“Papers and paint pots,” he said disparagingly. “Mixtli, those things you can do when you are as old and decrepit as I am. Save them for when you have energy only to set down your reminiscences. Until then, collect adventures and experiences to reminisce about. I strongly recommend travel. Go to far places, meet new people, eat exotic foods, enjoy all varieties of women, look on unfamiliar landscapes, see new things. And that reminds me—the other time we were here, you did not get to view the tequántin. Come.”
He opened a door and we went into the hall of the “human animals,” the freaks and monstrosities. They were not caged like the real beasts. Each lived in what would have been quite a nice, small, private chamber—except that it had no fourth wall, so that spectators like us could look in and see the tequáni at whatever activity he might contrive to fill his useless life and empty days. At that time of night, all those we passed were asleep on their pallets. There were the all-white men and women—white of skin and hair—looking as impalpable as the wind. There were dwarfs and hunchbacks, and other beings twisted into even more horrid shapes.
“How do they come to be here?” I asked in a discreet murmur.
The man said, not troubling to lower his voice, “They come of their own accord, if they have been made grotesque by some accident. Or they are brought by their parents, if they were born freakish. If the tequáni sells himself, the payment is given to his parents or to whomever he designates. And the Revered Speaker pays munificently. There are parents who literally pray to beget a freak, so they may become rich. The tequáni himself, of course, has no use for riches, since he has here all necessary comforts for the rest of his life. But some of these, the most bizarre, cost riches aplenty. This dwarf, for instance.”
The dwarf was asleep, and I was rather glad not to be seeing him awake, for he had only half a head. From the snaggle-toothed upper jaw to his collarbone, there was nothing—no lower mandible, no skin—nothing but an exposed white windpipe, red muscles, blood vessels and gullet, the latter opening behind his teeth and between his puffy little squirrel cheeks. He lay with that gruesome half head thrown back, breathing with a gurgling, whistling noise.
“He cannot chew or swallow,” said my guide, “so his food must be poked down that upper end of his gullet. Since he has to bend his head far back to be fed, he cannot see what is given him, and many visitors here play cruel jokes on him. They may give him a prickly tonal fruit or a violent purgative or sometimes worse things. On many occasions he has nearly died, but he is so greedy and stupid that still he will throw his head back for anyone who makes an offering gesture.”
I shuddered and went on to the next apartment. The tequáni there seemed not to be asleep, for its one eye was open. Where the other eye should have been was a smooth plane of skin. The head was hairless and even neckless, its skin sloping directly into its narrow shoulders and thence into a spreading, cone-shaped torso which sat on its swollen base as solidly as a pyramid, for it had no legs. Its arms were normal enough, except that the fingers of both hands were fused together, like the flippers of a green turtle.
“This one is called the tapir woman,” said the brown man, and I made a motion for him to speak more softly. “Oh, we need not mind our manners,” he said. “She is probably sound asleep. The one eye is permanently overgrown and the other has lost its lids. Anyway, these tequántin soon get accustomed to being publicly discussed.”
I had no intention of discussing that pitiable object. I could see why it was named for the prehensile-snouted tapir: its nose was a trunklike blob that hung pendulously to hide its mouth, if it had a mouth. But I should not have recognized it for a female, had I not been told. The head was not a woman’s, nor even a human’s. Any breasts were indistinguishable in the doughy rolls of flesh that composed its immovable pyramid of body. It stared back at me with its one never-closable eye.
“The jawless dwarf was born in his sad condition,” said my guide. “But this one was a grown woman when she was mutilated in some sort of accident. It is supposed, from the lack of legs, that the accident involved some cutting instrument, and, from the look of the rest of her, that it also involved a fire. Flesh does not always burn in a fire, you know. Sometimes it merely softens, stretches, melts, so it can be shaped and molded like—”
My sick stomach heaved, and I said, “In the name of pity. Do not talk in front of it. In front of her.”
“Her!“ the man grunted, as if amused. “You are ever the gallant with women, are you not?” He pointed at me almost accusingly. “You have just come from the embrace of a beautiful her.“ He pointed at the tapir woman. “Now how would you like to couple with this other thing you describe as her?”
The very thought made my nausea uncontainable. I doubled over, and there in front of the monstrous living heap, I vomited up everything I had eaten and drunk that night. When I was finally empty and had recovered my breath, I threw an apologetic glance at that staring eye. Whether the eye was awake or merely watering, I do not know, but a single tear rolled down from it. My guide was gone, and I did not see him again, as I went back through the menagerie and let myself out.
But there was still another unpleasantness in store for me that night, which by then was early morning. When I reached the portal of Ahuítzotl’s palace, the guard said, “Excuse me, Tequíua Mixtli, but the court physician has been awaiting your return. Will you please see him before you go to your room?”
The guard led me to the apartment of the palace doctor, where I knocked and found him awake and fully dressed. The guard saluted us both and went back to his post. The physician regarded me with an expression compounded of curiosity, pity, and professional unction. For a moment I thought he had waited up to prescribe a remedy for the queasiness I still felt. But he said, “The boy Cozcatl is your slave, is he not?”
I said he was, and asked if he had been taken ill.
“He has suffered an accident. Not a mortal one, I am happy to say, but not a trivial one either. When the plaza crowd began to disperse, he was noticed lying unconscious beside the Battle Stone. It may be that he stood too close to the duelists.”
I had not given Cozcatl a thought since I had appointed him to keep watch for any sign of a lurking Chimáli. I said, “He was cut, then, Lord Doctor?”
“Badly cut,” he said, “and oddly cut.” He kept his gaze on me as he picked up a stained cloth from a table, opened its folds, and held it out for me to see what it contained: an immature male member and its sac of olóltin, pale and limp and bloodless.
“Like an earlobe,” I muttered.
“What?” said the physician.
“You say it is not a mortal wound?”
“Well, you or I might consider it so,” the doctor said drily. “But the boy will not die of it, no. He lost an amount of blood, and it appears from bruises and other marks on his body that he was roughly handled, perhaps by the jostling mob. But he will live, and let us hope that he will not much mourn the loss of what he never had a chance to learn the value of. The cut was a clean one. It will heal over, in no more time than it takes him to recover from the loss of blood. I have arranged that the wound, in closing, will leave a necessary small aperture. He is in your apartment now, Tequíua Mixtli, and I took the liberty of placing him in your softer bed, rather than on his pallet.”
I thanked the doctor and hurried upstairs. Cozcatl was lying on his back in the middle of my thickly quilted bed, the top quilt drawn over him. His face was flushed with a slight fever and his breathing was shallow. Very gently, not to wake him, I edged the covering down off him. He was naked except for the bandage between his legs, held in place by a swathing of tape around his hips. There were bruises on his shoulder where a hand had clutched him while the knife was wielded. But the doctor had mentioned “other marks,” and I saw none—until Cozcatl, probably feeling the chill of the night air, murmured in his sleep and rolled over to expose his back.
“Your vigilance and loyalty will not go unrewarded,” I had told the bo
y, little suspecting what that reward would be. The vengeful Chimáli had indeed been in the crowd that day, but I had been almost all the time in such prominent places that he could make no sneak attack on me. So he had seen and recognized and assaulted my slave instead. But why injure such a small and comparatively valueless servant?
Then I recalled the curious expression on the doctor’s face, and I realized that he had been thinking what Chimáli must also have thought. Chimáli had assumed that the boy was to me what Tlatli had been to him. He had struck at the child, not to deprive me of an expendable slave, but to mutilate my supposed cuilóntli, in the way best calculated to shock me, to mock me.
All of that went through my mind when I saw, slapped in the middle of Cozcatl’s slender back, the familiar red handprint of Chimáli, only for once not in Chimáli’s own blood.
Since it was then so late, or so early, that the open skylight in the ceiling was beginning to pale—and since both my head and my stomach still hurt so horrendously—I sat by Cozcatl’s sickbed, not even trying to doze, trying instead to think.
I remembered the vicious Chimáli in the years before he became vicious, in the years when he was still my friend. He had himself been of just about Cozcatl’s age on that memorable evening when I led him home across Xaltócan, wearing the pumpkin on his head to hide his tufted hair. I remembered how he had commiserated with me when he went off to the calmécac and I did not, and how he once had given me that gift of his specially concocted paints….
Which led me to think about that other unexpected bequest I had received just a few days ago. Everything in it was of great value, except for one thing which had no apparent value whatever, at least here in Tenochtítlan. That was the bundle containing unfinished obsidian rocks, which were easily and cheaply obtainable from their nearby source, the canyon bed of The River of Knives, no long journey northeast of here. However, those rough chunks would be almost as prized as jadestone in the nations farther south, which had no such sources of obsidian from which to fashion their tools and weapons. That one “worthless” bundle made me recall some of the ambitions I had entertained and the ideas I had evolved in my long-ago days as an idly dreaming farm boy on the chinámpa of Xaltócan.
When the morning was full light, I quietly washed myself, cleaned my teeth, and changed into fresh garments. I went downstairs, found the palace steward, and requested an early interview with the Uey-Tlatoáni. Ahuítzotl was gracious enough to grant it, and I had not long to wait before I was ushered into his presence in that trophy-hung throne room.
The first thing he said was, “We hear that your small slave got in the way of a swinging blade yesterday.”
I said, “So it seems, Revered Speaker, but he will recover.”
I had no intention of denouncing Chimáli, or demanding a search for him, or even of mentioning his name. It would have necessitated some heretofore undisclosed revelations about the last days of Ahuítzotl’s daughter—revelations involving Cozcatl and myself as well as Chimáli. They could rekindle Ahuítzotl’s paternal anguish and anger, and he might very well execute me and the boy before he even sent soldiers looking for Chimáli.
He said, “We are sorry. Accidents are not infrequent among the spectators of the duels. We will be glad to assign you another slave while yours is incapacitated.”
“Thank you, Lord Speaker, but I really require no attendant. I came to request a different sort of favor. Having come into a small inheritance, I should like to invest it all in goods, and try my success at being a merchant.”
I thought I saw his lip curl. “A merchant? A stall in the Tlaltelólco market?”
“No, no, my lord. A pochtécatl, a traveling merchant.”
He sat back on his bearskin and regarded me in silence. What I was asking was a promotion in civil status approximately equal to what I had been given in military rank. Though the pochtéca were all technically commoners like myself, they were of the highest class of commoners. They could, if fortunate and clever in their trading, become richer than most pípiltin nobles, and command almost as many privileges. They were exempt from many of the common laws and subject mainly to their own, enacted and enforced by themselves. They even had their own chief god, Yacatecútli, the Lord Who Guides. And they jealously restricted their numbers; they would not admit as a pochtécatl just anybody who applied to be one.
“You have been awarded a rank of command soldier,” Ahuítzotl said at last, rather grumpily. “And you would neglect that to put a pack of trinkets on your back and thick-soled walking sandals on your feet? Need we remind you, young man, we Mexíca are historically a nation of valiant warriors, not wheedling tradesmen.”
“Perhaps war has outlasted some of its usefulness, Lord Speaker,” I said, braving his scowl. “I truly believe that our traveling merchants nowadays do more than all our armies to extend the influence of the Mexíca and to bring wealth to Tenochtítlan. They provide commerce with nations too far distant to be easily subjugated, but rich in goods and commodities they will readily barter or sell.”
“You make the trade sound easy,” Ahuítzotl interrupted. “Let us tell you, it has often been as hazardous as soldiering. The expeditions of pochtéca leave here laden with cargoes of considerable value. They have been raided by savages or bandits before they ever arrived at their intended destinations. When they did reach them, their wares were often simply confiscated and nothing given in return. For those reasons, we are obliged to send a sizable army troop along to protect every such expedition. Now you tell us: why should we continue to dispatch armies of nursemaids and not armies of plunderers?”
“With all respect, I believe the Revered Speaker already knows why,” I said. “For a so-called nursemaid troop, Tenochtítlan supplies only the armed men themselves. The pochtéca carry, besides their trade goods, the food and provisions for each journey, or purchase them along the way. Unlike an army, they do not have to forage and pillage and make new enemies as they go. So they arrive safely at their destination, they do their profitable trading, they march themselves and your armed men home again, and they pay a lavish tax into your Snake Woman’s treasury. The predators along the route learn a painful lesson and they cease to haunt the trade roads. The people of the far lands learn that a peaceable commerce is to their advantage as well as ours. Every expedition which returns makes that journey easier for the next one. In time, I think, the pochtéca will be able entirely to dispense with your supportive troops.”
Ahuítzotl demanded testily, “And what then becomes of our fighting men, when Tenochtítlan ceases to extend its domain? When the Mexíca no longer strive to grow in might and power, but simply sit and grow fat on commerce? When the once respected and feared Mexíca have become a swarm of peddlers haggling over weights and measures?”
“My lord exaggerates, to put this upstart in his place,” I said, purposely exaggerating my own humility. “Let your fighters fight and your traders trade. Let the armies subjugate the nations easily within their reach, like Michihuácan nearby. Let the merchants bind the farther nations to us with ties of trade. Between them, Lord Speaker, there need never be any limit set to the world won and held by the Mexíca.”
Ahuítzotl regarded me again, through an even longer silence. So, it seemed, did the ferocious bear’s head above his throne. Then he said, “Very well. You have told us the reasons why you admire the profession of traveling merchants. Can you tell us some reasons why the profession would benefit from your joining it?”
“The profession, no,” I said frankly. “But I can suggest some reasons why the Uey-Tlatoáni and his Speaking Council might thus benefit.”
He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Tell us, then.”
“I am a trained scribe, which most traveling merchants are not. They know only numbers and the keeping of accounts. As the Revered Speaker has seen, I am capable of setting down accurate maps and detailed descriptions in word pictures. I can come back from my travels with entire books telling of other nations, their arsenals and
storehouses, their defenses and vulnerabilities.…” His eyebrows had lowered again during that speech. I thought it best to trail off humbly, “Of course, I realize that I must first persuade the pochtéca themselves that I qualify for acceptance into their select society….”
Ahuítzotl said drily, “We doubt that they would long remain obdurate toward a candidate proposed by their Uey-Tlatoáni. Is that all you ask, then? That we sponsor you as a pochtécatl?”
“If it pleases my lord, I should like to take two companions. I ask that I be assigned not a troop of soldiers, but the Cuachic Extli-Quani, as our military support. Just the one man, but I know him of old, and I believe he will be adequate. I ask also that I may take the boy Cozcatl. He should be ready to travel when I am.”
Ahuítzotl shrugged. “The cuachic we shall order detached from active army duty. He is overage for anything more useful than nurse-maiding, anyway. As for the slave, he is already yours, and yours to command.”
“I would rather he were not, my lord. I should like to offer him his freedom as a small restitution for the accident he suffered yesterday. I ask that the Revered Speaker officially elevate him from the status of tlacotli to that of a free macehuáli. He will accompany me not as a slave, but with a free partner’s share in the enterprise.”
“We will have a scribe prepare the paper of manumission,” said Ahuítzotl. “Meanwhile, we cannot refrain from remarking that this will be the most quaintly composed trading expedition ever to set out from Tenochtítlan. Whither are you bound on your first journey?”
“All the way to the Maya lands, Lord Speaker, and back again, if the gods allow. Extli-Quani has been there before, which is one reason I want him along. I hope we will return with a considerable profit to be shared with my lord’s treasury. I am certain we will return with much information of interest and value to my lord.”