and offer him my body, in part payment, but he is a eunuch."

I grunted in wry amusement.

"He was formerly a priest of some god of the Zoque and, as so many priest do, in a mushroom ecstasy he cut off and laid his parts on the altar. He immediately regretted that, and left the order. But he had by then set aside for himself, from the believers' offerings, enough to set himself up in business."

I grunted again.

"The girls and I live simply, but it gets harder for us every day. If we are to live at all..." She squared her shoulders and said firmly, "I have explained to them what we must do. Now I will show them. Here we are."

She preceded me through the tatty cloth-curtained doorway of a rickety shack of saplings and thatch. It was a single room with a pounded earth floor, lighted by one fish-oil wick lamp, and pitifully furnished. I could see only a quilt-covered pallet, a feebly glowing charcoal brazier, and a few articles of feminine apparel hung on the inside twig stumps of the sapling walls.

"My daughters," she said, indicating the two girls who stood with their backs against the far wall.

I had been expecting two small and grubby brats, who would eye with awe the stranger their mother had suddenly brought home. But the one was as old as I; she was as tall as her mother, and just as shapely and fair of face. The other was perhaps three years younger, and of equal comeliness. They both stared at me with pensive curiosity. I was surprised, to put it mildly, but I made a bravura gesture of kissing the earth to them—and would have fallen on my face, had not the younger one caught me.

She giggled despite herself, and so did I, but then I stopped in puzzlement. Few Tzapoteca females show their age until they get well along in years. But that girl was only seventeen or so, and already her black hair had one startling strand of white streaking back from her forehead, like lightning through midnight.

Gie Bele explained, "A scorpion stung her there, when she was a baby still crawling. She nearly died of it, but the only lasting effect was that one lock of hair, white ever since."

"She is—they are both as beautiful as their mother," I mumbled gallantly. But my face must have expressed my twinge of consternation at having discovered that the woman was old enough to be my own mother, for she gave me a worried, almost frightened look and said:

"No, please do not think of taking one of them instead of me." She whipped her blouse over her head, and instantly blushed so extensively that the blush suffused her bare breasts. "Please, young lord! I offered only myself. Not yet the girls..." She seemed to mistake my numb silence for indecision; she quickly undid both her skirt and undergarment, and let them drop to the ground, and stood naked before me and her daughters.

I glanced uneasily at them, my eyes no doubt as wide as theirs were, and it must have seemed to Gie Bele that I was comparing the available wares. Still imploring, "Please! Not my girls. Use me!" she forcibly dragged me down beside her on the pallet. I was too shocked to resist, and she flung my mantle to one side and tugged at my loincloth, saying breathlessly, "The innkeeper would demand five cacao beans for a maátitl, and he would keep two for himself. So I will ask only three. Is not that a fair price?"

I was too dazed to reply. The private parts of us both were exposed to the view of the girls, who stared as if they could not look away, and their mother was next trying to roll me on top of herself. Perhaps the girls were not unacquainted with their mother's body, and perhaps they had even seen an erect male organ before, but I was sure they had never seen the two together. Drunk though I may have been, I protested, "Woman! The lamplight, the girls! At least send them outdoors while we—"

"Let them see!" she almost screamed. "They will be lying here on other nights!" Her face was wet with tears, and I finally understood that she was not so resigned to whoredom as she had tried to pretend. I grimaced at the girls and made a violent gesture. Looking frightened, they whisked out through the door curtain. But Gie Bele did not notice, and cried again, as if demanding the utmost debasement of herself, "Let them see what they will be doing!"

"You want others to see, woman?" I growled at her. "Let them see the better, then!"

Instead of sprawling atop her, I turned onto my back, lifting her at the same time, and set her kneeling astride me, and I impaled her to the hilt of myself. After that first painful moment, Gie Bele slowly relaxed against me and lay quiescent in my embrace, though I could feel her tears continuing to trickle onto my bare chest. Well, it happened quickly and powerfully for me, and she certainly felt the spurt inside her, but she did not pull away as any other bought woman would then have done.

By then, her own body was wanting satisfaction, and I think she would not have noticed if the girls had been still in the hut, would not have given thought to the detailed demonstration provided by our position, or the damp noise of suction made by her rocking back and forth the length of my tepúli. When Gie Bele came to climax, she reared up and leaned back, her distended nipples pointing high, her long hair brushing my legs, her eyes shut tight, her mouth open in a mewing cry like that of a jaguar kitten. Then she collapsed again onto my chest, her head beside mine, and she lay so limp that I would have thought she had died, except that she breathed in short gasps.

After a little, when I had myself recovered, slightly more sober for the experience, I became aware of another head near me on my other side. I turned to see immense brown eyes, wide behind their luxuriant dark lashes: the winsome face of one of the daughters. At some point she had reentered the hut and knelt beside the pallet and was regarding me intently. I drew the quilt over the nakedness of myself and her still-motionless mother.

"Nu shisha skaru..." the girl began to whisper. Then, seeing that I did not comprehend, she spoke softly in a broken Náhuatl, and giggled when she told me guiltily, "We watched through the cracks in the wall." I groaned in shame and embarrassment; I still burn when I think of it. But then she said thoughtfully, seriously, "Always I supposed it would be a bad thing. But your faces were good, like happy."

Though I was in no philosophic mood, I told her quietly, "I do not think it is ever really a bad thing, But it is much better when you do it with someone you love." I added, "And in private, without mice watching from the walls."

She started to say something more, but suddenly her stomach grumbled, more loudly than her voice had spoken. She looked pathetically mortified, and tried to pretend it had not happened, and drew a little away from me.

I exclaimed, "Child, you are hungry!"

"Child?" She petulantly tossed her head. "I have near your age, which is old enough for—for that. I am not a child."

I shook her drowsing mother and said, "Gie Bele, when did your daughters last eat a meal?"

She stirred and said meekly, "I am allowed to feed on the leftovers at the inn, but I cannot bring much home."

"And you asked for three cacao beans!" I said angrily.

I could have remarked that it might more rightly have been myself asking a fee, for performing to an audience, or instructing the young. But I groped for my castoff loincloth and the purse I kept sewn into it. "Here," I said to the daughter, and caught her hands and poured into them perhaps twenty or thirty beans. "You and your sister go and buy food. Buy fuel for the fire. Anything you like, and as much as you can carry."

She looked at me as if I had filled her hands with emeralds. Impulsively, she bent over and kissed my cheek, then bounded up and out of the hut again. Gie Bele raised up on one elbow to look down at my face.

"You are kind to us—and after I behaved so. Please, would you let me be kinder to you now?"

I said, "You gave me what I came to buy. I am not trying now to buy your affection."

"But I want to give it," she insisted, and began to give me an attention which may be exclusive to the Cloud People.

It really is much better when it is done lovingly—and in private. And she truly was so attractive that a man could hardly get enough of her. But we were up and dressed again when the girls returned, laden with comestibles: one entire and enormous plucked fowl, a basket of vegetables, many other things. Chattering cheerfully to each other, they set about building up the brazier fire, and the younger daughter courteously asked if her mother and myself would dine with them.

Gie Bele told them that we had both eaten at the inn. Now, she said, she would guide me back there and find some chore to occupy her there during what remained of the night, for if she slept she would surely oversleep the sunrise. So I bade the girls good night and we left them to what may have been, for all I knew, their first decent meal in four years. As the woman and I walked hand in hand through streets and alleys seeming darker even than before, I thought about the famished girls, their widowed and desperate mother, the greedy Zoque creditor... and at last I said abruptly:

"Would you sell me your house, Gie Bele?"

"What?" She started so that our hands came unlinked. "That dilapidated hut? Whatever for?"

"Oh, to rebuild into something better, of course. If I continue trading, I shall certainly pass this way again, perhaps often, and a place of my own would be preferable to a crowded inn."

She laughed at the absurdity of my lie, but pretended to take it seriously, asking, "And where in the world would we live?"

"In some place much finer. I would pay a good price, enough to enable you to live comfortably. And," I said firmly, "with no necessity for the girls or you to go astraddle the road."

"What—what would you offer to pay?"

"We will settle that right now. Here is the inn. Please to put lights in the room where we dined. And writing materials—paper and chalk will do. Meanwhile, tell me which is the room of that fat eunuch. And stop looking frightened; I am being no more imbecilic than usual."

She gave me a wavering smile and went to do my bidding, while I took a lamp to find the proprietor's room, and interrupted his snoring with a hard kick to his massive rear end.

"Get up and come with me," I said, as he spluttered with outrage and sleepy bewilderment. "We have business to transact."

"It is the middle of the night. You are drunk. Go away."

I had almost to lift him to his feet, and it took a while to convince him that I was sober, but I finally hauled him—still struggling to knot his mantle—to the room Gie Bele had lighted for us. When I half-dragged him in, she started to sidle out.

"No, stay," I said. "This concerns all three of us. Fat man, fetch out all the papers pertinent to the ownership of this hostel and the debt outstanding against it. I am here to redeem the pledge."

He and she stared at me in equal astonishment, and Wáyay, after spluttering some more, said, "This is why you rout me from my bed? You want to buy this place, you presumptuous pup? We can all go back to bed. I do not intend to sell."

"It is not yours to sell," I said. "You are not its owner, but the holder of a lien. When I pay the debt and all its accrual, you are a trespasser. Go, bring the documents."

I had the advantage of him then, when he was still befogged with sleep. But by the time we settled down to the columns of number dots and flags and little trees, he was again as acute and exacting as he had ever been in his careers of priest and currency changer. I will not regale you, my lords, with all the details of our negotiations. I will only remind you that I did know the craft of working with numbers, and I knew the craftiness possible to that craft.

What the late explorer husband had borrowed, in goods and currency, added up to an appreciable sum. However, the premium he had agreed to pay for the privilege of the loans should not have been excessive, except for the lender's cunning method of compounding it. I do not remember all the figures there involved, but I can give a simplified illustration. If I lend a man a hundred cacao beans for one month, I am entitled to the repayment of a hundred and ten. For two months, he repays a hundred and twenty beans. For three months, a hundred and thirty, and so on. But what Wáyay had done was to add the ten-bean premium at the end of the first month, and then on that total of a hundred and ten to calculate the next premium, so that at the end of two months he was owed a hundred twenty and one beans. The difference may sound trifling, but it mounts proportionately each month, and on substantial sums it can mount alarmingly.

I demanded a recalculation from the very start of Wáyay's giving credit to the inn. Ayya, he squawked as he must have done when he awoke from that disastrous mushroom rapture of his priesthood days. But, when I suggested that we refer the matter to Tecuantépec's bishosu for adjudication, he gritted his teeth and redid the arithmetic, with me closely monitoring. There were many other details to be argued, such as the inn's expenses and profits over the four years he had been running it. But finally, as dawn was breaking, we agreed on a lump sum due him, and I agreed to pay in currency of gold dust, copper and tin snippets, and cacao beans. Before I did so, I said:

"You have forgotten one small item. I owe you for the lodging of my own train."

"Ah, yes," said the fat old fraud. "Honest of you to remind me." And he added that to the accounting.

As if suddenly remembering, I said, "Oh, one other thing."

"Yes?" he said expectantly, his chalk poised to add it in.

"Subtract four years' wages due the woman Gie Bele."

"What?" He stared at me aghast. She stared too, but in dazzled admiration. "Wages?" he sneered. "The woman was bound over to me as a tlacotli."

"If your accounting had been honest, she would not have been. Look at your own revised arithmetic. The Bishosu might have awarded you a half interest in this property. You have not only swindled Gie Bele, you have also enslaved a free citizen."