“The lady came weeping, master. And with her guards came a priest of Tlazoltéotl.”
I mused, “If she is already confessing her sins to be swallowed, that means she has not much time.” Indeed, she had very little. It was only shortly afterward that I heard her door open again, when she was taken to the last tryst of her life.
“Master,” Cozcatl said timidly, “you and I are both outcasts now.”
“Yes,” I sighed.
“When we are banished …” He wrung his work-roughened little hands. “Will you take me? As your slave and servant?”
“Yes,” I said, after thinking for some moments. “You have served me loyally, and I will not abandon you. But in truth, Cozcatl, I do not have the least idea where we shall be going.”
The boy and I, kept in confinement, did not witness any of the executions. But I later learned the details of the punishment inflicted on the Lord Joy and the Lady Jadestone Doll, and those details may be of interest to Your Excellency.
The priest of Filth Eater did not even give the girl the opportunity to purge herself entirely to the goddess. In a pretense of kindness, he offered her a drink of chocolate—“to calm your nerves, my daughter”—in which he had mixed an infusion of the plant toloátzin, which is a powerful sleeping drug. Jadestone Doll was probably unconscious before she had recounted even the misdeeds of her tenth year, so she went to her death still burdened with much guilt.
She was carried to the palace maze of which I have spoken, and there she was stripped of all her clothes. Then the old gardener, who alone knew the secret paths, dragged her to the very center of the maze, where Pactli’s corpse already lay.
The Lord Joy had earlier been delivered to the convicted kitchen workers, and they were commanded to do one last task before their own execution. Whether they first mercifully put Pactli to death, I do not know, but I doubt it, since they had little reason to feel kindly toward him. They flayed his whole body, except for his head and genitals, and they gutted him and hacked away the other flesh on his body. When all that remained was a skeleton—not a very clean skeleton, still festooned with shreds of raw meat—they used something, perhaps an inserted rod, to stiffen his tepúli erect. That grisly cadaver was taken to the maze while Jadestone Doll was still closeted with her priest.
The girl woke in the middle of the night, at the middle of the maze, to find herself naked and her tipíli snugly impaled, as in happier times, on a tumescent male organ. But her dilated pupils must quickly have adjusted to the pale moonlight, so that she saw the ghastly thing she was embracing.
What happened after that can only be conjectured. Jadestone Doll surely leapt loose from him in horror and fled screaming from that last lover. She must have run off into the maze, again and again, the tortuous paths always bringing her back to the head and bones and upright tepúli of the late Lord Joy. And every time she came back, she would have found him in the company of more and ever more ants and flies and beetles. At last he would have been so covered by squirming scavengers that it must have looked to Jadestone Doll that the cadaver was writhing in an attempt to rise and pursue her. How many times she ran, how many times she dashed herself against the unyielding thorn walls, how many times she found herself again stumbling onto the carrion of Lord Joy, no one will ever know.
When the gardener brought her out in the morning, she was no longer beautiful. Her face and body were gashed and bloodied by the thorns. Her fingernails had been torn off. Patches of her scalp showed, where hanks of hair had been ripped loose. Her eye-enhancing drug had worn off, and the pupils were almost invisible points in her bulging, staring eyes. Her mouth was locked wide open in a silent scream. Jadestone Doll had always been so vain of her beauty that she would have been mortified and outraged to have been seen so ugly. But now she could not care. Somewhere in the night, somewhere in the maze, her terrified and pounding heart had finally burst.
When all was over, and Cozcatl and I were released from arrest, the guards told us we were not to go to classes, we were not to mingle or converse with any of our palace acquaintances, and I was not to go back to my writing job in the Speaking Council chamber. We were to wait, keeping ourselves as unobtrusive as possible, for the Revered Speaker to decide how and where to send us into exile.
So I passed some days in doing nothing but wandering along the lakeshore, kicking pebbles and feeling sorry for myself and mourning the high ambitions I had entertained when I first came to that land. On one of those days, engrossed in my thoughts, I let the twilight catch me far along the shore, and I turned to hurry back to the palace before the darkness fell. Halfway to the city, I came upon a man sitting on a boulder, a man who had not been there when I had passed earlier. He looked much as he had on the two previous occasions I had encountered him: weary of traveling afoot, his skin paled and his features obscured by a coating of the lakeside’s alkali dust.
When we had exchanged polite greetings, I said, “Again you come in the dusk, my lord. Do you come from afar?”
“Yes,” he said somberly. “From Tenochtítlan, where a war is being prepared.”
I said, “You sound as if it will be a war against Texcóco.”
“It has not been declared so, but that is what it will be. The Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl has finally finished building that Great Pyramid, and he plans a dedication ceremony more impressive than any ever known before, and for that he wants countless prisoners for the sacrifice. So he is declaring yet another war against Texcála.”
That did not sound much out of the ordinary to me. I said, “Then the armies of The Triple Alliance will fight side by side once again. Why do you call it a war against Texcóco?”
The dusty man said gloomily, “Ahuítzotl claims that almost all his Mexíca forces and his Tecpanéca allies are still engaged in fighting in the west, in Michihuácan, and cannot be sent eastward against Texcála. But that is only an unconvincing pretense. Ahuítzotl was much affronted by the trial and execution of his daughter.”
“He cannot deny that she deserved it.”
“Which makes him the more angry and vindictive. So he has decreed that Tenochtítlan and Tlácopan will each send a mere token force against the Texcaltéca—and that Texcóco must furnish the bulk of the army.” The dusty man shook his head. “Of the warriors who will fight and die to secure the prisoners for sacrifice at the Great Pyramid, perhaps ninety and nine out of each hundred will be Acólhua men. This is Ahuítzotl’s way of avenging the death of Jadestone Doll.”
I said, “Anyone can see that it is unfair for the Acólhua to bear the brunt. Surely Nezahualpíli could refuse.”
“Yes, he could,” the traveler said, in his weary voice. “But that could sunder The Triple Alliance—perhaps provoke the irascible Ahuítzotl into declaring a real war against Texcóco.” Sounding even more melancholy, he went on, “Also, Nezahualpíli may feel that he does owe some atonement for having executed that girl.”
“What?” I said indignantly. “After what she did to him?”
“Even for that, he may feel some responsibility. Through having been negligent of her, perhaps. So might some others feel some responsibility.” The wayfarer’s eyes were on me, and I felt suddenly uneasy. “For this war, Nezahualpíli will need every man he can get. He will doubtless look kindly on volunteers, and probably he will rescind any debts of honor they may feel they owe.”
I swallowed and said, “My lord, there are some men who can be of no use in a war.”
“Then they can die in it,” he said flatly. “For glory, for penance, for repayment of an obligation, for a happy afterlife in the warriors’ afterworld, for any other reason. I once heard you speak of your gratitude to Nezahualpíli, and your readiness to demonstrate it.”
There was a long silence between us. Then, as if casually changing the subject, the dusty man said, in a conversational tone, “It is rumored that you will soon be leaving Texcóco. If you have your choice, where will you go from here?”
I thought about it for a l
ong time, and the darkness settled all around, and the night wind began to moan across the lake, and at last I said, “To war, my lord. I will go to war.”
It was a sight to see: the great army forming up on the empty ground east of Texcóco. The plain bristled with spears and sparkled with bright colors and everywhere the sun glinted from obsidian points and blades. There must have been four or five thousand men all together, but, as the dusty man had foretold, the Revered Speakers Ahuítzotl of the Mexíca and Chimalpopóca of the Tecpanéca had sent only a hundred apiece, and those warriors were hardly their best, being mostly overage veterans and untried recruits.
With Nezahualpíli as battle chief, all was organization and efficiency. Huge feather banners designated the main contingents among the thousands of Acólhua and the puny hundreds from Tenochtítlan and Tlácopan. Multicolored cloth flags marked the separate companies of men under the command of various knights. Smaller guidons marked the smaller units led by the cuáchictin under-officers. There were still other flags around which mustered the noncombatant forces: those responsible for transporting food, water, armor, and spare arms; the physicians and surgeons and priests of various gods; the marching bands of drummers and trumpeters; the battlefield clean-up detachments of Swallowers and Swaddlers.
Although I told myself that I would be fighting for Nezahualpíli, and although I was ashamed at the poor participation of the Mexíca in that war, they were my countrymen, after all. So I went to volunteer my services to their leader, the one and only Mexícatl commander on the field, an Arrow Knight named Xococ. He looked me up and down and said grudgingly, “Well, inexperienced though you may be, you at least appear more physically fit than anybody in this command but me. Report to the Cuachic Extli-Quani.”
Old Extli-Quani! I was so pleased to hear his name again that I fairly ran to the guidon where he stood bellowing at a group of unhappy-looking young soldiers. He wore a headdress of feathers and a splinter of bone through the septum of his nose, and held a shield painted with the symbols denoting his name and rank. I knelt and brushed the ground in a perfunctory gesture of kissing the earth, then flung an arm around him as if he had been a long-lost relative, crying delightedly, “Master Blood Glutton! I rejoice to see you again!”
The other soldiers goggled. The elderly cuachic flushed dark red and roughly thrust me away, spluttering, “Unhand me! By the stone balls of Huitzilopóchtli, but this man’s army has changed since I was last afield. Doddering old growlers, pimply striplings, and now this! Are they enlisting cuilóntin now? To kiss the enemy to death?”
“It is I, Master!” I cried. “The commander Xococ told me to join your company.” It took me a moment to realize that Blood Glutton must have taught hundreds of schoolboys in his time. It took him a moment to search his memory and find me in some remote corner of it.
“Fogbound, of course!” he exclaimed, though not with such glee as I had evinced. “You are in my company? Are your eyes cured, then? You can see now?”
“Well, no,” I had to admit.
He stamped ferociously on a small ant. “My first active duty in ten years,” he muttered, “and now this. Maybe cuilóntin would be preferable. Ah, well, Fogbound, fall in with the rest of my trash.”
“Yes, Master Cuachic,” I said with military crispness. Then I felt a tug at my mantle and I remembered Cozcatl, who had been at my heels all that time. “What orders have you for young Cozcatl?”
“For whom?” he said, puzzled, looking around. Not until he looked down did his gaze light on the little boy. “For him?” he exploded.
“He is my slave,” I explained. “My body servant.”
“Silence in the ranks!” Blood Glutton bawled, both to me and to his soldiers, who had begun to giggle. The old cuachic walked in a circle for a time, composing himself. Then he came and stuck his big face into mine. “Fogbound, there are a few knights and nobles who rate the services of an orderly. You are a yaoquízqui, a new recruit, the lowest rank there is. Not only do you present yourself complete with servant, but what you bring is this runt of an infant!”
“I cannot leave Cozcatl behind,” I said. “But he will never be a nuisance. Cannot you assign him to the chaplains or some other rear guard where he can be useful?”
Blood Glutton growled, “And I thought I had escaped from that school to a nice restful war. All right. Runt, you report to that black and yellow guidon yonder. Tell the quartermaster that Extli-Quani ordered you to scullery duty. Now, Fogbound,” he said sweetly, persuasively, “if the Mexíca army is arranged to your satisfaction, let us see if you remember anything of battle drill.” I and all the other soldiers jumped when he bellowed, “You misbegotten rabble—FOUR ABREAST—MAKE RANKS!”
I had learned at The House of Building Strength that training to be a warrior was far different from my childhood play at being one. Now I learned that both the playing and the training were pale imitations of the real thing. To mention just one hardship that the tellers of glorious war stories omit, there is the dirt and the smell. At play or in school, after a day of hard exercise, I had always had the pleasant relief of a bath and a good sweat in the steam house. Here, there were no such facilities. At the end of a day of drilling we were filthy, and we stayed that way, and we stank. So did the open pits dug for our excretory functions. I loathed my own odor of dried sweat and unwashed garments as much as I did the ambient miasma of feet and feces. I regarded the uncleanliness and stench as the nastiest aspect of war. At that time, anyway, before I had been to war.
Another thing. I have heard old soldiers complain that, even in the nominally dry season, a warrior can rely on it that Tlaloc will mischievously make any and every battle the more difficult and miserable, with rain drenching a man from above and mud dragging at his feet below. Well, that was the rainy season, and Tlaloc sent unremitting rain during the several days we spent practicing with our weapons and rehearsing the various maneuvers we would be expected to perform on the battlefield. It was still raining, and our mantles were dead weights, and our sandals were ponderous lumps of mud, and our mood was foul, when at last we set out for Texcála.
That city was thirteen one-long-runs to the east-southeast. In decent weather, we could have traveled there in two days of forced march. But we would have arrived breathless and fatigued, to face an enemy who had had nothing to do but rest while they waited for us. So, considering the circumstances, Nezahualpíli ordered that we make the journey more leisurely, and stretch it over four days, so that we should arrive comparatively unwearied.
For the first two days we tramped directly east, so that we had to climb and cross only the lower slopes of the volcanic range which, farther south, became the steep peaks called Tlaloctépetl, Ixtaccíuatl, and Popocatépetl. Then we turned southeast and headed directly toward Texcála city. The whole way, we went slogging through mud, except when we were slipping and sliding on wet rock terrain. That was the farthest I had ever been abroad, and I should have liked to see the landscape. But, even if my circumscribed vision had not prevented that, the perpetual veil of rain did. On that journey I saw little more than the slowly trudging mud-caked feet of the men in front of me.
We did not march encumbered by our battle armor. Besides our customary garb, we carried a heavy garment called a tlamáitl, which we wore in cold weather and rolled up in at night. Each man also carried a pouch of pinóli, ground maize sweetened with honey, and a leather bag of water. Each morning before starting to march, and again at the midday rest stop, we mixed the pinóli and water to make a nourishing if not very filling meal of atóli mush. At each night’s halt, we would have to wait for the heavier-burdened supply forces to catch up to us. But then the commissary troops would provide every man with a substantial meal of hot food, including a cup of thick, nutritious, spirit-lifting hot chocolate.
Whatever his other duties, Cozcatl always brought my evening meal with his own hands, and often managed to get me a larger than standard portion or to slip me a stolen fruit or sweet. Some of the ot
her men of Blood Glutton’s company grumbled or sneered at the way I was coddled, so I weakly tried to refuse the extras Cozcatl brought.
He admonished me, “Do not act noble and deny yourself, master. You are not depriving your fellows in these forward columns. Do you not know that the best-fed men are the ones who stay farthest back from the fighting? The porters and cooks and message carriers. They are also the most boastful about their service. I only wish that I could somehow sneak a pot of hot water up here. Forgive me, master, but you smell atrocious.”
Late in the wet, gray afternoon of the fourth day, when we were still at least one-long-run from Texcála, our forward scouts espied the waiting Texcaltéca forces, and hurried back to report to Nezahualpíli. The enemy were waiting, in strength, on the other side of a river we should have to cross. In dry weather the river was probably no more than a shallow trickle, but after all those days of steady rain it was a formidable barrier. Though still no more than hip high at its deepest, it was swift-running and broader than arrow range from bank to bank. The enemy’s plan was obvious. While we waded across the river, we should be slow-moving targets, unable either to use our weapons or to dodge the enemy’s. With their arrows and atlatl-flung javelins, the Texcaltéca expected to decimate and demoralize us before we ever reached the farther side of the river.
It is told that Nezahualpíli smiled and said, “Very well. The trap has been so nicely prepared by the enemy and Tlaloc alike, we must not disappoint them. In the morning we will fall into it.”
He gave orders for our army to halt for the night where it was, still well distant from the river, and for all commanding knights and under-officers to gather about him and hear their instructions. We mere soldiers sat or squatted or stretched out on the soggy ground, while the commissary workers began preparing our evening meal, an ample one, for we would have no time to eat even atóli in the morning. The armorers unpacked and laid the stacks of spare weapons handy for distribution as needed the next day. The drummers tightened their drumheads, made slack by dampness. The physicians and chaplain-priests prepared their medicines and operating instruments, their incense and books of incantations, so that they were ready either to attend tomorrow’s injured or to hear, on behalf of Filth Eater, the confessions of the dying.