During the months of siege, the king thought to be a slave gave bits of information about the Aztec, like a lake letting only a little stream flow out each day. And he watched and learned. Like his own people, few here could read, although the secrets were not guarded. He learned the new language from a priest of the new god. He learned that it was not the sound from the sticks that killed, but a projectile that came at great speed from a hole in the stick. He learned that there were bigger sticks that fired bigger projectiles.

One night he learned to ride a horse and almost got killed.

The pale men's metals were harder than the Actatl's. Their military formations were not superior, but being able to stand twenty to thirty paces off and kill with the sticks called guns, the formations did not have to be superior. Their writing was not symbols of things but symbols of sound, and in this, the Actatl king knew, there was a great power. Lighter people were treated better than darker people, and these pale men did not, as his spies had correctly told him, sacrifice people or animals, although at first when he saw the statue of the man stretched out on crossed bars, he was not sure.

He saw the city of Moctezuma fall and its people enslaved, and he was sure that even as the stronger Aztec were doomed, so were his own people. There would be hardly a trace.

These pale men from a land called Europe were robber warriors, and while it was not unusual for new tribes to move into old land, these pale men were different because they did not share ways, they imposed theirs. And theirs was a better way that did not demand the silliness of the sacrifice.

But he must not let his people die.

Among the camp of the pales were many tribes that sided with the newcomers against Moctezuma. One man recognized the Actatl king, and he went to the woman of Cortez and said, "That is not a slave but king of the Actatl." And the woman called the king to her and asked why he had come as a slave when as a king he would have been welcome.