Totonaca who were standing and listening, with an appearance of attentive stupidity, while they were harangued by one of the Spanish priests who had come with the military men. Those priests, I might remark, seemed not so alien and unnatural as did the soldiers. Only the cut of their hair was different; otherwise their black garments much resembled those of our own priests, and smelled very like them, too. The one preaching to that assemblage was doing so with the help of the two interpreters, Aguilar and Ce-Malinali, whom evidently he borrowed whenever they were not required by Cortes. The Totonaca appeared to listen stolidly to his speech, though I knew they could not understand two words in ten of even Ce-Malinali's Nahuatl translation.
Among many other things, the priest explained that Our Lady was not exactly a goddess, that she was a female human being called Virgin Mary who had somehow remained a virgin even while copulating with the Holy Spirit of the Lord God, who was a god, and that thereby she had given birth to the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God thus enabled to walk the world in human form. Well, none of that was too hard to comprehend. Our own religion contained many gods who had coupled with human women, and many goddesses who had been exceedingly promiscuous with both gods and men—and prolific of godling children—while somehow retaining unsmirched their reputation and appellation of Virgin.
Please, Your Excellency, I am recounting the way things seemed then to my still untutored mind.
I also followed the priest's explanation of the act of baptism, and how we could all, that very day, partake of it—although it was normally inflicted on children soon after their birth: an immersion in water which forever bound them to adore and serve the Lord God in exchange for bounties to be granted during this life and in an afterlife. I could perceive very little difference from the belief and practice of most of our own peoples, thought they did the immersing with different gods in mind.
Of course, the priest did not try in that one speech to tell us every detail of the Christian Faith, with all its complications and contradictions. And although I, of all his audience that day, could best understand the words spoken in Spanish, Xiu, and Nahuatl, even I was mistaken in many of the things I thought I understood. For example, because the priest spoke so familiarly of Virgin Mary, and because I had already seen the fair-skinned, blue-eyed statues of her, I assumed Our Lady to be a Spanish woman, who might soon come across the ocean to visit us in person and perhaps bring her little boy Jesus. I also took the priest to be speaking of a countryman when he said that that day was the day of San Juan de Damasco, and that we would all be honored by being given the name of that saint when we were baptized.
With that, he and his interpreters called for all who wished to embrace Christianity to kneel down, and practically every Totonacatl present did so, though surely most of those dull-witted folk had no least idea of what was occurring; and may even have thought that they were about to be ritually slaughtered. Only a few old men and some small children took their departure. The old men, if they had understood anything at all, probably saw no benefit in burdening themselves with yet another god at their time of life. And the children probably had more enjoyable games they preferred to play.
The sea was not far distant, but the priest did not take all those people there for a ceremonial immersion. He simply walked up and down the rows of kneeling Totonaca, sprinkling them with water from a little wand in one hand and giving them a taste of something from the other hand. I watched, and when none of the baptized fell dead or showed any other dire effect, I decided to stay and partake myself. Apparently it would do me no harm and it might even give me some obscure advantage in later dealings with the white men. So I got a few drops of water on my head, and on my tongue a few grains of the salt from the priest's palm—that is all it was: common salt—and some words mumbled over me in what I know now is your religious language of Latin.
To conclude, the priest chanted over all of us another short speech in that Latin, and told us that henceforth all of us males were named Juan Damasceno and all the women Juana Demascena, and the ceremony was over. As best I can recollect, it was the first new name I had acquired since that of Urine Eye, and the last new name I have acquired to this day. I daresay it is a better name than Urine Eye, but I must confess that I have seldom thought of myself as Juan Damasceno. However, I suppose the name will endure longer than I do, because I have been thus inscribed on all the head-count rolls and other official papers of all the government departments of New Spain, and the last entry of all will no doubt say Juan Damasceno, deceased.
During one of my secret nighttime conferences with the other Mexica lords, in the flapping cloth house that had been erected for their quarters, they told me:
'Motecuzoma has wondered much, whether these white men might be gods or the Tolteca followers of gods, so we decided to make a test. We offered to sacrifice to the leader Cortes, to slay for him a xochimiqui, perhaps some available lord of the Totonaca. He was highly insulted at the suggestion. He said, 'You know very well that the benevolent Quetzalcoatl never required or allowed human sacrifices to him. Why should I?' So now we do not know what to think. How could this outlander know such things about the Feathered Serpent, unless—?'
I snorted. 'The girl Ce-Malinali could have told him all the legends of Quetzalcoatl. After all, she was born somewhere along this coast from which the god made his departure.'
'Please, Mixtzin, do not call her by that common name,' said one of the lords, seeming nervous. 'She is most insistent that she be addressed as Malintzin.'
I said, amused, 'She has risen far, then, since I first met her in a slave market.'
'No,' said my fellow envoy. 'Actually, she was a noble before she was a slave. She was the daughter of a lord and lady of the Coatlicamac. When her father died and her mother remarried, the new husband jealously and treacherously sold her into slavery.'
'Indeed,' I said drily. 'Even her imagination has improved since I first met her. But she did say that she would do anything to realize her ambitions. I suggest to all of you that you be most guarded in the words you speak within hearing of the Lady Malinali.'
I think it was on the next day that Cortes arranged for the lords a demonstration of his marvelous weapons and his men's military prowess, and of course I was present, among the crowd of our porters and the local Totonaca who also gathered to watch. Those commoners were awe-stricken by what they saw; they gasped at intervals and murmured 'Ayya!' and called often upon their gods. The Mexica envoys kept they faces impassive, as if they were unimpressed, and I was too busy memorizing the various events to make any exclamations myself. Nevertheless, the lords and I several times flinched at the sudden claps of noise, as startled as any commoners.
Cortes had had his men build a little mock house of driftwood and some leftover ship's timbers, so far up the beach that it was only just visible from where we stood. On the beach before us, he had positioned one of the heavy yellow-metal tubes on high wheels....
No, I will call things by their proper names. The wheel-mounted tube was a brass cannon whose muzzle pointed toward the distant wooden house. Ten or twelve soldiers led horses into a row on the hard-packed damp sand between the cannon and shoreline. The horses wore some of that equipment I had earlier been unable to comprehend: the leather chairs which were saddles for sitting on, leather reins for the animals' guidance, skirts of quilted material very like our people's fighting armor. Other men stood behind the horses, with the giant staghounds straining against the leather straps that held them in check.
All the soldiers were in full fighting garb, and very warlike they looked, with shining steel helmets on their heads and shining steel corselets over leather doublets. They carried swords sheathed at their sides, but when they mounted to their saddles, they were handed long weapons resembling our spears, except that their steel blades, besides being pointed, had protrusions at either side to deflect the blows of any enemies they rode against.
Cortes smiled with proprietorial pride as his warriors got into position. He was flanked by his two interpreters, and Ce-Malinali was also smiling, with the mildly bored superiority of having seen the performance before. Through her and Aguilar, Cortes said to our Mexica lords, 'Your own armies are fond of drums. I have heard their drums. Shall we commence this spectacle with a drum beat?'
Before anyone could answer, he shouted, 'For Santiago—now!' The three soldiers tending the cannon did something that flashed a small flame at the rear of the tube, and there came a single drumbeat, as loud as any noise ever made by our drum which tears out the heart. The brass cannon jumped—and so did I—and from its mouth came a smoke like stormclouds, and a thunder to rival Tlaloc's, and a lightning brighter than any of the forked sticks of the tlaloque. Then, after my blink of surprise, I saw a small object hurtling away through the air. It was of course an iron cannon ball, and it hit the faraway house and smashed it into its separate pieces of wood.
The cannon's sudden crash of thunder was prolonged, as Tlaloc's often is, into a rumble of lesser thunder. That was the sound the horses' iron-shod feet made, pounding on the sand flats, for the riders had put their mounts
