General Discussion

“You’ve seen the silvers defeat superior numbers in battle. They’re cunning and strong. Although we’re not warriors, we’ll soon fight alongside them. After we return to Tenochtitlan, visit your favorite woman, hunt, fish, sleep and eat to regain your strengths. Savages will soon enter the valley. While the furry leader sleeps with his whore, we’ll plan to hang their heads on our skull racks. Bring me the curly-haired beast.” A porter ran to him and handed him the prize.

            The chief merchant held it high by its hair. “This is the monster that has come to challenge our rule. Let him hear your fiercest war cries. Show him our Mexica courage.”

            Omotl stood with the merchant caravan and drew closer to Taponoc. The remains enraged the men like angry bees swarming an intruder who sought to steal their honey. They hurled insults and curses, shouted how they’d slaughter them in battle, and cut out their hearts. The dead head swung from side to side as if it disagreed. Its swollen, blackened tongue protruded past its lips in grotesque defiance.

            As the merchants’ curses and screams rang in his ears, Omotl broke away and raced toward his canoe. He swooped the limp snake from the ground, stretched it by its maw and tail to its full length. Once skinned, he would wrap the hide around the macuahuitl handle to remind him he was master of his fears. Despite the new and lethal swift beasts, shiny swords, curly-bearded, blue-eyed men, and fire sticks, Mexicas were beast-men as well. They wore ocelot and jaguar skin and eagle and crane feathers to fight with animal ferocity.

He would watch the enemy's ways, learn how he thinks, walks, drinks, sleeps, eats, shits, pisses and fucks. When they knew enough . . . Omotl snapped off the snake's head. With forceful pole plunges, snake wrapped around his neck, he smiled at the beastly war on the horizon.

His eyes on Tenochtitlan’s shiny temple-pyramids, the Eagle Warrior plunged the canoe pole into the lake, confident the hummingbird would slay the serpent.

CHAPTER 5

            The god Tlaloc rolled dark clouds over the eastern mountains as hovering harbingers for the bearded invaders and their allies. Ominous nimbus draped Iztaccíhuatl’s and Popocatépetl’s volcano cones in display of the god’s power over all below. The first drops splattered on Lake Texcoco’s surface, disturbing the waters with concentric circles. Cool winds gusted stronger, whipped rain to a sharp angle and chased fishermen to island safety.

At the first thunder crack, Teoxitl wrested his thoughts from the recent events and listened with fascination to Tlaloc's clap. Since his visit with Moctezuma, he had rested, eaten, slept, and recovered his strength and senses. He searched for theological sense in what he had seen and heard in Moctezuma’s garden.

A bolt strike electrified the air again as he rose from the Quetzalcoatl temple floor. He walked to the portal, formed into a snake's gaping maw, and gazed at the shower. Stretching out his arm in greetings, he strode into the rainfall. Wind caressed his hair away from his face.

            Tlaloc, we welcome your comforting waters in these troubled times. Your rain’s coolness will temper our fervent thoughts.

He walked down the pyramid steps and wandered through Tenochtitlan's Major Temple Square.

      *

            Zumal, sitting inside the Quetzalcoatl Temple, sat on a reed bench against the wall. Studying a religious calendar, she didn’t notice her teacher’s departure nor the arrival of the young woman.

            “You’re the one—the priest’s female student that people gossip about.” Water dripped down the visitor’s body to the clean temple floor. “I’ve seen you with him.”

            Zumal looked up, startled at the sudden intrusion. By her meager, maguey threaded dress, and short hair, she took her for a slave.

“Yes, he’s my teacher. Why do you ask?” She closed the codex, rose, and stood a foot taller over the slave. She leaned forward within a few inches of the girl’s nose. “You interrupt my studies and soil the temple. I search for his sacrificial victims. We’re short several females. He allows me to select the offerings.” She plunged an imaginary knife into her chest. “We eat our victims here.”  Zumal licked her lips. “You look delectable.”

            Slave girl cringed. “If so, I may be his last meal. They’ll poison him, if they can. I honor the priest and have risked my life by coming.”

            “Who conspires?” Zumal peered and stepped closer.

The slave girl trembled as she cast sidelong glances. She leaned forward.

            “I heard low voices in the garden outside the kitchen,” the slave girl whispered. “When I heard your teacher’s name, I peeked and saw priests from the Temple of Huitzilopóchtli. Please, take me to him.”

            “You’re certain?”

            “Yes.”

            “Have you told anyone else? Another slave?”

            “No one. Hurry, take me to him before I’m missed in the kitchen. The Tlatoani hosts the nobility. Your teacher is invited. They’ll try to kill him today.”

            “Follow me. Keep quiet.”

They walked through the circular temple past priestesses sweeping and washing the floor. Black-robed priests stood before Quetzalcoatl statues offering quail and copal incense.

“He’s not here.” Zumal grimaced at the thought he was wandering in the rain and lightning again.

            “I've been gone too long.” The servant girl tapped her feet. “I must go back to prepare and serve dinner. Please warn him. I beg you, don’t reveal me to anyone.”

            “Why so much concern for the priest?”

            “Cured me once with herbs and prayers from an unholy liking to sweet poppy. My master intended to drown me in the lake. Your teacher stopped him. Convinced him that with my youth and his remedies, I could recover. I did—under your teacher’s care.”

            Zumal nodded. She had seen him stop Mexicas in the market who looked ill and advised them how to regain their strength. His reputation as a healer spread throughout the Valley, especially among commoners.

            “Can the kitchen be entered from the canal?”

            “Yes,” the slave girl yelled back, her voice fading with her footsteps as she ran into the wind-whipped rain.

            Zumal stared at the floor, locked her hands behind her back and paced. Somehow, she had to protect him from that cult of killers. Despite his knowledge of their people's history, stellar paths, glyph writing, math, herbs, and the gods, he was still like a lost child in a cactus field where thorny priest-snakes slithered. Even if she revealed the plot to poison him, he might ignore her protests not to go to Moctezuma’s dinner. She must outwit the Huitzilopóchtli priests to save Teoxtil's life from their jealousy and rage. Her shrewdness and courage had saved her from the life of a temple sweeper and a priests’ cook.

            A thunder clap reminded Zumal about their first stormy encounter in the temple several years ago. Unlike other Mexica girls, she reluctantly learned feather weaving, meal preparation, and home-cleaning chores, traditional female lessons. Aware of his scholarly reputation, she sought out Teoxitl and pleaded he accept her as a student to the Calmecac, the boy's priest-preparation school.

He first laughed and told her it was impossible. He escorted her out and directed her to the telpochcalli to serve the priestesses.

She returned the next day, appealed again, and lay before him. Grabbing her hair, Teoxitl marched her back to her instructors and scolded them for their failure to curb her insolence. They explained she was an orphan, shuttled from one family to another. The chief priestess complained she had failed to learn normal Mexica discipline and respect for the divine roles of priests and priestesses. With fresh needle pierces, fasts, and beatings, they promised to mend her disobedience. If too stubborn, she would lie on the sacrificial slab as a holy ending to her rebellious spirit.

A week later, she followed the priest and watched him track stars from the Temple of Quetzalcoatl summit at Teotihuacan. When he discovered her praying at the plateau’s edge, he stared speechless.

She shouted she preferred he throw her off the pyramid and die mangled than to starve slowly in her hunger for his knowledge. With her hands in the air, she repeatedly brought them to her mouth as if to feed her with all he knew.

Recovered from his shock at her extraordinary persistence, Teoxitl said her plight bore a striking similarity to his own struggles to learn as an orphan. Despite his commoner birth, his quick mind earned him entrance to the elite Calmecac school reserved primarily for the children of nobility. He pointed to the sky and taught her the first lesson on how to map constellations.       Feathered Serpent temple priests complained to Teoxitl about the affront to their cult's integrity and charged blasphemy in sharing their secrets and skills with her. They worried other priests, especially those from the Temple of Huitzilopóchtli, would ridicule them as a women’s cult and intimated that perhaps his interest in her was more than religious.

Teoxitl ignored their protests, accusations, and rumors. Instead, he nurtured her with wit and spiritual solace. They grew into spiritual twins tethered with a common umbilical cord to the Feathered Serpent god.

The pair visited abandoned Teotihuacan pyramids, climbed monuments to the Moon, Sun, and Quetzalcoatl, and reveled in speculative reverie on the people who built the holy city. Its resplendent beauty left them heady with admiration for the mysterious, ancient architects. She’d recite and write about Quetzalcoatl's life and trials as Tula’s spiritual leader and his promise to return. By sunset, they’d arrive in Tenochtitlan imbued with a renewed faith in the advent of the Feathered Serpent God.