MOTECUHZOMA
            If, past this moment, you persist in lies,
            Know I shall bury you beneath my halls,
            Pull down your house till sludge seeps through the planks,
            And wipe your family name from off the earth,
            Yea, to the unborn fragments in the womb.
            Now, wouldn’t you recant this little fib?

FISHERMAN
            Forgive me lord, but what I tell is truth.

TLACAELEL
            Most like it is.

MOTECUHZOMA             Then know, you brave, bold slave,
            These spectral archipelagos you saw,
            Were giantlike canoes, with alien crew.
                                        He gestures to a servant, who produces a trunk.
            One year ago, the waves cast up this trunk
            Of jewels, foreign frocks, and silver swords:
            Most like, the precious jetsam of this launch.

FISHERMAN
            May my aviso aid your eminence.

MOTECUHZOMA
            One see him nobly boarded in our suites.
                                                                  Exit Servant with the Fisherman.

                                       Enter a Majordomo.
                    
TLACAELEL
            Well, watch, where are your hocus-pocus wards?

MAJORDOMO          My lord, command that I be cut to pieces or whatever you wish, for you should know that when I reached the cell, there was no one there. I had my best sentries there, trustworthy men I’ve known for years, but none of them heard the sorcerers escape.

TLACAELEL
            Then how, pray tell me, have they flown the coop?

MAJORDOMO
            Perhaps they flapped away.

TLACAELEL                                       What, gallows-meat?
          
MAJORDOMO        They can sprinkle themselves with fern-spores, and
shimmer into invisibility.

TLACAELEL
            Buzz, buzz! These twice-told tales upend my trust.
            Rope’s end-

MOTECUHZOMA          No. Suffer him.

TLACAELEL                                             As you see fit.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Some say such wizards take wing every night,
            And soar unto the fringes of the earth.

TLACAELEL
            His majesty’s broad magnanimity
            Has spared you this time, turnkey, but repair.
            Not all wards will be such skilled hide-and-seeks.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Now: Torch the hovels of their families,
            And witness if those new lighthouses’ beacons
            Will call their wandering rooks home to re-roost.
                                                                                     Exit Majordomo.
TLACAELEL
            And what of these vast dugouts?

MOTECUHZOMA                                        Time will tell.
            Our steward Teuhtlilli eastward creeps,
            To see what tricks are offered from the deeps.             *They exit.