Aztec Autumn

Yeyac asked, 'Had she a name?'

'An ugly-sounding Yaki name, yes, G'nda Ke. And, what she did—she began by deriding our simple ways and our reverence for the kindly goddess Coyolxauqui. Why, she asked, did we not instead revere the war god, Huitzilopochtli? He, she said, would lead us to victory in war, to conquer other nations, to take prisoners to sacrifice to the god, who would thus be persuaded to lead us to other conquests, until we ruled all of The One World.'

'But why,' asked Ameyatl, 'would she have sought to foment such alien passions and warlike ambitions among our peaceable people? What profit to her?'

'You will not be flattered to hear this, great-granddaughter. Most of the earlier Rememberers simply attributed it to the natural contrariness of all women.'

Ameyatl only wrinkled her pretty nose at him, so Canautli grinned toothlessly and went on:

'You should be glad to learn, then, that I hold a slightly different theory. It is a known fact that the Yaki men are as inhumanly cruel to their own women as they are to every non-Yaki human being alive. It is my belief that that one woman was obsessed with having every man treated as she must have been treated by those of her own nation. To set all the men of The One World to butchering one another in war, and bloodily sacrificing one another to the lip-smacking satisfaction of this or that god.'

'As almost every community in The One World does now,' said Yeyac. 'And as the Mexica priests and warriors would teach us to do. Except that we are on good terms with all our neighbors. We would have to march far beyond the mountains to wage a battle or take a prisoner for sacrifice. Nevertheless, the despicable G'nda Ke did indeed succeed.'

'Well, she very nearly did not,' said Canautli. 'She convinced hundreds of Aztlan's people to emulate her in worshiping the bloody-handed god Huitzilopochtli. But other hundreds sensibly refused to be converted. In time, she had split the Azteca into two factions so inimical—as I said, even brothers against brothers—that she and her followers crept away to take up residence in seven caverns in the mountains. There they armed themselves, and practiced at the skills of war, and awaited the Yaki woman's command to go forth and commence conquering other peoples.'

'And surely,' said softhearted Ameyatl, 'the first to suffer would have been the still-peaceable dissidents of Aztlan.'

'Most assuredly. However. However, by good fortune, Aztlan's tlatocapili of the time was about as irascible and fractious and intolerant of fools as is your own father Mixtzin. He and his loyal city guard went to the mountains and surrounded the misbelievers and slew many of them. And to the survivors he said, 'Take your contemptible new god and your families and begone. Or be slain to the last man, last woman, last child, last infant in the womb.' '

'And they went,' I said.

'They did. After sheaves of years of wandering, and new generations of them being born, they came at last to another island in another lake, where they espied the symbol of their war god—an eagle perched on a nopali cactus—so there they settled. They called the island Tenochtitlan, 'Place of the Tenoch,' which was, in some forgotten local dialect, the word for the nopali cactus. And, for what reason I have never troubled to inquire, they renamed themselves the Mexica. And in the course of many more years they thrived, they fought and overwhelmed their neighbors, and then nations farther afield.' Canautli shrugged his bony old shoulders, resignedly. 'Now, for good or ill, Tenamaxtli, through the efforts of your uncle and that other Mexicatl, also named Mixtli—we are reconciled again. We shall see what comes of it. And now I tire of remembering. Go, children, and leave me.'

We started away, but I turned back to ask, 'That Yaki woman—G'nda Ke—whatever became of her?'

'When the tlatocapili stormed the seven caves, she was among the first slain. But she was known to have coupled with several of her male followers. So there is no doubt that her blood still runs in the veins of many Mexica families. Perhaps in all of them. That would account for their still being as warlike and sanguinary as she was.'

I will never know why Canautli refrained from telling me right then: that I myself very likely contained at least a drop of that Yaki woman's blood, that I could certainly claim to be Aztlan's foremost example of an Azteca-Mexica 'family connection' since I had been born of an Aztecatl mother and sired by that Mexicatl Mixtli. Maybe the old man hesitated because he deemed it his granddaughter's place to disclose or withhold that family secret.

And I really do not know, either, why she did withhold it. When I was a child, the population of Aztlan was so small and close-knit that my illegitimacy had to have been widely known. An ordinary woman of the macehuali class would have been severely censured and probably chastised if she had borne a bastard. But Cuicani, being sister to the then tlatocapili and later the Uey-Tecutli, hardly had to fear gossip and scandal. Still, she kept me in ignorance of my paternity until that horrific day in the City of Mexico. I can only suspect that she must have hoped, during all the intervening years, that that other Mixtli would someday return to Aztlan, and to her embrace, and that he would rejoice in finding that the two of them had a son.

To be honest, I do not even know why I never, in childhood or later, evinced any inquisitiveness about my parentage. Well, Yeyac and Ameyatl had a father but no mother; I had a mother but no father. I must have reasoned that a situation so self-evident could only be normal and commonplace. Why ponder on it?

My mother would occasionally make a motherly proud remark—'I can see, Tenamaxtli, that you will grow up to be a handsome man, strong of features, just like your father.' Or, 'You are getting very tall for your age, my son. Well, so was your father much taller than most other men.' But I paid little heed to such comments; every mother fondly believes that her hatchling will prove an eagle.

Of course, if anyone at all had ever voiced an insinuating hint, I would have been prodded to ask questions about that absent father. But I was the nephew and the son of the lord and the lady occupying Aztlan's palace; no one with good sense would ever have risked Mixtzin's displeasure. Neither was I ever taunted by playmates nor neighbor children. And, at home, Yeyac and Ameyatl and I lived together in amity and harmony, more like half brothers and sister than like cousins. Or so we did, I should say, until a certain day.

  IV

Yeyac was then fourteen years old and I was seven, newly named and newly attending school. We were living in the splendid new palace by then, each of us young ones glorying in having his or her own sleeping room, and being childishly jealous of our separate privacies. So I was vastly surprised when one day, about twilight, Yeyac stepped into my room, uninvited and without asking permission. It happened that he and I were alone in the building—except for any servants who may have been working in the kitchen or elsewhere downstairs—because our elders, Mixtzin and Cuicani, had gone to the city's central square to watch Ameyatl participate in a public dance being performed by all the girls of The House of Learning Manners.

What mainly surprised me was that Yeyac entered, quietly, while my back was turned to the room door, so I did not even know he was there until his hand reached under my mantle, between my legs, and—as if weighing them—gently bounced my tepuli and ololtin. As startled as if a claw-clacking crab had got under my mantle, I gave a prodigious jump in the air. Then I whirled and stared at Yeyac, bewildered and disbelieving. My cousin had not only breached my privacy, he had handled my private parts.

'Ayya, touchy, touchy!' he said, half smirking. 'Still the little boy, eh?'

I spluttered, 'I was not aware... I did not hear...'

'Do not look so indignant, cousin. I was but comparing.'

'Doing what?' I said, mystified.

'I daresay mine must have been as puny as yours when I was your age. How would you like, small cousin, to have what I have got now?'

He raised his mantle, unloosed his maxtlatl loincloth, and there emerged—sprang forth, actually—a tepuli like none I had ever seen before. Not that I had seen many, only those in evidence when I and my playmates frolicked naked in the lake. Yeyac's was much longer, thicker, erect, engorged and almost glowing red at its bulbous tip. Well, his full name was Yeyac-Chichiquili, I reminded myself—Long Arrow—so perhaps the name-bestowing old seer had been truly prescient in this case. But Yeyac's tepuli looked so swollen and angry that I asked, sympathetically:

'Is it sore?

He laughed a loud laugh. 'Only hungry,' he said. 'This is the way a man's is supposed to be, Tenamaxtli. The bigger, the better. Do not you wish you possessed the like?'