Текст книги "Aztec"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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I continued following the coast, which led me completely around that Maya peninsula of Uluumil Kutz. I have already described that drear land to you in brief, my lords, and I will not waste words in describing it at any greater length, except to mention that on its western coast I remember only one town of a size big enough to be called a town: Kimpech; and on its northern coast another: Tihó; and on its eastern coast another: Chaktemal.

I had by then been gone from Tenochtítlan for more than a year. So I began, in a general way, to head homeward again. From Chaktemal I struck inland, due west, across the width of the peninsula. I carried adequate atóli and chocolate and other traveling rations, plus a quantity of water. As I have said, that is an arid land of maliferous climate, and it has no definable rainy season. I made the crossing early in what would be your month of July, which was the eighteenth month of the Maya year, the one called Kumkti—Thunderclap—not because it brought storms or the least mizzle of rainfall, but because that month is so dry that the already sere lands make an artificial thunder of groaning and crunching as they shrink and shrivel.

Maybe that summer was even more severely hot and parched than usual, because it provided me with a strange and, as it proved, a valuable discovery. One day I came to a small lake of what looked like that black muck I had earlier found in the Olméca swamps and utilized to fuel my campfires. But when I picked up and threw a stone into the lake, it did not go in; it bounced on the surface as if the lake had been made of congealed óli. Hesitantly, I set foot on the black stuff and found it just slightly yielding to my weight. It was chapopotli, a material like hard resin, but black. Melted, it was used to make bright-burning torches, to fill cracks in buildings, as an ingredient of various medicines, as a paint that would keep out water. But I had never seen an entire lake of it before.

I sat down on the bank to have a bite to eat while I contemplated that find. And, even as I sat there, the Kumku heat—which was still making the country all about me snap and rumble—also fractured the chapopotli lake. Its surface cracked in all directions as if overlaid with a spider web, then it broke up into jagged black chunks, and those were heaved about, and among them were thrown up some lengthy brown-black things which might have been the limbs and branches of a long-buried tree.

I congratulated myself that I had not ventured out upon the lake just in time to get tossed and probably injured in its convulsions. But, by the time I had finished eating, all was quiet again. The lake was no longer flat; it was a chopped-up jumble of shiny black fragments, but it looked unlikely to be further agitated, and I was curious about those objects it had cast up. So I cautiously stepped out on the lake again and, when it did not swallow me, picked my way among the black lumps and shards, and found that the thrown-up things were bones.

Having been discolored by their interment, they were no longer white, as old bones usually are, but they were of a size inconceivable, and I was reminded that our lands were once inhabited by giants. However, though I recognized here a rib, there a thighbone, I also recognized that they were from no human giant, but from some monster animal. I could only suppose that the chapopotli had long ago been liquid, and that some creature had unwarily stepped into it and been caught and sucked down, and that over the ages the liquid had solidified to its present consistency.

I found two bones even more gigantic than the others—or at first I thought they were bones. Each was as long as I was tall, and cylindrical, but as thick as my thigh at one end, tapering to a blunt point no bigger than my thumbtip at the other end. And each would have been even longer except that it had grown in a gradual curve and recurve, like a very hesitant spiral. They, like the bones, were stained brown-black from the chapopotli in which they had been entombed. I puzzled over them for some time before I knelt and, with my knife, scraped at the surface of one until I uncovered its natural color: a shining, mellow, pearly white. Those things were teeth—long teeth like a boar's tusks. But, I thought to myself, if that trapped animal had been a boar, it had indeed been a boar fit for the age of giants.

I stoop up and considered the things. I had seen labrets and nose plugs and similar bangles carved from the teeth of bears and sharks and the tusks of ordinary-sized boars, and they sold for as much as goldwork of the same weight. What, I wondered, could a master carver like the late Tlatli do with the material of teeth such as these?

The country there was sparsely inhabited—not surprisingly, in view of its bleakness. I had to wander into the greener, sweeter land of Cupilco before I came upon a village of some obscure Olméca tribe. The men were all óli tappers by occupation, but that was not the season for collecting sap, so they were sitting about idle. I did not have to offer much in payment for four of the burliest of them to work as porters for me. I almost lost them, though, when they realized where we were headed. The black lake, they said, was both a holy and a fearsome place, and a place to be avoided; so I had to increase the promised pay before they would go on. When we got there and I pointed out the tusks, they made haste to hoist them, two men to a tooth, and then we all got away from there as quickly as possible.

I led them back through Cupilco and to the ocean shore and along that spit of land to the capital city of Xicalanca and to the workshop of that master smith Tuxtem. He looked surprised, and not much pleased, when my porters tottered in with their queer loglike burdens. "I am not a woodcarver," he said at once. But I told him what I believed the things to be, and how fortuitously I had found them, and what rarities they must be. He touched the spot I had scraped on the one tusk, and his hand lingered there, and he caressed it, and a gleam came into his eyes.

I dismissed the weary porters, with thanks and a trifle of extra payment. Then I told the artist Tuxtem that I wanted to hire his services, but that I had only the most general idea of what I wanted him to do with my find:

"I want carvings I can sell in Tenochtítlan. You may cut up the teeth as you see fit. From the larger pieces, perhaps you can carve figurines of Mexíca gods and goddesses. From the smaller pieces, perhaps you can make poquietl tubes, combs, ornamental dagger handles. Even the tiniest fragments can make labrets and the like. But I leave it to you, Master Tuxtem, and to your artistic judgment."

"Of all the materials in which I have worked in my life," he said solemnly, "this is unique. It affords an opportunity and a challenge which I shall surely never find again. I will think long and deeply before I even abstract a small sample on which to experiment, with tools and finishing substances...." He paused, then said almost defiantly, "I had better tell you this. Of myself and my work, what I demanded is simple: only the best. This will not be the work of a day, young Lord Yellow Eye, or a month."

"Of course not," I agreed. "If you had said it was, I would have taken the trophies and gone. In any case, I do not know when I will again pass through Xicalanca, so you may take all the time you require. Now, as to your fee..."

"I am doubtless foolish to say this, but I would deem it the highest price I have ever been paid if only you promise to make it known that the pieces were sculptured by me, and tell my name."

"Foolish of your head, Master Tuxtem, though I say it with admiration of your heart's integrity. Either you set a price, or I make this offer. You take a twentieth part, by weight, of the finished works you do for me, or of the raw material to finish as you please."

"A munificent share." He bowed his head in agreement. "Had I been the most grasping of men, I should not have dared to ask such extravagant payment."

"And do not fear," I added. "I shall choose the buyers of those works as carefully as you choose your tools. They will be only persons worthy to own such things. And every one of them will be told: this was made by the Master Tuxtem of Xicalanca."

Dry though the weather had been on the peninsula of Uluumil Kutz, it was the rainy season in Cupilco, which is an uncomfortable time to walk through those Hot Lands of almost jungle growth. So I again kept to the open beaches as I made my way west, until I came to the town of Coatzacoalcos, what you now call Espiritu Santo, which was the terminus of the north-south trade route across the narrow isthmus of Tecuantépec. I thought to myself: that isthmus is almost all level land, not heavily forested, with a good road, so it would be an easy journey even if I got frequently rained upon. And at the other side of the isthmus was a hospitable inn, and my lovely Gie Bele of the Cloud People, and the prospect of a most refreshing rest before I continued on to Tenochtítlan.

So at Coatzacoalcos I turned south. Sometimes I walked in company with pochtéa trains or with individual traders, and we passed many others going in the opposite direction. But one day I was traveling alone, and the road was empty, when I topped a rise and saw four men seated under a tree on the other side. They were ragged, brutish-looking men, and they slowly, expectantly got to their feet as I approached. I remembered the bandits I had met once before, and I put my hand to the obsidian knife in my loincloth band. There was really nothing more I could do but walk on, and hope to walk past them with an exchange of greetings. But those four did not put up any pretense of inviting me to partake of a meal, or ask to share my own rations, or even speak. They simply closed in on me.

* * *

I came awake. Or awake enough to know that I lay unclothed on a pallet, with one quilt under me and another covering my nakedness. I was in a hut apparently empty of any other furnishings, and dark except for glints of daylight leaking through the sapling walls and the straw thatch. A middle-aged man knelt at my bedside and, from his first words, I took him to be a physician.

"The patient wakes," he said to someone behind him. "I feared he might never recover from that long stupor."

"Then he will live?" asked a female voice.

"Well, at least I can begin to treat him, which would have been impossible if he had remained insensible. I would say that he came to you barely in time."

"We almost turned him away, he looked so frightful. But then, through the blood and the dirt, we recognized him as Záa Nayazu."

That did not sound right. At that moment, I somehow could not quite remember my name, but I believed it was something less melodious than the lilting sound spoken by that female voice.

My head hurt atrociously, and felt as if its contents had been removed and a red-hot boulder substituted, and my body was sore all over. My memory was blank of many other things besides my real name, but I was sufficiently conscious to realize that I had not just fallen ill of something; I had in some way been injured. I wanted to ask how, and where I was, and how I had come there, but I could not make my voice work.

The doctor said to the woman I could not see, "Whoever the robbers were, they intended to give him a killing blow. Had it not been for that thick bandage he already wore, his neck would have snapped or his skull shattered like a gourd. But the blow did give his brain a cruel shaking. That accounted for the copious bleeding from the nose. And now that his eyes are open—observe—the pupil of one is larger than the other."

A girl leaned over the physician's shoulder and stared down at my face. Even in my dazed condition, I took note that her own face was lovely to behold, and that the black hair framing it had one pale lock streaking back from her forehead. I had a vague remembrance of having seen her before, and, to my puzzlement, I also seemed to find something familiar even in looking up at the underside of the thatched roof.

"The unequal pupils," said the girl. "That is a bad sign?"

"Extremely so," said the doctor. "An indication that something is wrong inside the head. So, besides trying to strengthen his body and heal the cuts and bruises, we must take care that his brain rests free of exertion or excitement. Keep him warm and keep the hut dim. Give him the broth and the medicine whenever he is awake, but on no account let him sit up, and try to prevent him even from talking."

Foolishly, I attempted to tell the physician that I was quite incapable of talking. But then the hut suddenly darkened even more, and I had the sickening sensation of falling swiftly down into a deep blackness.

They told me later that I lay there for many days and nights, and that my periods of consciousness were only sporadic and brief, and that in between them I would lie in a stupor so profound that it caused the doctor much worry. Of my waking moments, I remember that sometimes the physician was at my side, but always the girl was. She would be gently spooning between my lips a warm, rich-tasting broth or a bitter-tasting medicine, or she would be washing with a sponge what parts of me she could reach without moving my supine body, or she would be smoothing a flower-smelling salve over it. Her face was always the same—beautiful, concerned, smiling encouragement at me—but strangely, or so it seemed to me in my daze, sometimes her black hair bore the stark white streak and sometimes it did not.

I must have wavered between life and death, and I must have chosen or been granted by the gods or been destined by my tonáli to have the former. For the day came when I awoke with my mind somewhat cleared, and I looked up at the queerly familiar roof, and I looked at the girl's face close to mine, and I looked at her hair with the white lock running through it, and I managed to croak, "Tecuantépec."

"Yaa," she said, and then said yes again, but in Náhuatl, "Quema," and she smiled. It was a weary smile, after her long vigil of night and day attendance on me. I started to ask—but she laid a cool finger across my lips.

"Do not talk. The doctor said you must not for a while." She spoke Náhuatl haltingly, but better than I remembered having heard it spoken in that hut before. "When you are well, you can tell us what you remember of what happened. For now, I will tell you what little we know."

She had, one afternoon, been feeding the fowl in the door-yard of the inn, when an apparition came staggering toward her, not along the trade road but from the north, across the empty fields bordering the river. She would have fled inside the hostel and barricaded the door, but her shocked surprise held her motionless long enough for her to see something familiar in the naked man encrusted with dirt and dried gore. Nearly dead though I had been, I must have been making deliberately for the remembered inn. My lower face was masked and my chest was coated with the blood that still trickled from my nostrils. The rest of my body was scored with red scratches from thorns, mottled with bruises from blows or falls. The soles of my bare feet were raw meat, embedded with dirt and small sharp stones. But she had recognized me as her family's benefactor, and I had been taken in. Not into the hostel, for I could not have rested quietly there. It had become a busy and thriving place, much favored by Mexíca pochtéa like myself—which, she said, accounted for her improved command of Náhuatl.

"So we brought you to our old house here, where you could be tended undisturbed by the comings and goings of guests. And, after all, the hut is yours now, if you remember buying it." She motioned for me not to comment, and continued, "We assume you were set upon by bandits. You arrived here wearing nothing and carrying nothing."

I was alarmed by a sudden recollection. With anxious effort, I raised an aching arm and felt about my chest until my fingers found the topaz crystal still hanging there on its thong—and I breathed a long sigh of relief. Even the most rapacious of robbers would probably have supposed that to be a god-token of some kind, and superstitiously would have refrained from seizing it.

"Yes, that much you were wearing," said the girl, watching my movement. "And this heavy thing, whatever it is." She slid from under my pallet the cloth wad with its strings and sweat-band dangling.

"Open it," I said, my voice hoarse from having been so long unused.

"Do not talk," she repeated, but she obeyed me, carefully unfolding layer after layer of the cloth. The revealed gold dust, somewhat caked by perspiration, was so bright that it nearly lit up the hut's dark interior—and did spark golden lights in her dark eyes.

"We always supposed you were a very rich young man," she murmured. She thought for a moment and then said, "But you reached to make sure of that pendant first. Before the gold."

I did not know if I could make her comprehend my wordless explanation, but with another effort I brought the crystal up to my eye and looked at her through it for as long as I could hold it there. And then I could not have spoken, if I would. She was beautiful; more beautiful than I had once thought her, or since remembered her. Among the things I could not remember was her name.

That lightning-streak through her hair caught one's eye, but it was unnecessary to a loveliness that caught at one's heart. Her long eyelashes were like the wings of the tiniest black hummingbird. Her brows had the curve of a soaring sea gull's outflung wings. Even her lips had a winglike lift to each corner: a sort of tiny tuck, which made her appear always to be treasuring a secret smile. When she did smile, though, there was no mistaking it, for she did so then, perhaps at the wondering expression on my own face. The tucks deepened into winning dimples, and the radiance of her face was far more bright than my gold. If the hut had been full of the unhappiest of people—grieving mourners or somber-souled priests—they would have been compelled by her smile to smile in spite of themselves. The topaz dropped from my feeble hand, and my hand dropped to my side, and I dropped not into another stupor but a healing sleep, and she told me later that I slept with a smile on my face.

I was eminently glad I had come back to Tecuantépec, and had made the acquaintance of that girl—or had made her acquaintance again—but I wished that I could have come in health and strength and in the full panoply of a successful young merchant. Instead, I was bedridden and sapless and flaccid, not very appealing to look at, covered as I was with the scabs of my numerous cuts and scratches. I was still too weak to feed myself or take my own medicines, except from her hand. And, if I was not to smell bad besides, I had to submit even to her washing me all over.

"This is not fitting," I protested. "A maiden should not be washing the naked body of a grown man."

She said calmly, "We have seen you naked before. And you must have come naked across half the extent of the isthmus. Anyway"—her smile became teasing—"even a maiden can admire the long body of a handsome young man."

I think I must have blushed the entire length of my long body, but at least my weakness spared me the mortification of having one part of that body obtrusively respond to her touch, and perhaps send her fleeing from me.

Not since the impractical dreams Tzitzitlini and I had shared, when we were very young, had I contemplated the advantages of marriage. But it did not require much contemplation for me to decide that I would probably nowhere or never again find such a desirable bride as that girl of Tecuantépec. My head injury was still some way from full recovery; both my thinking and my memory were erratic; but I retained one recollection of the Tzapoteca traditions—that the Cloud People had little reason and less desire to marry outside the Cloud People, and that any of them who did was forever an outcast.

Nevertheless, when the doctor finally gave me leave to talk as much as I liked, I tried to speak words that would make myself attractive to the girl. Though I was only a despised Mexícatl, and at the moment a laughably poor specimen even of that breed, I exerted all the charm of which I was capable. I thanked her for her goodness to me, and complimented her on having a kindliness that equaled her loveliness, and spoke many other cajoling and persuasive words. But among my more flowery speeches, I managed to mention the considerable estate I had already amassed at a yet young age, and dwelt on my plans for enlarging it further, and made it clear that any girl who did wed me would never be in want. Though I refrained from ever blurting out a direct proposal, I did make allusive remarks like:

"I am surprised that such a beautiful girl as yourself is not married."

She would smile and say something like: "No man yet has captivated me enough to make me surrender my independence."

Another time I would say, "But certainly you are courted by many suitors."

"Oh, yes. Unfortunately, the young men of Uaxyacac have few prospects to offer. I think they yearn more to own a share of the inn than to own all of me."

On another occasion I would say, "You must meet many eligible men among the constant traffic of guests at your hostel."

"Well, they tell me they are eligible. But you know that most pochtéa are older men, too old for me, and outlanders besides. Anyway, however ardently they may pay court, I always suspect that they already have a wife at home, probably other wives at the end of every trade route they travel."

I was emboldened to say, "I am not old. I have no wife anywhere. If ever I take one, she will be the only one, and for all my life long."

She gave me a long look, and after some silence said, "Perhaps you should have married Gie Bele. My mother."

I repeat: my mind was not yet what it should have been. Until that moment, I had either somehow confused the girl with her mother, or had totally forgotten the mother. I had certainly forgotten having coupled with her mother, and—ayya, the shame!—in the girl's own presence. Given the circumstances, she must have thought me the most salacious of lechers, to be suddenly courting her, the daughter of that woman.

I could only mumble, in horrendous embarrassment, "Gie Bele... but I remember... old enough to be my own mother...."

At which the girl gave me another long look, and I said no more, and I pretended to fall asleep.

I reiterate, my lord scribes, that my mind had been woefully affected by my injury, and that it was excruciatingly slow to regather its wits. That is the only possible excuse for the blundering remarks I uttered. The worst blunder, the one with the saddest and longest-lasting consequences, I made when one morning I said to the girl:

"I have been wondering how you do it, and why."

"How I do what?" she asked, smiling that blithe smile.

"On some days your hair has a remarkable white streak through its whole length. On others—like today—it has not."

Involuntarily, in the feminine gesture of surprise, she passed a hand across her face, where for the first time I saw dismay. For the first time those uptilted winglike corners of her mouth drooped downward. She stood still, looking down at me. I am sure my face showed only bewilderment. What emotion she was feeling, I could not tell, but when she finally did speak there was a slight tremor in her voice.

"I am Béu Ribé," she said, and paused as if waiting for me to make some comment. "In your language, that is Waiting Moon." She paused again, and I said truthfully:

"It is a lovely name. It suits you to perfection."

Evidently she had hoped to hear something else. She said, "Thank you," but she sounded half angry, half hurt. "It is my younger sister, Zyanya, who bears the white strand in her hair."

I was struck speechless. Again, it was not until that moment that another memory came back to me: there had been not one but two daughters. During my time away, the younger and smaller had grown to be almost the identical twin of the elder. Or they would have been nearly identical but for the younger girl's distinctive lock of hair, the mark—I remembered that, too—of her having been stung by a scorpion when she was an infant.

I had stupidly not realized that there were two equally beautiful girls attending me alternately. I had fallen passionately in love with what, in my mind's confusion, I took to be one irresistible maiden. And I had been able to do that only because I had boorishly forgotten that I was once at least a little in love with her mother—their mother. Had I stayed longer in Tecuantopec on my first visit, that intimacy could well have culminated in my becoming the girls' stepfather. Most appalling of all, during the days of my slow convalescence, I had indiscriminately, simultaneously, with impartial ardor, been yearning for and paying court to both of what might have been my stepdaughters.

I wished I were dead. I wished I had died in the barrens of the isthmus. I wished I had never awakened from the stupor in which I had lain for so long. But I could only avoid the girl's eyes and say nothing more. Béu Ribé did the same. She tended my needs as deftly and tenderly as always, but with her face averted from mine, and when there was nothing further to do for me, she departed without ceremony. On her subsequent visits that day, bringing food or medicine, she remained silent and aloof.

The next day was the streak-haired younger sister's turn, and I greeted her with "Good morning, Zyanya," and I made no reference to my indiscretion of the day before, for I wistfully hoped to give the impression that I had only been playing a game, that I had all along known the difference between the two girls. But of course she and Béu Ribé must have thoroughly discussed the situation and, for all my hopefully bright banter, I fooled her no more than you would expect. She threw me sidelong glances while I babbled, though her expression seemed more amused than angry or hurt. Maybe it was only the look which both the girls ordinarily wore: that of treasuring a secret smile.

But I regret to report that I was not yet done with making blunders, or of being desolated by new revelations. At one point I asked, "Does your mother tend the inn all the time you girls are taking care of me? I should have thought Gie Bele could spare a moment to look in on—"

"Our mother is dead," she interrupted, her face going momentarily bleak.

"What?" I exclaimed. "When? How?"

"More than a year ago. In this very hut, for she could not well pass her confinement at the hostel among the guests."

"Confinement?"

"While she waited for the baby's arrival."

I said weakly, "She had a baby?"

Zyanya regarded me with some concern. "The physician said you are not to trouble your mind. I will tell you everything when you are stronger."

"May the gods damn me to Mictlan!" I erupted, with more vigor than I would have thought I could summon. "It must be my baby, must it not?"

"Well..." she said, and drew a deep breath. "You were the only man with whom she had lain since our father died. I am sure she knew how to take the proper precautions. Because, when I was born, she suffered extremely, and the doctor warned her that I must be the last child. Hence my name. But so many years had passed... she must have believed she was past the age of conceiving. Anyway"—Zyanya twisted her fingers together—"yes, she was pregnant by a Mexícatl outlander, and you know the Cloud People's feeling about such relations. She would not ask to be attended by a physician or midwife of the Ben Záa."

"She died of neglect?" I demanded. "Because your stiff-necked people refused to assist—?"

"They might have refused, I do not know, but she did not ask. A young Mexícatl traveler had been staying at the inn for a month or more. He was solicitous of her condition, and he won her confidence, and finally she told him all the circumstances, and he sympathized as wholeheartedly as any woman could have done. He said he had studied at a calmécac school, and that there had been a class in the rudimentary arts of doctoring. So when her time came, he was here to help."

"What help, if she died?" I said, silently cursing the meddler.

Zyanya shrugged in resignation. "She had been warned of the danger. It was a long labor and a difficult birth. There was a great deal of blood and, while the man tried to stanch the bleeding, the baby strangled in its navel string."

"Both dead?" I cried.

"I am sorry. You insisted on knowing. I hope I have not given you cause for a relapse."

I swore again, "To Mictlan with me! The child... what was it?"

"A boy. She planned—if they had lived—she said she would name him Záa Nayazu, after you. But of course there was no naming ceremony."

"A boy. My son," I said, gritting my teeth.

"Please try to be calm, Záa," she said, addressing me for the first time with warm familiarity. She added, compassionately, "There is no one to blame. I doubt that any of our doctors could have done better than the kindly stranger. As I say, there was much blood. We cleaned the hut, but some traces were indelible. See?"

She swung aside the doorway's cloth curtain to admit a shaft of light. It showed, on the wooden doorpost, the ingrained stain where a man had slapped it to leave his signature of a bloody hand.

I did not suffer a relapse. I continued to mend, my brain gradually clearing of its cobwebs and my body regaining its weight and strength. Béu Ribé and Zyanya continued to wait upon me alternately, and of course I was careful nevermore to say anything to either of them that could be construed as paying court. Indeed, I marveled at their tolerance in having taken me in at all, and in lavishing so much care upon me, considering that I had been the primary cause of their mother's untimely death. As for my entertaining any hope of winning and wedding either girl—although I sincerely and perversely still loved them equally—that had become unthinkable. The possibility of their ever having been my stepdaughters was a matter of mere speculation. But that I had sired their short-lived half brother was an unalterable fact.