Flower and Song

Episodes

• Flowers and Songs of Sorrow — The conch stops; the city is a ruin, the survivor un-free and the dead man at peace, and old Beltran, telling it decades on, says the last true thing — 'the people you followed were invented, except one; but we were here.' (One thread stays open: the new people, Martin, the world the fall makes.)
• The Slow Strangling — The lake is a floor of ships and the aqueduct runs dry, and the great drum booms for the Spaniards taken alive — 'and everyone in the city, and everyone in the camp, knew how it would end.'
• The Plague With No Enemy — Chimalli sounds the conch over a plague-dying city for a reason that is no longer the sun's — 'and out beyond the passes, thousands of hands were carrying ships over the mountains.'
• The Drums Cut Silent — Cortés is gone to the coast, and a frightened garrison is left holding a city of a quarter-million that hates them. At the height of the year's great feast, the strangers seal the sacred court — and the drums cut silent an instant before the screaming. From inside the massacre to the black water of the flight, the night the greatest city in the Americas turned to war.
• The Road to the City — The road leaves the coast and climbs. Three hard battles turn a hundred-year enemy into an ally; a plaza of the dead teaches the interpreter exactly what her own voice can do; and two worlds that have been drifting toward each other since the first strange sail finally stand face to face on a road built out across the water.
• The One Who Chooses — The emperor is a guest who cannot leave, and the greatest empire in the Americas is being run, that winter, through one enslaved woman's mouth. Between a captor and a captive god, she stops only carrying the words — and starts, by inches, to choose them.
• The City on the Water — The greatest city in the Americas is living one more ordinary morning at the height of its glory - the conch on the temple, the market louder than Rome, a general who cannot find the words for how much his son's rise means. And across the eastern sea, eleven ships are pointed straight at it. Two marvels, each the most astonishing thing the other will ever see, and neither one yet knowing the other is there.
• The Gift of the Tongue — After the battle of Centla, a broken town pays its conquerors in gold, maize, and twenty enslaved women. One of the twenty owns the single thing bondage could never take from her — three languages — and the afternoon three tongues discover they cannot speak to one another without her, she stops being spoil and becomes the wire the whole war has to run on. The story of Malintzin, and the price of being needed.