Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  “My telling the people that I am their Uey-Tlatoáni does not make it so. There are formalities to be observed, and in public. We will commence the ceremonies of succession this very afternoon, while there is still daylight. Since your troops have occupied The Heart of the One World, I and the priests and the Speaking Council”—he swept his arm to include every one of us Mexíca in the room—“will remove to the pyramid at Tlaltelólco.”

  Cortés said, “Oh, surely not now. The rain is becoming a downpour. Wait for a more clement day, my lord. I invite the new Revered Speaker to be my guest in this palace, as Montezuma was.”

  Cuitláhuac said firmly, “If I remain here, I am not yet the Revered Speaker, therefore I am useless as your guest. Which will you have?”

  Cortés frowned; he was not accustomed to hearing a Revered Speaker speak like a Revered Speaker. Cuitláhuac went on:

  “Even after I am formally confirmed by the priests and the Speaking Council, I must win the trust and approval of the people. It would help me gain the people’s confidence if I could tell them exactly when the Captain-General and his company plan to depart this place.”

  “Well …” said Cortés, drawing out the word, to make plain that he had not himself given thought to that, and was in no hurry to. “I promised your brother that I would take my leave when I was ready to take the gift of treasure he offered to donate. I now have that. But I will need some time to melt it all down so we can transport it to the coast.”

  “That might take years,” said Cuitláhuac. “Our goldsmiths have seldom worked with more than small amounts of gold at a time. You will find no facilities in the city for desecrating—for melting all those countless works of art.”

  “And I must not impose on my host’s hospitality for years,” said Cortés. “So I will have the gold carried to the mainland and let my own smiths do the compacting of it.”

  Rudely, he turned from Cuitláhuac to Alvarado and said in Spanish, “Pedro, have some of our artificers come in here. Let me see … they can take down these ponderous doors, and all the other doors throughout the palace. Have them build us a couple of heavy sledges to carry all that gold. Also order the saddlers to contrive harness for enough horses to drag the sledges.”

  He turned back to Cuitláhuac: “In the meantime, Lord Speaker, I ask your permission that I and my men remain in the city for at least a reasonable while. Most of my current company, as you know, were not with me during my earlier visit, and they are naturally most eager to see the sights of your great city.”

  “For a reasonable while, then,” repeated Cuitláhuac, nodding. “I will so inform the people, and bid them be tolerant, even affable, if they will. Now, I and my lords will leave you, to begin the preparations for my brother’s funeral and my own accession. The sooner we complete those formalities, the sooner I will be your host in truth.”

  When all of us who had been summoned by Motecuzóma left the palace, the Spanish carpenter-soldiers were eyeing the mountain of treasure in the downstairs dining hall, estimating its bulk and weight. We passed through the Snake Wall into the square and paused to watch the activity there. The white men moved about their various camp tasks, looking uncomfortably soggy, for the rain had become heavy. An equal number of our own men moved among the Spaniards, busy or managing to look busy, all stripped to their loincloths so the rain was not so much of a discomfort to them. Thus far, Cuitláhuac’s plan was progressing as he had explained it to us—except for the unforeseen but by no means unfortunate demise of Motecuzóma.

  All that I have recounted, reverend scribes, had been arranged by Cuitláhuac in every detail, long before our arrival in Cortés’s presence. It had been at his order that the crowd of Mexíca men and women gathered to clamor outside the palace. It had been at his order that they then dispersed to fetch food and drink for the white men. But—what none of the Spaniards had noticed in the confusion—it was only the women in that crowd who had left the plaza at that command. When they returned, they did not again enter the encampment, but handed their trays and jars and baskets to the men who had remained. So there were no longer any women in the danger area, except for Malíntzin and her Texcaltéca maids, for whose safety we cared nothing. And our men were still coming and going, in and out of the palace, back and forth through the camp, dispensing meat and maize and such, bringing dry wood for the soldiers’ fires, cooking in the palace kitchens, doing every kind of duty that would account for their being on the scene … and would keep them there until the temple conch trumpets signaled midnight.

  “Midnight is the striking time,” Cuitláhuac reminded us. “By then, Cortés and all these others will have become used to the constant traffic and the apparent servility of our nearly naked and clearly unarmed men. Meanwhile, let Cortés hear the music and see the incense smoke of what appears to be a jubilant ceremony preliminary to my inauguration. Find and collect every possible priest. They have already been told to await our instructions, but you may have to nudge them, since they, like the white men, will balk at having this rainfall wash them clean. Assemble the priests at the pyramid of Tlaltelólco. Have them put on the loudest, most firelit performance they have ever done. Also assemble there all the island’s women and children and every man excused from fighting. They will make a convincing multitude of celebrants, and they should be safe there.”

  “Lord Regent,” said one of the Council elders. “I mean, Lord Speaker. If the outlanders are all to die at midnight, why did you press Cortés to name a date for his departure?”

  Cuitláhuac gave the old man a look; I wagered that the old man would not much longer be a member of the Council. “Cortés is not such a fool as you, my lord. He certainly knows that I wish to be rid of him. Had I not spoken testily and insistently, he would have had cause to suspect a forcible ouster. Now I can hope he feels secure in my reluctant acceptance of his presence. I fervently hope he has no reason to feel otherwise between now and midnight.”

  He did not. But, while Cortés evidently felt no anxiety for the security of himself and his fellows, he apparently was most anxious to get the plundered treasury out of reach of its owners—or perhaps he decided that the rain-wet streets would make the sledges easier for his horses to pull. Anyway, despite their having to work in drenching rain, his carpenter-soldiers had the two crude land-boats hammered together not long after dark. Then other soldiers, helped by some of our own many men who were still making themselves useful to the Spaniards, carried the gold and jewels out of the palace and distributed them in equal piles on the sledges. Meanwhile, other soldiers used an elaborate tangle of leather straps to hitch four horses to each load. It was still some while before midnight when Cortés gave the order to move out, and the horses leaned into their leather webbing, like human porters bending against their tumplines, and the sledges glided quite smoothly across the wet marble paving of The Heart of the One World.

  Though the bulk of the white army remained in the plaza, a considerable escort of armed soldiers went with the train, and they were led by the three highest-ranking Spaniards: Cortés, Narváez, and Alvarado. Moving that immense treasure was a laborious task, I grant you, but it hardly required the personal attention of all three commanders. I suspect that they all went because no one of them would trust either or both of the others to be in possession of all those riches, unwatched, even for a little while. Malíntzin also accompanied her master, probably just to enjoy a refreshing excursion after her long time spent in the palace. The sledges slid west across the plaza and onto the Tlácopan avenue. None of the white men evinced any suspicion at finding the city outside the square empty of people, for they could hear the throb of drums and music coming from the northern end of the island, and could see the low clouds yonder tinted red by the glow of urn fires and torchlights.

  Like our earlier, unexpected opportunity to remove Motecuzóma as a possible obstacle to our plans, Cortés’s unexpectedly sudden removal of the treasure was an unforeseen circumstance, and impelled Cuitláhuac to make hi
s attack earlier than planned. Like Motecuzóma’s demise, Cortés’s precipitate move worked to Cuitláhuac’s advantage. When the treasure train slithered onto the Tlácopan avenue, it was obviously taking the shortest crossing to the mainland, so Cuitláhuac could recall the warriors he had posted to man the other two causeways, and add them to his striking force. Then he passed the word to all his knights and cuáchictin: “Do not wait for the midnight trumpets. Strike now!”

  I must remark that I was at home with Waiting Moon during these events I am recounting, for I was one of the men whom Cuitláhuac had charitably described as “excused from fighting”: men too old or unfit to take part. So I did not personally witness the happenings on the island and the mainland—and no single witness could have been everywhere, in any case. But I was later present to hear the reports of our various commanders, so I can tell you more or less accurately, lord friars, all the occurrences of what Cortés has ever since called “the Sad Night.”

  At the command to strike, the first move was made by some of those men of ours who had been in The Heart of the One World ever since the stoning of Motecuzóma. Their job was to loose and scatter the Spaniards’ horses—and they had to be brave men, for never in any war had any of our warriors had to contend with any but human creatures. While some of the horses had gone with the treasure train, there still remained about eighty of them, all tethered in the corner of the plaza where stood the temple that had been converted to a Christian chapel. Our men untied the leather head straps that held the horses, then plucked burning sticks from a nearby campfire and ran waving them among the loosed animals. The horses panicked and charged away in all directions, galloping through the camp, kicking over the stacked harquebuses, trampling several of their owners and throwing all the other white men into a confusion of running and shouting and cursing.

  Then the mass of our armed warriors poured into the square. Each of them carried two maquáhuime, and the extra weapon he tossed to one of the men who had already been long inside the plaza. None of our warriors wore the quilted armor, because it was not much protection in close combat, and would have been constrictive when sodden by the rain; our men fought wearing only their loincloths. The plaza had been but dimly lighted all night, since the soldiers’ cooking fires had had to be sheltered from the rain by propping shields and other objects to lean over them. The running and plunging horses pounded most of those fires to pieces, and so disconcerted the soldiers that they were quite taken by surprise when our nearly naked warriors leaped out of the shadows, some slashing and chopping at any glimpse of white skin or bearded face or steel-wearing body, others forcing their way inside the palace Cortés had so recently quit.

  The Spaniards manning the cannons on the palace roof heard the commotion below, but could see little of what was happening, and anyway could not discharge their weapons into the camp of their comrades. Another circumstance which worked in our favor was that the few Spaniards in the plaza who could lay hands on a harquebus found that it had got too wet to spit lightning and thunder and death. A number of the soldiers inside the palace did manage to use their harquebuses just once, but had no time to recharge them before our swarming warriors were upon them. So every white man and Texcaltécatl inside the palace was killed or captured, and our own men suffered few casualties in the process. But our warriors fighting outside, in The Heart of the One World, were not so quickly or entirely victorious. After all, the Spaniards and their Texcaltéca allies were brave men and trained soldiers. Recovering from their first surprise, they staunchly fought back. The Texcaltéca had weapons equal to ours, and the white men, even deprived of their harquebuses, had swords and spears far superior to ours.

  Though I was not there, I can imagine the scene: it must have seemed like a war taking place in our Míctlan or your Hell. The vast square was only barely lighted by the remains of campfires, and those smoldering embers sporadically exploded into sparks as men or horses stumbled through them. The rain was still falling and making a veil which prevented any group of fighters from seeing how their fellows fared elsewhere. The entire expanse of pavement was littered with tangled bedding, the spilled contents of the Spaniards’ packs, the remains of the evening meal, many fallen bodies, and blood making the marble even more slippery underfoot. The flash of steel swords and bucklers and pale white faces contrasted with the bare but less visible bodies of our copper-skinned warriors. There were separate duels taking place up and down the stairs of the Great Pyramid, and in and out of the many temples, and under the tranquil gaze of the innumerable sightless eyes of the skull rack. Making the whole battle even more unreal, the terrified horses still milled and reared and ran and kicked. The Snake Wall was too high for them to jump, but occasionally a horse would fortuitously find one of the wall’s avenue openings and escape into the city streets.

  At one point, a number of the white men turned and retreated to a far corner of the plaza, while a line of their comrades wielded their swords to keep our men from pursuing them—and that apparent retreat proved to be a clever feint. Those who fled had all snatched up harquebuses as they did so, and, during their brief respite from attack, they put dry charges from their belt pouches into the weapons. The swordsmen suddenly stood back, the harquebusiers stepped forward and all together discharged their lethal pellets into the crowd of our warriors who had been pressing them, and many of our men fell dead or wounded in that single roll of thunder. But the harquebuses could not again be charged before more of our men were pressing forward. Thereafter, the battle continued to be fought with stone weapons against steel weapons.

  I do not know what made Cortés aware that something was happening to the army he had left leaderless. Perhaps one of the loose horses came clattering toward him through the streets, or perhaps it was a soldier escaped from the battle, or perhaps the first he heard of it was that one concerted thunderclap of the massed harquebuses. I do know that he and his train had reached the Tlácopan causeway before they knew of anything gone wrong. He took only a moment to decide what action to take, and there was no one to report later what words he spoke, but what he decided was, “We cannot leave the treasure here. Let us hurry it to safety on the mainland, then come back.”

  Meanwhile, that sound of the many harquebuses had also been heard all around the lake’s nearer shores—by Cortés’s camped troops and by our expectant allies alike. Cuitláhuac had instructed our mainland forces to wait for the midnight trumpets, but they had the good sense to move immediately when they heard that noise of combat. Cortés’s detachments, on the other hand, had had no instructions. They must have jumped alert at the sudden sound, but did not know what to do. Likewise, the white men at the cannons set around the lakeshore had them already charged and aimed, but they could hardly send their projectiles flying into the city where their Captain-General and most of their comrades were in residence. So I suppose all of Cortés’s mainland troops were simply standing, indecisive, staring bewildered toward the island dimly visible through the rain, when they were attacked from behind.

  Around the whole western arc of the lakeshore, the armies of The Triple Alliance rose up. Though many of their best warriors were in Tenochtítlan fighting alongside our Mexíca, there were still multitudes of good fighters on the mainland. From as far south as the Xochimílca and Chalca lands, troops had secretly been moving northward and massing for that moment, and they fell upon Prince Black Flower’s Acólhua forces camped about Coyohuácan. On the other side of the straits there, the Culhua attacked Cortés’s Totonáca forces camped on the promontory of land around Ixtapalápan. The Tecpanéca rose up against the Texcaltéca camped about Tlácopan.

  At about the same time, the beleaguered Spaniards in The Heart of the One World made the sensible decision to run. Some one of their officers seized a horse as it pounded through the camp, swung himself onto its back, and began shouting in Spanish. I cannot repeat his exact words but, in effect, the officer’s command was, “Close ranks and follow after Cortés!” That gave the su
rviving white men at least a destination, and they fought their way from all the corners of the plaza to which they had been scattered, and they managed to bunch themselves in a tight pack which bristled with sharp steel. As a prickly little boar can roll itself into a ball of quills and defy even coyotes to swallow it, so that pack of Spaniards fought off our men’s repeated assaults.

  Still heeding the shouted directions of the one man astride a horse, they moved in that bristling clump backward toward the western opening in the Snake Wall. Several others of them, during that slow retreat, were able to catch and mount horses. When all those white men and Texcaltéca were outside the plaza, on the Tlácopan avenue, the mounted soldiers formed a rear guard. Their swinging swords and the pummeling hooves of the horses held back our pursuing warriors long enough for the men afoot to flee in the direction Cortés had gone.

  Cortés must have met them on his own way back toward the city’s center, for of course he and his treasure train had gone only as far along the causeway as the first canoe passage interrupting it, where they saw that the spanning wooden ramp had been removed, that they could not cross the gap. So Cortés alone rode back to the island, and there met the disorganized, ravaged remnant of his army, drenched with rain and blood, cursing their enemies and moaning over their wounds, but all fleeing for their lives. And he heard, not far behind them, the war cries of our pursuing warriors, still trying to fight past the barriers of horsemen.

  I know Cortés, and I know he did not waste time asking for a detailed explanation of what had occurred. He must have told those men to stand fast there, where the causeway joined the island, to hold off the enemy as long as possible. For he immediately galloped back along the causeway to where Alvarado and Narváez and the other soldiers waited, and shouted for them to shove all the treasure into the lake, to clear the sledges and then shove them across the gap to make a bridge. I daresay everybody from Alvarado to the lowliest trooper raised a howl of protest, and I imagine Cortés silenced them with some command like, “Do it! Or we are all dead men!”