Gary Jennings - Aztec

You brought us the Christian religion, and you assure us that the Lord God will reward us with Heaven when we die, but that unless we accept Him we are damned to Hell when we die. Why then did the Lord God send us also the afflictions which kill and damn so many innocents to Hell before they can meet His missionaries and hear of His religion? Christians are constantly bidden to praise the Lord God and all His works, which must include the work He has done here. If only, reverend friars, you could explain to us why the Lord God chose to send His gentle new religion trailing behind the cruelly murderous new diseases, we who survived them could more joyously join you in singing praises to the Lord God's infinite wisdom and goodness, His compassion and mercy, His fatherly love of all His children everywhere.

By unanimous vote, the Speaking Council selected the Lord Cuautemoc to be the next Uey-Tlatoani of the Mexíca. It is interesting to speculate on how different our history and our destiny might have been if Cuautemoc had become Revered Speaker, as he should have done, when his father Ahuítzotl died eighteen years earlier. Interesting to speculate, but of course fruitless. "If" is a small word in our language—tla—as it is in yours, but I have come to believe that it is the most heavy-laden word of all the words there are.

The death toll of the small pocks began to lessen as the summer's heat and rain abated, and finally, with the first chill of winter, the disease entirely let go its grip on the lake lands. But it left The Triple Alliance weak in every sense of the word. All our people were dispirited; we grieved for the countless dead; we pitied those who had survived to be gruesomely disfigured for the rest of their lives; we were wearied by the long visitation of calamity; we were individually and collectively drained of our human strength. Our population had been reduced perhaps by half, and the remainder consisted mainly of the old and infirm. Since those who died had been the younger men, not to speak of the women and children, our armies had been diminished by considerably more than half. No sensible commander would have ordered them into aggressive action against the massing outlanders, and their utility even for defense was dubious.

It was then, when The Triple Alliance was the weakest it had ever been, that Cortés once more marched against it. He no longer boasted any great advantage of superior weapons, for he had fewer than four hundred white soldiers and however many harquebuses and crossbows they still carried among them. All the cannons he had abandoned on the Sad Night—the four on the roof of Axayácatl's palace and the thirty or so he had posted around the mainland—we had pitched into the lake. But he still had more than twenty horses, a number of the staghounds, and all his formerly and latterly collected native warriors—the Texcalteca, the Totonaca and other minor tribes, the Acolhua still following Prince Black Flower. Altogether, Cortés had something like one hundred thousand troops. From all the cities and lands of The Triple Alliance—even counting outlying places like Tolocan and Quaunahuac, which were not really of the Alliance, but gave us their support—we could not muster one-third that many fighting men.

So when Cortés's long columns proceeded from Texcala toward the nearest capital city of The Triple Alliance, which was Texcóco, they took it. I could tell at length of the weakened city's desperate defense, and of the casualties its defenders inflicted and suffered, and of the tactics which eventually defeated it... but what matter? All that need be said is that the marauders took it. The marauders included Prince Black Flower's Acolhua, and they fought their fellow Acolhua warriors who were loyal to the new Revered Speaker Cohuanacoch—or, more truthfully, loyal to their city of Texcóco. And so it happened that, in that battle, many an Acolhuatl found himself wielding a blade against another Acolhuatl who was his own brother.

At least Texcóco's warriors were not all killed in the battle, and perhaps two thousand escaped before they could be trapped there. The troops of Cortés had assailed the city from its landward side, so the defenders, when they could no longer hold firm, were able to withdraw slowly to the lakeshore. There they took every fishing and fowling and passenger and freight acáli, including even the elegant acaltin of the court, and propelled themselves out into the lake. Their opponents, having been left no craft in which to pursue them, could only send a cloud of arrows after them, and the arrows did little damage. So the Acolhua warriors crossed the lake and joined our forces on Tenochtítlan, where, because so many people had lately died, there was ample room to quarter them.

Cortés would have known, from his conversations with Motecuzóma, if from no other source, that Texcóco was the strongest bastion city of our Triple Alliance, after Tenochtítlan. And, having conquered Texcóco so easily, Cortés was confident that the taking of all other and smaller lakeside cities and towns would be even easier. So he did not commit his whole army to that task, nor did he command it in person. To the mystification of our spies, he sent one entire half of his army back to Texcala. The other half he divided into detachments, each led by one of his under-officers: Alvarado, Narváez, Montejo, Guzmán. Some left Texcóco going northward, others southward, and they began circling the lake, along the way attacking the various small communities separately or simultaneously. Although our Revered Speaker Cuautemoc employed the fleet of canoes brought by the fugitive Acolhua to send those same warriors and our Mexíca to the aid of the beleaguered towns, the battles were so many and so far apart that he could not send enough men to any one of them to make any difference in the outcome. Every place the Spanish-led forces attacked, they took. The best our men could do was to evacuate from those towns whatever local warriors were left alive, and to bring them to Tenochtítlan as reinforcements for our own defense, when our turn should come.

Presumably Cortés, by means of messengers, directed the general strategy of his several officers and their detachments, but he—and Malintzin—remained in the luxurious residence of the Texcóco palace in which I myself had once lived, and he kept the hapless Revered Speaker Cohuanacoch there too, as his compulsory host, or guest, or prisoner. For I should mention here that the Crown Prince Black Flower, who had grown old waiting to become Uey-Tlatoani of the Acolhua, never did get that title and that eminence.

Even after the taking of the Acolhua's capital city, in which Black Flower's troops had played no small part, Cortés decreed that the inoffensive and uncontroversial Cohuanacoch should remain on the throne. Cortés knew that all the Acolhua, except those warriors who had for so long followed Black Flower, had come to loathe the once-respected Crown Prince as a traitor to his own people and a tool of the white men. Cortés would not risk provoking a future uprising of the whole nation by giving the traitor the throne for which he had turned traitor. Even when Black Flower groveled in the rite of baptism, with Cortés for his godfather, and in flagrant obsequiousness took the Christian name of Fernando Cortés Ixtlil-Xochitl, his godfather unbent in his resolve only sufficiently to appoint him lord ruler of three insignificant provinces of the Acolhua lands. At that, Don Fernando Black Flower showed one last flicker of his former lordly temperament, protesting angrily:

"You give me what already belongs to me? What has always belonged to my forefathers?"

But he did not long have to endure his dissatisfaction and debasement. He stormed out of Texcóco to take up his rule in one of those backwoods provinces, and arrived there just when the disease of the small pocks was also arriving, and within a month or two he was dead.