Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 102

"I am only an herb doctor," he said apologetically, in faltering Nahuatl, after he had examined Ten. "I have given the patient a purge, and can do no more. But tomorrow you will arrive at Chiapan, and there you will find many famous pulse doctors."

I did not know what pulse doctoring might be, but, by the next day, I could only hope it would be an improvement on herb doctoring. Before we got to Chiapan, Ten had collapsed and was being carried on the cuguar hide he had carried for so long. We took turns, by fours, bearing the improvised litter by the leg-skins at its corners, while Ten lay upon it and writhed and—between spasms of coughing—complained to us that several binkizaka were sitting on his chest and preventing him from breathing.

"One of them is gnawing on me, too. See?" And he held out his hand. What he showed was only the place where the harmless rabbit had nipped him, but, for some reason, that spot had ulcerated into an open sore. We carriers tried to tell him that we saw nothing sitting or eating upon him, and that his problem was only the thinness of the air on that high plateau. We ourselves had such difficulty in breathing that none of us could carry for long before we had to be relieved by another.

Chiapan looked nothing like a capital of anything. It was merely one more village, situated on the bank of a tributary of the Suchiapa River, and I supposed it was the capital only by virtue of its being the largest village of all the villages in the Chiapa nation. A few of its buildings, too, were of wood or adobe, instead of their all being the usual stick-and-thatch huts, and there were the crumbling remnants of two old pyramids.

Our little company came into town reeling with fatigue and calling for a doctor. A kindly passerby heeded our obviously urgent cries, and stopped to peer at the barely conscious Ten. He exclaimed, "Macoboo!" and shouted something else in his language which sent two or three other passersby off at a run. Then he made a beckoning gesture to us and trotted ahead to lead us to the abode of a physician who, we gathered from other gestures, had some command of the Nahuatl tongue.

By the time we got there, we had been joined by an excitedly jabbering crowd. It seemed that the Chiapa do not, like us Mexica, have entirely individual names. Though each person naturally has some distinguishing name, it is attached to a family name, like those of you Spaniards, which endures unchanging through all the generations of that family. The slave we called Ten was of the Macoboo family of Chiapan, and the helpful citizen, recognizing him, had shouted for someone to run and tell his relatives of his return to town.

Ten was unhappily in no condition to recognize any of the other Macoboo who converged on us, and the doctor—though visibly gratified to find such a crowd clamoring at his door—could not let them all inside. When the four of us carrying Ten had laid him on the earthen floor, the aged physician commanded that the hut be cleared of everybody except himself, his crone of a wife who would assist him, the patient, and myself, to whom he would explain the treatment while he performed it. He introduced himself to me as Doctor Maash and, in not very good Nahuatl, told me the theory of pulse doctoring.

He held the wrist of Ten Macoboo while he called out the name of each god, good and bad, in whom the Chiapa believe. As he explained it, when he shouted the name of the deity who was afflicting the patient, Ten's heart would pound and his pulse quicken. Then the doctor, knowing which god was responsible for the ailment, would know exactly what sacrificial offering should be made to persuade that god to cease the molestation. He would also know the proper medicines to administer to repair whatever damage had been done by the god.

So Ten lay there on the cuguar skin, his eyes closed in the sunken hollows of their sockets, and old Doctor Maash held his wrist, leaned over him, and shouted into his ear:

"Kakal, the bright god!" then a pause for the pulse to respond, then, "Totik, the dark god!" and a pause and "Teo, the love goddess!" and "Antun, the life god!" and "Hachakyum, the mighty god!" and so on, through more Chiapa gods and goddesses than I can remember. At last he squatted back on his heels and muttered in apparent defeat, "The pulse is so feeble that I cannot be sure of the response to any name."

Ten suddenly croaked, without opening his eyes, "Binkizaka bit me!"

"Aha!" said Doctor Maash, brightening. "It would not have occurred to me to suggest the lowly binkizaka. And here indeed is a hole in his hand!"

"Excuse me, Lord Doctor," I ventured. "It was not any of the binkizaka. It was a rabbit that bit him."

The physician raised his head so he could scowl down his nose at me. "Young man, I was holding his wrist when he said 'binkizaka,' and I know a pulse when I feel it. Woman!" I blinked, but he was addressing his wife. He afterward explained to me that he told her, "I shall need to confer with an expert in the lesser beings. Go fetch Doctor Kame."

The crone scuttled out of the hut, elbowing through the craning crowd, and in a few moments we were joined by another elderly man. The Doctors Kame and Maash huddled and muttered, then took turns holding Ten's flaccid wrist and roaring "Binkizaka!" into his ear. Then they huddled and consulted some more, then nodded in agreement. Doctor Kame barked, another order to the old woman and she departed again in a hurry. Doctor Maash told me:

"It is profitless to sacrifice to the binkizaka, since they are half beasts and do not understand the rites of propitiation. This being an emergency case, my colleague and I have decided on the radical measure of burning the affliction out of the patient. We have sent for the Sun Slab, the most holy treasure of our people."

The woman came back with two men, carrying between them what looked at first glance like a simple square of rock. Then I saw that its upper surface was inlaid with jadestone in the form of a cross. Yes, very similar to your Christian cross. In the four spaces between the arms of the cross, the rock had been bored completely through, and in each of those holes was a chunk of chipilotl quartz. But—and this is important for the understanding of what followed, my lords—each of those quartz crystals had been ground and polished so it was of perfectly round circumference and smoothly convex on both its upper and lower sides. Each of those transparent panes in the Sun Slab was like a flattened ball, or an extremely symmetrical clam.

While the two men stood holding the Sun Slab over the prostrate Ten, the old woman took a broom and, with his handle, poked holes in the thatch of the roof, each hole admitting a beam of the afternoon sun, until finally she punched a hole that let a beam right down on the patient. The two doctors tugged at the cuguar pelt to adjust Ten's position relative to the sunbeam and the Sun Slab. Then occurred a thing most marvelous, and I crept closer to see better.

Under the doctors' direction, the two men holding the heavy stone slab tilted it so the sun shone through one of the shaped quartz crystals and made a round spot of light on Ten's ulcerated hand. Then, moving the stone back and forth in the sunbeam, they made that round spot of light concentrate down to one intense dot of light, aimed directly upon the sore. The two doctors held the limp hand steady, the two men held the dot of light steady, and—believe me or not, as you will—a wisp of smoke came from the ugly sore. In another moment, there was a sizzling noise and a small flame was there, almost invisible in the brightness of that intensified light. The doctors gently moved the hand about, so that the sun-made flame went all over the ulcer.