The Lost Diary of Montezuma's Soothsayer
Page 4
May 5th, 1520
Wrong!
Today Caught-out marched away from the city with eighty of his own warriors and several hundred Indians. He’s going down to the coast to fight the new strangers who have just arrived.
I really think the end is in sight for Caught-out. Monty’s spies say there are hundreds of warriors in the new army that’s just landed. I don’t see how he can win against all of them. Monty can’t believe his luck. He’s like a new man. Caught-out wanted to take Monty with him, but our Great Speaker refused. So Caught-out has left some of his warriors in Tenochtitlan to guard Monty until he gets back – or so he says.
May 17th, 1520
Horror!
This is the feast of Toxcatl, one of the most important Aztec feasts in the whole year. So, what did Caught-out’s warriors, who were left here, do? They only attacked and killed hundreds of our nobles and priests while they were celebrating in the Great Temple, here in Tenochtitlan!
There are rumours that some of other Indians from Tlaxcala may have put them up to it by saying that the people in the city were about to attack them. Well, the people of Tenochtitlan are certainly armed and ready to attack them now.
Caught-out’s men are surrounded in their palace, with Monty. I had popped out for a quick cup of pulque, but I couldn’t get back because the streets were filled with fighting warriors. No-one will take them any food now. They’ll be starving soon. Serves them right, I say.
The only one I feel sorry for is Monty. He tried to speak to the people from the roof of the palace. He tried to make them understand why he had moved in with Caught-out, but they laughed at him and called him all sorts of horrid names.
No-one would have dared to do that this time last year but things have changed so much since Caught-out landed, I don’t think our lives will ever be the same.
I watched Monty from a safe distance. He couldn’t believe that his own subjects were turning against him. If it is the end for Caught-out, it could be the end for Montezuma II, our Great Speaker, as well.
June 25th, 1520
How wrong can I be? Call myself a soothsayer?!
Who should come back into the city yesterday morning as a half-man, half-deer monster, but Caught-out. Worse still, he’s brought even more warriors with him!
At first I thought he must have used some strange magic to turn the few warriors he took with him into this much bigger army. However, it seems he captured hundreds of the warriors he’d gone to fight and then asked them to fight for him. Now his army is bigger than when he arrived seven months ago.
Mind you, the city was different for this arrival. All the people stayed indoors. The streets were empty and there was an eerie quiet everywhere.
The warriors who killed all the people in the Great Temple look half starved. They have had almost nothing to eat since the massacre and they had to dig a well to get water. They were pleased to see Caught-out and his army, but no-one else was.
The people of the city have surrounded the palace once again and now Caught-out and all his warriors are trapped inside. They’ll really be for it now. What a sacrifice they will make!
June 27th, 1520
Poor old Monty, bad luck seems to stick to him like gum from the rubber tree.
Today there was more heavy fighting round the palace and Caught-out told Monty to go up on the roof to talk to the people and stop them attacking him and his warriors.
Monty wasn’t too keen on the idea after the last time he’d tried it. But he went up as he was told. As soon as he appeared the people began yelling at him. He tried to make himself heard above the noise. Then they started throwing stones at him. He made an easy target and almost immediately he was hit on the head and knocked over.
Caught-out told his medicine man to look after Monty, but things don’t look too good. I forsee that our Great Speaker will be saying hello to the gods before me.
June 30th, 1520
I was right. Montezuma II, the Great Speaker, went to join the gods today. He didn’t seem to want to recover from the wound to his head. I’ve got so used to him being around. I don’t think a day has gone by when I haven’t worried that he might send me up the pyramid to pay a final visit to the gods and now he’s gone himself. What will happen to us all now?
Caught-out says he is really sorry, but I wonder if he is. If it hadn’t been for him, none of this would have happened.
Monty’s body has been taken from the palace to the ceremonial funeral place where all the Great Speakers go. Caught-out wants the people to obey him now. Fat chance of that, from what I’ve seen around the city. There has been hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and several of Caught-out’s warriors have been killed, though nothing like as many of our own warriors.
There was a terrible bloody battle at the temple of Yopico, next to the palace where Caught-out has been living. Statues of the gods were destroyed and lots of priests were thrown from the temple at the top. There’s no turning back now. Caught-out’s days are numbered. No-one in the city thinks he’s a god any more. Maybe something good will come out of all this mess and muddle after all.
July 1st, 1520
They’ve gone! They’ve disappeared! Caught-out and most of his warriors turned tail in the night and ran away. I didn’t see anything like this happening – not in my wildest dreams.
We didn’t let them get away without a real fight. The sneaky pale-skinned rats tried to slip out of the city in the middle of the night. They tied soft material round the big, hard feet of the half-deer monsters so that they wouldn’t make a noise on the ground as they escaped. Some of them carried wooden ladders made from roof timbers in the palace. They used them like bridges, to reach across the gaps in the causeway, because we clever Aztecs had taken down the proper bridges to prevent them getting away.
Caught-out must have thought he was terribly clever, escaping in the dark. He knows that only the jaguar warriors and priests go outside at night because of the spirits. However, someone else was out in the city at midnight, a woman fetching water from the lake. She saw them trying to get across their wooden bridge at the first gap in the causeway, just outside the city, and she raised the alarm.
A priest on one of the temple pyramids heard her and started beating a war drum. Soon thousands of our warriors were tumbling out of their houses and into canoes to attack Caught-out and his warriors from both sides of the causeway as they tried to escape.
Who says Aztec warriors can’t fight in the dark? Our warriors were magnificent, even though they were fighting in the darkness and shooting arrows from canoes. Caught-out couldn’t use his exploding, fire-shooting tree trunks. The half-deer monsters were shrieking with fright. And so many of his warriors fell into the water as they tried crossing from one side of a causeway gap to the other that their bodies filled the gap like a farmer filling his chinampa with mud from the bottom of the lake. The last of them were even able to walk over the piled-up bodies of other warriors as they crossed the gap!
More of them would have got away if they hadn’t been so greedy. At least it proved one thing – they are just interested in gold, jewels and riches. Some of them had so much heavy gold hidden inside their clothes that when they fell in the water they sank straight under the surface and drowned. This morning our warriors found the causeway littered all the way from the city to the shore with treasure Caught-out’s army had stolen from the palaces and temples in Tenochtitlan.
I always said we Aztecs would show them a thing or two. And now we have! Goodbye nightmares! Goodbye Caught-out and your warriors! What idiots we were thinking you were a god! Go back to where you came from! That’s the last we’ve seen of you! Goodbye and good riddance!
THE END OF THE AZTECS
Unfortunately Guessalotl’s power to see into the future must have failed him at this point. His diary ends here and history loses touch with this remarkable Aztec historian. However, the story of Cortés and the Aztec empire has a twist in the tail.
The Spanish had
brought with them the deadly disease called smallpox. The Indians had no resistance to this and thousands died of smallpox after Cortés and his followers had been driven out of the city.
At the end of 1520 Cortés returned to the shores of Lake Texcoco with an even larger army. He was again supported by the Aztec’s old enemies, the people of Tlaxcala, and 100,000 Indians were now on his side. Cortés also had 10,000 porters who carried supplies and thirteen small ships that he planned to use to capture Tenochtitlan.
In May 1521 Cortés began his attack on the Aztec capital, approaching the city along the causeways and by water from all sides. Bloody fighting raged for sixty days and nights before Cortés broke into the city.
The Aztec defenders were weak from hunger and disease but they fought fiercely to defend the city street by street as it was gradually destroyed around them. In the end the Spanish invaders and their Indian allies were too strong for them. On 13 August 1520, Cuauhtémoc, the last Great Speaker of the Aztec empire, and nephew of Montezuma II, was taken prisoner. His capture marked the end of Aztec rule. The empire now had new masters and for the next 300 years it formed part of the Spanish empire, until 1821 when it became independent once again, as the country we know today as Mexico.
PUBLISHER’S ADDENDUM
Even though many of the events described in this so-called diary are recorded by reliable historians, a more recent and, we have to say, more thorough study of the book Mr Dickinson found in the market in Spain now makes us believe that it is nothing more than a hoax.
There is no doubt that Montezuma II was the Great Speaker of the Aztecs in the early sixteenth century. Hernán Cortés certainly led the Spanish forces that conquered the Aztec empire. The Indian woman referred to as Doña Marina was genuine and did act as an interpreter for Cortés.
However, it seems very unlikely that Montezuma had a soothsayer with a name like Guessalotl, or that there was a chief historian called Brainboxl and a merchant in Tenochtitlan called Stinkingrichl. We also have serious doubts about the two so-called experts on American history before the arrival of the Spanish. No trace has been found of either Dr Shady Practice or Professor Pulltheotherone.
It is our belief that this hoax has been cooked up to rob an innocent tourist. We only hope he did not pay too much for the ‘diary’, or for the ‘translation’ of what now appears to be a picture book for very young children.
It appears that Montezuma may have got his revenge after all.
OTHER WORKS
The Lost Diary of Tutankhamun’s Mummy
Other Lost Diaries recently discovered:
The Lost Diary of Henry VIII’s Executioner
The Lost Diary of Erik Bloodaxe, Viking Warrior
The Lost Diary of Julius Caesar’s Slave
The Lost Diary of Queen Victoria’s Undermaid
The Lost Diary of Hercules’ Personal Trainer
COPYRIGHT
First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1999
This edition published in 2012 by Collins
Collins is an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
THE LOST DIARY OF MONTEZUMA’S SOOTHSAYER © Clive Dickinson 1999.
Illustrations copyright © George Hollingworth 1999.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007502592
Version 1
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1 Auckland,
New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com