Every day in a Bundle of Years was the product of a unique combination of year, month and date in the divinatory calendar, and so had, for the Aztecs, its own individual character and religious and magical significance.
1
In my first few days in the slave-dealers’ warehouse, I sought to escape my tormentors. I cowered, with my back pressed hard against the stout bars at the back of my wooden cage, and tried to ward off their blows by putting my hands over my face, shielding my eyes by making fists over them like a sobbing child. It never worked. The cage was too small for me to stand up in, let alone dodge the long canes they prodded me with, and if I managed to shield my face for a moment they would only aim for some other delicate, fleshy part of me. Besides, they did not have to use sticks. On one occasion a whole bag of ground-up maguey thorns was tipped over me, and then all they had to do was stand back and laugh as I writhed, wept and scratched myself bloody in the midst of a blinding, itching cloud. And I was spat at and had excrement thrown over me through the bars, although soon I was so badly soiled with my own ordure that I barely noticed.
After a while I stopped cowering. I crouched, naked, in the middle of my tiny space, neither inviting the blows nor flinching from them, neither watching nor ignoring the faces leering at me, neither marking the passage of the days nor trying to escape them by falling asleep. Sleeping was not much better than being conscious, anyway. Being asleep just meant waking up again, discovering afresh my wounds and bruises and theagony of limbs I never had room to straighten. Worst of all, it meant dreams: nightmares about the fate that awaited me.
‘The fire sacrifice,’ my master’s steward crowed, standing in front of my cage just after the top had been shut over me and weighted down with a rock. ‘Did you ever see anyone die that way? Horrible, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said shortly, in answer to both questions. The victims, bound hand and foot, would be dragged up the steps of the pyramid of Teccalco to where a huge brazier had been set up on its summit. They must have felt its heat as they were carried around it, and their terrified faces, whitened with chalk to give them a deathly cast, used to glow pink in its red fight. They rarely made a sound, and in the moment when each one was about to die a strange silence would descend on the whole scene, disturbed only by the crackling of the brazier. Then, after four unhurried, much-practised swings, the priests holding the trussed captive would toss him alive on to the coals.
While he twisted and shrieked and his skin blackened and split, there would be music and dancing. A young man dressed as a squirrel would prance around the fire, whistling through his fingers, while another, got up as a bat, shook a pair of gourd rattles as gaily as an entertainer at a feast.
I remembered especially how one brave man had died. He had not screamed when the priests threw him on to the fire and made no sound even when they hooked him out again, still alive, and let him tumble on to the ground, scattering white-hot coals around him. He had made a noise only when they tried to pick him up and a long strip of burned skin peeled away from his back. Then, through what was left of his throat, he had forced a strange, keening cry, like a sick animal’s whimpering, that had ended only when he was stretched over the sacrificial stone and the priest was tearing the heart out of his chest for an offering to the god of fire.
‘I bet that’ll be it,’ the steward said. ‘Which festival is it? Come on, Yaotl, you used to be a priest. You must know.’
‘They kill some that way at the Festival of the Fall of the Fruit,’ I mumbled automatically, ‘and some others at the Arrival of the Gods.’
‘Lots of time to look forward to it, then!’ I had been shut in my cage in the middle of winter, and both the festivals I had mentioned took place in late summer.
‘You know that won’t happen to me. The fire sacrifice is reserved for captured enemy warriors. I’m not a warrior; I’m a slave.’
‘Oh, I’m sure the priests will make an exception. What if there hasn’t been a war lately and captives are hard to get? They could throw you in as a makeweight. It’s like the way a woman ekes out a stew sometimes, hiding dog meat under a layer of turkey. I don’t suppose the god will notice the difference.’
I said nothing. I knew what he was telling me was probably true, but I preferred not to think about it, far less discuss it.
‘Of course, you’re assuming you’re going to be bought by civilized people like Aztecs. Maybe it’ll be some horrible barbarians. Some of those savages are capable of anything: the Matlatzinca, for instance. They’ve got this way of crushing their victims slowly in a net. Very messy!’
‘Maybe I won’t be bought as a sacrifice. Someone might want to put me to work. Lord Tlilpotonqui did, after all.’
The steward’s only answer to that was to walk away, laughing.
My master. Lord Tlilpotonqui, whose name meant Feathered in Black, was being careful.
He was the second most powerful man in the World. He was the Cihuacoatl, priest of the goddess of that name, and also Chief Priest, Chief
