The Conquistadors (16 page)

Moctezuma had prepared against this moment, instructing his warriors to produce from the year's fighting a captive suitable for the occasion. The man chosen was a chieftain of the tribe of Huejotzingo. His name was Xiuhtlamin, and now this wretched man stood waiting in the idol-room with the priest whose duty it was to kindle the new fire. The priests had all put on the masks of the deities they served, and on the platform at the top of the teocalli the astrologers watched for the moment when certain stars would pass the meridian. The dark night wore on. No conflagration destroyed the earth. The world did not end.

Suddenly there was a movement among the astrologers. Word was passed to the idol-room; five priests seized Xiuhtlamin and flung him across the sacrificial stone. An obsidian blade slashed open his chest, the heart was plucked out, and in the gaping wound the new fire was kindled by the oldest of methods, a wooden spindle. It was a moment of wild rejoicing. Runners lit their torches from the solitary flame and ran through the starlit night, from village to village, relighting the altar fires of the temples. Long before dawn bonfires blazed the length of the Valley, and every hearth in every home burned with the new-born fire. The next cycle had begun – the cycle of the 8th sheaf – with the promise of fifty-two years before fear of the world's ending again threatened them.

This event undoubtedly made a deep impression on Moctezuma. The strain of it had been very great, for the shadow of it had lain over him ever since he had come to the throne. But for him it did not end with the birth of the 8th sheaf. The function of the priesthood in a religiously primitive and therefore superstitious community is leadership through intelligent anticipation of events and the interpretation of supernatural omens in such a way that the people are prepared and the events themselves controlled, or at least influenced. Trained to
the leadership of the priesthood, Moctezuma understood these functions very well, but at the same time he was himself deeply involved in the mythology of the past, so that his statesmanlike qualities were clouded by his religious beliefs, his martial instincts sapped.

In the years that followed, vague reports of the activities of men of another race were constantly coming in – from traders, from captives, from people of the coastal districts in touch with the Caribs. They were so persistent that they could not be ignored; and because of his training he was inclined to interpret every peasant's highly-coloured, emotional account of some unusual happening as a sign of ill-omen. Feeling himself threatened from the east, he became haunted by the old prophesy of Quetzalcoatl, that the prophet-king would return, pale-skinned and bearded, from out of the east where the morning star rose. And there were unusual happenings – a comet trailing sparks, lightning striking at the thatched roof of a small temple, a strange pillar of white smoke rising in the east. For a superstitious mind already filled with foreboding, these phenomena were far from reassuring.

Then, in the year 12-House, the fourteenth of his reign, came messengers from the coast with more definite news of the bearded white men. They had come out of the sea, from fortified islands that moved on the water; they had weapons that thundered flame and smoke and killed at a distance; and they were mounted on strange beasts like deer. An Indian description gives some idea of the impact of the horse on Moctezuma's warriors:

The ‘stags' came forward, carrying the soldiers on their backs. The soldiers were wearing cotton armour. They bore their leather shields and their iron spears in their hands, but their swords hung down from the necks of the ‘stags'. These animals wear little bells, they are adorned with many little bells. When the ‘stags' gallop, the bells make a loud clamour, ringing and reverberating. These ‘stags', these ‘horses', snort and bellow. They sweat a very great deal, the sweat pours from their bodies in streams. The foam from their muzzles drips onto the ground. It spills out in fat drops, like a lather of amole [plants from which soap was made]. They make a loud noise when they run; they make a great din, as if stones were raining on the earth. Then the ground is pitted and scarred where they set down their hooves. It opens wherever their hooves touch it.

Moreover the strangers were demanding gold. Grijalva had landed on the coast of Yucatán.

When Cortés landed in the year 1-Cane – this was the sign that ruled Quetzalcoatl and therefore the year of his prophesied return – Moctezuma, watching upon events in his distant capital, seems to have been strangely inhibited from direct action. He appears to have decided to discourage his war chiefs from leading their warriors into battle. Instead, he gave his sorcerer priests full rein. Some of the gifts sent to the Spaniards, possibly some of the food as well, had been doctored with the witchcraft of these necromancers. Quintalbor, the Mexican who resembled Cortés, was probably the equivalent of an effigy stuck with a needle. When the sorcerers had done their worst by incantation and sacrifice and all the devilish arts of the Aztec religion, without any effect whatsoever, no priest could accuse Moctezuma of having failed in his religious duties. It left him free to act as he thought best.

A crucial factor was Teudilli's arrival with the helmet and Cortés' request that it be filled with gold. The helmet was apparently somewhat similar to those worn by their ancestors, the people of Quetzalcoatl. It was just one of the many things that reinforced the growing belief that the Spaniards might be the followers of the great prophet-king their forefathers had spurned. Moreover, the pictographs sent back from San Juan de Ulúa were sufficiently clear in their portrayal of ships and guns and horses for Moctezuma's war chiefs to realize they would be faced with weapons that were quite new to them. In fact, in their portrayal of the Spaniards, they reinforced the godlike image already created by rumour. Pictographs, however, could not convey the intentions of the Spanish captain nor indicate whom he said he served. All Moctezuma knew for certain was that Cortés was stirring up trouble in the provinces, that he wished to visit him and was demanding gold.

Buying time is an old diplomatic move, but this explanation of Moctezuma's generous stream of gifts is an over-simplification. His reactions were undoubtedly more complex, for his mind was torn between belief in the superstitions of his religion and the practical problems of his dual position as religious and temporal leader of his people. He must have known he had the power to
destroy the invaders, but he was already convinced that behind these invaders would come others, a whole host rising out of the sea, and in any case he half believed they were gods, and as gods they should be propitiated. Thus, instead of armies, he sent them gold and presents and priests with copal to sprinkle them with incense as they did the gods. Anything, so long as he did not have to meet them face-to-face. And so, by prevarication, he lost even the will to resist.

At this stage, however, he had not finally decided on capitulation to what he felt was inevitable. The diplomat, the priest and the warrior in him were still at odds, so that his actions appear capricious and uncertain, his policy line difficult to understand. Thus, when Cortés has defeated the Tlaxcalans, Moctezuma expresses his willingness to become a vassal of the Emperor Charles, whilst at the same time instructing his emissaries to make every effort to dissuade Cortés from entering into an alliance with Tlaxcala. He is still hoping to put off the evil day. But the weakness resulting from the failure of the Mexicans to absorb the tribes they had conquered now became apparent. With Tlaxcala, and all the tribes back to the coast, in open revolt, the defection of Cholula was inevitable unless positive action were taken immediately. He had twenty thousand warriors – Cortés says fifty thousand – in the neighbourhood of Cholula. If the Spaniards could be lulled into a false sense of security, and by guile and treachery ambushed, then they would never again trust the Cholulans, or any other tribe, as allies.

On the day that Cortés entered Cholula Moctezuma sent an envoy to the caciques to arrange the ambush, with a present of jewels and cloth and a golden drum. The Cholulan chiefs agreed to the plan and at once ceased to have any contact with the Spaniards. On the third day, in accordance with Moctezuma's instructions, they ceased to supply them with food, and when Cortés thereupon decided to resume his march, he was informed that it was out of the question as there was no food available in Mexico to supply his army. The Cholulans, meanwhile, had agreed to provide him with an escort of two thousand warriors, much as the Tlaxcalans had done for the march to Cholula. They undertook to send them into the camp the following morning. The Mexican force was now split; half moved, into the city itself and the other half concealed itself in what would now be termed a
barranca,
a dry river-bed. The trap was set, and throughout the night and all next day Moctezuma waited anxiously for news, going through the daily routine of sacrifice and prayer.

When at length his ambassadors returned, hot-foot and dusty, and scared half out of their wits, it was with a story of total disaster. Cortés, they said, had known about the plot the previous evening. He had told them so to their faces, accusing Moctezuma of treachery. Then he had put them under a strong guard and at dawn the whole Spanish army had stood to, prepared for attack. As the sun rose far more than the two thousand Cholulan warriors promised as escort crowded into the great square where the Spaniards were encamped. Cortés had immediately informed their chiefs that he knew what they intended and that he proposed to
repay their treachery in kind. He locked them up and ordered an arquebus to be fired; at the signal the guns had opened up and the bright blades of Spanish steel had flashed in the sunlight. Without their chiefs to lead them, the Cholulans lacked direction. The slaughter had been dreadful. In two hours, the ambush that was to have been the end of the Spanish invaders had been itself destroyed. Moreover, those attacking from without the camp had been mowed down as they charged up the broad avenues by guns carefully sited in the gateways. By then Cortés' Tlaxcalans and Zempoalans were fighting their way into the city from the fields outside, and with the horsemen and foot soldiers advancing, the Cholulan and Mexican warriors had been caught between the hammer and the anvil of a double attack. At the end of five hours some six thousand of them were dead and some of the priests, who had climbed up to the top of the largest idol-tower, had been burned there, lamenting all the time that their idol had forsaken them.

This news, which was quickly followed by the return of the Mexican forces that had waited in ambush outside Cholula, seems to have completely unnerved Moctezuma. His reaction was to sacrifice several prisoners to the god of war, then shut himself up with ten of his chief priests and devote himself to prayer and further sacrifices. Ultimately he sent another embassy to Cortés, with yet more gifts, to plead his innocence and disclaim any responsibility for what had happened. He may even have been relieved to hear that Cortés affected to believe these protestations, for by then the Spanish general had Cholula in absolute submission and had even persuaded the chief cacique, whom he had appointed governor in place of his brother, who had been slain, to make peace with their old enemies, the Tlaxcalans. With these two tribes as allies, and all the country round supporting him, Cortés could now put into the field a confederate army of such power that the Mexican war chiefs themselves were probably by then advising caution.

Dazed, apparently, by the magnitude of the disaster, Moctezuma let more than a fortnight slip by without making any decisive move, thus allowing the Spaniards to consolidate their position in Cholula. In the end, it was Cortés who forced the issue, sending emissaries with a final request for permission to enter Mexico-Tenochtitlan. As remembered long afterwards by Bernal Díaz, the message Cortés sent to Moctezuma was a typical example of the sort of double talk at which his lawyer-trained mind excelled, making him more than a match for Indian cunning. The gist of it was that in order to fulfil the purpose for which their lord the king had sent them, the Spaniards had crossed many seas and distant lands, and all this for the sole purpose of visiting Moctezuma and telling him certain things which would be very profitable to him when he understood them. Furthermore, that on their way to his city his ambassadors had guided them to Cholula, which they said was tributary to him, and that for the first two days they spent there the inhabitants had treated them well, but that on the third day they had treacherously plotted to kill them. But since the Spaniards were men against whom no trickery or double-dealing or wickedness could be plotted without their immediately discovering it, they had punished some of the Cholulans who had hatched the plot; but knowing that they were the subjects of Moctezuma, they had, out of respect for his person and because of their great friendship for him, refrained from destroying and killing all those who had shared in the planning of this treachery.

Cortés' ambassadors had then made the point that both the priests and the caciques of Cholula had declared that the ambush had been arranged on his, Moctezuma's, advice and at his command. Having made this point quite clear, they then went on to say that Cortés had refused to believe that so great a prince would give such commands, especially as he had declared himself the friend of the Spaniards; and that they had inferred from his character that if his idols had put such an evil thought into his head as to make war on them, he would do it in the open field. ‘However, we do not care whether we are attacked in the open country or in the town, by day or by night, for we will kill anyone who ventures to do so.' And the emissaries added that as Cortés felt quite certain Moctezuma was his great friend, and wished to see and speak with him, he would set out for Mexico immediately to give him a very complete account of what his king, the Emperor Charles, commanded the Spaniards to do.