Cortés & Moctezuma

The lords of Potonchan give twenty women to the strangers the way they give cacao or folded cloth: to close a defeat and buy a friendship. Malintzin stands on the riverbank among the twenty and studies her new owners. She has been given away before. Nahuatl was her first language, spoken in her father's house near Coatzacoalcos before traders carried her east; Chontal Maya she learned in slavery, because a slave who cannot understand orders does not last. Two languages, each paid for in full.

Weeks later, on the dunes at San Juan de Ulúa, she watches a sentence die. Envoys have come from Moctezuma, robed and careful, speaking Nahuatl. The strangers' interpreter, Aguilar, eight years a castaway among the Maya, spreads his hands, lost. The captains' faces close like doors. And Malintzin, who owns nothing, sees what she alone is holding. She steps forward and takes the envoy's Nahuatl into Maya; Aguilar lifts her Maya into Castilian for Cortés. Three tongues, one meaning, every word crossing the beach twice through her.

The Spaniards will baptise her Marina, then doña Marina — the courtesy Castile keeps for women of rank. She did not choose the riverbank or the gift. What is said next on this coast, no one can say without her.

The runner finds him at his evening meal: toasted maize, beans, chillies, no salt. There has been no salt in Tlaxcala in his lifetime. The Mexica hold every road, and whatever must cross their empire — salt from the lake beds, cotton from the hot lands — stops at the border, so Tlaxcala stands inside the ring like a walled field. His mother died without once wearing cotton. That is what a blockade is: not an army at the gate, just a whole life of coarse cloth and flat food.

For two weeks his company fought the newcomers in the ravines — real war, not the flower wars with their counted captives. His obsidian edge opened a horse's neck, and the animal died like any deer. The men behind it did not break; they closed over their dead like water over a dropped stone.

Now the runner speaks the council's word: the four lords have chosen alliance. The strangers will sleep in the city, eat turkey stew, and be watched. He turns his blade in the firelight. For generations Tlaxcala has held this ring alone; if the bearded ones are a weapon, Tlaxcala means to be the hand that swings them.

The Castilians will tell this afterwards as their war. The lords of Tlaxcala already know whose it is.

The causeway leaves the shore and goes at the city dead straight, a stone road laid across open water, wide enough that the whole column — horse, foot, guns, allies — walks it without breaking file. Bernal Díaz keeps his eyes moving, the way five years in the Indies have taught him. Canoes past counting on both sides. Ahead, towers and temples stand lime-white in the lake as if anchored there. Older soldiers murmur about Amadís and the enchanted cities of the romances. Díaz shipped out through Seville at eighteen and believed nothing on earth could be bigger; he feels that certainty leave him quietly, like heat.

He also counts bridges. Every so often the stone gives way to a timber span that can be lifted clear, and then this road becomes a line of drowning men. A few hundred Castilians, water on either hand, and ahead one city holding more people than any he has ever stood in.

Drums, then a hush with weight to it. The ruler comes carried in a litter under a canopy of green feathers worked with gold, lords sweeping the stones before him, and in all that crowd not one person lifts their eyes to his face. Cortés swings down and steps forward with open arms, and two lords catch him — gently, firmly — before he can touch the man. Some things, the whole lake seems to say, are not done.

His son has been dancing since before dawn. The amantecatl watches from the crowd at the precinct wall, pride sitting in his chest like a warmed stone. Thirty years he has worked feathers — quetzal, spoonbill, hummingbird — layering colour that shifts as a man breathes, and his hands know better than most that the city's finest things are also its most breakable. The dancers wind past the great drum in the serpent step: the young men of the best houses, unarmed, wearing what their families could lend.

Cortés is away at the coast with most of his men, gone to fight other Castilians sent to arrest him. The one left in command is the one the city calls Tonatiuh, the Sun, for his red-gold head. It was Tonatiuh himself who gave leave for the feast.

The singing falters at the gates first: they are being closed. Then steel comes into the precinct, and the soldiers go for the drummer before anyone, and the drum stops in the middle of the measure.

He does not remember climbing the wall. He remembers the floor of the precinct afterwards, and that his hands, which know crushed things, went on searching anyway. By nightfall the market has shut, the bridges are up, and the city has stopped feeding the strangers it once housed as guests. What began as a feast is now the war.

They are calling it huey zahuatl, the great rash, and it moves through the city faster than news of it. She is nineteen, a weaver, and she has lost count of her days on the mat. The sores rose on her face first, then hands, belly, the soles of her feet, until no way of lying still did not hurt. When she called for water nobody came, because everyone who might have come lay on a mat of their own. That is the sickness's cruellest work: it fells whole households at once, so that people die less of the pox than of thirst, untended.

Sixty days, the old men will say, it burned through the city. She rises from it with a pitted face and arms that must relearn the loom. Her younger brother rises blind. Her mother does not rise. And she marks what everyone marks: the Castilians walk through it barely touched — men scarred long ago by the same pox in their own country, carrying its pardon.

Cuitláhuac, who drove the strangers into the lake on the night of rain, wore the turquoise diadem eighty days before the rash took him like anyone else. Now a young tlatoani, Cuauhtémoc, and a thinned city to obey him. She grinds maize for it. It is what there is to do.

All his life the lake has been road and field at once. His chinampas lie off the city's southern edge — driven stakes, dredged mud, willows at the corners — crop after crop the year round; each dawn he poles maize, greens and flowers up the canals to the market at Tlatelolco. A city on water is fed by water. The enemy understands this too.

In the spring the ships come. Thirteen, each longer than the longest war canoe, winged with cotton sails, oars down both flanks, a gun in the bow. Their story is already famous: cut as timber in the mountains of Tlaxcala, carried down in pieces on the backs of thousands of porters, nailed together at Texcoco and floated out along a canal dug for nothing else. When one runs before the wind it goes through a squadron of war canoes like a hand through smoke.

After that the lake closes like a fist. The aqueduct from Chapultepec is cut, so the city drinks the lake, which is salt. Fishing happens at night, between patrols; then there is no fishing, and people eat what nobody ate before — lizards, the salt grass off the reeds, hide softened in water.

On the last day, thunder and rain come in at evening. He watches a brigantine take Cuauhtémoc off the lake — the last tlatoani, in a canoe, going the only direction left. Wakes close over everything. The road he farmed all his life keeps no marks.