The Ball Court

The canoe was full of mud, and Mara 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, Mara 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 Mara'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 Mara'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.

Mara 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 Mara'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.

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

There were days when Mara 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.

Mara'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. Mara'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.

Mara 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 Mara nearly went over the side. Mud splattered everywhere. Into Mara's face. Into Mara's hair. A great gob of it hit Mara in the eye.

Mara 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.

Mara 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 Mara 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 Mara's family saw in a year.

"Hoi!"

A voice, from the bank. Mara 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 Mara. 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 Mara had seen in pictures painted on walls.

"That's ours," said the girl.

"It hit my canoe," said Mara.

"Well, throw it back."

Mara looked at the ball, sunk in the mud. Then at the girl. And then, for no reason at all except that Mara 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 Mara up and down. "You're from the back gardens. Nochtli's grandchild."

"So?"

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

Mara looked at the ball for a long time. Then stepped back, as far as the canoe allowed, and set her feet wide on the wet wood, the way Mara did for poling. And bent, and got a shoulder under the ball, and levered it up out of the mud, and rolled it up onto the edge of the canoe, balanced there.

Then Mara turned sideways, and swung her hips, hard, the way Mara had seen the boys do in the calpulli square, and hit it.

It was like being kicked by a deer. The ball was so heavy and so solid that the shock went right up Mara's side into her ribs and knocked the breath out of Mara. The canoe lurched. Mara nearly went in. But the ball flew. Not well. Not straight. It wobbled off over the canal in a low ugly curve, and hit the water just short of the bank with a great splash, and bounced up out of it, and rolled up onto the grass at the girl's feet, dripping.

Everybody stared.

"You hit it," said the small boy, astonished. "With your hip. First time."

"It went in the water," said the girl.

"It came out, though," said the big boy. "Most people can't even make it come out."

The girl put one foot on the dripping ball, and looked at Mara, rubbing her bruised side in the rocking canoe, with a quite different expression.

"What's going on?"

A new voice. Older. From farther back, among the willows.

A man came limping out onto the little patch of earth. He was old, older than Mara's father, with grey in his hair and a face like a walnut, brown and lined, and he walked with a stick, a long one of polished black wood, leaning on it heavily, because his left knee did not bend properly. It went stiff and straight when he walked, so that he swung that leg out sideways, like a gate. But he was broad in the shoulders still, and his arms were thick and strong, and round his own hips, faded and patched and very old, was a hip guard like the girl's. Deerskin and cotton padding. Worn shiny with use.

He looked at the ball at the girl's feet. Then out at Mara, in the canoe, covered in mud.

"Who's that?" he said.

"Nochtli's grandchild," said the girl. "From the back gardens. I kicked the ball into the canal and it went in the canoe."

"You bumped it into the canal," said the small boy.

"Same thing."

The old man was not listening. He was looking at Mara. Up and down, slowly, the way a farmer looks at a field. At Mara's shoulders, and the arms, black with mud to the elbow, and the legs, set wide on the wet wood of the canoe, holding it steady without thinking. At the pole. At the load of mud.

"How long have you been poling that canoe?" he said.

"Since I was six," said Mara.

"Every morning?"

"Every morning."

The old man nodded slowly. He leaned on his black stick and looked at Mara for a long time.

"Nochtli's grandchild," he said. "I know your grandmother. A long time ago." Something moved in his lined face, there and gone. "Come back this evening. When the work's done. Here." He tapped the hard-trodden earth with his stick. "Wash first."

"Why?" said Mara.

The old man looked at the girl, and the small boy, and the big boy, and then back at Mara.

"Because I have three players," he said. "And a team needs four." And he turned, and limped away among the willows, swinging his stiff leg like a gate, and did not look back.

The girl stared after him. Then at Mara. Her face had gone quite blank.

"Him?" she said. "Ollin?" She looked at Mara as if Mara had grown a second head. "He hasn't asked anybody in two years. He turned down my cousin. He turned down everybody."

"Who is he?" said Mara.

The small boy grinned, a huge gap-toothed grin.

"Don't you know?" he said. "That's Ollin. He's the best ball player Acatlan ever had. He played on the great court, once. In front of the whole city." He lowered his voice. "They say he nearly put the ball through the ring."

Mara looked at the place among the willows where the old man had gone. And then down at her own muddy hands, and the empty place in the mud in the bottom of the canoe, where the ball had been.