Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 273

Cuautemoc, well knowing the weakness of his warriors, had intended that they should merely fight a defensive withdrawal, delaying the enemy's advance insofar as possible, and slaying as many invaders as they could in the process. But the warriors themselves were so outraged by the desecration of The Heart of the One World that they exceeded their orders, and their anger gave them a surge of strength, and they several times emerged from the wreckage around the plaza, shouting war cries and pounding their weapons on their shields, to take offensive instead of defensive action. Even our women were infuriated and joined in, flinging down from rooftops nests full of wasps, and fragments of stone, and other things less mentionable, upon the despoilers.

Our warriors did kill some of the enemy soldiers and wreckers, and perhaps somewhat slowed their work of destruction. But a greater number of our men died in the doing so, and they were every time beaten back. Nevertheless, to discourage their harassment, Cortes sent his cannons continuing on to the north, blasting away more of the city, and his soldiers and dogs and work parties had to follow the cannons, to level what they left. It was because they moved on that they neglected to tear down this House of Song in which we sit today, and some few other buildings of no particular account in this southern half of the island.

But not many buildings were left, not anywhere, and those few stuck up from the prevailing wasteland like the last few, wide-apart teeth in an old man's gums, and my house was not among them. I suppose I should congratulate myself that when my house fell, I was not inside it. By that time, the city's entire remaining population was sheltering in the Tlaltelolco quarter, and in the very middle of it, to be as far as possible from the continuous barrage of cannon projectiles and fire arrows from the circling battle boats. The warriors and the stronger survivors lived in the open of the marketplace, and all the women and weaker folk were crammed into the houses already crowded by the neighborhood's resident families clumped together for refuge. Cuautemoc and his court occupied the old palace that had once belonged to Moquihuix, the last ruler of Tlaltelolco when it was still an independent city. As a lord, I also was accorded a small room there, which I shared with Beu. Although she had again protested against being moved from her home, I had carried her thither in my arms. So, with Cuautemoc and many others, I stood atop the Tlaltelolco pyramid, watching, on the day Cortes's wreckers moved into the Ixacualco quarter where I had lived. I could not see, through the clouds of cannon smoke and the dust of pulverized limestone, exactly when my own house went down. But when the enemy departed at the day's end, the Ixacualco quarter was, like most of the island's southern half, a barren desert.

I do not know if Cortes was ever afterward informed of the fact that every wealthy pochteatl of our city had in his house—as I did—a concealed treasure chamber. He clearly did not know at that time, for his work parties toppled every house indiscriminately and haphazardly, and, in the smoke and dust of each one's collapse, no one ever glimpsed the wrapped packets or bales of gold and gems and plumes and dyes and such, which got even more invisibly buried among the rubble and were later swept aside in the island's clearance and enlargement. Of course, even had Cortes scavenged every one of the pochtea's valuables, they would have amounted to far less than the still-lost treasury, but they would yet have made a gift to astonish and delight his King Carlos. So I watched that day's devastation with some ironic satisfaction, even though, at the day's end, I was an old man poorer than the young child I had been when I first saw Tenochtitlan.

Well, so was every other Mexicatl still alive, including even our Revered Speaker. The end came not long after that, and it came quickly when it came. We had been for countless days devoid of every commodity that could be remotely regarded as food, and our very ability to move about, even to talk to each other, was enfeebled to listlessness. Cortes and his army, as relentless and numerous and voracious as those ants that strip whole forests clean, finally reached the Tlaltelolco marketplace and began tearing down the pyramid there, meaning that we fugitives were so huddled in what little space was left to hide that we scarcely had even a place to stand in comfort. Still Cuautemoc would have stood, if he had had to do it on one foot, but, after I and the Snake Woman and some other counselors had privately conferred, we went to him and said:

"Lord Speaker, if you are taken by the outlanders, the whole of the Mexica nation falls with you. But if you escape, the rulership goes where you go. Even if every other person on this island is slain or captured, Cortes will not have bested the Mexica."

"Escape," he said dully. "To where? To do what?"

"To go into exile, with just your closest family and a few of your chief lords. It is true that we no longer have trustworthy allies anywhere among the lands closest to here. But there are farther countries from which you can recruit supporters. It may be a long time before you can hope to return in force and triumph, but however long it may take, the Mexica will still be unvanquished."

"What farther countries?" he asked, without enthusiasm.

The other lords looked to me, and I said, "To Aztlan, Revered Speaker. Go back to our very beginnings."

He stared as if I were mad. But I reminded him how we had, only comparatively recently, renewed our ties with our cousins of our first homeplace, and I gave him a map I had drawn to show him the way there. I added, "You can expect a hearty welcome, Lord Cuautemoc. When their Speaker Tlilectic-Mixtli left here, Motecuzoma sent with him a force of our warriors and a number of Mexica families skilled in all our modern crafts of city building. You may find they have already made of Aztlan a miniature Tenochtitlan. At the very least, the Azteca could be the seed kernels—as once before they were—from which to grow a whole new and mighty nation."

It took a good deal more persuasion to get Cuautemoc to agree, but I will not relate it all, since it all went for naught. I still think the plan should have succeeded; it was well conceived and executed; but the gods decreed that it should not. At twilight, when the battle boats ceased their day-long barrage and began to turn homeward toward the mainland, a goodly number of our men accompanied Cuautemoc and his chosen companions down to the edge of the island. They all got into canoes, and at a signal the many canoes paddled into the lake, all at once but each in a different direction, moving fast, appearing to be a sudden mass scurry for safety. The acali carrying Cuautemoc and his abbreviated court headed for the little mainland bay between Tenayuca and Azcapotzalco. Since there were few if any habitations at that spot, it was presumably unguarded by any of Cortes's camps or sentries, and Cuautemoc should easily have been able to slip inland from there and keep going northwest to Aztlan.

But the battle boats, spying the sudden eruption of acaltin from the island, turned back and began to whisk busily about among them, seeking to determine if they really were in rout. And, by ill chance, one of the boat captains was astute enough to notice that one of the occupants of one canoe was rather too richly dressed to be a mere warrior. That boat dropped iron hooks, and grappled the canoe fast to its side, and hauled aboard the Revered Speaker, and carried him straight to the Captain-General Cortes.

I was not present at that meeting, but I learned later that Cuautemoc spoke, through the interpreter Malintzin, saying, "I did not surrender. It was for my people's sake that I sought to elude you. But you caught me fairly." He pointed to the dagger at Cortes's belt. "Since I was taken in war, I deserve—and I request—the death of a warrior. I ask that you slay me now, where I stand."