"These things were my wife and my sons!"
I said nothing in reply, but kindly used my sword to send him to join them in whatever Christian afterworld they had gone to.
In time, I caught up to my foot warriors, Yaki and Aztéca intermingled, scuttling in and out of houses or chasing runaways through streets and alleys. I was pleased to see that they were obeying my instructions, or at least as well as I could have expected. Every Tonalá inhabitant of our own complexion, or darker, was being left unmolested. The Yaki were no longer wasting time in scalping, but were letting the dead bodies lie while they went to kill more. My instructions were being only slightly disregarded in one respect, and that was a matter of no great concern to me. I had ordered that the white females be let to live for a while, but the warriors were keeping—and herding before them—only the more comely women and young girls. Those, of course, were easy to discern, for few of them had been wearing much clothing at all, and now had been stripped naked. So the flabby or skinny or obese or wrinkled old women, and the children so young as to be indeterminate of sex, were being slaughtered along with their fathers and husbands and brothers and sons.
My men no longer had breath to spare in uttering war cries, but were doing their selecting and butchering in silence. Of course, the victims were not silent. Every living white female loudly pleaded or prayed or screamed or cursed or wept; and so did the men and the old women and the children, as long as they could. Those same despairing noises came from every direction—and other noises, too: the splinterings of doors being forced; the occasional blast of an arcabuz owned by some householder, discharging its single futile pellet; the continuing random thunders and thuds, not far off now, of our Purémpe women's granadas. And some heroically foolish person was even ringing a frantic, pathetic, far-too-late alarm on the town's church bell.
I turned my horse toward the sound of that bell, knowing it must come from the town's center. Along the way there, I saw—besides my energetically working warriors and their victims—many houses and merchants' shops and artisans' workshops that had formerly been well-built and perhaps even handsome structures, but were now mere ruins, irreparably shattered or totally leveled, clearly the doing of our women's granadas. There were yet more corpses visible within the rubble of those places, but they were so dismembered and shredded that they could hardly provide even intact scalps for the Yaki. I was eyeing one particularly fine house just ahead of me—certainly the abode of some high Spanish dignitary—and wondering why it had not been demolished, when I heard an urgent cautionary cry in the Poré tongue: "Take care, my lord!" and I yanked my horse to a halt.
Next instant, that house before me bulged—like the cheeks of a musician playing one of those jug flutes called "the warbling waters"—but it made no such sweet sound. The noise it uttered was more like that of the drum called "the drum that tears out the heart." I gave a violent start and my horse shied in fright, and the two of us nearly parted company. The house was enveloped in a thundercloud of smoke, and though it was too solidly constructed to fly asunder, its doors and shutters and bits of furniture and unidentifiable other contents came darting in shards like lightning out of that thundercloud. As chance would have it, I and my horse were struck by only a single fragment apiece, and those did us no harm, being only gobbets of some person's flesh. When things stopped falling roundabout, the woman emerged from the nearby alley where she had taken cover. It was Butterfly, and she came carrying a floppy leather bag and smoking a poquíetl.
"You do excellent work," I said. "I thank you for the warning."
"Those were my last two granadas," she said, shaking the bag to show me. Only a handful of thin reed-rolled poquíetin fell out. She gave me one, I took a light from hers, and we smoked companionably as she fell in beside my horse and we went leisurely on together.
She said, "We did as you ordered, Tenamáxtzin. Employed our granadas only on buildings, and we tried to choose the most imposing ones to destroy. Only twice did we have to squander the weapons just to slay individuals. Two mounted soldiers. There was not much left of them."
"That is a pity," I said. "I want to collect all the horses we can."
"Then I am sorry, Tenamáxtzin. But it was unavoidable. They came upon us suddenly, just as two of my warriors were about to toss their lighted granadas through a house window, and the soldiers were waving swords and shouting—for us to surrender, I suppose. Of course we did no such thing."
"Of course," I said. "I was not chiding you, Butterfly."
The church bell continued its useless pealing until she and I reached the open square fronting that church and the adjoining palace—and just then the ringing ceased abruptly. My arcabuz men had followed the rest of us into the town, to pick off any runaways that might outdistance our foot warriors, and one of those men very neatly put a ball into the bell-ringer up in the little tower that sat atop the church. The Spaniard, a black-clad priest or friar, pitched out of the bell tower, bounced off the slanted roof and was dead when he thumped onto the cobblestones of the square.
"As well as I can tell," said Knight Nochéztli, bringing his blood-spattered horse alongside mine, "there very soon will be only three white men still alive in Tonalá. They are in the church yonder—three men, unarmed. I glanced inside and saw them, but left them for you, my lord, as you commanded."
His knights and officers began grouping about us, waiting for further orders, and the square was rapidly filling with other people, as well. Every warrior not otherwise and elsewhere occupied was herding the captive white women and girls into that open space, and hurrying to claim the favor that is the common soldier's traditional celebration of a victory. That is to say, the men were violently raping the females. Since there were considerably more men than women and girls, and since many of the men were disinclined to wait their turn, in some cases two or three warriors would be simultaneously using the various orifices of a single female.
Needless to say, those women and girls capable of screaming or pleading or protesting were doing so, and vociferously. But I am sure that these victims were making a noise even more horrified and horrible than has ever been heard at any other such scene of celebration. That was because the white females, all having abundant and long and lustrous hair, made the Yaki warriors more lustful of having their scalps than of possessing any other part of them. Each of those Yaki who had dragged hither a Spanish female threw her down and tore off the top of her head before he threw himself on top of her bare body. Several other Yaki, who had brought no captives of their own, were scurrying about the square and sawing the scalps off supine women and girls while they were being violated by another man—or two or three.
I myself found those females, however comely and shapely and desirable in other respects, almost impossible even to look at, with their heads peeled nakedly round and red and pulpy. I could not have brought myself to couple with one—not even with my eyes shut, because there would have been no way to shut out the equally repellent stench of them. The smell of their torn heads' blood was rank enough, but many of the creatures also were voiding their bladders and bowels from sheer terror, and others were vomiting because of what had been put down their throats.
"I thank the war god Cuticáuri," said Butterfly, at my stirrup, "that we Purémpecha do not let our hair grow."
"I wish you did," growled Nochéztli, "so I could snatch all you stupid bitches bald of head!"