Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 13

"Tenochtitlan, Cem-Anahiuac Tlali Yoloco," murmured my father. "It is truly The Heart and Center of the One World." I had been so transfixed with enchantment that I had not noticed him join me at the forward edge of our freighter. "Look long, son Mixtli. You may experience this wonder and many other wonders more than once. But, of first times, there is always and forever only one."

Without blinking or moving my eyes from the splendor we were all too slowly approaching, I lay prone on a fiber mat and stared and stared until, I am ashamed to say, my eyelids closed of themselves and I fell asleep. I have no recollection of what must have been considerable noise and bustle and commotion when we landed, nor of my father's carrying me to a nearby inn for boatmen, where we stayed the night.

I awoke on a pallet on the floor of an unremarkable room, where my father and a few other men lay still snoring on pallets of their own. Realizing that we were in an inn, and where that inn was, I leapt to lean out the window opening—and for a moment felt dizzy at seeing my altitude above the stone pavement below. It was the first time I had ever been inside a building atop a building. Or that is what I thought it was, until my father later showed me, from the outside, that our room was on the upper floor of the inn.

I lifted my eyes to the city beyond the dockside area. It shone, it pulsated, it glowed white in the early sunlight. It made me proud of my own home island, because what buildings were not constructed of white limestone were plastered white with gesso, and I knew that most of the material had come from Xaltocan. Of course the buildings were frescoed and inlaid with bands and panels of vividly colored paints and mosaics, but the dominant effect was of a city so white, so nearly silver, that it almost hurt my eyes.

The lights of the night before were all extinguished now. Only a still-smoldering temple fire somewhere sent a trail of smoke into the sky. But now I saw a new marvel: from the top of every roof, every temple, every palace in the city, from every highest eminence projected a flagpole, and from every staff flew a banner. They were not squared or triangular like battle ensigns; they were pennants many times longer than they were broad. And they were all white, except for the colored insignia they bore. Some of those I recognized—that of the city itself, of the Revered Speaker Axayacatl, of some gods—but others were unfamiliar to me: the symbols of local nobles and special city gods, I supposed.

The flags of your white men are always swatches of cloth, often impressive in their elaborate blazonings, but still mere rags which either hang limp on their staffs or flutter and snap peevishly like a country woman's washing hung to dry on cactus spines. By contrast, those incredibly long banners of Tenochtitlan were woven of feathers—feathers from which the quills had been removed and only the lightest down used for the weaving. They were not painted or dyed. The flags were intricately woven of the feathers' natural colors: egret feathers for the white grounds of the flags, and for the designs the various reds of macaws and cardinals and parakeets, the various blues of jays and herons, the yellows of toucans and tanagers. Ayyo, I tell you true, I kiss the earth, there were all the colors and iridescences that can come only from living nature, not from man-mixed paint pots.

But most marvelous, those banners did not sag or flap, they floated. There was no wind that morning. Just the movement of people on the streets, and acaltin in the canals stirred enough air current to support those tremendous but almost weightless pennants. Like great birds unwilling to fly away, content to drift dreamily, the banners hung full-spread on the air. The thousands of feather banners undulated gently, soundlessly, magically, over all the towers and pinnacles of that magic island-city.

By daring to lean perilously far out the window opening, I could see, away to the southeast, the two volcano peaks called Popocatepetl and Ixtacciuatl, The Incense-Burning Mountain and The White Woman. Though it was the start of the dry season and the days were warm, both the mountains were capped with white—the first snow I had ever seen—and the smoldering incense deep inside Popocatepetl wafted a blue plume of smoke that floated over him as lazily as the feather banners floated over Tenochtitlan. I hurried from the window to wake my father. He must have been weary and wanting sleep, but he arose without complaint, with a smile of understanding at my eagerness to be out and away.

The unloading and delivery of our barge's cargo being the responsibility of its freightmaster, my father and I had the day to ourselves. He had one errand—to make some purchase my mother had ordered; I forget what—so we first wended our way northward into Tlaltelolco.

As you know, reverend friars, that portion of the island—what you now call Santiago—is separated from this southern part only by a broad canal crossed by several bridges. But Tlaltelolco was for many years an independent city, with its own ruler, and it brashly kept trying to outdo Tenochtitlan as chief city of the Mexica. Tlaltelolco's delusions of superiority were for a long time humorously tolerated by our Revered Speakers. But when that city's late ruler Moquihuix had the effrontery to build a temple pyramid higher than any in the four quarters of Tenochtitlan, the Uey-Tlatoani Axayacatl was justifiably annoyed. He ordered his sorcerers to harass that now intolerable neighbor.

If the stories are true, a carved stone face on one wall of Moquihuix's throne room suddenly spoke to him. The remark was so insulting to his manhood that Moquihuix snatched up a war club and pulverized the carving. Then, when he went to bed with his First Lady, the lips of her tipili parts also spoke to him, impugning his virility. Those occurrences, besides making Moquihuix impotent even with his concubines, much affrighted him, but still he would not cede allegiance to the Revered Speaker. So, earlier in that same year in which I made my naming-day visit, Axayacatl had taken Tlaltelolco by force of arms. He himself, Axayacatl, personally threw Moquihuix off the top of his upstart pyramid and dashed out his brains. And, just those few months later, by the time my father and I saw Tlaltelolco—though it was still a fine city of temples and palaces and pyramids—it was satisfied to be the fifth "quarter" of Tenochtitlan, the city's marketplace appendage.

Its immense open market area seemed to me to be as big as our whole island of Xaltocan, and richer, and more full of people, and far noisier. Walkway aisles separated the area into squares where the merchants laid out their wares on benches or groundcloths, and every square or a square of squares was allotted to a different kind of merchandise. There were sections for goldsmiths and silversmiths, for feather workers, for sellers of vegetables and condiments, of meat and live animals, of cloth and leather goods, of slaves and dogs, of pottery and copperware, of medicines and cosmetics, of rope and cord and thread, of raucous birds and monkeys and other pets. Ah, well, that market has been restored, and you have doubtless seen it. Though my father and I got there early in the morning, the place was already thronged with customers. Most were macehualtin like us, but there were lords and ladies too, imperiously pointing at the wares they wanted and leaving the haggling of price to their accompanying servants.

We were fortunate in arriving early, or at least I was, for there was one stall in the market which sold a commodity so perishable that it would be gone before midmorning, the most distinctive delicacy among all the foods for sale. It was snow. It was brought the ten one-long-runs from the crest of Ixtacciuatl, by relays of swift-messengers racing through the cool of the night, and the merchant kept it in thick clay jars under heaps of fiber mats. One serving of it cost twenty cacao beans. That was an entire day's wage for the average workman anywhere in the Mexica nation. For four hundred beans you could buy a passably strong and healthy slave for life. So snow was more expensive, by weight, than anything else in the Tlaltelolco market, even the most costly jewelry of the goldsmiths' stalls. Few but the nobles could afford a taste of that rare refreshment. Nevertheless, said the snow man, he always sold out his morning's supply before it melted.