Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary - Страница 35

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"I know the man," I said. "Caught you, did he? And he would hardly believe a spring to be any kind of church decoration. Did he scold you for neglecting your proper work?"

"No. But he did ask what I was fooling with. Cunningly, I told him that I had had an idea for an invention, and I was struggling to bring it into reality."

"An invention, eh?"

"That is what Padre Diego said, too, and he laughed in ridicule. He said, 'That is no invention, maestro. It is a contrivance that has been familiar to us civilized folk for ages and ages.' And then—can you guess what he did, Tenamaxtli?"

"He recognized it as a piece of an arcabuz," I groaned. "Our secret project is exposed and thwarted."

"No, no. Not at all. He went away somewhere and came back, bringing me a whole handful of different sorts of springs. The spiral coil that I require to spin the grooved wheel." He showed me the spring. "Also the flat kind that bends back and forth, which I need for snapping what you called the cat's-paw." He showed me that one, too. "In brief, I now know how to make those things, but I do not need to. The good priest made me a gift of them."

I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. "Marvelous!" I exclaimed. "For once, the coincidence-loving gods have been gracious. I must say, Pochotl, you are having more success than I." And I told him of my discouraging experiments with the polvora.

He thought for a moment, then suggested, "Perhaps you are not experimenting under the right conditions. From what you have described as the workings of the arcabuz, I think you cannot judge the efficacy of the polvora until you pack it into a tightly constricted space before you touch fire to it."

"Perhaps," I said. "But I have only pinches of the powder to work with. It will be a long time before I can fabricate enough of it to pack into anything."

However, the very next day the gods of coincidence arranged another happy furtherance of my project.

As I had promised Citlali, I was spending some part of every day at the late Netzlin's market stall. That required little of me except to be there standing among the baskets whenever a customer wished to buy one, because Citlali had told me the price she expected to be paid for each one—in cacao beans or snippets of tin or maravedi coins—and the customer could judge the quality without my needing to point it out. He or she could even pour water into any of Citlali's baskets to test it; they were all so tightly woven that they would not leak water, let alone seeds or meal or whatever else they were destined to contain. Since there was nothing else for me to do, between customers, I spent the time conversing with passersby or smoking picietl with other stall-keepers or—as I was doing on the day of which I speak—pouring onto my stall's shopboard small mounds of charcoal, azufre and xitli powders, so I could morosely meditate on them and their infinite number of possible combinations.

"Ayya, Cuatl Tenamaxtli!" boomed a hearty voice in a pretense of dismay. "Are you going into competition with my wares?"

I looked up. It was a man named Peloloa, a pochtecatl trader whom I knew from previous encounters. He regularly came to the City of Mexico, bringing the two prime products of his native Xoconochco, that coastal Hot Land far to the south, whence had come most of our cotton and salt since long before the white men set foot in The One World.

"By Iztociuatl!" he exclaimed, invoking the goddess of salt, as he pointed at my pathetic pile of white grains on the shopboard. "Are you intending to trounce me at my own trade?"

"No, Cuatl Peloloa," I said, smiling ruefully. "This is not a salt that anyone would wish to buy."

"You are right," he said, touching a few grains to his tongue, before I could stop him and tell him it was purely essence of urine. Then he surprised me, saying, "It is only the bitter first-harvest. What the Spaniards call salitre. It sells so cheaply that it would hardly pay you a living."

"Ayyo," I breathed. "You recognize this substance?"

"But of course. Who from the Xoconochco would not?"

"Do you boil women's urine in the Xoconochco, then?"

He looked blank and said, "What?"

"Nothing. No matter. You called the powder 'first-harvest.' What does that mean?"

"What it says. Some people think we simply dip a scoop into the sea and strain the salt directly from it. Not so. The making of salt is a more complicated process. We dike off the shallows of our lagoons and let them dry, yes, but then those chunks and lumps and flakes of dry matter must be rid of their many impurities. First, in fresh water, they are sieved clean of sand and shells and weeds. Then, again in fresh water, the substance is boiled. From that initial boiling come crystals that are also sieved out. Those are the first-harvest crystals—salitre—exactly what you have there, Tenamaxtli, only yours has been pulverized. To get to the goddess's invaluable real salt takes several more stages of refinement."

"You said this salitre sells, but cheaply."

"The Xoconochco farmers buy it merely to spread it on their cotton fields. They claim it enhances the ground's fertility. The Spanish employ salitre in some manner in their tanneries. I know not what use you might be thinking of making of it—"

"Tanning!" I lied. "Yes, that is it. I contemplate adding fine leather goods to my stock here. I was only puzzled as to where to get the salitre."

"I shall be glad to bring you a whole tamemi load, on my next trip north," said Peloloa. "Cheap it is, but I shall charge you nothing at all. You are a friend."

I raced home to announce the good news. But in my excitement, I did it awkwardly. I dashed through the doorway curtain, shouting:

"You can cease urinating now, Citlali!"

My inelegant entrance threw her into such a paroxysm of laughter that it was a while before she could gasp out, "I once—called you—preposterous. I was wrong. You are—totally xolopitli!" And it was a while longer before I could gather my wits and rephrase my announcement, and tell her what great good fortune had befallen me.

Citlali said shyly, and she was seldom shy, "Perhaps we should make a small celebration. To show gratitude to the salt goddess Iztociuatl."

"A celebration? Of what sort?"

Still shyly, and blushing now, she said, "I have been taking the powdered root tlatlaohuehuetl throughout the past month. I believe we need worry about no mishap if we were to give its vaunted impregnability a trial."

I looked at her—"with new eyes," I was about to say, but that would not be true. During all this time that we had been sleeping apart, on pallets in the separate rooms, I had been desiring her, but virtuously had given no sign of it. Also, it had been so very long since I had lain with a female—the tiny brown Rebeca—that I might soon have resorted to the services of a maatitl. Citlali must have taken my brief hesitation as reluctance, for now she said boldly, with laughter, and made me laugh, too:

"Niez tlalqua ayquic axitlinema." Which means, "I promise not to urinate."

And so we embraced laughing, which, I now learned for the first time, is the very best way to begin.

All this while, Ome-Ehecatl had been growing, from a babe in arms, to an infant that crawled, to a weanling learning wobblily to walk. I kept expecting Ehecatl to die any day, and no doubt Citlali did, too, because a child afflicted with a physical deformity so evident at birth usually has other defects that are not visible, and dies very young. During Ehecatl's infancy, the only other deficiency that became apparent was the child's never learning to speak, and possibly that indicated deafness as well. That may have troubled Citlali more than it did me; I was frankly pleased that the child never cried, either.

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