Dedicated to my parents, Bert and Louise, who taught me that in this great country, with inspiration and perspiration, anything worth achieving is possible.
I am bound to them, though I cannot look
into their eyes or hear their voices.
I honor their history.
I cherish their lives.
I will tell their story.
I will remember them.
—Unknown
Contents
Historical Note
I. End of Days
Chapter 1 – April 5, 1521
Chapter 2 – May 25, Present Day
Chapter 3 – April 12, 1521
Chapter 4 – May 29, Present Day
Chapter 5 – April 13, 1521
Chapter 6 – May 29, Present Day
Chapter 7 – April 14, 1521
Chapter 8 – May 30, Present Day
Chapter 9 – May 5, 1521
Chapter 10 – May 31, Present Day
Chapter 11 – July 2, 1521
Chapter 12 – June 2, Present Day
II. The God of the Hunt
Chapter 13 – June 18, Present Day
Chapter 14 – Morning, June 20
Chapter 15 – Afternoon, June 20
Chapter 16 – June 21
Chapter 17 – Night, June 21
Chapter 18 – Early Morning, June 22
Chapter 19 – Afternoon, June 22
Chapter 20 – Early Morning, June 23
Chapter 21 – Morning, June 23
Chapter 22 – Afternoon, June 23
Chapter 23 – June 24
Chapter 24 – Morning, June 25
III. The Rebirth of Empire
Chapter 25 – Morning, June 25
Chapter 26 – Noon, June 25
Chapter 27 – June 28
Chapter 28 – June 29
Chapter 29 – July 3
Chapter 30 – July 4
Chapter 31 – July 8
Chapter 32 – July 10
Chapter 33 – July 18
Chapter 34 – July 22
Chapter 35 – July 25
Chapter 36 – July 26
Epilogue
September 12, 1578
Principle Cast of Characters
Present Day
Time of the Conquest (1521)
About the Author
Historical Note
The Aztec Empire, or Triple Alliance, was the dominant civilization of Central America at the time the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés set foot ashore in 1519. The fact that Cortés landed with approximately 500 men and 16 horses and toppled an Empire of over five million subjects still defies credible explanation and belief, yet it happened and ultimately changed the course of world history. As Mark Twain stated, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
The initial part of this novel faithfully follows the conquest based upon as much historical evidence as was available. The principle protagonist from that time period is Asupacaci, third son of Montezuma and Queen Teotlalco. While Asupacaci is presumed to have died during the fall of Tenochtitlán (modern Mexico City) to the Spanish, there is no definitive proof of his demise. We have slightly more credible information on where and when Asupacaci’s two older brothers died at the hands of the Spaniards, yet his exact fate is forever lost to the mists of time. Asupacaci’s trek and subsequent adventure is where this novel delves from established fact, although it attempts to incorporate as much known history as possible in any references to the past.
Multiple languages are referenced in this book. For the sake of the reader, all dialogue is in English, even though much of it would have been spoken in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, Spanish, or Navajo. Where words from those languages are interjected for authenticity, a definition typically follows.
Part I
End of Days
In the age of the fifth sun,
if the Aztecs failed to please
the Gods by not sacrificing
enough human blood in their honor,
the world would go black.
Tzitzimitl would destroy
all of humanity,
and an earthquake would
shatter the world completely.
Chapter 1 – April 5, 1521
If they were followed and discovered, it would be the death of them all. It would be a lingering death, given what they were carrying; of that he was sure. The fault would be his alone if the expedition wasn’t warned. Indeed, it was a heavy burden for one man to carry. He pushed the thought from his mind and peered up over the rise, back along the trail. He struggled to hold his breath so his own labored breathing wouldn’t hinder his hearing and squinted into the distance. Nothing, only cacti and scrub brush were visible. There was no telltale dust anywhere in the distance, not even the slightest sound carried downwind toward him.
Cholo carefully crept back down behind the rise, lay on his back and exhaled. It was an honor, he reminded himself, to have been chosen to ensure no one followed them. It was solely because of his remarkable endurance, and in a land of remarkable runners, he could run the farthest. Even his name reflected it, meaning never tired. For three rises of the sun he had stayed hidden after the caravan had trudged northward, surveying all possible routes that could have been used to follow it. Last night he jogged even further south while the air was cool and the darkness cloaked his movements, to this very vantage point. Finally satisfied their trail was growing cool, if not cold, he sat up and ate a bit of dried turkey meat and sipped from the gourd he carried.
As he stood to work his way back, a movement off in the distance suddenly caught his eye. Cholo stealthily edged behind a cactus and spied a poor miltequitqui, a simple field worker, putting down his load and examining the tracks that led northward.
Why now, you lizard eater, he thought. You’ve endangered everything and gotten yourself killed.
The old man touched the strange straight lines and animal footprints, then glanced at the sun. The lines in the trail were clearly visible, not yet worn down by wind nor rain. They seemed recent. Whatever had passed this way, he hadn’t missed it by much. He grunted as he shouldered his load, and as he stood came face to face with a handsome Aztec warrior. The old man was startled but smiled, it was good to see a guardian of the empire, rather than any of the detested Spaniard invaders. His own daughter had been raped, his crops taken, and his wife felled by a mysterious and fatal illness. Perhaps this warrior had news of the great conflict to the south. Hopefully good news.
Cholo gently put a hand on the shoulder of the old man and a finger to his lips, be quiet. Before a word was spoken the warrior quickly slashed a sharp obsidian blade across the aged, leathery throat. Surprise registered on the elder’s face, then a brief glint of understanding, as his life-giving blood pooled at his feet. Cholo grabbed him as he collapsed, then dragged the body well off the trail to a ravine. After burying it deep under heavy rocks so no animals would disturb it, he scattered the bundle and kicked the coagulated pool of blood off the trail. Satisfied no trace was left, he started jogging back northward. He had to report in, before he would linger behind the great procession and start the process yet again.
Ahead with the caravan, Asupacaci put a hand over his brow and glanced back southward, through dark green eyes that were an indelible mark of his lineage. A few others of royal blood had been born with the mark of jade eyes, but they were all gone now, either from the curse of disease or the ongoing war. Everyone else’s eyes across the vast empire tended to be brown or black like obsidian, the sacred stone with which they made offerings to appease the gods. Jade or obsidian, a blessing or a curse, he was never sure which.
He alone had been chos
en to lead this expedition, and while he knew that it was a journey from which he would never return, it was the only way to preserve for all time the heart of the empire. He had been entrusted with the most sacred of tasks, one that only a blood relative of the most holy ruler could undertake. It was truly a pilgrimage, and everything, in both this world and the next, depended upon it.
Letting his mind wander and thinking back, it all seemed like the fading mist of a bad dream. For some reason, the Gods were angry with the Nahuatl-speaking peoples the Spaniards called the Mexica, or more commonly, the Aztecs. According to the history in the pictographic codices the priests had recorded since the very beginning, the Aztecs were the last tribe to migrate to the great valley, and so had to take the worst of the land. They settled upon a desolate patch called Chapultepec, or hill of the grasshoppers. Here they gained the favor of the strongest of their neighbors, the city state of Culhuacan, by fighting for them as mercenaries.
When the ruler of Culhuacan demanded they submit to being governed by his daughter, the Aztec’s response was defiance, and they flayed her as a sacrifice to the great god Xipe Totec, to ensure both a bountiful harvest and success in warfare. This incited the Culhuacan to gather their army to drive the Aztecs away from their desolate grasshopper hill. Defeated, they wandered until the favorable omen of an eagle with a snake in its claws alighted upon a cactus tree to show them where their true destiny lie. Tenochtitlán they would call the island city they founded in the center of Lake Texcoco, where the eagle had divinely landed in the year Ōme Calli, or Two House.
Asupacaci reflected on the irony that in serving Culhuacan and fighting their wars, the Aztecs should hone and perfect their martial skills. Alliances were formed, wars were fought, and territories were won, lost, and reconquered until a powerful empire emerged. It stretched from the great waters where the sun rose to the endless sea where the sun set and encompassed the numerous tribes and kingdoms that were allied or paid homage to the Aztecs.
Asupacaci’s chest swelled with pride as he recalled the glory of Tenochtitlán, how tribute flowed in from vassal states, and captives to appease the gods were captured in ongoing wars. Warfare served to keep the Aztec warriors fighting skills honed, while also turning drought into life sustaining rain by soaking and enriching the earth with the blood of their enemies. Blood equaled rain, and rain made plants, beasts, and man flourish, so in the times of the greatest dryness, when lands wanted to become deserts, the most captives were sacrificed. Little did the Aztecs realize then, Asupacaci ruefully pondered, that in ruling with a firm fist and placating their gods with so much blood of their enemies, they were sowing the seeds of their own eventual destruction.
Why had the gods become so angry in the first place, Asupacaci wondered? What offense had his people committed that had caused the Aztecs to be abandoned to this new strange group of men, if he could call them that? Coyoltlahtolli were what he heard the nobility call the Spaniards, because they were all devious liars and cheats with the trickster tongue of the coyote. Why would the gods bring down such devastating disease, which affected only the people of this land, allies and enemies alike, and not the detested Spaniards? It killed them off in untold numbers in the most excruciating and lingering of deaths, spreading from village to village like wildfire carried on the breath of winds in the dry season. The disease wasn’t even where the Spanish themselves had been. It preceded them like a reaper, killing the young and old, the healthy and feeble, wiping out entire villages, leaving no one to worship the gods or fight or work the fields. Why indeed?
The Spaniards sang the praises of their gods. They ate his body and drank his blood, yet they called the Aztecs savages? Why was their drinking the blood of the Christ right, while offering the blood of captives to placate the Aztec gods wrong? It made no sense, but the Spanish god had unleashed hellish disease that the Aztec gods had been powerless to stop, there was no denying that.
It all started when from across the waters, in huge floating houses with billowing cloth clouds, came the strange Spaniards and their leader Hernán Cortés. He was what their false religion called the devil, lying, deceiving and killing to gain what he wanted. Cortés first defeated and then allied himself with the Tlaxcalans, which swelled his little army into something much larger, more ominous, and threatening. Even the Totonacs, those traitorous dogs, rallied to his foreign banners. Some renegade tribes had never completely succumbed to living under the Aztec yoke, and Cortés cleverly played these shifting alliances to his advantage. Unrest was in the air, the edges of the Empire were fraying. Ill portents were in the wind.
Asupacaci remembered the day the Spaniards entered the sacred island city of Tenochtitlán, and how his father, the great Montezuma, had welcomed them. In the heart of the land of the Aztecs, in the middle of their impregnable island city fortress, how could so tiny a group of white, bearded, dog-faced men possibly present any possible threat? But they were devious, these coyote-men, and they had an unquenchable obsession with gold and silver. Their lust for it seemed insatiable, but why go to such extreme risks for something you could neither eat nor drink?
The Aztecs valued gold, silver, the bright stones the Spanish called emeralds, and the feathers of rare birds, but they did so only for the pure beauty of it, and as offerings to the gods. The Spaniards would do anything for it, even kill each other, they went yollotlahueliloc, crazy or loco for it. Once in possession they would erase the magnificent beauty the Aztec artisans had put into these offerings to the gods and melt it, all to make it easier to hide and carry away. Strange and vile creatures, the coyote-men.
The black day that changed the world of the Aztecs forever was so audacious that none could believe it happened. Cortés had taken the great Montezuma prisoner, and forced him to rule as a puppet of the detested Spaniards. The had resisted, but the bearded ones had magic that no one had ever seen, hard swords that shattered the Aztec obsidian blades and spears, wore beetle-like coverings that were impervious to their thrusts, rode huge deer that could outrun even the fastest runner, and had vicious war dogs that devoured men. Most frightening of all, they had sticks and logs that made thunder noises and lightning flashes, killing at a great distance.
Montezuma appeared to do the bidding of the Spaniards, but was secretly encouraging resistance, and ultimately the overthrow of those who dared to defile his kingdom. The circle would be complete when Montezuma could stand on the top of the great temple of Tenochtitlán, overlooking his sacred domain watching the hearts of Cortés, his men, and his traitorous allies ripped out and offered to the gods.
The Aztecs used their own silent methods and of watching, learning, and waiting. They found that the great Spanish stags the conquistadors mounted were called horses, and while they were powerful and intimidating, there was a weakness. The Spaniards had gone to great trouble to kill and bury their injured horses, so that the Aztecs would think them immortal. But spies saw them do this, and the truth was discovered. The Aztecs secretly kidnapped two of the Spaniards, and saw that they trembled, bled and screamed like any creature of the forest when tortured, and died when their still beating hearts were cut out with obsidian knives as an offering to Huitzilopochtli, the great God of War. If these pale, hairy, repugnant coyote-men could be killed, then they could be defeated, despite their loud fire sticks, sharp long poles and horses. The Aztecs bided their time.
When Cortés departed from Tenochtitlán with many of his best men for the coast, he left Pedro de Alvarado behind with orders to guard Montezuma and keep up a show of strength. The great Aztec leader had eyes and ears everywhere, and had an established and sophisticated relay network of long runners who could provide news from either coast within two rises of the sun. He knew that the threat Cortés was facing on the coast was from another group of the pale, bearded Spaniards, led by a dog named Narváez. With Cortés gone, Alvarado and his men noticed increased whisperings and activity around the great island city, and it became impossible for them to leave the palace compound
safely.
Alvarado decided to act at the annual Feast of Toxcatl. It was a festival day when all the Aztec nobility would all be in one confined place at one time. On that fateful day in May of 1520, the conquistadors hid and waited until the sacred temple square was so full of people it was hard for them to move, and they came in with their lances and swords made of what the Spanish called “good Toledo steel,” and massacred everyone. The Aztecs had waited too long, paying for it with the flower of their nobility and leadership.
At nearly the same time, the cunning Cortés defeated his rival Spaniards on the coast, and then told them stories of the unbelievable riches and opulence that awaited them in Tenochtitlán. “Let us stop spilling Spanish blood and go and share in the spoils that Tenochtitlán has to offer. The wealth is vast, the people primitive, and by the grace of King Charles we shall extinguish their heathen religion and bring them into the light of Christ,” Cortés exhorted. The defeated Spaniards couldn’t believe their change of fortune, and while few wanted to partake in a religious crusade to convert ignorant heathens, they all believed in the intoxicating power of gold.
Aztec Odyssey Page 1
