Through the great city walls, they followed Montezuma into the city, into the market, so full of llife of that November morning, the merchants peddling hare and deer skins and embroidered cotton with big blue feathers, or the baskets of coin-sized kidney beans and brown cacao powder, or the shackled, pillaged bodies tethered to rock, whose eyes glistened blank. Under sisal canopies, the metalsmiths bent and broke gold and silver into every shape, frogs of silver, butterflies of gold. From clumps of cotton, seamstresses, with dry and skilled fingers, pulled designs from the chaos, sewing dozens of robes, which fell gentle to their feet. Jesters balanced on silts strutted past them while clowns drew smiles with bellyful antics. The city’s gardens bloomed. And hummingbirds fluttered from petal to petal, filling themselves, before resting among the ponds and herbs, fat and tired from drinking so many colours.
Montezuma led them through the many streets, past the many curious faces, past the groups of children who giggled at the strange men’s clothing, which shone in the morning sun, shone so greatly that the little ones, in little sandals, thought that each Castilian had his own personal star hidden somewhere within. The men in steel sucked in the scene, soaked in its plentitude, the undeniable richness of the place, and they felt their rapine spirit snarl from within, those bellicose visions of bloodletting and prophecy that had followed them since leaving Iberia, since departing their puerile childhoods and their nothing, callow lives. They were in history now. They were the brave soldiers of Charles fighting for light in the darkness. They were men. Yet despite Tenochtitlan’s eminence, they recognized something in the great city, its marketplaces and violence, the hierarchy, and its penchant for pomp and ritual, the kings and slaves, the need to revere what lies beyond human comprehension, the necessity of sacrifice. In fleeting moments of clarity, they saw themselves.
Montezuma showed them his palace, sparkling in affluence, as big as a plaza. Hanging gardens dropped from the limestone ceilings, adjacent to windows that sprayed them in rays of light. The king brought them to his aviary complex, a dozen rooms in all, filled with salt-and fresh-water ponds, in which magnificent birds—macaws, toucans, and quetzals—relaxed in their resplendent plumage. He presented his caged rooms of jaguars, eagles, and snakes. He presented his collection of clay ceramics, the pottery used in legendary feasts, serving boar and rabbit,quail and venison. The corridors were lined with servants, standing in silence, arms outstretched, ready to be summoned, ready to serve. In the company of the young woman, Cortes took Montezuma aside and spoke of his king, Charles, and how he, too, rules over a great land and how he, too, is a wise and kind ruler. But what makes Charles truly great, Cortes intoned, is his desire to save his children who have gone astray or his children who have not yet received the word of God, the word of the one God who created everything—the waters, the forests, the mountains—all those things, they are his gifts to us, and he only asks for love in return. While she spoke, Montezuma played with his scant, greying beard, his face frozen in thinking. After several long seconds, he said that the Mixeca have many gods for many things and that surely the world is too big and too vast for one god to have made. Cortes replied in a pedantic pace, informing the king that he was misinformed. His gods, the idols, were nothing more than devils, who had tempted his people, through gold and gratification, into sin, into delusion, and if he, Montezuma, would grant Cortes one small favour, to erect a picture of Our Lady, beloved Mary, he would see how his ghouls cower in fear under her pure gaze. The priests beside Montezuma grew hostile. Sensing their outrage toward such opprobrium, Montezuma smiled and admonished Cortes for speaking in such a disrespectful manner. The gods are generous, he said, and give us harvests and health and prosperity. All of this, he gestured to the wealth around him, is because of them. You will see, he said, looking at his priests and then at Cortes, just how charitable many gods can be.
They arrived at the walls of the Hueteocalli complex, reminiscent of the ramparts of the Castilians’ homeland, and a pall fell over the cortege. As they entered through rounded pathway, overlaid with serpent reliefs, the hush was only broken by light drumming and intermittent howls of pain. The courtyard was massive and covered in temples and shrines. The smell of copal drifted over the space. Cortes cast his gaze towards the two colossal pyramids, following their staircases, hundreds upon hundreds of stone steps, to the sky and the two temples resting atop, whose shape and hue in the morning sun resembled pillars of ivory. In their glory, they were like mountains. At the foot of the staircases rested two balustrade serpents of basalt, lying uncoiled with tongue out, the size of two men. Montezuma noted with satisfaction the saturnine quality of his guests’ awe, the melancholic realization that they were mere ants among eagles.
They halted at the pyramid’s base. Montezuma shot his finger up to the southern temple and whispered for Huitzilopochtli, god of war, and then swung it to the northern counterpart, for Tlaco, he said, god of rain. Cortes trailed the king’s gaze to the ground where the remains of a woman were carved. Her head and limbs had been severed and had been placed around her body as in decoration. Her head titled upwards as if examining the place from which she fell. She had long feathers in her headdress. She wore bells on her cheeks, sandals on her feet, and a serpent belt around her waist.
Montezuma stared at the young woman, the translator, and spoke in deep baritone, a harsh string of syllables, that denoted a warning to heed his words. This is Coyolxauhqui, he said, the betrayer. Her mother, Coatlicue, was the goddess of the earth. She gave us life. She gave us sustenance. One day, Montezuma said, she was sweeping, cleaning the holy sites atop of Coatepec Mountain, when a ball of feathers descended from the sky, and when she tucked it in her belt, and became with child, Huitzilopochtli. Montezuma fell silent, and the other Mixteca stomped their feet and brandished their spears. He glared at the young woman again. Coyolxauhqui, he said, became angry when she heard that her mother was dishonoured, that she would give birth to something unclean, and with her own sons plotted to kill Huitzilopochtli while he slept in his mother’s womb. By a miracle of the skies, he said, Huitzilopochtli was warned, and he burst through his mother’s womb, fully grown, fully armoured, and with his sun sword, slew the sons and cut Coyolxauhqui’s head and threw her from the mountain. And she fell here, Montezuma said, pointing to the grey monolith.
He approached the young woman and dropped his hand on her shoulder; Cortes fingered his sword’s handle. Montezuma said that some believe Coatlicue has foretold the end of the Mixeca people, that our cities will crumble, that her son, our god of war, Huitziliopchtli, will be replaced, toppled, killed, and he will retreat to his mother, somewhere in the far sky, unseen for us, forever gone in the black. Montezuma’s body slunk and slouched, and as he gazed at the pyramid, something akin to a backward nostalgia, a remembrance of things not yet gone, seized him, and he climbed the first steps with a resignation tempered by a mild relief. Turning back to the young woman, as they followed him up, he said until that day comes, we will still feed the gods.
They climbed, and with causeways falling beneath them, the city in its totality spread over the Lake Texcoco and into the lowlands, to the mountains, and to the sun. Above them, the gentle cries had become distinct, pronounced, the screams of individual men, but then the sounds ended sharply. The bodies fell, tumbled down the stairs, humbled devotees, headless prisoners of war, who had given everything to secure the harvest. Their bodies broke and their bones unlocked and pierced their soft sink, before they came to rest, twisted and unrecognizable at the bottom.
At the top of the pyramid, outside the temple’s shrine, the world was swathed in the early morning’s golden hue. In the corner, across the flat platform, Cortes saw a dozen men in place with sisal strands, their faces rigid. Three men stood by the altar. Strange painted marks covered their face; gold rings hung from their noses, ears, and lips. Serrated black knives were tucked in their quilted vests, and lances were seen in their hands. The tallest draped in a feathered cloak and blood-clotted hair shouted some hard, unflinching thing, and Montezuma nodded. The two other men raced to the prisoners, untied one, and pulled him by his hair to the oblong altar, on which he was fastened, long rope curling and tightening over his shoulders, torso, and knees. The other prisoners did not move. From inside the shrine, incense burned, and its smoke wafted and then ensconced the idol of Huitzilopochtli, whose broad face, pasted with pearls and girdled golden snakes, slowly vanished. Atop a brazier, four hearts burned. A hawk swooped above. The pounding of the snake-skinned drums intensified; trumpets blared.
Cortes was appalled yet empathetic. He did not condone but he did understand. He understood what man had to become to secure the throne. Across the sea, he had heard those reports of Christianity under fire from heretics and apostates, the sodomizers and usurers, the old unholy ways of Jews and Moors, all of them beset to dethrone Christ, Charles, the Pope, from their place, to dirty Christendom, to defile the pure. No. It would not happen. Not with the fiery justice of the inquisitor, his penchant for hard justice, his merciless, ruthless quest to sate the hunger of God above, the one true God, his son, the holy spirit. Not with the rack, dunking, boiling, burning, stakes glowing with flames, not with the damned crying out for mercy, their bodies eviscerated with flames, skin sunken to bones, flesh ripped and ravaged, torn and frayed. No. God was avenged. His faith in his children’s devotion stayed unquestioned.
When Cortes saw the priests raise the flint knife in the air, when he saw the aquiline blade slice through the man’s chest from collar to abdomen, when he saw the prisoner’s eyes roll away to nothing, and when he saw the holy man reach inside and take the still beating heart in his hand and hold it to the sky, a part of Cortes understood, a part of him agreed. This was the cost. This was the price. And when the heart was placed in a stone vessel and set alight, Cortes could not fail to see the symmetry between him and the others, a deep reverence for the unknown, a deep respect for what cannot be heard or seen but what is known nonetheless to be there. Cortes sensed the moment.
Amid the roaring yelps of thanks, Montezuma moved toward the woman, petite, precocious, and pregnant, but he spoke not a word, only looked at her in deep silence, out of deference to the road that lay ahead beyond his sight.