Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  But whatever other thoughts and emotions rushed upon me in that moment of coming to awareness and at least partial sobriety, simple curiosity was the most immediate. I could not account for the lightening of the room; surely we had not been at it all night. I turned my head toward the light’s source and, even without my crystal, I could see that Béu stood in the room’s doorway, holding a lighted lamp. I had no idea how long she might have been watching. She swayed as she stood there, and not angrily but sadly she said:

  “You can—do this—while your friends are being slaughtered?”

  Malíntzin only languidly turned to look at Waiting Moon. I was not much surprised that such a woman did not mind being caught in such circumstances, but I should have expected her to make some exclamation of dismay at the news that her friends were being slaughtered. Instead, she smiled and said:

  “Ayyo, good. We have an even better witness than the guards, Mixtzin. Our pact will be more binding than I could have hoped.”

  She stood up, disdaining to cover her moistly glistening body. I grabbed for my discarded mantle, but even in my confusion of shame and embarrassment and lingering drunkenness, I had enough presence of mind to say, “Malíntzin, I think you wasted your time and your favors. No pact will avail you now.”

  “And I think it is you who are mistaken, Mixtzin,” she said, her smile unwavering. “Ask the old woman there. She spoke of your friends dying.”

  I sat suddenly upright and gasped, “Béu?”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “I was turned back by our men on the causeway. They were apologetic, but they said they could take no risk of anyone communicating with the outlanders across the lake. So I came back, and I came by way of the plaza to look at the dancing. Then … it was horrible….”

  She closed her eyes and leaned against the door frame and said, dazedly, “There was lightning and thunder from the palace roof, and the dancers—like some awful magic—they became shreds and pieces. Then the white men and their warriors poured out of the palace, with more fire and noise and flashing of metal. One of their blades can cut a woman in half at the waist, Záa, did you know that? And the head of a small child rolls just like a tlachtli ball, Záa, did you know that? It rolled right to my feet. When something stung my hand, I fled….”

  I saw then that there was blood all over her blouse. It was running along her arm from the hand that held up the lamp. I got quickly to my feet in the same moment that she fainted and fell. I caught the lamp before it could fire the floor matting. Then I lifted her in my arms, to carry her upstairs to bed. Malíntzin, leisurely picking up her clothes, said:

  “Will you not even pause to thank me? You have me and the guards to bear witness that you were here at home and not involved in any uprising.”

  I stared coldly at her. “You knew. All the time.”

  “Of course Pedro ordered me to stay well out of danger, so I decided to come here. You wanted to prevent my seeing your people’s preparations at the plaza.” She laughed. “I wanted to make sure you saw none of ours: the moving of all the four cannons to the plaza side of the roof, for instance. But you must agree, Miztzin, it was not a boring evening. And we do have a pact, have we not?” She laughed again, and with real amusement. “You can never again raise your hand against me. Not now.”

  I did not at all understand what she meant by that, until Waiting Moon was conscious again and could tell me. That was after the physician had come and tended to her hand, torn by what must have been one of the fragments discharged by the Spaniards’ cannons. When he was gone, I remained sitting beside the bed. Béu lay, not looking at me, her face more wan and worn than before, a tear trickling down one cheek, and for a long time we said nothing. Finally I managed to say huskily that I was sorry. Still without looking at me, she said:

  “You have never been a husband to me, Záa, and never let me be a wife to you. So your faithfulness to me, or your default of it, is not even worth discussing. But your being true to some—some standard of your own—that is another matter. It would have been vile enough if you had merely coupled with that woman used by the white men. But you did not. Not really. I was there, and I know.”

  Waiting Moon turned her head then, and turned on me a look that bridged the gulf of indifference which had for so long divided us. For the first time since the years of our youth, I felt an emanation of emotion from her that I knew was not a pretense or an affectation. Since it was a true emotion, I only wish it could have been a more cordial one. For she looked at me as she might have regarded one of the human monsters in the menagerie, and she said:

  “What you did—I think there is not even a name for it. While you were … while you were in her … you were running your hands over all her naked body, and you were murmuring endearments. ‘Zyanya, my darling,’ you said, and ‘Nochípa, my beloved,’ you said, and ‘Zyanya, my dearest,’ you said, and ‘Again, Nochípa!’ you said.” She swallowed, as if to prevent her suddenly being sick. “Because the two names mean the same thing, I do not know whether you lay with my sister or with your daughter, or with them both, or with them alternately. But this I know: both the women named Always—your wife and your daughter—they died years ago. Záa, you were coupling with the dead!”

  It pains me, reverend friars, to see you turn your heads away, exactly as Béu Ribé turned hers away from me, after she had spoken those words that night.

  Ah, well. It may be that, in trying to relate an honest account of my life and the world I lived in, I sometimes reveal more of myself than my closest loved ones ever knew of me, perhaps more than I might have wanted to know. But I will not retract or rephrase anything I have told, nor will I ask you to strike anything from your pages. Let it stand. Someday my chronicle may serve as my confession to the kindly goddess Filth Eater, since the Christian fathers prefer a shorter confession than mine could be, and they impose a longer penitence than I have life left to make it in, and they are not so tolerant of human frailty as was the patient and forgiving Tlazoltéotl.

  But I meant to tell of that night’s dalliance with Malíntzin only to explain why she is still alive today, although after that I hated her more than ever. My hatred for her was fired hotter by the loathing of me I had seen in Béu’s eyes, and the loathing I consequently felt for myself. However, I never made another attempt on Malíntzin’s life, though I had other opportunities, and in no way did I seek again to hinder her ambitions. Meanwhile, as it turned out, she had no cause to do me harm either. For, in subsequent years, as she rose high in the new nobility of this New Spain, I sank beneath her notice.

  I have said that Cortés may even have loved the woman, for he kept her by him for some years longer. He did not try to hide her even when his long-abandoned wife, the Doña Catalina, unexpectedly arrived here from Cuba. When the Doña Catalina died within a very few months, some attributed it to a broken heart, some to less romantic causes, but Cortés himself convoked a formal inquiry that absolved him of any blame in his wife’s death. Not long after that, Malíntzin gave birth to Cortés’s son Martin; the boy is now about eight years old and, I understand, will soon go to Spain for his schooling.

  Cortés did not put Malíntzin away from him until after his visit to the court of King Carlos, whence he returned as the Marqués del Valle, and with his newly acquired Marquesa Juana on his arm. Then he made sure that the discarded Malíntzin was well provided for. In the name of the Crown, he gave her a sizable land grant, and he saw her married in a Christian ceremony to one Juan Jaramillo, a ship’s captain. Unfortunately, the obliging captain was soon afterward lost at sea. So today Malíntzin is known to you, reverend scribes—and to His Excellency the Bishop, who treats her most deferentially—as the Doña Señora Marina, Viuda de Jaramillo, mistress of the imposing island estate of Tacamichápa, near the town of Espíritu Santo. That town was formerly called Coátzacoálcos, and the island granted her by the Crown stands in the river from which the onetime slave girl One Grass once gave me a dipperful of water to drink.

&
nbsp; The Doña Marina lives because I let her live, and I let her live because, for a brief while one night, she was … well, she was someone I loved….

  Either the Spaniards had foolishly been too eager to let loose their devastation in The Heart of the One World, or they had deliberately chosen to make their attack as wanton, punitive, and unforgettable as possible. For it had not yet been quite full night when they blasted with their cannons and then charged the crowd with swords and spears and harquebuses. They had killed or horribly wounded more than a thousand of the dancing women, girls, and children. But at that time of early dark, only a comparative few of our Mexíca warriors had infiltrated into the performance, so fewer than twenty of them had fallen, and not any of the commanding knights or the lords who had conceived the uprising. Then the Spaniards did not even go looking for the chief conspirators, to punish them; the white men, after their explosive emergence from the palace, merely withdrew into it again, not daring to be abroad in the wrathful city.

  To apologize for my failure in not having eliminated Malíntzin I did not go to the war chief Cuitláhuac, who I supposed must be raging with fury and frustration. Instead, I sought out the Lord Cuautémoc, hoping he would be more sympathetic to my dereliction. I had known him ever since he was a boy, visiting my house with his mother, the First Lady, in the days when his father Ahuítzotl and my wife Zyanya still lived. At that time, Cuautémoctzin had been the Crown Prince, heir to the Mexíca throne, and it was only mischance that had prevented his becoming Uey-Tlatoáni before Motecuzóma was insinuated into that office. Since Cuautémoc was familiar with disappointment, I thought he might be more lenient about my not having prevented Malíntzin’s warning the white men.

  “No one holds you to blame, Mixtzin,” he said, when I told how she had eluded the poison. “You would have done The One World a service in disposing of that traitress, but it does not matter that you did not.”

  Puzzled, I said, “It does not matter? Why not?”

  “Because she did not betray us,” said Cuautémoc. “She did not have to.” He grimaced as if in pain. “It was my exalted cousin. Our Revered Speaker Motecuzóma.”

  “What?” I exclaimed.

  “Cuitláhuac went to the officer Tonatíu Alvarado, you remember, and asked and was given permission to hold the Iztocíuatl ceremony. As soon as Cuitláhuac left the palace, Motecuzóma told Alvarado to beware of trickery.”

  “Why?”

  Cuautémoc shrugged. “Injured pride? Vindictive spite? Motecuzóma could hardly have been pleased that the uprising was the idea of his underlings, and arranged without his knowledge, to be done without his approval or participation. Whatever his real reason, his excuse is that he will countenance no breaking of his truce with Cortés.”

  I snarled a filthy word, not generally applied to Revered Speakers. “What is our breaking of the truce, compared to his instigating the butchery of a thousand women and children of his own people?”

  “Let us charitably assume that he expected Alvarado only to forbid the celebration, that he did not anticipate such a violent dispersal of the celebrants.”

  “Violent dispersal,” I growled. “That is a new way to say indiscriminate slaughter. My wife, a mere onlooker, was wounded. One of her two female servants was killed, and the other has fled terrified into hiding somewhere.”

  “If nothing else,” Cuautémoc said with a sigh, “the incident has united all our people in outrage. Before, they only muttered and grumbled, some of them mistrusting Motecuzóma, others supporting him. Now all are ready to tear him limb from limb, along with everyone else in that palace.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then let us do so. We still have most of our warriors. Raise the city folk as well—even old men like me—and storm the palace.”

  “That would be suicidal. The outlanders have now barricaded themselves inside it, behind their cannons, behind the harquebuses and crossbows aimed from every window. We could not get near the building without being obliterated. We must engage them hand to hand, as originally planned, and we must wait to have that opportunity again.”

  “Wait!” I said, with another profanity.

  “But while we wait, Cuitláhuac is packing the island with still more warriors. You may have noticed an increase in the traffic of canoes and freight barges plying between here and the mainland, apparently carrying flowers and vegetables and such. Concealed under that top cargo are men and arms—Cacáma’s Acólhua troops from Texcóco, Tecpanéca troops from Tlácopan. Meanwhile, as we get stronger, our opponents may get weaker. During the massacre, all their servants and attendants deserted the palace. Now, of course, not a single Mexícatl vendor or porter will deliver to them food or anything else. We will let the white men and their friends—Motecuzóma, Malíntzin, all of them—sit in their fortification and suffer for a while.”

  I asked, “Cuitláhuac hopes to starve them into surrender?”

  “No. They will be uncomfortable, but the kitchens and larders are adequately supplied to sustain them until Cortés gets back here. When he does, he must not find us overtly belligerent, holding the palace under siege, for he would need only to mount a similar siege around the whole island, and starve us as we starve them.”

  “Why let him get here at all?” I demanded. “We know he is marching hither. Let us go out and attack him in the open.”

  “Have you forgotten how easily he won the battle of Texcála? And he now has many more men and horses and weapons. No, we will not confront him in the field. Cuitláhuac plans to let Cortés come here unopposed, and find all his people in the palace unharmed, the truce apparently restored. He will not know of our imported and hidden and waiting warriors. But when we have him and all the white men within our confines, then we will attack—even suicidally, if necessary—and we will wipe this island and this whole lake district clean of them.”

  Perhaps the gods decided that it was time Tenochtítlan had a change for the better in its communal tonáli, because that latest plan did work—with only a few unforeseeable complications.

  When we got word that Cortés and his multitudinous force were approaching, everyone in the city, by command of the regent Cuitláhuac, determinedly assumed an outward semblance of untroubled normality, even the widowers and orphans and other kinfolk of the slain innocents. All three causeways were again bridged intact, and travelers and porters trudged and trotted back and forth across them. The canoes and barges that plied the canals of the city and the lake around the island were genuinely carrying innocuous cargoes. The thousands of Acólhua and Tecpanéca fighting men whom they had earlier ferried unnoticed, right from under the noses of Cortés’s mainland allies, had been kept out of sight ever since. Eight of them, in fact, were living in my house, bored and impatient for action. Tenochtítlan’s streets were as thronged as usual, and the Tlaltelólco market was as busy, colorful, and clamorous. The only nearly empty part of the city was The Heart of the One World, its marble pavement still bloodstained, its vast expanse traversed only by the priests of the temples there, who still performed their everyday functions of praying, chanting, burning incense, blowing the time-telling conch trumpets at dawn and midday and so on.

  Cortés came warily, apprehensive of animosity, for he had of course heard about the night of massacre, and he would not expose even his formidable army to any risk of ambush. After skirting Texcóco at a prudent distance, he came around the southern lakeshore as before, but he did not take the southern causeway into Tenochtítlan; his men would have been vulnerable to an attack by canoe-borne warriors if they were strung out along the open span of that longest causeway. He continued on around the lake, and up its western shore, dropping off Prince Black Flower and his warriors, posting the big cannons at intervals, all of them pointed across the water at the city, with men to tend them. He marched all the way to Tlácopan, because the causeway from there is the shortest of the three approaches. First he and his hundred or so other horsemen galloped across it as if expecting it to be snatched from under them
. Then his foot soldiers did the same, dashing across in companies of about a hundred men at a time.

  Once he was on the island, Cortés must have breathed more easily. There had been no ambush or other obstacle to his return. While the people on the city streets did not greet him with tumultuous welcome, neither did they revile him; they merely nodded as if he had never been away. And he must have felt comfortably powerful at being accompanied by one and a half thousand of his own countrymen, not to mention that backing of his thousands of allied warriors camped in an arc around the mainland. He may even have deluded himself that we Mexíca were at last resigned to recognizing his supremacy. So, from the causeway, he and his troops marched through the city like already acknowledged conquerors.

  Cortés showed no surprise at finding the central plaza so empty; perhaps he thought it had been cleared for his convenience. Anyway, the bulk of his force stopped there and, with much noise and bustle and wafting about of their bad odors, began to tether their horses, spread out their bedrolls, lay campfires, and otherwise settle down as if for an indeterminate stay. All the resident Texcaltéca, except for their chief knights, vacated the Axayácatl palace and also made camp in the plaza. Motecuzóma and a group of his loyal courtiers likewise made their first emergence from the palace since the night of Iztocíuatl—coming out to greet Cortés—but he disdainfully gave them no recognition at all. He and his newly recruited comrade in arms, Narváez, brushed past them and into the palace.

  I imagine the first thing they did was to shout for food and drink, and I would like to have seen Cortés’s face when he was served not by servants, but by Alvarado’s soldiers, and served only moldy old beans, atóli mush, whatever other provisions remained. I would also like to have overheard Cortés’s first conversation with Alvarado, when that sunlike officer told how he had so heroically put down the “uprising” of unarmed women and children, but had neglected to eliminate more than a handful of the Mexíca warriors who could still be a menace.