The Seven Serpents Trilogy (35 page)

“Much, I am sure, Lord Tzapotlan. And now that I have seen what a beautiful city it is and how friendly the Azteca are, I will come back again.”

“I trust it will be soon,” the lord said. “Meanwhile, since you are the first of the Mayan lords to visit Tenochtitlán, the event will be recorded by our best artists. It will be set down in the archives and preserved in pre cious stone.”

Lord Tzapotlan escorted us to our doorway, bowed, and hurried off as if on urgent business, accompanied by his four servants, who ran along beside him, fanning his person with feathered whisks, for now that night was near the plaza swarmed with insects.

From the window the dwarf and I watched him dis appear. The two palace guards, or two men in the same yellow and black–striped tunics, were standing not far away. When the lamp tender came past, they moved into the shadows.

“It is always better, they say in Seville, to die tomorrow than it is today,” said the dwarf, “so let us leave today. Now! It's clear that we are to play a prominent role in the rites of the war god. Chalco arranged for that before he left. He'll not be back. He's on his way to the coast. When he gets there, what will happen? What happens to the
Santa Margarita
? What becomes of our gold?

“The emperor's guards stand outside our door,” I said. “How far would we get before we're caught and trussed up like a pair of chickens?”

“If we stay,” the dwarf said, “in four days we'll be climbing the temple steps.”

“We know only one way out of the city. The way we came in.”

“Fear is a good guide. It finds ways where none existed before. Back of you is a ladder, which I have al ready investigated. It leads to the roof.”

“
Vámonos
, Guillermo. Let us go.”

It was dark now. We built up the fire in the brazier to make the guards think that we were settling down for the night.

Climbing the ladder, we found that we could walk on the roof and that it joined other roofs to the east and west. We set off toward the east, but when we reached the third building we came upon a gap too wide to leap. Retracing our steps, we tried the opposite direction, only to find that escape was impossible.

“What do you think?” the dwarf said.

“We'll have to wait until morning,” I said, “and slip out when the vendors are on their way to market. The plaza is always crowded at that hour.”

The stars glittered. A cold wind came up and whipped around my legs. A small fire was burning not far from our doorway. The palace guards were huddled around it, their clubs lying beside them.

“We go in the morning,” the dwarf said.

“Early, señor!”

 

I
N THE MORNING, AS THE PLAZA FILLED WITH VENDORS AND WE WERE
ready to leave, Lord Tzapotlan appeared at the door. He wore lordly regalia—a red embroidered tunic and a blue-feathered cloak—but all was askew, as if he had dressed in a hurry.

He spoke calmly, however, of small things, as is the Indian custom, then in a distressed tone said, “The em peror has had a vision. Perhaps it is not a vision, but a presence. There is a difference. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking in Christian terms, “I do un derstand.”

“Yesterday the vision came,” said Tzapotlan. “This is how. The emperor awakened from his sleep in the af ternoon. He lit his pipe and smoked. In the smoke a face began to form—the eyes first, then the nose, then the lips—until it was a face looking at him. Until it was
your
face looking at him.”

The young lord glanced at me, his eyes half closed and clouded, as if he had been partaking of
teonanacatl.
This was a black fungus that the Azteca ate with honey. He had offered me one of these little black buttons the previous day.

“Was the emperor smoking something that would give him visions?” I asked.

“A few
mixitl
seeds, but not so many that he would see a face. Your face. Yet this is not all. A hunter came from the lake. With him he had a bird that he had caught in his fowling net. The emperor had never seen a bird like it. It had feathers that grew in circles, like eyes, and the eyes were blue colored, like yours. But this was not the thing that made the bird so odd. Its eyes were mirrors that showed pictures of the sky and the stars. When the Revered Speaker looked into the bird's eyes he did not see the sky and the stars, only a picture of many men, and they were sitting on the backs of deer, holding spears in their hands and riding fast.”

Lord Tzapotlan paused to allow me to speak.

“He saw them clearly,” I said. “Armed men riding on the backs of deer?”

“Clearly in the round mirrors of the bird's two eyes.”

“What then?”

“Then the Great Speaker was alarmed and he sent for the wisest of his
tomalpouhque.
He said to him, ‘Do you see what I have seen? Look and you will find a crowd of people coming.' But before the soothsayer could answer, the bird fluttered its wings and vanished.”

I concealed my disbelief as best I could. The dwarf got up and put wood in the brazier.

“We'll never leave the city,” he said to me, “except as hummingbirds.”

“The emperor,” Tzapotlan said, “is much disturbed by these men who ride on the backs of deer and carry spears. He did not sleep last night for thinking about these things. This morning he called his soothsayers, but they could not help his mind.”

“Why do you tell me about the emperor's distress?”

“Because I believe that you might counsel with him. He looks upon you as a wise young man, as do I, from the questions you asked about our country and the love you show for your own. Besides, it is your face that he saw clearly in the smoke cloud.”

Lord Tzapotlan went on. “The thing of the bird is only the latest of many evils that have come to pass. Nine years ago the lake of Téxcoco, for no reason that could be seen, overflowed and furiously swept off many of the buildings in this city. Only a year later, one of the temples of the pyramid mysteriously took fire, and no body could stop it. Then there were three comets in the sky. Then a light broke forth in the east and rose in clouds that tossed red sparks everywhere. The emperor took counsel with Nezahualpilli, but the royal sage cast even a deeper gloom upon him. He predicted, three times over, that these events foretold the downfall of Tenochtitlán. Its downfall!”

The lord glanced at our few belongings, which were in a roll beside the brazier. He must have smiled to himself, knowing as he did that the emperor would never allow us to leave the city.

“You have told me your plans,” he said, “and I un derstand them. But you are needed here. Come, my dear friends.”

A number of armed servants had appeared with Lord Tzapotlan. One of them opened the door for us to pass.

The dwarf said, “Shall we go or not? I would as soon die here and now as later on the pyramid.”

“We say a prayer and go, Guillermo.”

The emperor was finishing his breakfast as we arrived. He sat behind a gold screen so that no one except the servants would see him, and they were removing it as we were ushered in. A servant held out a gold finger bowl. The emperor waved it away. He had eaten noth ing from the dozens of gold dishes that covered the table.

This chamber, which adjoined the throne room, was less than half its size. The walls were painted with bright scenes and hung with draperies of rich quetzal plumes. Four dwarfs, a hunchback, and a group of musicians huddled in a dim corner, as if the emperor had banished them from his sight.

We entered the room, not walking directly toward him, but to one side along the wall, as we were in structed. We bowed and touched the floor with our hands and remembered not to look at him.

Moctezuma said nothing for a long time.

His skin was pale and he seemed to be in a trance; his gaze moved slowly about the room, over the various scenes painted on the walls. On one scene, which depicted him as a young man receiving the jeweled diadem of an emperor, his gaze rested. He looked away at other scenes—some of battles fought and victims slain, others of festivals and flowery meadows—but always his eyes came back to the one that showed him receiving his jeweled crown.

Lord Tzapotlan spoke in a whisper. The emperor awakened from his trance and motioned to his servants, one of whom disappeared and quickly returned with a roll of sisal cloth.

The emperor's gaze again drifted away to the various scenes on the walls. Again Lord Tzapotlan whispered to him. The emperor lowered his eyes and by chance our gazes met. There was fear in his eyes and something more terrible than fear.

Calling the interpreter to his side, he said to me, “Five days ago, perhaps it was six days—I have lost count. It was the day after the hunter brought the bird that had eyes like mirrors and I saw men riding the backs of deer. It was two days before that day the runners came from the coast, from the sea where fish and turtles are caught. They brought news of a strange sight, which from excitement they were unable to describe. There upon I sent artists to paint the strange things the runners had seen.”

The emperor was silent for a while, then he roused himself and spoke to the servants.

Two men unloosed the roll they had brought, holding it up between them. On it, painted in true colors, using white for the sand, blue for the sea, black for the caravels, and white for their sails, was a picture of a fleet rid ing at anchor behind a small island covered with palm trees. A Spanish fleet!

My astonishment was greater than Moctezuma's must have been when the messengers first unrolled the painting before his startled gaze.

The dwarf whispered, “Help us, Blessed Mary of Se ville!” which was as close to my thoughts as anything could be.

“What does this mean?” the emperor said. “What do you see before you?”

“It is a fleet of big canoes,” I answered. “I have seen one of these canoes before.”

There were eleven ships in the picture, some large, some small, but all of them unmistakably Spanish, even to the Spanish cross on the sails.

“From where do they come, these big canoes?” the emperor said.

“From a far country, Great Speaker, a country east beyond the sea. Or so I have been told.”

“Who are these people?”

“They call themselves Spaniards.”

It was a cold morning with a north wind blowing. A pinewood fire was blazing in a pit in the center of the room, but servants brought Moctezuma a feathered blanket and put it around him. He looked cold and fearful.

“Do you have a message from these people?” I said.

“Two have come. One came yesterday and one came this morning. They were signed by a man whose name cannot be translated.”

A servant handed me a letter written in Nahuatl, which I could not read, but at the end of the letter there was a Spanish rubric with many elaborate flourishes that I deciphered as the name of someone who called himself Hernán Cortés.

I had never known anyone called Cortés, though the man most surely would have lived in Seville at some time in his life. The ships that journeyed to the New World were all outfitted in this city and sailed from there.

“What do these two messages say?” I asked.

“They say that the man wishes to come to Tenochtitlán. This is what he said in the first letter. In the sec ond letter he says that he is already on his way to Tenochtitlán.”

“Have you answered the letters?”

“The first one only.”

“What did you answer?”

“I said that he must not come.”

“What else, Great Speaker?”

“I sent him gold. A gold disk in the shape of the sun, twelve spans high. As high as you stand.”

“The last thing to give a Spaniard,” the dwarf whis pered. “It's like giving honey to a hornet.”

“These men ride on the backs of deer?” the emperor asked.

“Not on deer, but on large animals.”

“They ride with spears and thunder sticks?”

“Yes, with many weapons when I saw them.”

The emperor was silent. Then he spoke again and his voice now was the voice of a child, not that of an em peror.

“Do you think,” he said, “that these are the same men I saw in the eyes of the fowler's bird?”

“Yes, Revered Speaker, the same.”

Servants brought a second roll of sisal cloth, which Moctezuma carefully examined. It was a picture of a Spanish officer in helmet and cuirass, surrounded by soldiers, apparently a portrait of Hernán Cortés.

I could feel the emperor's gaze fixed upon me, com paring me to the men in the picture, the bearded Span iards, tanned from long exposure to the sun, and short, not much taller than the Maya, small men even in their heavy armor.

He roused himself and turned to Lord Tzapotlan.

“Looking out my window this morning,” he said, “I saw the temple of Uitzilopochtli shining brightly in the sun. That is good. Now we must gather many prison ers.”

Lord Tzapotlan gave a figure in Nahuatl that I translated as one thousand.

“Gather twice that number!” the emperor demanded. “Lord Uitzilopochtli will need all of his strength. Now more than ever!”

 

M
OCTEZUMA DID NOT MOVE FROM HIS JAGUAR BENCH.
H
E SAT QUIETLY
with hands folded, gazing beyond the chamber, as if his soul had fled to a distant place.

Lord Tzapotlan spoke to him, but he did not answer.

Then the lord called upon the clowns and they tum bled about while musicians played on their flutes. Moctezuma's gaze never changed. At last the golden screen was brought and placed in front of him.

At once the nobles began to argue. The soothsayers, a dozen old men in yellow gowns and pointed hats, joined the argument, which concerned Hernán Cortés and how he should be treated.

The time had come.
Ya!
It was here.