When they woke up the next morning, Cortez and Malinali bathed in the freshwater pool in their courtyard, and strolled among the sweet-smelling fruit trees and rose bushes in their palace garden. "My captain," she asked him, "you have chosen this day to meet the Great Montezuma and enter Tenochtitlan. What do you call this day and why have you chosen it?"
"This day is November 8th in the year of Our Lord 1519. There is nothing special about this day - it just happens to be the day we have come here. Why do you ask, my Lady?"
"Because all the people of Tenochtitlan, I have heard, are talking about this day. They went to sleep last night in terror, including Montezuma. For just as you chose to arrive in the land of the Mesheeka in a 1-Reed year, Quetzacoatl's year of return, so now you choose to enter the Mesheeka capital on a 1-Wind day - the one day of the year that bears the sign of Quetzacoatl in his guise of the whirlwind. The whirlwind that brings upheaval and destruction. The whirlwind that brings, the Mesheeka are whispering, the ‘disembowelment of the world'."
"The whirlwind?" Cortez exclaimed with a snap of his head. He stopped, clasped his hand around Malinali's and held them tightly. "Every Christian who reads the Bible knows the story of the prophet Hosea," he told her. "He warned his people of Israel that God would allow them to be conquered for their unfaithfulness to Him. This happened many, many centuries ago[1]. Yet his famous warning seems now to be directed at the Mesheeka:
For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: the grain shall have no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: and if it does, strangers shall swallow it up.[2]
"The Mesheeka have sown the wind with their evil. I know I am but a sinful man, not this god they confuse me with. But the One True God acted through Hosea, and these constant coincidences between me and these legends of Quetzacoatl are perhaps saying that He has sent us as the whirlwind which the Mesheeka must reap, that we are the strangers who must swallow up their evil."
Malinali's eyes were wide with wonder as they gazed into those of Cortez. "That is what my father prayed for, that is what I prayed for, my Captain, and that is what I now believe. Let us both pray to the Christian God in thanks for this whirlwind."
[1] ca. 750 BC.
[2] Hosea 8:7.
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