Aztec Autumn

of the nations to the south, where obsidian comes from. They had no swords like our maquahuime, but two or three of them carried—dangling from thongs about their wrists—clubs of the quauxeloloni wood that is as hard and heavy as Spanish iron.

One of the six men now grunted a brief remark to G'nda Ke, jerked his head backward in the direction from which they had come, and they all turned and went that way. We five followed, though I wondered if G'nda Ke had merely urged her countrymen to take us to some larger gathering of hunters, where we could more easily be overpowered, scalped and slain.

Either she had not, or if that had been her intent, she had failed to persuade them. They led us, without ever once turning their heads to see if we came along, through the hills and through the rest of that day until, at evening, we came to their village. It was situated on the north bank of a river called, unsurprisingly, the Yaki, and the village was named, unimaginatively, Bakum, which means only 'water place.' To me it was a village, and a meager and exceptionally squalid one, but G'nda Ke insisted on calling it a town, explaining:

'Bakum is one of the Uonaiki—that is, one of the Eight Sacred Towns—founded by the revered prophets who begot the whole race of us Yaki in the Batna'atoka—that is, in the Ancient Time.'

In the matter of living conditions and amenities, Bakum appeared to have made very little progress since that Ancient Time, however long ago that had been. The people dwelt in dome-shaped huts crudely made of split cane crisscrossed into mats, and the mats laid overlapping. The entire village—every Yaki village I visited—was enclosed by a high fence of cane stalks held together and upright by intertwined vines. I had never before, anywhere in The One World, seen any community so seclusive and unsociable that it fenced itself off from everybody and everything beyond. None of the huts was a steam hut, and despite the village's name of 'water place,' it was unpleasantly evident that the villagers took from the river only drinking water, never washing water.

The river's plentiful canes and reeds were employed for every conceivable purpose, not just for weapons and building mats and fencing material, but also for all the utensils of daily life. The people slept on woven-reed pallets, the women used split-cane knives and scooped-out cane spoons in their cooking, the men wore cane-and-reed headdresses and tootled on cane whistles in their ceremonial dances. The only other evidences of artisanry that I saw among the Yaki were ugly brownware clay pots, carved and painted wooden masks and the cotton blankets woven on back-strap looms.

The land all about Bakum was as fertile as I had seen anywhere, but the Yaki did only perfunctory farming— the Yaki women did, I should say—of maize, beans, amaranth, squash and just enough cotton to provide them with blankets and the women's apparel. Their every other vegetable need was supplied by wild-growing things—fruits of trees and cactus, various roots and grass seeds, bean pods of the mizquitl tree. Because the Yaki preferred to eat the fat of game animals, rather than render it into oil, they used for their cooking an oil laboriously pressed—by the women—from certain seeds. They knew nothing of making octli or any other such drink; they grew no picietl for smoking; their only intoxicant was the cactus bud called peyotl. They neither planted nor gathered any medicinal herbs, or even collected wild bees' honey for an alleviative balm. As Ualiztli observed, early on, with disgust:

'The Yaki ticiltin, such as they are, rely on fearsome masks and chants and wooden rattles and pictures drawn in trays of sand to cure any and every indisposition. Except for women's complaints—and most of those are only complaints, not genuine illnesses—the ticiltin have precious few cures to their credit. These people, Tenamaxtzin, are truly savages.'

I entirely agreed. The one and only aspect of the Yaki that a civilized person could find worthy of approbation was the ferocity of their warriors, whom they called yoem'sontaom. But that ferocity was, after all, exactly what I had come looking for.

When, in time, and with G'nda Ke translating, I was allowed to converse with Bakum's yo'otui—its five elders; there was no single chief in any community—I discovered that the word Yaki is really an all-inclusive name for three different branches of the same people. They are the Opata, the Mayo and the Kahita, each inhabiting one, two or three of the Eight Sacred Towns and the country roundabout, each staying strictly segregated from the others. Bakum was Mayo. I discovered also that I had been misinformed about the Yaki's detesting and slaughtering each other. At least, they did not quite. No man of the Opata would kill another of the Opata, unless he had very good reason for the act. But he would cheerfully slay any of his neighbor Mayo or Kahita who gave the slightest offense.

And all the three branches of the Yaki, I learned, were closely related to the To'ono O'otam, or Desert People, of whom I had first heard from the much-traveled slave Esteban. The To'ono O'otam lived far away to the northeast of the Yaki lands. To do some enjoyable killing of them required a long, long march and an organized onslaught. So, about once a year, all the Yaki yoem'sontaom would put aside their mutual animosities and would companionably combine to make that march against their Desert People cousins. And those would almost rejoicingly welcome the incursions, as giving them good excuse for butchering some of their Opata, Mayo and Kahita cousins.

About one thing, however, I had not been misinformed, and that was the Yaki's abominable attitude toward their womenfolk. I had always referred to G'nda Ke simply as Yaki, and it was not until we got to Bakum that I learned she was of the Mayo branch. I would have thought it her good fortune that the hunting party we had encountered were also Mayo, bringing her to a Mayo community. Not so. I soon realized that Yaki women were not regarded as being Mayo or Kahita or Opata or anything else except women, the lowest form of life. When we entered Bakum, G'nda Ke was not embraced as a long-lost sister blessedly returned to her people. All the villagers, including the females and children, watched her arrival as icily as the hunters had done, and as icily as they regarded us male outlanders.

That very first evening, G'nda Ke was put to work with the other women, preparing the night's meal—lardy tlecuachi meat, maize cakes, roasted locusts, unidentifiable beans and roots. Then the women, including G'nda Ke, served the fare to the village men and boys. When those had eaten their fill, before they went off to chew peyotl, they indicated offhandedly that I, Ualiztli, Machihuiz and Acocotli could scavenge among their leftovers. And not until we four had eaten most of what was left did the women, including G'nda Ke, dare to come and pick through the scraps and crumbs.

The men of whatever Yaki breed, when they were not fighting one cousin or another, did nothing but hunt all the day long—except in the Kahita village called Be'ene, on the shore of the Western, Sea, where later I saw the men do some lackadaisical fishing with their three-pronged spears and some lazy digging for shellfish. Everywhere, the women did all the work and lived only on remainders, including what little remainder of—I cannot say 'affection'—what little remainder of forbearance their men might come home with, after a hard day afield.

If a man returned home in a fairly benign mood, he might greet his woman with a mere passing snarl instead of a blow. If he had had a really successful hunt or fight, and came home in a really good frame of mind, he might even condescend to fling his woman to the ground, lift her cotton skirt and his skirt of scalps, and engage her in a less than loving act of ahuilnema, uncaring of how many onlookers might be present. That, of course, was why the village populations were so scant; the couplings occurred so seldom. More often, the men came home disgruntled, muttering curses and would beat their women as bloody as they would like to have bloodied the deer or bear or enemy that had got away.

'By Huitztli, I wish I could treat my woman so,' said Acocotli, because, he confided, back in Aztlan he had a wife almost as mean-spirited as G'nda Ke, who bullied and nagged him unmercifully. 'By Huitztli, I will, from now on, if I ever get home again!'

Our G'nda Ke found few opportunities in Bakum to exercise her mean spirit. Being worked like a slave, being regarded as otherwise worthless, she endured those humiliations not apathetically like the other women, but in sullen and smoldering anger, because even the other women looked down on her—for her having no man to do the beating of her. (I and my companions refused to oblige her in that respect.) I know she would mightily have liked to command some awed and admiring adulation from her people, by boasting of her far travels and her evil exploits and the turmoils she had caused among men. But the women scorned to respect her in the least, and the men glared her to silence whenever she tried to speak to them. Perhaps G'nda Ke had been so long away from her people that she had forgotten how miserably insignificant she would be even in such coarse and ignorant company—that she would be accounted something less than vermin. Vermin at any rate could make themselves an annoyance. She no longer could.