Gary Jennings - Aztec Autumn

I took that goose language to be a complaint about their having to walk, and said, "You will not need to walk any farther, if you can ride horseback."

"If we could ride a shipwreck over the Tortoise reefs," said Dos, "I would reckon we can ride anything."

"Might I ask, Cap'n," said Uno. "How come we gets kitted out so fancy, and not some of your chief mates?"

"Because, when we get to Tonalá, you two are going to be my mice."

"Mice, Cap'n?"

"I will explain when the time comes. Now, while the rest of us move on, you get into those uniforms, strap on the swords, get onto the two horses I am leaving for you and catch up to us as soon as you can."

"Aye aye, sir."

So Nochéztli and I had comfortable saddles again, and the two spare horses I put to use as pack animals, relieving several of my warriors of the heavy lead they were carrying.

The next event of any note occurred some days later, and this time I was not forewarned by my Aztéca scouts. Nochéztli and I rode over a low ridge and found ourselves looking down on some mud huts clustered on the bank of a large pond. Four of our scouts were there, drinking water given them by the villagers and sociably smoking poquíetin with them. I raised a hand to halt the column behind me and said to Nochéztli, "Collect all your knights and leading officers and join me yonder." He saw the look on my face and wordlessly went back to the train as I rode down to the little settlement.

I leaned from my horse and asked one of the scouts, "Who are these people?"

My look and my tone of voice made him stammer slightly. "Only—only simple fisher folk, Tenamáxtzin." And he beckoned to the oldest of the men present.

The old rustic sidled closer to me, fearful of my horse, and addressed me as respectfully as if I had been a mounted Spaniard. He spoke the tongue of the Kuanáhuata, which is a language sufficiently similar to Náhuatl that I was able to understand him.

"My lord, as I was telling your warrior here, we live by fishing this pond. Only we few families, as our ancestors have done since time before time."

"Why you? Why here?"

"There lives in this pond a small and delectable whitefish that can be found in no other waters. Until lately, they have been our commodity of trade with other Kuanáhuata settlements." He waved vaguely eastward. "But now there are white men—south, in Tonalá. They also esteem these unique fish, and we can trade for rich goods such as we have never before—"

He broke off, looking past me as Nochéztli and his officers came to stand, maquáhuime in hand, in a menacing ring about the cluster of huts. All the other folk huddled together, the men protectively putting their arms about the women and children. I spoke over my shoulder:

"Knight Nochéztli, give the order to kill the scouts."

"What? Tenamáxtzin, they are four of our best—" But he also broke off, when I turned my look on him, and obediently nodded to his nearest officers. Before the stunned and unbelieving scouts could move or make a sound of protest, they had been beheaded. The old man and his villagers stared in horror at the bodies lying twitching on the ground, and at the heads, apart, which were blinking their eyes as if still in disbelief of their fate.

I told the old man, "There will be no more white men for you to trade with. We are marching on Tonalá to make sure of that. Any of you who wish to come with us—and help us slaughter those white men—may do so, and welcome. Any who do not will be put to death right here where you stand."

"My lord," pleaded the old man. "We have no quarrel with the white men. They have traded fairly with us. Since they came, we have prospered more than—"

"I have heard that argument too often before," I interrupted him. "I will say this just once again. There will be no white men, fair traders or otherwise. You saw what I have done to men of my own who took my words too lightly. Those of you who are coming, come now."

The old man turned to his people and spread his arms helplessly. Several of the men and boys, and two or three of the sturdier women, one of them leading her boy-child, stepped forward and made the kissing-the-earth gesture to me.

The old man sadly shook his head and said, "Even were I not too aged to fight and even to march, my lord, I would not leave this place of my fathers and my fathers' fathers. Do what you will."

What I did was take off his head with my own steel sword. At that, all the remaining men and boys of the village hastened to step forward and make the tlalqualíztli gesture. So did most of the women and young girls. Only three or four other females, holding babies in their arms or with infants clutching to their skirts, remained where they were.

"Tenamáxtzin," said the cóyotl-faced officer Butterfly, with a solicitude I would not have expected of her, "those are innocent women and tiny children."

"You have killed others just like them," I said.

"But those were Spaniards!"

"These women can talk. These children can point. I want no witnesses left alive." I tossed her my spare sword, an obsidian-edged maquáhuitl that hung by a thong from my pommel, because she was carrying only an arcabuz. "Here. Pretend they are Spaniards."

And so she did, but clumsily, because she was obviously reluctant to do it. Hence her victims suffered more than the several men had done, cowering under her blows and having to be hacked at more often than should have been necessary. By the time Butterfly was done, their copiously spilled blood had trickled down the bank and was staining the water red at the pond's margin. The villagers who had surrendered themselves to me—all of them wailing and tearing their hair and mantles—were herded back among our slave contingent, and I ordered that they be closely watched, lest they try to flee.

We had gone a considerable distance from that place before Nochéztli worked up courage enough to speak to me again. He nervously cleared his throat and said:

"Those were people of our own race, Tenamáxtzin. The scouts were men of our own city."

"I would have slain those if they were my brothers born. I grant you that I have cost us four good warriors, but I promise you that, from this day on, not a single other of our army will ever be negligent of my commands, as were those four."

"That is certain," Nochéztli admitted. "But those Kuanáhuata you ordered slain—they had neither opposed nor angered you..."

"They were, at heart, as much in league with and dependent on the Spaniards as Yeyac was. So I gave them the same choice I gave Yeyac's warriors. Join us or die. They chose. See here, Nochéztli, you have not had the benefit of Christian teaching, as I did in my younger days. The priests were fond of telling us stories from the annals of their religion. They particularly rejoiced in recounting the exploits and sayings of their godling called Jesucristo. I well remember one of that godling's sayings. 'He that is not with me is against me.' "

"And you wished to leave no witnesses to our passage, I realize that, Tenamáxtzin. But you must know that eventually, inevitably, the Spanish are going to hear of our army and our intent."

"Ayyo, indeed they will. I want them to. I am planning to threaten and taunt them with it. But I want the white men to know only enough to keep them in uncertainty, in apprehension, in terror. I do not wish them to know our number, our strength of armament, our position at any given time, or our course of march. I want the white men starting in fright at every unexpected noise, recoiling from every unfamiliar sight, becoming distrustful of every stranger they see, getting neck cramps from forever looking over their shoulders. Let them think us evil spirits, and countless, impossible to find, and likely to strike here, there, anywhere. There must be no witnesses who can tell them anything different."