‘Even so! You are proposing a rebellion, Guatemoc, and that is unthinkable. It will always be unthinkable.’
Tozi wanted desperately to intervene, to shoot out from invisibility like a thunderbolt and put both these stupid, stubborn men right! Cuitláhuac needed to understand that a revolt against his wicked brother Moctezuma was absolutely, immediately, imperatively necessary. But it was even more important for Guatemoc to understand that the tueles, who he so dismissively called the ‘white-skins’, were not the enemy; rather they were his natural allies, since they had come across the eastern ocean to abolish the foul rule of Moctezuma and restore justice to the world.
‘I will not – I cannot – sanction rebellion,’ Cuitláhuac now whispered. ‘There must be some other way. I’ll speak to your uncle again in the council and try to get him to see reason.’
‘It won’t do any good, father,’ Guatemoc sighed, ‘you know it won’t! The man is far beyond reason.’
‘Nonetheless I have to try. Anything else is—’
‘Unthinkable?’
‘Yes. Unthinkable! Moctezuma has his faults but he is our ruler, sanctioned by the gods, loved by the people. We must never forget that.’
Tozi drifted closer to Guatemoc. She knew she must not speak to him in the presence of his father. She was tempted to wait until he was alone and then reveal herself, but she had brought none of the finery of the goddess Temaz that she’d used for disguise in their previous encounters, and she was under no illusions about how the prince would react to her real appearance as a street urchin and a witch!
She hated him, yet loved him, despised him, yet admired him, and above all, as had been the case since their first encounter in the royal hospital months before, when she’d gone to cut his throat and ended up saving his life, she felt powerfully drawn to him as though some deep and ancient connection bound them.
She was close enough to touch him now. Invisible, he could not see her, could not feel her, so what was the harm? She rested her hand on his arm. Closer … Closer still. Now she sensed that faint, strange resistance that was always there when she moved through a solid object. And then – she could not help herself – she merged with him, just for an instant occupying the same space filled by his strong, masculine body. She was within him, part of him, feeling the firm, steady beat of his heart, the vigour of his blood as it pulsed through its channels, the great reservoirs of warmth and courage that fed his vitality. She was within him and then she emerged beyond him, ending their fleeting union, and in that instant he turned, turned suddenly and looked at her – really looked at her – and she fled.
* * *
It must have been an illusion, Guatemoc decided much later as he worked out in the exercise yard, sparring not with Man-Eater or Mud Head as he would have preferred – for it was a strictly enforced condition of his house arrest that his closest friends must not visit him – but with two of Cuitláhuac’s bondsmen, trained warriors both, though not in the same league as any of his five comrades in arms. It must have been an illusion and yet … and yet … he had felt the most unsettling sensation within his body, something intimate, almost orgasmic. And then as the sensation abruptly ceased, he had turned and seen the diaphanous, translucent form of a woman there in the audience chamber between himself and his father – a young woman, strangely familiar, with the look of the goddess Temaz but yet also different, more fierce, with something wild and flighty about her, like a feral animal caught in a trap.
Guatemoc rolled his shoulders and deliberately dismissed the vision from his mind. He struck a blow – a very good one, he had to admit! – that brought one of the bondsmen to his knees with a gasp of pain, then on the backswing he struck again and laid the second burly soldier flat. Throwing down his macuahuitl – stripped of its obsidian blades for sparring purposes and thus toothless as a crone – he said, ‘Thank you, dear fellows, that will be enough for today’, and stalked off to the private apartments he now occupied in the south wing of his father’s mansion.
He needed to be alone. He needed to think. Why his mad uncle had let him live was a mystery to him, for he had fully expected to die. Indeed the night before he was to be killed, specialised priests had come to prepare his body for ritual slaughter by the ordeal of flaying. He had broken one priest’s jaw and pulled the arm of another out of its socket before they subdued him and began the process of softening his skin with unguents and hot towels to ensure it could be removed without tearing so Moctezuma could pull it over his own body like a glove.
But then, soon after dawn, the Great Farter himself had come to his cell, dismissed the priests and ordered Guatemoc’s release into the custody of Cuitláhuac. Moctezuma had seemed flustered, excited, anxious, with a strange fixed smile and staring eyes. He had acted, almost, as though he and Guatemoc were friends!
What was the reason for this sudden change of heart? What had happened to Moctezuma during that night? Guatemoc realised that he might never know, that his uncle was so crazed that his mental processes were beyond rational enquiry – which was precisely why he could no longer be trusted to rule the nation. Since Cuitláhuac was a weakling, Guatemoc resolved, it fell to him and him alone to plot the death of Moctezuma and to prepare a proper strategy for dealing with the threat of the white-skins. If they all fought like the man in the dunes had fought, they were going to prove to be very formidable enemies indeed.
* * *
After her eerie union with Guatemoc, an experience that had left her aching with an unaccountable sense of loss, as though there were now some void within her that could never be filled, Tozi walked steadily and determinedly north from Chapultepec through the spectacular beauty of the One World. She passed beneath the twin aqueducts that carried fresh water into Tenochtitlan from the springs on Chapultepec hill by means of a pair of gleaming ceramic pipes, each with a bore as wide as a man’s torso. Assembled from hundreds of short interlinked sections, the pipes were carried on marching lines of stilts and scaffolding that followed the curving decline of the hillside for two miles down to the edge of Lake Texcoco, and then soared out for a further two miles over the lake itself, finally entering the island metropolis in the district of Tlatelolco. The whole amazing construction was needed to keep Tenochtitlan alive because the lake waters were brackish and practically undrinkable, and there were few functional wells within the city. For this reason the aqueducts were guarded and patrolled along the full length of their overland transit by squads of warriors, from a permanent garrison of twelve thousand who were camped at the point where the springs emerged from the earth. Tozi saw no need to hide in invisibility as she passed the heavily armed patrols. Their vigilance was reserved for warriors like themselves – Tlascalans perhaps, or rebel Texcocans. Skinny, dirty, dressed in rags, she posed no apparent threat and was already effectively invisible to them.
She continued her journey north, leaving Chapultepec with its military hustle and bustle behind as the day wore on. The colours of the One World were lush fern green and rich loam for the fertile fields of the farmers that she passed on her left, deepest cerulean blue flecked with the snow-white of the wavelets that lapped the lake to her right; above her was the azure sky, in which slow-moving clouds floated like feathers, and the molten gold of the sun. Long, welcoming shadows were cast by stands of trees; the drab clothes of peasants contrasted with the bright stalls of market traders, standing amidst the red and yellow painted adobe buildings of the town of Tepuca on the north side of the lake, which she reached very late in the afternoon.
Tozi had no goods to barter with her – Huicton had insisted on that – so she begged shelter for the night from a widow in Tepuca, a stranger who took her in kindly and would accept no service in exchange for her food and lodging.
The following morning, early, Tozi was on her way again, heading north, constantly, unerringly north through the valley of the One World. Something plucked at her heart and she turned back for a last view of distant Tenochtitlan shimmering in the midst of t
he great lake – an impossible mirage of towering pyramids, palaces and mansions, separated by the perfect geometry of intersecting avenues and canals. The whole eye-achingly beautiful vista, which yet concealed so much ugliness, so much cruelty, so much woe, was encompassed, surrounded, defined, by distant ranges of jagged snow-capped mountains that soared to west and east, their descending slopes richly carpeted in the blue-green of forests that had already been remotely ancient when the Mexica, then a poverty-stricken but ferocious nomadic tribe, had first arrived in these lands.
And something else, even older, had been here to greet those first Mexica scouts as well. On the afternoon of her second day on the road, after begging a few cobs of maize for sustenance, Tozi’s quest brought her, as Huicton had told her it must, to the long-abandoned city of Teotihuacan, ‘the place where men became gods’, with its three ruined pyramids that had been built, the Mexica believed, at the very beginning of this present age of the earth. She advanced along the broad, straight, two-mile-long avenue called the Way of the Dead, mixing in with a group of hymn-singing pilgrims from Tenochtitlan as they visited first the small, ruined step-pyramid believed to have been the work of Quetzalcoatl because of the sculptured head of a plumed serpent that jutted from its steep side, thence onward to the gigantic pyramid of the Sun, which rose in five tiers towards the heavens, and finally, at the northern end of the avenue, to the slightly smaller pyramid of the Moon.
Like everything else the Mexica touched, Teotihuacan had become a focus of monstrous perversion in recent years. Age-old lore concerning this sacred ground held that the previous age of the earth, the Fourth Sun, was brought to a close by a cataclysmic flood, after which primeval darkness fell. The gods chose Teotihuacan as their gathering place to decide who was to sacrifice himself so as to become the new Fifth Sun and bring light again to the world: ‘Even though it was night, even though it was not day, even though there was no light, they gathered, the gods convened, there at Teotihuacan.’
Two of them, the legends said, competed for the honour to throw themselves into the sacred fire from which the Fifth Sun would be kindled – the handsome and worldy Tecciztecatl, arrogant and greedy for glory, and humble, self-effacing Nanahuatzin, ailing and covered with pustules. At the last moment Tecciztecatl baulked before the fierce heat of the flames. Nanahuatzin, however, closed his eyes, rushed forward and leapt into the fire where he began ‘to crackle and burn like one roasting’. As a result of his self-immolation, the Fifth Sun finally arose, ushering in the present epoch – ‘it took sight from the eyes, it shone and threw out rays splendidly, and its rays spilt everywhere’.
In this tale, which was not their own but had been passed on to them by the peoples they had encountered and conquered when they migrated into the valley two centuries before, the Mexica found cause to carry out mass human sacrifices by burning at Teotihuacan on two occasions each year, once at the winter solstice, Atemoztli, when the sun rose furthest to the south of east, and again at the summer solstice, Tecuilhuitl, rapidly approaching, when the sun rose furthest to the north of east. These holocausts, at which Moctezuma danced publicly and distributed gifts to the onlookers, were supposedly conducted to nourish the Fifth Sun with the suffering of the victims as they crackled and roasted on the sacred flames, thus preventing the untimely end of the age.
But once all the pious nonsense was set aside, what it was really all about, Tozi knew, was the sick pleasure and delight the Mexica took in finding ever more inventive and spectacular ways to degrade, humiliate, and terrorise others. And in the process of their wicked rituals, the true significance of ‘the place where men became gods’ was all but forgotten. She recalled the ancient and time-honoured words her mother had taught her about the meaning of Teotihuacan:
Thus they said, ‘When we die, truly we die not, because we will live, we will rise, we will continue living, we will awaken … ’ Thus the dead one was directed, when he died: ‘Awaken, already the sky is rosy … ’ Thus the old ones said that he who has died has become a god; they said: ‘He has been made a god there.’
And here lay the truth – the sacred ground of Teotihuacan was for renewal and rebirth, not for hopeless destruction and death of the kind the Mexica liked to celebrate. Transformation of the soul was intended here, not brutal murder of the body. After the party of pilgrims had left and evening was falling fast, remembering Huicton’s suggestion that she should seek guidance from Quetzalcoatl, Tozi walked back alone to the ruined pyramid he was said to have built and settled down cross-legged beneath his effigy of the plumed serpent.
She had failed him by submitting to terror when Acopol had set his eyes on her in Moctezuma’s palace, and proved he could see her even when she was invisible to others. Her ability to fade was her power, and Acopol had brushed it aside as though it were nothing, stealing her confidence, stealing her courage. Perhaps this was why Huicton had sent her away – not so much to find the lost land of Aztlán and seek a vision from the masters of wisdom in the Seven Caves of Chicomoztoc, as to find her courage again.
She gazed up into the stern features and the snarling teeth and jaws of the plumed serpent, the once and future king who had returned, after so long an absence, to claim the lands and the heritage that were rightfully his. Where was he now, she wondered, the warrior Huicton called Cortés, Quetzalcoatl taken human form, and his army of demigods? Something in her bones told her they were already marching inland from the coast, these ‘Spaniards’ who had come to work the doom of Moctezuma, and that great events lay close at hand.
‘I will find my courage,’ she said aloud. ‘I will be ready to fight by your side.’
‘In that case,’ replied a voice, ‘bide here nine days longer. I have work for you to do when Moctezuma comes to celebrate the festival of Tecuilhuitl.’
Tozi leapt up, looking in every direction, but there was not a sound, not a footstep. Night was falling, all the other visitors had gone, and she was alone amidst the ancient ruins.
‘You have work for me to do?’
‘Yes, little one.’ The voice was deep and resonant and it reverberated in the settling darkness. It seemed to emerge, Tozi now thought, from between the bared teeth of the sculpted head of the plumed serpent. It could only be the god Quetzalcoatl himself, speaking to her from his effigy of stone!
‘I long to serve you, lord,’ Tozi said. ‘Only tell me what I must do.’
‘Listen, then, bold one, brave one, here are my commands for you … ’
* * *
On Saturday 12 June, friendly relations and possible military cooperation with the fat cacique having been set on a proper footing, Cortés led his men out of Cempoala and down to Huitztlan at the coast – a march of less than six hours – to find that the fleet carrying Escalante and the other half of the army was already anchored in the bay and that the ground had been broken for the foundations of Villa Rica de la Veracruz. Totonac dignitaries had been sent ahead to prepare lodgings for the Spaniards to use in Huitztlan while the new town was being built, others under the direction of Meco accompanied Cortés to smooth the way, and in addition Tlacoch provided four hundred porters – called tamanes, Pepillo learned – to transport all the baggage the conquistadors had previously been obliged to carry themselves.
Arriving on the late afternoon of 12 June, Cortés convened a meeting that same evening in Huitztlan’s main square with Yaretzi, the town’s chief, and the Council of Elders; Meco and Malinal, supported to some extent by Aguilar, served as interpreters. The meeting was also attended by the fat cacique in his capacity as paramount chief. He’d had himself carried down from Cempoala on a litter and treated Yaretzi and the elders as his subordinates, often speaking over them, his voice booming out across the square.
Once again the atmosphere was friendly, with most of the townspeople crowding round to look on, and the talk soon turned to Moctezuma and what was to be done about him. Tlacoch’s complaints at the heavy toll of sacrificial victims demanded by the Mexica were echoed by the ot
her dignitaries present, who added that this ghastly tribute was extracted every year from every one of the thirty principal towns and villages where the Totonacs lived. The new levy of virgins to be killed for Hummingbird’s birthday was particularly resented, and in addition Moctezuma’s tax gatherers were hated as bullies who felt free to rape and even permanently abduct any man’s wife or daughter if she was beautiful, leaving husbands and fathers humiliated and bereft.
By a strange coincidence, at the exact moment these depredations were being discussed, a tangible ripple of fear went through the crowd in the square, a commotion broke out and people fled in all directions. Two Indians rushed to Tlacoch and Yaretzi and whispered in their ears. Both men at once lost colour and began to tremble and sweat in a manner that would have been comical if they hadn’t been so obviously terrified. An almost hysterical conversation broke out amongst the elders, many of whom were now on their feet. Meco spoke urgently to Malinal and Malinal turned to Cortés: ‘A delegation of Mexica tax collectors just arrived,’ she explained.
Cortés seemed delighted at the news. ‘Good! Now we’ll see how serious these Totonacs really are about their rebellion.’
Moments later, five haughty, cocksure men entered the square where Cortés and his captains still sat with the fat cacique and Yaretzi. The new arrivals, preceded by a host of servants with fly whisks to keep mosquitoes and other night insects away, had the appearance and bearing of overlords used to subservience. Their black hair seemed to shine, they wore richly embroidered cloaks and loincloths, and each held a crooked staff in one hand and roses in the other, which they raised disdainfully to their nostrils as though not wishing to smell the local air. They passed the Spaniards rudely, refusing even to acknowledge their presence, and made their way to a stately house. They were immediately followed by Yaretzi and, once he had been hoisted into his litter, by Tlacoch.