Praise for Aztec Autumn
“Fascinating.… Guided by exhaustive research into practically every facet of life in sixteenth-century Mexico.”
—The New York Times
“A plum pudding of historical information and detail set unobtrusively into brilliant plotting and offbeat remarkable digressions.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“It has adventure, detail, and a sense of historical authenticity, not to mention Jennings’ smart, precise language. And it’s a sequel that doesn’t demand familiarity with the original to be enjoyable.… This galloping book is savage and proud of it. And it’s that very ferocity that contributes so much to its appeal.”
—The Detroit Free Press
“Like all good historical writers, he demonstrates the talent to interpret history, not just relate it. The fact that he has taken a footnote in Aztec history and written almost four hundred pages about it is a testament to his imagination, ability, and knowledge of the subject matter.”
—The Tampa Tribune & Times
“Jennings’ research is as impressive as ever.… How he manages to introduce characters with such alien, tongue-twisting names into readers’ memories is a feat other writers would envy.”
—Florida Times-Union
“The reader is once again transported to this world now called New Spain.… If you were one of the legion of readers enchanted by Aztec, Aztec Autumn will be required reading.”
—The Rocky Mountain News
“Riveting historical fiction written with wonderful force.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jennings’ ability to marshal the results of considerable research into a smoothly flowing narrative is remarkable; here he gives appreciators of historical fiction something to relish.”
—Booklist
Praise for Aztec
“A dazzling and hypnotic historical novel.”
—The New York Times
“A first-class storyteller.… Mr. Jennings has achieved true distinction.”
—Atlantic Monthly
“Anyone who reads, anyone who still lusts for adventure or that book you can’t put down, will glory in Aztec.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Aztec is so vivid that this reviewer had the novel experience of dreaming of the Aztec world, in Technicolor, for several nights in a row.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Aztec is a magnificent historical saga.… The splendor and the sophistication as well as the sadism of these people come to life in this novel which is nothing less than a brilliant evocation of a vanished empire.… The true stuff of storytelling at its height.”
—Houston Chronicle
“The scope of the book includes the gallantry and barbarism, sex and nobility, intelligence and folly of historical fiction.… [The reader] is amply entertained and caught up in fascinating history.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
AZTEC AUTUMN
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GARY JENNINGS
AZTEC
AUTUMN
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NEW YORK
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
AZTEC AUTUMN
Copyright © 1997 by Gary Jennings
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-812-59096-8
ISBN-10: 0-812-59096-1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-5065
First Edition: August 1997
First Mass Market Edition: August 1998
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5
To HUGO N. GERSTL
for brotherliness immeasurable
I
I CAN STILL see him burning.
On that long-ago day when I watched the man being set afire, I was already eighteen years old, so I had seen other people die, whether given in sacrifice to the gods or executed for some outrageous crime or simply dead by accident. But the sacrifices had always been done by means of the obsidian knife that tears out the heart. The executions had always been done with the maquáhuitl sword or with arrows or with the strangling “flower garland.” The accidental deaths had mostly been the drownings of fishermen from our seaside city who somehow fell afoul of the water goddess. In the years since that day, too, I have seen people die in war and in various other ways, but never before then had I seen a man deliberately put to death by fire, nor have I since.
I and my mother and my uncle were among the vast crowd commanded by the city’s Spanish soldiers to attend the ceremony, so I supposed that this event was intended to be some sort of object lesson to all of us non-Spaniards. Indeed, the soldiers collected and prodded and herded so many of us into the city’s central square that we were crammed shoulder to shoulder. Within a space kept clear by a cordon of other soldiers, a metal post stood fixed into the flagstones of the square. To one side of it had been built a platform for the occasion, and on it sat or stood a number of Spanish Christian priests, all clad in flowing black gowns, as are our own priests.
Two burly Spanish guards brought the condemned man and roughly shoved him into that cleared space. When we saw that he was not a Spaniard, pale and bearded, but one of our own people, I heard my mother sigh, “Ayya ouíya …” and so did many others in the crowd. The man wore a loose, shapeless and colorless garment and, on his head, a scraggly crown made of straw. His only adornment that I could see was a pendant of some kind—it flashed when it caught the sun—hanging from a thong about his neck.
The man was quite old, even older than my uncle, and he put up no struggle against his guards. The man seemed, in fact, either resigned to his fate or indifferent to it, so I do not know why he was immediately encumbered by a heavy restraint. A tremendous piece of metal chain was hung upon him, a chain of such dimensions that a single link of it was big enough to be forced over his head to pinion his neck. That chain was then fixed to the upright post, and the guards began piling about his feet a heap of kindling wood. While that was being done, the oldest of the priests on the platform—the chief of them, I assumed—spoke to the prisoner, addressing him by a Spanish name, “Juan Damasceno.” Then he commenced a long harangue, naturally in Spanish, which at that time I had not yet learned. But a younger priest, dressed in slightly different vestments, translated his chief’s words—to my co
nsiderable surprise—into fluent Náhuatl.
This enabled me to comprehend that the old priest was reciting the charges against the condemned man, and also that he was—in a voice alternately unctuous and angry—trying to persuade the man to make amends or show contrition or something of the sort. But even when translated into my native language, the terms and expressions employed by the priest were a bafflement to me. After a long and wordy while of this, the prisoner was given leave to speak. He did so in Spanish, and when that was translated into Náhuatl, I understood him very clearly:
“Your Excellency, once when I was still a small child I vowed to myself that if ever I were selected for the Flowery Death, even on an alien altar, I would not degrade the dignity of my going.”
Juan Damasceno spoke nothing more than that, but among the priests and guards and other officials there ensued a great deal of discourse and conferring and gesticulation—before finally a stern command was uttered, and one of the soldiers set a torch to the pile of wood at the prisoner’s feet.
As is well known, the gods and goddesses take mischievous delight in perplexing us mortals. They frequently confound our best intentions and complicate our most straightforward plans and thwart even the least of our ambitions. Often they can do such things with ease, simply by arranging what appears to be a matter of coincidence. And if I did not know better, I would have said that it was mere coincidence that brought us three—my uncle, Mixtzin, his sister Cuicáni and her son, myself, Tenamáxtli—to the City of Mexíco on that particular day.
Fully twelve years previous, in our own city of Aztlan, the Place of Snowy Egrets, far to the northwest, on the coast of the Western Sea, we had heard the first startling news: that The One World had been invaded by pale-skinned and heavily bearded strangers. It was said that they had come from across the Eastern Sea in huge houses that floated on the water and were propelled by immense birdlike wings. I was only six years old at that time, with a whole seven years to wait before I could don, beneath my mantle, the máxtlatl loincloth that signifies the attainment of manhood. Hence I was an insignificant person, of no consequence at all. Nevertheless, I was precociously inquisitive and very sharp of ear. Also, my mother Cuicáni and I did reside in the Aztlan palace with my Uncle Mixtzin and his son Yeyac and daughter Améyatl, so I was always able to hear whatever news arrived and whatever comment it provoked among my uncle’s Speaking Council.
As is indicated by the -tzin suffixion to my uncle’s name, he was a noble, the highest noble among us Aztéca, being the Uey-Tecútli—the Revered Governor—of Aztlan. Some while earlier, when I was just a toddling babe, the late Uey-Tlatoáni Motecuzóma, Revered Speaker of the Mexíca, the most powerful nation in all The One World, had accorded our then-small village the status of “autonomous colony of the Mexíca.” He ennobled my Uncle Mixtli as the Lord Mixtzin, and set him to govern Aztlan, and bade him build the place into a prosperous and populous and civilized colony of which the Mexíca could be proud. So, although we were exceedingly far distant from the capital city of Tenochtítlan—The Heart of The One World—Motecuzóma’s swiftmessengers routinely brought to our Aztlan palace, as to other colonies, any news deemed of interest to his undergovernors. Of course, the news of those intruders from beyond the sea was anything but routine. It caused no small consternation and speculation among Aztlan’s Speaking Council.
“In the ancient archives of various nations of our One World,” said old Canaútli, our Rememberer of History, who also happened to be the grandfather of my uncle and my mother, “it is recorded that the Feathered Serpent, the once-greatest of all monarchs, Quetzalcóatl of the Toltéca—he who eventually was worshiped as the greatest of gods—was described as having a very white skin and a bearded face.”
“Are you suggesting—?” began another member of the Council, a priest of our war god Huitzilopóchtli. But Canaútli overrode him, as I could have told the priest he would, because I well knew how my great-grandfather loved to talk.
“It is also recorded that Quetzalcóatl abdicated his rule of the Toltéca as a consequence of his having done something shameful. His people might never have known of it, but he confessed to it. In a fit of intoxication—after overindulgence in the drunk-making octli beverage—he committed the act of ahuilnéma with his own sister. Or, some say, with his own daughter. The Toltéca so much adored the Feathered Serpent that they doubtless would have forgiven him that misconduct, but he could not forgive himself.”
Several of the councillors nodded solemnly. Canaútli went on:
“That is why he built a raft on the seashore—some say it was made of feathers felted together, some say it was made of interlaced snakes—and he floated off across the Eastern Sea. His subjects prostrated themselves on the beach, loudly bewailing his departure. So he called to them, assuring them that someday, when he had done sufficient penance in exile, he would return. But, over the years, the Toltéca themselves gradually vanished into extinction. And Quetzalcóatl has never been seen again.”
“Until now?” growled Uncle Mixtzin. He was almost never of very warm or cheerful temperament, and the messenger’s news had not been of a sort to exhilarate him. “Is that what you mean, Canaútli?”
The old man shrugged and said, “Aquin ixnéntla?”
“Who knows?” he was echoed by another elderly councillor. “I know this much, having been a fisherman all my working life. It would be next to impossible to make a raft float off across the sea. To get it out past the breakers and the combers and the landward surge of the surf.”
“Perhaps not impossible for a god,” said another. “Anyway, if the Feathered Serpent had great difficulty in doing that, it seems he has learned from the experience, if now he has voyaged hither in winged houses.”
“Why would he need more than one such vessel?” asked another. “He went away alone. But it appears that he returns with a numerous crew. Or passengers.”
Canaútli said, “It has been countless sheaves of sheaves of years since he left. Wherever he went, he could have married wife after wife, and begotten whole nations of progeny.”
“If this is Quetzalcóatl returned,” said that priest of the war god, in a voice that quavered slightly, “do any of you realize what the effects will be?”
“Many changes for the better, I should expect,” said my uncle, who took pleasure in discomfiting priests. “The Feathered Serpent was a gentle and beneficent god. All the histories agree—never before or since his time has The One World enjoyed such peace and happiness and good fortune.”
“But all our other gods will be relegated to inferiority, even obscurity,” said that priest of Huitzilopóchtli, wringing his hands. “And so will all us priests of all those gods. We shall be abased, made lower than the lowest slaves. Deposed … dismissed … discarded to beg and starve.”
“As I said,” grunted my irreverent uncle. “Changes for the better.”
Well, the Uey-Tecútli Mixtzin and his Speaking Council were soon disabused of any notion that the newcomers included or represented the god Quetzalcóatl. During the next year and a half or so, hardly a month went by without a swift-messenger from Tenochtítlan bringing ever more astounding and disconcerting news. From one runner, we would learn that the strangers were only men, not gods or the progeny of gods, and that they called themselves españoles or castellanos. The two names seemed interchangeable, but the latter was easier for us to transmute into Náhuatl, so for a long time all of us referred to the outlanders as the Caxtiltéca. Then the next-arriving runner would inform us that the Caxtiltéca resembled gods—at least, war gods—in that they were rapacious, ferocious, merciless, and lustful of conquest, because they were now forcing their way inland from the Eastern Sea.
Then the next swift-messenger would report that the Caxtiltéca certainly displayed godlike, or at least magical, attributes in their methods and weapons of war, for many of them rode mounted on giant, antlerless buck deer, and many of them wielded fearsome tubes that discharged lightning and thunde
r, and others had arrows and spears tipped with a metal that never bent or broke, and all wore armor of that same metal, which was impenetrable by ordinary projectiles.
Then came a messenger wearing the white mantle of mourning, and with his hair braided in the manner signifying bad news. His report was that the invaders had defeated one nation and tribe after another, on their way westward—the Totonáca, the Tepeyahuáca, the Texcaltáca—then had impressed any surviving native warriors into their own ranks. So the number of fighting men did not diminish but continually increased as they marched. (I might mention, from my advantage of hindsight, that many of those native warriors were not too reluctant to join the aliens’ forces, because their people had for ages been paying grudging and heavy tribute to Tenochtítlan, and now they had hopes of retaliating against (he domineering Mexíca.)
Finally there came to Aztlan a swift-messenger—with white mantle and bad-news hairdress—to tell us that the Caxtiltéca white men and their recruited native allies had now marched right into Tenochtítlan itself, The Heart of The One World, and, inconceivably, at the personal invitation of the once-puissant, now-irresolute Revered Speaker Motecuzóma. Furthermore, those intruders had not just marched on through and continued westward, but had occupied the city, and seemed inclined to settle down and stay there.
The one member of our Speaking Council who had most dreaded the coming of those outlanders—I mean that priest of the god Huitzilopóchtli—had lately been considerably heartened to know that he was not about to be deposed by a returning Quetzalcóatl. But he was dismayed anew when this latest swift-messenger also reported:
“In every city and town and village on their way to Tenochtítlan, the barbaric Caxtiltéca have destroyed every teocáli temple, torn down every tlamanacáli pyramid and toppled and broken every statue of every one of our gods and goddesses. In place of them, the foreigners have erected crude wooden effigies of a vapidly simpering white woman holding in her arms a white baby. These images, they say, represent a mortal mother who gave birth to a child-godling, and are the foundations of their religion called Crixtanoyotl.”