Gary Jennings - Aztec

"We waited for her to recover her health, for it would be unseemly to execute an ailing woman. When she was well and strong again, we brought her here. This morning. To die."

I gazed at the remains, wondering what mode of execution could have left the victim without any mark but staring eyes and silently screaming mouth.

"Now we come to remove her," the widower concluded. "A good place of execution is not easy to find in the desert, so we do not desecrate this one by leaving our carrion to attract the vultures and coyotes. It was thoughtful of you, stranger, to have appreciated that fact." He laid a hand companionably on my shoulder. "But we will attend to the disposal, and then perhaps you will share our night's meal at our camp."

"Gladly," I said, and my empty stomach rumbled. But what happened next nearly spoiled my appetite.

The man went to where his wife sat, and he moved her in a way that had not occurred to me. I had tried laying her down. He gripped her under her armpits and lifted. Even so, she still moved reluctantly, and he visibly had to exert some strength. There was a horrid sucking and tearing sound, rather as if the dead woman's bottom had put down roots in the earth. Then she came up off the stake on which she had been impaled.

I knew then why the man had said that a good place of execution was not easy to find. It had to provide a tree of just the right size, one growing straight from the ground without obstructive roots. That stake had been a mizquitl sapling as big around as my forearm, severed at knee height, then sharped to a point at the top, but the coarse bark left on the rest of it. I wondered whether the betrayed husband had sat his wife delicately on the stake point and only slowly let her down its cruelly barked length, or whether he had given her a slightly more merciful quick downward shove. I wondered, but I did not inquire.

When the nine men led me to their camp, they made me welcome there, and they treated me courteously as long as I stayed with them. They had thoroughly inspected the belongings I carried, but they stole nothing, not even my small store of copper trade currency. However I think I might have been treated otherwise if I had been carrying anything of value or leading a train of laden porters. Those men were, after all, the Chichimeca.

The name was always spoken among us Mexíca with contempt or derision or loathing, as you Spaniards speak of "barbarians" and "savages." We derived the name from chichine, one of our words meaning dog. When we said Chichimeca, we generally referred to those dog people among whom I had then arrived; the homeless, unwashed, forever wandering tribes of the desert not far north of the Otomí lands. (Which is why, some ten years earlier, I had been so indignant when the Fast of Feet Rarámuri mistook me for a Chichimecatl.) Those of the near north were sufficiently despied by us Mexíca, but it was widely believed that there were others of even lower degree. Farther north of the dog people supposedly lived still fiercer desert tribes, which we designated the Teochichimeca—as one might say, "the even more awful dog people." And in the desert's farthest northernmost regions supposedly lived even more fearsome tribes, which we called the Zacachichimeca, much as to say, "the most depraved of all the dog people."

But I must report, after having traveled through almost the whole extent of those desert lands, that I found none of those tribes inferior or superior to another. They were all ignorant, insensitive, and often inhumanly cruel, but it was that cruel desert which had made them so. They all lived in a squalor that would disgust a civilized man or a Christian, and they lived on foods that would nauseate a city man's stomach. They had no houses or trades or arts, because they had to keep ceaselessly roaming to forage for the scant sustenance they could wring from the desert. Though the Chichimeca tribes among which I sojourned all spoke a coherent Náhuatl, or some dialect of it, they had no word knowing or other education, and some of their habits and customs were veritably repulsive. But, while they would have horrified any civilized community that they might ever try to visit, I have to say that the Chichimeca had admirably adapted themselves to life in the pitiless desert, and I know few civilized men who could have done the same.

That first camp I visited, the only home its people knew, was just one more piece of the desert, on which they had elected to squat because they knew there was a seepage of underground water accessible by digging some way down in that particular patch of sand. The camp's only homelike aspect was the cooking fires of the tribe's sixteen or eighteen families. Except for the rudimentary cooking pots and utensils, there was no furniture. Near each fire was stacked each family's armory of hunting weapons and tools: a bow and some arrows, a javelin and its atlatl, a skinning knife, a meat-cutting ax, and the like. Only a few of those things were tipped or bladed with obsidian, that rock being a rare commodity in those regions. The majority of weapons were made of the copper-hard quauxeloloni wood, cunningly shaped and sharpened by fire.

Of course there were no solid-built houses, and only two temporary ones: crude little huts constructed by leaning dead-wood sticks haphazardly together. In each hut, I was told, lay a pregnant woman awaiting childbirth, for which reason that camp was more permanent than most, meaning it might exist for several days instead of being merely the usual overnight stop for sleep. The rest of the tribe scorned any shelter. Men, women, and the smallest infant children slept on the ground, as I had lately been doing, but instead of a ground-softening blanket, like mine of felted rabbit hair, they used only old and dirty and tattered deerskins. Equally bedraggled animal skins also composed what sketchy clothing they wore: loinclothes for the men; sleeveless, shapeless, knee-length blouses for the women; nothing at all for the children, even those almost full grown.

But the vilest thing about the camp was its odor, which even the surrounding vastness of open air failed to dispel, and the odor was that of the dog people, every one of them far dirtier than any dog. It might be doubted that a person could get soiled in the desert, for sand is as clean as snow. But those people were mainly befouled with their own dirt, their own secretions, their own negligence. They let their sweat cake on their bodies, so it encrusted the other oils and scurfs that the body normally sheds in unnoticeable flakes. Every wrinkle and fold of their bodies was a tracery of dark grime: knuckles, wrists, throats, inner elbows, backs of knees. Their hair flapped in mats, not strands, and lice and fleas crawled among that greasy matting. Their skin garments, as well as their own skins, were permeated with the additional odors of wood smoke, dried blood, and rancid animal fats. The total stench was staggering, and, although I eventually ceased to notice it, I long thought the Chichimeca the filthiest people I had ever encountered, and the people most uncaring about their filthiness.

They all had extremely simple names—such as Zoquitl and Nacatl and Chachapa, which mean Mud and Meat and Cloudburst—names rather pitiably unsuited to their blighted and starved habitat; but then, maybe they chose such names in a spirit of wishfulness. Meat was the name of the newly made widower who had invited me to visit the camp. He and I sat down at the cooking fire built by a number of other unattached males, apart from the fires of the family groups. Meat and his fellows already knew that I was a Mexícatl, but I was uncomfortably uncertain how to refer to their nationality. So, while one of the men used a yuca-leaf ladle to serve each of us some unidentifiable stew on a curved segment of maguey leaf, I said: