the colour of the Tribute Takers’ hair. They wore it pulled back, tight to their skulls, and trapped it in buns at the bases of their necks. They lived in a great floating city high in the mountains, where their leader, Montezuma, whispered to the gods.
Black was the colour of the ink on the scrolls the Takers carried—long lists noting the tribute the Totonac people were required to provide every eighty days: four pots of vanilla, twenty-eight bins of maize, twenty-one bins of smoked fish, two thousand feathers, four thousand cotton cloaks.
Black was the colour of the mushrooms the Takers ate—mushrooms that gave them visions of the end of the world. A menace from the heavens was coming, they told the Totonacs, and it could only be prevented with the blood of sacrifice.
Totonac blood.
Tula walked around her stone house and into the garden behind it. She dug beneath the tomato plants and found her stash of spears and arrows. Digging deeper, she seized her atlatl, which would send those arrows to their marks. She had killed so many creatures in her lifetime—far too many than was good or right. But the Takers demanded meat, more and more of it, and the Takers had to be fed. She ran her finger softly across the sharp, obsidian blades.
They, too, were black.
‘Daughter?’ whispered her father’s voice.
‘Father?’
The shadowy figure of her father appeared in the back doorway. ‘Why do you rise in the useless hours? Where do you go?’
‘I go to catch the fish, Father, and the birds. Coalingas and macaws. Perhaps even a quetzal.’
‘Nahuatl. Speak to me in Nahuatl.’
Tula sighed. ‘I go to find the...the...swimming creatures...’ she faltered ‘...and the flying creatures.’ Of all the languages her father had taught her, Tula liked Nahuatl the least. It was the language of the Mexica, the language of their oppressors, yet her father would not speak to her in any other tongue.
‘Why do you not wait for the Sun God to be reborn?’ he asked her, pointing at the eastern horizon.
‘I do not wait because the swimmers do not wait,’ she lied.
‘You rush to find fish, but you delay finding a husband.’
‘Why seek a husband if he is doomed to die?’ She bit her tongue. She had spoken too quickly and too loudly. Her father bent his neck inside the house, listening for her elder sister, Pulhko, who slept lightly and without rest. Satisfied with the unbroken peace, he shook his head. ‘Your sister Pulhko will remarry as soon as she is well,’ said her father.
But she will never be well, thought Tula, saying nothing.
‘And your sister Xanca seeks a husband already.’
‘Xanca is young and her head is full of colours. She knows little of the cruelty of the world.’
Her father did not respond and she knew that it was because he agreed. Xanca was not old enough to remember when Pulhko’s husband and two boys were taken. Nor had Xanca been instructed in the history of the world, as Tula had been. As a result, Xanca’s spirit remained light. Too light, perhaps.
‘Your husband is your protection,’ her father said finally. ‘As long as you are unmarried, you are exposed.’
‘We are all exposed. Marriage matters little.’
Now he whispered, ‘The Takers have asked our Chief to provide women for the festival of the fifteenth month. They seek noble young women, Tula,’ he said significantly. ‘Women without carnal knowledge.’
Women like me, Tula thought. ‘If they come for me, Father, they will not find me.’
‘The Takers are everywhere. They will find you.’
‘I am slippery like a fish,’ she said in Totonac.
‘You must marry.’
‘Pulkho was married. Now look at all she has lost. I will not follow a path that leads only to blackness.’ A lump of anguish plugged Tula’s throat.
‘I cannot protect you always, Daughter. If you do not marry, you will be taken. Then, it will not matter that you speak their language, or that you know the history of the world, or that you are slippery like a fish. You will suffer the flowery—’
‘The place of fish is four hours’ journey,’ Tula interrupted.
Tula’s father sighed. ‘There are fishing grounds much closer to Cempoala. Why must you travel so far away?’
‘Where I go, there are so many fish that you can walk upon their backs!’ said Tula, hoping that exaggeration would help conceal the lie she told. ‘In a single day, I can obtain our family’s entire contribution.’
She knew he could not argue with her. Their family’s share of tribute was fixed—there was nothing to do but make and gather it each cycle and be done.
‘I will return late tonight with my basket overflowing,’ Tula assured him.
‘Be safe,’ he whispered.
‘I will, Father,’ she replied. She pointed to where her atlatl poked out of her basket. ‘You taught me how.’ She blew him a kiss and set off across the plaza.
Yes, Tula loved the dark, for lying to her father was much easier in it.
Benicio lay on the scorched maize field, covered in blood. He stared up at the pale blue sky, trying to picture the stars. He had come to the Island of the Yucatan to take part in trade, not war. He had brought glass beads and fine mirrors and the hope that he might still fulfil the promise he had made to Luisa that day two long years ago: to find treasure.
Now a thousand Maya warriors lay all around him, slaughtered. They had not been his enemies. They had merely been defending their lands from men like him—strange, bearded thieves who had floated upriver on their temples of deceit.
That was what the Maya emissaries had called the Spanish brigantines—floating temples. They did not have a word for sailing ships in their language, nor did they have a word for the Spaniards themselves, so they called them bearded gods. If they had only known that Captain Cortés and his men were much more like bearded devils.
Benicio pulled off his helmet and unbuckled his chest plate. It had been so very hot inside his shell of steel, even in the depths of the night. It was a relief to finally be free of it. Above, the first rays of sun stretched into the sky, illuminating the gory scene. Not a single body stirred.
The Maya of the city of Potonchan had politely asked Cortés to leave, but El Capitán would not listen. Instead, he had told the Maya emissaries the same thing he had told Benicio and his five hundred other conscripts as they set out from Cuba: that they were on a mission of trade and discovery.
Benicio should have known better than to believe the bellicose Captain Cortés, who had filled their ships with more gunpowder than goods. Even the small brigantine for which Benicio served as navigator had been fitted with deadly falconets, though Benicio had managed not to notice them.
Nor did he bother to translate the banner that flew atop Cortés’s flagship, though he had spent years studying Latin: Amici, sequamur crucem et, si nos fidem habemus, vere in hoc signo vincemus. Friends, let us follow the cross and, if we have faith, let us conquer under this banner.
Benicio had ignored all of it. He was willing to overlook anything, it seemed, for the hope of finding gold. ‘Gold is nothing to the naturales of Yucatan Island,’ Cortés had assured his conscripts. ‘They trade it for beads and trinkets. It will be no effort for each of us to obtain a treasure fit for a king.’
Or a marquesa, Benicio had thought.
Had hoped.
What Cortés had not mentioned