The Other Time

by Mack Reynolds

  Eventually, he simply left his improvised wheelbarrow there and went off with his companion. They’d got the message. Unless he was sorely mistaken, there’d be a score of wheelbarrows in Tenochtitlan before the week was out, and hundreds in the valley of Mexico before the end of the Aztec month.

  But even as they walked his shoulders slumped. Did the poor bastards have even a month before Cortes got here? He couldn’t remember how long it had taken the Spanish army to get from the coast to Tenochtitlan. It had been fun and something to do in the absence of books and the various other things with which he usually occupied his time, but so far he had done the locals precious little good.

  When they got back to his quarters, it was to find a message from Motechzoma summoning him to the First Speaker’s quarters. He had seen the other on various occasions, but nothing of significance had been said. The head chief of the confederation was impressing Don Fielding less as time went by. He wondered if the man was a good leader in the field. As a handler of international affairs—intertribal was probably the better word—he was no Winston Churchill.

  Cuauhtemoc accompanied him up the stone steps to where Motechzoma held sway. There they found the First Speaker and the Snake-Woman. The other chiefs of the Tlatocan were not present.

  Motechzoma was jittery and looked wan. He didn’t look as though he was getting much sleep. The Snake-Woman was considerably in better possession of himself and sharp as ever.

  At their entrance, the war chief blurted, “You misinformed us. You said that the teteuhs were men, even as we are men, and that they could be killed in battle.”

  “They can,” Don told him.

  The Snake-Woman said, “We have spies and messengers. The teteuhs have fought battles with the Tlaxcalans. None of them died. Large multitudes of the Tlaxcalans died from the thunder weapons of the teteuhs, under the hoofs of the deer upon which they ride, from the fangs of the gigantic dogs and their other weapons. But none of the teteuhs died.”

  Don drew on his history once again. “Some of them died. They carried them from the field and buried them under the floors of the houses in which they were quartered, so as to pretend that they cannot be killed. They wish to throw fear into you by pretending that they are gods who cannot die.”

  He didn’t know why he bothered to tell them. Tenochtitlan was fated to fall. This Stone-Age culture was fated to disappear under the onslaught of a society at least two ethnic periods above them. What was he trying to do—prolong the agony? The coming of the Spanish was progress. Vicious as they were, by the standards of the twentieth century, they were far in advance of this primitive culture with its human sacrifices and all the rest of it. But then, he was anxious to live, no matter what, and at this stage he had to butter up the Mexican chiefs.

  Cuauhtemoc looked at him quizzically. “How could you know that they buried their dead under the floor?”

  Don said, “I know.”

  The Snake-Woman said softly, “You are then a magician who can look over great distances?”

  Don didn’t answer.

  The Snake-Woman said, “Then what do they do next?”

  “They will make friends with the Tlaxcalans and then march on Tenochtitlan. But first they will stop at Cholula; and though at first they will fight the Cholulans, as at first they fought the Tlaxcalans, they will make allies of them and the Cholulans too will join their march on Tenochtitlan.” Motechzoma’s face worked. “You claim then also to be able to look into the future?”

  Cuauhtemoc sucked in breath and said, “I reported, O Tlacatecuhtli, that he told me the teteuhs would first march on Tlaxcala. And he brings fire from his fingertips, as you have witnessed, and bears one of the thunder weapons, though a small one, of the teteuhs. He has killed their war dogs with it. He also wears on his wrist a small container which has within a demon worm which tells him the time of day beyond the accuracy of the position of the sun.” Motechzoma closed his eyes and moaned softly.

  The Snake-Woman went to a corner and picked up something and returned with it to Don Fielding.

  “What is this?”

  It was the sword which Don had taken from the man who had attempted to assassinate him in Cempoala.

  “It is a weapon of the Spanish. It is made of a metal you have not as yet discovered in… Mexico. It is their equivalent of the macquauitl, the weapon you use for close-in fighting.”

  The Snake-Woman was standing near the doorway. He slashed out with the sword, banging it into the stone. He knocked out a sizable chip of the soft rock they used in their construction.

  He said accusingly, “There is no such metal as this in all the land. See, it is not even dented. If this were a macquauitl, the obsidian which makes up the blades would be shattered. Even if it were made of copper, it would be badly dulled.”

  Don said doggedly, “Yes, this metal is in this land, but you have not as yet learned how to… wrest it from the mountains. You have gold and silver, and you have copper, particularly from Tarasca, to the north, but thus far you have not learned the use of this metal which is known as…” he used the English word “… iron. But it is here.”

  “It is a most deadly weapon,” Motechzoma protested. “With it, the teteuhs cut down the Tlaxcalans in large numbers. In very large numbers.”

  “Yes,” Don said. “Steel is far beyond obsidian for most purposes.”

  Cuauhtemoc said, “Could you show us how to find this new metal, in our streams, in our mines, so that we too can make these weapons?”

  “No. I do not know how to find it. But it is not found in streams, as gold dust is. It has to be extracted from stone as is copper. I am not knowledgeable in this field.”

  Snake-Woman said, “You will not tell?”

  “I do not know.”

  All three of them stared at him. Disbelief was possibly lacking in Cuauhtemoc alone.

  The First Speaker said in argument, “But you are a magician.”

  Don gave that up. He said, “But I know nothing of the working of metals.”

  Even Cuauhtemoc now had the expression of disbelief. They knew he was a magician, and did not magicians know everything? But what could they do? It was obvious that Motechzoma, at least, was afraid of him.

  Chapter Twelve

  Partly to kill time, partly out of pure curiosity, he argued theology with Cuauhtemoc. And largely got very little out of it. The Tenocha religion had evolved to a complexity that became pure chaos to someone not born into it.

  One afternoon, seated in his room after the midday meal, he asked about the human sacrifices.

  The other said simply, “The gods are pleased with the blood and hearts of the victims.”

  “How do you know?” Don demanded.

  That set the Indian back only momentarily. On the face of it, everybody knew that, surely. “The priests tell us so.”

  “Perhaps they lie. Throughout the world there are supposedly many gods, but nowhere except in this land do the gods thirst for blood.”

  “Perhaps that is why we Tenochas are so great, so powerful,” Cuauhtemoc said strongly. “Because we placate the wrath of Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird god of war.”

  “The Spanish do not make human sacrifices to their gods and they are more powerful than you. A mere four hundred of them are marching on your city.”

  The Indian had to think about that one. He said finally, “They are gods themselves.”

  Don shook his head. “No, they are not! We have argued about that before. They are not gods and they die just as other men die. But about the sacrifices. You told me the other day that Quetzalcoatl did not demand sacrifices of human beings and that he was the strongest god of all, before the coming of your Huitzilopochtli. If he did not need sacrifices and gave so many things to the people, why should your Hummingbird god, who gives nothing, but takes?”

  The other gave in slightly. He said, “In truth, I have thought about it on occasion, though never tell a priest I said so. It would be my death. But I have thought about it
and this is my conclusion: When we Tenochas were still very poor and a very small tribe and lived far to the north, we were already a warrior people; we had to be to survive in that harsh land. So it was that sometimes we took prisoners in battle. What could we do with these people? If we turned them loose, they would live to fight us again. If we kept them alive, as captives, they would eat our food and we had little enough for ourselves.”

  “So you got into the habit of sacrificing them to the gods,” Don said.

  Well, at least they had evolved out of the still earlier custom of eating their captives. From what he understood, the priests went through an act of symbolic cannibalism, but that was evidently a leftover from the early days of the tribe. These Indians weren’t the only ones to practice symbolic cannibalism in their religion. Even some of the Christian sects went through the act of supposedly eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood when they took the wafer and wine.

  “Yes,” Cuauhtemoc said. “And Huitzilopochtli grew so to like the stench of blood that he called for ever more victims. And so it was that when there was no war, and hence no prisoners to sacrifice, it became necessary for us to provoke wars so that we could take captives.”

  “Which also gave you a good excuse to clobber your neighbors and wrest their property from them.”

  “Yes,” the Indian said, not getting the sarcasm. “But there is another thing, too.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There are too many people in the land. In some areas there are more people than the land can feed. If great numbers are sacrificed on the altars of the gods, then those who remain have sufficient.”

  Don shook his head in despair. “That’s one way of controlling the population explosion,” he muttered. Then audibly, “The Spanish are going to introduce some even more effective methods. Wait until they put you to work, en masse, in their silver and gold mines.”

  Cuauhtemoc frowned and said, “What?”

  “I was but looking into the future.”

  The Indian shook his head in his turn, then laughed. “And you claim that you are not a magician!”

  The days passed rapidly. Cuauhtemoc, by the looks of it, took his position of responsibility for Don seriously and was seldom away from him during the daylight hours. He was continually amazed at his charge’s ignorance of the most common facts of life. He knew nothing whatsoever about hunting, certainly not with the weapons of the Indian, the javelin and spear thrower, the stone propelled from a sling, the blowgun and its pellets. He knew nothing about fishing, at least with the toe-anchored throw-lines the Tenochas used in the lake, and could not even paddle a dugout canoe.

  That last in particular flabbergasted the Indian. Everybody knew how to propel a canoe about the lake and about the canals of the city. Why, a child could hardly walk before it had the ability to punt a canoe around. You were practically born with the art. Not Don! The clumsy dugouts, usually round-bottomed, were completely unmanageable so far as he was concerned, particularly when you stood erect to either paddle or punt. He turned bottoms-up, drenching himself twice, before he called it quits. If he was to be boated around, let somebody else do the powering while he sat in the bottom.

  Cuauhtemoc gave up on introducing him to the weapons of war, as well. He just couldn’t get over the working of the atl-atl javelin thrower. And when he tried to explain the niceties of dueling, Indian-style, with the maquahuitl, utilizing practice weapons inset with the razor-sharp obsidian blades, he shortly rolled up his eyes in agony. The sling? Don couldn’t hit the wall of a house—from inside—with the egg-sized stones the slingers used.

  After a few days of this sort of chaff, Don Fielding had had enough. When he had been a boy in high school, there had been a school archery team, and although Don had never made the varsity, he had gotten the basics of the sport down pretty pat. And they had, of course, not only used an updated version of the English longbow; they’d been coached on techniques far and beyond any Robin Hood had known. Archery in the twentieth century was an art that approached science.

  Don had noticed that the Indian bow was all but useless, particularly in the manner in which it was fired. The short bow, about four feet long, was held in the right hand, the arrow drawn back to the chest with the left hand and aimed without truly sighting.

  He got out his drawing equipment and let the other know what he wanted. A bow, six feet long—he had Cuauhtemoc’s height in mind, or he would have made it longer—and a pull as stiff as the Indian bow-makers could make it. And he wanted arrows half again as long as the Indians utilized. Once again he had mystified his friend, but Cuauhtemoc had learned by now to be inquisitive about any innovations this white man suggested.

  The bow was ready in several days, as was a quiver of obsidian-tipped arrows of the length Don had requested.

  They walked over to Chapultepec, across the causeway, to check it out. Cuauhtemoc brought his own bow as well.

  Don found the glade he wanted. He pointed. “Let me see you hit that tree.”

  His companion frowned at first, but then made a shrug that would have done credit to an Armenian and began walking closer, pulling an arrow from his quiver.

  “No,” Don said. “From here.”

  Cuauhtemoc looked at him. “No man lives who could hit that tree from this distance, even if there was a bow that could reach so far.”

  The tree trunk was approximately the thickness of a man’s body. Don brought forth one of his arrows, closed his eyes long enough for a quick prayer to his nonexistent gods, and notched the arrow, using the left hand to hold the bow. He raised the arrow to eye level. The bow had a good pull. He could have possibly handled more, but it was enough. He held the same stance that once the English yeoman had at Crecy and Agincourt when longbowmen had destroyed the power of French chivalry.

  The arrow sped true and buried itself dead-center in the tree. Then and there, Don Fielding, who hadn’t shot a bow in fifteen years, decided never to fire an arrow again. His reputation was made; he wasn’t going to take any chance of it being destroyed!

  With a great air of nonchalance, he led the way to the tree, Cuauhtemoc following, bug-eyed. It was a lengthy walk.

  The arrow was implanted so deep that the Indian had considerable difficulty drawing it forth. The obsidian point, of course, was shattered, but that was not of importance.

  “What kind of a magician’s bow is that?” Cuauhtemoc demanded, an edge of indignation in his voice.

  Don handed it to him, unslung the quiver of arrows, and handed that over as well.

  He said, only mild condescension there, “I will give you a few lessons in the proper manner of handling a bow, and then you can practice.”

  The other stared at him, then at the bow, then at the—to him—outsized quiver of arrows. He threw his own bow away, without thought.

  “But this is a fantastically better weapon than my own.”

  “So the merry men in Sherwood Forest proved long ago,” Don told him.

  Nor was Don Fielding by any means done with the wheel, now that he had gotten his wheelbarrow built. He had spotted Motechzoma, in a ceremony evidently having something to do with a religious festival, being carried by four men in a litter, and his eyes had narrowed. The streets, here in Tenochtitlan, were paved. And well paved; some sort of mortar Don didn’t recognize, but it was at least as smooth as asphalt.

  He asked Cuauhtemoc about it and discovered that the Tenochas used litters ceremonially but not for cross-country travel. Don could understand that. The roads were too inadequate. It would be more comfortable to walk, and evidently that is exactly what happened. Even the Great Montezuma, as the Spanish called him, walked on his military expeditions.

  Don wanted one of the litters. Again his companion was mystified but, as always now, perfectly willing to go along. The litter, canopy-covered, was produced and parked in the courtyard before Don’s door.

  He looked it over critically. The shafts, before and behind, were not as sturdy as he could wish, b
ut they could work that out later, after sawing them short.

  He sketched out what he wanted. Four wheels, each about three times as large as the one he had based on the shield. Then he diagrammed the axles. He knew precious little about wagons, had never ridden in one, but he knew that some sort of grease had to be utilized, at least if you were going to get any efficiency and eliminate ordinary wear. He was no Connecticut Yankee all-around-man such as Mark Twain had written about. He was a teacher and knew nothing about even the basic mechanics. Although he assumed he could mess around with it and figure out a method of turning the front wheels, for the moment it eluded him, and after trying to puzzle it out, he decided to hell with it. Give them the basics and let the Indian craftsmen work out improvements.

  He had the litter hauled over to the street of the woodworkers and let Cuauhtemoc explain the sketches to them. By this time, the craftsmen were interested to a man in anything that Don attempted. Within days he had his primitive wagon. It was a litter mounted on four clumsy wheels, a shaft sticking out in front with a bar at its far end which two men could utilize to push. It amounted to a four-wheeled chariot, man-powered, since nothing else was available. He wondered, passingly, about goats. Didn’t they have king-sized mountain goats in Mexico? Yes, he had seen two in the Tenochtitlan zoo. Was it possible to train them? He hadn’t the slightest idea. And besides, the Spanish would take over before they’d have the time. And the Spanish would bring more practical animals than a trained mountain goat—oxen, horses, mules, burros.

  The wheeled litter was an instant success, so far as those who witnessed its maiden voyage were concerned. Two porters, at first stunned by it all, took over the job of pulling the clumsy contraption. Don and Cuauhtemoc sat above on the mats that were in lieu of seats. They took off at a trot across the great square in front of the pyramid. Actually, since none of the spectators had ever seen wheeled transport before, it must have seemed fantastically efficient to them, though it took half the square to turn because the front wheels were as stationary as the back.