And evidently Cortés did witness that mass sacrifice, or enough of it to put him in a retaliatory rage. He would exterminate all of us in the city, even if in the process he had to pulverize much of the city he wanted to preserve. He suspended his invasion attempts, but subjected our city to a vicious and unremitting cannonade, the balls being discharged from the cannons as rapidly and regularly as I suppose could be done without the cannons melting from the prolonged exertion. The projectiles plummeted down on us from the mainland and whistled across the water from the circling boats. Our city began to crumble, and many of our people died. A single cannon ball could knock a sizable chunk out of an edifice even as massively built as the Great Pyramid—and many of them did, until that once beautifully smooth structure looked like a mound of bread dough gnawed and nibbled by giant rats. A single cannon ball could knock down one entire wall of a sturdy stone house, and an adobe house would simply go all to clods and dust.

That iron rain went on for at least two months, day after day, abating only at night. But even during the nights, the cannoneers would send three or four balls crashing down among us, at unpredictably irregular intervals, just to insure that our sleep was made uneasy, if not impossible, and that we had no chance to rest undisturbed. After some time, the white men's iron projectiles were used up, and they had to gather and employ rounded stones. Those were slightly less destructive to our city buildings, but they often shattered on impact, and their flying fragments were even more destructive to human flesh.

But those who died in that manner at least died quickly. The rest of us seemed doomed to a slower and more wretchedly dwindling death. Because the stores in the granaries had to last as long as possible, the dispensing officials doled out the dry maize in the meagerest amounts that would help sustain life. For a while, we were able also to eat the dogs and fowl of the island, and we shared the fish caught by men who sneaked out at night upon the causeways with nets, or out onto the chinampa to dangle lines down among their roots. But eventually all the dogs and fowl were gone, and even the fish began to shun the island vicinity. Then we divided and ate all but the absolutely inedible creatures in the public menagerie, and the very rarest and most beautiful specimens, with which the keepers could not bear to part. Those remaining animals were kept alive—indeed, were kept in rather better health than their keepers—by being fed the bodies of our slaves who perished of hunger.

In time, we resorted to catching rats and mice and lizards. Our children, those few who had survived the small pocks, got quite adept at snaring almost every bird foolhardy enough to perch on the island. Still later, we cut the flowers of our roof gardens and stripped the leaves from the trees and made cooked greens of them. Toward the end, we were searching those gardens for edible insects, and peeling the bark from the trees, and we were chewing rabbit-fur blankets and hide garments and the fawnskin pages of books for whatever meat value might be extracted from them. Some people, trying to trick their bellies into thinking they had been fed, filled them by eating the lime cement from the rubble of broken buildings.

The fish had not left our neighborhood for fear of being caught; they left because our surrounding waters had become so foul. Though the rainy season was by then upon us, the rains fell during only a part of each afternoon. We set out every pot and bowl to catch it, and hung out lengths of cloth to be drenched and wrung, but, for all our efforts, there was seldom more than a trickle of fresh rainwater for each parched mouth. So, after our initial revulsion, we got accustomed to drinking the lake's brackish water. However, since there was no longer any means of collecting and carrying away the island's wastes of garbage and human excrement, those substances got into the canals, thence into the lake. Also, since we would feed none but slaves to the menagerie beasts, we had no way of disposing of our other dead except to commit their bodies to that same lake. Cuautemoc ordered that the corpses be shoved off the island only on its western side, because the eastern lake was the wider water and was more or less constantly refreshed by the prevailing east wind, thus he hoped that the water on that side could be kept less contaminated. But the seeping sewage and decomposing bodies inevitably dirtied the water on every side of the island. Since we still had to drink it when thirst drove us to it, we strained it through cloths and then boiled it. Even so, it knotted our guts with agonies of gripes and fluxes. Of our older people and young children, many died just from drinking that putrid water.

One night, when he could no longer watch his people suffer so, Cuautemoc called all the city's populace to gather in The Heart of the One World during that night's lull in the cannonade, and I think everyone who could still walk was there. We stood about the pits in what had been the sleek marble paving of the plaza, surrounded by the jagged upcrops remaining of what had been the undulating Snake Wall, while the Revered Speaker addressed us from partway up what remained of the Great Pyramid's shattered staircase:

"If Tenochtítlan is to last even a little longer, it must be no longer a city but a fortification, and a fort must be manned by those who can fight. I am proud of the loyalty and endurance shown by all my people, but the time has come when I must regretfully ask an end to your allegiance. There still remains one storehouse unopened, but only one..."

The assembled crowd neither cheered nor clamored in demand. It merely murmured, but the combined sound was like the hungry rumbling of a very large stomach.

"When I unseal that store," Cuautemoc went on, "the maize will be shared out equally among all who apply. Now, it can provide every person in this city perhaps one last and very scant meal. Or it would suffice to feed our warriors slightly better, to strengthen them for fighting to the end, whenever that end shall come and whatever that end may be. I will not command you, my people. I will only ask that you make the choice and the decision."

The people made no sound at all.

He resumed, "I have this night had the northern causeway spanned so it can be crossed. The enemy waits warily on the other side, wondering why that has been done. I did it so that all of you who can depart, and will, may do so. I do not know what you will find yonder in Tepeyáca—food and relief or a Flowery Death. But I beg you who can no longer fight; take this opportunity to leave Tenochtítlan. It will be no desertion, no admission of defeat, and you will incur no shame in the departure. To the contrary, you will enable our city to stand in defiance a while longer. I say no more."

None went hurriedly or even willingly, all went in tears and grief, but they recognized the practicality of Cuautemoc's plea, and in that one night the city emptied of its old and its youngest people, its ill and crippled and infirm, its priests and temple attendants, all who could no longer be of use in combat. Carrying bundles or tumplined packs of what few most valued possessions they could snatch up as they left, they drifted northward through the streets of all four quarters of Tenochtítlan, began to converge in the area of the Tlaltelólco market, then formed a column crossing the causeway. They were met with no bursts of lightning and thunder at the northern end. As I learned later, the white men yonder were simply indifferent to their arrival, and the Texcalteca occupying that position deemed those stumbling, emaciated seekers of refuge too scrawny even to be worth sacrificing as a celebration of victory, and the people of Tepeyáca—though themselves captives of the occupying forces—made them welcome, with food and clean water and shelter.