‘Happenings that involve the sorcerer Acopol?’
‘Yes, my child. I watched him for many days.’
‘And did you discover what he’s doing in Quetzalcoatl’s city?’
‘If you can still call it that! Acopol has imposed his will on it, in Moctezuma’s name, and made vassals of its rulers Tlaqui and Tlalchi. They are weak men, foolish men. They’ve even allowed him to build an altar to Hummingbird on Quetzalcoatl’s pyramid!’
‘To Hummingbird?’ Tozi was stunned.
‘I know. It’s unbelievable. But the old high priest was set aside, taken away – no one knows what’s happened to him – and Acopol was put in his place. He sacrifices twenty young boys to Hummingbird every morning, Tozi. He kills them at dawn just as the sun rises.’
‘Why?’ she asked. Her head was spinning. Never in this age of the earth had humans been sacrificed at Cholula. Because of its ancient sanctity, it was the last place in Mexico where Moctezuma had allowed the cult and worship of Quetzalcoatl to persist. ‘Why would they turn the world upside down?’
‘I believe it is all to do with the Spaniards,’ said Huicton, ‘who – I repeat – are not gods but mortal men of flesh and blood who can be killed. I heard rumours in Cholula that a trap is to be prepared for them there.’
‘A trap? How? Even if they are mortal men, and I know they are not, they’re still miles from Cholula.’
‘This is what I wasn’t able to discover. It’s a closely guarded secret. All I know is that Moctezuma has raised this sorcerer Acopol very high.’ Huicton tapped his nose. ‘I don’t like the smell of it. I had been thinking, my little spy, that perhaps you could go there and find out more, but now that I have heard your story, I cannot ask you.’
Tozi thought about it. She could not spy on Acopol. He would find her out in a moment.
On the other hand, if his purpose in Cholula was to prevent the return of Quetzalcoatl, then surely it was her duty to try?
* * *
Preparations for the move north to Huitztlan were set in motion immediately after the public meeting of 31 May, and on 7 June the fleet, under the command of Juan de Escalante, embarked for the new site, with orders to break the ground there and begin construction and fortification of the colony of Villa Rica de la Veracruz as a permanent base for future operations. With the fleet went half the army, while Cortés, guided by Meco, led the rest of his force overland on an indirect route by way of Cempoala, the Totonac regional capital, where meetings of the greatest importance were to be held with Tlacoch, the paramount chief.
Although still unhappy to be separated from Melchior, Pepillo had accepted his lot. There were times, now, when his pet, growing rapidly stronger and more savage in the company of the other dogs, did not even seem to know him. Melchior had developed a special friendship with Jairo, the black mastiff who had previously attacked him, and the two of them were now inseparable. If other dogs threatened the lurcher pup, Jairo would come ferociously to his aid. Melchior was cunning to seek protection in this way, Pepillo realised, and he watched with pride as his pet loped forward with the rest of the pack; he was already bigger than many of the full-grown dogs and soon he would be able to fight his own battles.
Meanwhile it was a joy, it was a delight, to be leaving the miserable and boring dunes on which the Spanish camp had been pitched since April, to cross the barren coastal plains and to advance into landscapes that became greener, richer and more interesting with every mile, offering glimpses in the distance of a towering, snow-capped volcano. Finding himself unable to resist the mood of excitement amongst the soldiers, Pepillo began to join in with their marching songs.
They crossed a river by making rafts and requisitioning some native canoes left lying on the banks, and thereafter found themselves on rolling plains, richly carpeted with tropical vegetation, overgrown with graceful palms and teeming with wild creatures. There were species they recognised, including large herds of deer – Alvarado gave chase on Bucephalus and wounded a buck with his lance, but it escaped into a palm forest and could not be caught. Other animals, however, were completely unfamiliar, and the skies were filled with strange, brightly coloured birds whose raucous cries rang out from morning to night. It seemed that all the towns and villages on their route had been deserted by their inhabitants – no doubt out of fear of the Spaniards – and in several they found temples with blood-spattered shrines and mutilated human corpses bearing witness to recent human sacrifices. The contrast between these horrors and the terrestrial paradise through which they passed could not have been more stark.
On 10 June, in the morning, they came in sight of Cempoala, its stuccoed walls gleaming like silver in the sun, and advanced on it with cavalry, cannon, muskets and crossbows ready. Twenty dignitaries hastened to intercept them, bringing cakes of finely scented rose petals, which they presented to the horsemen, greeting them with every sign of friendliness and telling them, through Malinal, that lodgings had already been prepared for them. The paramount chief, Meco explained, was too fat and heavy to come out and receive them personally, but eagerly awaited their arrival.
Pleased by such a warm reception, Cortés reached down to Pepillo, who was walking at his stirrup, and lifted him up into Molinero’s saddle as they rode through Cempoala. The city was so green with trees and bushes that it looked like a garden, and proved to be far larger and more beautiful than any other they had so far seen in Mexico, with a population of perhaps thirty thousand living in well-built stone houses thatched with palm leaves. Crowds of men, women and children thronged the streets, smiling and welcoming the conquistadors with wreaths of flowers – one of which was hung around Molinero’s neck, while Cortés was given a chaplet of roses to decorate his helmet.
Seated beneath a huge sunshade, Tlacoch was waiting to greet them as they entered the courtyard of the spacious lodgings he’d put at their disposal near his palace. Though tall, the paramount chief was indeed truly and enormously fat, a veritable mountain of wobbling flesh. He was so fat, in fact, that he could not walk unaided for more than a few paces. Inevitably the Spaniards began to call him ‘the fat cacique’ – ‘cacique’ being the word for chief they had adopted from the Taino Indians of Hispaniola and Cuba.
Cortés kept the men on their guard during the night, but there were no signs of hostility and the following morning, 11 June, he held a long meeting with the fat cacique, which Pepillo attended and kept note of. Meco and Malinal interpreted, with assistance and clarification where necessary from Jerónimo de Aguilar, who had at last recovered from his stomach ailment.
As usual the caudillo began by announcing himself to be the subject of a great monarch, dwelling beyond the waters, who had sent him to abolish the false religions and the vile practice of human sacrifice that prevailed in Mexico, to overthrow the foul demons mistakenly worshipped as gods by the Indians and to convert them to the true religion of Christianity.
To this Tlacoch replied that he was very happy with his own deities, who sent sunshine and rain, and that he too was the vassal of a powerful monarch, Moctezuma, whose capital city Tenochtitlan stood in the midst of a great lake far off in the mountains where, being surrounded by water, and approachable only along narrow, well-defended causeways, it was effectively impregnable. He then went on to paint a terrifying picture of Moctezuma and to reveal his hatred of him and of the burdensome tribute the Mexica extracted from him which, as well as gold, jewels and crops, included large numbers of young men and women, the flower of the nation, carried off each year for sacrifice on the altar of the Mexica war god Hummingbird.
The problem was getting worse, Tlacoch complained, as the years went by. Moctezuma had, for example, recently demanded an onerous new levy of sacrificial victims – a thousand virgin girls to be delivered to the fattening pens in Tenochtitlan in good time to celebrate the supposed birthday of Hummingbird at the beginning of the month the Mexica called Panquetzaliztli, a date corresponding with 20 November. When Cortés learned of this, his eyes lit up
with fury; he said he had been sent here by his own monarch precisely to stop such abuses. He invited the Totonacs to join forces with him to overthrow the oppressor before this wicked holocaust of virgins could occur.
The fat cacique’s response was ambiguous. On the one hand it was clear he wanted to take up Cortés’s invitation – indeed this was why he had asked him to come to Cempoala in the first place – and he hinted he might be able to provide the Spanish with as many as a hundred thousand warriors to support their conquest of Mexico. But, on the other hand, he was obviously deeply afraid of ‘the great Moctezuma’, as he always referred to him, opining that if he betrayed him, vast Mexica armies would ‘pour down from the mountains, rush over the plains like a whirlwind and sweep off the whole Totonac nation to slavery and sacrifice’.
Cortés endeavoured to stiffen Tlacoch’s backbone with reminders of what his soldiers had done to the Chontal Maya at Potonchan, declaring that a single Spaniard was equal to a thousand Mexica, and gradually extracting more information from him, much of which Malinal endorsed as true. The fat cacique spoke at some length of Ishtlil, the rightful monarch of the kingdom of Texcoco, who had been ousted by Moctezuma and replaced by his more compliant brother Cacama. ‘As well as ourselves,’ said Tlacoch, ‘Ishtlil can prove an important ally for you.’
‘We have already received representations from him,’ Cortés was able to reply. ‘His envoy approached us and offered us his master’s friendship. I understand, though, that my army must pass through the lands of a people called the Tlascalans if we are to join up with Ishtlil’s forces.’
‘That is correct,’ said Tlacoch, who was clearly taken aback that Cortés knew so much and was already in discussions with other leaders.
‘I’m told these Tlascalans are great fighters,’ Cortés added.
The fat cacique confirmed that this was indeed the case. The Tlascalans, he said, lived in a state of permanent warfare with the Mexica and might perhaps be recruited as allies. There was also a tribe named the Huexotzincos, smaller and less powerful than the Tlascalans, but likewise vehemently opposed to Mexica overlordship. In short, if Cortés were to make an alliance not only with the Totonacs but also with the Tlascalans, the Huexotzincos and Ishtlil, then there might be a real chance of defeating Moctezuma.
After translating this last point, Malinal interrupted the discussion and, relying very little on Aguilar, told Cortés in Spanish that the situation was not nearly so simple as Tlacoch was painting it. First, he was talking nonsense about the Totonacs; there was no way they could support Cortés with an army of a hundred thousand, or even a tenth of that number, and they were not renowned for their bravery on the field of battle. Second, the Huexotzincos and the Tlascalans hated each other at least as much as they both hated the Mexica, and had never before been known to cooperate. Thirdly, while it was true that the Tlascalans would make excellent allies, they were a ferocious, unpredictable and independent-minded people, and there was no guarantee they would join the Spaniards; on the contrary, they were just as likely to fight them.
‘Even so,’ Cortés replied, ‘if I can unite all these peoples in an alliance, what say you? Will we win?’
‘If you can do it,’ said Malinal, ‘then certainly you will win.’
That was the moment, Pepillo realised much later, when Cortés’s strategy for overthrowing Moctezuma began to take proper shape in his mind. He smiled, a broad smile, showing his teeth, and just for that instant he looked less like a man and more like a wolf.
* * *
Guatemoc was here! It seemed he’d committed some act of insubordination against the Great Speaker – something to do with the tueles. Could it be, Tozi hoped, that he’d listened to her after all? Could he have made an overture of peace to Quetzalcoatl? Huicton had been unable to glean any definite intelligence on the true nature of the prince’s crime, but whatever it was, his punishment was to be held under house arrest on his father Cuitláhuac’s estate at Chapultepec, just a few miles from Tacuba. Months before, when he’d been recovering from his battle wounds and from the poison Moctezuma’s physician had given him, Tozi had visited Guatemoc there in her disguise as the goddess Temaz and helped him to heal. Now she longed to pay an invisible call on him again, to appear to him again as Temaz, and to discover what had happened between him and the tueles, but Huicton would not allow it. ‘In truth, I can’t stop you, girl,’ the old spy said. ‘If you want to go I’m sure you will go. But if you are truly to face Acopol as you say you must, then you first have to renew and strengthen your powers; I fear the prince will prove a distraction.’
Huicton’s idea was that Tozi must go on a vision quest. She must travel, alone, into the northern deserts, through the lands of the Chichemec nomads whence Acopol himself had come. She must go at once.
‘And why must I go, Huicton?’
‘Because our cause needs you, dear girl, but you cannot help us when you are as damaged and afraid as you are now. You must journey to the place of your ancestors, to the lost land of Aztlán, you must find the Seven Caves of Chicomoztoc, and there you must seek a vision from the masters of wisdom.’
Aztlán was the home of the gods, though nobody knew where it was any more, and nobody had been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Seven Caves of Chicomoztoc were believed to lie within the borders of Aztlán and were the mystic place of origin of the Mexica, the Tlascalans and all other Nahuatl-speaking peoples. The masters of wisdom were workers of the highest magic, said to have concealed themselves from common sight in the caves long ages ago. So much, every Mexica knew, but what Tozi knew in addition, or at any rate had believed since her childhood, was that she came from Aztlán – not in some distant, remote, centuries-old, ancestral sense, but in the sense of actually having been born there and having migrated from there to Tenochtitlan in her infancy. Her mother had told her this – her mother who had passed on the gift of withcraft to her but who had only just begun to teach her the path when she was killed by a mob, leaving Tozi an orphan. Tozi had been reared by Huicton, who had found her in the hole she had hidden in after her mother’s murder; he had nurtured her skills and made her one of his spies. Now he stood over her in the yard of the Tacuba safe house and told her it was time for her to go.
‘Don’t delay,’ he urged. ‘Don’t think about it, even for a moment. Go! Find your vision, discover your power and return to me. Then and only then will we see what can be done about Acopol.’
So Tozi gathered up her few belongings, bundled them into a deerskin backpack and left without a backward glance. ‘Head north,’ Huicton called after her. ‘Go first by way of ancient Teotihuacan. There is a ruined pyramid there, said to have been built in the long ago by Quetzalcoatl himself, and from its flank protrudes the effigy of the plumed serpent. Seek guidance from the god you revere and then continue on your journey north … always north. Your feet will know the way.’
Tozi’s feet did know the way. Before Teotihuacan they took her directly to Chapultepec, where she slipped into invisibility – she did not fear the failure of her powers with ordinary mortals, only in the presence of adepts such as Acopol – and entered Cuitláhuac’s estate.
Huicton be damned!
If she was going to trudge hundreds of miles north into the Chichemec wilderness on some crazy quest for a mythical land, Tozi was absolutely determined that she would see Guatemoc first.
* * *
An hour later, Tozi lurked invisibly in the audience chamber of Cuitláhuac’s mansion, watching Guatemoc and his father locked in an intense, furious, but whispered argument. Their voices were lowered, she understood, because a small army of paid informers and secret policemen had been sent by Moctezuma to infiltrate the Chapultepec estate. Indeed she had passed several suspicious-looking characters as she had sought Guatemoc out, two of them loitering by the door to the audience chamber with their ears obviously pricked. She had thought of exposing their presence by some trick, and would perhaps have done so, had she not been so angry a
t Guatemoc because, once again, as when she had seen him performing unspeakable intimacies with another woman, he’d shattered her romantic image of him – in this case her foolish dream that he might have been persuaded to embrace the cause of Quetzalcoatl. She now knew that quite the opposite was true. The reason the prince had been placed here under house arrest – ‘you might so easily have been executed instead’, his father complained – was not that he had sought to make common cause with the tueles to bring Moctezuma down, as she had fantasised, but rather because he had tried to attack them, and had even taken one of them prisoner with the intention of sacrificing him, contrary to the wishes of the Great Speaker. Weirdly it seemed to be Moctezuma who was making peace overtures towards Quetzalcoatl, sucking up to him in every possible way and trying to curry favour, while the prince fought and opposed the return of the god.
The one thread of hope for Guatemoc, however, was that his hatred for Moctezuma plainly remained undimmed. ‘Father, we must act,’ he now whispered. ‘We must overthrow that monstrous fool before it’s too late.’
‘Overthrow the Great Speaker?’ replied Cuitláhuac, as though Guatemoc had suggested they turn the earth upside down. ‘But that would be treason. Such a thing has never been done in the whole history of our nation.’
‘It’s a short history, father, hardly two hundred years, and there is a first time for everything. I say the time has come – indeed is long overdue. If we do not act, my uncle will surrender to the white-skins and make slaves of us all.’
‘I won’t be part of any plot against him,’ Cuitláhuac insisted.
‘Even though he plotted to poison me?’
‘Even so.’
‘Even though in his every action he betrays the high office of Speaker?’