Aztec - Jennings Gary. Страница 264

Then the Spaniards suddenly seemed to give way, and fell back. But as they did so, they slid with them their sledge bridges, leaving our forward fighters teetering for balance on the edge of the sudden breach. One of the sledges, and several of our men, and several of the Spaniards too, fell into the lake. But the white men on the other side had little time to catch their breath. Our warriors were not heavily clothed and they were good swimmers. They began leaping deliberately into the water, swimming across the gap and climbing up the pilings below where the white men stood. At the same time, a rain of arrows came down on the Spaniards from both sides. Cuitlahuac had overlooked nothing; canoes full of archers were in the lake by then, converging on the causeway. Cortes had no choice but to make another fighting retreat. Since his horses were the biggest and most valuable and most vulnerable targets, he ordered a number of men to force the animals to plunge into the water, then to hang on to them as they swam for the mainland. Unbidden, Malintzin jumped with them, and was hauled by a swimming horse to the shore.

Then Cortes and his remaining men did their best to make an orderly withdrawal. Those who had crossbows and workable harquebuses discharged them at random into the darkness on both sides of the causeway, hoping to hit some of the canoe-borne attackers. The other Spaniards, alternately wielding their swords and sliding the remaining sledge, crept backward from the more and more numerous warriors who were successfully crossing that first break in the causeway. There were two more canoe passages between Cortes and the Tlacopan mainland. The sledge served to get him and his men across the next one, but there they had to abandon their makeshift bridge because their pursuers also got across it. At the next gap, the white men simply fought and walked backward until they toppled off the brink into the lake.

Actually, that close to the shore, the water was shallow enough that even a man incapable of swimming could make his way to land by a sort of series of hops, keeping his head-above water. But the white men wore heavy armor, and many of them were burdened with even heavier gold, and when they went into the water they flailed desperately to stay afloat. Cortes and their other comrades coming after them did not hesitate to step upon them in trying to leap across the breach. Thus many men who fell into the water sank, and the lowermost, I suppose, were stamped deep into the lake-bottom ooze. As more and more of the Spaniards fell and drowned, their bodies piled high enough to make a bridge of flesh, and it was by that means that the last surviving Spaniards got across.

Only one of them made the crossing without panic, with a flourish which our warriors so admired that they still speak of "Tonatiu's leap." When Pedro de Alvarado was pushed to the brink, he was armed only with a spear. He turned his back on his assailants, stabbed the spear into the heaving, drowning heap of his men in the water, and gave a mighty bound. Although he was heavily armored, probably wounded, and certainly weary, he vaulted across that gap from the near edge of the causeway all the way to the far edge... and to safety.

For our pursuing force stopped there. They had driven the last outlanders from Tenochtitlan into Tecpaneca territory, where they assumed the remainder would be killed or captured. Our warriors turned back along the causeway—where the boatmen were already bringing back and setting in place the missing spans—and on the way home, they did the work of Swallowers and Swaddlers. They picked up their own fallen fellows, and also those wounded white men who would live to serve as sacrifices, and with their blades they put a mercifully quick end to those Spaniards already near death.

Cortes and his accompanying survivors found a surcease from battle and a chance to rest in Tlacopan. The local Tecpaneca were not as good fighters as the Texcalteca whom Cortes had quartered upon them, but they had attacked with the advantage of surprise, and they did know their own local terrain. So, by the time Cortes reached that city, the Tecpaneca had driven his Texcalteca allies from Tlacopan north to Azcapotzalco and had them still on the run. Cortes and his companions had a time of reprieve in which to dress their wounds and assess their position and decide what to do next.

Among those still alive, Cortes at least had his chief under-officers: Narvaez and Alvarado and others—and his Malintzin—but his army was no longer an army. He had marched triumphantly into Tenochtitlan with something like one thousand five hundred other white men. He had just emerged from Tenochtitlan with fewer than four hundred—and about thirty horses, some of which had escaped from the plaza battle and swum all the way from the island. Cortes had no idea where his native allies were or how they were faring. The fact is that they too were in rout before the vengeful armies of The Triple Alliance. Except for the Texcalteca, who were then being pushed northward away from him, all his other forces, which had been stationed along the lakeshore to the south, were at that moment being driven northward to where he sat exhausted and morose in defeat.

It is said that Cortes did just that. He sat, as if he would never rise again. He sat with his back against one of the "oldest of old" cypress trees, and he wept. Whether he wept more for his crushing defeat or for the lost treasure, I do not know. But a fence has recently been put around that tree where Cortes wept, to mark it as a memorial of "the Sad Night." We Mexica, if we were still keeping histories, might have given a different name to that occasion—the Night of the Last Victory of the Mexica, perhaps—but it is you Spaniards who write the histories now, so I suppose that rainy and bloody night, by your calendar the thirtieth day of the month of June in the year one thousand five hundred and twenty, will forever be remembered as "La Noche Triste."

* * *

In many respects, that was a less than happy night for The One World too. The most unfortunate circumstance was that all our armies did not continue their pursuit of Cortes and his remaining white men and native supporters until they were slain to the last man. However, as I have said, the warriors of Tenochtitlan believed that their mainland allies would do just that, so they turned back to the island to devote the rest of the night to a celebration of what seemed a total victory. Our city's priests and most of its people were still engaged in that sham ceremony-of-distraction at the pyramid of Tlaltelolco, and they were only too pleased to move in mass to The Heart of the One World and hold a real ceremony of thanksgiving at the Great Pyramid. Even Beu and I, hearing the gladsome shouts of the returning warriors, left our house to attend. Even Tlaloc, as if better to watch his people's rejoicing, lifted his curtain of rain.

In normal times, we would not have dared to observe any kind of rite in the central plaza until every stone and statue and ornamentation had been newly scrubbed clean of every speck of dirt, every possible defilement, until The Heart of the One World shone bright for the gods' approval and admiration. But that night the torches and urn fires revealed the vast square to be a vast garbage heap. Everywhere lay dead bodies or parts of bodies, both white- and copper-skinned; also quantities of spilled entrails, gray-pink and gray-blue, hence indistinguishable as to origin. Everywhere lay broken and discarded weapons, and the excrement of frightened horses and of men who had incontinently defecated as they died, and the rancid bedding and clothing and other effects of the Spaniards. But the priests uttered no complaint about that foul setting for the ceremony, and the celebrants crowded in without showing too much disgust at the nasty things they trod on or in. We all trusted that the gods would not, that one time, take offense at the plaza's filthy condition, inasmuch as it was their enemies as well as ours whom we had defeated there.