Aztec

'When we are banished...' He wrung his work-roughened little hands. 'Will you take me? As your slave and servant?'

'Yes,' I said, after thinking for some moments. 'You have served me loyally, and I will not abandon you. But in truth, Cozcatl, I do not have the least idea where we shall be going.'

The boy and I, kept in confinement, did not witness any of the executions. But I later learned the details of the punishment inflicted on the Lord Joy and the Lady Jadestone Doll, and those details may be of interest to Your Excellency.

The priest of Filth Eater did not even give the girl the opportunity to purge herself entirely to the goddess. In a pretense of kindness, he offered her a drink of chocolate—'to calm your nerves, my daughter'—in which he had mixed an infusion of the plant toloatzin, which is a powerful sleeping drug. Jadestone Doll was probably unconscious before she had recounted even the misdeeds of her tenth year, so she went to her death still burdened with much guilt.

She was carried to the palace maze of which I have spoken, and there she was stripped of all her clothes. Then the old gardener, who alone knew the secret paths, dragged her to the very center of the maze, where Pactli's corpse already lay.

The Lord Joy had earlier been delivered to the convicted kitchen workers, and they were commanded to do one last task before their own execution. Whether they first mercifully put Pactli to death, I do not know, but I doubt it, since they had little reason to feel kindly toward him. They flayed his whole body, except for his head and genitals, and they gutted him and hacked away the other flesh on his body. When all that remained was a skeleton—not a very clean skeleton, still festooned with shreds of raw meat—they used something, perhaps an inserted rod, to stiffen his tepuli erect. That grisly cadaver was taken to the maze while Jadestone Doll was still closeted with her priest.

The girl woke in the middle of the night, at the middle of the maze, to find herself naked and her tipili snugly impaled, as in happier times, on a tumescent male organ. But her dilated pupils must quickly have adjusted to the pale moonlight, so that she saw the ghastly thing she was embracing.

What happened after that can only be conjectured. Jadestone Doll surely leapt loose from him in horror and fled screaming from that last lover. She must have run off into the maze, again and again, the tortuous paths always bringing her back to the head and bones and upright tepuli of the late Lord Joy. And every time she came back, she would have found him in the company of more and ever more ants and flies and beetles. At last he would have been so covered by squirming scavengers that it must have looked to Jadestone Doll that the cadaver was writhing in an attempt to rise and pursue her. How many times she ran, how many times she dashed herself against the unyielding thorn walls, how many times she found herself again stumbling onto the carrion of Lord Joy, no one will ever know. When the gardener brought her out in the morning, she was no longer beautiful. Her face and body were gashed and bloodied by the thorns. Her fingernails had been torn off. Patches of her scalp showed, where hanks of hair had been ripped loose. Her eye-enhancing drug had worn off, and the pupils were almost invisible points in her bulging, staring eyes. Her mouth was locked wide open in a silent scream. Jadestone Doll had always been so vain of her beauty that she would have been mortified and outraged to have been seen so ugly. But now she could not care. Somewhere in the night, somewhere in the maze, her terrified and pounding heart had finally burst.

When all was over, and Cozcatl and I were released from arrest, the guards told us we were not to go to classes, we were not to mingle or converse with any of our palace acquaintances, and I was not to go back to my writing job in the Speaking Council chamber. We were to wait, keeping ourselves as unobtrusive as possible, for the Revered Speaker to decide how and where to send us into exile.

So I passed some days in doing nothing but wandering along the lakeshore, kicking pebbles and feeling sorry for myself and mourning the high ambitions I had entertained when I first came to that land. On one of those days, engrossed in my thoughts, I let the twilight catch me far along the shore, and I turned to hurry back to the palace before the darkness fell. Halfway to the city, I came upon a man sitting on a boulder, a man who had not been there when I had passed earlier. He looked much as he had on the two previous occasions I had encountered him: weary of traveling afoot, his skin paled and his features obscured by a coating of the lakeside's alkali dust.

When we had exchanged polite greetings, I said, 'Again you come in the dusk, my lord. Do you come from afar?'

'Yes,' he said somberly. 'From Tenochtitlan, where a war is being prepared.'

I said, 'You sound as if it will be a war against Texcoco.

'It has not been declared so, but that is what it will be. The Revered Speaker Ahuitzotl has finally finished building that Great Pyramid, and he plans a dedication ceremony more impressive than any ever known before, and for that he wants countless prisoners for the sacrifice. So he is declaring yet another war against Texcala.'

That did not sound much out of the ordinary to me. I said, 'Then the armies of The Triple Alliance will fight side by side once again. Why do you call it a war against Texcoco?'

The dusty man said gloomily, 'Ahuitzotl claims that almost all his Mexica forces and his Tecpaneca allies are still engaged in fighting in the west, in Michihuacan, and cannot be sent eastward against Texcala. But that is only an unconvincing pretense. Ahuitzotl was much affronted by the trial and execution of his daughter.'

'He cannot deny that she deserved it.'

'Which makes him the more angry and vindictive. So he has decreed that Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan will each send a mere token force against the Texcalteca—and that Texcoco must furnish the bulk of the army.' The dusty man shook his head. 'Of the warriors who will fight and die to secure the prisoners for sacrifice at the Great Pyramid, perhaps ninety and nine out of each hundred will be Acolhua men. This is Ahuitzotl's way of avenging the death of Jadestone Doll.'

I said, 'Anyone can see that it is unfair for the Acolhua to bear the brunt. Surely Nezahualpili could refuse.'

'Yes, he could,' the traveler said, in his weary voice. 'But that could sunder The Triple Alliance—perhaps provoke the irascible Ahuitzotl into declaring a real war against Texcoco.' Sounding even more melancholy, he went on, 'Also, Nezahualpili may feel that he does owe some atonement for having executed that girl.'

'What?' I said indignantly. 'After what she did to him?'

'Even for that, he may feel some responsibility. Through having been negligent of her, perhaps. So might some others feel some responsibility.' The wayfarer's eyes were on me, and I felt suddenly uneasy. 'For this war, Nezahualpili will need every man he can get. He will doubtless look kindly on volunteers, and probably he will rescind any debts of honor they may feel they owe.'

I swallowed and said, 'My lord, there are some men who can be of no use in a war.'

'Then they can die in it,' he said flatly. 'For glory, for penance, for repayment of an obligation, for a happy afterlife in the warriors' afterworld, for any other reason. I once heard you speak of your gratitude to Nezahualpili, and your readiness to demonstrate it.'

There was a long silence between us. Then, as if casually changing the subject, the dusty man said, in a conversational tone, 'It is rumored that you will soon be leaving Texcoco. If you have your choice, where will you go from here?'

I thought about it for a long time, and the darkness settled all around, and the night wind began to moan across the lake, and at last I said, 'To war, my lord. I will go to war.'

* * *

It was a sight to see: the great army forming up on the empty ground east of Texcoco. The plain bristled with spears and sparkled with bright colors and everywhere the sun glinted from obsidian points and blades. There must have been four or five thousand men all together, but, as the dusty man had foretold, the Revered Speakers Ahuitzotl of the Mexica and Chimalpopoca of the Tecpaneca had sent only a hundred apiece, and those warriors were hardly their best, being mostly overage veterans and untried recruits.

With Nezahualpili as battle chief, all was organization and efficiency. Huge feather banners designated the main contingents among the thousands of Acolhua and the puny hundreds from Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan. Multicolored cloth flags marked the separate companies of men under the command of various knights. Smaller guidons marked the smaller units led by the cuachictin under-officers. There were still other flags around which mustered the noncombatant forces: those responsible for transporting food, water, armor, and spare arms; the physicians and surgeons and priests of various gods; the marching bands of drummers and trumpeters; the battlefield clean-up detachments of Swallowers and Swaddlers.