Aztec

by Colin Falconer

  He looked at the indian girl, Malinali. "Give her my thanks," he said to Aguilar. "In future she will stay by my side, to help me speak with the Mexica."

  Aguilar started to protest. “But my lord …”

  “Just do it, Aguilar,” Cortés said and walked away. More than a pretty face, he thought. He wondered what other secrets lay behind those black and velvet eyes.

  Malinali

  Feathered Serpent's tent has been pitched behind the dunes, in the shade of the palms. The royal blue silk whips in the ocean breeze, the wind which he alone commands. He sits behind a wooden table, his valet and major-domo standing at his shoulder on either side.

  I watch him, fascinated. He has the eyes of an owl man and when he holds you in his gaze you cannot look away. For the first time I notice the small scar on his chin and lower lip, that is partly concealed by his beard. Perhaps he was once attacked by the Earth Monster, as happened to another of the gods, Tezcatlipoca.

  He says something to Aguilar and Aguilar then turns to me. "He wants to know where you learned to speak the language of the Mexica."

  "I am not a native of Tabasco," I answer. I wonder how much I should tell him. I am too ashamed to reveal all of it. "I come from a place called Painali. There we have the elegant speech - Nahuatl. When I was a child I was ... captured ... and made a slave. "

  Feathered Serpent leans forward, his elbows resting on the table. "He asks if you know of this Montezuma," Aguilar says.

  "I went to Tenochtitlán only once, when I was a small girl. He passed in the street, borne on a palanquin. I know only that he is the richest prince in the whole world. But he is also very cruel."

  "This city - Tenochtitlán. What is it like?"

  I direct my answers to Feathered Serpent, even though it is Aguilar who speaks. I want Feathered Serpent to see that I am a Person, and not afraid. "Tenochtitlán is built on a lake in the middle of a great valley surrounded by mountains. It is the most beautiful city in the world. Perhaps one hundred thousand people live there."

  Aguilar smiles when he hears this. He thinks it is an empty boast, he thinks I see things with a peasant's eyes. I detest his smug smiles and cruel eyes.

  "Are they a rich people?"

  Now it is my turn to smile. "The Mexica own half the world, and half the world pays them tribute each year."

  Feathered Serpent nods, satisfied. He is a god and so he already knows the answers to these questions and is testing me.

  "He says you will be well rewarded for your service," Aguilar tells me. Then he asks, apparently of his own volition: "When we were talking with the Mexica, with Tendile ... did you translate exactly what I said?"

  I lower my eyes to the ground so they do not betray me. Does he suspect? I told the Lord Tendile the truth, certainly, even though it was not exactly what this fool asked me to say.

  "Yes, my lord."

  "You are sure?"

  I feel Feathered Serpent's eyes on me. I know e does not understand what we are saying yet I feel a thrill of fear. "I repeated everything as you said it to me."

  "And they understood it?"

  "They understood."

  Aguilar is either a fool or a charlatan and for some reason wishes to subvert his lord Feathered Serpent's task. If only I could talk with him directly.

  "Thankyou, Doña Marina," Aguilar mutters, although he appears much less than satisfied with me. I am escorted out of the tent by one of the Spanish guards but as I leave I turn around and give Feathered Serpent one last glance and I see that he is smiling at me.

  May you be buggered by a porcupine, Brother Aguilar. I shall be his right hand, not you!

  Painali, 1507

  I am seven years old and my father is trying to explain to me why he had not changed my date of naming to a more propitious day.

  "You will be Ce Malinali, One Grass of Penance," he whispers to me, "because you are fated to find your destiny in disorder and destruction. We have to destroy the Mexica so we can build a new nation."

  I am very young so what he says is incomprehensible to me. It is only when I am older that I realise my name is the reason my mother wished to be rid of me; such a daughter can only bring bad luck to those around her.

  My father and I are standing together on the summit of the Quetzalcóatl temple. Above us the blood-star falls down the night sky, its fiery tail pointing towards the Cloud Lands.

  "That is your star," he whispers to me. "It comes to tell the world that the reign of the Mexica is over, and the days of Hummingbird are numbered. It is sign that Feathered Serpent is to return.”

  His voice is soft and soothing it was, like a hand stroking my head.

  "You are of the few. I knew this from the moment of your birth. You will be here when Feathered Serpent arrives and you will help him rid us of the Mexica. I have seen it in the portents in the sky.

  "You are both blessed and cursed with a destiny, my little one, my daughter, my One Grass of Penance."

  Chapter 14

  Tenochtitlán, 1519

  It was late, deep into the Sixth Watch of the Night, when Tendile and his fellow lords arrived at the royal palace. Montezuma had given orders that he be woken immediately upon their arrival. The delegation removed their sandals and stripped off their decorated mantles, replacing them with plain cloaks of maguey fibre. Then they were led up the great staircase to Montezuma's apartments.

  Revered Speaker awaited them in one of his private chambers. As they entered they were assailed by the pungent musk of copal incense. Sandalwood glowed in a copper brazier, and Teztcatlipoca, Bringer of Darkness, watched them from the smoky gloom. Woman Snake lay prostrate in front of the altar. A young girl was spreadeagled, naked, over Montezuma's own sacrificial stone, arms and legs hanging limp, her chest open, her heart cooking in the coals.

  A skein of black smoke rose to the ceiling.

  Tendile and his officers approached on their faces. Montezuma stepped from behind the slab, his robes wet with gore from the sacrifice. He approached them with the basalt jaguar receptacle that held some of the dead girl's blood. He sprinkled it over his messengers, to purify them. They had spoken with gods.

  Montezuma had hoped for good news, but instead saw a terrible truth written on their stricken faces. "Speak," he said.

  "The great rafts appeared off our coast five days ago," Tendile said. "We met with the strangers and have hurried day and night since to bring you news."

  "Well?"

  "They do not have the elegant speech, they speak some other language that sounds like the quacking of ducks. They have a woman who speaks for them: a Person, like ourselves. She calls herself Malinali."

  "And what did this Malinali say to you?"

  Tendile was trembling. Saliva leaked from his mouth onto the floor.

  "What did she say?" Montezuma shouted.

  "She said that the ancient prophecies are to be fulfilled. She said ... that Feathered Serpent has returned as promised."

  Montezuma pressed his knuckles to his forehead, as if trying to burrow his way inside his own skull. "Who was this woman?"

  "I confess I do not know my Lord, except that she spoke most insolently to me."

  "What did she say?"

  "That Feathered Serpent wishes to speak with you in person, that he has been commanded to do this by Olintecle himself."

  Tendile lay prostrate on the cold marble, waiting a hundred years for these few terrible moments to pass. I will be sacrificed to Hummingbird for this, he thought. My skin will be flayed and thrown into the great pit at Yopico.

  Montezuma took an agave thorn from the shrine and stabbed at his own flesh, repeatedly, until the blood ran down his arms. "Did you see this stranger who claimed to be Quetzalcóatl?"

  "Yes, my lord. His skin was white, like chalk, and he had a dark beard and a straight nose. He was dressed in black and wore a green feather in his cap."

  "A quetzal plume!" Montezuma murmured. A god was known best by his head dress. A jade feather signified Feat
hered Serpent. And black was one of his colours. "What of the others who were with him?"

  "Like him, they wore strange clothes that had a pestilential odour about them. Many of them had long beards and hair of strange and unnatural colours. Their swords and shields and bows are all made of some metal that shines like the sun. And yet, great Lord, if they were indeed gods, their excrement was not of gold, as it should be, but like ours. For we waited after our meeting to observe them and ..."

  "What do you know of the ways of the gods!" Montezuma shouted.

  Tendile lay on his belly, silent. Please do not kill me.

  "Did this woman tell you why this bearded lord wishes to speak with me?"

  "She says it concerns matters of the gods."

  "They spoke of religion?"

  "No, but I saw them at their ritual, great Lord. They were drinking blood."

  For the first time Montezuma allowed himself to hope.

  But then Tendile said: "Yet it was not the blood of a man they were drinking, or this is what she said, but the blood of a god."

  "The blood of a god?”

  "My artists drew pictures for you, great lord.”

  One of Tendile's scribes crawled forward clutching several bark sheets, the paintings that he and his companion had made on the beach at San Juan de Ulúa. Montezuma snatched them from him. He stared at the floating temples with their great banners of cloth, the logs spitting fire, the two-headed monsters, the angry beasts that followed them.

  "What is this?"

  "Great Lord, the strangers possess stone serpents that shoot smoke and sparks from their mouths. If the serpent is pointed towards a tree, the tree falls. If it is pointed towards a mountain, the mountain cracks and crumbles away. The noise is like thunder and the smoke has a vile smell that made us all sick. Some of them rode great stags, taller than two men standing on each other's shoulders, and these beasts carry them wherever they want to go. They breathe smoke from their mouths and when they ran it was as if the very ground trembled under our feet. They also possess dogs as no dogs we have ever seen, monsters straight from the land of the dead, with great jowls and yellow teeth."

  What this woman called Malinali had told Tendile could not be denied. It was the year One Reed, the day Feathered Serpent had been born and the day he had sailed away. The portents were there for even the most obtuse priest to read. The owl men had prophesied:

  If he comes on 1-crocodile he strikes the old men, the old women,

  If on 1-Jaguar, 1-Deer, 1-Flower he strikes at children.

  If on 1-Reed, he strikes at kings ...

  Montezuma stared at the shadows, lost in his own despair. Finally, he remembered Tendile and the other lords, who were awaiting his answer.

  "Is there anything else you have to tell me?" he said.

  Another of Tendile's retinue crept forward. He was holding a metal helmet, made of some shining metal that resembled silver. What is this?

  "One of the strangers gave us this head-dress," Tendile said.

  Montezuma examined it. It was similar to the helmet worn by Hummingbird on the Left, their own war-god.

  "He gave you this as a gift?" Montezuma asked.

  "No, great Lord. He demanded that we return it, filled with gold."

  "Gold," Montezuma said. "Why gold?"

  "They said it was to heal a sickness peculiar to their kind. Indeed, they ignored all our other gifts, the finest cloth and feather work and some exquisite pieces of jade. Only the gold seemed to excite them."

  Perhaps that is why they have come, Montezuma thought. He started to giggle. Perhaps there was an answer to this after all ...

  "You shall return to the coast tonight and give these strangers exactly what they ask. If it is gold they want, it is gold they shall have. We shall also discover if this Malinali's Lord is truly Feathered Serpent or just a man, as you claim. There are ways we may divine the truth."

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  After they had gone Montezuma stared again at the pictures that had been painstakingly painted on the sheets of bark, and his fingers began to tremble uncontrollably.

  One Reed. A bad year for kings.

  San Juan de Ulúa

  A depressing place, just sand dunes with sparse patches of straw-coloured grass and a few groves of forlorn and wind-bowed palm trees. In the distance they could make out a range of blue mountains, dominated by a peak the local indians called Orizaba, a volcanic caldera cloaked in great banks of cloud.

  The indian slaves that Tendile left behind helped them make shelters from green branches and palm fronds and thatch. The naturales made their own camp a little way off, a shantytown built overnight to service the needs of the Spaniards. They cooked fish and turkeys over open fires and the women peeled fruit and prepared corn cakes under canopies of woven mats.

  For the first few days the Spaniards clustered around their own fires, shivering in the teeth of the northerly winds. Then quite suddenly the wind died away and the weather turned unbearably hot. They huddled in the shade of the few gnarled trees, slapping at the voracious clouds of tiny black insects that descended to feast on them and make their lives misery.

  Only Cortés seemed immune to the discomforts. Day after day he patrolled the dunes, staring at the forbidding range of mountains far to the west, and waited, and wondered, and planned.

  Malinali

  Rain Flower pulls off her huipitl, the long tunic of sheer cotton she wears over her skirt. As she undresses I see there are dark, plum-coloured bruises on her arms and her breasts. A she wades into the cold, black water of the pool, she sees me stare. "My hairy lord is rough with me. I don't think he means to be. He is big and clumsy. When he is in the cave he forgets how strong he is and how small I am."

  She crouches down so that the water reaches her shoulders. I feel a sudden and powerful affection for her. In Potonchan Rain Flower was thought ugly. Her mother had neglected to hang a pearl from her cap when she was an infant and so she had not grown up with the crossed eyes that the Tabascans found so becoming in a woman. Rain Flower's mother had in fact been Tiger Lip Plug's elder wife and Rain Flower was only a few years younger than I. She was like a younger sister to me. Like me, she had a quick tongue and a quick temper that had been curbed only a little by the chili smoke fires over which her father had upended her as punishment.

  "I do not believe they are gods, little mother. Their bodies have a rank smell and they spill their seed like any man."

  "Your cave has opened for the first time and now you know all there is to know of men. You are disappointed then, that he does not have claws on his maquauhuitl?"

  "I do not dare to look," she says and dips her head below the water.

  "Some men are not born gods," I tell her, when she bobs up again. "Sometimes the spirit of a god is born in them, or is given them, as it was with Montezuma."

  "And what of your god with the violet eyes?"

  "He has three penises and he keeps me awake all night! While the others are recovering their vigour he always has one that urgently seeks the cave of joy. Then at dawn he turns into a cat and joins the other ocelots in greeting the dawn with their cries."

  "You have a fancy tongue. I fear one day Montezuma's priests may cut it out and roast it in their fires."

  I have to smile at that. It is a warning I heard from Tiger Lip Plug many times.

  My Alonso is a better husband. He uses me gently and takes me in the way of the gods, with our faces and bodies pressed together. I see him only at night, for he does not try to speak to me through Aguilar, either because he does not wish to, or perhaps he finds Aguilar as tiresome as I.

  And I know his only purpose is to teach me the way of the gods so that I can come to Feathered Serpent better prepared.

  "Perhaps one day none of us will have to fear Montezuma."

  "Is that what you think?"

  "Why else would our thunder gods have come here?"

  Rain Flower ladles water from the palm of her hand over her shoulder, wincing at
the small bruises on her flesh. "They are just men. They will take whatever they want and go back to the Cloud Lands."

  "Perhaps they will take us with them. We will be better off than we were before. I do not wish to spend my whole life sewing cloaks and baking corn."

  "What else should a woman do?”

  How can I explain to her? I was born to the ordinary woman's life of pounding tortillas and having babies but I always knew in my heart that I was a warrior, a queen, a statesman, a prince-maker, a poet. I had always known it and my father had known it too.

  "You hope for too much," Rain Flower said. "Life is just a dream. What happens here should not matter to a Person."

  Lord Sun was sinking in the sky, to battle for another night against his sisters and brothers. Cicadas pounded a rhythm in the forest. A butterfly danced among the ferns, the spirit of a dead warrior playing forever among the flowers and reeds. "You may be right," I murmur, but I do not believe it, I do not believe it at all.

  The water seems suddenly black and very cold. We stand up and wade, shivering, towards the bank. I see a shadow running from a hiding place among the forest. It is one of the thunder gods; it is Jaramillo.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  My lord Tendile arrives with the usual fanfare; there are snakeskin drums, conches, clay flutes and wooden clappers. But this time his heralds also bear green quetzal standards to show that the delegation carries royal approval.

  "The Lord Tendile, governor and voice of the Mexica, appointed by the Revered Speaker himself, now comes! He brings greetings and friendship to Malintzin, newly arrived from the cloud lands of the east!"

  Malintzin. In Nahuatl it means Malinali's lord. So this is how they have decided to address him. So typical of Mexica ambiguity, skirting admission that he is either man or god.

  Tendile is dressed magnificently in a mantle of sheer orange cotton, embroidered with geometric designs along its hem. His head-dress is of flamingo plumes inlaid with gold. He is accompanied by a much larger retinue than before, both lords and slaves. Two young boys brush the insects aside from his face with feather fans while two priests walk ahead bearing braziers of copal incense. Behind him come the owl men, in their feathered cloaks and beaked helmets, skulls and human bones tagged to their cloaks. They scream like shrikes, and blow clouds of coloured smoke from clay censers.