"Excuse me, Tenamáxtzin," said one of the officers. "What is a cathedral?"
"A tremendous temple of the white men's religion. Such great temples are erected only in places that are expected to become great cities. Thus I believe that the town of Tonalá is intended to replace Compostela as the Spaniards' capital city of New Galicia. We will do our utmost to discourage that intention—by destroying, leveling, obliterating that Tonalá."
The officers all nodded and grinned at each other in gleeful anticipation.
"When we approach that place," I went on, "our army will halt while scouts steal out around the town. When they report back to me, I will decide the disposition of our forces for the assault. Meanwhile, I also want scouts preceding us on the way there. Ten of them, alert Aztéca men, fanned out well ahead of our column. If they espy any kind of settlement or habitation in our path, even a hermit's hut, I am to be told immediately. If they encounter anyone at all, of whatever color, even a child out picking mushrooms, I want that person brought immediately to me. Go now. Make sure those orders are understood by all."
I do not know—once our column was on the march and strung out behind me—how many days it would have been in passing any given point. We numbered nearly eight times as many people as Coronado was leading, but we did not have his herds of horses, mules and cattle. We possessed only the same two unsaddled horses that Nochéztli had retrieved from the long-ago ambush outside Compostela. He and I rode those as we left the Chicomóztotl encampment and took a southeastward winding trail that brought us gradually down from the mountains to the lower lands. And I have to say that whenever I looked back at the long, coiling, weapon-bristled train that followed us, I could not help feeling pridefully rather like a conquistador myself.
To everyone's great relief and greater joy, the vanguard hunters and foragers did provide us all with a fairly substantial meal from our first night on the march, and increasingly tasty and nourishing victuals during the subsequent days. Also, to the great relief of my rump and Nochéztli's, we eventually acquired two saddles. One of our advance scouts came running, one day, to report that there was a Spanish army outpost just one-long-run farther along the trail. It was, like the one Tiptoe and I had once encountered, a shack containing two soldiers and a pen containing four horses, two of them saddled.
I halted the train and Nochéztli summoned to us six warriors armed with maquáhuime. To them I said:
"I will not waste powder and lead on such a trivial obstacle. If you six cannot sneak up to that post and dispatch those white men on the instant, you do not deserve to be carrying swords. Go and do exactly that. One caution, however: try not to tear or bloody the clothes they wear."
The men did the gesture of kissing the earth, and dashed off through the underbrush. In a very short time they came back, all of them beaming happily and two of them holding high, by the hair, the heads of the two Spanish soldiers, dripping blood from their bearded neck stumps.
"We did it ever so neatly, my lord," said one of them. "Only the ground got bloody."
So we proceeded on to the guard shack, where we scavenged, besides the four horses, two more arcabuces, pólvora and balls for them, two steel knives and two steel swords. I set some men to stripping the soldiers' bodies of their armor and other garb, which was indeed unblemished except for the ingrained dirt and crusted sweat to be expected of uncleanly Spaniards. I congratulated the six warriors who had slain the soldiers, and the scouts who had found them, and told those scouts to go on ahead of us as before. Then I called for our two white men, Uno and Dos, to report to me.
"I have gifts for you," I told them. "Not only better clothes than those rags you are wearing, but also steel helmets and armor and stout boots."
"By the blood, Cap'n John, but we are grateful to you," said Uno. "Traveling shanks's-nag is hard enough on our old sea legs, let alone doing it baldfooted."
I took that goose language to be a complaint about their having to walk, and said, "You will not need to walk any farther, if you can ride horseback."
"If we could ride a shipwreck over the Tortoise reefs," said Dos, "I would reckon we can ride anything."
"Might I ask, Cap'n," said Uno. "How come we gets kitted out so fancy, and not some of your chief mates?"
"Because, when we get to Tonalá, you two are going to be my mice."
"Mice, Cap'n?"
"I will explain when the time comes. Now, while the rest of us move on, you get into those uniforms, strap on the swords, get onto the two horses I am leaving for you and catch up to us as soon as you can."
"Aye aye, sir."
So Nochéztli and I had comfortable saddles again, and the two spare horses I put to use as pack animals, relieving several of my warriors of the heavy lead they were carrying.
The next event of any note occurred some days later, and this time I was not forewarned by my Aztéca scouts. Nochéztli and I rode over a low ridge and found ourselves looking down on some mud huts clustered on the bank of a large pond. Four of our scouts were there, drinking water given them by the villagers and sociably smoking poquíetin with them. I raised a hand to halt the column behind me and said to Nochéztli, "Collect all your knights and leading officers and join me yonder." He saw the look on my face and wordlessly went back to the train as I rode down to the little settlement.
I leaned from my horse and asked one of the scouts, "Who are these people?"
My look and my tone of voice made him stammer slightly. "Only—only simple fisher folk, Tenamáxtzin." And he beckoned to the oldest of the men present.
The old rustic sidled closer to me, fearful of my horse, and addressed me as respectfully as if I had been a mounted Spaniard. He spoke the tongue of the Kuanáhuata, which is a language sufficiently similar to Náhuatl that I was able to understand him.
"My lord, as I was telling your warrior here, we live by fishing this pond. Only we few families, as our ancestors have done since time before time."
"Why you? Why here?"
"There lives in this pond a small and delectable whitefish that can be found in no other waters. Until lately, they have been our commodity of trade with other Kuanáhuata settlements." He waved vaguely eastward. "But now there are white men—south, in Tonalá. They also esteem these unique fish, and we can trade for rich goods such as we have never before—"
He broke off, looking past me as Nochéztli and his officers came to stand, maquáhuime in hand, in a menacing ring about the cluster of huts. All the other folk huddled together, the men protectively putting their arms about the women and children. I spoke over my shoulder:
"Knight Nochéztli, give the order to kill the scouts."
"What? Tenamáxtzin, they are four of our best—" But he also broke off, when I turned my look on him, and obediently nodded to his nearest officers. Before the stunned and unbelieving scouts could move or make a sound of protest, they had been beheaded. The old man and his villagers stared in horror at the bodies lying twitching on the ground, and at the heads, apart, which were blinking their eyes as if still in disbelief of their fate.
I told the old man, "There will be no more white men for you to trade with. We are marching on Tonalá to make sure of that. Any of you who wish to come with us—and help us slaughter those white men—may do so, and welcome. Any who do not will be put to death right here where you stand."
"My lord," pleaded the old man. "We have no quarrel with the white men. They have traded fairly with us. Since they came, we have prospered more than—"