Gary Jennings - Aztec

"Are we amenable, my lord?" I asked impudently. "Are you amenable? The return of Quetzalcoatl would unseat every ruler now ruling, from Revered Speakers to the lowliest tribal chiefs. He would rule supreme."

Motecuzóma put on an expression of pious humility. "A returned god will no doubt be grateful to those who have preserved and even improved his dominions, and he will no doubt make evident his gratitude. If he should grant only that I be a voice among his Speaking Council, I would be more highly honored than any other mortal ever has been."

I said, "Lord Speaker, I have erred before. I may err now in supposing the white men to be no gods or forerunners of any god. But might you not err more gravely in supposing that they are?"

"Suppose? I do not suppose!" he said sternly. "I do not say yes a god comes, or no he does not, as you so impertinently presume to do!" He stood erect and almost shouted, "I am the Revered Speaker of the One World, and I do not say this or that, yes or no, gods or men, until I have pondered and observed and waited to make certain!"

I took his standing up as my dismissal. I backed away from the throne, repeatedly kissing the earth as prescribed, and I left the chamber, and I tore off the sackcloth robe, and I went home.

As to the question—gods or men?—Motecuzóma had said he would wait until he was certain, and that is what he did. He waited, and he waited too long, and even when it could no longer matter, he was still not really certain. And because he waited in uncertainty, he died at last in disgrace, and the last command he tried to give his people began uncertainly, "Mixchia—!" I know; I was there; and I heard that last word Motecuzóma ever spoke in his life: "Wait—!"

* * *

Waiting Moon did nothing to spoil my homecoming that time. There was by then some natural gray in her hair, but she had dyed or cut whatever remained of that offending strand of bleached white. And although Béu had ceased trying to make herself into a simulacrum of her dead sister, she had nevertheless made herself into quite a different person from the one I had known for nearly half a sheaf of years, ever since we first met in her mother's Tecuantépec hut. During all those years, every time we had been in each other's company, it seemed we had quarreled or fought or at best maintained only an uneasy truce. But she seemed to have decided that henceforth we would act the roles of an ageing couple, long and amicably married. I do not know whether it was a result of my having so thoroughly chastised her, or whether it was meant for the admiration of our neighbors, or whether Béu Ribé had resigned herself to the age of never and had said to herself, "Never any more open animosities between us."

Anyway, her new attitude made it easier for me to settle down and adapt to living in a house and a city again. Always before, even in the days when my wife Zyanya or my daughter Nochipa still lived, every time I had come home it was with the expectation of sometime leaving again on a new adventure. But the latest homecoming made me feel that I had come home to stay for the remainder of my life. Had I been younger, I should have rebelled at that prospect, and soon have found some reason to depart, to travel, to explore. Or had I been a poorer man, I should have had to bestir myself, just to earn a living. Or had Béu been her former harridan self, I should have seized any excuse to get away—even leading a troop to war somewhere. But, for the first time, I had no reason or necessity to go on running and seeking down all the roads and all the days. I could even persuade myself that I deserved the long rest and the easy life that my wealth and my wife could provide. So I gradually eased into a routine which, while neither demanding nor rewarding, at least kept me occupied and not too bored. I could not have done that, but for the change in Béu.

When I say she had changed, I mean only that she had succeeded in concealing her lifelong dislike and contempt of me. She has never yet given me reason to think that those feelings ever abated, but she did stop letting them show, and that small sham has been enough for me. She ceased being proud and assertive, she became bland and docile in the manner of most other wives. In a way, I rather missed the high-spirited woman she had been, but that twinge of regret was outweighed by my relief at not having to contend with her former willful self. When Béu submerged her once distinctive personality and assumed the near invisibility of a woman all deference and solicitude, I was enabled to treat her with equal civility.

Her dedication to wifeliness did not include the slightest hint that I might finally use her for the one wifely service of which I had refrained from availing myself. She never suggested that we consummate our marriage in the accepted way; she never again flaunted her womanhood or taunted me to try it; she never complained of our sleeping in separate chambers. And I am glad she did not. My refusing any such advances would have disturbed the new equanimity of our life together, but I simply could not have made myself embrace her as a wife. The sad fact was that Waiting Moon was as old as I, and she looked her age. Of the beauty that had once been equal to Zyanya's, little remained except the beautiful eyes, and those I seldom saw. In her new role of subservience, Béu tried always to keep them modestly downcast, in the same way that she kept her voice down.

Her eyes had used to flash brilliantly at me, and her voice had used to be tart or mocking or spiteful. But in her new guise she spoke only quietly and infrequently. As I left the house of a morning, she might ask, "When would you like your meal waiting, my lord, and what would it please you to eat?" When I left the house in the evening, she might caution me, "The night grows chill, my lord, and you risk catching cold if you do not wear a heavier mantle."

I have mentioned my daily routine. That was it: I left my house at morning and evening, to pass the time in the only two ways I could think of.

Each morning I went to The House of Pochtéa and spent the greater part of the day there, talking and listening and sipping the rich chocolate handed around by the servants. The three elders who had interviewed me in those rooms, half a sheaf of years before, were of course long dead and gone. But they had been replaced by numerous other men just like them: old, fat, bald, complacent and assured in their importance as fixtures of the establishment. Except that I was not yet either bald or fat and did not feel like an elder, I suppose I could have passed for one of them, doing little but basking in remembered adventures and present affluence.

Occasionally the arrival of a merchant train afforded me the opportunity to make a bid for its cargo, or for whatever part of it I fancied. And before the day was out I could usually engage another pochtéatl in a round of bargaining, and end by selling him my merchandise at a profit. I could do that without ever setting down my cup of chocolate, without ever seeing what it was I had bought and sold. Occasionally there would be a young and newly aspiring trader in the building, making preparations to set out on his first journey somewhere. I would detain him for as long as it might take to give him the benefit of all my experience on that particular route, or for as long as he would listen without fidgeting and pleading urgent errands.

But on most days there were few persons present except myself and various retired pochtéa who had no place they would rather be. So we sat together and traded stories instead of merchandise. I listened to them tell tales of the days when they had fewer years and less wealth, but ambitions illimitable; the days when they themselves did the traveling, when they did the daring of risks and dangers. Our stories would have been interesting enough, even unadorned—and I had no need to exaggerate mine—but since the old men all tried to out do each other in the uniqueness and variety of their experiences, in the hazards they had faced and bested, the narrow escapes they had enjoyed, the notable acquisitions they had so cunningly made... well, I noticed that some of the men present began to embroider their adventures after the tenth or twelfth telling—