Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  So it was that we knew Cortés's actions and at least some of his intentions. I have heard many persons—who were not here at the time—speak critically of our apparent apathy or stupidity or deluded sense of security, because we stayed in isolation and did nothing to prevent Cortés's rallying of his forces. But the reason that we did nothing was that we could do nothing. From Tzumpanco in the north to Xochimilco in the south, from Tlácopan in the west to Texcóco in the east, every ablebodied man and woman who was not helping to nurse the afflicted was himself ill or dying or dead. In our weakness, we could only wait, and hope that we should have recovered to some degree before Cortés came again. About that, we had no delusions; we knew he would come again. And it was during that drear summer of waiting that Cuitlahuac made a remark, in the presence of myself and his cousin Cuauternoc:

  "I had rather the nation's treasury lie forever at the bottom of Lake Texcóco—or sink all the way to the black depths of Mictlan—than that the white men should ever have it in their hands again."

  I doubt that he later changed his mind, for he scarcely had time. Before the rainy season was over, he had fallen ill of the small pocks, and vomited up all his blood, and died. Poor Cuitlaliuac, he became our Revered Speaker without the proper ceremonies of installation and, when his brief reign ended, he was not honored with the funeral befitting his station.

  By that time, not the noblest of noblemen could be accorded a service with drums and mourners and panoply—or even the luxury of earth burial. There were simply too many dead, too many dying every day. There were no longer any available places left in which to bury them, or men to dig the graves for them, or time enough to dig all the graves that would have been necessary. Instead, each community designated some nearby wasteland spot where its dead could be taken and unceremoniously piled together and burned to ashes—and even that mode of mass disposal was no easy matter in the damp days of the rainy season. Tenochtítlan's chosen burning place was an uninhabited spot on the mainland behind the rise of Chapultepec, and the busiest traffic between our island and the mainland consisted of the freight barges. Rowed by old men indifferent to the disease, they shuttled back and forth, all day long, day after day. Cuitlahuac's body was just one among the hundreds ferried on that day he died.

  The disease of the small pocks was the conqueror of us Mexíca and of some other peoples. Still other nations were defeated or are still being devastated by other diseases never known in these lands before, some of which might make us Mexíca feel almost thankful to have been visited only with the small pocks.

  There is the sickness you call the plague, in which the victim develops agonizing black bulges in his neck and groin and armpits, so that he keeps continually stretching his head backward and his extremities outward, as if he would gladly break them from his body to be rid of the pain. Meanwhile, his every bodily emanation—his spittle, his urine and excrement, even his sweat and his breath—are of such vile stench that neither hardened physicians nor tender kinsmen can bear to stay near the victim, until at last the bulges burst with a gush of nauseous black fluid, and the sufferer is mercifully dead.

  There is the sickness you call the cholera, whose victims are seized by cramps in every muscle of the body, randomly or all at once. A man will at one moment have his arms or legs wrenched into contortions of anguish, then be splayed out as if he were flinging himself apart, then have his whole body convulsed into a knot of torture. All the time, he is also tormented by an unquenchable thirst. Although he gulps down torrents of water, he continuously retches it out, and uncontrollably urinates and defecates. Since he cannot contain any moisture, he dries and shrivels so that, when at last he dies, he looks like an old seedpod.

  There are the other diseases you call the measles and the pease pocks, which kill less horrifically but just as certainly. Their only visible symptom is an itchy rash on the face and torso, but invisibly those sicknesses invade the brain, so the victim subsides first into unconsciousness and then into death. I am telling you nothing you do not already know, lord friars, but did you ever think of this? The ghastly diseases brought by your countrymen have often spread out ahead of them faster than the men themselves could march. Some of the people they set out to conquer were conquered and dead before they knew they were the objects of conquest. Those people died without ever fighting against or surrendering to their conquerors, without ever even seeing the men who killed them. It is entirely possible that there are still reclusive peoples in remote corners of these lands—tribes like the Rarámuri and the Zyu Huave, for instance—who do not even yet suspect that such beings as white men exist. Nevertheless, those people may at this moment be dying horribly of the small pocks or the plague, dying without knowing that they are being slain, or why, or by whom.

  You brought us the Christian religion, and you assure us that the Lord God will reward us with Heaven when we die, but that unless we accept Him we are damned to Hell when we die. Why then did the Lord God send us also the afflictions which kill and damn so many innocents to Hell before they can meet His missionaries and hear of His religion? Christians are constantly bidden to praise the Lord God and all His works, which must include the work He has done here. If only, reverend friars, you could explain to us why the Lord God chose to send His gentle new religion trailing behind the cruelly murderous new diseases, we who survived them could more joyously join you in singing praises to the Lord God's infinite wisdom and goodness, His compassion and mercy, His fatherly love of all His children everywhere.

  By unanimous vote, the Speaking Council selected the Lord Cuautemoc to be the next Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexíca. It is interesting to speculate on how different our history and our destiny might have been if Cuautemoc had become Revered Speaker, as he should have done, when his father Ahuítzotl died eighteen years earlier. Interesting to speculate, but of course fruitless. "If" is a small word in our language—tla—as it is in yours, but I have come to believe that it is the most heavy-laden word of all the words there are.

  The death toll of the small pocks began to lessen as the summer's heat and rain abated, and finally, with the first chill of winter, the disease entirely let go its grip on the lake lands. But it left The Triple Alliance weak in every sense of the word. All our people were dispirited; we grieved for the countless dead; we pitied those who had survived to be gruesomely disfigured for the rest of their lives; we were wearied by the long visitation of calamity; we were individually and collectively drained of our human strength. Our population had been reduced perhaps by half, and the remainder consisted mainly of the old and infirm. Since those who died had been the younger men, not to speak of the women and children, our armies had been diminished by considerably more than half. No sensible commander would have ordered them into aggressive action against the massing outlanders, and their utility even for defense was dubious.

  It was then, when The Triple Alliance was the weakest it had ever been, that Cortés once more marched against it. He no longer boasted any great advantage of superior weapons, for he had fewer than four hundred white soldiers and however many harquebuses and crossbows they still carried among them. All the cannons he had abandoned on the Sad Night—the four on the roof of Axayácatl's palace and the thirty or so he had posted around the mainland—we had pitched into the lake. But he still had more than twenty horses, a number of the staghounds, and all his formerly and latterly collected native warriors—the Texcalteca, the Totonaca and other minor tribes, the Acolhua still following Prince Black Flower. Altogether, Cortés had something like one hundred thousand troops. From all the cities and lands of The Triple Alliance—even counting outlying places like Tolocan and Quaunahuac, which were not really of the Alliance, but gave us their support—we could not muster one-third that many fighting men.

  So when Cortés's long columns proceeded from Texcala toward the nearest capital city of The Triple Alliance, which was Texcóco, they took it. I could tell at length of the weakened city's desperate defense, and of the casualties its
defenders inflicted and suffered, and of the tactics which eventually defeated it... but what matter? All that need be said is that the marauders took it. The marauders included Prince Black Flower's Acolhua, and they fought their fellow Acolhua warriors who were loyal to the new Revered Speaker Cohuanacoch—or, more truthfully, loyal to their city of Texcóco. And so it happened that, in that battle, many an Acolhuatl found himself wielding a blade against another Acolhuatl who was his own brother.

  At least Texcóco's warriors were not all killed in the battle, and perhaps two thousand escaped before they could be trapped there. The troops of Cortés had assailed the city from its landward side, so the defenders, when they could no longer hold firm, were able to withdraw slowly to the lakeshore. There they took every fishing and fowling and passenger and freight acáli, including even the elegant acaltin of the court, and propelled themselves out into the lake. Their opponents, having been left no craft in which to pursue them, could only send a cloud of arrows after them, and the arrows did little damage. So the Acolhua warriors crossed the lake and joined our forces on Tenochtítlan, where, because so many people had lately died, there was ample room to quarter them.

  Cortés would have known, from his conversations with Motecuzóma, if from no other source, that Texcóco was the strongest bastion city of our Triple Alliance, after Tenochtítlan. And, having conquered Texcóco so easily, Cortés was confident that the taking of all other and smaller lakeside cities and towns would be even easier. So he did not commit his whole army to that task, nor did he command it in person. To the mystification of our spies, he sent one entire half of his army back to Texcala. The other half he divided into detachments, each led by one of his under-officers: Alvarado, Narváez, Montejo, Guzmán. Some left Texcóco going northward, others southward, and they began circling the lake, along the way attacking the various small communities separately or simultaneously. Although our Revered Speaker Cuautemoc employed the fleet of canoes brought by the fugitive Acolhua to send those same warriors and our Mexíca to the aid of the beleaguered towns, the battles were so many and so far apart that he could not send enough men to any one of them to make any difference in the outcome. Every place the Spanish-led forces attacked, they took. The best our men could do was to evacuate from those towns whatever local warriors were left alive, and to bring them to Tenochtítlan as reinforcements for our own defense, when our turn should come.

  Presumably Cortés, by means of messengers, directed the general strategy of his several officers and their detachments, but he—and Malintzin—remained in the luxurious residence of the Texcóco palace in which I myself had once lived, and he kept the hapless Revered Speaker Cohuanacoch there too, as his compulsory host, or guest, or prisoner. For I should mention here that the Crown Prince Black Flower, who had grown old waiting to become Uey-Tlatoani of the Acolhua, never did get that title and that eminence.

  Even after the taking of the Acolhua's capital city, in which Black Flower's troops had played no small part, Cortés decreed that the inoffensive and uncontroversial Cohuanacoch should remain on the throne. Cortés knew that all the Acolhua, except those warriors who had for so long followed Black Flower, had come to loathe the once-respected Crown Prince as a traitor to his own people and a tool of the white men. Cortés would not risk provoking a future uprising of the whole nation by giving the traitor the throne for which he had turned traitor. Even when Black Flower groveled in the rite of baptism, with Cortés for his godfather, and in flagrant obsequiousness took the Christian name of Fernando Cortés Ixtlil-Xochitl, his godfather unbent in his resolve only sufficiently to appoint him lord ruler of three insignificant provinces of the Acolhua lands. At that, Don Fernando Black Flower showed one last flicker of his former lordly temperament, protesting angrily:

  "You give me what already belongs to me? What has always belonged to my forefathers?"

  But he did not long have to endure his dissatisfaction and debasement. He stormed out of Texcóco to take up his rule in one of those backwoods provinces, and arrived there just when the disease of the small pocks was also arriving, and within a month or two he was dead.

  We soon learned that the marauding armies' Captain-General was lingering in Texcóco for other reasons than merely to enjoy a rest in luxury. Our quimichime came to Tenochtítlan to report, not more mystification, but the news that the departed half of Cortés's force was returning to Texcóco, bringing on their backs or hauling on log rollers the many and various hulls and poles and other components of the thirteen "ships" that had been partially constructed on the dry land of Texcala. Cortés had stayed to be in Texcóco when they arrived, to oversee their assembly and launching upon the lake there.

  They were not, of course, any such formidable things as the seagoing ships from which they had been fashioned. They were more like our flat-bottomed freight barges, only with high sides, and with the winglike sails that, we discovered to our dismay, made them far more swift than our many-oared biggest aciltin, and far more agile than our smallest. Besides the boatmen who controlled the vessels' movements, each carried twenty Spanish soldiers who stood on shelves behind those high sides. Thus they had the significant advantage of holding the height in any water battle with our low-slung canoes, and even stood high enough to discharge their weapons across our causeways.

  On the day they made their trial voyage from Texcóco into the lake, Cortés himself was aboard the leading craft, which he called La Capitana. A number of our largest war canoes rowed out from Tenochtítlan and through the Great Dike, to engage them in the most open expanse of the lake. Each canoe carried sixty warriors, each of whom was armed with a bow and many arrows, an atlatl and several javelins. But on the choppy waters, the white men's heavier craft made much more stable platforms from which to discharge projectiles, so their harquebuses and crossbows were lethally more accurate than our men's hand-held bows. Besides, their soldiers had to expose only their heads and arms and weapons, so our arrows either struck in their boats' high sides or went harmlessly over them. But our men in the low, open canoes were exposed to the darts and metal pellets, and many of them fell dead or wounded. So the canoes' steersmen desperately tried to keep at a safer range, and that meant a distance too great for our warriors to fling their javelins. Before very long, all our war canoes came ignominiously home, and the enemy craft disdained to pursue them. For a while they almost gaily danced in intricate crossings and patterns, as if to show they owned the lake, before going back to Texcóco. But they were out again the next day, and every day after that, and they did more than dance.

  By then, Cortés's under-officers and their various companies had marched all the way around the lake district, laying waste or capturing and occupying every community in their path, until at that time they had reassembled in two sizable armies, positioned on the headlands jutting into the lake exactly north and south of our island. It only remained for them to destroy or subdue the larger and more numerous cities situated around the lake's western shore, and they would have Tenochtítlan completely surrounded.

  They went about it almost leisurely. While the other half of Cortés's army was resting in Texcóco, after its incredible labor of transporting those battle boats overland, the boats themselves went back and forth over the entire expanse of Lake Texcóco east of the Great Dike, clearing it of every other craft. They rammed and overturned, or they seized and captured, or they killed the occupants of every single canoe that plied the waters. And those were not war canoes: they were the acaltin of everyday fishermen and fowlers and freighters peaceably carrying goods from one place to another. Very soon, the winged battle boats did own all that end of the lake. Not a fisherman dared to put out from shore, even to net a meal for his own family. Only at our end of the lake, inside the dike, could the normal water traffic continue, and that did not continue for long.

  Cortés finally moved his resting reserve army out of Texcóco, dividing it into two equal parts which separately made their way around the lake to join the other two forces
poised north and south of us. And while that was being done, the battle boats breached the Great Dike. Their soldiers had only to sweep the length of it with their harquebuses and crossbows, and kill or rout all the unarmed dike workers who could have closed the flood-protection gates to impede them. Then the boats slid through those passages and were in Mexíca waters. Though Cuautemoc immediately sent warriors to stand shoulder to shoulder along the northern and southern causeways, they could not long repel the advance of the boats, which headed directly for the causeways' canoe passages. While some of the white soldiers cleared away the defenders with their hail of metal pellets and crossbow darts, other soldiers leaned over the boats' sides to pry loose and topple into the water the wooden bridges that spanned those gaps. So the battle boats got past the last barriers, and inside them, and, as they had done in the outer reaches of the lake, they cleared this end too of all water traffic: war canoes, freight acaltin, everything.

  "The white men command all the causeways and the waterways as well," said the Snake Woman. "When they besiege the other cities on the mainland, we have no way of sending our men to reinforce those cities. What is worse, we have no way of getting anything from the mainland. No additional forces, no additional weapons. And no food."

  "There is enough in the island storehouses to sustain us for some while," said Cuautemoc, adding bitterly: "We can thank the small pocks that there are fewer people to be fed than there might have been. And we have also the chinampa crops."

  The Snake Woman said, "The storehouses contain only dried maize, and the chinampa are planted only with delicacies. Tomatoes and chilis and coriander and the like. It will be a quaint diet—poor men's tortillas and mush, garnished with elegant condiments."