Aztec (Aztec, #1)

by Gary Jennings

You may experience this wonder and many other wonders more than once. But, of first times, there is always and forever only one.”

Of necessity I slowed my pace, I was often still, I scrutinized instead of scanning. When others hurried, I waited. When others rushed, I moved with deliberation. I learned to differentiate between purposeful movement and mere motion, between action and mere activity. Where others, impatient, saw a village, I saw its people. Where others saw people, I saw persons.

He lived only to go on living.” I waited for more, but he said no more, so I asked, “What became of him, Master Cuachic?” “He died.” “That is all?” “What else ever becomes of any man? I no longer remember even his name. No one remembers anything at all about him, except that he lived and then he died.”

“Strike just one telling blow in battle, my boy. Then, even if you are slain the next moment, you will have done something with your life. More than all those men who merely drudge to exist until the gods tire of watching their futility and sweep them off to oblivion.”

No, we might defeat and humble another nation, but we would not obliterate it from the earth.

Human flesh, like almost any other animal flesh, when properly hung, aged, seasoned, and broiled, makes a tasty dish, and it is suitable for sustenance when there is no other meat.

“No warrior, in a real war or a War of Flowers, must ever expect to be counted among the fallen or the captured. He must expect to live through the war and to come out of it a hero. Oh, I will not dissemble, my boy. He may very well die, yes, while still thrilling to that expectation. But if he goes into battle not expecting victory for his side and glory for himself, die he surely will.”

It is my sincere belief that every man should experience one war, or at least one battle, in his lifetime. Because, if he survives, he savors all the rest of his life the more richly and dearly.

But then some one of the boys, I forget who, discovered the solitary act. He was not shy or selfish about his discovery, and immediately demonstrated the art to the rest of us. From then on, the boys no longer carried beans when they went on guard; they had their games equipment attached. For that is all it amounted to: a game. We held contests and made wagers on the amount of omícetl we could ejaculate, the number of times we could do it in succession, and the time needed in between for resurgence. It was like our even younger days, when we had competed to see who could spit or urinate farthest or most copiously. But in this new competition I was at hazard.

Out of pocket

“A homeless man is at home anywhere in the world,” he said, as if it were something to be proud of.

“A man with a talent for listening can hear even things not yet spoken.

“Yes, at your age, many possible lives await. Go whichever way you choose. Go alone or in company. The companions may walk with you a long way or a little. But at the end of your life, no matter how crowded were its roads and its days, you will have learned what all must learn. And that will be too late for any starting over, too late for anything but regret. So learn it now. No man has ever yet lived out any life but one, and that one his chosen own, and most of that alone.”

It seems that it matters not who makes a poem, and it matters not what kind of poem: a tribute to some god or hero, a lengthy historical account, a love song, a lamentation, or a joking bit of banter. That poem is not judged according to the poet’s age, sex, social standing, education, or experience. A poem merely is or is not. It lives or it never existed. It is made and remembered or it is forgotten so quickly that it might never have been made at all.

Our poems lived by oral repetition, or lived not at all. Anyone who heard and liked a poem would memorize it and retell it to someone else, who might in turn tell it again. To aid the hearers in that memorizing, a poem was usually constructed in such a manner that the syllables of its words had a regular rhythm, and in such a manner that the same word sounds regularly recurred at the ends of its separate lines.

I made a song in praise of life, a world as bright as quetzal feather: to skies of turquoise, sunlight gold, to streams like jadestone, gardens blooming … But gold can melt and jadestone shatter, leaves turn brown and trees fall down, our flowers fade, their petals scatter. The sun sets soon, the night comes looming. See beauty fade, our loves grow cold, the gods desert, their temples weather … Why does my song pierce like a knife?

You tell me then that I must perish like the flowers that I cherish. Nothing remaining of my name, nothing remembered of my fame? But the gardens I planted still are young— the songs I sang will still be sung!

I am not a priest, to question the god’s authenticity, and I am not a fool, to question an imperious queen. I do the work I am bidden to do, and so far I have kept my own skull intact.

The gods supposedly know all our plans, and know their ends before their beginnings. The gods are mischievous, and they delight to potter with the plans of men. They usually prefer to complicate those plans, as they might snarl a fowler’s net, or to frustrate them so the plans come to no result whatever. Very seldom do the gods intervene to any worthier purpose. But I do believe, that time, they looked at my plan and said among themselves, “This dark scheme contrived by Dark Cloud, it is so ironically good, let us make it ironically even better.”

“Whatever occupation you do undertake, young man, you ought to do it well.”

“And I thought I had escaped from that school to a nice restful war.

Do you not know that the best-fed men are the ones who stay farthest back from the fighting? The porters and cooks and message carriers. They are also the most boastful about their service.

“It is sometimes as saddening to lose a worthy foe as to lose a good friend.”

“You have done here today a deed to be proud of—and to be ashamed of. You rendered harmless the one man most to be feared among all our opponents on this field. And you brought a noble knight to an ignoble end. Even when Armed Scorpion reaches the afterworld of heroes, his eternal bliss will have an eternally bitter taste, because all his comrades there will know that he was ludicrously brought down by a callow, shortsighted, common recruit.”

“What I ask cannot be commanded. I entreat you, Mixtli, from now henceforward, to be prudent, even gingerly in your handling of the right and the truth. Such things can cut as cruelly as any obsidian blade. And, like the blade, they can also cut the man who wields them.”

On that day we celebrated the might of the Mexíca, and we did not even suspect the existence of such things as white men, and we supposed that our roads and our days led ahead into a limitless future. Indeed, we did have some years of vigor and glory still before us, so I am glad—even knowing what I know—I am glad that no alien intruder spoiled that splendid day.

“Even if I could walk home, my Lord Speaker, I would not. A prisoner once taken is a man destined by his tonáli and the gods to die. I should shame my family, my fellow knights, all of Texcála, if I returned dishonorably alive. No, my lord, I have had what I requested—one last fight—and it was a good fight. Let your Eagle Knight live. A left-handed warrior is too rare and valuable to discard.”

So, yes, we slew countless xochimíque to honor Tlaloc and Huitzilopóchtli on the day of the dedication of the Great Pyramid. But try to look at it as we did, Your Excellency. Not one man gave up more than his own one life. Each man of those thousands died only the once, which he would have done anyway, in time. And dying thus, he died in the noblest way and for the noblest reason we knew.

That no man can manifest greater love than to surrender his life for his friends.

That feast of human meat and the subsequent enjoyment of casual copulation—they took place right here in this now sanctified diocesan headquarters.

“After a day spent enjoying the rites and delights of human beings, let us commune with what we call the beasts.”

“Oh, a soldier acquires callosity after only a few fights, and his stomach no longer rebels.”

There are parents who literally pray to beget a freak, so they may become rich.