Then Cortés and his remaining men did their best to make an orderly withdrawal. Those who had crossbows and workable harquebuses discharged them at random into the darkness on both sides of the causeway, hoping to hit some of the canoe-borne attackers. The other Spaniards, alternately wielding their swords and sliding the remaining sledge, crept backward from the more and more numerous warriors who were successfully crossing that first break in the causeway. There were two more canoe passages between Cortés and the Tlácopan mainland. The sledge served to get him and his men across the next one, but there they had to abandon their makeshift bridge because their pursuers also got across it. At the next gap, the white men simply fought and walked backward until they toppled off the brink into the lake.
Actually, that close to the shore, the water was shallow enough that even a man incapable of swimming could make his way to land by a sort of series of hops, keeping his head-above water. But the white men wore heavy armor, and many of them were burdened with even heavier gold, and when they went into the water they flailed desperately to stay afloat. Cortés and their other comrades coming after them did not hesitate to step upon them in trying to leap across the breach. Thus many men who fell into the water sank, and the lowermost, I suppose, were stamped deep into the lake-bottom ooze. As more and more of the Spaniards fell and drowned, their bodies piled high enough to make a bridge of flesh, and it was by that means that the last surviving Spaniards got across.
Only one of them made the crossing without panic, with a flourish which our warriors so admired that they still speak of "Tonatíu's leap." When Pedro de Alvarado was pushed to the brink, he was armed only with a spear. He turned his back on his assailants, stabbed the spear into the heaving, drowning heap of his men in the water, and gave a mighty bound. Although he was heavily armored, probably wounded, and certainly weary, he vaulted across that gap from the near edge of the causeway all the way to the far edge... and to safety.
For our pursuing force stopped there. They had driven the last outlanders from Tenochtítlan into Tecpanéca territory, where they assumed the remainder would be killed or captured. Our warriors turned back along the causeway—where the boatmen were already bringing back and setting in place the missing spans—and on the way home, they did the work of Swallowers and Swaddlers. They picked up their own fallen fellows, and also those wounded white men who would live to serve as sacrifices, and with their blades they put a mercifully quick end to those Spaniards already near death.
Cortés and his accompanying survivors found a surcease from battle and a chance to rest in Tlácopan. The local Tecpanéca were not as good fighters as the Texcalteca whom Cortés had quartered upon them, but they had attacked with the advantage of surprise, and they did know their own local terrain. So, by the time Cortés reached that city, the Tecpanéca had driven his Texcalteca allies from Tlácopan north to Azcapotzálco and had them still on the run. Cortés and his companions had a time of reprieve in which to dress their wounds and assess their position and decide what to do next.
Among those still alive, Cortés at least had his chief under-officers: Narváez and Alvarado and others—and his Malintzin—but his army was no longer an army. He had marched triumphantly into Tenochtítlan with something like one thousand five hundred other white men. He had just emerged from Tenochtítlan with fewer than four hundred—and about thirty horses, some of which had escaped from the plaza battle and swum all the way from the island. Cortés had no idea where his native allies were or how they were faring. The fact is that they too were in rout before the vengeful armies of The Triple Alliance. Except for the Texcalteca, who were then being pushed northward away from him, all his other forces, which had been stationed along the lakeshore to the south, were at that moment being driven northward to where he sat exhausted and morose in defeat.
It is said that Cortés did just that. He sat, as if he would never rise again. He sat with his back against one of the "oldest of old" cypress trees, and he wept. Whether he wept more for his crushing defeat or for the lost treasure, I do not know. But a fence has recently been put around that tree where Cortés wept, to mark it as a memorial of "the Sad Night." We Mexíca, if we were still keeping histories, might have given a different name to that occasion—the Night of the Last Victory of the Mexíca, perhaps—but it is you Spaniards who write the histories now, so I suppose that rainy and bloody night, by your calendar the thirtieth day of the month of June in the year one thousand five hundred and twenty, will forever be remembered as "La Noche Triste."
* * *
In many respects, that was a less than happy night for The One World too. The most unfortunate circumstance was that all our armies did not continue their pursuit of Cortés and his remaining white men and native supporters until they were slain to the last man. However, as I have said, the warriors of Tenochtítlan believed that their mainland allies would do just that, so they turned back to the island to devote the rest of the night to a celebration of what seemed a total victory. Our city's priests and most of its people were still engaged in that sham ceremony-of-distraction at the pyramid of Tlaltelólco, and they were only too pleased to move in mass to The Heart of the One World and hold a real ceremony of thanksgiving at the Great Pyramid. Even Béu and I, hearing the gladsome shouts of the returning warriors, left our house to attend. Even Tlaloc, as if better to watch his people's rejoicing, lifted his curtain of rain.
In normal times, we would not have dared to observe any kind of rite in the central plaza until every stone and statue and ornamentation had been newly scrubbed clean of every speck of dirt, every possible defilement, until The Heart of the One World shone bright for the gods' approval and admiration. But that night the torches and urn fires revealed the vast square to be a vast garbage heap. Everywhere lay dead bodies or parts of bodies, both white- and copper-skinned; also quantities of spilled entrails, gray-pink and gray-blue, hence indistinguishable as to origin. Everywhere lay broken and discarded weapons, and the excrement of frightened horses and of men who had incontinently defecated as they died, and the rancid bedding and clothing and other effects of the Spaniards. But the priests uttered no complaint about that foul setting for the ceremony, and the celebrants crowded in without showing too much disgust at the nasty things they trod on or in. We all trusted that the gods would not, that one time, take offense at the plaza's filthy condition, inasmuch as it was their enemies as well as ours whom we had defeated there.
I know it has always distressed you, reverend scribes, to hear me describe the sacrifice of any human beings, even the heathens despised by your Church, so I will not dwell on the sacrifice of your own Christian countrymen, which commenced when the sun Tonatíu began to rise. I will only remark, though it will make you think us a very foolish people, that we also sacrificed the forty or so horses which the soldiers had left behind—because, you see, we could not be sure that they were not also Christians of a sort. I might say, also, that the horses went to their Flowery Deaths much more nobly than did the Spaniards, who struggled while they were being undressed, and cursed while they were dragged up the staircase, and cried like children when they were bent backward on the stone. Our warriors recognized some of the white men who had most bravely fought them, so, after those men died, their thighs were cut for broiling and...