Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary (версия книг .txt) 📗
It seemed that she might truly be eager to see her homeland again, because she did not—as certainly could be expected—try to make the journey as tiresome or uncomfortable or hazardous or endless as she could. Except when she directed us to veer around a tar pit ahead, or a quaking sand, or some other obstacle, I could tell by the sun that she was keeping to a course as directly northwestward as was possible, through the valleys of the coastal mountain ranges. The distance would have been shorter if we had followed the coastline west of the mountains or the flat Dead-Bone Lands to the east—but either way would have taken more time and been far more arduous for us, sweltering in the seaside swamps or shriveling in the mercilessly hot desert sands.
Nevertheless, and even without G'nda Ke's attempting to add hardships to it, the journey was rigorous and tiresome enough. Climbing a steep mountainside, of course, strains and cramps a body's muscles, seemingly all of them. You reach the crest with a sigh of heartfelt relief. But then you discover, going down the steep other side, that your body has countless other muscles to get strained and cramped. G'nda Ke and I and the two warriors—they were named Machihuiz and Acocotli—endured those travails well enough, but we frequently had to stop and let the Ticitl Ualiztli regain his breath and strength. None of those mountains is high enough to wear a perpetual crown of snow, as does Popocatepetl, but many of them rise as far as the chill regions of the sky where Tlaloc reigns, and many were the nights that we five shivered sleepless, even wrapped in our heavy tlamaitin mantles.
Often and often, at night, we would hear a bear or jaguar or cuguar or ocelotl snuffling inquisitively about our camp site, but they kept their distance, for wild animals have a natural abhorrence of humans—of live ones, anyway. Other game was plentiful by day, however: deer, rabbits, the masked mapache, the pouch-bellied tlecuachi. And there were abundant growing things: camotin tubers, ahuacatin fruits, mexixin cress. When Ualiztli found some of the herb called camopalxihuitl, he mixed that with the fat of our slain animals and made an ointment with which to soothe our sore muscles.
G'nda Ke asked him for some of the herb, to squeeze juice from it into her eyes, "because it makes them more dark and lustrous and beautiful." But the ticitl refused her because, he said, "Anyone fed a bit of that herb can soon be dead, and I would not trust you, my lady, to have it in your possession."
There were many waters in those mountains, both ponds and streams, all of them cold and sweet and delicious. We were not equipped for netting their fish or waterfowl, but the axolotin lizards and frogs were easily caught. We also dug amoli root and, cold though the waters were, bathed almost every day. In short, we never lacked for good food and drink and the pleasure of being clean. I can also say—now that I am no longer having to climb them—that those mountains are surpassingly lovely to look at.
During most of our journey, we were hospitably welcomed by the villages we came to. We slept under roofs, and the local women cooked for us many delicacies that were new to us. At every village, Ualiztli immediately sought out its ticitl, and begged various medicaments and implements from his colleague's stores. Though Ualiztli muttered that most of those backwoods ticiltin had pathetically antiquated notions of the physician's art, he was soon again carrying a well-stocked sack.
The person I sought to befriend in every community was its headman, or chief, or lord, or whatever he called himself. During most of our journey, we were traversing the lands of the peoples called the Cora, the Tepehuane, the Sobaipuri and the Raramuri, which is why they were amicable toward us, all those nations and tribes having long had dealings with Azteca traveling traders and, before the downfall of Tenochtitlan, with Mexica traders as well. They all spoke different languages, and some of their words and phrases I had learned—as I have earlier told—from their scouts sent to get a look at the white men, when those scouts and I resided at the Meson de San Jose in the City of Mexico. But G'nda Ke, because of her many and extensive travels, was much more fluent than I in all those languages. So, untrustworthy though she was at any responsible task, I employed her as my interpreter.
The message I wished to convey to every headman was the same: that I was collecting an army to overthrow the alien whites, and would he lend me as many strong, brave, truculent men as he could spare? Evidently G'nda Ke did not spitefully mistranslate my words, because almost all the headmen responded eagerly and generously to my request.
Those who had sent scouts south into the Spanish-held lands had already heard vivid firsthand reports of the white men's brutal oppression and mistreatment of those of our people who had survived the Conquest. They knew of the enslavements in obrajes, the killings, the whippings, the brandings, the humiliation of once-proud men and women, the imposition of an incomprehensible but cruel new religion. Those reports had naturally circulated among all the other tribes and communities and nations nearby, and, even at secondhand, had fired every manly and able-bodied man with an ardor to do something in retaliation. Now, here was their opportunity.
The headmen hardly had to call for volunteers. As soon as they relayed my words to their subjects, I would be surrounded by men—some of them mere adolescents, some old and rickety—enthusiastically shouting war cries and waving their weapons of obsidian or bone. I could take my choice, and those I picked I sent southward, with directions—as precise as I could make them—to enable their finding Chicomoztotl and joining Nocheztli there. Even to those too old or too young, I assigned an important errand:
"Go and spread my message to every other community, as far abroad as you can take it. And to every man who volunteers, give those same directions I have just given."
I should remark that I was not collecting men who merely wanted to be warriors. All of these were well accustomed to battle, because their tribes so often fought with neighboring ones, over territorial boundaries or hunting grounds or even to abduct each other's women for wives. However, none of these rustics had any experience of mass warfare, of being a component in an army, of serving in organized contingents that would act in disciplined concert. I was relying on Nocheztli and my other knights to teach them all they would need to know.
I suppose it was only to be expected that as we five travelers made our way farther and farther to the northwest, I would find my message received with more incredulity than enthusiasm. The communities in those distant reaches of The One World were smaller and more isolated, one from another. They apparently had little wish or need for mutual intercourse or trade or even communication. The few contacts between or among them occurred only when two or more had occasion to fight each other—as did those communities we had previously visited—usually for causes that more civilized people would have thought trifling.
Even the numerous tribes of the Raramuri country—the name means the Runner People—seemed seldom to have done their running very far from their home villages. Most of their headmen had heard only vague rumors of strangers from beyond the Eastern Sea having invaded The One World. Some of those men felt that if any such thing really had happened, it was a disaster so distant that it was of no concern to them. Others flatly refused to believe the rumors at all. And eventually our little group arrived in regions where the resident Raramuri had heard nothing whatever of the white men, and several of them laughed uproariously at the notion that whole hordes of uniformly white-skinned persons could exist.
