"That quaint diet you will remember fondly," said Cuautemoc, "when your belly has Spanish steel in it instead."

With the boats keeping our warriors pent on our island, Cortés's land troops resumed their march around the western curve of the mainland and, one after another, the cities there were forced to surrender. First to fall was Tepeyáca, our nearest neighbor on the northern headland, then the southern promontory towns of Ixtapalápan and Mexicaltzínco. Then Tenayúca in the northwest, and Azcapotzálco. Then Coyohuacan in the southwest. The circle was closing, and we in Tenochtítlan no longer required quimichime spies to tell us of what was happening. As our mainland allies fell or surrendered, numbers of their warriors survived to flee to our island, under cover of night, either coming in acaltin and managing to elude the patrolling battle boats, or sneaking across, the causeways and swimming the gaps in them, or swimming all the long way across the water.

On some days, Cortés was astride his horse She-Mule, directing the implacable progress of his land forces. On other days, he was in his boat La Capitana, directing with signal flags the movements of his other craft and the discharge of their weapons, killing or dispersing any warriors who showed themselves on the shore of the mainland or on our island's truncated causeways. To fend off those harrying craft, we on Tenochtítlan contrived the only defense possible. Every usable piece of wood on the island was sharpened at one end, and divers took those pointed stakes underwater and fixed them firmly, angled outward, just under the surface of the shallows all about the island. Had we not done that, Cortés's battle boats could have come right into our canals and to the city's very center. The defense proved its worth when one of the boats one day moved close, apparently intending to tear up some of our food-growing chinampa, and impaled itself on one or more of those stakes. Our warriors immediately sent flocks of arrows at it, and may have killed some of the occupants before they worked the boat loose and retreated to the mainland to patch it. Thereafter, since the Spanish boatmen had no way of knowing how far from the island our sharp stakes were planted, they kept a discreet distance.

Then Cortés's land troops began to find their cannons which our men had tumbled into the lake during the Sad Night—because such heavy objects could not be thrown very far—and they began retrieving them. The immersion had not, as we might have hoped, ruined the cursed things. They needed only to be cleaned of mud and dried and recharged to make them workable again. As they were recovered, Cortés had the first thirteen of them mounted, one apiece, in his battle boats, and those boats took up positions offshore of the cities where his troops were fighting, and there discharged their lightning and thunder and rain of man-killing projectiles. Unable to defend themselves any longer, when simultaneously beset from the front and from the side, the cities had to surrender, and when the last of them surrendered—Tlácopan, capital of the Tecpanéca, third bastion of The Triple Alliance—the encircling arms of Cortés's land forces met and joined.

His battle boats were no longer needed to support the troops ashore, but, the very next day, they were moving about the lake again and discharging their cannons. We on the island could watch them, and for a while we could not understand their intent, since they were aiming neither at us nor at any apparent targets on the mainland. Then, when we heard and saw the crash of a cannon ball's destructive impact, we understood. The heavy projectiles battered first the old aqueduct from Chapultepec, then the one built by Ahuítzotl from Coyohuacan, and they broke them both.

The Snake Woman said, "The aqueducts were our last connections to the mainland. We are now as helpless as a boat adrift without oars on a stormy sea full of evil monsters. We are surrounded, unprotected, fully exposed. Every other nearby nation which has not voluntarily joined the white men has been overrun by them and now does their bidding. Except for the fugitive warriors among us, there is no one but us—the Mexíca alone—against the entire One World."

"That is fitting," Cuautemoc said calmly. "If it should be our tonáli not to be victorious at last, then let The One World forever remember—that the Mexíca were the last to be vanquished."

"But Lord Speaker," pleaded the Snake Woman, "the aqueducts were also our last link to life. We might have fought for a time without fresh food, but for how long can we fight without drinkable water?"

"Tlacotzin," said Cuautemoc, as gently as a good teacher addressing a backward student. "There was another time—long ago—when the Mexíca stood alone, in this very place, unwanted and detested by all other peoples. They had only weeds to eat, only the brackish lake water to drink. In those dismally hopeless circumstances, they might well have knelt to their surrounding enemies, to be scattered or absorbed, to be forgotten by history. But they did not. They stood, and they stayed, and they built all this." He gestured with his hand to encompass the whole splendor of Tenochtítlan. "Whatever the end is to be, history cannot forget them now. The Mexíca stood. The Mexíca stand. The Mexíca will stand until they can stand no longer."

After the aqueducts, our city was the target of the cannons, those repositioned on the mainland and those mounted on the boats which constantly circled the island. The iron balls coming from Chapultepec were the most damaging and frightening, for the white men had hauled some of their cannons all the way to the crest of that hill and from there they could send the balls flying in a high arc so that they dropped almost directly downward, like great iron raindrops, on Tenochtítlan. One of the very first to fall in the city, I might remark, demolished the temple of Huitzilopóchtli atop the Great Pyramid. At which, our priests cried "woe!" and "awful omen!" and commenced to hold ceremonies that combined abject prayers for the war god's forgiveness and desperate prayers for the war god's intercession on our behalf.

Although the cannons continued that first thundering for some days, they did so only at intervals, and it seemed a most desultory attack compared to what I knew those cannons could do. I believe Cortés was hoping to make us concede that we were marooned and defenseless and inevitably to be defeated, to make us surrender without a fight, as he would expect any sensible people to do under those conditions. I do not believe he was showing any merciful compunction about having to slay us; he merely wanted to take the city intact, so he could present to his King Carlos the colony of New Spain complete with a capital that was superior to any city in Old Spain.

However, Cortés is and was an impatient man. He did not waste many days waiting for us to take the sensible course of surrender. He had his artificers construct light, portable wooden bridges and, using them to span the gaps in all the causeways, he sent heavy forces of his men running to the city in a sudden onslaught from all three directions at once. But our warriors were not then weakened by hunger, and the three columns of Spaniards and their allies were stopped as if they had run into a solid stone wall encircling the island. Many of them died and the remainder retreated, though not as quickly as they had come, for they were bearing many wounded.

Cortés waited for some days, and tried again in the same manner, and with even worse results. That time, when the enemy poured onto the island, our war canoes darted out and their warriors climbed onto the causeways behind the first waves of attackers. They kicked away the portable bridges and so had a goodly portion of the assault forces marooned with us in the city. The trapped Spaniards fought for their lives; but their native allies knew better what was in store, and fought until they were killed instead of captured. That night our whole island was lighted with celebratory torches and urn fires and incense fires and altar fires—the Great Pyramid in particular was brightly illuminated—so Cortés and the other white men could see, if they approached close enough, and if they cared to watch, what happened to their forty or so comrades we had caught alive.