The one who spoke first brought a message dictated by Patzinca: "Twenty of the winged ships, the biggest yet seen, have arrived in the bay of the lesser Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. From those ships have come ashore one thousand three hundred white soldiers, armed and armored. Eighty of them bear harquebuses and one hundred twenty bear crossbows, in addition to their swords and spears. Also there are ninety and six horses and twenty cannons."
Motecuzóma looked suspiciously at Cortés and said, "It seems quite a warlike force, my friend, just to escort you home."
"Yes, it does," said Cortés, himself looking less than delighted at the news. He turned to me. "Have they anything else to report?"
The other messenger spoke then, and revealed himself to be one of those tedious word rememberers. He rattled off every word overheard from Patzinca's first meeting with the new white men, but it was a monkey like babble of the Totonaca and Spanish languages, quite incomprehensible, owing to there having been no interpreters present to sort out the speeches. I shrugged and said, "Captain-General, I can catch nothing but two names frequently repeated. Your own and another which sounds like Narváez."
"Narváez here?" blurted Cortés, and he added a very coarse Spanish expletive.
Motecuzóma began again, "I will have the gold and gems brought from the treasury, as soon as your train of porters—"
"Pardon me," said Cortés, recovering from his evident surprise. "I suggest that you keep the treasure hidden and safe, until I can verify the intentions of these new arrivals."
Motecuzóma said, "Surely they are your own countrymen."
"Yes, Don Montezúma. But you have told me how your own countrymen sometimes turn bandit. Just so, we Spaniards must be chary of some of our fellow seafarers. You are commissioning me to carry to King Carlos the richest gift ever sent by a foreign monarch. I should not like to risk losing it to the sea bandits we call pirates. With your leave, I will go immediately to the coast and investigate these men."
"By all means," said the Revered Speaker, who could not have been more overjoyed if the separate groups of white men decided to go for each other's throats in mutual annihilation.
"I must move rapidly, by forced march," Cortés went on, making his plans aloud. "I will take only my Spanish soldiers and the pick of our allied warriors. Prince Black Flower's are the best—"
"Yes," said Motecuzóma approvingly. "Good. Very good." But he lost his smile at the Captain-General's next words:
"I will leave Pedro de Alvarado, the red-bearded man your people call Tonatíu, to safeguard my interests here." He quickly amended that statement. "I mean, of course, to help defend your city in case the pirates should overcome me and fight their way here. Since I can leave with Pedro only a small reserve of our comrades, I must reinforce them by bringing native troops from the mainland—"
And so it was that, when Cortés marched away eastward with the bulk of the white force and all of Black Flower's Acolhua, Alvarado was left in command of about eighty white men and four hundred Texcalteca, all quartered in the palace. It was the ultimate insult. During his winter-long residence there, Motecuzóma had been in a situation that was peculiar enough. But spring found him in the even more degrading position of living not just with the alien whites, but also with that horde of surly, glowering, not at all respectful warriors who were veritable invaders. If the Revered Speaker had seemed briefly to come alive and alert at the prospect of being rid of the Spaniards, he was again dashed down to morose and impotent despair when he became both host and captive of his lifelong, most abhorrent, most abhorred enemies. There was only one mitigating circumstance, though I doubt that Motecuzóma found much comfort in the fact: the Texcalteca were notably cleanlier in their habits and much better smelling than an equal number of white men.
The Snake Woman said, "This is intolerable!"—words I was hearing more and more frequently from more and more of Motecuzóma's disgruntled subjects.
The occasion was a secret meeting of the Speaking Council, to which had been summoned many other Mexíca knights and priests and wise men and nobles, among them myself. Motecuzóma was not there, and knew nothing of it.
The war chief Cuitlahuac said angrily, "We Mexíca have only rarely been able to penetrate the borders of Texcala. We have never fought our way as far as its capital." His voice rose during the next words, until at the last he was fairly shouting. "And now the detestable Texcalteca are here—in the impregnable city of Tenochtítlan, Heart of the One World—in the palace of the warrior ruler Axayicatl, who surely must be trying right now to claw his way out of the afterworld and back to this one, to redress the insult. The Texcalteca did not invade us by force—they are here by invitation, but not our invitation—and in that palace they live side by side, on an equal standing, with our REVERED SPEAKER!"
"Revered Speaker in name only," growled the chief priest of Huitzilopóchtli. "I tell you, our war god disowns him."
"It is time we all did," said the Lord Cuautemoc, son of the late Ahuítzotl. "And if we dally now, there may never be another time. The man Alvarado shines like Tonatíu, perhaps, but he is less brilliant as a surrogate Cortés. We must strike against him, before the stronger Cortés comes back."
"You are sure, then, that Cortés will come back?" I asked, because I had attended no Council meetings, open or secret, since the Captain-General's departure some ten days before, and I was not privy to the latest news. Cuautemoc told me:
"It is all most strange, what we hear from our quimichime on the coast. Cortés did not exactly greet his newly arrived brothers like brothers. He fell upon them, made a night attack upon them, and took them unprepared. Though outnumbered by perhaps three to one, his forces prevailed over them. Curiously, there were few casualties on either side, for Cortés had ordered that there be no more killing than necessary, that the newcomers be only captured and disarmed, as if he were fighting a Flowery War. And since then, he and the new expedition's chief white man have been engaged in much argument and negotiation. We are at a loss to understand all these occurrences. But we must assume that Cortés is arranging the surrender of that force to his command, and that he will return here leading all those additional men and weapons."
You can understand, lord scribes, why all of us were bewildered by the quick turns of events in those days. We had supposed that the new arrivals came from the King Carlos, at the request of Cortés himself; thus his attacking them without provocation was a mystery we could not plumb. It was not until long afterward that I gathered enough fragments of information, and pieced them together, to realize the true extent of Cortés's deception—both of my people and of yours.
From the moment of his arrival in these lands, Cortés represented himself as the envoy of your King Carlos, and I know now that he was no such thing. Your King Carlos never sent Cortés questing here—not for the enhancement of His Majesty, not for the aggrandizement of Spain, not for the propagation of the Christian Faith, not for any other reason. When Hernán Cortés first set foot on The One World, your King Carlos had never heard of Hernán Cortés!
To this day, even His Excellency the Bishop speaks with contempt of "that pretender Cortés" and his lowly origins and his upstart rank and his presumptuous ambitions. From the remarks of Bishop Zumárraga and others, I now understand that Cortés was originally sent here, not by his King or his Church, but by a far less exalted authority, the governor of that island colony called Cuba. And Cortés was sent with instructions to do nothing more venturesome than to explore our coasts, to make maps of them, perhaps to do a little profitable trading with his glass beads and other trinkets.
But even I can comprehend how Cortés came to see far greater opportunities, after he so easily defeated the Olméca forces of the Tabascoob, and more especially after the weakling Totonaca people submitted to him without even a fight. It must have been then that Cortés determined to become the Conquistador en Jefe, the conqueror of all The One World. I have heard that some of his under-officers, fearful of their govern
or's anger, opposed his grandiose plans, and it was for that reason that he ordered his less timid followers to burn their ships of transport. Stranded on these shores, even the objectors had little choice but to fall in with Cortés's scheme.
As I have heard the story, only one misfortune briefly threatened to impede Cortés's success. He sent his one remaining ship and his officer Alonso—that man who had first owned Malintzin—to deliver the first load of treasure extorted from our lands. Alonso was supposed to steal past Cuba and go straight across the ocean to Spain, there to dazzle King Carlos with the rich gifts, that the King might give his royal blessing to Cortés's enterprise, along with a grant of high rank to make legitimate his foray of conquest. But somehow, I do not know how, the governor got word of the ship's secretive passing of his island, and guessed that Cortés was doing something in defiance of his orders. So the governor mustered the twenty ships and the multitude of men and set Pamfilo de Narváez in command of them—to chase and catch the outlaw Cortés, to strip him of all authority, to make peace with any peoples he had offended or abused, and to bring Cortés back to Cuba in chains.
However, according to our watching mice, the outlaw had bested the outlaw hunter. So, while Alonso was presumably laying golden gifts and golden prospects before your King Carlos in Spain, Cortés was doing the same at Vera Cruz—showing Narváez samples of the riches of these lands, persuading him that the lands were all but won, convincing Narváez to join him in concluding the conquest, assuring him that they had no reason to fear the wrath of any mere colonial governor. For they would soon deliver—not to their insignificant immediate superior, but to the all-powerful King Carlos—a whole new colony greater in size and wealth than Mother Spain and all its other colonies put together.
Even if we leaders and elders of the Mexíca had known all those things on that day we met in secret, I do not suppose we could have done more than what we did. And that was, by formal vote, to declare Motecuzóma Xocoyotzin "temporarily incapacitated," and to appoint his brother Cuitlahuatzin as regent to rule instead, and to approve his first decision in that office: that we swiftly eliminate all the aliens then infesting Tenochtítlan.
"Two days from now," he said, "occurs the ceremony in honor of the rain god's sister, Iztociuatl. Since she is only the goddess of salt, it would normally be a minor event involving only a few priests, but the white men cannot know that. Neither can the Texcalteca, who have never before attended any religious observances in this city." He gave a small, wry laugh. "For that reason, we can be glad that Cortés chose to leave our old enemies here, and not the Acolhua, who are well acquainted with our festivals. Because I will go now to the palace and, bidding my brother show no surprise, I will tell that officer Tonatíu Alvarado a blatant lie. I will stress to him the importance of our Iztociuatl ceremony, and ask his permission that all our people be allowed to gather in the grand plaza during that day and night, to make worship and merriment."
"Yes!" said the Snake Woman. "Meanwhile, the rest of you will alert every ablebodied knight and warrior within call, every least yaoquizqui who can bear arms. When the outlanders see a crowd of people harmlessly flourishing weapons in what appears to be only a ritual dance, accompanied by music and singing, they will merely look on with their usual tolerant amusement. But, at a signal—"
"Wait," said Cuautemoc. "My cousin Motecuzóma will not give away the deception, since he will divine our good reason for it. But we are forgetting that cursed woman Malintzin. Cortés left her to be the officer Tonatíu's interpreter during his absence. And she has made it her business to learn much about our customs. When she sees the plaza full of people other than priests, she will know that it is not the customary homage to the salt goddess. She is certain to cry the alarm to her white masters."
"Leave the woman to me," I said. It was the opportunity I had waited for, and it would effect more than just my personal satisfaction. "I regret that I am a bit too old to fight in the plaza, but I can remove our one most dangerous enemy. Proceed with your plans, Lord Regent. Malintzin will not see the ceremony, or suspect anything, or disclose anything. She will be dead."
The plan for the night of Iztociuatl was this. It would be preceded by day-long singing and dancing and mock combat in The Heart of the One World, all performed by the city's women, girls, and children. Only when the twilight began to come down would the men begin to drift in by twos and threes and take the places of the women and children dancing out of the plaza by twos and threes. By the time it was full dark, and the scene was illuminated by torches and urn fires, most of the watching outlanders might well have tired of it and gone to their quarters, or at least, in the fitful firelight, might not observe that all the performers had become large and male. Those chanting, gesticulating dancers would gradually form lines and columns that would twine and weave their way from the center of the plaza toward the Snake Wall entrance to the palace of Axayácatl.
The strongest deterrent to their assault was the menace of the four cannons on the roof of that palace. One or more of them could rake almost all of the open plaza with their terrible shards, but they could not so easily be aimed directly downward. So it was Cuitlahuac's intention to get all his men crowded as closely as possible against the very walls of that palace before the white men realized that they were under attack. Then at his signal, the entire Mexíca force would burst in past the doorway guards and do their fighting in the rooms and courts and halls and chambers inside, where the greater numbers of their obsidian maquahuime should overwhelm their opponents' stronger but fewer steel swords and more unwieldly harquebuses. Meanwhile, other Mexíca would have lifted and removed the wooden bridges spanning the canoe passages of the three island causeways, and, with bows and arrows, those men would repel any attempt by Alvarado's mainland troops to swim or otherwise cross those gaps.
I made my own plans just as carefully. I visited the physician who had for long attended my household, a man I could trust, and without flinching at my request he gave me a potion on which he swore I could rely. I was of course well known to the servants of Motecuzóma's court and the workers in the kitchens, and they were unhappy enough in their current service that I had no trouble in getting their agreement to employ the potion in the exact manner and at the exact time I specified. Then I told Béu that I wanted her out of town during the Iztociuatl ceremony, though I did not tell her why: that there was to be an uprising, and I feared the fighting might spread over the whole island, and I fully expected—because of my singular part in the affair—that the white men, if they had the chance, might wreak their most vengeful fury on me and mine.
Béu was, as I have said, frail and unwell, and she was clearly less than enthusiastic about leaving our house. But she was not unaware of the secret meetings I had attended, so she knew something was going to happen, and she complied without protest. She would visit a woman friend who lived in Tepeyáca on the mainland. As a concession to her weakened condition, I let her stay at home, resting, until shortly before the causeway bridges should be lifted. It was in the afternoon that I sent her off in a little chair, the two Turquoises walking alongside.
I remained in the house, alone. It was far enough from The Heart of the One World that I could not hear the music or other sounds of the feigned revelry, but I could imagine the plan unfolding as the twilight deepened: the causeways being sundered, the armed warriors beginning to replace the female celebrants. I was not particularly elated by my imaginings, since my own contribution had been to kill by stealth for the first time in my life. I got a jug of octli and a cup from the kitchen, hoping the strong beverage would dull the twinges of my conscience. Then I sat in the gathering dusk of my downstairs front room, not lighting any lamps, trying to drink to numbness, waiting for whatever might happen next.
I heard the tramp of many feet in the street outside, and then a heavy banging upon my house door. When I opened it, there stood four palace guards, holding the four corners of a plaited-reed pallet on which lay a slender body cove
red by a fine white cotton cloth.
"Forgive the intrusion, Lord Mixtli," said one of the guards, sounding not at all anxious for forgiveness. "We are bidden to ask you to look upon the face of this dead woman."
"No need," I said, rather surprised that Alvarado or Motecuzóma had so quickly guessed the perpetrator of the murder. "I can identify the bitch coyote without looking."
"You will regard her face," the guard sternly insisted.
I lifted the sheet from her face, lifting my topaz to my eye at the same time, and I may have made some involuntary noise, for it was a young girl I could not recognize as anyone I had seen before.
"Her name is Laurel," said Malintzin, "or it was." I had not noticed that a litter chair was at the foot of my stairs. Its bearers set it down, and Malintzin stepped from it, and the guards bearing the pallet edged aside to make room for her to come up to me. She said, "We will talk inside," and to the four guards, "Wait below until I come or unless I call. If I do, drop your burden and come at once."
I swung the door wide for her, then closed it in the guards' faces. I fumbled about the darkening hall, seeking a lamp, but she said, "Leave the house in gloom. We do not much enjoy looking at each other, do we?" So I led her into the front room, and we sat on facing chairs. She was a small, huddled figure in the dusk, but the threat of her loomed large. I poured and drank another copious draft of octli. If I had earlier sought numbness, the new circumstances made either paralysis or maniac delirium seem preferable.
"Laurel was one of the Texcalteca girls given me to be my personal maids," said Malintzin. "Today was her turn to taste the food served to me. It is a precaution I have been taking for some time, but unknown to the other servants and occupants of the palace. So you need not reproach yourself too harshly for your failure, Lord Mixtli, though you might sometime spare a moment's remorse for the blameless young Laurel."
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