Red City on the Ocean

Chapter 3. The Captive

Tupac, the otomi of the military group, entered the chambers of the ticitl, Chimalli. At the entrance, Tupac raised his palm with outstretched fingers to the level of his chest, decorated with the Nahui Ollin necklace, and said, "Tonatiu kuautik!" Tupac's shoulder was tied with a strip of maguey cloth, brown with dried blood. On top of Tupac's head was a shock of black hair, tied with a red ribbon.

Chimalli, a man in his late forties, stepped up to Tupac and took his uninjured hand. The hands of the guest and the host intertwined in greeting. Chimalli led Tupac to a bench in the middle of the room, sat him down, and examined the wound. "An arrow?" Chimalli instantly assessed the cause of the injury.

"Yes."

"Anacaona!" Chimalli called, and a girl in a light skirt and short-sleeved dark shirt came out of another room. The young woman's outfit, like her other garments, was emblazoned with a bizarre design. A lock of hair brushed her dark, friendly face like a raven's wing. The girl's face was decorated with peculiar, elaborately made tattoos, the last of which indicated her seventeenth birthday.

"Tupac!" she exclaimed.

"An arrow was taken from the warrior's shoulder," Chimalli said. "We need to heal the wound."

Anacaona rushed to the shelves that completely covered one of the walls. There were a lot of ceramic vessels on the shelves along with large and small bags, and hanging were bunches of dried medicinal herbs. On other shelves were strange-looking tools made of copper, silver, and flint, and the sharpest ones, made of pieces of cooled lava, the obsidian glinting in the light. Broken bones and punctured skulls were next to them, and on the walls hung fabrics and sheets of amatl, covered with drawings that represented wounds in different places of the human body with inscriptions.

The walls, ceiling, and floor here were completely made of stiffened bamboo stalks of different thicknesses. The bamboo floor was covered with a substance that had a red-orange color. It was a solidified mixture of rubber and a special powder. The secret of the powder was revealed only to a select few ore miners. This mixture turned into a glue that became solid and allowed long structures to be firmly connected and did not let water through.

Along the other walls were two small low beds covered with woolen bedspreads.

The young woman brought the necessary vessels, herbs, and a piece of canvas to the table next to where Tupac was sitting. Chimalli untied the knot on the blood-soaked bandage and yanked it off his shoulder. Tupac winced but didn't make a sound, and Anacaona found herself echoing the grimace of pain on his face. Chimalli looked at his daughter questioningly.

Under the ceiling, coming out of one wall and disappearing into another, crossing the whole room, ran a long bamboo stalk with a cork stuck in the middle. Anacaona raised her hand to this cork, twisted it, and took it out. Clean water poured out of the hole. Collecting water into a small jug, Anacaona inserted the cork into place. Then she washed the wound, shifted Tupac's hand to the table, and opened one of the clay vessels. The girl sniffed the contents of the vessel with her eyes closed and seemed to nod affirmatively to herself.

Now the ticitl himself took up the task. He plunged a long and thin wooden spatula into the jar, lifted a clot of black ointment at its end, smeared the ointment on the wound, and began to rub it. Tupac's eyes narrowed in pain, but he courageously remained silent. The wound began to ooze with dark black dirty blood and then with regular dark red blood. "The bad blood has to come out," Chimalli explained.

When the bleeding stopped, Chimalli opened another jar and took out another ointment; it was dark green in color. He quickly rubbed the ointment into the wound and said to his daughter, "A bandage." Anacaona took a length of thick white cloth from a clay pot. She wrapped it around Tupac's shoulder and tied the ends of the bandage. Her work was done.