Said one informant, "It must be their gods—that white woman and child, may they be damned to Mictlan—who do the slaughtering. They inflict whole populations with diseases that kill everyone
"Hordes of our people are dying of that blight," said yet another. "But the white men seem impervious. It
that,
Old
When eventually we of Aztlan got word that the white men were fighting to subjugate the territories of the Otomi and Purempecha peoples, we fully expected soon to see those marauders arriving on our own doorstep, so to speak, because the northern limit of the Purempecha's land called Michihuacan is no more than ninety one-long-runs from Aztlan. However, the Purempecha put up a fierce and unflagging resistance that kept the invaders embroiled there in Michihuacan for years. Meanwhile, the Otomi people simply melted away before the attackers and let them
So the white men finally were satisfied to cease their advance at the southern edge of that unlovely desert (what
During the eventful years that I have sketchily chronicled here, there also occurred the more expectable and less epochal events of my own youth. The day I became seven years old, I was taken before Aztlan's wizened old tonalpoqui, the name-giver, so he could consult his tonalmatl book of names (and ponder all the good and bad omens attendant on the time of my birth), to fix on me the appellation I would wear forever after. My first name, of course, had to be merely that of the day I came into the world: Chicuace-Xochitl, Six-Flower. For my second name, the old seer chose—as having "good portents," he said—Teotl-Tenamaxtli, "Girded Strong As Stone."
Simultaneous with my becoming Tenamaxtli, I commenced my schooling in Aztlan's two telpochcaltin, The House of Building Strength and The House of Learning Manners. When I turned thirteen and donned the loincloth of manhood, I graduated from those lower schools and attended only the city's calmecac, where teacher-priests imported from Tenochtitlan taught the art of word-knowing and many other subjects—history, doctoring, geography, poetry—almost any kind of knowledge a pupil might wish to possess.
"It is also time," said my Uncle Mixtzin, on that thirteenth birthday of mine, "for you to celebrate another sort of graduation. Come with me, Tenamaxtli."
He escorted me through the streets to Aztlan's finest anyanicati and, from the numerous females resident there, picked out the most attractive—a girl almost as young and almost as beautiful as his own daughter Ameyatl—and told her: "This young man is today a
Anyway, during those years and subsequent years, Aztlan never was visited by even a roving patrol of the Caxtilteca forces, nor were any of the nearer communities with which we Azteca traded. Of course, all the lands north of New Spain had always been sparsely populated in comparison to the midlands. It would not have surprised me if, to the north of
The scouts went forth with understandable apprehension, not knowing what dangers they might encounter on the way. But they went with curiosity, too, their mission being to report back to their headmen on what they saw of life in the midlands, in the towns and cities, and especially in the City of Mexico, now that all was ruled by the white men. On those reports would depend our peoples' decision: whether to approach and ally ourselves with the conquerors, in hope of a resumption of normal trade and social intercourse; or to remain remote and unnoticed and independent, even if poorer for that; or to concentrate on building strong forces and impregnable defenses and an armory of weapons, to fight for our lands when and if the Caxtilteca did come.
Well, in time, almost all the scouts returned, at intervals, intact and unscathed by any misadventures either going or coming. Only one or two parties had even seen a border sentry and, except for the scouts having been awestruck by their first sight of a white man in the flesh, they had nothing to report about their crossing of the border. Those guards had ignored them as if they were no more than desert lizards seeking a new feeding ground. And throughout New Spain, in the countryside, in villages and towns and cities, including the City of Mexico, they had not seen—or heard from any of the local inhabitants—any evidence that the new overlords were any more strict or severe than the Mexica rulers had been.
"My scouts," said Kevari, tlatocapili of the village of Yakoreke, "say that all the surviving pipiltin of the court of Tenochtitlan—and the heirs of those lords who did not survive—have been allowed to keep their family estates and property and lordly privileges. They have been most leniently treated by the conquerors."
"However, except for those few who are still accounted lords or nobles," said Teciuapil, chief of Tecuexe, "there
"Only one of my scouts returned," said Tototl, headman of Tepiz. "He reports that the City of Mexico is almost complete, except for a few very grand buildings still under construction. Of course there are no more temples to the old gods. But the marketplaces, he said, are thronged and thriving. That is why my other two scouts, a married couple, Netzlin and Citlali, chose to stay there and seek their fortune."
"I am not surprised," growled my Uncle Mixtzin, to whom the other chiefs had come to report. "Such peasant oafs would never before in their lives have seen
"Kevari is right," said Teciuapil. "It was agreed that all of us leaders would convene, discuss what we have learned and then decide our course of action regarding the Caxtilteca invaders. But all you do, Mixtzin, is scoff."
"Yes," said Tototl. "If you so disdainfully dismiss the honest efforts of our
Mixtzin, then send some of your educated and refined Azteca. Or some of your tame Mexica immigrants. We will postpone any decisions until
So that was the sequence of events that took the three of us journeying to the City of Mexico—where I would get my uncle's reluctant permission to remain and reside for a time, and where I would learn many things, including the speaking of your Spanish tongue. However, I never took the time to learn the reading and writing of your language—which is why I am at this moment recounting my reminiscences to you,
I can still see him burning.
It was the first time I had ever gone very far from the place where I had been born. So, although I was well aware of the serious intent of our venture, still, to me, the horizon was a wide and welcoming grin. It beckoned me to all manner of new sights and experiences. For instance, at Aztlan the dawn had always come late and in full-blown radiance, because it had first to clear the mountains inland of us. Now, when I had crossed those mountains into flatter country, I could really see the dawn breaking—or, rather, unfurling, one colored ribbon after another: violet, blue, pink, pearl, gold. Then the birds began to bubble over in greeting of the day, singing a music all of green notes. It was autumn, so there came no rains, but the sky was the color of wind, and through it wafted clouds that were always the same but never the same. The blowing, dancing trees were music visible, and the nodding, bowing flowers were prayers that said themselves. When twilight darkened the land, the flowers closed, but the stars opened in the sky. I have always been glad that those star blooms are out of the reach of men, else they would have been snatched and stolen long ago. At last, at nightfall, there arose the soft dove-colored mists, which I believe are the grateful sighs of the earth going tired to bed.
The journey was long—more than two hundred one-long-runs—because it could not be done in a direct, straight line of march. It was also sometimes arduous and frequently wearisome, but never really hazardous, because Mixtzin had traveled that route before. He had done that about fifteen years before, but he still remembered the shortest way across scorching patches of desert, and the easiest way to skirt around the bases of mountains instead of having to climb over them and the shallow places where we could ford rivers without having to wait and hope for someone to come by in an acali. Often, though, we had to veer from the paths he remembered, to make a prudent circuit around parts of Michihuacan where, the local folk told us, there were still battles going on between the unrelenting Caxtilteca and the proudly stubborn Purempecha.
When, somewhere in the Tecpaneca lands, we did eventually begin to encounter an occasional white man and the animals called horses, and the other animals called cows and the other animals called staghounds, we did our best to assume an air of indifference, as if we had been accustomed to seeing them all our lives long. The white men seemed equally indifferent to our passing by, as if we too were only commonplace animals.
All along our way, Uncle Mixtzin kept pointing out to my mother and myself landmarks he recalled from his earlier journey—curiously shaped mountains; ponds of water too bitter to be drinkable, but so hot that they steamed even in the sun; trees and cactuses of sorts that did not grow where we lived, some of those bearing delicious fruits. He also kept up a commentary (though we had heard it all before, and more than once) on the difficulties of that earlier excursion toward Tenochtitlan:
"As you know, my men and I were rolling the giant carved stone disk representing the moon goddess Coyolxauqui, taking it to present as a gift to the Revered Speaker Motecuzoma. A disk is round, true, and you might suppose it would roll easily along. But a disk is also flat on both faces. So an unexpected dip in the ground, or an unnoticed unevenness, could cause it to tilt sideways. And, though my men were sturdy and attentive to their labors, they could not always prevent the tilted stone from falling completely on its back or sometimes, grievous to relate, the dear goddess would fall flat on her face. And
And Mixtzin would recollect, as he had done more than once before: "I might never even have got to meet the Uey-Tlatoani Motecuzoma, because I was apprehended by his palace guards and very nearly imprisoned as a despoiler of the city. As you can imagine, all of us were filthy and fatigued by the time we arrived there, and our raiment was torn and tattered, so no doubt we did resemble savages who had wandered in from some wilderness. Also, Tenochtitlan was the first and only city we traversed that had fine stone-paved streets and causeways. It did not occur to us that our rolling the massive Moon Stone through those streets would so badly crunch and crush the elegant paving. But then the angry guards swooped down upon us..." and Mixtzin laughed at the memory.