"No, no!" Aguilar shouted yet again, when I ate the thing. "This is unthinkable! You cannot receive the Sacrament!
He regarded me with the same expression of horror that I see right now on Your Excellency's face. I am sorry for my impulsive and shocking behavior. But you must remember that I was only an ignorant pagan then, and I was concerned with hurrying to save a girl's life. I pressed some of the little disks into the doctor's hand and told him:
"This is god food, magic food, and easy to eat. You can force them into her mouth without the risk of choking her."
He went off at a run, or as much of a run as his dignity would permit—
In much the way that His Excellency has just now done.
I clapped Aguilar companionably on the shoulder and said, "Forgive me for taking the matter out of your hands. But if the girl is cured, you will get the credit, and you will be much honored by these people. Now let us find Guerrero and sit and talk some more about your people."
There were still many things I wished to learn from Jeronimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero. And, since by then we could converse with fair comprehension, albeit haltingly, they were equally curious about things in these lands. They asked some questions that I pretended not to understand: "Who is your King? Does he command great armies? Does he possess great riches of gold?" And some questions that I truly did not understand: "Who are your Dukes and Counts and Marquises? Who is the Pope of your Church?" And some questions that I daresay no one could answer: "Why do your women have no hair down there?" So I warded off their questions by asking my own, and they answered all of them with no perceptible hesitation or suspicion or guile.
I could have stayed with them for at least a year, improving my grasp of their language and constantly thinking of new things to ask. But I made the precipitate decision to leave their company when, two or three days after our visit to the ailing girl, the physician came to me and silently beckoned. I followed him to that same hut, and looked down at the girl's dead face, hideously bloated beyond recognition and flushed to a gruesome purple color.
"All her blood vessels burst and her tissues swelled," said the doctor "including those inside her nose and mouth. She died in an agony of simply trying to breathe." He added disparagingly, "The god food you gave me worked no magic."
I asked, "And how many sufferers have you cured, Lord Physician, without recourse to that magic?"
"None," he sighed, and his pomposity deflated. "Nor have any of my colleagues saved a single patient. Some die like this, of strangulation. Some die with a gush of blood from the nose and mouth. Some die in raving delirium. I fear that all will die, and die miserably."
Looking at the ruin of what had been quite a pretty child, I said, "She told me, this very girl, that only a vulture could take pleasure from the white men. She must have had a true premonition. The vultures will now be pleased to gorge on her carrion, and her dying was somehow the doing of the white men."
When I returned to the palace and reported to Ah Tutal, he said emphatically, "I will no longer have the diseased and unclean strangers here!" I could not make out whether his crossed eyes glared at me or past me, but they were undeniably angry. "Do I let them go away in their canoe, or do you take them to Tenochtítlan?"
"Neither," I said. "And do not kill them either, Lord Mother, at least until you receive permission from Motecuzóma. I would suggest that you get rid of them by giving them into slavery. Give them to the chiefs of tribes well distant from here. The chiefs should feel flattered and honored by such gifts. Not even the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca has a white slave."
"Um... yes..." Ah Tutal said thoughtfully. "There are two chiefs I particularly dislike and distrust. It would not grieve me should the white men bring misery on them." He regarded me more kindly. "But you were sent all this way, Knight Ek Muyal, to find the outlanders. What will Motecuzóma say when you return empty-handed?"
"Not quite empty-handed," I said. "I will take back at least the box of god food and the little blue prayers., and I have learned many things to tell to Motecuzóma." A sudden thought struck me. "Oh, yes, Lord Mother, there could be one other thing to show him. If any of your females who lay with the white men should prove pregnant, and if they do not fall victim to the small pocks—well, if there are offspring, send them to Tenochtítlan. The Revered Speaker can put them on display in the city menagerie. They ought to be monsters unique among monsters."
Word of my returning to Tenochtítlan must have preceded me by several days, and Motecuzóma must certainly have been simmering with impatience to know what news—or what visitors—I might be bringing. But he was the same old Motecuzóma, and I was not ushered immediately into his presence. I had to stop in the corridor outside his throne room, and change from my Eagle Knight costume into the sackcloth of a supplicant, and then do the ordained adulatory ritual of kissing the earth all the way across the chamber to where he sat between the gold and silver gongs. Despite his cool and unhurried reception of me, though, he was obviously determined to be the first to hear my report—perhaps the only one to hear—for the other members of his Speaking Council were not present. He did allow me to dispense with the formality of speaking only when queried, and I told him all that I have thus far told you, reverend friars, and a few other things I had learned from your two countrymen:
"As best I can calculate, Lord Speaker, it was about twenty years ago that the first floating houses, called ships, set out from that distant land of Spain to explore the ocean to the west of it. They did not then reach our coast because it seems there are a great many islands, large and small, between here and Spain. There were people already resident on those islands and, from the description, I take them to have been something like the barbaric Chichimeca of our northern lands. Some of those islanders fought to repel the white men, some of them meekly allowed the incursion, but all by now have been made subject to those Spaniards and their King. During the past twenty years, then, the white men have been occupied with settling colonies on those islands, and plundering their resources, and trading between the islands and their Spanish homeland. Only a few of their ships, moving from one island to another, or idly exploring, or blown astray by the wind, have until now even glimpsed these lands. We might hope that the islands will keep the white men busy for many more years, but I beg leave to doubt it. Even the biggest island is only an island, therefore limited in riches worth taking and land worth populating. Also, the Spaniards seem insatiable both in their curiosity and in their rapacity. They are already seeking beyond the islands for new discoveries and new opportunities. Soon or later, their seeking will bring them to these lands. It will be as the Revered Speaker Nezahualpili foretold: an invasion, for which we had best prepare."
"Prepare!" snorted Motecuzóma, probably stung by the memory of Nezahualpili's having supported that prophecy by winning the tlachtli contest. "That aged fool prepares by sitting down and sitting still. He will not even help me war against the insufferable Texcalteca."
I did not remind him of what else Nezahualpili had said: that all our peoples should cease the perpetuation of old enmities and unite against that impending invasion.
"Invasion, you said," Motecuzóma went on. "You also said that those two outlanders came without weapons and totally defenseless. It would imply an unusually peaceable invasion, if any."
I said, "What weapons might have gone down with their flooded ship, they did not confide. They may need no weapons at all—not weapons of the sort we know—if they can inflict a killing disease to which they themselves are casually indifferent."