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 Motecuzoma secretly sent a force of twenty thousand Mexica warriors to encircle Chololan. At a certain signal, she said, the Mexica 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.
Cortes 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 Cortes arrived at Chololan, it was inhabited by some eight thousand people. When he departed, it was empty. I say again that Motecuzoma had confided to me none of his plans. For all I know, he did have Mexica 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 Cortes's attentions to the local women. Whether she was moved by misunderstanding or malice, she effectually moved Cortes 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 Cortes'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 Motecuzoma. Then they conquered Texcala, which not Motecuzoma nor any of his predecessors ever could do. Then they obliterated Motecuzoma's allies in Chololan, caring not a little finger for Motecuzoma's anger or vindictiveness. It begins to appear that the white men are mightier even than the long-mightiest Mexica. 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. Motecuzoma 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 Texcoco throne. To Black Flower, the coming of Cortes 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 Cortes was regrouping his multitude in preparation for continuing their march westward. At their meeting, Black Flower surely told Cortes of the mistreatment he had suffered at Motecuzoma's hands, and Cortes presumably promised to help him redress it. Anyway, the next piece of bad news we heard in Tenochtitlan was that Cortes's company had been augmented by the addition of the vengeful Prince Black Flower and his several thousand superbly trained Acolhua warriors.
Clearly, the impulsive and perhaps unnecessary massacre in Chololan had proved a master stroke for Cortes, and he had his woman Malintzin to thank, whatever had been her reason for provoking it. She had demonstrated her wholehearted dedication to his cause, her eagerness to help him achieve his destiny, even if it meant trampling the dead bodies of men, women, and children of her own race. From then on, though Cortes still relied on her as an interpreter, he valued her even more as his chief strategic adviser, his most trusted under-officer, his staunches! of all his allies. He may even have come to love the woman; no one ever knew. Malintzin had achieved her two ambitions: she had made herself indispensable to her lord; and she was going to Tenochtitlan, her long-dreamed-of destination, with the title and perquisites of a lady.
Now, it may be that all the events I have recounted would have come to pass even if the orphan brat Ce- Malinali had never been born to that slave slut of the Coatlicamac. And I may have a personal motive in so contemptuously reviling her groveling devotion to her master, her shameful disloyalty to her own kind. It may be that I nursed a special loathing of her, simply because I could not forget that she had the same birth-name as my dead daughter, that she was the same age Nochipa would have been, that her despicable actions seemed, to my mind, to cast obloquy on my own Ce-Malinali, blameless and defenseless.
But, my personal feelings aside, I had twice encountered Malintzin before she became Cortes's most wicked weapon, and either time I could have prevented her becoming that. When we first met at the slave market, I could have bought her, and she would have been content to spend her life in the great city of Tenochtitlan as a member of the household of an Eagle Knight of the Mexica. When we met again in the Totonaca country, she was still a slave, and the property of an officer of no consequence, and a mere link in the chain of interpreting of conversations. Her disappearance then would have occasioned only a minimum of fuss, and I could easily have arranged her disappearance. So twice I might have changed the course of her life, I might perhaps have changed the course of history, and I had not. But her instigation of the Chololan butchery made me recognize the menace of her, and I knew that I would eventually see her again—in Tenochtitlan, whither she had been traveling all her life— and I swore to myself that I would arrange for her life to end there.
Meanwhile, immediately after receiving news of the massacre at Chololan, Motecuzoma had made another of his irresolute shows of resolute action, by sending there another delegation of nobles, and that embassy was headed by his Snake Woman Tlacotzin, High Treasurer of the Mexica, second in command only to Motecuzoma himself. Tlacotzin and his companion nobles led a train of porters again laden with gold and many other riches—not intended to provide for a repopulation of the unfortunate city, but for the cajoling of Cortes.
In that one move, I believe, Motecuzoma revealed the ultimate hypocrisy of which he was capable. The people of Chololan had either been totally innocent and undeserving of their annihilation, or, if they had been planning to rise up against Cortes, they could only have been obeying secret orders from Motecuzoma. However, the Revered Speaker, in the message conveyed to Cortes by Tlacotzin, blamed his Chololan allies for having contrived the dubious 'plot' entirely on their own; he claimed to have had no knowledge of it; he described them as 'traitors to both of us'; he praised Cortes for his swift and complete extinction of the rebels; and he hoped the unhappy occurrence would not imperil the anticipated friendship between the white men and The Triple Alliance.
I think it was fitting that Motecuzoma's message was delivered by his Snake Woman, since it was a masterpiece of reptilian squirming. It went on, 'Nevertheless, if Chololan's perfidy has discouraged the Captain- General and his company from venturing any farther through such hazardous lands and unpredictable people, we
