But Hualpa interfered. “No. He still believes Malinche a god. Let him alone! I can use him.” Then he spoke to the merchant. “Hear me, my friend, and I will read. If I err, stop me.”
“Read, read!” went up on all sides.
Hualpa turned to the group as if studying it. Around him fell the silence of keen expectancy.
“Thus writes Huitzil’, greatest of gods, to the children of Anahuac, greatest of peoples!”—so Hualpa began. “‘The strangers in Tenochtitlan are my enemies, and yours, O people. They come to overthrow my altars, and make you a nation of slaves. You have sacrificed and prayed to me, and now I say to you, Arise! Take arms before it is too late. Malinche and his followers are but men. Strike them, and they will die. To convince you that they are not gods, lo! here is one of them dead. So I say, slay them, and everything that owns them master, even the beasts they ride!’—Ho, friend, is not that correct?”
“So I would have read,” said the merchant.
“Praised be Huitzil’!” cried Hualpa, devoutly.
“Live the good god of our fathers! Death to the strangers!” answered the people.
And amid the stir and hum of many voices, the comrade of the ’tzin, listening, heard his words repeated, and passed from man to man; so that he knew his mission done, and that by noon the story of the effigy would be common throughout the city, and in flight over the valley, with his exposition of its meaning accepted and beyond counteraction.
After a while the Chalcan caught his arm, saying, “The smell is dreadful to a cultivated nose sharpened by an empty stomach. Snuff for one, breakfast for the other. Let us go.”
Hualpa followed him.