Aztec - Jennings Gary (книги хорошем качестве бесплатно без регистрации TXT) 📗

Ahuitzotl had begun to make a parkland of what had formerly been a forest wilderness. That project would not be completed for several years yet—the baths and fountains and statuary and such—but already the forest had been thinned to leave standing only the incalculably ancient, towering ahuehuelque cypresses and the carpet of grass and wild flowers growing beneath them. That carpet was quite invisible, and the mighty cypresses appeared to stand magically rootless in the pale blue ground mist rising as Tonatiu arose. Chimali would have been equally invisible to me, had he chosen to crouch somewhere in that mist.

Instead, I saw as soon as I raised my topaz to my eye, he had elected to strip off his garments and lie naked along the length of a thick cypress limb which stretched horizontally from its tree, about half again my height above ground level. Chimali's outstretched right arm, clutching the haft of a maquahuitl, was also laid along the limb and pressed close to it. For a moment I was puzzled. Why such an easily seen ambuscade? Why was he unclothed?

Then I grasped his intention, and I must have grinned like a coyote. At the reception the night before, Chimali had not seen me make that one use of my seeing crystal, and obviously no one had thought to inform him of the new and artificial improvement to my vision. He had doffed his colorful clothes so that his skin would blend with the brown of the cypress bough. He believed that there he would be invisible to his old friend Mole, his fellow student Fogbound, while I went groping and searching for him among the trees. He had only to lie there in safety until, in my halting and squinting progress, I finally passed beneath. Then he would hack downward with the maquahuitl, a single stroke, and I would be dead.

For an instant, I felt it was almost unfair of me to have taken advantage of my crystal to descry his whereabouts. But then I thought: he must have been much pleased by my stipulation that we two meet alone. After disposing of me, he could dress and go back to the city, and tell how we had met bravely face to face, and what a savage and knightly duel we had fought, before he finally overpowered me. If I knew Chimali, he would even inflict a few minor cuts on himself to make the story more credible. So I had no more compunction about what I was going to do. I tucked the topaz back inside my mantle, dropped my maquahuitl to the ground and, both hands on the shaft of my leveled spear, went down into the misty wood.

I walked slowly and warily, as he would expect of the inept fighter Fogbound, my knees bent, my eyes narrowed to slits, like a mole's. Of course, I did not go directly to his tree, but began quartering the wood from well to one side of it. Every time I approached a tree, I would reach far forward and jab my spear clumsily around the opposite side of its trunk before moving farther. However, I had made mental note of Chimali's lurking place and the position of the limb on which he lay. As I neared the spot, I began gradually to raise my spear from the horizontal until I was carrying it upright in front of me, point uppermost, as Blood Glutton had taught me to carry it in the jungle, to discourage jaguars lying in wait to pounce. With my weapon in that position, I insured that he could not slash down at me from my front; he would have to wait until the spear point and I had passed a little way under him, and then strike at the back of my head or neck.

I approached his tree as I had all the others, crouched and slowly stalking, continuously turning my frowning, peering face from side to side, keeping my squinted gaze always level, never once looking up. The moment I came under his limb, I jabbed upward two-handed, with all my strength.

I had a heart-stopping moment then. The spear point never touched him; it stopped short of meeting any flesh; it hit with a thunk! against the wood of the limb and sent a numbing shock through both my arms. But Chimali must, at that same instant, have been swinging his maquahuitl, thus simultaneously loosing his grip on the limb and putting himself off balance. For the blow I gave the limb shook him off it; he landed just behind me, flat on his back. The breath whooshed from his lungs as the maquahuitl jumped from his hand. I whirled and clubbed him in the head with the butt end of my spear shaft, and he lay still.

I bent over him to note that he was not dead, but that he would be unconscious for some little while yet. So I simply picked up his sword and went back over the rise, retrieving my own dropped sword on the way, and rejoined the two young arms bearers. Cozcatl gave a small cheer when he saw me carrying my opponent's weapon: "I knew you would slay him, Mixtli!"

"I did not," I said. "I left him insensible, but if he wakes he will have suffered nothing worse than a bad headache. If he wakes. I told you once, long ago, that when the time came for Chimali's execution you would decide the manner of it." I plucked my dagger from my waistband and handed it to him. The page watched us with horrified fascination. I waved Cozcatl toward the wood. "You will easily find where he lies. Go, and give him what he deserves."

Cozcatl nodded and marched over the rise and out of sight. The page and I waited. His face was discolored and contorted, and he kept swallowing in an endeavor not to be sick. When Cozcatl returned, before he got close enough to speak, we could see that his dagger was no longer a glittery black, it was a gleaming red.

But he shook his head as he approached, and said, "I let him live, Mixtli."

I exclaimed, "What? Why?"

"I overheard the Revered Speaker's threatening words last night," he said apologetically. "With Chimali helpless before me, I was much tempted, but I did not kill him. Since he still lives, the Lord Speaker cannot vent too much anger on you. I took from Chimali only these."

He held out one clenched hand and opened it so I could see the two mucously glistening globules and the flabby pink thing, raggedly cut off about halfway down its length.

I said to the miserable and retching page, "You heard. He lives. But he will require your help to return to the city. Go and stanch his bleeding and wait for him to awaken."

"So the man Chimali lives," said Ahuitzotl frostily. "If you can call it life. So you complied with our prohibition against killing him, by not quite killing him entirely. So you blithely expect that we will not be outraged and vengeful as we promised." I prudently said nothing. "We grant that you obeyed our spoken word, but you understood very well our unspoken meaning, and what of that? What earthly use is the man to us in his present condition?"

I had by then resignedly come to expect that in any interview with the Uey-Tlatoani I would be the focus of a bulging-eyed glare. Others quailed and quaked before that awful look, but I was beginning to take it as a matter of course.

I said, "Perhaps, if the Revered Speaker would now hear my reasons for having challenged the palace artist, my lord might be inclined to leniency regarding the tragic outcome of the duel."

He merely grunted, but I took it as permission to speak. I told him much the same history I had told Zyanya, only omitting all mention of the events in Texcoco, since they had so intimately involved Ahuitzotl's murder of my newborn son, hence my fears for my newly-wed wife, Ahuitzotl grunted again, then meditated on the matter—or so I assumed from his scowling silence—then finally said:

"We did not engage the artist Chimali because of or in spite of his despicable amorality, his sexual proclivities, his vindictive nature, or his tendency to treachery. We engaged him only to paint pictures, which he did better than any other painter of these or bygone days. You may not have slain the man, but you most certainly slew the artist. Now that his eyeballs have been plucked out, he can no longer paint. Now that his tongue has been cut out, he cannot even impart to any of our other artists the secret of compounding those unique colors he invented."