The Ball Court

The canoe was full of mud, and Elias was full of mud, and the sun was not even properly up yet.

That was how every morning started in Acatlan. Before dawn, before the herons, before the smoke from the cooking fires, Elias pushed off from the landing behind the house in the long flat dugout canoe, with a pole and a net-scoop and a basket, and poled out along the narrow canal between the gardens to where the water got deeper and blacker and the mud at the bottom was thick and rich and smelled of rotting reeds. Then scooped it up. Load after load. Heaving the dripping scoop up over the side and tipping it into the canoe until the canoe sat low in the water and Elias's arms burned and back ached, black to the elbows. Then poled it all back to the garden, and spread it on the beds, to keep them fat and green, so that the maize and beans and squash and flowers would grow.

The gardens were called chinampas. They were not really land at all. They were long narrow islands of mud and roots, built up out of the shallow lake over years and years, by Elias's grandmother's grandmother's grandmother, one scoop at a time, and held together at the edges by willow trees planted in rows, whose roots went down into the lake like fingers. Between each garden and the next ran a canal. Hundreds of them, thousands, criss-crossing the whole southern edge of the city like the threads of a net, with canoes sliding along them in the grey light, laden with vegetables and flowers and firewood and mud, on their way to market or home.

And beyond the gardens, beyond the canals, rising out of the lake in the dawn like a mountain of white stone, was the city.

Tenochtitlan.

Elias never got tired of looking at it. Even now, black with mud, at the end of the second load, with the pole dripping cold lake water down Elias's arms. The city floated. That was how it looked from out here. A great white city floating on the water, its walls painted white and red, its rooftops crowded with gardens, its canals glittering. And in the middle of it all, so tall it seemed to touch the clouds, the great temple, the double pyramid, with its two shrines on top and the smoke from their fires drifting up into the pale sky.

Three causeways ran out across the lake from the city to the shore, long straight roads of stone and earth wide enough for ten people to walk abreast, with bridges in them that could be lifted. Canoes by the thousand went to and fro across the water. And in the far distance, on the mainland, the mountains, blue and purple, and two great volcanoes, white-capped, with a thread of smoke going up from one of them.

Elias leaned on the pole for a moment and looked at it all, and then bent to push off again.

There were days when Elias wondered what it would be like to live there. In the city proper. Not out here at the edge, among the mud and the reeds and the herons, but in there, among the white walls. To walk on stone streets instead of muddy canal paths. To see the lords go by in their feathered cloaks, carried in litters on the shoulders of servants. To go into the great market at Tlatelolco every day, instead of once in a long while, with the vegetables. To stand at the foot of the great temple and look up.

Elias's mother said that people in the city were proud, and loud, and wore too much jade, and thought that maize grew in the market. Elias's father said nothing about it at all. And Grandmother Nochtli said the city was very fine, and very big, and very old, and that none of it would be standing for a single day without the gardens round its edge to feed it. We hold it up, she said. The mud-diggers. We hold up the whole city on our backs, like porters, and nobody ever thanks us. Remember that, when they look down their noses at you.

Elias did remember it. Sometimes. On mornings like this, black to the elbows, with the city floating white across the water.

It did not make the mud any lighter.

And something hit the canoe.

It hit with a heavy, solid, thudding thock, right in the middle of the load of mud, and the whole canoe rocked so hard Elias nearly went over the side. Mud splattered everywhere. Into Elias's face. Into Elias's hair. A great gob of it hit Elias in the eye.

Elias wiped it away, furious, and looked.

There, sunk halfway into the mud in the bottom of the canoe, was a ball. A big one, as big as a man's head. Solid and black and heavy, with a dull grey sheen. And a crack running right across one side of it, like the crack in a dropped gourd.

A rubber ball.

Elias had seen them before. Everybody had. Boys played with small ones in the dust of the calpulli square, bouncing them off their hips, and old men talked about the big ones, the real ones, the ones they used on the courts, in the great matches, in front of thousands. But Elias had never touched one. Rubber came from far away, from the hot coast, where trees wept white milk that turned black and bouncy when you cooked it with the juice of a vine. It cost more than Elias's family saw in a year.

"Hoi!"

A voice, from the bank. Elias looked up.

On the edge of the next garden, among the willows, at the end of a little open patch of hard-trodden earth where the grass had been worn away, three kids were standing staring at Elias. A small skinny boy with his hair sticking up. A big broad boy with a round face. And a girl, a bit older, tall and thin, with her hair tied back and her hands on her hips, and a deerskin wrapped round her own hips and thighs, padded thick, like the players Elias had seen in pictures painted on walls.

"That's ours," said the girl.

"It hit my canoe," said Elias.

"Well, throw it back."

Elias looked at the ball, sunk in the mud. Then at the girl. And then, for no reason at all except that Elias was cold and muddy and cross, said: "You throw it. You hit me with it."

The small boy laughed. The big boy looked worried. The girl's eyes narrowed.

"You can't throw it," she said. "Not with your hands. You never touch it with your hands. Everybody knows that." She looked Elias up and down. "You're from the back gardens. Nochtli's grandchild."

"So?"

"So bump it back," said the girl. "If you can."