There is but one weapon which such cannot defile, a rope, and it waits for you, Thomas Wingfield.’
I tore the writing to pieces and stamped upon it in my rage, for now, to all his other crimes against me, de Garcia had added the blackest insult.
But wrath availed me nothing, for I could never come near him, though once, with ten of my Otomies, I charged into the heart of the Spanish column after him.
From that rush I alone escaped alive, the ten Otomies were sacrificed to my hate.
How shall I paint the horrors that day by day were heaped upon the doomed city?
Soon all the food was gone, and men, ay, and worse still, tender women and children, must eat such meat as swine would have turned from, striving to keep life in them for a little longer.
Grass, the bark of trees, slugs and insects, washed down with brackish water from the lake, these were their best food, these and the flesh of captives offered in sacrifice.
Now they began to die by hundreds and by thousands, they died so fast that none could bury them.
Where they perished, there they lay, till at length their bodies bred a plague, a black and horrible fever that swept off thousands more, who in turn became the root of pestilence.
For one who was killed by the Spaniards and their allies, two were swept off by hunger and plague.
Think then what was the number of dead when not less than seventy thousand perished beneath the sword and by fire alone.
Indeed, it is said that forty thousand died in this manner in a single day, the day before the last of the siege.
One night I came back to the lodging where Otomie dwelt with her royal sister Tecuichpo, the wife of Guatemoc, for now all the palaces had been burnt down.
I was starving, for I had scarcely tasted food for forty hours, but all that my wife could set before me were three little meal cakes, or tortillas, mixed with bark.
She kissed me and bade me eat them, but I discovered that she herself had touched no food that day, so I would not till she shared them.
Then I noted that she could scarcely swallow the bitter morsels, and also that she strove to hide tears which ran down her face.
‘What is it, wife?’ I asked.
Then Otomie broke out into a great and bitter crying and said:
‘This, my beloved: for two days the milk has been dry in my breast—hunger has dried it—and our babe is dead!
Look, he lies dead!’ and she drew aside a cloth and showed me the tiny body.
‘Hush,’ I said, ‘he is spared much.
Can we then desire that a child should live to see such days as we have seen, and after all, to die at last?’
‘He was our son, our first-born,’ she cried again.
‘Oh! why must we suffer thus?’
‘We must suffer, Otomie, because we are born to it.
Just so much happiness is given to us as shall save us from madness and no more.
Ask me not why, for I cannot answer you!
There is no answer in my faith or in any other.’
And then, looking on that dead babe, I wept also.
Every hour in those terrible months it was my lot to see a thousand sights more awful, and yet this sight of a dead infant moved me the most of all of them.
The child was mine, my firstborn, its mother wept beside me, and its stiff and tiny fingers seemed to drag at my heart strings.
Seek not the cause, for the Almighty Who gave the heart its infinite power of pain alone can answer, and to our ears He is dumb.
Then I took a mattock and dug a hole outside the house till I came to water, which in Tenoctitlan is found at a depth of two feet or so.
And, having muttered a prayer over him, there in the water I laid the body of our child, burying it out of sight.
At the least he was not left for the zapilotes, as the Aztecs call the vultures, like the rest of them.
After that we wept ourselves to sleep in each other’s arms, Otomie murmuring from time to time,
‘Oh! my husband, I would that we were asleep and forgotten, we and the babe together.’
‘Rest now,’ I answered, ‘for death is very near to us.’
The morrow came, and with it a deadlier fray than any that had gone before, and after it more morrows and more deaths, but still we lived on, for Guatemoc gave us of his food.
Then Cortes sent his heralds demanding our surrender, and now three-fourths of the city was a ruin, and three-fourths of its defenders were dead.
The dead were heaped in the houses like bees stifled in a hive, and in the streets they lay so thick that we walked upon them.
The council was summoned—fierce men, haggard with hunger and with war, and they considered the offer of Cortes.
‘What is your word, Guatemoc?’ said their spokesman at last.
‘Am I Montezuma, that you ask me? I swore to defend this city to the last,’ he answered hoarsely, ‘and, for my part, I will defend it.
Better that we should all die, than that we should fall living into the hands of the Teules.’
‘So say we,’ they replied, and the war went on.
At length there came a day when the Spaniards made a new attack and gained another portion of the city.
There the people were huddled together like sheep in a pen.
We strove to defend them, but our arms were weak with famine.
They fired into us with their pieces, mowing us down like corn before the sickle.