Aztec

I asked cautiously, 'You found that amusing?'

He laughed some more. 'By the cold hole of the moon goddess's dry tipili, yes! Yes, I did! In all my lifetime in this weary and wearisome backwater, it was the first occurrence not ordinary and expectable. I thank you for making one unusual thing happen at last in this abyss of monotony. How are you called, stranger?'

I said, 'My name is, er, Tepetzalan,' taking that of my father for the occasion.

'Valley?' he said. 'Tallest valley I ever saw. Well, Tepetzalan, do not fear any retaliation for your treatment of me. By the flabby teats of the goddess, it is a pleasure finally to meet a man with testicles under his loincloth. If my tribesmen have any, they display them only to their women.' He turned to bark at his own woman, 'There are frogs enough for my friend and myself. Prepare them while I steam away some of this muck. Friend Tepetzalan, perhaps you would also like a refreshing bath?'

As we stripped at the steam house behind the residence—and I took note that his torso was as hairless as mine—the Tlatocapili said, 'I presume you are one of our cousins from the far desert. No nearer neighbors speak our language.'

'One of your cousins, I think,' I said. 'But not from the desert. Do you know of the Mexica nation? Of the great city Tenochtitlan?'

'No,' he said carelessly, as if his ignorance was nothing to be ashamed of. He even said, 'Among the various miserable villages in these parts, Aztlan is the only city.' I did not laugh, and he went on, 'We pride ourselves on our self-sufficiency here, so we seldom go traveling or engage in traffic with any other tribes. We know only our closest neighbors, though we care not to mingle with them. To the north of these swamps, for instance, are the Kaita. Since you came from that direction, you must have recognized them as a paltry people. In the swamps south of here, there is only the single insignificant village of Yakoreke.'

I was pleased to hear that. If Yakoreke was the nearest community to the southward, then I was closer to home than I had reckoned. Yakoreke was an outpost village of the Nauyar Ixu lands subject to the Purempecha nation. From anywhere in Nauyar Ixu it was not an impossibly long journey to Michihuacan, and beyond that country lay the lands of The Triple Alliance.

The young man continued, 'Eastward of these swamps are the high mountains, in which dwell peoples called the Cora and the Huichol. Beyond those mountains lies a desert wasteland where some of our poor relations have long lived in exile. Only once in a great while does one of them find his way here to the home of his forefathers.'

I said, 'I know of your poor relations in the desert. But I repeat, I am not one of them. And I also know that not all of your distant relations are poor. Of those who left here so long ago to seek their fortune in the outside world, some of them did find a fortune, a fortune beyond your imagining.'

'I rejoice to hear it,' he said indifferently. 'My wife's grandfather will be even more pleased. He is Aztlan's Rememberer of History.'

That remark made me realize that, of course, the Azteca could have no knowledge of picture writing. We Mexica had attained it only long after the migration. So they could not possess any history books or other archives. If they relied on an old man to be the repository of their history, then he would be only the latest in a long line of old men who had handed that history down through the ages, one to another.

The other Mixtli went on, 'The gods know that this crack in the buttocks of the world is no joyous place to live. But we live here because it has everything we need for life. The tides bring us seafood to eat, without our even having to seek it. The coconut gives us sweets, and oil for our lamps, and its liquid is fermented into a most enjoyably intoxicating drink. Another kind of palm gives us fiber from which to weave cloth, another yields flour, another bears the coyacapuli fruit. We need not trade for any resource with any other tribes, and the swamps protect us from molestation by them....'

He went on with his unenthusiastic listing of the awful Aztlan's natural advantages, but I had ceased listening. I felt slightly dazed, realizing how very remotely related I was to my 'cousin' of the same name. It is possible that we two Mixtlis could have sat down and traced our lineage back to a common ancestor, but our divergent development had moved us far apart in more than distance. We were separated by an immeasurable disparity of education and outlook. That cousin Mixtli might as well have been living in the Aztlan of antiquity from which his ancestors had refused to stir, for Aztlan was still what it had been then: the abode of unadventurous sluggards. Ignorant of picture writing, they were equally ignorant of all it could teach: arithmetic, geography, architecture, commerce, conquest. They knew even less than the barbarian cousins they despised, the desert Chichimeca, who had at least ventured some way beyond Aztlan's constricted horizons.

Because my forebears had left that hind end of nowhere and had found a place where the art of word knowing flourished, I had had access to the libraries of the knowledge and experience accumulated by the Azteca- Mexica in all the subsequent sheaves of years, not to mention the finer arts and sciences of even older civilizations. Culturally and intellectually, I was as superior to my cousin Mixtli as a god might be to me. But I decided I would refrain from flaunting that superiority. It was not his fault that he had been deprived of my advantages through the lethargy of his ancestors. I felt sorry for that cousin Mixtli. I would do what I could to coax him out of his benighted Aztlan into the enlightened modern world.

His wife's grandfather, Canautli, the aged historian, sat with us while we dined. The old man was one of the persons I had earlier seen eating the unlovely swamp greens, and he watched rather wistfully as we two Mixtlis savored our dish of delicate frogs' legs. I think old Canautli paid more attention to our lip smacking and chop licking than he did to my discourse. Hungry though I was, I managed, between mouthfuls, to tell briefly what had become of the Azteca who had departed Aztlan: how they had become known as the Tenochca, then as the Mexica, then as the foremost lords of The One World. The old man and the young one occasionally shook their heads in mute admiration—or maybe disbelief—as I recounted one achievement and advancement and war triumph after another.

The Tlatocapili interrupted once to murmur, 'By the six fragments of the goddess, if the Mexica have become all that grand, perhaps we ought to change the name of Aztlan.' Meditatively, he tried two or three new names: 'Place of the Mexica. First Homeland of the Mexica...'

I went on to give a brief biography of the Mexica's current Uey-Tlatoani, Motecuzoma, then a lyrical description of his capital city of Tenochtitlan. The old grandfather sighed and closed his eyes, as if to see it better in his imagination.

I said, 'The Mexica could not have progressed so far and so fast if they had not availed themselves of the art of word knowing.' Then I hinted heavily, 'You too, Tlatocapili Mixtli, might make of Aztlan a grander city—make your people the equals of their Mexica cousins—if you learned how to preserve the spoken word in lasting pictures.'

He shrugged and said, 'We have not yet suffered by not knowing.'

Nevertheless, his interest seemed to quicken when I showed him—using a slender frog bone to scratch the hard earth of the floor—how simply his own name could be permanently graven.

'Yes, that is a cloud shape,' he conceded. 'But how could it say Dark Cloud?'

'Merely color it with a dark paint, gray or black. A single picture is capable of infinite useful variations. Paint that figure blue-green, for example, and you have the name Jadestone Cloud.'

'Is that so?' he said, and then, 'What is jadestone?' And the gulf gaped again between us. He had never seen or even heard of the mineral held sacred by all civilized peoples.

I muttered something about the night getting late, that I would tell more on the morrow. My cousin offered me a pallet for the night, if I did not object to sleeping in a room full of some other probable male relations of mine. I thanked him and accepted, and concluded my evening's discourse by explaining how I had come to Aztlan: tracking backward along my ancestors' route of march, trying to verify a legend. I turned to old Canautli and said:

'Perhaps you would know, venerable Rememberer of History. When they left here, did they carry a sufficiency of supplies that they could have made provision for a necessary return?'

He did not reply. The venerable Rememberer had fallen asleep.

But the next day he said, 'Your ancestors took almost nothing with them when they left here.'

I had breakfasted together with the whole 'palace family,' on tiny fish and mushrooms grilled together, and some kind of hot herb drink. Then my namesake had gone out on some civic business, leaving me to converse with the aged historian. But that day, unlike the night before, it was Canautli who did most of the talking.

'If all our Rememberers have spoken truly, those people who departed took only what belongings they could pack in a hurry, and only meager rations for the march. And they took the image of their villainous new god: a