Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  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 Texcaltecatl 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 Texcalteca allies were brave men and trained soldiers. Recovering from their first surprise, they staunchly fought back. The Texcalteca 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 Mictlan 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. Cuitlahuac 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 Xochimilca and Chalca lands, troops had secretly been moving northward and massing for that moment, and they fell upon Prince Black Flower's Acolhua forces camped about Coyohuacan. On the other side of the straits there, the Culhua attacked Cortés's Totonaca forces camped on the promontory of land around Ixtapalápan. The Tecpanéca rose up against the Texcalteca 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 surviving 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 Texcalteca 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!"

  So they obeyed, or most of them did. Under cover of the darkness, before they helped to empty the sledges, many of the soldiers emptied whatever traveling packs they carried, and then crammed into their packs, inside their doublets, even down the wide tops of their jackboots, every scrap of gold small enough for them to steal. But the bulk of the treasure vanished into the lake waters there, and the horses were unhitched, and the men pushed the sledges across the break in the causeway.

  By that time, the rest of the army was coming from the city along the causeway, not entirely voluntarily, being pressed backward along it as they fought our advancing warriors. When they had retreated to the point where Cortés a
nd the others waited, the retreat halted momentarily, and the front ranks of the Spaniards and Mexíca came together in a toe-to-toe, standstill fight. The reason was that, although the causeway was broad enough for twenty men to walk abreast, not so many could fight efficiently side by side. Perhaps no more than the foremost twelve of our warriors could engage the front twelve of theirs, and the weight of our numbers in the rear ranks was of no avail.

  Then the Spaniards suddenly seemed to give way, and fell back. But as they did so, they slid with them their sledge bridges, leaving our forward fighters teetering for balance on the edge of the sudden breach. One of the sledges, and several of our men, and several of the Spaniards too, fell into the lake. But the white men on the other side had little time to catch their breath. Our warriors were not heavily clothed and they were good swimmers. They began leaping deliberately into the water, swimming across the gap and climbing up the pilings below where the white men stood. At the same time, a rain of arrows came down on the Spaniards from both sides. Cuitlahuac had overlooked nothing; canoes full of archers were in the lake by then, converging on the causeway. Cortés had no choice but to make another fighting retreat. Since his horses were the biggest and most valuable and most vulnerable targets, he ordered a number of men to force the animals to plunge into the water, then to hang on to them as they swam for the mainland. Unbidden, Malintzin jumped with them, and was hauled by a swimming horse to the shore.

  Then Cortés and his remaining men did their best to make an orderly withdrawal. Those who had crossbows and workable harquebuses discharged them at random into the darkness on both sides of the causeway, hoping to hit some of the canoe-borne attackers. The other Spaniards, alternately wielding their swords and sliding the remaining sledge, crept backward from the more and more numerous warriors who were successfully crossing that first break in the causeway. There were two more canoe passages between Cortés and the Tlácopan mainland. The sledge served to get him and his men across the next one, but there they had to abandon their makeshift bridge because their pursuers also got across it. At the next gap, the white men simply fought and walked backward until they toppled off the brink into the lake.

  Actually, that close to the shore, the water was shallow enough that even a man incapable of swimming could make his way to land by a sort of series of hops, keeping his head-above water. But the white men wore heavy armor, and many of them were burdened with even heavier gold, and when they went into the water they flailed desperately to stay afloat. Cortés and their other comrades coming after them did not hesitate to step upon them in trying to leap across the breach. Thus many men who fell into the water sank, and the lowermost, I suppose, were stamped deep into the lake-bottom ooze. As more and more of the Spaniards fell and drowned, their bodies piled high enough to make a bridge of flesh, and it was by that means that the last surviving Spaniards got across.

  Only one of them made the crossing without panic, with a flourish which our warriors so admired that they still speak of "Tonatíu's leap." When Pedro de Alvarado was pushed to the brink, he was armed only with a spear. He turned his back on his assailants, stabbed the spear into the heaving, drowning heap of his men in the water, and gave a mighty bound. Although he was heavily armored, probably wounded, and certainly weary, he vaulted across that gap from the near edge of the causeway all the way to the far edge... and to safety.

  For our pursuing force stopped there. They had driven the last outlanders from Tenochtítlan into Tecpanéca territory, where they assumed the remainder would be killed or captured. Our warriors turned back along the causeway—where the boatmen were already bringing back and setting in place the missing spans—and on the way home, they did the work of Swallowers and Swaddlers. They picked up their own fallen fellows, and also those wounded white men who would live to serve as sacrifices, and with their blades they put a mercifully quick end to those Spaniards already near death.

  Cortés and his accompanying survivors found a surcease from battle and a chance to rest in Tlácopan. The local Tecpanéca were not as good fighters as the Texcalteca whom Cortés had quartered upon them, but they had attacked with the advantage of surprise, and they did know their own local terrain. So, by the time Cortés reached that city, the Tecpanéca had driven his Texcalteca allies from Tlácopan north to Azcapotzálco and had them still on the run. Cortés and his companions had a time of reprieve in which to dress their wounds and assess their position and decide what to do next.

  Among those still alive, Cortés at least had his chief under-officers: Narváez and Alvarado and others—and his Malintzin—but his army was no longer an army. He had marched triumphantly into Tenochtítlan with something like one thousand five hundred other white men. He had just emerged from Tenochtítlan with fewer than four hundred—and about thirty horses, some of which had escaped from the plaza battle and swum all the way from the island. Cortés had no idea where his native allies were or how they were faring. The fact is that they too were in rout before the vengeful armies of The Triple Alliance. Except for the Texcalteca, who were then being pushed northward away from him, all his other forces, which had been stationed along the lakeshore to the south, were at that moment being driven northward to where he sat exhausted and morose in defeat.

  It is said that Cortés did just that. He sat, as if he would never rise again. He sat with his back against one of the "oldest of old" cypress trees, and he wept. Whether he wept more for his crushing defeat or for the lost treasure, I do not know. But a fence has recently been put around that tree where Cortés wept, to mark it as a memorial of "the Sad Night." We Mexíca, if we were still keeping histories, might have given a different name to that occasion—the Night of the Last Victory of the Mexíca, perhaps—but it is you Spaniards who write the histories now, so I suppose that rainy and bloody night, by your calendar the thirtieth day of the month of June in the year one thousand five hundred and twenty, will forever be remembered as "La Noche Triste."

  * * *

  In many respects, that was a less than happy night for The One World too. The most unfortunate circumstance was that all our armies did not continue their pursuit of Cortés and his remaining white men and native supporters until they were slain to the last man. However, as I have said, the warriors of Tenochtítlan believed that their mainland allies would do just that, so they turned back to the island to devote the rest of the night to a celebration of what seemed a total victory. Our city's priests and most of its people were still engaged in that sham ceremony-of-distraction at the pyramid of Tlaltelólco, and they were only too pleased to move in mass to The Heart of the One World and hold a real ceremony of thanksgiving at the Great Pyramid. Even Béu and I, hearing the gladsome shouts of the returning warriors, left our house to attend. Even Tlaloc, as if better to watch his people's rejoicing, lifted his curtain of rain.

  In normal times, we would not have dared to observe any kind of rite in the central plaza until every stone and statue and ornamentation had been newly scrubbed clean of every speck of dirt, every possible defilement, until The Heart of the One World shone bright for the gods' approval and admiration. But that night the torches and urn fires revealed the vast square to be a vast garbage heap. Everywhere lay dead bodies or parts of bodies, both white- and copper-skinned; also quantities of spilled entrails, gray-pink and gray-blue, hence indistinguishable as to origin. Everywhere lay broken and discarded weapons, and the excrement of frightened horses and of men who had incontinently defecated as they died, and the rancid bedding and clothing and other effects of the Spaniards. But the priests uttered no complaint about that foul setting for the ceremony, and the celebrants crowded in without showing too much disgust at the nasty things they trod on or in. We all trusted that the gods would not, that one time, take offense at the plaza's filthy condition, inasmuch as it was their enemies as well as ours whom we had defeated there.

  I know it has always distressed you, reverend scribes, to hear me describe the sacrifice of any human beings, even the heathens d
espised by your Church, so I will not dwell on the sacrifice of your own Christian countrymen, which commenced when the sun Tonatíu began to rise. I will only remark, though it will make you think us a very foolish people, that we also sacrificed the forty or so horses which the soldiers had left behind—because, you see, we could not be sure that they were not also Christians of a sort. I might say, also, that the horses went to their Flowery Deaths much more nobly than did the Spaniards, who struggled while they were being undressed, and cursed while they were dragged up the staircase, and cried like children when they were bent backward on the stone. Our warriors recognized some of the white men who had most bravely fought them, so, after those men died, their thighs were cut for broiling and...

  But perhaps you will not look so nauseated, lord friars, if I assure you that most of the bodies were without ceremony fed to the animals of the city menagerie...

  Very well, my lords, I will return to the less gala events of that night. While we were thanking the gods for the riddance of the outlanders, we were unaware that our mainland armies had not annihilated them. Cortés was still sulking miserably in Tlácopan when he was roused by the noisy approach of his other fleeing forces—the Acolhua and Totonaca, or what was left of them—being chased northward by the Xochimilca and Chalca. Cortés and his officers, with Malintzin no doubt shouting louder than she had ever had to shout in her life, managed to halt the headlong rout and restore some semblance of order. Then Cortés and his white men, some on horseback, some walking, some limping, some in litters, led the reorganized native troops farther on northward before their pursuers caught up. And those pursuers, probably believing that the fugitives would be dealt with by other Triple Alliance forces beyond, or perhaps over-eager to commence their own victory celebrations, let the fugitives go.