Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 79

"How do they come to be here?" I asked in a discreet murmur.

The man said, not troubling to lower his voice, "They come of their own accord, if they have been made grotesque by some accident. Or they are brought by their parents, if they were born freakish. If the tequani sells himself, the payment is given to his parents or to whomever he designates. And the Revered Speaker pays munificently. There are parents who literally pray to beget a freak, so they may become rich. The tequani himself, of course, has no use for riches, since he has here all necessary comforts for the rest of his life. But some of these, the most bizarre, cost riches aplenty. This dwarf, for instance."

The dwarf was asleep, and I was rather glad not to be seeing him awake, for he had only half a head. From the snaggle-toothed upper jaw to his collarbone, there was nothing—no lower mandible, no skin—nothing but an exposed white windpipe, red muscles, blood vessels and gullet, the latter opening behind his teeth and between his puffy little squirrel cheeks. He lay with that gruesome half head thrown back, breathing with a gurgling, whistling noise.

"He cannot chew or swallow," said my guide, "so his food must be poked down that upper end of his gullet. Since he has to bend his head far back to be fed, he cannot see what is given him, and many visitors here play cruel jokes on him. They may give him a prickly tonal fruit or a violent purgative or sometimes worse things. On many occasions he has nearly died, but he is so greedy and stupid that still he will throw his head back for anyone who makes an offering gesture."

I shuddered and went on to the next apartment. The tequani there seemed not to be asleep, for its one eye was open. Where the other eye should have been was a smooth plane of skin. The head was hairless and even neckless, its skin sloping directly into its narrow shoulders and thence into a spreading, cone-shaped torso which sat on its swollen base as solidly as a pyramid, for it had no legs. Its arms were normal enough, except that the fingers of both hands were fused together, like the flippers of a green turtle.

"This one is called the tapir woman," said the brown man, and I made a motion for him to speak more softly. "Oh, we need not mind our manners," he said. "She is probably sound asleep. The one eye is permanently overgrown and the other has lost its lids. Anyway, these tequantin soon get accustomed to being publicly discussed."

I had no intention of discussing that pitiable object. I could see why it was named for the prehensile-snouted tapir: its nose was a trunklike blob that hung pendulously to hide its mouth, if it had a mouth. But I should not have recognized it for a female, had I not been told. The head was not a woman's, nor even a human's. Any breasts were indistinguishable in the doughy rolls of flesh that composed its immovable pyramid of body. It stared back at me with its one never-closable eye.

"The jawless dwarf was born in his sad condition," said my guide. "But this one was a grown woman when she was mutilated in some sort of accident. It is supposed, from the lack of legs, that the accident involved some cutting instrument, and, from the look of the rest of her, that it also involved a fire. Flesh does not always burn in a fire, you know. Sometimes it merely softens, stretches, melts, so it can be shaped and molded like—"

My sick stomach heaved, and I said, "In the name of pity. Do not talk in front of it. In front of her."

"Her!" the man grunted, as if amused. "You are ever the gallant with women, are you not?" He pointed at me almost accusingly. "You have just come from the embrace of a beautiful her." He pointed at the tapir woman. "Now how would you like to couple with this other thing you describe as her?"

The very thought made my nausea uncontainable. I doubled over, and there in front of the monstrous living heap, I vomited up everything I had eaten and drunk that night. When I was finally empty and had recovered my breath, I threw an apologetic glance at that staring eye. Whether the eye was awake or merely watering, I do not know, but a single tear rolled down from it. My guide was gone, and I did not see him again, as I went back through the menagerie and let myself out.

But there was still another unpleasantness in store for me that night, which by then was early morning. When I reached the portal of Ahuitzotl's palace, the guard said, "Excuse me, Tequiua Mixtli, but the court physician has been awaiting your return. Will you please see him before you go to your room?"

The guard led me to the apartment of the palace doctor, where I knocked and found him awake and fully dressed. The guard saluted us both and went back to his post. The physician regarded me with an expression compounded of curiosity, pity, and professional unction. For a moment I thought he had waited up to prescribe a remedy for the queasiness I still felt. But he said, "The boy Cozcatl is your slave, is he not?"

I said he was, and asked if he had been taken ill.

"He has suffered an accident. Not a mortal one, I am happy to say, but not a trivial one either. When the plaza crowd began to disperse, he was noticed lying unconscious beside the Battle Stone. It may be that he stood too close to the duelists."

I had not given Cozcatl a thought since I had appointed him to keep watch for any sign of a lurking Chimali. I said, "He was cut, then, Lord Doctor?"

"Badly cut," he said, "and oddly cut." He kept his gaze on me as he picked up a stained cloth from a table, opened its folds, and held it out for me to see what it contained: an immature male member and its sac of ololtin, pale and limp and bloodless.

"Like an earlobe," I muttered.

"What?" said the physician.

"You say it is not a mortal wound?"

"Well, you or I might consider it so," the doctor said drily. "But the boy will not die of it, no. He lost an amount of blood, and it appears from bruises and other marks on his body that he was roughly handled, perhaps by the jostling mob. But he will live, and let us hope that he will not much mourn the loss of what he never had a chance to learn the value of. The cut was a clean one. It will heal over, in no more time than it takes him to recover from the loss of blood. I have arranged that the wound, in closing, will leave a necessary small aperture. He is in your apartment now, Tequiua Mixtli, and I took the liberty of placing him in your softer bed, rather than on his pallet."

I thanked the doctor and hurried upstairs. Cozcatl was lying on his back in the middle of my thickly quilted bed, the top quilt drawn over him. His face was flushed with a slight fever and his breathing was shallow. Very gently, not to wake him, I edged the covering down off him. He was naked except for the bandage between his legs, held in place by a swathing of tape around his hips. There were bruises on his shoulder where a hand had clutched him while the knife was wielded. But the doctor had mentioned "other marks," and I saw none—until Cozcatl, probably feeling the chill of the night air, murmured in his sleep and rolled over to expose his back.

"Your vigilance and loyalty will not go unrewarded," I had told the boy, little suspecting what that reward would be. The vengeful Chimali had indeed been in the crowd that day, but I had been almost all the time in such prominent places that he could make no sneak attack on me. So he had seen and recognized and assaulted my slave instead. But why injure such a small and comparatively valueless servant?

Then I recalled the curious expression on the doctor's face, and I realized that he had been thinking what Chimali must also have thought. Chimali had assumed that the boy was to me what Tlatli had been to him. He had struck at the child, not to deprive me of an expendable slave, but to mutilate my supposed cuilontli, in the way best calculated to shock me, to mock me.