Gary Jennings - Aztec

The long-lashed eyelids lifted, and she looked at me, and her eyes were like unfathomably deep forest pools. I found out later that she habitually put into her eyes drops of juice from the herb camopalxihuitl, which greatly enlarged her pupils and made her eyes lustrous as jewels. It also forced her to avoid bright lights, even the light of day, when her dilated eyes saw almost as poorly as mine.

"Well, then," said the Revered Speaker, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. I wondered, with some misgivings, just how long he had conferred with his counsel skull before deciding on this arrangement. To me he said:

"I ask only that you provide brotherly direction and advice, Head Nodder. I do not expect you to correct or chastise the Lady Jadestone Doll. It would, in any event, be a capital offense for a commoner to raise either his hand or his voice against a noblewoman. Nor do I expect you to play the jailer or the spy or the talebearer of her confidences. But I would be pleased, Mole, if you devote to your lady sister what time you can spare from your school work and studies. That you serve her with the same devotion and discretion with which you serve me or the First Lady Tolana-Teciuapil. Now go, young people, ximopanólti, and get acquainted with each other."

We made the proper obeisances and left the throne room. In the corridor, Jadestone Doll smiled sweetly at me and said, "Mole, Head Nodder, Mixtli. How many names do you have?"

"My lady may call me whatever she pleases."

She smiled even more sweetly, and put a delicate tapered fingertip to her pointed little chin. "I think I shall call you..." She smiled still more sweetly, and said with a sweetness like the taste of sticky maguey syrup, "I will call you Qualcuie!"

That word is the third person singular jussive of the verb "to fetch," and is always pronounced forcefully and commandingly: "Fetch!" My heart grew heavy. If my latest name was to be Fetch!, my misgivings about this arrangement seemed justified. And I was right. Though she still spoke in that maguey syrup voice, the young queen dropped all semblance of demureness, docility, and submissiveness, and said, very queen-like:

"You need not interrupt any of your daytime classwork, Fetch! However, I shall want you available in the evenings, and on call if necessary during the nights. You will please move all your effects into the apartment directly across the hall from mine." Without waiting for me to say any word of acquiescence, without herself saying any polite word of leave-taking, she turned and walked away down the hall.

Jadestone Doll. She was named for the mineral chalchihuitl, which, though it is neither rare nor of any intrinsic value, was prized by our people because it was the color of The Center of Everything. Unlike you Spaniards, who know only the four directions of what you call the compass, we perceived five, and designated them by different colors. Like you, we had the east, north, west, and south, respectively referred to as the directions of the red, black, white, and blue. But we also had the green: to mark the center of the compass, so to speak—the place where a man was at any given moment, and all the space above that spot as far as the sky, and all below it as far as the Mictlan underworld. So the color green was important to us, and the green stone chalchihuitl was precious to us, and only a child of noble lineage and high degree could appropriately have been named Jadestone Doll.

Like a Jadestone, that girl queen was an object to be handled most respectfully and carefully. Like a doll, she was exquisitely fashioned, she was beautiful, she was a work of divine craftsmanship. But, like a doll, she had no human conscience or compunctions. And, though I did not immediately recognize my feeling of premonition, like a doll she was fated to be broken.

* * *

I must admit that I rather reveled in the sumptuousness of my new chambers. Three rooms, and the sanitary closet contained my own private steam bath. The bed in the bedroom was an even higher than ordinary pile of quilts, over which lay an enormous coverlet made of hundreds of tiny squirrel skins bleached white and sewn together. Over the whole was suspended a fringed canopy and from that hung almost invisible, fine-meshed net curtains, which I could close around the bed to keep out mosquitoes and moths.

The one inconvenience of the apartment was that it was far distant from those others which the slave Cozcatl had in his charge. But when I mentioned that to Jadestone Doll, little Cozcatl was abruptly relieved of all his other duties, to attend solely to me. The boy was ever so proud of that promotion. Even I felt rather the pampered young lord. And later, when Jadestone Doll and I were in disgrace, I would be glad that Cozcatl had always been by me and was loyally ready to testify in my defense.

For soon I learned: if Cozcatl was my slave, I was Jadestone Doll's. On that first evening, when one of her maids admitted me to her grand suite, the young queen's first words were:

"I am glad you were given to me, Fetch!, for I was getting unutterably bored, cooped up in seclusion like some rare animal." I tried to make a demurrer regarding the word "given," but she overrode me. "I am told by Pitza"—she indicated the elderly maidservant hovering behind her cushioned bench—"that you are an expert at capturing the likeness of a person on paper."

"I flatter myself, my lady, that people have recognized themselves and each other in my drawings. But it is some while since I have practiced the craft."

"You will practice on me. Pitza, go across the corridor and have Cozcatl collect the implements Fetch! will require."

The little boy brought me some chalk sticks and several sheets of bark paper—the brown, the cheapest, uncoated with lime, which I used for rough drafts of my picture writing. At my gesture, the boy went to crouch in a corner of the big room.

I said apologetically, "You know of my poor eyesight, my lady. If I may have your permission to sit near you?"

I moved a low chair over beside the bench, and Jadestone Doll held her head still and steady, her glorious eyes on me, while I did a sketch. When I was done and handed her the paper, she did not glance at it, but held it over her shoulder to the maid.

"Pitza, is it I?"

"To the very dimple in the cheek, my lady. And no one could mistake those eyes."

At which the young queen condescended to examine it, and nodded, and smiled sweetly at me. "Yes, it is I. I am very beautiful. Thank you, Fetch! Now, can you do bodies, too?"

"Well, yes, the articulation of limbs, the folds of garments, the identifying emblems and insignia..."

"I am not interested in the outward habiliments. I mean the body. Here, do mine."

The maid Pitza gave a muted shriek and Cozcatl's mouth dropped open, as Jadestone Doll stood up and, without coyness or hesitation, stripped off all her jewelry and bangles, her sandals, her blouse, her skirt, and finally her single remaining undergarment. Pitza went away and buried her flushed face in the draperies by the window—Cozcatl seemed incapable of movement—as the young queen again reclined on the bench.

In my agitation, I dropped some of my drawing materials from my lap to the floor, but I managed to say, and in a voice of severity, "My lady, this is most unseemly."

"Ayya, the typical prudery of a commoner," she said, and laughed at me. "You must learn, Fetch!, that a noblewoman thinks nothing of being nude, or of bathing, or of performing any function in the presence of slaves. Male or female, they might be pet deer or quail, or a moth in the room, for all that their seeing signifies."

"I am not a slave," I said stiffly. "My seeing my lady unclad—the queen of the Uey-Tlatoani—would be accounted a criminal liberty, a capital offense. And those who are slaves can talk."