Free Feathered Serpent by Colin Falconer

were there for even the most obtuse priest to read. The owl men had prophesied:
If he comes on 1-crocodile he strikes the old men, the old women,
If on 1-Jaguar, 1-Deer, 1-Flower he strikes at children.
If on 1-Reed he strikes at kings ...
    Motecuhzoma stared at the shadows, lost in his own despair. Finally he remembered Tendile and the other lords, who were awaiting his answer.
    “Is there anything else you have to tell me?” he said.
    Another of Tendile’s retinue crept forward. He was holding a metal helmet, made of some shining metal that resembled silver. What is this?
    “One of the strangers gave us this head-dress,” Tendile said.
    Motecuhzoma examined it. It was similar to the helmet worn by Hummingbird on the Left, their own war-god.
    “He gave you this as a gift?” Motecuhzoma asked.
    “No, great Lord. He demanded that we return it, filled with gold.”
    “Gold,” Motecuhzoma said. “Why gold?”
    “They said it was to heal a sickness peculiar to their kind. Indeed, they ignored all our other gifts, the finest cloth and feather work and some exquisite pieces of jade. Only the gold seemed to excite them.”
    Perhaps that is why they have come, Motecuhzoma thought. He started to giggle. Perhaps there was an answer to this after all ...
    “You shall return to the coast tonight and give these strangers exactly what they ask. If it is gold they want, it is gold they shall have. We shall also discover if this Malinali’s Lord is truly Feathered Serpent or just a man, as you claim. There are ways we may divine the truth.”
      ———————
    After they had gone Motecuhzoma stared again at the pictures that had been painstakingly painted on the sheets of bark, and his fingers began to tremble uncontrollably.
    One Reed. A bad year for kings.
     
    San Juan de Ulúa
     
    A depressing place, just sand dunes with sparse patches of straw-coloured grass and a few groves of forlorn and wind-bowed palm trees. In the distance they could make out a range of blue mountains, dominated by a peak the local Indians called Orizaba, a volcanic caldera cloaked in great banks of cloud.
    The Indian slaves that Tendile left behind helped them make shelters from green branches and palm fronds and thatch. The naturales made their own camp a little way off, a shantytown built overnight to service the needs of the Spaniards. They cooked fish and turkeys over open fires and the women peeled fruit and prepared corn cakes under canopies of woven mats.
    For the first few days the Spaniards clustered around their own fires, shivering in the teeth of the northerly winds. Then quite suddenly the wind died away and the weather turned unbearably hot. They huddled in the shade of the few gnarled trees, slapping at the voracious clouds of tiny black insects that descended to feast on them and make their lives misery.
    Only Cortés seemed immune to the discomforts. Day after day he patrolled the dunes, staring at the forbidding range of mountains far to the west, and waited, and wondered, and planned.
     

      ———————

MALINALI
     
    Rain Flower pulls off her huipitl, the long tunic of sheer cotton she wears over her skirt. As she undresses I see there are dark, plum-coloured bruises on her arms and her breasts. A she wades into the cold, black water of the pool, she sees me stare. “My hairy lord is rough with me. I don’t think he means to be. He is big and clumsy. When he is in the cave he forgets how strong he is and how small I am.”
    She crouches down so that the water reaches her shoulders. I feel a sudden and powerful affection for her. In Potonchan Rain Flower was thought ugly. Her mother had neglected to hang a pearl from her cap when she was an infant and so she had not grown up with the crossed eyes that the Tabascans found so becoming in a woman. Rain Flower’s mother had in fact been Tiger Lip Plug’s elder wife and Rain Flower was only a few years younger than I. She was like a younger sister to me. Like