Aztec

Mexica will prosper.'

From where I stood, the softly waving feather banners that lined the staircase of the Great Pyramid appeared to converge toward the top, like an arrow pointing to the high, distant, tiny figures of our new Revered Speaker and the aged priest who just then placed the jewel-encrusted red leather crown on his head. And at last the priest was finished and Motecuzoma spoke:

'Great and respected priest, your words might have been spoken by mighty Huitzilopochtli himself. Your words have given me much upon which to reflect. I pray that I may be worthy of the sage counsel you have dispensed. I thank you for the fervor and I cherish the love with which you have spoken. If I am to be the man my people would wish me to be, I must forever remember your words of wisdom, your warnings, your admonitions —'

To be ready to shatter the very clouds in the sky at the close of Motecuzoma's acceptance speech, the ranks of priests poised their conch trumpets, the musicians raised their drumsticks and readied their flutes.

And Motecuzoma said, 'I am proud to bring again to the throne the estimable name of my venerated grandfather. I am proud to be called Motecuzoma the Younger. And in honor of the nation which I am to lead—a nation even mightier than in my grandfather's day—my first decree is that the office I occupy will be no longer called Revered Speaker of the Mexica, but that it have a more fitting tide.' He turned to face the crowded plaza, and he held high the gold and mahogany staff, and he shouted, 'Henceforth, my people, you will be governed and defended and led to ever greater heights by Motecuzoma Xocoyotzin, Cem-Anihuac Uey-Tlatoani!'

Even if all of us in the plaza had been lulled to sleep by the half a day of speech making we had just endured, we would have started awake at the blast of sound that seemed to make the whole island quake. It was a simultaneous shriek of flutes and whistles, a blare of conch horns, and the incredible thunder of some twenty of the drums that tear out the heart, all massed together. But the musicians could also have been asleep, and their instruments mute, and we would all have come wide awake just from the impact of Motecuzoma's closing words.

The other Eagle Knights and I exchanged sidelong glances, and I could see the numerous foreign rulers exchanging scowls. Even the commoners must have been shocked by their new lord's announcement, and no one could have been much pleased by the audacity of it. Every previous ruler in all the history of our nation had been satisfied to call himself Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexica. But Motecuzoma had just extended his dominion to the farthest extent of the horizon in all directions.

He had bestowed upon himself a new title: Revered Speaker of The One World.

* * *

When I dragged myself home that night, again eager to be out of my plumage and into a cleansing cloud of steam, I got only an offhand greeting from my daughter, instead of the usual scamper to fling herself upon me in a four-limbed hug. She was sitting on the floor, undressed, in an awkwardly backward-arched posture, holding a tezcatl mirror over her head as if she was trying to get a view of her bare back, and was too engrossed in the attempt to take much notice of my arrival. I found Beu in the adjoining room and asked her what Cocoton was doing.

'She is at the age of asking questions.'

'About mirrors?'

'About her own body,' said Beu, adding scornfully, 'She was told a number of ignorant mistruths by her Tene Ticklish. Do you know that Cocoton once asked why she does not have a little dangle in front, like the boy up the street who is her favorite playmate? And do you know what that Ticklish told her? That if Cocoton is a good girl in this world, she will be rewarded in her afterlife by being reborn as a boy.'

I was tired and grumpy, not too happy at that moment with my own burden of body, so I muttered, 'I will never know why any woman should think it rewarding to be born a male.'

'Exactly what I told Cocoton,' Beu said smugly. 'That a female is far superior. Also much more neatly made, not having an excrescence like the dangle in front.'

'Is she trying instead to grow a tail behind?' I asked, indicating the child, who was still trying with the mirror to look down her back.

'No. Today she noticed that every one of her playmates has the tlacihuitztli, and she asked me what it is, not realizing she has one herself. Now she is trying to examine it.'

Perhaps, reverend scribes, like most recently arrived Spaniards, you are unfamiliar with the tlacihuitztli mark, for I understand it does not appear on any white children. If it appears on the bodies of your blackamoors, I suppose it would be unnoticeable. But all our infants are born with it: a dark spot like a bruise in the small of the back. It may be as large as a dish or as little as a thumbnail, and it seems to have no function, for it gradually diminishes and fades and, after ten years or so, entirely disappears.

'I told Cocoton,' Beu went on, 'that when the tlacihuitztli is all gone, she will know she has grown into a young lady.'

'A lady of ten years old? Do not give her too fanciful ideas.'

Beu said loftily, 'Like some of the foolish notions you have given her, Zaa?'

'I?' I said, astonished. 'I have answered all her questions as honestly as I know how.'

'Cocoton told me how one day you took her walking in the new park at Chapultepec, and she asked you why the grass was green, and you told her it was so she would not walk on the sky by mistake.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Well, it was the most honest answer I could think of. Do you know a better one?'

'The grass is green,' Beu said authoritatively, 'because the gods decided it should be green.'

I said, 'Ayya, that never occurred to me.' I said, 'You are right.' I nodded and said, 'Beyond a doubt.' She smiled, pleased with her wisdom and with my acknowledgment of it. 'But tell me,' I said. 'Why did the gods chose green instead of red or yellow or some other color?'

Ah, Your Excellency arrives just in time to enlighten me. On the third day of Creation, was it? And you can recite our Lord God's very words. 'To every thing that creepeth upon the earth, I have given every green herb.' One can hardly dispute it. That the grass is green is evident even to a non-Christian, and of course we Christians know that our Lord God made it so. I merely wonder, still—after all the years since my daughter inquired—why did our Lord God make it green instead of...?

Motecuzoma? What was he like?

I understand. Your Excellency is concerned to hear matters of import; you are rightly impatient of trivial subjects like the color of the grass or the small, dear things I remember of my little family in the long-ago. Nevertheless, the great Lord Motecuzoma, in whatever forgotten place he lies how, is but a buried smudge of decomposed matter, perhaps discernible only if the grass grows a brighter green where he lies. To me, it seems that our Lord God cares more for keeping His grass green than He cares for keeping green the memory of the greatest noblemen.

Yes, yes, Your Excellency. I will cease my unprofitable musings. I will cast my mind back, that I may satisfy your curiosity about the nature of the man Motecuzoma Xocoyotzin.

And a man is all he was, a mere man. As I have said, he was about a year younger than myself, which would mean he was thirty and five when he took the throne of the Mexica—or of the entire One World, as he would have it. He was of average height for a Mexicatl, but his body was of slender build and his head was a trifle large, and that touch of disproportion made him appear somewhat shorter than he really was. His complexion was of a fine, light copper color, his eyes were coldly bright, and he would have been handsome but for a slightly flat nose which made his nostrils spread a bit too broadly.

At his ceremony of inauguration, when Motecuzoma doffed the black and blue mantles of humility, he was draped with garments of surpassing richness, which indicated the kind of taste he would always thereafter indulge. At his every public appearance, he wore a costume that was never twice the same in every detail, but in sumptuosity was always on the order of what I now describe:

He wore either a red leather or an ornately embroidered cotton maxtlatl, the flaps of which hung below his knees front and back. That excessively ample loincloth, I suspect, he may have adopted to prevent any accidental exposure of the genital malformation I have alluded to. His sandals were gilded and sometimes, if he was required only to appear and not do much walking, their soles were of solid gold. He might wear any number of ornaments—a golden necklace with a medallion that covered most of his chest; a labret in his lower lip, made of crystal enclosing