Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “Motecuzóma has wondered much, whether these white men might be gods or the Toltéca followers of gods, so we decided to make a test. We offered to sacrifice to the leader Cortés, to slay for him a xochimíqui, perhaps some available lord of the Totonáca. He was highly insulted at the suggestion. He said, ‘You know very well that the benevolent Quetzalcóatl never required or allowed human sacrifices to him. Why should I?’ So now we do not know what to think. How could this outlander know such things about the Feathered Serpent, unless—?”

  I snorted. “The girl Ce-Malináli could have told him all the legends of Quetzalcóatl. After all, she was born somewhere along this coast from which the god made his departure.”

  “Please, Mixtzin, do not call her by that common name,” said one of the lords, seeming nervous. “She is most insistent that she be addressed as Malíntzin.”

  I said, amused, “She has risen far, then, since I first met her in a slave market.”

  “No,” said my fellow envoy. “Actually, she was a noble before she was a slave. She was the daughter of a lord and lady of the Coatlícamac. When her father died and her mother remarried, the new husband jealously and treacherously sold her into slavery.”

  “Indeed,” I said drily. “Even her imagination has improved since I first met her. But she did say that she would do anything to realize her ambitions. I suggest to all of you that you be most guarded in the words you speak within hearing of the Lady Malináli.”

  I think it was on the next day that Cortés arranged for the lords a demonstration of his marvelous weapons and his men’s military prowess, and of course I was present, among the crowd of our porters and the local Totonáca who also gathered to watch. Those commoners were awestricken by what they saw; they gasped at intervals and murmured “Ayya!” and called often upon their gods. The Mexíca envoys kept their faces impassive, as if they were unimpressed, and I was too busy memorizing the various events to make any exclamations myself. Nevertheless, the lords and I several times flinched at the sudden claps of noise, as startled as any commoners.

  Cortés had had his men build a little mock house of driftwood and some leftover ship’s timbers, so far up the beach that it was only just visible from where we stood. On the beach before us, he had positioned one of the heavy yellow-metal tubes on high wheels….

  No, I will call things by their proper names. The wheel-mounted tube was a brass cannon whose muzzle pointed toward the distant wooden house. Ten or twelve soldiers led horses into a row on the hard-packed damp sand between the cannon and the shoreline. The horses wore some of that equipment I had earlier been unable to comprehend: the leather chairs which were saddles for sitting on, leather reins for the animals’ guidance, skirts of quilted material very like our people’s fighting armor. Other men stood behind the horses, with the giant staghounds straining against the leather straps that held them in check.

  All the soldiers were in full fighting garb, and very warlike they looked, with shining steel helmets on their heads and shining steel corselets over leather doublets. They carried swords sheathed at their sides, but when they mounted to their saddles, they were handed long weapons resembling our spears, except that their steel blades, besides being pointed, had protrusions at either side to deflect the blows of any enemies they rode against.

  Cortés smiled with proprietorial pride as his warriors got into position. He was flanked by his two interpreters, and Ce-Malináli was also smiling, with the mildly bored superiority of having seen the performance before. Through her and Aguilar, Cortés said to our Mexíca lords, “Your own armies are fond of drums. I have heard their drums. Shall we commence this spectacle with a drum beat?”

  Before anyone could answer, he shouted, “For Santiago—now!“ The three soldiers tending the cannon did something that flashed a small flame at the rear of the tube, and there came a single drumbeat, as loud as any noise ever made by our drum which tears out the heart. The brass cannon jumped—and so did I—and from its mouth came a smoke like stormclouds, and a thunder to rival Tlaloc’s, and a lightning brighter than any of the forked sticks of the tlalóque. Then, after my blink of surprise, I saw a small object hurtling away through the air. It was of course an iron cannon ball, and it hit the faraway house and smashed it into its separate pieces of wood.

  The cannon’s sudden crash of thunder was prolonged, as Tlaloc’s often is, into a rumble of lesser thunder. That was the sound the horses’ iron-shod feet made, pounding on the sand flats, for the riders had put their mounts to a full gallop at the moment the cannon had bellowed. They went off along the beach, side by side, as fast as any unencumbered deer could run, and the great dogs, let loose at the same time, easily kept up with them. The horsemen converged on the ruins of the house, and we could see the glint of their flourished spears, as they pretended to cut down any survivors of the demolition. Then they all turned their mounts and came pounding back down the beach toward us again. The dogs did not immediately accompany them, and, although my ears were ringing, I could distantly hear the staghounds making ravenous roaring noises, and I thought I heard men shrieking. When the dogs did return, their fearsome jaws were smeared with blood. Either some of the Totonáca had chosen to hide near that mock house to watch the proceedings, or Cortés had deliberately and callously arranged for them to be there.

  Meanwhile, the approaching horsemen were no longer keeping in a line abreast. They were weaving their horses back and forth among each other, in intricate movements and crossings and patterns, to show us what perfect control they could maintain even at that headlong speed. Also, the big red-bearded man, Alvarado, did an even more amazing performance all his own. At full gallop, he swung off his saddle and, holding to it with just one hand, ran alongside his thundering animal, easily keeping pace with it, and then somehow, without slowing speed, vaulted from the ground back onto the leather seat. It would have been an exploit of admirable agility even for one of the Fast of Feet Rarámuri, but Alvarado did it while wearing a costume of steel and leather that must have weighed as much as he did.

  When the horsemen had finished displaying the speed and sure-footedness of their massive animals, a number of foot soldiers deployed on the beach. Some carried the metal harquebuses as long as the men were tall, and the metal rods upon which those things must be rested for taking aim. Some carried the short bows mounted crossways on heavy stocks which are held braced against the shoulder. A number of adobe bricks were brought by some Totonáca laborers and stood on end a good arrow’s flight distant from the soldiers. Then the white men knelt and alternately discharged the bows and the harquebuses. The bowmen’s accuracy was commendable, hitting perhaps two of every five bricks, but they were not very quick with their weapons. After propelling an arrow, they could not just pull the bowstring back again by hand, but had to draw it taut along the stock by means of a small turning tool.

  The harquebuses were more formidable weapons; just the crash of noise and the billows of smoke and the flashes of fire they made were enough to daunt any enemy facing them for the first time. But they threw more than fear; they threw small metal pellets, flying so fast that they were invisible. Where the short arrows of the crossbows merely stuck in the bricks they hit, the metal pellets of the harquebuses struck the bricks so hard that they blew apart into fragments and dust. Nevertheless, I took note that the pellets really flew no farther than one of our arrows could fly, and a man using the harquebus took so long to prepare it for its next discharge that any of our bowmen could have sent six or seven arrows at him in the interval.

  By the time the demonstration was over, I had still more bark paper drawings to show to Motecuzóma, and much to tell him besides. I lacked only the pictured face of Cortés he had requested. Many years before, in Texcóco, I had sworn never to draw any more portraits, for they seemed always to visit some disaster upon the person I portrayed, but I had no compunction about bringing trouble to any of the white men. So the next evening, when the Mexíca lords sat down for their final meeting w
ith Cortés and his under-chiefs and his priests, there were five of us lords. None of the Spaniards seemed to notice or to care that our number had been increased by a newcomer, and neither Aguilar nor Ce-Malináli recognized me in my lordly vestments any more than they had when I was posing as a porter.

  We all sat and dined together, and I will refrain from comment on the eating manners of the white men. The food had been provided by us, so it was all of the best quality. The Spaniards had contributed a beverage called wine, poured from large leather bags. Some of it was pale and sour, some dark and sweet, and I drank only sparingly, for it was quite as intoxicating as octli. While my four companion envoys carried the burden of what conversation there was, I sat silent, trying as unobtrusively as possible to capture Cortés’s likeness with my chalk and bark paper. Seeing him close for the first time, I could discern that the hair of his beard was rather more sparse than that of his fellows. It could not adequately conceal an ugly puckered scar under his lower lip, and a chin that receded almost like a Maya chin, and I put those details into my portrait. Then I became aware that the whole circle of men had fallen silent, and I looked up to find Cortés’s gray eyes fixed on me.

  He said, “So I am being recorded for posterity? Let me see it.” He spoke in Spanish, of course, but his extended hand would have conveyed the same command, so I gave him the paper.

  “Well, I would not call it flattering,” he said, “but it is recognizable.” He showed it to Alvarado and the other Spaniards, and they severally chuckled and nodded. “As for the artist,” said Cortés, still staring at me, “regard the face on him, comrades. Why, if he were plucked of all those feathers he wears, and powdered a little paler of complexion, he could pass for an hijodalgo, even a grandee. Were you to meet him at the Court of Castile—a man of that stature and that craggy face—you would doff your hats in a sweeping bow.” He gave the picture back to me, and his interpreters translated his next remark, “Why am I being thus portrayed?”

  One of my companion lords, thinking quickly, said, “Since our Revered Speaker Motecuzóma will unfortunately not have the opportunity of meeting you, my Lord Captain, he asked that we bring him your likeness as a memento of your short stay in these lands.”

  Cortés smiled with his lips, not with his flat eyes, and said, “But I will meet your emperor. I am determined on it. All of us so admired the treasures he sent as gifts that we are all most eager to see the other wonders that must reside in his capital city. I would not think of departing before I and my men feast our eyes on what we have been told is the richest city in these lands.”

  When that exchange had been translated back and forth, another of my companions put on a mournful face and said, “Ayya, that the white lord should travel such a long and hazardous way to find only disappointment. We had not wanted to confess it, but the Revered Speaker stripped and despoiled his city to provide those gifts. He had heard that the white visitors prized gold, so he sent all the gold he possessed. Also all his other trinkets of any value. The city is now poor and bleak. It is not worth the visitors’ even looking at it.”

  When Ce-Malináli translated that speech to Aguilar in the Xiu language, she translated it thus: “The Revered Speaker Motecuzóma sent those trifling gifts in hope that the Captain Cortés would be satisfied with them and would immediately go away. But in fact they represented only the merest skimming of the inestimable treasures in Tenochtítlan. Motecuzóma wishes to discourage the Captain from seeing the real wealth that abounds in his capital city.”

  While Aguilar was putting that into Spanish for Cortés, I spoke for the first time, and quietly, and to Ce-Malináli, and in her native tongue of Coatlícamac, so that only she and I would understand:

  “Your job is to speak what is spoken, not to invent lies.”

  “But he lied!” she blurted, pointing to my companion. Then she blushed, realizing that she had been caught in her duplicity and that she had confessed to having been caught.

  I said, “I know his motive for lying. I should be interested to know yours.”

  She stared at me, and her eyes widened in recognition. “You!” she breathed, mingling fright, loathing, and dismay in that one word.

  Our brief colloquy had gone unnoticed by the others, and Aguilar still had not recognized me. When Cortés spoke again, and Ce-Malináli translated it, her voice was only a little unsteady:

  “We would be gratified if your emperor were to extend to us his formal invitation to visit his magnificent city. But tell him, my lords ambassadors, that we do not insist upon any official welcome. We will come there, with or without an invitation. Assure him that we will come.”

  My four companions all began at once to expostulate, but Cortés cut them short, saying:

  “Now, we have carefully explained to you the nature of our mission, how our emperor the King Carlos sent us with most particular instructions to pay our respects to your ruler, and to ask his permission to introduce the Holy Christian Faith into these lands. And we have carefully explained the nature of that Faith, of the Lord God, the Christ Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, who wish only that all peoples live in brotherly love. We have also taken the trouble to demonstrate to you the insuperable weapons we possess. I cannot think of anything we have neglected to make clear to you. But before you depart, is there anything else you would know of us? Any questions you care to ask?”

  My four companions looked bothered and indignant, but they said nothing. So I cleared my throat, and spoke directly to Cortés, and in his own language: “I have one question, my lord.”

  The white men all looked surprised at being addressed in Spanish, and Ce-Malináli stiffened, no doubt fearing that I was about to denounce her—or perhaps apply to take her place as interpreter.

  “I am curious to know …” I began, pretending humility and uncertainty. “Could you tell me …?”

  “Yes?” prompted Cortés.

  Still seeming shy and hesitant, I said, “I have heard your men—so many of your men—speak of our women as, well, incomplete in a certain respect….”

  There was a clanking of metal and a squeaking of leather as all the white men bent closer their attention to me. “Yes? Yes?”

  I asked as if I really wanted to know, and asked politely, solemnly, with no hint of scurrility or mockery, “Do your women … does your Virgin Mary have hair covering her private parts?”

  There was another clank and squeak of their armor; I think their opening mouths and eyelids almost squeaked too, as they all sat back and gaped at me—rather as Your Excellency is doing at this moment. There were shocked mutters of “Locura!” and “Blasfemia!” and “Ultraje!”

  Only one of them, the big flame-bearded Alvarado, laughed uproariously. He turned to the priests dining with us and pounded his big hands on the shoulders of two of them and, between his gusts of laughter, asked, “Padre Bartolomé, Padre Merced, have you ever been asked that before? Did the seminary teach you a suitable answer to that question? Have you ever even thought of it before? Eh?”

  The priests made no comment, except to glare at me and grind their teeth and make the cross sign to ward off evil. Cortés had not taken his eyes off me. Still skewering me with his falcon gaze, he said, “No, you are no hijodalgo or grandee, or any other sort of courtly gentleman. But you will bear remembering. Yes, I will remember you.”

  Next morning, while our party was packing to depart, Ce-Malináli came and imperiously beckoned to me, indicating that she wished a private discussion. I took my time about joining her. When I did, I said:

  “This should be interesting. Speak, One Grass.”

  “Kindly do not address me by my discarded slave name. You will call me Malíntzin or Doña Marina.” She explained, “I was christened with the name of the Santa Margarita Marina. That means nothing to you, of course, but I suggest that you show me the proper respect, for the Captain Cortés regards me highly, and he is quick to punish insolence.”

  I said coldly, “Then I suggest that you sleep very cl
ose against your Captain Cortés, for at a word from me any of these Totonáca hereabout will gladly slip a blade between your ribs the first time you are off guard. You are talking insolently now to the Lord Mixtli, who earned the -tzin to his name. Slave girl, you may fool the white men with your pretensions to nobility. You may endear yourself to them by coloring your hair like a maátitl. But your own people see exactly that: a red-haired slut who has sold more than just her own body to the invader Cortés.”

  That shook her, and she said defensively, “I do not sleep with the Captain Cortés. I serve only as his interpreter. When the Tabascoöb presented us, we twenty women were shared out among the white men. I was given to that man.” She indicated one of the under-chiefs who had dined with us. “His name is Alonso.”

  “Are you enjoying him?” I asked drily. “As I recall from our earlier meeting, you expressed a hatred of men and the use they make of women.”

  “I can pretend anything,” she said. “Anything that serves my purpose.”

  “And what is your purpose? I am sure the mistranslation I overheard was not your first. Why do you goad Cortés to press on to Tenochtítlan?”

  “Because I wish to go there. I told you so, years ago, when we first met. Once I get to Tenochtítlan, I care not what happens to the white men. Perhaps I will be rewarded for having brought them to where Motecuzóma can squash them like bugs. Anyway, I will be where I have always wanted to be, and I will be noticed and known, and it will not take me long to become a noblewoman in fact as well as in name.”

  “On the other hand,” I suggested, “if by some quirk of chance the white men are not squashed, you would be even better rewarded.”

  She made a gesture of indifference. “I only wish to ask … to beg if you like, Lord Mixtli … that you do nothing to imperil my opportunity. Only give me time to prove my usefulness to Cortés, so that he cannot dispense with my help and advice. Only let me get to Tenochtítlan. It can matter little to you or to your Revered Speaker or to anyone else, but it matters much to me.”