"No, my lord," I said, still smiling. "But I believe I know what it was they saw. May I ask a question?" He gave me a curt nod. "Those things mentioned—floating house, winged object—were they the same things, or separate?"
Motecuzóma scowled more darkly. "The messenger was gone before any more details could be elicited. He did say that two things had been sighted. I suppose one could have been a floating house and the other an object with wings. Whatever they were, they reportedly stayed well offshore, so it is likely that no observer could give any very accurate description. Why do you maintain that cursed grin?"
I tried to repress it, and said, "Those people did not imagine those things, Lord Speaker. They are merely too lazy to have investigated them. If any observer had had the initiative and courage to swim close, he would have recognized them as sea creatures—wonderful ones, and perhaps not a common sight, but no profound mystery—and the Maya messengers would not now be spreading unwarranted alarm."
"Do you mean you have seen such things?" said Motecuzóma, regarding me almost with awe. "A floating house?"
"Not a house, my lord, but a fish literally and honestly bigger than any house. The ocean fishermen call it the yeyemichi." I told of how I had once been helplessly adrift in a canoe upon the sea, when whole hosts of the monsters had floated close enough to endanger my frail craft. "The Revered Speaker may find it hard to credit, but if a yeyemichi had its head butting the wall outside my lord's window yonder, its tail would be flapping among the remains of the late Speaker Ahuítzotl's palace, clear on the other side of the great plaza."
"Say you so?" Motecuzóma murmured wonderingly, looking out the window. Then he turned again to me to ask, "And during your sojourn at sea, did you also encounter water creatures with wings?"
"I did, my lord. They flew in swarms about me, and at first I took them to be ocean insects of immense size. But one of them actually glided into my canoe, and I seized and ate it. Indisputably it was a fish, but just as indisputably it had wings with which it flew."
Motecuzóma's rigid posture relaxed a little, clearly in relief. "Only fish," he muttered. "May the doltish Maya be damned to Mictlan! They could panic entire populations with their wild tales. I will see that the truth is instantly and widely told. Thank you, Knight Mixtli. Your explanation has served a most useful purpose. You deserve a reward. Let it be this. I invite you and your family to be among the select few who, with me, will ascend Huixachi Hill for the New Fire ceremony next month."
"I shall be honored, my lord," I said, and I meant it. The New Fire was lighted only once in the average man's lifetime, and the average man never got a close look at the ceremony, for Huixachi Hill could accommodate only a comparatively few spectators in addition to the officiating priests.
"Fish," Motecuzóma said again. "But you saw them far at sea. If they have only now come close enough inshore for the Maya to see them for the first time, they still could constitute an omen of some significance—"
I need not stress the obvious, reverend friars; I can only blush at the recollection of my brash skepticism. The two objects glimpsed by the Maya coast dwellers—what I so fatuously dismissed as one giant fish and one winged fish—were of course Spanish seagoing vessels under sail. Now that I know the sequence of long-ago events, I know that they were the two ships of your explorers de Solis and Pinzon, who surveyed but did not land upon the shore of Uluumil Kutz. I was wrong, and an omen it was.
That interview with Motecuzóma took place toward the end of the year, when the nemontemtin hollow days were approaching. And, I repeat, that was the year One Rabbit—by your count, the year one thousand five hundred and six.
During the unnamed empty days at the close of every solar year, as I have told you, our people lived in apprehension of the gods' smiting them with some disaster, but never did our people live in such morbid apprehension as then. For One Rabbit was the last year of the fifty and two composing a xiumolpili, or sheaf of years, which caused us to dread the worst disaster imaginable: the complete obliteration of mankind. According to our priests and our beliefs and our traditions, the gods had four times previously purged the world clean of men, and would do it again whenever they chose. Quite naturally, we assumed that the gods—if they did decide to exterminate us—would pick a fitting time, like those last days of the last year binding up a sheaf of years.
And so, during the five days between the end of the year One Rabbit and the beginning of its successor Two Reed—which, assuming Two Reed arrived and we survived to know it, would start the next sheaf of fifty and two years—it was fear as much as religious obedience which made most people behave in the approved meek and muted manner. People almost literally walked on tiptoe. All noise was hushed, all talking done in whispers, all laughter forbidden. Barking dogs, gobbling fowl, wailing babies were silenced insofar as possible. All household fires and lights were put out, as in the empty days that terminated every ordinary solar year, and all other fires were extinguished as well, including those in temples, on altars, in the urns set before the statues of the gods. Even the fire atop Huixachi Hill, the one fire that had been kept ever burning for the past fifty and two years, even that was put out.
In all the land there was not a glimmer of light during those five nights.
Every family, noble or humble, smashed all their clay vessels used for cooking and storage and dining; they buried or threw into the lake their maize-grinding metlatin stones and other utensils of stone or copper or even precious metals; they burned their wooden spoons and platters and chocolate beaters and other such implements. During those five days they did no cooking, anyway, and ate only scantily, and used segments of maguey leaves for dishes, and used their fingers to scoop and eat the cold baked camotin or congealed atóli mush or whatever else they had prepared in advance. There was no traveling, no trading or other business conducted, no social mingling, no wearing of jewelry or plumes or any but the plainest garments. No one, from the Uey-Tlatoani to the lowliest tlacotli slave, did anything but wait, and remain as inconspicuous as possible while he waited.
Though nothing noteworthy happened during those somber days, our tension and apprehension understandably increased, reaching its height when Tonatíu went to his bed on the fifth evening. We could only wonder: would he rise once more and bring another day, another year, another sheaf of years? I should say that the common folk could only wonder; it was the task of the priests to try what persuasion was in their power. I Shortly after that sundown, when the night was full dark, a whole procession of them—the chief priest of every god and goddess, major and minor, each priest costumed and masked and painted to the semblance of his particular deity—marched from Tenochtítlan and along the southern causeway toward Huixachi Hill. They were trailed by the Revered Speaker and his invited companions, all dressed in such humbly shapeless garments of sacking that they were unrecognizable as lords of high degree, wise men, sorcerers, whatever. Among them was myself, leading my daughter Nochipa by the hand.
"You are only nine years old now," I had told her, "and there is a very good chance that you will still be here to see the next New Fire, but you might not be invited to see that ceremony up close. You are fortunate to be able to observe this one."
She was thrilled by the prospect, for it was the first major religious celebration to which I had yet escorted her. Had it not been such a solemn occasion, she would have skipped merrily along at my side. Instead, she paced slowly, as was proper, wearing drab raiment and a mask fashioned by me from a piece of a maguey leaf. As we followed the rest of the procession through a darkness relieved only by the dim light of a sliver of moon, I was reminded of the time so long ago when I had been thrilled to accompany my own father across Xaltócan to see the ceremony honoring the fowler-god Atlaua.