At the head of the eastern steps of the temple, as the king began the descent, the holy man knelt, and said,—
“For peace to his people let the wise Montezuma look to Quetzal’. Mualox gives him his blessing. Farewell.”
CHAPTER VI
THE CONQUEROR WILL COME
A few weeks more,—weeks of pain, vacillation, embassies, and distracted councils to Montezuma; of doubt and anxiety to the nobles; of sacrifice and ceremonies by the priests; of fear and wonder to the people. In that time, if never before, the Spaniards became the one subject of discourse throughout Anahuac. In the tianguez, merchants bargaining paused to interchange opinions about them; craftsmen in the shops entertained and frightened each other with stories of their marvellous strength and ferocity; porters, bending under burdens, speculated on their character and mission; and never a waterman passed an acquaintance on the lake, without lingering awhile to ask or give the latest news from the Holy City, which, with the best grace it could, still entertained its scourgers.
What Malinche—for by that name Cortes was now universally known—would do was the first conjecture; what the great king intended was the next.
As a matter of policy, the dismal massacre in Cholula accomplished all Cortes proposed; it made him a national terror; it smoothed the causeway for his march, and held the gates of Xoloc open for peaceful entry into Tenochtitlan. Yet the question on the many tongues was, Would he come?
And he himself answered. One day a courier ran up the great street of Tenochtitlan to the king’s palace; immediately the portal was thronged by anxious citizens. That morning Malinche began his march to the capital,—he was coming, was actually on the way. The thousands trembled as they heard the news.
After that the city was not an hour without messengers reporting the progress of the Spaniards, whose every step and halt and camping-place was watched with the distrust of fear and the sleeplessness of jealousy. The horsemen and footmen were all numbered; the personal appearance of each leader was painted over and over again with brush and tongue; the devices on the shields and pennons were described with heraldic accuracy. And though, from long service and constant exposure and repeated battles, the equipments of the adventurers had lost the freshness that belonged to them the day of the departure from Cuba; though plumes and scarfs were stained, and casques and breastplates tarnished, and good steeds tamed by strange fare and wearisome marches, nevertheless the accounts that went abroad concerning them were sufficiently splendid and terrible to confirm the prophecies by which they were preceded.
And the people, made swift by alarm and curiosity, out-marched Cortes many days. Before he reached Iztapalapan, the capital was full of them; in multitudes, lords and slaves, men, women, and children, like Jews to the Passover, scaled the mountains, and hurried through the valley and across the lakes. Better opportunity to study the characteristics of the tribes was never afforded.