Aztec

'I do not know, Lord Speaker,' said the hoarse-voiced man. 'I know only this. The hundreds of white warriors are now aground on that coast, with no means of returning whence they came. The chief Cortes will not now be persuaded or forced to go away, because, by his own action, he cannot. His back is to the sea, and I do not believe he will simply stand there. His only alternative is to march forward, inland from the ocean. I believe the Eagle Knight Mixtli has predicted correctly: that he will march this way. Toward Tenochtitlan.'

Seeming as troubled and unsure of himself as the unhappy Patzinca of Tzempoalan, our Revered Speaker refused to make any immediate decision or to order any immediate action. He commanded that the throne room be cleared and that he be left alone. 'I must give these matters deep thought,' he said, 'and closely study this account compiled by my brother and the Knight Mixtli. I will commune with the gods. When I have determined what should be done next, I will communicate my decisions. For now, I require solitude.'

So the five bedraggled registrars went away to refresh themselves, and the Speaking Council dispersed, and I went home. Although Waiting Moon and I seldom exchanged many words, and then only regarding trivial household matters, on that occasion I felt the need of someone to talk to. I related to her all the things that had been happening on the coast and at the court, and the troublous apprehensions they were causing.

She said softly, 'Motecuzoma fears that it is the end of our world. Do you, Zaa?'

I shook my head noncommittally. 'I am no far-seer. Quite the contrary. But the end of The One World has been often predicted. So has the return of Quetzalcoatl, with or without his Tolteca attendants. If this Cortes is only a new and different sort of marauder, we can fight him and probably vanquish him. But if his coming is somehow a fulfillment of all those old prophecies... well, it will be like the coming of the great flood twenty years ago, against which none of us could stand. I could not, and I was then in my prime of manhood. Even the strong and fearless Speaker Ahuitzotl could not. Now I am old, and I have little confidence in the Speaker Motecuzoma.'

Beu regarded me pensively, then said, 'Are you thinking that perhaps we should take our belongings and flee to some safer haven? Even if there is calamity here in the north, my old home city of Tecuantepec should be out of danger.'

'I had thought of that,' I said. 'But I have for so long been involved in the fortunes of the Mexica that I should feel like a deserter if I departed at this juncture. And it may be perverse of me, but if this is some kind of ending, I should like to be able to say, when I get to Mictlan, that I saw it all.'

Motecuzoma might have gone on vacillating and temporizing for a long time, except for what occurred that very night. It was yet another omen, and a sufficiently alarming one that he bestirred himself at least to send for me. A palace page came, himself much perturbed, and roused me from my bed to accompany him at once to the palace.

As I dressed, I could hear a subdued hubbub from the street outside, and I grumbled, 'What has happened now?'

'I will show you, Knight Mixtli,' said the young messenger, 'as soon as we are outdoors.'

When we were, he pointed to the sky and said in a hushed voice, 'Look there.' Late though it was, well after midnight, we were not the only ones watching the apparition. The street was full of people from the neighboring houses, scantily clad in whatever garments they had snatched up, all of them with their faces upturned, all of them murmuring uneasily except when they were calling for other neighbors to wake up. I raised my crystal and looked at the sky, at first as wonderingly as everyone else. But then a memory came to my mind from long ago, and it somewhat diminished the dreadfulness of the spectacle, at least for me. The page glanced sideways at me, perhaps waiting for me to utter some exclamation of dismay, but I only sighed and said:

'This is all we lacked.'

At the palace, a half-dressed steward hurried me up the stairs to the upper floor, then up another staircase to the roof of the great building. Motecuzoma sat on a bench in his roof garden, and I think he was shivering, though the spring night was not cold and he was swathed in several mantles hastily flung around him. Without shifting his gaze from the sky, he said to me:

'After the New Fire ceremony came the eclipse of the sun. Then the falling stars. Then the smoking stars. All those things of the past years were omens evil enough, but at least we knew them for what they were. This is an apparition never seen before.'

I said, 'I beg to correct you, Lord Speaker—only that I may relieve your apprehensions to some degree. If you will wake your historians, my lord, and set them to searching the archives, they can ascertain that this has occurred before. In the year One Rabbit of the last preceding sheaf of years, during the reign of your namesake grandfather.'

He stared at me as if I had suddenly confessed to being some kind of sorcerer. 'Sixty and six years ago? Long before you were born. How could you know of it?'

'I remember my father telling of lights like these, my lord. He claimed it was the gods striding about the skies, but with only their mantles visible, all tinted in the same cold colors.'

And that is what the lights looked like that night: like filmy cloth draperies depending from a point at the top of the sky and hanging all the way down to the mountain horizon, and swaying and stirring as if in a light breeze. But there was no noticeable breeze, and the long curtains of light made no swishing sound as they swung. They merely glowed coldly, in colors of white and pale green and pale blue. As the draperies softly undulated, those colors subtly changed places and sometimes merged. It was a beautiful sight, but a sight to make one's hair similarly stir.

Much later, I chanced to mention that night's spectacle to one of the Spanish boatmen, and told him how we Mexica had interpreted it as a warning of dire things coming. He laughed and called me a superstitious savage. 'We too saw the light that night,' he said, 'and we were mildly surprised to see it this far south. But I know it signifies nothing, for I have seen it on many nights when sailing in the cold northern oceans. It is a commonplace sight there in those seas chilled by Boreas, the north wind. Hence the name we call it, the Boreal Lights.'

But that night I knew only that the pale and lovely and fearsome lights were being seen in The One World for the first time in sixty and six years, and I told Motecuzoma, 'According to my father, they were the omen that presaged the Hard Times back then.'

'Ah, yes.' He nodded somberly. 'The history of those starvation years I have read. But I think any bygone Hard Times will prove to have been negligible in comparison to what is now in store.' He sat silent for a time, and I thought he was only moping, but suddenly he said, 'Knight Mixtli, I wish you to undertake another journey.'

I protested as politely as I could, 'My lord, I am an ageing man.'

'I will again provide carriers and escorts, and it is no rigorous trail from here to the Totonaca coast.'

I protested more strongly, 'The first formal meeting between the Mexica and the white Spaniards, my lord, should be entrusted to no lesser personages than the nobles of your Speaking Council.'

'Most of them are older than you are, and less fit for traveling. None of them has your facility at word picture accounts, or your knowledge of the strangers' tongue. Most important, Mixtli, you have some skill at picturing people as they really look. That is something we have not yet had, not since the outlanders first arrived in the Maya country—a good picture of them.'

I said, 'If that is all my lord requires, I can still draw from memory the faces of those two I visited in Tiho, and do a passably recognizable portrayal.'

'No,' said Motecuzoma. 'You said yourself that they were only artisan commoners. I wish to see the face of their leader, the man Cortes.'

I ventured to say, 'Has my lord then concluded that Cortes is a man?'

He smiled wryly. 'You have always disdained the notion that he might be a god. But there have been so many omens, so many coincidences. If he is not Quetzalcoatl, if his warriors are not the Tolteca returning, they could still have been sent by the gods. Perhaps as a retribution of some sort.' I studied his face, rather corpse-looking in the greenish glow from above. I wondered if, when he spoke of retribution, he was thinking of his having snatched the throne of Texcoco from the Crown Prince Black Flower, or if he had other, private, secret sins in mind.

But he suddenly drew himself up and said in his more usual tart manner, 'That aspect of the matter need not concern you. Only bring me a portrait of Cortes, and word pictures numbering his forces, describing their mysterious weapons, showing the manner in which they fight, anything else that will help us know them better.'

I tried one last demurrer. 'Whatever the man Cortes may be or may represent, my lord, I judge that he is no fool. He is not likely to let a spying scribe wander at will about his encampment, counting his warriors and their armory.'

'You will not go alone, but with many nobles, richly accoutered according to their station, and all of you will