Aztec Autumn

quavered slightly, 'do any of you realize what the effects will be?'

'Many changes for the better, I should expect,' said my uncle, who took pleasure in discomfiting priests. 'The Feathered Serpent was a gentle and beneficent god. All the histories agree—never before or since his time has The One World enjoyed such peace and happiness and good fortune.'

'But all our other gods will be relegated to inferiority, even obscurity,' said that priest of Huitzilopochtli, wringing his hands. 'And so will all us priests of all those gods. We shall be abased, made lower than the lowest slaves. Deposed... dismissed... discarded to beg and starve.'

'As I said,' grunted my irreverent uncle. 'Changes for the better.'

Well, the Uey-Tecutli Mixtzin and his Speaking Council were soon disabused of any notion that the newcomers included or represented the god Quetzalcoatl. During the next year and a half or so, hardly a month went by without a swift-messenger from Tenochtitlan bringing ever more astounding and disconcerting news. From one runner, we would learn that the strangers were only men, not gods or the progeny of gods, and that they called themselves espanoles or castellanos. The two names seemed interchangeable, but the latter was easier for us to transmute into Nahuatl, so for a long time all of us referred to the outlanders as the Caxtilteca. Then the next-arriving runner would inform us that the Caxtilteca resembled gods—at least, war gods—in that they were rapacious, ferocious, merciless, and lustful of conquest, because they were now forcing their way inland from the Eastern Sea.

Then the next swift-messenger would report that the Caxtilteca certainly displayed godlike, or at least magical, attributes in their methods and weapons of war, for many of them rode mounted on giant, antlerless buck deer, and many of them wielded fearsome tubes that discharged lightning and thunder, and others had arrows and spears tipped with a metal that never bent or broke, and all wore armor of that same metal, which was impenetrable by ordinary projectiles.

Then came a messenger wearing the white mantle of mourning, and with his hair braided in the manner signifying bad news. His report was that the invaders had defeated one nation and tribe after another, on their way westward—the Totonaca, the Tepeyahuaca, the Texcalteca—then had impressed any surviving native warriors into their own ranks. So the number of fighting men did not diminish but continually increased as they marched. (I might mention, from my advantage of hindsight, that many of those native warriors were not too reluctant to join the aliens' forces, because their people had for ages been paying grudging and heavy tribute to Tenochtitlan, and now they had hopes of retaliating against the domineering Mexica.)

Finally there came to Aztlan a swift-messenger—with white mantle and bad-news hairdress—to tell us that the Caxtilteca white men and their recruited native allies had now marched right into Tenochtitlan itself, The Heart of The One World, and, inconceivably, at the personal invitation of the once-puissant, now-irresolute Revered Speaker Motecuzoma. Furthermore, those intruders had not just marched on through and continued westward, but had occupied the city, and seemed inclined to settle down and stay there.

The one member of our Speaking Council who had most dreaded the coming of those outlanders—I mean that priest of the god Huitzilopochtli—had lately been considerably heartened to know that he was not about to be deposed by a returning Quetzalcoatl. But he was dismayed anew when this latest swift-messenger also reported:

'In every city and town and village on their way to Tenochtitlan, the barbaric Caxtilteca have destroyed every teocali temple, torn down every tlamanacali pyramid and toppled and broken every statue of every one of our gods and goddesses. In place of them, the foreigners have erected crude wooden effigies of a vapidly simpering white woman holding in her arms a white baby. These images, they say, represent a mortal mother who gave birth to a child-godling, and are the foundations of their religion called Crixtanoyotl.'

So our priest wrung his hands some more. He was apparently doomed to be displaced anyway—and not even by one of our own land's former gods, who had stature and grandeur, but by some new, incomprehensible religion that evidently worshiped an ordinary woman and a lackwit infant.

That swift-messenger was the last ever to come to us from Tenochtitlan or from anywhere else in the Mexica lands, bringing what we could assume was authoritative and trustworthy news. After him, we only heard rumors that spread from one community to another and eventually reached us by way of some traveler journeying overland or paddling an acali canoe up the seacoast. From those rumors, one had to sift out the impossible and the illogical —miracles and omens allegedly descried by priests and far-seers, exaggerations attributable to the superstitions of the common folk, that sort of thing—because, anyway, what remained after the sifting, and could be recognized as at least possible, was dire enough.

In the course of time, we heard and had no reason to disbelieve these things: that Motecuzoma had died at the hands of the Caxtilteca; that the two Revered Speakers who briefly succeeded him had also perished; that the entire city of Tenochtitlan—houses, palaces, temples, marketplaces, even the massive icpac tlamanacali, the Great Pyramid—had been leveled and reduced to rubble; that all the lands of the Mexica and all their tributary nations were now the property of the Caxtilteca; that more and more floating houses were coming across the Eastern Sea and disgorging more and more of the white men and that those alien warriors were fanning out northward, westward and southward to conquer and subdue still other, farther nations and lands. According to the rumors, everywhere the Caxtilteca went, they scarcely needed to use their lethal weapons.

Said one informant, 'It must be their gods—that white woman and child, may they be damned to Mictlan— who do the slaughtering. They inflict whole populations with diseases that kill everyone but the white men.'

'And horrible diseases they are,' said another passerby. 'I hear that a person's skin turns to ghastly boils and pustules, and he suffers untold agonies for a long time before death mercifully releases him.'

'Hordes of our people are dying of that blight,' said yet another. 'But the white men seem impervious. It has to be an evil enchantment laid by their white goddess and godling.'

We heard also that every surviving and able-bodied man, woman and child in and around Tenochtitlan was put to slave labor, using what material was salvageable from the ruins, to rebuild that city. But now, by order of the conquerors, it was to be known as the City of Mexico. It was still the capital of what had been The One World, but that, by order of the conquerors, was henceforth to be called New Spain. And, so said the rumors, the new city in no way resembled the old; the buildings were of complex designs and ornamentation that the Caxtilteca must have remembered from their Old Spain, wherever that was.

When eventually we of Aztlan got word that the white men were fighting to subjugate the territories of the Otomi and Purempecha peoples, we fully expected soon to see those marauders arriving on our own doorstep, so to speak, because the northern limit of the Purempecha's land called Michihuacan is no more than ninety one-long-runs from Aztlan. However, the Purempecha put up a fierce and unflagging resistance that kept the invaders embroiled there in Michihuacan for years. Meanwhile, the Otomi people simply melted away before the attackers and let them have that country, for what it was worth. And it was not worth much to anybody, including the rapacious Caxtilteca, because it was and is nothing but what we call the Dead-Bone Lands—arid, bleak, inhospitable desert, as is also all the country north of Michihuacan.

So the white men finally were satisfied to cease their advance at the southern edge of that unlovely desert (what they called the Great Bald Spot). In other words, they established the northern border of their New Spain along a line stretching approximately from Lake Chapalan in the west to the shore of the Eastern Sea, and thus it has remained to this day. Where the southern border of New Spain was finally established, I have no idea. I do know that detachments of the Caxtilteca conquered and settled in the once-Maya territories of Uluumil Kutz and Quautemalan and still farther south, in the blazing, steaming Hot Lands. The Mexica had formerly traded with those lands, but, even at the height of their power, had had no craving to acquire or inhabit them.

During the eventful years that I have sketchily chronicled here, there also occurred the more expectable and less epochal events of my own youth. The day I became seven years old, I was taken before Aztlan's wizened old tonalpoqui, the name-giver, so he could consult his tonalmatl book of names (and ponder all the good and bad omens attendant on the time of my birth), to fix on me the appellation I would wear forever after. My first name, of course, had to be merely that of the day I came into the world: Chicuace-Xochitl, Six-Flower. For my second name, the old seer chose—as having 'good portents,' he said—Teotl-Tenamaxtli, 'Girded Strong As Stone.'

Simultaneous with my becoming Tenamaxtli, I commenced my schooling in Aztlan's two telpochcaltin, The House of Building Strength and The House of Learning Manners. When I turned thirteen and donned the loincloth of manhood, I graduated from those lower schools and attended only the city's calmecac, where teacher-priests