Aztec

* * *

In many respects, that was a less than happy night for The One World too. The most unfortunate circumstance was that all our armies did not continue their pursuit of Cortés and his remaining white men and native supporters until they were slain to the last man. However, as I have said, the warriors of Tenochtítlan believed that their mainland allies would do just that, so they turned back to the island to devote the rest of the night to a celebration of what seemed a total victory. Our city's priests and most of its people were still engaged in that sham ceremony-of-distraction at the pyramid of Tlaltelólco, and they were only too pleased to move in mass to The Heart of the One World and hold a real ceremony of thanksgiving at the Great Pyramid. Even Béu and I, hearing the gladsome shouts of the returning warriors, left our house to attend. Even Tlaloc, as if better to watch his people's rejoicing, lifted his curtain of rain.

In normal times, we would not have dared to observe any kind of rite in the central plaza until every stone and statue and ornamentation had been newly scrubbed clean of every speck of dirt, every possible defilement, until The Heart of the One World shone bright for the gods' approval and admiration. But that night the torches and urn fires revealed the vast square to be a vast garbage heap. Everywhere lay dead bodies or parts of bodies, both white- and copper-skinned; also quantities of spilled entrails, gray-pink and gray-blue, hence indistinguishable as to origin. Everywhere lay broken and discarded weapons, and the excrement of frightened horses and of men who had incontinently defecated as they died, and the rancid bedding and clothing and other effects of the Spaniards. But the priests uttered no complaint about that foul setting for the ceremony, and the celebrants crowded in without showing too much disgust at the nasty things they trod on or in. We all trusted that the gods would not, that one time, take offense at the plaza's filthy condition, inasmuch as it was their enemies as well as ours whom we had defeated there.

I know it has always distressed you, reverend scribes, to hear me describe the sacrifice of any human beings, even the heathens despised by your Church, so I will not dwell on the sacrifice of your own Christian countrymen, which commenced when the sun Tonatíu began to rise. I will only remark, though it will make you think us a very foolish people, that we also sacrificed the forty or so horses which the soldiers had left behind—because, you see, we could not be sure that they were not also Christians of a sort. I might say, also, that the horses went to their Flowery Deaths much more nobly than did the Spaniards, who struggled while they were being undressed, and cursed while they were dragged up the staircase, and cried like children when they were bent backward on the stone. Our warriors recognized some of the white men who had most bravely fought them, so, after those men died, their thighs were cut for broiling and...

But perhaps you will not look so nauseated, lord friars, if I assure you that most of the bodies were without ceremony fed to the animals of the city menagerie...

Very well, my lords, I will return to the less gala events of that night. While we were thanking the gods for the riddance of the outlanders, we were unaware that our mainland armies had not annihilated them. Cortés was still sulking miserably in Tlácopan when he was roused by the noisy approach of his other fleeing forces—the Acolhua and Totonaca, or what was left of them—being chased northward by the Xochimilca and Chalca. Cortés and his officers, with Malintzin no doubt shouting louder than she had ever had to shout in her life, managed to halt the headlong rout and restore some semblance of order. Then Cortés and his white men, some on horseback, some walking, some limping, some in litters, led the reorganized native troops farther on northward before their pursuers caught up. And those pursuers, probably believing that the fugitives would be dealt with by other Triple Alliance forces beyond, or perhaps over-eager to commence their own victory celebrations, let the fugitives go.

Sometime about daybreak, at the northern extremity of Lake Tzumpanco, Cortés realized that he was closely trailing our allied Tecpanéca. And they, still on the trail of his allied Texcalteca, were surprised and displeased to find themselves trudging along between two enemy forces. Deciding that something had gone amiss with the general battle plan, the Tecpanéca also abandoned their pursuit, dispersed sideways off the trail and made their way home to Tlácopan. Cortés eventually caught up to his Texcalteca, and his whole army was again intact, though notably diminished and in dismal spirits. Still, Cortés may have been somewhat relieved that his best native fighters, the Texcalteca—because they were the best fighters—had suffered the fewest losses. I can imagine what went through Cortés's mind then:

"If I go to Texcala, its old King Xicotenca will see that I have preserved most of the warriors he lent me. So he cannot be too angry with me, or account me a total failure, and I may be able to persuade him to give the rest of us refuge there."

Whether or not that was his reasoning, Cortés did lead his wretched troops on around the northern extent of the lake lands toward Texcala. Several more men died of their wounds during that long march, and all of them suffered greatly, for they took a prudently circuitous route, avoiding every populated place, hence could not beg or demand food. They were forced to subsist on what edible wild creatures and plants they could find, and at least once had to butcher and eat some of their precious horses and staghounds.

Only once in that long march were they again engaged in combat. They were caught in the foothills of the mountains to the east, by a force of Acolhua warriors from Texcóco still loyal to The Triple Alliance. But those Acolhua were lacking in both leadership and incentive to fight, so the battle was conducted almost as bloodlessly as a Flowery War. When the Acolhua had secured a number of prisoners—all Totonaca, I believe—they retired from the field and went home to Texcóco to hold their own celebration of "victory." Thus Cortés's remaining army was not further diminished too severely between its flight on the Sad Night and its arrival, twelve days later, in Texcala. That nation's lately converted Christian ruler, the aged and blind Xicotenca, did welcome Cortés's return and gave him permission to quarter his troops and to stay as long as he might wish. All those events I have just recounted, all working to our detriment, were unknown to us in Tenochtítlan when, in the radiant dawn after the Sad Night, we sent the first Spanish xochimíqui to the sacrificial stone at the summit of the Great Pyramid.

Other things happened at the time of that Sad Night which, if not sad, were at least to be wondered at. As I have told, the Mexíca nation lost its Revered Speaker Motecuzóma. But also the then Revered Speaker of Tlácopan, Totoquihuaztli, died in that city during the night's battle there. And the Revered Speaker Cacama of Texcóco, who fought with the Acolhua warriors he had lent to Tenochtítlan, was found among the dead when our slaves did the grisly work of clearing the night's detritus from The Heart of the One World. No one much mourned the loss of either Motecuzóma or his nephew Cacama, but it was a disturbing coincidence that all three ruling partners of The Triple Alliance should have died in the one afternoon and night. Of course, Cuitlahuac had already assumed the vacant throne of the Mexíca—though he never did get to enjoy the full pomp and ceremony of an official coronation ceremony. And the people of Tlácopan chose as a replacement for their slain Uey-Tlatoani his brother Tetlapanquetzal.

The choice of a new Revered Speaker for Texcóco was less easy. The legitimate claimant was the Prince Black Flower, who should rightly have been the ruler anyway, and most of the Acolhua people would have welcomed him to the throne—except that he had allied himself with the hated white men. So the Speaking Council of Texcóco, in consultation with the new Revered Speakers of Tenochtítlan and Tlácopan, decided to appoint a man of such nonentity that he would be acceptable to all factions, yet could be replaced by whatever leader finally emerged as the strongest among the fragmented Acolhua. His name was Cohuanacoch, and I think he was a nephew of the late Nezahualpili. It was because of that nation's uncertainty and division of loyalties and frailty of leadership that the Acolhua warriors attacked the fleeing forces of Cortés so halfheartedly, when they could have destroyed them utterly. And never again did the Acolhua manifest the warlike ferocity that I had admired when Nezahualpili led them—and me—against the Texcalteca those many years ago.

Another curious occurrence of the Sad Night was that, sometime during that night, the dead body of Motecuzóma disappeared from the palace throne room in which it last lay, and was never seen again. I have heard many suppositions as to what became of it—that it was viciously dismembered and chopped and minced and scattered by our warriors when they overran the palace; that his wives and children spirited the corpse away for more respectful disposition; that his loyal priests treated the cadaver with preservatives and hid it away, and will bring it magically to life again, someday when you white men have gone and the Mexíca reign once more. What I believe is that Motecuzóma's body got mixed in with those of the Texcalteca knights who were slain in that palace and, unrecognized, went where theirs did: to the animals of the menagerie. But only one thing is certain. Motecuzóma departed this world as vaguely and irresolutely as he had lived in it, so his body's resting place is as unknown as the whereabouts of the treasure which vanished during that same night.

Ah, yes, the treasure: what is now called "the lost treasure of the Aztecs." I wondered when you would ask me about it. In after years, Cortés often called me in to help Malintzin interpret while he interrogated many persons, each of them many times and in many interestingly persuasive ways, and he often demanded to know what I might know about the treasure, though he did not subject me to any of the persuasions. Many other Spaniards besides Cortés have repeatedly asked me and other former courtiers to tell them: of what did the treasure consist? and how much was it worth? and above all, where is it now? You would not believe some of the inducements I am still being offered to this day, but I will remark that some of the most persistent and more generously inclined inquirers are highborn Spanish doñas.

I have already told you, reverend friars, of what the treasure consisted. As to its worth, I do not know how you would appraise those innumerable works of art. Even considering the gold and gems simply in bulk, I have no way of reckoning their value in your currency of maravedies and reales. But, from what I have been told of the great wealth of your King Carlos and your Pope Clemente and other rich personages of your Old World, I think I can declare that any man possessing "the lost treasure of the Aztecs" would be by far the wealthiest of all wealthy men in your Old World.

But where is it? Well, the old causeway still stretches from here to Tlácopan—or Tacuba, as you prefer to call it. Though the span is shorter now than it used to be, the farthest west canoe passage is still there, and that is where many Spanish soldiers sank from the weight of gold in their packs and doublets and boots. Of course, they must have sunk far into the ooze of the lake bottom in the past eleven years, and been even deeper buried by the silt deposited in those same years. But any man sufficiently greedy and sufficiently energetic to dive down and dig there should find many bleached bones, and among them many jeweled golden diadems, medallions, figurines, and such. Perhaps not enough to make him rank with King Carlos or Pope Clemente, but enough that he need never feel greedy again.

Unfortunately for any really greedy treasure seekers, the greater part of the plunder was thrown into the lake, on Cortés's orders, at the causeway's first acáli passage, the nearest to the city here. The Revered Speaker Cuitlahuac could have sent divers down to recover it afterward, and perhaps he did so, but I have reasons for doubting that. Anyway, Cuitlahuac died before Cortés could ask him, either politely or persuasively. And if any Mexíca divers did bring up from the lake the treasury of their nation, either they too have died or they are men of dedicated and exceptional reticence.

I believe the bulk of the treasure still lies there where Cortés had it jettisoned on that Sad Night. But when Tenochtítlan was later razed to the very ground and, after that, when the rubble was cleared for the city's rebuilding in the Spanish style, the unusable remains of Tenochtítlan were simply scraped to the sides of the island—partly for your builders' convenience, partly to increase the island's surface area. So the Tlácopan causeway was shortened by the encroachment of the enlarging island, and that nearest canoe passage is now underground. If I am correct in my estimation of where the treasure rests, it is somewhere deep beneath the foundations of the elegantly señorial buildings lining your avenue called the Calzada Tacuba.

Of all the things I have told of the Sad Night, I have not mentioned the one event that, all by itself, determined the future of The One World. It was the death of just one man. He was no one of any importance. If he had a name, I never heard it. He may have done nothing either praiseworthy or blameworthy in all his life, except to have his roads and his days end here, and I do not know whether he died bravely or cowardly. But during the next day's cleaning of The Heart of the One World, his body was found, cloven by a maquihuitl, and the slaves made an outcry when they found it, because he was neither a white man nor one of our race, and those slaves had never seen such a being before. I had. He was one of those unbelievably black men who had come from Cuba with Narváez, and he was the one whose blemished face had made me shrink away when I saw it.

I smile now—ruefully and contemptuously, but I smile—when I see the swaggering and strutting of Hernán Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado and Beltran de Guzmán and all the other Spanish veterans who now exalt themselves as "Los Conquistadores." Oh, they did some brave and daring deeds, I cannot deny it. Cortés's burning of his own ships on his first arrival in these lands has hardly ever been outdone, as an example of jaunty audacity, even by any caprice of the gods. And there were other factors that contributed to the downfall of The One World—not least the deplorable fact of The One World's turning against itself: nation against nation, neighbor against neighbor, finally even brother against brother. But if any one, single, solitary human being deserves to be honored and remembered with the title of El Conquistador, it is that nameless blackamoor who brought the disease of the small pocks to Tenochtítlan.

He could have given the disease to Narváez's soldiers during their voyage here from Cuba. He did not. He could have given the disease to them, and to Cortés's troops besides, during their march hither from the coast. He did not. He could himself have died of the disease before reaching here. He did not. He lived to visit Tenochtítlan, and to bring the disease to us. Perhaps it was one of those caprices of the gods, to let him do so, and there was nothing we could have done to avert it. But I wish the black man had not then been killed. I wish he had been among those of his fellows who escaped, so he could have shared the affliction with them, soon or later. But no. Tenochtítlan was ravaged by the small pocks, and the disease spread throughout the lake region, into every community of The Triple Alliance, but it never reached Texcala or troubled our enemies there.

In fact, the first of our city folk were beginning to fall ill even before we got the word that Cortés and his company had found refuge in Texcala. You reverend scribes doubtless know the symptoms and progress of the disease. Anyway, I long ago described to you how I had seen, many years earlier, a young Xiu girl die of the small pocks in the faraway town of Tihó. So I need only say that our people died in the same manner: strangling on the swollen tissues inside their noses and throats—or in some manner equally dreadful: thrashing and screaming in violent delirium until their brains could no longer stand the torment, or vomiting blood until their bodies were empty of blood, until they died more husk than human. Of course, I early recognized the disease and told our physicians:

"It is a common affliction among the white men, and they hold it of little account, for they seldom die of it. They call it the small pocks."

"If this is their small pocks," said one doctor, without humor, "I hope they never favor us with any larger. What is it the white men do to keep from dying of it?"

"There is no remedy. Or so they told me. Except to pray." So thereafter our temples were crowded with priests and worshipers making offerings and sacrifices to Patecatl, the god of healing, and to every other god as well. The temple that Motecuzóma had lent to the Spaniards was also crowded, with those of our people who had submitted to baptism and who suddenly, devoutly hoped they had truly been made Christians—meaning they hoped that the Christian god of the small pocks would look on them as simulated white men, and so spare them. They lighted candles and crossed themselves and muttered what they could remember of the rituals in which they had received only slight instruction and to which they had paid even slighter attention.

But nothing stopped the spread of the disease and the dying of it. Our prayers were as futile and our physicians as helpless as those of the Maya had been. Before long, we were threatened with starvation as well, because our affliction could be kept no secret, and the mainland folk dreaded to come near us, so there was a cessation of the traffic of supply-carrying acaltin so necessary to our island's subsistence. But it was not much longer before the disease made its appearance in the mainland communities too, and, once it became evident that all of us of The Triple Alliance were in the same predicament, the boatmen resumed their freighting—or I should say, those boatmen did who were not yet stricken. For the disease seemed selective of its victims in only one particularly cruel respect. I never took sick with it, nor did Béu, nor did any of our contemporaries. The small pocks seemed to ignore those of our age, and those already ill of something else, and those who had always been of feeble constitution. Instead, it seized upon the young and strong and vigorous, not wasting its maleficence on any who for other reasons had not long lives to live.

Our having been stricken by the small pocks is one reason why I doubt that Cuitlahuac ever did anything about recovering the treasure sunk in the lake. The disease came upon us so soon after the departure of the white men—only days after we had cleaned up the litter they left, before we had begun to recover from the strain of the long occupation, before we had in any measure resumed our civic life where it had been interrupted—that I know the Revered Speaker gave no thought at that time to salvaging the gold and jewels. And later, as the disease became a devastation, he had other reasons for neglecting that task. You see, we were for a long while cut off from all news of the world beyond the lake region. Merchants and messengers of other nations refused to enter our tainted area, and Cuitlahuac forbade our own pochtéa and travelers to go elsewhere and possibly carry the contamination. I think it was fully four months after the Sad Night when one of our quimichime mice posted in Texcala summoned up the courage to come from there and tell us what had been happening during that time.

"Know then, Revered Speaker," he said to Cuitlahuac and the others, including myself, who were eager to hear him. "Cortés and his company spent some while merely resting and eating ravenously and convalescing from their injuries and generally regaining their health. But they did not do so in preparation for continuing on to the coast, to go aboard their ships and leave these lands. They have been recuperating for one purpose only: to gather strength to make another assault upon Tenochtítlan. Now that they are up and active again they and their Texcalteca hosts are journeying throughout all the country eastward of here, recruiting ever more warriors from tribes not over-friendly to the Mexíca."

The Snake Woman interrupted the mouse to say urgently to the Revered Speaker, "We hoped we had permanently discouraged them. Since we did not, we now must do what should have been done long before now. We must assemble all our forces and march against them. Kill every last white man, every one of their allies and supporters, every one of our tributary dissidents who has aided Cortés. And we must do it now, before he is strong enough to do exactly that to us!"

Cuitlahuac said wanly, "What forces do you suggest we assemble, Tlacotzin? There is hardly a warrior in any troop anywhere in The Triple Alliance who has force enough in both arms to lift his own blade."

"Excuse me, Lord Speaker, but there is more to tell," said the quimichi. "Cortés also sent many of his men to the coast, where they and their Totonaca dismantled several of the moored ships. With toil and labor inconceivable, they have brought all those many and heavy pieces of wood and metal all the arduous way from the sea across the mountains to Texcala. There, at this moment, Cortés's boatmen are putting those pieces together to make smaller ships. As they did, you will recall, when they built the small ship here for the amusement of the late Motecuzóma. But now they are making many of them."

"On dry land?" Cuitlaliuac exclaimed incredulously. "There is no water in the whole Texcala nation deep enough to float anything bigger than a fishing acáli. It sounds like insanity."

The quimichi shrugged delicately. "Cortés may have been demented by his recent humiliation here. But I respectfully submit, Revered Speaker, that I am telling truthfully what I have seen, and that I am sane. Or I was, until I decided those doings seemed ominous enough to warrant risking my life to bring you the news of them."

Cuitlahuac smiled. "Sane or not, it was the act of a brave and loyal Mexícatl, and I am grateful. You will be well rewarded—and then given an even greater reward: my permission to depart this pestilent city again as swiftly as you can."

So it was that we knew Cortés's actions and at least some of his intentions. I have heard many persons—who were not here at the time—speak critically of our apparent apathy or stupidity or deluded sense of security, because we stayed in isolation and did nothing to prevent Cortés's rallying of his forces. But the reason that we did nothing was that we could do nothing. From Tzumpanco in the north to Xochimilco in the south, from Tlácopan in the west to Texcóco in the east, every ablebodied man and woman who was not helping to nurse the afflicted was himself ill or dying or dead. In our weakness, we could only wait, and hope that we should have recovered to some degree before Cortés came again. About that, we had no delusions; we knew he would come again. And it was during that drear summer of waiting that Cuitlahuac made a remark, in the presence of myself and his cousin Cuauternoc:

"I had rather the nation's treasury lie forever at the bottom of Lake Texcóco—or sink all the way to the black depths of Mictlan—than that the white men should ever have it in their hands again."

I doubt that he later changed his mind, for he scarcely had time. Before the rainy season was over, he had fallen ill of the small pocks, and vomited up all his blood, and died. Poor Cuitlaliuac, he became our Revered Speaker without the proper ceremonies of installation and, when his brief reign ended, he was not honored with the funeral befitting his station.

By that time, not the noblest of noblemen could be accorded a service with drums and mourners and panoply—or even the luxury of earth burial. There were simply too many dead, too many dying every day. There were no longer any available places left in which to bury them, or men to dig the graves for them, or time enough to dig all the graves that would have been necessary. Instead, each community designated some nearby wasteland spot where its dead could be taken and unceremoniously piled together and burned to ashes—and even that mode of mass disposal was no easy matter in the damp days of the rainy season. Tenochtítlan's chosen burning place was an uninhabited spot on the mainland behind the rise of Chapultepec, and the busiest traffic between our island and the mainland consisted of the freight barges. Rowed by old men indifferent to the disease, they shuttled back and forth, all day long, day after day. Cuitlahuac's body was just one among the hundreds ferried on that day he died.

The disease of the small pocks was the conqueror of us Mexíca and of some other peoples. Still other nations were defeated or are still being devastated by other diseases never known in these lands before, some of which might make us Mexíca feel almost thankful to have been visited only with the small pocks.

There is the sickness you call the plague, in which the victim develops agonizing black bulges in his neck and groin and armpits, so that he keeps continually stretching his head backward and his extremities outward, as if he would gladly break them from his body to be rid of the pain. Meanwhile, his every bodily emanation—his spittle, his urine and excrement, even his sweat and his breath—are of such vile stench that neither hardened physicians nor tender kinsmen can bear to stay near the victim, until at last the bulges burst with a gush of nauseous black fluid, and the sufferer is mercifully dead.

There is the sickness you call the cholera, whose victims are seized by cramps in every muscle of the body, randomly or all at once. A man will at one moment have his arms or legs wrenched into contortions of anguish, then be splayed out as if he were flinging himself apart, then have his whole body convulsed into a knot of torture. All the time, he is also tormented by an unquenchable thirst. Although he gulps down torrents of water, he continuously retches it out, and uncontrollably urinates and defecates. Since he cannot contain any moisture, he dries and shrivels so that, when at last he dies, he looks like an old seedpod.

There are the other diseases you call the measles and the pease pocks, which kill less horrifically but just as certainly. Their only visible symptom is an itchy rash on the face and torso, but invisibly those sicknesses invade the brain, so the victim subsides first into unconsciousness and then into death. I am telling you nothing you do not already know, lord friars, but did you ever think of this? The ghastly diseases brought by your countrymen have often spread out ahead of them faster than the men themselves could march. Some of the people they set out to conquer were conquered and dead before they knew they were the objects of conquest. Those people died without ever fighting against or surrendering to their conquerors, without ever even seeing the men who killed them. It is entirely possible that there are still reclusive peoples in remote corners of these lands—tribes like the Rarámuri and the Zyu Huave, for instance—who do not even yet suspect that such beings as white men exist. Nevertheless, those people may at this moment be dying horribly of the small pocks or the plague, dying without knowing that they are being slain, or why, or by whom.

You brought us the Christian religion, and you assure us that the Lord God will reward us with Heaven when we die, but that unless we accept Him we are damned to Hell when we die. Why then did the Lord God send us also the afflictions which kill and damn so many innocents to Hell before they can meet His missionaries and hear of His religion? Christians are constantly bidden to praise the Lord God and all His works, which must include the work He has done here. If only, reverend friars, you could explain to us why the Lord God chose to send His gentle new religion trailing behind the cruelly murderous new diseases, we who survived them could more joyously join you in singing praises to the Lord God's infinite wisdom and goodness, His compassion and mercy, His fatherly love of all His children everywhere.

By unanimous vote, the Speaking Council selected the Lord Cuautemoc to be the next Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexíca. It is interesting to speculate on how different our history and our destiny might have been if Cuautemoc had become Revered Speaker, as he should have done, when his father Ahuítzotl died eighteen years earlier. Interesting to speculate, but of course fruitless. "If" is a small word in our language—tla—as it is in yours, but I have come to believe that it is the most heavy-laden word of all the words there are.

The death toll of the small pocks began to lessen as the summer's heat and rain abated, and finally, with the first chill of winter, the disease entirely let go its grip on the lake lands. But it left The Triple Alliance weak in every sense of the word. All our people were dispirited; we grieved for the countless dead; we pitied those who had survived to be gruesomely disfigured for the rest of their lives; we were wearied by the long visitation of calamity; we were individually and collectively drained of our human strength. Our population had been reduced perhaps by half, and the remainder consisted mainly of the old and infirm. Since those who died had been the younger men, not to speak of the women and children, our armies had been diminished by considerably more than half. No sensible commander would have ordered them into aggressive action against the massing outlanders, and their utility even for defense was dubious.

It was then, when The Triple Alliance was the weakest it had ever been, that Cortés once more marched against it. He no longer boasted any great advantage of superior weapons, for he had fewer than four hundred white soldiers and however many harquebuses and crossbows they still carried among them. All the cannons he had abandoned on the Sad Night—the four on the roof of Axayácatl's palace and the thirty or so he had posted around the mainland—we had pitched into the lake. But he still had more than twenty horses, a number of the staghounds, and all his formerly and latterly collected native warriors—the Texcalteca, the Totonaca and other minor tribes, the Acolhua still following Prince Black Flower. Altogether, Cortés had something like one hundred thousand troops. From all the cities and lands of The Triple Alliance—even counting outlying places like Tolocan and Quaunahuac, which were not really of the Alliance, but gave us their support—we could not muster one-third that many fighting men.

So when Cortés's long columns proceeded from Texcala toward the nearest capital city of The Triple Alliance, which was Texcóco, they took it. I could tell at length of the weakened city's desperate defense, and of the casualties its defenders inflicted and suffered, and of the tactics which eventually defeated it... but what matter? All that need be said is that the marauders took it. The marauders included Prince Black Flower's Acolhua, and they fought their fellow Acolhua warriors who were loyal to the new Revered Speaker Cohuanacoch—or, more truthfully, loyal to their city of Texcóco. And so it happened that, in that battle, many an Acolhuatl found himself wielding a blade against another Acolhuatl who was his own brother.

At least Texcóco's warriors were not all killed in the battle, and perhaps two thousand escaped before they could be trapped there. The troops of Cortés had assailed the city from its landward side, so the defenders, when they could no longer hold firm, were able to withdraw slowly to the lakeshore. There they took every fishing and fowling and passenger and freight acáli, including even the elegant acaltin of the court, and propelled themselves out into the lake. Their opponents, having been left no craft in which to pursue them, could only send a cloud of arrows after them, and the arrows did little damage. So the Acolhua warriors crossed the lake and joined our forces on Tenochtítlan, where, because so many people had lately died, there was ample room to quarter them.

Cortés would have known, from his conversations with Motecuzóma, if from no other source, that Texcóco was the strongest bastion city of our Triple Alliance, after Tenochtítlan. And, having conquered Texcóco so easily, Cortés was confident that the taking of all other and smaller lakeside cities and towns would be even easier. So he did not commit his whole army to that task, nor did he command it in person. To the mystification of our spies, he sent one entire half of his army back to Texcala. The other half he divided into detachments, each led by one of his under-officers: Alvarado, Narváez, Montejo, Guzmán. Some left Texcóco going northward, others southward, and they began circling the lake, along the way attacking the various small communities separately or simultaneously. Although our Revered Speaker Cuautemoc employed the fleet of canoes brought by the fugitive Acolhua to send those same warriors and our Mexíca to the aid of the beleaguered towns, the battles were so many and so far apart that he could not send enough men to any one of them to make any difference in the outcome. Every place the Spanish-led forces attacked, they took. The best our men could do was to evacuate from those towns whatever local warriors were left alive, and to bring them to Tenochtítlan as reinforcements for our own defense, when our turn should come.

Presumably Cortés, by means of messengers, directed the general strategy of his several officers and their detachments, but he—and Malintzin—remained in the luxurious residence of the Texcóco palace in which I myself had once lived, and he kept the hapless Revered Speaker Cohuanacoch there too, as his compulsory host, or guest, or prisoner. For I should mention here that the Crown Prince Black Flower, who had grown old waiting to become Uey-Tlatoani of the Acolhua, never did get that title and that eminence.

Even after the taking of the Acolhua's capital city, in which Black Flower's troops had played no small part, Cortés decreed that the inoffensive and uncontroversial Cohuanacoch should remain on the throne. Cortés knew that all the Acolhua, except those warriors who had for so long followed Black Flower, had come to loathe the once-respected Crown Prince as a traitor to his own people and a tool of the white men. Cortés would not risk provoking a future uprising of the whole nation by giving the traitor the throne for which he had turned traitor. Even when Black Flower groveled in the rite of baptism, with Cortés for his godfather, and in flagrant obsequiousness took the Christian name of Fernando Cortés Ixtlil-Xochitl, his godfather unbent in his resolve only sufficiently to appoint him lord ruler of three insignificant provinces of the Acolhua lands. At that, Don Fernando Black Flower showed one last flicker of his former lordly temperament, protesting angrily:

"You give me what already belongs to me? What has always belonged to my forefathers?"

But he did not long have to endure his dissatisfaction and debasement. He stormed out of Texcóco to take up his rule in one of those backwoods provinces, and arrived there just when the disease of the small pocks was also arriving, and within a month or two he was dead.

We soon learned that the marauding armies' Captain-General was lingering in Texcóco for other reasons than merely to enjoy a rest in luxury. Our quimichime came to Tenochtítlan to report, not more mystification, but the news that the departed half of Cortés's force was returning to Texcóco, bringing on their backs or hauling on log rollers the many and various hulls and poles and other components of the thirteen "ships" that had been partially constructed on the dry land of Texcala. Cortés had stayed to be in Texcóco when they arrived, to oversee their assembly and launching upon the lake there.

They were not, of course, any such formidable things as the seagoing ships from which they had been fashioned. They were more like our flat-bottomed freight barges, only with high sides, and with the winglike sails that, we discovered to our dismay, made them far more swift than our many-oared biggest aciltin, and far more agile than our smallest. Besides the boatmen who controlled the vessels' movements, each carried twenty Spanish soldiers who stood on shelves behind those high sides. Thus they had the significant advantage of holding the height in any water battle with our low-slung canoes, and even stood high enough to discharge their weapons across our causeways.

On the day they made their trial voyage from Texcóco into the lake, Cortés himself was aboard the leading craft, which he called La Capitana. A number of our largest war canoes rowed out from Tenochtítlan and through the Great Dike, to engage them in the most open expanse of the lake. Each canoe carried sixty warriors, each of whom was armed with a bow and many arrows, an atlatl and several javelins. But on the choppy waters, the white men's heavier craft made much more stable platforms from which to discharge projectiles, so their harquebuses and crossbows were lethally more accurate than our men's hand-held bows. Besides, their soldiers had to expose only their heads and arms and weapons, so our arrows either struck in their boats' high sides or went harmlessly over them. But our men in the low, open canoes were exposed to the darts and metal pellets, and many of them fell dead or wounded. So the canoes' steersmen desperately tried to keep at a safer range, and that meant a distance too great for our warriors to fling their javelins. Before very long, all our war canoes came ignominiously home, and the enemy craft disdained to pursue them. For a while they almost gaily danced in intricate crossings and patterns, as if to show they owned the lake, before going back to Texcóco. But they were out again the next day, and every day after that, and they did more than dance.

By then, Cortés's under-officers and their various companies had marched all the way around the lake district, laying waste or capturing and occupying every community in their path, until at that time they had reassembled in two sizable armies, positioned on the headlands jutting into the lake exactly north and south of our island. It only remained for them to destroy or subdue the larger and more numerous cities situated around the lake's western shore, and they would have Tenochtítlan completely surrounded.

They went about it almost leisurely. While the other half of Cortés's army was resting in Texcóco, after its incredible labor of transporting those battle boats overland, the boats themselves went back and forth over the entire expanse of Lake Texcóco east of the Great Dike, clearing it of every other craft. They rammed and overturned, or they seized and captured, or they killed the occupants of every single canoe that plied the waters. And those were not war canoes: they were the acaltin of everyday fishermen and fowlers and freighters peaceably carrying goods from one place to another. Very soon, the winged battle boats did own all that end of the lake. Not a fisherman dared to put out from shore, even to net a meal for his own family. Only at our end of the lake, inside the dike, could the normal water traffic continue, and that did not continue for long.

Cortés finally moved his resting reserve army out of Texcóco, dividing it into two equal parts which separately made their way around the lake to join the other two forces poised north and south of us. And while that was being done, the battle boats breached the Great Dike. Their soldiers had only to sweep the length of it with their harquebuses and crossbows, and kill or rout all the unarmed dike workers who could have closed the flood-protection gates to impede them. Then the boats slid through those passages and were in Mexíca waters. Though Cuautemoc immediately sent warriors to stand shoulder to shoulder along the northern and southern causeways, they could not long repel the advance of the boats, which headed directly for the causeways' canoe passages. While some of the white soldiers cleared away the defenders with their hail of metal pellets and crossbow darts, other soldiers leaned over the boats' sides to pry loose and topple into the water the wooden bridges that spanned those gaps. So the battle boats got past the last barriers, and inside them, and, as they had done in the outer reaches of the lake, they cleared this end too of all water traffic: war canoes, freight acaltin, everything.

"The white men command all the causeways and the waterways as well," said the Snake Woman. "When they besiege the other cities on the mainland, we have no way of sending our men to reinforce those cities. What is worse, we have no way of getting anything from the mainland. No additional forces, no additional weapons. And no food."

"There is enough in the island storehouses to sustain us for some while," said Cuautemoc, adding bitterly: "We can thank the small pocks that there are fewer people to be fed than there might have been. And we have also the chinampa crops."

The Snake Woman said, "The storehouses contain only dried maize, and the chinampa are planted only with delicacies. Tomatoes and chilis and coriander and the like. It will be a quaint diet—poor men's tortillas and mush, garnished with elegant condiments."

"That quaint diet you will remember fondly," said Cuautemoc, "when your belly has Spanish steel in it instead."

With the boats keeping our warriors pent on our island, Cortés's land troops resumed their march around the western curve of the mainland and, one after another, the cities there were forced to surrender. First to fall was Tepeyáca, our nearest neighbor on the northern headland, then the southern promontory towns of Ixtapalápan and Mexicaltzínco. Then Tenayúca in the northwest, and Azcapotzálco. Then Coyohuacan in the southwest. The circle was closing, and we in Tenochtítlan no longer required quimichime spies to tell us of what was happening. As our mainland allies fell or surrendered, numbers of their warriors survived to flee to our island, under cover of night, either coming in acaltin and managing to elude the patrolling battle boats, or sneaking across, the causeways and swimming the gaps in them, or swimming all the long way across the water.

On some days, Cortés was astride his horse She-Mule, directing the implacable progress of his land forces. On other days, he was in his boat La Capitana, directing with signal flags the movements of his other craft and the discharge of their weapons, killing or dispersing any warriors who showed themselves on the shore of the mainland or on our island's truncated causeways. To fend off those harrying craft, we on Tenochtítlan contrived the only defense possible. Every usable piece of wood on the island was sharpened at one end, and divers took those pointed stakes underwater and fixed them firmly, angled outward, just under the surface of the shallows all about the island. Had we not done that, Cortés's battle boats could have come right into our canals and to the city's very center. The defense proved its worth when one of the boats one day moved close, apparently intending to tear up some of our food-growing chinampa, and impaled itself on one or more of those stakes. Our warriors immediately sent flocks of arrows at it, and may have killed some of the occupants before they worked the boat loose and retreated to the mainland to patch it. Thereafter, since the Spanish boatmen had no way of knowing how far from the island our sharp stakes were planted, they kept a discreet distance.

Then Cortés's land troops began to find their cannons which our men had tumbled into the lake during the Sad Night—because such heavy objects could not be thrown very far—and they began retrieving them. The immersion had not, as we might have hoped, ruined the cursed things. They needed only to be cleaned of mud and dried and recharged to make them workable again. As they were recovered, Cortés had the first thirteen of them mounted, one apiece, in his battle boats, and those boats took up positions offshore of the cities where his troops were fighting, and there discharged their lightning and thunder and rain of man-killing projectiles. Unable to defend themselves any longer, when simultaneously beset from the front and from the side, the cities had to surrender, and when the last of them surrendered—Tlácopan, capital of the Tecpanéca, third bastion of The Triple Alliance—the encircling arms of Cortés's land forces met and joined.

His battle boats were no longer needed to support the troops ashore, but, the very next day, they were moving about the lake again and discharging their cannons. We on the island could watch them, and for a while we could not understand their intent, since they were aiming neither at us nor at any apparent targets on the mainland. Then, when we heard and saw the crash of a cannon ball's destructive impact, we understood. The heavy projectiles battered first the old aqueduct from Chapultepec, then the one built by Ahuítzotl from Coyohuacan, and they broke them both.

The Snake Woman said, "The aqueducts were our last connections to the mainland. We are now as helpless as a boat adrift without oars on a stormy sea full of evil monsters. We are surrounded, unprotected, fully exposed. Every other nearby nation which has not voluntarily joined the white men has been overrun by them and now does their bidding. Except for the fugitive warriors among us, there is no one but us—the Mexíca alone—against the entire One World."

"That is fitting," Cuautemoc said calmly. "If it should be our tonáli not to be victorious at last, then let The One World forever remember—that the Mexíca were the last to be vanquished."

"But Lord Speaker," pleaded the Snake Woman, "the aqueducts were also our last link to life. We might have fought for a time without fresh food, but for how long can we fight without drinkable water?"

"Tlacotzin," said Cuautemoc, as gently as a good teacher addressing a backward student. "There was another time—long ago—when the Mexíca stood alone, in this very place, unwanted and detested by all other peoples. They had only weeds to eat, only the brackish lake water to drink. In those dismally hopeless circumstances, they might well have knelt to their surrounding enemies, to be scattered or absorbed, to be forgotten by history. But they did not. They stood, and they stayed, and they built all this." He gestured with his hand to encompass the whole splendor of Tenochtítlan. "Whatever the end is to be, history cannot forget them now. The Mexíca stood. The Mexíca stand. The Mexíca will stand until they can stand no longer."

After the aqueducts, our city was the target of the cannons, those repositioned on the mainland and those mounted on the boats which constantly circled the island. The iron balls coming from Chapultepec were the most damaging and frightening, for the white men had hauled some of their cannons all the way to the crest of that hill and from there they could send the balls flying in a high arc so that they dropped almost directly downward, like great iron raindrops, on Tenochtítlan. One of the very first to fall in the city, I might remark, demolished the temple of Huitzilopóchtli atop the Great Pyramid. At which, our priests cried "woe!" and "awful omen!" and commenced to hold ceremonies that combined abject prayers for the war god's forgiveness and desperate prayers for the war god's intercession on our behalf.

Although the cannons continued that first thundering for some days, they did so only at intervals, and it seemed a most desultory attack compared to what I knew those cannons could do. I believe Cortés was hoping to make us concede that we were marooned and defenseless and inevitably to be defeated, to make us surrender without a fight, as he would expect any sensible people to do under those conditions. I do not believe he was showing any merciful compunction about having to slay us; he merely wanted to take the city intact, so he could present to his King Carlos the colony of New Spain complete with a capital that was superior to any city in Old Spain.

However, Cortés is and was an impatient man. He did not waste many days waiting for us to take the sensible course of surrender. He had his artificers construct light, portable wooden bridges and, using them to span the gaps in all the causeways, he sent heavy forces of his men running to the city in a sudden onslaught from all three directions at once. But our warriors were not then weakened by hunger, and the three columns of Spaniards and their allies were stopped as if they had run into a solid stone wall encircling the island. Many of them died and the remainder retreated, though not as quickly as they had come, for they were bearing many wounded.

Cortés waited for some days, and tried again in the same manner, and with even worse results. That time, when the enemy poured onto the island, our war canoes darted out and their warriors climbed onto the causeways behind the first waves of attackers. They kicked away the portable bridges and so had a goodly portion of the assault forces marooned with us in the city. The trapped Spaniards fought for their lives; but their native allies knew better what was in store, and fought until they were killed instead of captured. That night our whole island was lighted with celebratory torches and urn fires and incense fires and altar fires—the Great Pyramid in particular was brightly illuminated—so Cortés and the other white men could see, if they approached close enough, and if they cared to watch, what happened to their forty or so comrades we had caught alive.

And evidently Cortés did witness that mass sacrifice, or enough of it to put him in a retaliatory rage. He would exterminate all of us in the city, even if in the process he had to pulverize much of the city he wanted to preserve. He suspended his invasion attempts, but subjected our city to a vicious and unremitting cannonade, the balls being discharged from the cannons as rapidly and regularly as I suppose could be done without the cannons melting from the prolonged exertion. The projectiles plummeted down on us from the mainland and whistled across the water from the circling boats. Our city began to crumble, and many of our people died. A single cannon ball could knock a sizable chunk out of an edifice even as massively built as the Great Pyramid—and many of them did, until that once beautifully smooth structure looked like a mound of bread dough gnawed and nibbled by giant rats. A single cannon ball could knock down one entire wall of a sturdy stone house, and an adobe house would simply go all to clods and dust.

That iron rain went on for at least two months, day after day, abating only at night. But even during the nights, the cannoneers would send three or four balls crashing down among us, at unpredictably irregular intervals, just to insure that our sleep was made uneasy, if not impossible, and that we had no chance to rest undisturbed. After some time, the white men's iron projectiles were used up, and they had to gather and employ rounded stones. Those were slightly less destructive to our city buildings, but they often shattered on impact, and their flying fragments were even more destructive to human flesh.

But those who died in that manner at least died quickly. The rest of us seemed doomed to a slower and more wretchedly dwindling death. Because the stores in the granaries had to last as long as possible, the dispensing officials doled out the dry maize in the meagerest amounts that would help sustain life. For a while, we were able also to eat the dogs and fowl of the island, and we shared the fish caught by men who sneaked out at night upon the causeways with nets, or out onto the chinampa to dangle lines down among their roots. But eventually all the dogs and fowl were gone, and even the fish began to shun the island vicinity. Then we divided and ate all but the absolutely inedible creatures in the public menagerie, and the very rarest and most beautiful specimens, with which the keepers could not bear to part. Those remaining animals were kept alive—indeed, were kept in rather better health than their keepers—by being fed the bodies of our slaves who perished of hunger.

In time, we resorted to catching rats and mice and lizards. Our children, those few who had survived the small pocks, got quite adept at snaring almost every bird foolhardy enough to perch on the island. Still later, we cut the flowers of our roof gardens and stripped the leaves from the trees and made cooked greens of them. Toward the end, we were searching those gardens for edible insects, and peeling the bark from the trees, and we were chewing rabbit-fur blankets and hide garments and the fawnskin pages of books for whatever meat value might be extracted from them. Some people, trying to trick their bellies into thinking they had been fed, filled them by eating the lime cement from the rubble of broken buildings.

The fish had not left our neighborhood for fear of being caught; they left because our surrounding waters had become so foul. Though the rainy season was by then upon us, the rains fell during only a part of each afternoon. We set out every pot and bowl to catch it, and hung out lengths of cloth to be drenched and wrung, but, for all our efforts, there was seldom more than a trickle of fresh rainwater for each parched mouth. So, after our initial revulsion, we got accustomed to drinking the lake's brackish water. However, since there was no longer any means of collecting and carrying away the island's wastes of garbage and human excrement, those substances got into the canals, thence into the lake. Also, since we would feed none but slaves to the menagerie beasts, we had no way of disposing of our other dead except to commit their bodies to that same lake. Cuautemoc ordered that the corpses be shoved off the island only on its western side, because the eastern lake was the wider water and was more or less constantly refreshed by the prevailing east wind, thus he hoped that the water on that side could be kept less contaminated. But the seeping sewage and decomposing bodies inevitably dirtied the water on every side of the island. Since we still had to drink it when thirst drove us to it, we strained it through cloths and then boiled it. Even so, it knotted our guts with agonies of gripes and fluxes. Of our older people and young children, many died just from drinking that putrid water.

One night, when he could no longer watch his people suffer so, Cuautemoc called all the city's populace to gather in The Heart of the One World during that night's lull in the cannonade, and I think everyone who could still walk was there. We stood about the pits in what had been the sleek marble paving of the plaza, surrounded by the jagged upcrops remaining of what had been the undulating Snake Wall, while the Revered Speaker addressed us from partway up what remained of the Great Pyramid's shattered staircase:

"If Tenochtítlan is to last even a little longer, it must be no longer a city but a fortification, and a fort must be manned by those who can fight. I am proud of the loyalty and endurance shown by all my people, but the time has come when I must regretfully ask an end to your allegiance. There still remains one storehouse unopened, but only one..."

The assembled crowd neither cheered nor clamored in demand. It merely murmured, but the combined sound was like the hungry rumbling of a very large stomach.

"When I unseal that store," Cuautemoc went on, "the maize will be shared out equally among all who apply. Now, it can provide every person in this city perhaps one last and very scant meal. Or it would suffice to feed our warriors slightly better, to strengthen them for fighting to the end, whenever that end shall come and whatever that end may be. I will not command you, my people. I will only ask that you make the choice and the decision."

The people made no sound at all.

He resumed, "I have this night had the northern causeway spanned so it can be crossed. The enemy waits warily on the other side, wondering why that has been done. I did it so that all of you who can depart, and will, may do so. I do not know what you will find yonder in Tepeyáca—food and relief or a Flowery Death. But I beg you who can no longer fight; take this opportunity to leave Tenochtítlan. It will be no desertion, no admission of defeat, and you will incur no shame in the departure. To the contrary, you will enable our city to stand in defiance a while longer. I say no more."

None went hurriedly or even willingly, all went in tears and grief, but they recognized the practicality of Cuautemoc's plea, and in that one night the city emptied of its old and its youngest people, its ill and crippled and infirm, its priests and temple attendants, all who could no longer be of use in combat. Carrying bundles or tumplined packs of what few most valued possessions they could snatch up as they left, they drifted northward through the streets of all four quarters of Tenochtítlan, began to converge in the area of the Tlaltelólco market, then formed a column crossing the causeway. They were met with no bursts of lightning and thunder at the northern end. As I learned later, the white men yonder were simply indifferent to their arrival, and the Texcalteca occupying that position deemed those stumbling, emaciated seekers of refuge too scrawny even to be worth sacrificing as a celebration of victory, and the people of Tepeyáca—though themselves captives of the occupying forces—made them welcome, with food and clean water and shelter.

In Tenochtítlan there remained Cuautemoc, the other lords of his court and his Speaking Council, the wives and families of the Revered Speaker and some other nobles, several physicians and surgeons, all the knights and warriors still fit—and some few stubborn old men, myself among them, who had been in good enough health before the siege that we had not been severely weakened by it, and could still fight if necessary. There also remained the young women of fair health and strength and potential usefulness—and one elderly woman who, for all my urgings, declined to leave the sickbed she had occupied for some while past.

"I am less of a nuisance lying here," said Béu, "than being carried on a litter by others who can barely walk. Also, it has been a long time since I cared to eat much, and I can as easily eat nothing at all. My staying may earn me an earlier end to my tediously long illness. Besides, Záa, you yourself once ignored an opportunity to go safely away. It might be foolish, you said, but you wished to see the end of things." She smiled weakly. "Now, after all your foolishnesses I have put up with, would you refuse to let me share the one that will likely be your last?"

Cortés rightly concluded, from the sudden evacuation of Tenochtítlan and the skeletal appearance of those who left, that the remaining inhabitants must also have weakened considerably. So, on the following day, he sent another frontal attack against the city, though he did not do it quite so impetuously as he had done before. The day began with the heaviest rain of projectiles that had yet fallen on us; he must have worked his cannons very near their melting point. No doubt he hoped the we would still be cowering under shelter long after the devastating rain stopped. But even then, when the shore cannons desisted, he kept his battle boats hovering about the northern end of the island, discharging a barrage into that half of the city, while his foot soldiers streamed across the southern causeway.

They found us not cowering. Indeed, what they did find made the front ranks of white men stop so suddenly that the following ranks rather untidily piled up behind them. For we had posted, at each place where the invaders could arrive upon the island, one of the fattest men among us—well, at least plump, compared to the rest of us—and the Spaniards found him simply strolling there, contentedly belching while he munched on a haunch of dog or rabbit or some such meat. If the soldiers had seen it close, the meat was in reality an awful green from having been so long hoarded just for that gesture of ostentation.

But they did not see it close. The fat man quickly vanished, while a host of much leaner men suddenly stood up from the broken buildings and wreckage all about, hurling javelins. Though many of the marauders were felled in that moment, some pressed forward, only to meet other warriors armed with maquahuime, and others quailed backward, where they were showered with arrows. All of them who survived that surprising and firm defense retreated even farther, all the way back to the mainland. I am sure they reported the apparition of the well-fed and still-feeding man—and I am sure Cortés laughed at that pathetic bit of bravado on our part—but they also reported, quite matter-of-factly, that the rubble of the city provided even better defensive positions for its occupants than the city would have done, had it been left entire.

"Very well," said the Captain-General, according to later report. "I had hoped to save at least some of it, for the amazement of our countrymen who will come later as colonists. But we will level it... level every standing stone and timber of it... level it until not even a scorpion has a hiding place from which to creep upon us."

Of course that is what he did, and this is how he did it. While the boats' cannons continued to pound the northern half of the city, Cortés wheeled several of his shore cannons along the southern and western causeways; they were followed by fighting men, some on horses, some on foot, accompanied by staghounds; and those were followed by many more men armed only with mallets and axes and prybars and battering beams. First the cannons were employed, to blow down everything possible in front of them, and to kill our warriors in hiding, or at least to keep them crouching harmlessly. Then the soldiers advanced into the area of devastation; when our warriors rose up to fight, they were ridden down by the horsemen or overrun by the foot soldiers. Our men fought bravely, but they were weak from hunger and half dazed by the cannonade they had just endured, and they invariably died or had to withdraw deeper into the city.

Some of them tried to remain undetected in their hiding places while the fighting swept on past them, hoping that when the enemy was later off guard they could make just one killing javelin throw or maquahuitl stroke before they were slain. But none got that chance; they were always quickly unearthed; that was what the soldiers had brought the dogs for. Those huge staghounds could sniff out a man, however securely hidden, and if they themselves did not rend him apart, they disclosed his position to the soldiers. Then, as the area was cleared of defenders and danger, the working parties moved in with their tools of demolition, and they cleared whatever was left. They tore down houses and towers and temples and monuments, and they set afire everything that would burn. When they were done, there remained only a flat and featureless plot of ground. That would be one day's work. On the following day, the cannons would be able to advance unimpeded across that cleared area and batter a new portion, to be followed by the soldiers and the dogs, then the demolishes. And so, day by day, the city diminished a little more, as if afflicted by The Being Eaten by the Gods. We in the yet unafflicted sections of the city could stand on our rooftops and watch the progress of the leveling, and its approach toward us.

I remember the day the wreckers reached The Heart of the One World. First they amused themselves by shooting fire arrows at those tremendous feather banners which, although sadly tattered, still floated majestically overhead, and the banners, one by one, disappeared in flares of flame. But many more days were required for the destruction of that city within a city—the temples, the tlachtli court, the skull rack, the palaces and court buildings. Though the Great Pyramid was already a gnawed ruin, and could afford no stronghold or concealment worth Cortés's concern, he must have felt that, simply because it was Tenochtítlan's most magnificent and distinguishing symbol, it had to come down. It did not come down easily, even when swarmed over by hundreds of workmen with heavy steel tools, but at last it yielded, layer by layer, revealing the older pyramids inside it, each of them smaller and more crudely built, and they came down too. Cortés had his men work rather more gently and carefully when they began dismantling the palace of Motecuzóma Xocoyatl, for he obviously expected to find the nation's treasury reinstalled in the thick-walled chambers there. When he did not, he let the demolition proceed with a vengeance.

I remember also the burning of the great menagerie just outside the plaza's fragmented Snake Wall, for that day I was watching from the roof of a house close enough that I could hear the bellowing and roaring and howling and screeching of its occupants as they burned alive. True, the menagerie's population had been reduced by our having been forced to eat a good number of its occupants, but still there remained many wondrous beasts and birds and reptiles. Some of them may now be irreplaceable, should you Spaniards ever decide to build a similar showplace. For example, at that time the hall of animals exhibited a totally white jaguar, a rarity we Mexíca had never seen before and no one may ever see again.

Cuautemoc, well knowing the weakness of his warriors, had intended that they should merely fight a defensive withdrawal, delaying the enemy's advance insofar as possible, and slaying as many invaders as they could in the process. But the warriors themselves were so outraged by the desecration of The Heart of the One World that they exceeded their orders, and their anger gave them a surge of strength, and they several times emerged from the wreckage around the plaza, shouting war cries and pounding their weapons on their shields, to take offensive instead of defensive action. Even our women were infuriated and joined in, flinging down from rooftops nests full of wasps, and fragments of stone, and other things less mentionable, upon the despoilers.

Our warriors did kill some of the enemy soldiers and wreckers, and perhaps somewhat slowed their work of destruction. But a greater number of our men died in the doing so, and they were every time beaten back. Nevertheless, to discourage their harassment, Cortés sent his cannons continuing on to the north, blasting away more of the city, and his soldiers and dogs and work parties had to follow the cannons, to level what they left. It was because they moved on that they neglected to tear down this House of Song in which we sit today, and some few other buildings of no particular account in this southern half of the island.

But not many buildings were left, not anywhere, and those few stuck up from the prevailing wasteland like the last few, wide-apart teeth in an old man's gums, and my house was not among them. I suppose I should congratulate myself that when my house fell, I was not inside it. By that time, the city's entire remaining population was sheltering in the Tlaltelólco quarter, and in the very middle of it, to be as far as possible from the continuous barrage of cannon projectiles and fire arrows from the circling battle boats. The warriors and the stronger survivors lived in the open of the marketplace, and all the women and weaker folk were crammed into the houses already crowded by the neighborhood's resident families clumped together for refuge. Cuautemoc and his court occupied the old palace that had once belonged to Moquihuix, the last ruler of Tlaltelólco when it was still an independent city. As a lord, I also was accorded a small room there, which I shared with Béu. Although she had again protested against being moved from her home, I had carried her thither in my arms. So, with Cuautemoc and many others, I stood atop the Tlaltelólco pyramid, watching, on the day Cortés's wreckers moved into the Ixacualco quarter where I had lived. I could not see, through the clouds of cannon smoke and the dust of pulverized limestone, exactly when my own house went down. But when the enemy departed at the day's end, the Ixacualco quarter was, like most of the island's southern half, a barren desert.

I do not know if Cortés was ever afterward informed of the fact that every wealthy pochtéatl of our city had in his house—as I did—a concealed treasure chamber. He clearly did not know at that time, for his work parties toppled every house indiscriminately and haphazardly, and, in the smoke and dust of each one's collapse, no one ever glimpsed the wrapped packets or bales of gold and gems and plumes and dyes and such, which got even more invisibly buried among the rubble and were later swept aside in the island's clearance and enlargement. Of course, even had Cortés scavenged every one of the pochtéa's valuables, they would have amounted to far less than the still-lost treasury, but they would yet have made a gift to astonish and delight his King Carlos. So I watched that day's devastation with some ironic satisfaction, even though, at the day's end, I was an old man poorer than the young child I had been when I first saw Tenochtítlan.

Well, so was every other Mexícatl still alive, including even our Revered Speaker. The end came not long after that, and it came quickly when it came. We had been for countless days devoid of every commodity that could be remotely regarded as food, and our very ability to move about, even to talk to each other, was enfeebled to listlessness. Cortés and his army, as relentless and numerous and voracious as those ants that strip whole forests clean, finally reached the Tlaltelólco marketplace and began tearing down the pyramid there, meaning that we fugitives were so huddled in what little space was left to hide that we scarcely had even a place to stand in comfort. Still Cuautemoc would have stood, if he had had to do it on one foot, but, after I and the Snake Woman and some other counselors had privately conferred, we went to him and said:

"Lord Speaker, if you are taken by the outlanders, the whole of the Mexíca nation falls with you. But if you escape, the rulership goes where you go. Even if every other person on this island is slain or captured, Cortés will not have bested the Mexíca."

"Escape," he said dully. "To where? To do what?"

"To go into exile, with just your closest family and a few of your chief lords. It is true that we no longer have trustworthy allies anywhere among the lands closest to here. But there are farther countries from which you can recruit supporters. It may be a long time before you can hope to return in force and triumph, but however long it may take, the Mexíca will still be unvanquished."

"What farther countries?" he asked, without enthusiasm.

The other lords looked to me, and I said, "To Aztlan, Revered Speaker. Go back to our very beginnings."

He stared as if I were mad. But I reminded him how we had, only comparatively recently, renewed our ties with our cousins of our first homeplace, and I gave him a map I had drawn to show him the way there. I added, "You can expect a hearty welcome, Lord Cuautemoc. When their Speaker Tlilectic-Mixtli left here, Motecuzóma sent with him a force of our warriors and a number of Mexíca families skilled in all our modern crafts of city building. You may find they have already made of Aztlan a miniature Tenochtítlan. At the very least, the Aztéca could be the seed kernels—as once before they were—from which to grow a whole new and mighty nation."

It took a good deal more persuasion to get Cuautemoc to agree, but I will not relate it all, since it all went for naught. I still think the plan should have succeeded; it was well conceived and executed; but the gods decreed that it should not. At twilight, when the battle boats ceased their day-long barrage and began to turn homeward toward the mainland, a goodly number of our men accompanied Cuautemoc and his chosen companions down to the edge of the island. They all got into canoes, and at a signal the many canoes paddled into the lake, all at once but each in a different direction, moving fast, appearing to be a sudden mass scurry for safety. The acáli carrying Cuautemoc and his abbreviated court headed for the little mainland bay between Tenayúca and Azcapotzálco. Since there were few if any habitations at that spot, it was presumably unguarded by any of Cortés's camps or sentries, and Cuautemoc should easily have been able to slip inland from there and keep going northwest to Aztlan.

But the battle boats, spying the sudden eruption of acaltin from the island, turned back and began to whisk busily about among them, seeking to determine if they really were in rout. And, by ill chance, one of the boat captains was astute enough to notice that one of the occupants of one canoe was rather too richly dressed to be a mere warrior. That boat dropped iron hooks, and grappled the canoe fast to its side, and hauled aboard the Revered Speaker, and carried him straight to the Captain-General Cortés.

I was not present at that meeting, but I learned later that Cuautemoc spoke, through the interpreter Malintzin, saying, "I did not surrender. It was for my people's sake that I sought to elude you. But you caught me fairly." He pointed to the dagger at Cortés's belt. "Since I was taken in war, I deserve—and I request—the death of a warrior. I ask that you slay me now, where I stand."

Magnanimous in victory, or at least unctuous, Cortés said, "No, you did not surrender, and you have not ceded your rule. I decline to slay you, and I insist that you retain your leadership of your people. For we have much work to do, and I pray you will help me do it. Let us together build your city to a new grandeur, my esteemed Lord Cuautemoc."

Cortés probably pronounced it Guatemoc, as he always later did. I think I long ago mentioned, reverend friars, that the name Cuautemoc meant Swooping. Eagle, but I suppose it was inevitable and even fitting that, after that day—by our calendar the day One Serpent of the year Three House; by your calendar the thirteenth day of August in the year one thousand five hundred twenty and one—our last Revered Speaker's name was ever afterward translated into Spanish as Falling Eagle.

* * *

For some while after the fall of Tenochtítlan, life was not much changed in most of The One World. Outside the immediate area of The Triple Alliance, no other part of these lands had been so devastated, and there were probably many parts where the people were not yet aware that they resided not in The One World but in a place called New Spain. Though they were cruelly ravaged by the mysterious new diseases, they seldom saw a Spaniard or a Christian, so they had no new laws or gods imposed on them, and they went on with their accustomed ways of life—harvesting, hunting, fishing, whatever—as they had done through all the sheaves of years before.

But here in the lake lands, life was much altered, and it was hard, and it has never got easier, and I doubt that it ever will. From the day after Cuautemoc's capture, Cortés concentrated all his attention and energy on the rebuilding of this city—or I should say our energy. For he decreed that, since it was entirely the fault of us fractious Mexíca that Tenochtítlan had been destroyed, its restoration as the City of Mexíco should be our responsibility. Though his architects drew the plans, and his artificers oversaw the work, and his most brutal soldiers wielded the whips to make the work get done, it was our people who did the work, and we who supplied the materials, and if we would eat after our labors, it was we who had to provide the food. So the quarriers of Xaltócan worked harder than ever in their lives, and foresters laid naked the lakeside hills to cut beams and planks, and our former warriors and pochtéa became foragers and carriers of what foodstuffs and other necessities they could forcibly extort from the surrounding lands, and our women—when they were not being openly molested by the white soldiers, even raped before the eyes of all who cared to watch—were pressed into service as porters and messengers, and even small children were put to work mixing mortar.

Of course, the first things attended to were those most important. The broken aqueducts were repaired, and then the foundations were laid for what would be your cathedral church, while directly in front of it were erected the pillory and the gallows. Those were the first functioning structures in the new City of Mexíco, for they were much exercised to inspire us to unceasing and conscientious labor. Those who slacked at any job were strangled on the gallows, or were branded with the "prisoner of war" mark on the cheek and then were exposed in the pillory for the outlanders to pelt with stones and horse droppings, or they were broken by the whips of the overseers. But those who worked hard died almost as frequently as did the slackers, from such causes as being forced to lift a stone so heavy that they ruptured their insides.

I was far more fortunate then most, for Cortés gave me employment as an interpreter. With all the orders and instructions to be relayed from architects to builders, with all the new laws and proclamations and edicts and sermons to be translated to the people, there was more work than Malintzin alone could manage, and the man Aguilar, who might have assisted to some degree, had long ago died in a battle somewhere. So Cortés engaged me, and even paid me a small wage in Spanish coin, in addition to giving me and Béu accommodation in the splendid residence—what had once been Motecuzóma's country palace near Quaunahuac—which he had appropriated for himself and Malintzin and his ranking officers and their concubines, and where he also kept under his eye Cuautemoc and his family and courtiers.

Perhaps I should apologize, though I do not know to whom, that I took employment with the white men, rather than die defying them. But, since the battles were all over, and I had not perished in the struggle, it seemed my tonáli ordained that for at least a while longer I should struggle not to perish. I had once been bidden, "Stand! Endure! Remember!" and that was what I determined to do.

For some time, a major part of my interpreting duties consisted in my translating Cortés's incessant and insistent demands to know what had become of the Mexíca's vanished treasury. If I had been a younger man, and able to work at any other trade that would have supported myself and my ever-ailing wife, I would right then have quit that degrading occupation. It required me to sit with Cortés and his officers, as if I were one of them, while they bullied and insulted my fellow lords, calling them "damned, lying, greedy, treacherous, clutching Indians!" I was especially ashamed of myself when I had to participate in the repeated interrogations of the Uey-Tlatoani Cuautemoc, whom Cortés no longer addressed with unction or even the least respect. To Cortés's reiterated queries, Cuautemoc could or would say nothing but a disclaimer:

"To the best of my knowledge, Captain-General, my predecessor Cuitlahuac left the treasure in the lake where you threw it."

At which, Cortés would snarl, "I have sent down my best swimmers and yours. They find nothing but mud!"

And Cuautemoc could or would make only the rejoinder, "The mud is soft. Your cannons made the whole Lake Texcóco tremble. Any objects as heavy as gold would have settled ever deeper in that ooze."

I felt most ashamed on the day I had to watch the "persuasion" of Cuautemoc and the two old men of his Speaking Council who had accompanied him to that session of questioning. After I had many times translated those same words so many times exchanged before, Cortés exploded in a temper. He ordered his soldiers to rake from the palace kitchen's hearth three large bowls of embers, and made the three lords of the Mexíca sit with their bare feet in those smoldering coals while he again asked the identical questions and they, gritting their teeth against the pain, gave the identical replies. At last, Cortés threw up his hands in a gesture of disgust and stalked out of the room. The three cautiously stood up from their chairs and stepped out of the bowls and began gingerly to make their way to their quarters. The two old men and the younger one, doing their best to support each other, hobbled on their blistered and blackened feet, and I heard one of the elders moan:

"Ayya, Lord Speaker, why do you not tell them something else? Anything? I hurt unbearably!"

"Be silent!" snapped Cuautemoc. "Do you think I am this moment walking in a pleasure garden?"

Though I loathed Cortés and myself and our association, I refrained from any deed or remark that might arouse his displeasure and endanger my soft situation, because, within a year or two, there were many of my fellows who would happily have replaced me as Cortés's collaborator, and could adequately have done so. More and more of the Mexíca and other peoples—of nations both inside and outside The Triple Alliance—were hastening to learn Spanish and to apply for baptism as Christians. They did it not so much from servility as from ambition, and even necessity. Cortés had early promulgated a law that no "Indian" could hold any position higher than that of common laborer until and unless he was a confirmed Christian and proficient in the conquerors' spoken tongue.

I was already recognized by the Spaniards as Don Juan Damasceno, and Malintzin was Doña Marina, and the other Spaniards' concubines were Doña Luisa and Doña Maria Immaculada and the like, and some few nobles succumbed to the temptation of the advantages of being Christian and speaking Spanish; the former Snake Woman, for instance, became Don Juan Tlacotl Velasquez. But, as might have been expected, most others of the onetime pípiltin, from Cuautemoc on down, disdained the white men's religion and language and appellations. However admirable their stand, it proved to be a mistake, for it left them nothing but their pride. It was the people of the lowest classes, and the lowest-born of the middle classes, and even slaves of the nethermost tlacotli class, who did besiege the chaplains and the missionary friars for instruction in Christianity, and for baptism with Spanish names. It was they who, to learn the Spanish tongue, eagerly gave their own sisters and daughters in payment to the Spanish soldiers who had enough education and intelligence to teach it.

Thus it was the mediocrities and dregs of society who, having no inborn pride to discard, freed themselves of the drudge work and got themselves put in charge of the drudges—who in an earlier day had been their superiors, their leaders, even their owners. Those upstart "imitation whites," as others of us called them, eventually were given posts in the increasingly complex government of the city, and were made the chiefs of outlying towns, even of several negligible provinces. It might have been regarded as praiseworthy: that a nobody could uplift himself to eminence; except that I cannot recall a single one who utilized his eminence for the good of anyone but himself.

Such a man was suddenly superior to all who had been his superiors and equals, and that was as high as his ambition reached. Whether he achieved the post of provincial governor or merely that of timekeeper at some building project, he became a despot over everyone under him. The timekeeper could denounce as a trifler or drunkard any workman who did not fawn on him and bribe him with gifts. He could condemn that workman to anything from a cheek brand to a hanging on the gallows. The governor could debase onetime lords and ladies to garbage collectors and street sweepers, while he forced their daughters to submit to what you Spaniards call "the rights of the señorio." However, I must in fairness say that the new nobility of Spanish-speaking Christians behaved equally toward all their countrymen. As they humiliated and tormented the formerly highest classes, so did they similarly mistreat the lower classes from which they themselves had sprung. They made everybody—except their own appointed superiors, of course—far more miserable than any meanest slave had been in years gone by. And, while the total reversal of society did not physically affect me, I was troubled by my realization that, as I told Béu, "These imitation whites are the people who will write our history!"

Though I had my own snug position in the new society of New Spain during those years, I can slightly excuse my reluctance to give it up on the ground that I sometimes could use my position to help others besides myself. At least once in a while, and if Malintzin or one of the later-engaged other interpreters was not present to betray me, I could word my translating in such a way as to enhance the plea of some petitioner seeking a favor, or to mitigate the punishment of some accused malefactor. In the meantime, since Béu and I were enjoying free sustenance and lodging, I was able to hoard away my wages against the day when—perhaps through my own fault, or because of some visible worsening of Béu's condition—I should be expelled from my employment and from the Quaunahuac palace.

As it happened, I left the position of my own accord, and it happened like this. By the third year after the Conquest, that impatient man Cortés was becoming impatient with his no longer adventurous role as administrator of many details and arbitrator of petty disputes. Much of the City of Mexíco had by then been built, and the building of the remainder was well under way. Then as now, about a thousand new white men arrived each year in New Spain—most of them, with their white women, settling in or about the lake region, carving out their own Little Spains of the best lands, and appropriating our sturdiest people as "prisoners of war" to work those lands. All the newcomers so swiftly and firmly consolidated their positions as overlords that any uprising against them was unthinkable. The Triple Alliance had become irreversibly New Spain, and was functioning, I gathered, as well as Cuba or any other Spanish colony—its native population subdued and resigned, if not notably happy or comfortable in that subjection—and Cortés appeared confident that his under-officers and his appointed imitation whites were capable of maintaining it so. He himself wanted new lands to conquer, or, more precisely, he wanted to view more of the lands he regarded as already his.

"Captain-General," I said to him, "you are already acquainted with the country between the eastern coast and here. The lands between here and the western coast are not greatly different, and to the north are mostly wastelands unworth the looking at. But to the south—ayyo, southward of here are majestic mountain ranges and verdant plains and impressive forests and, south of all, the jungle that is awesome and trackless and infinitely hazardous, but so full of wonders that no man should live out his life without venturing into it."

"Southward it is, then!" he cried, as if ordering a troop to move out that very moment. "You have been there? You know the country? You speak the languages?" I said yes and yes and yes, at which he did give a command: "You will guide us there."

"Captain-General," I said. "I am fifty and eight years old. That is a journey for young men of strength and stamina."

"A litter and bearers will be provided—and also some interesting companions for you," he said, and left me abruptly, to go and choose the soldiers for the expedition, so I had no chance to tell him anything about the impracticality of litters on steep mountainsides or in the jungle's tangle.

But I did not balk at going. It would be good to make one last long journey across this world, before my very last and longest, to the next. Though Béu might be lonesome while I was gone, she would be in capable hands. The palace servants knew her condition, and they served her tenderly and well, and they were discreet; Béu herself would only have to take care not to attract the notice of any of the resident Spaniards. As for me, old though I was by the calendar count, I did not yet feel hopelessly decrepit. If I could survive the siege of Tenochtítlan, as I had done, I supposed I could survive the rigors of Cortés's expedition. Given good fortune, I might lose him there, or lead the train among people so revolted by the sight of white men that they would slay us all, and I would then have died to good purpose.

I was a trifle puzzled by Cortés's mention of "interesting companions" for me, and, on the autumn day of our departure, I was frankly astonished when I saw who they were: the three Revered Speakers of the three nations of The Triple Alliance. I wondered whether Cortés insisted on their coming along because he feared they might concoct some plot against him during his absence, or because he wanted the people of the southern lands to be impressed at the sight of such august personages meekly following in his train.

They certainly made a sight to see, because their rich litters were so often so unwieldy in so many terrains that the personages had to get out and walk, and because Cuautemoc had been permanently crippled on that occasion of Cortés's persuasive questioning. So, in many places along the trail, the local people were treated to the spectacle of the Revered Speaker Cuautemoc of the Mexíca limping and dangling from the shoulders of the two others supporting him: on one side the Revered Speaker Tetlapanquetzal of Tlácopan and on the other the Revered Speaker Cohuanacoch of Texcóco.

But none of the three ever complained, even though they must have realized, after a while, that I was deliberately leading Cortés and his horsemen and foot soldiers along difficult trails through country with which I was unfamiliar. I did it only partly from the intent to make the expedition no pleasure trip for the Spaniards, and the hope that they might never return from it. Also, because it was to be my last journey abroad, I had decided I might as well see some new country. So, after taking them through the most rugged mountains of Uaxyacac, then across the unlovely barrens of that isthmus between the northern and southern seas, I took them northeast into the swampiest interior of the Cupilco country. And that was where at last, sick of the white men, sick of my association with them, I went off and left them.

I should mention that, obviously to monitor the truthfulness of my own translating along the way, Cortés had brought along a second interpreter. For a change, it was not Malintzin, since she was at that time still nursing her infant Martin Cortés, and I almost regretted her absence, for she was at least comely to look at. Her replacement was likewise a female, but a woman with the face and whine and disposition of a mosquito. She was one of those upstarts from the lowest class, who had become an imitation white by learning to speak Spanish and taking the Christian name of Florencia. However, since her only other language was Náhuatl, she was of no use in those foreign parts, except each night to service however many of the Spanish soldiers who had not been able to entice to their pallets, with gifts and the lure of curiosity, younger and more desirable local sluts.

One night in early spring, after having spent the day slogging through a particularly nasty and noisome swamp, we camped on a dry piece of ground in a grove of ceiba and amatl trees. We had eaten our evening meal and were resting around the several campfires, when Cortés came and squatted beside me and put a comradely arm about my shoulders and said:

"Look yonder, Juan Damasceno. That is a thing to be marveled at." I raised my topaz and looked where he pointed: at the three Revered Speakers sitting together, apart from the rest of the men. I had seen them sit like that many times on the journey, presumably discussing whatever is left to be discussed by rulers with nothing left to rule. Cortés said, "That is a sight infrequent enough in the Old World, believe me—three kings seated peaceably together—and it may never again be seen here. I should like a memento of it. Draw me a portrait of them, Juan Damasceno, just as they are, with their faces inclined toward each other in serious conversation."

It seemed an innocuous request. Indeed, for Hernán Cortés, it seemed unusually thoughtful, his recognition of a moment worth recording. So I willingly complied. I peeled a strip of bark from one of the amatl trees, and on its clean inner surface I drew, with a charred and pointed stick from the fire, the best picture I could make with such crude materials. The three Revered Speakers were individually recognizable, and I caught the solemnity of their faces, so that anyone looking at the picture could divine that they spoke of lordly things. It was not until the next morning that I had cause to lament having broken my long-ago oath never to draw any more portraits, lest I bring ill fortune upon those portrayed.

"We will not march today, my boys," Cortés announced, at our arising. "For this day we have the unhappy duty of convening a martial court."

His soldiers looked as startled and bewildered as I and the Revered Speakers did.

"Doña Florencia," said Cortés, with a gesture toward the smirking woman, "has taken care to overhear the conversations between our three distinguished guests and the chiefs of the villages through which we have passed. She will testify that these kings have been conniving with the peoples hereabout to mount a mass uprising against us. I also have, thanks to Don Juan Damasceno"—he waved the piece of bark—"a drawing which is incontrovertible proof of their being deep in conspiracy."

The three Speakers had thrown only a glance of disgust at the contemptible Florencia, but their look at me was full of sadness and disillusion. I leapt forward and cried, "This is not true!"

Instantly, Cortés had his sword out, the point of it against my throat. "I think," he said, "for these proceedings, your testimony and translation might not be entirely impartial. Doña Florencia will serve as interpreter, and you—you will keep silent."

So six of his under-officers sat as the tribunal, and Cortés presented the charges, and his witness Florencia provided the spurious supporting evidence. Perhaps Cortés had tutored her in advance, but I do not think that would have been necessary. Persons of her base sort—resentful that the world neither knows nor cares if they even exist—will grasp any chance to be recognized, if only for their egregious malignity. Thus Florencia seized that one opportunity to be noticed: by reviling her betters, and with seeming impunity, and before an apparently attentive audience which pretended to believe her. Dredging up her lifelong indignation at her own nonentity, she spewed a torrent of lies and fabrications and accusations intended to make the three lords seem creatures more despicable than she was.

I could say nothing—not until now—and the Revered Speakers would say nothing. In their disdain for the mosquito posturing as a vulture, they did not refute her vituperation or defend themselves or let their faces show what they thought of that sham trial. Florencia would probably have gone on for days, inventing even evidence that the three were Devils from Hell, if she had had the intellect to think of it. But the tribunal finally wearied of listening to her rant, and they summarily commanded her to desist, and then they just as summarily pronounced the three lords guilty of conspiring to revolt against New Spain.

Without protest or expostulation, only exchanging ironic farewells with each other, the three let themselves be stood in a row under a massive ceiba tree, and the Spaniards threw ropes over a convenient limb, and the three were hauled up together. In that moment, when the Revered Speakers Cuautemoc and Tetlapanquetzal and Cohuanacoch died, there also ended the last remaining trace of the existence of The Triple Alliance. I do not know the exact date of the year, because on that expedition I had not been keeping a journal. Perhaps you reverend scribes can calculate the date, for when the execution was concluded, Cortés shouted merrily:

"Now let us hunt, my boys, and kill some game and make a feast! Today is Meat Tuesday, the last day of Carnival!"

They caroused throughout the night, so I had no difficulty in slipping away from the camp unnoticed, and back the way we had come. In much less time than we had taken outbound, I returned to Quaunahuac and to Cortés's palace. The guards were accustomed to my comings and goings, and they indifferently accepted my off hand remark that I had been sent home in advance of the rest of the expedition. I went to Béu's room and told her of all that had happened.

"I am now an outcast," I said. "But I believe Cortés is totally unaware that I have a wife, or that she is in residence here. Even if he were to find out, it is unlikely that he would wreak my deserved punishment on you. I must flee, and I can best hide among the crowds of Tenochtítlan. Perhaps I can find an empty hut in the laborers' low quarter. I would not wish you to live in such squalor, Waiting Moon, when you can stay and be comfortable here—"

"We are now outcasts," she interrupted, her voice husky but determined. "I may even be able to walk to the city, Záa, if you will lead me."

I argued and pleaded, but she would not be dissuaded. So I made a pack of our belongings, which were not many, and I called for two slaves to bear her in a litter, and we traveled over the mountain rim, back into the lake lands, and across the southern causeway into Tenochtítlan, and here we have been ever since.

* * *

I bid you welcome once again, Your Excellency, after such long absence. Do you come to hear the conclusion of my narrative? Well, I have told it all, except for a little bit.

Cortés returned with his train about a year after I had left him, and his first concern was to put about the false story of the planned insurrection of the three Revered Speakers, and to show my drawing as "proof" of their collusion, and to proclaim the justness of his having executed them for that treason. It came as a shock to all the people of what had been The Triple Alliance, for I had not broached the news to any but Béu. All the people mourned, of course, and held belated funeral services of remembrance. They also, of course, muttered darkly among themselves, but they had no choice except to feign belief in the version of the incident told by Cortés. He did not, I might remark, bring back the perfidious Florencia to support his story. He would not have risked her trying to achieve another fleeting moment of recognition by publicly giving the lie to her own lies. Where and how he disposed of the creature, no one ever heard, or cared enough to inquire.

Surely Cortés had been angered by my desertion of his expedition, but that anger must have ebbed during the ensuing year, for he never ordered a hunt for me, or not that I know of. None of his men ever came seeking my whereabouts; none of his dogs were sent to sniff me out. Béu and I were left to live as best we could.

By that time, the marketplace of. Tlaltelólco had been restored, though much reduced in size. I went there to see what was being bought and sold, and by whom, and for what prices. The market was as crowded as in the old days, though at least half the crowd consisted of white men and women. I noticed that most of the goods exchanged between my own people went by barter—"I will give you this gallipavo fowl for that pottery bowl"—but the Spanish buyers were paying in trade currency: ducados and reales and maravedies. And, while they bought foodstuffs and other commodities, they also bought a great many things of only trifling use or decorative worth. Listening to them talk, I gathered that they were buying "quaint native handcrafts" to keep for their "curiosity value" or to send to their kinfolk back home as "mementos of New Spain."

As you know, Your Excellency, many different flags have flown over this city during the years since its reconstruction as the City of Mexíco. There has been Cortés's personal standard, blue and white with a red cross; and the blood-and-gold flag of Spain; and the one bearing the picture of the Virgin Mary in what I suppose are realistic colors; and the one with the two-headed eagle signifying empire; and others of significance unknown to me. In the market that day, I saw many artisans obsequiously offering for sale miniature copies of those various flags, well or badly done, but even the best did not seem to arouse any fervor among the browsing Spaniards. And I saw that not any of the tradesmen were offering similar replicas of our own proud symbol of the Mexíca nation. Perhaps they feared they could be charged with harboring sympathies contrary to peace and good order.

Well, I had no such fears. Or rather, I was already punishable for worse offenses, so I felt not much concern for trivial ones. I went home to our wretched little hut, and I made a drawing, and I knelt beside Béu's pallet to hold it close to her eyes.

"Waiting Moon," I said, "can you see this clearly enough to copy it?" She peered intently as I pointed to the various elements. "See, it is an eagle, with his wings poised for flight, and he perches on a nopali cactus, and in his beak he holds the war symbol of intertwined ribbons—"

"Yes," she said. "Yes. I can better make out the details, now that you have explained them. But copy it, Záa? What do you mean?"

"If I buy the materials, could you make a copy of this by embroidering with colored threads upon a small square of cloth? It need not be as exquisite as the pictures you used to make. Just brown for the eagle, green for the nopali, perhaps red and yellow for the ribbons."

"I believe I could. But why?"

"If you can make enough such copies, I can sell them in the market. To the white men and women. They seem to fancy such curiosities, and they pay in coin for them."

She said, "I will make one, while you watch me, so you can correct me where I go wrong. When I have one done right, and can feel it with my fingertips, I can use it for a pattern to do any number of others."

And she did, and very nicely too, and I applied for a place in the market, and was allotted a small space, and there I spread a groundcloth, and on it I arrayed the replicas of the old emblem of the Mexíca. No one in authority came to molest me, or to make me take the things away; instead, many people came and bought. Most were Spaniards, but even some of my own race offered me this or that in barter, because they had thought they would never again see that reminder of who and what we had been.

From the start, many Spaniards complained of the design: "That is not a very lifelike snake the eagle is eating." I tried to tell them that it was not intended to be a snake, nor was the eagle eating it. But they seemed unable to comprehend that it was a word picture, the intertwined ribbons that signified fire and smoke, hence also signified war. And warfare, I explained, had constituted a great part of Mexíca history, whereas no reptile ever had. They said only, "It would look better with a snake."

If that was what they wanted, that was what they would have. I made a revised drawing, and helped Waiting Moon make from it a new piece of embroidery, which she used thereafter as her pattern. When inevitably other tradesmen at the market copied the emblem, they copied it complete with the snake. None of the imitations were as well made as Béu's, so my business did not suffer much. Rather, I was amused by the slavishness of the copies, amused that I had instigated a whole new industry, amused that that should be my concluding contribution to The One World. I had been many things in my life, even for a time the Lord Mixtli, a man of stature and wealth and respectability. I would have laughed if anyone had told me, "You will end your roads and your days as a common tradesman peddling to haughty outlanders little cloth copies of the Mexíca emblem—and a debased travesty of the emblem, at that." I would have laughed, so I did laugh, as I sat there day after day in the marketplace, and those who stopped to buy from me thought me a jolly old man.

As things turned out, I did not quite end there, because the time came when Béu's eyesight failed completely, and her fingers also went, and she could no longer do the embroidery, so I had to close my little venture into trade. We have lived since then on the savings of coins we put by, though Waiting Moon has often and fretfully expressed the wish that death might release her from her black prison of boredom and immobility and misery. After a while of inactivity, of doing no more than existing, I might have wished that release for myself as well. But it was then that Your Excellency's friars found me and brought me here, and you asked me to talk of times past, and that has been diversion enough to sustain my interest in living. While my employment here has meant an even more dreary and solitary imprisonment for Béu, she has endured it just so I would have someone to go home to, on the nights I have gone home to that shack. When finally I go there to stay, perhaps I shall arrange that it be no overlong stay for her and me. We have no more work to do, or any other excuse for remaining in the world of the living. And I might mention that the last contribution we did make to The One World does not now amuse me. Go to the Tlaltelólco market this day and you will see the Mexíca emblem still for sale, still complete with serpent. What is worse—why I am not amused—you will also hear there the professional storytellers, now coiling that invented and excrescent snake into our most venerable legends:

"Hear me and know. When our people first came here to this lake region, when we were still the Aztéca, our great god Huitzilopóchtli bade our priests look for a place where there stood a nopali, and upon it an eagle perched, eating a snake...."

Well, Your Excellency, so much for history. I cannot change the pitiful little falsities of it, any more than I can change the far more deplorable realities of it. But the history I have told is the history through which I lived, and in which I had some part, and I have told it truthfully. I kiss the earth to that, which is to say: I swear to it.