Aztec (Aztec, #1)

by Gary Jennings

Since Coatlícue was, after all, the mother of the god of war, most earlier artists had portrayed her as grim of visage, but in form she had always been recognizable as a woman. Not so in Tlatli’s conception. His Coatlícue had no head. Instead, above her shoulders, two great serpents’ heads met, as if kissing, to compose her face: their single visible eye apiece gave Coatlícue two glaring eyes, their meeting mouths gave Coatlícue one wide mouth full of fangs and horribly grinning. She wore a necklace hung with a skull, with severed hands and torn-out human hearts. Her nether garment was entirely of writhing snakes, and her feet were the taloned paws of some immense beast. It was a unique and original image of a female deity, but a gruesome one, and I believe that only a cuilóntli man who could not love women could have carved a goddess so egregiously monstrous.

the town is called Surrounded by Forest, or Quaunáhuac. That melodious name your thick-tongued countrymen have contorted into the ridiculous and derogatory Cuernavaca, or Cow-Horn, and I hope they will never be forgiven for that. The town, the surrounding mountains,

The beneficent Feathered Serpent whom we call Quetzalcóatl they call Kukulkán. The rain god whom we call Tlaloc they call Chak.

When those first Spaniards landed and asked, “What is this place called?” the inhabitants, never having heard Spanish before, quite naturally replied, “Yectetán,” which means only “I do not understand you.” Those explorers made of that the name Yucatán,

Xipe Totec was our god of seedtime, and that came in our month of Tlacaxípe Ualíztli, which can be translated as The Gentle Flaying. It was the season when the dead stumps and stalks of last year’s harvests were burned off or cleared away or turned under, so the earth was clean and ready to receive its new planting. Death making way for life, you see, as it does even for Christians, when at every seedtime the Lord Jesus dies and is reborn.

So Zyanya’s body was never found, nor any trace of her, not so much as one of her rings or sandals. She vanished as utterly and irretrievably as that small song she once made. But, my lords, I know she is still here somewhere—though two new cities in succession have since then been built over her undiscovered grave. I know it, because she did not take with her the jadestone chip to insure her passage to the afterworld. 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.

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?

The so-called Feathery Snake was the one supernatural being recognized by every separate nation and variant religion so far known to have existed in all of New Spain, his name being severally rendered as Quetzalcóatl among the Náhuatl-speakers, Kukulkán among the Maya-speakers, Gukumatz among peoples even farther south, &c.

Among the numberless deities of these lands, Quetzalcóatl was one of the very few that never demanded or countenanced human sacrifice. The offerings made to him were always innocuous: birds, butterflies, flowers, and the like.

The earth goddess Coatlícue and her family do nothing to add interest to the monotonous and almost uniformly level terrain of gray-yellow sand, gray-brown gravel, and gray-black boulders. Coatlícue does not deign to disturb that land with earthquakes. Chántico does not spurt volcanoes through it, nor Temazcaltóci spit any spouts of hot water and steam. The mountain god Tepeyólotl stays aloofly far away. I could, with the aid of my topaz, just make out the low profiles of mountains far to east and west, jagged mountains colored the gray-white of granite. But they remained always infinitely distant; they never came nearer to me nor I to them.

Each morning, the sun god Tonatíu sprang angrily from his bed, without his accustomed dawn ceremony of selecting his bright spears and arrows for the day. Each evening, he plummeted into bed without donning his lustrous feather mantle or spreading wide his colorful flower quilts. In between the abrupt lifting and dropping of the nights’ blessedly cool darkness, Tonatíu was merely a brighter yellow-white spot in the yellow-white sky—sultry, sullen, sucking all the breath from that land—burning his way across the parched sky as slowly and laboriously as I crept across the parched sands below.

The rain god Tlaloc paid even less attention to the desert, though it was by then the season of rains. His casks of clouds often piled up, but only over the granite mountains far away to east and west. The clouds would belly and billow and tower high over the horizon, then darken with storm, and the tlalóque spirits would flail their blazing forked sticks, making a drumming that came to me as a faint mutter. But the sky above me and ahead of me remained forever that unrelieved yellow-white. Neither the clouds nor the tlalóque ventured into the oven heat of the desert. They let their rain spill o...

The wind god Ehécatl blew now and then, but his lips were as parched as the desert earth, his breath as hot and dry, and he seldom made a sound, since he had practically nothing to blow against. Sometimes, though, he blew so hard that he whistled. Then the sand stirred and lifted and drove across the land in c...

Only one kindly goddess dares to stroll through that forbidding desert, to reach among the fangs and talons of those touch-me-not plants, to sweeten their ill nature with her caress. That is Xochiquétzal, goddess of love and flowers, the goddess best loved by my long-gone sister Tzitzitlíni. Each spring, for a little while, the goddess beautifies every meanest shrub and cactus. During the rest of the year, it might seem to an ordinary traveler that Xochiquétzal has abandoned the desert to unenlivened ugliness. But I still, as I had done in my short-sighted childhood, looked closely at things that would not catch the eye of people with normal vision. And I found flowers in the desert in every season, on the long, thready vines that crept along the surface of the ground. They were miniature flowers, almost invisible unless they were sought, but they were flowers, and I knew that Xochiquétzal was there.

“The legends tell that seven different tribes—among them your Aztéca—departed long ago from that Aztlan, The Place of Snowy Egrets, in search of a more pleasant place to live. The tribes were all related, they spoke the same language and recognized the same gods and observed the same customs, and for a long while that mixed company traveled amicably. But, as you might expect, among so many persons on such a long journey, there arose frictions and dissensions. Along the way, various of them dropped out of the march—families, whole calpúli clans, even entire tribes. Some quarreled and left, some stopped from sheer fatigue, some took a liking to a place in which they found themselves and decided to go no farther. It is impossible now to say which of them went where. Over the sheaves of years since then, those truant tribes themselves have often fragmented and moved apart. It is known that your Aztéca continued all the way to wherever your Tenochtítlan now stands, and perhaps others also traveled that far. But we were not among them, we who are now the Chichiméca. That is why I say this. When your Aztéca crossed the desert lands, they left no stores for future use, they left no trace, they left nothing behind them but us.”

Just in recent years, for example, it has added such words as cahuáyo for horse, Crixtanóyotl for Christianity, Caxtiltéca for Castilians and Spaniards in general, pitzóme for pigs….

Canaútli went on, “Those were the first of our people to be evilly influenced by the stranger, and they began to change. The stranger said, ‘Worship Huitzilopóchtli,’ and they did. The stranger said, ‘Give blood to feed Huitzilopóchtli,’ and they did. According to our Rememberers, those were the first human sacrifices ever made by any people who were not outright savages. They held their ceremonies secretly, in the seven great caves in the mountains, and they took care to spill only the blood of expendable orphans and old people. The stranger said, ‘Huitzilopóchtli is the god of war. Let him lead you to conquer richer lands.’ And more and more of our people listened and heeded, and they offered up more and more sacrifices. The stranger urged, ‘Nourish Huitzilopóchtli, make him stronger yet, and he will win for you a life better than you could ever have dreamed.’ And the misbelievers grew more numerous, more dissatisfied with their old ways of life, more ready and avid for bloodshed….”

“The Yaki woman had run away from her people to escape that fate reserved for women. I repeat, it is only conjecture, but our Rememberers have always supposed that the woman burned with a desire to see men suffer the same way. Any men. Her hatred of them was indiscriminate. And she found her opportunity here. Our own beliefs may have given her the idea, for do not forget: Huitzilopóchtli had slain and dismembered Coyolxaúqui with no more remorse than a Yaki would have shown. So that woman, by pretending to admire and exalt Huitzilopóchtli, hoped to set our men fighting against each other, killing and spilling each other’s blood and entrails, as hers might have been spilled.”

The word Chichiméca did not necessarily mean “barbarians,” though that is what they are. The word could as well mean “red people,” the whole race of mankind to which I and every other human belonged. We Mexíca might boast of our accumulated years and layers of civilization and culture, but we were not otherwise superior to those barbarians. The Chichiméca were indisputably cousins of ours. And we too—we proud and haughty Mexíca—we too had once been drinkers of our own urine, eaters of our own excrement.

“Because they stink!“ said Ah Tutál, triumphantly and disgustedly at the same time. “Their bodies smell of old odors and sweats and rancid breath and encrusted dirt. If that were not bad enough, they seem content to empty their bladders and bowels out the back window of their rooms, and content to let that ordure pile up out there, and content to live with the appalling stench of it. The two seem as unacquainted with cleanliness as they are unacquainted with freedom and with the good foods we provide.”

“One Reed would also, of course, have been the designation of the succeeding year in which Quetzalcóatl attained his sheaf of fifty and two years. And, again according to legend, it was in that year One Reed that his enemy the god Tezcatlipóca tricked him into becoming drunk, so that without intent he sinned abominably.” And another said, “The great sin he committed, while inebriated, was to couple with his own daughter. When he awoke beside her in the morning, his remorse made him abdicate his throne and go away alone upon his raft, beyond the eastern sea.”

And another said, “But even as he went away, he vowed to return. You see, my lord? The Feathered Serpent was born in the year One Reed, and he vanished in the next year known as One Reed. Admittedly, that is only a legend, and other legends about Quetzalcóatl cite different dates, and all of them were countless sheaves of years ago. But, since this is another One Reed year, might it not be likely to wonder …?”

Among many other things, the priest explained that Our Lady was not exactly a goddess, that she was a female human being called Virgin Mary who had somehow remained a virgin even while copulating with the Holy Spirit of the Lord God, who was a god, and that thereby she had given birth to the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God thus enabled to walk the world in human form. Well, none of that was too hard to comprehend. Our own religion contained many gods who had coupled with human women, and many goddesses who had been exceedingly promiscuous with both gods and men—and prolific of godling children—while somehow retaining unsmirched their reputation and appellation of Virgin.

During the affray at Cholólan, while the Texcaltéca were indiscriminately butchering the mass of the city’s inhabitants, the Spaniards had gone looking specifically for the females with whom they had disported themselves during their fourteen days of revel, and they found most of those women and girls still in their quarters, trembling with fear. Convinced that the females had coupled with them only to sap their strength, the Spaniards exacted a unique revenge. They seized the women and girls, stripped them naked, and used some of them a last time or two. Then, though the females screamed and pleaded, the soldiers held them down and, with their sharp steel knives, they cut away from each female’s crotch a hand-sized flap of skin containing the oval opening of her tipíli. They left the mutilated and sexless women to bleed to death, and went away. They took the warm, purselike pouches of skin and stretched the lips of them around the pommels of their horses’ saddles. When the flesh had dried but was still pliable, they slipped the resultant circlets over their helmets, each with its little xacapíli pearl facing front—that is, the shriveled, beanlike gristle that had been a tender xacapíli. I do not know whether the soldiers wore those trophies as a grisly joke or as a warning to other scheming females.

“It is something I have been deploring for years,” I said, with inebriated gravity. “Always the wrong people die—the good, the useful, the worthy, the innocent. But the wicked ones—and, even more lamentably, the totally useless and worthless and dispensable ones—they all go on cluttering our world, long beyond the life span they deserve. Of course, it requires no wise man to make that observation. I might as well grumble because Tlaloc’s hailstorms destroy the nourishing maize but never a disagreeable thornbush.”

“Tlácotzin,” said Cuautémoc, as gently as a good teacher addressing a backward student. “There was another time—long ago—when the Mexíca stood alone, in this very place, unwanted and detested by all other peoples. They had only weeds to eat, only the brackish lake water to drink. In those dismally hopeless circumstances, they might well have knelt to their surrounding enemies, to be scattered or absorbed, to be forgotten by history. But they did not. They stood, and they stayed, and they built all this.” He gestured with his hand to encompass the whole splendor of Tenochtítlan. “Whatever the end is to be, history cannot forget them now. The Mexíca stood. The Mexíca stand. The Mexíca will stand until they can stand no longer.”

In time, we resorted to catching rats and mice and lizards. Our children, those few who had survived the small pocks, got quite adept at snaring almost every bird foolhardy enough to perch on the island. Still later, we cut the flowers of our roof gardens and stripped the leaves from the trees and made cooked greens of them. Toward the end, we were searching those gardens for edible insects, and peeling the bark from the trees, and we were chewing rabbit-fur blankets and hide garments and the fawnskin pages of books for whatever meat value might be extracted from them. Some people, trying to trick their bellies into thinking they had been fed, filled them by eating the lime cement from the rubble of broken buildings.

They found us not cowering. Indeed, what they did find made the front ranks of white men stop so suddenly that the following ranks rather untidily piled up behind them. For we had posted, at each place where the invaders could arrive upon the island, one of the fattest men among us—well, at least plump, compared to the rest of us—and the Spaniards found him simply strolling there, contentedly belching while he munched on a haunch of dog or rabbit or some such meat. If the soldiers had seen it close, the meat was in reality an awful green from having been so long hoarded just for that gesture of ostentation. But they did not see it close. The fat man quickly vanished, while a host of much leaner men suddenly stood up from the broken buildings and wreckage all about, hurling javelins. Though many of the marauders were felled in that moment, some pressed forward, only to meet other warriors armed with maquáhuime, and others quailed backward, where they were showered with arrows. All of them who survived that surprising and firm defense retreated even farther, all the way back to the mainland. I am sure they reported the apparition of the well-fed and still-feeding man—and I am sure Cortés laughed at that pathetic bit of bravado on our part—but they also reported, quite matter-of-factly, that the rubble of the city provided even better defensive positions for its occupants than the city would have done, had it been left entire.

Thus it was the mediocrities and dregs of society who, having no inborn pride to discard, freed themselves of the drudge work and got themselves put in charge of the drudges—who in an earlier day had been their superiors, their leaders, even their owners. Those upstart “imitation whites,” as others of us called them, eventually were given posts in the increasingly complex government of the city, and were made the chiefs of outlying towns, even of several negligible provinces. It might have been regarded as praiseworthy: that a nobody could uplift himself to eminence; except that I cannot recall a single one who utilized his eminence for the good of anyone but himself.

Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent.