Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 232

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"This is all we lacked."

At the palace, a half-dressed steward hurried me up the stairs to the upper floor, then up another staircase to the roof of the great building. Motecuzoma sat on a bench in his roof garden, and I think he was shivering, though the spring night was not cold and he was swathed in several mantles hastily flung around him. Without shifting his gaze from the sky, he said to me:

"After the New Fire ceremony came the eclipse of the sun. Then the falling stars. Then the smoking stars. All those things of the past years were omens evil enough, but at least we knew them for what they were. This is an apparition never seen before."

I said, "I beg to correct you, Lord Speaker—only that I may relieve your apprehensions to some degree. If you will wake your historians, my lord, and set them to searching the archives, they can ascertain that this has occurred before. In the year One Rabbit of the last preceding sheaf of years, during the reign of your namesake grandfather."

He stared at me as if I had suddenly confessed to being some kind of sorcerer. "Sixty and six years ago? Long before you were born. How could you know of it?"

"I remember my father telling of lights like these, my lord. He claimed it was the gods striding about the skies, but with only their mantles visible, all tinted in the same cold colors."

And that is what the lights looked like that night: like filmy cloth draperies depending from a point at the top of the sky and hanging all the way down to the mountain horizon, and swaying and stirring as if in a light breeze. But there was no noticeable breeze, and the long curtains of light made no swishing sound as they swung. They merely glowed coldly, in colors of white and pale green and pale blue. As the draperies softly undulated, those colors subtly changed places and sometimes merged. It was a beautiful sight, but a sight to make one's hair similarly stir.

Much later, I chanced to mention that night's spectacle to one of the Spanish boatmen, and told him how we Mexica had interpreted it as a warning of dire things coming. He laughed and called me a superstitious savage. "We too saw the light that night," he said, "and we were mildly surprised to see it this far south. But I know it signifies nothing, for I have seen it on many nights when sailing in the cold northern oceans. It is a commonplace sight there in those seas chilled by Boreas, the north wind. Hence the name we call it, the Boreal Lights."

But that night I knew only that the pale and lovely and fearsome lights were being seen in The One World for the first time in sixty and six years, and I told Motecuzoma, "According to my father, they were the omen that presaged the Hard Times back then."

"Ah, yes." He nodded somberly. "The history of those starvation years I have read. But I think any bygone Hard Times will prove to have been negligible in comparison to what is now in store." He sat silent for a time, and I thought he was only moping, but suddenly he said, "Knight Mixtli, I wish you to undertake another journey."

I protested as politely as I could, "My lord, I am an ageing man."

"I will again provide carriers and escorts, and it is no rigorous trail from here to the Totonaca coast."

I protested more strongly, "The first formal meeting between the Mexica and the white Spaniards, my lord, should be entrusted to no lesser personages than the nobles of your Speaking Council."

"Most of them are older than you are, and less fit for traveling. None of them has your facility at word picture accounts, or your knowledge of the strangers' tongue. Most important, Mixtli, you have some skill at picturing people as they really look. That is something we have not yet had, not since the outlanders first arrived in the Maya country—a good picture of them."

I said, "If that is all my lord requires, I can still draw from memory the faces of those two I visited in Tiho, and do a passably recognizable portrayal."

"No," said Motecuzoma. "You said yourself that they were only artisan commoners. I wish to see the face of their leader, the man Cortes."

I ventured to say, "Has my lord then concluded that Cortes is a man?"

He smiled wryly. "You have always disdained the notion that he might be a god. But there have been so many omens, so many coincidences. If he is not Quetzalcoatl, if his warriors are not the Tolteca returning, they could still have been sent by the gods. Perhaps as a retribution of some sort." I studied his face, rather corpse-looking in the greenish glow from above. I wondered if, when he spoke of retribution, he was thinking of his having snatched the throne of Texcoco from the Crown Prince Black Flower, or if he had other, private, secret sins in mind.

But he suddenly drew himself up and said in his more usual tart manner, "That aspect of the matter need not concern you. Only bring me a portrait of Cortes, and word pictures numbering his forces, describing their mysterious weapons, showing the manner in which they fight, anything else that will help us know them better."

I tried one last demurrer. "Whatever the man Cortes may be or may represent, my lord, I judge that he is no fool. He is not likely to let a spying scribe wander at will about his encampment, counting his warriors and their armory."

"You will not go alone, but with many nobles, richly accoutered according to their station, and all of you will address the man Cortes as an equal noble. That will flatter him. And you will take a train of porters bearing rich gifts. That will allay his suspicions as to your real intent. You will be high emissaries from the Revered Speaker of the Mexica and The One World, fitly greeting the emissaries of that King Carlos of Spain." He paused and gave me a look. "Every man of you will be an authentic and fully accredited lord of the Mexica nobility."

When I got home again, I found Beu also awake. After having watched the night sky's lights for some time, she was brewing chocolate for my return. I greeted her considerably more exuberantly than usual, "It has been quite a night, my Lady Waiting Moon."

She obviously took that for an endearment, and looked both startled and delighted, for I do not believe I had ever in our married life spoken an endearment to her.

"Why, Zaa," she said, and blushed with pleasure. "If you were merely to call me 'wife' it would lift my heart. But—my lady? Why this sudden affection? Has something—?"

"No, no, no," I interrupted. I had for too many years been satisfied with Beu's closed and contained demeanor; I did not want her suddenly gushing sentimentality. "I spoke with the prescribed formality. 'Lady' is now your entitled mode of address. This night the Revered Speaker awarded me the -tzin to my name, which confers it upon you as well."

"Oh," she said, as if she would have preferred some other sort of benefaction. But she quickly reverted to her cool and unemotional former self. "I take it you are pleased, Zaa."

I laughed, somewhat ironically. "When I was young I dreamt of doing great deeds and earning great wealth and becoming a noble. Not until now, past my sheaf of years, am I Mixtzin, the Lord Mixtli of the Mexica, and perhaps only briefly, Beu.... Perhaps only as long as there are lords, only as long as there are Mexica—"

There were four other nobles besides myself, and, since they had been born to their titles, they were not much pleased that Motecuzoma had set an upstart like me in command of the expedition and the mission we were charged to accomplish.

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