Huitzilopochtli

The story

Before there was a city, before there was an empire, there was a mountain shaped like a serpent. It was called Coatepec, the Serpent Mountain, and it rose near Tollan, where the night wind cuts like a blade.

Every day at dawn a woman climbed up there with a broom made of twigs. Her name was Coatlicue, the goddess with the skirt of serpents. She swept the courtyard of the shrine, slowly and in silence, because she had made a promise to the gods: as long as there was dust to sweep away, she would not stop.

One morning, as she was sweeping, a small ball of feathers floated down from the sky. It was so light that it made no sound when it touched the ground. Coatlicue picked it up and, not knowing where she could put it down without showing it disrespect, she tucked it into her belt, under her dress. Then she went back to her broom, and for a moment it seemed to her that the wind had stopped to listen.

When she finished and went to look for it, the ball of feathers was gone.

But something in her had changed. She was expecting a child.

The news ran across the mountain faster than the wind. No one could explain it, and what cannot be explained is sometimes more frightening than an enemy. The first to hear was her eldest daughter, Coyolxauhqui, and she was not happy.

“Who did this?” she said to her brothers, gathered in the dark. There were four hundred of them, the Centzon Huitznahua, the Four Hundred of the South, and when they all spoke at once they sounded like a river in flood. “Our mother has shamed us. She is carrying a child and has told us nothing. We must do something before it is born.”

The four hundred agreed. They dressed for war: they tied bells to their legs, stuck feathers in their hair and painted their faces. Then they took up their weapons and set off up Coatepec, with Coyolxauhqui marching at their head.

Coatlicue heard them coming. She knew it from the sound of the bells, which climbed the slope like a shower of pebbles. She stopped sweeping. She laid the broom carefully on the ground and sat down on the stone of the shrine, her hands on her belly. She was afraid, and she did not hide it from anyone: the mountain was empty and the noise was getting closer and closer.

Among the four hundred, though, there was one who did not agree. His name was Cuahuitlicac. He did not dare stand up to his brothers, but secretly, with every step, he drifted a little away from the group, and with every step he came a little closer to his mother. When he was far enough away not to be heard, he whispered towards Coatlicue's belly:

“They are coming. They want to kill her.”

Then, from inside the goddess, came a voice. It was the voice of the child who had not yet been born.

“Do not be afraid,” it said. “I know what I must do. Just tell me when they are close.”

Cuahuitlicac was lost for words. Then he went back to his brothers, and at each stage of the climb he secretly told the goddess how far they had come.

“They are at the foot of the mountain,” he said the first time.

“They have passed the first stretch.”

“They are almost at the top. I can hear them. They are here.”

At that moment, in that very instant, Huitzilopochtli was born.

He was not born the way babies are born. He was born already standing. In one hand he held his shield and his darts, and in the other he carried his dart-thrower, all blue, the colour of turquoise. His face was painted with stripes, his head was crowned with feathers, and his left leg, thinner than the other, was covered in plumes. He looked like a grown warrior stepped out of a legend.

“Light the turquoise serpent,” he ordered one of his servants, Tochancalqui. It was his fire, his weapon, his light.

In the silence that followed, the four hundred stopped. That was when the god struck.

Coyolxauhqui fell first. Her body slid down the slope of Coatepec, rolling over and over, and came to rest only at the foot of the mountain, where the mountain ends. It was over in a moment, and none of her brothers had time to understand what had happened.

Then Huitzilopochtli turned to the others.

The four hundred began to run. The god chased them all around the mountain, once, twice, three times, four times, and with every lap the sound of the bells grew fainter. They tried to defend themselves. They clashed their shields, they begged, they asked to be spared.

“Wait,” one of them shouted. “Wait, we are your brothers!”

But he did not stop. Almost all of them were defeated. Only a very few managed to escape, towards the south, to Huitzlampa, the land of the South, and there they stayed, far away. Huitzilopochtli took the feathers, the weapons and the ornaments of the defeated, and made them his own.

From the top of Coatepec, the goddess Coatlicue saw everything. Her son was alive. She was safe.

The Aztecs said that from that day Huitzilopochtli was the strongest of the gods, the protector of his people, and that his name was a riddle: huitzilin, the hummingbird, and opochtli, the left, or the South. The hummingbird is small, but no bird is faster or braver. Warriors who died in battle, so the story went, came back to earth in just that way, as hummingbirds, to drink the nectar of the flowers.

When the Aztecs built their great pyramid in Tenochtitlan, the Templo Mayor, they built it as a copy of the Serpent Mountain. At the top stood the temple of Huitzilopochtli. At the foot of the staircase, in the place where the story said the mountain ends, they carved a great round stone with the figure of Coyolxauhqui, so that everyone would remember.

The city vanished beneath the houses of the Spanish, and the stone with it.

In 1978, in Mexico City, some workers from the electricity company were digging a trench in a street in the centre. All at once a shovel struck something hard, and smooth, and round. It was the Coyolxauhqui stone. It had been sleeping down there for more than four centuries, at the foot of a temple that no longer existed, and its eyes were still open on the story carved all around it.