Gary Jennings - Aztec

When we rounded the base of the mighty volcano Citlaltepetl, we began to descend through the last of the mountainous country into the Hot Lands. On the morning of the day that would bring us clear to the coast, my fellow lords donned their splendiferous regalia of feather headdresses, mantles, and such, but I did not.

I had decided to add a few refinements to our plans and instructions. For one reason, it had been eight years since I had learned what Spanish I knew, and that had hardly improved with disuse. I wanted to mingle with the Spaniards unobserved, and hear them talk their language, and absorb it, and possibly gain a bit more fluency before I attended any of the formal meetings between our lords and theirs. Also, I had spying and note taking to do, and I could do those tasks better if I was invisible.

"So," I told the other nobles, "from here to the meeting ground I will go barefoot, and wear only a loincloth, and carry one of the lighter packs. You will lead the train, you will greet the outlanders, and when you make camp you will let our porters disperse and relax as they like. For one of them will be me, and I want freedom to wander. You will do the feasting and consultation with the white men. From time to time I will confer with you, privately, after dark. When we have jointly collected all the information the Revered Speaker requested, I will give the word and we will take our leave."

* * *

I am glad that you again join us, Lord Bishop, for I know you will wish to hear of the first real confrontation between your civilization and ours. Of course, Your Excellency will appreciate that many of the things I saw at that time were so new and exotic as to be baffling to me, and many of the things I heard sounded like monkey gibberish. But I will not prolong this account by repeating my ingenuous and often erroneous first impressions. I will not, as our earlier observers had done, speak foolishly of such things as the Spanish soldiers wearing the four legs of animals. The things I saw I will report in the light of my later and clearer understanding of them. The things I heard I will recount as I later construed them when I had a more perfect knowledge of your language.

As a pretended porter, I could only infrequently and surreptitiously use my topaz for looking at things, but these were the things I saw first. As we had been told to expect, there was in the bay only one ship. It was some distance from shore, but it was obviously as big as a goodly house. Its wings were apparently furled, for there extended upward from its roof only some tall poles and a tangle of ropes. Here and there about the bay, similar poles stuck up from the water, where the other ships had sunk as they burned. On the beach of the bay, the white men had erected three markers to commemorate the spot where they had first stepped ashore. There was a very large cross made of heavy wooden timbers from one of the destroyed ships. There was a high flagstaff flying a tremendous banner, the colors of blood and gold, the colors of Spain. And there was a shorter flagstaff bearing a smaller flag, the personal ensign of Cortés, blue and white with a red cross in the center.

The Place of Abundant Beautiful Things, which the white men had named the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, had sprouted quite a village. Some of the dwellings were only of cloth supported on sticks, but others were the typical coastal huts of cane walls and palm-leaf thatch, built for the visitors by their submissive Totonaca hosts. But that day there were not many white men in evidence—or their animals or their conscripted Totonaca laborers—for most of them, we learned, were working in a place some way farther north, where Cortés had decreed the construction of a more permanent Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, with solid houses of wood and stone and adobe.

Our train's approach had of course been noted by sentries and reported to the Spaniards. So there was a small group of them waiting to greet us. Our party halted at a respectful distance and our four lords, as I had privately recommended to them, lighted censers of copali incense and began swinging them on their chains, making coils of blue smoke in the air about them. The white men assumed, then and long afterward—to this day, as far as I know—that the wafting of perfumed smoke was our traditional way of saluting distinguished strangers. It was really only our attempt to draw a defensive veil between us and the intolerable smell of those ever-unwashed strangers.

Two of them came forward to meet our lords. I estimated them both to be of about thirty and five years of age. They were well dressed, in what I know now to have been velvet hats and cloaks, long-sleeved doublets and bulbous breeches made of merino, with thigh-high boots of leather. One of the men was taller than I, and broad and muscular, and most striking of appearance. He had a wealth of gold-colored hair and beard which flamed in the sunlight. He had bright blue eyes and, though his skin was of course pallid, his features were strong. The local Totonaca had already given him the name of their sun god, Tezcatlipóca, for his sunny appearance. We new arrivals naturally took him to be the white men's leader, but soon learned that he was only second in command, Pedro de Alvarado by name.

The other man was rather shorter and much less prepossessing, with bandy legs and a pigeon chest like the prow of a canoe. His skin was even whiter than the other's, though he had black hair and beard. His eyes were as colorless and cold and distant as a winter sky of gray cloud. That unimpressive person was, he told us pompously, the Captain Don Hernán Cortés of Medellin in the Extremadura, more recently of Santiago de Cuba, and he was come here as representative of His Majesty Don Carlos, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain.

At the time, as I have said, we could understand little of that lengthy title and introduction, although it was repeated for us in Xiu and Náhuatl by the two interpreters. They also had come toward us, walking a few paces behind Cortés and Alvarado. One was a white man, with a pockmarked face, dressed in the manner of their common soldiers. The other was a young woman of one of our own nations, clad in a maidenly yellow blouse and skirt, but her hair was an unnaturally reddish brown, almost as gaudy as Alvarado's. Of all the numerous native females presented to the Spaniards by the Tabascoob of Cupilco and more recently by Patzinca of the Totonaca, that one was the most admired by the Spanish soldiers, because her red hair was, they said, "like that of the whores of Santiago de Cuba."

But I could recognize hair artificially reddened by a brew of achiyotl seeds, just as I could recognize both the man and the girl. He was that Jeronimo de Aguilar who had been a reluctant guest of the Xiu for the past eight years. Before touching at the Olméca lands and then here, Cortés had paused at Tihó and found and rescued the man. Aguilar's fellow castaway, Guerrero, after having infected all that Maya country with his small pocks, had died of them himself. The red-haired girl, though by then about twenty and three years old, was still small, still pretty, still the slave Ce-Malinali whom I had met in Coatzacoalcos on my own way to Tihó, those eight years before.

When Cortés spoke in Spanish, it was Aguilar who rendered the words into the labored Xiu he had learned during his captivity, and it was Ce-Malinali who translated that into our Náhuatl, and, when our emissary lords spoke, the process was reversed. It did not take me long to realize that the words of both the Mexíca and Spanish dignitaries were often being imperfectly rendered, and not always because of the cumbersome three-language system. However, I said nothing, and neither of the interpreters took notice of me among the porters, and I determined that they should not for a while yet.