Now Montezuma looked at me for the first time, then opened a picture scroll that one of the counsellors handed to him, and read in it, glancing at me from time to time.
‘The description is good,’ he said at length, ‘in all save one thing–it does not say that this prisoner is the handsomest man in Anahuac. Say, Teule, why have your countrymen landed on my dominions and slain my people?’
‘I know nothing of it, O king,’ I answered as well as I might with the help of Guatemoc, ‘and they are not my countrymen.’
‘The report says that you confess to having the blood of these Teules in your veins, and that you came to these shores, or near them, in one of their great canoes.’
‘That is so, O king, yet I am not of their people, and I came to the shore floating on a barrel.’
‘I hold that you lie,’ answered Montezuma frowning, ‘for the sharks and crocodiles would devour one who swam thus.’ Then he added anxiously, ‘Say, are you of the descendants of Quetzal?’
‘I do not know, O king. I am of a white race, and our forefather was named Adam.’
‘Perchance that is another name for Quetzal,’ he said. ‘It has long been prophesied that his children would return, and now it seems that the hour of their coming is at hand,’ and he sighed heavily, then added: ‘Go now. To-morrow you shall tell me of these Teules, and the council of the priests shall decide your fate.’
Now when I heard the name of the priests I trembled in all my bones and cried, clasping my hands in supplication:
‘Slay me if you will, O king, but I beseech you deliver me not again into the hands of the priests.’
‘We are all in the hands of the priests, who are the mouth of God,’ he answered coldly. ‘Besides, I hold that you have lied to me.’
Then I went foreboding evil, and Guatemoc also looked downcast. Bitterly did I curse the hour when I had said that I was of the Spanish blood and yet no Spaniard. Had I known even what I knew that day, torture would not have wrung those words from me. But now it was too late.
Now Guatemoc led me to certain apartments of this palace of Chapoltepec, where his wife, the royal princess Tecuichpo, was waiting him, a very lovely lady, and with her other ladies, among them the princess Otomie, Montezuma’s daughter, and some nobles. Here a rich repast was served to us, and I was seated next to the princess Otomie, who spoke to me most graciously, asking me many things concerning my land and the people of the Teules. It was from her that I learned first that the emperor was much disturbed at heart because of these Teules or Spaniards, for he was superstitious, and held them to be the children of the god Quetzal, who according to ancient prophecy would come to take the land. Indeed, so gracious was she, and so royally lovely, that for the first time I felt my heart stirred by any other woman than my betrothed whom I had left far away in England, and whom, as I thought, I should never see again. And as I learned in after days mine was not the only heart that was stirred that night.
Near to us sat another royal lady, Papantzin, the sister of Montezuma, but she was neither young nor lovely, and yet most sweet faced and sad as though with the presage of death. Indeed she died not many weeks after but could not rest quiet in her grave, as shall be told.
When the feast was done and we had drunk of the cocoa or chocolate, and smoked tobacco in pipes, a strange but most soothing custom that I learned in Tobasco and of which I have never been able to break myself, though the weed is still hard to come by here in England, I was led to my sleeping place, a small chamber panelled with cedar boards. For a while I could not sleep, for I was overcome by the memory of all the strange sights that I had seen in this wonderful new land which was so civilised and yet so barbarous. I thought of that sad-faced king, the absolute lord of millions, surrounded by all that the heart of man can desire, by vast wealth, by hundreds of lovely wives, by loving children, by countless armies, by all the glory of the arts, ruling over the fairest empire on the earth, with every pleasure to his hand, a god in all things save his mortality, and worshipped as a god, and yet a victim to fear and superstition, and more heavy hearted than the meanest slave about his palaces. Here was a lesson such as Solomon would have loved to show, for with Solomon this Montezuma might cry: