Simon Levack - Jades Kirt

My mistress was concerned about her water supply.

This may seem an odd preoccupation for an Aztec. After all, our city, Mexico, was built on an island in a freshwater lake and was riddled with canals, one of which ran past my mistress’s house. However, you had only to think of all the rubbish and other things that were tipped into them by the city’s thousands of households to know why the water we drank always came from springs. Some of these were within the city itself, but the city had long since outgrown them, and now the most important source was on the hill of Chapultepec, across the water on the western shore of the lake.

Years ago-before I was born-the rulers of Mexico had built a great aqueduct whose two stone channels linked Chapultepec to the city. Most households got their fresh water from men who filled their jars from the aqueduct near the point where it entered the city and carried them by canoe through the city’s network of canals direct to our doors. They were paid in bags of cocoa beans and most Aztecs scarcely reckoned the cost, being happy to be spared the daily chore of fetching their own water. Merchants, however, took worldly wealth more seriously than most of us. My mistress, Tiger Lily-the lady to whom I was bound technically as a slave, although in reality our relationship was a good deal more complex than that-was a merchant. This all had something to do with why I was standing in one of the aque-duct’s channels-the southern one, currently empty and closed for cleaning-with evil-smelling muck oozing between my toes and a fetid stench filling my nostrils.

“It’s free water for two years, Yaotl,” Lily had explained. “Just for standing around and watching a ceremony, and you can’t claim you haven’t done worse before. Not to mention the fact that you drink the water, too.”

“I know,” I admitted. “It still seems like an odd request, though. What can I tell a water seller that he can’t see for himself?”

Blue Feather, whose canoe brought a full jar to Lily’s house every day, had asked her for my services for a day. The newly cleaned and reopened northern channel of the aqueduct was to be rededicated to the water goddess, Lady Jade Skirt, and I was to watch the ceremony. I was to take careful note of every aspect of the proceedings, even down to precisely where the priest stood while he made his sacrifices-Blue Feather had been most particular about this.

My mistress’s face, framed in a mass of dark, silver-streaked hair, wore a frown whose meaning I could catch better than anyone. She obviously thought my assignment strange, too. “Does it matter?” she asked eventually. “He can’t be there because he’s got to make a sacrifice at Jade Skirt’s temple, but he wants to be sure every detail of the ceremony at the aqueduct is right. And you have to admit you’re a better person to observe something like this than most-after all, you used to be a priest.”

That much was true, although as I stood in the slime watching Jade Skirt’s devotee going through the ritual, I was still puzzled. This ceremony was not much like the bloody sacrifices of men and quails I had been used to when I had served in the temples.

The goddess’s priest balanced precariously at the edge of the full channel. “O Lady of the Jade Skirt!” he cawed in a harsh, deep voice. “O Goddess of the rivers and springs, accept this, our unworthy gift!” And so saying, he tossed the object in his hands into the water at his feet. It made a soft plop and vanished from sight.

The goddess had received many gifts that morning, each of them accompanied by the same self-abasing formula. Some had been humble enough-tortillas, ears of maize, drinking vessels, a ladle full of burning incense-but the priest had saved the best till last, and the offering he had just made had been splendid: a small gold statuette of the goddess with glittering emeralds for eyes. It had been paid for by the water sellers. A small crowd of them stood around, some with the priest on the edge of the water channel, others looking up from the empty conduit next to it. Their canoes jammed the canal running beneath us under the aqueduct. Others, including Blue Feather, were at the goddess’s temple, where more offerings would be made.

It was the southern channel’s turn in the regular maintenance schedule, which is why it was empty of water. I stood in it among the rest of the water sellers and the other spectators, waiting silently for the ceremony to end and fervently wishing I were somewhere else. A fine drizzle had begun to fall. It plastered the priest’s long, already lank hair to his pitch-stained temples and made his black cloak hang limply around him, and made me feel more miserable than ever.

“It always seems like a terrible waste to me,” someone nearby remarked.

“A waste of time, certainly,” I muttered. Then I peered around at the speaker. He had a plain, undyed cloak and the tonsured hair of a man who had never captured an enemy warrior in battle: the lowliest of commoners. I wondered whether he was one of the water sellers, but when he caught my eye he told me otherwise.

“I know what you mean.” He spoke quietly, for fear of upsetting our neighbours, although they were all huddled and shivering in their cloaks and probably longing to be elsewhere, too. “But we have to do it, don’t we? My parish provided the work detail that cleaned out that half of the aqueduct, you see, so we have to be here.”

“Cleaning these channels must be a nasty job,” I remarked sympathetically. One of the quirks of slavery among Aztecs was that it freed a man from many of the onerous duties that ordinary commoners were subject to, such as taking part in public works whenever the emperor or his officials demanded it. The only person I had to obey was my mistress. So I had no first-hand knowledge of the kind of labour that cleaning the aqueduct or shoring up the sides of a canal or whitewashing a palace might involve.

“Oh, it’s all right, unless you have a problem with filth, stink, and a back that feels like you’ll never be able to straighten it again.” The other man grinned. “Of course, with this particular job we always live in hopes-if you see what I mean. Never comes to anything, mind you. Like I said, it’s a terrible waste.”

I frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Stuff like that gold statue,” he explained patiently. “And all the other jewels and things that get thrown in the water as offerings to the goddess. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that some of that would come up when we’re scooping all the muck out of the bottom? Never happens, though.” He sighed regretfully. “A man could live for years on just one find like that, but I suppose the goddess can’t spare it! All we ever get is the rubbish. She doesn’t seem so interested in the clay bowls and tobacco tubes. Funny, that, isn’t it?”

Eventually, the priest gabbled his way to the end of the ritual. It concluded with a sacrifice of his own blood, drawn from his earlobe with an obsidian razor and sprinkled on the water’s surface.

By the time I had returned home, Blue Feather was already there, passing the time of day in Lily’s courtyard and clearly itching to be told exactly what I had seen. He was all polite attention as I gave my account, but he might as well have been asleep, since he immediately asked me to repeat it.

After he had left, Lily and I agreed that we still could not understand what he was about. Still, as Lily pointed out, that was up to him, provided she still got her water.

She was less sanguine the next morning, when she found out that her water seller had vanished. And naturally it became my job to find him.

“I was looking for him in the marketplace,” she explained, “to get our agreement witnessed. But he wasn’t at his usual place by the canal, and no one could tell me where he was. Go and see if he’s ill or something.”