Aztec Autumn Read online

  Uncle Mixtzin had learned, beginning back when he was just a village tlatocapíli, and he went on learning all his life long. His education in literacy was begun under the instruction of that long-ago Mexícatl visitor, the other Mixtli. Then, during my uncle’s return journey from Tenochtítlan, with all those other Mexíca in his train, at every night’s camp he would sit down with a teacher-priest for further instruction. And, from their first arrival in Aztlan, he had kept by him that same priest for his private tutoring. So, by the time I started my schooling, he was already able to send wordpicture reports to Motecuzóma regarding Aztlan’s progress. And more: he even entertained himself by writing poems—the kind of poems that we who knew him would have expected him to write—cynical musings on the imperfectibility of human beings, the world and life in general. He used to read them to us, and I remember one in particular:

  Forgive?

  Never forgive,

  But pretend to forgive.

  Say amiably that you forgive.

  Convince that you have forgiven.

  Thus, devastating is the effect

  When at last you lunge

  And reach for the throat.

  Even in the lower schools, we students were taught a bit of the history of The One World, and young though I was, I could not help noticing that some of the things we were told were considerably at variance with a few tales that my greatgrandfather, Aztlan’s Rememberer of History, had occasionally confided to our family circle. For example, from what the Mexícatl teacher-priest taught, one might suppose that the whole nation of Mexíca people had simply sprung up one day from the earth of the island of Tenochtítlan, all of them full-grown, in full strength and vigor, fully educated, civilized, and cultured. That did not accord with what I and my cousins had heard from old Canaútli, so Yeyac, Améyatl, and I went to him and asked for elucidation.

  He laughed and said tolerantly, “Ayya, the Mexíca are a boastful people. Some of them do not hesitate to contort any uncomfortable facts to fit their haughty image of themselves.”

  I said, “When Uncle Mixtzin brought them here, he spoke of them as ‘our cousins,’ and mentioned some kind of iong-forgotten family connection.’ ”

  “I imagine,” said the Rememberer, “that most of the Mexíca would have preferred not to hear of that connection. But it was one fact that could not be avoided or obscured, not after your—not after that other Mixtli stumbled upon this place and then took the word of our existence back to Motecuzóma. You see, that other Mixtli asked me, as you three have just done, for the true history of the Aztéca and their relation to the Mexíca, and he believed what I told him.”

  “We will believe you, too,” said Yeyac. “Tell us.”

  “On one condition,” he said. “Do not use what you learn from me to correct or contradict your teacher-priest. The Mexíca are nowadays being very good to us. It would be wicked of you children to impugn whatever silly but harmless delusions it pleases them to harbor.”

  Each of us three said, “I will not. I promise.”

  “Know then, young Yeyac-Chichiquili, young PatzcatlAméyatl, young Téotl-Tenamáxtli. In a time long ago, long sheaves of years ago—but a time known and recounted ever since, from each Rememberer to his successor—Aztlan was not just a small seaside city. It was the capital of a territory stretching well up into the mountains. We lived simply—the folk of today would say we lived primitively—but we fared well enough, and seldom suffered the least hardship. That was thanks to our moon goddess Coyolxaúqui, who saw to it that the dark sea’s tides and the mountains’ dark fastnesses provided bountifully for us.”

  Améyatl said, “And you once told us that we Aztéca worshiped no other gods.”

  “Not even those others as beneficent as Coyolxaúqui. Tlaloc, to name one, the rain god. For look about you, girl.” He laughed again. “What need had we to pray that Tlaloc give us water? No, we were quite content with things as they were. That does not mean we were hapless weaklings. Ayyo, we would fiercely defend our borders when some envious other nation might try to encroach. But otherwise we were a peaceable people. Even when we made sacrificial offerings to Coyolxaúqui, we never chose a maiden to slay, or even a captured enemy. On her altar we offered only small creatures of the sea and of the night. Perhaps a strombus of perfectly shaped and unblemished shell… or one of the big-winged, soft-green moon moths…”

  He paused for a bit, apparently contemplating those good old days, long before even his great-grandfather was born. So I gently prompted him:

  “Until there came the woman … ”

  “Yes. A woman, of all things. And a woman of the Yaki, that most savage and vicious of all peoples. One of our hunting parties came upon her, wandering aimlessly, high in our mountains, alone, infinitely far from the Yaki desert lands. And those men fed and clothed her and brought her here to Aztlan. But, ayya ouíya, she was a bitter woman. When our ancestors thus befriended her, she repaid them by turning Aztéca friends against friends, families against families, brothers against brothers.”

  Yeyac asked, “Had she a name?”

  “An ugly-sounding Yaki name, yes, G’nda Ké. And, what she did—she began by deriding our simple ways and our reverence for the kindly goddess Coyolxaúqui. Why, she asked, did we not instead revere the war god, Huitzilopóchtli? He, she said, would lead us to victory in war, to conquer other nations, to take prisoners to sacrifice to the god, who would thus be persuaded to lead us to other conquests, until we ruled all of The One World.”

  “But why,” asked Améyatl, “would she have sought to foment such alien passions and warlike ambitions among our peaceable people? What profit to her?”

  “You will not be flattered to hear this, great-granddaughter. Most of the earlier Rememberers simply attributed it to the natural contrariness of all women.”

  Améyatl only wrinkled her pretty nose at him, so Canaútli grinned toothlessly and went on:

  “You should be glad to learn, then, that I hold a slightly different theory. It is a known fact that the Yaki men are as inhumanly cruel to their own women as they are to every non-Yaki human being alive. It is my belief that that one woman was obsessed with having every man treated as she must have been treated by those of her own nation. To set all the men of The One World to butchering one another in war, and bloodily sacrificing one another to the lip-smacking satisfaction of this or that god.”

  “As almost every community in The One World does now,” said Yeyac. “And as the Mexíca priests and warriors would teach us to do. Except that we are on good terms with all our neighbors. We would have to march far beyond the mountains to wage a battle or take a prisoner for sacrifice. Nevertheless, the despicable G’nda Ké did indeed succeed.”

  “Well, she very nearly did not,” said Canaútli. “She convinced hundreds of Aztlan’s people to emulate her in worshiping the bloody-handed god Huitzilopóchtli. But other hundreds sensibly refused to be converted. In time, she had split the Aztéca into two factions so inimical—as I said, even brothers against brothers—that she and her followers crept away to take up residence in seven caverns in the mountains. There they armed themselves, and practiced at the skills of war, and awaited the Yaki woman’s command to go forth and commence conquering other peoples.”

  “And surely,” said softhearted Améyatl, “the first to suffer would have been the still-peaceable dissidents of Aztlan.”

  “Most assuredly. However. However, by good fortune, Aztlan’s tlatocaíli of the time was about as irascible and fractious and intolerant of fools as is your own father Mixtzin. He and his loyal city guard went to the mountains and surrounded the misbelievers and slew many of them. And to the survivors he said, Take your contemptible new god and your families and begone. Or be slain to the last man, last woman, last child, last infant in the womb.’ ”

  “And they went,” I said.

  “They did. After sheaves of years of wandering, and new generations of them being born, they came at last to another island in another
lake, where they espied the symbol of their war god—an eagle perched on a nopáli cactus—so there they settled. They called the island Tenochtítlan, ‘Place of the Tenoch,’ which was, in some forgotten local dialect, the word for the nopáli cactus. And, for what reason I have never troubled to inquire, they renamed themselves the Mexíca. And in the course of many more years they thrived, they fought and overwhelmed their neighbors, and then nations farther afield.” Canaútli shrugged his bony old shoulders, resignedly. “Now, for good or ill, Tenamáxtli, through the efforts of your uncle and that other Mexícatl, also named Mixtli—we are reconciled again. We shall see what comes of it. And now I tire of remembering. Go, children, and leave me.”

  We started away, but I turned back to ask, “That Yaki woman—G’nda Ké—whatever became of her?”

  “When the tlatocapíli stormed the seven caves, she was among the first slain. But she was known to have coupled with several of her male followers. So there is no doubt that her blood still runs in the veins of many Mexíca families. Perhaps in all of them. That would account for their still being as warlike and sanguinary as she was.”

  I will never know why Canaútli refrained from telling me right then: that I myself very likely contained at least a drop of that Yaki woman’s blood, that I could certainly claim to be Aztlan’s foremost example of an Aztéca-Mexíca “family connection” since I had been bom of an Aztécatl mother and sired by that Mexícatl Mixtli. Maybe the old man hesitated because he deemed it his granddaughter’s place to disclose or withhold that family secret.

  And I really do not know, either, why she did withhold it. When I was a child, the population of Aztlan was so small and close-knit that my illegitimacy had to have been widely known. An ordinary woman of the macehudli class would have been severely censured and probably chastised if she had borne a bastard. But Cuicáni, being sister to the then tlatocapíli and later the Uey-Tecútli, hardly had to fear gossip and scandal. Still, she kept me in ignorance of my paternity until that horrific day in the City of Mexíco. I can only suspect that she must have hoped, during all the intervening years, that that other Mixtli would someday return to Aztlan, and to her embrace, and that he would rejoice in finding that the two of them had a son.

  To be honest, I do not even know why I never, in childhood or later, evinced any inquisitiveness about my parentage. Well, Yeyac and Améyatl had a father but no mother, I had a mother but no father. I must have reasoned that a situation so self-evident could only be normal and commonplace. Why ponder on it?

  My mother would occasionally make a motherly proud remark—“I can see, Tenamáxtli, that you will grow up to be a handsome man, strong of features, just like your father.” Or, “You are getting very tall for your age, my son. Well, so was your father much taller than most other men.” But I paid little heed to such comments; every mother fondly believes that her hatchling will prove an eagle.

  Of course, if anyone at all had ever voiced an insinuating hint, I would have been prodded to ask questions about that absent father. But I was the nephew and the son of the lord and the lady occupying Aztlan’s palace; no one with good sense would ever have risked Mixtzin’s displeasure. Neither was I ever taunted by playmates nor neighbor children. And, at home, Yeyac and Améyatl and I lived together in amity and harmony, more like half brothers and sister than like cousins. Or so we did, I should say, until a certain day.

  IV

  YEYAC WAS THEN fourteen years old and I was seven, newly named and newly attending school. We were living in the splendid new palace by then, each of us young ones glorying in having his or her own sleeping room, and being childishly jealous of our separate privacies. So I was vastly surprised when one day, about twilight, Yeyac stepped into my room, uninvited and without asking permission. It happened that he and I were alone in the building—except for any servants who may have been working in the kitchen or elsewhere downstairs—because our elders, Mixtzin and Cuicéni, had gone to the city’s central square to watch Améyatl participate in a public dance being performed by all the girls of The House of Learning Manners.

  What mainly surprised me was that Yeyac entered, quietly, while my back was turned to the room door, so I did not even know he was there until his hand reached under my mantle, between my legs, and—as if weighing them—gently bounced my tepuli and olóltin. As startled as if a clawclacking crab had got under my mantle, I gave a prodigious jump in the air. Then I whirled and stared at Yeyac, bewildered and disbelieving. My cousin had not only breached my privacy, he had handled my private parts.

  “Ayya, touchy, touchy!” he said, half smirking. “Still the little boy, eh?”

  I spluttered, “I was not aware… I did not hear…”

  “Do not look so indignant, cousin. I was but comparing.”

  “Doing what?” I said, mystified.

  “I daresay mine must have been as puny as yours when I was your age. How would you like, small cousin, to have what I have got now?”

  He raised his mantle, unloosed his máxtlatl loincloth, and there emerged—sprang forth, actually—a tepuli like none I had ever seen before. Not that I had seen many, only those in evidence when I and my playmates frolicked naked in the lake. Yeyac’s was much longer, thicker, erect, engorged and almost glowing red at its bulbous tip. Weil, his full name was Yeyac-Chichiqufli, I reminded myself—Long Arrow—so perhaps the name-bestowing old seer had been truly prescient in this case. But Yeyac’s tepuli looked so swollen and angry that I asked, sympathetically:

  “Is it sore?

  He laughed a loud laugh. “Only hungry,” he said. “This is the way a man’s is supposed to be, Tenamáxtli. The bigger, the better. Do not you wish you possessed the like?”

  “Well,” I said hesitantly, “I expect I will. When I am of age. like you.”

  “Ah, but you should start exercising it now, cousin, because it improves and enlarges, the more it is employed. That way, you can be sure to have an impressive organ when you are man-grown.”

  “Employ it how?”

  “I will show you,” he said. “Take mine in your grasp.” And he took my hand and put it there, but I yanked it back again, saying severely:

  “You have heard the priest warn that we should not play with those parts of ourselves. You are in the same cleanliness class as I at The Learning Manners House.”

  (Yeyac was one of those older boys who had had to start, along with us really young ones, at the most elementary school level. And now, though he had worn the máxtlatl for a year or more, he had not yet qualified to go on to a calmécac.)

  “Manners!” he snorted scornfully. “You really are an innocent The priests warn us against pleasuring ourselves, only because they hope that sometime we will pleasure them.”

  “Pleasure?” I said, more befuddled than ever.

  “Of course the tepuli is for pleasure, imbecile! Did you think it was only to make water with?”

  “That is all mine has ever done,” I said.

  Yeyac said impatiently, “I told you—I will show you how to have pleasure with it Watch. Take mine in your hand and do this to it.” He was briskly rubbing his own clasped hand up and down the length of his tepuli. Now he let go of it, hugged me to him and closed my hand on it—though mine only barely encircled the girth of it.

  I imitated, as well as I could, what he had been doing. He closed his eyes, and his face got almost as red as his tepuli bulb, and his breathing became quick and shallow. After a while of nothing else happening, I said, “This is very boring.

  “And you are very awkward,” he said, his voice quavery. “Tighter, boy! And faster! And do not interrupt my concentration.”

  After another while I said, “This is extremely boring. And how is my doing this supposed to benefit mine?”

  “Pochéoa!” he growled, which is a mildly dirty word. “All right. We will exercise them both at once.” He let me take my hand away, but with his own resumed the stroking of his tepuli. “Lie down here on your pallet. Lift up your mantle.”
r />   I complied, and he lay down beside me, but opposite—that is, with his head near my crotch and my head near his.

  “Now,” he said, still vigorously stroking himself. “Take mine in your mouth—like this.” And, to my amazement and incredulity, he did just that with my small thing. But I said vehemently:

  “I most certainly will not I know your japeries, Yeyac. You will make water in my mouth.”

  He made a noise like “arrgh!” in a rage of frustration, but without releasing my tepuli from his mouth, or breaking the rhythm of his hand stroking his own, close before my face. For a moment, I feared that he might be angry enough to bite my thing right off. But all he did was keep his lips tight about it, and suck at it and wiggle his tongue all over it. I confess that I felt sensations that were not at all unpleasant It even seemed that he might be right—that my small organ was actually lengthening under these ministrations. But it did not stiffen like his, it merely let itself be played with, and that did not go on for long enough for me to get bored again. Because suddenly Yeyac’s whole body convulsed, and he widened his mouth to gobble into it also my sac of olóltin, and sucked hard at all those parts of mine. Then his tepuli gushed a stream of white matter, liquid but thick, like coconut-milk syrup, that splashed all over my head.

  Now it was I who bellowed “arrgh!”—in disgust—and frantically wiped at the stickiness befouling my hair, eyebrows, lashes and cheeks. Yeyac rolled away from me and, when he could cease his gasping and catch his breath, said, “Ayya, do not go on behaving like a timid child. That is only omícetl. It is the spurting of the omícetl that gives such sublime pleasure. Also, omícetl is what creates babies.”

  “I do not want any babies!” I croaked, wiping even more desperately.

  “Fool of a cousin! The omícetl does that only to females. Exchanged between men it is an expression of—of deep affection and mutual passion.”