Jaguar Princess (22 page)

Wise Coyote could see her heritage in the controlled grace of her walk, the way she held her head and body. She moved with the unconscious suppleness of a great cat. For an instant he could almost see the lines of the divine jungle beast that he hoped and feared lay within her.

As Mixcatl approached him, he noted her height. Most women barely reached his chin. She had cast her gaze down as was proper, but she would only have to lift her head and tilt her chin slightly back to look him full in the face.

His hand twitched at a sudden impulse to place his fingers alongside her jaw, to bring those soft full lips to his…Instead he closed his fingers and took his seat once more, indicating that the two scribes should sit nearby.

He became aware of Mixcatl’s scent as she knelt down beside him. It was warm, animal, with a humid sweetness like the air of the deep jungle where he had gone to hunt as a young man. Yet her hair was damp and her skin fresh, telling him that she had just bathed.

Yes, he was definitely spoiled in the matter of women, for it was hard to restrain the urge to send Nine-Lizard and the two door guards away and take Mixcatl into his private quarters. But now was not the time to indulge himself, especially under the sharp gaze of Nine-Lizard. He wondered if the old man had already sensed his reaction to the girl. Would Nine-Lizard welcome it, resent it or try to use it?

He swallowed. Gods, he felt like a schoolboy on his first visit to the House of Song.

“Have you had any difficulties in finding sources?” he asked. He expected Nine-Lizard to answer, but it was Mixcatl who spoke.

“Actually, we now have the opposite problem, now that you have so graciously allowed us to use your library,” she said. “There are many records and not all agree. I am not sure what to include or what to leave out.”

Wise Coyote clasped his hands on the low table. “Where do you find most of the differences?”

“The references we found claim that the Aztecs worshipped other gods before Hummingbird on the Left. The records we brought with us from the House of Scribes claim that Hummingbird has always been supreme.”

Wise Coyote watched Mixcatl’s face as she puzzled over the disparity between the records at Texcoco and the ones brought from Tenochtitlan. He wondered if she thought that his documents were inaccurate or even the result of heresy. She might be of foreign origin, but she had been raised to believe the Aztec religion.

“Have you any reason to believe one source rather than the other?” he asked softly.

She gave him a sharp look, as if she suspected that he might be questioning her faith.

“The history as related in your records disagrees with what I learned from my teacher. Speaking Quail. Yet these texts”—she paused, laying her hands on the books taken from Tezcotzinco’s library—“seem more…authentic. I see different styles, different interpretations, as if they were written by many scholars throughout many New Fires.” She paused. “I know this may sound strange to you, tlatoani, but I have a very good sense of smell and I have handled many old books. The mixture of odors in the manuscripts from your shelves tells me they are genuinely ancient, and authored by many hands, as the text claims.”

“And the ones from the House of Scribes are not?” Wise Coyote asked, growing more intrigued.

Mixcatl shook her head, frowning at the pile of cord-bound books at the end of the low table. “No. Those records are supposed to predate the reign of Itzcoatl, Obsidian Serpent, but they are too new. They do not smell right and the styles are too uniform, as if a small number of scribes produced them over a short interval.”

Wise Coyote glanced at Nine-Lizard, who indicated his agreement with Mixcatl’s words. Carefully he said, “Perhaps it was done in order to make Hummingbird on the Left appear to occupy a greater place in history than he deserved?”

There was a sharp intake of breath from the girl and her eyes went wide. Wise Coyote wondered if he had pushed her too far too fast. Yet the look in her eyes was not anger or indignation, but wonder touched with a sense of…relief? Perhaps she was not as devoted to the bloody god of her adoptive land as he feared.

The king leaned back in his icpalli. “Your observation supports a similar discovery of mine. I came across a text that claimed that Obsidian Serpent had older books burned and rewritten to
glorify Hummingbird and his worshippers. Scholars to whom I showed it claimed that it was a lie, written by a disgruntled scribe who had been exiled from Itzcoatl’s court. Needless to say, I have not shown it to anyone since.”

Mixcatl looked taken aback. “The books that the

House of Scribes has taken great care to preserve and recopy—they cannot be false!” she said indignantly.

“Seven-Flower, remember whose company we are now in,” said Nine-Lizard mildly.

Mixcatl swallowed, gave an apologetic dip of the head. “I beg your forgiveness, tlatoani.”

“It is given,” Wise Coyote answered, and added, “I too would be angered if I found that much of my life’s work was devoted to reproducing documents whose truthfulness I later came to doubt.”

The girl sat with her eyes shut. “I do not wish to believe what you say, tlatoani, but I cannot turn aside the evidence of my own senses either. I have wondered if those texts…were really what they seemed, but I thought it was my own inability to accept what they said. I should have spoken up sooner and told the Master of Scribes.”

“And you would have died for it,” said Nine-lizard sharply. “You are not the only one to suspect that those records were forged. I knew too, but I kept quiet.”

Mixcatl looked at him, astonished. “Why? If those books are false, all that effort has been wasted to keep alive a lie!”

“The effort was not wasted,” said Wise Coyote, with a grim smile. “Altering the story must have served Itzcoatl well, and all those after him, including IIhuicamina.”

“But now, if we have the real story…” Mixcatl faltered.

Wise Coyote felt a surge of respect and affection toward the girl. If she valued truth more than religious belief, she had the makings of a true scholar. He regretted what he had to say next.

“It will be recorded, but not in any document intended for Ilhuicamina. I dare not inflame his anger toward me, or I will end up doing Hummingbird a greater favor than just building temples for him.” Wise Coyote caught himself, for passion had made him say more than he intended. “Listen,” he said to the two scribes in a low voice. “I am enlarging your task to include the preparation of two versions of the history. One will be given to Ilhuicamina; the other will stay here at Texcoco with me. Perhaps someday, when the Aztec state falls of its own weight, the second document can carry the truth to those who live after. Do you agree?”

“You do not need our approval,” said Mixcatl, puzzled. “As king, you command us—we were brought here to serve you.”

“I can command you, but in truth, I would prefer willing partners in this task.”

“Preparation of a second document would allow us to stay longer at Tezcotzinco,” added Nine-Lizard.

“That is an additional benefit.”

Wise Coyote looked at Mixcatl, who was staring down at her hands, laid flat upon the tabletop. She looked a bit lost and he couldn’t blame her, for it was difficult to have the foundation of your religion yanked out from under you. Yet she did not seem as aggrieved as she might over the insult done to the god she had been brought up to worship.

“Seven-Flower,” he said, “if you find this painful, please accept my sympathy.”

She looked up suddenly and he found himself staring deep into her eyes as she replied, “It is not so much painful as confusing. I…I need to think. And I would like to see the other document you referred to, the one by the scribe who was expelled from Itzcoatl’s court.”

To decide for yourself if it is true or not
, thought Wise Coyote.
Well, I will not be insulted if you do not accept it on my word alone
.

“I will have the manuscript brought,” he said, getting up from the table. “This has been a long but fruitful discussion. We will talk more tomorrow—I am tired.” Motioning his men after him. Wise Coyote left the chamber. On his way back to his own quarters, he got the old book out of the library and ordered a servant to take it to Mixcatl.

On his sleeping mat that night. Wise Coyote struggled with sleeplessness. It was an old enemy of his, and lately had been plaguing him more. At last he sat up in the darkened room and wrapped his arms about his knees.

Somehow he could not get Seven-Flower Mixcatl out of his mind. He remembered the sound of her voice and the look in her eyes as she had reluctantly admitted that she also did not trust the truthfulness of the Aztec records from the House of Scribes. There was something else, something that had rung a sympathetic chord in him but had passed away too rapidly. He knitted his brow and pressed his forehead against his knees. Then, her words did come back to him.

I thought it was my own inability to accept what the books said
.

Her statement echoed words that he himself had said long ago, not once but many times, as he struggled between the demands of religion and conscience. Last night, had she revealed the signs of a similar inward battle, or had he misinterpreted what she had said? Had he heard only what he wanted to hear?

At last he knew what drew him so strongly to Mixcatl. Not her exotic beauty or the strength in that tall powerful body. Not the titillation of danger remembered from seeing her half-transformed. Not even the frightening promise of seeing her reveal her true nature by taking the shape of the great cat.

It was loneliness. Not solitude, but a wrenching loneliness that first came when he realized that the world about him had become a blood-spewing nightmare and that no one else was sickened by it. Everyone knelt willingly at the temple steps and lapped the red stream trickling down from the altar. And now he, like a reluctant animal, was having his nose forced into the redness and was being forced to drink.

No one cried out. No one rebelled. Even the scholars of Texcoco, whose ideals had shaped his
own, accepted it as fate. This is the way the world is, they said, and did not acknowledge his own cry that it did not have to be so. He had begun to wonder over the last year or so, who was really closer to madness—Ilhuicamina or himself.

The most terrible feeling was that he was alone in his inability to bear the world’s horror. In blacker moments he wondered if he had perhaps been born into the wrong age. Perhaps the gods, in their cruelty, had taken a spirit destined for the golden light of Quetzalcoatl’s reign and thrown it into an abyss.

Even those about whom he cared most deeply could never understand. The women he loved, the many sons he had sired, even the sensitive and sympathetic Huetzin, had all been too well shielded. For them, the pain was dulled, if they felt it at all. For him the pain was sharp and made keener by the inability to share it. Only in his poetry, and perhaps in design, did his desperation emerge.

The thought that he might at last have found in this strange slave girl a spirit whose struggle was akin to his own made the path ahead seem bearable. Perhaps it was ironic that it took someone who was so distant from the rest of humanity to hear what the humanity in him pleaded for. Could one who was born from loins of the predator be sickened by the sanguineous frenzy growing in Tenochtitlan and threatening to engulf Texcoco?

Or was this hope also an illusion? Perhaps she would kneel and lap with the best of them. Perhaps, in the end, so would he.

Jaguar shapes haunted the king’s dreams that night. They prowled the halls of Tezcotzinco, brushing past his thighs as he walked among them. They turned shadowy heads and stared at him. One among them turned noiseless steps toward his chamber and beckoned with a wave of a ghostly tail.

Dreambound, he could only follow.

The powerful sinuous lines of the cat seemed to give way to the sleek curves of a woman, although he could not tell in the dream whether she had become one or the other. It did not matter whatever form she took, for she had ignited a powerful hunger in him. It drew him to where she lay on the sleeping mat, and when he lay down beside her, caressing and being caressed, he did not know if he stroked fur or silken skin. When his desire became heated and the urge to couple strong, he did not know whether hands or teeth ripped away the bindings of his loincloth. And when he buried himself in soft warm flesh, trembling both with dread and ecstasy, the soft sounds that came from her and built to a triumphant cry at his final thrust were both the moans of a woman and the echoing roar of the cat.

He sat up in a cold sweat, the dream falling away like strands of an enfolding shroud. A clammy stickiness beneath his loincloth told him that his body had indeed responded to the illusion that the dream had created. At first he felt a surge of revulsion as he mopped himself up and put on a fresh loincloth. How had he become so degraded to fantasize coupling with a beast?

Perhaps it was the lateness of the night that had stolen away his ability to reason and intensified his despair. He should just pull his cloak over himself once more and lie down on the mat.
If Mixcatl is a child of the divine jaguar
,
then she is herself a goddess and my desire is not
unnatural. The legends say that men united with jaguars to sire the first ancient kings
.

He felt himself relax as sleep approached and his thoughts began to wander. Perhaps it was time for the great cycle of change to renew itself. Perhaps he was the one chosen to bring about the rebirth of mighty people.

If she is indeed the jaguar’s daughter, what a son I could breed by her! Texcoco would have an heir, a replacement for my murdered Prodigy, and more
.

Wise Coyote lost himself in a vision of a dynasty of jaguar-blooded Texcocan kings. What men such a blending of lineages might produce! The infusion of the jaguar strain into the noble Texcocan descendants of the Toltecs could create a people even greater than any who had previously arisen. Before such warriors, the Aztecs would wither and crumble and Hummingbird on the Left would have the cup of “precious water” struck away from his greedy lips.