Mexico (28 page)

In 1145, when the Cactus People were a definite threat, Tlotsin was thirty-three and married to a keen-eyed girl of twenty named Xolal, who was particularly sensitive to the danger posed by the invaders because her father had been sent as an ambassador to the Cactus People some years earlier when they were still some hundred miles to the north and they had promptly sacrificed him to their War God. At the time Xolal had wanted the king to dispatch a force to punish the murderers, but Tlotsin, who was then wooing her, argued: "They're barbarians! You've got to take into account that they don't know the customs of civilized states."

"They killed an ambassador," Xolal protested.

'They probably don't know what an ambassador is," Tlotsin rationalized.

"They're a hideous people and they worship a hideous god," Xolal said.

"Our scouts tell me there are only four or five thousand of them," the king said lightly. "Two generations ago they were living in caves."

But when, in 1146, the Cactus People sent an armed group within a few miles of the city and captured a band of Tlotsin's people, hauling all the men back to their camp to serve as living sacrifices, City-of-the-Pyramid was finally forced to acknowledge the existence of a powerful enemy.

"They worship a monstrous god," reported a man who had escaped from his captors. "He feeds only on human hearts.

Any man captured by them is stretched across an altar and his heart is ripped out while he is still breathing."

The escaped prisoner's description of the god did not so much terrify the Drunken Builders as fascinate them, and men began to speculate on what life would be like if the invaders triumphed. There was discussion of how it would feel to be flung across an altar with a knife at one's chest, and it was generally concluded that any god that could command such devotion must be more important than the pallid ones worshiped in City-of-the-Pyramid.

"There's only a handful of them," Tlotsin temporized, "and it isn't logical to suppose that they could cause trouble to a large city like ours."

Xolal, who made every effort to discover as much as she could about the enemy, became convinced that they did intend to occupy the high valley permanently, and she argued: "They are few now, and they have not yet crossed the mountains into our valley. Let us drive them back now, lest they invade our fields and, strengthened by our food supply, become too strong for us to oppose."

In fairness to King Tlotsin, it must be said that there was not much he could do, for during the golden age of the Drunken Builders there had been no knowledge of war and therefore no need for an army. Complacently Tlotsin took refuge in the thought, Something will happen and they will go away.

But when Xolal persisted in arguing for defensive action King Tlotsin produced a map that showed the high valley secure within its rim of hills and explained indulgently, "The Cactus People are here beyond the hills, and we are safe inside. Before they reach us they must pass Valley-of-Plenty, which has always been our outpost, and when they see how strong we are'-'--he pointed triumphantly at the distant valley--"their scouts will report how many we are and how few they are, and they will depart along this river."

To this reasoning Xolal replied, "Three years ago they were far away and we did nothing. Next year they will occupy Valley-of-Plenty and it will be theirs."

"If that occurs," the king replied resolutely, "we shall hav
e t
o do something."

In 1147, as Xolal had predicted, the Cactus People and their puissant god moved to the crest of the protecting hills, but to her surprise they did not attack Valley-of-Plenty. Instead the
y w
aited for their own meager crops to ripen, after which their priests decreed that anyone with even a slight physical defect must be killed off. Eighty of the best warriors were also sacrificed, and at the height of the religious frenzy thus induced, the Cactus People rushed through the passes and down into Valley-of-Plenty, capturing or killing all those at the Drunken Builder outpost. They sacrificed every one of their captives and rededicated the area as Valley-of-the-Dead, a name that has continued to this day.

"Now we have got to do something," King Tlotsin said, and he summoned his advisers, who argued back and forth futilely all through the winter of 1148. When the autumn came, more Drunken Builders were captured and there was another ghastly series of sacrifices, after which the Cactus People moved closer to the city.

Some of the younger men, encouraged by Xolal, proposed conscripting an army that would drive the invaders away, but King Tlotsin opposed this with determination. "We would only anger them," he cautioned, and the year progressed with still no decision, except that a delegation of ambassadors was dispatched. This time the Cactus People did not cut out the emissaries' hearts. "See!" Tlotsin said to his advisers. "They are becoming civilized."

"Did our ambassadors win any concessions?" Queen Xolal demanded.

"No," the king replied, "but at least they weren't sacrificed, and that's progress." The Cactus People made progress in another direction, too. When the crops were in, they moved even closer to the city.

The year 1149 was a critical one, for it became evident that if the Cactus People were to usurp any more fields the Drunken Builders would begin to experience shortages in food. Now something had to be done, so against his better judgment King Tlotsin authorized the formation of a battle corps that would march against the intruders and convince them that they must come no nearer the city. It was an exciting day when the corps assembled and its inexperienced generals fortified themselves with liberal drafts of pulque, which gave them all the courage they needed. There were banners and drums and flutes and ferocious-looking headdresses designed to frighten the enemy.

Some four thousand men marched out from City-of-the-Pyramid and against them the Cactus People dispatched seven hundred rock-hard warriors. Sustained by an absolute belief in their War God, these skilled warriors hacked their way right into the middle of the enemy army and with no great struggle carried off more than twelve hundred prisoners.

That afternoon, while the remnants of King Tlotsin's demoralized army were creeping back to the city, the Cactus People hauled their god to the scene of the battle, and while the appalled citizens of the city looked down from the terraces of their pyramid, the captives were lined up and led one by one to the altar, across which they were stretched by powerful priests while their hearts were ripped out and fed to the hungry War God. The citizens of City-of-the-Pyramid could identify their husbands and sons as they came before the awful deity, and they could hear their final shrieks of agony as the swift daggers plunged into their breasts. They could also see the smoking fires as they enveloped the god and the bowl of pulsating hearts that was constantly replenished.

The aftermath of this terrifying day could not have been predicted. The Cactus People made no effort to assault the city. They merely kept their god on the spot where he had gained a significant victory and from time to time his priests sacrificed whatever captives were taken on raids throughout the countryside. The harvest of 1149 was garnered and a thanksgiving celebration was held, at which over three hundred victims were sacrificed in plain view of any who wanted to watch from City-of-the-Pyramid. In 1150 new crops were planted and in the autumn of that year they were harvested to the accompaniment of a celebration fully as bloody as those that had preceded. The next year a new crop was planted, this time less than a hundred yards from the northern base of the pyramid.

Within the city a great debate was being waged. In his public speeches King Tlotsin maintained that within a year or so the Cactus People would go away, but sometimes when he drank in private with his closest advisers he would say in the fourth or fifth hour, "Now I see it all very clearly. We should have opposed them when they were camped beyond the hills. Before they captured our grain fields." But when his council asked him directly, "What shall we now do?" he never had any clear idea. He kept repeating: "I feel sure that sooner or late
r t
hey will go away."

Queen Xolal in these days moved among the people trying to make them rise to some supreme effort. She often argued, "Granted that we were defeated that first time, and granted that we lost some of our best men. Look at the Cactus People! Each year they willingly sacrifice many of their bravest warriors and each year they return stronger than before. We too could muster our strength." To her despair, her pleas went unheeded because the great snakeskin drum beyond the pyramid would begin to throb and the people would throng to the walls and rooftops to watch yet another gruesome scene of bloody sacrifice; becoming transfixed by the barbarity, they would wonder among themselves: "How many of us will they sacrifice when they capture the city?" And it was an appalling fact that as the sacrifices continued, the people of the city became increasingly engrossed in conjecturing when it was going to happen to them, and how it would feel, and how great the War God must be if he could command such devotion; so before Xolal could devise a plan to ward off disaster, and before the drunken king could make up his mind on what to do, the city had virtually surrendered from within.

In midsummer of the year 1151 the Cactus People simply walked into City-of-the-Pyramid and occupied all buildings. There was no fighting, no massacre, not even any negotiation. They came in not from the north, which would have disturbed their ripening crops, but from the east, where the roads were good.

July, August and September passed without a single Drunken Builder being killed by the Cactus People. They were, of course, pressed into service for harvesting the crops, and some six thousand were assigned the task of tearing down everything on top of the pyramid to make way for an imposing temple in which was to be seated the hideous statue of War God. Since the Cactus People admitted that, unlike the Drunken Builders, they were not skilled craftsmen, they appointed a team of the best local stone carvers to construct a new statue of War God, and it is interesting to note that we have on clay tablets fine portraits of the old version in wood and the new in stone--you can study them at the Palafox Museum in Toledo--and what is most notable is that in the new stone version every trace of the original god who had nourished these people in the caves is gone. There is a slight indication of a glittering fish, but the iridescence comes from jewels in the handle of a war club, and there is a hint of a quetzal feather, but it is really the hair of a victim. The new god who was to occupy the apex of the ancient pyramid was remorseless, warlike and terrifying; and he clasped between his knees a bowl of stone much deeper and wider than the original one.

As the end of harvest approached, and as the newly carved image of War God was installed in the temple atop the pyramid, a pall of nervous apprehension hung over the city and men whispered to one another: "I wonder if I'll be taken?"

When the harvest was in and all work on the pyramid had been completed, the great snakeskin drum began to throb and its echoes penetrated to the limits of the city. Gaunt priests, their ears pierced with cactus spines, their hair matted with human blood, appeared at the base of the pyramid, and scores of men were lined up at various points throughout the city. Then it became obvious to the horror of all that the entire corps of six thousand men who had worked on the pyramid was to be sacrificed. The number was almost too vast to comprehend, but the Cactus People had decided that in this greatest of all celebrations they must outdo themselves in expressing gratitude to their god. For such an occasion six thousand human hearts were not excessive.

The victims were paraded through the streets along which they had once reeled in drunken revelry, and their compatriots, watching them go, could only think, This must be a most powerful god who now sits atop our pyramid. There were gasps of surprise when the final procession formed and it was seen that at its head marched King Tlotsin, a tall, imposing Indian of thirty-nine--an ancestor of mine in direct line. That day, the chronicles tell us, he wore a kind of numbed look, but he also smiled. In a simpler time, when a king could drink as he liked and postpone decisions to another day, Tlotsin would have been an adequate ruler; even now as he marched to the base of the pyramid he failed to realize how wretchedly he had met the challenge of his reign. The Cactus People, willing to accommodate a captive king who would shortly initiate the installation of the new god, had allowed him as much pulque as he wished, and he had drunk generously. When, in the solemn procession, he passed some old friend he would nod in a kind of daze and pass on with his fatuous smile unchanged. He knew where he was marching, but he was able to erase that knowledge from his mind.

But when he came at last to the pyramid itself, leading his six thousand, he saw his beautiful queen, Xolal; he realized that she had been set aside as a prize for one of the Cactus People's leaders, and the foolish smile left his face. "Xolal," he mumbled, but his brain would not form the words he wished to say, and he could only look at her dumbly.

Breaking loose from the Cactus People who surrounded her, Xolal leaped to her husband's side and, standing before him as a shield, started to cry, "Men of the city! Defend yourselves at last!" Before she could continue her exhortations, an eagle warrior, his terrible mask in place, slammed his hand across her mouth. Biting the hand, she broke loose again and shouted: "Men! Men! You must resist" With a sweep of his obsidian dagger the eagle warrior cut Xolal's throat and silenced her forever. She fell backward against her husband, then slumped to the ground, but as she fell she trailed a line of blood down his body.