Aztec

by Gary Jennings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “On the day Eight Alligator …”

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

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

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

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

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

  The word rememberer looked momentarily flustered. He cleared his throat and went all the way back to:

  “On the day Eight Alligator, my Lord Speaker …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Motecuzóma said gloomily. “One word.”

  “It means courteous, Lord Speaker, or gentle, mannerly, kindly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What madness is going on over there?” Motecuzóma demanded.

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

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

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

  We all blinked and Motecuzóma exclaimed, “Secretly?”

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

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

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

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