Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗

"That vicious woman G'nda Ke did not really die. Why should she have done, after living unkillable all those sheaves and sheaves of years?"

And, "She once threatened that I would never be rid of her. Since she lived only to do evil, she might easily live as long as evil does, and that must be until the end of time."

And, "Now she has taken her revenge on us who watched her seeming to die—a quick revenge on Ualiztli, a lingering revenge on me. I wonder what appalling thing she has done to that poor innocent ticitl back in Bakum..."

And at last, "Somewhere she is gloating at my plight, at my pitifully trying to stay alive. May she be damned to Mictlan, and may I never meet her there. I shall entrust my fate to the gods of wind and water, and hope I shall have merited Tonatiucan when I die..."

At that, I threw away my paddle and stretched out in the acali to sleep while I waited for the inevitable.

I said that, to this day, I almost wish the voyage had continued as uneventfully as it had begun. The good Ticitl Ualiztli would not have been lost, I would soon have seen Aztlan and dear Ameyatl again, and then Nocheztli and my army, and then have got on with my war. But if things had happened so, I would not have been impelled into the most extraordinary of all my life's adventures, and I would not have met the extraordinary young woman I have most loved in all my life.

XXV

I did not exactly sleep. The combination of my being unutterably weary, weakened by hunger, blistered by the sun, parched with thirst—and withal, too dispirited to care—simply sank me into an insensibility that was relieved only by an occasional bout of delirium. During one of those, I raised my head and thought I saw a distant smudge of land, off where the sea met the sky. But I knew that could not be, because it lay on the southern horizon, and there is no land mass in the southern stretches of the Western Sea. It had to be only a taunting apparition born of my delirium, so I was grateful when I subsided again into insensibility.

The next unlikely occurrence was that I felt water splashing on my face. My dull mind did not respond with alarm, but dully accepted that my acali had been swamped by a wave, and that I would shortly be entirely underwater, and drowned, and dead. But the water continued just to splash my face, stopping my nostrils so that I involuntarily opened my dry, cracked, gummed-together lips. It took a moment for my dulled senses to register that the water was sweet, not salt. At that realization, my dull mind began to fight its way upward through the layers of insensibility. With an effort, I opened my gummed-together eyelids.

Even my dulled, dimmed eyes could descry that they were seeing two human hands squeezing a sponge, and behind the hands was the extremely beautiful face of a young woman. The water was as fresh, cool and sweet as her face. Dully, I supposed that I had attained Tonatiucan or Tlalocan or some other of the gods' blissful afterworlds, and that this was one of that god's attendant spirits waking me to welcome me. If so, I was exceedingly glad to be dead.

Anyway, dead or not, I was slowly recovering my vision, and also the ability to move my head slightly, to see the spirit the better. She was kneeling close beside me and she wore nothing but her long black hair and a maxtlatl, a man's loincloth. She was not alone; other spirits had convened to help welcome me. Behind her, I could now see, stood several other female spirits of various sizes and apparently various ages, all wearing the same costume—or lack of it.

But, I dully wondered, was I being welcomed? Though the lovely spirit was gently rousing and refreshing me with water, she regarded me with a not very kindly look and addressed me in a tone of mild vexation. Curiously, the spirit spoke not my Nahuatl tongue, as I would have expected in an afterlife arranged by one of the Azteca gods. She spoke the Pore of the Purempe people, but a dialect new to me, and it took a while for my dull brain to comprehend what she was repeating over and over:

"You have come too soon. You must go back."

I laughed, or intended a laugh. I probably squawked like a seagull. And my voice was raw and raspy when I summoned up enough Pore to say, "Surely you can see... I came not by choice. But where... so providentially... have I come to?"

"You truly do not know?" she asked, less severely.

I shook my head, only feebly, but I should not have done that, for it rocked me back into insensibility. As my mind went reeling and fading away into darkness, though, I heard her say:

"Iya omekuacheni uarichehuari."

It means, "These are The Islands of the Women."

A long while back, when I described what Aztlan was like in the days of my childhood, I remarked that our fishermen took from the Western Sea every sort of edible and useful and valuable thing except those things that are called, in all the languages of The One World, "the hearts of oysters." By ancient tradition, and by agreement throughout the Azteca dominions, the collection of the Western Sea's oyster-heart pearls has always been done exclusively by the fishermen of Yakoreke, the seaside community situated twelve one-long-runs south of Aztlan.

Oh, now and again, an Aztecatl fisherman elsewhere, dredging up shellfish just to sell as food, would have the good fortune to find in one of his oysters that lovely little pebble of a heart. No one bade him throw it back into the sea, or forbade him to keep or sell it, for a perfect pearl is as precious as a solid gold bead of equal size. But it was the Yakoreke men who knew how to find those oyster-hearts in quantity, and they kept that knowledge a secret, handing it down from fisher fathers to fisher sons, none ever confiding it to any outsider.

Nevertheless, over the sheaves of years, outsiders had learned a few tantalizing things about that pearl-gathering process. One thing everyone knew was that just once each year all the sea-fishers of Yakoreke set out in their several acaltin, each canoe heavily laden with some kind of freight, the nature of which was hidden by coverings of mats and blankets. The natural presumption would have been that the men carried some secret sort of oyster bait. Whatever it was, they carried it out of sight of land. That, in itself, was a feat so bold that no envious fisherman from any other place, in all the sheaves of years, had ever dared to try to follow them to their secret oyster ground.

This much else was known: the Yakoreke men would stay out there, wherever they went, for the space of nine days. On the ninth day, their waiting families—and pochteca traders gathering there from all over The One World—would sight the fleet of acaltin coming landward from the horizon. And the canoes came no longer heaped with shrouded freight, nor even laden with oysters. Each man brought home only a leather pouch full of the oysters' hearts. The merchants waiting to buy those pearls knew better than to ask where the men had got them, or how. And so did the fishermen's womenfolk.

So much was known; outsiders had to conjecture the rest, and they made up various legends to fit the circumstances. The most credible supposition was that there had to be some land out there west of Yakoreke—islands, maybe, surrounded by shoal waters—because it would be impossible for any fishermen to dredge up oysters from the great depths of the open sea. But why did the men go out only once a year? Perhaps they kept slaves on those islands, collecting oyster-hearts all year round, and saving them until their masters came at an appointed time, bearing goods to trade for the pearls.

And the fact that the fishermen told their secret only to their sons, not to the females of Yakoreke, inspired another touch to the legend. Those supposed slaves on those supposed islands must be females themselves, and the Yakoreke women must never know, lest they jealously prevent their menfolk from going there. Thus grew the legend of The Islands of the Women. All my young life I had heard that legend and variants of it—but, like everyone else of good sense, I had always dismissed the tales as mythical and absurd. For one reason, it was foolish to believe that an isolated populace all female could have perpetuated itself over so many lifetimes. But now, by pure chance, I had found that those islands did and do exist in fact. I would not have survived if they did not.