TRIBUTE OF DEATH
a novel by
SIMON LEVACK
First published by Lulu.com 2007
Copyright © Simon Levack 2007. All rights reserved.
This Amazon Kind Edition copyright © Simon Levack 2011. All rights reserved.
Author’s website: www.simonlevack.com
This book is fiction. All characters and situations depicted herein are imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
For Sarah and Isaac, with love
Acknowledgement
This fourth of Yaotl’s adventures was the hardest to write. As ever, thanks are due to my agent, Jane Gregory and her team at Gregory & Co, for making sure I did not let the standard slip.
Rather belatedly I also want to thank my friends, the Forest Writers of Walthamstow, without whose support, encouragement and suggestions this book and its predecessors would have been quite different and not nearly so good.
And where would I be without my wife? Sarah can always be relied upon to tell me candidly exactly what is wrong with anything I write!
Certainly it is our mortality, we who are women, for it is our battle, for at this time our mother, Cihuacoatl, Quilaztli, exacteth the tribute of death.
The Florentine Codex, Book VI
I should rather carry a shield in battle three times, than give birth once.
Euripides, Medea
Author’s Note
Tribute of Death is the fourth novel featuring Cemiquiztli Yaotl and set in the Mexico of the early Sixteenth Century, in the final years before the coming of the Conquistadors. At this time the region was dominated by the people we call Aztecs, but whose name for themselves was Mexica. They had made their home in the central Mexican highlands, on the site of modern Mexico City, building an impregnable fortress-city on an island in the middle of a lake. They called the city Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and used it as a base to conquer and subdue most of their neighbours.
We tend to think of the Aztecs – when we think of them at all – in rather grand, dramatic terms. All too often, they are presented as builders of pyramids and temples, practitioners of grisly sacrificial rites and players in the final tragedy that saw their civilisation overturned and their magnificent island city devastated.
Of course, the Aztecs were all these things; but they were also men and women with food to prepare, children to bring up, errands to run, debts to pay and relatives to squabble with. Domestic concerns probably loomed larger in their minds than the great and terrible events that were unfolding around them: in that, of course, they were no different from us.
The story I have tried to tell in this book has less to do with the great and terrible events and more with the daily lives of ordinary Aztecs, and with one aspect, in particular, which was sharply at odds with anything we are familiar with: their view of childbirth. For in giving birth – in risking her life to bring forth a child – a mother was likened to a warrior, hazarding everything to seize and drag home an enemy captive on the battlefield. And just as a flowery death in war or on the sacrificial stone of an enemy’s temple transformed the soul of the warrior, so strange and terrifying things were thought to befall the woman who died in childbirth.
Much of the action in this story takes place in a calpolli, or parish, named Atlixco. Although there was a place called Atlixco, the precise geography of the one in my book is imaginary; I believe an Aztec would have recognised it as typical of his city, however.
A Note on Nahuatl
The Aztec language, Nahuatl, is easy to pronounce, but is burdened with spellings based on Sixteenth Century Castilian. This note should help:
c is pronounced as in 'cecil' before e or i but as in 'cat' or 'cot' before o or a.
ch and x are both pronounced like English 'sh'.
hu and uh are both pronounced like English 'w'.
qu is pronounced like English 'k' as in 'kettle' before e but like English 'qu' as in 'quack' before a.
tl is pronounced as in English but where it occurs at the end of a word the 'l' is hardly sounded.
I have used as few Nahuatl words as possible and favoured clarity at the expense of strict accuracy in choosing English equivalents. Hence, for example, I have rendered huey tlatoani as ‘emperor’, cihuacoatl as ‘chief minister’, calpolli as ‘parish’, octli as ‘sacred wine’ and maquahuitl as ‘sword’, and been similarly cavalier in choosing English replacements for most of the frequently recurring personal names. In referring to the Aztec emperor at the time when this story is set I have used the most familiar form of his name, Montezuma, although Motecuhzoma would be more accurate.
Finally I have called the people of Mexico-Tenochtitlan ‘Aztecs’, although their own name for themselves was Mexica, ‘Mexicans’.
The name of the principal character in the novel, Yaotl, is pronounced ‘YAH-ot’.
The Aztec Calendar
The Aztecs lived in a world governed by religion and magic, and their rituals and auguries were in turn ordered by the calendar.
The solar year, which began in our February, was divided into eighteen twenty-day periods (often called ‘months’). Each month had its own religious observances associated with it; often these involved sacrifices, some of them human, to one or more of the many Aztec gods. At the end of the year were five ‘useless days’ that were considered profoundly unlucky.
Parallel to this ran a divinatory calendar of 260 days divided into twenty groups of thirteen days (sometimes called ‘weeks’). The first day of each ‘week’ would bear the number 1 and one of twenty names – Reed, Jaguar, Eagle, Vulture and so on. The second day would bear the number 2 and the next name in the sequence. On the fourteenth day the number would revert to 1 but the sequence of names continued seamlessly, with
