In the coming days, the Castilians had masons build them a church and crucifix outside their lodgings, where they held mass and prayed every day. On one such morning, when discussing where to place an altar, the Castilians’ happened across a secret chamber full golden treasure—jewels and plates and ingots. Their eyes wept in adoration: their childhood fantasies had been confirmed. Amid such wealth, they evaluated their position precarious, and upon hearing rumours of the slaughter of Christians along the coast, they devised a plan: they would imprison Montezuma and rule through him.

Cortes and his retinue cornered the Montezuma in his chambers and told him of the coastal massacre, the betrayal of the Castilians’ good intentions, the murder of moral Christians. Cortes touched the king as he would a cherub and approached him with condescension. He loved him as a brother and would not believe that his brother would orchestra such infidelity. No brother of his was a Judas. All would be forgiven, Cortes promised, if Montezuma would simply follow him and his captains—who stood over the god man with murder in their eyes—to their quarters and wait until the guilty were punished, until the truth was discovered. But if he cried out, the woman with black hair emphasized in a string of prefixed words, he would be killed right now in his room, unaccompanied and unmourned. When Montezuma protested, the woman screamed at him to go, to go now, to salvage what could be salvaged. He did. He went willingly. And when his captains and caciques visited him barefoot and in humble subservience and asked whether he was under duress, he laughed and shook his head. This was preordained, he said. This was the wish of Huitzilopochtli.

Cortes whispered him further instructions. Montezuma summoned the captains responsible for the treachery on the coast. He had them sign confessions and then watched in chains while Cortes burned them alive. As Montezuma roared with indignity, Cortes spoke in sparse and serious words. I have great affection for you, Cortes said, great admiration. I love you as I love myself; this, my friend, is the truth. Montezuma’s eyes became glazed and worn.

Cortes told the king that they are both rulers who answer to higher powers, a higher purpose. They protect their people. They serve their God. And the Christian God is loving and just, Cortes reminded Montezuma. He rewards obedience as does Montezuma’s, but the idols’ time, Cortes warned, has concluded and Christ, the king, the sword bearer, will spread his reign through all dark places. He will need disciples, Cortes hinted, holy men to rule the world, brave and ruthful men who fear nothing but the wrath from above. Keep the peace, keep your charges alive, Cortes said, and I will reward you with riches beyond what your idols have seen. Cortes wrapped his arms around the king, who felt the flattery enliven his spirits. The time had come at last. He needed to rest.

Montezuma followed Cortes. He accepted it all. He sailed in the Castilians’ newly constructed sloops. He calmed the worries of his vassal states. He told Cortes and his men where the gold lay, which mines yielded the best. He demanded that all his caciques begin to pay tribute to Charles in Castile. He gave Cortes all his father’s treasure, that bounty which first grabbed his men’s attention all those weeks ago. As the soldiers melted the slabs and grains of gold into broad bars, Cortes told Montezuma that he had made Charles happy and that he had done his people well. But one difficult task remained to prove his loyalty to Charles, to Cortes, and to God above, which would forever stich the king into their good graces.

Cortes paced across the limestone floor, which in the early morning hues took on the appearance of snow, the texture of ice. His movements were of an impetuous man, his mind moving faster than his legs, his feet darting and scudding and slipping, his mobility oiled. His mask of diplomacy fell for a second as he laid his hands across the king’s thighs and dropped his eyes onto the king’s retreating ones. His hand curled into a fist. “I know you go to your temple when you think no eyes can see you,” Cortes began. “I know you have been secretly sacrificing more poor souls to your accursed gods, decorating your devilish idols with blood and muck.” Cortes touched Montezuma on the shoulder. “This will stop,” he said. Montezuma did not move, did not register the truth of the observation, for he had grown despondent, drained of the resolve and resolution to fight this beguiling stranger any further. So despite the persistent humiliation, despite Cortes’s demand that all idols be removed from the great temple, despite his insistence that an altar and cross be assembled and a picture of Our Lady be placed where stood the idols to the gods, his ties to time immemorial, the seasons before time, Montezuma did not flinch, did not protest. He accepted it all as given. It was fine. Cortes could not contain his satisfaction, chuckling at the sight of this bowed, obedient thing before adopting his rueful visage, that of a disciplinarian parent who punishes out of love. Cortes, ever the tactful tactician, the master of deceit, brushed his fingers over Montezuma’s cheek and told him that his people will see how advantageous it is to believe in Our Lady, her son, the holy spirit, how good for the harvests, for their wealth. Assailed to his fate, Montezuma looked at the translator, who had stood all along, forever it seemed, who had grown stronger with each passing week and month, who understood, it seemed, that in many ways her fate was that of the king’s, both doomed in different ways, both were great and insufficient, but he was of the past, she of the future. “Rocks do not burn so easily” was all the king said.

In the summer of 1520, the Mixteca people of Tenochtitlan attacked the Castilians. In retribution for their gods’ debasement, in reaction to disturbing accounts of more and more of these strange men landing at Veracruz, the Mixteca raided Cortes’s lodgings and rained javelins and arrows and stones upon the intruders. Several Castilians fell; scores more were wounded. In the tumult, in the great cloud of arrowheads, Cortes grabbed Montezuma and called him a treacherous dog, an unscrupulous knave who had forfeited his greatness for some love of forgettable things. He demanded Montezuma go to the roof and pacify his people, calm their suicidal drive, smooth their angry retribution. Montezuma was lifted to the roof, under guard, and looked upon his city, the great Tenochtitlan bruised and lacerated, wounded by sickness, the streets clogged with dying, with disease. He spoke in words bereft of blood, cold and lifeless sounds asking them to stop, to allow the visitors safe passage from the city, which would secure his release. His sounds fell deaf among the melee below, unconvincing to even Montezuma himself, but the rebels did cease for a second to look at their once king, the corroded and peeling shell, and told him that they would never stop, as the gods commanded, and had chosen another chief to lead them. And when the sun was blotted by a series of arrows, Montezuma found it neither odd nor outrageous, and when one after another pierced his skin and brought him knee by knee to the ground, he could only sigh with relief, thankful that it was over, grateful that he would see no more.

In the coming months, after the Castilians managed to escape, after they waded and sloshed through the waters to the mainland, their gold weighing them down, they regrouped and rearmed and reallied themselves with the surrounding groups, who had grown ravenous to benefit from Montezuma’s sudden demise. They blockaded the city and laid siege to it. They clogged the causeways and patrolled the waterways. No supplies arrived from the coast; no food alleviated hunger. They burned the houses and fortifications in the hinterland. They squeezed the stomach of the starving city. They advanced in pieces along the bridges and over the water, little by little, attacking and then retreating, thrusting and then parrying. Darts flew in the sky, stones dropped in the water like hail, the whistles and shrieks of charging Mixteca roused the fear of the invaders, who lifted their muskets, steadied their bows, and readied their catapults. They took more fortresses, razed more temples, and blocked more channels. As time went, the drumming and trumpeting of sacrifices sounded less and less, and the stench of the dead flesh rose more and more, wafting from the city into the camps, growing and spreading along Tenochtitlan’s edges. But the Mixteca fought further still, repelling the great Castilian advances along the causeway, stopping the horses with their men full of armour. Yet the tide turned only for the second, and with their allies, the army pushed back in waves, each unit penetrating the city from a disparate angle, enveloping it with cannon fire and sharpened silver. And with the strength of Jesus Christ, he who gave solace to the wounded and provided relief for their cauterized cuts, they broke over the causeway and through the gates and into the marketplaces and demanded, on the threat of extermination, peace.

Dead bodies littered the city floor. Their mouths cupped into shapes of surprise, little ovals of disbelief. The smell was foul. Corpses lay with blistered skin, thousands upon thousands of white lesions, little dots, stuck to them like leeches. The city itself appeared ploughed; all roots, all weeds, anything resembling green, were dug and forged and boiled and eaten. Tree trunks had teeth marks, their bark gone.

Cortes allowed the survivors to exit Tenochtitlan. For three days and nights, men, women, and children marched from their city, streaming out in an endless line of suffering, bodies thinned, sallowed, and dirtied. Chieftains were hanged or burned. Noblemen were tortured for gold, for knowledge of its whereabouts. Other men were branded and set to work. Cortes ordered the temple razed and a new church built in its stead. Other Castilians left for other provinces to seek further fortune and to colonize further land. Tenochtitlan slouched in ruin.

But in the marshy shallows on the city’s outskirts, a woman with obsidian hair stands cradling her belly, which extends slightly more than other young woman her age. She feels their eyes on her, both from the captured and the victorious, the dead and the alive, yet she does not relinquish her gaze from Tenochtitlan smoldering, the fires still burning, the smoke sailing past the sun to the mountains. She hears the clucking of many tongues, all of which she understands. She knows what they will say, what they have already begun to say. But it does not matter, she says to her midsection, as she feathers her hands over it. She is not guilty. She knows this. Her name is La Malinche. She is a mother, and mothers have neither the time nor the patience for endless analysis, for the dissemination of blame and responsibility. Mothers work. She has things to do.