OAXACA, 1409
Though he had successfully overrun the border defenses of Oaxaca in 1408, Mahpilxocoyōtl failed to reach the fortified sacred city of Lyobaa and withdrew to Quizii to pass the 1409 rainy season there. It was there that the Little Finger and his men learned of
the World-Conqueror’s defeat. They scarcely believed it, at first—
defeat? that word the King of Tiho had never known, it must be a lie, propaganda—but more and more proof of Huēcalpan trickled in in dribs and drabs, in the veiled words of messengers from Tiho and the brazenness of the display of captured banners at Cholōllān—the defeat was undeniable.
Mahpilxocoyōtl was not fazed. The man was a true believer in Ah Ek Lemba, and for him, his king’s destiny to prevail was little less than the gospel truth; as for the calamity at Huēcalpan, the Finger denied with religious fervor any possibility that it might be consequential. The soldiers in Quizii were also enthusiastic, if only for the fact that they had nowhere else to go. After years and years on foreign soil, home seemed but a distant memory a thousand leagues away, infinite rows of hills and streams in between, a dream in a dream, somewhere only a god-king could bring them back. If only for the hope of going home, the men
had to believe in Ah Ek Lemba.
In September 1409, the harvest season, Mahpilxocoyōtl and the Yucatec army marched to Oaxaca. The fortifications on the Quizii-Oaxaca border had stalled them last year, but not now; the Tiho troops had taken care to raze them after their capture, and the vassals of Cholōllān had not had the time to reman them. Burning down cornfields, incinerating harvests, slaughtering peasants wherever they could, they reached the Zapotec city of Lyobaa in October, a little ahead of schedule.
The theocratic city of Lyobaa was the holiest place of the Zapotec nation. There sat the conjunction between earth and underworld; there the great Zapotec lords received burial; there nobility from all of Zapoteca came to offer sacrifice and beseech Coquebila the Death God’s oracle for some favorable augury. In Isatian the city was called
Mictlān, “Place of Death”. And when Mahpilxocoyōtl demanded surrender, the high priest wrote out a two-word pun in syllabary:
Mictlān amomictlān
“Mictlān [Place of Death], Place of Your Death”
As he charted out the terrain to begin the siege, Mahpilxocoyōtl had his scribe give a two-word reply, also a pun and also in syllabary:
Micqueh tiquintēcah
“We lay down corpses”
[If the three middle syllables are removed, one reads Mictēcah “People of Mictlān”]
Lyobaa was well-fortified, and the Tiho troops made little headway as the harvest season waned. In traditional Mesoamerican fashion, the war season proper began in November, the moment the harvests were done. Zapotec kings and Mixtec princes rallied their levies to war, and tens of thousands of cotton-clad warriors (some said a hundred thousand or more, though Mahpilxocoyōtl discounted such information) soon pooled like floodwater around the besiegers of Lyobaa.
“They are too many,” someone said, “we cannot win.” And Mahpilxocoyōtl heard that someone’s words grow louder and louder, swelling like a torrential flood, more and more someones adding their voices to it.
“We will win.”
“How so?”
“We are more desperate than they.”
Night battles were rare in the pre-night vision world and almost unknown in the Americas. It demanded the strictest discipline and the closest concentration—two things until recently uncommon in the armies of the Western Hemisphere—to kill and be killed when so little could be seen, when an enemy soldier might be crouching under you and you would never know, not before the obsidian blade was already deep into your neck, the glass on the blood as cold as it was sharp. In all known history, Ah Ek Lemba alone had succeeded a large-scale night operation, and even that occasionally.
The Battle of Yagüi was almost miraculous, a testimony to how far the Tiho army’s discipline had come.
Mahpilxocoyōtl’s troops set off when the Moon was at her height, sputtering pine torches in their hands. The Mixtec and Zapotec armies were in three separate encampments, slumbering obliviously. No scouts. The Maya sped to where the warrior societies slept.
The eagle and jaguar warriors awoke to the ghastly howls of Tiho troops deafening the ear, their nose stuffed from the pungency of burning aromatic pine, and knew that things were very wrong. Some of them tried to run. Their comrades scolded them: “We swore an oath to never die with a wound on our backs, only on our chests.” And so they stood their ground as arrows flew out of darkness and lodged deep into their chests (and not their backs). Or sometimes the eagle and jaguar warriors had slept too late last night and woke only to the sudden
woosh of a
mācuahuitl cutting through the air as it landed on their neck. Or sometimes the warrior was on his feet immediately, screaming the worst Zapotec profanities he could think of as Maya silhouettes glided in, swinging knives blindly into the dark, hardly feeling his injuries, until he tripped on something long and slippery—and realized his intestines were spilling out—and let out an unearthly shriek and all his strength deserted him and the Maya left him to die.
The peasant levies were roused by the commotion, realized what was happening soon enough, and began to run
en masse. Many of them fell into a nearby lake, forgetting it was there in the night’s obscurity, and drowned. Later legends told of the last straggling men fleeing over the lake, running over the mass of drowned bodies of their comrades.
The Battle of Yagüi raged into morning, but by noon the vultures began to set in. The slaughter had not been as complete as Mahpilxocoyōtl had hoped, almost all the peasants having run and disappeared, but it was good enough. The Mixtec and Zapotec professional warriors had suffered unrecoverable casualties, and Oaxaca could no longer provide a realistic challenge to Mahpilxocoyōtl on the battlefield.
The afternoon, the Maya toured the local lake, dyed black and red with bodies and blood. Mahpilxocoyōtl was not a literary man—he appears to have had dyslexia and could not read, and was notorious for his inability to draw—but he had the army scribe compose a song about the lake for the occasion.
“How many lines, sire?”
“Not too many. Three, perhaps.”
“Salty-red today;
“Buzzing-black tomorrow;
“The day after, squirming-white.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, sire, that now the lake is salty and red with blood; tomorrow the carrion flies will set in, buzzing thick and black all over the lake; and finally, when the flies are sated and depart, all there will be left is rotten flesh, where writhing white maggots play.”
“What a wonderful song! Have the villagers call this place Squirming White Lake.”
To this day, the local Zapotecs still do.