The whole Mexica nation feasted on the flesh of the defeated warriors.
The gods were pleased. The rains came and the sun shined.
All was well with the Mexica people. It had taken us nearly twenty generations, but we had risen to hegemony over the One World.
But there was always one god who could never be satisfied. Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, would not be satisfied with just blood. When he left Tula and sailed over the Eastern Sea, he had declared that he would be returning to claim his kingdom.
Although my people enjoyed the opulence of the masters of the One World, they always knew that someday Quetzalcóatl would return.
And the kingdom he would claim was the one they possessed.
FORTY-NINE
We left Teotihuacan, left the dream, and I returned to being a servant boy to a traveling magician. The time I had been with the Healer turned into a year and then into another. After my experience with the potion of the flower weaver, I continued to learn the way of the indios, the dialects, the nuances of walk and talk and even thinking. The day came when the Healer paid me the compliment I had long waited for.
"You no longer smell like a white man," he said.
Besides knowledge of my indio ancestors' history, I gained respect for them. Aztec history was a bloody one, but besides war, the indios made astronomical discoveries, perfected a calendar, published innumerable books in the picture writing that resembled the hieroglyphics of the Egypt of the pharaohs, and made amazing discoveries in health and medicine. Tenochtitlan was said to be a clean, fresh-smelling city in which waste was hauled away in boats to be used as fertilizer. The floating gardens that took root and created man-made islands and temples larger than any on earth were marvels of engineering.
It was true that there were aspects of the Aztecs that were not to be admired. Their practice of the blood covenant was cruel and barbaric. But it was not any more brutal than the practices of the largest and most respected European empire in history: the Roman Empire. Not even the great Aztec sacrificial ceremony where twenty thousand people were killed overshadows the savageness and cruelty of the Roman arenas. The arenas were not just places where thousands of gladiators fought to the death, but many thousands of innocent Christians and other dissenters were murdered by professional warriors or torn apart by wild animals—all for the amusement of crowds.
The Aztecs were no more hated by the indio states they demanded tribute from than the Romans were hated by the peoples they had subjugated. The fray told me that the Romans crucified ten thousand Jews at one time after they rebelled against Roman tyranny and payment of tribute to Rome. Whole cities were decimated.
Even in my own enlightened time, how many thousands were sacrificedbecause of some unspoken blood covenant the Inquisition had with God? Is being burned aliveat the stake less barbaric than having a knife plunged into your chest and your heart ripped out?
Ayya, I would not be the first to cast a stone at my Aztec ancestors.
There was more to the story of the Aztecs, the return of Quetzalcóatl, and the attack by gods astride great animals, but that must wait for another time. But there was one custom of my indio ancestors that I found more repugnant than ripping out beating hearts. Aztec priests often slit their pene so that they could not have relations with women. And if they did have relations despite the cut, their virile juice spilled onto the ground. And many of their warriors cut off a piece of the skin at the front of their pene and offered the skin in sacrifice.
Eh, you think it was just a dream? This tale of Huitzilopochtli and blood, that I had walked with the gods? Perhaps so, but I carried away from that "dream" a mark placed upon me by the gods: The skin at the tip of my pene was severed. I had made the sacrifice of an Aztec warrior.
I learned more than indio ways and legends from the Healer. Besides practical facts about the plants and animals of New Spain, information that I could use if I ever had to survive from what I could find on the land, watching his wise and smooth manners gave me insights into dealing with people. Fray Antonio had dealt bluntly with people he had controversies with, often as a battering ram, driven by his passions. The Healer was a man of cleverness and cunning. Had he not deprived a master liar and thief of two reales? How he caught a thief with a snake trap gave me fresh perception about how greed can snarl a criminal. Later in life I would use the same trick. He called it "the snake trap."
In a village where we had stopped to heal local ailments, someone stole the Healer's prize pipe, the one that fed the belly of Chac-Mool. Only a fool would steal from a sorcerer, but fool he may have been. The Healer had had the pipe long before I was born. I could tell from the quiet intensity of his eyes that he was more upset about the loss than his impassive facial features revealed.
To catch the thief, he told me, he would use a snake trap.
"What's a snake trap?" I asked him.
"A snake trap is two eggs and a ring. The ring is attached upright to a piece of wood. Close to a snake hole, an egg is placed on each side of the ring. When the snake sees the egg, it swallows the first one. Snakes, like people, are greedy, and rather than stealing just one egg, as soon as the egg is worked down its body a little, it slips through the ring and swallows the second egg. It is now trapped because it can't go any farther forward or backward because the ring won't slip past either egg until they digest."
"You can't get a man to slip through a ring for an egg."
He twittered. "Not for an egg, but perhaps for tobacco to smoke in the pipe he stole."
The Healer placed a pouch of tobacco in our campsite at the spot where the pipe had been taken. He smeared red chili powder on the underside of some of the tobacco leaves.
"The thief already has his head through the ring, he did that when he slipped into our camp to steal my pipe. Now we shall see if instead of backing out of the ring, he takes the tobacco."
We left our camp for the cacique's hut, where those requiring the Healer's services had gathered. After an hour I went back to the camp under the pretense of getting something. The tobacco was gone. I ran and told the Healer.
Moments later the cacique ordered every person in the village out into the street and instructed them to hold up their hands.
One man had red powder on his hands. We found the pipe under the straw bedding in his hut.
We left the thief to his fellow villagers for punishment. I got another lesson in the Aztec Ways when the Healer explained how a punishment would be devised.
"Our people believe that a crime should be punished with the same instrument that the crime was committed with. If a man murders another with a knife, the killer will be stabbed with a knife, the same one if possible; that returns the evil the killer gave to the knife back to the killer himself."
Tobacco theft presented a less clear choice of punishment than murder. I wondered what punishment the cacique and village elders would devise.
They consulted in a circle while they drank pulque—and smoked the ever-present tobacco, of course.
Finally, they came to a conclusion.
The thief was tied to a tree and a cloth sack placed over his head. A small hole was cut in the sack and one by one the men of the village went up to the sack with their burning pipes and blew smoke into the hole.
At first I heard the tied man coughing. The coughing became a gasping hack. When it began to sound like a death rattle, I left and returned to our camp.