Текст книги "Aztec"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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Many times, late at night, I have walked these streets and softly called her name. I did it in Tenochtítlan and I do it still in this City of Mexíco; an old man sleeps little at night. And I have seen many apparitions, but none of them hers.

I have encountered only unhappy or malevolent spirits, and I could not mistake any of them for Zyanya, who was happy all her life and who died while trying to do a kindness. I have seen and recognized many a dead warrior of the Mexíca; the city teems with those woebegone specters. I have seen the Weeping Woman; she is like a drifting wisp of fog, woman-shaped; and I have heard her mournful wail. But she did not frighten me; I pitied her, because I too have known deprivation; and when she could not howl me down, she fled my words of solace. Once, it seemed to me that I met and conversed with two wandering gods, Night Wind and The Oldest of Old Gods. Anyway, that is who they claimed to be, and they did me no harm, deeming that I have had harm enough in my life.

Sometimes, on streets absolutely dark and deserted, I have heard what could have been Zyanya's merry laugh. That might be a product of my senile imagination, but the laugh has each time been accompanied by a glint of light in the darkness, very like the pale streak in her black hair. And that might be a trick of my feeble eyesight, for the vision has each time disappeared when I fumbled my topaz to my eye. Nevertheless, I know she is here, somewhere, and I need no evidence, however much I yearn for it.

I have considered the matter, and I wonder. Do I meet only the doleful and misanthropic denizens of the night because I am so like them myself? Is it possible that persons of better character and gladder heart might more readily perceive the more gentle phantasms? I beg you, my lord friars, if one of you good men should encounter Zyanya some night, would you let me know? You will recognize her at once, and you will not be affrighted by a wraith of such loveliness. She will still seem a girl of twenty, as she did then, for death at least spared her the diseases and desiccation of age. And you will know that smile, for you will be unable to resist smiling in return. If she should speak...

But no, you would not comprehend her speech. Just have the kindness to tell me that you saw her. For she still walks these streets. I know it. She is here and will be always.

I H S

S.C.C.M.

Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

Royal and Redoubtable Majesty, our King Paramount: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this day of St. Paphnutius, Martyr, in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.

It is typically thoughtful of Our Condolent Sovereign that you commiserate with Your Majesty's Protector of the Indians, and that you ask for more details of the problems and obstacles we daily confront in that office.

Heretofore, Sire, it was the practice of the Spaniards who were granted landholdings in these provinces to appropriate also the many Indians already living thereon, and to brand their cheeks with the "G" for "guerra," and to claim them as prisoners of war, and cruelly to treat and exploit them as such. That practice has at least been ameliorated to the extent that an Indian can no longer be sentenced to slave labor unless and until he is found guilty of some crime by either the secular or the ecclesiastical authorities.

Also, the law of Mother Spain is now more strictly applied in this New Spain, so that an Indian here, like a Jew there, has the same rights as any Christian Spaniard, and cannot be condemned for a crime without due process of charge, trial, and conviction. But of course the testimony of an Indian, like that of a Jew—even of converts to Christianity—cannot be allowed equal weight against the testimony of a lifelong Christian. Hence, if a Spaniard desires to acquire as a slave some robust red man or personable red woman, all he need do, in effect, is to lodge against that Indian any accusation that he has the wit to invent.

Because we beheld the conviction of many Indians on charges that were moot at best, and because we feared for the souls of our countrymen who were apparently aggrandizing themselves and their estates by sophistical means unbecoming to Christians, we were saddened and we felt moved to action. Wielding the influence of our title as Protector of the Indians, we have succeeded in persuading the judges of the Audiencia that all Indians to be branded henceforth must be registered with our office. Therefore the branding irons are now kept locked in a box which must be opened with two keys, and one of the keys resides in our possession.

Since no convicted Indian can be branded without our cooperation, we have consistently refused to cooperate in those cases that are flagrant abuses of justice, and those Indians have perforce been reprieved. Such exercise of our office as Protector of the Indians has earned us the odium of many of our countrymen, but that we can bear with equanimity, knowing that we act for the ultimate good of all involved. However, the economic welfare of all New Spain might suffer (and the King's Fifth of its riches be diminished) if we too adamantly obstructed the recruitment of the slave labor on which depends the prosperity of these colonies. So now, when a Spaniard is desirous of acquiring some Indian for a bondsman, he does not invoke the secular arm; he charges the Indian with being a Christian convert who has committed some lapsus fidei.Since our prelacy as Defender of the Faith takes precedence over all our other offices and concerns, we do not in those cases withhold the brand.

Thus we simultaneously accomplish three things that we trust will find favor in Your Majesty's sight. Primus,we effectually prevent the misfeasance of the civil law. Secundus,we steadfastly uphold Church dogma as it regards lapsed converts. Tertius,we do not impede the maintenance of a steady and adequate labor supply.

Incidentally, Your Majesty, the brand on the convict's cheek is no longer the demeaning "G," which imputes the dishonor of defeat in war. We now apply the initials of the slave's designated owner (unless the convict is a comely woman whom the owner prefers not to deface). Besides being a mark to identify property and runaways, such a branding eventually serves also to mark those slaves who are hopelessly rebellious and unfit for work. Many such intractable malcontents, having passed through several changes of ownership, now bear numerous and overlapping initials upon their faces, as if their skin were a palimpsest manuscript.

There is touching evidence of Your Compassionate Majesty's goodness of heart, in this same latest letter, when you say of our Aztec chronicler, anent the death of his woman, "Although of inferior race, he seems a man of human emotions, capable of feeling happinesses and hurts quite as keenly as we do." Your sympathy is understandable, since Your Majesty's own abiding love for your young Queen Isabella and your baby son Felipe is a tender passion remarked and much admired by all.

However, we respectfully suggest that you expend not too much pity on persons whom Your Majesty cannot know as well as we do, and especially not on one who, over and over again, shows himself undeserving of it. This one may in his time have felt an occasional emotion or entertained an occasional human thought which would do no discredit to a white man. But Your Majesty will have noticed that, though he professes to be now a Christian, the old dotard maundered much about his dead mate's still wandering the world—and why?—because she did not have a certain green pebble by her when she died! Also, as Your Majesty will perceive, the Aztec was not long cast down by his bereavement. In these ensuing pages of the narrative, he again ramps like a colossus, and behaves in his old accustomed ways.

Sire, not long ago we heard a priest wiser than ourself say this: that no man should be unreservedly lauded while he still lives and still sails upon the unpredictable seas of life. Not he nor anyone can know whether he will survive all the besetting tempests and the lurking reefs and the distracting Siren songs, to make safe harbor at last. That man alone can rightly be praised whom God has guided so that he finishes his days in the port of Salvation, for the Gloriais sung only at the end.

May that guiding Lord God continue to smile upon and favor Your Imperial Majesty, whose royal feet are kissed by your chaplain and servant,

(ecce signum)Zumárraga

OCTAVA PARS

My own personal tragedy naturally overshadowed everything else in the world, but I could not help being aware that the entire Mexíca nation had also suffered more of a tragedy than the demolition of its capital city. Ahuítzotl's frantic and rather uncharacteristic plea for Nezahualpili's help in stopping the flood was the last act he ever performed as Uey-Tlatoani. He was inside his palace when it collapsed and, though he was not killed, he would probably have preferred that he had been. For he was struck on the head by a falling beam, and thereafter—so I was told; I never saw him again alive—he was as witless as the timber that struck him. He wandered aimlessly about, talking to himself in gibberish, while an attendant followed the once great statesman and warrior everywhere he went, to keep changing the loincloth he kept soiling.

Tradition forbade that Ahuítzotl be divested of the title of Revered Speaker as long as he lived, even if his speaking was a babble and he could be revered no more than could an ambulatory vegetable. Instead, as soon as was practical, the Speaking Council convened to choose a regent to lead the nation during Ahuítzotl's incapacity. No doubt vengefully, because Ahuítzotl had slain two of their number during the panic on the causeway, those old men refused even to consider the most eligible candidate, his eldest son Cuautemoc. They chose for regent his nephew, Motecuzóma the Younger, because, they announced, "Motecuzóma Xocoyotzin has proved his ability successively as a priest, a military commander, a colonial administrator. And, having traveled so widely, he has firsthand knowledge of all the farthest Mexíca lands."

I remembered the words Ahuítzotl had thundered at me one time: "We will not set upon this throne a hollow drum!" and I decided that it was probably as well that he was out of his wits when that very thing occurred. If Ahuítzotl had been killed outright, so that he died in his right mind, he would have clambered up from the nethermost pit of Mictlan and sat his cadaver on the throne in preference to Motecuzóma. As things turned out, a dead ruler might almost have been better for the Mexíca. A corpse at least maintains a fixed position.

But at that time I was not at all interested in court intrigues; I was myself preparing to abdicate for a while, and for several reasons. For one, my home had become a place full of painful memories from which I wished to get away. I felt a pang even when I looked at my dear daughter, because I saw so much of Zyanya in her face. For another reason, I thought I had devised a way to keep Cocóton from feeling too poignantly the loss of her mother. For still another, my friend Cozcatl and his wife Quequelmíqui, when they came to comfort me with condolences, let slip the news that they were homeless, their own house having been among those toppled by the flood.

"We are not as downcast about it as we might be," Cozcatl said. "To tell the truth, we were getting rather cramped and uncomfortable, with our home and the school for servants both under one roof. Now that we are forced to rebuild, we will put up two separate buildings."

"And meanwhile," I said, "this will be your home. You will both live here. I am going away in any case, so the place and the servants will be all yours. I ask only one favor in return. Will you two be substitute mother and father to Cocóton as long as I am absent? Could you play Tene and Tete to an orphan child?"

Ticklish said, "Ayyo, what a lovely idea!"

Cozcatl said, "We will do it willingly—no, gratefully. It will be the one time we shall have had a family."

I said, "The child gives no trouble. The slave Turquoise tends to her routine needs. You will have to provide nothing but the security of your presence... and a show of affection from time to time."

"Of course we will!" Ticklish exclaimed, and there were tears in her eyes.

I went on, "I have already explained to Cocóton—meaning I lied to her—about her mother's absence these past several days. I said that her Tene is out marketing, buying the necessities she and I will need for a long journey we must undertake. The child only nodded and said, 'Long journey,' but it means little to her at her age. However, if you keep reminding Cocóton that her Tete and Tene are traveling in far places... well, I hope she will have got used to being without her mother by the time I return, so that she will not be too dismayed when I tell her that her Tene has not returned with me."

"But she would get used to being without you, too," Cozcatl warned.

"I suppose so," I said resignedly. "I can only trust that, when I do come back, she and I can get reacquainted again. In the meantime, if I know that Cocóton is well cared for, and is loved..."

"She will be!" Ticklish said, laying a hand on my arm. "We will live here with her for as long as need be. And we will not let her forget you, Mixtli."

They went away, to prepare for the moving in of what possessions they had saved from the ruins of their own house, and that same night I put together a light and compact traveling pack. Early the next morning I went into the nursery and woke Cocóton, and told the sleepy little girl:

"Your Tene asked me to say good-bye for us both, Small Crumb, because... because she cannot leave our train of porters, or they will scatter and run away like mice. But here is a good-bye kiss from her. Did not that taste exactly like her kiss?" Surprisingly, it did, to me at least. "Now, Cocóton. With your fingers, lift Tene's kiss from your lips and hold it in your hand, like that, so your Tete can kiss you, too. There. Now take mine and hers, and hold them both tight in your hand while you go to sleep again. When you get up, put them safely away and keep the kisses to return to us when we come back."

"Come back," she said drowsily, and smiled her Zyanya smile, and closed her Zyanya eyes.

Downstairs, Turquoise sniffled and Star Singer several times blew his nose as we said our good-byes, and I charged them with the management of the household and reminded them that until my return they were to obey Cozcatl and Quequelmíqui as their lord and lady. I paused once more on my way out of town, at The House of Pochtéa, and left there a message to be carried by the next merchant train going in the direction of Tecuantépec. The folded paper was to advise Béu Ribé—in the least hurtful word pictures I could compose—of her sister's death and the manner of it.

It did not occur to me that the normal flow of Mexíca commerce had been considerably disrupted, and that my message would not soon be delivered. Tenochtítlan's fringe of chinampa had been underwater for four days, at the season when the crops of maize, beans, and other staples were just sprouting. Besides drowning those plants, the water had also invaded the warehouses kept stocked for emergencies and ruined all the dried foods stored in them. So, for many months, the Mexíca pochtéa and their porters were occupied solely with supplying the destitute city. That kept them constantly traveling, but did not take them far afield, and that is why Waiting Moon did not learn of Zyanya's death until more than a year after it happened.

I was also constantly traveling during that time, wandering like a milkweed puff wherever the winds might blow me, or wherever some scenic vista beckoned me closer, or wherever a path meandered so tantalizingly that it was forever seeming to say, "Follow me. Just around the next bend there is a land of heart's-ease and forgetfulness." There never was such a place, of course. A man can walk to the end of all the roads there are, and to the end of his days, but he can nowhere lay down his past and walk away from it and never look back.

Most of my adventures during that time were of no special account, and I sought to do no trading nor to burden myself with acquisitions, and if there were fortuitous discoveries to be made—like the giant tusks I found that other time I tried to walk away from woe—I passed them unseeing. The one rather memorable adventure that I did have, I fell into quite by accident, and it happened in this way:

I was near the west coast, in the land of Nauyar Ixu, one of the remote northwestern provinces or dependencies of Michihuácan. I had wandered up that way just to see a volcano that had been in violent eruption for almost a month and threatened never to stop. The volcano is called Tzeboruko, which means to snort with anger, but it was doing more than that: it was roaring with rage, like the overflow of a war going on down below in Mictlan. Gray-black smoke billowed from it, shot with jacinth flashes of fire, and towered up to the sky, and had been doing that for so many days that the whole sky was dirty and the whole of Nauyar Ixu in day-long twilight. From that cloud constantly rained down a soft, warm, pungent gray ash. From the crater came the incessant angry growl of the volcano goddess Chantico, and gouts of fiery-red lava, and what looked from a distance like pebbles being tossed up and out, though they were of course immense hurled boulders.

Tzeboruko sits at the head of a river valley, and its outpour found its easiest course along that riverbed. But the water was too shallow to chill and harden and stop the molten rock; the water simply shrieked to an instant boil when they met, and then steamed away before the onslaught. As each successive wave of hot, glowing lava vomited from the crater, it would surge down the mountainside and down the valley, then flow more slowly, then merely ooze as it cooled and darkened. But its hardening provided a smoother slide for the next gush, which would run farther before it stopped. So by the time I arrived to see the spectacle, the molten rock had, like a long red tongue, lapped far down the retreating river. The heat of liquefied rock and sizzling steam was so intense that I could get nowhere near the mountain itself. Nobody could, and nobody else wanted to. Most of the people living thereabouts were glumly packing their household belongings to get farther away. I was told that past eruptions had sometimes devastated the entire river valley as far as the seacoast, perhaps twenty one-long-runs away.

And so did that one. I have tried to convey the fury of the eruption, reverend scribes, just so you will believe me when I tell how it finally flung me right off The One World and out into the unknown.

Having nothing else to do, I spent some days ambling along beside the river of lava—or as close as I could walk beside its scorching heat and unbreathable fumes—while it implacably boiled away the river water and filled its bed from bank to bank. The lava moved like a wave of mud, at about the pace of a man's slow walk, so, when each night I made camp on higher ground and ate from my provisions and rolled into my blanket or hung my gishe between two trees, I would wake in the morning to find that the moving rock had so far outdistanced me that I would have to hurry to catch up with its forward edge. But the mountain Tzeboruko, though it diminished behind me, continued to spew, so I kept on accompanying its outpour just to see how far the lava would go. And after some days it and I arrived at the western ocean.

The river valley there squeezes between two highlands and debouches into a long, deep crescent of beach embracing a great bay of turquoise water. There was a settlement of reed huts on the beach, but no people anywhere about; clearly the fisher folk, like those farther inland, had prudently decamped; but someone had left a small seagoing acáli drawn up on the beach, complete with its paddle. It gave me the notion of paddling out into the bay to watch, from a safe distance, when the seething rock met the sea. The shallow river had been unable to resist the lava's advance, but I knew the inexhaustible waters of the ocean would stop it. The encounter, I thought, would be something worth seeing.

It did not happen until the next day, and by then I had put my traveling pack in the canoe, and paddled out beyond the breakers, and I sat in the very middle of the bay. I could see through my topaz how the evilly smoldering lava spread and crept across the beach, advancing toward the waterline on a broad front. Not much was visible inland, except that I could just make out—through the obscuring smoke and falling ash—the pinkish flare and occasional brighter yellow twinkle of Tzeboruko still vomiting from the bowels of Mictlan.

Then the undulant, glowing-red muck on the beach seemed to hesitate and gather itself so that, instead of creeping forward, it launched itself ferociously into the ocean. During the days previous, up the river, when the hot rock and cold water had met, the sound had been an almost human screech and a hissing gasp. At the seaside, the sound was the thunderous bellow of an unexpectedly wounded god, a shocked and outraged god. It was a tumult compounded of two noises: an ocean heated to boiling so suddenly that it exploded into steam, and a lava chilled to hardness so suddenly that it exploded into fragments all along its leading edge. The steam towered up like a cliff made of cloud, and a hot spray came drizzling down on me, and my acáli jolted backward so abruptly that I nearly fell out of it. I clutched at its wooden sides, and so dropped the paddle overboard.

The canoe continued its backward swoop, as the ocean recoiled from the suddenly unfriendly land. Then the sea recovered from its apparent surprise, and sloshed toward the beach again. But the molten rock was still advancing; the thunder was uninterrupted and the cloud clawed upward as if trying to reach the sky where clouds belong; and the affronted ocean recoiled again. That whole vast bay surged seaward and landward again more times than I could count, for I was quite dizzied by the rocking and yawing of my canoe. But I was aware that each revulsion took me farther from land than each resurgence took me back. In the swirling waters about my curvetting canoe, fish and other sea creatures floated on the surface, most of them belly up.

All the rest of that day, as the twilight got ever darker, my acáli continued its progress of one wave shoreward, three waves seaward. With the very last of daylight, I saw that I was precisely between the two headlands of the bay entrance, but too far from either to swim the distance, and that beyond them was limitless empty ocean. There was nothing I could do, except two things. I leaned from the canoe and plucked out of the water every dead fish within my reach, and piled them in one end of my craft. Then I lay down with my head on my damp pack, and went to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, I might have thought I had dreamt all that turmoil, except that I was still helplessly adrift in an acáli and the shore was so far away that its only recognizable feature was the jagged profile of dim blue mountains. But the sun was rising in a clear sky, there was no pall of smoke and ash, there was no erupting Tzeboruko discernible among the distant mountains, the ocean was as calm as Lake Xaltócan on a summer day. Using my topaz, I fixed my eye on the landward horizon and attempted to imprint its profile on my vision. Then I closed my eyes for a few moments before opening them again to see any change from the remembered vision. After doing that several times, I was able to perceive that the closer mountains were moving past the farther ones, from left to right. Obviously, then, I was caught in an ocean current that was carrying me northward, but frighteningly far offshore.

I tried swerving the canoe by paddling with my hands on the side away from the land, but I quickly gave that up. There was a swirl in the formerly calm water alongside, and something struck the acáli so hard that it rocked. When I looked overside I saw a deep gouge in the hard mahogany, and an upright fin, like an oblong leather war shield, slicing through the water nearby. It circled my canoe two or three times before it disappeared with another ponderous swirl of the water, and thereafter I put not so much as a finger beyond the sheltering wood.

Well, I thought to myself, I have escaped any dangers posed by the volcano. Now I have nothing to fear except being eaten by sea monsters, or dying of hunger, or shriveling from heat and thirst, or drowning if the sea gets rough. I thought about Quetzalcoatl, the long-ago ruler of the Toltéca, who had similarly floated away alone into the other ocean to the east, and thereby had become the best beloved of all gods, the one god adored by far-apart peoples who had absolutely nothing else in common. Of course, I reminded myself, there had been a crowd of his worshipful subjects on the shore to watch his departure, and to weep when he did not turn back, and subsequently to go about informing other people that Quetzalcoatl the man was henceforth to be revered as Quetzalcoatl the god. Not a single person had seen me set off, or knew about it, or was likely—when I never came back—to start a popular demand for my elevation to godhood. So, I said to myself, if I have no hope of becoming a god, I had better do what I can to remain a man as long as possible.

I had twenty and three fish, from which I picked and laid aside ten which I recognized as being of edible species. Of those I cleaned two with my dagger and ate them raw—though not quite raw; they had been at least a little cooked in the cauldron of the bay back yonder. The thirteen questionable fish I gutted and filleted and then, getting my eating bowl from my pack, I wrung them like rags to extract every drop of their body moisture. I tucked the bowl of liquid and the eight remaining edible fish under the pack, so they were out of the sun's direct rays. Thus I was able to eat two more fish, still comparatively unspoiled, the next day. But by the third day I really had to force myself to eat two more—trying to swallow the chunks of them without chewing, they were so slimy and vile—and I threw the reeking last four over the side. For some while after that, my only sustenance—actually just a moistening of my painfully cracked lips—was a very occasional and restrained sip of the fish water from the bowl.

I think it was also on my third day at sea that the last visible mountain peak of The One World disappeared below the horizon to the east. The current had carried me entirely out of sight of land, and there was nothing firm anywhere, and that was the first such experience I had ever had in my life. I wondered if I might eventually be cast up on The Islands of the Women, of which I had heard storytellers tell, though none ever claimed to have been there in person. According to the legends, those were islands inhabited entirely by females, who spent all their time in diving for oysters and extracting the pearl hearts from those oysters which had grown hearts. Only once a year did the women ever see men, when a number of men would canoe out from the mainland to trade cloth and other such supplies for the collected pearls—and, while there, to couple with the women. Of the babies later born of the brief mating, the island women kept only the female infants and drowned the males. Or so said the stories. I meditated on what would happen if I should land on The Islands of the Women uninvited and unexpected. Would I be immediately slain or subjected to a sort of mass rape in reverse?

As it happened, I found not those mythical islands nor any others. I merely drifted miserably across those endless waters. The ocean ringed me about on every side, and I was most unhappy, feeling like an ant at the very bottom and center of a blue urn whose sides were slippery and unclimbable. The nights were not so unnerving, if I put away my topaz so I could not see the overwhelming profusion of stars. In the dark I could pretend I was somewhere safe—anywhere solid—in a mainland forest or even inside my own house. I could pretend that the rocking boat was a gishe bed of rope-slung netting, and thus sleep soundly.

During the days, however, I could not pretend that I was anywhere but in the exact middle of that appalling blue, hot, shadeless vastness. Fortunately for my sanity, there were a few other things to see by daylight besides that unending, uncaring expanse of water. Some of those other things were not particularly comforting to contemplate either, but I forced myself to look at them with my crystal, and to examine them as closely as circumstances permitted, and to speculate on the nature of them.

A few of the things I saw, I knew what they were, though I had never seen them before. There was the blue and silver swordfish, bigger than I am, which likes to leap straight up from the water and dance for a moment on its tail. There was the even bigger sawfish, flat and brown, with elongated fins along its sides like the wavy skin flaps of a flying squirrel. I recognized both of those by their wicked beaks, which the warriors of some coastal tribes use for weapons. I dreaded the moment when one of those big fish would stave in my acáli with its sword or saw, but none ever did.

Other things I saw while adrift on that western ocean were totally unfamiliar to me. There were countless small creatures with long fins which they used like wings, to spurt from the water and glide prodigious distances. I would have thought them a kind of water insect, but one landed in my canoe, and I seized and ate him instantly, and he tasted like a fish. There were immense blue-gray fish which regarded me with intelligent eyes and a fixed grin, but they seemed more sympathetic than menacing. Numbers of them would accompany my acáli for long periods, and entertain me by doing water acrobatics in practiced unison.