Текст книги "Aztec"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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Текущая страница: 66 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

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That was the day Two House in our year of One Reed, which is to say, early in your month of November, in your year counted as one thousand five hundred and nineteen.

The southern causeway had known many processions in its time, but never one that made such an unaccustomed noise. The Spaniards carried no musical instruments, and they did not sing or chant or make any other sort of music to accompany their pacing. But there was a jingling and clashing and clanging of all the weapons they carried and the steel armor they wore and the harness of their horses. Though the procession moved at a ceremonially slow walk, the horses' hooves struck heavily on the paving stones and the big wheels of the cannons rumbled ponderously; so the whole length of the causeway vibrated; and the whole lake surface, like a drumhead, amplified the noise; and the clamor echoed back from all the distant mountains.

Cortés led, of course, mounted on his She-Mule, carrying on a tall staff the blood-and-gold banner of Spain, and Malintzin proudly paced beside the horse, carrying her master's personal flag. Behind them came the Snake Woman and the other Mexíca lords who had gone to Chololan and back. Behind them came the mounted Spanish soldiers, their upright spears bearing pennons at their points. Then came the fifty or so selected warriors of our own race. Behind them came the Spanish foot soldiers, their crossbows and harquebuses held at parade position, their swords sheathed and their spears casually leaned back upon their shoulders. Trailing that neatly ranked and professionally marching company came a jostling crowd of citizens from Ixtapalápan and the other promontory towns, merely curious to see the unprecedented sight of warlike foreigners walking unopposed into the hitherto unassailable city of Tenochtítlan.

Halfway along the causeway, at the Acachinánco fort, the procession was met by its first official greeters: the Revered Speaker Cacamatzin of Texcóco and many Acolhua nobles, who had come by canoe across the lake, also Tecpanéca nobles from Tlácopan, the third city of The Triple Alliance. Those magnificently garbed lords led the way, as humbly as slaves, sweeping the causeway with brooms and strewing it with flower petals in advance of the parade, all the way to where the causeway joined the island. Meanwhile, Motecuzóma had been carried from his palace in his most elegant litter. He was accompanied by a numerous and impressive company of his Eagle, Jaguar, and Arrow Knights, and all the lords and ladies of his court, including this Lord Mixtli and my Lady Béu.

The timing had been arranged so that our procession arrived at the island's edge—at the entrance to the city—just as the incoming procession did. The two trains stopped, some twenty paces apart, and Cortés swung down from his horse, handing his banner to Malintzin. At the same moment, Motecuzóma's canopied litter was set by its bearers on the ground. When he stepped out from its embroidered curtains, we were all surprised by his dress. Of course, he wore his most flamboyant long mantle, the one made all of shimmering hummingbird feathers, and a fan crown of quetzal tototl plumes, and many medallions and other adornments of the utmost richness. But he did not wear his golden sandals; he was barefoot—and none of us Mexíca was much pleased to see our Revered Speaker of the One World manifest even that token humility.

He and Cortés stepped forward from their separate companies and slowly walked toward each other across the open space between. Motecuzóma made the deep bow of kissing the earth, and Cortés responded with what I know now is the Spanish military hand salute. As was fitting, Cortés presented the first gift, leaning forward to drape around the Speaker's neck a perfumed strand of what appeared to be alternate pearls and flashing gems—a cheap thing of nacre and glass, it later proved to be. Motecuzóma in turn looped over Cortés's head a double necklace made of the rarest sea shells and festooned with some hundred finely wrought solid-gold bangles in the shapes of various animals. The Revered Speaker then made a lengthy and flowery speech of welcome. Malintzin, holding an alien flag in either hand, boldly stepped forward to stand beside her master, to translate Motecuzóma's words, and then those of Cortés, which were somewhat fewer.

Motecuzóma returned to his litter chair, Cortés remounted his horse, and the procession of us Mexíca led the procession of Spaniards through the city. The marching men began to march a little less orderly, bumping into each other and treading on each other's heels, as they gawked about—at the well-dressed people lining the streets, at the fine buildings, at the hanging rooftop gardens. In The Heart of the One World, the horses had trouble keeping their footing on the sleek marble paving of that immense plaza; Cortés and the other riders had to dismount and lead them. We went past the Great Pyramid and turned right, to the old palace of Axayácatl, where a sumptuous banquet was spread for all those hundreds of visitors and all us hundreds who had received them. There must have been equally as many hundreds of different foods, served on thousands of platters of gold-inlaid lacquerware. As we took our places at the dining cloths, Motecuzóma led Cortés to the dais set for them, saying meanwhile:

"This was the palace of my father, who was one of my predecessors as Uey-Tlatoani. It has been scrupulously cleaned and furnished and decorated to be worthy of such distinguished guests. It contains suites of chambers for yourself, for your lady"—he said that with some distaste—"and for your chief officers. There are ample and suitable quarters for all the rest of your company. There is a complete staff of slaves to serve you and cook for you and attend to your needs. The palace will be your residence for as long as you stay in these lands."

I think any other man but Cortés, in his equivocal situation, would have declined that offer. Cortés knew that he was a guest only by self-invitation, and was more likely regarded as an unwelcome aggressor. By taking up residence in the palace, even with some three hundred of his own soldiers under the same roof, the Captain-General would be in a position far more dangerous than when he had stayed in the palace of Chololan. Here, he would be at all times under Motecuzóma's eye, and within Motecuzóma's reach, should his host's unwillingly extended hand of friendship suddenly decide to clutch or clench. The Spaniards would be captives—unfettered, but captives—in Motecuzóma's own stronghold city, the city perched on an island, the island encircled by a lake, the lake surrounded by all the cities and peoples and armies of The Triple Alliance. While Cortés stayed in the city, his own allies would not be within easy call, and, even if he did call, those reinforcements might have trouble getting to his side. For Cortés would have noticed, as he came along the southern causeway, that its several bridged canoe passages could easily be unbridged to prevent its being crossed. He must have guessed that the city's other causeways were similarly constructed, as of course they were.

The Captain-General could tactfully have told Motecuzóma that he preferred to make his residence on the mainland, and from there to visit the city as their intermittent conferences might require. But he said no such thing. He thanked Motecuzóma for the hospitable offer, and accepted it, as if a palace were no more than his due, and as if he scorned even to consider any danger in occupying it. Though I bear no love for Cortés, and no admiration for his guile and his deceits, I must grant that in the face of danger he always acted without hesitation, with a daring that defied what other men call common sense. Perhaps I felt that he and I had temperaments much alike, because in my lifetime I also often took audacious risks that "sensible" men would have shunned as insane.

Still, Cortés did not trust his survival entirely to chance. Before he and his men spent their first night in the palace, he had them use heavy ropes and great effort to hoist four of his cannons to the roof—uncaring that the process rather thoroughly destroyed the flower garden newly planted up there for his delectation—and positioned the cannons so they could cover every approach to the building. Also, on that night and every night, soldiers carrying charged harquebuses paced all night long around the rooftop and around the palace's exterior at ground level.

During the following days, Motecuzóma personally conducted his guests on tours of the city, accompanied by the Snake Woman or others of his Speaking Council, and by a number of his court priests, who wore faces of extreme disapproval, and by me. I was always in the company, at Motecuzóma's insistence, because I had warned him of Malintzin's cunning aptitude for mistranslating. Cortés remembered me, as he had said he would, but apparently without any rancor. He smiled his thin smile when we were introduced by name, and he accepted my company amiably enough, and he spoke his words as often through my translation as through that of his woman. She also recognized me, of course, and with obvious odium, and she addressed me not at all. When her master chose to speak through me, she glared as if she were awaiting only a propitious moment to have me put to death. Well, fair enough, I thought. It was what I planned for her.

On those walks about the city, Cortés was always accompanied by his second in command, the big, flame-haired Pedro de Alvarado, and by most of his other officers, and naturally by Malintzin, and by two or three of his own priests, who looked about as sour as ours. We would also usually be followed by a straggle of the common soldiers, though other groups of them might wander about the island on their own, while the native warriors of their company tended not to stray far from the security of their barracks at the palace.

As I have said, those warriors wore the new headdress ordained by Cortés: it looked like a clump of high, pliant grass growing from the tops of their heads. But the Spanish soldiers too, since I had seen them last, had added to their military headgear a distinctive adornment. Each of them wore a curious, pale-leather band encircling the crown of his steel helmet, just above its flanged brim. It was not particularly decorative, and served no apparent purpose, so eventually I inquired about it and one of the Spaniards, laughing, told me what it was.

During the affray at Chololan, while the Texcalteca were indiscriminately butchering the mass of the city's inhabitants, the Spaniards had gone looking specifically for the females with whom they had disported themselves during their fourteen days of revel, and they found most of those women and girls still in their quarters, trembling with fear. Convinced that the females had coupled with them only to sap their strength, the Spaniards exacted a unique revenge. They seized the women and girls, stripped them naked, and used some of them a last time or two. Then, though the females screamed and pleaded, the soldiers held them down and, with their sharp steel knives, they cut away from each female's crotch a hand-sized flap of skin containing the oval opening of her tipíli. They left the mutilated and sexless women to bleed to death, and went away. They took the warm, purselike pouches of skin and stretched the lips of them around the pommels of their horses' saddles. When the flesh had dried but was still pliable, they slipped the resultant circlets over their helmets, each with its little xacapili pearl facing front—that is, the shriveled, beanlike gristle that had been a tender xacapili. I do not know whether the soldiers wore those trophies as a grisly joke or as a warning to other scheming females.

All the Spaniards remarked approvingly on the size and population and splendor and cleanliness of Tenochtítlan, and compared it to other cities they had visited. The names of those other cities mean nothing to me, but you reverend friars may know them. The guests said our city was bigger in extent than Valladolid, that it was more populous than Seville, that its buildings were almost as magnificent as those of Holy Rome, that its canals made it resemble Amsterdam or Venice, that its streets and airs and waters were cleaner than in any of those places. We guides refrained from remarking that the effluvium of the Spaniards was noticeably diminishing that cleanliness. Yes, the newcomers were much impressed by our city's architecture and ornamentation and orderliness, but do you know what most impressed them? What moved them to their loudest exclamations of wonder and amazement?

Our sanitary closets.

It was clear that many of those men had traveled widely in your Old World, but it was equally clear that nowhere had they encountered an indoor facility for performing one's necessary functions. They were amazed enough to find such closets in the palace they occupied; they were astonished beyond words when we took them to visit the market square of Tlaltelólco and they found public conveniences provided for even the common folk: the vendors and the marketers there. When the Spaniards first noticed the things, every single man of them, Cortés included, just had to go inside and void himself. So did Malintzin, since such conveniences were as unknown in her native backcountry of the uncivilized Coatlicamac as they evidently are in Spain's Holy Rome. As long as Cortés and his company stayed on the island, and as long as the marketplace existed, those public closets were the most popular and most often visited attractions of all that Tenochtítlan had to offer.

While the Spaniards were enchanted by the closets of continually flushing water, our Mexíca physicians were cursing those same conveniences, for they avidly wished to get a sample of Cortés's bodily wastes. And if the Spaniards were behaving like children with a new toy, those doctors were behaving like quimichime mice, forever following Cortés about or popping their heads suddenly from around corners. Cortés could not help noticing those various elderly strangers peeking and peering at him everywhere he went in public. He finally asked about them, and Motecuzóma, secretly amused by their antics, replied only that they were doctors watching over the health of their most honored guest. Cortés shrugged and said no more, though I suspect he formed the opinion that all our physicians were more pathetically ill than any patients they might attend. Of course, what the doctors were doing, and not doing very subtly, was trying to verify their earlier conclusion that the white man Cortés was indeed afflicted with the nanaua disease. They were trying to measure with their eyes the significant curvature of his thighbones, trying to get close enough to hear if he breathed with the characteristic snuffling noise, or to see if his incisor teeth had the telltale notches.

Even I began to find them an embarrassment and an annoyance, always lurking in the way of our walks about the city and abruptly pouncing from unexpected places. When one day I literally tripped over an old doctor who was crouching for a leg-level view of Cortés, I angrily took him aside and demanded, "If you dare not ask for permission to examine the exalted white man, surely you can invent some excuse for examining his woman, who is merely one of us."

"It would not serve, Mixtzin," said the physician unhappily. "She will not have been infected by their connection. The nanaua can be transmitted to a sexual partner only in its early and flagrantly evident stages. If, as we suspect, the man was born of a diseased mother, then he is long past being a hazard to any other woman, though he could give her a diseased child. We are all naturally eager to know if we rightly divined his condition, but we cannot be sure. If only he were not so fascinated by the sanitary facilities, if we could examine his urine for traces of chiatoztli..."

I said in exasperation, "I keep finding you everywhere except squatting under him in the closets. I suggest, Lord Physician, that you go and instruct their palace steward to have slaves dismantle the man's closet there, and explain that it is clogged, and provide a pot for him to use in the meantime, and instruct his chambermaid to bring the pot—"

"Ayyo, a brilliant idea," said the physician, and he went hurrying off. We were molested no more during our excursions, but I never did hear whether the doctors found any definite evidence of Cortés's being a sufferer of the shameful disease.

I must report that those first Spaniards did not admire everything in Tenochtítlan. Some of the sights we showed them they disliked and even deplored. For example, they recoiled violently at sight of the skull rack in The Heart of the One World. They seemed to find it disgusting that we should wish to keep those relics of so many persons of renown who had gone to their Flowery Deaths in that plaza. But I have heard your Spanish storytellers tell of your own long-ago hero, El Cid, whose death was kept secret from his enemies, while his stiff body was bent to a shape that could be mounted on a horse, and thus he led his army to win its last battle. Since you Spaniards so treasure that tale, I do not know why Cortés and his company thought our display of notable persons' skulls any more gruesome than El Cid's preservation after death.

But the things that most repelled the white men were our temples, with their evidence of many sacrifices, both recent and long past. To give his visitors the best possible view of his city, Motecuzóma took them to the summit of the Great Pyramid, which, except during sacrificial ceremonies, was always kept scrubbed and gleaming on its outside. The guests climbed the banner-bordered stairs, admiring the grace and immensity of the edifice, the vividness of its painted and beaten-gold decoration, and they looked all about them at the vista of city and lake which broadened as they climbed. The two temples atop the pyramid were also bright on the outside, but the interiors were never cleaned. Since an accumulation of blood signified an accumulation of veneration, the temples' statues and walls and ceilings and floors were thick with coagulated blood.

The Spaniards entered the temple of Tlaloc, and instantly lunged out again, with retching exclamations and faces expressive of nausea. It was the first and only time I ever knew the white men to back away from a smell, or even acknowledge one, but in truth the stench of that place was worse than their own. When they could control their heaving stomachs, Cortés and Alvarado and the priest Bartolome went inside again, and went into spasms of rage when they discovered Tlaloc's hollow statue to be filled, right up to the level of his gaping square mouth, with the decaying human hearts on which he had been fed. Cortés was so infuriated that he whipped out his sword and gave the statue a mighty blow. It only chipped away a fragment of dried blood from Tlaloc's stone face, but it was an insult that made Motecuzóma and his priests gasp with consternation. However, Tlaloc did not respond with any devastating blast of lightning, and Cortés caught hold of his temper. He said to Motecuzóma:

"This idol of yours is not god. It is an evil thing which we call a devil. It must be cast down and out and into eternal darkness. Let me set here in its place the cross of Our Lord and an image of Our Lady. You will see that this demon dares not object, and from that you will realize that it is inferior, that it fears the True Faith, and that you will be well advised to abjure such wicked beings and embrace our kindly ones."

Motecuzóma said stiffly that the idea was unthinkable, but the Spaniards went into convulsions again when they entered the adjacent temple of Huitzilopóchtli, and yet again when they beheld the similar temples atop the lesser pyramid at Tlal-telólco, and each time Cortés expressed his repugnance more strongly and in more intemperate words.

"The Totonaca," he said, "have swept their country clean of these foul idols, and have given their allegiance to Our Lord and His Virgin Mother. The monstrous mountain temple at Chololan has been leveled. At this moment, some of my friars are instructing King Xicotenca and his court in the blessings of Christianity. I tell you, in none of those places have the old devil-deities so much as whimpered. And I swear on my oath, neither will they when you cast them out!"

Motecuzóma replied, and I translated, doing my best to convey the iciness of his words, "Captain-General, you are here as my guest, and a mannerly guest does not deride his host's beliefs any more than he would mock his host's taste in dress or wives. Also, although you are my guest, a majority of my people resent that they too must be hospitable to you. If you try to tamper with their gods, the priests will raise an outcry against you, and in matters of religion the priests can overrule my mandates. The people will heed the priests, not me, and you will be fortunate if you and your men are only evicted alive from Tenochtítlan."

Even the brash Cortés understood that he was being sharply reminded of his tenuous position, and he withdrew from pressing the topic further, and he muttered words of apology. At which Motecuzóma likewise thawed a little, and said:

"However, I try to be a fair man and a generous host. I realize that you Christians have no place here in which to worship your own gods, and I have no objection to your doing that. I will order that the small Eagle Temple in the grand plaza be cleared of its statues and altar stones and anything else offensive to your faith. Your priests may put in whatever furnishings they require, and the temple is your temple for as long as you want it."

Our own priests naturally were not pleased at even that minor concession to the aliens, but they did no more than grumble when the white priests took over the little temple. Thereafter, in fact, the place was more frequented than it had ever been. The Christian priests seemed to hold their Masses and other services continuously from morning to night, whether the white soldiers attended or not—because numbers of our own people, drawn by simple curiosity, began to drift in to those services. I say our own people; in actuality, they were mainly the white men's female consorts and allied warriors from other nations. But the priests employed Malintzin to translate their sermons, and were delighted when many of those heathen participants submitted—still no more than curious about the novelty of it—to take the salt and sprinkling and new-naming of baptism. Anyway, Motecuzóma's granting of that temple temporarily diverted Cortés from laying violent hands on our ancient gods, as he had done in other places.

The Spaniards had been in Tenochtítlan for little more than a month when something happened that could have expunged them forever from Tenochtítlan, probably from the entire One World. A swift-messenger came from Lord Patzinca of the Totonaca and, if he had reported to Motecuzóma, as formerly he would have done, the white men's sojourn might have ended then and there. However, the messenger made his report to the Totonaca army camped on the mainland, and he was brought by one of that company into the city to repeat it privily to Cortés. His news was that a serious commotion had occurred on the coast.

What had happened was this. A Mexícatl tribute collector named Cuaupopoca, making his accustomed annual round of various tributary nations, accompanied by a troop of Mexíca warriors, had collected the year's levy from the Huaxteca, who also live on the seacoast, but to the north of the Totonaca. Then, leading a train of Huaxteca porters, conscripted to carry their own tribute goods to Tenochtítlan, Cuaupopoca had moved on south into the Totonaca country, as he had been doing every year for years. But on reaching the capital city of Tzempoalan, he was shocked and indignant to find that the Totonaca were unprepared for his arrival. There was no stock of goods ready to go; there were no local men waiting to serve as porters; the ruling Lord Patzinca had not even the usual list compiled for Cuaupopoca to know what the tribute was supposed to consist of.

Having come from the northern hinterlands, Cuaupopoca had heard nothing of the misadventure that had befallen the Mexíca registrars who always went ahead of him, and he knew nothing of all the occurrences since then. Motecuzóma could easily have sent word to him, but had not. And I will never know whether the Revered Speaker simply forgot, in the press of so many other events, or whether he deliberately chose to let the tribute collection proceed as usual, just to see what would happen. Well, Cuaupopoca tried to do his duty. He demanded the tribute from Patzinca, who did his customary cringing but refused to comply, on the ground that he was no longer subordinate to The Triple Alliance. He had new masters, white ones, who lived in a fortified village farther down the beach. Patzinca whiningly suggested that Cuaupopoca apply to the white officer in charge there, a certain Juan de Escalante.

Angry and mystified, but determined, Cuaupopoca led his men to the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, to be received only with jeers in a language that was incomprehensible but recognizably insulting. So he, a mere tribute collector, did what the mighty Motecuzóma never had done yet; he objected to being thus disdainfully treated, and he objected strenuously, violently, decisively. In so doing, Cuaupopoca may have made a mistake, but he made it in the grand manner, in the lordly manner to be expected of the Mexíca. Patzinca and Escalante made a worse mistake in provoking him to it, for they should have been aware of their vulnerability. Practically the entire Totonaca army had marched away with Cortés, along with practically all of his own. Tzempoalan had few men left to defend it, and Vera Cruz was not much better manned, since most of its garrison consisted of the boatmen left there simply because they had no ships to require their employment.

Cuaupopoca, I repeat, was only a minor Mexícatl official. I may be the only person who even remembers his name, though many still remember the fate to which his tonáli brought him. The man was diligent in his duty of collecting levies, and that was the first time in his career that he had ever met defiance from a tributary nation, and he must have been as fiery-tempered as his name implied—it meant Smoldering Eagle—and he would not be balked in accomplishing his mission. He snapped an order to his force of Mexíca warriors and they leapt eagerly into action, because they were fighting men, bored by an undemanding journey of escort duty. They happily seized the opportunity for combat, and they were not long deterred by the few harquebuses and crossbows discharged at them from the stockade walls of the white men's village.

They killed Escalante and what few professional soldiers Cortés had detached to his command. The remaining population of unwarlike boatmen immediately surrendered. Cuaupopoca set guards there and around the Tzempoalan palace, then ordered the rest of his men to strip clean the entire surrounding country. This year, he proclaimed to the terrorized Totonaca, their levy would comprise no fraction of their goods and produce, but all of it. So it had been something of a feat for Patzinca's messenger to escape from the cordoned palace, and to slip past the scourging warriors of Cuaupopoca, and to bring Cortés the bad news.

Surely Cortés perceived how much more perilous his own position had suddenly become, and how uncertain his future, but he wasted no time in brooding. He went immediately to Motecuzóma's palace, and in no subdued or fearful mood. He took with him the red giant Alvarado and Malintzin and a number of heavily armed men, and all of them stormed past the palace stewards and, without ceremony, directly into Motecuzóma's throne room. Cortés raged, or pretended to rage, as he regaled the Revered Speaker with an amended version of the report he had received. As he told it, a roving band of Mexíca bandits had without provocation attacked his few men peaceably living on the beach, and had slaughtered them. It was a grave breach of the truce and friendship Motecuzóma had promised, and what did Motecuzóma intend to do about it?

The Revered Speaker knew of the tribute train's presence in that general area, so, from hearing Cortés's account, he would have supposed that it had got involved in a skirmish there and had done some damage among the white men. But he need not have hastened to conciliate Cortés; he could have temporized long enough to find out the true state of affairs. And the truth was this: the white men's one and only established settlement in these lands had surrendered itself to Cuaupopoca's Mexíca troops; the white men's one most biddable ally, Lord Patzinca, was cowering inside his palace, a prisoner of the Mexíca. Meanwhile, Motecuzóma had almost all the rest of the white men contained on his island, easy prey for elimination; and Cortés's other white and native troops could easily have been held off the island while the mainland armies of The Triple Alliance gathered to pulverize them. Thanks to Cuaupopoca, Motecuzóma held the Spaniards and all their supporters helpless in his hand. He had only to close that hand into a fist and squeeze until the blood ran out between his fingers.

He did not. He expressed to Cortés his dismay and condolence. He sent a force of his palace guard to make apologies in Tzempoalan and Vera Cruz, to relieve Cuaupopoca of his authority, to bring him and his chief military officers under arrest to Tenochtítlan.

What was worse, when the praiseworthy Cuaupopoca and his four commendable cuáchictin "old eagles" of the Mexíca army knelt in obeisance before the throne, Motecuzóma sat flaccidly slumped on that throne, flanked by the sternly erect Cortés and Alvarado, and in a not at all lordly voice he said to the prisoners: