Aztec

* * *

Waiting Moon did nothing to spoil my homecoming that time. There was by then some natural gray in her hair, but she had dyed or cut whatever remained of that offending strand of bleached white. And although Béu had ceased trying to make herself into a simulacrum of her dead sister, she had nevertheless made herself into quite a different person from the one I had known for nearly half a sheaf of years, ever since we first met in her mother's Tecuantépec hut. During all those years, every time we had been in each other's company, it seemed we had quarreled or fought or at best maintained only an uneasy truce. But she seemed to have decided that henceforth we would act the roles of an ageing couple, long and amicably married. I do not know whether it was a result of my having so thoroughly chastised her, or whether it was meant for the admiration of our neighbors, or whether Béu Ribé had resigned herself to the age of never and had said to herself, "Never any more open animosities between us."

Anyway, her new attitude made it easier for me to settle down and adapt to living in a house and a city again. Always before, even in the days when my wife Zyanya or my daughter Nochipa still lived, every time I had come home it was with the expectation of sometime leaving again on a new adventure. But the latest homecoming made me feel that I had come home to stay for the remainder of my life. Had I been younger, I should have rebelled at that prospect, and soon have found some reason to depart, to travel, to explore. Or had I been a poorer man, I should have had to bestir myself, just to earn a living. Or had Béu been her former harridan self, I should have seized any excuse to get away—even leading a troop to war somewhere. But, for the first time, I had no reason or necessity to go on running and seeking down all the roads and all the days. I could even persuade myself that I deserved the long rest and the easy life that my wealth and my wife could provide. So I gradually eased into a routine which, while neither demanding nor rewarding, at least kept me occupied and not too bored. I could not have done that, but for the change in Béu.

When I say she had changed, I mean only that she had succeeded in concealing her lifelong dislike and contempt of me. She has never yet given me reason to think that those feelings ever abated, but she did stop letting them show, and that small sham has been enough for me. She ceased being proud and assertive, she became bland and docile in the manner of most other wives. In a way, I rather missed the high-spirited woman she had been, but that twinge of regret was outweighed by my relief at not having to contend with her former willful self. When Béu submerged her once distinctive personality and assumed the near invisibility of a woman all deference and solicitude, I was enabled to treat her with equal civility.

Her dedication to wifeliness did not include the slightest hint that I might finally use her for the one wifely service of which I had refrained from availing myself. She never suggested that we consummate our marriage in the accepted way; she never again flaunted her womanhood or taunted me to try it; she never complained of our sleeping in separate chambers. And I am glad she did not. My refusing any such advances would have disturbed the new equanimity of our life together, but I simply could not have made myself embrace her as a wife. The sad fact was that Waiting Moon was as old as I, and she looked her age. Of the beauty that had once been equal to Zyanya's, little remained except the beautiful eyes, and those I seldom saw. In her new role of subservience, Béu tried always to keep them modestly downcast, in the same way that she kept her voice down.

Her eyes had used to flash brilliantly at me, and her voice had used to be tart or mocking or spiteful. But in her new guise she spoke only quietly and infrequently. As I left the house of a morning, she might ask, "When would you like your meal waiting, my lord, and what would it please you to eat?" When I left the house in the evening, she might caution me, "The night grows chill, my lord, and you risk catching cold if you do not wear a heavier mantle."

I have mentioned my daily routine. That was it: I left my house at morning and evening, to pass the time in the only two ways I could think of.

Each morning I went to The House of Pochtéa and spent the greater part of the day there, talking and listening and sipping the rich chocolate handed around by the servants. The three elders who had interviewed me in those rooms, half a sheaf of years before, were of course long dead and gone. But they had been replaced by numerous other men just like them: old, fat, bald, complacent and assured in their importance as fixtures of the establishment. Except that I was not yet either bald or fat and did not feel like an elder, I suppose I could have passed for one of them, doing little but basking in remembered adventures and present affluence.

Occasionally the arrival of a merchant train afforded me the opportunity to make a bid for its cargo, or for whatever part of it I fancied. And before the day was out I could usually engage another pochtéatl in a round of bargaining, and end by selling him my merchandise at a profit. I could do that without ever setting down my cup of chocolate, without ever seeing what it was I had bought and sold. Occasionally there would be a young and newly aspiring trader in the building, making preparations to set out on his first journey somewhere. I would detain him for as long as it might take to give him the benefit of all my experience on that particular route, or for as long as he would listen without fidgeting and pleading urgent errands.

But on most days there were few persons present except myself and various retired pochtéa who had no place they would rather be. So we sat together and traded stories instead of merchandise. I listened to them tell tales of the days when they had fewer years and less wealth, but ambitions illimitable; the days when they themselves did the traveling, when they did the daring of risks and dangers. Our stories would have been interesting enough, even unadorned—and I had no need to exaggerate mine—but since the old men all tried to out do each other in the uniqueness and variety of their experiences, in the hazards they had faced and bested, the narrow escapes they had enjoyed, the notable acquisitions they had so cunningly made... well, I noticed that some of the men present began to embroider their adventures after the tenth or twelfth telling—

In the evenings I left my house to seek not company but solitude, in which I could reminisce and repine and yearn unobserved. Of course, I would not have objected if that solitude had been interrupted by one longed-for encounter. However, as I have told, that has never happened yet. So it was only with wistful hope, not with expectation, that I walked the nearly empty night streets of Tenochtítlan, from end to end of the island, remembering how here had occurred a certain thing and there another.

In the north was the causeway to Tepeyáca, across which I had carried my baby daughter when we fled from the flooding city to safety on the mainland. At that time Nochipa could speak only two-word sentences, but some of them had said much. And on that occasion she had murmured, "Dark night."

In the south was the causeway to Coyohuacan and all the lands beyond, the causeway I had crossed with Cozcatl and Blood Glutton on my very first trading expedition. In the splendor of that day's dawn the mighty volcano Popocatepetl had watched us go, and had seemed to say, "You depart, my people, but I remain...."

In between were the island's two vast plazas. In the more southerly one, The Heart of the One World, stood the Great Pyramid, so massive and solid and eternal of aspect that a viewer might assume it had towered there for as long as Popocatepetl had towered on the distant horizon. It was difficult for even me to believe that I was older than the completed pyramid, that it had been only an unfinished stump the first time I saw it.

In the more northerly plaza, Tlaltelólco's wide-spreading market area, I had walked for the first time holding tightly to my father's hand. There he had generously paid the extravagant price to buy me my first taste of flavored snow, while he told the vendor, "I remember the Hard Times...." It was then that I had first met the cacao-colored man, he who so accurately foretold my life to come.

That recollection was slightly disturbing, for it reminded me that all the future he had foreseen for me was in my past. Things I had once looked forward to had become memories. I was nearing the full sheaf of my years, and not many men lived more than those fifty and two. Then was there to be no more future for me? When I told myself that I was at last rightfully enjoying the idle life I had labored so long to earn, perhaps I was just refusing to confess that I had outlived my usefulness, that I had outlived every person I ever loved or who ever loved me. Was I only taking up space in this world until I should be summoned to some other one?

No! I refused to believe that, and for confirmation I looked up to the night sky. Again a smoking star hung there, as a smoking star had hung over my reunion with Motecuzóma at Teotihuacan, and then over my meeting with the girl Ce-Malinali, and then over my meeting with the white visitors from Spain. Our astronomers could not agree: whether it was the same comet returning in a different shape and brightness and in a different corner of the sky, or whether it was a new comet each time. But, after the one that accompanied me on my last journey southward, some smoking star appeared in the night sky again in both of the two subsequent years, and each time was visible for nearly a month of nights. Even the usually imperturbable astronomers had to agree that it was an omen, that three comets in three years defied any other explanation. So something was going to happen in this world and, good or bad, it ought to be worth waiting for. I might or might not have any part to play in the event, but I would not resign from this world just yet.

Various things did happen during those years, and each time I wondered: is this what the smoking stars portended? The happenings were all remarkable in one respect or another, and some of them were lamentable, but none seemed quite momentous enough to have justified the gods' sending us such ominous warnings.

For example, I had been only a few months returned from my meeting with the Spaniards, when word came from Uluumil Kutz that the mysterious disease of the small pocks had swept like an ocean wave over the entire peninsula. Among the Xiu, the Tzotxil, the Quiche, and all the other Maya-descendant tribes, something like three of every ten persons had died—among them my host, the Lord Mother Ah Tutal—and almost every survivor would live the rest of his or her life disfigured by the pock marks.

However uncertain Motecuzóma was about the nature and intention of those god-or-men visitors from Spain, he was not eager to expose himself to any god disease. For once, he acted promptly and decisively, putting a strict prohibition on any trade with the Maya lands. Our pochtéa were forbidden to go there, and our southern frontier guards were instructed to turn back all produce and merchandise coming from there. Then the rest of The One World waited in apprehension for some months longer. But the small pocks were successfully contained within the unfortunate Maya tribes and did not—not then—afflict any other peoples.

Some more months passed, and one day Motecuzóma sent a messenger to fetch me to the palace, and again I wondered: does this mean that the smoking stars' prophecy has been fulfilled? But, when I made the customary supplicant-in-sackcloth entrance to the throne room, the Revered Speaker looked only annoyed, not stricken with fear or wonder or any of the other larger emotions. Several of his Speaking Council, standing about the room, appeared rather amused. I myself must have looked puzzled when he said:

"This madman calls himself Tlilectic-Mixtli." Then I realized that he was not speaking of me, but to me, and was pointing at a glum-faced, shabbily dressed stranger held firm in the grip of two palace guards. I raised my seeing crystal for a look, and recognized the man as no stranger, and I smiled first at him, then at Motecuzóma, and I said:

"Tlilectic-Mixtli is his name, my lord. The name Dark Cloud is not at all uncommon among—

"You know him!" Motecuzóma interrupted, or accused. "Some relative of yours, perhaps?"

"Perhaps of yours as well, Lord Speaker, and perhaps of equal nobility."

He blazed, "You dare compare me to this filthy and witless beggar? When the court guards apprehended him, he was demanding audience with me by reason of his being a visiting dignitary. But look at him! The man is mad!"

I said, "No, my lord. Where he comes from, he is indeed the equivalent of yourself, except that the Aztéca do not use the title Uey-Tlatoani."

"What?" said Motecuzóma, surprised.

"This is the Tlatocapili Tlilectic-Mixtli of Aztlan."

"Of where?" cried Motecuzóma, astounded.

I turned my smile again to my namesake. "Did you bring the Moon Stone, then?"

He gave an abrupt, angry nod and said, "I begin to wish I had not. But the Stone of Coyolxauqui lies yonder in the plaza, watched by the men who survived the labor of helping me roll it and raft it and drag it...."

One of the guards holding him murmured audibly, "That cursed great rock has torn up half the paving of the city between here and the Tepeyáca causeway."

The newcomer resumed, "Those remaining men and I are near dead of fatigue and hunger. We hoped for a welcome here. We would have been satisfied with common hospitality. But I have been called a liar for speaking only my own name!"

I turned back to Motecuzóma, who was still staring in unbelief. I said, "As you perceive, Lord Speaker, the Lord of Aztlan is himself capable of explaining his name. Also his rank and his origin and anything else you might wish to know about him. You will find the Aztéca Náhuatl a trifle antiquated, but easily comprehensible.

Motecuzóma came alert with a start, and expressed apologies and greetings—"We will converse at your convenience, Lord of Aztlan, after you have dined and rested"—and gave orders to the guards and counselors that the visitors be fed and clothed and quartered as befitted dignitaries. He motioned for me to stay when the crowd left the throne room, then said:

"I can hardly believe it. An experience as unsettling as meeting my own legendary Grandfather Motecuzóma. Or like seeing a stone figure step down from a temple frieze. Imagine! A genuine Aztecatl, come to life." However, his natural suspicion quickly asserted itself, and he asked, "But what is he doing here?"

"He brings a gift, my lord, as I suggested to him when I rediscovered Aztlan. If you will go down to the plaza and look at it, I think you will find it worth many broken paving stones."

"I will do so," he said, but added, still suspiciously, "He must want something in return."

I said, "I think also that the Moon Stone is worth the bestowal of some high-sounding titles on its giver. And some feathered mantles, some jeweled ornaments, that he may be dressed according to his new station. And perhaps the bestowal of some Mexíca warriors as well."

"Warriors?"

I told Motecuzóma the idea I had earlier expounded to that ruler of Aztlan: that a renewed family tie between us Mexíca and those Aztéca would give The Triple Alliance what it did not currently have, a strong garrison on the northwestern coast.

He said cautiously, "Bearing in mind all the omens, this may not be the time to disperse any of our forces, but I will consider the notion. And one thing is certain. Even if he is younger than you and I, our ancestor deserves a better title than that of Tlatocapili. I will at least put the -tzin to his name."

So I left the palace that day feeling rather pleased that a Mixtli, even if it was not myself, had achieved the noble name of Mixtzin. As things turned out, Motecuzóma complied in full with my suggestions. The visitor left our city bearing the resounding title of Aztéca Tlani-Tlatoani, or Lesser Speaker of the Aztéca. He also took with him a considerable troop of armed soldiers and a number of colonist families selected for their skill at building and fortifying.

I had the opportunity for only one brief conversation with my namesake while he was in Tenochtítlan. He thanked me effusively for my part in his having been welcomed and ennobled and made a partner in The Triple Alliance, and he added:

"Having the -tzin suffixed to my name puts it also on the names of all my family and descendants, even those of slightly indirect descent and divergent lineage. You must come again to Aztlan, Brother, for a small surprise. You will find more than a new and improved city."

At the time, I supposed he meant that he would arrange a ceremony to make me some sort of honorary lord of the Aztéca. But I have never been again to Aztlan, and I do not know what it became in the years after Mixtzin's return there. As for the magnificent Moon Stone, Motecuzóma dithered as usual, unable to decide where in The Heart of the One World it might best be displayed. So the last time I remember seeing it, the Moon Stone was still lying flat on the plaza pavement, and it is now as buried and lost as the Sun Stone.

The fact is that something else happened, to make me and most other people speedily forget the visit of the Aztéca, their bringing of the Moon Stone, and their plans for making Aztlan into a great seaside city. What happened was that a messenger came across the lake from Texcóco, wearing the white mantle of mourning. The news was not shockingly unexpected, since the Revered Speaker Nezahualpili was by then a very old man, but it desolated me to hear that my earliest patron and protector was dead.

I could have gone to Texcóco with the rest of the Eagle Knights, in the company of all the other Mexíca nobles and courtiers who crossed the lake to attend the funeral of Nezahualpili, and who would either stay there or cross the lake again, some while later, to attend the coronation of the Crown Prince Ixtlil-Xochitl as new Revered Speaker of the Acolhua nation. But I chose to go without pomp and ceremony, in plain mourning dress, as a private citizen. I went as a friend of the family, and I was received by my old schoolmate, the Prince Huexotl, who greeted me as cordially as he had first done thirty and three years before, and greeted me with the name I had worn then: "Welcome, Head Nodder!" I could not help noticing that my old schoolmate Willow was old; I tried not to let my expression show what I felt when I saw his graying hair and lined visage; I had remembered his as a lithe young prince strolling with his pet deer in a verdant garden. But then I thought, uncomfortably: he is no older than I am.

The Uey-Tlatoani Nezahualpili was buried in the grounds of his city palace, not at the more expansive country estate near Texcotzinco Hill. So the smaller palace's lawns fairly overflowed with those come to say farewell to that much loved and respected man. There were rulers and lords and ladies from the nations of The Triple Alliance, and from other lands both friendly and not so. Those emissaries of farther countries who could not arrive in time for Nezahualpili's funeral were nevertheless on their way to Texcóco at that moment, hurrying to be in time to salute his son as the new ruler. Of all who should have been at the graveside, the most conspicuously absent was Motecuzóma, who had sent in his place his Snake Woman Tlacotzin and his brother Cuitlahuac, chief commander of the Mexíca armies.

Prince Willow and I stood side by side at the grave, and we stood not far from his half brother, Ixtlil-Xochitl, heir to the Acolhua throne. He still somewhat resembled his name of Black Flower, since he still had the merged black eyebrows that made him appear always to be scowling. But he had lost most of what other hair he had had, and I thought: he must be ten years older than his father was when I first came to school in Texcóco. After the interment, the crown repaired to the palace ballrooms, to feast and chant and grieve aloud and loudly recount the deeds and merits of the late Nezahualpili. But Willow and I secured several jars of prime octli, and we went to the privacy of his chambers, and we gradually got very drunk as we relived the old days and contemplated the days to come.

I remember saying at one point, "I heard much muttering about Motecuzóma's rude absence today. He has never forgiven your father's aloofness in these past years, particularly his refusal to help in fighting petty wars."

The prince shrugged. "Motecuzóma's bad manners will win him no concessions from my half brother. Black Flower is our father's son, and believes as he did—that The One World will someday soon be invaded by outlanders, and that our only security is in unity. He will continue our father's policy; that we Acolhua must conserve our energies for a war that will be anything but petty."

"The right course, perhaps," I said, "But Motecuzóma will love your brother no better than he loved your father."

The next thing I remember was looking at the window and exclaiming, "Where has the time gone? It is late at night—and I am woefully inebriated."

"Take the guest chamber yonder," said the prince. "We must be up tomorrow to hear all the palace poets read their eulogies."

"If I sleep now I shall have a horrendous head in the morning," I said. "With your leave, I will first go for a walk in the city and let Night Wind blow some of the vapors from my brain."

My mode of walking was probably a sight to see, but there was nobody to see it. The night streets were even emptier than usual, for every resident of Texcóco was in mourning and indoors. And the priests had evidently sprinkled copper filings in the pine-splint torches on the street corner poles, for their flames burned blue, and the light they cast was dim and somber. In my muddled state, I somehow got the impression that I was repeating a walk I had walked once before, long ago. The impression was heightened when I saw ahead of me a stone bench under a red-flowering tapachini tree. I sank down on it gratefully, and sat for a while, enjoying being showered by the tree's scarlet petals blown loose by the wind. Then I became aware that on either side of me was seated another man.

I turned left and squinted through my topaz, and saw the same shriveled, ragged, cacao-colored man I had seen so often in my life. I turned to my right, and saw the better-dressed but dusty and weary man I had seen not quite so often before. I suppose I should have started up with a loud cry, but I only chuckled drunkenly, aware that they were illusions induced by all the octli I had imbibed. Still chuckling, I addressed them both:

"Venerable lords, should you not have gone underground with your impersonator?"

The cacao man grinned, showing the few teeth he had. "There was a time when you believed us to be gods. You supposed that I was Huehueteotl, Oldest of Old Gods, he who was venerated in these lands long before all others."

"And that I was the god Yoali Ehecatl," said the dusty man. "The Night Wind, who can abduct unwary walkers by night, or reward them, according to his whim."

I nodded, deciding to humor them even if they were only hallucinations. "It is true, my lords, I was once young and credulous. But then I learned of Nezahualpili's pastime of wandering the world in disguise."

"And that made you disbelieve in the gods?" asked the cacao man.

I hiccuped and said, "Let me put it this way. I have never met any others except you two."

The dusty man murmured obscurely, "It may be that the real gods appear only when they are about to disappear."

I said, "You had better disappear, then, to where you belong. Nezahualpili cannot be very happy, walking the dismal road to Mictlan while two embodiments of himself are still above-ground."

The cacao man laughed. "Perhaps we cannot bear to leave you, old friend. We have so long followed your fortunes in your various embodiments: as Mixtli, as Mole, as Head Nodder, as Fetch!, as Záa Nayazu, as Ek Muyal, as Su-kuru—

I interrupted, "You remember my names better than I do."

"Then remember ours!" he said, rather sharply. "I am Huehueteotl and this is Yoali Ehecatl."

"For mere apparitions," I grumbled, "you are cursedly persistent and insistent. I have not been this drunk for a long time. It must have been seven or eight years ago. And I remember... I said then that someday, somewhere I would meet a god, and I would ask him. I would ask him this. Why have the gods let me live so long, while they have struck down every other person who ever stood close to me? My dear sister, my beloved wife, my infant son and treasured daughter, so many close friends, even transient loves..."

"That is easily answered," said the ragged apparition who called himself The Oldest of Old Gods. "Those persons were, so to speak, the hammers and chisels used for the sculpturing of you, and they got broken or discarded. You did not. You have weathered all the blows and the chipping and the abrasion."

I nodded with the solemnity of inebriation and said, "That is a drunken answer, if ever I heard one."

The dusty apparition who called himself Night Wind said, "You of all people, Mixtli, know that a statue or monument does not come already shaped from the limestone quarry. It must be hewn with adzes and ground with obsidian grit and hardened by exposure to the elements. Not until it is carved and toughened and polished is it fit for use."

"Use?" I said harshly. "At this dwindling end of my roads and my days, of what use could I possibly be?"

Night Wind said, "I mentioned a monument. All it does is stand upright, but that is not always an easy thing to do."

"And it will not get easier," said The Oldest of Old Gods. "This very night, your Revered Speaker Motecuzóma has made one irreparable mistake, and he will make others. There is coming a storm of fire and blood, Mixtli. You were shaped and hardened for only one purpose. To survive it."

I hiccuped again and asked, "Why me?"

The Oldest said, "A long time ago, you stood one day on a hillside not far from here, undecided whether to climb. I told you then that no man has ever yet lived out any life except his one chosen own. You chose to climb. The gods chose to help you."

I laughed a horrible laugh.

"Oh, you could not have appreciated their attentions," he admitted, "any more than the stone recognizes the benefits conferred by hammer and chisel. But help you they did. And you will now requite their favors."

"You will survive the storm," said Night Wind.

The Oldest went on, "The gods have helped you to become a knower of words. Then they helped you to travel in many places and to see and learn and experience much. That is why, more than any other man, you know what The One World was like."

"Was?" I echoed.

The Oldest made a sweeping gesture with his skinny arm. "All this will disappear from sight and touch and every other human sense. It will exist only in memory. You have been charged with remembering."

"You will endure," said Night Wind.

The Oldest gripped my shoulder and said, with infinite melancholy, "Someday, when all that was is gone... never to be seen again... men will sift the ashes of these lands, and they will wonder. You have the memories and the words to tell of The One World's magnificence, so it will not be forgotten. You, Mixtli! When all the other monuments of all these lands have fallen, when even the Great Pyramid falls, you will not."

"You will stand," said Night Wind.

I laughed again, scoffing at the absurd idea of the ponderous Great Pyramid ever falling down. Still trying to humor the two admonitory phantasms, I said, "My lords, I am not made of stone. I am only a man, and a man is the frailest of monuments."

But I heard no reply or reproof. The apparitions had gone as quickly as they had come, and I was talking to myself.

From some distance behind my bench, the street lamp flickered its moody blue flames. In that mournful lighting, the red tapachini blossoms that fluttered down onto me were dark, a crimson color, like a drizzle of drops of blood. I shuddered, for I felt a feeling I had experienced only once before—when for the first time I had stood at the edge of the night and the edge of the darkness—the feeling of being utterly alone in the world, and desolate, and forlorn. The place where I sat was only a tiny island of dim blue light, and all about that place there was nothing but darkness and emptiness and the low moaning of the night wind, and the wind moaned, "Remember...."

* * *

When I was awakened by a street-lamp tender making his rounds at dawn, I laughed at my unbecomingly drunken behavior and my even more foolish dream. I limped back to the palace, stiff from having slept on the cold stone bench, expecting to find the whole court still asleep. But there was great excitement there, everyone up and dashing frantically about, and a number of armed Mexíca soldiers inexplicably posted at the building's various portals. When I found Prince Willow and he glumly told me the news, I began to wonder if my nighttime encounter really had been a dream. For the news was that Motecuzóma had done a base and unheard-of thing.

As I have said, it was an inviolable tradition that solemn ceremonies like the funeral of a high ruler would not be marred by assassination or other such treacheries. As I have also said, the Acolhua army had been all but disbanded by the late Nezahualpili, and the token few troops still under arms were in no state of readiness to repel invaders. As I have also said, Motecuzóma had sent to the funeral his Snake Woman Tlacotzin and his army commander Cuitlahuac. But I have not said, because I did not know, that Cuitlahuac had brought with him a war acáli carrying sixty hand-picked Mexíca warriors, who he had secretly debarked outside Texcóco.

During that night, while in my drunken confusion I was conversing with my hallucinations or with myself, Cuitlahuac and his troops had routed the palace guards, had taken over the building, and the Snake Woman had summoned all its occupants to hear a proclamation. The Crown Prince Black Flower would not be crowned his father's successor. Motecuzóma, as chief ruler of The Triple Alliance, had decreed that the crown of Texcóco would go instead to the lesser prince Cacama, Maize Cob, the twenty-year-old son of one of Nezahualpili's concubines who, not incidentally, was Motecuzóma's youngest sister.

Such a display of duress was unprecedented, and it was reprehensible, but it was incontestable. However admirable Nezahualpili's pacificatory policy might have been in principle, it had left his people sadly unprepared to resist the Mexíca's meddling in their affairs. Crown Prince Black Flower put up a furious show of black indignation, but that was all he could do. Commander Cuitlahuac was not a bad man, despite his being Motecuzóma's brother and his following Motecuzóma's orders. He expressed his condolences to the deposed prince, and advised him to go quietly away somewhere, before Motecuzóma should get the very practical notion of ordering him imprisoned or eliminated.

So Black Flower departed that same day, accompanied by his personal courtiers and servants and guards and quite a number of other nobles equally infuriated by the turn of events, all of them loudly vowing revenge for having been betrayed by their longtime ally. The rest of Texcóco could only seethe in impotent outrage, and prepare to witness the coronation of Motecuzóma's nephew as Cacamatzin, Uey-Tlatoani of the Acolhua.

I did not stay for that ceremony. I was a Mexícatl, and no Mexícatl was very popular in Texcóco right then, and indeed I was not very proud of being a Mexícatl. Even my old schoolmate Willow was eyeing me pensively, probably wondering if I had spoken a veiled threat when I told him, "Motecuzóma will love your brother no better than he loved your father." So I left there and returned to Tenochtítlan, where the priests were jubilantly arranging special rites in almost every temple to celebrate "our Revered Speaker's clever stratagem." And Cacamatzin's buttocks had barely warmed the Texcóco throne before he was announcing a reversal of his father's policy: calling a new muster of Acolhua troops to help his uncle Motecuzóma mount still another offensive against the eternally beleaguered nation of Texcala.

And that war too was unsuccessful, mainly because Motecuzóma's new and young and bellicose ally, though personally selected by him and related by blood to him, was not of much help to him. Cacama was neither loved nor feared by his subjects, and his call for volunteer soldiers went absolutely ignored. Even when he followed his call with a stern order of conscription, only a comparatively few men responded, and did so reluctantly, and proved remarkably listless in battle. Others of the Acolhua, who would otherwise eagerly have taken up arms, pleaded that they had grown old or ill during Nezahualpili's years of peace, or that they had fathered large families they could not leave. The truth was that they were still loyal to the Crown Prince who should have been their Revered Speaker.

On leaving Texcóco, Black Flower had removed to another of the royal family's country residences, somewhere in the mountains well to the northeast, and had begun making of it a fortified garrison. Besides the nobles and their families who had voluntarily gone into exile with him, many other Acolhua joined that company: knights and warriors who had formerly served under his father. Still other men, who could not permanently leave their homes or occupations in the domains of Cacama, did slip away at intervals to Black Flower's mountain redoubt, for training and practice with the other troops. All those facts were unknown to me at the time, as they were unknown to most people. It was a well-kept secret that Black Flower was preparing, slowly but carefully, to wrest his throne from the usurper, even if that should mean his having to fight the entire Triple Alliance.

Meanwhile, Motecuzóma's disposition, poisonous at the best of times, was not being improved. He suspected that he had fallen much in the esteem of other rulers by his domineering intervention in the affairs of Texcóco. He felt humiliated by his latest failure to humble Texcala. He was not much pleased with his nephew Cacama. Then, as if he had not enough to worry and annoy him, even more troublesome things began to occur.

Nezahualpili's death might almost have been the signal for the fulfillment of his gloomiest predictions. In the month of The Tree is Raised next following his funeral, a swift-messenger from the Maya lands arrived with the disturbing news that the strange white men had come again to Uluumil Kutz, and not two of them that time, but a hundred. They had come in three ships, and moored off the port town of Kimpech on the western shore of the peninsula, and rowed to the beach in their big canoes. The people of Kimpech, those who had survived the decimation of the small pocks, resignedly let them land without fuss or opposition. But the white men boldly entered a temple and, without even gestures of requesting permission, began to strip the temple of its golden ornamentation. At that, the local populace put up a fight.

Or they tried to, said the messenger, for the weapons of the Kimpech warriors shattered on the white men's metal bodies, and the white men shouted a war cry, "Santiago!" and they fought back with the sticks they carried, which were not mere staves or clubs. The sticks spat thunder and lightning like the god Chak at his angriest, and many Maya fell dead at a great distance from the spitting sticks. Of course, we all know now that the messenger was trying to describe your soldiers' steel armor and far-killing harquebuses, but at the time his story sounded demented.

However, he brought two articles to substantiate his wild tale. One was a bark paper tally of the dead: more than a hundred of the Kimpech men, women, and children; forty and two of the outlanders—an indication that Kimpech had put up a brave fight against those terrible new weapons. At any rate, the defense had repelled the invaders. The white men had retreated to their canoes, thence to their ships, which had spread their wings and disappeared again beyond the horizon. The other article brought by the messenger was the face of one of the dead white men, flayed from its head, complete with hair and beard, and dried taut on a willow hoop. I later had an opportunity to see it myself, and it much resembled the faces of the men I had met—in its limelike skin, at least—but the hair of scalp and face was of an even more odd color: as yellow as gold.

Motecuzóma rewarded the messenger for bringing him that trophy, but, after the man had gone, he reportedly did much cursing about what fools the Maya were—"Imagine, attacking visitors who might be gods!"—and in great agitation he closeted himself with his Speaking Council and his priests and his seers and sorcerers. But I was not summoned to join the conference and, if it came to any conclusions, I did not hear of them.

However, a little more than a year later, in the year Thirteen Rabbit, the year when I turned my sheaf of years, the white men came again from beyond the horizon, and that time Motecuzóma did call me to a private audience.

"For a change," he said, "this report was not brought by a Maya of sloping forehead and constricted brain. It was brought by a group of our own pochtéa who happened to be trading along the coast of the eastern sea. They were in Xicalanca when six of the ships came, and they had the good sense not to panic nor to let the townsfolk panic."

I remembered Xicalanca well: that town so beautifully situated between blue ocean and green lagoon, in the Olméca country.

"So there was no fighting," Motecuzóma went on, "although the white men this time numbered two hundred and forty, and the natives were much affrighted. Our staunch pochtéa took command of the situation, and kept everyone calm, and even persuaded the ruling Tabascoob to greet the newcomers. So the white men made no trouble, they ravaged no temples, they stole nothing, they did not even molest any women, and they went away again after spending the day admiring the town and sampling the native foods. Of course, nobody could communicate in their language, but our merchants managed with signs to suggest some bartering. The white men had come ashore with not much to trade. But they did, in exchange for some quills of gold dust, give these!"

And Motecuzóma, with the gesture of a street sorcerer magically producing sweets for a crowd of children, whipped from under his mantle several strings of beads. Though they were made of various materials in various colors, they were identical in the numbers of small beads separated at intervals by larger beads. They were strings of prayers like the string I had acquired from Jeronimo de Aguilar seven years earlier. Motecuzóma smiled a smile of vindication, as if he expected me suddenly to grovel and concede, "You were right, my lord, the strangers are gods."

Instead, I said, "Clearly, Lord Speaker, the white men all worship in the same manner, which indicates that they all come from the same place of origin. But we already supposed that much. This tells us no new thing about them."

"Then what about this?" And from behind his throne, with that same air of triumph, he brought out what looked like a tarnished silver pot. "One of the visitors took that from off his own head and traded it for gold."

I examined the thing. It was no pot, for its rounded shape would have prevented its standing upright. It was of metal, but of a kind grayer than silver and not so shiny—it was steel, of course—and at its open side were affixed some leather straps, evidently to be secured beneath the wearer's chin.

I said, "It is a helmet, as I am sure the Revered Speaker has already ascertained. And a most practical sort of helmet. No maquahuitl could split the head of a man wearing one of these. It would be a good thing if our own warriors could be equipped with—"

"You miss the important point!" he interrupted impatiently. "That thing is of the exact same shape as what the god Quetzalcóatl habitually wore on his revered head."

I said, skeptically but respectfully, "How can we possibly know that, my lord?"

With another swoop of movement, he produced the last of his triumphant surprises. "There! Look at that, you stubborn old disbeliever. My own nephew Cacama sent it from the archives of Texcóco."

It was a history text on fawnskin, recounting the abdication and departure of the Toltéca ruler Feathered Serpent. Motecuzóma pointed, with a slightly trembling finger, to one of the pictures. It showed Quetzalcoatl waving good-bye as he stood on his raft, floating out to sea.

"He is dressed as we dress," said Motecuzóma, his voice also a little tremulous. "But he wears on his head a thing which must have been the crown of the Toltéca. Compare it with the helmet you hold at this moment!"

"There is no disputing the resemblance between the two objects," I said, and he gave a grunt of satisfaction. But I went on, cautiously, "Still, my lord, we must bear in mind that all the Toltéca were long gone before any of the Acolhua learned to draw. Therefore the artist who did this could never have seen how any Toltecatl dressed, let alone Quetzalcoatl. I grant that the appearance of his pictured headgear is of marvelous likeness to the white man's helmet. But I know well how storytelling scribes can indulge their imagination in their work, and I remind my lord that there is such a thing as coincidence."

"Yya!" Motecuzóma made the exclamation sound rather like a retch of nausea. "Will nothing convince you? Listen, there is even more proof. As I long ago promised, I set all the historians of all The Triple Alliance to the task of learning all they could about the vanished Toltéca. To their own surprise—they confess it—they have unearthed many old legends, hitherto mislaid or forgotten. And hear this: according to those rediscovered legends, the Toltéca were of uncommonly pale complexion and of uncommon hairiness, and their men accounted it a sign of manliness to encourage the growth of hair on their faces." He leaned forward, the better to glare at me. "In simple words, Knight Mixtli, the Toltéca were white and bearded men, exactly like the outlanders making their ever more frequent visits. What do you say to that?"

I could have said that our histories were so full of legends and variant legends and elaborations on legends that any child could find some one of them that would support any wildest belief or new theory. I could have said that the most dedicated historian was not likely to disappoint a Revered Speaker who was infatuated with an irrational idea and demanding substantiation of it. I did not say those things. I said circumspectly:

"Whoever the white men may be, my lord, you rightly remark that their visits are becoming ever more frequent. Also, they are coming in greater numbers each time. Also, each landing has been more westerly—Tihó, then Kimpech, now Xicalanca—ever closer to these lands of ours. What does my lord make of that?"

He shifted on his throne, as if unconsciously suspecting that he sat only precariously there, and after a few moments of cogitation he said:

"When they have not been opposed, they have done no harm or damage. It is obvious from their always traveling in ships that they prefer to be on or near the sea. You yourself told that they come from islands. Whoever they are—the returning Toltéca or the veritable gods of the Toltéca—they show no inclination to press on inland toward this region which once was theirs." He shrugged. "If they wish to return to The One World, but wish only to settle in the coastlands... well..." He shrugged again. "Why should we and they not be able to live as friendly neighbors?" He paused, and I said nothing, and he asked with asperity, "Do you not agree?"

I said, "In my experience, Lord Speaker, one never really knows whether a prospective neighbor will be a treasure or a trial, until that neighbor has moved in to stay, and then it is too late to have regrets. I might liken it to an impetuous marriage. One can only hope."

Less than a year later, the neighbors moved in to stay. It was in the springtime of the year One Reed that another swift-messenger came, and again from the Olméca country, but that time bringing a most alarming report, and Motecuzóma sent for me at the same time he convened his Speaking Council to hear the news. The Cupilcatl messenger had brought bark papers documenting the sad story in word pictures. But, while we examined them, he also told us what had happened, in his own breathless and anguished words. On the day Six Flower, the ships had again floated on their wide wings to that coast, and not a few but a frightening fleet of them, eleven of them. By your calendar, reverend scribes, that would have been the twenty-fifth day of March, or your New Year's Day of the year one thousand five hundred and nineteen.

The eleven ships had moored off the mouth of The River of the Tabascoob, farther to the west than on the earlier visit, and they had disgorged onto the beaches uncountable hundreds of white men. All armed and sheathed with metal, those men had swarmed ashore—shouting "Santiago!," apparently the name of their war god—coming with the clear intent of doing more than admiring the local landscape and savoring the local foods. So the populace had immediately mustered their warriors—the Cupilco, the Coatzacuali, the Coatlicamac, and others of that region—some five thousand men altogether. Many battles had been fought in the space of ten days, and the people had fought bravely, but to no avail, for the white men's weapons were invincible.

They had spears and swords and shields and body coverings of metal, against which the obsidian maqualiuime shattered at first blow. They had bows that were contemptibly small and held awkwardly cross ways, but which somehow propelled short arrows with incredible accuracy. They had the sticks that spat lightning and thunder and put an almost trifling but death-dealing hole in their victims. They had metal tubes on large wheels, which even more resembled a furious storm god, for they belched still brighter lightning, louder thunder, and a spray of jagged metal bits that could mow down many men at once, like maize stalks beaten down by a hailstorm. Most wondrous and unbelievable and terrifying of all, said the messenger, some of the white warriors were beast-men: they had bodies like giant, hornless deer, with four hoofed legs on which they could gallop as fleetly as deer, while their two human arms wielded sword or spear to lethal effect, and while the very sight of them sent brave men scattering in fear.

You smile, reverend friars. But at that time, neither the messenger's tumbling words nor the crude Cupilco drawings conveyed to us any coherent idea of soldiers mounted on animals larger than any animal in these lands. We were equally uncomprehending of what the messenger called lion-dogs, which could run down a running man, or sniff him out of hiding, and rend him as terribly as a sword or jaguar could do. Now, of course, we have all become intimately acquainted with your horses and staghounds, and their utility in hunting or in battle.

When the combined Olméca forces had lost eight hundred men to death and about an equal number to severe wounds, said the messenger, and had in the meantime killed only fourteen of the white invaders, the Tabascoob called them all to retreat from the engagement. He sent emissary nobles carrying the gilt mesh flags of truce, and they approached the houses of cloth which the white men had erected upon the ocean beach. The nobles were surprised to find that they could communicate without having to use gestures, for they found that one of the white men spoke an understandable dialect of the Maya language. The envoys asked what terms of surrender the white men would demand, that a peace might be declared. One of the white men, evidently their chief, spoke some unintelligible words, and the Maya-speaking one translated.

Reverend scribes, I cannot testify to the exactitude of those words, since I repeat to you only what the Cupilcatl messenger said that day, and he of course had heard them only after their passing through several mouths and the several languages spoken by the several parties. But the words were these:

"Tell your people that we did not come to make war. We came seeking a cure for our ailment. We white men suffer from a disease of the heart, for which the only remedy is gold."

At that, the Snake Woman Tlacotzin looked up at Motecuzóma and said, in a voice meant to be encouraging, "That could be a valuable thing to know, Lord Speaker. The outlanders are not invulnerable to everything. They are afflicted with a curious disease which has never troubled any of the peoples in these lands."

Motecuzóma nodded hesitantly, uncertainly. All the old men of his Speaking Council followed his lead and likewise nodded as if reserving judgment. Only one old man in the room was rude enough to speak an opinion, and that of course was myself.

"I beg to differ, Lord Snake Woman," I said. "I have known numerous of our own people to show symptoms of that affliction. It is called greed."

Both Tlacotzin and Motecuzóma threw me peevish glances, and I said nothing else. The messenger was told to proceed with his story, of which there was not much more.

The Tabascoob, he said, had bought peace by heaping upon the sands every fragment of gold he could immediately order brought to that place: vessels and chains and god images and jewels and ornaments of wrought gold, even dust and nuggets and chunks of the raw metal yet unworked. The obviously commanding white man asked, almost off-handedly, where the people acquired that heart-soothing gold. The Tabascoob replied that it was found in many places in The One World, but that most of it was pledged to the ruler Motecuzóma of the Mexíca, hence the greatest store of it was to be found in his capital city. The white men had seemed much beguiled by that remark, and inquired where that city might be. The Tabascoob told them that their floating houses could get near to it by floating farther along the coast, west, then northwest.

Motecuzóma growled, "Nice helpful neighbors we already have."

The Tabascoob had also given the white commander a gift of twenty beautiful young women to be divided among himself and his ranking under-chiefs. Nineteen of the girls has been selected, by the Tabascoob himself, as the most desirable of all the virgins in that immediate region. They did not go too happily into the camp of the outlanders. But the twentieth girl had unselfishly volunteered herself to make the gift total twenty, which ritual number might influence the gods to send the Olméca no more such visitations. So, the Cupilcatl concluded, the white men had loaded their plunder of gold and young womanhood into their big canoes, then into their immeasurably bigger floating houses and, as all the people had fervently hoped, the houses had unfurled their wings and set off westward, on the day Thirteen Flower, keeping close along the shoreline.

Motecuzóma growled some more, while the elders of his Speaking Council huddled in a muttering conference, and while the palace steward ushered the messenger from the room.

"My Lord Speaker," one of the elders said with diffidence, "this is the year One Reed."

"Thank you," Motecuzóma said sourly. "That is one thing which I already knew."

Another old man said, "But perhaps the possible significance of it has escaped my lord's attention. According to at least one legend, One Reed was the year in which Quetzalcoatl was born in his human form, to become the Uey-Tlatoani of the Toltéca."

And another said, "One Reed would also, of course, have been the designation of the succeeding year in which Quetzalcóatl attained his sheaf of fifty and two years. And, again according to legend, it was in that year One Reed that his enemy the god Tezcatlipóca tricked him into becoming drunk, so that without intent he sinned abominably."

And another said, "The great sin he committed, while inebriated, was to couple with his own daughter. When he awoke beside her in the morning, his remorse made him abdicate his throne and go away alone upon his raft, beyond the eastern sea."

And another said, "But even as he went away, he vowed to return. You see, my lord? The Feathered Serpent was born in the year One Reed, and he vanished in the next year known as One Reed. Admittedly, that is only a legend, and other legends about Quetzalcoatl cite different dates, and all of them were countless sheaves of years ago. But, since this is another One Reed year, might it not be likely to wonder...?"

That one let his question trail off into silence, because Motecuzóma's face had gone almost as pale as that of any white man. He was shocked to speechlessness. It may have been because the reminder of the coincidental dates had followed so closely upon what the messenger had told: that the men from beyond the eastern sea were apparently intent on seeking his own city. Or he may have paled at the suggestive hint of a resemblance between himself and the Quetzalcoatl dethroned by shame at his own sin. Motecuzóma by then had numerous children of varying ages, by his various wives and concubines, and for some time there had been scurrilous gossip regarding his rumored relationship with two of three of his own daughters. The Revered Speaker had a sufficiency of things to ponder upon at that moment, but the palace steward came in again, kissing the earth and begging permission to announce the arrival of more messengers.

It was a delegation of four men from the Totonaca country on the eastern coast, come to report the appearance there of those eleven ships full of white men. The entry of the Totonaca messengers so immediately after the Cupilcatl messenger was yet another unsettling coincidence, but it was not an inexplicable one. Some twenty days had elapsed between the ships' leaving the Olméca lands and appearing on the Totonaca coast, but the latter country was almost directly east of Tenochtítlan and there were well-trodden trade routes between. The man from the Olméca country had had to come by a much longer and more arduous route. So the nearly simultaneous arrival of the separate reports was not remarkable, but neither did it make any of us in the throne room feel any easier.

The Totonaca were an ignorant people, and had not the art of word knowing, so they had sent no word-picture documentation of events. The four messengers were word rememberers, delivering a memorized report from their ruler, the Lord Patzinca, as he had spoken it to them, word for word. I should here remark that word rememberers were almost as useful as written accounts, in one respect: they could repeat whatever they had memorized, over and over again, as many times as necessary, and not omit or misplace a word of it. But they had their limitations, being impervious to questioning. When asked to clarify some obscure point in their message, they could not, They could only repeat the obscurity. They could not even elaborate a message by adding opinions or impressions of their own, for their single-mindedness precluded their having any such things.

"On the day Eight Alligator, my Lord Speaker," began one of the Totonaca, and went on to recite the message sent by Patzinca. On the day Eight Alligator, the eleven ships had suddenly materialized on the ocean and had come to a halt outside the bay of Chalchihuacuecan. It was a place I had once visited myself, The Place of Abundant Beautiful Things, but I made no comment, knowing better than to interrupt a word rememberer. The man went on to report that, on the following day, the day Nine Wind, the white and bearded strangers had begun to come ashore and build themselves little houses of cloth on the beach, and to erect large wooden crosses in the sand, also large banners, and to enact what appeared to be some sort of ceremony, since it included much chanting and gesticulation and kneeling down and standing up, and there were several priests, unmistakably priests, for they dressed all in black, just like those of these lands. Such were the occurrences of the day Nine Wind. On the next day...

One of the old men of the Speaking Council said pensively, "Nine Wind. According to at least one legend, Quetzalcoatl's full name was Nine Wind Feathered Serpent. That is to say, he was born on the day Nine Wind."

Motecuzóma flinched slightly, perhaps because that information struck him as portentous, perhaps because the informant should have known that it was a mistake ever to interrupt a word rememberer. A word rememberer could not just pick up his recitation where it was broken off; he had to back up and start from the beginning again.

"On the day Eight Alligator..."

He droned along to the point he had reached before, and went on, to report that there had been no battles on the beach, or anywhere else as yet. That was understandable. The Totonaca, besides being ignorant, were a servile and whining people. For years they had been subordinate to the Triple Alliance, and they regularly, though with querulous complaints, had paid us their annual tribute of fruits, fine woods, vanilla and cacao for making chocolate, picíetl for smoking, and other such products of the Hot Lands.

The residents of that Place of Abundant Beautiful Things, said the messenger, had not opposed the outlanders' arrival, but had sent word of it to their Lord Patzinca in the capital city of Tzempoalan. Patzinca in turn sent nobles bearing many gifts to the bearded white strangers, and also an invitation that they come to visit his court. So five of their presumably highest-ranking personages went to be his guests, taking with them one woman who had come ashore with them. She was neither white nor bearded, said the messenger, but was a female of some nation of the Olméca lands. At the Tzempoalan palace, the visitors presented gifts to Patzinca: a chair of curious construction, many beads of many colors, a hat made of some heavy, fuzzy red cloth. The visitors then announced that they came as envoys of a ruler called Kinkarlos and of a god called Our Lord and a goddess called Our Lady.

Yes, reverend scribes, I know, I know. I merely repeat it as the Totonacatl ignorantly repeated it.

Then the visitors intensely questioned Patzinca as to the circumstances obtaining in his land. To what god did he and his people pay homage? Was there much gold in this place? Was he himself an emperor or a king or merely a viceroy? Patzinca, though considerably perplexed by the many unfamiliar terms employed in the interrogation, replied as best he could. Of the multitudinous gods in existence, he and his people recognized Tezcatlipóca as the highest. He himself was ruler of all the Totonaca, but was subservient to three mightier nations farther inland, the mightiest of which was the nation of the Mexíca, ruled by the Revered Speaker Motecuzóma. At that very moment, confided Patzinca, five registrars of the Mexíca treasury were in Tzempoalan to review this year's list of the items the Totonaca were to yield in tribute...

"I should like to know," a Council elder suddenly said, "how was this interrogation conducted? We have heard that one of the white men speaks the Maya tongue. But none of the Totonaca speaks anything but his own language and our Náhuatl."

The word rememberer looked momentarily flustered. He cleared his throat and went all the way back to: "On the day Eight Alligator, my Lord Speaker..."

Motecuzóma glared with exasperation at the hapless elder who had interrupted, and said between his teeth, "Now you may perish of old age before the lout ever gets around to explaining that."

The Totonacatl cleared his throat again. "On the day Eight Alligator..." and we all sat fidgeting until he worked his way through his recital and arrived again at new information. When he did, it was of sufficient interest to have been almost worth the wait.

The five haughty Mexíca tribute registrars, Patzinca told the white men, were exceedingly angry at him because he had made those strangers welcome without first asking the permission of their Revered Speaker Motecuzóma. In consequence, they had added to their tribute demand ten adolescent Totonaca boys and ten virgin Totonaca maidens, to be sent with the vanilla and cacao and other items to Tenochtítlan, to be sacrificed when such victims should be required by the Mexíca gods.

On hearing that, the chief of the white men made noises of great revulsion, and stormed at Patzinca that he should do no such thing, that he should instead have the five Mexíca officials seized and imprisoned. When the Lord Patzinca expressed a horrified reluctance to lay hands on Motecuzóma's functionaries, the white chief promised that his white soldiers would defend the Totonaca against any retaliation. So Patzinca, though sweating in apprehension, had given the order, and the five registrars were last seen—by the word rememberers, before they departed for Tenochtítlan—caged in a small cage of vine-tied wooden bars, all five stuffed in together like fowl going to market, their feather mantles lamentably ruffled, to say nothing of their state of mind.

"This is outrageous!" cried Motecuzóma, forgetting himself. "The outlanders may be excused for not knowing out tributary laws. But that witless Patzinca—!" He stood up from his throne and shook a clenched fist at the Totonacatl who had been speaking. "Five of my treasury officials treated so, and you dare to come and tell me! By the gods, I will have you thrown alive to the great cats in the menagerie unless your next words explain and excuse Patzinca's insane act of treason!"

The man gulped and his eyes bulged, but what he said was, "On the day Eight Alligator, my Lord Speaker..."

"Ayya ouíya, BE STILL!" roared Motecuzóma. He sank back onto his throne and despairingly covered his face with his hands. "I retract the threat. Any cat would be too proud to eat such trash."

One of the Council elders diplomatically supplied a diversion by signaling for one of the other messengers to speak. That one immediately began to babble rapidly, and in a mixture of languages. It was evident that he had been present during at least one of the conferences between his ruler and the visitors, and was repeating every single word that had passed among them. It was also evident that the white chief spoke in Spanish, after which another visitor translated that into Maya, after which still another translated that into Náhuatl for Patzinca's comprehension, after which Patzinca's replies were relayed back to the white chief along that same chain of interpretation.

"It is good that you are here, Mixtli," Motecuzóma said to me. "The Náhuatl is poorly spoken but, with enough repetitions, we may be able to make sense of it. Meanwhile, the other tongues—can you tell us what they say?"

I would have liked to show off with an immediate and glib translation but, in truth, I understood little more of the welter of words than did anyone else there. The messenger's Totonacatl accent was enough of an impediment. But also his ruler did not speak Náhuatl very well, since it was for him a language acquired only for conversing with his betters. Also, the Maya dialect being spoken as an intermediate translation was that of the Xiu tribe and, while I was competent enough in that tongue, the presumably white interpreter was not. Also, I was of course far from fluent in Spanish at that time. Also, there were many Spanish words used—such as "emperadore" and "virrey"—for which there were then no substitutes in any of our languages, so they were merely and badly parroted without translation in both the Xiu and Náhuatl the messenger recited. Somewhat abashedly, I had to confess to Motecuzóma:

"Perhaps I too, my lord, hearing enough repetitions, might be able to extract some pertinence. But at this moment I can only tell you that the word most often spoken by the white men in their own tongue is 'cortés.' "

Motecuzóma said gloomily, "One word."

"It means courteous, Lord Speaker, or gentle, mannerly, kindly."

Motecuzóma brightened a little and said, "Well, at least it does not bode too ill if the outlanders are speaking of gentleness and kindliness." I refrained from remarking that they had hardly behaved gently in their assault upon the Olméca lands.

After some moody cogitation, Motecuzóma told me and his brother, the war chief Cuitiahuac, to take the messengers elsewhere, to listen to what they had to say, as often as necessary, until we could reduce their effusions to a coherent report of the occurrences in the Totonaca country. So we took them to my house, where Béu kept us all supplied with food and drink while we devoted several whole days to listening to them. The one messenger recited, over and over, the message he had been given by the Lord Patzinca; the other three repeated, over and over, the garble of words they had memorized at the many-voiced conferences between Patzinca and the visitors. Cuitiahuac concentrated on the Náhuatl portions of the recitals, I on the Xiu and Spanish, until our ears and brains were all but benumbed. However, from the flux of words, we at last got a sort of essence, which I put into word pictures.

Cuitiahuac and I perceived the situation thus. The white men professed to be scandalized that the Totonaca or any other people should be fearful of or subject to the domination of a "foreign" ruler called Motecuzóma. They offered to lend their unique weapons and their invincible white warriors, to "liberate" the Totonaca and any others who wished to be free of Motecuzóma's despotism—on condition that those peoples would instead give their allegiance to an even more foreign King Carlos of Spain. We knew that some nations might be willing to join in an overthrow of the Mexíca, for none had ever been pleased to pay tribute to Tenochtítlan, and Motecuzóma had lately made the Mexíca even less popular throughout The One World. However, the white men attached one other condition to their offer of liberation, and any ally's acceptance of it would commit that ally to another act of rebellion that was appalling to contemplate.

Our Lord and Our Lady, said the white men, were jealous of all rival deities, and were revolted by the practice of human sacrifice. All the peoples desirous of becoming free of Mexíca domination would also have to become worshipers of the new god and goddess. They would eschew blood offerings, they would topple all the statues and temples of their old deities, they would instead set up crosses representing Our Lord and images of Our Lady—which objects the white men were conveniently ready to supply. Cuitlahuac and I agreed that the Totonaca or any other disaffected people might see much advantage in deposing Motecuzóma and his everywhere pervasive Mexíca, in favor of a faraway and invisible King Carlos. But we were also sure that no people would be so ready to disavow the old gods, immeasurably more fearsome than any earthly ruler, and thereby risk an immediate earthquake destruction of themselves and the entire One World. Even the easily swayed Patzinca of the Totonaca, we gathered from his messengers, was aghast at that suggestion.

So that was the account, and the conclusions we had drawn from it, which Cuitlalmac and I took to the palace. Motecuzóma laid my book of bark paper across his lap and began reading it, cheerlessly unfolding pleat after pleat, while I told its content aloud for the benefit of the Speaking Council elders also convened in the room. But that meeting, like an earlier one, was interrupted by the palace steward's announcement of new arrivals imploring immediate audience.

They were the five treasury registrars who had been in Tzempoalan when the white men arrived there. Like all such officials traveling in tributary lands, they wore their richest mantles and feather headdresses and insignia of office—to impress and awe the tribute payers—but they entered the throne room looking like birds that had been blown by a storm through several thorny thickets. They were disheveled and dirty and haggard and breathless, partly because, they said, they had come from Tzempoalan at their fastest pace, but mainly because they had spent many days and nights confined in Patzinca's accursed prison cage, where there was no room to lie down and no sanitary facilities.

"What madness is going on over there?" Motecuzóma demanded.

One of them sighed wearily and said, "Ayya, my lord, it is indescribable."

"Nonsense!" snapped Motecuzóma. "Anything survivable is describable. How did you manage to escape?"

"We did not, Lord Speaker. The leader of the white strangers secretly opened the cage for us."

We all blinked and Motecuzóma exclaimed, "Secretly?"

"Yes, my lord. The white man, whose name is Cortés—"

"His name is Cortés?" Motecuzóma followed that exclamation with a piercing look at me, but I could only shrug helplessly, being as mystified as he. The word rememberers' memorized conversations had given me no hint that the word was a name.

The newcomer went on patiently, wearily. "The white man Cortés came to our cage secretly, in the night, when there were no Totonaca about, and he was accompanied only by two interpreters. He opened the cage door with his own hands. Through his interpreters, he told us that his name is Cortés, and he told us to flee for our lives, and he asked that we convey his respects to our Revered Speaker. The white man Cortés wishes you to know, my lord, that the Totonaca are in a rebellious mood, that Patzinca imprisoned us despite the urgent cautioning of Cortés that the envoys of the mighty Motecuzóma should not be so rashly manhandled. Cortés wishes you to know, my lord, that he has heard much of the mighty Motecuzóma, that he is a devoted admirer of the mighty Motecuzóma, and that he willingly risks the fury of the treasonous Patzinca in thus sending us back to you unharmed, as a token of his regard. He wishes you also to know that he will exert all his persuasion to prevent an uprising of the Totonaca against you. In exchange for his keeping the peace, Lord Speaker, the white man Cortés asks only that you invite him to Tenochtítlan, so that he may pay his homage in person to the greatest ruler in all these lands."

"Well," said Motecuzóma, smiling and sitting straighter on his throne, unconsciously preening in that spate of adulation. "The white outlander is aptly named Courteous."

But his Snake Woman, Tlacotzin, addressed the man who had just spoken: "Do you believe what that white stranger told you?"

"Lord Snake Woman, I can recount only what I know. We were imprisoned by Totonaca guards and we were freed by the man Cortés."

Tlacotzin turned again to Motecuzóma. "We were told by Patzinca's own messengers that he laid hands on these officials only after being commanded to do so by that same chief of the white men."

Motecuzóma said uncertainly, "Patzinca could have lied, for some devious reason."

"I know the Totonaca," Tlacotzin said contemptuously. "None of them, including Patzinca, has the courage to rebel or the wit to dissemble. Not without assistance."

"If I may speak, Lord Brother," said Cuitlahuac. "You had not yet finished reading the account prepared by the Knight Mixtli and myself. The words repeated therein are the actual words spoken between the Lord Patzinca and the man Cortés. They do not at all accord with the message just received from that Cortés. There can be no doubt that he has artfully tricked Patzinca into treason, and that he has shamelessly lied to these registrars."

"It does not make sense," Motecuzóma objected. "Why should he incite Patzinca to the treachery of seizing these men, and then negate that by setting them loose himself?"

"He hoped to make sure that we blamed the Totonaca for the treason," resumed the Snake Woman. "Now that the officials have returned to us, Patzinca must be in a frenzy of fear, and mustering his army against our reprisal. When that army is gathered to mount a defense, the man Cortés may just as easily incite Patzinca to use them for attack instead."

Cuitlahuac added, "And that does accord with our conclusions, Mixtli. Does it not?"

"Yes, my lords," I said, addressing them all. "The white chief Cortés clearly wants something from us Mexíca, and he will use force to get it, if necessary. The threat is implicit in the message brought by these registrars he so cunningly freed. His price for keeping the Totonaca in check is that he be invited here. If the invitation is withheld, he will use the Totonaca—and perhaps others—to help him fight his way here."

"Then we can easily forestall that," said Motecuzóma, "by extending the invitation he requests. After all, he says he merely wishes to pay his respects, and it is proper that he should. If he comes with no armies, with just an escort of his ranking subordinates, he can certainly work no harm here. My belief is that he wishes to ask our permission to settle a colony of his people on the coast. We already know that these strangers are by nature island dwellers and seafarers. If they wish only an allotment of some seaside land..."

"I hesitate to contradict my Revered Speaker," said a hoarse voice. "But the white men want more than a foothold on the beach." The speaker was another of the returned registrars. "Before we were freed from Tzempoalan, we saw the glow of great fires in the direction of the ocean, and a messenger came running from the bay where the white men had moored their eleven ships, and eventually we heard what had happened. At the order of the man Cortés, his soldiers stripped and gutted every useful item from ten of those ships, and the ten were burned to ashes. Only one ship is left, apparently to serve as a courier craft between here and wherever the white men come from."

Motecuzóma said irritably, "This makes less and less sense. Why should they deliberately destroy their only means of transport? Are you trying to tell me that the outlanders are all madmen?"

"I do not know, Lord Speaker," said the hoarse-voiced man. "I know only this. The hundreds of white warriors are now aground on that coast, with no means of returning whence they came. The chief Cortés will not now be persuaded or forced to go away, because, by his own action, he cannot. His back is to the sea, and I do not believe he will simply stand there. His only alternative is to march forward, inland from the ocean. I believe the Eagle Knight Mixtli has predicted correctly: that he will march this way. Toward Tenochtítlan."

Seeming as troubled and unsure of himself as the unhappy Patzinca of Tzempoalan, our Revered Speaker refused to make any immediate decision or to order any immediate action. He commanded that the throne room be cleared and that he be left alone. "I must give these matters deep thought," he said, "and closely study this account compiled by my brother and the Knight Mixtli. I will commune with the gods. When I have determined what should be done next, I will communicate my decisions. For now, I require solitude."

So the five bedraggled registrars went away to refresh themselves, and the Speaking Council dispersed, and I went home. Although Waiting Moon and I seldom exchanged many words, and then only regarding trivial household matters, on that occasion I felt the need of someone to talk to. I related to her all the things that had been happening on the coast and at the court, and the troublous apprehensions they were causing.

She said softly, "Motecuzóma fears that it is the end of our world. Do you, Záa?"

I shook my head noncommittally. "I am no far-seer. Quite the contrary. But the end of The One World has been often predicted. So has the return of Quetzalcoatl, with or without his Toltéca attendants. If this Cortés is only a new and different sort of marauder, we can fight him and probably vanquish him. But if his coming is somehow a fulfillment of all those old prophecies... well, it will be like the coming of the great flood twenty years ago, against which none of us could stand. I could not, and I was then in my prime of manhood. Even the strong and fearless Speaker Ahuítzotl could not. Now I am old, and I have little confidence in the Speaker Motecuzóma."

Béu regarded me pensively, then said, "Are you thinking that perhaps we should take our belongings and flee to some safer haven? Even if there is calamity here in the north, my old home city of Tecuantépec should be out of danger."

"I had thought of that," I said. "But I have for so long been involved in the fortunes of the Mexíca that I should feel like a deserter if I departed at this juncture. And it may be perverse of me, but if this is some kind of ending, I should like to be able to say, when I get to Mictlan, that I saw it all."

Motecuzóma might have gone on vacillating and temporizing for a long time, except for what occurred that very night. It was yet another omen, and a sufficiently alarming one that he bestirred himself at least to send for me. A palace page came, himself much perturbed, and roused me from my bed to accompany him at once to the palace.

As I dressed, I could hear a subdued hubbub from the street outside, and I grumbled, "What has happened now?"

"I will show you, Knight Mixtli," said the young messenger, "as soon as we are outdoors."

When we were, he pointed to the sky and said in a hushed voice, "Look there." Late though it was, well after midnight, we were not the only ones watching the apparition. The street was full of people from the neighboring houses, scantily clad in whatever garments they had snatched up, all of them with their faces upturned, all of them murmuring uneasily except when they were calling for other neighbors to wake up. I raised my crystal and looked at the sky, at first as wonderingly as everyone else. But then a memory came to my mind from long ago, and it somewhat diminished the dreadfulness of the spectacle, at least for me. The page glanced sideways at me, perhaps waiting for me to utter some exclamation of dismay, but I only sighed and said:

"This is all we lacked."

At the palace, a half-dressed steward hurried me up the stairs to the upper floor, then up another staircase to the roof of the great building. Motecuzóma sat on a bench in his roof garden, and I think he was shivering, though the spring night was not cold and he was swathed in several mantles hastily flung around him. Without shifting his gaze from the sky, he said to me:

"After the New Fire ceremony came the eclipse of the sun. Then the falling stars. Then the smoking stars. All those things of the past years were omens evil enough, but at least we knew them for what they were. This is an apparition never seen before."

I said, "I beg to correct you, Lord Speaker—only that I may relieve your apprehensions to some degree. If you will wake your historians, my lord, and set them to searching the archives, they can ascertain that this has occurred before. In the year One Rabbit of the last preceding sheaf of years, during the reign of your namesake grandfather."

He stared at me as if I had suddenly confessed to being some kind of sorcerer. "Sixty and six years ago? Long before you were born. How could you know of it?"

"I remember my father telling of lights like these, my lord. He claimed it was the gods striding about the skies, but with only their mantles visible, all tinted in the same cold colors."

And that is what the lights looked like that night: like filmy cloth draperies depending from a point at the top of the sky and hanging all the way down to the mountain horizon, and swaying and stirring as if in a light breeze. But there was no noticeable breeze, and the long curtains of light made no swishing sound as they swung. They merely glowed coldly, in colors of white and pale green and pale blue. As the draperies softly undulated, those colors subtly changed places and sometimes merged. It was a beautiful sight, but a sight to make one's hair similarly stir.

Much later, I chanced to mention that night's spectacle to one of the Spanish boatmen, and told him how we Mexíca had interpreted it as a warning of dire things coming. He laughed and called me a superstitious savage. "We too saw the light that night," he said, "and we were mildly surprised to see it this far south. But I know it signifies nothing, for I have seen it on many nights when sailing in the cold northern oceans. It is a commonplace sight there in those seas chilled by Boreas, the north wind. Hence the name we call it, the Boreal Lights."

But that night I knew only that the pale and lovely and fearsome lights were being seen in The One World for the first time in sixty and six years, and I told Motecuzóma, "According to my father, they were the omen that presaged the Hard Times back then."

"Ah, yes." He nodded somberly. "The history of those starvation years I have read. But I think any bygone Hard Times will prove to have been negligible in comparison to what is now in store." He sat silent for a time, and I thought he was only moping, but suddenly he said, "Knight Mixtli, I wish you to undertake another journey."

I protested as politely as I could, "My lord, I am an ageing man."

"I will again provide carriers and escorts, and it is no rigorous trail from here to the Totonaca coast."

I protested more strongly, "The first formal meeting between the Mexíca and the white Spaniards, my lord, should be entrusted to no lesser personages than the nobles of your Speaking Council."

"Most of them are older than you are, and less fit for traveling. None of them has your facility at word picture accounts, or your knowledge of the strangers' tongue. Most important, Mixtli, you have some skill at picturing people as they really look. That is something we have not yet had, not since the outlanders first arrived in the Maya country—a good picture of them."

I said, "If that is all my lord requires, I can still draw from memory the faces of those two I visited in Tihó, and do a passably recognizable portrayal."

"No," said Motecuzóma. "You said yourself that they were only artisan commoners. I wish to see the face of their leader, the man Cortés."

I ventured to say, "Has my lord then concluded that Cortés is a man?"

He smiled wryly. "You have always disdained the notion that he might be a god. But there have been so many omens, so many coincidences. If he is not Quetzalcoatl, if his warriors are not the Toltéca returning, they could still have been sent by the gods. Perhaps as a retribution of some sort." I studied his face, rather corpse-looking in the greenish glow from above. I wondered if, when he spoke of retribution, he was thinking of his having snatched the throne of Texcóco from the Crown Prince Black Flower, or if he had other, private, secret sins in mind.

But he suddenly drew himself up and said in his more usual tart manner, "That aspect of the matter need not concern you. Only bring me a portrait of Cortés, and word pictures numbering his forces, describing their mysterious weapons, showing the manner in which they fight, anything else that will help us know them better."

I tried one last demurrer. "Whatever the man Cortés may be or may represent, my lord, I judge that he is no fool. He is not likely to let a spying scribe wander at will about his encampment, counting his warriors and their armory."

"You will not go alone, but with many nobles, richly accoutered according to their station, and all of you will address the man Cortés as an equal noble. That will flatter him. And you will take a train of porters bearing rich gifts. That will allay his suspicions as to your real intent. You will be high emissaries from the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca and The One World, fitly greeting the emissaries of that King Carlos of Spain." He paused and gave me a look. "Every man of you will be an authentic and fully accredited lord of the Mexíca nobility."

When I got home again, I found Béu also awake. After having watched the night sky's lights for some time, she was brewing chocolate for my return. I greeted her considerably more exuberantly than usual, "It has been quite a night, my Lady Waiting Moon."

She obviously took that for an endearment, and looked both startled and delighted, for I do not believe I had ever in our married life spoken an endearment to her.

"Why, Záa," she said, and blushed with pleasure. "If you were merely to call me 'wife' it would lift my heart. But—my lady? Why this sudden affection? Has something—?"

"No, no, no," I interrupted. I had for too many years been satisfied with Béu's closed and contained demeanor; I did not want her suddenly gushing sentimentality. "I spoke with the prescribed formality. 'Lady' is now your entitled mode of address. This night the Revered Speaker awarded me the -tzin to my name, which confers it upon you as well."

"Oh," she said, as if she would have preferred some other sort of benefaction. But she quickly reverted to her cool and unemotional former self. "I take it you are pleased, Záa."

I laughed, somewhat ironically. "When I was young I dreamt of doing great deeds and earning great wealth and becoming a noble. Not until now, past my sheaf of years, am I Mixtzin, the Lord Mixtli of the Mexíca, and perhaps only briefly, Béu.... Perhaps only as long as there are lords, only as long as there are Mexíca—"

There were four other nobles besides myself, and, since they had been born to their titles, they were not much pleased that Motecuzóma had set an upstart like me in command of the expedition and the mission we were charged to accomplish.

"You are to lavish esteem, attention, and flattery on the man Cortés," said the Revered Speaker, giving us our instructions, "and on any others of his company you perceive to be of high rank. At every opportunity you will lay a feast for them. Your porters include capable cooks, and they carry ample supplies of our tastiest delicacies. The porters also carry many gifts, which you are to present with pomp and gravity, and say that Motecuzóma sends these things as a token of friendship and peace between our peoples." He paused to mutter, "Besides the other valuables, there should be enough gold there to assuage all their heart ailments."

There certainly should, I thought. In addition to medallions and diadems and masks and costume adornments of solid gold—the most beautifully worked pieces from the personal collection of himself and prior Revered Speakers, many of them pieces of great antiquity and inimitable craftsmanship—Motecuzóma was even sending the massive disks, one of gold, one of silver, that had flanked his throne and served him for gongs of summons. There were also splendid feather mantles and headdresses, exquisitely carved emeralds, amber, turquoises, and other jewels, including an extravagant quantity of our holy jadestones.

"But, above all things, do this," said Motecuzóma. "Discourage the white men from coming here, or even wanting to come here. If they seek only treasure, your gift of it may be sufficient to send them seeking in other nations there along the coast. If not, tell them the road to Tenochtítlan is hard and perilous, that they could never make the journey alive. If that fails, then tell them that your Uey-Tlatoani is too busy to receive them—or too aged or ill—or too unworthy to merit a visit by such distinguished personages. Tell them anything that will make them lose interest in Tenochtítlan."

When we crossed the southern causeway and then turned east, I was leading a longer and richer and more heavily laden train than any pochtéatl ever had done. We skirted south of the unfriendly land of Texcala, and went by way of Chololan. There and in other cities, towns, and villages along the rest of our route, the anxious inhabitants pestered us with questions about the "white monsters" whom they knew to be disturbingly nearby, and about our plans for keeping them at a distance.

When we rounded the base of the mighty volcano Citlaltepetl, we began to descend through the last of the mountainous country into the Hot Lands. On the morning of the day that would bring us clear to the coast, my fellow lords donned their splendiferous regalia of feather headdresses, mantles, and such, but I did not.

I had decided to add a few refinements to our plans and instructions. For one reason, it had been eight years since I had learned what Spanish I knew, and that had hardly improved with disuse. I wanted to mingle with the Spaniards unobserved, and hear them talk their language, and absorb it, and possibly gain a bit more fluency before I attended any of the formal meetings between our lords and theirs. Also, I had spying and note taking to do, and I could do those tasks better if I was invisible.

"So," I told the other nobles, "from here to the meeting ground I will go barefoot, and wear only a loincloth, and carry one of the lighter packs. You will lead the train, you will greet the outlanders, and when you make camp you will let our porters disperse and relax as they like. For one of them will be me, and I want freedom to wander. You will do the feasting and consultation with the white men. From time to time I will confer with you, privately, after dark. When we have jointly collected all the information the Revered Speaker requested, I will give the word and we will take our leave."

* * *

I am glad that you again join us, Lord Bishop, for I know you will wish to hear of the first real confrontation between your civilization and ours. Of course, Your Excellency will appreciate that many of the things I saw at that time were so new and exotic as to be baffling to me, and many of the things I heard sounded like monkey gibberish. But I will not prolong this account by repeating my ingenuous and often erroneous first impressions. I will not, as our earlier observers had done, speak foolishly of such things as the Spanish soldiers wearing the four legs of animals. The things I saw I will report in the light of my later and clearer understanding of them. The things I heard I will recount as I later construed them when I had a more perfect knowledge of your language.

As a pretended porter, I could only infrequently and surreptitiously use my topaz for looking at things, but these were the things I saw first. As we had been told to expect, there was in the bay only one ship. It was some distance from shore, but it was obviously as big as a goodly house. Its wings were apparently furled, for there extended upward from its roof only some tall poles and a tangle of ropes. Here and there about the bay, similar poles stuck up from the water, where the other ships had sunk as they burned. On the beach of the bay, the white men had erected three markers to commemorate the spot where they had first stepped ashore. There was a very large cross made of heavy wooden timbers from one of the destroyed ships. There was a high flagstaff flying a tremendous banner, the colors of blood and gold, the colors of Spain. And there was a shorter flagstaff bearing a smaller flag, the personal ensign of Cortés, blue and white with a red cross in the center.

The Place of Abundant Beautiful Things, which the white men had named the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, had sprouted quite a village. Some of the dwellings were only of cloth supported on sticks, but others were the typical coastal huts of cane walls and palm-leaf thatch, built for the visitors by their submissive Totonaca hosts. But that day there were not many white men in evidence—or their animals or their conscripted Totonaca laborers—for most of them, we learned, were working in a place some way farther north, where Cortés had decreed the construction of a more permanent Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, with solid houses of wood and stone and adobe.

Our train's approach had of course been noted by sentries and reported to the Spaniards. So there was a small group of them waiting to greet us. Our party halted at a respectful distance and our four lords, as I had privately recommended to them, lighted censers of copali incense and began swinging them on their chains, making coils of blue smoke in the air about them. The white men assumed, then and long afterward—to this day, as far as I know—that the wafting of perfumed smoke was our traditional way of saluting distinguished strangers. It was really only our attempt to draw a defensive veil between us and the intolerable smell of those ever-unwashed strangers.

Two of them came forward to meet our lords. I estimated them both to be of about thirty and five years of age. They were well dressed, in what I know now to have been velvet hats and cloaks, long-sleeved doublets and bulbous breeches made of merino, with thigh-high boots of leather. One of the men was taller than I, and broad and muscular, and most striking of appearance. He had a wealth of gold-colored hair and beard which flamed in the sunlight. He had bright blue eyes and, though his skin was of course pallid, his features were strong. The local Totonaca had already given him the name of their sun god, Tezcatlipóca, for his sunny appearance. We new arrivals naturally took him to be the white men's leader, but soon learned that he was only second in command, Pedro de Alvarado by name.

The other man was rather shorter and much less prepossessing, with bandy legs and a pigeon chest like the prow of a canoe. His skin was even whiter than the other's, though he had black hair and beard. His eyes were as colorless and cold and distant as a winter sky of gray cloud. That unimpressive person was, he told us pompously, the Captain Don Hernán Cortés of Medellin in the Extremadura, more recently of Santiago de Cuba, and he was come here as representative of His Majesty Don Carlos, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain.

At the time, as I have said, we could understand little of that lengthy title and introduction, although it was repeated for us in Xiu and Náhuatl by the two interpreters. They also had come toward us, walking a few paces behind Cortés and Alvarado. One was a white man, with a pockmarked face, dressed in the manner of their common soldiers. The other was a young woman of one of our own nations, clad in a maidenly yellow blouse and skirt, but her hair was an unnaturally reddish brown, almost as gaudy as Alvarado's. Of all the numerous native females presented to the Spaniards by the Tabascoob of Cupilco and more recently by Patzinca of the Totonaca, that one was the most admired by the Spanish soldiers, because her red hair was, they said, "like that of the whores of Santiago de Cuba."

But I could recognize hair artificially reddened by a brew of achiyotl seeds, just as I could recognize both the man and the girl. He was that Jeronimo de Aguilar who had been a reluctant guest of the Xiu for the past eight years. Before touching at the Olméca lands and then here, Cortés had paused at Tihó and found and rescued the man. Aguilar's fellow castaway, Guerrero, after having infected all that Maya country with his small pocks, had died of them himself. The red-haired girl, though by then about twenty and three years old, was still small, still pretty, still the slave Ce-Malinali whom I had met in Coatzacoalcos on my own way to Tihó, those eight years before.

When Cortés spoke in Spanish, it was Aguilar who rendered the words into the labored Xiu he had learned during his captivity, and it was Ce-Malinali who translated that into our Náhuatl, and, when our emissary lords spoke, the process was reversed. It did not take me long to realize that the words of both the Mexíca and Spanish dignitaries were often being imperfectly rendered, and not always because of the cumbersome three-language system. However, I said nothing, and neither of the interpreters took notice of me among the porters, and I determined that they should not for a while yet.

I stayed in attendance while the Mexíca lords ceremoniously presented the gifts we had brought from Motecuzóma. A gleam of avarice enlivened even the flat eyes of Cortés, as one porter after another laid down his burden and undid its wrappings—the great gold gong and the silver gong, the feather-work articles, the gems and jewelry. Cortés said to Alvarado, "Call the Flemish lapidary," and they were joined by another white man who evidently had come with the Spaniards for the sole purpose of evaluating the treasures that they might find in these lands. Whatever a Flemish is, he spoke Spanish, and, though his words were not translated for us, I caught the sense of most of them.

He pronounced the gold and silver items to be of great worth, and likewise the pearls and opals and turquoise. The emeralds and jacinths and topazes and amethysts, he said, were even more valuable—above all, the emeralds—though he would have preferred them cut in facets instead of sculptured into miniature flowers and animals and such. The feather-work headdresses and mantles, he suggested, might have some curiosity value as museum pieces. The many gem-worked jadestones he contemptuously swept to one side, though Ce-Malinali tried to explain that their religious aspect made them the gifts most to be respected.

The lapidary shrugged her off and said to Cortés, "They are not the jade of Cathay, nor even a passable false jade. They are only carved pebbles of green serpentine, Captain, worth hardly more than our glass trade beads."

I did not then know what glass is, and I still do not know what jade of Cathay is, but I had always known that our jadestones possessed only ritualistic value. Nowadays, of course, they have not even that; they are playthings for children and teething stones for infants. But at that time they still meant something to us, and I was angered by the way in which the white men received our gifts, putting a price on everything, as if we had been no more than importunate merchants trying to foist upon them spurious merchandise.

What was even more distressing: although the Spaniards so superciliously set values to everything we gave them, they clearly had no appreciation of works of art, but only of their worth as bulk metal. For they pried all the gems from their gold and silver settings, and put the stones aside in sacks, while they broke and bent and mashed the residue of finely wrought gold and silver into great stone vessels, and set fires under them, and by squeezing leather devices pumped those fires to fierce heat, so that the metals melted. Meanwhile, the lapidary and his assistants scooped rectangular depressions in the damp sand of the shore, and into those they poured the molten metals to cool and harden. So what remained of the treasures we had brought—even those huge and irreplaceably beautiful gold and silver disks which had served Motecuzóma for gongs—became only solid ingots of gold and silver as featureless and unlovely as adobe bricks.

Leaving my fellow lords to act their lordliest, I spent the next several days drifting to and fro among the mass of common soldiers. I counted them and their weapons and their tethered horses and staghounds, and other appurtenances of which I could not then divine the purpose: such things as stores of heavy metal balls and strangely curved low chairs made of leather. I took care not to attract attention as a mere idler. Like the Totonaca men whom the Spaniards had put to forced labor, I made sure to be always carrying something like a plank of wood or a water skin, and to look as if I were taking it to some destination. Since there was a constant traffic of Spanish soldiers and Totonaca porters between the camp of Vera Cruz and the rising town of Vera Cruz, and since the Spaniards then (as they still do) claimed that they "could not tell the damned Indians apart," I went as unnoticed as any single blade of the dune grasses growing along that shore. Whatever pretended freight I carried did not interfere with my subtly using my topaz, and making notes of the things and persons I counted, and quickly jotting down word picture descriptions of them.

I could have wished that I was carrying a censer of incense, instead of a plank or whatever, when I was among the Spaniards. But I must concede that they did not all smell quite so bad as I remembered. While they still showed no inclination to wash or steam themselves, they did—after a day of hard work—strip down to their startlingly pale skin, only leaving on their filthy underclothes, and wade out into the sea surf. None of them could swim, I gathered, but they splashed about sufficiently to rinse the day's sweat from their bodies. That did not make them smell like flowers, particularly since they climbed right back into their crusty and rancid outer clothes, but the rinsing at least made them slightly less fetid than a vulture's breath.

As I rambled up and down the coast, and spent the nights in either the Vera Cruz camp or the Vera Cruz town, I kept my ears as wide open as my eyes. Though I seldom heard anything rousingly informative—the soldiers spent a good deal of their talk in grumbling about the unfamiliar baldness of the "Indian" women's torsos, as compared to the comfortably hairy crotches and armpits of their women across the water—I did recover and improve my understanding of the Spanish language. Still, I took care not to be overheard by any of the soldiers when I practiced repeating their words and phrases to myself.

As a further safeguard against exposure as an imposter, I did not converse with the Totonaca either, so I could not ask anyone to explain a curious thing which I saw repeatedly, and was puzzled by. Along the coast, and especially in the capital city of Tzempoalan, there are many pyramids erected to Tezcatlipóca and other gods. There is even one pyramid that is not square but a conical tower of diminishing round terraces; it is dedicated to the wind god Ehecatl, and was constructed so that his winds might blow freely about it without having to angle around corners.

Every one of the Totonaca pyramids has a temple on top, but all those temples had been shockingly changed. Not a single one any longer contained the statue of Tezcatlipóca or Ehecatl or any other god. All of them had been scraped and scrubbed of their accumulation of coagulated blood. All of them had been refinished on the inside with a clean wash of white lime. And in every one stood only a stark wooden cross and a single small figure, also made of wood, rather crudely carved. It represented a young woman, her right hand raised in a vaguely admonitory gesture. Her hair was painted flat black, her robe a flat blue and her eyes the same, her skin a pinkish-white like that of the Spaniards. Most queer, the woman wore a gilded circular crown that was so much too large for her that it nowhere rested on her head but was attached at the back of her hair.

It was clear to me that, although the Spaniards had not sought or provoked any battle with the Totonaca, they had threatened and bullied and frightened those people into replacing all their mighty and ancient gods with the single pallid and placid female. I took her to be the goddess Our Lady of whom I had heard, but I could not see what made the Totonaca accept her as in any way superior to the old gods. In truth, from the vapid look of her, I could not understand why even the Spaniards saw in Our Lady any godlike attributes worth their own veneration.

But then my wanderings brought me one day to a grassy hollow some way inshore, and it was full of Totonaca who were standing and listening, with an appearance of attentive stupidity, while they were harangued by one of the Spanish priests who had come with the military men. Those priests, I might remark, seemed not so alien and unnatural as did the soldiers. Only the cut of their hair was different; otherwise their black garments much resembled those of our own priests, and smelled very like them, too. The one preaching to that assemblage was doing so with the help of the two interpreters, Aguilar and Ce-Malinali, whom evidently he borrowed whenever they were not required by Cortés. The Totonaca appeared to listen stolidly to his speech, though I knew they could not understand two words in ten of even Ce-Malinali's Náhuatl translation.

Among many other things, the priest explained that Our Lady was not exactly a goddess, that she was a female human being called Virgin Mary who had somehow remained a virgin even while copulating with the Holy Spirit of the Lord God, who was a god, and that thereby she had given birth to the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God thus enabled to walk the world in human form. Well, none of that was too hard to comprehend. Our own religion contained many gods who had coupled with human women, and many goddesses who had been exceedingly promiscuous with both gods and men—and prolific of godling children—while somehow retaining unsmirched their reputation and appellation of Virgin.

Please, Your Excellency, I am recounting the way things seemed then to my still untutored mind.

I also followed the priest's explanation of the act of baptism, and how we could all, that very day, partake of it—although it was normally inflicted on children soon after their birth: an immersion in water which forever bound them to adore and serve the Lord God in exchange for bounties to be granted during this life and in an afterlife. I could perceive very little difference from the belief and practice of most of our own peoples, thought they did the immersing with different gods in mind.

Of course, the priest did not try in that one speech to tell us every detail of the Christian Faith, with all its complications and contradictions. And although I, of all his audience that day, could best understand the words spoken in Spanish, Xiu, and Náhuatl, even I was mistaken in many of the things I thought I understood. For example, because the priest spoke so familiarly of Virgin Mary, and because I had already seen the fair-skinned, blue-eyed statues of her, I assumed Our Lady to be a Spanish woman, who might soon come across the ocean to visit us in person and perhaps bring her little boy Jesus. I also took the priest to be speaking of a countryman when he said that that day was the day of San Juan de Damasco, and that we would all be honored by being given the name of that saint when we were baptized.

With that, he and his interpreters called for all who wished to embrace Christianity to kneel down, and practically every Totonacatl present did so, though surely most of those dull-witted folk had no least idea of what was occurring; and may even have thought that they were about to be ritually slaughtered. Only a few old men and some small children took their departure. The old men, if they had understood anything at all, probably saw no benefit in burdening themselves with yet another god at their time of life. And the children probably had more enjoyable games they preferred to play.

The sea was not far distant, but the priest did not take all those people there for a ceremonial immersion. He simply walked up and down the rows of kneeling Totonaca, sprinkling them with water from a little wand in one hand and giving them a taste of something from the other hand. I watched, and when none of the baptized fell dead or showed any other dire effect, I decided to stay and partake myself. Apparently it would do me no harm and it might even give me some obscure advantage in later dealings with the white men. So I got a few drops of water on my head, and on my tongue a few grains of the salt from the priest's palm—that is all it was: common salt—and some words mumbled over me in what I know now is your religious language of Latin.

To conclude, the priest chanted over all of us another short speech in that Latin, and told us that henceforth all of us males were named Juan Damasceno and all the women Juana Demascena, and the ceremony was over. As best I can recollect, it was the first new name I had acquired since that of Urine Eye, and the last new name I have acquired to this day. I daresay it is a better name than Urine Eye, but I must confess that I have seldom thought of myself as Juan Damasceno. However, I suppose the name will endure longer than I do, because I have been thus inscribed on all the head-count rolls and other official papers of all the government departments of New Spain, and the last entry of all will no doubt say Juan Damasceno, deceased.

During one of my secret nighttime conferences with the other Mexíca lords, in the flapping cloth house that had been erected for their quarters, they told me:

"Motecuzóma has wondered much, whether these white men might be gods or the Toltéca followers of gods, so we decided to make a test. We offered to sacrifice to the leader Cortés, to slay for him a xochimíqui, perhaps some available lord of the Totonaca. He was highly insulted at the suggestion. He said, 'You know very well that the benevolent Quetzalcoatl never required or allowed human sacrifices to him. Why should I?' So now we do not know what to think. How could this outlander know such things about the Feathered Serpent, unless—?"

I snorted. "The girl Ce-Malinali could have told him all the legends of Quetzalcoatl. After all, she was born somewhere along this coast from which the god made his departure."

"Please, Mixtzin, do not call her by that common name," said one of the lords, seeming nervous. "She is most insistent that she be addressed as Malintzin."

I said, amused, "She has risen far, then, since I first met her in a slave market."

"No," said my fellow envoy. "Actually, she was a noble before she was a slave. She was the daughter of a lord and lady of the Coatlicamac. When her father died and her mother remarried, the new husband jealously and treacherously sold her into slavery."

"Indeed," I said drily. "Even her imagination has improved since I first met her. But she did say that she would do anything to realize her ambitions. I suggest to all of you that you be most guarded in the words you speak within hearing of the Lady Malinali."

I think it was on the next day that Cortés arranged for the lords a demonstration of his marvelous weapons and his men's military prowess, and of course I was present, among the crowd of our porters and the local Totonaca who also gathered to watch. Those commoners were awe-stricken by what they saw; they gasped at intervals and murmured "Ayya!" and called often upon their gods. The Mexíca envoys kept they faces impassive, as if they were unimpressed, and I was too busy memorizing the various events to make any exclamations myself. Nevertheless, the lords and I several times flinched at the sudden claps of noise, as startled as any commoners.

Cortés had had his men build a little mock house of driftwood and some leftover ship's timbers, so far up the beach that it was only just visible from where we stood. On the beach before us, he had positioned one of the heavy yellow-metal tubes on high wheels....

No, I will call things by their proper names. The wheel-mounted tube was a brass cannon whose muzzle pointed toward the distant wooden house. Ten or twelve soldiers led horses into a row on the hard-packed damp sand between the cannon and shoreline. The horses wore some of that equipment I had earlier been unable to comprehend: the leather chairs which were saddles for sitting on, leather reins for the animals' guidance, skirts of quilted material very like our people's fighting armor. Other men stood behind the horses, with the giant staghounds straining against the leather straps that held them in check.

All the soldiers were in full fighting garb, and very warlike they looked, with shining steel helmets on their heads and shining steel corselets over leather doublets. They carried swords sheathed at their sides, but when they mounted to their saddles, they were handed long weapons resembling our spears, except that their steel blades, besides being pointed, had protrusions at either side to deflect the blows of any enemies they rode against.

Cortés smiled with proprietorial pride as his warriors got into position. He was flanked by his two interpreters, and Ce-Malinali was also smiling, with the mildly bored superiority of having seen the performance before. Through her and Aguilar, Cortés said to our Mexíca lords, "Your own armies are fond of drums. I have heard their drums. Shall we commence this spectacle with a drum beat?"

Before anyone could answer, he shouted, "For Santiago—now!" The three soldiers tending the cannon did something that flashed a small flame at the rear of the tube, and there came a single drumbeat, as loud as any noise ever made by our drum which tears out the heart. The brass cannon jumped—and so did I—and from its mouth came a smoke like stormclouds, and a thunder to rival Tlaloc's, and a lightning brighter than any of the forked sticks of the tlalóque. Then, after my blink of surprise, I saw a small object hurtling away through the air. It was of course an iron cannon ball, and it hit the faraway house and smashed it into its separate pieces of wood.

The cannon's sudden crash of thunder was prolonged, as Tlaloc's often is, into a rumble of lesser thunder. That was the sound the horses' iron-shod feet made, pounding on the sand flats, for the riders had put their mounts to a full gallop at the moment the cannon had bellowed. They went off along the beach, side by side, as fast as any unencumbered deer could run, and the great dogs, let loose at the same time, easily kept up with them. The horsemen converged on the ruins of the house, and we could see the glint of their flourished spears, as they pretended to cut down any survivors of the demolition. Then they all turned their mounts and came pounding back down the beach toward us again. The dogs did not immediately accompany them, and, although my ears were ringing, I could distantly hear the staghounds making ravenous roaring noises, and I thought I heard men shrieking. When the dogs did return, their fearsome jaws were smeared with blood. Either some of the Totonaca had chosen to hide near that mock house to watch the proceedings, or Cortés had deliberately and callously arranged for them to be there.

Meanwhile, the approaching horsemen were no longer keeping in a line abreast. They were weaving their horses back and forth among each other, in intricate movements and crossings and patterns, to show us what perfect control they could maintain even at that headlong speed. Also, the big red-bearded man, Alvarado, did an even more amazing performance all his own. At full gallop, he swung off his saddle and, holding to it with just one hand, ran alongside his thundering animal, easily keeping pace with it, and then somehow, without slowing speed, vaulted from the ground back onto the leather seat. It would have been an exploit of admirable agility even for one of the Fast of Feet Rarámuri, but Alvarado did it while wearing a costume of steel and leather that must have weighed as much as he did.

When the horsemen had finished displaying the speed and surefootedness of their massive animals, a number of foot soldiers deployed on the beach. Some carried the metal harquebuses as long as the men were tall, and the metal rods upon which those things must be rested for taking aim. Some carried the short bows mounted crossways on heavy stocks which are held braced against the shoulder. A number of adobe bricks were brought by some Totonaca laborers and stood on end a good arrow's flight distant from the soldiers. Then the white men knelt and alternately discharged the bows and the harquebuses. The bowmen's accuracy was commendable, hitting perhaps two of every five bricks, but they were not very quick with their weapons. After propelling an arrow, they could not just pull the bowstring back again by hand, but had to draw it taut along the stock by means of a small turning tool.

The harquebuses were more formidable weapons; just the crash of noise and the billows of smoke and the flashes of fire they made were enough to daunt any enemy facing them for the first time. But they threw more than fear; they threw small metal pellets, flying so fast that they were invisible. Where the short arrows of the crossbows merely stuck in the bricks they hit, the metal pellets of the harquebuses struck the bricks so hard that they blew apart into fragments and dust. Nevertheless, I took note that the pellets really flew no farther than one of our arrows could fly, and a man using the harquebus took so long to prepare it for its next discharge that any of our bowmen could have sent six or seven arrows at him in the interval.

By the time the demonstration was over, I had still more bark paper drawings to show to Motecuzóma, and much to tell him besides. I lacked only the pictured face of Cortés he had requested. Many years before, in Texcóco, I had sworn never to draw any more portraits, for they seemed always to visit some disaster upon the person I portrayed, but I had no compunction about bringing trouble to any of the white men. So the next evening, when the Mexíca lords sat down for their final meeting with Cortés and his under-chiefs and his priests, there were five of us lords. None of the Spaniards seemed to notice or to care that our number had been increased by a newcomer, and neither Aguilar nor Ce-Malinali recognized me in my lordly vestments any more than they had when I was posing as a porter.

We all sat and dined together, and I will refrain from comment on the eating manners of the white men. The food had been provided by us, so it was all of the best quality. The Spaniards had contributed a beverage called wine, poured from large leather bags. Some of it was pale and sour, some dark and sweet, and I drank only sparingly, for it was quite as intoxicating as octli. While my four companion envoys carried the burden of what conversation there was, I sat silent, trying as unobtrusively as possible to capture Cortés's likeness with my chalk and bark paper. Seeing him close for the first time, I could discern that the hair of his beard was rather more sparse than that of his fellows. It could not adequately conceal an ugly puckered scar under his lower lip, and a chin that receded almost like a Maya chin, and I put those details into my portrait. Then I became aware that the whole circle of men had fallen silent, and I looked up to find Cortés gray eyes fixed on me.

He said, "So I am being recorded for posterity? Let me see it." He spoke in Spanish, of course, but his extended hand would have conveyed the same command, so I gave him the paper.

"Well, I would not call it flattering," he said, "but it is recognizable." He showed it to Alvarado and the other Spaniards, and they severally chuckled and nodded. "As for the artist," said Cortés, still staring at me, "regard the face on him, comrades. Why, if he were plucked of all those feathers he wears, and powdered a little paler of complexion, he could pass for an hijodalgo, even a grandee. Were you to meet him at the Court of Castile—a man of that stature and that craggy face—you would doff your hats in a sweeping bow." He gave the picture back to me, and his interpreters translated the next remark, "Why am I being thus portrayed?"

One of my companion lords, thinking quickly, said, "Since our Revered Speaker Motecuzóma will unfortunately not have the opportunity of meeting you, my Lord Captain, he asked that we bring him your likeness as a memento of your short stay in these lands."

Cortés smiled with his lips, not with his flat eyes, and said, "But I will meet your emperor. I am determined on it. All of us so admired the treasures he sent as gifts that we are all most eager to see the other wonders that must reside in his capital city. I would not think of departing before I and my men feast our eyes of what we have been told is the richest city in these lands."

When that exchange had been translated back and forth, another of my companions put on a mournful face and said, "Ayya, that the white lord should travel such a long and hazardous way to find only disappointment. We had not wanted to confess it, but the Revered Speaker stripped and despoiled his city to provide those gifts. He had heard that the white visitors prized gold, so he sent all the gold he possessed. Also all his other trinkets of any value. The city is now poor and bleak. It is not worth the visitors' even looking at it."

When Ce-Malinali translated that speech, to Aguilar in the Xiu language, we translated it thus: "The Revered Speaker Motecuzóma sent those trifling gifts in hope that the Captain Cortés would be satisfied with them and would immediately go away. But in fact they represented only the merest skimming of the inestimable treasures in Tenochtítlan. Motecuzóma wishes to discourage the Captain from seeing the real wealth that abounds in his capital city."

While Aguilar was putting that into Spanish for Cortés, I spoke for the first time, and quietly, and to Ce-Malinali, and in her native tongue of Coatlicamac, so that only she and I would understand:

"Your job is to speak what is spoken, not to invent lies."

"But he lied!" she blurted, pointing to my companion. Then she blushed, realizing that she had been caught in her duplicity and that she had confessed to having been caught.

I said, "I know his motive for lying. I should be interested to know yours."

She stared at me, and her eyes widened in recognition. "You!" she breathed, mingling fright, loathing, and dismay in that one word.

Our brief colloquy had gone unnoticed by the others, and Aguilar still had not recognized me. When Cortés spoke again, and Ce-Malinali translated it, her voice was only a little unsteady:

"We would be gratified if your emperor were to extend to us his formal invitation to visit his magnificent city. But tell him, my lords ambassadors, that we do not insist upon any official welcome. We will come there, with or without an invitation. Assure him that we will come."

My four companions all began at once to expostulate, but Cortés cut them short, saying:

"Now, we have carefully explained to you the nature of our mission, how our emperor the King Carlos sent us with most particular instructions to pay our respects to your ruler, and to ask his permission to introduce the Holy Christian Faith into these lands. And we have carefully explained the nature of that Faith, of the Lord God, the Christ Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, who wish only that all peoples live in brotherly love. We have also taken the trouble to demonstrate to you the insuperable weapons we possess. I cannot think of anything we have neglected to make clear to you. But before you depart, is there anything else you would know of us? Any questions you care to ask?"

My four companions looked bothered and indignant, but they said nothing. So I cleared my throat, and spoke directly to Cortés, and in his own language: "I have one question, my lord."

The white men all looked surprised at being addressed in Spanish, and Ce-Malinali stiffened, no doubt fearing that I was about to denounce her—or perhaps apply to take her place as interpreter.

"I am curious to know..." I began, pretending humility and uncertainty. "Could you tell me...?"

"Yes?" prompted Cortés.

Still seeming shy and hesitant, I said, "I have heard your men—so many of your men—speak of our women as, well, incomplete in a certain respect...."

There was a clanking of metal and a squeaking of leather as all the white men bent closer their attention to me. "Yes? Yes?"

I asked as if I really wanted to know, and asked politely, solemnly, with no hint of scurrility or mockery. "Do your women... does your Virgin Mary have hair covering her private parts?"

There was another clank and squeak of their armor; I think their opening mouths and eyelids almost squeaked too, as they all sat back and gaped at me—rather as Your Excellency is doing at this moment. There were shocked mutters of "Locura!" and "Blasfemia!" and "Ultraje!"

Only one of them, the big flame-bearded Alvarado, laughed uproariously. He turned to the priests dining with us and pounded his big hands on the shoulders of two of them and, between his gusts of laughter, asked, "Padre Bartolome, Padre Merced, have you ever been asked that before? Did the seminary teach you a suitable answer to that question? Have you ever even thought of it before? Eh?"

The priests made no comment, except to glare at me and grind their teeth and make the cross sign to ward off evil. Cortés had not taken his eyes off me. Still skewering me with his falcon gaze, he said, "No, you are no hijodalgo or grandee, or any other sort of courtly gentleman. But you will bear remembering. Yes, I will remember you."

Next morning, while our party was packing to depart, Ce-Malinali came and imperiously beckoned to me, indicating that she wished a private discussion. I took my time about joining her. When I did, I said:

"This should be interesting. Speak, One Grass."

"Kindly do not address me by my discarded slave name. You will call me Malintzin or Doña Marina." She explained, "I was christened with the name of the Santa Margarita Marina. That means nothing to you, of course, but I suggest that you show me the proper respect, for the Captain Cortés regards me highly, and he is quick to punish insolence."

I said coldly, "Then I suggest that you sleep very close against your Captain Cortés, for at a word from me any of these Totonaca hereabout will gladly slip a blade between your ribs the first time you are off guard. You are talking insolently now to the Lord Mixtli, who earned the -tzin to his name. Slave girl, you may fool the white men with your pretensions to nobility. You may endear yourself to them by coloring your hair like a maátitl. But your own people see exactly that: a red-haired slut who has sold more than just her own body to the invader Cortés."

That shook her, and she said defensively, "I do not sleep with the Captain Cortés. I serve only as his interpreter. When the Tabascoob presented us, we twenty women were shared out among the white men. I was given to that man." She indicated one of the under-chiefs who had dined with us. "His name is Alonso."

"Are you enjoying him?" I asked drily. "As I recall from our earlier meeting, you expressed a hatred of men and the use they make of women."

"I can pretend anything," she said. "Anything that serves my purpose."

"And what is your purpose? I am sure the mistranslation I overheard was not your first. Why do you goad Cortés to press on to Tenochtítlan?"

"Because I wish to go there. I told you so, years ago, when we first met. Once I get to Tenochtítlan, I care not what happens to the white men. Perhaps I will be rewarded for having brought them to where Motecuzóma can squash them like bugs. Anyway, I will be where I have always wanted to be, and I will be noticed and known, and it will not take me long to become a noblewoman in fact as well as in name."

"On the other hand," I suggested, "if by some quirk of chance the white men are not squashed, you would be even better rewarded."

She made a gesture of indifference. "I only wish to ask... to beg if you like, Lord Mixtli... that you do nothing to imperil my opportunity. Only give me time to prove my usefulness to Cortés, so that he cannot dispense with my help and advice. Only let me get to Tenochtítlan. It can matter little to you or to your Revered Speaker or to anyone else, but it matters much to me."

I shrugged and said, "I do not step out of my way just to squash bugs. I will not impede your ambitions, slave girl, unless and until they conflict with the interests I serve."

While Motecuzóma studied the portrait of Cortés and the other drawings I had given him, I enumerated the persons and things I had counted:

"Including the leader and his several officers, there are five hundred and eight fighting men. Most of them carry the metal swords and spears, but thirteen of them have also the fire-stick harquebuses, thirty and two have the crossbows, and I venture to suppose that all the other men are equally capable of using those special weapons. There are, in addition, one hundred men who were evidently the boatmen of the ten ships that were burned.

Motecuzóma handed the sheaf of bark papers over his shoulder. The elders of the Speaking Council, ranged behind him, began to pass them back and forth.

I went on, "There are four white priests. There are numerous women of our own race, given to the white men by the Tabascoob of Cupilco and by Patzinca of the Totonaca. There are sixteen of the riding horses and twelve of the giant hunting dogs. There are ten of the far-throwing cannons and four smaller cannons. As we were told, Lord Speaker, there remains only one ship still floating in the bay, and there are boatmen aboard, but I could not count them."

Two of the Council, two physicians, were solemnly scrutinizing my drawings of Cortés and conferring in professional mumbles.

I concluded, "Besides the persons I have mentioned, practically the entire Totonaca population appears to be at Cortés's command, working as porters and carpenters and masons and such... when they are not being taught by the white priests how to worship before the cross and the lady image."

One of the two doctors said, "Lord Speaker, if I may make a comment..." Motecuzóma nodded permission. "My colleague and I have looked hard at this drawing of the face of the man Cortés, and at the other drawings which show him entire."

Motecuzóma said impatiently, "And I suppose, as physicians, you officially declare him to be a man."

"Not just that, my lord. There are other signs diagnostic. It is impossible to say with certainty, unless we should sometime have a chance to examine him in person. But it very much appears, from his weak features and sparse hair and the ill proportioning of his body, that he was born of a mother afflicted with the shameful disease nanaua. We have seen the same characteristics often in the offspring of the lowest class of maátime."

"Indeed?" said Motecuzóma, visibly brightening. "If this is true, and the nanaua has affected his brain, it would explain some of his actions. Only a madman would have burned those vessels and destroyed his only means of retreat to safety. And if a man consumed by the nanaua is the leader of the outlanders, the others must be vermin of even feebler intellect. And you, Mixtzin, tell us that their weapons are not so invincibly terrible as others have described them. Do you know, I begin to think that we may have much exaggerated the peril posed by these visitors."

Motecuzóma was suddenly more cheerful than I had seen him in a long time, but his swift rebound from gloom to jauntiness did not dispose me to imitate it. He had until then held the white men in awe, as gods or messengers of gods, requiring our respect and propitiation and perhaps our utter submission. But, on hearing my report and the doctors' opinion, he was just as ready to dismiss the white men as undeserving of our attention or concern. One attitude seemed to me as dangerous as the other, but I could not say that in so many words. Instead I said:

"Perhaps Cortés is diseased to the point of madness, Lord Speaker, but a madman can be even more fearsome than a sane one. It was only months ago that these same vermin easily vanquished some five thousand warriors in the Olméca lands."

"But the Olméca defenders did not have our advantage." It was not Motecuzóma who spoke, but his brother, the war chief Cuitlahuac. "They went against the white men in the age-old tactic of close combat. But thanks to you, Lord Mixtli, we now know something of the enemy's capabilities. I will equip the majority of my troops with bows and arrows. We can stay out of range of their metal weapons, we can dodge the discharges of their unwieldy fire weapons, and we can deluge them with arrows faster than they can send projectiles in return."

Motecuzóma said indulgently, "It is expectable that a war chief speaks of war. But I see no need for fighting at all. We simply send a command to the Lord Patzinca that the Totonaca cease all aid to the white men, and all supplying of food and women and other comforts. The intruders should soon tire of eating only what fish they can catch, and drinking only coconut juice, and enduring high summer in the Hot Lands."

It was his Snake Woman, Tlacotzin, who disputed that. "Patzinca seems disinclined to refuse anything to the white men, Revered Speaker. The Totonaca have never rejoiced at being our tributary subjects. They may prefer this change of overlords."

One of the envoys who had gone with me to the coast said, "Also, the white men speak of other white men, countless numbers more, living wherever it is that these came from. If we fight and vanquish this company, or starve them into surrender, how can we know when the next will come, or how many they will be, or what more powerful weapons they may bring?"

Motecuzóma's new cheerfulness had rather dissipated. His eyes darted restlessly about, as if he were unconsciously seeking an escape—whether from the white men or from the necessity of making a firm decision, I do not know. But his gaze eventually touched me, and stayed on me, and he said, "Mixtzin, your fidgeting speaks of impatience. What is it you would say?"

I said without hesitation, "Burn the white men's one remaining ship."

Some of the men in the throne room blurted, "What?" or "Shame!" Others said things like, "Attack the visitors without provocation?" and "Open war without sending the tokens of declaration?" Motecuzóma silenced them all with a slashing gesture and said to me only, "Why?"

"Before we left the coast, my lord, that ship was being loaded with the melted-down gold and the other gifts you sent. It will soon wing away to the place called Cuba or the place called Spain, or perhaps directly to report to that King Carlos. The white men were hungry for gold, and my lord's gifts have not sated them, but only whetted their appetite for more. If that ship is allowed to depart, with proof that there is gold here, nothing can save us from an inundation of more and more white men hungry for gold. But the ship is made of wood. Send only a few good Mexíca warriors out upon that bay, my lord, by night and in canoes. While pretending to fish by torchlight, they can approach near enough to fire that ship."

"And then?" Motecuzóma chewed his lip. "Cortés and his company would be entirely cut off from their homeland. They would certainly march this way—and certainly with no friendly intent, not after such a hostile action on our part."

"Revered Speaker," I said wearily, "they will come anyway, whatever we do or refrain from doing. And they will come with their tame Totonaca to show them the way, to carry supplies for the journey, to make sure they survive the mountain crossings and their encounters with other people on the way. But we can prevent that, too. I have made careful note of the terrain. There are only so many ways to ascend from the coast to the higher lands, and they all lead through steep and narrow defiles. In those tight places, the white men's horses and harquebuses and cannons will be all but useless, their metal armor no defense. A few good Mexíca warriors posted in those passes, with nothing but boulders for weapons, could mash every man of them to pulp."

There was another chorus of horrified exclamation, at my suggestion that the Mexíca attack by stealth, like savages. But I went on, more loudly:

"We must stop this invasion by whatever ugly means is most expedient, or we have no hope of averting further invasions. The man Cortés, perhaps being mad, has made it easier for us. He has already burned ten of his ships, leaving us only the one to destroy. If that messenger ship never returns to the King Carlos, if not one white man is left alive and capable, of making even a raft for his escape, the King Carlos will never know what became of this expedition. He may believe it traveled on forever without finding land, or that it disappeared in some sea of perpetual storm, or that it was obliterated by a formidably powerful people. We can hope that he will never risk sending another expedition."

There was a long silence in the throne room. No one wanted to be the first to comment, and I tried not to fidget. Finally it was Cuitlahuac who said, "It sounds practical advice, Lord Brother."

"It sounds monstrous," grumbled Motecuzóma. "First to destroy the outlander's ship, and thereby prod them into advancing inland, and then to catch them defenseless in a sneak attack. This will require much meditation, much consultation with the gods."

"Lord Speaker!" I said urgently, desperately. "That messenger ship may be spreading its wings at this very moment!"

"Which would indicate," he said, impervious, "that the gods meant for it to go. Kindly do not flap your hands at me like that."

My hands actually wanted to strangle him, but I constrained them to a gesture of no more than resigned relinquishment of my proposal.

He mused aloud, "If the King Carlos hears no more of his company and assumes them to be in trouble, that King may not hesitate to send rescuers or reinforcements. Perhaps uncountable ships bringing uncountable white men. From the casual way in which Cortés burned his ten ships, it is apparent that the King Carlos has plenty in reserve. It may be that Cortés is only the merest point of a spearhead already launched. It may be our wisest course to treat warily and peaceably with Cortés, at least until we can determine how heavy is the spear behind him." Motecuzóma stood up, to signal our dismissal, and said in parting, "I will think on all that has been said. Meanwhile, I will send quimichime to the Totonaca lands, and to all lands between here and there, to keep me advised of the white men's doings."

Quimichime means mice, but the word was also used to mean spies. Motecuzóma's retinue of slaves included men from every nation in The One World, and the more trusty of them he employed often to spy for him in their native lands, for they could infiltrate their own people and move among them with perfect anonymity. Of course, I myself had recently played the spy in the Totonaca country, and I had done similar work on other occasions—even in places where I could not pass for a native—but I was only one man. Whole flocks of mice, such as Motecuzóma then sent, could cover much more ground and bring back much more information.

Motecuzóma again called for the presence of the Speaking Council and myself, when the first quimichi returned—to report that the white men's one floating house had indeed unfurled large wings and gone eastward out of sight across the sea.

Dismayed though I was at hearing that, I nevertheless listened to the rest of the report, for the mouse had done a good job of looking and listening, even overhearing several translated conversations.

The messenger ship had departed with however many boatmen it required, plus one man detached from Cortés's military force, presumably entrusted to deliver the gold and other gifts, and to make Corps's official report to his King Carlos. That man was the officer Alonso, who had had the keeping of Ce-Malinali, but of course he had not taken that valuable young woman with him when he left. The not noticeably bereaved Malintzin—as everyone was increasingly calling her—had immediately become concubine as well as interpreter to Cortés.

With her help, Cortés had made a speech to the Totonaca. He told them that the messenger ship would return with his King's commission elevating him in rank. He would anticipate that promotion, and henceforth be entitled not mere Captain but Captain-General. Further anticipating his King's commands, he was giving a new name to Cem-Anáhuac, The One World. The coastal land which he already held, he said, and all the lands he would in future discover, would henceforth be known as the Captaincy General of New Spain. Of course, those Spanish words meant little to us then, especially as the quimichi relayed them to us in his Totonacatl accent. But it was clear enough that Cortés—whether pitiably mad or incredibly bold or, as I suspected, acting on the prompting of his ambitious consort—was arrogating to himself limitless lands and numberless peoples he had not yet even seen, let alone conquered by combat or other means. The lands over which he claimed dominion included ours, and the peoples over whom he claimed sovereignty included us, the Mexíca.

Almost frothing with outrage, Cuitlahuac said, "If that is not a declaration of war, Revered Brother, I have never heard one."

Motecuzóma said uncertainly, "He has not yet sent any war gifts or other tokens of such intention."

"Will you wait until he discharges one of those thunder cannons into your ear?" Cuitlahuac impertinently demanded. "Obviously he is ignorant of our custom of giving due advisement. Perhaps the white men do it only with words of challenge and presumption, as he has done. So let us teach the upstart some good manners. Let us send him our war gifts of token weapons and banners. Then let us go down to the coast and push the insufferable braggart into the sea!"

"Calm yourself, Brother," said Motecuzóma. "As yet, he had bothered nobody in these parts except the paltry Totonaca, and even at them he has only made noise. So far as I am concerned, Cortés can stand on that beach forever, and preen and posture and break wind from both ends. Meanwhile, until he actually does something, we will wait."

I H S

S.C.C.M.

Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:

Esteemed Majesty, our Royal Patron: from this City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty and one, greeting.

Since we have received from Your Transcendent Majesty no order to desist in the compilation of this chronicle, and since with the following pages it now at last seems to us complete, and since even the narrating Aztec himself declares that he has no more to say, we herewith annex the final and concluding segment.

Much of the Indian's relation of the Conquest and its aftermath will already be familiar to Your Omnilegent Majesty, from the accounts sent during those years by Captain-General Cortés and other officers chronicling the events in which they took part. However, if nothing else, our Aztec's account rather repudiates the Captain-General's tediously repeated boast that only "he and a handful of stout Castilian soldiers" conquered this whole continent unaided.

Beyond any doubt, now that we and you, Sire, can contemplate this history entire, it is nothing like what Your Majesty must have envisioned when your royal cédula commanded its commencement. And we hardly need reiterate our own dissatisfaction with what it proved to be. Nevertheless, if it has been in the least informative to our Sovereign, or to any extent edifying in its plethora of bizarre minutiae and arcana, we will try to persuade ourself that our patience and forbearance and the drudging labors of our friar scribes have not entirely been a waste. We pray that Your Majesty, imitating the benign King of Heaven, will consider not the trivial value of the accumulated volumes, but the sincerity with which we undertook the work and the spirit in which we offer it, and that you will regard it and us with an indulgent aspect.

Also, we would inquire, before we terminate the Aztec's employment here, might Your Majesty desire that we demand of him any further information or any addenda to his already voluminous account? In such case, we shall take care to see to his continued availability. But if you have no further use for the Indian, Sire, might it be your pleasure to dictate the disposition now to be made of him, or would Your Majesty prefer that we simply relinquish him to God for the determination of his due?

Meantime, and at all times, that God's holy grace may dwell continuously in the soul of our Praiseworthy Majesty, is the uninterrupted prayer of Your S.C.C.M.'s devoted servant,

(ecce signum) Zumárraga

ULTIMA PARS

As I have told you, reverend scribes, the name of our eleventh month, Ochpaniztli, meant The Sweeping of the Road. That year, the name took on a new and sinister import, for it was then, toward the close of that month, when the rains of the rainy season began to abate that Cortés began his threatened march inland. Leaving his boatmen and some of his soldiers to garrison his town of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, Cortés headed westward to the mountains, with about four hundred fifty white troops and about one thousand three hundred Totonaca warriors, all armed and wearing fighting garb. There were another thousand Totonaca men serving as tamémime to carry spare arms, the dismantled cannons and their heavy projectiles, traveling rations, and the like. Among those porters were several of Motecuzóma's mice, who communicated with other quimichime posted along the route, thereby keeping us in Tenochtítlan informed of the procession's composition and its progress.

Cortés led the march, they said, wearing his shining metal armor and riding the horse he derisively but affectionately called She-Mule. His other female possession, Malintzin, carried his banner and walked proudly beside his saddle at the head of the company. Only a few of the other officers had brought their women, for even the lowest-ranking white soldiers expected to be given or to take other women along the way. But all the horses and dogs had been brought, though the quimichime reported that the mounts became slow and clumsy and troublesome when they were on the mountain trails. Also, in those heights Tlaloc was prolonging his rainy season, and the rain was cold, windblown, often mixed with sleet. The travelers, soaked and chilled, their armor a clammy weight on them, were hardly enjoying the journey.

"Ayyo!" said Motecuzóma, much pleased. "They find the interior country not so hospitable as the Hot Lands. I will now send my sorcerers to make life even more uncomfortable for them."

Cuitlahuac said grimly, "Better you let me take warriors and make life impossible for them."

Motecuzóma still said no. "I prefer to preserve an illusion of amiability as long as the pretense may serve our purpose. Let the sorcerers curse and afflict that company until they turn back of their own accord, not knowing it was our doing. Let them report to their King that the land is unhealthy and impenetrable, but give no bad report of us."

So the court sorcerers went scurrying eastward, disguised as common travelers. Now, sorcerers may be capable of doing many strange and wonderful things beyond the power of ordinary folk, but the impediments they put in the way of Cortés proved pitifully ineffectual. First, in the trail ahead of the marching company, they stretched between trees some thin threads on which hung blue papers marked with mysterious designs. Although those barriers were supposed to be impassable by any but sorcerers, the horse She-Mule, leading the train, unconcernedly broke through them, and probably not its rider Cortés nor anyone else even noticed the things. The sorcerers sent word back to Motecuzóma, not that they had failed, but that the horses possessed some sorcery which defeated that particular stratagem.

What they did next was secretly to meet with the quimichime traveling unsuspected with the train, and arrange to have those mice insinuate into the white men's rations some ceiba sap and tonaltin fruits. The sap of the ceiba tree, when ingested by a person, makes that person so hungry that he eats voraciously of everything on which he can get his hands and teeth, until, in only a matter of days, he becomes so fat that he cannot move. At least, so say the sorcerers; I have never witnessed the phenomenon. But the tonal fruit demonstrably does work mischief, though of a less spectacular nature. The tonal is what you call the prickly pear, the fruit of the nopali cactus, and the early-arriving Spaniards did not know to peel it carefully before biting into it. So it was the expectation of the sorcerers that the white men would be intolerably tormented when the tiny, invisible but painful prickles got irremovably into their fingers and lips and tongues. The tonal does something else besides. Anyone who eats its red pulp urinates an even brighter red urine, and a man passing what looks like blood may be terrified by the certainty that he is mortally ill.

If the ceiba sap made any of the white men fat, none of them got so fat as to be immobilized. If the white men cursed the tonaltin needles, or were dismayed when they apparently leaked blood, that did not stop them either. Perhaps their beards gave them some protection against the prickles and, for all I know, they always urinated red. But it is more likely that the woman Malintzin, knowing how easily her new comrades could be poisoned, paid close attention to what they ate, and showed them how to eat tonaltin, and told them what to expect afterward. At any rate, the white men kept moving inexorably westward.

When Motecuzóma's mice brought him word of his sorcerers' futility, they brought another and even more worrisome report. Cortés's company was passing through the lands of many minor tribes resident in those mountains, tribes like the Tepeyahuaca, the Xica, and others who had never been very amenable to paying tribute to our Triple Alliance. At each village, the marching Totonaca soldiers would call out, "Come! Join us! Rally to Cortés! He leads us to free ourselves from the detested Motecuzóma!" And those tribes did willingly contribute many warriors. So, although by then several white men were being carried in litters because they had injured themselves by falling off their stumbling horses, and although numbers of the lowland Totonaca had dropped by the wayside when they were made ill by the thin air of those heights, Cortés's company did not dwindle but increased in strength.

"You hear, Revered Brother!" Cuitlahuac stormed at Motecuzóma. "The creatures even dare to boast that they are coming to confront you personally! We have every excuse to swoop upon them, and now is the time to do it. As the Lord Mixtli predicted, they are nearly helpless in those mountains. We need not fear their animals or weapons. You can no longer say wait!"

"I say wait," Motecuzóma replied, imperturbable. "And I have good reason. Waiting will save many lives."

Cuitlihuac literally snarled, "Tell me: when in all of history has any single life ever been saved?"

Motecuzóma looked annoyed and said, "Very well, then, I speak of not cutting unnecessarily short the life of any Mexícatl soldier. Know this, Brother. Those outlanders are now approaching the eastern border of Texcala, the nation that has for so long repelled the fiercest assaults of even us Mexíca. That land will not be any more ready to welcome another enemy of a different color coming from a different direction. Let the Texcalteca fight the invaders, and we Mexíca will profit in at least two respects. The white men and their Totonaca will most surely be vanquished, but I also trust that the Texcalteca will suffer sufficient losses that we can strike them immediately afterward and, at last, defeat them utterly. If in the process we should find any white men still surviving, we will give them succor and shelter. It will appear to them that we have fought solely to rescue them. We will have won their gratitude and that of their King Carlos. Who can say what further benefits may accrue to us? So we will continue to wait."

If Motecuzóma had confided to Texcala's ruler Xicotenca what we had learned of the white men's fighting capabilities and limitations, the Texcalteca would wisely have pounced upon the white men somewhere in the steep mountains of which their nation" has an abundance. Instead, Xicotenca's son and war chief, Xicotenca the Younger, chose to make his stand on one of Texcala's few level grounds of great expanse. In the traditional manner, he arrayed his troops in preparation for fighting one of the traditional battles—in which both opponents poised their forces, exchanged the traditional formalities, and then rushed together to pit human strength against human strength. Xicotenca may have heard rumors that the new enemy possessed more than human strength, but he had no way of knowing that the new enemy cared not a little finger for our world's traditions and our established rules of war.

As we in Tenochtítlan heard later, Cortés walked out of a wood on the edge of that plain, leading his four hundred fifty white soldiers and by then about three thousand warriors of the Totonaca and other tribes, to find himself facing, on the other side of that ground, a solid wall of Texcalteca, at least ten thousand of them; some reports said as many as thirty thousand. Even if Cortés had been deranged by disease, as alleged, he would have recognized the formidability of his opponents. They were garbed in their quilted armor of yellow and white. They bore their many great feather banners, variously worked with the wide-winged golden eagle of Texcala and the white heron symbol of Xicotenca. They threateningly thumped their war drums and played the shrill war whistle on their flutes. Their spears and maquihuime flashed brilliant lights from the clean black obsidian that thirsted to be reddened.

Cortés must have wished then that he had better allies than his Totonaca, with their weapons made mostly of sawfish snouts and sharpened bones, their unwieldy shields which were nothing but the carapaces of sea turtles. But if Cortés was at all worried, he remained calm enough to keep his most outlandish weapon concealed. The Texcalteca saw only him and those of his army who were afoot. All the horses, including his own, were still in the wood, and at his command they stayed there, out of sight of the defenders of Texcala.

As tradition dictated, several Texcalteca lords stepped forward from their ranks and crossed the green plain between the two armies, and ceremoniously presented the symbolic weapons, the feather mantles and shields, to declare that a state of hostility existed. Cortés deliberately lengthened that ceremony by asking that the meaning of it be explained to him. And I should remark that Aguilar was by then seldom needed as an intermediate interpreter; the woman Malintzin had exerted herself to learn Spanish, and she had progressed rapidly; after all, bed is the best place to learn any language. So, after acknowledging the Texcalteca's declaration, Cortés made one of his own, unrolling a scroll and reading from it while Malintzin translated to the waiting lords. I can repeat it from memory, for he made the same proclamation outside every village, town, city and nation that shut itself against his approach. He first demanded that he be let enter without hindrance, and then he said:

"But if you will not comply, then, with the help of God, I will enter by force. I will make war against you with the utmost violence. I will bind you to the yoke of obedience to our Holy Church and our King Carlos. I will take your wives and children, and make them slaves, or sell them, according to His Majesty's pleasure. I will seize your belongings, and do you all the mischief in my power, regarding you as rebellious subjects who maliciously refuse to submit to their lawful sovereign. Therefore, all ensuing bloodshed and calamity are to be imputed to you, and not to His Majesty or to me or to the gentlemen who serve under me."

It can be imagined that the Texcalteca lords were not much pleased to be called subjects of any alien, or to be told that they were disobeying any alien in defending their own frontier. If anything, those haughty words only heightened their desire for bloody battle, and the bloodier the better. So they made no reply, but turned and stalked back the long distance to where their warriors were more and more loudly whooping and making their flutes shriek and their drums throb.

But that exchange of formalities had given Cortés's men ample time to assemble and position their ten big-mouthed cannons and the four smaller ones, and to charge them not with house-battering balls but with scraps of jagged metal, broken glass, rough gravel, and the like. The harquebuses were prepared and set upon their supports and aimed, and the crossbows were readied. Cortés quickly gave commands, and Malintzin repeated them to the allied warriors, and then she hurried to safety, back the way they had come. Cortés and his men stood or knelt while others, staying in the woods, sat upon their horses. And they all waited patiently, while the great wall of yellow and white suddenly surged forward, and a rain of arrows arced from it across the field between, and the wall resolved itself into a rush of thousands of warriors, beating their shields, roaring like jaguars, screaming like eagles.

Not Cortés nor any of his men moved to meet them in the traditional manner. He merely shouted, "For Santiago!" and the bellow of the cannons made the Texcalteca's war noises sound like the creaking of crickets in a thunderstorm. All the warriors in the first onrushing rank tore apart in bits of bone and blobs of flesh and spatters of blood. The men in the following rank simply fell, but fell dead, and for no immediately apparent reason, since the harquebuses' pellets and the crossbow's short arrows disappeared inside their thick quilted armor. Then there was a different kind of thunder, as the horsemen came at full gallop out of the wood, the staghounds running with them. The white soldiers rode with their spears leveled, and they skewered their quarry in the way that chilis are strung on a string, and when their spears could collect no more bodies, the riders dropped the spears and unsheathed their steel swords and rode flailing them so that amputated hands and arms and even heads flew in the air. And the dogs lunged and ripped and tore, and cotton armor was no protection against their fangs. The Texcalteca were understandably taken by surprise. Shocked, dismayed, and terrified, they lost their impetus and will to win; they scattered and milled about and wielded their inferior weapons desperately but to little use. Several times their knights and cuáchictin rallied and regrouped them and led them in renewed charges. But each time the cannons and harquebuses and crossbows had again been prepared, and they let loose their terrible shredding and piercing projectiles again and again into the Texcalteca ranks, causing unspeakable devastation....

Well, I need not tell every detail of the one-sided battle; what happened that day is well known. In any case, I can describe it only from what was later told by the day's survivors, though I myself eventually saw occasions of similar slaughter. The Texcalteca fled from the field, pursued by Cortés's native Totonaca warriors, who loudly and cowardly exulted in the opportunity to participate in a battle that required them only to harry the retreating warriors from behind. The Texcalteca left perhaps one-third of their entire force lying on the field that day, and they had inflicted only trivial casualties on the enemy. One horse downed, I think, and a few Spaniards pricked by the first arrows, and some others more badly injured by fortunate strokes of maquahuime, but none killed or put out of action for long. When the Texcalteca had fled beyond range of pursuit, Cortés and his men made camp right there on the battlefield, to bind up their few wounds and to celebrate their victory.

Considering the awful losses it had suffered, it is to the credit of Texcala that the nation did not surrender itself to Cortés forthwith. But the Texcalteca were a brave and proud and defiant people. Unfortunately, they had an unshakable faith in the infallibility of their seers and sorcerers. So it was to those wise men that the war chief Xicotenca resorted, in the very evening of that day of defeat, and asked of them:

"Are these outlanders really gods, as rumored? Are they truly invincible? Is there any way to overcome their flame-spouting weapons? Should I waste still more good men by fighting any longer?"

The seers, after deliberating by whatever magical means they employed, said this:

"No, they are not gods. They are men. But the evidence of their weapons' discharging flame suggests that they have somehow learned to employ the hot power of the sun. As long as the sun shines, they have the superiority of their fire-spitting weapons. But when the sun goes down, so will their sun-given strength. By night, they will be only ordinary men, able to use only ordinary weapons. They will be as vulnerable as any other men, and as weary from the day's exertions. If you would vanquish them, you must attack by night. Tonight. This very night. Or at sunrise, they will rise also, and they will sweep your army from the field as weeds are mowed."

"Attack at night?" Xicotenca murmured. "It is against all custom. It violates all the traditions of fair combat. Except in siege situations, no armies have ever done battle by night."

The sages nodded. "Exactly. The white outlanders will be off guard and not expecting any such assault. Do the unexpected."

The Texcalteca seers were as calamitously in error as seers everywhere so often are. For white armies in their own lands evidently do fight often by night among themselves, and are accustomed to taking precautions against any such surprises. Cortés had posted sentries at a distance all around his camp, men who stayed awake and alert while all their fellows slept in full battle garb and armor, with their weapons already charged and near to their hands. Even in the darkness, Cortés's sentries easily descried the first advance Texcalteca scouts creeping on their bellies across the open ground.

The guards raised no cry of alarm, but slipped back to camp and quietly woke Cortés and the rest of his army. No soldier stood up in profile against the sky; no man raised himself higher than a sitting or kneeling position; none made a noise. So Xicotenca's scouts returned to report to him that the whole camp seemed to be defenselessly asleep and unaware. What remained of the Texcalteca army moved in mass, on hands and knees, until they were right upon the camp's perimeter. Then they rose up to leap upon the sleeping enemy, but they had no chance to give even a war cry. As soon as they were upright, and easy targets, the night exploded in lightning and thunder and the whistle of projectiles... and Xicotenca's army was swept from the field as weeds are mowed.

The next morning, though his blind old eyes wept, Xicotenca the Elder sent an embassy of his highest nobles, carrying the square gold-mesh flags of truce, to negotiate with Cortés the terms of Texcala's surrender to him. Much to the envoys' surprise, Cortés evinced none of the demeanor of a conqueror; he welcomed them with great warmth and apparent affection. Through his Malintzin, he praised the valor of the Texcalteca warriors. He regretted that their having mistaken his intentions had necessitated his having to defend himself. Because, he said, he did not want surrender from Texcala, and would not accept it. He had come to that country hoping only to befriend and help it.

"I know," he said, no doubt having been well informed by Malintzin, "that you have for ages suffered the tyranny of Motecuzóma's Mexíca. I have liberated the Totonaca and some other tribes from that bondage. Now I would free you from the constant threat of it. I ask only that your people join me in this holy and praiseworthy crusade, that you provide as many warriors as possible to augment my forces."

"But," said the bewildered nobles, "we heard that you demand of all peoples that they vow submission to your alien ruler and religion, that all our venerable gods be overthrown and new ones worshiped."

Cortés made an airy gesture of dismissing all that. The Texcalteca's resistance had at least taught him to treat them with some shrewd circumspection.

"I ask alliance, not submission," he said. "When these lands have all been purged of the Mexíca's malign influence, we will be glad to expound to you the blessings of Christianity and the advantages of an accord with our King Carlos. Then you can judge for yourselves whether you wish to accept those benefits. But first things first. Ask your esteemed ruler if he will do us the honor of taking our hand in friendship and making common cause with us."

Old Xicotenca had hardly heard that message from his nobles before we in Tenochtítlan had it from our mice. It was obvious to all of us gathered in the palace that Motecuzóma was shaken, he was appalled, he was enraged by the way his confident predictions had turned out, and he was agitated near to panic by the realization of what could come of his having been so irredeemably wrong. It was bad enough that the Texcalteca had not stopped the white invaders for us, or even proved a hindrance to them. It was bad enough that Texcala was not laid open for our vanquishing. Worse, the outlanders were not at all discouraged or weakened; they were still coming, still uttering threats against us. Worst of all, the white men would now come reinforced by the strength and hatred of our oldest, fiercest, most unforgiving enemies.

Recovering himself, Motecuzóma made a decision that was at least a bit more forceful than "wait." He called for his most intelligent swift-messenger and dictated to him a message and sent him running immediately to repeat it to Cortés. Of course, the message was lengthy and fulsome with complimentary language, but in essence it said:

"Esteemed Captain-General Cortés, do not put your trust in the disloyal Texcalteca, who will tell you any lies to win your confidence and then will treacherously betray you. As you can easily discover by inquiry, the nation of Texcala is an island completely surrounded and blockaded by those neighbor nations of which it has made enemies. If you befriend the Texcalteca you will be, like them, despised and shunned and repelled by all other nations. Heed our advice. Abandon the unworthy Texcalteca and unite yourself instead with the mighty Triple Alliance of the Mexíca, the Acolhua, and the Tecpanéca. We invite you to visit our allied city of Chololan, an easy march south of where you are. There you will be received with a great ceremony of welcome befitting so distinguished a visitor. When you have rested, you will be escorted to Tenochtítlan, as you have desired, where I, the Uey-Tlatoani Motecuzóma Xocoyotzin, wait eagerly to embrace my friend and do him all honor."

It may be that Motecuzóma meant exactly what he said, that he was willing to capitulate to the extent of granting audience to the white men while he pondered what to do next. I do not know. He did not then confide his plans to me or to any of his Speaking Council. But this I do know. If I had been Cortés, I should have laughed at such an invitation, especially with the sly Malintzin standing by to interpret it more plainly and succinctly:

"Detested enemy: Please to dismiss your new-won allies, throw away the additional forces you have acquired, and do Motecuzóma the favor of walking stupidly into a trap you will never walk out of."

But to my surprise, since I did not then know the man's audacity, Cortés sent the messenger back with an acceptance of the invitation, and he did march south to pay a courtesy call on Chololan, and he was received there like a notable and welcome guest. He was met on the city's outskirts by its joint rulers, the Lord of What Is Above and the Lord of What Is Below, and by most of the civilian population, and by no armed men. Those lords Tlaquiach and Tlalchiac had mustered none of their warriors, and no weapons were in evidence; all appeared as Motecuzóma had promised, peaceable and hospitable.

Nevertheless, Cortés had naturally not complied with all of Motecuzóma's suggestions; he had not divested himself of his allies before coming to Chololan. In the interim, old Xicotenca of the defeated Texcala had accepted Cortés's offer of making common cause, and had given into his command fully ten thousand Texcalteca warriors—not to mention many other things: a number of the most comely and noble Texcalteca females to be divided among Cortés's officers, and even a numerous retinue of maids to be the personal serving women of the Lady One Grass, or Malintzin, or Doña Marina. So Cortés arrived at Chololan leading that army of Texcalteca, plus his three thousand men recruited from the Totonaca and other tribes, plus of course his own hundreds of white soldiers, his horses and dogs, his Malintzin and the other women traveling with the company.

After properly saluting Cortés, the two lords of Chololan looked fearfully at that multitude of his companions and meekly told him, through Malintzin, "By command of the Revered Speaker Motecuzóma, our city is unarmed and undefended by any warriors. It can accommodate your lordly self and your personal troops and attendants, and we have made arrangements to accommodate all of you in comfort, but there is simply no room for your countless allies. Also, if you will excuse our mentioning it, the Texcalteca are our sworn enemies, and we should be most uneasy if they were let to enter our city..."

So Cortés obligingly gave orders that his greater force of native warriors stay outside the city, but camping in a circle that would entirely surround it. Cortés surely felt secure enough, with all those thousands so near and on call if he should need help. And only he and the other white men entered Chololan, striding as proudly as nobles or riding their horses in towering majesty, while the gathered populace cheered and tossed flowers in their path.

As had been promised, the white men were given luxurious lodgings—every least soldier being treated as obsequiously as if he were a knight—and they were provided with servants and attendants, and women for their beds at night. Chololan had been forewarned of the men's personal habits, so no one—not even the women commanded to couple with them—ever commented on the dreadful smell of them, or their vulturine manner of eating, or their never taking off their filthy clothes and boots, or their refusal to bathe, or their neglect even to clean their hands between performing excretory functions and sitting down to dine. For fourteen days, the white men lived the kind of life that heroic warriors might hope for in the best of afterworlds. They were feasted, and plied with octli, and let to get as drunk and disorderly as they pleased, and they made free with the women assigned to them, and they were entertained with music and song and dancing. And after those fourteen days, the white men rose up and massacred every man, woman, and child in Chololan.

We got the news in Tenochtítlan, probably before the harquebus smoke had cleared from the city, by way of our mice who flitted in and out of Cortés's own ranks. According to them, the slaughter was done at the instigation of the woman Malintzin. She came one night to her master's room in the Chololan palace, where he was swilling octli and disporting himself with several women. She snapped at the women to begone and then warned Cortés of a plot in progress. She had learned of it, she said, by mingling and conversing with the local market women, who innocently supposed her to be a war captive eager for liberation from her white captors. The whole purpose of the visitors' being so lavishly entertained, said Malintzin, was to lull and weaken them while Motecuzóma secretly sent a force of twenty thousand Mexíca warriors to encircle Chololan. At a certain signal, she said, the Mexíca forces would fall upon the native troops camped outside, while the city men inside would arm themselves and turn on the unready white men. And, she said, on her way to expose the scheme, she had seen the city folk already grouping under banners in the central square.

Cortés burst from the palace, with his under-officers who had also been lodged there, and their shouts of "Santiago!" brought their troops converging from other lodgings in the city, throwing aside their women and their cups and seizing up their weapons. As Malintzin had warned, they found the plaza packed with people, many of them bearing feather banners, all of them wearing ceremonial garments which perhaps did look like battle garb. Those gathered people were given no time to raise a war cry or issue a challenge to combat—or otherwise to explain their presence there—for the white men instantly discharged their weapons and, so dense was the crowd, the first volley of pellets and arrows and other projectiles mowed them down like weeds.

When the smoke cleared a bit, perhaps the white men saw that the plaza contained women and children as well as men, and they may even have wondered if their precipitate action had been warranted. But the noise of it brought their Texcalteca and other allies swarming from their camps into the city. It was they who, more wantonly than the white men, laid waste the city and slew its populace without mercy or discrimination, killing even the lords Tlaquiach and Tlalchiac. Some of the men of Chololan did run to get weapons with which to fight back, but they were so outnumbered and encircled that they could only fight a delaying action as they retreated upward along the slopes of Chololan's mountain-sized pyramid. They made their last stand at the very top of it, and at the end were penned inside the great temple of Quetzalcoatl there. So their besiegers simply piled wood about the temple and set it afire and incinerated the defenders alive.

That was nearly twelve years ago, reverend friars, when that temple was burned and leveled and its rubble scattered. There remained nothing but trees and shrubs to be seen, which is why so many of your people have since been unable to believe that the mountain is not a mountain but a pyramid long ago erected by men. Of course, I know that it now bears something more than greenery. The summit where Quetzalcoatl and his worshipers were that night overthrown has lately been crowned with a Christian church.

When Cortés arrived at Chololan, it was inhabited by some eight thousand people. When he departed, it was empty. I say again that Motecuzóma had confided to me none of his plans. For all I know, he did have Mexíca troops moving stealthily toward that city, and he had instructed the people to rise up when the trap was sprung. But I beg leave to doubt it. The massacre occurred on the first day of our fifteenth month, called Panquetzaliztli, which means The Flourishing of the Feather Banners, and was everywhere celebrated with ceremonies in which the people did just that.

It may be that the woman Malintzin had never before attended an observance of that festival. She may genuinely have believed, or mistakenly assumed, that the people were massing with battle flags. Or she could have invented the "plot," perhaps from her jealous resentment of Cortés's attentions to the local women. Whether she was moved by misunderstanding or malice, she effectually moved Cortés to make a desert of Chololan. And if he regretted that at all, he did not regret it for long, because it advanced his fortunes more than even his defeat of the Texcalteca had done. I have mentioned that I have visited Chololan, and found the people there to be rather less than lovable. I had no reason to care if the city went on existing, and its abrupt depopulation caused me no grief, except insofar as that added to Cortés's increasingly fearsome reputation. Because, when the news of the Chololan massacre spread by swift-messenger throughout The One World, the rulers and war chiefs of many other communities began to consider the course of events to date, no doubt in some such words as these:

"First the white men took the Totonaca away from Motecuzóma. Then they conquered Texcala, which not Motecuzóma nor any of his predecessors ever could do. Then they obliterated Motecuzóma's allies in Chololan, caring not a little finger for Motecuzóma's anger or vindictiveness. It begins to appear that the white men are mightier even than the long-mightiest Mexíca. It may be wise for us to side with the superior force... while we still can do so of our own volition."

One powerful noble did so without hesitation: the Crown Prince Ixtlil-Xochitl, rightful ruler of the Acolhua. Motecuzóma must have bitterly regretted his ouster of that prince, three years before, when he realized that Black Flower had not just spent those years sulking in his mountain retreat, that he had been collecting warriors in preparation for reclaiming his Texcóco throne. To Black Flower, the coming of Cortés must have seemed a god-sent and timely help to his cause. He came down from his redoubt to the devastated city of Chololan, where Cortés was regrouping his multitude in preparation for continuing their march westward. At their meeting, Black Flower surely told Cortés of the mistreatment he had suffered at Motecuzóma's hands, and Cortés presumably promised to help him redress it. Anyway, the next piece of bad news we heard in Tenochtítlan was that Cortés's company had been augmented by the addition of the vengeful Prince Black Flower and his several thousand superbly trained Acolhua warriors.

Clearly, the impulsive and perhaps unnecessary massacre in Chololan had proved a master stroke for Cortés, and he had his woman Malintzin to thank, whatever had been her reason for provoking it. She had demonstrated her wholehearted dedication to his cause, her eagerness to help him achieve his destiny, even if it meant trampling the dead bodies of men, women, and children of her own race. From then on, though Cortés still relied on her as an interpreter, he valued her even more as his chief strategic adviser, his most trusted under-officer, his staunches! of all his allies. He may even have come to love the woman; no one ever knew. Malintzin had achieved her two ambitions: she had made herself indispensable to her lord; and she was going to Tenochtítlan, her long-dreamed-of destination, with the title and perquisites of a lady.

Now, it may be that all the events I have recounted would have come to pass even if the orphan brat Ce-Malinali had never been born to that slave slut of the Coatlicamac. And I may have a personal motive in so contemptuously reviling her groveling devotion to her master, her shameful disloyalty to her own kind. It may be that I nursed a special loathing of her, simply because I could not forget that she had the same birth-name as my dead daughter, that she was the same age Nochipa would have been, that her despicable actions seemed, to my mind, to cast obloquy on my own Ce-Malinali, blameless and defenseless.

But, my personal feelings aside, I had twice encountered Malintzin before she became Cortés's most wicked weapon, and either time I could have prevented her becoming that. When we first met at the slave market, I could have bought her, and she would have been content to spend her life in the great city of Tenochtítlan as a member of the household of an Eagle Knight of the Mexíca. When we met again in the Totonaca country, she was still a slave, and the property of an officer of no consequence, and a mere link in the chain of interpreting of conversations. Her disappearance then would have occasioned only a minimum of fuss, and I could easily have arranged her disappearance. So twice I might have changed the course of her life, I might perhaps have changed the course of history, and I had not. But her instigation of the Chololan butchery made me recognize the menace of her, and I knew that I would eventually see her again—in Tenochtítlan, whither she had been traveling all her life—and I swore to myself that I would arrange for her life to end there.

Meanwhile, immediately after receiving news of the massacre at Chololan, Motecuzóma had made another of his irresolute shows of resolute action, by sending there another delegation of nobles, and that embassy was headed by his Snake Woman Tlacotzin, High Treasurer of the Mexíca, second in command only to Motecuzóma himself. Tlacotzin and his companion nobles led a train of porters again laden with gold and many other riches—not intended to provide for a repopulation of the unfortunate city, but for the cajoling of Cortés.

In that one move, I believe, Motecuzóma revealed the ultimate hypocrisy of which he was capable. The people of Chololan had either been totally innocent and undeserving of their annihilation, or, if they had been planning to rise up against Cortés, they could only have been obeying secret orders from Motecuzóma. However, the Revered Speaker, in the message conveyed to Cortés by Tlacotzin, blamed his Chololan allies for having contrived the dubious "plot" entirely on their own; he claimed to have had no knowledge of it; he described them as "traitors to both of us"; he praised Cortés for his swift and complete extinction of the rebels; and he hoped the unhappy occurrence would not imperil the anticipated friendship between the white men and The Triple Alliance.

I think it was fitting that Motecuzóma's message was delivered by his Snake Woman, since it was a masterpiece of reptilian squirming. It went on, "Nevertheless, if Chololan's perfidy has discouraged the Captain-General and his company from venturing any farther through such hazardous lands and unpredictable people, we will understand his decision to turn and go homeward, though we will sincerely regret having missed the opportunity of meeting the valiant Captain-General Cortés face to face. Therefore, since you will not be visiting us in our capital city, we of the Mexíca ask that you accept these gifts as a small substitute for our friendly embrace, and that you share them with your King Carlos when you have returned to your native country."

I heard later that Cortés could hardly contain his mirth when that transparently devious and wishful message was translated to him by Malintzin, and that he mused aloud, "I do look forward to meeting, face to face, a man with two faces." But he then made reply to Tlacotzin:

"I thank your master for his concern, and for these gifts of amends, which I gratefully accept in the name of His Majesty King Carlos. However"—and here he yawned, Tlacotzin reported—"the recent trouble here at Chololan was no trouble at all." And here he laughed. "As we Spanish fighting men account trouble, this was no more than a fleabite to be scratched. Your lord need not worry that it has lessened our determination to continue our explorations. We will keep on traveling westward. Oh, we may digress here and there, to visit other cities and nations which may wish to contribute forces to our retinue. But eventually, assuredly, our journey will bring us to Tenochtítlan. You may give your ruler our solemn promise that we will meet." He laughed again. "Face to face to face."

Naturally, Motecuzóma had foreseen that the invaders might still resist dissuasion, so he had provided his Snake Woman with one more squirm.

"In that case," said Tlacotzin, "it would please our Revered Speaker to have the Captain-General no longer delay his arrival." Meaning that Motecuzóma did not want him wandering at will among the malcontent tributary peoples, and probably enlisting them. "The Revered Speaker suggests that in these uncomfortable and primitive outer provinces you can get the impression only that our people are barbarous and uncivilized. He is desirous that you see his capital city's splendor and magnificence, so you may realize our people's real worth and ability. He urges that you come now and directly to Tenochtítlan. I will guide you there, my lord. And since I am Tlacotzin, second to the ruler of the Mexíca, my presence will be proof against any other people's trickery or ambush."

Cortés swept his arm in a gesture encompassing the troops ranked and waiting all about Chololan. "I do not fret overmuch about trickery and ambush, friend Tlacotzin," he said pointedly. "But I accept your lord's invitation to the capital, and your kind offer to guide. We are ready to march when you are."

It was true that Cortés had little to fear from either open or sneak attack, or that he had any real need to continue collecting new warriors. Our mice estimated that, when he departed Chololan, his combined forces numbered about twenty thousand, and there were in addition some eight thousand porters carrying the army's equipment and provisions. The company stretched over two one-long-runs in length, and required a quarter of a day to march past any given point. Incidentally, by then, every warrior and porter wore an insigne that proclaimed him a man of Cortés's army. Since the Spaniards still complained that they "could not tell the damned Indians apart," and could not in the confusion of battle distinguish friend from enemy, Cortés had ordered all his native troops to adopt a uniform style of headdress: a high crown of mazatla grass. When that army of twenty and eight thousand advanced toward Tenochtítlan, said the mice, it resembled from a distance a great, undulating, grass-grown field magically on the move.

Motecuzóma had probably considered telling his Snake Woman to lead Cortés aimlessly around and about the mountain country until the invaders were either desperately fatigued or hopelessly lost, and could be abandoned there; but of course there were many men among the Acolhua and Texcalteca and other accompanying troops who would soon have divined that trick. However, Motecuzóma apparently did instruct Tlacotzin to make it no easy journey, no doubt still wistfully hoping that Cortés would give up the expedition in discouragement. At any rate, Tlacotzin brought them westward along none of the easier trade routes through the lower valleys; he led them up and over the high pass between the volcanoes Ixtacciuatl and Popocatepetl.

As I have said, there is snow on those heights even in the hottest days of summer. By the time that company came across, the winter was beginning. If anything was likely to dishearten the white men, it would have been the numbing chill and fierce winds and great drifts of snow they had to make their way through. To this day, I do not know what the climate of your native Spain is like, but Cortés and his soldiers had all spent years in Cuba, which I understand is as torrid and humid as any of our coastal Hot Lands. So the white men, like their allies the Totonaca, were unprepared and unclothed to withstand the piercing cold of the frozen route Tlacotzin chose. He later reported with satisfaction that the white men had suffered terribly.

Yes, they suffered and they complained, and four white men died, and so did two of their horses and several of their staghounds, and so did perhaps a hundred of their Totonaca, but the remainder of the train persevered. In fact, ten of the Spaniards, to show off their stamina and prowess, briefly digressed from the route of march, with the declared intention of climbing all the way to the top of Popocatepetl to look down into his incense-smoking crater. They did not get that far; but then, not many of our own people have ever done so, or have cared to try. The climbers rejoined their company, blue and stiff with cold, and some of them later had a number of their fingers and toes fall off. But they were much admired by their comrades for having made the attempt, and even the Snake Woman grudgingly had to admit that the white men, however foolhardy, were men of dauntless courage and energy.

Tlacotzin also reported to us the white men's very human expressions of astonishment and awe and gladness when at last they came out from the western end of the pass, and they stood on the mountain slopes overlooking the immense lake basin, and the falling snow briefly parted its curtain to give them an unimpeded view. Below and beyond them lay the interconnected and varicolored bodies of water, set in their vast bowl of luxuriant foliage and tidy towns and straight roads between. So suddenly seen, after the unappealing heights they had just crossed, the sweep of land below would have appeared like a garden: pleasant and green, all shades of green, thick green forests and neat green orchards and variously green chinampa and farm plots. They could have seen, though only in miniature, the numerous cities and towns bordering the several lakes, and the lesser island communities set in the very waters. They were then still at least twenty one-long-runs from Tenochtítlan, but the silvery-white city would have shone like a star. They had journeyed for months, from the featureless seacoast beaches, over and around numberless mountains, through rocky ravines and rough valleys, meanwhile seeing only towns and villages of no particular distinction, finally breasting the formidably bleak pass between the volcanoes. Then, suddenly, the travelers looked down on a scene that—they said it themselves—"seemed like a dream... like a marvel from the old books of fables...."

Coming down from the volcanoes, the travelers of course entered the domains of The Triple Alliance by way of the Acolhua lands, where they were met and greeted by the Uey-Tlatoani Cacamatzin, come out from Texcóco with an impressive assembly of his lords and nobles and courtiers and guards. Though Cacama, as instructed by his uncle, made a warm speech of welcome to the newcomers, I daresay he must have felt uneasy, being glared at by his dethroned half brother Black Flower, who at that moment stood before him with a powerful force of disaffected Acolhua warriors at his command. The confrontation between those two might have erupted into battle right there, except that both Motecuzóma and Cortés had strictly forbidden any strife that might mar their own momentous meeting. So, for the time being, all was outwardly amicable, and Cacama led the whole train into Texcóco for lodging and refreshment and entertainment before it continued on to Tenochtítlan.

However, there is no doubt that Cacama was embarrassed and enraged when his own subjects crowded the streets of Texcóco to receive the returning Black Flower with cheers of rejoicing. That was insult enough, but it was not long before Cacama had to endure the even worse insult of mass desertion. During the day or two that the travelers spent in that city, perhaps two thousand of the men of Texcóco dug out their long unused battle armor and weapons, and when the visitors moved on, those men marched with them as volunteer additions to Black Flower's troop. From that day on, the Acolhua nation was disastrously divided. Half of its population remained submissive to Cacama, who was their Revered Speaker and was so recognized by his fellow rulers of The Triple Alliance. The other half gave their loyalty to the Black Flower who should have been their Revered Speaker, however much they may have deplored his having cast his lot with the alien whites.

From Texcóco, the Snake Woman Tlacotzin conducted Cortés and his multitude around the southern margin of the lake. The white men marveled at the "great inland sea," and marveled even more at the increasingly evident splendor of Tenochtítlan, which was visible from several points along their route, and which seemed to grow in size and magnificence as they neared it. Tlacotzin took the entire company to his own sizable palace at the promontory town of Ixtapalápan, where they lodged while they polished their blades and armor and cannons, while they groomed their horses, while they furbished their shabby uniforms insofar as possible, that they might look suitably imposing when they made the last march across the causeway into the capital.

While that was going on, Tlacotzin informed Cortés that the city, being an island and already densely populated, had no room for quartering even the smallest part of his thousands of allies. The Snake Woman also made it plain that Cortés should not tactlessly take with him to the city such an unwelcome guest as Black Flower, or a horde of troops which, although of our own race, were from notably unfriendly nations.

Cortés, having already seen the city, at least from a distance, could hardly dispute its limitations of accommodation, and he was willing enough to be diplomatic in his choice of those who would accompany him there. But he set some conditions. Tlacotzin must arrange for his forces to be distributed and quartered along the mainland shore, in an arc extending from the southern causeway to the most northern—in effect, covering every approach to and egress from the island-city. Cortés would take with him into Tenochtítlan, besides most of his Spaniards, only a token number of warriors from the Acolhua, Texcalteca, and Totonaca tribes. And he must be promised that those warriors would have unhindered passage on and off the island, at all times, so he could use them as couriers to maintain contact with his mainland forces.

Tlacotzin agreed to those conditions. He suggested that some of the native troops could remain where they were, in Ixtapalápan, convenient to the southern causeway; others could be camped about Tlácopan near the western causeway; others in Tepeyáca near the northern causeway. So Cortés selected the warriors he would keep with him for couriers, and he sent the remaining thousands marching off with the guides Tlacotzin provided, and he ordered various of his white officers and soldiers to go in command of each of the detached forces. When runners came back from each of the detachments to report that they were in position and making camp to stay on call as long as necessary, Cortés told Tlacotzin, and the Snake Woman sent the word to Motecuzóma: the emissaries of King Carlos and the Lord God would enter Tenochtítlan the next day.