I followed the canal out of that chamber, under the weeping willows that overhung it in the courtyard garden, and into the chamber on the other side of the palace, where the walls were covered with murals. They mostly depicted the military and civic deeds done by Ahuítzotl before and since his accession to the throne: himself the most prominent participant in various battles, himself supervising the finishing touches on the Great Pyramid. But the pictures were alive, not stiff; they teemed with detail; they were artfully colored. As I had expected, the murals were finer than any other modern paintings I had seen. Because, as I had expected, each of them was signed in its lowermost right corner with the blood-red print of Chimali's hand.
I wondered if he was yet back in Tenochtítlan, and if we would meet, and how he would go about killing me if we did. I went in search of my little slave Cozcatl, and gave him instructions:
"You know the artist Chimali by sight, and you know that he has reason to wish me dead. I shall have duties to perform tomorrow, so I cannot keep looking over my shoulder for an assassin. I want you to circulate among the throng and then come to warn me if you see Chimali. In tomorrow's crowd and confusion, he may hope to knife me unobserved and slip away unsuspected."
"He cannot, if I see him first," Cozcatl said staunchly. "And I promise, if he is present, I will see him. Have I not been useful before, master, at being your eyes?"
I said, "You have indeed, young one. And your vigilance and loyalty will not go unrewarded."
* * *
Yes, Your Excellency, I know that you are most particularly interested in our former religious observances, hence your attendance here today. Although I was never a priest, nor much of a friend to priests, I will explain the dedication of the Great Pyramid—the manner of it and the significance of it—as well as I can.
If that was not the most resplendent, populous, and awesome celebration ever held in the history of the Mexíca, it certainly outdid all others I beheld in my time. The Heart of the One World was a solid mass of people, of colorful fabrics, of perfumes, of feather plumes, of flesh, of gold, of body heat, of jewels, of sweat. One reason for the crowding was that lanes had to be kept open—by cordons of guards, their arms linked, struggling to contain the jostling mob—so the lines of prisoners could march to the pyramid and ascend to the sacrificial altar. But the spectator crush was also due to the fact that the standing room in the plaza had been reduced by the building of numerous new temples over the years, not to mention the gradually spreading bulk of the Great Pyramid itself.
Since Your Excellency never saw it, perhaps I had better describe that icpac tlamanacali. Its base was square, one hundred and fifty paces from one corner to the next, the four sides sloping inward as they rose, until the pyramid's flat summit measured seventy paces to a side. The staircase ascending its front or western incline was actually two stairways, one each for those persons climbing and descending, separated by an ornamental gutter for blood to flow down. Fifty and two stairs of steep risers and narrow treads led to a terrace that encircled the pyramid a third of the way up. Then another flight of one hundred and four steps culminated in the platform on top, with its temples and their appurtenances. At either side of every thirteenth step of the staircase stood the stone image of some god, major or minor, its stone fists holding aloft a tall pole from which floated a white feather banner.
To a man standing at the very bottom of the Great Pyramid, the structures on top were invisible. From the bottom he could see only the broad dual staircase ascending, appearing to narrow, and seeming to lead even higher than it did—into the blue sky or, on other occasions, into the sunrise. A xochimíqui trudging up the stairs toward his Flowery Death must have felt that he was truly climbing toward the very heavens of the high gods.
But when he reached the top, he would find first the small, pyramidal sacrificial stone and behind that the two temples. In a sense, those teocaltin represented war and peace, for the one on the right was the abode of Huitzilopóchtli, responsible for our military prowess, and in the one on the left dwelt Tlaloc, responsible for our harvests and peacetime prosperity. Perhaps there should rightly have been a third teocali for the sun Tonatíu, but he already had a separate sanctuary on a more modest pyramid elsewhere in the plaza, as did several other important gods. There was also in the plaza the temple in which were ranked the images of numerous gods of subordinate nations.
The new temples of Tlaloc and Huitzilopóchtli, atop the new Great Pyramid, were but square stone rooms, each containing a hollow stone statue of the god, his mouth wide open to receive nourishment. But each temple was made much taller and more impressive by a towering stone facade or roof comb: Huitzilopóchtli's indented with angular and red-painted designs, Tlaloc's indented with rounded and blue-painted designs. The body of the pyramid was predominantly a gleaming almost-silver gesso white, but the two serpentine banisters, one along each flank of the dual staircase, were painted with reptilian scales of red, blue, and green, and their big snake heads, stretching out at the ground level, were entirely covered with beaten gold.
When the ceremony began, at the first full light of day, the chief priests of Tlaloc and Huitzilopóchtli, with all their assistants, were fussing around the temples at the top of the pyramid, doing whatever it is that priests do at the last moment. On the terrace encircling the pyramid stood the more distinguished guests: Tenochtítlan's Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl, naturally, with Texcóco's Revered Speaker Nezahualpili and Tlácopan's Revered Speaker Chimalpopoca. There were also the rulers of other cities, provinces, and nations—from far-flung Mexíca domains, from the Tzapoteca lands, from the Mixteca, from the Totonaca, from the Huaxteca, from nations whose names I did not then even know. Not present, of course, was that implacably inimical ruler, old Xicotenca of Texcala, but Yquingare of Michihuácan was there.
Think of it, Your Excellency. If your Captain-General Cortés had arrived in the plaza on that day, he could have accomplished our overthrow with one swift and easy slaughter of almost all our rightful rulers. He could have proclaimed himself, there and then, the lord of practically all of what is now New Spain, and our leaderless peoples would have been hard put to dispute him. They would have been like a beheaded animal which can twitch and flail only futilely. We would have been spared, I now realize, much of the misery and suffering we later endured. But yyo ayyo! On that day we celebrated the might of the Mexíca, and we did not even suspect the existence of such things as white men, and we supposed that our roads and our days led ahead into a limitless future. Indeed, we did have some years of vigor and glory still before us, so I am glad—even knowing what I know—I am glad that no alien intruder spoiled that splendid day.
The morning was devoted to entertainments. There was much singing and dancing by the troupes from this very House of Song in which we now sit, Your Excellency, and they were far more professionally skilled than any performers I had seen or heard in Texcóco or Xaltócan—though to me none equaled the grace of my lost Tzitzitlini. There were the familiar instruments: the single thunder drum, the several god drums, the water drums, the suspended gourds, the reed flutes and shin-bone flutes and sweet-potato flutes. But the singers and dancers were also accompanied by other instruments of a complexity I had not seen elsewhere. One was called "the warbling waters," a flute which sent its notes bubbling through a water jug, with an echo effect. There was another flute, made of clay, shaped rather like a thick dish, and its player did not move his lips or fingers; he moved his head about while he blew into the mouthpiece, so that a small clay ball inside the flute rolled to stop one hole or another around its rim. And, of course, of every kind of instrument there were many. Their combined music must have been audible to any stay-at-homes in every community around all the five lakes.