Gary Jennings - Aztec

So Cortés obligingly gave orders that his greater force of native warriors stay outside the city, but camping in a circle that would entirely surround it. Cortés surely felt secure enough, with all those thousands so near and on call if he should need help. And only he and the other white men entered Chololan, striding as proudly as nobles or riding their horses in towering majesty, while the gathered populace cheered and tossed flowers in their path.

As had been promised, the white men were given luxurious lodgings—every least soldier being treated as obsequiously as if he were a knight—and they were provided with servants and attendants, and women for their beds at night. Chololan had been forewarned of the men's personal habits, so no one—not even the women commanded to couple with them—ever commented on the dreadful smell of them, or their vulturine manner of eating, or their never taking off their filthy clothes and boots, or their refusal to bathe, or their neglect even to clean their hands between performing excretory functions and sitting down to dine. For fourteen days, the white men lived the kind of life that heroic warriors might hope for in the best of afterworlds. They were feasted, and plied with octli, and let to get as drunk and disorderly as they pleased, and they made free with the women assigned to them, and they were entertained with music and song and dancing. And after those fourteen days, the white men rose up and massacred every man, woman, and child in Chololan.

We got the news in Tenochtítlan, probably before the harquebus smoke had cleared from the city, by way of our mice who flitted in and out of Cortés's own ranks. According to them, the slaughter was done at the instigation of the woman Malintzin. She came one night to her master's room in the Chololan palace, where he was swilling octli and disporting himself with several women. She snapped at the women to begone and then warned Cortés of a plot in progress. She had learned of it, she said, by mingling and conversing with the local market women, who innocently supposed her to be a war captive eager for liberation from her white captors. The whole purpose of the visitors' being so lavishly entertained, said Malintzin, was to lull and weaken them while Motecuzóma secretly sent a force of twenty thousand Mexíca warriors to encircle Chololan. At a certain signal, she said, the Mexíca forces would fall upon the native troops camped outside, while the city men inside would arm themselves and turn on the unready white men. And, she said, on her way to expose the scheme, she had seen the city folk already grouping under banners in the central square.

Cortés burst from the palace, with his under-officers who had also been lodged there, and their shouts of "Santiago!" brought their troops converging from other lodgings in the city, throwing aside their women and their cups and seizing up their weapons. As Malintzin had warned, they found the plaza packed with people, many of them bearing feather banners, all of them wearing ceremonial garments which perhaps did look like battle garb. Those gathered people were given no time to raise a war cry or issue a challenge to combat—or otherwise to explain their presence there—for the white men instantly discharged their weapons and, so dense was the crowd, the first volley of pellets and arrows and other projectiles mowed them down like weeds.

When the smoke cleared a bit, perhaps the white men saw that the plaza contained women and children as well as men, and they may even have wondered if their precipitate action had been warranted. But the noise of it brought their Texcalteca and other allies swarming from their camps into the city. It was they who, more wantonly than the white men, laid waste the city and slew its populace without mercy or discrimination, killing even the lords Tlaquiach and Tlalchiac. Some of the men of Chololan did run to get weapons with which to fight back, but they were so outnumbered and encircled that they could only fight a delaying action as they retreated upward along the slopes of Chololan's mountain-sized pyramid. They made their last stand at the very top of it, and at the end were penned inside the great temple of Quetzalcoatl there. So their besiegers simply piled wood about the temple and set it afire and incinerated the defenders alive.

That was nearly twelve years ago, reverend friars, when that temple was burned and leveled and its rubble scattered. There remained nothing but trees and shrubs to be seen, which is why so many of your people have since been unable to believe that the mountain is not a mountain but a pyramid long ago erected by men. Of course, I know that it now bears something more than greenery. The summit where Quetzalcoatl and his worshipers were that night overthrown has lately been crowned with a Christian church.

When Cortés arrived at Chololan, it was inhabited by some eight thousand people. When he departed, it was empty. I say again that Motecuzóma had confided to me none of his plans. For all I know, he did have Mexíca troops moving stealthily toward that city, and he had instructed the people to rise up when the trap was sprung. But I beg leave to doubt it. The massacre occurred on the first day of our fifteenth month, called Panquetzaliztli, which means The Flourishing of the Feather Banners, and was everywhere celebrated with ceremonies in which the people did just that.

It may be that the woman Malintzin had never before attended an observance of that festival. She may genuinely have believed, or mistakenly assumed, that the people were massing with battle flags. Or she could have invented the "plot," perhaps from her jealous resentment of Cortés's attentions to the local women. Whether she was moved by misunderstanding or malice, she effectually moved Cortés to make a desert of Chololan. And if he regretted that at all, he did not regret it for long, because it advanced his fortunes more than even his defeat of the Texcalteca had done. I have mentioned that I have visited Chololan, and found the people there to be rather less than lovable. I had no reason to care if the city went on existing, and its abrupt depopulation caused me no grief, except insofar as that added to Cortés's increasingly fearsome reputation. Because, when the news of the Chololan massacre spread by swift-messenger throughout The One World, the rulers and war chiefs of many other communities began to consider the course of events to date, no doubt in some such words as these:

"First the white men took the Totonaca away from Motecuzóma. Then they conquered Texcala, which not Motecuzóma nor any of his predecessors ever could do. Then they obliterated Motecuzóma's allies in Chololan, caring not a little finger for Motecuzóma's anger or vindictiveness. It begins to appear that the white men are mightier even than the long-mightiest Mexíca. It may be wise for us to side with the superior force... while we still can do so of our own volition."

One powerful noble did so without hesitation: the Crown Prince Ixtlil-Xochitl, rightful ruler of the Acolhua. Motecuzóma must have bitterly regretted his ouster of that prince, three years before, when he realized that Black Flower had not just spent those years sulking in his mountain retreat, that he had been collecting warriors in preparation for reclaiming his Texcóco throne. To Black Flower, the coming of Cortés must have seemed a god-sent and timely help to his cause. He came down from his redoubt to the devastated city of Chololan, where Cortés was regrouping his multitude in preparation for continuing their march westward. At their meeting, Black Flower surely told Cortés of the mistreatment he had suffered at Motecuzóma's hands, and Cortés presumably promised to help him redress it. Anyway, the next piece of bad news we heard in Tenochtítlan was that Cortés's company had been augmented by the addition of the vengeful Prince Black Flower and his several thousand superbly trained Acolhua warriors.