Not every community was so fortunate in its governor as was our Xaltocan. A member of the nobility was expected to live up to his station—that is, to be noble—but not all of them were. And no pili born to the nobility could ever be demoted to any lower class, however ignoble his behavior. (He could, however, if his conduct was inexcusable by his pipiltin peers, be ousted from office or even put to death by them.) I might also mention that, though most nobles got that way by being born to noble parents, it was not impossible for a mere commoner to win elevation to that upper class.
I remember two Xaltocan men who were raised from the macehualtin to the pipiltin and given an estimable lifetime income. Colotic-Miztli, an elderly onetime warrior, had lived up to his name of Fierce Mountain Lion by doing some great feat of arms in some forgotten war against some long-ago enemy. It had cost him such scars that he was gruesome to look at, but it had gained him the coveted -tzin suffix to his name: Miztzin, Lord Mountain Lion. The other man was Quali-Ameyatl, or Good Fountain, a mild-mannered young architect who did no deed more notable than to design some gardens at the governor's palace. But Ameyatl was as handsome as Miztzin was hideous, and during his work at the palace, he won the heart of a girl named Dewdrop, who happened to be the governor's daughter. When he married her, he became Ameyatzin, the Lord Fountain.
I have tried to make clear that our Lord Red Heron was genial and generous, but above all he was a just man. When his own daughter Dewdrop tired of her lowborn Lord Fountain and was surprised in an adulterous act with a blood-born pili, Red Heron commanded that both she and the man be put to death. Many of his other nobles petitioned that the young woman be spared her life and instead be banished from the island. Even the husband swore that he forgave his wife's adultery, and that he and Dewdrop would remove to some far country. But the governor would not be swayed, though we all knew he loved that daughter very much.
He said, "I would be called unjust if, for my own child, I should waive a law that is enforced against my subject people." And he said to Lord Fountain, "The people would someday maintain that you forgave my daughter out of deference to my office and not of your own free will." And he commanded that every other woman and girl of Xaltocan come to his palace and witness Dewdrop's execution. "Especially all the nubile but unmarried maidens," he said, "for their juices run high, and they might be inclined to sympathize with my daughter's dalliance, or even envy it. Let them be shocked at her dying, that they may dwell instead on the severity of the consequences."
So my mother went to the execution, and took Tzitzitlmi.
On their return, my mother said the errant Dewdrop and her lover had been strangled, with cords disguised as garlands of flowers, and in full view of the populace, and that the young woman took her punishment badly, with terrors and pleas and struggling, and that her betrayed husband Good Fountain wept for her, but that the Lord Red Heron had watched without expression. Tzitzi said nothing of the spectacle. However, she told me of meeting at the palace the condemned woman's young brother, Red Heron's son Pactli.
"He looked long at me," she said with a shudder, "and he smiled and bared his teeth. Can you believe such a thing, on such a day? It was a look that gave me gooseflesh."
I would wager that Red Heron did no smiling that day. But you can understand why all the island folk so esteemed our impartially fair-minded governor. In truth, we all hoped the Lord Red Heron would live to a great age, for we regarded unhappily the prospect of being governed by that son Pactli. The name means Joy, a misgiven name if ever there was one. He was an ill-natured and despotic brat long before he even wore the loincloth of manhood. That obnoxious offspring of a courtly father did not, of course, freely associate with any middle-class boys like myself and Tlatli and Chimali, and anyway was a year or two older. But, as my sister Tzitzi flowered into beauty, and Pactli began to manifest increased interest in her, she and I came to share a special loathing of him. However, all that was still in the future.
Meanwhile, ours was a prosperous and comfortable and untroubled community. We who had the good fortune to live there did not have to grind away our energies and spirits just for subsistence. We could look to horizons beyond our island, to heights above those to which we had been born. We could dream, as did my friends Chimali and Tlatli. Both their fathers were sculptors at the quarries, and those two boys, unlike myself, aspired to follow their fathers' trade of art, but more ambitiously than their fathers had done.
"I want to be a better sculptor," said Tlatli, scraping away at a fragment of soft stone which was actually beginning to resemble a falcon, the bird for which he was named.
He went on, "The statues and friezes carved here on Xaltocan go away in the big freighting canoes unsigned and their artists unacknowledged. Our fathers get no more credit for their work than a slave woman who weaves mats of the lake reeds. And why? Because the statues and ornaments we make here are as indistinguishable as those reed mats. Every Tlaloc, for example, looks exactly like every Tlaloc that has been sculptured on Xaltocan since our fathers' fathers' fathers were carving them."
I said, "Then they must be what the priests of Tlaloc want."
"Ninotlancuicui in tlamacazque," growled Tlatli. "I pick my teeth at the priests." He could be as stolid and immovable as any stone figure. "I intend to do sculptures different from all that have ever been done before. And no two, even of my own, will be alike. But all will be so recognizably my work that people will exclaim, 'Ayyo, a statue by Tlatli!' I will not even have to sign them with my falcon symbol."
"You want to do a work as fine as the Sun Stone," I suggested.
"Finer than the Sun Stone," he said stubbornly. "I pick my teeth at the Sun Stone." And I thought that audacity indeed, for I had seen the Sun Stone.
But our mutual friend Chimali gazed toward even farther vistas than did Tlatli. He intended so to refine the art of painting that it would be independent of any sculpture underneath. He would be a painter of pictures on panels and murals on walls.
"Oh, I will color Tlatli's lumpy statues for him, if he likes," said Chimali. "But sculpture requires only flat colors, since its shape and modeling gives the colors light and shade. Also, I am weary of the same old unvarying colors other painters and muralists use. I am trying to mix new kinds of my own: colors that I can modulate in tint and hue so that the colors themselves give an illusion of depth." He made excited gestures, modeling the empty air. "When you see my pictures you will think they have shape and substance, even when they have none, when they have no more dimension than the panel itself."
"But to what purpose?" I asked.
"Of what purpose is the shimmering beauty and form of a hummingbird?" he demanded. "Look. Suppose yourself to be a priest of Tlaloc. Instead of dragging a huge statue of the rain god into a small temple room, and thereby cramping the room even more, the priests of Tlaloc can simply have me paint on a wall a portrait of the god—as I imagine him to be—and with a limitless rain-swept landscape stretching away behind him. The room will seem immeasurably larger than it really is. And there is the advantage of thin, flat pictures over gross and bulky sculptures."
"Well," I said to Chimali, "a shield usually is fairly thin and flat." I was making a joke: Chimali means shield, and Chimali himself was a lean and lanky boy.
At my friends' ambitious plans and grandiose boasts I smiled indulgently. Or perhaps a little enviously, for they knew what they wanted eventually to be and do, and I did not. My mind had yet conceived no notion of its own, and no god had yet seen fit to send me a sign. I knew only two things for sure. One was that I did not want to hew and haul stone from a noisy, dusty, god-menaced quarry. The other was that, whatever career I essayed, I did not intend to pursue it on Xaltocan or in any other provincial backwater.
If the gods allowed, I would take my chances in the most challenging but potentially most rewarding place in The One World—in the Uey-Tlatoani's own capital city, where the competition among ambitious men was most merciless, and where only the worthiest could rise to distinction—in the splendid, the wondrous, the awesome city of Tenochtitlan.
I was sufficiently pleased with the name, a manly one, but I was not much impressed by the ritual of selecting it. Even at the age of seven, I, Dark Cloud, had some opinions of my own. I said out loud that anybody could have done it, I could have done it, and quicker and cheaper, at which I was sternly shushed.
Early on the morning of the momentous birthday, I was taken to the palace and the Lord Red Heron himself graciously and ceremoniously received us. He patted me on the head and said, with paternal good humor, "Another man grown to the glory of Xaltocan, eh?" With his own hand, he drew my name symbols—the seven dots, the three-petaled flower symbol, the clay-gray puffball signifying a dark cloud—in the tocayamatl, the official registry of all the island's inhabitants. My page would remain there as long as I lived on Xaltocan, to be expunged only if I died or was banished for some monstrous crime or moved permanently elsewhere. I wonder: for how long has Seven Flower Dark Cloud's page been gone from that book?
Ordinarily there would have been a deal of other celebration on a naming day, as there had been on my sister's: all the neighbors and our relatives coming with gifts, my mother cooking and serving a grand spread of special foods, the men smoking tubes of picietl, the old folks getting drunk on octli. But I did not mind missing all that, for my father had told me, "A cargo of temple friezes leaves today for Tenochtitlan, and there is room aboard for you and me. Also, word comes of a great ceremony to be held in the capital—the celebration of some new conquest or the like—and that will be your name-day festival, Mixtli." So, after no more than a congratulatory kiss on the cheek from my mother and my sister, I followed my father down to the quarries' loading dock.
All our lakes bore a constant traffic of canoes, coming and going in all directions, like hordes of water striders. Most were the little one- and two-man acaltin of fowlers or fishermen, made from a single gutted tree trunk and shaped like a bean pod. But others ranged upward in size to the giant sixty-man war canoes, and our freight acali consisted of eight boats nearly that big, all lashed side by side. Our cargo of the carved limestone panels had been carefully piled aboard, each stone wrapped in heavy fiber mats for protection.
With such a load on such an unwieldy craft, we naturally moved very slowly, though my father was one of more than twenty men paddling (or poling, where the water was shallow). Owing to the curving route—southwest through Lake Xaltocan, south into Lake Texcoco, thence southwest again to the city—we had to cover some seven of the distances we called one-long-run, each of which would be approximately equivalent to one of your Spanish leagues. Seven leagues to go, then, and our big scow seldom moved faster than a man can walk. We left the island well before midday, but it was well into the night when we tied up at Tenochtitlan.
For a while, the view was nothing out of the ordinary: the red-tinted lake I knew so well. Then the land closed in on both sides as we slipped through the southern strait, and the water around us gradually paled to a dun color as we emerged into the vast lake of Texcoco. It stretched away so far to the east and south of us that the land yonder was only a dark, toothed smudge on the horizon.
We crept southwest for a time, but Tonatiu the sun was slowly cloaking himself in the radiance of his sleeping gown by the time our oarsmen backed water to bring our clumsy craft to a halt at The Great Dike. That barrier is a double palisade of tree trunks driven into the lake bottom, the space between the parallel rows of logs packed solid with earth and rock fill. Its purpose is to prevent lake waves, whipped up by the east wind, from flooding the low-lying island-city. The Great Dike has gates set into it at intervals, and the dikemen keep those gates open in most weathers. But of course the lake traffic headed for the capital is considerable, so our freighter had to wait a while in line before it could edge through the opening.
As it did so, Tonatiu drew the dark covers of night over his bed, and the sky went purple. The mountains to the west, directly ahead of us, looked suddenly as sharply outlined and dimensionless as if they had been cut from black paper. Above them, there was a shy twinkle and then a bold spark of light: After Blossom again assuring us that this was only one more of many nights, not the last and everlasting one.
"Open wide your eyes now, son Mixtli!" called my father from his place at the oars.
As if After Blossom had been a signal fire, a second light appeared, this one low beneath the jagged line of black mountains. Then there came another point of light, and another, and twenties upon twenties more. And thus I saw Tenochtitlan for the first time in my life: not a city of stone towers, rich woodwork, and bright paint, but a city of light. As the lamps and lanterns and candles and torches were lit—in window openings, on the streets, along the canals, on building terraces and cornices and rooftops—the separate pinpoints of light became clusters, the clusters blended to form lines of light, the lines drew the outlines of the city.
The buildings themselves, from that distance, were dark and indistinct of contour, but the lights, ayyo, the lights! Yellow, white, red, jacinth, all the various colors of flame—here and there a green or blue one, where some temple's altar fire had been sprinkled with salt or copper filings. And every one of those shining beads and clusters and bands of light shone twice, each having its brilliant reflection in the lake. Even the stone causeways that vault from the island to the mainland, even those wore lanterns on posts at intervals along their reach across the water. From our acali, I could see only the two causeways going north and south from the city. Each looked like a slender bright-jeweled chain across the throat of night, with the city displayed between them, a splendid bright-jeweled pendant on the night's bosom.