1 Xochitl

Trecena 4 opens on 1 Xochitl, the flower, under the patronage of Huehuecoyotl, the old, old coyote, a trickster god of music, dance and mischief whose feasts and song contests Sahagun's informants describe as occasions of real license, a deity who shares Tezcatlipoca's taste for testing human vanity through pranks and reversals of fortune.

Sahagun reads the flower week as double edged: its children were born to be makers, singers, embroiderers, painters and craftsmen of every kind, gifted with the artistry the flower sign itself signified across Mesoamerican thought, and their talent prospered while they worked but failed the moment they gave themselves over to pleasure rather than discipline, a warning folded directly into an otherwise generous augury. This double reading mirrors Huehuecoyotl's own character as patron: a trickster god presiding over artists risked handing his charges his own weakness for indulgence alongside his gift for invention, and the readers' craft made that risk explicit rather than leaving it implied. The trecena's position as the fourth in the count, following the difficult jaguar week and the milder deer week, gave it a distinctive reputation among the tonalpouhque as the artists' week, sought out deliberately by families hoping for a child gifted in the crafts the flower sign favoured.

Trecena 4 runs from 1 Xochitl through 13 Malinalli, grass, its thirteen days carrying the sequence through flower, crocodile, wind, house, lizard, serpent, death, deer, rabbit and water before closing on the twisted grass sign that itself opens Trecena 8 later in the round. As the fourth of twenty trecenas it sits within the count's opening quarter, and the tonalamatl tables the calendar priests consulted set its patron Huehuecoyotl beside the trecena patrons either side of it, Quetzalcoatl governing the jaguar week before it and Chalchiuhtlicue governing the reed week after, a run of three trecenas whose patrons range from the severe to the generous within the space of thirty nine days.

The numbered days within Trecena 4 each carried the patron bird system the Codex Borbonicus assigns to the thirteen numbers, a register layered atop both the trecena's own patron and the day sign's character, so that even within one artist favouring week a reader distinguished the earlier numbered days from the later ones. Because thirteen and twenty share no common factor beyond one, Xochitl itself, the day sign that opens this trecena, recurs at a different number in twelve of the other nineteen trecenas across the full 260 day tonalpohualli, never repeating its position as trecena opener until the whole count restarts.