whatever was required, and supervised the doing of it, and continued to teach, chide, correct mistakes, reprove and approve until, after a while, the Azteca could do a good many new things on their own. I myself, well before my naming-day, was carrying light loads, fetching tools, dispensing food and water to the workers. Women and girls were learning to weave and sew with new materials—cotton, metl cloth and thread, egret feathers—much finer than the palm fibers they had formerly used.
When our men came to the end of each workday, the Mexica supervisors did not just let them go home to lie around and get drunk on their fermented coconut potation. No, the overseers turned our men over to the Mexica warriors. Those, too, might already have put in a full day of hard work, but they were indefatigable. They put our men to learning drills and parading and other military basics, then to the use—eventually the mastery—of the maquahuitl obsidian sword, the bow and arrow, the spear, and then to learning various battlefield tactics and maneuvers. Women and girls were exempted from this training; anyway, not many of them were inclined, as their men had been, to waste their free time in drinking and indolence. Boys, myself included, would have been overjoyed to partake of the military training, but were not allowed until they were of age to wear the loincloth.
Mind you, none of this total remaking of Aztlan and remolding of its people took place all of a sudden, as I may have made it sound. I repeat, I was a mere child when it all began. So the clearing away of the old Aztlan and the raising up of the new seemed—to me—to keep pace with my own growing up, growing stronger, growing in maturity and sapience. Hence, to me, what happened to my hometown was equally imperceptible and unremarkable. It is only now, in retrospect, that I can recall in not too many words all the very many trials and errors and labors and sweats and years that went into the civilizing of Aztlan. And I have not bothered to recount the almost-as-many setbacks, frustrations and failed attempts that were likewise involved in the process. But the endeavors did succeed, as Uncle Mixtzin had commanded, and on my naming-day, just those few years after the coming of the Mexica, there were already built and waiting the telpochcaltin schools for me to start attending.
In the mornings, I and the other boys my age—plus a goodly number of older boys who had never had any schooling in their childhood—went to The House of Building Strength. There, under the tutelage of a Mexicatl warrior assigned as Master of Athletics, we performed physical exercises, and learned to play the exceedingly complicated ritual ball game called tlachtli, and eventually were taught elementary hand-to-hand combat. However, our swords and arrows and spears bore no obsidian blades or points, but merely tufts of feathers wetted with red dye to simulate blood marks where we struck our opponents.
In the afternoons, I and those same boys—and girls of the same ages—attended The House of Learning Manners. There an assigned teacher-priest taught us hygiene and cleanliness (which quite a few lower-class children knew nothing about), and the singing of ritual songs, and the dancing of ceremonial dances, and the playing of a few musical instruments—the variously sized and tuned drums, the four-holed flute, the warbling jug.
In order to perform all the ceremonies and rituals properly, we had to be able to follow the tunes and beats and movements and gestures exactly as they had been done since olden times. To make sure of that, the priest passed around among us a roughly pictured page of instructions. Thus we came to grasp at least the rudiments of word-knowing. And when the children went home from school, they taught what they had learned of it to their elders—because both Mixtzin and the priests encouraged that passing-along of knowledge, at least to the grown-up males. Females, like slaves, were not expected ever to have any need of word-knowing. My own mother, though of the highest noble rank attainable in Aztlan, never learned to read or write.
Uncle Mixtzin had learned, beginning back when he was just a village tlatocapili, and he went on learning all his life long. His education in literacy was begun under the instruction of that long-ago Mexicatl visitor, the other Mixtli. Then, during my uncle's return journey from Tenochtitlan, with all those other Mexica in his train, at every night's camp he would sit down with a teacher-priest for further instruction. And, from their first arrival in Aztlan, he had kept by him that same priest for his private tutoring. So, by the time I started my schooling, he was already able to send word-picture reports to Motecuzoma regarding Aztlan's progress. And more: he even entertained himself by writing poems—the kind of poems that we who knew him would have expected him to write—cynical musings on the imperfectibility of human beings, the world and life in general. He used to read them to us, and I remember one in particular:
Even in the lower schools, we students were taught a bit of the history of The One World, and young though I was, I could not help noticing that some of the things we were told were considerably at variance with a few tales that my great-grandfather, Aztlan's Rememberer of History, had occasionally confided to our family circle. For example, from what the Mexicatl teacher-priest taught, one might suppose that the whole nation of Mexica people had simply sprung up one day from the earth of the island of Tenochtitlan, all of them full-grown, in full strength and vigor, fully educated, civilized and cultured. That did not accord with what I and my cousins had heard from old Canautli, so Yeyac, Ameyatl and I went to him and asked for elucidation.
He laughed and said tolerantly,
I said, 'When Uncle Mixtzin brought them here, he spoke of them as 'our cousins,' and mentioned some kind of 'long-forgotten family connection.' '
'I imagine,' said the Rememberer, 'that most of the Mexica would have preferred not to hear of that connection. But it was one fact that could not be avoided or obscured, not after your—not after that other Mixtli stumbled upon this place and then took the word of our existence back to Motecuzoma. You see, that other Mixtli asked me, as you three have just done, for the true history of the Azteca and their relation to the Mexica, and he believed what I told him.'
'We will believe you, too,' said Yeyac. 'Tell us.'
'On one condition,' he said. 'Do not use what you learn from me to correct or contradict your teacher-priest. The Mexica are nowadays being very good to us. It would be wicked of you children to impugn whatever silly but harmless delusions it pleases them to harbor.'
Each of us three said, 'I will not. I promise.'
'Know then, young Yeyac-Chichiquili, young Patzcatl-Ameyatl, young Teotl-Tenamaxtli. In a time long ago, long sheaves of years ago—but a time known and recounted ever since, from each Rememberer to his successor— Aztlan was not just a small seaside city. It was the capital of a territory stretching well up into the mountains. We lived simply—the folk of today would say we lived primitively—but we fared well enough, and seldom suffered the least hardship. That was thanks to our moon goddess Coyolxauqui, who saw to it that the dark sea's tides and the mountains' dark fastnesses provided bountifully for us.'
Ameyatl said, 'And you once told us that we Azteca worshiped no other gods.'
'Not even those others as beneficent as Coyolxauqui. Tlaloc, to name one, the rain god. For look about you, girl.' He laughed again. 'What need had we to pray that Tlaloc give us water? No, we were quite content with things as they were. That does not mean we were hapless weaklings.
He paused for a bit, apparently contemplating those good old days, long before even
'Until there came the woman...'
'Yes. A woman, of all things. And a woman of the Yaki, that most savage and vicious of all peoples. One of our hunting parties came upon her, wandering aimlessly, high in our mountains, alone, infinitely far from the Yaki desert lands. And those men fed and clothed her and brought her here to Aztlan. But,
