The stone floor was cold beneath his feet.
His eyes opened onto a room bathed in soft grey while the body was already upright, already balanced on the cold stone, toes spreading to grip the rough texture.
"Already up, it seems," he thought, mildly surprised to be standing before he had even fully woken.
The mat was behind him, and his feet moved toward the hearth without asking his opinion.
The smell came with them a blend of cold copal and dried maize, thick in the throat, faintly grainy before it had even reached the lungs.
There was a paragraph on this in chapter two of one of his favorite books "domestic ritual use of copal in pipiltin households" seven lines, sourced and clean of all fake news. But seven lines had not anticipated that the smell would carry this weight first thing in the morning, before morning light, before any decision.
Fortunately the body knew the way but perhaps that was also the problem…
Xochicueitl was crouched before the metate, bare forearms pushing and pulling the stone in a low, steady, unbroken rhythm the same rhythm as the drums of the Templo Mayor, which the walls filtered without ever truly silencing, even in the quiet of night. She looked up when Itzli entered, held his gaze a beat too long, as though noticing something about him:
- "You slept on your right side again," she told him, in an accusatory tone.
- "No?" he answered, instinctively.
- "Little liar! Something on your face tells me so. There's no point in lying, you know?"
She held out a flatbread without waiting for his answer, while he brought his hand to his cheek, which was already flushing at being caught red-handed.
The body took it before Itzli had even looked at what he was receiving. The flatbread was warm and dense, acrid on the underside with an earthy sweetness that rose through the nostrils from within, and the body ate with the honest appetite of a hungry child.
"It might be time I synchronized with this body or whatever one does to stop making these instinctive gestures. It's… unsettling," he thought, having silently scolded his greedy arm.
On the subject of food, the Codex Florentinus he had read in his previous life dedicated at least two pages to the foods of noble households, and he had to admit reality was not disappointing — even if modern food was more flavorful in terms of outright sensory explosion.
- "No industrially processed foods, at least," he consoled himself.
Xochicueitl stood, wiping her palms on her skirt. Her gaze dropped to Itzli's right hand.
- "Your hand," she commanded.
He raised his palm at her order. There, a pearlescent scar in the shape of a red sun rested at its center, pale enough in the grey morning light.
- "It was white just last night," she said, and it was not a question.
- "It doesn't hurt me, Mother."
His mother studied it for a long moment eyes calm but narrowed, mouth closed, saying nothing. Then she returned to the metate, resumed the rhythm of the stone, and said nothing more and that way of saying nothing resembled less an acceptance than a decision to wait.
The courtyard was full of sun when Tezca-Tlachtli stepped out, two javelins over his shoulder and the atlatl in his right hand.
He set everything down at Itzli's feet without looking at his son, crossed the courtyard to the opposite wall, folded his arms, and waited. The heat pressed down from the nape of the neck with the regularity of a hand bearing down dry and insistent and the courtyard dust was already white beneath the soles.
The atlatl was heavier than in any museum, the wood slick where hundreds of grips had polished it, the rear notch rough against the thumb in a way no display-case photograph had ever conveyed.
Itzli fitted the javelin into the groove, assessed the angle roughly forty-five degrees the arm extension, the shoulder rotation, the transmission of leverage through the propulsor. He had devoted twenty-three pages of chapter three to the mechanics of this instrument; footnote forty-seven cited Ross Hassig,* as it happened. He threw.
The javelin planted itself in the dust six meters from the post.
Tezca-Tlachtli did not move. Neither did his eyes.
Itzli picked up the second javelin, recalibrated in his head where everything was perfectly correct, and threw again. Too high this time the javelin disappeared into the shadow of the back wall with a dull, brief sound.
His father crossed the courtyard slowly, positioned himself behind Itzli, and took his right forearm in a firm hand that carried a trace of sternness promising consequences if things didn't improve trust me, you don't want a correction from an Aztec father given the size of those arms…
He moved the elbow down and forward in a slow, decisive gesture as economical as a correction penciled in the margin of a manuscript. Then he stepped back two paces.
The third throw hit the post two hand-spans to the left. The fourth struck it clean the wood shuddered, the sound crossed the courtyard with the clarity of something done right, and the body registered it in the arms and the chest before the mind had time to form any thought at all.
Tezca-Tlachtli gathered the javelins from his height, returned them to his son. At the moment his fingers released the wood, he said, without looking at Itzli:
- "Better than your first throws. I thought I might have to disown you," he began, in a heavy tone, before adding: "Your great-grandfather also threw like that on the fourth attempt. Don't worry, you still have time but train hard and seriously. The people of our family are skilled warriors, and that will not change with you."
Then he went back inside.
Itzli remained in the courtyard, javelins in his arms, white dust on his calves. His father did not have a single journal title in his head. He had never heard of Ross Hassig. And he had just given his son something no footnote had ever contained.
The market of Tlatelolco always attacked first through sound.
The great square opened from the northern causeway as a wall of overlapping voices vendors, children, animals, the knock of canoes against the docks and beneath all of it, the drums of the Templo Mayor continuing their background beat from the southern horizon, as steady as something that had never had a first beat and would never have a last.
Then came the smells: cacao roasted on hot stone, always acrid and sweet at the same time; dried chili that stung before it burned; wet leather from a stall at the back; and flowers from Xochimilco piled in yellow and violet mounds against the columns. In short, the market was the market, and its particular smell was something Itzli would never tire of.
His mother released Itzli's wrist at the entrance to the cacao stalls and stopped to examine beans in her palm, turning each one toward the light. Itzli, for his part, stayed beside her and let his eyes move across the stalls the stone weights, the prices displayed in gestures and beans on the mats below.
He was calculating the average price of cacao in Tenochtitlan in 1504, its quachtli equivalence according to colonial sources, and the impact of the rainy season on lake-route supply, when he was suddenly interrupted by a young voice.
- "You're looking at those beans like someone who isn't going to buy any," she said.
A young girl appeared to his left around eight years old, with two thick braids, arms carrying a basket that smelled of dried pepper and fresh resin. She set it down at the feet of a tall man with greying hair who must have been her father, barely breaking her stride, and continued moving until she planted herself beside Itzli arms now crossed over her chest, eyes on the beans.
- "I'm looking at the prices," said Itzli.
- "Then you're looking at the wrong ones. Those beans are from last season." She pointed with her thumb at the stall across from them narrower, run by a man who neither cried his wares nor watched passersby. "The fresh ones are over there."
Itzli looked, his eyes moving back and forth between the two stalls. The man opposite did indeed have darker, smaller beans, laid out on a clean mat.
- "How much?"
- "Twenty the quachtli."
He hesitated half a second.
- "I had calculated seventeen."
- "You calculated the price from five days ago." The girl rose onto her toes, examined the beans at the stall before them with the air of an owner checking her own stock. "The rain delayed the canoes from the south. The old stock ran out the day before yesterday. Your seventeen is finished do you live in a cave, or are you just plain stupid?"
Itzli's hands stopped dead above the crate, his face flushing in a thoroughly embarrassing way while his brain worked at full speed to extract him from this very awkward situation.
In Chapter IV, at footnote twenty-three, he recalled that it was written that seasonal fluctuations in goods imported by lake route were poorly documented, owing to a lack of pre-Hispanic accounting sources. He had written that footnote with the serenity of historians who name their ignorances in the margins and move on, and Professor Renard had approved the paragraph with the smile of thesis directors who appreciate when their doctoral students confess their gaps rather than filling them with speculation.
The gap was here now, standing beside him arms crossed, two braids, eight years old, with a way of looking at beans that left no room for discussion.
"Hell, no choice let's accept defeat," he sighed inwardly.
- "Twenty," he said at last.
- "Twenty. And twenty-two tomorrow if the rain comes back before noon." The girl stepped down from the crate on her toes and picked up her basket again. "Your father sends you to the market alone?"
- "I come alone, yes."
- "You count well for someone who didn't know how to count," she said dryly.
- "My father taught me," he answered, playing along.
- "Mazatl says children who learn to count at home always count in theory." She gestured broadly at the market, her open hand sweeping over the thousands of voices and hundreds of stalls. "The market you learn that here. Come back tomorrow morning. The canoes from the south arrive tonight normally, prices drop at dawn. By the way, my name is Zyanya."
She left just as quickly toward her father's stall without waiting for an answer, basket on her forearm and braids swinging behind her.
- "And I'm..." Itzli wanted to answer, but she was already gone. He sighed, defeated twice in one afternoon by an eight-year-old girl. What a disgrace…
Xochicueitl, two stalls away with the beans still in her palm, was watching her son with a small, almost mocking smile one that nonetheless carried a trace of something promising considerably closer supervision during future market trips.
Evening descended from the bottom, first.
The shadow rose from the flagstones while the sky stayed copper at the zenith, the lake mosquitoes beginning to hum in the waterside grass, and the damp crept into stone and clothing with the patience of the Texcoco, which surrounded the city on all sides and carried it on dark water.
Itzli sat against the courtyard wall, knees pulled to his chest, watching the stars appear one by one in a sky that the streetlamps of boulevard Voltaire had stolen from him for thirty-two years, from rue Mouffetard. The Milky Way was not abstract here. It had weight. It was white and dense and it crossed the sky of Tenochtitlan from north to south like a river that needed no name to exist.
Four hundred and fifty men. The figure from footnote forty-seven clean and cold when he had written it at his desk. Three days in this body, and it had a temperature a low pressure beneath the sternum, steady and dull, the kind of weight one first mistakes for exhaustion, and which ends up acquiring a name.
Those men were sleeping tonight in houses he could not point to on any map of this place. Something lived in their lungs that had no name here yet — something that would travel on breath and clothing and hands before the ships ever touched the coast, and that would wait for nothing, and negotiate with no one.
The scar then warmed in his right palm.
From its center, the pearlescent sun-mark radiated a dry heat that traveled up through the tendons of the wrist and settled into the forearm without hurry like an ember closed inside a fist. He closed his fist. It did not go out.
Xochicueitl's voice rose from the hearth with a three-note melody, repeated the kind of tune one sings because one has always heard it, passed from throat to throat since before the codices, since before any archive, since before the two articles published in the Revue d'Histoire des Amériques in which he had exhausted everything he thought he knew about this city.
He had no footnote for that melody. It did not exist.
Come back tomorrow morning, Zyanya had said. The canoes from the south arrive tonight, normally.
He would come back. And the day after. And every day of the fifteen years he had left. He would learn the prices on a rainy day, the routes the pochteca recorded nowhere, everything that footnote twenty-three had disposed of in three clean lines before moving on. He would learn all of it — because if he was wrong about the price of cacao on a Tuesday in the rainy season, how many other things was he still wrong about?
If the Empire had a chance, it would not be found in his footnotes.
And after?
The ember in his palm did not answer. It burned, and that was all.
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* American historian and anthropologist, specialist in Mesoamerican studies, particularly Aztec culture