Anyway, Cortés and the other men were impartial; they misnamed everybody else as well. Since Náhuatl's soft sound of "sh" does not exist in your Spanish language, we Mexíca were for a long time called either Mes-sica or Mec-sica. But you Spaniards have lately preferred to bestow on us our older name, finding it easier to call us Aztecs. Because Cortés and his men found the name Motecuzóma unwieldy, they made of it Montezúma, and I think they honestly believed they were doing no discourtesy, since the new name's inclusion of their word for "mountain" could still be taken to imply greatness and importance. The war god's name Huitzilopóchtli likewise defeated them, and they loathed that god anyway, so they made his name Huichilobos, incorporating their word for the beasts called "wolves."
* * *
Well, the winter passed, and the springtime came, and with it came more white men. Motecuzóma heard the news before Cortés did, but only barely and only by chance. One of his quimichime mice still stationed in the Totonaca country, having got bored and restless, wandered a good way south of where he should have been. So it was that the mouse saw a fleet of the wide-winged ships, only a little distance offshore and moving only slowly northward along the coast, pausing at bays and inlets and river mouths—"as if they were searching for sight of their fellows," said the quimichi, when he came scuttling to Tenochtítlan, bearing a bark paper on which he had drawn a picture enumerating the fleet.
I and other lords and the entire Speaking Council were present in the throne room when Motecuzóma sent a page to bring the still uninformed Cortés. The Revered Speaker, taking the opportunity to pretend that he knew all things happening everywhere, broached the news, through my translation, in this fashion:
"Captain-General, your King Carlos has received your messenger ship and your first report of these lands and our first gifts which you sent to him, and he is much pleased with you."
Cortés looked properly impressed and surprised. "How can the Don Señor Montezúma know that?" he asked.
Still feigning omniscience, Motecuzóma said, "Because your King Carlos is sending a fleet twice the size of yours—a full twenty ships to carry you and your men home."
"Indeed?" said Cortés, politely not showing skepticism. "And where might they be?"
"Approaching," said Motecuzóma mysteriously. "Perhaps you are unaware that my far-seers can see both into the future and beyond the horizon. They drew for me this picture while the ships were still in mid-ocean." He handed the paper to Cortés. "I show it to you now because the ships should soon be in sight of your own garrison."
"Amazing," said Cortés, examining the paper. He muttered to himself, "Yes... galleons, transports, victuallers... if the damned drawing is anywhere near correct." He frowned. "But... twenty of them?"
Motecuzóma said smoothly, "Although we have all been honored by your visit, and I personally have enjoyed your companionship, I am pleased that your brothers have come and that you are no longer isolated in an alien land." He added, somewhat insistently, "They have come to bear you home, have they not?"
"So it would appear," said Cortés, though looking a trifle bemused.
"I will now order the treasury chambers in my palace unsealed," said Motecuzóma, sounding almost happy at the imminence of his nation's impoverishment.
But at that moment the palace steward and some other men came kissing the earth at the throne room door. When I said that Motecuzóma had barely got the news of the ships before Cortés did, I spoke literally. For the newcomers were two swift-messengers sent by Lord Patzinca, and they had been hurriedly brought from the mainland by the Totonaca knights to whom they had reported. Cortés glanced uncomfortably about the room; it was plain that he would have liked to take the men away and interrogate them in private; but he asked me if I would convey to all present whatever the messengers had to say.
The one who spoke first brought a message dictated by Patzinca: "Twenty of the winged ships, the biggest yet seen, have arrived in the bay of the lesser Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. From those ships have come ashore one thousand three hundred white soldiers, armed and armored. Eighty of them bear harquebuses and one hundred twenty bear crossbows, in addition to their swords and spears. Also there are ninety and six horses and twenty cannons."
Motecuzóma looked suspiciously at Cortés and said, "It seems quite a warlike force, my friend, just to escort you home."
"Yes, it does," said Cortés, himself looking less than delighted at the news. He turned to me. "Have they anything else to report?"
The other messenger spoke then, and revealed himself to be one of those tedious word rememberers. He rattled off every word overheard from Patzinca's first meeting with the new white men, but it was a monkey like babble of the Totonaca and Spanish languages, quite incomprehensible, owing to there having been no interpreters present to sort out the speeches. I shrugged and said, "Captain-General, I can catch nothing but two names frequently repeated. Your own and another which sounds like Narváez."
"Narváez here?" blurted Cortés, and he added a very coarse Spanish expletive.
Motecuzóma began again, "I will have the gold and gems brought from the treasury, as soon as your train of porters—"
"Pardon me," said Cortés, recovering from his evident surprise. "I suggest that you keep the treasure hidden and safe, until I can verify the intentions of these new arrivals."
Motecuzóma said, "Surely they are your own countrymen."
"Yes, Don Montezúma. But you have told me how your own countrymen sometimes turn bandit. Just so, we Spaniards must be chary of some of our fellow seafarers. You are commissioning me to carry to King Carlos the richest gift ever sent by a foreign monarch. I should not like to risk losing it to the sea bandits we call pirates. With your leave, I will go immediately to the coast and investigate these men."
"By all means," said the Revered Speaker, who could not have been more overjoyed if the separate groups of white men decided to go for each other's throats in mutual annihilation.
"I must move rapidly, by forced march," Cortés went on, making his plans aloud. "I will take only my Spanish soldiers and the pick of our allied warriors. Prince Black Flower's are the best—"
"Yes," said Motecuzóma approvingly. "Good. Very good." But he lost his smile at the Captain-General's next words:
"I will leave Pedro de Alvarado, the red-bearded man your people call Tonatíu, to safeguard my interests here." He quickly amended that statement. "I mean, of course, to help defend your city in case the pirates should overcome me and fight their way here. Since I can leave with Pedro only a small reserve of our comrades, I must reinforce them by bringing native troops from the mainland—"
And so it was that, when Cortés marched away eastward with the bulk of the white force and all of Black Flower's Acolhua, Alvarado was left in command of about eighty white men and four hundred Texcalteca, all quartered in the palace. It was the ultimate insult. During his winter-long residence there, Motecuzóma had been in a situation that was peculiar enough. But spring found him in the even more degrading position of living not just with the alien whites, but also with that horde of surly, glowering, not at all respectful warriors who were veritable invaders. If the Revered Speaker had seemed briefly to come alive and alert at the prospect of being rid of the Spaniards, he was again dashed down to morose and impotent despair when he became both host and captive of his lifelong, most abhorrent, most abhorred enemies. There was only one mitigating circumstance, though I doubt that Motecuzóma found much comfort in the fact: the Texcalteca were notably cleanlier in their habits and much better smelling than an equal number of white men.