The earth was lit, but the fifth sun hung exhausted and motionless in the heavens. Only when the gods cut their bodies, feeding him with their own hearts’ blood, did he have the strength to move across the sky.
Thus the age of the fifth sun dawned. With blood. With sacrifice.
With death.
And – so the priests foretold – it would draw to a close with earthquakes and destruction.
By that strange light Mitotiqui and I clasped each other for comfort, trembling in fear of what was to come.
Full well we knew that the age into which we had been born would end in fire.
The flame blazed in the sky all that night, and the many nights that followed. For almost a year the spectacular omen hung above us. To begin with, fear held the city in its icy fingers, but when month followed month and no disaster came, it waned. Though it did not entirely vanish, it was put away in a dark corner, where it could be overlooked and ignored.
I grew accustomed to the warm glow that filled our courtyard, and it gave me comfort. The night was a time of terror when the sun battled for its very life, and all feared lest it failed in its struggle and rose no more. So when at last the strange sky fire faded and ceased I missed it sorely, for the night seemed darker and blacker than it had ever been. Whether it was truly so, or whether my troubled heart and bitter thoughts coloured my perception, it was impossible to tell. For when the omen vanished, Mayatl decided it was time I learnt to weave.
I was then ten years old, and had been aiding her in the household tasks since I was four – a little later than most girls, who assisted their mothers almost as soon as they could walk. As a small child, my weak stature had bought me a time of freedom. But when I survived my early childhood, and racing against my brother had made me grow strong, I became condemned to a life of domesticity.
It had started with sweeping and scrubbing, tasks I did not greatly object to, for they gave me access to my father’s workshop. When he was absent I was sent there by Mayatl to dust and sweep, but I spent more time examining his designs and handling polished gems than I ever did in cleaning. Secretly, alone, I learnt the weight of fine stones and observed the flaws that marred those of lesser value. I studied the settings he worked, seeing how they displayed the gems to their best advantage.
But the goldsmith’s art was not for me. Girls could not be craftsmen. At seven, I had to learn the art of cooking tortillas.
My first attempt had been a disaster. I had rushed the grinding of the maize, being too hasty with the heavy stone to produce a smooth flour. Likewise, I had hurried the shaping and rolling of the dough, so desperate had I been to finish the chore and get back to Mitotiqui. I recall my father chewing bravely on the hard, lumpen tortilla, saying nothing but smiling vaguely with encouragement until he gave a sudden cry and clutched his jaw.
It seemed I had done my task so poorly that a piece of grit had become mingled with the grain and chipped his tooth. My heart had beaten fast with shame for many days as his mouth swelled in wordless accusation. He had finally had his tooth pulled, and, although he never once reproached me, I made a solemn vow then to cause him no further injury. I would be careful. But the dreariness of grinding corn was an endless source of irritation to me. And I burned with jealousy that while I knelt rolling the stone back and forth, Mitotiqui was allowed to follow my father and assist him when he worked gold into fine ornaments.
Mitotiqui was destined for glory on the field of battle, but a warrior is not always at war. Only in the appropriate season did our army set forth to fight the ancient enemy, Tlaxcala. Therefore my father reasoned that Mitotiqui also needed to learn the goldsmith’s art.
Envy of my brother soured my temper. I had not forgotten my stolen glimpse of the emperor’s adornments. Indeed, each time I set foot in the city streets I could not help but glance at nobles to assess the craftsmanship of the jewels they wore. Tortilla-making seemed such dull, repetitious labour in comparison. To relieve the tedium I often moulded shapes in the dough – the gods, the tiny hairless dogs that were the pets of noblemen, the flowers that tumbled from the roof of every house – before I had to squash them and roll the dough flat. Such usage did not improve the flavour of my tortillas, nor soften their texture. I was a pitifully poor cook, for I saw no reward in the task. Hour after hour I pummelled and flattened and baked, only to see my work disappear in the course of a single meal!
I complained of it crossly to Mitotiqui. “What our father crafts – what you craft – will last for ever. Anything I make vanishes down your throat in the blink of an eye!”
“You think so?” Mitotiqui’s voice was deadly serious, but his eyes gleamed teasingly. “I assure you, Itacate, you are mistaken.”
“How?”
“Your tortillas are so heavy that they take months to pass through my insides.” He rubbed his stomach. “In fact, I think there is one lodged just here that you baked last year.”
I cried with indignation, and cuffed Mitotiqui as he mimed chewing, and gave a perfect imitation of my father smashing his tooth.
“Your tortillas are good, solid creations. They are immortal, Itacate, like the gods.” He nudged me. “Perhaps our emperor should use them to pave his palace. They would last longer than terracotta.”
I fell upon him in play, beating him around the head with the palm of my hand. And so, with laughter, my brother lightened the weight of my domestic burden. But even he could not ease my horror of weaving, for by then he was attending school.
I was ten. In five or six years my father would approach Nemaneoanoliztli, the matchmaker, and she would begin the search to find me a suitable husband. It went unsaid, but I knew well that a good match was unlikely to be made: the predictions at my birth made certain of that. Nevertheless, Mayatl was determined that I should learn all the womanly skills that would be expected of a wife.
My life acquired a deadly, dull discipline. Mornings were taken up with grinding maize and cooking, sweeping and cleaning. The rest of the daylight hours were spent spinning and weaving. We had a constant need of cloth not only for clothing, but also for bartering at market. Well-woven fabric could be exchanged for meat and vegetables.
When Mayatl first fitted me to the loom, I felt as though a huge chain were being fastened about my waist, pinning me to the hearth. The strap was passed behind my back and tied to the first bar of wood. Mayatl then tied the second – the loom bar – to a post in the courtyard. Here I was to kneel, using my weight to straighten the warp threads that ran between the two bars. Inside that contraption I felt as helpless and trapped as a trussed chicken.
Mayatl then showed me how to pass the weft thread over and under the strands of warp, using a heddle stick and shed rod to lift the alternating strands. With a steadily sinking heart, I began. I knelt until my neck ached, my fingers were raw, my knees had lost all feeling, and the sun had sunk into the darkness of Mictlan. Back and forth I passed the heddle, over and under, thread by tiny, narrow, hair-thin thread.
At the end of that first day, in the still darkness while the rest of the city slept, I wept. I felt I could work all year and still see only a fingernail’s length of fabric! And if I wanted to follow the design that was Mayatl’s instruction, I did not know how I would endure it. It was so complex, and yet so repetitive! I could not even talk, or listen to Mayatl’s tales, for the concentration I needed was so great. Not even the story of my birth could relieve the tedium of the task.
As day succeeded day, month followed month and the years moved on, I became more skilled, but I grew to loathe the cloths I created. They were so flat. So dull. So unvarying. I dreaded the moment after the noonday meal when we had finished eating, and I could avoid my loom no longer. Each piece I wove seemed to drain me of energy, of spirit, of life. I dreamt of fabric, the patterns dancing before my eyes even when the lids were shut.
To evade this domestic oppression I began more and more to retreat to a place deep inside my head. Into my cloths I threaded stories of escape. The he
ddle stick became myself – weaving between the reeds at the edge of the lake, between boulders as I climbed the hills, between stout trunks of trees in distant jungles. When I beat the weft threads into position, I journeyed further away. By the time each piece was finished, in my mind I had arrived amongst a strange new tribe of men, and I was weaving freely amongst them in a great, triumphant dance.
While I stayed, bound with tight cords of resentment to my loom, my brother was schooled. He went not to the telpochcalli, where the son of a goldsmith might be expected to attend, but to the calmecac along with the city’s nobility, for his propitious birth had marked him for great deeds. Here he excelled both in learning and in popularity, as the gods had blessed Mitotiqui with a spirit that charmed everyone he met.
Each day I eagerly awaited his return; I found our home empty and lifeless without him and our daily separation miserably hard to endure. I had always thought us to be two halves of one whole, and in his absence I felt myself to be a shrivelled, withered thing. When he came back, he would sit with me awhile, telling me of what he had learnt. His world had expanded as mine shrank, and I devoured his knowledge with the same fervour as he devoured his food.
One afternoon he returned home wielding a cudgel, a fearsome, flat-sided weapon with many sharp obsidian blades set into the edges. In high spirits he demonstrated to me the elaborate steps of the ritual dance that preceded any battle.
“And then I must approach my enemy thus,” he declared, grimacing menacingly.
I laughed at his expression, as he intended I should.
“Can you not just beat your opponent over the head?” I asked. “Would it not be a swifter way to dispatch him?”
Mitotiqui sighed dramatically. “The object is not to kill, Itacate, as well you know. I must take live captives for sacrifice.” He swung his cudgel again.
“You are likely to remove their legs if you do it like that,” I replied. “Then how will they climb the temple steps?”
“Wait and see, Itacate. The blood I take shall make the sun rise. I am an important man. Do not forget it.”
He spoke in jest, but his remark grated, setting my teeth on edge.
As children we had always talked as equals. Fool that I was, I had expected it to remain so. We had always delighted in flights of fancy, each of us striving to top the other with the wildness of our imaginings. But now our conversation was lopsided. Daily my brother came back with tales of new triumphs and nuggets of knowledge that gleamed like gold. And what could I tell Mitotiqui in return?
He would say, “Today we studied the movement of the stars and assessed the sacred calendar. And then we practised the skills of oratory, debating whether the gods are separate deities, or aspects of one vast whole as the poet Nezahualcoyotl thought.”
Was I to reply, “Today I studied the movement of the grinding stone and assessed the inordinate amount of time it takes to turn maize into flour. Then I knelt for hours within my loom and debated with myself whether I should use the red or the black thread, and if anyone in the entire world would care a grain of salt either way”?
Mitotiqui perfected imitations of his fellow students and the many priests who taught him. He copied their speech and their way of walking with deadly accuracy. And how was I to entertain him in return? By mimicking the ant who carried a fragment of corn across the courtyard while I spun thread? By impersonating the spider who repaired its web above me with greater skill than I could ever master? For I neither met nor talked with anyone else!
I could say nothing. So while Mitotiqui became more eloquent, more glorious, more shining, as he grew to manhood, I became his opposite: tight-lipped, dark, dull. If we were parts of one whole, we were no longer twin halves. He was the corn’s kernel, growing and ripening to perfect fruition; I was the husk – empty, dried out, discarded and useless. Thus it went on. Until the day I crossed him, and tainted his golden glow.
We were by that time fifteen years old. My brother had continued to assist our father in his workshop, and one evening he brought a necklet into the house to show me. It was Mitotiqui’s own work – he had made it unaided – and he was proud of his craftsmanship.
I did not mean to be cruel, but as I examined it I realized his work was ill done: he had marred the beauty of the stones in setting them, rather than enhancing them.
I was out of sorts, or I would have chosen my words more carefully. I did not bother with soothing tact, but merely said, “It is badly made,” and handed his work back to him.
Mitotiqui’s brow furrowed, but only for a moment. He had become accustomed to my curtness and was not troubled. Besides, he had an open heart and a generous nature; if my criticism was just, he would accept it.
“You think so?” he asked. “How should it be done?”
I took the necklet once more and examined the stones. He had matched them with little thought to hue and shape, and I told him so. Several small flawed turquoises were embedded around a perfect jade of infinitely superior quality. The turquoises clashed with the jade, somehow draining it of colour. And as for the setting he had worked around them…
“Look at the jade,” I said. “Feel its weight; see its shape. It should be framed by the gold, not weighed down by it. You have made it look as though … as though…” I struggled to find an apt description, but Mitotiqui supplied one for me.
“As though a bird’s dropping has landed on it!”
I smiled at him, laughing. But then our father’s voice slid like a knife between us.
“Quite so.”
These words alarmed us as neither Mitotiqui nor I had heard his approach. We sprang apart guiltily, although why we did so was a puzzle, for we had done nothing wrong.
Our father studied our faces closely in the fading light. We had become so used to his indifference that such intensity was a frightening thing. Furtively I glanced at Mitotiqui, but his expression mirrored my own; neither of us knew what to say.
My father broke our silence. Crossing the room and taking my arm, he led me into the courtyard. Pointing at the ground he said, “There! Show me what you would have done with the jade.”
It was a test, a challenge: one I did not wish to fail. My heart pounded. I did not know what my father meant by it, but I felt the moment was heavy with significance. I would not be hurried. I held the necklet in my hand and considered the jade. It was a perfect circle of smooth, even colour. How best to enhance its beauty? It should stand alone, of that I was certain, not compete against other beads. Not a necklet, then… Perhaps a figurine?
While the sun’s last rays streaked the sky blood red, I found a sharp stone and scratched the image of Tezcatlipoca, the god who brings fortune, on the terracotta tiles, the jade the mirror in which the god sees the future. It was hastily done, but not poorly. The shape I had drawn was elegant and apt.
My father expelled a long breath. Slowly he nodded his approval.
“You have the eye of a goldsmith!” he exclaimed, and his tone was one of wonder. He whispered, almost to himself, “My own seem to have been tight shut these many years.” Then, grasping my chin in his hand, he softly spoke my name. “Itacate.” A smile lifted the corners of his mouth as he looked at me, seemingly for the first time. “Child, you have the face of your mother!”
His voice was so unexpectedly tender that my vision was briefly blurred with tears. Wiping them away, I glanced at my brother to see his reaction to this strange scene.
Mitotiqui stood framed in the doorway, lit red by the dying light. He was struggling to compose his features, but I could read the emotion upon them. He – the glorious child whom the gods favoured – had never had cause to feel envy before, not of me, not of anyone. But now it burst into his heart with all the heated energy and raw strength of a new-made sun.
Brilliant. Fierce. Searing.
He turned away, for he did not know how to control his anguish. My own heart contracted and I felt then that I was cursed. It seemed bitter indeed that at the very moment my father had l
ooked at me and seen something more than an ill-favoured daughter, my brother’s face had become stained by the dark cloud of jealousy.
It had taken my father fifteen years to recall that he had a daughter. It did not take him so long to make use of me.
The next market day, instead of going to the square with Mayatl as usual, I accompanied my father there, walking three steps behind him, head bowed, the very picture of a dutiful daughter. And this time I did not stop amongst the fresh fruit and vegetables. Instead I followed where he led, winding through stalls piled high with turkeys, deer, rabbits, fish. The smell of dead flesh jostled with the scents of heady oils and perfumes. My father led me past the sellers of pots and jars and bowls, and the vendors of fine cloaks and sandals. We did not pause to admire the bright displays of precious feathers laid out by Mayan traders, nor the skins of jaguar and panther spread on the ground by those of the Otomi tribe. My father walked, his eyes fixed on the far corner.
I knew where he led. As children, Mitotiqui and I had often evaded Mayatl’s clutches and lost ourselves in this vast, crowded throng. Like moths to the moon we would always be drawn to the place where my father now took me. A canal ran along one side of the square. Heavily laden canoes banged against the stone quay, and each other, threatening to unbalance and capsize. At the furthest end merchants from the very edges of the world traded precious stones, silver and gold. Children are invisible to some adults’ eyes, and we had spent many hours staring and giggling at the strange foreigners with their unfamiliar dialects and exotic dress.
Thinking about my brother now brought a stab of sorrow to my chest. Mitotiqui fought and struggled against his jealousy, but my father – all unknowing – poured salt in his wound with every word he spoke. At our evening meals, he had taken to bringing in pieces he had worked on during the day to show me how they had been made, and to ask my opinion of them. He did not ask for Mitotiqui’s. Thrilled and flattered though I was to have our father’s favour suddenly, I felt the pain it gave my brother. And so in the space of a few days our meals had become strained, uncomfortable affairs. I had never imagined that Mitotiqui’s time in our father’s workshop might have been as torturous to him as the loom was to me; he had never spoken of it. But then neither had I told him how much I hated my weaving. We were twins; we had shared the same womb. And yet now, how little we seemed to know of each other!