Gary Jennings - Aztec

"It does not make sense," Motecuzóma objected. "Why should he incite Patzinca to the treachery of seizing these men, and then negate that by setting them loose himself?"

"He hoped to make sure that we blamed the Totonaca for the treason," resumed the Snake Woman. "Now that the officials have returned to us, Patzinca must be in a frenzy of fear, and mustering his army against our reprisal. When that army is gathered to mount a defense, the man Cortés may just as easily incite Patzinca to use them for attack instead."

Cuitlahuac added, "And that does accord with our conclusions, Mixtli. Does it not?"

"Yes, my lords," I said, addressing them all. "The white chief Cortés clearly wants something from us Mexíca, and he will use force to get it, if necessary. The threat is implicit in the message brought by these registrars he so cunningly freed. His price for keeping the Totonaca in check is that he be invited here. If the invitation is withheld, he will use the Totonaca—and perhaps others—to help him fight his way here."

"Then we can easily forestall that," said Motecuzóma, "by extending the invitation he requests. After all, he says he merely wishes to pay his respects, and it is proper that he should. If he comes with no armies, with just an escort of his ranking subordinates, he can certainly work no harm here. My belief is that he wishes to ask our permission to settle a colony of his people on the coast. We already know that these strangers are by nature island dwellers and seafarers. If they wish only an allotment of some seaside land..."

"I hesitate to contradict my Revered Speaker," said a hoarse voice. "But the white men want more than a foothold on the beach." The speaker was another of the returned registrars. "Before we were freed from Tzempoalan, we saw the glow of great fires in the direction of the ocean, and a messenger came running from the bay where the white men had moored their eleven ships, and eventually we heard what had happened. At the order of the man Cortés, his soldiers stripped and gutted every useful item from ten of those ships, and the ten were burned to ashes. Only one ship is left, apparently to serve as a courier craft between here and wherever the white men come from."

Motecuzóma said irritably, "This makes less and less sense. Why should they deliberately destroy their only means of transport? Are you trying to tell me that the outlanders are all madmen?"

"I do not know, Lord Speaker," said the hoarse-voiced man. "I know only this. The hundreds of white warriors are now aground on that coast, with no means of returning whence they came. The chief Cortés will not now be persuaded or forced to go away, because, by his own action, he cannot. His back is to the sea, and I do not believe he will simply stand there. His only alternative is to march forward, inland from the ocean. I believe the Eagle Knight Mixtli has predicted correctly: that he will march this way. Toward Tenochtítlan."

Seeming as troubled and unsure of himself as the unhappy Patzinca of Tzempoalan, our Revered Speaker refused to make any immediate decision or to order any immediate action. He commanded that the throne room be cleared and that he be left alone. "I must give these matters deep thought," he said, "and closely study this account compiled by my brother and the Knight Mixtli. I will commune with the gods. When I have determined what should be done next, I will communicate my decisions. For now, I require solitude."

So the five bedraggled registrars went away to refresh themselves, and the Speaking Council dispersed, and I went home. Although Waiting Moon and I seldom exchanged many words, and then only regarding trivial household matters, on that occasion I felt the need of someone to talk to. I related to her all the things that had been happening on the coast and at the court, and the troublous apprehensions they were causing.

She said softly, "Motecuzóma fears that it is the end of our world. Do you, Záa?"

I shook my head noncommittally. "I am no far-seer. Quite the contrary. But the end of The One World has been often predicted. So has the return of Quetzalcoatl, with or without his Toltéca attendants. If this Cortés is only a new and different sort of marauder, we can fight him and probably vanquish him. But if his coming is somehow a fulfillment of all those old prophecies... well, it will be like the coming of the great flood twenty years ago, against which none of us could stand. I could not, and I was then in my prime of manhood. Even the strong and fearless Speaker Ahuítzotl could not. Now I am old, and I have little confidence in the Speaker Motecuzóma."

Béu regarded me pensively, then said, "Are you thinking that perhaps we should take our belongings and flee to some safer haven? Even if there is calamity here in the north, my old home city of Tecuantépec should be out of danger."

"I had thought of that," I said. "But I have for so long been involved in the fortunes of the Mexíca that I should feel like a deserter if I departed at this juncture. And it may be perverse of me, but if this is some kind of ending, I should like to be able to say, when I get to Mictlan, that I saw it all."

Motecuzóma might have gone on vacillating and temporizing for a long time, except for what occurred that very night. It was yet another omen, and a sufficiently alarming one that he bestirred himself at least to send for me. A palace page came, himself much perturbed, and roused me from my bed to accompany him at once to the palace.

As I dressed, I could hear a subdued hubbub from the street outside, and I grumbled, "What has happened now?"

"I will show you, Knight Mixtli," said the young messenger, "as soon as we are outdoors."

When we were, he pointed to the sky and said in a hushed voice, "Look there." Late though it was, well after midnight, we were not the only ones watching the apparition. The street was full of people from the neighboring houses, scantily clad in whatever garments they had snatched up, all of them with their faces upturned, all of them murmuring uneasily except when they were calling for other neighbors to wake up. I raised my crystal and looked at the sky, at first as wonderingly as everyone else. But then a memory came to my mind from long ago, and it somewhat diminished the dreadfulness of the spectacle, at least for me. The page glanced sideways at me, perhaps waiting for me to utter some exclamation of dismay, but I only sighed and said:

"This is all we lacked."

At the palace, a half-dressed steward hurried me up the stairs to the upper floor, then up another staircase to the roof of the great building. Motecuzóma sat on a bench in his roof garden, and I think he was shivering, though the spring night was not cold and he was swathed in several mantles hastily flung around him. Without shifting his gaze from the sky, he said to me:

"After the New Fire ceremony came the eclipse of the sun. Then the falling stars. Then the smoking stars. All those things of the past years were omens evil enough, but at least we knew them for what they were. This is an apparition never seen before."

I said, "I beg to correct you, Lord Speaker—only that I may relieve your apprehensions to some degree. If you will wake your historians, my lord, and set them to searching the archives, they can ascertain that this has occurred before. In the year One Rabbit of the last preceding sheaf of years, during the reign of your namesake grandfather."

He stared at me as if I had suddenly confessed to being some kind of sorcerer. "Sixty and six years ago? Long before you were born. How could you know of it?"

"I remember my father telling of lights like these, my lord. He claimed it was the gods striding about the skies, but with only their mantles visible, all tinted in the same cold colors."

And that is what the lights looked like that night: like filmy cloth draperies depending from a point at the top of the sky and hanging all the way down to the mountain horizon, and swaying and stirring as if in a light breeze. But there was no noticeable breeze, and the long curtains of light made no swishing sound as they swung. They merely glowed coldly, in colors of white and pale green and pale blue. As the draperies softly undulated, those colors subtly changed places and sometimes merged. It was a beautiful sight, but a sight to make one's hair similarly stir.