Montezuma II in the Ryazan region

That night, Tenochtitlan smelled not of lake water but of copal smoke. He smelled of sweat, fumes and the greed of the white Teule gods.
The captive Tlatoani Montezuma II lay on a mat in the chambers of the palace of Axayacatl. Behind the stone walls, Spanish armor rang dully - this sound reminded the leader of the rustle of dry snake skins.
Montezuma closed his eyes, preparing to meet Quetzalcoatl, but instead of a feathered serpent, his consciousness fell into a white, icy void where there was no sun.


He woke up in the middle of an endless, flat field under a low, gray sky. The soil here was fat, black and cold - not at all like the fiery clay of Anahuac. Montezuma wore neither quetzal feathers nor jasper beads. He no longer felt the familiar, sacred weight of the golden shell that had protected his body and spirit for centuries. Instead, a thin white linen embroidery caressed his skin—cool, like lake water, and alive. The emperor's priestly mind intuitively perceived her relief red patterns on her chest as protective signs of unknown gods, bestowing peace.


But this moment of warmth was cut short. Over the shirt, the body was shackled in a strange, baggy gray suit made of coarse wool. The prickly cloth adhered to the body with thousands of small needles, causing unbearable itching. Hidden hard seams pressed on the shoulders. The suit smelled of machine smoke and an alien, gray era, turning the great Tlatoani into a faceless prisoner of this endless cold field.


- Plant, Nikita, plant, what did you hatch? - someone’s voice roared nearby, heavy as the blow of a ritual club.
Montezuma turned. Next to him stood a fat, round man with a face like a peeled cassava tuber and sly little eyes. The fat man had a white straw hat on his head.
In the hands of Montezuma himself (whom this strange priest persistently called Nikita) was a bucket filled to the top with grains. He looked inside and was stunned.

It was she - Tlaolli. Sacred corn. But its grains were unnaturally large, yellow and shiny, as if cast from gold, which Cortez’s bearded men were so greedily looking for.

“Is this... the land of Huitzilopochtli?” - asked Montezuma, and his voice sounded like the crunch of a dry stem.

- What the hell is Huitzilopochtli! — the fat man laughed, slapping his thighs. - This is the Ryazan region, Nikita Sergeevich! Let's catch up and overtake these American Ayhuacs! Come on, plant it in the soil using the square-nest method! Two grains per hole!

Montezuma complied.

Some higher, alien will forced him to bend. He took handfuls of the golden teeth of the corn god and threw them into the black Ryazan mud. For a moment it seemed to him that he was performing a great sacrament: the corn planted here, in the far northeast of the world, was to grow across the globe and feed his dying, besieged Tenochtitlan.
Every grain that fell into the ground echoed in his ears with the distant cry of a wounded Aztec warrior.


Suddenly the space around them warped. Instead of an endless field, Montezuma found himself in a giant stone palace, where hundreds of pale-faced people in black clothes sat on stepped benches. They talked in an incomprehensible, barking language, similar to the knocking of pebbles in a shaman’s rattle. Montezuma felt that these people did not respect him. They looked at him the same way as Cortez - with polite, well-fed contempt for other people's greatness.

Fury boiled inside the emperor. This was not the rage of Nikita, it was the rage of thirty generations of rulers of Mesoamerica, whose temples were now being desecrated by aliens. He could not declare war on them - he had neither obsidian swords nor loyal jaguars.

Then Montezuma bent down, unfastened the strap on his left foot and took off a heavy, ugly black shoe that smelled of shoe polish and foreign sweat. He straightened up, raised his boot above his head as if it were the severed heart of an enemy, and pounded it as hard as he could on the wooden podium. Bam! Bam! Bam! - echoed throughout the hall.
“We’ll show you Kuzka’s mother!” - Montezuma shouted, not understanding who this formidable Mother of Kuzma was and what pantheon she came from. - We'll fill you with corn! You will dance with me, you pale-faced dogs!

The hall froze in holy horror. The pale-faced leaders on the benches pressed their heads into their shoulders. Montezuma pounded his boot, and with each blow, golden corn kernels fell from the sole, rolling across the polished wood. They turned into tiny suns, exploded into harmless white flakes of popcorn and filled the stuffy hall with the smell of satiety and near madness.
“Boris Nikolaevich, be careful, the tank is rocking...” whispered someone’s voice from the corner, but Montezuma could no longer hear it.
He opened his eyes. A pale dawn broke over Tenochtitlan. A young ray of sun was peeping through the palace window. Montezuma II, the Aztec ruler, lay on a mat and breathed heavily. A tear froze on his cheek. He looked at his bare feet - they were clean, no black shoes.

The Emperor understood everything. His empire will perish, the temples will be destroyed, and the gold will be taken overseas. But hundreds of years later, on the other side of the earth, his sacred corn will take revenge. She will subjugate the minds of the leaders of the distant northern empire, make them go crazy, worship yellow grains and knock their shoes on tables, frightening the whole world with the great curse of Montezuma. Tlatoani smiled and prepared to go out onto the balcony to his people, where the first stone thrown from the crowd was already waiting for him