A year was named after the day in the divinatory calendar on which it began. For mathematical reasons these days could bear only one of four names – Reed, Flint Knife, House and Rabbit – combined with a number from 1 to 13. This produced a cycle of fifty-two years at the beginning and end of which the solar and divinatory calendars coincided. The Aztecs called this period a ‘bundle of years’.
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.
The Aztec name for the year in which this book is set is Thirteen Rabbit. In our calendar, it is the spring of 1518.
TWELVE VULTURE
1
It was a fine evening at the beginning of the year Thirteen Rabbit, after the winter rains had ceased but before the time for planting maize and amaranth. A few stars were out, sparkling frostily in the clear sky. In front of a little palace a girl kneeled to prepare chocolate, while I watched her and thought about fate.
On the day I was born, a soothsayer had told my parents that I would prosper and grow rich. This was on account of that day being One Death, which was sacred to Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, the god who fixed our destinies and ruled our daily lives.
When I grew up, I learned exactly why the seer had thought that particular god would favour me. He would have consulted the Book of Days, the long screenfold volume which had every possible combination of day, month and year inscribed on its stiff bark paper pages. On the strength of his advice I had become a priest, which was a rare thing for a commoner’s child but which my father had obviously thought a promising way to the fortune and renown that were my due.
As a priest I often had to look at the Book of Days myself, committing the pictures in it to memory: the glyphs for the days, months and years, and the harsh, angular, stylised images of the gods who presided over each of them. I knew exactly what the soothsayer had seen, and in his place would have made the same prediction. Nonetheless, on this evening in Thirteen Rabbit, as my eyes lingered over the sight of slim brown fingers gently turning a gourd bowl, then tipping it delicately until the warm, foaming contents spilled into another vessel, I asked myself what that learned man had actually done, all those years ago. Perhaps he had not looked my future up in a book after all. Why go to the trouble, when all he had needed to do was to take a few sacred mushrooms and give himself a vision of me as I was now, idling away my time on a marble patio, with half my attention on the game I was supposed to be playing and half on the girl and the rich aroma rising from those bowls. That, I thought contentedly, ought to have told him all he needed to know.
My opponent’s peevish voice roused me from my reverie.
‘Are you going to make your throw or do you intend spending the entire evening eyeing up that young woman?’
A torch, flickering behind me, caught the tiny hairs on the girl’s arm, so that they glittered as she skimmed foam off the top of one of the bowls with a spoon and shook it into a third vessel. With my last, wistful glance, I caught what may have been the tiniest hint of a smile flickering across her beautiful face before I turned reluctantly back to the cross-shaped mat spread out in front of me.
‘All right. Here we go… Oh, not again!’ Four beans spilled out of my fist to fall, every one of them, white side up beside the mat. Nothing. I could not move.
The game was patolli: a race around a cross-shaped board where the first player to get all his counters back to where he started from was the winner. It resembled life, the centre and arms of the board representing the world’s five directions, the fifty-two points on it standing for a full bundle of years, which however long a man actually lived was thought of as his natural time on Earth. It was seen as a means of revealing what the gods had in store for us, although as often as not we played it for fun or money.
‘Bad luck, Yaotl,’ the other player chuckled, as he gathered the beans for his own throw. He managed a four, his beans all landing with their black faces showing, which, since he had just one counter left on the board exactly four points from home, meant he had won. ‘Your divine patron isn’t with you tonight, is he?’
I grinned in spite of myself. ‘I thought you told me it was a game of skill! But it’s funny you should mention Tezcatlipoca. I was just thinking about all the tricks the god has chosen to play on me and what a funny one this one has turned to be!’ I glanced about me, deliberately taking in all our surroundings, from the elegant house behind us to the girl who was now taking the foam she had skimmed off the surface of the chocolate and spreading it carefully over little clay cups full of the stuff. ‘Do you think this is what he had in mind for us all along?’
I had served the god as a priest; but in my time I had also been a thief, then one of the water-folk, raking scum off the surface of the lake for a living, as well as a drunk, a prisoner and a slave. To the best of my knowledge no soothsayer had ever predicted any
