“That is because of a refrainment which was put upon me by an impudent black rascal who carried arrows and a fan with a mirror in it, and who called himself Yaotl.”
“Blessed be the name of that god!” said the pious Emperor Vemac, “although we worship the Feathered Serpent, and not the Capricious Lord.”
Then Vemac went on to explain that he had an only daughter, who five days earlier had observed Coth, first from the windows of the palace, and later had gone down veiled into the market-place in order to regard at closer quarters this virtually pink person. She had returned, astounded and in some excitement, to demand of her father that he give her this queerly colored and greatly gifted seller of peppers to be her husband. Vemac granted her request, because he never denied his daughter anything, and ardently desired a grandson: but when they sent to look for the pink-colored pepper vendor with the great and hairless, pink-colored head, he was nowhere to be found.
The Princess Utsume had taken this disappointment, with its attendant delay of her nuptials, rather hard. In fine, said Vemac, the girl had fallen sick with love, six physicians had been able to do nothing for her, and nobody could heal her, she declared, except that beautifully tinted and in all ways magnificent pepper vendor.
“Well, you must tell the poor girl that I already have a wife,” said Coth, “even over and above an understanding with a seller of watercresses.”
“I do not,” Vemac submitted, “see what that has to do with it. In Tollan a man is permitted as many wives as he cares to have, within, of course, reason.”
“Marrying does not come under the head of reason,” said Coth.
“Then, as the husband of my only child,” said Vemac, “you will rule over Tollan along with me.”
“Oh! oh!” said Coth. For, since he had punctiliously disobeyed Yaotl in everything, he knew this must be a coincidence, and it seemed a very strange coincidence.
“And, finally,” said Vemac, “if you are hard-headed about this really excellent opening in life for a green pepper vendor, we shall have to persuade you.”
“But how,” asked Coth, reservedly, “how would you persuade me?”
Vemac raised his brown hand. His persuaders came, masked, and bringing with them their implements and a stalwart male slave. They demonstrated their methods of persuasion; and after what remained of the slave was quiet at last, Coth also for a while remained quiet.
“Of two evils,” Coth said then, “one should choose the more familiar. I will marry.”
He let them take him and bathe him and trim his long mustachios and dye his body black and perfume him and set upon his great bald head a coronal of white hens’ feathers. A red cloth was wrapped about his loins, upon his feet a priest put painted sandals with little golden bells fastened to them, and about Coth’s scented body was placed a mantle of yellow netting very beautifully fringed.
“Now,” said Vemac, “when you have had supper, do you go in there and comfort my daughter in her sickness!”
Coth obeyed, and found the princess—who proved to be in an unmitigatedly brunette fashion a most charming girl,—recumbent and weeping in a solidly built double-bed. Coth hung upon a peg in the wall his coronal of white hens’ feathers, he coughed, and he looked again at the weeping princess.
Coth said: “By such an attachment to me, my dear, I am touched. An attachment to me, in this land of half-men, is indicative of sound sense.” He coughed again, perhaps to hide his emotion, and he added: “An attachment to me is moving. So do you move over!”
She, still weeping, made room for him. He sat down upon the bed and began to comfort her. She in turn began to express her appreciation of this comforting. He hung upon a peg in the wall a mantle of yellow netting, and a red loin-cloth.
In the morning no trace whatever remained of the Princess Utsume’s illness except a great and agreeable fatigue. And in the forenoon Coth was married to the Princess Utsume and escorted to the temple of the Feathered Serpent, and there given the imperial name Toveyo, and he was crowned as the co-ruler along with Vemac over all Tollan.
Yet afterward a rather curious ceremony—called, as his brown loving bride informed Toveyo, the Feast of Brooms,—was enacted by the clergy and the entire populace of Porutsa, in order to ensure for the marriage of their princess fertility.
“I feel that this ceremony is superfluous,” Utsume said, still yawning. “But this ceremony was divinely ordained by the Goddess of Dirt; and I feel, too, my wonderful pink darling, that it is becoming for persons of our exalted rank to encourage all true religious sentiment, and generally to consent that the will of the gods be done.”
Meanwhile these rites had opened with the beheading of a quite handsome young woman, from whose body the skin was then removed, in two sections, like a horrid corselet and trousers. As such they were worn each by a priest during the rest of the ceremony: and about this Feast of Brooms the less said, the better, but to the newly christened Toveyo a great deal of it seemed morbid and even a bit immodest.
Chapter XXII. Toveyo Dances
Toveyo’s first official act was to send ambassadors to the kings in that neighborhood,—to Cocox and Napaltzin and Acolhua, the second of that name,—but none of these could give him any news of Dom Manuel. Meanwhile Coth cherished his wife and dealt with other persons also according to his nature.
Of his somewhat remarkable behavior in the war with Cacat and Coat, of how in one of his rages he destroyed a bridge with all the people on it, and of how he killed ten of his subjects with a gardener’s hoe, there is in this place no need to speak. But it came about unavoidably that, before Coth’s honeymoon was over, a deputation from the Taoltecs was beseeching Vemac to have this son-in-law of his unostentatiously assassinated.
“For there is really,” they said, “no standing him and his tantrums.”
“Such,” Vemac replied, “has been my own experience. I am afraid, though, that if we kill him my daughter will be put out, for she seems to have discovered about him some feature or another feature of great and unfailing attractiveness.”
“It is better, majesty, that she should weep than that we all be driven mad. The man’s pride and self-conceit are unbearable.”
“Nobody knows that better than I do. He hectors me in my own palace, where I am not accustomed to be overrun by anybody except my daughter. In such a position we must be politic. We must first see that this Toveyo is belittled in my daughter’s eyes. Afterward, if I know her as well as I think I do, she will consent to let us get rid of him.”
One of the darker Taoltecs, who called himself Tal-Cavepan, said then:” This all-overbearing Toveyo is now in the market-place. Follow me, and you shall see him belittled in his wife’s eyes and in the eyes of everybody!”
They followed, inquiring among themselves who might be this huge Tal-Cavepan, that he spoke so boldly. Nobody remembered having seen him before. Meanwhile Tal-Cavepan went up to where Coth and his royal wife Utsume were chaffering with a Yopi huckster over some melons. Tal-Cavepan clapped his hand to Coth’s shoulder and bore down with this hand. Coth became smaller and smaller, so that presently Tal-Cavepan stooped and picked up the nuisance whom they called Toveyo, and thus displayed to the Taoltecs their blustering oppressor as a pink midget not more than four inches high, standing there in the palm of Tal-Cavepan’s black hand.
“Dance, majesty! dance, dreadful potentate!” said Tal-Cavepan. And Coth danced for them. All the while that he danced, he swore very horribly, and his little voice was like the cheeping of a young bird.
The people crowded about him, because no such wonder-working had ever before been seen in Porutsa. Tal-Cavepan cried merrily to Vemac the Emperor, “Is not this capering son-in-law of yours belittled in his wife’s eyes and in the eyes of everybody?”