None of this made any sense to me at all, so I returned to the matter nearer to hand, saying, "This man today, cuatl—you did not appear very happy to see this one burned."
"Ayya, make no mistake," he hastened to say. "By all the beliefs and laws and rules of our Church, this Damasceno most certainly deserved his fate. I would not dispute that, not in the least. It is only that... well, over the years, I had grown rather fond of the old fellow." He looked down at the ashes one last time. "Now, Cuatl Tenamaxtli, you must excuse me. I have duties. But I shall be pleased to converse with you again, whenever you are in the city."
I had followed his glance down at the ashes with a glance of my own, and had instantly perceived that one other thing besides the metal chain and the upright metal post had survived the flames. It was the pendant I had earlier glimpsed, the light-reflecting object that the dead man had worn about his neck.
As the notarius Alonso turned away, I quickly stooped and picked up the thing, having to toss it from hand to hand for a while, because it was still scorching hot. It was a small disk of some kind of yellow crystal, and it was curiously but smoothly polished, flat on one side, curved inward on the other. The thing had hung from a leather thong, which of course was gone, and it had evidently been set in a circlet of copper, because traces of that still remained, though most had melted.
None of the soldiers patrolling the area or other Spanish persons with errands that took them strolling or hurrying across the vast open square paid any attention to my filching the yellow talisman, or whatever it was. So I tucked it inside my mantle and went in search of my mother and uncle.
I found them standing on a walk-bridge that spanned one of the city's remaining canals. My mother had been weeping—her face was still wet with tears—and her brother had a comforting arm clasped about her shoulders. He was also growling, more to himself than to her:
"Those other scouts gave good report of the white men's rule. They could not have witnessed anything like this. When we get back, I shall most certainly insist that we Azteca keep our distance from these loathsome—" Then he broke off, to demand crossly of me, "What kept you, nephew? We might well have decided to start for home without you."
"I stayed to pass a few words with that Spaniard who speaks our tongue. He said he had been fond of old Juan Damasceno."
"That was not the man's real name," said my uncle, his voice gruff, and my mother again gave a small sob. I looked at her, in some surmise, and hesitantly said:
"Tene, you sighed and sobbed back there in the square. Of what earthly concern could that man have been to you?"
"I knew him," she said.
"How is that possible, dear Tene? You have never set foot in this city before."
"No," she said. "But he came once, long ago, to Aztlan."
"Even if not for the yellow eye," said my uncle, "Cuicani and I would have recognized him."
"The yellow eye?" I repeated. "Do you mean this thing?" And I brought out the crystal I had taken from the ashes.
"Why did you call it an eye?" I asked Uncle Mixtzin. "And if this man was not who they said, Juan Damasceno, who was he?"
"I have many times told you about him, nephew, but I suppose I neglected to mention the yellow eye. He was that Mexicatl stranger who came to Aztlan, and it turned out that he had the same name I bore, Tlilectic-Mixtli. It was he who inspired me to begin to learn the art of word-knowing. And he was the cause of my later bringing the Moon Stone to this city—and my being welcomed by the late Motecuzoma, and my being given by Motecuzoma all those warriors and artists and teachers and artisans who went with me back to Aztlan..."
"Of course I remember your telling all that, uncle. But what does the yellow eye have to do with anything?"
"Ayya, that poor Cuatl Mixtli had a disability, some weakness of his vision. The thing you hold—it is a disk of yellow topaz, specially and perhaps magically ground and polished. That other Mixtli used to hold it up to his eye whenever he wished to see anything really clearly. But that handicap never deterred his adventuring and exploring. And, if I may say so—in the case of our Aztlan, anyway—his doing good and great deeds."
"You may indeed say so," I murmured, impressed. "And we ought indeed to mourn him. That other Mixtli gave us much."
"To you, Tenamaxtli, even more," my mother said quietly. "That other Mixtli was your father."
I stood stunned and speechless, unable for a long moment to do anything more than stare down at the topaz in my hand, the last remainder of the man who had sired me. At last, though feeling as if I were strangling, I managed to blurt out:
"Why are we all just standing here, then? Are we to do nothing—
Those and many other Azteca, too, remembered my uncle's later setting out for Tenochtitlan, with numerous men helping him roll the Moon Stone. And my uncle's triumphant return from that journey is vividly remembered by everyone in Aztlan who was alive at the time—including myself, because I was by then three or four years old. When he went away, he had been only Tlilectic-Mixtli, tlatocapili of Aztlan. Tlatocapili was not much of a title—it meant only a "tribal chief"—and his domain was only an insignificant village surrounded by swamps. He himself had on several occasions described Aztlan as "this crack in the buttocks of the world." But he returned to it bedecked in a wondrously beautiful feather headdress and feather mantle, accompanied by many attendants, wearing jewels on his fingers. He was now to be known by the new and noble name of Tlilectic-Mixtzin, "Lord Dark Cloud," and bearing the title of Uey-Tecutli, "Revered Governor."
Immediately on his arrival—since the entire adult population had convened to see and admire his new splendor—he addressed his people. I can repeat his words with fair accuracy, because Canautli memorized them and told them to me when I was old enough to comprehend.
"Fellow Azteca," said the Uey-Tecutli Mixtzin, loudly and with determination. "As of this day we resume our long-forgotten family connection with our cousins the Mexica, the most powerful people of The One World. We are henceforth a colony of those Mexica, and an important one, for the Mexica have previously had no outpost or stronghold abutting the Western Sea this far north of Tenochtitlan. And a stronghold we shall be!"
He gestured at the considerable train of people who had accompanied him. "The men who came here with me did not come merely to make an impressive show of my return. They and their families will settle among us, will make their homes here, as once their forefathers did. Every one of these stalwarts—from warriors to word-knowers—was chosen for his skill and experience at various arts and trades. They will show you what this farthest bastion of Tenochtitlan can be—a Tenochtitlan in miniature—strong, civilized, cultured, prosperous, and proud."
His voice got even louder, commanding, "And you will hear and heed and obey these teachers. No longer will we of Aztlan be torpid and uncouth and ignorant, and content to be so. From this day on, every man, woman and child of you will learn and work and strive, until we are in every way the equals of our admirable Mexica cousins."
I remember only vaguely what Aztlan was like in those days. Consider, I was then a child. And a child neither esteems nor disprizes his hometown, does not perceive it as either grand or squalid; it is what he has always known and been accustomed to. But, whether from fragments of memory or from what I was told in later years, I can fairly well describe the Place of Snowy Egrets as it was when that other Tlilectic-Mixtli, the explorer, came upon it.
For one thing, the "palace" in which my tlatocapili uncle and his two children lived—as did I and my mother, for she became her brother's housekeeper after his wife died—was of numerous rooms but only one story. It was built of wood and reeds and palm leaves, made sturdier and "ornamented" to some extent by having been covered all over with a plaster made from crushed seashells. The rest of Aztlan's buildings of residence and commerce were, if it can be believed, of even flimsier and less handsome construction.
The entire city was set upon an oval-shaped island, perched in the middle of a sizable lake. That lake's farther edges had no real borders or banks. Its brackish, undrinkable waters simply shallowed away in the distance, all around, merging into oozy swampland that, to the west, merged with the sea. Those swamps exuded dank night mists and pestiferous insects and perhaps evil spirits. My aunt was only one of many people who died every year from a consuming fever, and our physicians asserted that the fever was somehow inflicted on us by the swamps.
Notwithstanding Aztlan's backwardness in many respects, we Azteca at least ate well. Beyond the marshlands was the Western Sea, and from it our fishermen netted or hooked or gaffed or pried from its bottom not only the common and abundant fishes—rays, swordfish, flatfish, liza, crabs, squid—but also tasty delicacies: oysters, cockles, abalone, turtles and turtle eggs, shrimp and sea crayfish. Sometimes, after much violent and prolonged struggling, usually causing the crippling or drowning of one or more fishermen, they would succeed in landing a yeyemichi. That is a gigantic gray fish—some can be as big as any palace—and well worth catching. We townsfolk would absolutely gorge ourselves on the innumerable delicious fillets cut from a single one of those immense fish. In that sea, there were also pearl oysters, but we refrained from harvesting them ourselves, for a reason I will tell later.
As for vegetables, besides the numerous edible seaweeds, we had also a variety of swamp-growing greens. And mushrooms could be found sprouting everywhere—frequently even, uninvited, on our houses' ever-damp earthen floors. The only greenery that we actually worked to cultivate was picietl, dried for smoking. From the meat of coconuts our sweets were confected, and the coconut milk, when fermented, became a drink far more intoxicating than the octli so popular everywhere else in The One World. Another kind of palm tree gave us the coyacapuli fruits, and another palm's inner pulp was dried and ground into a palatable flour. Yet another palm provided us with fiber for weaving into cloth, while shark's skin makes the finest, most durable leather one could want. The pelts of sea otters covered our soft sleeping pallets and made fur cloaks for those who traveled into the high, cold mountains inland. From both coconuts and fish we extracted the oils that lighted our lamps. (I will grant that for any newcomer not inured to the smells of those oils burning, they must have been overpoweringly rank.)
As the Mexica masters of diverse crafts walked about Aztlan on their first tour of inspection, to see what they might contribute to the city's improvement, they must have had difficulty in containing their laughs or sneers. They surely found our conception of a "palace" ludicrous enough. And our island's one and only temple—dedicated to Coyolxauqui, the moon goddess, the deity whom in those days we worshiped almost exclusively—was no more elegantly built than was the palace, except for having some conch, whelk, strombus and other shells inset in the plaster around its doorway.
Anyway, the craftsmen were not discouraged by what they saw. They immediately set to work, first finding a place—a comparatively unsoggy hummock some way around the lake from Aztlan—on which to put temporary houses for themselves and their families. Their womenfolk did most of the house building, using what was at hand: reeds and palm leaves and mud daubing. Meanwhile, the men went inland, eastward, having to go no great distance before they were in the mountains. There they felled oak and pine trees, and manhandled the trunks down to flatter riverside land, where they split and burned and adzed them into acaltin, far bigger than any of our fishing craft, big enough to freight ponderous burdens. Those burdens also came from the mountains, for some of the men were experienced quarriers, who searched for and found limestone deposits, and dug deep into them, and broke the stone into great chunks and slabs. Those they roughly squared and evened on the site, then loaded them into the acaltin, which brought them down a river to the sea, thence along the coast to the inlet leading to our lake.
The Mexica masons smoothed and polished and used the first-brought stone to erect a new palace, as was only proper, for my Uncle Mixtzin. When completed, it might not have rivaled any of the palaces in Tenochtitlan. For our city, though, it was an edifice to marvel at. Two stories high, and with a roof comb making it twice that tall, it contained so many rooms—including an imposing throne room for the Uey-Tecutli—that even Yeyac, Ameyatl and I had each a separate sleeping room. That was something almost unheard of then, in Aztlan, for any person, let alone three children aged twelve, nine and five, respectively. Before any of us moved in, however, a swarm of additional workers did—carpenters, sculptors, painters, weaver-women—to decorate every room with statuettes and murals and wall hangings and the like.
Other Mexica, at the same time, were cleansing and rechanneling the waters in and around Aztlan. They dredged the old muck and garbage from the canals that have always crisscrossed the island, and lined those with stone. They drained the swamps around the lake, by digging new canals that drew off the old water and let in new from streams farther inland. The lake remained brackish, being of commingled fresh water and seawater, but it no longer stood stagnant, and the marshes began to dry into solid land. The result was an immediate diminution of the noxious night mists and the former troublesome multitudes of insects and—proving that our physicians had been right—the swamp spirits thereafter vexed only one or two persons each year with their malign fevers.
In the meantime, the masons went straight from building the palace to building a stone temple for our city's patron goddess, Coyolxauqui, a temple that put the old one to shame. It was so very well designed and graceful that it made Mixtzin grumble:
"I wish now that I had not trundled to Tenochtitlan the stone depicting the goddess—now that she has a temple befitting her serene beauty and goodness."
"You are being foolish," said my mother. "Had you not done that, we would not now have the temple. Or any of the other benefactions brought by that gift to Motecuzoma."
My uncle grumbled some more—he did not like having his convictions disputed—but had to concede that his sister was right.
Next, the masons erected a tlamanacali, in a manner that we all thought most ingenious, practical and interesting to watch. While the stoneworkers laid inward-slanting slabs, making a mere shell of a pyramid, ordinary laborers brought tumplined loads of earth, stones, pebbles, driftwood, just about every kind of trash imaginable, and dumped that in to fill the stone shell and tamped it firmly down inside. So eventually there arose a perfect tapered pyramid that seemed to be of solid shining limestone.