Her first intimation that things might not go the way that numbers and common sense suggested came a moment later when she saw five clouds of dirty grey smoke rise up a little distance in front of those tiny squares. This interesting phenomenon was followed almost instantly by some ripple or perturbance in the Mayan front ranks; though she could not see the cause, it was obvious that men had fallen. Finally, a fifteen count after the smoke had appeared, she heard a tremendous rolling, crashing blast, a sound like the thunder of doom, and knew she was witnessing in action the weapons the white men called ‘guns’.
Well, Muluc’s men were prepared for this. They now knew – for the intelligence Cit Bolon Tun brought had been passed to every one of them – that there was nothing supernatural about these ‘guns’; they were just weapons like any other, albeit very dangerous ones. After they had been fired they had to be reloaded, which took time, and during the intervals the white men would be vulnerable.
As she had expected, the entire Mayan force, which had been approaching at a fast march, surged forward into a wild charge. Immediately, five more clouds of dirty grey smoke rose up from before the squares.
Had Cit Bolon Tun been lying?
No, Malinal thought. The more likely explanation was that the Spaniards had ten ‘guns’ and were reloading the first five while the second five were fired.
Again she saw that mysterious perturbance in the Mayan ranks – more noticeable this time than before; it seemed that many men had fallen and that these powerful weapons worked their harm not only on those directly facing them but in long narrow strips extending five or even ten ranks back into the charging mass. Even so the charge did not break – and it still had not broken after a fifteen count when the devastating reverberating roar of the guns reached her.
What was becoming obvious, however, was a distinct closing-up, a definite compression, of the forty-thousand-strong army. To Malinal’s eye it seemed that the front ranks had slowed their onward rush somewhat while the rearmost ranks had, if anything, increased their pace, and the result was that the whole force had now become more dense, compacted into a space somewhat less than a thousand feet deep, as it bore down in a mass on the white men’s squares.
That was when Malinal saw two much larger clouds of smoke billow from the top of Potonchan’s ancient pyramid and sensed a blur in the air as two objects, moving incredibly fast, crashed into the very heart of Muluc’s army.
What was this? She blinked, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. There! And there! Two glinting objects bouncing and rolling with unbelievable force, mowing down hundreds – hundreds! – of Mayan warriors amidst bright splashes of blood, spreading disorder and rampant terror amongst them. Cuetzpalli gasped and leaned forward, shading his eyes with his hand; Ah Kinchil’s face turned grey and his toothless jaw sagged.
And then came the sound …
A sound beyond imagination and nightmares.
A sound like the end of the world.
Pepillo pulled his fingers from his ears, shook his head to clear the infernal ringing that had set in and surveyed the damage that the first two seventy-pound balls from the lombards had done to the massed enemy. Already visibly discomfited by the ten one-pound rounds from the falconets, he saw they were now in a state of some distress, not exactly falling apart but definitely lacking the aggressive certainty and cohesion they’d shown moments before.
He and Melchior had very little to do and looked on in amazement as Mesa’s gun crews worked like demons, swabbing out the big barrels and loading new charges. Down on the plain the enemy front line, still manoeuvring from a block into a horned formation, was quarter of a mile from the four Spanish squares and coming on at a full run. But the falconets had been reloaded and now Ordaz fired all ten at once, a concentrated salvo that smashed through the advance, cutting deep swathes into the ranks, raising screams of confusion and terror, causing some men to halt and others to turn back, transforming the Mayan army almost instantly from an organised coherent force into a melee. Meanwhile the crews were reloading the little cannon and, from now on, Melchior explained, they would fire grapeshot at point-blank range, doing terrible damage.
But the Maya did not lack courage and large elements of their wavering front line still pressed forward, now less than a thousand feet from the Spanish squares. Behind, in a seething, tumultuous, curving band, seven hundred feet deep and two thousand wide, the rest of the huge force struggled with itself, some advancing, some retreating – a giant flux of close to forty thousand men into the midst of whom, keeping the seventy-pound balls as far from the Spaniards as possible, Mesa must concentrate his fire.
The lombards were ready again. Melchior and Pepillo returned their fingers to their ears.
Ah Kinchil, Cuetzpalli, the scribe, the artist, the Cuahchics, Ah Kinchil’s guards and retainers, Malinal, even the litter-bearers, in short everyone on the hilltop regardless of rank or station, had now pressed forward to the edge of the trees and stood silent, riveted in place by the events unfolding on the plain below. Whereas moments before it had seemed certain that Muluc’s army must sweep the white men away like saplings before an avalanche, it was now obvious that the forty thousand Maya warriors were in some kind of serious, unprecedented, unknown trouble.
Malinal saw the smoke plumes that told her the ten guns in front of the Spanish squares had fired again, all of them together this time, felt in her viscera the hammer blows that struck the Mayan front ranks, making them reel back, and sensed the shock waves radiating rearwards from there through the whole army, causing men far from the impact to stumble and fall as though pushed by giant, invisible hands while others – thousands! – turned in blind panic and ran.
‘Fight!’ Ah Kinchil croaked, ‘Fight!’ – as if anyone could hear him; as if it would make any difference if they did! But perhaps in some way the paramount chief’s feeble command had got through, for those who ran on towards the Spaniards, Malinal realised, still far outnumbered those attempting to desert.
Cuetzpalli was whispering urgently to his artist – ‘Paint everything! The Lord Speaker will reward you!’ – when Malinal saw two huge plumes of smoke rush up again from the top of the distant pyramid and, in the same instant, with intimations of horror, witnessed the same shimmer in the air she had seen before, presaging the same mysterious phenomenon of shining metallic spheres tearing through the Maya ranks, bowling over whole rows of men twenty or thirty deep, crushing some, decapitating or dismembering others, bouncing high, crashing down, bouncing and rolling again.
‘Fight!’ Ah Kinchil was still screaming, spittle running out of his mouth and down his chin. ‘Fight for the honour of the Chontal Maya!’ Cuetzpalli looked on, his fists clenched so tightly that the knuckles had turned white. Malinal saw that the chaos in the midst of the ranks was multiplying out of control as the metal spheres spread their doom and those running away collided with those running forward. Yet so huge was the army that tens of thousands at the front were still swept onwards by the vast momentum of the charge – onwards like some great ocean wave that must crash down on those tiny, seemingly defenceless Spanish squares and wipe them utterly from the face of the earth.
Bernal Díaz knew he should have stayed behind with the injured men assigned to defend the pyramid, but his pride and his infernal sense of honour had got in the way when Mesa made his selection. Instead of admitting he could hardly walk, let alone stand and fight for hours on the plains, he’d kept his head down and let the dour chief of artillery choose others, fitter than himself, for the garrison.
Worse still, he’d said yes when Ordaz had picked him to lead the hundred men in the westernmost of the four squares. Well, how could he refuse? Most of the officers were away with the cavalry – and where the hell was the cavalry, come to think of it? – leaving precious few with enough experience to command large groups of infantry.
Ah, pride! Ah, honour! Díaz winced and closed his eyes for a moment against a wave of dizziness as another stabbing pain
ran the length of his throbbing, hugely swollen leg. When he looked again the onrushing mass of Indians, like some turbulent, surging tide, was just five hundred feet away, their shrill cries and whistles and the terrible beat of their drums ringing in his ears, and he saw Ordaz’s sword come slashing down, the signal to the gunners, and the ten falconets ranged in front of the squares again fired in unison amidst clouds of smoke, their coughing, booming roar echoing forth, their charges of grapeshot spreading out and tearing into the massed enemy, cutting them to bloody ribbons as though a thousand keen-edged knives had been hurled at them. The attack faltered but did not break and the gun crews wheeled the little cannon back on the double, three into the protection of Díaz’s square, two into the next, three into the next and two into the last, just ahead of the Indian front rank, which threw itself against the Spanish pikes with suicidal fury.
Gods! Díaz thought, sweeping aside a spear thrust and hacking his broadsword into a screaming, painted face. Are these men or devils? And suddenly his square was engulfed – all the squares were engulfed – by countless thousands of the enemy. The fighting was so intense, so furious, so close that Díaz forgot the crippling pain of his leg, forgot the fever and nausea that shook him, and fought like a madman for his life, aware as he parried and thrust that the crews of the three falconets inside his square were feverishly reloading.
‘Musketeers!’ he yelled. ‘A volley! A volley now!’
Cortés was finding it difficult to stay calm. For the past quarter-hour he and his riders had been hearing cannon fire, yet they still remained stuck on the track that ran east and then south out of Potonchan, curving through forest and dense bush for two miles before reaching open fields. There had been no musket fire, which meant the Mayan and Spanish front ranks were not yet engaged, but he knew the clash could not be delayed much longer. He cursed under his breath as, for the seventh or eighth time since leaving the town, the whole troop was forced to dismount in order to clear trees that had been felled across their path.
This was a bad development. Alvarado and Davila had both made use of the track yesterday, and Alvarado again this morning, and they had reported it narrow but free of obstacles and passable by horses riding in single file. It followed that the enemy – Cortés could not guess how many – had penetrated the forest within the past few hours. Might there be enough of them to stage an ambush? The dismounted riders were vulnerable. Or might they be planning a flanking attack on the town?
Both possibilities loomed large in Cortés’s imagination; however, the greater worry was the time it was taking to get his cavalry into the field – far, far longer than anyone had anticipated! Once battle was joined in earnest in front of the town, the foot soldiers could not hold out indefinitely against the overwhelming numbers of the Maya. Cannon might delay the inevitable but only a decisive charge of heavy horse could swing the balance and demoralise the enemy completely enough to give victory to the hard-pressed Spaniards.
Sandoval and Escalante wrestled aside the last of the felled trunks and the troop mounted up again.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Puertocarrero, glancing nervously into the dark mass of trees pressing close to the track. ‘Forest is no place for cavalry.’
‘Who cares whether you like it or not?’ growled Alvarado, touching his heel to Bucephalus’s flank and causing the white stallion to surge forward into the rump of Puertocarrero’s silver-grey mare.
‘Silence, gentlemen, please,’ said Cortés. In the distance they all heard the bark of muskets.
Where was the cavalry? This was the question at the forefront of Díaz’s mind. Despite the carnage wrought by the cannon, the gigantic, howling torrent of Mayan warriors had engulfed all four of the squares, flowing round them as a river in spate flows round islands in its midst, hammering at the Spaniards on every side. He smelt them – rank, fetid, like dead meat; saw their furious eyes, their bared teeth, filed to sharp points, their brown skin glistening with sweat, their lean, painted bodies, the barbaric splendour of their plumes and standards, the flash and gleam of their primitive stone weapons – here an axe, here a dagger, here a spear – lunging and battering at his men, breaking against armour, deflected by good Spanish shields. He was sorely tempted to unleash the twenty-five war hounds held barking and straining at the centre of his square, but the signal Ordaz had arranged, three blasts on the bugle, had not been sounded, and there was more work yet for gun and sword.
Responding to his command, his twelve musketeers had pushed their way forward, three on the north, three on the south, three on the east, and three on the west side of the square, and now fired a volley in unison, tearing holes in the press of the enemy, creating points of weakness and confusion into which his swordsmen charged, hacking and slashing wildly. The madness of battle was on him, the agony of his leg wound dulled, and Díaz found that he too had surged out of the protection of the square to attack the disrupted enemy ranks, shield in his left hand, sword in his right, a lunge to a man’s throat, a slash across a bare abdomen, smash his shield into another’s face, hack down with his blade to take off a leg at the knee …
Then suddenly he was cut off, alone, surrounded by a wheeling knot of the foe, and he felt a spear thud and shatter against his cuirass. In the next instant a flint knife somehow found a way through his pauldron and embedded itself in his left armpit with a shock of intense, burning pain, and some great club smashed against his helmet, knocking him sick and dizzy to the ground, stars flashing before his eyes.
What was this? What was this? Dirty bare feet, hairless brown legs, a man’s crotch bound in a breechclout, strong hands gripping his upper arms, dragging him away, excited voices jabbering in the barbarous tongue of the Maya.
The realisation dawned on Díaz that he was being taken. Dear God! They’ll sacrifice me! They’ll cut out my heart! But just then he heard a great roar of ‘Santiago and at them!’, saw an Indian’s head go thumping and rolling, the stump of a neck gushing blood, long black hair cartwheeling, saw a hand sliced off, an arm amputated at the shoulder, saw another painted warrior hacked clean in half as Mibiercas, like the angel of death, did terrible butchery with his longsword, yelling furious insults with every massive blow, clearing a wide space into which La Serna and three others charged and bore Díaz aloft and carried him back into the square.
There was no let-up, the press of the enemy resumed at once, but then someone shouted ‘Now!’ and Díaz sensed rather than saw the three falconets trundled forward to the edges of the square, heard the roar of their percussion and the whistle of grapeshot and the terrible screams as their tempest of fire was unleashed.
At point-blank range, the effect of the shrapnel storm was calamitous for the Maya. Huge gaps a dozen men wide opened up in their ranks into which, once again, poured the flying squads of Spanish swordsmen, Mibiercas to the fore. They hacked mercilessly at their dazed foes until they began to form up again and then withdrew to the protection of the squares.
Ignoring the thudding pain in his leg, ignoring the hot blood dripping from under his left arm, Díaz was on his feet near the middle of the square where his friends had set him down, using his height to get a sense of the ebb and flow of the battle. He saw that wherever the Maya kept their discipline and dashed in good order against the outer ranks of the Spanish formations, they were met by solid walls of shields over the top of which long spears and pikes were thrust into their faces from the ranks behind, while the men directly confronting them gutted and hamstrung them with sword blades. Meanwhile the musketeers and crossbowmen, firing sequentially in groups of six, kept up almost continuous withering volleys that tore yet more holes in the Mayan ranks, which were again exploited by groups of swordsmen until the falconets were once more ready to fire, restarting the whole cycle of death and destruction.
Díaz felt proud of his comrades, so proud that tears leapt to his eyes and his breath caught in his throat. They were men of the finest mettle, men who refused to break, no matter what fearsome odds the
y faced, men who would not give way, men who did not know the meaning of defeat.
Yet even men such as they could not possibly survive this terrible onslaught. Had they killed a thousand of the enemy with their cannon and muskets and swordplay? Two thousand? It did not matter. They could kill three thousand or even five thousand and the odds would still be close to a hundred to one and the final outcome certain.
Unless the will of the foe broke – and only the cavalry, Díaz was sure, had the power to bring that about.
Mesa was ready to fire the lombards again and Pepillo put his fingers back in his ears. He could see the shots were becoming more difficult for the artilleryman now the enemy swirled so close to the Spaniards. Still, they were legion, stretching back in a disordered mass at least five hundred feet south of the squares.
The two huge guns bellowed flame and smoke, sending the lethal seventy-pound balls whistling low to crash down amidst the Mayan ranks just a hundred feet south of the Spanish formations.
My goodness, thought Pepillo, that was a close thing! But again the cannon balls and the massive roar of the big guns had a stunning effect on the enemy, causing even those locked in direct combat with the squares to pause and look up.
Some were pointing at him! Then his eye was caught by a horde of warriors, a thousand strong, leaving the centre of the battle and pouring north across the intervening mile directly towards the town.
Directly towards the pyramid.
‘Captain Mesa!’ he yelled. ‘There! Look there!’
Seeing the threat, the artilleryman scrambled to crank down the elevation of the barrels as the gun crews frantically reloaded.
War God Page 54