'Occupation!' Cozcatl squeaked. 'Do you mean work, master? Why should you work? There is enough here to keep you in fair comfort all your days. You, a wife, a family, a devoted slave.' He added mischievously, 'You once said you would build a nobleman's mansion and make me the Master of the Keys.'
'Hold your tongue,' I told him. 'If all I wanted was idleness, I could have let Armed Scorpion send me to the after-world. I now have the means to do many things. I have only to decide what I prefer to do.'
When I completed the battle report, the day before the pyramid's dedication, I took it downstairs, seeking Ahuitzotl's trophy-hung den where I had first met him. But the palace steward, looking flustered, intercepted me to accept it in his stead.
'The Revered Speaker is entertaining many notables who have come from far lands for the ceremony,' said the man distractedly. 'Every palace around the plaza is crammed with foreign rulers and their retinues. I do not know how or where we can accommodate many more. But I will see that Ahuitzotl gets this account of yours, when he can read it in tranquility. He will summon you for another interview after things quiet down again.' And he bustled off.
As long as I was on the ground floor, I wandered through those rooms accessible to the public, just to admire the architecture and decor. Eventually I found myself in the great hall of statues, through the middle of which the canal flowed. The walls and ceiling were spangled with light reflections from the water. Several freight boats came through while I was there, their rowers admiring—as I was doing—the several sculptures of Ahuitzotl and his wives, of the patron god Huitzilopochtli, of numerous other gods and goddesses. They were all most excellent works, most skillfully done, as they should have been: every one of them bore the incised falcon symbol of the late sculptor Tlatli.
But, as he had boasted many years before, Tlatli's work scarcely needed a signature; his god statues were indeed very different from those which had been imitated and replicated through generations of less imaginative sculptors. His distinctive vision was perhaps most evident in his depiction of Coatlicue, the goddess mother of the god Huitzilopochtli. The massive stone object stood nearly a third again as tall as I did, and, looking up at it, I felt my back hair prickle at the eeriness of it.
Since Coatlicue was, after all, the mother of the god of war, most earlier artists had portrayed her as grim of visage, but in form she had always been recognizable as a woman. Not so in Tlatli's conception. His Coatlicue had no head. Instead, above her shoulders, two great serpents' heads met, as if kissing, to compose her face: their single visible eye apiece gave Coatlicue two glaring eyes, their meeting mouths gave Coatlicue one wide mouth full of fangs and horribly grinning. She wore a necklace hung with a skull, with severed hands and torn-out human hearts. Her nether garment was entirely of writhing snakes, and her feet were the taloned paws of some immense beast. It was a unique and original image of a female deity, but a gruesome one, and I believe that only a cuilontli man who could not love women could have carved a goddess so egregiously monstrous.
I followed the canal out of that chamber, under the weeping willows that overhung it in the courtyard garden, and into the chamber on the other side of the palace, where the walls were covered with murals. They mostly depicted the military and civic deeds done by Ahuitzotl before and since his accession to the throne: himself the most prominent participant in various battles, himself supervising the finishing touches on the Great Pyramid. But the pictures were alive, not stiff; they teemed with detail; they were artfully colored. As I had expected, the murals were finer than any other modern paintings I had seen. Because, as I had expected, each of them was signed in its lowermost right corner with the blood-red print of Chimali's hand.
I wondered if he was yet back in Tenochtitlan, and if we would meet, and how he would go about killing me if we did. I went in search of my little slave Cozcatl, and gave him instructions:
'You know the artist Chimali by sight, and you know that he has reason to wish me dead. I shall have duties to perform tomorrow, so I cannot keep looking over my shoulder for an assassin. I want you to circulate among the throng and then come to warn me if you see Chimali. In tomorrow's crowd and confusion, he may hope to knife me unobserved and slip away unsuspected.'
'He cannot, if I see him first,' Cozcatl said staunchly. 'And I promise, if he is present, I will see him. Have I not been useful before, master, at being your eyes?'
I said, 'You have indeed, young one. And your vigilance and loyalty will not go unrewarded.'
* * *
Yes, Your Excellency, I know that you are most particularly interested in our former religious observances, hence your attendance here today. Although I was never a priest, nor much of a friend to priests, I will explain the dedication of the Great Pyramid—the manner of it and the significance of it—as well as I can.
If that was not the most resplendent, populous, and awesome celebration ever held in the history of the Mexica, it certainly outdid all others I beheld in my time. The Heart of the One World was a solid mass of people, of colorful fabrics, of perfumes, of feather plumes, of flesh, of gold, of body heat, of jewels, of sweat. One reason for the crowding was that lanes had to be kept open—by cordons of guards, their arms linked, struggling to contain the jostling mob—so the lines of prisoners could march to the pyramid and ascend to the sacrificial altar. But the spectator crush was also due to the fact that the standing room in the plaza had been reduced by the building of numerous new temples over the years, not to mention the gradually spreading bulk of the Great Pyramid itself.
Since Your Excellency never saw it, perhaps I had better describe that icpac tlamanacali. Its base was square, one hundred and fifty paces from one corner to the next, the four sides sloping inward as they rose, until the pyramid's flat summit measured seventy paces to a side. The staircase ascending its front or western incline was actually two stairways, one each for those persons climbing and descending, separated by an ornamental gutter for blood to flow down. Fifty and two stairs of steep risers and narrow treads led to a terrace that encircled the pyramid a third of the way up. Then another flight of one hundred and four steps culminated in the platform on top, with its temples and their appurtenances. At either side of every thirteenth step of the staircase stood the stone image of some god, major or minor, its stone fists holding aloft a tall pole from which floated a white feather banner.
To a man standing at the very bottom of the Great Pyramid, the structures on top were invisible. From the bottom he could see only the broad dual staircase ascending, appearing to narrow, and seeming to lead even higher than it did—into the blue sky or, on other occasions, into the sunrise. A xochimiqui trudging up the stairs toward his Flowery Death must have felt that he was truly climbing toward the very heavens of the high gods.
But when he reached the top, he would find first the small, pyramidal sacrificial stone and behind that the two temples. In a sense, those teocaltin represented war and peace, for the one on the right was the abode of Huitzilopochtli, responsible for our military prowess, and in the one on the left dwelt Tlaloc, responsible for our harvests and peacetime prosperity. Perhaps there should rightly have been a third teocali for the sun Tonatiu, but he already had a separate sanctuary on a more modest pyramid elsewhere in the plaza, as did several other important gods. There was also in the plaza the temple in which were ranked the images of numerous gods of subordinate nations.
The new temples of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli, atop the new Great Pyramid, were but square stone rooms, each containing a hollow stone statue of the god, his mouth wide open to receive nourishment. But each temple was made much taller and more impressive by a towering stone facade or roof comb: Huitzilopochtli's indented with angular and red-painted designs, Tlaloc's indented with rounded and blue-painted designs. The body of the pyramid was predominantly a gleaming almost-silver gesso white, but the two serpentine banisters, one along each flank of the dual staircase, were painted with reptilian scales of red, blue, and green, and their big snake heads, stretching out at the ground level, were entirely covered with beaten gold.
When the ceremony began, at the first full light of day, the chief priests of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli, with all their assistants, were fussing around the temples at the top of the pyramid, doing whatever it is that priests do at the last moment. On the terrace encircling the pyramid stood the more distinguished guests: Tenochtitlan's Revered Speaker Ahuitzotl, naturally, with Texcoco's Revered Speaker Nezahualpili and Tlacopan's Revered Speaker Chimalpopoca. There were also the rulers of other cities, provinces, and nations—from far-flung Mexica domains, from the Tzapoteca lands, from the Mixteca, from the Totonaca, from the Huaxteca, from nations whose names I did not then even know. Not present, of course, was that implacably inimical ruler, old Xicotenca of Texcala, but Yquingare of Michihuacan was there.
Think of it, Your Excellency. If your Captain-General Cortes had arrived in the plaza on that day, he could have accomplished our overthrow with one swift and easy slaughter of almost all our rightful rulers. He could have proclaimed himself, there and then, the lord of practically all of what is now New Spain, and our leaderless peoples would have been hard put to dispute him. They would have been like a beheaded animal which can twitch and flail
