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 upinto 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 havea 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 perfumehim 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 thePrincess 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.