Gary Jennings - Aztec

(ecce signum) Zumárraga

ULTIMA PARS

As I have told you, reverend scribes, the name of our eleventh month, Ochpaniztli, meant The Sweeping of the Road. That year, the name took on a new and sinister import, for it was then, toward the close of that month, when the rains of the rainy season began to abate that Cortés began his threatened march inland. Leaving his boatmen and some of his soldiers to garrison his town of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, Cortés headed westward to the mountains, with about four hundred fifty white troops and about one thousand three hundred Totonaca warriors, all armed and wearing fighting garb. There were another thousand Totonaca men serving as tamémime to carry spare arms, the dismantled cannons and their heavy projectiles, traveling rations, and the like. Among those porters were several of Motecuzóma's mice, who communicated with other quimichime posted along the route, thereby keeping us in Tenochtítlan informed of the procession's composition and its progress.

Cortés led the march, they said, wearing his shining metal armor and riding the horse he derisively but affectionately called She-Mule. His other female possession, Malintzin, carried his banner and walked proudly beside his saddle at the head of the company. Only a few of the other officers had brought their women, for even the lowest-ranking white soldiers expected to be given or to take other women along the way. But all the horses and dogs had been brought, though the quimichime reported that the mounts became slow and clumsy and troublesome when they were on the mountain trails. Also, in those heights Tlaloc was prolonging his rainy season, and the rain was cold, windblown, often mixed with sleet. The travelers, soaked and chilled, their armor a clammy weight on them, were hardly enjoying the journey.

"Ayyo!" said Motecuzóma, much pleased. "They find the interior country not so hospitable as the Hot Lands. I will now send my sorcerers to make life even more uncomfortable for them."

Cuitlahuac said grimly, "Better you let me take warriors and make life impossible for them."

Motecuzóma still said no. "I prefer to preserve an illusion of amiability as long as the pretense may serve our purpose. Let the sorcerers curse and afflict that company until they turn back of their own accord, not knowing it was our doing. Let them report to their King that the land is unhealthy and impenetrable, but give no bad report of us."

So the court sorcerers went scurrying eastward, disguised as common travelers. Now, sorcerers may be capable of doing many strange and wonderful things beyond the power of ordinary folk, but the impediments they put in the way of Cortés proved pitifully ineffectual. First, in the trail ahead of the marching company, they stretched between trees some thin threads on which hung blue papers marked with mysterious designs. Although those barriers were supposed to be impassable by any but sorcerers, the horse She-Mule, leading the train, unconcernedly broke through them, and probably not its rider Cortés nor anyone else even noticed the things. The sorcerers sent word back to Motecuzóma, not that they had failed, but that the horses possessed some sorcery which defeated that particular stratagem.

What they did next was secretly to meet with the quimichime traveling unsuspected with the train, and arrange to have those mice insinuate into the white men's rations some ceiba sap and tonaltin fruits. The sap of the ceiba tree, when ingested by a person, makes that person so hungry that he eats voraciously of everything on which he can get his hands and teeth, until, in only a matter of days, he becomes so fat that he cannot move. At least, so say the sorcerers; I have never witnessed the phenomenon. But the tonal fruit demonstrably does work mischief, though of a less spectacular nature. The tonal is what you call the prickly pear, the fruit of the nopali cactus, and the early-arriving Spaniards did not know to peel it carefully before biting into it. So it was the expectation of the sorcerers that the white men would be intolerably tormented when the tiny, invisible but painful prickles got irremovably into their fingers and lips and tongues. The tonal does something else besides. Anyone who eats its red pulp urinates an even brighter red urine, and a man passing what looks like blood may be terrified by the certainty that he is mortally ill.

If the ceiba sap made any of the white men fat, none of them got so fat as to be immobilized. If the white men cursed the tonaltin needles, or were dismayed when they apparently leaked blood, that did not stop them either. Perhaps their beards gave them some protection against the prickles and, for all I know, they always urinated red. But it is more likely that the woman Malintzin, knowing how easily her new comrades could be poisoned, paid close attention to what they ate, and showed them how to eat tonaltin, and told them what to expect afterward. At any rate, the white men kept moving inexorably westward.

When Motecuzóma's mice brought him word of his sorcerers' futility, they brought another and even more worrisome report. Cortés's company was passing through the lands of many minor tribes resident in those mountains, tribes like the Tepeyahuaca, the Xica, and others who had never been very amenable to paying tribute to our Triple Alliance. At each village, the marching Totonaca soldiers would call out, "Come! Join us! Rally to Cortés! He leads us to free ourselves from the detested Motecuzóma!" And those tribes did willingly contribute many warriors. So, although by then several white men were being carried in litters because they had injured themselves by falling off their stumbling horses, and although numbers of the lowland Totonaca had dropped by the wayside when they were made ill by the thin air of those heights, Cortés's company did not dwindle but increased in strength.

"You hear, Revered Brother!" Cuitlahuac stormed at Motecuzóma. "The creatures even dare to boast that they are coming to confront you personally! We have every excuse to swoop upon them, and now is the time to do it. As the Lord Mixtli predicted, they are nearly helpless in those mountains. We need not fear their animals or weapons. You can no longer say wait!"

"I say wait," Motecuzóma replied, imperturbable. "And I have good reason. Waiting will save many lives."

Cuitlihuac literally snarled, "Tell me: when in all of history has any single life ever been saved?"

Motecuzóma looked annoyed and said, "Very well, then, I speak of not cutting unnecessarily short the life of any Mexícatl soldier. Know this, Brother. Those outlanders are now approaching the eastern border of Texcala, the nation that has for so long repelled the fiercest assaults of even us Mexíca. That land will not be any more ready to welcome another enemy of a different color coming from a different direction. Let the Texcalteca fight the invaders, and we Mexíca will profit in at least two respects. The white men and their Totonaca will most surely be vanquished, but I also trust that the Texcalteca will suffer sufficient losses that we can strike them immediately afterward and, at last, defeat them utterly. If in the process we should find any white men still surviving, we will give them succor and shelter. It will appear to them that we have fought solely to rescue them. We will have won their gratitude and that of their King Carlos. Who can say what further benefits may accrue to us? So we will continue to wait."

If Motecuzóma had confided to Texcala's ruler Xicotenca what we had learned of the white men's fighting capabilities and limitations, the Texcalteca would wisely have pounced upon the white men somewhere in the steep mountains of which their nation" has an abundance. Instead, Xicotenca's son and war chief, Xicotenca the Younger, chose to make his stand on one of Texcala's few level grounds of great expanse. In the traditional manner, he arrayed his troops in preparation for fighting one of the traditional battles—in which both opponents poised their forces, exchanged the traditional formalities, and then rushed together to pit human strength against human strength. Xicotenca may have heard rumors that the new enemy possessed more than human strength, but he had no way of knowing that the new enemy cared not a little finger for our world's traditions and our established rules of war.