island—partly for your builders' convenience, partly to increase the island's surface area. So the Tlacopan causeway was shortened by the encroachment of the enlarging island, and that nearest canoe passage is now underground. If I am correct in my estimation of where the treasure rests, it is somewhere deep beneath the foundations of the elegantly senorial buildings lining your avenue called the Calzada Tacuba.
Of all the things I have told of the Sad Night, I have not mentioned the one event that, all by itself, determined the future of The One World. It was the death of just one man. He was no one of any importance. If he had a name, I never heard it. He may have done nothing either praiseworthy or blameworthy in all his life, except to have his roads and his days end here, and I do not know whether he died bravely or cowardly. But during the next day's cleaning of The Heart of the One World, his body was found, cloven by a maquihuitl, and the slaves made an outcry when they found it, because he was neither a white man nor one of our race, and those slaves had never seen such a being before. I had. He was one of those unbelievably black men who had come from Cuba with Narvaez, and he was the one whose blemished face had made me shrink away when I saw it.
I smile now—ruefully and contemptuously, but I smile—when I see the swaggering and strutting of Hernan Cortes and Pedro de Alvarado and Beltran de Guzman and all the other Spanish veterans who now exalt themselves as 'Los Conquistadores.' Oh, they did some brave and daring deeds, I cannot deny it. Cortes's burning of his own ships on his first arrival in these lands has hardly ever been outdone, as an example of jaunty audacity, even by any caprice of the gods. And there were other factors that contributed to the downfall of The One World—not least the deplorable fact of The One World's turning against itself: nation against nation, neighbor against neighbor, finally even brother against brother. But if any one, single, solitary human being deserves to be honored and remembered with the title of El Conquistador, it is that nameless blackamoor who brought the disease of the small pocks to Tenochtitlan.
He could have given the disease to Narvaez's soldiers during their voyage here from Cuba. He did not. He could have given the disease to them, and to Cortes's troops besides, during their march hither from the coast. He did not. He could himself have died of the disease before reaching here. He did not. He lived to visit Tenochtitlan, and to bring the disease to us. Perhaps it was one of those caprices of the gods, to let him do so, and there was nothing we could have done to avert it. But I wish the black man had not then been killed. I wish he had been among those of his fellows who escaped, so he could have shared the affliction with them, soon or later. But no. Tenochtitlan was ravaged by the small pocks, and the disease spread throughout the lake region, into every community of The Triple Alliance, but it never reached Texcala or troubled our enemies there.
In fact, the first of our city folk were beginning to fall ill even before we got the word that Cortes and his company had found refuge in Texcala. You reverend scribes doubtless know the symptoms and progress of the disease. Anyway, I long ago described to you how I had seen, many years earlier, a young Xiu girl die of the small pocks in the faraway town of Tiho. So I need only say that our people died in the same manner: strangling on the swollen tissues inside their noses and throats—or in some manner equally dreadful: thrashing and screaming in violent delirium until their brains could no longer stand the torment, or vomiting blood until their bodies were empty of blood, until they died more husk than human. Of course, I early recognized the disease and told our physicians:
'It is a common affliction among the white men, and they hold it of little account, for they seldom die of it. They call it the small pocks.'
'If this is their small pocks,' said one doctor, without humor, 'I hope they never favor us with any larger. What is it the white men do to keep from dying of it?'
'There is no remedy. Or so they told me. Except to pray.' So thereafter our temples were crowded with priests and worshipers making offerings and sacrifices to Patecatl, the god of healing, and to every other god as well. The temple that Motecuzoma had lent to the Spaniards was also crowded, with those of our people who had submitted to baptism and who suddenly, devoutly hoped they had truly been made Christians—meaning they hoped that the Christian god of the small pocks would look on them as simulated white men, and so spare them. They lighted candles and crossed themselves and muttered what they could remember of the rituals in which they had received only slight instruction and to which they had paid even slighter attention.
But nothing stopped the spread of the disease and the dying of it. Our prayers were as futile and our physicians as helpless as those of the Maya had been. Before long, we were threatened with starvation as well, because our affliction could be kept no secret, and the mainland folk dreaded to come near us, so there was a cessation of the traffic of supply-carrying acaltin so necessary to our island's subsistence. But it was not much longer before the disease made its appearance in the mainland communities too, and, once it became evident that all of us of The Triple Alliance were in the same predicament, the boatmen resumed their freighting—or I should say, those boatmen did who were not yet stricken. For the disease seemed selective of its victims in only one particularly cruel respect. I never took sick with it, nor did Beu, nor did any of our contemporaries. The small pocks seemed to ignore those of our age, and those already ill of something else, and those who had always been of feeble constitution. Instead, it seized upon the young and strong and vigorous, not wasting its maleficence on any who for other reasons had not long lives to live.
Our having been stricken by the small pocks is one reason why I doubt that Cuitlahuac ever did anything about recovering the treasure sunk in the lake. The disease came upon us so soon after the departure of the white men—only days after we had cleaned up the litter they left, before we had begun to recover from the strain of the long occupation, before we had in any measure resumed our civic life where it had been interrupted—that I know the Revered Speaker gave no thought at that time to salvaging the gold and jewels. And later, as the disease became a devastation, he had other reasons for neglecting that task. You see, we were for a long while cut off from all news of the world beyond the lake region. Merchants and messengers of other nations refused to enter our tainted area, and Cuitlahuac forbade our own pochtea and travelers to go elsewhere and possibly carry the contamination. I think it was fully four months after the Sad Night when one of our quimichime mice posted in Texcala summoned up the courage to come from there and tell us what had been happening during that time.
'Know then, Revered Speaker,' he said to Cuitlahuac and the others, including myself, who were eager to hear him. 'Cortes and his company spent some while merely resting and eating ravenously and convalescing from their injuries and generally regaining their health. But they did not do so in preparation for continuing on to the coast, to go aboard their ships and leave these lands. They have been recuperating for one purpose only: to gather strength to make another assault upon Tenochtitlan. Now that they are up and active again they and their Texcalteca hosts are journeying throughout all the country eastward of here, recruiting ever more warriors from tribes not over-friendly to the Mexica.'
The Snake Woman interrupted the mouse to say urgently to the Revered Speaker, 'We hoped we had permanently discouraged them. Since we did not, we now must do what should have been done long before now. We must assemble all our forces and march against them. Kill every last white man, every one of their allies and supporters, every one of our tributary dissidents who has aided Cortes. And we must do it now, before he is strong enough to do exactly that to us!'
Cuitlahuac said wanly, 'What forces do you suggest we assemble, Tlacotzin? There is hardly a warrior in any troop anywhere in The Triple Alliance who has force enough in both arms to lift his own blade.'
'Excuse me, Lord Speaker, but there is more to tell,' said the quimichi. 'Cortes also sent many of his men to the coast, where they and their Totonaca dismantled several of the moored ships. With toil and labor inconceivable, they have brought all those many and heavy pieces of wood and metal all the arduous way from the sea across the mountains to Texcala. There, at this moment, Cortes's boatmen are putting those pieces together to make smaller ships. As they did, you will recall, when they built the small ship here for the amusement of the late Motecuzoma. But now they are making many of them.'
'On dry land?' Cuitlaliuac exclaimed incredulously. 'There is no water in the whole Texcala nation deep enough to float anything bigger than a fishing acali. It sounds like insanity.'
The quimichi shrugged delicately. 'Cortes may have been demented by his recent humiliation here. But I respectfully submit, Revered Speaker, that I am telling truthfully what I have seen, and that I am sane. Or I was, until I decided those doings seemed ominous enough to warrant risking my life to bring you the news of them.'
Cuitlahuac smiled. 'Sane or not, it was the act of a brave and loyal Mexicatl, and I am grateful. You will be well rewarded—and then given an even greater reward: my permission to depart this pestilent city again as swiftly as you can.'
So it was that we knew Cortes's actions and at least some of his intentions. I have heard many persons— who were not here at the time—speak critically of our apparent apathy or stupidity or deluded sense of security,
