The Strange War

the camp where Tumba’s group was staying. With yells, they descended upon the sleepy camp and chased the men around the huts. The men and boys defended themselves as well as they could, raced to the garbage piles behind the huts and threw whatever they could get in their hands at the fiery girls. Finally Arobanai caught sight of her chosen one. He was using his bow to shoot dry banana peels at the girls. But he had to throw in the towel to the nine wild combatants. Arobanai didn’t spare him.

  On the fifth day he finally came to the Elima hut. He put up a manly fight against the mothers in order to get in, but after he had succeeded, he had done his duty. He could now either devote himself to Arobanai or leave, or he could choose another girl. And that’s what the guy did too. He flirted with Kidaya, and when night came, Arobanai could hear only too well what the two of them were up to. So she decided to grant a hearing to Aberi, who had fought his way into the hut on the first day and since then had tried to get her to like him by any means available. She would do with him what Tumba and Kidaya were doing, and if she liked it, she would ask him to hunt an antelope for her parents and to find a sister in his group who wanted to marry one of her brothers. And if she didn’t like it – there were more pretty boys out there, great hunters, who boasted that they would bring their bride’s parents not one, but two antelopes. Antelopes? No, an elephant or maybe even two! Life was beautiful. The forest took care of its sons and daughters. It gave them not only meat and fruit to eat and clear water to drink, but it also gave them fire, and it gave them the joys of love.

  “It’s dark around us,” whispered Arobanai,

  “but if there is darkness,

  then the darkness is good.”

  Then she lay down with Aberi on his mat and started to tickle him. He giggled and reached out for her.

  Star Snake

  Here I am. I am dancing. We dance in a long line, painted and adorned in honor of the God. Soon we will be with Huitzilopochtli; soon we will escort the sun in the sky. We were warriors, now we are prisoners. In a long line we dance, and up front the High Priests are standing. We dance in a long line, and one after the other of us passes away, as a sacrifice to the Gods. Soon they will push the knife made of black rock into my breast too. My blood will flow over the altar, and they will cut out my heart. My blood is nourishment for the gods. My blood is nourishment for Huitzilopochtli, the sun. I dance. They gave me pulque to drink. Now I feel light and I dance. At first I was sad that it wasn’t I who had made a prisoner of an enemy. But now I am light: through me the Earth will be saved, my sacrifice will appease the Gods so that they will not destroy the Earth. I will rise to Huitzilopochtli; I will travel with him in the sky. And then I will become a hummingbird, as will all brave warriors who fall in battle, who are sacrificed in battle, and will fly from flower to flower and always be happy as long as the Earth exists. That’s the way it has always been, and that’s the way it must be.

  I dance and I’m getting closer and closer to the altar. I dance, and while I’m dancing, I remember:

  I was born on day 1 of the month of Ocelotl, and so fate predetermined me to die as a prisoner of war. When I came into this world, the midwife said to me: “Dearest son, know that your house is not the house of your birth, for you are a warrior, you are a Quecholli-bird, and the house where you came into this world is only a nest. You are destined to refresh the sun with the blood of your enemies and to feed the Earth with their bodies.” In this manner, all boys are greeted.

  If I had been a girl, she would have said, “You have to be in the house just as the heart is in the body. You mustn’t leave the house, you have to be like the ash in the stove.”

  Many speeches were held at my birth. Relatives and friends came, and the astrologer priest was asked to read the sacred calendar, which foretells one’s destiny. He set the day of my immersion, and on this day I was sprinkled with water many times. And the midwife said the words: “Take and receive because you will live on water on this Earth, you grow and become verdant from water; water gives us what we need to live.” Then they chose the name Citlalcoatl for me, Star Snake.

  For eight years I lived in my father’s house. As soon as I could walk and speak, I had to fetch water and wood and go with my father to market. Later I learned to fish and sail; my sisters, however, learned spinning and weaving, swept the house, and ground corn on the grinding stone. When I was eight years old, my father sent me to the calmecac, the temple school, not to the ordinary warrior school. “Listen, my son,” he said to me. “You will reap neither honor nor respect. You will be ignored, despised, and degraded. Every day you’ll cut agave thorns to do penance. You’ll have to prick yourself with the thorns and give your blood as a sacrifice, and at night they will wake you up in order for you to bathe in cold water. Steel your body in the cold, and when the fasting time comes, be sure not to break it, and don’t let anyone notice any weakness during the fasting and the penance exercises.”

  I learned to be a man in the temple school. They demanded sacrifice and self-denial. At night, in the mountains, we had to offer incense and our blood to the gods. During the day we had to work very hard in the temple fields. There was severe punishment for even the smallest infraction. Sometimes I cried and thought how hard it is to be a warrior and a man. But in time I became stronger. And I looked down on the boys who visited the ordinary warrior school. They had to chop wood and clean the water ditches and canals and farm in the community fields. But at sunset they all went to the cuicacalco, the house of song and danced and sang there until midnight and slept with girls they weren’t married to. They associated only with warriors whose actions they admired and wanted to imitate. They knew nothing of the higher things, of science, the arts, or the worship of the Gods.

  We students of the calmecac were marked for higher duties. We could become priests or public officials. I learned self-discipline and tenacity in the temple school, but I also learned to speak and address people with decency, using the customs that prevail at the court of the king. I learned the correct way to treat public officials and judges. I also learned astronomy and the interpretation of dreams, the calculation of years and the astrological calendar. I learned to draw the signs and pictures for numbers and names and to decipher the writings of our ancestors. And I learned the sacred hymns of our people, the songs with which the Gods are honored and the songs that tell the history of the Aztecs. For we are a great and mighty people and are feared by all the peoples of the earth.

  Long ago we moved away from Aztlán, our first homeland, from which we Aztecs get our name. The legends tell us that Aztlán was surrounded by water and that we lived there as fishermen. In the beginning we were poor. We clothed ourselves in animal skins and had nothing but arrows and bows and targets for our spears. We were no better than the forest people who live to the north of our empire. Our leaders were four priests, who carried a shrine made of reeds. In the shrine was our God, Huitzilopochtli, who spoke to them and told them what we should do. After we had left Aztlán, our God commanded us to call ourselves the “moon people,” the Mexicas.

  If we found a good location, we stayed there a few years maybe. We sowed corn, but we didn’t always stay long enough to harvest it. Usually we lived from hunting deer, rabbits, birds, and snakes and on what grew in the earth.

  But God promised us: “We shall settle down and establish ourselves, and we shall conquer all the peoples of the world; and indeed, I say to you, I shall make you lords and kings over everything in this world; and you shall rule and have countless vassals who will pay tribute to you, and they will give you innumerable and very precious stones, and gold, the feathers of the Quetzal-bird, emeralds, coral, amethysts. And you will wear them as jewelry. And you shall also have many kinds of feathers and cocoa and cotton in many colors. You shall experience all of this!”

  Some say that Huitzilopochtli wasn’t our God from the beginning. Our tribe consisted of seven clans, and every clan held its own counsel and chose its own leader. And so, they say, each clan had its
own god. But Huitzilopochtli was the greatest of them, the God of the sun and war. We wandered through many lands. Some were desolate and unpopulated, others were settled and we had to fight with the inhabitants. At some places we stayed longer and built a temple for our God. But we always felt driven to push on. We often had to leave our old people behind when we moved on. Sometimes a group from our tribe would separate and journey in a different direction. But others joined us: hunters, who had never lived in villages. Finally we came to the beautiful land between the mountains that today bears our name, the name Mexica. It is situated high above the two seas, protected and surrounded by mountains. Eternal spring prevails here. Only very seldom do we have a freeze, and when it is hot in the summer, the nights stay cool. Mountain springs supply the land with water, and in the valley lowlands there are five cool lakes, surrounded by villages and cities.

  Once there was a mighty empire here, the Tula Empire, the city of the God Quetzalcoatl. But Quetzalcoatl, the God of the arts and the calendar, had abandoned his city, and the empire had fallen. The villages and cities of the lagoons were small, and the people