QUARTA PARS
The other side of the hill was even more beautiful than the side facing Lake Texcoco. The slope was gentle, the gardens undulated downward and away below me, variously formal and informal, glinting with ponds and fountains and bathing pools. There were long sweeps of green lawn, on which grazed a number of tame deer. There were shady groves of trees, and an occasional tree standing alone which had been clipped and pruned into the living statue of some animal or bird. Toward the bottom of the hill there were many buildings, large and small, but all most handsomely proportioned and set at comfortable distances from one another. I believed I could even make out richly dressed persons moving about on the walkways between the buildings—anyway, there were moving dots of brilliant colors. The Xaltocan palace of the Lord Red Heron had been a commodious building, and impressive enough, but the Texcotzinco palace of the Uey-Tlatoani Nezahualpili was an entire, self-contained, pastoral dry.
The top of the hill, where I stood, was wooded with the 'oldest of the old' cypress trees, some of them so big around that perhaps twelve men with arms outstretched could not have encircled their trunks, and so tall that their gray-green feathery leaves merged into the azure of the sky. I looked about and, though they were cleverly concealed by shrubbery, I espied the big clay pipes that watered those gardens and the city below. As well as I could judge, the pipes led away in the distance to an even higher mountain to the southeast, whence no doubt they brought the water from some pure spring and distributed it by letting it seek its own level.
Because I could not resist lingering to admire the various gardens and parklands through which I descended, it was getting well on toward sundown when I finally emerged among the buildings at the bottom of the hill. I wandered along the flower-bordered white gravel paths, meeting many people: richly mantled noblemen and women, knights in plumed headgear, distinguished-looking elderly gentlemen. Every one of them graciously gave me a word or a nod of greeting, as if I belonged there, but I was shy of asking any of those fine folk exactly where I did belong. Then I came upon a young man of about my own age, who seemed not to be occupied with any urgent business. He stood beside a young buck deer that was just beginning to sprout antlers, and he was idly scratching the nubs between its ears. Perhaps ungrown antlers are itchy; at any rate, the deer appeared to be enjoying the attention.
'Mixpantzinco, brother,' the young man greeted me. I supposed that he was one of Nezahualpili's offspring, and took me for another. But then he noticed the basket I carried, and said, 'You are the new Mixtli.'
I said I was, and returned his greeting.
'I am Huexotl,' he said; the word means Willow. 'We already have at least three other Mixtlis around here, so we will have to think of a different name for you.'
Feeling in no great need of yet another name, I changed the subject. 'I have never seen deer walk among people like this, uncaged, unafraid.'
'We get them when they are fawns. The hunters find them, usually when a doe has been killed, and they bring them here. There is always a wet nurse about, with full breasts but no baby to tend at the moment, and she gives suck to the fawn. I think they will all grow up believing they are people. Have you just arrived, Mixtli? Would you like to eat? To rest?'
I said yes, yes, and yes. 'I really do not know what I am supposed to do here. Or where to go.'
'My father's First Lady will know. Come, I will take you to her.'
'I thank you, Huexotzin,' I said, calling him Lord Willow, for I had obviously guessed right: he was a son of Nezahualpili and therefore a prince.
As we walked through the extensive palace grounds, the deer ambling along between us, the young prince identified for me the many edifices we passed. One immense building of two floors ran around three sides of a gardened central court. The left wing, Willow told me, contained the rooms of himself and all the other royal children. In the right wing dwelt Nezahualpili's forty concubines. The central portion contained apartments for the Revered Speaker's counselors and wise men who were always with him, whether he resided in his city or country palace; and for other tlamatintin: philosophers, poets, men of science whose work the Speaker was encouraging. In the grounds about were dotted small, marble-pillared pavilions to which a tlamatini could retire if he wanted to write or invent or predict or meditate in solitude.
The palace proper was a building as huge and as beautifully ornamented as any palace in Tenochtitlan. Two floors high and at least a thousand man's-feet in frontage, it contained the throne room, the Speaking Council chambers, ballrooms for court entertainments, quarters for the guardsmen, the hall of justice where the Uey- Tlatoani regularly met with those of his people who had troubles or complaints to lay before him. There were also Nezahualpili's own apartments and those of his seven wedded wives.
'All together, three hundred rooms,' said the prince. Then he confided, with a grin, 'And all sorts of concealed passages and stairways. So my father can visit one wife or another without the others' getting envious.'
We dismissed the deer and entered the great central doorway, a knight-sentry on either side snapping to attention, spears vertical, as we passed them. Willow led me through a spacious hall hung with featherwork tapestries, then up a broad stone staircase and along a gallery carpeted with rushes, to the elegantly appointed chambers of his stepmother. So the second person I met was that Tolana-Teciuapil whom the old man on the hill had mentioned, the First Lady and noblest of all the noblewomen of the Acolhua. She was conversing with a beetle-browed young man, but she turned to give us an inviting smile and a gesture to enter.
Prince Willow told her who I was, and I bent to make the motion of kissing the earth. The Lady of Tolan, with her own hand, gently lifted me from my kneeling position and, in turn, introduced me to the other young man: 'My eldest son, Ixtlil-Xochitl.' I immediately dropped to kiss the earth again, for this third person I had met so far was the Crown Prince Black Flower, ordained heir to Nezahualpili's throne of Texcoco. I was beginning to feel a little giddy, and not just from bobbing up and down. Here was I, the son of a common quarrier, meeting three of the most eminent personages in The One World, and all three in a row. Black Flower nodded his black eyebrows at me, then he and his half brother departed from the room.
The First Lady looked me up and down, while I covertly studied her. I could not guess her age, though she must have been well along into middle age, at least forty, to have a son as old as the Crown Prince Black Flower, but her face was unlined and lovely and kindly.
'Mixtli, is it?' she said. 'But we already have so many Mixtlis among the young folk and, oh, I am so bad at remembering names.'
'Some call me Tozani, my lady.'
'No, you are much bigger than a mole. You are a tall young man, and you will be taller yet. I shall call you Head Nodder.'
'As you will, my lady,' I said, with an inward sigh of resignation. 'That is also my father's nickname.'
'Then we will both be able to remember it, will we not? Now, come and I will show you your quarters.'
She must have pulled a bell rope or something, because when we stepped out of the room there was waiting a litter chair borne by two burly slaves. They lowered it for her to get in and sit down, then lofted her along the gallery, down the stairs (keeping the chair carefully horizontal), out of the palace, and into the deepening dusk. Another slave ran ahead carrying a pitch-pine torch, and still another ran behind, carrying the lady's banner of rank. I trotted alongside the chair. At the three-sided building that Willow had already pointed out to me, the Lady of Tolan led me inside, up the stairs and around several corners, far into the left wing.
'There you are,' she said, swinging open a door made of hides stretched on a wooden frame and varnished stiff. It was not just leaned in place, but pivoted in sockets top and bottom. The slave carried the torch inside to light my way, but I stuck only my head in, saying uncertainly, 'It seems to be empty, my lady.'
'But of course. This is yours.'
'I thought, in a calmecac, all the students were bunched together in a common sleeping room.'
'I daresay, but this is an annex of the palace, and this is where you will live. My Lord Husband is contemptuous of those schools and their teacher priests. You are not here to attend a calmecac.'
'Not attend—! But, my lady, I thought I came to study—!'
'And so you shall, very hard indeed, but in company with the palace children, those of Nezahualpili and his nobles. Our children are not taught by unwashed zealot priests, but by my Lord Husband's own chosen wise men, every teacher already noted for his own work in whatever it is he teaches. Here you may not learn many sorceries or invocations to the gods, Head Nodder, but you will learn real, true, useful things that will make you a man of
