Feathered Serpent (13 page)

———————

Eight young women are led into the plaza, dressed in sheer cotton mantles and glittering with golden collars and ear rings. So much for the destitution to which the Mexica had apparently condemned the Totonac nation. But never mind. I am sure my Lord is aware of their perfidy; as long as they are unaware of his.

Seven of the women are presented to my lord’s captains; my violet-eyed Puertocarrero and Tonatiuh are rewarded with a second wife. My husband’s is especially beautiful, the daughter of Gordo’s own prime minister, Lord Cuesco. She is immediately sprinkled with water by Fray Olmedo, and Aguilar tells me she is henceforward now to be called Doña Francisca.

Then Gordo presents my lord with his own niece. There are stifled guffaws among the moles. I feel a surge of relief. The princess is not as fat as Gordo; not quite. Give her a few months. She approaches in a wobbling gait like an overfed turkey and looks utterly ridiculous in her bridal finery, covered from head to foot in flowers, a garden on the move.

I dare a glance at my lord. He silences the titters of his captains with a hard stare and then steps forward and kisses his bride gallantly on the hand. I wonder at his manners and his kindness. My heart goes out to him.

Then he looks at me and I see laughter in his eyes but not on his lips. He whispers something to Aguilar.

“My lord Cortés wishes you to tell this girl’s uncle that his generosity is huge.” I smile at this, but it is evident Aguilar cannot see the joke. In my translation I change “huge” to something approximating “boundless”, as I am sure my lord wishes me to do.

Gordo’s niece is the last to submit to the sprinkling of the water.

Aguilar seems pleased. “Tell Gordo that now he has sworn fealty to his most Catholic majesty the King of Spain, he must abandon these damnable blood sacrifices and tear down his devilish idols.”

I turn to Gordo. “Feathered Serpent says that you must now abandon human sacrifice as he preached when he was last here many sheaves of years ago.”

Gordo gapes at me, astonished. “But surely, a few slaves, some prisoners taken in battle, this is not unreasonable to ensure a good harvest or to propitiate the gods when the rains are late...”

“Feathered Serpent says it is a crime and must be stopped immediately. You must also tear down your images of his great enemy, Tetzcatlipoca, Bringer of Darkness.”

“But if we destroy our gods there will be no more rains, no more crops in the fields...”

An angry murmur passes through the crowd. Like a ripple on a pond, the whispers pass from mouth to mouth.

“What is Gordo saying?” Aguilar wants to know.

“He argues like a woman at the market. Let me have one more moment with him.” I return my attention to the
cacique
. “All these years you and your ancestors have waited for Feather Serpent’s return and now you reject his teaching! First you welcome him back with a great procession and then you betray him! What if he decides not to bother with you any further? What do you think Motecuhzoma will do when my lord is no longer here to protect you, when he has gone back to the Cloud Lands in disgust?”

Gordo hesitates.

I turn to my lord Feathered Serpent in frustration. He gives a signal to the other lords waiting on the other side of the plaza.

A clap of thunder. The crowd gasps, some fall to the ground in terror, others start to run. Tonatiuh and his fellow captains sprint up the temple steps, holding swords and heavy iron bars. When they reach the top they knock aside the priests and then a dozen of them lever one of the stone idols towards the edge. It is Serpent Skirt herself.

Even as I will them on, I concede it is a terrible sight to witness. The goddess falls, lurching sideways onto the topmost step, and then comes crashing down towards us. Serpent Skirt is broken in three pieces by the time she reaches the plaza, stone splinters landing a hundred paces from where she finally comes to rest, bloodying some of the crowd.

The thunder gods are now attacking Rain Bringer and Maize Mother. The crowd spills back into the plaza, moaning like a giant wounded beast. They rush the temple to protect their gods, only to retreat again as Bringer of Darkness rumbles down the steps, gathering speed before shattering into pieces at the bottom beside Serpent Skirt.

It is a moment I had thought never to see in my lifetime, a sacrilege that leaves me breathless, exhilarated and terrified. I smell smoke. They have overturned Lord of Fire and the sparks from his crown have ignited the thatched roof.

A black pall hangs over the temple. The wails of the Totonáca are deafening. They will turn on us any moment, I am sure of it, they are only waiting for a signal from Gordo.

But the thunder lords have already formed a defensive perimeter around Feathered Serpent and the fat
cacique
, their swords and pikes and thunder sticks trained on the crowd. It seems impossible that just a few moments before the Totonáca were giving us their women and their devotion. Gordo’s fat niece is running comically in circles, wailing at the top of her lungs. Fray Olmedo is on his knees, hands clenched and thrust towards the sky.

Aguilar, though, evinces my grudging admiration. In the face of this wild crowd he stands in front of his own soldiers with his precious book clutched to his chest and regards the Totonáca who wish to kill him with the benign forbearance of a schoolteacher.

I feel almost serene. My father had told me never to fear chaos. In destruction you will find your destiny.

Cortés drew his sword. “How many innocent women and children have been butchered by these heathen?” he shouted to his soldiers over the baying of the crowd. “How can we count ourselves as Christians and honourable Spaniards if we allow this to continue? Let us count our lives as nothing if we fail God in this venture!”

The soldiers kept their order as the Indians surged forward. Benítez shouted a warning and pointed to the royal palace. Totonac archers were assembling on the roof.

Cortés grabbed Gordo by the arm and held his sword to his throat.

“Lady Marina!” Aguilar shouted over the din. “Cortés says you must inform their
cacique
that he is about to die unless he restores order!”

Cortés forced Gordo to his knees, the sharpened edge of his sword had already drawn a trickle of blood from his doughy flesh. Malinali put her face in front of his and whispered to him in
Nahuatl
. He nodded his acquiescence, babbling.

It took four of his own slaves to get him back to his feet. He addressed the mob, his voice a wavering tremolo and gradually a silence fell over the plaza.

 
  
———————

The next day the Totonacs drag their shattered gods from the plaza with ropes. Rain Bringer and Maize Mother and the rest disappear into the forest. They will not be smashed and buried as my lord has ordered, of course. They will be hidden in the jungle, so that the Totonáca can steal away, from time to time, to the secret hiding places. But it is enough for now that their hold on the people broken.

On the summit of the pyramid another thatch is already being built over the ashes of the old, and the bloodstained walls have been whitewashed. A new shrine has been laid, this one bright with fresh flowers and illuminated by the candles that the thunder gods make from bees wax. The priests have been made to exchange their blood-encrusted black garments for new white vestments. Their hair, which they allowed to grow to their waists and was caked stiff with dried blood, has been sawed off with the sharp blades of the captains' swords.

In the place of the old stone gods, a cross and a picture of the goddess Aguilar calls Virgin has been placed in the temple. Feathered Serpent himself carried the picture up the step.

I must confess, this new shrine disturbs me. My lord is truly like no other god I have ever imagined. He is divine and yet he bends his knee each day before the gentle image of a mother and child; he rages against human sacrifice yet drinks the blood of his own god, Olintecle.

He is Feathered Serpent as I always imagined him to be; and yet in so many ways he is also not him.

He is not faultless, but then no god is without fault. Sometimes a god will find his way inside a man, as with Motecuhzoma. And if a god may find his way inside a man, could the divine not also find a warm place inside the heart of a living woman?

Cortés abandoned San Juan de Ulúa and built his new colony on the plain seven miles to the north of Cempoallan. Alvarado took possession in the name of King Charles the Fifth of Spain. He named it The Rich Town of the True Cross - Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz.

The men cheered him, even those who had formerly wished to go back to Cuba. After all, as Cortés had said, the gold wheel must be only the beginning, and if they continued to create new colonies, soon every last one of them would be an
alcalde
himself.

After the ceremony, the position of chief justice and captain-general of the new colony was declared vacant. The post was unanimously offered to Hernan Cortés who humbly accepted.

The next day they set to work on building; there was to be a church, a marketplace, warehouses, a stockade, a hospital, a town hall and an arsenal, all protected by a high stone wall with watchtowers, parapets and barbicans. They would also construct kilns to make clay bricks, and smithies from the ships were put to work forging wrought iron. As part of the treaty Cortés had made with Gordo, thousands of Cempoallans were recruited as native labour. But all the Spaniards helped with the work, digging foundations or carrying earth to the kilns; Cortés himself put his back into hewing logs.

Malinali and Rain Flower went to work in the hospital, assisting the Spaniards' only doctor, Mendez. Now they were away from the marshes there were fewer cases of fever and vómito, but Malinali proved her worth, preparing herbal remedies for a variety of ailments.

As the months passed, the new colony took shape. The Mexica waited and watched.

 
  
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Cortés kneels before the wooden trestle that serves as an altar in the half-finished church. A wooden cross has been fixed high on the wall above a picture of Aguilar’s goddess and her baby. Cortés fingers the beads he holds in his right hand, his face serene, oblivious to the banging of nails and the shouts of the moles around him.

I watch him at his devotions. It moves me to my core that such a great lord will fall to his knees before the image of a woman with an infant. It is testament to both his gentleness and his strength. The picture perhaps reminds him that in his last incarnation he was a priest, serving the gods. Now he has returned to destroy those same gods and bring us a new divinity, a gentle god, not a bringer of war and destruction and deception.

Seeing him like this renews my faith in him. How can a goddess with a suckling baby be the harbinger of anything but good? Would such a goddess demand blood and burning?

As I leave the church I see Norte, bare-chested, heading across the plaza, carrying some rough-hewn timber over his shoulder.

I call out to him in Chontal Maya. “Norte! Will you help me?”

He lays down his burden and looks up, surprised. “If I can, Doña Marina.”

“Come here, please.”

He approaches, cautiously. “What can I do for you?”

“I want you to talk to your lord for me.”

“Why me? What about Aguilar?”

“Because I want you to speak for me, not Aguilar.”

Norte reluctantly agrees. He follows me back inside the half-built church and we wait for my lord to finish his devotions.

He stands up and smiles at me, but frowns when he sees Norte.

“Please beg his forgiveness,” I say to Norte, “and tell him I did not mean to disturb him while he was with the gods. But there is something I must ask him.”

There is a swift exchange between the two men. “He says that there is nothing to forgive. He is very happy to see you.”