Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 220

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So Ah Tutal led me and Aguilar to a hut in the town, and inside, where a doctor stood muttering and rubbing his chin and frowning down at a pallet where a young girl lay tossing in fever, her face shiny with sweat, her eyes glazed and unseeing. Aguilar's whiteness went rather pink when he recognized her as one of the females who had visited his and Guerrero's quarters.

He said slowly, so that I should understand, "I am sorry to tell you that she has the small pocks. You see? The eruptions are beginning to grow on her forehead."

I translated that to the physician, who looked professionally mistrustful, but said, "Ask him what his people do to treat it."

I did, and Aguilar shrugged and said, "They pray."

"Evidently a backward people," grunted the doctor, but added, "Ask him to which god."

Aguilar said, "Why, they pray to the Lord God!"

That was of no help, but I thought to ask, "Do you pray to that god in some manner which we might imitate?"

He tried to explain, but the explanation was of a complexity beyond my grasp of the language. So he indicated that it could more easily be demonstrated, and the three of us—Ah Tutal, the physician, and I—hurried after him back to the palace courtyard. He ran to his quarters while we stayed at a distance, and he came back to us with something in each hand.

One of the things was a small box with a tight-fitting cover. Aguilar opened it to show its contents: a considerable number of small disks that appeared to have been cut from heavy white paper. He attempted another explanation, from which I gathered that he had illicitly kept or stolen the box as a memento of his days in the priest school. And I further understood that the disks were a special sort of bread, the most holy and potent of all foods, because a person who ate one of them partook of the strength of that almighty Lord God.

The other object was a string of many small beads irregularly interspersed among numerous larger ones. All the beads were of a blue substance that I had never seen before: as blue and hard as turquoise but as transparent as blue water. Aguilar started another complex explanation, of which I heard only the information that each bead represented a prayer. Naturally I was reminded of the practice of placing a jadestone chip in the mouth of someone dead, and I thought the prayer beads might be similarly and beneficially employed by the not yet dead. So I interrupted Aguilar to ask urgently:

"Do you put the prayers in the mouth, then?"

"No, no," he said. "They are held in the hands." Then he gave a cry of protest as I snatched the box and beads from him.

"Here, Lord Physician," I said to the doctor. I broke the string and gave him two of the beads, and I translated what little I had comprehended of Aguilar's instructions: "Take the girl's hands and clench each hand around one of these prayers—"

"No, no!" Aguilar wailed. "Whatever you are doing, it is wrong! There is more to prayer than just—"

"Be quiet!" I snapped, in his language. "We have not time for more!"

I fumbled some of the papery little bits of bread from the box and put one in my mouth. It tasted like paper, and it dissolved on my tongue without my having to chew it. I felt no instant surge of god strength, but at least I realized the bread could be fed to the girl even in her half-conscious condition.

"No, no!" Aguilar shouted yet again, when I ate the thing. "This is unthinkable! You cannot receive the Sacrament!

He regarded me with the same expression of horror that I see right now on Your Excellency's face. I am sorry for my impulsive and shocking behavior. But you must remember that I was only an ignorant pagan then, and I was concerned with hurrying to save a girl's life. I pressed some of the little disks into the doctor's hand and told him:

"This is god food, magic food, and easy to eat. You can force them into her mouth without the risk of choking her."

He went off at a run, or as much of a run as his dignity would permit—

In much the way that His Excellency has just now done.

I clapped Aguilar companionably on the shoulder and said, "Forgive me for taking the matter out of your hands. But if the girl is cured, you will get the credit, and you will be much honored by these people. Now let us find Guerrero and sit and talk some more about your people."

There were still many things I wished to learn from Jeronimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero. And, since by then we could converse with fair comprehension, albeit haltingly, they were equally curious about things in these lands. They asked some questions that I pretended not to understand: "Who is your King? Does he command great armies? Does he possess great riches of gold?" And some questions that I truly did not understand: "Who are your Dukes and Counts and Marquises? Who is the Pope of your Church?" And some questions that I daresay no one could answer: "Why do your women have no hair down there?" So I warded off their questions by asking my own, and they answered all of them with no perceptible hesitation or suspicion or guile.

I could have stayed with them for at least a year, improving my grasp of their language and constantly thinking of new things to ask. But I made the precipitate decision to leave their company when, two or three days after our visit to the ailing girl, the physician came to me and silently beckoned. I followed him to that same hut, and looked down at the girl's dead face, hideously bloated beyond recognition and flushed to a gruesome purple color.

"All her blood vessels burst and her tissues swelled," said the doctor "including those inside her nose and mouth. She died in an agony of simply trying to breathe." He added disparagingly, "The god food you gave me worked no magic."

I asked, "And how many sufferers have you cured, Lord Physician, without recourse to that magic?"

"None," he sighed, and his pomposity deflated. "Nor have any of my colleagues saved a single patient. Some die like this, of strangulation. Some die with a gush of blood from the nose and mouth. Some die in raving delirium. I fear that all will die, and die miserably."

Looking at the ruin of what had been quite a pretty child, I said, "She told me, this very girl, that only a vulture could take pleasure from the white men. She must have had a true premonition. The vultures will now be pleased to gorge on her carrion, and her dying was somehow the doing of the white men."

When I returned to the palace and reported to Ah Tutal, he said emphatically, "I will no longer have the diseased and unclean strangers here!" I could not make out whether his crossed eyes glared at me or past me, but they were undeniably angry. "Do I let them go away in their canoe, or do you take them to Tenochtitlan?"

"Neither," I said. "And do not kill them either, Lord Mother, at least until you receive permission from Motecuzoma. I would suggest that you get rid of them by giving them into slavery. Give them to the chiefs of tribes well distant from here. The chiefs should feel flattered and honored by such gifts. Not even the Revered Speaker of the Mexica has a white slave."

"Um... yes..." Ah Tutal said thoughtfully. "There are two chiefs I particularly dislike and distrust. It would not grieve me should the white men bring misery on them." He regarded me more kindly. "But you were sent all this way, Knight Ek Muyal, to find the outlanders. What will Motecuzoma say when you return empty-handed?"

"Not quite empty-handed," I said. "I will take back at least the box of god food and the little blue prayers., and I have learned many things to tell to Motecuzoma." A sudden thought struck me. "Oh, yes, Lord Mother, there could be one other thing to show him. If any of your females who lay with the white men should prove pregnant, and if they do not fall victim to the small pocks—well, if there are offspring, send them to Tenochtitlan. The Revered Speaker can put them on display in the city menagerie. They ought to be monsters unique among monsters."

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