Land of Sweetness: A Pre-Columbian Timeline

Vuu

Banned
I think we'll see the many disparate yet closely-related native American languages grow closer - for example only 3 Maya languages, 2 Quechua etc
 
On the mercenaries who went into the Atlantic: while I'm not gonna say anything about them just yet, I would like to point out that this is hardly new—the image of people heading out into the vast unknown for good is a motif that I'm really fond of personally, and that we've seen before in this TL. Both the Isatian and the Taiguano versions of Tēzcatl row away to never return, and of course Lakekala Siki ends his days by sailing down the Amazon and leaving no shadows behind.

I think we'll see the many disparate yet closely-related native American languages grow closer - for example only 3 Maya languages, 2 Quechua etc
The Mayan languages as a group are not closely related, actually! Yucatec Maya diverged from the other Mayan languages three thousand years ago, back when neither Rome nor China was even a dream of a dream. As early as the beginning of the Postclassic era there were nearly twenty mutually unintelligible Mayan languages, excluding Huastec which isn't Mayan in any non-linguistic sense.

1024px-Mayan_languages_tree_en.svg.png

Same with Quechua. Proto-Quechua was probably spoken more than two thousand years ago, just as Vulgar Latin was coming into being, and even during the Proto-Quechua period there appear to have been two very different dialects known as Quechua I and Quechua II.
 
The Mayan languages as a group are not closely related, actually! Yucatec Maya diverged from the other Mayan languages three thousand years ago, back when neither Rome nor China was even a dream of a dream. As early as the beginning of the Postclassic era there were nearly twenty mutually unintelligible Mayan languages, excluding Huastec which isn't Mayan in any non-linguistic sense.

{mega chart}​

Same with Quechua. Proto-Quechua was probably spoken more than two thousand years ago, just as Vulgar Latin was coming into being, and even during the Proto-Quechua period there appear to have been two very different dialects known as Quechua I and Quechua II.

I know a YouTube channel that had a video on this, though I'm guessing you saw it too. How accurate do you think this is?

 

Vuu

Banned
On the mercenaries who went into the Atlantic: while I'm not gonna say anything about them just yet, I would like to point out that this is hardly new—the image of people heading out into the vast unknown for good is a motif that I'm really fond of personally, and that we've seen before in this TL. Both the Isatian and the Taiguano versions of Tēzcatl row away to never return, and of course Lakekala Siki ends his days by sailing down the Amazon and leaving no shadows behind.


The Mayan languages as a group are not closely related, actually! Yucatec Maya diverged from the other Mayan languages three thousand years ago, back when neither Rome nor China was even a dream of a dream. As early as the beginning of the Postclassic era there were nearly twenty mutually unintelligible Mayan languages, excluding Huastec which isn't Mayan in any non-linguistic sense.

1024px-Mayan_languages_tree_en.svg.png

Same with Quechua. Proto-Quechua was probably spoken more than two thousand years ago, just as Vulgar Latin was coming into being, and even during the Proto-Quechua period there appear to have been two very different dialects known as Quechua I and Quechua II.

this is why you always the horses, kids
 
I know a YouTube channel that had a video on this, though I'm guessing you saw it too. How accurate do you think this is?
I know only bits and parts of Yucatec Maya, so I can't really speak on that, but WRT Nahuatl everything is very well-explained. The only errors seem to be with the transitive verbs mentioned beginning in 5:26. Phrases like timaca or ticua are ungrammatical in Nahuatl; all Nahuatl transitive verbs require an object prefix, so when you want to say "You give" or "You eat" without specifying what is being given or eaten, you need to use a dummy prefix, tla- "something" or tē- "someone". The grammatical forms would be titlamaca "You give things" and titlacua "You eat things." The video does actually mention this in 5:42, for what it's worth. Also, in most cases, long vowels are shortened in Nahuatl when they come at the end of a word. So even though the verbal root -cuā- "to eat" does in fact end with a long vowel, in the case of titlacua the vowel at the end is short, so titlacuā as seen in the video isn't quite right.

The Mesoamerican sprachbund is a well-studied phenomenon, as the video discusses at length. The five traditional defining features of the sprachbund are, as mentioned by the video,
  • Non-verb-final word order. In practice, this means Subject-Object-Verb word order (e.g. "I him love") is strongly avoided, despite languages to the north and south of Mesoamerica all preferring SOV. The most common word order in Mesoamerica is Verb-Subject-Object (e.g. "love I him").
  • Possession marked on the possessed noun, not the possessor (e.g. "His dog John" for "John's dog")
  • Locations are marked through relational nouns, often taken from body parts (e.g. "Its stomach house" for "Inside the house"; "Its lips water" for "On the water")
  • A base-20 counting system
  • A large number of shared expressions, like "bird stone" for "egg" and "deer snake" for "boa".
It's kinda neat to see how well this linguistic phenomenon aligns with the cultural area of Mesoamerica. For example, as mentioned in Entry 41, the Tarascans were rather culturally idiosyncratic in Mesoamerica. They didn't worship most of the pan-Mesoamerican gods, they used fire extensively in their religious rituals, they didn't construct normal pyramids and often preferred building in wood to stone, they ruled an unusually centralized state, and so forth. This is reflected in their language, which is only partially within the sprachbund:
  • Tarascan word order is Subject-Object-Verb or Subject-Verb-Object, depending on the dialect. SOV seems to be the original form, since the grammatical features of Tarascan align with those typical for SOV languages.
  • In Tarascan, possession is marked on the possessor noun (e.g. Tarascan John-iri wíchu vs. Nahuatl Īchichiuh John for "John's dog")
  • Tarascan does not have relational nouns, and instead has dozens of verbal affixes to classify space.
  • Tarascan does use base-20.
  • Tarascan has few of the Mesoamerican calques.
This is one of the reasons the Tarascans rely solely on their own syllabary ITTL, since things like the shared understanding of calques are major principles of the tēctlahcuilōlli system.

The Mesoamerican sprachbund is also amazing because its five features are so omnipresent despite how linguistically diverse Mesoamerica is. In 1492, there were at least the following language families present in the region, within an area the size of Spain + France:
Even if we restrict things to prestige languages used by major empires, we still have IOTL at least Classical Nahuatl, Tarascan, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Yucatec and K'iche' Maya: six languages from four entirely different language families.

Indeed, out of all the urbanized regions of the world occupied by state societies in 1492, Mesoamerica may well have been the most linguistically diverse.
 
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Entry 52: Defending Cholōllān
The description of Lord Mahpilhuēyac/Middle Finger now includes the sentence "He was also the first to die [among the Fingers]."

The description of Lord Mahpilxocoyōtl/Little Finger now includes the sentence "Much like Mahpilhuēyac, his rise to prominence appears to have come from the Cholōltec campaign," and his campaigning in southern Maya country and the Pacific coast is now qualified with "until the Cholōltec campaign".

* * *

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DEFENDING CHOLŌLLĀN
Cholōllān in 1408 was ruled by two priests of the Feathered Serpent god Quetzalcōhuātl, titled tlalchiach and aquiach. The last tlalchiach was remembered as craven and effeminate, an unworthy inheritor to the glory of Cholōllān. The aquiach was another man entirely. Nicknamed Īcuauh Quetzalcōhuātl, the Eagle of Quetzalcōhuātl, he was a brave and astute man, outspoken in his determination to defend his city from the “madman of Tiho”.

From the 1390s onward, the aquiach made preparations to face Ah Ek Lemba in war. On the battlefield, he mimicked his adversary’s organizational reforms. Aware of the Tiho army’s tendency to attack during the harvest season before peasant levies could be raised, the aquiach greatly expanded the professional military societies, drawing on mercenaries fleeing the rampages of Ah Ek Lemba, and encouraged the Nahua, Mixtec, and Zapotec kings crowned at Cholōllān to do so as well. He promoted the slaughter of fleeing enemy troops rather than their capture, increased the number of standard-bearers in Cholōltec armies to a fortieth of the troops, and improved on the color-coding of troops to minimize the chance of early routs—all policies Ah Ek Lemba had mandated a decade or two earlier.

There was little need to respond to the Tiho fleet’s naval maneuvers, as Cholōllān’s sphere of influence was landlocked, but Ah Ek Lemba’s siegecraft had to be countered. Traditional Mesoamerican fortress-headquarters were formidable constructions, with zigzagging walls and looping bends and angles, sometimes even moats. But they had weakness that Ah Ek Lemba saw: relatively low and narrow walls on unstable foundations, moats not too wide for portable drawbridges to traverse. Ah Ek Lemba’s sieges focused on exploiting these weaknesses from all directions simultaneously—sappers undermining the walls from their tunnels, drawbridges covered with deer hide lowered to cross any moat or trench, ladders scaling the walls under covering fire from siege towers, battering rams assaulting the gates—followed by storming the fortress with overwhelming numbers.

The aquiach’s solution was twofold. First, he vastly expanded the garrisons in the fortresses with refugee mercenaries, preventing Ah Ek Lemba from nonchalantly storming the walls and forcing him into costly rainy-season sieges of attrition. Second, the aquiach attempted to devise countermeasures to each of Ah Ek Lemba’s siegecraft tactics. The new fortresses of the aquiach had extremely thick walls of rammed earth with a trench dug into them, so that even if the enemy scaled them successfully, they would still fall into the trench and be easy targets for defending archers. These new walls also had a gentle inclining slope on the interior side, making it easier for large rocks to be rolled above and dropped on any bridges and battering rams that Ah Ek Lemba might construct. Wide waterlogged moats were dug all around the walls. Sapping was countered by extending the foundations of the fortress deeper into the earth and by training troops to dig counter-mines.

The Cholōltec priest-king constructed and revamped a number of fortresses all along the Cholōllān-Tiho frontier, with an especial focus on preventing Ah Ek Lemba from ever reaching the sacred city. Major fortifications of this “New Cholōltec Style,” all built between 1396 and 1408, include Tōchpan, Zacatlān, Ixhuacān, Tepēyacac, Lyobaa, and, of course, the new city walls of Cholōllān itself. All of them would play a major role in the war.
 
It feels like if anyone is able to stand up to Ah Ek Lemba at this point, it's Cholollan since they're a major power and they've built themselves up for this war for a long while.
 
Entry 53: Ixhuacān and Huēcalpan, January 1409
IXHUACĀN AND HUĒCALPAN, JANUARY 1409

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The camp of the aquiach

The aquiach of Cholōllān looked down at the fortress of Ixhuacān and smiled.

Years of preparation had not been in vain. The Madman’s army that clustered around Ixhuacān, like swarms of ants writhing over rotting meat, was huge—some scouts spoke of twenty thousand men, others of forty thousand, yet others of eighty thousand. Ixhuacān was defended only by a garrison of fourteen thousand, refugee mercenaries fresh from the Madman’s conquest of Tamallan eight years before. The garrison had been there, besieged and beleaguered, hungry and haggard, for five full months. Yet they had not surrendered, nor had the walls been breached.

From his hilltop vintage point, the aquiach could see the carcasses of enemy battering rams squished flat by rocks, drawbridges splintered open and siege towers half-sunk in the moat. The Madman had done his best, and his best had always been enough for all, save Ixhuacān. A sudden rush of exhilaration surged through the aquiach.

“Do remind me,” he said, a thin smile on his face, “What has happened elsewhere.” His servant seemed to hesitate. “Yes, I remember them all—I’m not so old to be forgetful yet! But good news, even old, is still good news.”

“I obey, my honored god,” said the servant in a rehearsed voice. (It was customary for the tlalchiach and the aquiach to be titled teōtzintli, “honored god.” He discouraged it nowadays, it felt far too much like the Madman’s blasphemies, but old habits in old servants stuck hard.) “The enemy commander Mahpilhuēyac has besieged Tōchpan for five months, to no avail. The enemy commander Mahpilxocoyōtl has overrun Quizii in the harvest season and attacked and pillaged the western Valley of Oaxaca. He did not, however, manage to approach Lyobaa, and he fled back to Quizii when the army of tlalchiachteōtzintli arrived in Oaxaca.”

“Very good.” None of the new fortresses had yielded. For a split second, the aquiach pitied the man at the head of that anthill of men. What must he be feeling, to believe he is a god and yet not break through the works of man? To taste frustration and defeat for the first time in his sixty years? Then Ah Ek Lemba’s hubris came back to mind, how he stood against all that was represented by the very god he claimed to be, and the aquiach’s pity sank away as quickly it had risen.

Tomorrow was the day. This may have been a time when the rules of war were in abeyance, and the Madman always attacked without any declaration of war, but the aquiach still believed in decency. Some days ago, he had formally invited Ah Ek Lemba to a set-piece battle on an open field where each side could display their valiance to the full, proposing the day and place by means of an invitation in tēctlahcuilōlli carried by an overeager teenager. The teenager’s head alone was returned to the Cholōltec camp, two syllabary glyphs carved into his forehead with an obsidian knife. (Using syllabary was an intentional snub, the Cholōltecs knew.) The two glyphs read quē and mah. Quēmah. “I agree.”

Would he win the battle tomorrow? The aquiach had sacrificed meticulously to the gods throughout his life, reddening the pyramid steps and stocking the skull racks with the grins of the sacrificed, keeping the world in motion another day. It would be much too unfair if he were to lose. But the world had never been much of a fair place—his mentor had said, when he was still a young novice priest, that the gods toyed with men like ocelots with mice—and only the gods knew what tomorrow would bring for the world.

Tomorrow, tomorrow. The aquiach feared that his soldiers would focus too much on capture tomorrow. He had carefully studied the tactics of the Madman, and he knew that a favorite trick of his was to feign retreat, convincing the enemy into breaking ranks and scattering in order to take captives for sacrifices, then retaliate with overwhelming force once the enemy had lost unit cohesion and were concentrating on captive-taking. This could not, must not, happen tomorrow. I should tell the troops to kill again. The gods forbid they might forget. It was a cowardly thing to kill and not to capture, but bravery alone never was enough to win.

The Madman’s men are murderers, not warriors. Do not grant them the dignity of capture, they will not grant it to you. It does not befit your honor nor that of the gods to sacrifice them; capturing a Yucatec counts less for honor than capturing commoner women, and their hearts are like spoiled tortillas to the gods. So tomorrow, kill, kill, kill, as you would kill fish! And when you kill them, do it with a blow to the back of the head. That is the way we Nahuas execute criminals, and these, remember, are criminals.

Yes, this was what he would tell the soldiers tonight. It was not in their nature to forgo capture, especially in such a big war, but they must remember to kill. Then, tomorrow, it was slaughter day.


The Battle of Huēcalpan

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The armies of Ah Ek Lemba and the aquiach marched from their camps before dawn and reached the chosen battlefield between Huēcalpan and Lake Ālchichīcān early morning.

Ah Ek Lemba was, as usual, outnumbered, and he knew that success that day would depend on quickly overwhelming the enemy center before the Cholōltec right wing could descend in force from the western mountains. Ah Ek Lemba thought the terrain especially propitious for such a battle; Lake Ālchichīcān lay at the back of the aquiach’s army, and once the Cholōltecs began to rout, the lake would prevent them from regrouping. The World-Conqueror placed his center and two wings on the higher ground toward Huēcalpan in the south, and all three units charged toward the aquiach’s center, seeking to break it as fast as possible. Most Mesoamerican armies would have shattered upon this charge, unable to withstand the fanatical devotion of the Maya and their targeted attacks on commanders and standard bearers.

Yet the Cholōltec center did not yield at Huēcalpan. The aquiach had trained his troops years and years to not break before this very type of charge, and practice showed; the men fought on, even as their standards toppled and the plumes of their commanders fell bloodied upon the ground. The aquiach himself stood amid the soldiers of the center in full battle regalia, holding his ground. The Cholōltec left wing skirmished with the Tiho right wing, relieving the pressure toward the west. Yes, the Cholōltecs were retreating step by step, but they were not running, they were not routing, their backs were still to the lake and their weapons to the enemy.

This bought enough time for the Cholōltec right wing to approach from the south.

Ah Ek Lemba had realized that the center would not break, and was about to initiate one of his feigned retreats—a tactic in which the Tiho army pretended to rout, so that the enemy units would scatter into individual warriors eager for captives, then retaliate once the enemy had lost all cohesion. Yet he now saw that the enemy right wing was in the rear of his own army, ready to block any feigned retreat and make it not so feigned.

“I have made a mistake,” he is reputed to have said for the first time in his life.


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The Cholōltec right wing soon attacked from the rear, seeking to split the Tiho left wing from Ah Ek Lemba’s center. The Tiho army had not sufficiently prepared for this turn of events, and the Cholōltecs soon gained the field. Ah Ek Lemba attempted to compensate by concentrating his attacks on the Cholōltec left (his right), but to little avail—the aquiach’s men were too well trained to flee—all while as his left wing was under attack from all directions but the west. The left wing was pushed away west and west, and eventually the Maya soldiers there could no longer see what was going on in the center.

Around noon, the Cholōltecs held aloft a disheveled head wearing a bronze helmet, pierced atop a Tiho banner they had captured. “Behold the head of the Madman,” they cried, “dead like the man he was!” The left wing saw their god-king dead, and despair sank deep into their hearts.


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It was a clever ruse. The Tiho left wing routed when they saw their dead king, and the Cholōltec right wing turned their full attention to overwhelming the Maya center, where an irate Ah Ek Lemba was very much alive and only murkily aware of how one-third of his army had collapsed believing he was dead.

Ah Ek Lemba ordered a last-ditch feigned retreat toward Huēcalpan. Yes, the left wing was eliminated as a fighting force, but if the aquiach’s army behaved as any other Mesoamerican army would and lost all organization upon seeing the enemy seem to flee, the tables could still be turned. Once the army disappeared into thousands of individual warriors seeking glory, even a small army could overcome them, one by one.

The aquiach had lectured at length on this exact tactic the night before, and the Cholōltecs did not fall for the trap. They chased the Tiho army as an organized force, not as individual warriors, and all those unfortunate Maya who straggled behind were killed (with a blow to the head), not captured.

The World-Conqueror, for perhaps the first time in his life, was struck dumb. “This retreat, from now on,” said Ah Ek Lemba at last, “Is real and not feigned.”

The Tiho army returned to Huēcalpan, a vanquished god at their head. Ah Ek Lemba decided that the army was no longer sufficient to besiege Ixhuacān and ordered a withdrawal to the east via the Chilchōtlān Pass. Chilchōtl: that was Isatian for a type of chili pepper so painful to eat that it made you cry. Ah Ek Lemba thought the place name bitterly appropriate.

The aquiach led his victorious army north, relieved the weary garrison of Ixhuacān, and chased Ah Ek Lemba east.
 
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Oh snap! :eek:

If the tactics of the Cholōltec be passed down to all towns and forts along the border, Ah Ek Lamba will conquer no more.

Unless he thinks of another tactic...
 
It seems that Quetzalcōhuātl has shown favor to his Eagle, the aquiach. It's not the nature of the World-Conqueror to suffer such setbacks and I wonder if his troops will be more rattled by the defeat of their living deity than by the losses of the battle itself.
 
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This is Ah Ek Lemba's greatest test on whether he is a worthy conqueror or not. Many warlords have achieved seemingly fantastic conquests, only for their empires to collapse once their myth of invincibility is broken. Can Ah Ek Lemba snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? Or will Cholōllān defy the madman?

I love the diagrams on the battle- is there any way we will get to see some of Ah Ek Lemba's earlier victories?
 
I wonder if his troops will be more rattled by the defeat of their living deity than by the losses of the battle itself.
Many warlords have achieved seemingly fantastic conquests, only for their empires to collapse once their myth of invincibility is broken. Can Ah Ek Lemba snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? Or will Cholōllān defy the madman?
Is this his first big defeat? How many conquered people will revolt once they hear of it?
Yes, this is his first real defeat. And, worse, it's a defeat against a city that's widely recognized as being the favored city of the Feathered Serpent—the city founded by Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl himself, the city ruled by the god's highest priests, the city with the biggest pyramid in the entire Mesoamerican world. This defeat will absolutely bring up questions that Ah Ek Lemba and his supporters might be hard-pressed to answer, such as:
  • If Ah Ek Lemba really is the return of Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl, why isn't he born in the year 1 Reed, even though the real Topiltzin was both born and departed in 1 Reed? (Ah Ek Lemba was born in 1351, which is 2 Reed in the Nahua zodiac; the fourteenth-century 1 Reed years are 1311 and 1363)
  • If Ah Ek Lemba really is the return of Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl, why is he fighting with (and losing to) the high priests of Cholōllān, presumably the most reliable authorities on Quetzalcōhuātl out there?
  • If Ah Ek Lemba really is the return of Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl, why the fuck is he going around killing everybody and prancing around in their flayed skins, cruel practices the real Topiltzin abhorred?
The World-Conqueror's own soldiers will be the ones asking these questions.

is there any way we will get to see some of Ah Ek Lemba's earlier victories?
Maybe. No promises though.

I wonder how the fingers will react?
The Fingers were all Ah Ek Lemba's comrades-in-arms before his ascendancy and they have personal ties to him, so rebellion is unlikely at this point. But this defeat will surely be a reminder of their king's mortality and alert them to the fact that both Ah Ek Lemba and they are getting pretty old (AEL is fifty-seven upon his defeat, and the Fingers are all in their fifties and sixties) and all five of them might die soon. AEL is childless and wifeless, and for the Fingers, it's time to start staking out their children's inheritance before it's too late...
 
Entry 54: Ah Ek Lemba in Cempoala, 1409
AH EK LEMBA IN CEMPOALA, 1409

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Ah Ek Lemba’s army beat an inglorious retreat to Cempoala, the aquiach hot in pursuit. The Cholōltecs were confident. Their Eagle had won against the World-Conqueror, something widely regarded as impossible. The gods must be on their side, and the soldiers muttered, only half-joking, about how they were about to march all the way to Tiho, Ah Ek Lemba’s skull impaled on their banner.

Mahpilhuēyac, Ah Ek Lemba’s Middle Finger, heard the news of his master’s defeat and hurried south. In the rush of confidence that gripped the entire Cholōltec army following Huēcalpan, they had almost forgotten that Mahpilhuēyac’s army did, in fact, exist. Mahpilhuēyac caught the aquiach by surprise in February 1409, crushed the Cholōltecs in the Battle of Ātocpan, and forced them back into the mountains. The aquiach’s army quickly scattered. The rainy season was fast approaching, and with that the cessation of all campaigns—not even a god could make war across waterlogged paths and bog-ridden roads. There would be peace until September, when the rains ended. It was the gods’ way of giving the people a respite from blood.

Ātocpan was a much-needed lesson in humility, but it hardly dismayed the army of Cholōllān. They had won. They could win. The aquiach and his city had proven themselves worthy of Quetzalcōhuātl, and the impostor who claimed he was Quetzalcōhuātl had not.

When the army returned to Cholōllān in March, the city was more festive than anyone could remember. Music was everywhere, both priestly psalms of jubilation and the cheery tunes of youth. Great merchants were hurling sacks of gold and cacao beans into the street for beggars to take; petals and perfumes and butterflies strewed the air; great sacrifices were held in honor of the troops, and for once, each victim willingly climbed up the pyramids, singing the songs of his homeland on his way to death before a transfixed audience. The aquiach was greeted as the greatest hero in history since the god-king Topiltzin himself, and the tēctlahcuilohqueh (scribes of tēctlahcuilōlli) competed to see who could paint the most fitting image of the priest.

The tlalchiach looked at the honors due the aquiach and frowned, though he was careful that nobody would see.

Meanwhile, in the south, Mahpilxocoyōtl remained in Quizii with his army throughout the 1409 rainy season. The Tiho invasion had provoked a famine in the area, and the troops were supplied with grain shipped from Soconusco. No concern could be spared for the commoners, even as they starved away by the tens of thousands.

* * *

It was the war of arrows that was on hiatus in the rainy season, not the war of words. The aquiach began to circulate propaganda letters targeted at Ah Ek Lemba’s soldiers around this time. The following examples, recently discovered sealed in a cave by archaeologists, are emblematic.

Although large portions of the first text are no longer legible, it seeks to establish 1) the sacral authority of Cholōllān, per the tale of Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl, the god-king of the city of Tōllān whose reincarnation Ah Ek Lemba claimed to be; 2) the vast base of support for Cholōllān; and 3) incongruities between Ah Ek Lemba and the real Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl.

[Lacuna in the text]

When Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl fled his city of Tōllān where he had been king, what was his destination, what were his deeds, what were his words? His destination was our city, his deeds were to found it, and his words were thus: “Here will be my most favored city on earth, and I christen it Cholōllān, because it is the beautiful city I founded on my flight.” [This is a pun; in Isatian, the verb choloa means “to flee.”]

And he added: “And the people will call this city of the gods Tōllān Cholōllān Tlachīhualtepētl [Cholōllān, Place of Reeds, Man-Made Mountain], first because the people here will be as thick as reeds and it will be like a second Tōllān in all its splendor, and second because the people here will be so great a nation that their pyramids will be taller than the star-piercing mountains.”

And later, when the cities of the Toltecs were brought to ruin, the tribes of the Toltecs—our ancestors—fled to Cholōllān. And it was the god Quetzalcōhuātl who led us here, who granted us entry here.

Our city is then the city of Quetzalcōhuātl. Your city is not the city of any god; it was built by Ah Ek Lemba in the middle of demon-dwelling forests. No wonder then that your king fled from our city like a guinea pig, that our city of Cholōllān is your city of Running Away! [The pun is clearer in Isatian: Tāltepēuh Cholōllān amāltepēuh Cholōliztlān, “Our city of Cholōllān is your city of Flight.”]

[Lacuna in the text]

[And the kings...] of Teōtihuācan and Ācōlmān, of Tetzcoco and Cōhuātlinchān, of Chīmalhuacān and Iztāpalocān and Aztahuacān, of Chālco and Xōchimīlco, of Tīzapan and Coyōhuacān, of Mixcōhuāc and Chapōltepēc, of Tlacōpan and Āzcapōtzalco, of Tenanyohcān and Ehēcatepēc, of Cuauhtitlān and Chicōnauhtlān, of Ixhuatepēc and Ātzacualco and Tepēyacac, of Cōlhuahcān and Iztapalāpan, of Mēxihco-Tlatelōlco and Mēxihco-Tenōchtitlan…

[Lacuna in the text]

[These kings] all support us for their own sake. Who supports your king for his own sake, without trembling in fear? Not a single clot of mud. Impious and tyrannical is Ah Ek Lemba’s authority…

[Lacuna in the text]

Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl was born in the year 1 Reed, and he was a king of peace and prosperity. During his reign, ears of corn were as big as a man, and beans were so plentiful that the people burned them for sweat baths. Ah Ek Lemba is born in the year 2 Reed, and he is a king of war and insanity. In his reign, the corn plants shrivel away for lack of people to tend them—he having killed them all—and beans are so rare that people scrounge in filth for a single one. What a fine god your king makes!

And now he runs like a coward deer before Tōllān Cholōllān, runs in defeat—only to be saved by his middle finger! How laughable! The finger is worthier than the man.​

The second text is much shorter and of clearer intent. Written in the Yucatec syllabary, it is a brief emotional appeal to the Maya troops of Ah Ek Lemba:

To the Maya people [Maya winikob]

You are in a land of barbarians [Dzul luum, lit. “non-Maya soil”]. Your children are born in a land of barbarians, you grow old in a land of barbarians, you die in a land of barbarians, and you are buried in a land of barbarians, with never a home to call your own.

Do you not miss your native land?​

* * *

“Do you… not… miss your native land?” Faltered out Nabatun Namon. He was one of the few literates in the soldier clan of Namon, and even then it had been a long time since he had ever read his native tongue. His Majesty did everything in the barbarian language now. He checked, one last time, if he had gotten everything right. “Yes, that seems right. ‘Do you not miss your native land?’ That’s what it says.”

Silence.

“Well. Do you?”

Silence.

“How could I? I barely know what it’s like back home.” Nabatun swerved to see who spoke. It was a young boy, eighteen at most. His childhood was in the Gulf Coast, his adolescence in Panama. “All I have are other people’s stories. I’ve got no home.”

Silence (again). Nabatun looked up at the sky, hoping to find some light in all this tenseness, but it was ashen with clouds. It was the kind of weather that his grandmother told him would bring thunderstorms.

“This must end,” his grandmother’s voice seemed to say, but she was dead. Nabatun looked back down and saw an old woman hobble into the center of the men. Ixek’ Nawat, the old dynastiarch’s four-k’atun [one k’atun is twenty years] widow. “This must end,” she said again.

“This must end,” the others murmured back. Ixek’ looked around, saw that nobody seemed to disagree, and took that as encouragement to speak.

“The world has gone mad. The children have not seen a single tree or a single bird in the Land of Turkey and Deer [Maya expression for the Yucatan]. The Namons have become beggars, homeless and landless—and now that we have offended the Serpent in Tōllān Cholōllān, we will surely all die. And that thing is all correct! We will die and be buried in a barbarian land.”

“But the King is the Serpent,” somebody suggested hopefully. “Who knows!” Another asked back. “But he conquered the world!” “But not Cholōllān, clearly.” “Would a god do this to us?” “Have we Maya lost all courage?” “Sycophants!” “Think of the children, what will they do when we die?” “Coward, the children will do fine!”—“Monster!”—“You greatest fool since this sun was made!”—“I will report this all”—“We will kill the king before you can!”—“Traitor!”—“Who’s the real traitor here?”—"You're the traitor to your clan!"—"You'll go to some terrible afterlife, but we will die in war and be reborn as butterflies"—"I'll tell my future children to kill every butterfly they see just so they might kill you again"—"The problem was that we stopped the heart sacrifices"—"Let's start with you then, I'd be very glad to tear out your heart"—“I will boil you alive and eat you with relish, mark my words!”—“As for you we won’t even eat you, your stupidity spoils the meat”—this went on for the gods knew how long—

“Quiet!” Ixek’ again. “If he is not a god, at the very least he is a sorcerer. It is foolhardy to rebel, even if it were advisable. And whether it is is another question of its own.”

And silence again, of a thicker sort than before. The overcast clouds seemed to have swallowed their words.

“We’ll try.” Everyone’s head turned to see who had spoken. The Nanawat triplets. They were fifteen years old, and their parents had vanished at Huēcalpan. “We don’t think the king is really Topiltzin. And when we’re caught, you can say that we went insane. They’ll believe you.” A final silence, and Nabatun realized with a mix of revulsion and respect that nobody would stop them, that the Nanawats would try, knowing full well that they would die horribly.

“You are all too young,” said Ixek’, but her tone was halfhearted.

“We are old enough for three spears.”

* * *

In August 1409, an attempt was made on Ah Ek Lemba’s life, when three spears were hurled at him. According to later accounts, the king grabbed all three spears with only his right hand while they were still in the air, and snapped all three of them in half in a single twirl of his four fingers. His troops marveled and prepared for the next month’s campaigns, confident that their king could still perform such miracles, reassured that he had not lost his divinity.
 
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