Aztec (Aztec, #1)

by Gary Jennings

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.