Mexico

by James A. Michener

  In their first encounters with other tribes, the wandering Cave People gained significant victories, and so grateful were they to Glittering-Fish Color-Bird that they dropped the complex double name and referred to him thereafter simply as War God. His original attributes were ignored, and few in the tribe remembered that he had once been their god of fertility and beauty.

  After they had been wandering for thirty years in the general direction of Yucatán, they encamped somewhere in north-central Mexico—the place has never been identified—which was entirely different from their riverbank home: it was a broad, and plain whose fields were surrounded by cactus. Here they stayed for about half a century to recoup strength, during which they introduced certain innovations. First, they were so impressed by the cactus plant that when there was no one surviving who could remember the caves they renamed themselves the Cactus People. Second, from the tanned skins of large snakes that infested the area they built themselves a huge drum that they beat whenever they were to offer a human sacrifice. Third, they were so fascinated by the soaring eagles that guarded the cactus plains that they adopted the habit of dressing their chief warriors in costumes that made them look like eagles, and it was these fighters who would soon be dreaded by much of Mexico.

  A fourth change was one that occurred in the hearts of the people, for when the leaders decided that the time was ripe for a major thrust at some area in which they could settle permanently and cease their aimless wandering, the priests advised: “For an adventure of this magnitude, in which we may have to wage prolonged war against well-prepared adversaries, we should carry with us a powerful image of our god, one that reminds us of his strength and our enemies of his power.” (Up to this time other peoples had been known as strangers; now anyone not of their clan carried automatically the label of enemy.)

  Accordingly a hideous image was carved that represented a tyrant who sat in judgment not only of captives hauled before him but also of his own people. Held between his knees was a stone bowl, into which were thrown the still-pulsing human hearts ripped from the chests of living men. Smoke, emblem of the power of fire, curled about the figure, which in the years of its horrible existence became blackened with soot, and always there was that bottomless bowl into which heart after heart was thrown.

  After the harvest period in the year 1130 the Cactus People held a convocation where in a two-day period they sacrificed four hundred and eighty men, of whom nineteen were Drunken Builders who had been surprised on a hunting trip. They were the first Indians from the high valley to die at the hands of War God. The military leaders and the priests presented the people with options: “One scouting party proposes yearly marches until the rich lands of Yucatán are reached, and rich they are, but the distance is endless, requiring so many years to traverse, that some of you would not live to see it.” The people shouted down this proposal, so the leaders continued: “Other scouts have found a lake region only two years distant. But it has no high land in the vicinity except smoking volcanoes.” To this the people cried: “We want no burning mountain,” and it was rejected. At this impasse, the high priest spoke: “There is one land that I myself have seen. It lies not far away, set among hills. It is a high valley, the kind of land our people have always sought, and it contains a man-made mountain upon which the present inhabitants have erected their temple. It almost looks as if it were waiting for our War God.”

  “Are the people living there warlike?” the king asked.

  “We’ve engaged them in minor skirmishes,” the high priest assured him, “and they are easy prey. War God has assured us that we can capture their city.”

  At the time of this meeting, City-of-the-Pyramid and its supporting countryside counted a population of about sixty thousand, whereas the nomadic Cactus People could not have numbered more than five thousand; furthermore, each year upward of a hundred of the best Cactus warriors were sacrificed to War God, which constantly weakened the tribe, but on the other hand the weak, the worn-out and the blind were also killed off, which constantly strengthened it.

  The elite warriors that remained were among the most effective fighting men in Mexico and the idea of engaging an enemy twelve times their number in no way disturbed them. From having defeated many different tribes they had accumulated some of the most advanced weapons of the age: obsidian war clubs, shields of hardened wood, mechanical spear-throwers, and sharp-tipped arrows. Their War God was decorated with turquoise and silver, which made him flash when fires were lighted at his feet and magnified his aura of evil menace.

  The Cactus People were convinced that sixty thousand lackadaisical Drunken Builders could not withstand them. Therefore, in the year 1130 the Cactus People decided to move slowly but with constant pressure against City-of-the-Pyramid and occupy it. For the first fifteen years of this slow encroachment the Drunken Builders were not even aware that hostile forces were approaching, but in the spring of 1145 they awakened to the fact that the nomads were encamped only sixty miles away. Although there was consternation, no one knew what to do about the distressing situation.

  During these critical years, the king of the Drunken Builders was Tlotsín, a descendant of Nopiltzín, the discoverer of pulque, and of all that his ancestors had accomplished in the high valley Tlotsín appreciated most the brewing of this beverage. He could not be called a hopeless drunkard, but he did find solace in drink.

  In 1145, when the Cactus People were a definite threat, Tlotsín was thirty-three and married to a keen-eyed girl of twenty named Xolal, who was particularly sensitive to the danger posed by the invaders because her father had been sent as an ambassador to the Cactus People some years earlier when they were still some hundred miles to the north and they had promptly sacrificed him to their War God. At the time Xolal had wanted the king to dispatch a force to punish the murderers, but Tlotsín, who was then wooing her, argued: “They’re barbarians! You’ve got to take into account that they don’t know the customs of civilized states.”

  “They killed an ambassador,” Xolal protested.

  “They probably don’t know what an ambassador is,” Tlotsín rationalized.

  “They’re a hideous people and they worship a hideous god,” Xolal said.

  “Our scouts tell me there are only four or five thousand of them,” the king said lightly. “Two generations ago they were living in caves.”

  But when, in 1146, the Cactus People sent an armed group within a few miles of the city and captured a band of Tlotsín’s people, hauling all the men back to their camp to serve as living sacrifices, City-of-the-Pyramid was finally forced to acknowledge the existence of a powerful enemy.

  “They worship a monstrous god,” reported a man who had escaped from his captors. “He feeds only on human hearts. Any man captured by them is stretched across an altar and his heart is ripped out while he is still breathing.”

  The escaped prisoner’s description of the god did not so much terrify the Drunken Builders as fascinate them, and men began to speculate on what life would be like if the invaders triumphed. There was discussion of how it would feel to be flung across an altar with a knife at one’s chest, and it was generally concluded that any god that could command such devotion must be more important than the pallid ones worshiped in City-of-the-Pyramid.

  “There’s only a handful of them,” Tlotsín temporized, “and it isn’t logical to suppose that they could cause trouble to a large city like ours.”

  Xolal, who made every effort to discover as much as she could about the enemy, became convinced that they did intend to occupy the high valley permanently, and she argued: “They are few now, and they have not yet crossed the mountains into our valley. Let us drive them back now, lest they invade our fields and, strengthened by our food supply, become too strong for us to oppose.”

  In fairness to King Tlotsín, it must be said that there was not much he could do, for during the golden age of the Drunken Builders there had been no knowledge of war and therefore no need for an army. Complacently T
lotsín took refuge in the thought, Something will happen and they will go away.

  But when Xolal persisted in arguing for defensive action King Tlotsín produced a map that showed the high valley secure within its rim of hills and explained indulgently, “The Cactus People are here beyond the hills, and we are safe inside. Before they reach us they must pass Valley-of-Plenty, which has always been our outpost, and when they see how strong we are”—he pointed triumphantly at the distant valley—“their scouts will report how many we are and how few they are, and they will depart along this river.”

  To this reasoning Xolal replied, “Three years ago they were far away and we did nothing. Next year they will occupy Valley-of-Plenty and it will be theirs.”

  “If that occurs,” the king replied resolutely, “we shall have to do something.”

  In 1147, as Xolal had predicted, the Cactus People and their puissant god moved to the crest of the protecting hills, but to her surprise they did not attack Valley-of-Plenty. Instead they waited for their own meager crops to ripen, after which their priests decreed that anyone with even a slight physical defect must be killed off. Eighty of the best warriors were also sacrificed, and at the height of the religious frenzy thus induced, the Cactus People rushed through the passes and down into Valley-of-Plenty, capturing or killing all those at the Drunken Builder outpost. They sacrificed every one of their captives and rededicated the area as Valley-of-the-Dead, a name that has continued to this day.

  “Now we have got to do something,” King Tlotsín said, and he summoned his advisers, who argued back and forth futilely all through the winter of 1148. When the autumn came, more Drunken Builders were captured and there was another ghastly series of sacrifices, after which the Cactus People moved closer to the city.

  Some of the younger men, encouraged by Xolal, proposed conscripting an army that would drive the invaders away, but King Tlotsín opposed this with determination. “We would only anger them,” he cautioned, and the year progressed with still no decision, except that a delegation of ambassadors was dispatched. This time the Cactus People did not cut out the emissaries’ hearts. “See!” Tlotsín said to his advisers. “They are becoming civilized.”

  “Did our ambassadors win any concessions?” Queen Xolal demanded.

  “No,” the king replied, “but at least they weren’t sacrificed, and that’s progress.” The Cactus People made progress in another direction, too. When the crops were in, they moved even closer to the city.

  The year 1149 was a critical one, for it became evident that if the Cactus People were to usurp any more fields the Drunken Builders would begin to experience shortages in food. Now something had to be done, so against his better judgment King Tlotsín authorized the formation of a battle corps that would march against the intruders and convince them that they must come no nearer the city. It was an exciting day when the corps assembled and its inexperienced generals fortified themselves with liberal drafts of pulque, which gave them all the courage they needed. There were banners and drums and flutes and ferocious-looking headdresses designed to frighten the enemy.

  Some four thousand men marched out from City-of-the-Pyramid and against them the Cactus People dispatched seven hundred rock-hard warriors. Sustained by an absolute belief in their War God, these skilled warriors hacked their way right into the middle of the enemy army and with no great struggle carried off more than twelve hundred prisoners.

  That afternoon, while the remnants of King Tlotsín’s demoralized army were creeping back to the city, the Cactus People hauled their god to the scene of the battle, and while the appalled citizens of the city looked down from the terraces of their pyramid, the captives were lined up and led one by one to the altar, across which they were stretched by powerful priests while their hearts were ripped out and fed to the hungry War God. The citizens of City-of-the-Pyramid could identify their husbands and sons as they came before the awful deity, and they could hear their final shrieks of agony as the swift daggers plunged into their breasts. They could also see the smoking fires as they enveloped the god and the bowl of pulsating hearts that was constantly replenished.

  The aftermath of this terrifying day could not have been predicted. The Cactus People made no effort to assault the city. They merely kept their god on the spot where he had gained a significant victory and from time to time his priests sacrificed whatever captives were taken on raids throughout the countryside. The harvest of 1149 was garnered and a thanksgiving celebration was held, at which over three hundred victims were sacrificed in plain view of any who wanted to watch from City-of-the-Pyramid. In 1150 new crops were planted and in the autumn of that year they were harvested to the accompaniment of a celebration fully as bloody as those that had preceded. The next year a new crop was planted, this time less than a hundred yards from the northern base of the pyramid.

  Within the city a great debate was being waged. In his public speeches King Tlotsín maintained that within a year or so the Cactus People would go away, but sometimes when he drank in private with his closest advisers he would say in the fourth or fifth hour, “Now I see it all very clearly. We should have opposed them when they were camped beyond the hills. Before they captured our grain fields.” But when his council asked him directly, “What shall we now do?” he never had any clear idea. He kept repeating: “I feel sure that sooner or later they will go away.”

  Queen Xolal in these days moved among the people trying to make them rise to some supreme effort. She often argued, “Granted that we were defeated that first time, and granted that we lost some of our best men. Look at the Cactus People! Each year they willingly sacrifice many of their bravest warriors and each year they return stronger than before. We too could muster our strength.” To her despair, her pleas went unheeded because the great snakeskin drum beyond the pyramid would begin to throb and the people would throng to the walls and rooftops to watch yet another gruesome scene of bloody sacrifice; becoming transfixed by the barbarity, they would wonder among themselves: “How many of us will they sacrifice when they capture the city?” And it was an appalling fact that as the sacrifices continued, the people of the city became increasingly engrossed in conjecturing when it was going to happen to them, and how it would feel, and how great the War God must be if he could command such devotion; so before Xolal could devise a plan to ward off disaster, and before the drunken king could make up his mind on what to do, the city had virtually surrendered from within.

  In midsummer of the year 1151 the Cactus People simply walked into City-of-the-Pyramid and occupied all buildings. There was no fighting, no massacre, not even any negotiation. They came in not from the north, which would have disturbed their ripening crops, but from the east, where the roads were good.

  July, August and September passed without a single Drunken Builder being killed by the Cactus People. They were, of course, pressed into service for harvesting the crops, and some six thousand were assigned the task of tearing down everything on top of the pyramid to make way for an imposing temple in which was to be seated the hideous statue of War God. Since the Cactus People admitted that, unlike the Drunken Builders, they were not skilled craftsmen, they appointed a team of the best local stone carvers to construct a new statue of War God, and it is interesting to note that we have on clay tablets fine portraits of the old version in wood and the new in stone—you can study them at the Palafox Museum in Toledo—and what is most notable is that in the new stone version every trace of the original god who had nourished these people in the caves is gone. There is a slight indication of a glittering fish, but the iridescence comes from jewels in the handle of a war club, and there is a hint of a quetzal feather, but it is really the hair of a victim. The new god who was to occupy the apex of the ancient pyramid was remorseless, warlike and terrifying; and he clasped between his knees a bowl of stone much deeper and wider than the original one.

  As the end of harvest approached, and as the newly carved image of War God was installed in the temple atop the pyr
amid, a pall of nervous apprehension hung over the city and men whispered to one another: “I wonder if I’ll be taken?”

  When the harvest was in and all work on the pyramid had been completed, the great snakeskin drum began to throb and its echoes penetrated to the limits of the city. Gaunt priests, their ears pierced with cactus spines, their hair matted with human blood, appeared at the base of the pyramid, and scores of men were lined up at various points throughout the city. Then it became obvious to the horror of all that the entire corps of six thousand men who had worked on the pyramid was to be sacrificed. The number was almost too vast to comprehend, but the Cactus People had decided that in this greatest of all celebrations they must outdo themselves in expressing gratitude to their god. For such an occasion six thousand human hearts were not excessive.

  The victims were paraded through the streets along which they had once reeled in drunken revelry, and their compatriots, watching them go, could only think, This must be a most powerful god who now sits atop our pyramid There were gasps of surprise when the final procession formed and it was seen that at its head marched King Tlotsín, a tall, imposing Indian of thirty-nine—an ancestor of mine in direct line. That day, the chronicles tell us, he wore a kind of numbed look, but he also smiled. In a simpler time, when a king could drink as he liked and postpone decisions to another day, Tlotsín would have been an adequate ruler; even now as he marched to the base of the pyramid he failed to realize how wretchedly he had met the challenge of his reign. The Cactus People, willing to accommodate a captive king who would shortly initiate the installation of the new god, had allowed him as much pulque as he wished, and he had drunk generously. When, in the solemn procession, he passed some old friend he would nod in a kind of daze and pass on with his fatuous smile unchanged. He knew where he was marching, but he was able to erase that knowledge from his mind.

  But when he came at last to the pyramid itself, leading his six thousand, he saw his beautiful queen, Xolal; he realized that she had been set aside as a prize for one of the Cactus People’s leaders, and the foolish smile left his face. “Xolal,” he mumbled, but his brain would not form the words he wished to say, and he could only look at her dumbly.