of the mind-stunning splendor I would see on later visits. The Snake Wall had not yet been built to enclose the area. The Revered Speaker Axayacatl was still living in the palace of his late father Motecuzoma, while a new one was being built for him diagonally across the plaza. The new Great Pyramid, begun by that First Motecuzoma, was still unfinished. Its sloping stone walls and serpent-banistered staircases ended well above our heads, and from inside could be seen poking the top of the earlier, smaller pyramid that was being thus enclosed and enlarged.
But the plaza was already awesome enough to a country boy like me. My father told me that he had once crossed it in a straight line and paced it off, placing foot before foot, and that it measured almost exactly six hundred of his feet. That whole immense space—some six hundred man's-feet from north to south and from east to west—was paved with marble, a stone whiter even than Xaltocan's limestone, and it was polished as smooth and shiny as a tezcatl mirror. Many people there that day, if their sandals were soled with one of the more slippery kinds of leather, had to take them off and walk barefoot.
The city's three broadest avenues, each wide enough for twenty men to walk abreast, began there at the plaza and led out of it, north, west, and south, to become the three equally wide causeways going all the way to the mainland. The plaza itself was not then so full of temples and altars and monuments as it would be in later years. But there were already modest teocaltin containing statues of the chief gods. There was already the elaborate rack on which were displayed the skulls of the more distinguished xochimique who had been sacrificed to one or another of those gods. There was the Revered Speaker's private ball court in which were played special ritual games of tlachtli.
There was also The House of Song, which contained comfortable quarters and practice studios for those foremost musicians, singers, and dancers who performed at religious festivals in the plaza. The House of Song was not, like all the other edifices on the plaza, entirely obliterated with the rest of the city. It was restored and is now, until your cathedral Church of San Francisco shall be completed, your Lord Bishop's temporary diocesan headquarters and residence. It is in one of the rooms of that House of Song that we now sit, my lord scribes.
My father correctly supposed that a seven-year-old would hardly be enraptured by religious or architectural landmarks, so he took me to the sprawling building at the southeast corner of the plaza. That housed the Uey- Tlatoani's collection of wild animals and birds, and it too was not yet so extensive as it would be in later years. It had been begun by the late Motecuzoma, whose notion was to put on public display a specimen of the land and air creatures to be found in all the parts of all these lands. The building was divided into countless rooms—some mere cubicles, some large chambers—and troughs from a nearby canal kept a continuous flow of water flushing out the rooms' waste matter. Each room opened onto the viewers' passageway, but was separated from it by netting or in some cases stout wooden bars. There was an individual room for each creature, or for those several kinds of creatures that could live together amicably.
'Do they always make so much noise?' I shouted to my father, over the roaring and howling and screeching.
'I do not know,' he said. 'But right now some of them are hungry, because they have deliberately not been fed for some time. There will be sacrifices at the ceremony, and the remains will be disposed of here, as meat for the jaguar and cuguar cats, and the coyotin wolves and the tzopilotin vultures.'
I was eyeing the largest animal native to our lands—the ugly and bulky and sluggish tapir; it waggled its prehensile snout at me—when a familiar voice said, 'Master quarrier, why do you not show the boy the tequani hall?'
It was the bent brown man we had earlier met in the street. My father gave him an exasperated look and demanded, 'Are you following us, old nuisance?'
The man shrugged. 'I merely drag my ancient bones here to see the Sun Stone dedication.' Then he gestured to a closed door at the far end of the passage and said to me, 'In there, my boy, are sights indeed. Human animals far more interesting than these mere brutes. A tlacaztali woman, for instance. Do you know what a tlacaztali is? A person dead white all over, skin and hair and all, except for her eyes, which are pink. And there is a dwarf with only half a head, who eats—'
'Hush!' my father said sternly. 'This is a day for the boy to enjoy. I will not sicken him with the sight of those pitiful freaks.'
'Ah, well,' said the old man. 'Some do enjoy viewing the deformed and the mutilated.' His eyes glittered at me. 'But they will still be there, young Mixtli, when you are grown mature and superior enough to mock and tease them. I daresay there will be even more curiosities in the tequani hall by then, no doubt even more entertaining and edifying to you.'
'Will you be silent?' bellowed my father.
'Pardon, my lord,' said the hunched old man, hunching himself even smaller. 'Let me make amends for my impertinence. It is almost midday and the ceremony will soon begin. If we go now and get good places, perhaps I can explain to you and the boy some things you might not otherwise understand.'
The plaza was now full to overflowing, and the people were shoulder to shoulder. We would never have got anywhere close to the Sun Stone, except that more and more nobles were now haughtily arriving at the last moment, borne in gilded and upholstered litter chairs. The crowds of commoners and lower classes parted without a murmur to let them through, and the brown man audaciously eeled along behind them, with us behind him, until we were almost as far forward as the front ranks of real notables. I would still have been hemmed in without a view, but my father hoisted me to one shoulder. He looked down at our guide and said, 'I can lift you up too, old man.'
'I thank you for your thoughtfulness, my lord,' said that one, half smiling, 'but I am heavier than I look.'
The focus of all eyes was the Sun Stone, set for the occasion on a terrace between the two broad staircases of the unfinished Great Pyramid. But it was shrouded from our sight with a mantle of shining white cotton. So I occupied myself with admiring the arriving nobles, for their litter chairs and their costumes were something to behold. The men and women alike wore mantles entirely woven of feathers, some varicolored, some of just one coruscating hue. The ladies' hair was tinted purple, as was customary on such a day, and they held their hands high to display the bangled and festooned rings on their fingers. But the lords wore many more ornaments than their ladies. All had diadems or tassels of gold and rich feathers on their heads. Some wore gold medallions on neck chains, gold bracelets and armlets and anklets. Others wore ornate plugs of gold or jewels piercing earlobes or nostrils or lower lips, or all of those.
'Here comes the High Treasurer,' said our guide. 'Ciuacoatl, the Snake Woman, second in command to the Revered Speaker himself.'
I looked, eager to see a snake woman, which I assume must be a creature like those 'human animals' which I had not been allowed to look at. But it was just another pili, and a man at that, distinguished only for being even more gorgeously attired than most of the other nobles. The labret he wore was so heavy that it dragged his lower lip down in a pout. But it was a cunning labret: a miniature serpent of gold, so fashioned that it wriggled and flickered its tiny tongue in and out as the Lord Treasurer bobbed along in his chair.
Our guide laughed at me; he had seen my disappointment. 'The Snake Woman is merely a title, boy, not a description,' he said. 'Every High Treasurer has always been called Ciuacoatl, though probably none of them could tell you why. My own theory is that it is because both snakes and women coil tight around any treasures they may hold.'
Then the crowd in the plaza, which had been murmurous, quieted all at once; the Uey-Tlatoani himself had appeared. He had somehow arrived unseen or had been hidden somewhere beforehand, for now he suddenly stood beside the veiled Sun Stone. Axayacatl's visage was obscured by labret, nose plug, and ear plugs, and shadowed by the sunburst crown of scarlet macaw plumes that arched completely over his head from shoulder to shoulder. Not much of the rest of his body was visible either. His mantle of gold and green parrot feathers fell all the way to his feet. His chest bore a large and intricately worked medallion, his loincloth was of rich red leather, on his feet he wore sandals apparently of solid gold, laced as high as his knees with gilded straps.
By custom, all of us in the plaza should have greeted him with the tlalqualiztli: the gesture of kneeling, touching a finger to the earth and then to our lips. But there was simply no room for that; the crowd made a sort of loud sizzle of combined kissing sounds. The Revered Speaker Axayacatl returned the greeting silently, nodding the spectacular scarlet feather crown and raising aloft his mahogany and gold staff of office.
He was surrounded by a hoard of priests who, with their filthy black garments, their dirt-encrusted black faces, and their blood-matted long hair, made a somber contrast to Axayacatl's sartorial flamboyance. The Revered Speaker explained to us the significance of the Sun Stone, while the priests chanted prayers and invocations every
