The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  “Are they fixed or can they be raised and lowered?”

  “I have not seen them raised or lowered.”

  “There are causeways, I hear.”

  “Several.”

  “How can they be described?”

  “They are wide and rise up from the water to a good height.”

  Cortés was standing in the doorway—I never saw him seated, except on a horse—and the sun was shin ing on him. His long hair had a golden glint but, though he was still a young man, his beard was streaked with gray.

  “Have you seen Moctezuma?” he asked me. “I under stand that you have. What can you say about him?”

  “You know his nephew, Lord Tzapotlan,” I said.

  “They are alike. I find both of them gentle people.”

  “How can a man be gentle and at the same time sacri fice thousands on the altars of his devilish temples? I take it that you like this man.”

  “I like him.”

  “And he looks favorably on you. By the way, what is your name?”

  “Julián Escobar,” I said, but the name “god Kukulcán” was on my tongue.

  Cortés turned to one of his officers. When he spoke to me again his manner had changed.

  “I’ve decided to send you and your dwarfed friend into Tenochtitlán with a message for the emperor. I re ceived word from him just an hour ago that he does not wish me to enter his city. Tell him that I have made a journey of thousands of leagues for no other reason than to see him and bring friendly greetings from the most powerful king in the world. Therefore it would be a dis appointment to me and an insult to my king to turn back now when I stand on his doorstep.”

  Cortés yanked his sword out of its scabbard and held it before him as if he were making a vow.

  “You’ve seen what has gone on here in Cholólan? You’ve seen how I treat acts of treachery?”

  I nodded.

  “If Moctezuma gives you a message like the one I have just received, if he says that he does not wish me to come to Tenochtitlán, then describe to him what you have witnessed here these last days.”

  “I will describe it,” I said, trying to give my voice an honest ring, “in all its many details. And I shall go rap idly on a good horse. On Bravo, since I have ridden him before.”

  I was given the stallion, a decent saddle, and a fine Spanish bit and sent on my way in the early afternoon. The dwarf came alone, riding behind me.

  I was anxious to deliver the message Cortés had given me, anxious to tell Moctezuma that a scourge stood at the gates of Tenochtitlán. To warn him that unless he called out his thousands of warriors the city would be destroyed, its streets clogged with dead, like the streets of Cholólan.

  As we rode along the causeway at a slow trot, the memory of the ruined fields and burned huts and the dead woman went with me. I saw again the old man without thumbs stumbling down the hill, the men of Texcála fleeing with their bloody hands clasped to their breasts, the courtyard at Cholólan heavy with smoke and sad with the moans of the dying, the streets where people were hunted down from house to house and heads rolled in the gutters.

  It was not these sights, however, that sent me hurrying to Moctezuma’s door resolved to help him turn back Hernán Cortés, to annihilate him and his army. Truth fully, I must confess, it was the thought of the death and devastation that this Spanish monster might inflict upon my island.

  CHAPTER 23

  WE ARRIVED IN TENOCHTITLÁN TO FIND TORCHES FLAMING everywhere along the causeway, the plaza strewn with flowers and filled with a curious throng, word having reached the city of the beast with a voice like thunder that ran much faster than a deer and carried a man on its back.

  Indeed, so curious were the Indians that as they lost their fears, they began to press around us and had to be driven away. So keen was their delight, I regretted that the stallion had only a small part of his once magnificent tail to show them.

  Lord Tzapotlan led us to the emperor’s palace, I still riding Bravo and the dwarf clinging on behind. A place for the stallion was waiting, and for us a series of rooms, sparsely furnished but with braziers burning and flowers scattered about.

  Lord Tzapotlan had water brought to us in silver bowls and then disappeared, saying that he would see the Revered Speaker and arrange for our meeting. I thought because of the important message I carried that the emperor would be anxious to see us. But Lord Tzapotlan came back in a short time with distressing news.

  “The great emperor,” he said, “has locked himself away. He is taking neither food nor drink. He has only Tenayuca, his trusted soothsayer, at his side.”

  “You understand the urgent message I carry from Captain General Cortés?”

  “It is understood,” the lord said. “I spoke of it to the wizard.”

  “The emperor won’t talk to you?”

  “He’ll talk to no one except to Tenayuca.”

  We waited that night with no word from Lord Tzapotlan. But in the morning one of the servants said that she had heard that the emperor had left the palace se cretly during the night and gone to the temple of Uitzilopochtli, where he had prayed for a sign from the war god.

  The emperor remained in the temple for two days, praying and burning incense, surrounded by wizards.

  On the third day at noon, Lord Tzapotlan came and led me to a chamber different from the one I had visited before. The walls and ceiling were bare and painted a pearly white, which gave me a feeling that I was sus pended in the sky, floating high among drifting clouds.

  Moctezuma was sitting on a mat that was the same color as the walls, woven of dovelike feathers. I stood before him in my bare feet, out of respect, and gave him the message that Cortés had given me, only softening it somewhat from the harsh words Cortés had angrily spo ken.

  A confused man, thin and visibly different from the proud emperor I had once talked to, sat before me. He seemed even more confused than on the morning he had shown me the painting of the Spanish ships.

  A servant brought forth a long-stemmed reed packed with a brown substance, which he had lit. The emperor put the stem in his mouth and sucked on it. Smoke came out from his nostrils. He did this but once, then put it aside, as if it were suddenly distasteful.

  “Tell me,” he said, “you of the sunlit hair, with whom I hoped to talk during many hours, to whom I wished to make princely gifts, who fled from me not knowing that I planned for you the most exalted of deaths, tell me...”

  Moctezuma paused. I began to wonder if he had lost the thread of his thought or if he had changed his mind about what he had started to say.

  “Tell me,” he said, moving his gaze from the dove-colored walls that seemed to drift about like clouds, “tell me, why did you flee?”

  “Truly,” I said in a firm voice, “I fled because I did not want to die on the altar stone.”

  “But when we talked before, you agreed that it was a great honor to die and be transported to a warrior’s heaven, the place of flowers and hummingbirds and life everlasting.”

  “I discovered, thinking about it later, that I was not yet ready to visit this place of hummingbirds and flowers. I have more battles to fight, many more prisoners to take.”

  At that moment, looking at the emperor’s gold-shod feet, I saw them move nervously back and forth. I took from this that my answer had diminished me in his eyes. He was silent for a long time.

  “I showed you,” he said at last, “the pictures my art ists painted of Cortés and his captains. They do not look like you, but still they have an air about them, all these men who call themselves Spaniards, that I find about you. Are you one of them? Are you a Spaniard?”

  I nodded.

  “A Spaniard in the army of this Cortés?”

  “No, I am a seminarian. Someday I hope to be a priest. I was cast away on an island off the coast, among the Maya.”

  “I have heard of a white man who was left on this coast. He became a great cacique.”

  “The man you name is Gerónimo d
e Aguilar.”

  “You are not a spy for this Cortés?” the Emperor said.

  “No.”

  “You have seen Cortés. You have talked to him. You have brought a message from Cortés. You were with him, so my ambassadors say, in Texcála and Cholólan. What do you think of this Hernán Cortés?”

  I had no difficulty in answering this question.

  “He is a ruthless man, cruel and ambitious and with out fear of anything or anyone, even you, Revered Speaker.”

  “He says, he has said many times, since the day he left the sea, that he comes to visit a city about which he has heard marvelous things and to pledge me loyalty and...”

  “The loyalty is only to himself,” I broke in.

  “To pledge loyalty and to inform me about his king and his god. Lately, in a message sent from Texcála, he scolds me about the Azteca gods and our rites. We have worshipped our gods from the long beginning. In our own way. And we know them to be good. Your gods may be good, also. Is this why he wishes to come, to scold me again?”

  “It is not why he comes,” I said. “He comes as a con queror to subdue the city, to kill all those who seek to defend it, to kill you yourself, should you dare to oppose him.”

  Moctezuma showed no emotion at these words. He turned his gaze to the wall, to the stars I had not noticed before painted there among the clouds, and fell silent.

  I left with the strong belief that he would oppose Cortés’s entry into the city and that Lord Tzapotlan, who had heard of the happening in Texcála and himself had seen the carnage in Cholólan, would stand firmly behind him.

  My belief, however, was not borne out.

  No sooner had Cortés appeared on the outskirts of the city than the emperor went forth to greet him, carrying presents of gold. With the emperor were Cacámatzin, Revered Speaker of Téxcoco, the lord of Tlácopan, and a company of arrow, eagle, and jaguar knights, be decked in feathers and jade insignias, who swept the causeway clean and scattered it with flowers as the cap tain general advanced.

  The lords supported Moctezuma upon a litter, beneath a rich canopy of green feathers, and when Cortés was close at hand he descended and walked on bare feet to meet him. A number of lords went ahead, sweeping his path, laying cloaks so that his feet would not touch the earth.

  Upon seeing the emperor, Cortés jumped from his horse. When the two came close, each bowed to the other. Moctezuma welcomed Cortés and he, speaking through Doña Marina, who stood at his side proudly holding aloft his personal banner, wished the emperor good health.

  Cortés then brought out a necklace of colored glass, dipped in musk to give it a pleasant odor, and hung it around the emperor’s neck.

  As he did so, Cortés attempted to take hold of him in a hearty Spanish abrazo. But the lords who stood around Moctezuma quickly grasped Cortés’s arms, for they felt that this was an indignity.

  Afterward, Hernán Cortés made another complimen tary speech, thanking Moctezuma for being there to greet him, and saying that it rejoiced his heart to meet the great emperor. Whereupon Moctezuma ordered his nephew, the lord of Téxcoco, to accompany Cortés and his captains into the city.

  They were escorted to a large house located on the plaza close to the royal palace.

  Taking Cortés by the hand, Moctezuma led him to a richly furnished hall where the captain was to stay, gave him a heavy necklace fashioned of golden crabs, and disappeared, suggesting that he rest from his hard journey.

  Cortés waited until the emperor’s entourage was out of earshot, then called me over and queried me at length.

  “The emperor seems friendly,” he said. “Perhaps a shade too friendly. Is he sincere in his protestations? The Indians are good at this game of deceit.”

  As are you, I thought.

  “What do you make of him?” Cortés asked.

  “He’s confused,” I said.

  “I gather this from his messages, which changed from week to week, lately from day to day. If I had waited for him to make up his mind I would still be camped in Cholólan. But now that I am inside the gates, what can we expect? Will he strangle us in the night while we sleep—or gather our men for a festival, then treacherously fall upon them?”

  As you did with the men and women of Cholólan, I wanted to say.

  “The emperor has a vast army,” I said. “He should be treated with respect.”

  “I intend to, but I am not here to trade compliments and gifts. Remember this when you talk to him. And do so at once. He seems to put trust in you. Remind him that we come here in the name of God and our King. And do not forget, I have allies, an army of five thou sand Texcaltéca camped in the hills. In the meantime, I trust him with all my heart.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THERE WAS NO TRUTH IN THE WORDS OF HERNÁN CORTÉS.

  In no respect did he trust the emperor. He had al ready given orders to have his army lodged conveniently around the main square, his cannon mounted on the rooftops that commanded the square, and had ordered each soldier to be on the alert.

  Why should I go to Moctezuma and repeat the lie that Cortés trusted him with all his heart? I had talked to the emperor only the day before, recounted the horrors of Cholólan and Texcála, and gravely warned him that a like fate cast its shadow on him. In the face of this he had gone to greet Cortés on bare feet, as an act of humility.

  The moment I left the captain general’s presence I set out to find Doña Marina.

  Aware that he held her in the highest esteem, both as an interpreter and as a woman, I knew that she would have influence with Cortés. What would it be, what would I ask of her? I had only the hope that somehow she could prevail upon him to discharge me from the army and send me on my way, out of the land of the Azteca.

  I found her, after a morning’s search, in the emperor’s garden on the back of the stallion, Bravo. She was rest ing the horse but sitting erect in the saddle, as if anxious to gallop off again. There was the same wild look about her that I remembered from long ago, when she had first ridden him in the meadow.

  I came upon her unawares and seized the bridle be fore she had a chance to set spurs to the stallion. She held a whip in her hand and was about to use it upon the intruder before, looking down from the saddle, she rec ognized me.

  There was a moment of silence while she gasped for her breath. Then she moaned and slid from the saddle, glancing about in terror.

  She could neither turn and flee through the cypress grove at her back, for it was impenetrable, nor pass me, because I barred her way.

  Slowly she sank upon her knees and kissed the earth at my feet. She crouched there, her eyes cast down, muttering, “Oh, Lord of the Evening Star, Lord of Light.”

  “Doña Marina,” I said, using her Spanish name, for I was certain that she was proud of it, “I want you to lis ten. I talk to you now not as the god Kukulcán, but in a different guise, out of the mouth of the young man you knew on the headland and the cove, the one you brought food and fire.”

  She started to glance up at me, but, catching herself in time, lowered her eyes. She had long eyelashes and they cast shadows on her cheeks. Her strong hands, clasped together, rested at my feet.

  “It is necessary for me to leave the city of Tenochtitlán,” I said, “and return to our island. You are to help me. You are to go to the captain general and ask him to give me safe passage out of the city. I must leave to morrow. In two days at the most.”

  I held the reins for her. She took them and staggered to her feet. I lifted her into the saddle. She sat there, making no effort to leave, as if she were caught in a dream.

  I was tempted to ask her how Don Luis had freed himself, whether she had had a part in his escape, and how she had met Hernán Cortés. But, knowing that while she was in her trancelike state I could never pry from her an answer to these questions, I kept silent.

  “You have not told the captain general that I am the god Kukulcán. You are not to tell him now,” I finally cautioned her. “Say that I am a merchant,
when you give him my petition. A rich merchant whose favor it is wise for him to cultivate.”

  She made no reply. She sat limp in the big saddle, her hands clasped to her breast and scarcely breathing. I slapped the stallion’s flank. Swiftly he bore her away, out of the trees and the emperor’s garden.

  The dwarf and I had no preparations to make. Our few belongings were on our backs and stored in a small wicker bag. In my belt I still had one pearl, nothing more.

  We waited for two days, never leaving our quarters lest word come from Cortés. On the third day I received a note from the captain general himself.

  “We have an army of Indians waiting in the hills,” he wrote in his florid hand. “But they are, as you know, not to be counted upon. Our own army numbers less than four hundred. I beg leave to inform you that we cannot spare a single man. When it is possible, and I trust it will be before the year is over, I will see that you are promptly relieved of your duties.”

  This was a blow.

  The dwarf suggested that we leave the city at once, in the same way as before. We talked about it for the rest of the day.

  That night we went to the wharf. We found an untended canoe and were about to climb into it when four men seized us—not Cortés’s soldiers, but guards be longing to Moctezuma. They marched us to the palace and lodged us there in an alcove adjoining the throne room.

  After that I saw the emperor every day, at either breakfast or supper, depending upon his mood. Cantú and I were not allowed out of the palace, but we were treated courteously and fed choice food from his table.

  I think Moctezuma found comfort in talking about Cortés, though I never told him what he wanted to hear. Whether it was a day when he was suspicious of the captain general or a day when he fawned upon him, I always said that unless he tied up Hernán Cortés and put him safely away somewhere, he would lose his king dom and his life.

  As for Cortés, he was glad to have me located in the palace. Every day or two he would want to know about Moctezuma’s mood, whether he was plotting a surprise, what his nobles and astrologers were saying. I told him nothing that could possibly help him.