1521 AD
"It's amazing what a person will do when the have no money and are starving... It's also amazing that a conquistador would let a street rat such as myself in his army, but I did know how to sail, and I did know how to wield a musket, so I suppose a poorer choice could have been made. Now I longed for home. Now I have the blood of many on my hands... If not literally, than certainly I do in a sense of spirit...
They took our leader as a God. He wasn't. In fact, he wasn't even a nice guy. But I suppose this tribe wouldn't know better... In a way, I wish they had. We had tried to defeat them before, but they had driven us off. Cortes had gotten too greedy. Taken their king hostage, tried to use him as a puppet... It did not work. After burning down of their temples, it became clear to them that if he was in fact a God, he was one that they no longer cared to worship. Their sheer numbers drove us off... But Cortes was not a man who suffered defeat easily.
He thought long and hard, and came up with a plan. Despite my new found temperament(the thoughts that this was wrong and that I was being part of some unspeakable evil) I have to at least respect it's military genius. Use the enemy of one people to overthrow that people. So we did. We raised a large army of natives, built ourselves boats, and laid siege to the capital city of this people calling themselves 'Mexica'. This capital city was amazing, unlike anything I had ever seen in Spain. It was a city floating atop a great lake. We laid siege to it's magnificence, laid waste to it, laid our torches upon it, and in a sad triumph, we sank that city to the bottom of the lake...
It was later that evening, back on land, as I lay, trying to sleep but unable to, that the voice of Cortes and one of our men came drifting to me on a breeze. 'Cortes,' the man said, 'today we have won a great victory. You are to us what Caeser was to Rome.'
My heart ached upon hearing those words, and although I know not why, I fell asleep crying.
Years later, in my old age, I would think back to that statement... And have dreams, from where I know not, of a time when I was the one being held by a siege. I recognized neither the land nor the enemy, nor even the people I was with... But the memories were vivid enough to almost make me believe that they had actually happened... And sometimes I would wake with tears in my eyes, and a cry of pain rising in my chest..."
More of my tale soon to come...