I said, "In my experience, Lord Speaker, one never really knows whether a prospective neighbor will be a treasure or a trial, until that neighbor has moved in to stay, and then it is too late to have regrets. I might liken it to an impetuous marriage. One can only hope."
Less than a year later, the neighbors moved in to stay. It was in the springtime of the year One Reed that another swift-messenger came, and again from the Olméca country, but that time bringing a most alarming report, and Motecuzóma sent for me at the same time he convened his Speaking Council to hear the news. The Cupilcatl messenger had brought bark papers documenting the sad story in word pictures. But, while we examined them, he also told us what had happened, in his own breathless and anguished words. On the day Six Flower, the ships had again floated on their wide wings to that coast, and not a few but a frightening fleet of them, eleven of them. By your calendar, reverend scribes, that would have been the twenty-fifth day of March, or your New Year's Day of the year one thousand five hundred and nineteen.
The eleven ships had moored off the mouth of The River of the Tabascoob, farther to the west than on the earlier visit, and they had disgorged onto the beaches uncountable hundreds of white men. All armed and sheathed with metal, those men had swarmed ashore—shouting "Santiago!," apparently the name of their war god—coming with the clear intent of doing more than admiring the local landscape and savoring the local foods. So the populace had immediately mustered their warriors—the Cupilco, the Coatzacuali, the Coatlicamac, and others of that region—some five thousand men altogether. Many battles had been fought in the space of ten days, and the people had fought bravely, but to no avail, for the white men's weapons were invincible.
They had spears and swords and shields and body coverings of metal, against which the obsidian maqualiuime shattered at first blow. They had bows that were contemptibly small and held awkwardly cross ways, but which somehow propelled short arrows with incredible accuracy. They had the sticks that spat lightning and thunder and put an almost trifling but death-dealing hole in their victims. They had metal tubes on large wheels, which even more resembled a furious storm god, for they belched still brighter lightning, louder thunder, and a spray of jagged metal bits that could mow down many men at once, like maize stalks beaten down by a hailstorm. Most wondrous and unbelievable and terrifying of all, said the messenger, some of the white warriors were beast-men: they had bodies like giant, hornless deer, with four hoofed legs on which they could gallop as fleetly as deer, while their two human arms wielded sword or spear to lethal effect, and while the very sight of them sent brave men scattering in fear.
You smile, reverend friars. But at that time, neither the messenger's tumbling words nor the crude Cupilco drawings conveyed to us any coherent idea of soldiers mounted on animals larger than any animal in these lands. We were equally uncomprehending of what the messenger called lion-dogs, which could run down a running man, or sniff him out of hiding, and rend him as terribly as a sword or jaguar could do. Now, of course, we have all become intimately acquainted with your horses and staghounds, and their utility in hunting or in battle.
When the combined Olméca forces had lost eight hundred men to death and about an equal number to severe wounds, said the messenger, and had in the meantime killed only fourteen of the white invaders, the Tabascoob called them all to retreat from the engagement. He sent emissary nobles carrying the gilt mesh flags of truce, and they approached the houses of cloth which the white men had erected upon the ocean beach. The nobles were surprised to find that they could communicate without having to use gestures, for they found that one of the white men spoke an understandable dialect of the Maya language. The envoys asked what terms of surrender the white men would demand, that a peace might be declared. One of the white men, evidently their chief, spoke some unintelligible words, and the Maya-speaking one translated.
Reverend scribes, I cannot testify to the exactitude of those words, since I repeat to you only what the Cupilcatl messenger said that day, and he of course had heard them only after their passing through several mouths and the several languages spoken by the several parties. But the words were these:
"Tell your people that we did not come to make war. We came seeking a cure for our ailment. We white men suffer from a disease of the heart, for which the only remedy is gold."
At that, the Snake Woman Tlacotzin looked up at Motecuzóma and said, in a voice meant to be encouraging, "That could be a valuable thing to know, Lord Speaker. The outlanders are not invulnerable to everything. They are afflicted with a curious disease which has never troubled any of the peoples in these lands."
Motecuzóma nodded hesitantly, uncertainly. All the old men of his Speaking Council followed his lead and likewise nodded as if reserving judgment. Only one old man in the room was rude enough to speak an opinion, and that of course was myself.
"I beg to differ, Lord Snake Woman," I said. "I have known numerous of our own people to show symptoms of that affliction. It is called greed."
Both Tlacotzin and Motecuzóma threw me peevish glances, and I said nothing else. The messenger was told to proceed with his story, of which there was not much more.
The Tabascoob, he said, had bought peace by heaping upon the sands every fragment of gold he could immediately order brought to that place: vessels and chains and god images and jewels and ornaments of wrought gold, even dust and nuggets and chunks of the raw metal yet unworked. The obviously commanding white man asked, almost off-handedly, where the people acquired that heart-soothing gold. The Tabascoob replied that it was found in many places in The One World, but that most of it was pledged to the ruler Motecuzóma of the Mexíca, hence the greatest store of it was to be found in his capital city. The white men had seemed much beguiled by that remark, and inquired where that city might be. The Tabascoob told them that their floating houses could get near to it by floating farther along the coast, west, then northwest.
Motecuzóma growled, "Nice helpful neighbors we already have."
The Tabascoob had also given the white commander a gift of twenty beautiful young women to be divided among himself and his ranking under-chiefs. Nineteen of the girls has been selected, by the Tabascoob himself, as the most desirable of all the virgins in that immediate region. They did not go too happily into the camp of the outlanders. But the twentieth girl had unselfishly volunteered herself to make the gift total twenty, which ritual number might influence the gods to send the Olméca no more such visitations. So, the Cupilcatl concluded, the white men had loaded their plunder of gold and young womanhood into their big canoes, then into their immeasurably bigger floating houses and, as all the people had fervently hoped, the houses had unfurled their wings and set off westward, on the day Thirteen Flower, keeping close along the shoreline.
Motecuzóma growled some more, while the elders of his Speaking Council huddled in a muttering conference, and while the palace steward ushered the messenger from the room.
"My Lord Speaker," one of the elders said with diffidence, "this is the year One Reed."
"Thank you," Motecuzóma said sourly. "That is one thing which I already knew."
Another old man said, "But perhaps the possible significance of it has escaped my lord's attention. According to at least one legend, One Reed was the year in which Quetzalcoatl was born in his human form, to become the Uey-Tlatoani of the Toltéca."