as a seal of this, I must put upon you three refrainments. We will make
them very light ones, since this is but a matter of form. I will order
you to refrain from such things as no sane person would ever dream of
doing in any event; and thus nobody will be discommoded.”
Coth cried out, “Bosh!”
“So you must not infringe upon divine privileges by going naked in
public; you must avoid any dealings with green peppers such as you see
over yonder, for the reason that they are sacred to my worthless
stepson, the Flower Prince; and the third refrainment which I now put
upon you I shall not bother to reveal, because you are certain to find
this abstinence even more easy to observe than the others. I have
spoken.”
“I know well enough that you have spoken! But you have spoken
balderdash. For if you for one moment think I am going to be bullied by
you and your idiotic refrainments—!”
But Coth saw that the image had closed its eyes, and had tranquilly
turned back in all to stone, and was not heeding him any longer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_21._
_The Profits of Pepper Selling_
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COTH was goaded, by such incivility, from indignation into a fine rage.
He addressed the idol at some length, in terms which no person, whether
human or divine, could have construed as worshipful. He gathered from
the plants about him an armful of green peppers, he took off all his
clothes, and he left them there in a heap upon the altar that was carved
with skulls. He went up into the city of Porutsa stark naked and sat
down in the market-place, crying, “Who will buy my green peppers!”
None of the Taoltecs hindered him, because the hill people, from Uro and
Hipal and Thiapas, were used to come into Porutsa almost thus lightly
clad; and it was evident enough that this fair-skinned stranger, with
the bare, great, round, pink head, came unarmed with anything except the
equipments of nature.
Coth sold his peppers, and went striding about the market-place
inquiring for news of Dom Manuel, but none of these charcoal- and
copper-colored persons seemed ever to have heard of the gray champion.
When the market for that day was over, Coth went up into the hills about
Tzatzitepec, in company with a full-bosomed, brown-eyed, delicious girl
who had been selling water-cresses in the market-place: she proved
brisk; and Coth spent four days with her to their mutual contentment.
On the fifth day he returned, still naked as his mother bore him, to the
market-place in Porutsa; and there he again sold green peppers, so that
this brow-beating Yaotl might have no least doubt as to the value which
Coth set on this god’s patronage.
And all went well enough for a while. But by and by seven soldiers came
into the market-place, and so to where Coth had just disposed of the
last bunch of peppers; and the leader of these soldiers said, “Our
Emperor desires speech with you.”
“Well,” Coth returned, “I am through with my day’s work, and I can
conveniently spare him a moment or two.”
He went affably with these soldiers, and they led him to the Emperor
Vemac. “Who are you?” said the Emperor, first of all, “and what is your
business in Porutsa?”
“I am an outlander called Coth of the Rocks, a dealer in green peppers,
and I came hither to sell my green peppers.”
“But why do you come into my city wearing no blanket and no loin-cloth
and, in fact, nothing whatever except a scowl?”
“That is because of a refrainment which was put upon me by an impudent
black rascal who carried arrows and a fan with a mirror in it, and who
called himself Yaotl.”
“Blessed be the name of that god!” said the pious Emperor Vemac,
“although we worship the Feathered Serpent, and not the Capricious
Lord.”
Then Vemac went on to explain that he had an only daughter, who five
days earlier had observed Coth, first from the windows of the palace,
and later had gone down veiled into the market-place in order to regard
at closer quarters this virtually pink person. She had returned,
astounded and in some excitement, to demand of her father that he give
her this queerly colored and greatly gifted seller of peppers to be her
husband. Vemac granted her request, because he never denied his daughter
anything, and ardently desired a grandson: but when they sent to look
for the pink-colored pepper vendor with the great and hairless,
pink-colored head, he was nowhere to be found.
The Princess Utsume had taken this disappointment, with its attendant
delay of her nuptials, rather hard. In fine, said Vemac, the girl had
fallen sick with love, six physicians had been able to do nothing for
her, and nobody could heal her, she declared, except that beautifully
tinted and in all ways magnificent pepper vendor.
“Well, you must tell the poor girl that I already have a wife,” said
Coth, “even over and above an understanding with a seller of
water-cresses.”
“I do not,” Vemac submitted, “see what that has to do with it. In Tollan
a man is permitted as many wives as he cares to have, within, of course,
reason.”
“Marrying does not come under the head of reason,” said Coth.
“Then, as the husband of my only child,” said Vemac, “you will rule over
Tollan along with me.”
“Oh! oh!” said Coth. For, since he had punctiliously disobeyed Yaotl in
everything, he knew this must be a coincidence, and it seemed a very
strange coincidence.
“And, finally,” said Vemac, “if you are hard-headed about this really
excellent opening in life for a green pepper vendor, we shall have to
persuade you.”
“But how,” asked Coth, reservedly, “how would you persuade me?”
Vemac raised his brown hand. His persuaders came, masked, and bringing
with them their implements and a stalwart male slave. They demonstrated
their methods of persuasion; and after what remained of the slave was
quiet at last, Coth also for a while remained quiet.
“Of two evils,” Coth said then, “one should choose the more familiar. I
will marry.”
He let them take him and bathe him and trim his long mustachios and dye
his body black and perfume him and set upon his great bald head a
coronal of white hens’ feathers. A red cloth was wrapped about his
loins, upon his feet a priest put painted sandals with little golden
bells fastened to them, and about Coth’s scented body was placed a
mantle of yellow netting very beautifully fringed.
“Now,” said Vemac, “when you have had supper, do you go in there and
comfort my daughter in her sickness!”
Coth obeyed, and found the princess—who proved to be in an unmitigatedly
brunette fashion a most charming girl,—recumbent and weeping in a
solidly built double-bed. Coth hung upon a peg in the wall his coronal
of white hens’ feathers, he coughed, and he looked again at the weeping
princess.
Coth said: “By such an attachment to me, my dear, I am touched. An
attachment to me, in this land of half-men, is indicative of sound
sense.” He coughed again, perhaps to hide his emotion, and he added: “An
attachment to me is moving. So do you move over!”
She, still weeping, made room for him. He sat down upon the bed and
began to comfort her. She in turn began to express her appreciation of
this comforting. He hung upon a peg in the wall a mantle of yellow
netting, and a red loin-cloth.
In the morning no trace whatever remained of the Princess Utsume’s
illness except a great and agreeable fatigue. And in the forenoon Coth
was married to the Princess Utsumé and escorted to the temple of the
Feathered Serpent, and there given the imperial name Toveyo, and he was
crowned as the co-ruler along with Vemac over all Tollan.
Yet afterward a rather curious ceremony—called, as his brown loving
bride informed Toveyo, the Feast of Brooms,—was enacted by the clergy
and the entire populace of Porutsa, in order to ensure for the marriage
of their princess fertility.
“I feel that this ceremony is superfluous,” Utsumé said, still yawning.
“But this ceremony was divinely ordained by the Goddess of Dirt; and I
feel, too, my wonderful pink darling, that it is becoming for persons of
our exalted rank to encourage all true religious sentiment, and
generally to consent that the will of the gods be done.”
Meanwhile these rites had opened with the beheading of a quite handsome
young woman, from whose body the skin was then removed, in two sections,
like a horrid corselet and trousers. As such they were worn each by a
priest during the rest of the ceremony: and about this Feast of Brooms
the less said, the better, but to the newly christened Toveyo a great
deal of it seemed morbid and even a bit immodest.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_22._
_Toveyo Dances_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
TOVEYO’S first official act was to send ambassadors to the kings in that
neighborhood—to Cocox and Napaltzin and Acolhua, the second of that
name,—but none of these could give him any news of Dom Manuel. Meanwhile
Coth cherished his wife and dealt with other persons also according to
his nature.
Of his somewhat remarkable behavior in the war with Cacat and Coät, of
how in one of his rages he destroyed a bridge with all the people on it,
and of how he killed ten of his subjects with a gardener’s hoe, there is
in this place no need to speak. But it came about unavoidably that,
before Coth’s honeymoon was over, a deputation from the Taoltecs was
beseeching Vemac to have this son-in-law of his unostentatiously
assassinated.
“For there is really,” they said, “no standing him and his tantrums.”
“Such,” Vemac replied, “has been my own experience. I am afraid, though,
that if we kill him my daughter will be put out, for she seems to have
discovered about him some feature or another feature of great and
unfailing attractiveness.”
“It is better, majesty, that she should weep than that we all be driven
mad. The man’s pride and self-conceit are unbearable.”
“Nobody knows that better than I do. He hectors me in my own palace,
where I am not accustomed to be overrun by anybody except my daughter.
In such a position we must be politic. We must first see that this
Toveyo is belittled in my daughter’s eyes. Afterward, if I know her as
well as I think I do, she will consent to let us get rid of him.”
One of the darker Taoltecs, who called himself Tal-Cavêpan, said then:
“This all-overbearing Toveyo is now in the market-place. Follow me, and
you shall see him belittled in his wife’s eyes and in the eyes of
everybody!”
They followed, inquiring among themselves who might be this huge
Tal-Cavêpan, that he spoke so boldly. Nobody remembered having seen him
before. Meanwhile Tal-Cavêpan went up to where Coth and his royal wife
Utsumé were chaffering with a Yopi huckster over some melons.
Tal-Cavêpan clapped his hand to Coth’s shoulder and bore down with this
hand. Coth became smaller and smaller, so that presently Tal-Cavêpan
stooped and picked up the nuisance whom they called Toveyo, and thus
displayed to the Taoltecs their blustering oppressor as a pink midget
not more than four inches high, standing there in the palm of
Tal-Cavêpan’s black hand.
“Dance, majesty! dance, dreadful potentate!” said Tal-Cavêpan. And Coth
danced for them. All the while that he danced, he swore very horribly,
and his little voice was like the cheeping of a young bird.
The people crowded about him, because no such wonder-working had ever
before been seen in Porutsa. Tal-Cavêpan cried merrily to Vemac the
Emperor, “Is not this capering son-in-law of yours belittled in his
wife’s eyes and in the eyes of everybody?”
Vemac called out to his guards, “Kill this sorcerer!”
His soldiers obeyed the Emperor. But the Princess Utsumé caught up her
tiny husband and thrust him into the bosom of her purple gown, out of
harm’s way, the while that Tal-Cavêpan was being enthusiastically
despatched.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_23._
_Regrettable Conduct of a Corpse_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
NOW the huge body of Tal-Cavêpan lay where it had fallen, and it
instantly began to corrupt, and from it arose a most astounding stench.
“Take that devil carrion out of my city!” Vemac commanded his guards,
“lest it breed a pestilence in Porutsa.”
But when they attempted again to obey the Emperor, they found the body
was so heavy that no force could raise it from the ground. So the
Taoltecs of necessity left this corpse in their market-place. And a
pestilence, in the form of a small yellow whirlwind, went stealthily
about the city; and many hundreds died.
Those who yet remained in life, now that they were not able to help
themselves, prayed for help from the Feathered Serpent, and, at each of
the seven holy stations, sacrificed to him suckling children decked with
bands and streamers of properly colored paper. But the pestilence
continued.
The Taoltecs then made a yet handsomer oblation, of plump and really
valuable slaves and of captive warriors, each one of whom had been duly
painted with blue-and-gilt stripes; and they offered the hearts of all
these to their older and somewhat outmoded gods, to the Slayer with the
Left Hand and to the Maker of Sprouts. Then, as the pestilence grew
worse, they became desperate, and they experimentally decapitated and
flayed eight of the lesser nobility in honor of the new god called
Yaotl, the Capricious Lord, the Enemy upon Both Sides.
Forthwith the dead Tal-Cavêpan raised up what was left of his
countenance, and he said: “Fasten to me ropes woven of black and of red
cords, you worshipers of the Feathered Serpent! And when fifty of you
have done so-and-so,”—he stipulated very exactly what they were to do,
each to the other,—“then do you drag my body to the Place of the Dead,
which is Yaotl’s place; and there let my body be burned upon his altar.
So shall this pestilence be ended.”
The Taoltecs obeyed. Fifty of them, forming a circle, shamefacedly did
the abomination which was required, and fifty of them tugged at the
parti-colored ropes: but still the corpse could not be moved.
Tal-Cavêpan spoke again, saying, “Fetch Vemac, that Emperor who decreed
my death!”
Vemac came, and along with him, came his daughter.
“Hail, Vemac, son of Imos, of the line of Chan, and of the race of
Chivim!” said the corpse. “It appears that these puny sons of nobodies,
enfeebled by their long worship of the Feathered Serpent, are not
able—after one little act of homage to the Capricious Lord,—to remove me
from this city. It is therefore necessary that their broad-shouldered
and heavenly descended Emperor draw my body to the Place of the Dead,
and there burn my body upon the altar of Yaotl.”
“What will become of me in the Place of the Dead?” Vemac asked.
The corpse smiled. “From that holy place the Emperor will depart on a
long journey. His son-in-law will thereafter reign, as was foretold,
over all Tollan. For the Emperor Vemac will be traveling afar, he will
be journeying between two mountains and beyond the lair of the snake and
the crocodile, even to the Nine Waters, which he will cross upon the
back of a red dog. Nor will the Emperor Vemac ever return from that
journeying.”
Vemac shivered a little. But he said:
“It is right that an emperor should die rather than his people perish. I
will not degrade my body, but your body I will draw to the Place of the
Dead; and I will abide what follows.”
Now Coth cried out, like the cheeping of a bird, from where he sat in
the bosom of his wife’s gown. “This sort of talk is very well, but what
assurance have we that this dung-pile is speaking the truth?”
The corpse answered: “To you, Toveyo, I swear that when the Emperor of
Tollan has drawn my body to the Place of the Dead, the pestilence will
cease: and I swear too that the Emperor will never return. Thus shall
his son-in-law reign in his stead, precisely as was foretold.”
“Oho!” said Coth, “so it is as I thought, and nobody guarantees the
affair but you! Well, now, upon my word, do you take us for buzzards or
for scavengers, that we should in any way be bothering about what
emanates from you! By what oath can garbage swear, that anybody should
heed it!”
The great corpse stirred restively under the midget’s piping taunts. But
the voice of Tal-Cavêpan said only, “I swear by the oath of the Star
Warriors, even by the Word of the Tzitzi-Mimé.”
“Ah, ah!” said Coth. “Put me down, dear little wife!” Then Coth, the
very tiny pink mannikin, strutted toward the evil-smelling black corpse,
and brown Utsumé followed fondly after him. Coth posed in a majestic
attitude, resting one elbow upon his wife’s instep, and twirling at his
mustachios. Coth said:
“You have sworn to these things, Yaotl, by that unbreakable oath of
yours which first started all this trouble. Very well! I am co-emperor
of Tollan. I am as much emperor as Vemac is: and it is I who will draw
you to the burning you have richly earned; and it is I whom your oath
will prevent from ever returning into this infernal Porutsa, where such
uncalled-for liberties are taken with a person’s size, and the people
are very much too fond of dancing.”
“But,” said the corpse, “I meant the other emperor!”
Coth answered: “Bosh! Nobody cares what you meant, it matters only what
you have sworn.”
“But,” said the corpse, “but, you pernicious pink shrimp—!”
Coth replied, “I do not deny that you spoke lightly: even so, you did
swear it, by an unbreakable oath; and the affair is concluded.”
Coth caught at the parti-colored ropes with tiny fingers. But as he
tugged, Coth began to grow. The harder he pulled, the greater became his
stature, in order that the honor of the Capricious Lord might stay
undisgraced, and Yaotl not be evicted from Porutsa by a midget. And now
the corpse moved. Now the Taoltecs saw hauling doggedly at those black
and red ropes a full-grown if somewhat short-legged champion, with a
remarkably large and glistening pink head: before him went a little
yellow whirlwind, and behind him dragged a dreadful black corruption.
Thus Coth passed through the east gate of their city.
“The will of the gods be done!” said Vemac,—“especially when it is in
every way a very good riddance.” Nobody dissented with his pious
utterance. “Let the city gates be closed!” said Vemac then. “Put new
bolts on them, lest that son-in-law of mine be coming back to us against
the will of the gods. And you, my dear Utsumé, since you alone are
losing anything, howsoever happily, by this business, you shall have
another husband, of less desultory dimensions, and, in fact, you may
have as many husbands as you like, my darling, to raise up an heir for
us in Porutsa and an emperor to come after me and rule over all Tollan.”
Utsumé replied: “I have reason to believe, my revered father, that the
matter of an heir has been attended to. I shall regret my pink Toveyo
and his great natural gifts, which were to me as a tireless fountain of
delights. And I shall honor his memory by always marrying somebody as
near like him as it may be possible to find in this degenerate country.
Meanwhile I quite agree with you that it is becoming for persons of our
exalted rank to encourage all true religious sentiment, and generally to
consent that the will of the gods be done.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_24._
_Economics of Yaotl_
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IN the Place of the Dead, Yaotl sat up and scratched his nose
reflectively. The Capricious Lord had put off the putrid appearance of
Tal-Cavêpan. He now had the seeming which is his in the heaven called
Tamo-Anchan: and as he sat opposite the black stone idol there was no
difference between Yaotl and the image of Yaotl. At the god’s navel also
shone a green jewel, his face was striped with yellow, and from his ears
hung rings of gold and silver. Otherwise he wore nothing at all, but in
one hand he carried arrows, and in his other hand was the scrying-stone
with long feathers of three differing colors set about it.
“I will now,” said Yaotl, “reveal to you the third refrainment which was
put upon you. It was that you must never obey my commands in anything.”
“That,” Coth replied, hotly, “is not a fair refrainment. It gives me no
chance to treat you as you deserve. It is a refrainment which strikes
directly at the doctrine of free will. It is a treacherous and vile
refrainment! For if you will consider just for a moment,—you black and
very dull-witted dancing-master!—even you will see that, by commanding
any self-respecting person to do the exact contrary of your most absurd
and tyrannical wishes—”
“I had considered that,” said Yaotl, dryly. “It was quite necessary I
should retain some little protection for my real wishes in the lands
over which I exercise divine power.” Now the Capricious Lord fell into a
silence, out of which by and by bubbled a chuckle. “Well, you tricked me
neatly enough, just now, when I was in train to make you the sole ruler
over this country. And I was going to have a rather pleasant forenoon,
too, with that Vemac! Still, I did make you an emperor: and I have kept
in everything the oath of the Star Warriors. So the affair is concluded:
I am released from my oath; and you may now return to that home of
yours, where people have, in some unimaginable fashion, learned how to
put up with you.”
“I shall not give over my searching of the West,” Coth answered,
stubbornly, “until I have found my liege-lord, whom I intend to fetch
back into Poictesme.”
“But that will never do, because we really must preserve hereabouts some
sort of order and rule! And no man nor any deity can hope for actual
ease in Tollan as long as you are blustering about like a bald-headed
pink hornet.... So do you let me think the thought of the Most High
Place of the Gods, and take counsel with the will of Teotex-Calli. About
this Dom Manuel of yours, for instance—”
Yaotl sat quite still for a moment, thinking and looking into the
scrying-stone. And his thought, which was the thought of the Most High
Place of the Gods of Tollan, took form there very slowly as a gray
smoke; and a little by a little this pallid smoke assumed the appearance
of a tall gray man, clad all in silvery gray armor, and displaying upon
his shield the silver emblem of Poictesme: and Coth knelt before his
master, in Yaotl’s Place of the Dead.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_25._
_Last Obligation upon Manuel_
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“COTH” said the voice of Manuel, “most stubborn and perverse of all that
served me! Coth, that must always serve me grudgingly, with so much of
grumbling and of ill grace and of more valor! So, is it you, Coth, is it
you, bald-headed, gruff growler!”
Coth answered: “It is I, master, who am come to fetch you back into
Poictesme. And I take it very ill, let me tell you quite frankly, sir,
that you should be expressing any surprise to see me in my place and
about my proper duty! I follow, as my oath was, after the captain of the
Fellowship of the Silver Stallion. They tell me that the fellowship is
dissolved by your wife’s orders. Well, we both know what wives are. We
know, moreover, that my oath was to follow you and to serve you. So I
take it that such surprise in the matter comes from you most
unbecomingly: and that much, master or not, I wish you distinctly to
understand.”
And Manuel said: “You follow me across the world and over the world’s
rim because of that oath, you pester these gods into summoning me from
my last home, and then you begin forthwith to bluster at me! Yes, this
is Coth, who serves me just as he did of old. What of the others who
swore with you, Coth?”
“They thrive, master. They thrive, and they listen to small poets
caterwauling about you, in those fine fiefs and castles which you gave
them.”
“But you only, the least honored and the most rebellious of my barons,
have followed me even to this far Place of the Dead! Coth, yet you also
had your lands and your two castles.”
“Well, they will keep! What do you mean by hinting that anybody will
dare in my absence to meddle with my property! Did I not pick up an
empire here with no trouble at all! You are casting reflections, sir,
upon my valor and ability, which, I must tell you quite frankly, and for
your own good—!”