On leaving Texcóco, Black Flower had removed to another of the royal family’s country residences, somewhere in the mountains well to the northeast, and had begun making of it a fortified garrison. Besides the nobles and their families who had voluntarily gone into exile with him, many other Acólhua joined that company: knights and warriors who had formerly served under his father. Still other men, who could not permanently leave their homes or occupations in the domains of Cacáma, did slip away at intervals to Black Flower’s mountain redoubt, for training and practice with the other troops. All those facts were unknown to me at the time, as they were unknown to most people. It was a well-kept secret that Black Flower was preparing, slowly but carefully, to wrest his throne from the usurper, even if that should mean his having to fight the entire Triple Alliance.
Meanwhile, Motecuzóma’s disposition, poisonous at the best of times, was not being improved. He suspected that he had fallen much in the esteem of other rulers by his domineering intervention in the affairs of Texcóco. He felt humiliated by his latest failure to humble Texcála. He was not much pleased with his nephew Cacáma. Then, as if he had not enough to worry and annoy him, even more troublesome things began to occur.
Nezahualpíli’s death might almost have been the signal for the fulfillment of his gloomiest predictions. In the month of The Tree Is Raised next following his funeral, a swift-messenger from the Maya lands arrived with the disturbing news that the strange white men had come again to Uluümil Kutz, and not two of them that time, but a hundred. They had come in three ships, and moored off the port town of Kimpéch on the western shore of the peninsula, and rowed to the beach in their big canoes. The people of Kimpéch, those who had survived the decimation of the small pocks, resignedly let them land without fuss or opposition. But the white men boldly entered a temple and, without even gestures of requesting permission, began to strip the temple of its golden ornamentation. At that, the local populace put up a fight.
Or they tried to, said the messenger, for the weapons of the Kimpech warriors shattered on the white men’s metal bodies, and the white men shouted a war cry, “Santiago!” and they fought back with the sticks they carried, which were not mere staves or clubs. The sticks spat thunder and lightning like the god Chak at his angriest, and many Maya fell dead at a great distance from the spitting sticks. Of course, we all know now that the messenger was trying to describe your soldiers’ steel armor and far-killing harquebuses, but at the time his story sounded demented.
However, he brought two articles to substantiate his wild tale. One was a bark paper tally of the dead: more than a hundred of the Kimpéch men, women, and children; forty and two of the outlanders—an indication that Kimpéch had put up a brave fight against those terrible new weapons. At any rate, the defense had repelled the invaders. The white men had retreated to their canoes, thence to their ships, which had spread their wings and disappeared again beyond the horizon. The other article brought by the messenger was the face of one of the dead white men, flayed from its head, complete with hair and beard, and dried taut on a willow hoop. I later had an opportunity to see it myself, and it much resembled the faces of the men I had met—in its limelike skin, at least—but the hair of scalp and face was of an even more odd color: as yellow as gold.
Motecuzóma rewarded the messenger for bringing him that trophy, but, after the man had gone, he reportedly did much cursing about what fools the Maya were—“Imagine, attacking visitors who might be gods!”—and in great agitation he closeted himself with his Speaking Council and his priests and his seers and sorcerers. But I was not summoned to join the conference and, if it came to any conclusions, I did not hear of them.
However, a little more than a year later, in the year Thirteen Rabbit, the year when I turned my sheaf of years, the white men came again from beyond the horizon, and that time Motecuzóma did call me to a private audience.
“For a change,” he said, “this report was not brought by a Maya of sloping forehead and constricted brain. It was brought by a group of our own pochtéca who happened to be trading along the coast of the eastern sea. They were in Xicalánca when six of the ships came, and they had the good sense not to panic nor to let the townsfolk panic.”
I remembered Xicalánca well: that town so beautifully situated between blue ocean and green lagoon, in the Olméca country.
“So there was no fighting,” Motecuzóma went on, “although the white men this time numbered two hundred and forty, and the natives were much affrighted. Our staunch pochtéca took command of the situation, and kept everyone calm, and even persuaded the ruling Tabascoöb to greet the newcomers. So the white men made no trouble, they ravaged no temples, they stole nothing, they did not even molest any women, and they went away again after spending the day admiring the town and sampling the native foods. Of course, nobody could communicate in their language, but our merchants managed with signs to suggest some bartering. The white men had come ashore with not much to trade. But they did, in exchange for some quills of gold dust, give these!”
And Motecuzóma, with the gesture of a street sorcerer magically producing sweets for a crowd of children, whipped from under his mantle several strings of beads. Though they were made of various materials in various colors, they were identical in the numbers of small beads separated at intervals by larger beads. They were strings of prayers like the string I had acquired from Jerónimo de Aguilar seven years earlier. Motecuzóma smiled a smile of vindication, as if he expected me suddenly to grovel and concede, “You were right, my lord, the strangers are gods.”
Instead, I said, “Clearly, Lord Speaker, the white men all worship in the same manner, which indicates that they all come from the same place of origin. But we already supposed that much. This tells us no new thing about them.”
“Then what about this?” And from behind his throne, with that same air of triumph, he brought out what looked like a tarnished silver pot. “One of the visitors took that from off his own head and traded it for gold.”
I examined the thing. It was no pot, for its rounded shape would have prevented its standing upright. It was of metal, but of a kind grayer than silver and not so shiny—it was steel, of course—and at its open side were affixed some leather straps, evidently to be secured beneath the wearer’s chin.
I said, “It is a helmet, as I am sure the Revered Speaker has already ascertained. And a most practical sort of helmet. No maquáhuitl could split the head of a man wearing one of these. It would be a good thing if our own warriors could be equipped with—”
“You miss the important point!” he interrupted impatiently. “That thing is of the exact same shape as what the god Quetzalcóatl habitually wore on his revered head.”
I said, skeptically but respectfully, “How can we possibly know that, my lord?”
With another swoop of movement, he produced the last of his triumphant surprises. “There! Look at that, you stubborn old disbeliever. My own nephew Cacáma sent it from the archives of Texcóco.”
It was a history text on fawnskin, recounting the abdication and departure of the Toltéca ruler Feathered Serpent. Motecuzóma pointed, with a slightly trembling finger, to one of the pictures. It showed Quetzalcóatl waving good-bye as he stood on his raft, floating out to sea.
“He is dressed as we dress,” said Motecuzóma, his voice also a little tremulous. “But he wears on his head a thing which must have been the crown of the Toltéca. Compare it with the helmet you hold at this moment!”
“There is no disputing the resemblance between the two objects,” I said, and he gave a grunt of satisfaction. But I went on, cautiously, “Still, my lord, we must bear in mind that all the Toltéca were long gone before any of the Acólhua learned to draw. Therefore the artist who did this could never have seen how any Toltécatl dressed, let alone Quetzalcóatl. I grant that the appearance of his pictured headgear is of marvelous likeness to the white man’s helmet. But I know well how storytelling scribes can indulge their imagination in their w
ork, and I remind my lord that there is such a thing as coincidence.”
“Yya!” Motecuzóma made the exclamation sound rather like a retch of nausea. “Will nothing convince you? Listen, there is even more proof. As I long ago promised, I set all the historians of all The Triple Alliance to the task of learning all they could about the vanished Toltéca. To their own surprise—they confess it—they have unearthed many old legends, hitherto mislaid or forgotten. And hear this: according to those rediscovered legends, the Toltéca were of uncommonly pale complexion and of uncommon hairiness, and their men accounted it a sign of manliness to encourage the growth of hair on their faces.” He leaned forward, the better to glare at me. “In simple words, Knight Mixtli, the Toltéca were white and bearded men, exactly like the outlanders making their ever more frequent visits. What do you say to that?”
I could have said that our histories were so full of legends and variant legends and elaborations on legends that any child could find some one of them that would support any wildest belief or new theory. I could have said that the most dedicated historian was not likely to disappoint a Revered Speaker who was infatuated with an irrational idea and demanding substantiation of it. I did not say those things. I said circumspectly:
“Whoever the white men may be, my lord, you rightly remark that their visits are becoming ever more frequent. Also, they are coming in greater numbers each time. Also, each landing has been more westerly—Tihó, then Kimpéch, now Xicalánca—ever closer to these lands of ours. What does my lord make of that?”
He shifted on his throne, as if unconsciously suspecting that he sat only precariously there, and after a few moments of cogitation he said:
“When they have not been opposed, they have done no harm or damage. It is obvious from their always traveling in ships that they prefer to be on or near the sea. You yourself told that they come from islands. Whoever they are—the returning Toltéca or the veritable gods of the Toltéca—they show no inclination to press on inland toward this region which once was theirs.” He shrugged. “If they wish to return to The One World, but wish only to settle in the coastlands … well … He shrugged again. “Why should we and they not be able to live as friendly neighbors?” He paused, and I said nothing, and he asked with asperity, “Do you not agree?”
I said, “In my experience, Lord Speaker, one never really knows whether a prospective neighbor will be a treasure or a trial, until that neighbor has moved in to stay, and then it is too late to have regrets. I might liken it to an impetuous marriage. One can only hope.”
Less than a year later, the neighbors moved in to stay. It was in the springtime of the year One Reed that another swift-messenger came, and again from the Olméca country, but that time bringing a most alarming report, and Motecuzóma sent for me at the same time he convened his Speaking Council to hear the news. The Cupílcatl messenger had brought bark papers documenting the sad story in word pictures. But, while we examined them, he also told us what had happened, in his own breathless and anguished words. On the day Six Flower, the ships had again floated on their wide wings to that coast, and not a few but a frightening fleet of them, eleven of them. By your calendar, reverend scribes, that would have been the twenty-fifth day of March, or your New Year’s Day of the year one thousand five hundred and nineteen.
The eleven ships had moored off the mouth of The River of the Tabascoöb, farther to the west than on the earlier visit, and they had disgorged onto the beaches uncountable hundreds of white men. All armed and sheathed with metal, those men had swarmed ashore—shouting “Santiago!,” apparently the name of their war god—coming with the clear intent of doing more than admiring the local landscape and savoring the local foods. So the populace had immediately mustered their warriors—the Cupílco, the Coatzacuáli, the Coatlícamac, and others of that region—some five thousand men altogether. Many battles had been fought in the space of ten days, and the people had fought bravely, but to no avail, for the white men’s weapons were invincible.
They had spears and swords and shields and body coverings of metal, against which the obsidian maquáhuime shattered at first blow. They had bows that were contemptibly small and held awkwardly crossways, but which somehow propelled short arrows with incredible accuracy. They had the sticks that spat lightning and thunder and put an almost trifling but death-dealing hole in their victims. They had metal tubes on large wheels, which even more resembled a furious storm god, for they belched still brighter lightning, louder thunder, and a spray of jagged metal bits that could mow down many men at once, like maize stalks beaten down by a hailstorm. Most wondrous and unbelievable and terrifying of all, said the messenger, some of the white warriors were beast-men: they had bodies like giant, hornless deer, with four hoofed legs on which they could gallop as fleetly as deer, while their two human arms wielded sword or spear to lethal effect, and while the very sight of them sent brave men scattering in fear.
You smile, reverend friars. But at that time, neither the messenger’s tumbling words nor the crude Cupílco drawings conveyed to us any coherent idea of soldiers mounted on animals larger than any animal in these lands. We were equally uncomprehending of what the messenger called lion-dogs, which could run down a running man, or sniff him out of hiding, and rend him as terribly as a sword or jaguar could do. Now, of course, we have all become intimately acquainted with your horses and staghounds, and their utility in hunting or in battle.
When the combined Olméca forces had lost eight hundred men to death and about an equal number to severe wounds, said the messenger, and had in the meantime killed only fourteen of the white invaders, the Tabascoöb called them all to retreat from the engagement. He sent emissary nobles carrying the gilt mesh flags of truce, and they approached the houses of cloth which the white men had erected upon the ocean beach. The nobles were surprised to find that they could communicate without having to use gestures, for they found that one of the white men spoke an understandable dialect of the Maya language. The envoys asked what terms of surrender the white men would demand, that a peace might be declared. One of the white men, evidently their chief, spoke some unintelligible words, and the Maya-speaking one translated.
Reverend scribes, I cannot testify to the exactitude of those words, since I repeat to you only what the Cupílcatl messenger said that day, and he of course had heard them only after their passing through several mouths and the several languages spoken by the several parties. But the words were these:
“Tell your people that we did not come to make war. We came seeking a cure for our ailment. We white men suffer from a disease of the heart, for which the only remedy is gold.”
At that, the Snake Woman Tlácotzin looked up at Motecuzóma and said, in a voice meant to be encouraging, “That could be a valuable thing to know, Lord Speaker. The outlanders are not invulnerable to everything. They are afflicted with a curious disease which has never troubled any of the peoples in these lands.”
Motecuzóma nodded hesitantly, uncertainly. All the old men of his Speaking Council followed his lead and likewise nodded as if reserving judgment. Only one old man in the room was rude enough to speak an opinion, and that of course was myself.
“I beg to differ, Lord Snake Woman,” I said. “I have known numerous of our own people to show symptoms of that affliction. It is called greed.”
Both Tlácotzin and Motecuzóma threw me peevish glances, and I said nothing else. The messenger was told to proceed with his story, of which there was not much more.
The Tabascoöb, he said, had bought peace by heaping upon the sands every fragment of gold he could immediately order brought to that place: vessels and chains and god images and jewels and ornaments of wrought gold, even dust and nuggets and chunks of the raw metal yet unworked. The obviously commanding white man asked, almost offhandedly, where the people acquired that heart-soothing gold. The Tabascoöb replied that it was found in many places in The One World, but that most of it was pledged to the ruler Motecuzóma of the Mexíca, hence the g
reatest store of it was to be found in his capital city. The white men had seemed much beguiled by that remark, and inquired where that city might be. The Tabascoöb told them that their floating houses could get near to it by floating farther along the coast, west, then northwest.
Motecuzóma growled, “Nice helpful neighbors we already have.”
The Tabascoöb had also given the white commander a gift of twenty beautiful young women to be divided among himself and his ranking under-chiefs. Nineteen of the girls had been selected, by the Tabascoöb himself, as the most desirable of all the virgins in that immediate region. They did not go too happily into the camp of the outlanders. But the twentieth girl had unselfishly volunteered herself to make the gift total twenty, which ritual number might influence the gods to send the Olméca no more such visitations. So, the Cupílcatl concluded, the white men had loaded their plunder of gold and young womanhood into their big canoes, then into their immeasurably bigger floating houses and, as all the people had fervently hoped, the houses had unfurled their wings and set off westward, on the day Thirteen Flower, keeping close along the shoreline.
Motecuzóma growled some more, while the elders of his Speaking Council huddled in a muttering conference, and while the palace steward ushered the messenger from the room.
“My Lord Speaker,” one of the elders said with diffidence, “this is the year One Reed.”
“Thank you,” Motecuzóma said sourly. “That is one thing which I already knew.”
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