Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary - Страница 3

Said one informant, "It must be their gods—that white woman and child, may they be damned to Mictlan—who do the slaughtering. They inflict whole populations with diseases that kill everyone but the white men."

"And horrible diseases they are," said another passerby. "I hear that a person's skin turns to ghastly boils and pustules, and he suffers untold agonies for a long time before death mercifully releases him."

"Hordes of our people are dying of that blight," said yet another. "But the white men seem impervious. It has to be an evil enchantment laid by their white goddess and godling."

We heard also that every surviving and able-bodied man, woman and child in and around Tenochtitlan was put to slave labor, using what material was salvageable from the ruins, to rebuild that city. But now, by order of the conquerors, it was to be known as the City of Mexico. It was still the capital of what had been The One World, but that, by order of the conquerors, was henceforth to be called New Spain. And, so said the rumors, the new city in no way resembled the old; the buildings were of complex designs and ornamentation that the Caxtilteca must have remembered from their Old Spain, wherever that was.

When eventually we of Aztlan got word that the white men were fighting to subjugate the territories of the Otomi and Purempecha peoples, we fully expected soon to see those marauders arriving on our own doorstep, so to speak, because the northern limit of the Purempecha's land called Michihuacan is no more than ninety one-long-runs from Aztlan. However, the Purempecha put up a fierce and unflagging resistance that kept the invaders embroiled there in Michihuacan for years. Meanwhile, the Otomi people simply melted away before the attackers and let them have that country, for what it was worth. And it was not worth much to anybody, including the rapacious Caxtilteca, because it was and is nothing but what we call the Dead-Bone Lands—arid, bleak, inhospitable desert, as is also all the country north of Michihuacan.

So the white men finally were satisfied to cease their advance at the southern edge of that unlovely desert (what they called the Great Bald Spot). In other words, they established the northern border of their New Spain along a line stretching approximately from Lake Chapalan in the west to the shore of the Eastern Sea, and thus it has remained to this day. Where the southern border of New Spain was finally established, I have no idea. I do know that detachments of the Caxtilteca conquered and settled in the once-Maya territories of Uluumil Kutz and Quautemalan and still farther south, in the blazing, steaming Hot Lands. The Mexica had formerly traded with those lands, but, even at the height of their power, had had no craving to acquire or inhabit them.

During the eventful years that I have sketchily chronicled here, there also occurred the more expectable and less epochal events of my own youth. The day I became seven years old, I was taken before Aztlan's wizened old tonalpoqui, the name-giver, so he could consult his tonalmatl book of names (and ponder all the good and bad omens attendant on the time of my birth), to fix on me the appellation I would wear forever after. My first name, of course, had to be merely that of the day I came into the world: Chicuace-Xochitl, Six-Flower. For my second name, the old seer chose—as having "good portents," he said—Teotl-Tenamaxtli, "Girded Strong As Stone."

Simultaneous with my becoming Tenamaxtli, I commenced my schooling in Aztlan's two telpochcaltin, The House of Building Strength and The House of Learning Manners. When I turned thirteen and donned the loincloth of manhood, I graduated from those lower schools and attended only the city's calmecac, where teacher-priests imported from Tenochtitlan taught the art of word-knowing and many other subjects—history, doctoring, geography, poetry—almost any kind of knowledge a pupil might wish to possess.

"It is also time," said my Uncle Mixtzin, on that thirteenth birthday of mine, "for you to celebrate another sort of graduation. Come with me, Tenamaxtli."

He escorted me through the streets to Aztlan's finest anyanicati and, from the numerous females resident there, picked out the most attractive—a girl almost as young and almost as beautiful as his own daughter Ameyatl—and told her: "This young man is today a man. I would have you teach him all that a man should know about the act of ahuilnema. Devote the entire night to his education."

The girl smiled and said she would, and she did. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed her attentions and the night's activities, and I was duly grateful to my generous uncle. But I also must confess that, unknown to him, I already had been foretasting such pleasures for some months before I merited the manly loincloth.

Anyway, during those years and subsequent years, Aztlan never was visited by even a roving patrol of the Caxtilteca forces, nor were any of the nearer communities with which we Azteca traded. Of course, all the lands north of New Spain had always been sparsely populated in comparison to the midlands. It would not have surprised me if, to the north of our lands, there were hermit tribes who had not yet even heard that The One World had been invaded, or that there existed such things as white-skinned men.

Aztlan and those other communities naturally felt relief at being left unmolested by the conquerors, but we also found that our safety-in-isolation entailed some disadvantages. Since we and our neighbors did not want to attract the attention of the Caxtilteca, we sent none of our pochteca traveling merchants or even swift-messengers venturing across the border of New Spain. This meant that we voluntarily cut ourselves off from all commerce with the communities south of that line. Those had formerly been the best markets in which to sell our homegrown and homemade products—coconut milk and sweets and liquor and soap, pearls, sponges—and from them we had procured items unavailable in our lands—every sort of commodity from cacao beans to cotton, even the obsidian needed for our tools and weapons. So the headmen of various towns roundabout us—Yakoreke, Tepiz, Tecuexe and others—began sending discreet scouting parties southward. These went in groups of three, one of them always a woman, and they went unarmed and unarmored, wearing simple country clothes, seeming to be simple country people trudging to some innocuous family gathering somewhere. They carried nothing to make any Caxtilteca border guards suspicious or predaceous; usually nothing but a leather bag of water and another of pinoli for traveling provisions.

The scouts went forth with understandable apprehension, not knowing what dangers they might encounter on the way. But they went with curiosity, too, their mission being to report back to their headmen on what they saw of life in the midlands, in the towns and cities, and especially in the City of Mexico, now that all was ruled by the white men. On those reports would depend our peoples' decision: whether to approach and ally ourselves with the conquerors, in hope of a resumption of normal trade and social intercourse; or to remain remote and unnoticed and independent, even if poorer for that; or to concentrate on building strong forces and impregnable defenses and an armory of weapons, to fight for our lands when and if the Caxtilteca did come.

Well, in time, almost all the scouts returned, at intervals, intact and unscathed by any misadventures either going or coming. Only one or two parties had even seen a border sentry and, except for the scouts having been awestruck by their first sight of a white man in the flesh, they had nothing to report about their crossing of the border. Those guards had ignored them as if they were no more than desert lizards seeking a new feeding ground. And throughout New Spain, in the countryside, in villages and towns and cities, including the City of Mexico, they had not seen—or heard from any of the local inhabitants—any evidence that the new overlords were any more strict or severe than the Mexica rulers had been.