WHAT NEVER FELL · 1520 · TENOCHTITLAN
The lake city holds
The night of 30 June 1520: Hernan Cortes and his army are fleeing Tenochtitlan across a causeway over the lake, a portable bridge their only way past the gaps. In our timeline enough of them clawed across the dead to escape. This is the timeline where the causeway keeps them, and the city on the lake does not fall.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
30 JUN 1520 · MIDNIGHT
For eight months Hernan Cortes has held Tenochtitlan by holding its emperor. In May, while Cortes is away on the coast fighting a rival Spanish force, his deputy Pedro de Alvarado massacres unarmed celebrants at the festival of Toxcatl, and the city rises. Moctezuma, the captive emperor, is dead, by Mexica stones or Spanish hands depending on who tells it. Besieged in the palace of Axayacatl, Cortes orders a retreat by night, west along the Tlacopan causeway over the lake. His men carry a portable bridge of beams and planks to span the gaps the Mexica have cut in the road. They pass the first canals in the rain and the dark. Then a woman drawing water sees them, and a priest on the Great Temple begins to shout.
In the timeline recorded here, the alarm runs a few breaths faster. The Mexica reach the far gap before the Spanish do. The portable bridge jams in the mud at the first canal and is never freed. The column is caught on a stone road the width of eight horsemen, with black water on either side. There is nowhere left to go but into the lake.
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