But his Snake Woman, Tlácotzin, addressed the man who had just spoken: “Do you believe what that white stranger told you?”
“Lord Snake Woman, I can recount only what I know. We were imprisoned by Totonáca guards and we were freed by the man Cortés.”
Tlácotzin turned again to Motecuzóma. “We were told by Patzínca’s own messengers that he laid hands on these officials only after being commanded to do so by that same chief of the white men.”
Motecuzóma said uncertainly, “Patzínca could have lied, for some devious reason.”
“I know the Totonáca,” Tlácotzin said contemptuously. “None of them, including Patzínca, has the courage to rebel or the wit to dissemble. Not without assistance.”
“If I may speak, Lord Brother,” said Cuitláhuac. “You had not yet finished reading the account prepared by the Knight Mixtli and myself. The words repeated therein are the actual words spoken between the Lord Patzínca and the man Cortés. They do not at all accord with the message just received from that Cortés. There can be no doubt that he has artfully tricked Patzínca into treason, and that he has shamelessly lied to these registrars.”
“It does not make sense,” Motecuzóma objected. “Why should he incite Patzínca to the treachery of seizing these men, and then negate that by setting them loose himself?”
“He hoped to make sure that we blamed the Totonáca for the treason,” resumed the Snake Woman. “Now that the officials have returned to us, Patzínca must be in a frenzy of fear, and mustering his army against our reprisal. When that army is gathered to mount a defense, the man Cortés may just as easily incite Patzínca to use them for attack instead.”
Cuitláhuac added, “And that does accord with our conclusions, Mixtli. Does it not?”
“Yes, my lords,” I said, addressing them all. “The white chief Cortés clearly wants something from us Mexíca, and he will use force to get it, if necessary. The threat is implicit in the message brought by these registrars he so cunningly freed. His price for keeping the Totonáca in check is that he be invited here. If the invitation is withheld, he will use the Totonáca—and perhaps others—to help him fight his way here.”
“Then we can easily forestall that,” said Motecuzóma, “by extending the invitation he requests. After all, he says he merely wishes to pay his respects, and it is proper that he should. If he comes with no armies, with just an escort of his ranking subordinates, he can certainly work no harm here. My belief is that he wishes to ask our permission to settle a colony of his people on the coast. We already know that these strangers are by nature island dwellers and seafarers. If they wish only an allotment of some seaside land …”
“I hesitate to contradict my Revered Speaker,” said a hoarse voice. “But the white men want more than a foothold on the beach.” The speaker was another of the returned registrars. “Before we were freed from Tzempoálan, we saw the glow of great fires in the direction of the ocean, and a messenger came running from the bay where the white men had moored their eleven ships, and eventually we heard what had happened. At the order of the man Cortés, his soldiers stripped and gutted every useful item from ten of those ships, and the ten were burned to ashes. Only one ship is left, apparently to serve as a courier craft between here and wherever the white men come from.”
Motecuzóma said irritably, “This makes less and less sense. Why should they deliberately destroy their only means of transport? Are you trying to tell me that the outlanders are all madmen?”
“I do not know, Lord Speaker,” said the hoarse-voiced man. “I know only this. The hundreds of white warriors are now aground on that coast, with no means of returning whence they Game. The chief Cortés will not now be persuaded or forced to go away, because, by his own action, he cannot. His back is to the sea, and I do not believe he will simply stand there. His only alternative is to march forward, inland from the ocean. I believe the Eagle Knight Mixtli has predicted correctly: that he will march this way. Toward Tenochtítlan.”
Seeming as troubled and unsure of himself as the unhappy Patzínca of Tzempoálan, our Revered Speaker refused to make any immediate decision or to order any immediate action. He commanded that the throne room be cleared and that he be left alone. “I must give these matters deep thought,” he said, “and closely study this account compiled by my brother and the Knight Mixtli. I will commune with the gods. When I have determined what should be done next, I will communicate my decisions. For now, I require solitude.”
So the five bedraggled registrars went away to refresh themselves, and the Speaking Council dispersed, and I went home. Although Waiting Moon and I seldom exchanged many words, and then only regarding trivial household matters, on that occasion I felt the need of someone to talk to. I related to her all the things that had been happening on the coast and at the court, and the troublous apprehensions they were causing.
She said softly, “Motecuzóma fears that it is the end of our world. Do you, Záa?”
I shook my head noncommittally. “I am no far-seer. Quite the contrary. But the end of The One World has been often predicted. So has the return of Quetzalcóatl, with or without his Toltéca attendants. If this Cortés is only a new and different sort of marauder, we can fight him and probably vanquish him. But if his coming is somehow a fulfillment of all those old prophecies … well, it will be like the coming of the great flood twenty years ago, against which none of us could stand. I could not, and I was then in my prime of manhood. Even the strong and fearless Speaker Ahuítzotl could not. Now I am old, and I have little confidence in the Speaker Motecuzóma.”
Béu regarded me pensively, then said, “Are you thinking that perhaps we should take our belongings and flee to some safer haven? Even if there is calamity here in the north, my old home city of Tecuantépec should be out of danger.”
“I had thought of that,” I said. “But I have for so long been involved in the fortunes of the Mexíca that I should feel like a deserter if I departed at this juncture. And it may be perverse of me, but if this is some kind of ending, I should like to be able to say, when I get to Míctlan, that I saw it all.”
Motecuzóma might have gone on vacillating and temporizing for a long time, except for what occurred that very night. It was yet another omen, and a sufficiently alarming one that he bestirred himself at least to send for me. A palace page came, himself much perturbed, and roused me from my bed to accompany him at once to the palace.
As I dressed, I could hear a subdued hubbub from the street outside, and I grumbled, “What has happened now?”
“I will show you, Knight Mixtli,” said the young messenger, “as soon as we are outdoors.”
When we were, he pointed to the sky and said in a hushed voice, “Look there.” Late though it was, well after midnight, we were not the only ones watching the apparition. The street was full of people from the neighboring houses, scantily clad in whatever garments they had snatched up, all of them with their faces upturned, all of them murmuring uneasily except when they were calling for other neighbors to wake up. I raised my crystal and looked at the sky, at first as wonderingly as everyone else. But then a memory came to my mind from long ago, and it somewhat diminished the dreadfulness of the spectacle, at least for me. The page glanced sideways at me, perhaps waiting for me to utter some exclamation of dismay, but I only sighed and said:
“This is all we lacked.”
At the palace, a half-dressed steward hurried me up the stairs to the upper floor, then up another staircase to the roof of the great building. Motecuzóma sat on a bench in his roof garden, and I think he was shivering, though the spring night was not cold and he was swathed in several mantles hastily flung around him. Without shifting his gaze from the sky, he said to me:
“After the New Fire ceremony came the eclipse of the sun. Then the falling stars. Then the smoking stars. All those things of the past years were omens evil enough, but at least we knew them for what they were. This is an apparition never seen before.”
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sp; I said, “I beg to correct you, Lord Speaker—only that I may relieve your apprehensions to some degree. If you will wake your historians, my lord, and set them to searching the archives, they can ascertain that this has occurred before. In the year One Rabbit of the last preceding sheaf of years, during the reign of your namesake grandfather.”
He stared at me as if I had suddenly confessed to being some kind of sorcerer. “Sixty and six years ago? Long before you were born. How could you know of it?”
“I remember my father telling of lights like these, my lord. He claimed it was the gods striding about the skies, but with only their mantles visible, all tinted in these same cold colors.”
And that is what the lights looked like that night: like filmy cloth draperies depending from a point at the top of the sky and hanging all the way down to the mountain horizon, and swaying and stirring as if in a light breeze. But there was no noticeable breeze, and the long curtains of light made no swishing sound as they swung. They merely glowed coldly, in colors of white and pale green and pale blue. As the draperies softly undulated, those colors subtly changed places and sometimes merged. It was a beautiful sight, but a sight to make one’s hair similarly stir.
Much later, I chanced to mention that night’s spectacle to one of the Spanish boatmen, and told him how we Mexíca had interpreted it as a warning of dire things coming. He laughed and called me a superstitious savage. “We too saw that light that night,” he said, “and we were mildly surprised to see it this far south. But I know it signifies nothing, for I have seen it on many nights when sailing in the cold northern oceans. It is a commonplace sight there in those seas chilled by Boreas, the north wind. Hence the name we call it, the Boreal Lights.”
But that night I knew only that the pale and lovely and fearsome lights were being seen in The One World for the first time in sixty and six years, and I told Motecuzóma, “According to my father, they were the omen that presaged the Hard Times back then.”
“Ah, yes.” He nodded somberly. “The history of those starvation years I have read. But I think any bygone Hard Times will prove to have been negligible in comparison to what is now in store.” He sat silent for a time, and I thought he was only moping, but suddenly he said, “Knight Mixtli, I wish you to undertake another journey.”
I protested as politely as I could, “My lord, I am an ageing man.”
“I will again provide carriers and escorts, and it is no rigorous trail from here to the Totonáca coast.”
I protested more strongly, “The first formal meeting between the Mexíca and the white Spaniards, my lord, should be entrusted to no lesser personages than the nobles of your Speaking Council.”
“Most of them are older than you are, and less fit for traveling. None of them has your facility at word picture accounts, or your knowledge of the strangers’ tongue. Most important, Mixtli, you have some skill at picturing people as they really look. That is something we have not yet had, not since the outlanders first arrived in the Maya country—a good picture of them.”
I said, “If that is all my lord requires, I can still draw from memory the faces of those two I visited in Tihó, and do a passably recognizable portrayal.”
“No,” said Motecuzóma. “You said yourself that they were only artisan commoners. I wish to see the face of their leader, the man Cortés.”
I ventured to say, “Has my lord then concluded that Cortés is a man?”
He smiled wryly. “You have always disdained the notion that he might be a god. But there have been so many omens, so many coincidences. If he is not Quetzalcóatl, if his warriors are not the Toltéca returning, they could still have been sent by the gods. Perhaps as a retribution of some sort.” I studied his face, rather corpse-looking in the greenish glow from above. I wondered if, when he spoke of retribution, he was thinking of his having snatched the throne of Texcóco from the Crown Prince Black Flower, or if he had other, private, secret sins in mind.
But he suddenly drew himself up and said in his more usual tart manner, “That aspect of the matter need not concern you. Only bring me a portrait of Cortés, and word pictures numbering his forces, describing their mysterious weapons, showing the manner in which they fight, anything else that will help us know them better.”
I tried one last demurrer. “Whatever the man Cortés may be or may represent, my lord, I judge that he is no fool. He is not likely to let a spying scribe wander at will about his encampment, counting his warriors and their armory.”
“You will not go alone, but with many nobles, richly accoutered according to their station, and all of you will address the man Cortés as an equal noble. That will flatter him. And you will take a train of porters bearing rich gifts. That will allay his suspicions as to your real intent. You will be high emissaries from the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca and The One World, fitly greeting the emissaries of that King Carlos of Spain.” He paused and gave me a look. “Every man of you will be an authentic and fully accredited lord of the Mexíca nobility.”
When I got home again, I found Béu also awake. After having watched the night sky’s lights for some time, she was brewing chocolate for my return. I greeted her considerably more exuberantly than usual, “It has been quite a night, my Lady Waiting Moon.”
She obviously took that for an endearment, and looked both startled and delighted, for I do not believe I had ever in our married life spoken an endearment to her.
“Why, Záa,” she said, and blushed with pleasure. “If you were merely to call me ‘wife’ it would lift my heart. But—my lady? Why this sudden affection? Has something—?”
“No, no, no,” I interrupted. I had for too many years been satisfied with Béu’s closed and contained demeanor; I did not want her suddenly gushing sentimentality. “I spoke with the prescribed formality. ‘Lady’ is now your entitled mode of address. This night the Revered Speaker awarded me the -tzin to my name, which confers it upon you as well.”
“Oh,” she said, as if she would have preferred some other sort of benefaction. But she quickly reverted to her cool and unemotional former self. “I take it you are pleased, Záa.”
I laughed, somewhat ironically. “When I was young I dreamt of doing great deeds and earning great wealth and becoming a noble. Not until now, past my sheaf of years, am I Mixtzin, the Lord Mixtli of the Mexíca, and perhaps only briefly, Béu.… Perhaps only as long as there are lords, only as long as there are Mexíca….”
There were four other nobles besides myself, and, since they had been born to their titles, they were not much pleased that Motecuzóma had set an upstart like me in command of the expedition and the mission we were charged to accomplish.
“You are to lavish esteem, attention, and flattery on the man Cortés,” said the Revered Speaker, giving us our instructions, “and on any others of his company you perceive to be of high rank. At every opportunity you will lay a feast for them. Your porters include capable cooks, and they carry ample supplies of our tastiest delicacies. The porters also carry many gifts, which you are to present with pomp and gravity, and say that Motecuzóma sends these things as a token of friendship and peace between our peoples.” He paused to mutter, “Besides the other valuables, there should be enough gold there to assuage all their heart ailments.”
There certainly should, I thought. In addition to medallions and diadems and masks and costume adornments of solid gold—the most beautifully worked pieces from the personal collection of himself and prior Revered Speakers, many of them pieces of great antiquity and inimitable craftsmanship—Motecuzóma was even sending the massive disks, one of gold, one of silver, that had flanked his throne and served him for gongs of summons. There were also splendid feather mantles and headdresses, exquisitely carved emeralds, amber, turquoises, and other jewels, including an extravagant quantity of our holy jadestones.
“But, above all things, do this,” said Motecuzóma. “Discourage the white men from coming here, or even wanting to come here. If they seek only treasure, your gift
of it may be sufficient to send them seeking in other nations there along the coast. If not, tell them the road to Tenochtitlan is hard and perilous, that they could never make the journey alive. If that fails, then tell them that your Uey-Tlatoáni is too busy to receive them—or too aged or ill—or too unworthy to merit a visit by such distinguished personages. Tell them anything that will make them lose interest in Tenochtítlan.”
When we crossed the southern causeway and then turned east, I was leading a longer and richer and more heavily laden train than any pochtécatl ever had done. We skirted south of the unfriendly land of Texcála, and went by way of Cholólan. There and in other cities, towns, and villages along the rest of our route, the anxious inhabitants pestered us with questions about the “white monsters” whom they knew to be disturbingly nearby, and about our plans for keeping them at a distance. When we rounded the base of the mighty volcano Citlaltépetl, we began to descend through the last of the mountainous country into the Hot Lands. On the morning of the day that would bring us clear to the coast, my fellow lords donned their splendiferous regalia of feather headdresses, mantles, and such, but I did not.
I had decided to add a few refinements to our plans and instructions. For one reason, it had been eight years since I had learned what Spanish I knew, and that had hardly improved with disuse. I wanted to mingle with the Spaniards unobserved, and hear them talk their language, and absorb it, and possibly gain a bit more fluency before I attended any of the formal meetings between our lords and theirs. Also, I had spying and note taking to do, and I could do those tasks better if I was invisible.
“So,” I told the other nobles, “from here to the meeting ground I will go barefoot, and wear only a loincloth, and carry one of the lighter packs. You will lead the train, you will greet the outlanders, and when you make camp you will let our porters disperse and relax as they like. For one of them will be me, and I want freedom to wander. You will do the feasting and consultation with the white men. From time to time I will confer with you, privately, after dark. When we have jointly collected all the information the Revered Speaker requested, I will give the word and we will take our leave.”
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