Aztec Autumn

'Well,' I said hesitantly, 'I expect I will. When I am of age. Like you.'

'Ah, but you should start exercising it now, cousin, because it improves and enlarges, the more it is employed. That way, you can be sure to have an impressive organ when you are man- grown.'

'Employ it how?'

'I will show you,' he said. 'Take mine in your grasp.' And he took my hand and put it there, but I yanked it back again, saying severely:

'You have heard the priest warn that we should not play with those parts of ourselves. You are in the same cleanliness class as I at The Learning Manners House.'

(Yeyac was one of those older boys who had had to start, along with us really young ones, at the most elementary school level. And now, though he had worn the maxtlatl for a year or more, he had not yet qualified to go on to a calmecac.)

'Manners!' he snorted scornfully. 'You really are an innocent. The priests warn us against pleasuring ourselves, only because they hope that sometime we will pleasure them.'

'Pleasure?' I said, more befuddled than ever.

'Of course the tepuli is for pleasure, imbecile! Did you think it was only to make water with?'

'That is all mine has ever done,' I said.

Yeyac said impatiently, 'I told you—I will show you how to have pleasure with it. Watch. Take mine in your hand and do this to it.' He was briskly rubbing his own clasped hand up and down the length of his tepuli. Now he let go of it, hugged me to him and closed my hand on it— though mine only barely encircled the girth of it.

I imitated, as well as I could, what he had been doing. He closed his eyes, and his face got almost as red as his tepuli bulb, and his breathing became quick and shallow. After a while of nothing else happening, I said, 'This is very boring.'

'And you are very awkward,' he said, his voice quavery. 'Tighter, boy! And faster! And do not interrupt my concentration.'

After another while I said, 'This is extremely boring. And how is my doing this supposed to benefit mine?'

'Pocheoa!' he growled, which is a mildly dirty word. 'All right. We will exercise them both at once.' He let me take my hand away, but with his own resumed the stroking of his tepuli. 'Lie down here on your pallet. Lift up your mantle.'

I complied, and he lay down beside me, but opposite—that is, with his head near my crotch and my head near his.

'Now,' he said, still vigorously stroking himself. 'Take mine in your mouth—like this.' And, to my amazement and incredulity, he did just that with my small thing. But I said vehemently:

'I most certainly will not. I know your japeries, Yeyac. You will make water in my mouth.'

He made a noise like 'arrgh!' in a rage of frustration, but without releasing my tepuli from his mouth, or breaking the rhythm of his hand stroking his own, close before my face. For a moment, I feared that he might be angry enough to bite my thing right off. But all he did was keep his lips tight about it, and suck at it and wiggle his tongue all over it. I confess that I felt sensations that were not at all unpleasant. It even seemed that he might be right—that my small organ was actually lengthening under these ministrations. But it did not stiffen like his, it merely let itself be played with, and that did not go on for long enough for me to get bored again. Because suddenly Yeyac's whole body convulsed, and he widened his mouth to gobble into it also my sac of ololtin, and sucked hard at all those parts of mine. Then his tepuli gushed a stream of white matter, liquid but thick, like coconut-milk syrup, that splashed all over my head.

Now it was I who bellowed 'arrgh!'—in disgust—and frantically wiped at the stickiness befouling my hair, eyebrows, lashes and cheeks. Yeyac rolled away from me and, when he could cease his gasping and catch his breath, said, 'Ayya, do not go on behaving like a timid child. That is only omicetl. It is the spurting of the omicetl that gives such sublime pleasure. Also, omicetl is what creates babies.'

'I do not want any babies!' I croaked, wiping even more desperately.

'Fool of a cousin! The omicetl does that only to females. Exchanged between men it is an expression of—of deep affection and mutual passion.'

'I have no affection for you, Yeyac, not any more.'

'Come, now,' he said, wheedlingly. 'In time you will learn to like our playing together. You will yearn for it.'

'No. The priests are right to forbid such play. And Uncle Mixtzin seldom agrees with any priest, but I wager he would, if I told him about this.'

'Ayya—touchy, touchy,' Yeyac said again, but not jovially this time.

'No fear. I will not tell. You are my cousin, and I would not see you beaten. But you are nevermore to touch my parts or show me yours. Do your exercises elsewhere. Now kiss the earth to that.'

Looking disappointed and disgruntled, he slowly bent down to touch a finger to the stone floor and then to his lips, the formal gesture signifying that I-swear-to-it.

And he kept that promise. Not ever again did he try to fondle me or even let me see him except when he was fully clothed. He evidently found other boys who were not, like me, averse to learning what he taught, because when the Mexicatl warrior in charge of our House of Building Strength assigned students to the tedious duty of standing guard in remote places, I noticed that Yeyac and three or four boys of varying ages were always eager to step forward. And Yeyac may have been right in what he had said about the priests. There was one who, whenever he wanted something carried to his room, would always ask Yeyac to do it, and then neither of them would be seen again for a long while.

But I did not hold that against Yeyac, or hold any lingering resentment about his behavior with me. True, relations between the two of us were strained for some time, but they gradually relaxed to mere coolness and perhaps overpolite politeness. Eventually I, at least, quite forgot the episode—until much, much later, when something occurred to make me remember it. And meanwhile, my tepuli grew on its own, without requiring any outside assistance, as the years passed.

Over those years, we Azteca got accustomed to the crowded pantheon of gods the Mexica had brought with them and raised temples to. Our people began to join in the rites for this or that god—at first, I think, just to show courtesy and respect to the Mexica now residing among us. But, in time, our Azteca seem to have found that they were deriving something—security? uplift? solace? I do not know—from sharing in the worship of those gods, even some of the ones they might otherwise have found repellent, such as the war god Huitzilopochtli and the frog-faced water goddess Chalchihuitlicue. Nubile girls prayed to Xochiquetzal, the Mexica's goddess of love and flowers, that they might snare a desirable young man and make a good marriage. Our fishermen, before setting out to sea, besides uttering their usual prayers to Coyolxauqui for a bounteous catch, prayed also that Ehecatl, the Mexica's wind god, would not raise a gale against them.

No person was expected, as are Christians, to confine his or her devotion to any particular god. Nor were people punished, as Christians are, if they switched their allegiance at whim from one deity to another, or impartially among many of them. Most of our folk still reserved their truest adoration for our longtime patron goddess. But they saw no harm in giving some, too, to the Mexica deities—partly because those newcome gods and goddesses provided them with so many new holidays and impressive ceremonies and causes for song and dance. The people were not even much deterred by the fact that many of those deities demanded compensation in the form of human hearts and blood.

We never, during those years, engaged in any wars to provide us with foreign prisoners for sacrifice. But, surprisingly, there was never any lack of persons—Azteca as well as Mexica—to volunteer to die and thereby nourish and please the gods. Those were the people convinced by the priests that if they simply lolled about and waited to die of old age or in some other ordinary way, they risked an instant plunge into the depths of Mictlan, the Dark Place, there to suffer an eternal afterlife devoid of delight, diversion, sensation, even misery, an afterlife of absolute nothingness. To the contrary, said the priests, anyone undergoing the Flowery Death, so-called, would instantly be wafted to the lofty realm of the sun god, Tonatiu, there to enjoy a blissful and ever-lasting afterlife.

That is why numerous slaves offered themselves to the priests, to be sacrificed to any god—the slaves cared