The squat figure of Ordaz was before him, sword mired to the hilt with blood, a look of triumph on his face as he surveyed the rout of the enemy. Cortés reined in beside him, pointed with his lance to the pyramid. ‘It’s not over yet,’ he yelled. ‘Bring two hundred men. Bring them fast!’ As he spurred forward again he saw Vendabal and swerved by him. ‘Dogs!’ he shouted. ‘I need dogs now. Tear them loose from the foe and bring them to the aid of our comrades.’ Vendabal followed his gaze to the pyramid, his eyes widened, and he bellowed for his assistants.
Cortés urged Molinero to a full gallop, furious to see Alvarado and some of the other cavaliers hanging back, so keen to punish the thousands fleeing the battlefield that they were oblivious to the danger in the town. But Escalante, Puertocarrero and Morla on his left, Sandoval, Velázquez de León and Dominguez on his right, had seen what he saw, and others were wheeling away to join the charge.
‘Santiago and at them!’ Cortés yelled, thrusting his lance forward. ‘Santiago and at them!’
Darting here and there behind the line, Pepillo saw everything and could do nothing. He saw a black-and-white painted warrior, his face twisted with hate, exploit a gap in the thicket of spear points, bound up the last three steps and break his stone dagger against a bearded soldier’s mailed hauberk, while to his right another of the foe also found his way through, somehow grabbing the ankles of a defender and tugging wildly to unbalance him. Both attackers were dead within seconds, the first with a dagger thrust to his heart and a shove that sent him rolling and tumbling down the side of the pyramid; the second with a thudding blow from a war hammer that split his skull and spilled his brains.
Following Melchior’s example, Pepillo held the heavy buckler above his head to ward off the missiles – arrows, fire-hardened darts, slingstones – that showered down constantly on the summit platform as he dashed to and fro, his heart drumming, ready to spear any man who broke through the line.
It had all happened suddenly. One minute he and Melchior had been spectators only, safe on top of the pyramid watching the lombards rain death on the enemy, the next minute Melchior had spotted two hundred Indians approaching the square from the east and Mesa and his troops had charged down to stop them. But no sooner had they placed the falconets to enfilade the attackers than the crews of the other battery, positioned on the south side of town, had appeared in the square, hotly pursued by a further hundred of the foe, the remnant of the large column that had approached from the south and been torn apart – though unfortunately not completely destroyed – by the lombards. This changed everything and Mesa was only able to get off one salvo of grapeshot towards the east before abandoning the little cannon, wheeling his men to the defence of the fleeing gunners and fighting a desperate retreat up the pyramid steps against the combined force of the two Indian bands.
In addition to himself and the Taino slaves, who’d been herded into the temple and would not take part in the defence, Pepillo counted sixty-four defenders now ringing the summit platform – forty injured soldiers, sixteen gun crew from the falconet batteries, six further gunners who had fired the now silent lombards, the artilleryman Mesa, and Melchior.
Despite the many injuries they’d already suffered in this morning’s battles, they held the high ground and were better armed and equipped than the far more numerous Indians attempting to storm the summit platform. Morale was high, too, because even as they fought with all their strength to prevent the summit from being overwhelmed, and thus save their own lives, all the defenders had seen the huge Maya army out on the plain break and fall apart as Cortés and his cavalryman entered the field and the war dogs were unleashed from the squares. Then a great cheer went up and someone shouted: ‘The caudillo’s seen us! He’s coming.’ And another man said: ‘God be praised, I knew Cortés wouldn’t leave us in the lurch.’
‘Five minutes more,’ Mesa bellowed as he lunged his twelve-foot spear into the face of another attacker. ‘Five minutes more and the cavalry will be in the square and then we’ll have these devils on the run.’
Pepillo watched the infantryman next to Mesa on the south side of the platform swing a great double-headed axe, sending two more of the Indians hurtling and screaming down the steep steps to the ground far below. ‘I do believe,’ said Melchior, ‘that we may live through this after all.’ But just then, perhaps because they too had seen what had happened on the plain, the Indians redoubled their assault, huge numbers of them pressing up the steps at once, and the defenders on the west side suddenly buckled and gave way; an infantryman with a bandaged leg was pulled down and a crazed savage burst through, stabbed another man in the neck with his flint knife and opened a gap for more attackers to follow. In an instant a knot of half a dozen Maya fighters gained the summit, screaming ferocious battle cries, laying about themselves mightily with clubs and obsidian-edged blades.
Melchior didn’t hesitate but ran at them with his spear and thrust it under the ribs of the warrior who’d first broken the line. He hit him with such force that the man was thrown back over the lip of the summit and tumbled out of sight, taking the spear with him, even as another lean Indian, smeared with blood and paint, forced his way forward. Melchior drew his knife and two more attackers closed with him, stone blades flashing. For an instant longer Pepillo stood frozen with his back against the wall of the little temple at the centre of the platform, his hands shaking; then the spell was broken and he dashed forward, thrust his own eight-foot spear at the mob of invaders and felt the impact as its tip hit bone and it was snatched from his grasp. Where was Melchior? For a moment, in the screaming, bellowing scrum, amidst the press of bodies, he couldn’t locate him, but then he saw he was down, grinding his rusty old dagger between the ribs of a long-haired warrior who straddled and stabbed at him repeatedly with a flint blade. Pepillo sensed a rush of feet and heard the roar of Mesa’s voice as men from the south side, where the line still held, charged in to throw the invaders back, but his only thought was for Melchior. As he hurtled across the intervening space at his friend’s attacker, Cortés’s knife gripped in his fist, something huge and heavy smashed with dreadful force into the side of his head and he tumbled instantly into darkness.
When Pepillo awoke, blinking, with the taste of blood in his mouth and the sounds of screams flooding back into his ears, he didn’t know how much time had passed, or even, for the first few moments, where he was. He sat up groggily to see a massive wolfhound feasting on a dead Indian whose throat it had torn out. Other dogs were here, and more fallen Indians – most dead, some wounded; they were the ones doing the screaming. He recognised Sandoval, in armour, a bloodied broadsword gripped in his hand, talking quietly to Mesa. And there was Cortés, his armoured back and shoulders drenched in gore, crouched over a sprawled, still form.
Melchior!
Dread seized Pepillo as he crawled and clambered over bodies, shoved a snarling mastiff out of his way and dragged himself to his friend’s side.
Melchior’s eyes turned towards him. ‘Pepillo!’ he whispered. ‘You did well. I saw you spear that Indian …’
‘I tried to get to you,’ Pepillo sobbed. ‘Something hit me in the head, knocked me out. But thank God, you’re alive.’
Melchior reached out his hand, rested it on Pepillo’s arm and held him in a fierce grip. ‘Silly mammet!’ he said. ‘Of course I’m alive. Who else is going to teach you to ride?’
Chapter Sixty
Thursday 25 March 1519 to Sunday 18 April 1519
In the aftermath of the battle, though he had won an astounding victory against overwhelming odds, though he had destroyed the Indians of Potonchan utterly, as Saint Peter had required him to do, Cortés was seized by an immense weariness and a fall in his spirits. It was almost, he thought, like the feeling one has after sex, when one has anticipated the joys of a woman’s body, seduced her at great length, got her between the sheets and finally spent one’s seed in her only to discover, when all is said and done, that the act was a little less pleasur
able than one had imagined it might be.
A sense, somehow, of anticlimax rather than culmination.
A sense of melancholy and a vague, restless, gnawing hunger for something more …
Something … better.
In this mood, leaving Alvarado in charge of the mopping-up operation, not pausing even to wash or take supper, Cortés threw himself down on his bed soon after nightfall in the former palace of the chief of Potonchan, now commandeered as his own headquarters, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.
Deep, but not dreamless.
For it seemed very little time passed – no time at all – before the beloved figure of a tall strong man of middle years, very handsome and commanding, with golden hair and dazzling bright skin, appeared to him and drew his soul out of his body and lifted him, high, high, into the evening sky under the flickering stars and carried him off over the field of battle where countless thousands of the enemy lay dead. ‘The Lord God smiles upon you,’ Saint Peter said. ‘He celebrates your victory. We all do.’
‘You all do?’ Cortés asked.
‘We the saints, and the congregation of angels. The Lord is pleased with you, Cortés. I am pleased with you. We are all pleased with you.’
And it was true. The keeper of the keys of Heaven, the very rock upon whom Christ built his church, beamed with joy as they descended to the battlefield and walked together, their feet bathed in blood, amongst the heaped and mutilated dead. ‘Look, Cortés,’ Saint Peter chortled, ‘look what you have done for your God. Look there, and there, and there.’ And he showed him the bodies, some ripped apart by the fangs of the war dogs, others trampled by the horses, some hacked and stabbed to death by the swords and pikes and spears of the Spaniards, others with their heads blown off, many torn limb from limb or burst apart into unrecognisable fragments of flesh and bone, where storms of grapeshot and musket rounds had struck them or where the heavy cannonballs fired by the lombards had bounced lethally through their ranks, striking them down in swathes. ‘You have won,’ said the holy saint, ‘a great and terrible victory over the heathen; you have laid my vengeance upon them as I asked, and now your reward beckons.’
An image took shape in Cortés’s mind of the city in the lake surrounded by mountains that Saint Peter had shown him weeks before, the jewelled and shining city built upon the water with an immense pyramid of pure gold towering at its heart.
‘Yes,’ said the saint, smiling encouragingly, ‘that’s the one. That’s your prize. Shall we go and take another look?’
‘Yes, Holy Father, you have read the secret yearnings of my heart.’
‘You have no secrets from me, for I know all your yearnings, all your hopes, all your dreams, and in the fullness of time I will satisfy every one of them.’ So saying, the saint swept Cortés up into the sky again and showed him the way, a hundred miles and another hundred, and yet another hundred, and a hundred miles more across jungles, across rivers, across snow-capped mountains, between two immense volcanoes and down into the distant, verdant valley beyond and the gleaming lake that lay at its centre and the shining city that stood in the midst of the lake, and the massy pyramid looming at the very heart of the city.
But what was this?
‘The pyramid is no longer of gold, Holy Father,’ Cortés protested, ‘as you showed me before.’
‘Oh,’ said Saint Peter, ‘is it not?’
‘Well, see for yourself,’ said Cortés, hearing the disappointment in his voice as he pointed to the hulking structure beneath them. Though splendidly made, and monstrous huge, it was of common stone with its four levels painted respectively green, red, turquoise and yellow.
‘Ah,’ said the saint. ‘You are quite correct.’
Then what, Cortés wanted to ask, do you propose to do about it? Part of his plan for keeping the demands and insurrections of the Velazquistas in check had involved the golden pyramid. To be able to offer them a share of such a bounty, at the right moment, would have quieted all dissent. But a pyramid of stone? What use was that to him or them?
‘There is gold here aplenty,’ said Saint Peter, as ever reading his thoughts. ‘Gold in the treasure houses of the emperor, gold in the temples, gold around the necks of the nobles, gold in the emporia of the merchants – more than enough to satisfy the greed of your opponents, more gold than you can possibly imagine – and all of it I will make yours.’
‘An emperor rules here?’ Cortés asked.
‘A great and wealthy emperor, whom I give you leave to plunder for the glory of the Lord, whose temples you must bring low, whose idols you must destroy, whose pyramid you must take apart block by block.’
‘But why,’ Cortés asked, ‘did you show me the pyramid of gold when in truth it is made of painted stone?’
The saint’s smile was somehow fearsome, and his black eyes glittered. ‘Therein lies a great mystery,’ he said, ‘and it will be your fate to discover its meaning.’
There came a clap of thunder, the heavens split, darkness descended upon the scene like an inkblot and Cortés awoke in his commandeered bed in the midst of the night and for a long moment he had no idea where he was.
Tozi’s second visit to Guatemoc in his bedchamber at Chapultepec began much as the first. Entering the darkened room after midnight she emerged into form and offered him healing.
He seemed childlike in his trust. She said ‘turn here’, and he turned; she said ‘face there’, and he obeyed, all the while groaning with relief as her fingers gently caressed and probed his wounds.
It was not until close to dawn that the encounter became scary and unpredictable. Tozi thought him asleep and was about to leave him to his rest when suddenly he reached out to her and drew her close. ‘Is it permissible,’ he asked in that soft, aristocratic drawl of his, ‘for a mortal man to kiss a goddess?’
She was flustered, afraid, her whole body was trembling, sweat broke out on her brow. It was all she could do not to render herself invisible at once and fade away like smoke between his hands. ‘No, Prince!’ she exclaimed. ‘Such a thing is impossible. You would be turned to stone!’
‘I think I would be willing to endure that fate,’ he said, ‘and remain eternally a statue, in return for one taste of your sweet lips.’
He was, Tozi had to admit, very persuasive. She felt the heat of his body, felt herself blush. Thankfully it was still too dark for him to see. But he mused: ‘What is this? Even a goddess trembles?’
‘I tremble that you do not die for this sacrilege! Release me at once, Prince, or never see me again!’
Guatemoc nodded. ‘So slim,’ he whispered, ‘so warm …’ His forehead rested against hers before he let her go. ‘So moist … So very human …’
Feeling his hands unclasp from her waist, Tozi stepped back sharply from the bed and faded into invisibility.
‘And yet not human,’ she heard the prince add as she disappeared, ‘for surely no human has such powers.’
‘Who else is going to teach you to ride?’
Those words, so full of hope and promise, were the last Melchior spoke. Moments later he slipped into unconsciousness, his fierce grip slackening, and did not wake again. Pepillo sat vigil with him through the night in the makeshift field hospital that Dr La Peña had set up for the injured, but as dawn was breaking his friend drew a final laboured breath and died.
‘He’s gone to a better place, lad,’ said Bernal Díaz, who lay on the next mat, his right thigh swollen and septic where an arrow had struck him two days before, the left side of his chest bandaged and seeping blood where a knife thrust in yesterday’s fighting had got past his armour.
‘What’s so good about being dead?’ Pepillo shouted angrily. ‘Nothing’s better than being alive!’ Then he remembered that if it hadn’t been for Díaz he and Melchior would both have been dead, killed by Muñoz, weeks before. ‘I’m sorry,’ he sniffled. ‘I didn’t mean to shout.’
‘And I’m sorry you’ve lost your friend,’ said Díaz. ‘He was a good lad and a
brave one. He didn’t deserve this.’
‘He was teaching me to ride,’ Pepillo said. Suddenly, the emotions he had held in check all night, trying to be strong, trying to be a man, overwhelmed him, and he found himself doubled over, sobbing disconsolately, snot running out of his nose. ‘He put me on Molinero’s back. Yesterday! Just yesterday, Don Bernal. And we rode, and we felt so fine and Melchior was so happy. Even after what Muñoz did to him – the bad memories, the horror, the pain – he’d overcome all that. I know he’d overcome it, and he was smiling again. And he loved his horses, Don Bernal. He loved his horses. He told me how he’d been a slave and how riding like the wind was the true meaning of freedom for him. And now he’s dead. Just dead! It’s not right! It’s not fair! What kind of God would allow a good person like Melchior to die in such a way?’
‘The same kind of God that let an evil person like Muñoz live for so many years,’ said Díaz quietly. Pepillo looked up and saw only kindness and concern in the ensign’s eyes, but when he looked down again, nothing had changed, for there was Melchior, cold and still.
Outside morning had broken and a new day had begun.
During the night after the battle, Ah Kinchil recovered his wits and refused Muluc’s request to raise another army from surrounding towns to do battle with the white men again.
‘Are you mad?’ the old chief spat at him incredulously as Malinal served them an early breakfast in the palace in Cintla. ‘I saw what happened. I saw how they defeated us. Don’t forget I was there, Muluc! I witnessed the whole battle, from beginning to end, and it was unbelievable. Something impossible even to imagine. Whether they are men or gods, it’s obvious we can’t fight them.’
At that moment, Cit Bolon Tun, the cross-eyed former captive of the Spaniards, was brought in by the palace guards. The man’s nose had been broken by some brutal blow and was still bleeding freely.
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