the person of her daughter.
With Beu's help, I arranged a grand feast of celebration for the day, to be attended by the little neighbor Chacalin and all my daughter's other playmates and all their parents. Beforehand, however, Beu and I escorted the birthday girl to have her new name inscribed in the register of citizens just come of that age. We did not go to the man who was in charge of keeping track of the general population. Since Zyanya-Nochipa was the daughter of an Eagle Knight, we went to the palace tonalpoqui, who kept the register of the more elite citizens.
The old archivist grumbled, 'It is my duty and my privilege to use the divinatory tonalmatl book and my interpretive talents to select the child's name. Things have come to a grievous pass when parents can simply come and tell me what the new citizen is to be named. That is unseemly enough, Lord Knight, but you are also naming the poor young one with two words exactly alike, though in two different languages, and neither word means any thing. Could you not at least call her Always Bejeweled or something comprehensible like that?'
'No,' I said firmly. 'It is to be Always Always.'
He said in exasperation, 'Why not Never Never? How do you expect me to draw upon her page in the registry a name symbol of abstract words? How do I make a picture of meaningless noises?'
'They are not at all meaningless,' I said with feeling. 'However, Lord Tonalpoqui, I anticipated such an objection, so I presumed to work out the word pictures myself. You see, I have been a scribe in my time.' I gave him the drawing I had made, which showed a hand gripping an arrow on which was perched a butterfly.
He read aloud the words for hand, arrow, and butterfly, 'Noma, chichiquili, papalotl. Ah, I see you are acquainted with the useful mode of picturing a thing for its sound alone. Yes, indeed, the first sounds of the three words do make no-chi-pa. Always.'
He said it with admiration, but it appeared to cost him some effort. I finally grasped that the old sage was afraid of being cheated of his full fee, since I had left him nothing but copywork to do. So I paid him an amount of gold dust that would amply have reimbursed him for several days' and nights' study of his divinatory books. At that, he ceased grumbling and set to work most eagerly. With the proper ceremony and care, and the use of rather more brushes and reeds than were really necessary, he painted on a panel page of his register the symbols: the One single dot and the tufty Grass and then my concocted symbols for Always, twice repeated. My daughter was formally named: Ce-Malinali Zyanya-Nochipa, to be familiarly called Nochipa.
At the time Motecuzoma acceded to the throne, his capital of Tenochtitlan had only half recovered from the devastation of the great flood. Thousands of its inhabitants were still living crowded together with those of their relations fortunate enough to have a roof, or were living in shanties heaped up of the flood's rubble or of maguey leaves brought from the mainland, or were living even more wretchedly in canoes moored under the city causeways. It took two more years before Tenochtitlan's reconstruction, with adequate buildings for tenement dwelling, was completed under Motecuzoma's direction.
And while he was at it, he built a fine new palace for himself, on the bank of the canal at the southern side of The Heart of the One World. It was the most immense, most luxurious, most elaborately decorated and furnished palace ever built anywhere in these lands, far grander even than Nezahualpili's city and country estates combined. As a matter of fact, Motecuzoma, determined to outdo Nezahualpili, built himself an elegant country palace as well, on the outskirts of that lovely mountain town of Quaunahuac which I have several times admiringly mentioned. As you may know, my lord friars, if any of you have visited there since your Captain-General Cortes appropriated that palace for his residence, its gardens must be the most vast, the most magnificent and variously planted of any you have ever seen anywhere.
The reconstruction of Tenochtitlan might have proceeded more rapidly—the whole of the Mexica domain might have been better assured of prosperity—had not Motecuzoma been engaged, almost from the moment he took the throne, in supervising one war after another, and sometimes two wars at once. As I have told, he immediately launched a new assault on the oft-beset but always obdurate land of Texcala. But that was only to be expected. A newly installed Uey-Tlatoani almost always began his reign by flexing his muscles, and that land was, by virtue of its propinquity and stolid enmity, the most natural victim, however little value it would have been to us if we ever had conquered it.
But at the same time, Motecuzoma was first beginning to lay out the gardens of his country estate, and he heard from some traveler about a distinctive tree which grew only in one small region of northern Uaxyacac. The traveler rather unimaginatively called it just 'the red-painted-flower tree,' but his description of it intrigued the Revered Speaker. That tree's blossoms, said the man, were so constructed that they looked exactly like miniature human hands, their red petals or lobes making fingers with an apposed thumb. Unfortunately, said the traveler, the sole habitat of that tree was also the home ground of one paltry tribe of the Mixteca. Its chief or elder, an old man named Suchix, had reserved the red-painted-flower tree to himself—three or four big ones growing about his squalid hut—and kept his tribesmen forever searching for and uprooting any new sprouts that might dare to spring up elsewhere.
'He does not just have a passion for exclusive possession,' the traveler is reported to have said. 'The hand- shaped flower makes a medicine that cures heart ailments which resist any other treatment. Old Suchix heals sufferers from all the lands about, and charges them extravagantly. That is why he is anxious that the tree remain a rarity, and his alone.'
Motecuzoma is said to have smiled indulgently. 'Ah, if it is a mere matter of greed, I shall simply offer him more gold than he and his trees can earn in his lifetime.'
And he sent a Mixteca-speaking swift-messenger trotting toward Uaxyacac, carrying a fortune in gold, with instructions to buy one of the trees and pay any price Suchix asked. But there must have been more than miserliness about that old Mixtecatl chief; there must have been some trace of pride or integrity in his nature. The messenger returned to Tenochtitlan with the fortune undiminished by a single grain of gold dust, and with the news that Suchix had haughtily declined to part with so much as a twig. So Motecuzoma next sent a troop of warriors, carrying only obsidian, and Suchix and his whole tribe were exterminated, and you can now see the tree of the handlike blossoms growing in those gardens outside Quaunahuac.
But the Revered Speaker's concern was not entirely for events abroad. When he was not plotting or trying to provoke a new war, or directing its prosecution from one of his palaces, or personally enjoying it by leading an army into combat himself, he stayed at home and worried about the Great Pyramid. If that seems inexplicably eccentric to you, reverend scribes, so did it seem to many of us, his subjects, when Motecuzoma conceived a peculiar preoccupation with what he had decided was the structure's 'misplacement.' It seems that what was wrong was that on the two days of the year, in spring and autumn, when the length of day and night are precisely equal, the pyramid threw a small but perceptible shadow to one side at high midday. According to Motecuzoma, the temple should not have cast any shadow at all at those two instants of the year. That it did, he said, meant that the Great Pyramid had been built just slightly—perhaps only the breadth of a finger or two—skewed from its proper position in relation to Tonatiu's course across the sky.
Well, the Great Pyramid had placidly sat so for some nineteen years since its completion and dedication—for more than a hundred years since Motecuzoma the Elder first started its construction—and during all that time not the sun god nor any other had given any sign of being displeased with it. Only Motecuzoma the Younger was troubled by its being that tiny bit off axis. He could often be seen standing and regarding the mighty edifice, looking morose, as if he might have been about to give a vexed and corrective kick at one of its misplaced corners. Of course, the only possible rectification of the original architect's error would have been to tear down the Great Pyramid entirely and rebuild it from the ground up, a daunting project to contemplate. Nevertheless, I believe that Motecuzoma might have got around to doing just that, except that his attention was forcibly diverted to other problems.
For it was about that time that a series of alarming omens began to occur: the strange happenings that, everyone is now firmly convinced, presaged the overthrow of the Mexica, the downfall of all the civilizations flourishing in these lands, the death of all our gods, the end of The One World.
One day toward the close of the year One Rabbit, a palace page came hurrying to summon me to an immediate appearance before the Uey-Tlatoani. I mention the year because it had an ominous significance of its own, as I shall explain later. Motecuzoma did not bid me omit the ritual of repeatedly kissing the earth as I entered and crossed the throne room, but he impatiently drummed his fingers upon his knee, as if wishing I would hasten the approach.
The Revered Speaker was unattended on that occasion, but I noticed two new additions to the room. On each side of his icpali throne a great metal wheel hung by chains in a carved wooden frame. One was of gold, the
