Motecuzóma's rigid posture relaxed a little, clearly in relief. "Only fish," he muttered. "May the doltish Maya be damned to Mictlan! They could panic entire populations with their wild tales. I will see that the truth is instantly and widely told. Thank you, Knight Mixtli. Your explanation has served a most useful purpose. You deserve a reward. Let it be this. I invite you and your family to be among the select few who, with me, will ascend Huixachi Hill for the New Fire ceremony next month."
"I shall be honored, my lord," I said, and I meant it. The New Fire was lighted only once in the average man's lifetime, and the average man never got a close look at the ceremony, for Huixachi Hill could accommodate only a comparatively few spectators in addition to the officiating priests.
"Fish," Motecuzóma said again. "But you saw them far at sea. If they have only now come close enough inshore for the Maya to see them for the first time, they still could constitute an omen of some significance—"
I need not stress the obvious, reverend friars; I can only blush at the recollection of my brash skepticism. The two objects glimpsed by the Maya coast dwellers—what I so fatuously dismissed as one giant fish and one winged fish—were of course Spanish seagoing vessels under sail. Now that I know the sequence of long-ago events, I know that they were the two ships of your explorers de Solis and Pinzon, who surveyed but did not land upon the shore of Uluumil Kutz. I was wrong, and an omen it was.
That interview with Motecuzóma took place toward the end of the year, when the nemontemtin hollow days were approaching. And, I repeat, that was the year One Rabbit—by your count, the year one thousand five hundred and six.
During the unnamed empty days at the close of every solar year, as I have told you, our people lived in apprehension of the gods' smiting them with some disaster, but never did our people live in such morbid apprehension as then. For One Rabbit was the last year of the fifty and two composing a xiumolpili, or sheaf of years, which caused us to dread the worst disaster imaginable: the complete obliteration of mankind. According to our priests and our beliefs and our traditions, the gods had four times previously purged the world clean of men, and would do it again whenever they chose. Quite naturally, we assumed that the gods—if they did decide to exterminate us—would pick a fitting time, like those last days of the last year binding up a sheaf of years.
And so, during the five days between the end of the year One Rabbit and the beginning of its successor Two Reed—which, assuming Two Reed arrived and we survived to know it, would start the next sheaf of fifty and two years—it was fear as much as religious obedience which made most people behave in the approved meek and muted manner. People almost literally walked on tiptoe. All noise was hushed, all talking done in whispers, all laughter forbidden. Barking dogs, gobbling fowl, wailing babies were silenced insofar as possible. All household fires and lights were put out, as in the empty days that terminated every ordinary solar year, and all other fires were extinguished as well, including those in temples, on altars, in the urns set before the statues of the gods. Even the fire atop Huixachi Hill, the one fire that had been kept ever burning for the past fifty and two years, even that was put out.
In all the land there was not a glimmer of light during those five nights.
Every family, noble or humble, smashed all their clay vessels used for cooking and storage and dining; they buried or threw into the lake their maize-grinding metlatin stones and other utensils of stone or copper or even precious metals; they burned their wooden spoons and platters and chocolate beaters and other such implements. During those five days they did no cooking, anyway, and ate only scantily, and used segments of maguey leaves for dishes, and used their fingers to scoop and eat the cold baked camotin or congealed atóli mush or whatever else they had prepared in advance. There was no traveling, no trading or other business conducted, no social mingling, no wearing of jewelry or plumes or any but the plainest garments. No one, from the Uey-Tlatoani to the lowliest tlacotli slave, did anything but wait, and remain as inconspicuous as possible while he waited.
Though nothing noteworthy happened during those somber days, our tension and apprehension understandably increased, reaching its height when Tonatíu went to his bed on the fifth evening. We could only wonder: would he rise once more and bring another day, another year, another sheaf of years? I should say that the common folk could only wonder; it was the task of the priests to try what persuasion was in their power. I Shortly after that sundown, when the night was full dark, a whole procession of them—the chief priest of every god and goddess, major and minor, each priest costumed and masked and painted to the semblance of his particular deity—marched from Tenochtítlan and along the southern causeway toward Huixachi Hill. They were trailed by the Revered Speaker and his invited companions, all dressed in such humbly shapeless garments of sacking that they were unrecognizable as lords of high degree, wise men, sorcerers, whatever. Among them was myself, leading my daughter Nochipa by the hand.
"You are only nine years old now," I had told her, "and there is a very good chance that you will still be here to see the next New Fire, but you might not be invited to see that ceremony up close. You are fortunate to be able to observe this one."
She was thrilled by the prospect, for it was the first major religious celebration to which I had yet escorted her. Had it not been such a solemn occasion, she would have skipped merrily along at my side. Instead, she paced slowly, as was proper, wearing drab raiment and a mask fashioned by me from a piece of a maguey leaf. As we followed the rest of the procession through a darkness relieved only by the dim light of a sliver of moon, I was reminded of the time so long ago when I had been thrilled to accompany my own father across Xaltócan to see the ceremony honoring the fowler-god Atlaua.
Nochipa wore a mask concealing her whole face because, on that most precarious night of all nights, every child did. The belief—or the hope—was that the gods, if they did decide to expunge mankind from the earth, might mistake the disguised young folk for creatures other than human, and might spare them, and so there would be at least some seedling survivors to perpetuate our race. The adults did not try any such feeble dissimulation, but neither did they go to sleep resigned to the inevitable. Everywhere in the lightless land, our people spent that night upon their rooftops, nudging and pinching each other to keep awake, their gaze fixed in the direction of Huixachi Hill, praying for the blaze of the New Fire to tell them that the gods had once again deferred the ultimate disaster.
The hill called in our language Huixichtlan is situated on the promontory between lakes Texcóco and Xochimilco, just south of the town of Ixtapalápan. Its name came from its thickets of huixachi shrub which, at that season of the turning of the year, were just beginning to open their tiny yellow flowers of disproportionately great and sweet fragrance. The hill had little other distinction, since it was a mere pimple in comparison to the mountains farther distant. But, jutting up abruptly from the flat terrain around the lakes, it was the one eminence sufficiently high and near enough to all the lake communities to be visible to the inhabitants of them all—as far away as Texcóco to the east and Xaltócan to the north—and that was the reason for its having been selected, sometime far back in our history, as the site of the New Fire ceremony.