"I do not know," he said. "But right now some of them are hungry, because they have deliberately not been fed for some time. There will be sacrifices at the ceremony, and the remains will be disposed of here, as meat for the jaguar and cuguar cats, and the coyotin wolves and the tzopilotin vultures."
I was eyeing the largest animal native to our lands—the ugly and bulky and sluggish tapir; it waggled its prehensile snout at me—when a familiar voice said, "Master quarrier, why do you not show the boy the tequani hall?"
It was the bent brown man we had earlier met in the street. My father gave him an exasperated look and demanded, "Are you following us, old nuisance?"
The man shrugged. "I merely drag my ancient bones here to see the Sun Stone dedication." Then he gestured to a closed door at the far end of the passage and said to me, "In there, my boy, are sights indeed. Human animals far more interesting than these mere brutes. A tlacaztali woman, for instance. Do you know what a tlacaztali is? A person dead white all over, skin and hair and all, except for her eyes, which are pink. And there is a dwarf with only half a head, who eats—"
"Hush!" my father said sternly. "This is a day for the boy to enjoy. I will not sicken him with the sight of those pitiful freaks."
"Ah, well," said the old man. "Some do enjoy viewing the deformed and the mutilated." His eyes glittered at me. "But they will still be there, young Mixtli, when you are grown mature and superior enough to mock and tease them. I daresay there will be even more curiosities in the tequani hall by then, no doubt even more entertaining and edifying to you."
"Will you be silent?" bellowed my father.
"Pardon, my lord," said the hunched old man, hunching himself even smaller. "Let me make amends for my impertinence. It is almost midday and the ceremony will soon begin. If we go now and get good places, perhaps I can explain to you and the boy some things you might not otherwise understand."
The plaza was now full to overflowing, and the people were shoulder to shoulder. We would never have got anywhere close to the Sun Stone, except that more and more nobles were now haughtily arriving at the last moment, borne in gilded and upholstered litter chairs. The crowds of commoners and lower classes parted without a murmur to let them through, and the brown man audaciously eeled along behind them, with us behind him, until we were almost as far forward as the front ranks of real notables. I would still have been hemmed in without a view, but my father hoisted me to one shoulder. He looked down at our guide and said, "I can lift you up too, old man."
"I thank you for your thoughtfulness, my lord," said that one, half smiling, "but I am heavier than I look."
The focus of all eyes was the Sun Stone, set for the occasion on a terrace between the two broad staircases of the unfinished Great Pyramid. But it was shrouded from our sight with a mantle of shining white cotton. So I occupied myself with admiring the arriving nobles, for their litter chairs and their costumes were something to behold. The men and women alike wore mantles entirely woven of feathers, some varicolored, some of just one coruscating hue. The ladies' hair was tinted purple, as was customary on such a day, and they held their hands high to display the bangled and festooned rings on their fingers. But the lords wore many more ornaments than their ladies. All had diadems or tassels of gold and rich feathers on their heads. Some wore gold medallions on neck chains, gold bracelets and armlets and anklets. Others wore ornate plugs of gold or jewels piercing earlobes or nostrils or lower lips, or all of those.
"Here comes the High Treasurer," said our guide. "Ciuacoatl, the Snake Woman, second in command to the Revered Speaker himself."
I looked, eager to see a snake woman, which I assume must be a creature like those "human animals" which I had not been allowed to look at. But it was just another píli, and a man at that, distinguished only for being even more gorgeously attired than most of the other nobles. The labret he wore was so heavy that it dragged his lower lip down in a pout. But it was a cunning labret: a miniature serpent of gold, so fashioned that it wriggled and flickered its tiny tongue in and out as the Lord Treasurer bobbed along in his chair.
Our guide laughed at me; he had seen my disappointment. "The Snake Woman is merely a title, boy, not a description," he said. "Every High Treasurer has always been called Ciuacoatl, though probably none of them could tell you why. My own theory is that it is because both snakes and women coil tight around any treasures they may hold."
Then the crowd in the plaza, which had been murmurous, quieted all at once; the Uey-Tlatoani himself had appeared. He had somehow arrived unseen or had been hidden somewhere beforehand, for now he suddenly stood beside the veiled Sun Stone. Axayácatl's visage was obscured by labret, nose plug, and ear plugs, and shadowed by the sunburst crown of scarlet macaw plumes that arched completely over his head from shoulder to shoulder. Not much of the rest of his body was visible either. His mantle of gold and green parrot feathers fell all the way to his feet. His chest bore a large and intricately worked medallion, his loincloth was of rich red leather, on his feet he wore sandals apparently of solid gold, laced as high as his knees with gilded straps.
By custom, all of us in the plaza should have greeted him with the tlalqualiztli: the gesture of kneeling, touching a finger to the earth and then to our lips. But there was simply no room for that; the crowd made a sort of loud sizzle of combined kissing sounds. The Revered Speaker Axayácatl returned the greeting silently, nodding the spectacular scarlet feather crown and raising aloft his mahogany and gold staff of office.
He was surrounded by a hoard of priests who, with their filthy black garments, their dirt-encrusted black faces, and their blood-matted long hair, made a somber contrast to Axayácatl's sartorial flamboyance. The Revered Speaker explained to us the significance of the Sun Stone, while the priests chanted prayers and invocations every time he paused for breath. I cannot now remember Axayácatl's words, and probably did not understand them all at the time. But the gist was this. While the Sun Stone actually pictured the sun Tonatíu, all honor paid to it would be shared with Tenochtítlan's chief god Huitzil-opochtli, Southern Hummingbird.
I have already told how our gods could wear different aspects and names. Well, Tonatíu was the sun, and the sun is indispensable, since all life on earth would perish without him. We of Xaltócan and the peoples of many other communities were satisfied to worship him as the sun. However, it seemed obvious that the sun required nourishment to keep him strong, encouragement to keep him at his daily labors—and what could we give him more vitalizing and inspiriting than what he gave us? That is to say, human life itself. Hence the kindly sun god had the other aspect of the ferocious war god Huitzilopóchtli, who led us Mexíca in all our battle forays to procure prisoners for that necessary sacrifice. It was in the stern guise of Huitzil-opóchtli that he was most revered here in Tenochtítlan, because it was here that all our wars were planned and declared and the warriors mustered. Under yet another name, Tezcatlipóca, Smoldering Mirror, the sun was the chief god of our neighbor nation of the Acolhua. And I have come to suspect that innumerable other nations I have never visited—even nations beyond the sea across which you Spaniards came—must likewise worship that selfsame sun god, only calling him by some other name, according as they see him smile or frown.
While the Uey-Tlatoani went on speaking, and the priests kept chanting in counterpoint, and a number of musicians began to play on flutes, notched bones, and skin drums, my father and I were privately getting the history of the Sun Stone from our cacao-brown old guide.