Aztec

Kimpech had put up a brave fight against those terrible new weapons. At any rate, the defense had repelled the invaders. The white men had retreated to their canoes, thence to their ships, which had spread their wings and disappeared again beyond the horizon. The other article brought by the messenger was the face of one of the dead white men, flayed from its head, complete with hair and beard, and dried taut on a willow hoop. I later had an opportunity to see it myself, and it much resembled the faces of the men I had met—in its limelike skin, at least— but the hair of scalp and face was of an even more odd color: as yellow as gold.

Motecuzoma rewarded the messenger for bringing him that trophy, but, after the man had gone, he reportedly did much cursing about what fools the Maya were—'Imagine, attacking visitors who might be gods!'—and in great agitation he closeted himself with his Speaking Council and his priests and his seers and sorcerers. But I was not summoned to join the conference and, if it came to any conclusions, I did not hear of them.

However, a little more than a year later, in the year Thirteen Rabbit, the year when I turned my sheaf of years, the white men came again from beyond the horizon, and that time Motecuzoma did call me to a private audience.

'For a change,' he said, 'this report was not brought by a Maya of sloping forehead and constricted brain. It was brought by a group of our own pochtea who happened to be trading along the coast of the eastern sea. They were in Xicalanca when six of the ships came, and they had the good sense not to panic nor to let the townsfolk panic.'

I remembered Xicalanca well: that town so beautifully situated between blue ocean and green lagoon, in the Olmeca country.

'So there was no fighting,' Motecuzoma went on, 'although the white men this time numbered two hundred and forty, and the natives were much affrighted. Our staunch pochtea took command of the situation, and kept everyone calm, and even persuaded the ruling Tabascoob to greet the newcomers. So the white men made no trouble, they ravaged no temples, they stole nothing, they did not even molest any women, and they went away again after spending the day admiring the town and sampling the native foods. Of course, nobody could communicate in their language, but our merchants managed with signs to suggest some bartering. The white men had come ashore with not much to trade. But they did, in exchange for some quills of gold dust, give these!'

And Motecuzoma, with the gesture of a street sorcerer magically producing sweets for a crowd of children, whipped from under his mantle several strings of beads. Though they were made of various materials in various colors, they were identical in the numbers of small beads separated at intervals by larger beads. They were strings of prayers like the string I had acquired from Jeronimo de Aguilar seven years earlier. Motecuzoma smiled a smile of vindication, as if he expected me suddenly to grovel and concede, 'You were right, my lord, the strangers are gods.'

Instead, I said, 'Clearly, Lord Speaker, the white men all worship in the same manner, which indicates that they all come from the same place of origin. But we already supposed that much. This tells us no new thing about them.'

'Then what about this?' And from behind his throne, with that same air of triumph, he brought out what looked like a tarnished silver pot. 'One of the visitors took that from off his own head and traded it for gold.'

I examined the thing. It was no pot, for its rounded shape would have prevented its standing upright. It was of metal, but of a kind grayer than silver and not so shiny—it was steel, of course—and at its open side were affixed some leather straps, evidently to be secured beneath the wearer's chin.

I said, 'It is a helmet, as I am sure the Revered Speaker has already ascertained. And a most practical sort of helmet. No maquahuitl could split the head of a man wearing one of these. It would be a good thing if our own warriors could be equipped with—'

'You miss the important point!' he interrupted impatiently. 'That thing is of the exact same shape as what the god Quetzalcoatl habitually wore on his revered head.'

I said, skeptically but respectfully, 'How can we possibly know that, my lord?'

With another swoop of movement, he produced the last of his triumphant surprises. 'There! Look at that, you stubborn old disbeliever. My own nephew Cacama sent it from the archives of Texcoco.'

It was a history text on fawnskin, recounting the abdication and departure of the Tolteca ruler Feathered Serpent. Motecuzoma pointed, with a slightly trembling finger, to one of the pictures. It showed Quetzalcoatl waving good-bye as he stood on his raft, floating out to sea.

'He is dressed as we dress,' said Motecuzoma, his voice also a little tremulous. 'But he wears on his head a thing which must have been the crown of the Tolteca. Compare it with the helmet you hold at this moment!'

'There is no disputing the resemblance between the two objects,' I said, and he gave a grunt of satisfaction. But I went on, cautiously, 'Still, my lord, we must bear in mind that all the Tolteca were long gone before any of the Acolhua learned to draw. Therefore the artist who did this could never have seen how any Toltecatl dressed, let alone Quetzalcoatl. I grant that the appearance of his pictured headgear is of marvelous likeness to the white man's helmet. But I know well how storytelling scribes can indulge their imagination in their work, and I remind my lord that there is such a thing as coincidence.'

'Yya!' Motecuzoma made the exclamation sound rather like a retch of nausea. 'Will nothing convince you? Listen, there is even more proof. As I long ago promised, I set all the historians of all The Triple Alliance to the task of learning all they could about the vanished Tolteca. To their own surprise—they confess it—they have unearthed many old legends, hitherto mislaid or forgotten. And hear this: according to those rediscovered legends, the Tolteca were of uncommonly pale complexion and of uncommon hairiness, and their men accounted it a sign of manliness to encourage the growth of hair on their faces.' He leaned forward, the better to glare at me. 'In simple words, Knight Mixtli, the Tolteca were white and bearded men, exactly like the outlanders making their ever more frequent visits. What do you say to that?'

I could have said that our histories were so full of legends and variant legends and elaborations on legends that any child could find some one of them that would support any wildest belief or new theory. I could have said that the most dedicated historian was not likely to disappoint a Revered Speaker who was infatuated with an irrational idea and demanding substantiation of it. I did not say those things. I said circumspectly:

'Whoever the white men may be, my lord, you rightly remark that their visits are becoming ever more frequent. Also, they are coming in greater numbers each time. Also, each landing has been more westerly—Tiho, then Kimpech, now Xicalanca—ever closer to these lands of ours. What does my lord make of that?'

He shifted on his throne, as if unconsciously suspecting that he sat only precariously there, and after a few moments of cogitation he said:

'When they have not been opposed, they have done no harm or damage. It is obvious from their always traveling in ships that they prefer to be on or near the sea. You yourself told that they come from islands. Whoever they are—the returning Tolteca or the veritable gods of the Tolteca—they show no inclination to press on inland toward this region which once was theirs.' He shrugged. 'If they wish to return to The One World, but wish only to settle in the coastlands... well...' He shrugged again. 'Why should we and they not be able to live as friendly neighbors?' He paused, and I said nothing, and he asked with asperity, 'Do you not agree?'

I said, 'In my experience, Lord Speaker, one never really knows whether a prospective neighbor will be a treasure or a trial, until that neighbor has moved in to stay, and then it is too late to have regrets. I might liken it to an impetuous marriage. One can only hope.'

Less than a year later, the neighbors moved in to stay. It was in the springtime of the year One Reed that another swift-messenger came, and again from the Olmeca country, but that time bringing a most alarming report, and Motecuzoma sent for me at the same time he convened his Speaking Council to hear the news. The Cupilcatl messenger had brought bark papers documenting the sad story in word pictures. But, while we examined them, he also told us what had happened, in his own breathless and anguished words. On the day Six Flower, the ships had again floated on their wide wings to that coast, and not a few but a frightening fleet of them, eleven of them. By your calendar, reverend scribes, that would have been the twenty-fifth day of March, or your New Year's Day of the year one thousand five hundred and nineteen.

The eleven ships had moored off the mouth of The River of the Tabascoob, farther to the west than on the earlier visit, and they had disgorged onto the beaches uncountable hundreds of white men. All armed and sheathed with metal, those men had swarmed ashore—shouting 'Santiago!,' apparently the name of their war god—coming with the clear intent of doing more than admiring the local landscape and savoring the local foods. So the populace had immediately mustered their warriors—the Cupilco, the Coatzacuali, the Coatlicamac, and others of that region —some five thousand men altogether. Many battles had been fought in the space of ten days, and the people had