Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  Unfortunately for any really greedy treasure seekers, the greater part of the plunder was thrown into the lake, on Cortés’s orders, at the causeway’s first acáli passage, the nearest to the city here. The Revered Speaker Cuitláhuac could have sent divers down to recover it afterward, and perhaps he did so, but I have reasons for doubting that. Anyway, Cuitláhuac died before Cortés could ask him, either politely or persuasively. And if any Mexíca divers did bring up from the lake the treasury of their nation, either they too have died or they are men of dedicated and exceptional reticence.

  I believe the bulk of the treasure still lies there where Cortés had it jettisoned on that Sad Night. But when Tenochtítlan was later razed to the very ground and, after that, when the rubble was cleared for the city’s rebuilding in the Spanish style, the unusable remains of Tenochtítlan were simply scraped to the sides of the island—partly for your builders’ convenience, partly to increase the island’s surface area. So the Tlácopan causeway was shortened by the encroachment of the enlarging island, and that nearest canoe passage is now underground. If I am correct in my estimation of where the treasure rests, it is somewhere deep beneath the foundations of the elegantly señorial buildings lining your avenue called the Calzada Tácuba.

  Of all the things I have told of the Sad Night, I have not mentioned the one event that, all by itself, determined the future of The One World. It was the death of just one man. He was no one of any importance. If he had a name, I never heard it. He may have done nothing either praiseworthy or blameworthy in all his life, except to have his roads and his days end here, and I do not know whether he died bravely or cowardly. But during the next day’s cleaning of The Heart of the One World, his body was found, cloven by a maquáhuitl, and the slaves made an outcry when they found it, because he was neither a white man nor one of our race, and those slaves had never seen such a being before. I had. He was one of those unbelievably black men who had come from Cuba with Narváez, and he was the one whose blemished face had made me shrink away when I saw it.

  I smile now—ruefully and contemptuously, but I smile—when I see the swaggering and strutting of Hernán Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado and Beltrán de Guzmán and all the other Spanish veterans who now exalt themselves as “Los Conquistadores.” Oh, they did some brave and daring deeds, I cannot deny it. Cortés’s burning of his own ships on his first arrival in these lands has hardly ever been outdone, as an example of jaunty audacity, even by any caprice of the gods. And there were other factors that contributed to the downfall of The One World—not least the deplorable fact of The One World’s turning against itself: nation against nation, neighbor against neighbor, finally even brother against brother. But if any one, single, solitary human being deserves to be honored and remembered with the title of El Conquistador, it is that nameless blackamoor who brought the disease of the small pocks to Tenochtítlan.

  He could have given the disease to Narváez’s soldiers during their voyage here from Cuba. He did not. He could have given the disease to them, and to Cortés’s troops besides, during their march hither from the coast. He did not. He could himself have died of the disease before reaching here. He did not. He lived to visit Tenochtítlan, and to bring the disease to us. Perhaps it was one of those caprices of the gods, to let him do so, and there was nothing we could have done to avert it. But I wish the black man had not then been killed. I wish he had been among those of his fellows who escaped, so he could have shared the affliction with them, soon or later. But no. Tenochtítlan was ravaged by the small pocks, and the disease spread throughout the lake region, into every community of The Triple Alliance, but it never reached Texcála or troubled our enemies there.

  In fact, the first of our city folk were beginning to fall ill even before we got the word that Cortés and his company had found refuge in Texcála. You reverend scribes doubtless know the symptoms and progress of the disease. Anyway, I long ago described to you how I had seen, many years earlier, a young Xiu girl die of the small pocks in the faraway town of Tihó. So I need only say that our people died in the same manner: strangling on the swollen tissues inside their noses and throats—or in some manner equally dreadful: thrashing and screaming in violent delirium until their brains could no longer stand the torment, or vomiting blood until their bodies were empty of blood, until they died more husk than human. Of course, I early recognized the disease and told our physicians:

  “It is a common affliction among the white men, and they hold it of little account, for they seldom die of it. They call it the small pocks.”

  “If this is their small pocks,” said one doctor, without humor, “I hope they never favor us with any larger. What is it the white men do to keep from dying of it?”

  “There is no remedy. Or so they told me. Except to pray.”

  So thereafter our temples were crowded with priests and worshipers making offerings and sacrifices to Patécatl, the god of healing, and to every other god as well. The temple that Motecuzóma had lent to the Spaniards was also crowded, with those of our people who had submitted to baptism and who suddenly, devoutly hoped they had truly been made Christians—meaning they hoped that the Christian god of the small pocks would look on them as simulated white men, and so spare them. They lighted candles and crossed themselves and muttered what they could remember of the rituals in which they had received only slight instruction and to which they had paid even slighter attention.

  But nothing stopped the spread of the disease and the dying of it. Our prayers were as futile and our physicians as helpless as those of the Maya had been. Before long, we were threatened with starvation as well, because our affliction could be kept no secret, and the mainland folk dreaded to come near us, so there was a cessation of the traffic of supply-carrying acáltin so necessary to our island’s subsistence. But it was not much longer before the disease made its appearance in the mainland communities too, and, once it became evident that all of us of The Triple Alliance were in the same predicament, the boatmen resumed their freighting—or I should say, those boatmen did who were not yet stricken. For the disease seemed selective of its victims in only one particularly cruel respect. I never took sick with it, nor did Béu, nor did any of our contemporaries. The small pocks seemed to ignore those of our age, and those already ill of something else, and those who had always been of feeble constitution. Instead, it seized upon the young and strong and vigorous, not wasting its maleficence on any who for other reasons had not long lives to live.

  Our having been stricken by the small pocks is one reason why I doubt that Cuitláhuac ever did anything about recovering the treasure sunk in the lake. The disease came upon us so soon after the departure of the white men—only days after we had cleaned up the litter they left, before we had begun to recover from the strain of the long occupation, before we had in any measure resumed our civic life where it had been interrupted—that I know the Revered Speaker gave no thought at that time to salvaging the gold and jewels. And later, as the disease became a devastation, he had other reasons for neglecting that task. You see, we were for a long while cut off from all news of the world beyond the lake region. Merchants and messengers of other nations refused to enter our tainted area, and Cuitláhuac forbade our own Pochtéca and travelers to go elsewhere and possibly carry the contamination. I think it was fully four months after the Sad Night when one of our quimíchime mice posted in Texcála summoned up the courage to come from there and tell us what had been happening during that time.

  “Know then, Revered Speaker,” he said to Cuitláhuac and the others, including myself, who were eager to hear him. “Cortés and his company spent some while merely resting and eating ravenously and convalescing from their injuries and generally regaining their health. But they did not do so in preparation for continuing on to the coast, to go aboard their ships and leave these lands. They have been recuperating for one purpose only: to gather strength to make another assault upon Tenochtítlan. Now that they are up and active again they and their Texcal
téca hosts are journeying throughout all the country eastward of here, recruiting ever more warriors from tribes not over-friendly to the Mexíca.”

  The Snake Woman interrupted the mouse to say urgently to the Revered Speaker, “We hoped we had permanently discouraged them. Since we did not, we now must do what should have been done long before now. We must assemble all our forces and march against them. Kill every last white man, every one of their allies and supporters, every one of our tributary dissidents who has aided Cortés. And we must do it now, before he is strong enough to do exactly that to us!”

  Cuitláhuac said wanly, “What forces do you suggest we assemble, Tlácotzin? There is hardly a warrior in any troop anywhere in The Triple Alliance who has force enough in both arms to lift his own blade.”

  “Excuse me, Lord Speaker, but there is more to tell,” said the quimíchi. “Cortés also sent many of his men to the coast, where they and their Totonáca dismantled several of the moored ships. With toil and labor inconceivable, they have brought all those many and heavy pieces of wood and metal all the arduous way from the sea across the mountains to Texcála. There, at this moment, Cortés’s boatmen are putting those pieces together to make smaller ships. As they did, you will recall, when they built the small ship here for the amusement of the late Motecuzóma. But now they are making many of them.”

  “On dry land?” Cuitláhuac exclaimed incredulously. “There is no water in the whole Texcála nation deep enough to float anything bigger than a fishing acáli. It sounds like insanity.”

  The quimíchi shrugged delicately. “Cortés may have been demented by his recent humiliation here. But I respectfully submit, Revered Speaker, that I am telling truthfully what I have seen, and that I am sane. Or I was, until I decided those doings seemed ominous enough to warrant risking my life to bring you the news of them.”

  Cuitláhuac smiled. “Sane or not, it was the act of a brave and loyal Mexícatl, and I am grateful. You will be well rewarded—and then given an even greater reward: my permission to depart this pestilent city again as swiftly as you can.”

  So it was that we knew Cortés’s actions and at least some of his intentions. I have heard many persons—who were not here at the time—speak critically of our apparent apathy or stupidity or deluded sense of security, because we stayed in isolation and did nothing to prevent Cortés’s rallying of his forces. But the reason that we did nothing was that we could do nothing. From Tzumpánco in the north to Xochimílco in the south, from Tlácopan in the west to Texcóco in the east, every ablebodied man and woman who was not helping to nurse the afflicted was himself ill or dying or dead. In our weakness, we could only wait, and hope that we should have recovered to some degree before Cortés came again. About that, we had no delusions; we knew he would come again. And it was during that drear summer of waiting that Cuitláhuac made a remark, in the presence of myself and his cousin Cuautémoc:

  “I had rather the nation’s treasury lie forever at the bottom of Lake Texcóco—or sink all the way to the black depths of Míctlan—than that the white men should ever have it in their hands again.”

  I doubt that he later changed his mind, for he scarcely had time. Before the rainy season was over, he had fallen ill of the small pocks, and vomited up all his blood, and died. Poor Cuitláhuac, he became our Revered Speaker without the proper ceremonies of installation and, when his brief reign ended, he was not honored with the funeral befitting his station.

  By that time, not the noblest of noblemen could be accorded a service with drums and mourners and panoply—or even the luxury of earth burial. There were simply too many dead, too many dying every day. There were no longer any available places left in which to bury them, or men to dig the graves for them, or time enough to dig all the graves that would have been necessary. Instead, each community designated some nearby wasteland spot where its dead could be taken and unceremoniously piled together and burned to ashes—and even that mode of mass disposal was no easy matter in the damp days of the rainy season. Tenochtítlan’s chosen burning place was an uninhabited spot on the mainland behind the rise of Chapultépec, and the busiest traffic between our island and the mainland consisted of the freight barges. Rowed by old men indifferent to the disease, they shuttled back and forth, all day long, day after day. Cuitláhuac’s body was just one among the hundreds ferried on that day he died.

  The disease of the small pocks was the conqueror of us Mexíca and of some other peoples. Still other nations were defeated or are still being devastated by other diseases never known in these lands before, some of which might make us Mexíca feel almost thankful to have been visited only with the small pocks.

  There is the sickness you call the plague, in which the victim develops agonizing black bulges in his neck and groin and armpits, so that he keeps continually stretching his head backward and his extremities outward, as if he would gladly break them from his body to be rid of the pain. Meanwhile, his every bodily emanation—his spittle, his urine and excrement, even his sweat and his breath—are of such vile stench that neither hardened physicians nor tender kinsmen can bear to stay near the victim, until at last the bulges burst with a gush of nauseous black fluid, and the sufferer is mercifully dead.

  There is the sickness you call the cholera, whose victims are seized by cramps in every muscle of the body, randomly or all at once. A man will at one moment have his arms or legs wrenched into contortions of anguish, then be splayed out as if he were flinging himself apart, then have his whole body convulsed into a knot of torture. All the time, he is also tormented by an unquenchable thirst. Although he gulps down torrents of water, he continuously retches it out, and uncontrollably urinates and defecates. Since he cannot contain any moisture, he dries and shrivels so that, when at last he dies, he looks like an old seedpod.

  There are the other diseases you call the measles and the pease pocks, which kill less horrifically but just as certainly. Their only visible symptom is an itchy rash on the face and torso, but invisibly those sicknesses invade the brain, so the victim subsides first into unconsciousness and then into death.

  I am telling you nothing you do not already know, lord friars, but did you ever think of this? The ghastly diseases brought by your countrymen have often spread out ahead of them faster than the men themselves could march. Some of the people they set out to conquer were conquered and dead before they knew they were the objects of conquest. Those people died without ever fighting against or surrendering to their conquerors, without ever even seeing the men who killed them. It is entirely possible that there are still reclusive peoples in remote corners of these lands—tribes like the Raramuri and the Zyú Huave, for instance—who do not even yet suspect that such beings as white men exist. Nevertheless, those people may at this moment be dying horribly of the small pocks or the plague, dying without knowing that they are being slain, or why, or by whom.

  You brought us the Christian religion, and you assure us that the Lord God will reward us with Heaven when we die, but that unless we accept Him we are damned to Hell when we die. Why then did the Lord God send us also the afflictions which kill and damn so many innocents to Hell before they can meet His missionaries and hear of His religion? Christians are constantly bidden to praise the Lord God and all His works, which must include the work He has done here. If only, reverend friars, you could explain to us why the Lord God chose to send His gentle new religion trailing behind the cruelly murderous new diseases, we who survived them could more joyously join you in singing praises to the Lord God’s infinite wisdom and goodness, His compassion and mercy, His fatherly love of all His children everywhere.

  By unanimous vote, the Speaking Council selected the Lord Cuautémoc to be the next Uey-Tlatoáni of the Mexíca. It is interesting to speculate on how different our history and our destiny might have been if Cuautémoc had become Revered Speaker, as he should have done, when his father Ahuítzotl died eighteen years earlier. Interesting to speculate, but of course fruitless. “If” is a small word in
our language—tla—as it is in yours, but I have come to believe that it is the most heavy-laden word of all the words there are.

  The death toll of the small pocks began to lessen as the summer’s heat and rain abated, and finally, with the first chill of winter, the disease entirely let go its grip on the lake lands. But it left The Triple Alliance weak in every sense of the word. All our people were dispirited; we grieved for the countless dead; we pitied those who had survived to be gruesomely disfigured for the rest of their lives; we were wearied by the long visitation of calamity; we were individually and collectively drained of our human strength. Our population had been reduced perhaps by half, and the remainder consisted mainly of the old and infirm. Since those who died had been the younger men, not to speak of the women and children, our armies had been diminished by considerably more than half. No sensible commander would have ordered them into aggressive action against the massing outlanders, and their utility even for defense was dubious.

  It was then, when The Triple Alliance was the weakest it had ever been, that Cortés once more marched against it. He no longer boasted any great advantage of superior weapons, for he had fewer than four hundred white soldiers and however many harquebuses and crossbows they still carried among them. All the cannons he had abandoned on the Sad Night—the four on the roof of Axayácatl’s palace and the thirty or so he had posted around the mainland—we had pitched into the lake. But he still had more than twenty horses, a number of the staghounds, and all his formerly and latterly collected native warriors—the Texcaltéca, the Totonáca and other minor tribes, the Acólhua still following Prince Black Flower. Altogether, Cortés had something like one hundred thousand troops. From all the cities and lands of The Triple Alliance—even counting outlying places like Tolócan and Quaunáhuac, which were not really of the Alliance, but gave us their support—we could not muster one-third that many fighting men.