Текст книги "Aztec"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 45 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

After another long time, the sky in the east lightened, and finally Grandfather Fire made his reappearance, and more time passed while—as slowly as any aged human grandfather—he crept a third of the way up the sky. It was breakfast time and, by my calculations, time for the Guacho-chi men to be returning on their homeward run. I faced the northwest, where I had last seen them. Since in daylight there would be no torches to signal their coming, I strained my ears to hear them before they were in sight. I heard nothing, I saw nothing.

More time passed. In my mind I went over my reckoning, to find where I had miscalculated, but I could perceive no error. More time passed. I searched my mind, to remember whether or not Tes-disora had ever said anything about the racers' taking different routes on their return runs. More time passed, and the sun was almost directly overhead, when I heard a hail:

"Kuira-ba!"

It was a man of the Rarámuri, wearing only a runner's loincloth and waist pouches and yellow designs on his bare skin, but he was no one I recalled ever having seen before, so I took him to be one of Guacho-chi's outpost sprinters. Evidently he took me to be a Guaguey-bo counterpart, for, when I had returned his greeting, he approached me with a friendly but anxious smile and said:

"I saw your fire last night, so I left my station and came here. Tell me confidentially, friend, how did your people arrange to detain our runners in your village? Were your women all waiting stripped naked and lying compliant?"

"It is a vision pleasant to entertain," I said. "But they were not, to my knowledge. I was wondering myself, is it possible that your men are returning by some other way?"

He started to say, "It would be the first time ever—" when he was interrupted. We both heard another shout of "Kuira-ba!" and turned to see the approach of Tes-disora and his five fellow racers. They were lurching and reeling with fatigue, and the ball they perfunctorily kicked among them had been worn down to about the size of my fist.

"We—" said Tes-disora to the man from Guacho-chi, and had to pause to gulp for air. Then he painfully panted, "We have not yet—met your runners. What trickery—?"

The man said, "This sprinter of yours and I were just asking each other what might have become of them."

Tes-disora stared at the two of us, his chest heaving. Another man gasped, in a voice of disbelief, "They have—not yet—passed here?"

As the whole company of Guaguey-bo runners straggled up to join us, I said, "I asked the stranger if they might have taken a different course. He asked me if your women might have contrived to detain them in your village."

There was a general shaking of heads. Then the heads moved more slowly, as the men looked at one another in bewilderment.

Somebody said, softly, worriedly, "Our village."

Somebody else said, more loudly, with more anxiety, "Our women."

And the stranger said, his voice quavering, "Our best men."

Then there was realization in all their eyes, and shock and anguish, and it was in the eyes of the Guacho-chi man as well. All those eyes turned bleakly to the northwest and, in the brief breathless moment before the men suddenly left me, all of them running harder than ever, someone among them said just one word: "Yaki!"

No, I did not follow them to Guaguey-bo. I never went back there again. I was an outlander, and it would have been presumptuous of me to join the Rarámuri men in bewailing their bereavement. I realized what they would find: that the Yaki marauders and the Guacho-chi runners had arrived in Guaguey-bo at about the same time, and the runners would have been too tired to have put up much of a fight against the savages. The Guacho-chi men would all have suffered having the scalps torn from their heads before they died. What the Si-riame and young Vi-rikota and the other Guaguey-bo women would have endured before they died I did not even want to think about. I presume that the surviving Rarámuri men eventually repopulated their villages by dividing themselves and the Guacho-chi women between the two, but I will never know.

And I never saw a Yaki, not then or to this day. I would have liked to—if I could have managed it without the Yaki seeing me—for they must be the most fearsome human animals in existence, and wonderful to look upon. In all my years I have known only one man who did meet the Yaki and did live to tell of it, and he was that elder of The House of Pochtéa who had no top to his head. Nor have any of you Spaniards yet encountered a Yaki. Your explorers of these lands have not yet ventured that far north and west. I think I might almost pity even a Spaniard who goes among the Yaki.

When the stricken men went running, I stood still and watched them disappear in the forest. I stayed looking toward the northwest for a while after they were out of sight, saying a silent farewell. Then I squatted down and made a meal of my remaining pinoli and water, and chewed a jipuri to keep me awake during the rest of the day. I dumped earth on the last embers of my campfire, then stood erect, glanced at the sun for direction, and strode off to the south. I had enjoyed my stay with the Rarámuri, and I grieved at having it end so.

But I wore good clothing of deerskin and sandals of boar hide, and I had leather pouches in which to carry food and water, and I had a flint blade at my waist, and I still had my seeing crystal and my burning crystal. I had left nothing behind in Guaguey-bo, unless you count the days that I lived there. But of them I brought away and have kept the memory.

I H S

S.C.C.M.

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

Sublime and Most August Majesty: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this St. Ambrose's Day in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.

In our last letters, Sire, we expatiated upon our activities as Protector of the Indians. Let us here dwell upon our primary function as Bishop of Mexíco, and our task of propagating the True Faith among these Indians. As Your Percipient Majesty will discern from the next following pages of our Aztec's chronicle, his people have always been contemptibly superstitious, seeing omens and portents not only where reasonable men see them—in the eclipse of the sun, for example—but also in everything from simple coincidences to commonplace phenomena of nature. That tendency to superstition and credulity has both helped and hindered our continuing campaign to turn them from devil-worship to Christianity.

The Spanish Conquistadores, in their first slashing sweep through these lands, did an admirable work of casting down the major temples and idols of the heathen deities, and putting in their place crosses of the Christ and statues of the Virgin.

We and our colleagues of the cloth have affirmed and maintained that overthrow by erecting more permanent Christian edifices at those sites which heretofore were shrines to the demons and demonesses. Because the Indians stubbornly prefer to congregate for worship in their old accustomed places, they now find in those places not such bloodthirsty beings as their Huichilobos and Tlaloque, but the Crucified Jesus and His Blessed Mother.

To cite a few of many instances: the Bishop of Tlaxcala is building a Church of Our Lady atop that gigantic pyramid mountain in Cholula—so remindful of Shinar's overweening Tower of Babel—where formerly the Feathery Snake Quetzalcóatl was adored. Here in the capital of New Spain, our own nearly completed Cathedral Church of St. Francis is deliberately located (as nearly as Architect Garcia Bravo can determine) on the site of what was once the Aztecs' Great Pyramid. I believe the church walls even incorporate some of the stones of that toppled monument to atrocity. On the point of land called Tepeyáca, across the lake just to the north of here, where lately the Indians worshiped one Tonantzin, a sort of Mother Goddess, we have put a shrine to the Virgin Mother instead. At the request of Captain-General Cortés, it has been given the same name as that shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe situated in his home province of Extremadura in Spain.

To some it might appear unseemly that we should thus locate bur Christian tabernacles on the ruins of heathen temples whose rubble is still blood-drenched by unholy sacrifice. But in actuality we only emulate the very earliest Christian evangels, who placed their altars where the Romans, Greeks, Saxons, etc. had been wont to worship their Jupiters and Pans and Eostras, etc.—in order that those devils might be driven away by the divine presence of Christ Sacrificed, and that the places which had been given to abomination and idolatry might become places of santification, where the people could be more readily induced by the ministers of the True God to offer the adoration due to His Divinity.

Therein, Sire, we are much abetted by the Indians' superstitions. In other undertakings we are not; for, besides being much bound by their superstitions, they are as hypocritical as Pharisees. Many of our apparent converts, even those professing themselves devout believers in our Christian Faith, yet live in superstitious dread of their old demons. They judge themselves to be only prudent in reserving some of their reverence for Huichilobos and the rest of that horde; doing so, they explain in all solemnity, to ward off any possibility of the demons' jealously wreaking revenge for having been supplanted.

We have mentioned our success, during our first year or so in this New Spain, at finding and destroying many thousands of idols which the Conquistadores had overlooked. When at last there were no more to be seen, and when the Indians swore to our patrolling Inquisitors that there were no more to be dug up from any hiding places, we nevertheless suspected that the Indians were still and privily venerating those proscribed old deities. So we preached most strongly, and had all our priests and missionaries do the same, commanding that no idol, not the least and smallest, not even an ornamental amulet, should remain in existence. Whereupon, confirming our suspicions, the Indians began to come again, meekly bringing to us and to other priests great numbers of clay and pottery figures, and in our presence renouncing them and breaking them to bits.

We took much satisfaction in that renewed discovery and destruction of so many more of the profane objects—until, after some while, we learned that the Indians were only seeking to mollify us or to make mock of us. The distinction is unimportant, since we would have been equally outraged by the imposture in either case. It seems that our stern sermons had provoked quite an industry among the Indian artisans: the hasty manufacture of those figurines for the sole purpose that they might be shown to us and broken before us in seeming submission to our admonitions.

At the same time, to our even greater distress and affront, we learned that numerous real idols—that is to say, antique statues, not counterfeits—had been hidden from our searching friars. And where do you suppose they had been hidden, Sire? Inside the foundations of the shrines and chapels and other Christian monuments built for us by Indian laborers! The deceitful savages, secreting their impious images in such sacrosanct places, believed them to be safe from disclosure. Worse, they believed that they could in those places go on worshiping those concealed monstrosities while they seemed to be paying homage to the cross or the Virgin or whatever saint was there visibly represented.

Our revulsion at those unwelcome revelations was only a little mitigated by our having the satisfaction of telling our congregations—and our taking some pleasure in seeing them cringe when they heard it—that the Devil or any other Adversary of the True God suffers untold anguish at being in proximity to a Christian cross or other embodiment of the Faith. Thereafter, without further prompting, the Indian masons who had contrived those coverts resignedly revealed the idols, and more of them than we could have found unaided.

Given so many evidences that so few of these Indians have yet entirely awakened from the sleep of their error—despite the best efforts of ourself and others—we much fear that they must be shocked awake, as was Saul outside Damascus. Or perhaps they could be more gently swayed toward a salvatio omnibusby some small miracle, like that one which long ago gave a Patron Saint to Your Majesty's principality of Catalonia in Aragon: the miraculous finding of the black image of the Virgin of Montserrat, not a hundred leagues from where we ourself were born. But of course we cannot pray that the Blessed Mary vouchsafe another miracle, or even a repetition of one in which She has already manifested Herself—

We thank Your Generous Majesty for the gift brought by this latest arriving caravel: the many rose cuttings from the Royal Herbary to supplement those we brought originally. The cuttings will be conscientiously apportioned among the gardens of all our various Church properties. It may interest Your Majesty to know that, although there were never before any roses growing in these lands, the roses we have planted have flourished more exuberantly than we have ever seen, even in the gardens of Castile. The climate here is so salubriously like an eternal springtime that the roses bloom abundantly the year around, right through these months (it is December as we write) which according to the calendar should be midwinter. And we are fortunate in having a highly capable gardener in our faithful Juan Diego.

Despite his name, Sire, he is an Indian, like all our domestics, and, like all our domestics, a Christian of unimpeachable piety and conviction (unlike those we have mentioned in earlier paragraphs). The baptismal name was given to him some years ago by the chaplain accompanying the Conquistadores, Father Bartolome de Olmedo. It was Father Bartolome's very practical practice to baptize the Indians not individually but in populous gatherings, so that as many as possible might be granted the Sacrament as soon as possible. And of course, for convenience, he gave every Indian, of whom there were often hundreds of both sexes at each baptizing, the name of the saint whose feast day it happened to be. Owing to the multiplicity of Saints John in the Church Calendar, it now sometimes seems, to our confusion and even vexation, that every second Christian Indian in New Spain is named either Juan or Juana.

Nonetheless, we are very fond of our Juan Diego. He has a way with flowers, and a most obliging and biddable character, and a sincere devotion to Christianity and to ourself.

That the Royal Majesty whom we serve be blessed with the unceasing benignity of the Lord God Whom we both serve, is the incessant prayer of Your S.C.C.M.'s worshipful vicar and legate,

(ecce signum)Zumárraga

NONA PARS

I come now to that time in our history when we Mexíca, having for so many sheaves of years been climbing the mountain of greatness, at last reached its pinnacle, meaning that all unwittingly we began to descend the far side.

On my way home, after a few more months of aimless wandering in the west, I stopped in Tolocan, a pleasant mountaintop town in the lands of the Matlaltzinca, one of the smaller tribes allied to The Triple Alliance. I took a room at an inn and, after bathing and dining, I went to the town's marketplace to buy new garments for my homecoming and a gift for my daughter. While I was thus engaged, a swift-messenger came trotting from the direction of Tenochtítlan, through the market square of Tolocan, and he wore two mantles. One was white, the color of mourning because it is the color denoting the west, whither the dead depart. Over that was a mantle of green, the color signifying good news. So it was no surprise to me when Tolocan's governor made the public announcement: that the Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl, who had been dead of mind for two years, had finally died in body; that the lord regent, Motecuzóma the Younger, had been officially elevated by the Speaking Council to the exalted rank of Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexíca.

The news put me in a mood to turn again, to set my back to Tenochtítlan and trudge off again toward the far horizons. But I did not. Many times in my life I have flouted authority and been rash in my actions, but I have not always behaved as a recreant or a fool. I was still a Mexícatl, hence subject to the Uey-Tlatoani, whoever he might be and however far I might roam. More, I was an Eagle Knight, sworn to fealty even to a Revered Speaker whom I personally could not revere.

Without ever having met the man, I disliked and distrusted Motecuzóma Xocoyotzin—for his attempt to frustrate his Revered Speaker's alliance with the Tzapoteca, years before, and for the ignobly perverse manner in which he had molested Zyanya's sister Béu at that time. But Motecuzóma had probably never yet heard of me, and could not know what I knew about him, and so had no reason to reciprocate my animosity. I would be a fool to give him any such reason by making my feelings evident, or even bringing myself to his notice. If, for instance, he should take a notion to count the Eagle Knights attendant at his inauguration, he might be insulted by the inexcusable absence of one knight named Dark Cloud.

So I went on eastward from Tolocan, down the steep slopes that lead from there to the lake basin and the cities therein. Arriving at Tenochtítlan, I went directly to my house, where I was received with exultation by the slaves Turquoise and Star Singer, and by my friend Cozcatl, and with somewhat less enthusiasm by his wife, who said with tears in her eyes, "Now you will make us give up our cherished little Cocóton."

I said, "She and I will always be devoted to you, Quequelmíqui, and you may visit each other as often as you like."

"It will not be the same as having her."

I said to Turquoise, "Tell the child her father is home. Ask her to come to me."

They came downstairs hand in hand. At four years, Cocóton was still of an age to go about nude at home, and that made the change in her immediately evident to me. I was pleased to note that, as her mother had predicted, she was still beautiful; indeed, her facial resemblance to Zyanya was even more to be remarked. But she was no longer a formlessly pudgy infant with stubby limbs. She was recognizably a human being in miniature, with real arms and legs proportionate to her size. I had been away for two years, a span of time that a man in his middle thirties can squander unheeding. But it had been half of my daughter's lifetime, during which she had magically changed from a baby to a charming little girl. Suddenly I felt sorry not to have been present to observe her blossoming; it must have been as wonderfully perceptible, from moment to moment, as the unfolding of a water lily at twilight. I reproached myself for having deprived myself, and I made a silent vow that I would not do it again.

Turquoise made the introductions with a proud flourish: "My little mistress Ce-Malinali called Cocóton. Here is your Tete Mixtli returned at last. Greet him with respect, as you have been taught."

To my pleased surprise, Cocóton dropped gracefully to make the gesture of kissing the earth to me. She did not look up from the posture of obeisance until I called her name. Then I beckoned, and she bestowed on me her dimpled smile, and she came running into my arms, and gave me a shy, wet kiss, and said, "Tete, I am happy that you have come back from your adventures."

I said, "I am happy to find such a mannerly little lady awaiting me." To Ticklish I said, "Thank you for keeping your promise. That you would not let her forget me."

Cocóton leaned from my embrace to look around, saying, "I did not forget my Tene either. I want to greet her too."

The others in the room stopped smiling, and discreetly turned away. I drew a long breath and said:

"I must tell you with sadness, little girl, that the gods needed your mother's help in some adventures of their own. In a far place where I could not accompany her, a place from which she cannot return. And such a request from the gods cannot be refused. So she will not be coming home; you and I must make our lives without her. But still you must not forget your Tene."

"No," the child said solemnly.

"But just to make sure you remember her, Tene sent you a memento." I produced the necklace I had purchased in Tolocan, some twenty small firefly stones strung on a fine silver wire. I let Cocóton briefly handle it and coo over it, then clasped it at the nape of her slender neck. Seeing the little girl standing clad only in an opal necklace made me smile, but the women gasped with delight and Turquoise went running to bring a tezcatl mirror.

I said, "Cocóton, each of those stones sparkles as your mother did. On each of your birthdays, we will add another and a larger one. With so many fireflies twinkling all about you, their light will remind you not to forget your Tene Zyanya."

"You know she will not," said Cozcatl, and he pointed to Cocóton, who was admiring herself in the mirror held by Turquoise. "She has only to do that whenever she wishes to see her mother. And you, Mixtli, you have only to look at Cocóton." As if embarrassed by his show of sentimentality, he cleared his throat and said, with an emphasis meant for Ticklish, "I think the temporary parents had best be going now."

It was obvious that Cozcatl was eager to move from my house to his own rebuilt one, where he could better supervise his school for servants. But it was equally obvious that Ticklish had grown to feel for Cocóton the love of an otherwise childless mother. That day's parting entailed a struggle—almost a literal, physical struggle—to peel the young woman's arms from around my daughter. During the subsequent days, when Cozcatl and Ticklish and their porters made repeated trips to remove their possessions, it was Cozcatl who directed the removal. For his wife, each trip was an excuse to spend "one last time together" with Cocóton.

Even after Cozcatl and his wife were ensconced in their own household and she should have been helping him with the management of the school, Ticklish still contrived to invent errands which brought her to our neighborhood so that she could drop in for a visit with my daughter. I could not really complain. I understood that, while I was trying to win Cocóton's love, Ticklish was trying to relinquish it. I was making every effort to have the child accept as her Tete a man who was almost a total stranger. So I sympathized with the pain it was costing Ticklish to cease being a Tene, after two years in the role, and her need to do it gradually.

I was fortunate in that there were no other demands on me during my first several days back home, and I was free to devote that time to renewing my acquaintance with my daughter. Though the Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl had died two days before my return, his funeral—and Motecuzóma's coronation—naturally could not take place without the attendance of every other available ruler and noble and notable personage from every other nation in The One World, and many of them had to come from afar. During that time of gathering the celebrants, Ahuítzotl's body was preserved by a continuously supplied packing of snow brought by swift-messengers from the volcano peaks.

The funeral day came at last, and I, in my Eagle Knight regalia, was among the multitude filling the grand plaza, to cry the owl hoot when the litter bearers brought our late Uey-Tlatoani on his last journey through the upper world. The whole island seemed to reverberate to our long-drawn "hoo-oo-ooo!" of lament and farewell. The dead Ahuítzotl sat upright on the litter, but hunched, knees to chest, his arms wrapped around his knees to hold them so. His First Widow and the lesser widows had washed the body in water of clover and other sweet herbs, and had perfumed it with copali. His priests had clothed the body in seventeen mantles, but all of cotton so fine that they did not make a bulky wad. Over that ritual swathing, Ahuítzotl wore a mask and robe to give him the aspect of Huitzilopóchtli, god of war and foremost god of us Mexíca. Since Huitzilopóchtli's distinguishing color was blue, so was Ahuítzotl's garb, but not colored with mere paints or dyes. The mask over his face had its features ingeniously delineated in a mosaic of bits of turquoise set in gold, with obsidian and nacre for the eyes, and lips outlined in bloodstones. The robe was sewn all over with jadestones of that sort which tend more to blue than green.

We of the procession were formed up in order of precedence, and we several times circled The Heart of the One World, with muted drums beating a soft counterpoint to the dirge we chanted. Ahuítzotl on his litter led the way, accompanied by a continuous hoo-oo-ing of the crowd. Alongside the litter walked his successor, Motecuzóma, not triumphantly striding but dolefully shuffling, as befitted the occasion. He walked barefooted and wore nothing pretentious, only the ragged black robes of the priest he had once been. His hair hung unbound and disheveled, and he had put lime dust in his eyes to redden them and make them weep unceasingly.

Next marched all the rulers come from other nations, among them some old acquaintances of mine: Nezahualpili of Texcóco and Kosi Yuela of Uaxyacac and Tzimtzicha of Michihuácan, who was present as the representative of his father Yquingare, by then too old to travel. For the same reason, the aged and blind Xicotenca of Texcala had sent his son and heir, Xicotenca the Younger. Both of those latter-mentioned nations, as you know, were rivals or enemies of Tenochtítlan, but the death of any nation's ruler imposed a truce and obliged all other rulers to join in the public mourning of the departed, however much their hearts might rejoice at his departure. Anyway, they and their nobles could enter and leave the city in safety, for an assassination or other treachery would have been unthinkable at the funeral of a nation's ruler.

Behind the visiting dignitaries paraded Ahuítzotl's family: the First Lady and her children, then the lesser legitimate wives and their several children, then the more numerous concubines and their considerably more numerous children. Ahuítzotl's eldest recognized son Cuautemoc led, on a golden chain, the small dog that would accompany the dead man on his journey to the afterworld. Others of the children carried the other articles Ahuítzotl would need or want: his various banners, batons, feather headdresses, and other insignia of his office, including a great quantity of jewelry; his battle uniforms and weapons and shields; some of his other symbolic possessions which had been unofficial but dear to him—including that awesome skin and head of the grizzled bear which had adorned his throne for so many years.

Behind the family marched the old men of the Speaking Council and various others of the Revered Speaker's wise men, sorcerers, seers, and sayers. Then came all the highest nobles of his court and those noblemen who had arrived with the foreign delegations. Behind them marched the warriors of Ahuítzotl's palace guard, and old soldiers who had served with him in the days before he became Uey-Tlatoani, and some of his favorite court servants and slaves, and of course the three companies of knights: Eagle, Jaguar, and Arrow. I had arranged for Cozcatl and Ticklish to take a front-rank position among the onlookers, and for them to bring Cocóton so she could see me parade in my uniform and in that exalted company. It made an odd note among the murmurous hoo-oo-ing and drumming and chanting of lamentation when, as I passed her, the little girl gave a squeal of glee and admiration and cried, "That is my Tete Mixtli!"

The cortege had to cross the lake, for it had been decided that Ahuítzotl would lie at the foot of the Chapultepec crag, directly under that place on it where his magnified likeness had been carved from the rock. Practically every acáli, from the elegant private craft of the court to the plain ones of freighters and fowlers and fishermen, had been commandeered to carry us of the funeral retinue, so not many citizens of Tenochtítlan were able to follow. However, when we reached the mainland, we found an almost equal crowd of people from Tlácopan, Coyohuacan, and other cities gathered to pay their final respects. We proceeded to the already dug grave at the foot of Chapultepec and there we all stood sweating and itching in our ceremonial finery, while the priests droned the lengthy instructions Ahuítzotl would need to make his way through the forbidding terrain that lies between our world and the afterworld.

In recent years, I have heard His Excellency the Bishop and quite a few other Christian fathers preach sermons inveighing against our barbaric funeral custom—when a high personage died—of slaughtering a numerous company of his wives and servants so that he might be properly attended in the other world. The criticism puzzles me. I grant that the practice should rightly be condemned, but I wonder where the Christian fathers have encountered it. I thought I was acquainted with just about every nation and people and set of customs in all The One World, and nowhere have I known such a mass burial to have occurred.

Ahuítzotl was the highest-ranking noble I ever actually saw interred, but if any other personage ever took his retinue with him in death it would have been common knowledge. And I have seen the burial places of other lands: old, uncovered tombs in the deserted cities of the Maya, the ancient crypts of the Cloud People at Lyobaan. In none of them did I ever see the remains of any but the one rightful occupant. Each had of course taken along his tokens of nobility and prestige: jeweled insignia and the like. But dead wives and slaves? No. Such a practice would have been worse than barbaric, it would have been foolish. Though a dying lord might have yearned for the company of family and servants, he would never have decreed it, for he and they and everyone else knew that such lesser persons went to an entirely different afterworld.