No one knew that when they buried Princess Papantzin she was still alive. Suddenly, the quiet of the lush palace gardens was shattered by her screams from within the damp tomb. Hummingbirds scattered, and spotted leopards yowled in fear. Members of the royal household, who had been mourning her death, came running. “Unseal the tomb!” they cried, their faces ashen with terror.
Princess Papantzin stumbled out, skin tingling from the effects of the strange dream she had had while in her coma. “Alert my brother!” she ordered.
Emperor Montezuma II listened wide-eyed as his sister described her experience. “My vision was a prophecy meant for you!” she exclaimed. “In my dream I met a man all made of light. He wore a kind of symbol on his forehead—two intersecting black lines. I followed him to the edge of the great sea. We stared into the mists over the water. Suddenly, the fog parted and I gasped at vast canoes that loomed over me, bounding toward the shore.
“The vessels were carrying men from a faraway land—men who are our people’s long-awaited messengers from the god, Quetzalcoatl (KETS-ahl-KO-waht). They are the prophesied foreigners who will conquer you, Montezuma. They will finally bring knowledge of the true God to our people, the Aztecs.”
“I have expected this,” the emperor murmured. “How shall I know when all you saw is about to be fulfilled?”
“The billowing white sails of the vessels also bore the symbol of the intersecting lines,” Princess Papantzin told her brother. “It was as if that symbol itself were the force that drew the great canoes to Mexico’s shores.”
“The symbol?” Emperor Montezuma asked. The Mexican tribes already honored a symbol made of two intersecting lines. The vertical line stood for things that descended from the supernatural world, and the horizontal line stood for earthly things. At the point where the two lines touched—the center of this “cross”—the Aztecs believed that the worlds of heaven and earth met. “So,” the emperor reasoned, “it is to be by this sign that our empire will fall and the Aztecs will be given a new life!”