BUFFOON

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1964.

The priest barely nodded his head, his long hair stiff with clotted blood and dirt hardly stirred. He wiped his palm on his black robe, then gripped the jade-and-turquoise mosaic hilt of his knife. His aides measured their movements to the two-toned drum beat and to the unconsciously united heartbeats of all those watching from the foot of the pyramid. Four seized the sacrifice by his arms and legs, flung him on the slightly rounded stone, and held him spread-eagled on his back; the fifth held his head by a turn of the hair. The priest swept the obsidian blade from breastbone to groin, reached in and with a twist tore out the heart, held it up to the sun, then burnt it, still beating, in the eagle-cup.

Klon turned laughing to Zwordil and found that Zwordil too had seen the jest-potential.

The Construct saw that both were laughing. It spoke.

“We’ll go on then.”

It showed them the third planet of an average star swimming within the ken of one of its spaced sensors. It showed them that tribes on the planet, and outstandingly the people they had just seen, held fire-dousing-and-rekindling rites in the fall of every fifty-second time around the star. It showed them that these rites took place when one constellation zenithed at midnight. The world’s tongues called the constellation Kimah, Mao, Parwin, Al Thuruyya, Groaperikie, Pizaana-Cache, Sette Palommiele, Sifunsterri, Crannarain, Makali’i, Nanook, Pleiades, Karakarook, Tianquiztli, and many other names. Many names but one tradition—that the planet had suffered disaster, a great flood, in some past age at the moment of a midnight culmination of the constellation. It showed them this out of its memory in a swift unfolding, then paused briefly.

Klon felt Zwordil and himself grow tense. The Construct spoke.

“Now for the deciding item. You’re to tell me the relevancy. Any questions?”

Neither Klon or Zwordil had any; the one asking for more information lost a point, while the other shared in the information at no cost.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” Zwordil said.

“Ready,” Klon said.

The Construct shaped the air about each to seal them off from one another.

Klon knew a stab of fear that Zwordil would beat him out. At the signal to begin, he spilled out his answer in speedtalk. He waited a long moment. It was all over now. Soon he would know if he had won or lost. All through the competition Zwordil had been his leading rival. Each had attained to the rank of Buffoon. Each had lived long—two rejuvenations for Klon and probably the same for Zwordil. Each was almost wholly free from the pressures of animal needs. All that remained to give meaning to existence was to play out a Final Jest. The one great thrill, the one real charge, could only be one you paid for with your life. He did not want to think of losing. It would be wearying to wait till the Construct found somewhere another Final Jest pattern and set up another competition.

The shell of air vanished into air and the Construct spoke to them. “Both of you gave the right answer. The relevancy is that the constellation in question, from the point of view of the world in question, is one whose brightest star is our own sun. But because Zwordil took time to activate my frustration circuit, Klon came in ahead.”

He had won. He knew sudden misgiving. He hadn’t stopped to remember the frustration circuit that forced the Construct to indicate whether it was using the pattern for a jest of its own. Too late to ask now. But he relaxed. Zwordil had played it safe and yet had gone on to give the right answer. So all was well. He had won, and, for all Zwordil or the Construct knew, he had deliberately passed up the safeguard, gambling to win. He smiled kindly upon Zwordil, who was smiling back twistedly.

The Construct spoke.

“Klon, your Final Jest will take place at the next culminating ceremony. According to my projection of events, it will probably be the last.”

Klon was vaguely aware Zwordil was leaving; Zwordil put his hands behind his back in farewell and homed to await another competition. Klon moved into a chamber of the Construct for the changes in feature and coloring and the gaining of learning that would end with the Construct saying,

“You look, speak, and think Aztec. You’re no longer Klon.”

The youth let a smile unmask his proud handsome face.

“I’ve thought of that. I’ll call myself Yollotl.”

He and the Construct laughed heartily.

* * * *

The bloody fingers of dawn tore out the heart of day and held it up, still beating, to the darkness. The sun renewed the world. Birds, their voices and feathers glistening with dew, blazed the air. A grasshopper whirred out of Yollotl’s way.

Yollotl moved slowly up the slope, crouching to keep from showing against the sky. He halted, lay flat, twisted forward, and looked through the grass he breathed.

The land lay open, all but a clench of mesquite. The village, drawing the trail, stood beyond. Sounds of waking came faintly from the village and threads of smoke rose thicker. She lay still, watching the mesquite for as long as it took shadow to shrink the breadth of a finger, his head unmoving when swaying blades grazed his face. All that while, the mesquite looked out blindly through its fringe. Then—sunlight striking the point of an arrow or a spear—it glinted.

He smiled. He moved back down the slope. Brushing dew from his tunic, he returned to the trail. He stepped into a lope and rounded the hill into the open. He veered from the trail as though to put the mesquite between himself and the village. As he skirted the mesquite his shoulder blades winged backward; the jest would be on him if it ended this way.

A shout and an arrow passed his ear. The arrow quivered the ground in front of him. He stopped. He made his chest heave as though with long running and a measure of fear. The arrow was Chichimec; someone had clipped the feathers at the nock end so that the shaft would fit the peg of an Aztec throwing-stick. He turned his head slowly. Two men had stepped out. The fat one stood back upon himself, ready to hurl an arrow. The thin one was fitting an arrow into his throwing-stick. Their eyes ran over him.

“I’ll take him to the village!”

“We’ll both take him.”

“It was my arrow that stopped him.”

“It was my arrow that held him.”

The fat one was Chimalpopoca, the thin one was Xiuhcozcatl, and the man they brought him before was Acamapichtli. Others of them had crowded into the room but Acamapichtli was the tecuhnenenque. All had let their hair grow down to the waist. None wore the clothing of warriors. All wore the clothing of traders. But the bales and baskets of goods that narrowed every room in the village they had not come by through trading.

Yollotl remained silent underquestioning until Acamapichtli smiled and said, “What were you running from?”

Yollotl made his face and voice sullenly proud.

“I do not run from. I was running toward. I was running to warn my village that an army comes.”

Acamapichtli came up straight, deaf to the sudden murmuring around him.

“It comes from?”

Yollotl spat on the ground.

“From your city, yes.”

Acamapichtli held back another’s arm.

“How far away is this army now?

“Three days’ march.”

“Did you see who heads it?”

“I saw.”

“Then tell.”

“A man of not more than twenty. Tall, slender, long-faced.”

The others traded glances and nodded. They talked among themselves.

“A younger son of the king.”

“Montezuma would be twenty now.”

“What manner of man?”

“If he is as I last heard of him he has yet to learn humility.”

“He’ll be burning to win a great victory.”

They laughed, then sobered quickly. They looked to Acamapichtli. He spoke.

“We can’t wait here for him to find out that we’re not exactly under siege. We must pack up and go!”

“Home?”

“Of course, home. How better can we show our good faith than by bringing back goods for the king to tax?”

They laughed, then sobered seeing Acamapichtli sober. He went on.

“The burning young prince will wonder that we should have broken out now, just when he comes to our relief. He will realize that we have learned of his coming and he will understand that we are proving our right to the spoils. He will not mind that as much as that we will have robbed him of battle glory.” He smiled. “He will put a good face on it, but if he should ever come to power he will bleed us.”

“Does that not trouble you?”

“I see ahead, but I live in now. And now is for leaving. The sooner we leave, the nearer home we meet him on the road. The nearer home, the easier for him to put a good face on it.”

The others began speaking, more and more eagerly, about home. A few, Xiuhcozcatl among them, gazed at the baskets of spoils and looked sour, as though sorry they could not remain to wring more from the countryside.

Acamapichtli turned his gaze on Yollotl. His eyes, hard as cacao beans, touched the turquoise mosaic ear pegs and the gold nose crescent. He spoke softly.

“Where is your village?”

Yollotl knelt silent. A point nicked his side. Acamapichtli sighed and shook his head. The point drew away. Acamapichtli smiled kindly on Yollotl.

“He was heading beyond. His village is not on our way home.” He rose from the reed mat. “In any event it is now we must think of: use it to make ready to leave.” He slapped Yollotl on the shoulder. “You have fallen into good hands.” Yollotl heard him add low to another, “Strong back.”

Yollotl smiled to himself. Acamapichtli was two-tongued as the teponaztli drum. Acamapichtli turned to Xiuhcozcatl and Chimalpopoca.

“Who is his owner?”

“I am.”

“I am.”

Acamapichtli twitched his lips.

“Then we must leave it to die owned.”

Yollotl looked at Xiuhcozcatl and Chimalpopoca. Each sought his eye. Xiuhcozcatl’s eyes were fiercely demanding, Chimalpopoca’s were plumply beseeching. Yollotl met Xiuhcozcatl’s gaze long enough to acknowledge silently between them that it had truly been Xiuhcozcatl’s first arrow that had made the capture, then he pointed to Chimalpopoca. He laughed inwardly, thinking how he had just made for himself a bad friend and a good foe.

The laden caravan left the picked bone of a village. It was a village of women and children and a few old men and such of the mute hairless dogs as had not fattened enough to trot along for eating on the way. Looking at the children of three years and younger it was plain to see that the traders had planted their seed. The people, mute as the dogs, watched the caravan take the trail to the northwest and the high valley of Mexico.

They marched, the traders each with his long wooden staff in his right hand and his fan in his left and his weapon slung ready, the porters each with a broad band of woven straw across his forehead to take the weight of the plumes of parrot and quetzal and blue cotinga or the tortoise shell or the jaguar and puma skins or the amber and jade and emeralds in the carrying frame on his back.

Chimalpopoca had proudly taken for Yollotl a heavy burden. From time to time Yollotl made as though wiping face and neck; implants of thermostatic tissue kept him free from any need to sweat. He pretended to down the cold beans they gave him to eat on the move; his skin photosynthesized all the energy he required.

They made camp. The porters did what they could to give ease to their feet and their backs. The traders stacked their staffs. With agave thorns the traders drew blood from tongue, ear, and private parts and sprinkled their blood on the staffs. They burned copal incense, offering it up to the staffs. They made a great show of all this, and would every night stop of a journey; but it was only fitting, for each rod possessed the magical virtue of Yacatecuhtli, god of merchants. The porters watched in dull awe; they felt still the ghost of the mecapalli biting into the brow with the ghost weight of the load and there was dullness of thought as though the tumpline had cut deep into the lobes of the brain, but deeper in the brain was the lurk of awe.

Yollotl lay peacefully awake through the night. He looked at the stars and found the cluster of Tianquiztli in the east. He smiled watching Xiuhcozcatl and Chimalpopoca stand their separate turns at guard. Once, toward midnight, he felt a faint uneasiness, but he put it down to the strangeness of a coyote giving tongue.

* * * *

They met Montezuma before noon. The chiefs in their feathered cloaks stood out from the common soldiers in their white cotton mail. Montezuma with his bearing and the quetzal feathers in his red leather headband stood out from the chiefs. He was ready for the meeting. His plainclothes mice had been scouting ahead and on the flanks and had alerted him. He seemed to have taken bravely the knowledge that he had set out on an empty mission.

Acamapichtli had passed word to appear weary but not weak and the traders wore the look of hard campaigning. He stood before Montezuma without raising his eyes but with flags of precious feathers, trophies of battle, flying behind him. He greeted the prince and thanked him for coming. Then, as though to put out the flair of anger burning in Montezuma’s heart, he beckoned to Yollotl.

“As the prince can see, this captive is a leader among his people. Has the prince ever seen a finer figure of a man?”

Xiuhcozcatl smiled and Chimalpopoca showed dismay.

“And as to bravery, Chimalpopoca here will tell you how valiant a fight this man put up.”

Xiuhcozcatl scowled and Chimalpopoca showed fierce pride.

Chimalpopoca started to tell how valiant a fight Yollotl had put up before Chimalpopoca, with some help, had subdued the man but Montezuma stopped him.

“I do not need gifts of slaves. I gather my own sacrifices.”

Montezuma’s glance passed over Yollotl. Yollotl chided himself. He had miscalculated; he ought to have let himself fall into Montezuma’s hands, not into those of the traders. He looked at Chimalpopoca. Chimalpopoca appeared not to know whether to feel disappointment or relief. He would have to find a way to get a hold on Chimalpopoca. Acamapichtli gestured him away.

* * * *

They made camp there. Again at dusk the traders sprinkled their blood on their staffs and burned copalli. This evening they had a much greater onlooking.

A young girl stood watching Yollotl for a time, a camp-follower by the yellow cream and the rouge on her face and by the loose hair. She gazed at him boldly, chewing chicle and showing that she had dyed her teeth red with cochineal, then turned away. Yollotl was well to look at but it was the traders it was well to do business with.

There was much business, at the rate of eight cacao beans. But at last there was silence even in the shadows and then sound sleep.

The relief column had thrown out a perimeter, so the traders did not post guard but left it to the virtue of Yacatecuhtli in the staffs to mount guard over their goods. Yollotl lay watching the sentry nearest him. The soldier had stiffened the cotton armor to turn arrows by soaking it in brine and the salt crystals glittered in the moonlight. His maquahuitl hung from his wrist by a leather thong and the obsidian splinters toothing its edges gleamed as it swung to his pacings. Yollotl waited until the man’s relief came and the two were talking. The sister of one had tied the navel cord of her new son about a toy shield and toy arrows for him to bury in a battlefield that the boy might grow brave; the soldier griped that he would now have to carry the damn thing all the way back if they did not on the road home stop by some place of old fighting. Yollotl snaked to the staffs.

He lay behind the pile of staffs and drew down the topmost noiselessly. It was sticky to the touch. A slight shifting sensation passed from it into his hands as he moved it through them to get hold of an end. He smiled. As he had guessed, it was hollow its full length and something filled this hollow. A plug tipped the staff. He worked it loose. Stones, in cotton, came forth, and quills of gold dust. He smiled again. He replaced the jewels and the gold, tapped the plug home, and put the staff back noiselessly.

He snaked to his place. With dirt he rubbed his fingers clean. He laughed silently. Chimalpopoca’s slave was Chimalpopoca’s master.

Yollotl watched Chimalpopoca’s face redden with emotion and effort as the master bent to pick up the two sticks he had placed in the doorless doorway to safeguard his household while he journeyed.

Matlalxochitl, the mistress, greeted her husband smilingly and in an aside ordered a bent woman slave to fetch water and pulp of amulli root; now she could soap and rinse her head more than the once in eighty days her husband’s absence had held her and the children to. It was a meeting of strangers. The children greeted their father with eyes four years older. Matlalxochitl thrust forward Tlacotl, a plump boy of thirteen, that he might be the first to greet his father. But Chimalpopoca’s soft face set and he eyed the boy coldly and to him alone of his sons did not say “My son.” Yollotl gathered there had been a question of timing about the boy’s birth.

But Chimalpopoca was too full of present rejoicings to let a marrowless bone of the past gnaw at him long. He put Tlacotl out of his eye and told how Ahuitzotl the king had welcomed the traders at the palace most graciously and how after they had laid the trophy banners at his feet Ahuitzotl had called them his uncles and had granted them permission to wear gold and feathers during their holidays and how he, Chimalpopoca, had stolen a glance at Montezuma and had struggled to keep from laughing.

Then, with meaningful winkings at his wife and whisperings of “tonight,” at which Matlalxochitl covered her mouth but let her eyes laugh, Chimalpopoca went into his temazcalli to sweat and switch away the dust. Matlalxochitl, on her broad face a measuring look at Yollotl, told a boy slave to show the new slaves where they would stay, herself shooed the children indoors and went to wash her hair, and so in a moment emptied the courtyard of human life.

* * * *

The slave boy, who had recently taken over his older brother’s bondage on his brother’s coming of age to marry, overslept. And Matlalxochitl’s rough tongue and the boy’s later recounting in the slave quarters and the loud hushings that Yollotl himself had heard in the night told Yollotl that Chimalpopoca’s “tonight” had meant that Chimalpopoca had gone out on midnight business.

Today meant the coming of the tax-gatherers—each with his topknot nodding in wise doubt and his drone nose twitching at the bunch of flowers in his hand to counter the smell of suspicion and his heavy-lidded eyes taking in the kings share of the spoils—and their clerks with calculating cords and their attendants with fans. So, last night, the traders had lightened the spoils as much as they dared and had poled the offtake through the canals from warehouse to hiding places. Chimalpopoca had blindfolded the boy going and coming, so that the waters did not gleam for him with the flaring from the ever-burning fires of the altars on the pyramids.

Soon, Yollotl thought gloating, the priests and the people would extinguish all fire and the people would wait in fear to see if there would be new fire. Soon would come the midnight culmination of the constellation Tianquiztli—and with it the feast of The Binding of the Years to bring to pass that the end of one fifty-two-year period should not be the end of all time but be the beginning of another fifty-two-year period. He did not have long in which to force three masters running to get rid of him. Only then, according to law, would someone be free to buy him for sacrificing. He had to begin in earnest.

The other slaves had been happy to tell him this was not a happy household. The bent slave woman cackled telling him that the first fire Matlalxochitl had lit in this house had burned badly, a bad omen at the very start of the marriage. He remembered Matlalxochitl’s measuring eyes. He could not let Matlalxochitl involve him in an affair of the heart. If they took him in adultery he would not die by the knife but by a skull-crushing stone. Neither the manner or the timing of such a death was in the pattern of his Final Jest

He began his first day in the household by stepping upon the three hearthstones. Matlalxochitl screamed. He dropped his armful of wood and stood gazing at her with an empty buffoonish grin. He had put fear into her, and rage. She ordered his beating, even though his offending the hearthstones meant that he surely would die very soon.

“Harder! Send him at least three steps nearer death!”

Chimalpopoca looked anxious when he heard. He wondered aloud whether it would not be wise to sell Yollotl before the man died on their hands, profitlessly. But then he eyed Yollotl’s strong, quickly healing body and shook his head.

“I set no store by old wives tales. Besides…” But he kept his besides to himself.

But Yollotl soon guessed it. He caught Chimalpopoca going through his wife’s wardrobe while she was out shopping. Chimalpopoca, unaware anyone watched, held up piece after piece of clothing as though hoping to find holes or signs of hole-mending and ground his teeth when he found neither.

Often Chimalpopoca left Yollotl at home, throwing him much in Matlalxochitl’s company, and on returning stole the first opportunity to examine his wife’s wardrobe once more. But there were times Chimalpopoca needed Yollotl’s back to carry his plunder to market and trade goods back from market.

Once the traders had celebrated their great homecoming feast, The Washing of Feet, they began planning the next caravan. This would have to be a true trading expedition, for the soldiers would not stand so soon again for taking the leavings of conquest. The traders would wait for the lucky sign One Snake to come around before setting out. Meanwhile, Chimalpopoca was taking his profits and laying in cloth, embroidered clothes, rabbit’s hair blankets, bells, obsidian knives, obsidian and copper earrings, cochineal dye, herbs for healing and herbs for scenting.

And at such times Yollotl more than once saw Chimalpopoca meet, take aside, and whisper with a girl Yollotl remembered as the eight-cacao-bean camp-follower; her name was Nenetl.

Seizing his first chance, smiling to help along an old wives’ tale, Yollotl stole into his master’s room and took sharp little bites in Chimalpopoca’s best cloak.

Soon after, all heard Matlalxochitl’s tongue lashing Chimalpopoca.

“Rat’s gnawings; you can’t get around it! You’ve been committing adultery!”

Chimalpopoca denied all wrongdoing and decried the foolishness of believing in such signs. But he could not hide the look of guilt and fear on his face.

He set out traps, first placing the corn-grinding roller outside so that it would not warn the rats.

Chimalpopoca stared at Yollotl.

“Sell you? Why should I sell you?”

“I have behaved badly. I have refused to work. I have taken things.”

Chimalpopoca smiled understanding.

“When two have fought as foes, desperately, savagely, a tie binds them. I will remain patient. Do not take your fate too much to heart. In time you will make a good slave.”

“Sell me.”

“I am the master. It is for me to say if I will keep you or sell you. I will not sell you. Why should I?”

“I wish to pass through three pairs of hands so that I may die on the stone.”

“Die? You have set your heart on dying? Madness. Worse, heartless ingratitude. Have I denied myself to feed you only to fatten you for sacrifice? Are you not a man? Why would you be an empty husk before your time? An end of this talk. It is not for you to tell me what to do with my property. I will not sell you.”

“Sell me. Would you have the tax-gatherers learn of the rich hollowness of the traveling staffs now resting in the temple of the merchants?”

“Enough. I will not have you arguing with me. I have decided to sell you, and nothing you say will move my heart.”

* * * *

Chimalpopoca admonished Yollotl gravely three times before witnesses for stealing and refusing to work but Yollotl did not mend his ways and one morning Chimalpopoca put a heavy wooden yoke about Yollotl’s neck and led him to the slave market at Azcapotzalco, having, the evening before, taken out from its wrappings the arm of a female monkey and offered chili peppers to it so this would be a fine day for selling. He had also given in to Matlalxochitl and grudgingly let Tlacotl come along to see how things went; as Matlalxochitl said, and said, one day Tlacotl would be a trader like his father (she stared Chimalpopoca down) and, though he went to the calmecac with the children of dignitaries, seeing such things would serve him better than the lessons in flower-sniffing he learned at the calmecac.

Tlacotl’s eyes begged Chimalpopoca to look upon him with favor; his face and legs bore scars of maguey spines, he was lean from fasting, he had hardened himself to the cold by bathing at night. But Chimalpopoca’s eyes disowned him.

Yollotl watched with idle interest the bargaining over a slave who had passed through the hands of three masters. The bargaining paused while a party of nobles, pulling their feathered cloaks about themselves, passed through the throng. Then the bargaining took up again and Yollotl quickened to see that the eyes of the would-be buyer streamed freely.

Fear gripped Yollotl. Had the Aztecs degenerated? Did the maudlin one mean to buy the sullen slave only to free him out of compassion? If so, it was a bad omen for the outcome of his Final Jest. But when he listened closely and unwound the whisperings of the crowd he understood that the man was spokesman for the guild of featherworkers of the Amantlan quarter, who had pooled to buy a sacrificial slave. There was no doubt that the slave would end on the stone. Then why the tears? Yollotl remembered the feather cloaks passing and smiled to think that the spokesman must be a featherworker himself and allergic to feathers. Tears streaming, the spokesman was proving a reassuringly hard bargainer. The slave’s owner drew himself and the slave up.

“The slave is tall, male, young. What more do you ask?”

“The slave is tall, yes; male, apparently; young, no.”

“He saw light in the year of the great earthquake, making him just twenty-six.”

Yollotl had been smiling to himself. But now fear gripped him again. What he had just heard triggered his mind into full reckoning awareness. The earthquakes had taken place nineteen years after the last Binding of the Years. The Construct had led him to believe that at this point in the pattern another thirty-three years would have passed, bringing the fifty-two-year cycle around again. If it was true that only twenty-six years had passed since the earthquakes, then he had come the wrong distance in time.

It was true. He knew now the reason for his unease that night in camp when he had gazed at the stars; Tianquiztli had not mounted high enough then to be coming soon to its midnight culmination. He saw now the meaning of Zwordil’s twisted smile. The Construct was using the pattern for a jest of its own. It had tricked him into arriving here not a mere several months before The Binding of the Years but a long seven years. It was a fine jest.

At least the Construct had sent him to the right planet. But he had seven years to live out.

The featherworkers had led the slave away. It was his own turn on the block. It must have been as plain to Chimalpopoca as it was to Yollotl that Xiuhcozcatl, his face cutting through the crowd like a copper hatchet, was waiting to outbid everyone. But Chimalpopoca swung into a long speech on Yollotl’s obvious merits. Xiuhcozcatl, his eyes narrow as though fixing on a throwing-stick target, seemed to smile at the look on Yollotl’s face. He cut in.

“Eight cacao beans.”

There was laughing. Chimalpopoca lowered his head with a scowl and his jowls grew into angry wattles. Then he looked past Xiuhcozcatl and smiled as if at another bidder. Xiuhcozcatl spoke again, quickly.

“I will name you a price in cloth. I will give you—”

Yollotl moved to break free. The bar of the yoke tore from Chimalpopoca s grasp. Yollotl sprang backwards, turned thrust through the watchers. The cry went up.

“A slave escapes!”

Seeing and hearing, people gave way, they melted before him. Others, seeing a slave wearing a yoke fleeing through the marketplace, took up the cry but made no move to stop him, for none but the master and his son might pursue the slave—any other would become a slave himself. The market police looked on. Chimalpopoca stared in frozen disbelief at Yollotl’s sudden change of heart, at Yollotl’s vanishing form. He came to life, turned to Tlacotl. The boy s mouth had dropped open. Tlacotl backed away. Chimalpopoca’s expression turned to urgent kindliness.

“Come, my son. After him, my son.”

The yoke slowed Yollotl. It forced him to crab his way between rows of stalls. Fearful warning, hollow thudding, angry shouting; he looked back to see a pyramid of calabashes spill as Chimalpopoca and Tlacotl veered too sharply in an effort to cut him off.

But now there was open space and he could run faster. Ahead stood a wall and an opening in the wall.

“This way, this way!”

At first Yollotl thought it was the parrot who directed him, then he swung his gaze away from the cage and down. It was a dwarf, wearing rubber footgear the better to bounce, bouncing now not to amuse the king but to express his own rubbery excitement.

“This way. This is the king’s garden, but you are not free till you are in the palace.”

The dwarf pulled at Yollotl’s tilmatli. Wondering what jest the dwarf meant to play on him, Yollotl went along. They passed swans, ducks, egrets on pools. They came under a roof. Yollotl heard and smelled large beasts before he saw them. He watched to thrust the dwarf into any jaws the dwarf planned to open for him. Jaguars and pumas blinked golden eyes; they yawned, breath foul with man meat, they sharing in the communion. Pink eyes stared at him; human albinos in cages, to look at and to keep for sacrificing during eclipses of the sun. The dwarf led him past coyotes and foxes to cages holding eagles and vultures. For an instant, an eagle’s glare turned the angles of its cage inside out, so that the cage caged all the rest of the universe, then the soaring flame blew out and it was an old bird in a cage. But it was another cage the dwarf stopped before and pointed to. Yollotl saw a bird of gold with eyes and feathers of precious stones. The dwarf’s eyes had a far look.

* * * *

“That is the likeness of a quetzal. It is the one thing the king cannot have. Its home is in the Land of Bats. It will not live in a cage because it pines to be free.”

“I have heard of the quetzal. It dies in a cage not because it pines to be free but because it feeds off insects on the wing.”

But the dwarf seemed not to have heard Yollotl.

“Come. I am Tepotzitotzin.”

“I am Yollotl.”

They left the zoo and crossed an open space to a great building with a great doorway. Yollotl stopped on the bottom step and looked around. He saw Tlacotl. The boy stood on the nearest bridge raking all the ways over the canals in wild sweeps of his gaze; he caught sight of Yollotl and leaped toward him, shouting and gesturing. Yollotl mounted the steps slowly toward the guards at the doorway. The guards laughed to see Tepotzitotzin bounce, anxiously pulling at Yollotl. The boy glanced back, stopped dead, helplessly watched Yollotl enter the palace.

“Now you are free.”

“Now I am free.”

Tepotzitotzin helped Yollotl remove the yoke.

“You have no land, no goods, but Yollotl is no man’s slave, no man is Yollotl’s master. You can leave without fear. Where will you go? To the chinampas?”

“Yes.”

“My mother and father live there. If you meet the mother and father of Tepotzitotzin tell them Tepotzitotzin is well and happy.”

“You are still a slave to the needs of the flesh. Eat.”

The old man avoided his wife’s eye and nodded encouragingly.

Though much older than this man, Yollotl had never felt age. He smiled to see this child of fifty put a hand to his back when getting up and sitting down.

“There is only stone dung.”

The woman’s voice had the rough music of a notched human femur rubbing a rasp of conch. It was a time of famine and the old woman offered the stone dung with an almost agonized look of hope that he would refuse. The old man had skimmed floating stuff from the lake and the old woman had squeezed it into these cheese-like cakes. Yollotl smiled.

“Stone dung is good.”

He helped himself freely, in fun and in keeping with his pretense of having the failing of hunger, though when none watched he would bury the food in the dirt. The old man saw Yollotl’s smiling gaze rest on the old woman and his face brightened with pride.

“She is a good wife and a good mother. It was she who reshaped Tepotzitotzin into a hunched dwarf so that he would grow up to find a place in the palace.”

She passed the stone dung to her husband.

“Your lordship will take and eat.”

The old man looked at Yollotl over his cake.

“I saw light on the day Four Dog. You know the saying? Tour Dog’s child will prosper even though he never does a lick.”

He showed his gaps in a laugh. He looked out at the green light of dusk on the green waters.

“The god has gone in. You will stay with us this night, and tomorrow we will begin to make your own land by piling lake-bottom mud on a wicker-work raft, and then I will help you build a proper house of wattle and thatch and mud. You are fortunate; there is a good spot near the nightsoil barges. Are you a Four Dog’s child too?”

* * * *

Willow roots grew to lace the mud and grew to anchor the raft.

* * * *

The night was cold but Yollotl did not feel the cold though he stood well outside the warmth and the light from the great tripods in which pitch pine burned on the steps of the teocalli. The steps marched up to the ever-burning fire on the altar within the temple—“ever” meaning fifty-two years—but Yollotl did not see how to make his way to the temple storeroom without raising an alarm. The priests were always rising during the night to offer copal incense and their own blood to the sun.

He stood gazing up out of shadow while flames and drums tore the dark silence. He was forever thinking of some jest to help fill the time. He had seen the young war captive without blemish who for a year would be the god Tezcatlopoca; where the young man sauntered, tinkling with gold and turquoise and playing his flute or puffing his cigar or smelling his flowers, the people flung themselves down and ate dust. He had seen the captain making sure the eight guards always with the god stayed alert; if the god escaped it was the captain who would have to take the god’s place on the last day. He had seen much sacrificing here and had watched how the priest reached into the small yellow pouch slung over his back and cast a powder in the victim’s face or dropped a pellet into the incense basin and the victim had come without struggling to the stone and the knife. These things formed the pattern of a jest. But he had not seen how to get into the storeroom to carry it through.

* * * *

A hand closed on his wrist. He stiffened; then he relaxed, even before he heard the low laugh. It was a soft hand, a girl’s.

“Did you think me one of the Ciuateteo?” She drew him with her out of the shadow. “See, I am no monster of the night.”

He knew her. She was Nenetl, the camp-follower, the friend of Chimalpopoca. She knew him too. Her mouth twisted.

“You owe me a life. You know Chimalpopoca’s heart failed him chasing after you?”

He smiled.

“I know. Are you bitter?”

Her eyes widened.

“How, bitter? He would have got rid of his wife; he would have married me. That is what he said. But you did what was good for you. No, I am not bitter about that.” She drew out a small heap of cacao beans. “About this that happened tonight I am bitter.”

He took a bean. It weighed right, but then he saw that someone had bored a hole in it to draw out the fat and had packed the hole with dirt. He smiled and handed it back.

“You will know the man again?”

She shrugged and put away the beans.

“A man is a man. I will make all men pay!” Her eyes and her voice grew soft. “But I like you. Do you like me?”

It would be fun to lead her on before he thrust her from him.

“When first I saw you look at me—by campfire, do you remember?—I thought at once of the riddle, ‘What is the mirror that dwells in a house of pine branches?’”

“The eye behind eyelashes. Yes, I have pretty eyes.” A chill wind had been whipping the water of the canals. She shivered now. “Why do we stand here?”

She rubbed against him. “Do you not want someone to warm you tonight?”

He moved to thrust her from him with a laugh. His glance struck the temple. He had seen men carrying wood and water to the temple. They were not slaves or sharecroppers, but freemen. When a freeman married; the state gave him land and inscribed him on the rolls; the palace and the temples could call him at any time to bring wood and water, or to sweep, or to build and mend bridges and roads. A man working on such a fatigue party might have a chance of stealing into the temple storeroom. He took Nenet’s arm.

“The night is cold.”

* * * *

“Forgive an old man his loose tongue. But I have seen you with the woman Nenetl. Do not throw yourself upon women like a dog upon its food.”

“Nenetl and I are to be man and wife.”

“Ah. I have said too much.”

* * * *

Yollotl stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom handle. This was the heart of the city. This was where the wandering tribesmen had seen the eagle sitting on the cactus and holding a serpent in its talons, the sign that here was the Promised Land. He stood on the platform at the top of the pyramid, in front of the sanctuary. From this height he saw to the southeast the two great volcanoes and their dark woods and their snows. He saw the three causeways that led into Mexico—the southern causeway with one leg in Coyaocan and the other in Iztapalapan, the western causeway stretching from Tlacopan, and the northern causeway reaching from Tepeyacac. He saw the aqueduct grasshoppering from Chapultepec with sweet water for the city. He saw the canals and the causeways and the bridges making and breaking the causeways; they were like the interweaving of basketry. He saw the many boats going this way and that on the lake and the canals. He saw the high temples, all shining white, and the terraced houses, and the towers commanding the southern approaches. Then his eyes swept to the great marketplace; the hum and the murmur carried more than a league. He heard footsteps behind him. He worked the broom.

A man had come out of the sanctuary, his eyes opening slowly to the sunlight. It was the prince Montezuma, in the cloak of a simple priest. Montezuma frowned a bit on seeing him, as though dimly associating him with something unpleasant. Then he forgot Yollotl and set his face in a look of calm sorrow, as if remembering that his father the king had just died. But under the calm sorrow was something else, as though he were a priest of Xipe Totec wearing the slippery skin of the man he had just flayed.

Montezuma gazed down at the open square where the tzompantli stood, the skull rack, an abacus counting its own thousands. Yollotl moved the dust quietly. Montezuma stiffened. Yollotl looked. A procession was rounding the tzompantli, heading toward the temple. Montezuma whirled. He swept the broom from Yollotl’s hands and began moving the dust.

“The messengers come! They have named Montezuma to be our king!”

The sanctuary emptied. Yollotl let himself slip back through the gathering. Montezuma, seeming unaware of the ascending messengers or of the hum and murmur around him, fixed his eyes on the steps he was cleaning, and the messengers, Nezahualpilli king of Tezcuco leading them, came upon him so.

Nezahualpilli looked at Montezuma as though comparing this good son with his own son, whom he had let die for writing verses to his concubine; he nodded as though approving the choosing of this prince of humble bearing over the prince’s older brothers.

Yollotl saw no more of this; he was now behind the last back and sidling into the sanctuary. The air was thick, the walls black with smoke and blood. He was alone. He listened. Nezahualpilli was asking Montezuma to swear to make the sun to shine, the clouds to give rain, the streams to flow, and the earth to bring forth fruits in abundance. Yollotl found the doorway to the storeroom. He glided through.

It was a place of pots and baskets. He searched among them. Red feathers for asperging blood, supplies of maguey thorns for making blood flow, reeds and cord for passing through wounds to keep the blood flowing, black ashes, knives, basins, rattle sticks; then he smiled—here were the pellets in the shape of mouse droppings: this was yaqualli. He took and filled two pouches and hid them under his cloak. He helped himself to a knife as well and thrust it in his loincloth.

He made his way back into the sunlight and the throng. Nazahualpilli was foretelling a long and glorious reign for Montezuma and his words were moving Montezuma to tears.

* * * *

Though Yollotl stood near the blazing tripod he did not feel the heat. He waited his chance and tossed a handful of pellets into the flames. The breeze blew the smoke toward the guard. Night swallowed the smoke.

Slowly, with a smile, the guard leaned against the wall and slid down, his hand sliding down the shaft of his spear, and sat smiling. Yollotl moved quickly. He drew the spear out of the soft grasp and set it on the ground. He listened.

The voices in the god’s quarters had not changed. He smiled. The god seemed to have forgotten the elegant speech and fine manners the priests had taught him. One of the girls was speaking soothingly, another was weeping.

Yollotl dragged the tripod nearer the doorway. He emptied a pouch into the flames and fanned the smoke into the room. Some smoke blew back into his face but it did not send him into trance. He waited. He reached for the other pouch but the voices were slurring and he held his hand. Now he heard only the wind of fire. He stepped into the room.

His glance passed over the god’s four brides of a month and over the remaining seven guards. His gaze swung between two men, though he knew which was the god and which the captain. They had shorn the god’s hair in the style of a captain’s and Yollotl did not want to make a mistake at this point. He stepped over a girl to the god. The yaqualli had caught him with his mouth sick of banqueting and his eyes empty with the fullness of doom. He stared unseeing at Yollotl.

Yollotl set the god on his feet. He tore off the god’s finery and tossed it in an empty heap beside the captain. He tied a plain black cloak, about the god and led him into the night, stopping to smear the god’s face and his own with black from the tripod to seem black courage—ashes of ground-up scorpions, tarantulas, wasps, centipedes, rattlesnakes, tobacco, and peyote—and themselves two junior priests venturing into the haunted forest to offer pine wood and copal to the mountain gods.

The walk in the night air stirred the god. Yollotl crumbled a pellet and cast the dust into the gods face. A look of peace came over the god’s face. He did not feel the stinging of the branches whipping back as Yollotl led him into the woods.

Behind was shouting, but by now the two priests were deep in the woods.

* * * *

Here where they hid waiting for dawn the woods touched the shore. They looked out through pine branches and across the mirror of lake at the temple of Tezcatlipoca. The god turned to Yollotl.

“Are you truly the messenger of Tezcatlipoca?”

“Silence. Watch.”

The god did not dare turn and speak again. They watched in silence. Then they heard and saw the procession.

It wound along the far shore and came to a stop, all but the captain and the eight guards. The captain, the guards tight about him, marched on to the foot of the pyramid. Here they came to a stop. The guards filled the captain’s arms with clay flutes that during the year had known the glorious breath of the god. The captain looked up to where six priests and stone altar and obsidian blade waited for him. Alone, he climbed toward them, stopping on each step to break one of the flutes.

When the captain lay spread-eagled on the stone and the knife hung in the air Yollotl spoke.

“Smell the flowers, listen to the birds, look at the sky. Is life not sweet?”

The god empty of his godhood nodded impatiently, not breathing. The captain would come back to life as a hummingbird giddying the air among the flowers forever. The god looked on in an empty mingling of fear and envy, joy and guilt. As the priest’s knife flashed down Yollotl thrust his own knife into the god’s heart.

* * * *

That had been a fine jest. And it was a fine jest when Nenetl died in childbirth and so became a night monster. “Did you think me one of the Ciuateteo?” Too, she had said, “You owe me a life,” and the life he had given her—a strange dead child the midwife quickly buried—had killed her. A very fine jest.

He had found some fun in the jest of another. Nezahualpilli king of Tezcuco had married Chalchiuhnenetzin, a sister of Montezuma. Nezahualpilli caught her cuckolding him with young men of the court and killed her. Montezuma, nursing this as an insult, had let Tlacauepan, his younger brother and dearest to him of all the persons near to him by blood, go to his death at the head of his troops so that Nezahualpilli would not guess Montezuma meant the battle to go against them and meant the Tlaxcalan foe to wipe out the Tezcucan allies. But if there were other jests on the same scale Yollotl had not seen their working out. And so on the whole it had been an empty seven years.

He had to live out—function somehow throughout—the emptiness at the heart of time. Even the most miserable of these people found escape. He watched the old ones eat the narrow caps and delicate stalks of the mushroom they called teonanacatl; they escaped from this world into the world of visions. They looked at him as though he were fading. “Here, eat this and forget your sorrows. You need not be a slave to the world of the senses.” But he was unable to follow them into that other world. He ate this flesh of the god but he saw only an endless darkness. He cursed his body; then he laughed at himself, remembering his Final Jest, and he bowed to his burden. He saw day follow day. And then one day it was time.

Xiuhcozcatl stared at Yollotl.

“Buy you? Once you ran away in fear that I would become your master.”

“Yes. I ran.”

“And now you wish to sell your hand, your foot?”

“Yes.”

“And to me?”

“Yes.”

“One does not take that way from choice. Have you no land?”

‘I have left my digging stick standing in the soil.”

“Perhaps it will take root.”

“Perhaps.”

Xiuhcozcatl smiled understanding.

“Ah, it is hard to be your own master. And you wish to be free of freedom. Very well.”

* * * *

There were many besides the four elderly witnesses to lend their presence to the ceremony and to watch Yollotl bear away one load of quachtli, the burden of his price, twenty lengths of cloth.

To the surprise of those who thought they knew him, he spent the cloth on drink. In his drunkenness he looked and behaved a buffoon, so that they laughed and did not think what they could have done with the cloth. Once, he staggered into a woman leaving her house with a pot of urine for the dyer. He lay in the spill and shatter for all to see. Woodenly he suffered the shaving of his head in punishment; it seemed only to quicken his rush to doom. Xiuhcozcatl sent a man to follow him about and see that he came to no real harm, but in a month Yollotl wasted what would have lasted more than a year.

At the end he was down to drinking uitzoctli, the newly fermented agave juice that pricked like the thorns of the plant. Then there was no more cloth and he gave himself up to Xiuhcozcatl.

Xiuhcozcatl’s thin smile faded fast. Yollotl had guessed rightly that Chimalpopoca would not have warned his fellow traders, till he had the price for Yollotl in his hands, that the secret of the hollow staffs stood in danger. Xiuhcozcatl listened and sold him to Tlacotl.

Tlacotl had grown plump, he had to keep remembering to deepen his voice, the matchmaker had knotted his cloak with that of a trader’s daughter. Matlalxochitl’s nose had sharpened. They listened and sold him to another.

In this manner Yollotl passed from the possession of the statutory three owners. The fourth owner was Acamapichtli, who listened, eyes still hard as cacao beans, and sold him to be chief sacrifice at The Bind of the Years.

* * * *

The trees with their brown bark looked like men in strange rough robes. Priests in the rich robes of Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc, Huitzilopochtli, and the other great gods, marched past the trees. The procession paced itself to reach the summit of the Hill of the Star just before midnight. Huixachtecatl was a volcanic crater, but its fire was dead.

All fire was dead. Throughout the land they had put out every fire in home and temple. And when they had put out the last fire all the world and all hearts grew chill. Would there ever be fire again? Throughout the land they watched from the roofs. They had masked the children and they stung them wakeful with nettles, so the children would not fall asleep and turn into rats. They had shut up the women with child in the maize granaries and covered the women’s faces with masks of maguey leaves, so the women would not turn into wild animals. Had they done enough? The times were ominous. From the coast in late days had come word of strange white men carrying thunders and lightnings and moving over the waters in strange craft. The way ahead was dark and all earthly fire dead. Only the stars remained. If they too failed, the world would end and the light-fearing monsters swarm out at last.

The procession reached the summit. The priest looked up. The constellation Tianquiztli hung at the zenith. Would it go on?

One of the quacuilli flung yaqualli powder in Yollotl’s face. Yollotl smiled; he would not have struggled; he would not struggle. The priest made a sign. The quacuilli seized Yollotl by the arms and legs. Round about him spun the landscape, sky and forest reeled together. He lay spread-eagled on the stone. They held him fast. In the faint light of the stars all was clear as day in his eyes. He smiled to see that the priest had filters of charcoal in his nostrils; the priest did not wish the yaqualli dust floating in the air to dull his senses, he wished to feel to the full his knife slitting the flesh and his hand wrenching out the heart.

The priest swept the obsidian blade from breastbone to groin, reached in, and felt emptiness. A man bearing the name Heart had none—at least none that someone unaware of prosthetic miniaturization could grasp. Yollotl laughed. The Final Jest had come off.

He had to admire the priest. The priest withdrew his fist, raised its dark shine to the stars, then tossed the nothing it held into the eagle-cup. The priest wiped his hands on his robe and took up the fire sticks. He placed the flat board of soft wood in Yollotl’s chest, then spun the tlequauitl.

A great hush. The flame spurted. A great shout. Tianquiztli was continuing on its way, the stars had not failed, the new fire had caught.

One of the quacuilli fed this flame, then carried fire from it and touched off the pyre nearby. They threw Yollotl on the pyre. The flames rose around him. With a smile he reached inside his chest, broke a connection, and ceased to be.

Men lit torches at the pyre and ran into the night to spread the new fire throughout the land. Tomorrow, the sun would shine. The sun, in its coming out and its going in, its coming out and its going in, was a heart, beating, beating. It was life. From this life, Man took his life. Man had to give life back, feed the flames of life. There was a time when the heart had stopped and all things died. Would it stop again? What would rekindle the universe when the stars were cinders, when the constellation Mamalhuaztli, the Fire Sticks, itself flickered out? Peace. Was it not enough for now that men were running through the night with burning torches and there would be new fire in every home and temple?