Текст книги "Aztec Blood"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

The Healer slipped out his own smoking mirror, and the woman and men drew back from it in fear and awe.

"We must burn her hut," the cacique said, "to rid her of this fiend. He must hide in a dark corner and come out at night to have his pleasure with her."

The Healer clicked his tongue. "No, it would do no good to burn the hut—not unless the woman was in it. The shadow fiend is inside of her!"

More gasps. The Healer was a true showman. He used his hands, eyes, and facial expressions to get across every point. I could imagine him on a comedia stage with the picaros at the fair, the audience alternately in awe and shock from his pronouncements, as he explained how life was but a dream....

"Tlazoltéotl has hidden the shadow in you," he told the woman. "We need to draw it out and destroy it so it cannot come back and violate you."

He instructed the cacique to get a fire going; then he led the woman into the hut. I followed inside, but he barred everyone else but the cacique.

"Lie down on the bed," he told the woman.

When she was on her back on the bed, he knelt down beside her and began to hum near her ear. His humming got louder and developed into a soft chant.

His mouth got closer and closer to her ear and finally his lips were brushing the woman's ear. She was wide-eyed and frozen in fear as if she expected him to mount her as her husband's ghost had done.

He slowly moved away from her ear, just inches, but enough so that the cacique and I could see that he was drawing a snake from her ear and into his mouth.

He suddenly stood up and spit the snake into his hand. Rushing by the cacique, he ran outside. I followed him outside with the cacique and the woman on my heels.

The Healer paused before the fire and held the wriggling snake in the air, hoarsely whispering an incantation of words that were completely unfamiliar to me. I knew it was not Náhuatl; no doubt they were magic words learned from secret sources and known only to those in the inner circle of magic.

He threw the snake into the fire. When the snake hit the flames, a whiff of green flame flashed. As he stood by the fire and made more proclamations in the strange tongue, I wondered if I had seen a little dust come out of his pocket and hit the flames just before the fire flashed green.

Sweating and trembling from ecstatic excitement, he turned to the woman. "The demon who has violated you each night, I have burned in this fire. It is gone and cannot return. Tlazoltéotl no longer has any control over your life. You will sleep well tonight and will never again be visited by the shadow creature."

After receiving his pay, a handful of cacao beans, the Healer led us back to the cacique's house, where pipes were once more lit and a jug of pulque passed around.

The old men were still discussing the oversexed ghost a little later when horsemen came into the village. I had heard the horses approaching and started up to flee but sat down at a look from the Healer. He was right. I could not outrun a horse.

Three men rode into the village: A Spaniard was on a horse. His clothes were similar to the man who had chased me at the fair, and I took him to be a hacienda overseer. The other two men were on mules, an indio and an africano. Both of these mule riders were dressed better than common indios and slaves. From their appearance I concluded that they were not simply vaqueros but a step above, men who held some authority over common workers.

I knew the moment I saw them that these men were hunters looking for me. Rather than simply passing through the village, they looked about with the wariness and intensity of men on a mission.

They paused their mounts by us. The cacique rose and greeted them, the mounted indio returning his greeting before he addressed all of us in Náhuatl.

"Have any of you seen a mestizo boy, about fourteen or fifteen years old? He would have passed through in the last couple of days."

I had to lift my head a little to look up to the indio on the mule. My hat was pulled down because of the sun, and I shaded my eyes with my hand in the hopes of concealing part of my face, hoping that the searchers would only see my big nose.

I waited gripped by fear as a general discussion ensued among the old men about who had passed through the village in the last two days. Finally the cacique said, "No mestizo has passed this way."

The elders murmured their assent.

"There is a reward," the hacienda indio said. "Ten pesos if you catch him."

Ayyo! The reward was a hundred pesos. These searchers were thieves who would cheat poor indios out of most of the reward.

FORTY-ONE

That evening as we lay in our blankets, I said to the Healer, "The way you disguised my face fooled not only the Spaniard and the vaqueros, but even the cacique and the old men who were around me for hours."

"You did not fool the cacique or the elders; they know you are a mestizo."

I was shocked. "Why didn't they tell the Spaniard?"

"Their enemy is your enemy," the Healer said. "The cacique's son was forced to labor in a hole the Spanish have dug in the ground to steal silver. These holes are to the north, in the land of the Mictlán, the dark place where the dead go. The silver is put into the mountains by Coyolxauhqui, the Moon goddess. It is her excrement and she puts it in the mountains as a gift to her fellow god, Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the underworld. Digging the holes to steal the wealth of Mictlantecuhtli angers him, and he causes the tunnels to cave in. Many indios die there, some from the cave-ins and others from starvation and beatings. The cacique's son passed from sorrow to the Dark Place while working in one of the holes.

"The Spanish have recently come again to this small village and taken men. All are the sons, grandchildren, or nephews of the elders. The young men are being forced to dig a hole through a mountain to drain the lake surrounding Tenochtitlan, the city the Spanish called Mexico. Mictlantecuhtli is again angered by this violation, and many indios have died digging through this mountain."

"But there is a reward offered," I said. "Ten pesos is mucho dinero, probably more than the cacique or anyone else in the village see at any one time."

"The Spaniard's gold is stolen from Huitzilopochtli, the sun god, who excretes it for Mictlantecuhtli. The villagers do not want the gold. These are vengeful gods, who take many indio lives. The cacique and the other elders want their sons to live and the Spanish to stop forcing them to anger the gods."

Any Veracruz indio or mestizo, household servant, or street trash would have slit my throat and turned my dead body in for a reward of ten pesos. They would have revealed me to the Spaniard just in the hopesof a small reward. I learned something about the indios of New Spain: The domesticated indios, raised like work animals on haciendas and in cities, were different than the ones who were not corrupted by the conquerors. There were still indios who followed the old ways and to whom honor was more important than gold.

I asked the most important question. "How did the cacique know I'm not indio? The color of my skin? Hair? My facial features? Did I expose any pale skin? What was it?"

"Your smell."

I sat up. "My smell?" I was indignant. That morning I had washed with water from a creek. Late that afternoon both the Healer and I had used the cacique's temazcalli, his steam hut. While the Spanish did not bath as much as an indio, I bathed more than a Spaniard.

"How could he tell from my smell? Don't people all smell the same?"

The only response from the Healer was birdlike twittering.

"I must know," I insisted. "What do I have to do to make sure I smell like an indio? I don't have access to a temazcalli every day. Is there a special soap I can use?"

He tapped his heart. "Sweat and soap cannot take away what is in the heart. When you walk the Way of your indio ancestors, you will be an indio."

Before we left the village the Healer treated several others for ailments. Like Fray Antonio, who "doctored" the poor of Veracruz, the Healer was also a man of practical medicine, although the fray would not have recognized his methods.

A woman brought a small child to be examined for a stomach problem. The Healer held the child over a trough of water, studying the reflection. He twittered a bit and then prescribed pulverized avocado seed and crushed plantain in raw, unfermented maguey juice.

He examined a man suffering from a bad cough with his smoke mirror. The man, emaciated and in obvious discomfort, described pains in his chest, abdomen, and back. The Healer prescribed pulque and honey.

I was surprised that he had not drawn snakes from either person. "You told me that all illness is caused by the invasion of the body by evil spirits and they take the form of snakes that wiggle around the body. Why didn't you draw the evil snakes from the child and the man today?"

"Not all sickness can be sucked out. The woman whose dead husband has been forcing her to have sex at night believes his ghost is attacking her. When she sees the snake come out, she realizes that the ghost is gone. The man suffers from los aires, bad spirits in the air, which have entered his body. The snakes are too small and too many to suck out. They are everywhere in his body. He will die soon."

That shocked me. "The child will die, too?"

"No, no, the child's stomach is just upset. It would be a waste of a snake to use it with a child who would not understand that the evil had been withdrawn."

I knew that the snakes were not evil spirits in the body but were stored in a basket hauled around on the Healer's donkey. What he seemed to be telling me was that what he took from people's heads were bad thoughts. The thoughts themselves were maladies.

Although I had assisted the fray in cutting off a prostitute's leg and many lesser medical treatments, bad thoughts were a strange malady to me. Yet it seemed to work. Each person who had the snake removed smiled and was noticeably happier afterward.

The woman who suffered from the abuse of her husband brought us corn cakes and honey for breakfast and told the Healer that she had had the first good night's sleep in months. Had the woman gone to a Spanish doctor and complained of a ghost, he would have sent her to a priest for an exorcism. The priest would have used prayers and the cross to drive the evil from her—and perhaps solicited the help of the Inquisition to inquire whether the woman was a witch.

Whose method was the more humane? The more effective?

I was beginning to understand what the Healer meant when he said the Spanish had conquered the flesh of the indio but not the spirit.

FORTY-TWO

When I awoke in the morning, the Healer had already left his blanket. I went to the creek to wash and saw him in a small clearing between the trees. He was surrounded by birds, one of which was on his shoulder and eating from his hand.

Later, when we were traveling to the next village, he told me that he had been given knowledge about me.

"You have died once,"he said, "and you will die again before you know your name."

I had no clue as to the meaning of this prophecy; he refused to say anything more.

The Healer began to guide me in learning the Aztec Ways as we journeyed between villages.

The Aztec way of life was to honor one's family, clan, tribe, and gods. Children were taught and strictly disciplined from birth about the way they must act and live and treat others.

The umbilical cord of a male child was given to a warrior who buried it on a battlefield, thus ensuring that the boy grew up to be a strong warrior. The umbilical cord of a girl child was buried under the floor of the house to keep her close to home.

"When an Aztec child is born," he said, "the father calls upon a soothsayer to read the child's path in life. The day sign the child is born under will affect him throughout life. There are good signs that bring happiness, health, and even wealth, and bad ones that bring failure and sickness."

"How are the paths determined?"

"The Tonalamatl, The Book of Fates, which sets forth the good and bad days, must be consulted. The day and week signs of your birth and other events surrounding it must be probed. A favorable birth sign brings rewards in life... but only if you lead your life according to the sign. An evil life will turn a fortunate birth sign bad."

He asked me questions about the day and time of my birth. That much I knew, along with the fact that the fray had hinted at ominous events surrounding my birth. I also knew from street talk something about good and bad days. The days of the Aztec calendar were numbered and named. One Crocodile, meaning the first time in the calendar day crocodile occurred, was considered a fortuitous day to be born on. Five Coatl, serpent, was a bad day. I was only familiar with the character of a few signs I heard street people talking about, but I knew there were days named for deer, rabbit, water, wind, and other things.

The Healer disappeared into the forest for two hours. Upon his return, we ate a meal I had prepared over our campfire. While he was gone, I had foretold the future for a pregnant india who had had two girls and was desperate to birth a boy. After examining the ashes in her cooking fire and muttering some Latin at a flock of birds, I advised her that she would indeed have a boy. The grateful woman gave me the duck I'd roasted for our meal.

I dared not tell the Healer that I was telling fortunes.

I listened to him as I attacked the duck with great enthusiasm.

He spoke solemnly. "Each of us has our destiny cast by the gods. For some there are clear signs of good fortune, while pain and misfortune will be the circumstance of others." He shook his head. "You fall within the Shadow Fates, the destines the gods have left uncompleted. Your day is Four and the sign is Ollin, motion. The gods do not cast the destiny of those born under this sign because motion is changeable. It runs here and there and changes direction many times. It is under the control of Xolotl, the Plumed Serpent's evil twin. You see Xolotl blazing in the night sky at certain times of the year, the dark side of the star, while the light side blazes in the morning."

From the description I assumed Xolotl was the evening star, the nighttime manifestation of Venus, as opposed to the morning star. Xolotl, a dog-headed monster, was another favorite character at mascaradas.

"It is said that those born under the motion sign change their path in life frequently and often become rogues and tale bearers."

Eh, that caught my attention.

"Because they are so fluid, they are able to change shapes. The darkest side of those born under the sign of motion are the shape changers who are able to take on different forms, even the shape of animals."

"Why is that considered the dark side?" I asked.

"Because there are evil persons who do much harm under the guise of animals or in the shape of another person."

The Healer also told me I needed an Aztec name.

I removed my mouth from the carcass of the duck I was gnawing and wiped duck fat from my chin. "What should my Aztec name be?"

"Nezahualcóyotl."

I recognized the name. Next to Montezuma, he was the most famous indio king. There were many tales about Nezahualcóyotl, the king of Texcoco. He was famous for his poetry and wisdom. But from the amused glint in the Healer's eye when he bestowed the name upon me, I realized I was not being honored for my wisdom or literary talents.

The name meant "Hungry Coyote."

Along the road the Healer showed me vegetation—plants and trees and bushes—that were useful in the healing arts, and the ways of the forest and jungle and the animals and people that inhabit them.

"Before the Spanish came, the revered speakers, what we called our Aztec emperors, had not only a great animal and serpent zoo, but vast gardens in which thousands of plants were grown that were used by healers. The potency and healing powers of the plant were determined by using them on criminals and prisoners who were to be sacrificed."

The great medical gardens and books suffered the same fate most Aztec knowledge did—the priests who followed the conquistadors destroyed them. What had the fray said about such ignorance? What they didn't understand, they feared and destroyed.

The Healer showed me plants that were used for wounds and ulcers, to heal the blisters of burns, reduce swelling, cure skin diseases and eye problems, cool fevers, soothe the stomach, calm the heart when it is too active and stimulate it when it is too quiet. Jalop was used to unlock the bowels, a plant called "urine of a tiger" to make water come when urination was difficult.

"Aztec doctors sewed up wounds with human hair. They set broken bones with pieces of wood and put a gum of ocozotl tree with resin and feather over the wood."

Not even the fish were free from the influence of Aztec herbs. Indios crushed a plant called barbasco and threw it into rivers and lakes. The herb stunned the fish and forced them to the surface, where the indios grabbed them.

Children were instructed to keep their teeth clean to avoid decay; salt and powered charcoal were used with a wooden instrument to clean teeth.

I saw an amazing example of Aztec tooth remedies in a village where another traveling healer had stopped at the same time we did. This healer's specialty was removing painful teeth—painlessly. He applied a substance to the teeth that instantly deadened the tooth. Within hours, the tooth had fallen out.

I asked the Healer what the man had applied that worked so well.

"The venom of a rattlesnake," he said.

The Healer told me not all the products of plants were used to heal. Veintiunilla, the "little twenty-one," caused death in exactly twenty-one days. Persons given the plant developed an insatiable thirst for potent drinks like pulque and cactus wine, and drank the intoxicating beverages until they died.

"Evil Aztec whores tricked men into drinking macacotal, the steeping from a snake. Ayyo, these men engage in ahuilnéma with six or seven women, one after another, and moments later are ready to have ahuilnéma with even more women. This goes on and on, with the man unable to control his urge, giving anything he owns to the whores, until the life is gone from him and his flesh hangs from his bones."

To have power to satisfy so many women. Muy hombre! What a way to die, eh, amigos?

Another indio aphrodisiac was the "witches rose." Medicine women used magic words to make roses open before their season. These were sold to men for a wicked purpose: the seduction of women. The rose was hidden under the woman's pillow. When she inhaled the scent, she became intoxicated with love for the person who put the rose there and called his name.

I asked him about the drugs that robbed one of their mind. His expression never changed, but when he was amused by something a glint came to his eye and he would emit a quiet, birdlike chuckle. He did so as he told me about yoyotli, the dust that made one so happy and pliable that you danced gaily to the sacrificial block where the priest was waiting with an obsidian knife to cut your heart out.

"Flower weavers are the sorcerers who bring our minds into contact with the gods," the Healer said. Peyotl, from the buds of cacti that grow only in the Place of the Dead, the northern deserts; and brown seeds from ololiuqui, a plant that climbs and clings to other plants, were used to "take people to the gods," which I understood to mean that the person entered a dreamlike state. From the babbling uttered and visions the person experienced, a healer could determine the person's malady.

Teunanacatl, a bitter black mushroom, was called the "flesh of the gods." Occasionally served with honey at feasts, it also took one to the gods, but the hallucinations were less than those created by peyotl. "Some people laugh hysterically, others image they are being chased by snakes or that their bellies are full of worms eating them alive. Others fly with the gods."

A plant that could be smoked was called coyote weed by the Healer. "It makes the smoker feel calm and soothes deep pains." A small smile on his face hinted that some of the tobacco he smoked was of the coyote weed variety.

The most powerful substance was teopatli, the divine ointment. The Healer spoke of it with a tone of awe. To the seeds of certain plants "are added the burnt ashes of spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and other noxious insects, petum to make the flesh painless, and ololiuqui to lift the spirits." When applied to the skin, it made the person invincible, as if an invisible shield was held in front of him. "The greatest warriors of the Aztec were the Jaguar Knights and Eagle Knights; it is said that the weapons of their enemies could not cut them when they had the teopatli ointment applied to their skin."

As the months passed by and we went from one small village to another, I never encountered another rider searching for me. Soon enough of the fear was gone for me to stop puffing up my nose. Because the sun darkened my skin so well, I needed little dye. But for safety's sake the Healer gave me a "sore" to wear on my cheek, a small, black piece of bark held on with sap.

We stayed away from the larger villages and towns while I learned how to think and act like an indio.

Even more than the Spanish, the indios were ruled by superstition and the whim of their gods. Nothing they did or experienced, from the sun overhead and ground beneath their feet, giving birth or to going to the marketplace to sell ears of maize, went without having some spiritual power involved. Sickness came mostly from evil spirits, bad aires, that one breathed in or was touched by. And the cure was to remove the spirits with the magic and herbs of a healer.

The Spanish priests battled the indio superstitions, trying to replace them with Christian rites. Most of the indio customs I found to be harmless or, in the case of herbal medical remedies, to be extremely beneficial. Occasionally I would be shocked.

In our travels to places little visited by outsiders, we came to a village where an old woman had been stoned to death just before our arrival. Her body, with bloodied stones lying about, was still on the ground when we walked in leading the donkey.

I asked the Healer what great crime the old woman had committed.

"She died not for her sins, but the sins of all the villagers. The oldest woman in the village is chosen each year to hear the confessions of all the people in the village. She is then stoned to death to win atonement for the entire village."

¡Ayya ouiya!

The gods were as involved in death as they were in life. Just as there was a Christian world of death, the Aztecs had their places where dead spirits resided, both an underworld and a heavenly paradise. Where you went, to the underworld or the celestial heaven, what happened to your soul, depended not upon conduct during life but on how you died.

The House of the Sun was a celestial paradise to the east of the Aztec world. Warriors killed in battle, people who were sacrificed, and women who had died in childbirth shared the honor of residing in this wondrous place after death. The house of the sun was filled with beautiful gardens, perfect weather, and the finest foods. It was the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Allah, paradise.

Warriors who dwelled there passed their time in bloodless battles. But each morning they assembled as a vast army on a great open plain that stretched almost endlessly to the horizon. They were waiting for the sun to rise in the East. When the first glow of light slipped above the horizon, the warriors greeted it by clashing their spears against their shields; then they escorted the sun on its journey across the sky.

After four years, the warriors, sacrifice victims, and women who'd died in childbirth returned to earth as hummingbirds.

Most people, those who succumbed to disease, accidents, and the maladies of old age, went to the Dark Place, the place of the dead, Mictlan.

This underworld, far to the north of the Aztec world, was a place of scorching deserts and winds that can freeze a person in place. The lord of Mictlan was Mictlantecuhtli, a god who wore a skull mask and a cloak of human bones. To reach Mictlan the soul had to journey through eight hells before arriving at the ninth hell, where Mictlantecuhtli and his goddess queen live.

Each of the journeys had the type of dangers Odysseus experienced and the ghoulish horrors of Dante's infernal. The dead must first cross a wide and swift river. A red or yellow dog was needed for this task. After forging the river, they had to pass between two mountains which were clashing together. The tasks became more and more difficult—a mountain of razor-sharp obsidian to be climbed, a region of icy winds that could sear flesh from the bone; places where banners battered wayfarers, where arrows pierced the unwary, and savage beasts ripped open chests to eat human hearts. In the eighth realm, the dead had to climb narrow ledges of cliffs.

After four years of trial and torment, the dead achieve the ninth hell, a place deep in the bowels of the earth. In this fiery bowel of the Lord Mictlantecuhtli and his queen, the essence of the dead—what the Christians called the soul—was burned to achieve eternal peace.

Eh, I would take the Christian heaven over Mictlan. Even thieving, murdering léperos make it there as long as they repent at the end.

The preparation for the journey after death also depends on the way one had died.

"Those who died in battle and childbirth were burned atop a pyre," the Healer told me. "This frees the spirit for its upward journey to the Eastern Heaven. Those who are to journey to the realm of the Lord of the Dead, Mictlantecuhtli, are buried beneath the ground. This gives them a start on their journey through the underworld."

Regardless of their destination, the dead were dressed in their finest ceremonial clothing and provided with food and drink for their journey. A piece of jade or other valuable placed in the mouth of the dead was money for buying whatever they needed in the hereafter. Even the poor were given food and water to help them on the long trip.

Those who could afford it made the journey to the House of the Sun or the underworld with a companion, a red or yellow dog.

When the Healer told me that, I glanced over at his yellow dog that never left his side, day or night.

Kings and great nobles made the journey surrounded by the wealth and splendor they'd enjoyed in life. Stone tombs were constructed and filled with food, chocolate, and sacrificed wives and slaves. Instead of a simple piece of jade, earthly treasure—objects of gold and silver and gems—were put in the tomb. The dead notable would be positioned seated in a chair with his weapons and golden breastplate or carried upon a litter.

The funeral customs of these people were not unlike those the fray had told me existed among the ancient Egyptians. "Because of the pyramids, funeral rites, and the fact that some Aztecs circumcised males in the manner of Semites, some scholars believed the Aztecs were originally from the Holy Lands, perhaps a lost tribe of Israel."

Aztec poets compared human life to the fate of a flower, rising from the earth, growing toward the sky, blooming, then swallowed up by the earth again.

"Our souls in your eyes are but as wisps of smoke or clouds rising out of the earth," they sang.

And they were fatalistic about death. It spared no one, rich or poor, good or bad. The Healer sang to me across the flames of a campfire:

Even jade will shatter,

Even gold will crush.

Even quetzal plumes will tear.

One does not live forever on this earth:

Only for an instant do we endure.

"Did they believe in life after death?" I asked the Healer. "Like the frays teach about the Christian religion?"

Where are we going,ay, where are we going?

Will we be dead there, or will we live still?

Will there be existence again there?

Will we feel again the joy of the Giver of Life?

"Your question," he said, "is answered by a third song."

By chance are we to live a second time?

Your heart knows it.

Only once have we come to live.

FORTY-THREE

Along with learning the Ways of the Aztec, I slowly picked up the methods of the Healer, not just learning the art of treating wounds and sickness, but much more important in my eyes, the technique of pulling an "evil" snake from a person's head. I couldn't stomach putting one of the Healer's snakes in my mouth when doing the trick and instead I practiced with a twig.

I soon was able to put my "magic" into practice in a most delightful way.

The Healer had gone off to meditate with birds, and I was in the hut provided by the village cacique. Bored and with time on my hands, a dangerous combination for any youth, I had put on the Healer's colorful feather manta and elaborate headdress that covered most of my face. I was practicing the snake trick when the local cacique entered the hut.

"Great Sorcerer," he said, "I have waited for your arrival. I have problems with my new wife. She is very young, and is proving difficult for this old man to deal with."

The fray always claimed that I had a devil in me. At the old man's words, the devil in me awoke and took control. I could not resist finding out what problems this old man had with his young wife.

"I need you to come now to my hut and examine her. Some evil spirit has entered her tipíli and my tepúli is unable to penetrate into her."

Eh, I had seen the Healer deal many times with sex problems. It would be an easy task for me. Mumbling nonsense and gesturing with my hand, I sent him out of the hut. Once he was outside, I pocketed one of the Healer's pet snakes. The notion of using the snake was repulsive to me, but he would expect it.

The cacique's house was the largest house in the village. While most of the village huts consisted of one or two rooms, his had four.

Ayya. The old man's wife was a surprise. A young, good-looking female, little older than me. Very ripe for ahuilnéma, even if it was an old pene being poked at her.