"When you do kill a wild animal, Mixtli, you need not carry and age the meat until it loses it toughness and gamy flavor. Wrap the meat in the leaves of a papaya tree and it will be rendered tender and savory overnight."
"Be wary of the women in lands where Mexíca armies have raided. Some of those women were so maltreated by our soldiers, and bear such a grudge, that they have deliberately let their parts become infected with the dread disease nanaua. Such a woman will couple with any passing Mexícatl to get her revenge, so that he will eventually suffer the rotting away of his tepúli and his brain."
"If you should run out of bark paper for keeping your accounts, simply pluck the leaves of any grapevine. Write on them with a sharp twig, and the white scratches on the green leaves are as enduring as paint on paper."
Very early in the morning of the day One Serpent, we left Tenochtítlan: Cozcatl, Blood Glutton, and I—and our twelve slaves under their tumplined burdens, and the pack of plump little dogs frisking about our feet. We set off along the causeway that leads southward across the lake. To our right, to the west, on the nearest point of the mainland, rose the mount of Chapultepec. On its rock face, the first Motecuzóma had caused his likeness to be carved in giant size, and every subsequent Uey-Tlatoani had cumulated his example. According to report, Ahuítzotl's immense portrait there was almost finished, but we could make out no detail of any of the sculptured reliefs, because that hill was not yet in daylight. The month was our Panquetzaliztli, when the sun rises late and well to the southeast, from directly behind the peak of Popocatepetl.
When we first stepped onto the causeway, there was nothing to be seen in that direction but the usual morning fog glowing with the opal light of imminent dawn. But slowly the fog thinned, and gradually the massive but shapely volcano became discernible, as if it were moving forward from its eternal place and coming toward us. When the veil of mist all dissipated, the mountain was visible in its entirety. The snow-covered cone radiated a glorious halo from the sun behind it. Then, seemingly from the crater itself, Tonatíu bounded upward and the day came, the lake glittering, the lands all around washed with pale gold light and pale purple shadows. At the same instant, the incense-burning volcano exhaled a gout of blue smoke which rose and billowed into the form of a gigantic mushroom.
It had to be a good omen for our journey: the sun blazing on Popocatepetl's snowy crest and making it gleam like white onyx encrusted with all the jewels of the world, while the mountain itself saluted with that lazily climbing smoke, saying:
"You depart, my people, but I remain, as I always have and always will, a beacon to guide your safe return."
I H S
S.C.C.M.
Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos, Our Lord King:
Royal and Imperial Majesty, our Revered Ruler: from the City of Mexíco, capital of New Spain, this second day after Rogation Sunday in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty, greeting.
Regarding the query in Your Esteemed Majesty's most recent letter, we must confess ourselves unable to report to Your Majesty the exact number of Indian prisoners sacrificed by the Aztecs on that occasion of "dedicating" their Great Pyramid, more than forty years ago. The pyramid is long gone now, and so are any records of that day's victims, if indeed any count was ever kept.
Our Aztec chronicler of that occasion, present on that occasion, is himself unable to set the number closer than "thousands"—but it is possible that the old charlatan exaggerates the figure in order to make that day (and that edifice) seem more historically important. Our precursors here, the Franciscan missionary friars, have variously estimated the number of that day's sacrifices at anywhere from four thousand to eighty thousand. But those good brothers, too, may have inflated the figure, perhaps unconsciously influenced by their sheer revulsion at such an occurrence, or perhaps to impress upon us, their new-come Bishop, the inherent bestiality of the native population.
We hardly require any exaggeration to persuade us of the Indians' inborn savagery and depravity. We readily believe it, for we have the daily evidence of this storyteller whose presence we endure at Your Most Magnificent Majesty's behest. Over these past months, his few utterances of any value or interest have been woefully outweighed by his vile and venereous maunderings. He has nauseated us by interrupting his accounts of solemnly intended ceremonies, significant travels, and momentous events, simply to dwell on some transient lust—his own or anybody else's—and minutely to describe the gratification of it, in all the physically possible ways, in preferably infructuous ways, in often disgusting and defiling ways, including that perversion of which St. Paul said, "Let it not so much as be named among you."
Given what we have learned from him of the Aztec character, we can readily believe that the Aztecs would willingly have slaughtered eighty thousand of their fellows at the Great Pyramid, and in one day, except that the feat would have been impossible. Even if the executing priests had worked unceasingly around the clock, they would have to kill fifty and five men every minute during those twenty and four hours, a rate of nearly one per second. And even the lesser estimates of the number of victims are hard to credit. Having ourself had some experience of mass executions, we find it difficult to believe that such primitive people as these could have managed the disposal of many thousands of corpses before they putrefied and engendered a citywide pestilence.
However, whether the number butchered that day had been eighty thousand, or a tenth of that figure, a hundredth, a thousandth of that figure, it still would be execrable to any Christian and a horror to any civilized person, that so many should have died in the name of a false religion and to the glory of demonic idols. Wherefore, at our instigation and command, Sire, in the seventeen months since our arrival here, there have been destroyed five hundred thirty and two temples of various sizes, from elaborate structures on high pyramids to simple altars erected inside natural caves. There have been destroyed in excess of twenty and one thousand idols of various sizes, from monstrous carved monoliths to small clay household figurines. To none of those will there ever again be a human sacrificed, and we will continue to seek out and cast down others as the borders of New Spain expand.
Even were it not the mandate and function of our office, it would still be our foremost intent: to ferret out and defeat the Devil in every guise he assumed here. In this regard, we invite Your Majesty's particular attention to our Aztec chronicler's latest claim—in the pages next following—his claim that certain of the heathens in the southern part of this New Spain had already recognized some sort of a single Almighty Lord and a seeming twin to the Holy Cross, well before the coming of any missionaries of our Mother Church. Your Majesty's chaplain is inclined to take the information with a measure of dubiety, frankly because we have such a low opinion of the informant.
In Spain, Sire, in our offices as Provincial Inquisitor of Navarre and as Guardian of the miscreants and mendicants at the Reform Institution of Abrojo, we met too many incorrigible reprobates not to recognize another, whatever the color of his skin. This one, in the rare moments when he is not obsessed by the demons of concupiscence, evinces all the other most common human faults and fallibilities—some of them, in his case, egregious—and others besides. We take him to be just as duplicitous as those despicable Marrano Jews of Spain, who have submitted to Baptism and attend our churches and even eat pig meat, but still in secret maintain and practice their forbidden Judaic worship.