What seemed to us certain proof of our Sovereign’s supposition was the otherwise unaccountable presence here of the Host, secreted in that native-made pyx at the ancient city of Tula. We have but recently learned, from listening to our resident Aztec’s narrative—as Your Majesty will learn from reading the transcribed pages herewith—that we were deceived by what was no more than a superstitious act of the Indians, committed only a comparatively few years ago. And they were abetted in that by an evidently failed or apostate Spanish priest who had earlier dared an unspeakably profane act of larceny. Wherefore, we have regretfully written to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, confessing our gullibility and requesting that they ignore that false item of evidence. Since all the other apparent links between St. Thomas and the mythical Feathery Snake are purely circumstantial, it is to be expected that the Congregatio will, at least until more tenable proofs are forthcoming, dismiss Your Majesty’s suggestion that the Indian deity could in reality have been the Apostle Thomas making an evangelical sojourn in this New World.
It grieves us to make such a disheartening report, but we maintain that it was not the fault of our eagerness to make even more evident the astuteness of our Most Admired Majesty. It was entirely the fault of this ape of an Aztec!
He was aware that we had come into possession of that pyx containing the Sacrament, preserved fresh and intact and, as we judged, for perhaps fifteen centuries. He was aware of the marveling excitement which it engendered in us and in every other Christian in these lands. The Indian could at that time have told us how that object came to be where it was found. He could have averted our premature exclamations over that discovery, and the many church services held to celebrate it, and the high reverence in which we held that apparently divine relic. Above all, he could have prevented our making a fool of ourself by so hurriedly and mistakenly reporting the matter to Rome.
But no. The despicable Aztec watched all the excitement and jubilation, no doubt with concealed and malicious merriment, and said not a word to disabuse us of our joyous misapprehensions. Not until too late, and in the chronological course of his narrative, and only casually, does he make mention of the true origin of those Communion wafers and the manner of their having been secreted at Tula! We ourself feel sufficiently humiliated, knowing how our superiors at Rome will be amused by or disparaging of our having been victimized by a hoax. But we feel immeasurably more contrite because, in our haste to inform the Congregatio, we seemed to impute a similar gullibility to our Most Respected Emperor and King, albeit the deed was done with all good intent of giving Your Majesty due credit for what should have been a reason for rejoicing among Christians everywhere.
We beg and trust that you will see fit to put the blame for our mutual embarrassment where it belongs: on the tricksome and treacherous Indian, whose silence, it is now evident, can be almost as outrageous as some of his utterances. (In the next pages, if you can believe it even when you read it, Sire, he uses the noble Castilian language as an excuse to speak words which surely have never before been deliberately inflicted on the ears of any other Bishop anywhere!) Perhaps our Liege will now take cognizance that, when this creature so brazenly makes jape of Your Majesty’s vicar, there can be no question but that, by extension, he makes jape of Your Majesty as well, and not at all unintentionally. Perhaps, Sire, you will at last agree that the day is considerably overdue when we might dispense with the employment of this depraved old barbarian whose unwelcome presence and unwholesome disclosures we have now endured for more than a year and a half.
Please to forgive the brevity and acrimony and unmannerly curtness of this communication, Your Majesty. We are at present too vexed and discomposed to write at greater length or with the mansuetude fitting to our holy office.
May all the goodness and virtue that shine from Your Radiant Majesty continue to illumine the world. Such is the prayer of Your S.C.C.M.’s devoted (if chastened) chaplain,
(ecce signum) Zumárraga
UNDECIMA PARS
AYYO! After so long neglect, Your Excellency joins us once again. But I believe I can divine the reason. I am now about to speak of those new-come gods, and gods clearly are of interest to a man of God. We are honored by your presence, my Lord Bishop. And not to demand too much of Your Excellency’s valuable time, I will hasten my tale to that encounter with those gods. I will only digress to tell of a meeting with one small and lesser being on the road, for that being was later to prove not small at all.
I left Tenochtítlan on the day after the day I had returned to it, and I left in style. Since the fearsome smoking star was not in evidence in the daytime, the streets were crowded with people, and they ogled my parade of departure. I wore my ferociously beaked helmet and feathered armor of an Eagle Knight, and I carried my shield bearing the feather-worked symbols of my name. However, as soon as I had crossed the causeway, I entrusted those things to the slave who carried my flag of rank and my other regalia. I put on more comfortable clothing for the journey, and did not again dress in all my finery except when we came to one or another important community along the way, where I wished to impress the local ruler with my own importance.
The Uey-Tlatoáni had provided a gilded and bejeweled litter in which I rode whenever I tired of walking, and another litter full of gifts for me to present to the Xiu chief Ah Tutál, besides other gifts which I was to present to the gods—if gods they proved to be, and if they did not scorn such offerings. In addition to my litter bearers and the porters carrying our travel provisions, I was accompanied by a troop of Motecuzóma’s tallest, most robust and imposing palace guards, all of them formidably armed and magnificently garbed.
I need hardly say that no bandits or other villains dared to attack such a train. I need hardly describe the hospitality with which we were received and regaled at every stop along our route. I will recount only what happened when we spent one night at Coátzacoálcos, that market town on the northern coast of the narrowest land between the two great seas.
I and my party arrived near sunset on one of the town’s apparently busiest market days, so we did not push into its center to be quartered as distinguished visitors. We merely made camp in a field outside the town, where other late-arriving trains were doing the same. The one that settled nearest ours was the train of a slave trader herding to market a considerable number of men, women, and children. After our company had eaten, I sauntered over to the slave camp, half thinking that I might find a suitable replacement for my late servant Star Singer, and that I might strike a good bargain if I bought one of the men before they went up for bidding in the town market on the morrow.
The pochtécatl told me he had acquired his human herd, by ones and twos, from such inland Olméca tribes as the Coatlícamac and Cupílco. His string of male slaves was literally a string: they traveled and rested and ate and even slept all linked together by a long rope threaded through each man’s pierced nose septum. The women and girls, however, were left free to do the work of making the camp, laying the fires, doing the cooking, fetching water and wood and such. As I strolled about, idly eyeing the wares, one young girl carrying a jug and a gourd dipper shyly approached me and sweetly asked:
“Would my Lord Eagle Knight care for a refreshing drink of cool water? At the far side of the field, there is a clear river running to the sea, and I dipped this long enough ago that all the impurities have settled.”
I looked at her across the gourd as I sipped. She was plainly a backcountry girl, short and slender, not very clean, dressed in a knee-length blouse of cheap sackcloth. But she was not coarse or dark of complexion; in a soft and unformed adolescent way, she was quite pretty. She was not, like every other female in the neighborhood, chewing tzictli, and she was obviously not as ignorant as might have been expected.
“You addressed me in Náhuatl,” I said. “How do you come to speak it?”
The girl put on a woebegone expression and murmured, “One does much traveling, being repeatedly bought and sold. It is at lea
st an education of sorts. I was born to the Coatlícamac tongue, my lord, but I have learned some of the Maya dialects and the trade language of Náhuatl.”
I asked her name. She said, “Ce-Malináli.”
“One Grass?” I said. “That is only a calendar date, and only half a name.”
“Yes,” she sighed tragically. “Even the slave children of slave parents receive a seventh-birthday name, but I never did. I am less than a slave born of slaves, Lord Knight. I have been an orphan since my birth.”
She explained. Her unknown mother was some Coatlícamatl drab, made pregnant by some unknown one of the many men who had straddled her. The woman had given birth in a farm furrow one day while working in the fields, as casually as she would have defecated, and had left the newborn infant there, as uncaringly as she would have left her excrement. Some other woman, less heartless, or perhaps herself childless, had found the abandoned baby before it perished, and had taken it home and given it succor.
“But who that kindly rescuer was, I no longer remember,” said Ce-Malináli. “I was still a child when she sold me—for maize to eat—and I have been passed from owner to owner since then.” She put on the look of one who had suffered long but persevered. “I know only that I was born on the day One Grass in the year Five House.”
I exclaimed, “Why, that was the very day and year of my own daughter’s birth in Tenochtítlan. She too was Ce-Malináli until she became Zyanya-Nochípa at the age of seven. You are small for your age, child, but you are precisely the age she—”
The girl interrupted excitedly, “Then perhaps you would buy me, Lord Knight, to be personal maid and companion to your young lady daughter!”
“Ayya,” I mourned. “That other Ce-Malináli … she died … nearly three years ago….”
“Then buy me to be your house servant,” she urged. “Or to wait upon you as your daughter would have done. Take me with you when you return to Tenochtítlan. I will do any kind of work or”—she demurely lowered her eyelashes—“any not daughterly service my lord might crave.” I was drinking again from the dipper at that moment, and I spluttered the water. She said hastily, “Or you can sell me in Tenochtítlan, if my lord is perhaps beyond the age of such cravings.”
I snapped, “Impudent little vixen, the women I crave I do not have to buy!”
She did not cringe at my words; she said boldly, “And I do not wish to be bought just for my body. Lord Knight, I have other qualities—I know it—and I yearn for the opportunity to make use of those qualities.” She grasped my arm to emphasize her pleading. “I want to go where I will be appreciated for more than just my being a young female. I want to try my fortunes in some great city. I have ambitions, my lord, I have dreams. But they are vain if I am condemned to be forever a slave in these dreary provinces.”
I said, “A slave is a slave, even in Tenochtítlan.”
“Not always, not necessarily forever,” she insisted. “In a city of civilized men, my worth and intelligence and aspirations could perhaps be recognized. A lord might elevate me to the status of concubine, and then even make me a free woman. Do not some lords free their slaves, when they prove deserving?”
I said they did; even I had once done so.
“Yes,” she said, as if she had wrung some concession from me. She squeezed my arm, and her voice became wheedling. “You do not require a concubine, Lord Knight. You are a man stalwart and handsome enough that you need not buy your women. But there are others—old or ugly men—who must and do. You could sell me at a profit to one of those in Tenochtítlan.”
I suppose I should have sympathized with the child. I too had once been young, and brimming with ambition, and I had yearned to try the challenge of the greatest city of them all. But there was something so hard and intense about the way in which Ce-Malináli tried to ingratiate herself that I found her less than appealing. I said, “You seem to have a very high opinion of yourself, girl, and a very low opinion of men.”
She shrugged. “Men have always used women for their pleasure. Why should not one woman use men for her advancement? Although I do not like the act of sex, I can pretend to. Although I have not yet been often used, I have become quite good at it. If that talent can help lift me from slavery … well … I have heard that a concubine of a high lord may enjoy more privilege and power than his legitimate first lady. And even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca collects concubines, does he not?”
I laughed. “Little bitch, you have high ambitions indeed.”
She said tartly, “I know I have more to offer than a hole between my legs that is still invitingly tight and tender. A man can buy a techíchi bitch and get that!”
I disengaged her grip on my arm. “Know this, girl. Sometimes a man may keep a dog just to have an affectionate companion. I discern no capacity for affection in you. A techíchi can also be a nourishing meal. You are not clean or appetizing enough to be cooked. You are articulate for one of your age and low origins. But you are only a backwoods brat with nothing to offer except windy boasts and ill-concealed greed and a pathetic notion of your own importance. You admit that you do not even like to employ that vaunted tight hole of yours, which is your only worth. If you exceed any of your sister slaves in any respect, it is merely in vainglorious presumption.”
She raged at me, “I can go yonder to the river and wash myself clean—make myself appetizing—and you would not reject me! In fine clothes I can pass for a fine lady! I can pretend affection, and make even you believe it genuine!” She paused, then sneered, “What other woman has ever done otherwise with you, my lord, when she aspired to be something more than a receptacle for your tepúli?”
My fingers twitched to punish her impertinence, but the grubby slave was too nearly grown to be spanked like a child, and too young to be whipped like an adult. So I only put my hands on her shoulders, but I held her hard enough to hurt, and I said between my teeth:
“It is true that I have known other females like you: venal and deceitful and perfidious. But I have known others who were not. One of them was my daughter, born to the same name you wear, and had she lived she would have made it a name to be proud of.” I could not suppress my rising anger, and my voice rose with it: “Why did she die, and you live?”
I shook that Ce-Malináli so fiercely that she dropped the water jar. It broke with a crash and a splash, but I paid no heed to that portent of misfortune. I shouted so loudly that heads turned throughout the camp, and the slave trader came running to beg that I not mishandle his merchandise. I think, in that moment, I had been briefly granted the vision of a far-seer, and it had shown me a glimpse of the future, because what I shouted was this:
“You will make that name vile and filthy and contemptible, and all people will spit when they speak it!”
I note Your Excellency’s impatience at my dwelling on an encounter that must seem meaningless. But the episode, though brief, was not trivial. Who that girl was, and who she became in womanhood, and what was the ultimate outcome of her precocious ambitions—all those things are of utmost significance. But for that child, Your Excellency might not now be our excellent Bishop of Mexíco.
I had forgotten her myself by the time I fell asleep that night, under the ill-omened smoking star that hung in the black sky above. The next day I and my company moved on, beyond Coátzacoálcos, and kept to the coast, passing through the cities of Xicalánca and Kimpéch, and at last we came to the place where the presumed gods waited, in the town called Tihó, capital of the Xiu branch of the Maya people, at the northern extremity of the Uluümil Kutz peninsula. On arrival, I was attired in all the splendor of my Eagle Knight regalia, and of course we were respectfully received by the personal guard troops of the Xiu chief Ah Tutál, and we were conducted through the streets of the all-white city in solemn procession to his palace. It was not much of a palace; one does not expect much grandeur among any of the remnant Maya. But its one-floor, thatched-roof buildings of adobe brick were, like the rest of the town, brightly whitewash
ed with lime, and the palace buildings were arranged in a square around a commodious inner court.
Ah Tutál, a superbly cross-eyed gentleman of about my age, was properly impressed by the magnificence of the gifts sent him by Motecuzóma, and I was properly feasted with a welcoming banquet, and while we ate he and I conversed on matters like his health and mine and that of all our various living friends and relations. We could not have cared a little finger for such trivial exchanges; the purpose was to measure my grasp of the local dialect of the Maya tongue. When we had more or less determined the extent of my Xiu vocabulary, we got to the reason for my visit.
“Lord Mother,” I said to him, for that ludicrous title is the proper way of addressing the chief of any community in those parts. “Tell me. Are they gods, these new-come strangers?”
“Knight Ek Muyal,” said the Mother, using the Maya version of my name, “when I sent word to your Revered Speaker, I was sure they must be. But now …” He made a face of uncertainty.
I asked, “Could either of them be the long-gone god Quetzalcóatl who promised to return, the god you call in these lands Kukulkán?”
“No. At any rate, neither of the outlanders has the form of a feathered serpent.” Then he sighed and shrugged and said, “In the absence of any marvelous aspect, how does one recognize a god? These two are passably human in appearance, though much hairier and larger than normal. They are bigger than you are.”
I said, “According to tradition, other gods have often adopted human bodies for a visit to the mortal world. They might understandably choose bodies of intimidating appearance.”
Ah Tutál went on, “There were four in the strangely built canoe that was washed ashore on the beach north of here. But when they were brought in litters to Tihó, we discovered that two of them were dead. Can gods be dead?”
“Dead …” I mused. “Could it be that they were not yet alive? Perhaps they were spare bodies the two live ones like to carry about with them, to slip into when they desire a change.”
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