'I will now order the treasury chambers in my palace unsealed,' said Motecuzoma, sounding almost happy at the imminence of his nation's impoverishment.
But at that moment the palace steward and some other men came kissing the earth at the throne room door. When I said that Motecuzoma had barely got the news of the ships before Cortes did, I spoke literally. For the newcomers were two swift-messengers sent by Lord Patzinca, and they had been hurriedly brought from the mainland by the Totonaca knights to whom they had reported. Cortes glanced uncomfortably about the room; it was plain that he would have liked to take the men away and interrogate them in private; but he asked me if I would convey to all present whatever the messengers had to say.
The one who spoke first brought a message dictated by Patzinca: 'Twenty of the winged ships, the biggest yet seen, have arrived in the bay of the lesser Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. From those ships have come ashore one thousand three hundred white soldiers, armed and armored. Eighty of them bear harquebuses and one hundred twenty bear crossbows, in addition to their swords and spears. Also there are ninety and six horses and twenty cannons.'
Motecuzoma looked suspiciously at Cortes and said, 'It seems quite a warlike force, my friend, just to escort you home.'
'Yes, it does,' said Cortes, himself looking less than delighted at the news. He turned to me. 'Have they anything else to report?'
The other messenger spoke then, and revealed himself to be one of those tedious word rememberers. He rattled off every word overheard from Patzinca's first meeting with the new white men, but it was a monkey like babble of the Totonaca and Spanish languages, quite incomprehensible, owing to there having been no interpreters present to sort out the speeches. I shrugged and said, 'Captain-General, I can catch nothing but two names frequently repeated. Your own and another which sounds like Narvaez.'
'Narvaez here?' blurted Cortes, and he added a very coarse Spanish expletive.
Motecuzoma began again, 'I will have the gold and gems brought from the treasury, as soon as your train of porters—'
'Pardon me,' said Cortes, recovering from his evident surprise. 'I suggest that you keep the treasure hidden and safe, until I can verify the intentions of these new arrivals.'
Motecuzoma said, 'Surely they are your own countrymen.'
'Yes, Don Montezuma. But you have told me how your own countrymen sometimes turn bandit. Just so, we Spaniards must be chary of some of our fellow seafarers. You are commissioning me to carry to King Carlos the richest gift ever sent by a foreign monarch. I should not like to risk losing it to the sea bandits we call pirates. With your leave, I will go immediately to the coast and investigate these men.'
'By all means,' said the Revered Speaker, who could not have been more overjoyed if the separate groups of white men decided to go for each other's throats in mutual annihilation.
'I must move rapidly, by forced march,' Cortes went on, making his plans aloud. 'I will take only my Spanish soldiers and the pick of our allied warriors. Prince Black Flower's are the best—'
'Yes,' said Motecuzoma approvingly. 'Good. Very good.' But he lost his smile at the Captain-General's next words:
'I will leave Pedro de Alvarado, the red-bearded man your people call Tonatiu, to safeguard my interests here.' He quickly amended that statement. 'I mean, of course, to help defend your city in case the pirates should overcome me and fight their way here. Since I can leave with Pedro only a small reserve of our comrades, I must reinforce them by bringing native troops from the mainland—'
And so it was that, when Cortes marched away eastward with the bulk of the white force and all of Black Flower's Acolhua, Alvarado was left in command of about eighty white men and four hundred Texcalteca, all quartered in the palace. It was the ultimate insult. During his winter-long residence there, Motecuzoma had been in a situation that was peculiar enough. But spring found him in the even more degrading position of living not just with the alien whites, but also with that horde of surly, glowering, not at all respectful warriors who were veritable invaders. If the Revered Speaker had seemed briefly to come alive and alert at the prospect of being rid of the Spaniards, he was again dashed down to morose and impotent despair when he became both host and captive of his lifelong, most abhorrent, most abhorred enemies. There was only one mitigating circumstance, though I doubt that Motecuzoma found much comfort in the fact: the Texcalteca were notably cleanlier in their habits and much better smelling than an equal number of white men.
The Snake Woman said, 'This is intolerable!'—words I was hearing more and more frequently from more and more of Motecuzoma's disgruntled subjects.
The occasion was a secret meeting of the Speaking Council, to which had been summoned many other Mexica knights and priests and wise men and nobles, among them myself. Motecuzoma was not there, and knew nothing of it.
The war chief Cuitlahuac said angrily, 'We Mexica have only rarely been able to penetrate the borders of Texcala. We have never fought our way as far as its capital.' His voice rose during the next words, until at the last he was fairly shouting. 'And now the detestable Texcalteca are here—in the impregnable city of Tenochtitlan, Heart of the One World—in the palace of the warrior ruler Axayicatl, who surely must be trying right now to claw his way out of the afterworld and back to this one, to redress the insult. The Texcalteca did not invade us by force—they are here by invitation, but not our invitation—and in that palace they live side by side, on an equal standing, with our REVERED SPEAKER!'
'Revered Speaker in name only,' growled the chief priest of Huitzilopochtli. 'I tell you, our war god disowns him.'
'It is time we all did,' said the Lord Cuautemoc, son of the late Ahuitzotl. 'And if we dally now, there may never be another time. The man Alvarado shines like Tonatiu, perhaps, but he is less brilliant as a surrogate Cortes. We must strike against him, before the stronger Cortes comes back.'
'You are sure, then, that Cortes will come back?' I asked, because I had attended no Council meetings, open or secret, since the Captain-General's departure some ten days before, and I was not privy to the latest news. Cuautemoc told me:
'It is all most strange, what we hear from our quimichime on the coast. Cortes did not exactly greet his newly arrived brothers like brothers. He fell upon them, made a night attack upon them, and took them unprepared. Though outnumbered by perhaps three to one, his forces prevailed over them. Curiously, there were few casualties on either side, for Cortes had ordered that there be no more killing than necessary, that the newcomers be only captured and disarmed, as if he were fighting a Flowery War. And since then, he and the new expedition's chief white man have been engaged in much argument and negotiation. We are at a loss to understand all these occurrences. But we must assume that Cortes is arranging the surrender of that force to his command, and that he will return here leading all those additional men and weapons.'
You can understand, lord scribes, why all of us were bewildered by the quick turns of events in those days. We had supposed that the new arrivals came from the King Carlos, at the request of Cortes himself; thus his attacking them without provocation was a mystery we could not plumb. It was not until long afterward that I gathered enough fragments of information, and pieced them together, to realize the true extent of Cortes's deception—both of my people and of yours.
From the moment of his arrival in these lands, Cortes represented himself as the envoy of your King Carlos, and I know now that he was no such thing. Your King Carlos never sent Cortes questing here—not for the enhancement of His Majesty, not for the aggrandizement of Spain, not for the propagation of the Christian Faith, not for any other reason. When Hernan Cortes first set foot on The One World, your King Carlos had never heard of Hernan Cortes!
To this day, even His Excellency the Bishop speaks with contempt of 'that pretender Cortes' and his lowly origins and his upstart rank and his presumptuous ambitions. From the remarks of Bishop Zumarraga and others, I now understand that Cortes was originally sent here, not by his King or his Church, but by a far less exalted authority, the governor of that island colony called Cuba. And Cortes was sent with instructions to do nothing more venturesome than to explore our coasts, to make maps of them, perhaps to do a little profitable trading with his glass beads and other trinkets.
But even I can comprehend how Cortes came to see far greater opportunities, after he so easily defeated the Olmeca forces of the Tabascoob, and more especially after the weakling Totonaca people submitted to him without even a fight. It must have been then that Cortes determined to become the Conquistador en Jefe, the conqueror of
