At last, sated with sex, food, smoke, and drink, I decided I would like to be alone for a while. The banquet hall was murky with stale air and layers of smoke, with the smells of leftover food and men's sweat and burnt-out pitch torches, all of which made my stomach feel queasy. I left The House of Song and walked unsteadily toward The Heart of the One World. There my nostrils were-assailed by an even worse smell, and my stomach churned. The plaza swarmed with slaves scraping and swabbing at the blood caked everywhere. So I skirted the outside of the Snake Wall until I found myself at the door of the menagerie I had visited with my father once, long ago.
A voice said, "It is not locked. The inmates are all caged, and anyway they are now gorged and torpid. Shall we go in?"
Even at that time of night, long past midnight, I was scarcely surprised to see him: the bent and wizened cacao-brown man who had also been present at the menagerie that other time, and present at other times in my life since. I muttered some thick-tongued greeting, and he said:
"After a day spent enjoying the rites and delights of human beings, let us commune with what we call the beasts."
I followed him inside and we strolled along the walkway between the cages and cubicles. All the carnivorous animals had been well fed with the meat of the sacrifices, but the constantly running water of the drains had flushed away almost all trace and smell of it. Here and there a coyote or jaguar or one of the great constrictor snakes opened a drowsy eye at us, then closed it again. Only a few of even the nocturnal animals were awake—bats, opossums, howler monkeys—but they too were languid and made only quiet chitters and grunts.
After a while, my companion said, "You have come a long way in a short time, Fetch!"
"Mixtli," I corrected him.
"Mixtli again, then. Always I find you with a different name and pursuing a different career. You are like that quicksilver which the goldsmiths use. Adaptable to any shape, but not to be confined in any one for long. Well, you have now had your experience of war. Will you become a professional military man?"
"Of course not," I said. "You know I have not the eyesight for that. And I think I do not have the stomach for it either."
He shrugged. "Oh, a soldier acquires callosity after only a few fights, and his stomach no longer rebels."
"I did not mean a stomach for fighting, but for the celebrations afterward. Right now I feel quite—" I belched loudly.
"Your first inebriation," he said, with a laugh. "A man gets used to that, too, I assure you. Often he gets to enjoy it, even to require it."
"I think I had rather not," I said. "I have recently experienced too many firsts too rapidly. Now I should like just a little while of repose, devoid of incidents and excitements and upsets. I believe I can prevail on Ahuítzotl to engage me as a palace scribe."
"Papers and paint pots," he said disparagingly. "Mixtli, those things you can do when you are as old and decrepit as I am. Save them for when you have energy only to set down your reminiscences. Until then, collect adventures and experiences to reminisce about. I strongly recommend travel. Go to far places, meet new people, eat exotic foods, enjoy all varieties of women, look on unfamiliar landscapes, see new things. And that reminds me—the other time you were here, you did not get to view the tequantin. Come."
He opened a door and we went into the hall of the "human animals," the freaks and monstrosities. They were not caged like the real beasts. Each lived in what would have been quite a nice, small, private chamber—except that it had no fourth wall, so that spectators like us could look in and see the tequani at whatever activity he might contrive to fill his useless life and empty days. At that time of night, all those we passed were asleep on their pallets. There were the all-white men and women—white of skin and hair—looking as impalpable as the wind. There were dwarfs and hunchbacks, and other beings twisted into even more horrid shapes.
"How do they come to be here?" I asked in a discreet murmur.
The man said, not troubling to lower his voice, "They come of their own accord, if they have been made grotesque by some accident. Or they are brought by their parents, if they were born freakish. If the tequani sells himself, the payment is given to his parents or to whomever he designates. And the Revered Speaker pays munificently. There are parents who literally pray to beget a freak, so they may become rich. The tequani himself, of course, has no use for riches, since he has here all necessary comforts for the rest of his life. But some of these, the most bizarre, cost riches aplenty. This dwarf, for instance."
The dwarf was asleep, and I was rather glad not to be seeing him awake, for he had only half a head. From the snaggle-toothed upper jaw to his collarbone, there was nothing—no lower mandible, no skin—nothing but an exposed white windpipe, red muscles, blood vessels and gullet, the latter opening behind his teeth and between his puffy little squirrel cheeks. He lay with that gruesome half head thrown back, breathing with a gurgling, whistling noise.
"He cannot chew or swallow," said my guide, "so his food must be poked down that upper end of his gullet. Since he has to bend his head far back to be fed, he cannot see what is given him, and many visitors here play cruel jokes on him. They may give him a prickly tonal fruit or a violent purgative or sometimes worse things. On many occasions he has nearly died, but he is so greedy and stupid that still he will throw his head back for anyone who makes an offering gesture."
I shuddered and went on to the next apartment. The tequani there seemed not to be asleep, for its one eye was open. Where the other eye should have been was a smooth plane of skin. The head was hairless and even neckless, its skin sloping directly into its narrow shoulders and thence into a spreading, cone-shaped torso which sat on its swollen base as solidly as a pyramid, for it had no legs. Its arms were normal enough, except that the fingers of both hands were fused together, like the flippers of a green turtle.
"This one is called the tapir woman," said the brown man, and I made a motion for him to speak more softly. "Oh, we need not mind our manners," he said. "She is probably sound asleep. The one eye is permanently overgrown and the other has lost its lids. Anyway, these tequantin soon get accustomed to being publicly discussed."
I had no intention of discussing that pitiable object. I could see why it was named for the prehensile-snouted tapir: its nose was a trunklike blob that hung pendulously to hide its mouth, if it had a mouth. But I should not have recognized it for a female, had I not been told. The head was not a woman's, nor even a human's. Any breasts were indistinguishable in the doughy rolls of flesh that composed its immovable pyramid of body. It stared back at me with its one never-closable eye.
"The jawless dwarf was born in his sad condition," said my guide. "But this one was a grown woman when she was mutilated in some sort of accident. It is supposed, from the lack of legs, that the accident involved some cutting instrument, and, from the look of the rest of her, that it also involved a fire. Flesh does not always burn in a fire, you know. Sometimes it merely softens, stretches, melts, so it can be shaped and molded like—"
My sick stomach heaved, and I said, "In the name of pity. Do not talk in front of it. In front of her."