Aztec - Jennings Gary - Страница 241
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"You hear, Revered Brother!" Cuitlahuac stormed at Motecuzoma. "The creatures even dare to boast that they are coming to confront you personally! We have every excuse to swoop upon them, and now is the time to do it. As the Lord Mixtli predicted, they are nearly helpless in those mountains. We need not fear their animals or weapons. You can no longer say wait!"
"I say wait," Motecuzoma replied, imperturbable. "And I have good reason. Waiting will save many lives."
Cuitlihuac literally snarled, "Tell me: when in all of history has any single life ever been saved?"
Motecuzoma looked annoyed and said, "Very well, then, I speak of not cutting unnecessarily short the life of any Mexicatl soldier. Know this, Brother. Those outlanders are now approaching the eastern border of Texcala, the nation that has for so long repelled the fiercest assaults of even us Mexica. That land will not be any more ready to welcome another enemy of a different color coming from a different direction. Let the Texcalteca fight the invaders, and we Mexica will profit in at least two respects. The white men and their Totonaca will most surely be vanquished, but I also trust that the Texcalteca will suffer sufficient losses that we can strike them immediately afterward and, at last, defeat them utterly. If in the process we should find any white men still surviving, we will give them succor and shelter. It will appear to them that we have fought solely to rescue them. We will have won their gratitude and that of their King Carlos. Who can say what further benefits may accrue to us? So we will continue to wait."
If Motecuzoma had confided to Texcala's ruler Xicotenca what we had learned of the white men's fighting capabilities and limitations, the Texcalteca would wisely have pounced upon the white men somewhere in the steep mountains of which their nation" has an abundance. Instead, Xicotenca's son and war chief, Xicotenca the Younger, chose to make his stand on one of Texcala's few level grounds of great expanse. In the traditional manner, he arrayed his troops in preparation for fighting one of the traditional battles—in which both opponents poised their forces, exchanged the traditional formalities, and then rushed together to pit human strength against human strength. Xicotenca may have heard rumors that the new enemy possessed more than human strength, but he had no way of knowing that the new enemy cared not a little finger for our world's traditions and our established rules of war.
As we in Tenochtitlan heard later, Cortes walked out of a wood on the edge of that plain, leading his four hundred fifty white soldiers and by then about three thousand warriors of the Totonaca and other tribes, to find himself facing, on the other side of that ground, a solid wall of Texcalteca, at least ten thousand of them; some reports said as many as thirty thousand. Even if Cortes had been deranged by disease, as alleged, he would have recognized the formidability of his opponents. They were garbed in their quilted armor of yellow and white. They bore their many great feather banners, variously worked with the wide-winged golden eagle of Texcala and the white heron symbol of Xicotenca. They threateningly thumped their war drums and played the shrill war whistle on their flutes. Their spears and maquihuime flashed brilliant lights from the clean black obsidian that thirsted to be reddened.
Cortes must have wished then that he had better allies than his Totonaca, with their weapons made mostly of sawfish snouts and sharpened bones, their unwieldy shields which were nothing but the carapaces of sea turtles. But if Cortes was at all worried, he remained calm enough to keep his most outlandish weapon concealed. The Texcalteca saw only him and those of his army who were afoot. All the horses, including his own, were still in the wood, and at his command they stayed there, out of sight of the defenders of Texcala.
As tradition dictated, several Texcalteca lords stepped forward from their ranks and crossed the green plain between the two armies, and ceremoniously presented the symbolic weapons, the feather mantles and shields, to declare that a state of hostility existed. Cortes deliberately lengthened that ceremony by asking that the meaning of it be explained to him. And I should remark that Aguilar was by then seldom needed as an intermediate interpreter; the woman Malintzin had exerted herself to learn Spanish, and she had progressed rapidly; after all, bed is the best place to learn any language. So, after acknowledging the Texcalteca's declaration, Cortes made one of his own, unrolling a scroll and reading from it while Malintzin translated to the waiting lords. I can repeat it from memory, for he made the same proclamation outside every village, town, city and nation that shut itself against his approach. He first demanded that he be let enter without hindrance, and then he said:
"But if you will not comply, then, with the help of God, I will enter by force. I will make war against you with the utmost violence. I will bind you to the yoke of obedience to our Holy Church and our King Carlos. I will take your wives and children, and make them slaves, or sell them, according to His Majesty's pleasure. I will seize your belongings, and do you all the mischief in my power, regarding you as rebellious subjects who maliciously refuse to submit to their lawful sovereign. Therefore, all ensuing bloodshed and calamity are to be imputed to you, and not to His Majesty or to me or to the gentlemen who serve under me."
It can be imagined that the Texcalteca lords were not much pleased to be called subjects of any alien, or to be told that they were disobeying any alien in defending their own frontier. If anything, those haughty words only heightened their desire for bloody battle, and the bloodier the better. So they made no reply, but turned and stalked back the long distance to where their warriors were more and more loudly whooping and making their flutes shriek and their drums throb.
But that exchange of formalities had given Cortes's men ample time to assemble and position their ten big-mouthed cannons and the four smaller ones, and to charge them not with house-battering balls but with scraps of jagged metal, broken glass, rough gravel, and the like. The harquebuses were prepared and set upon their supports and aimed, and the crossbows were readied. Cortes quickly gave commands, and Malintzin repeated them to the allied warriors, and then she hurried to safety, back the way they had come. Cortes and his men stood or knelt while others, staying in the woods, sat upon their horses. And they all waited patiently, while the great wall of yellow and white suddenly surged forward, and a rain of arrows arced from it across the field between, and the wall resolved itself into a rush of thousands of warriors, beating their shields, roaring like jaguars, screaming like eagles.
Not Cortes nor any of his men moved to meet them in the traditional manner. He merely shouted, "For Santiago!" and the bellow of the cannons made the Texcalteca's war noises sound like the creaking of crickets in a thunderstorm. All the warriors in the first onrushing rank tore apart in bits of bone and blobs of flesh and spatters of blood. The men in the following rank simply fell, but fell dead, and for no immediately apparent reason, since the harquebuses' pellets and the crossbow's short arrows disappeared inside their thick quilted armor. Then there was a different kind of thunder, as the horsemen came at full gallop out of the wood, the staghounds running with them. The white soldiers rode with their spears leveled, and they skewered their quarry in the way that chilis are strung on a string, and when their spears could collect no more bodies, the riders dropped the spears and unsheathed their steel swords and rode flailing them so that amputated hands and arms and even heads flew in the air. And the dogs lunged and ripped and tore, and cotton armor was no protection against their fangs. The Texcalteca were understandably taken by surprise. Shocked, dismayed, and terrified, they lost their impetus and will to win; they scattered and milled about and wielded their inferior weapons desperately but to little use. Several times their knights and cuachictin rallied and regrouped them and led them in renewed charges. But each time the cannons and harquebuses and crossbows had again been prepared, and they let loose their terrible shredding and piercing projectiles again and again into the Texcalteca ranks, causing unspeakable devastation....
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