The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  We had difficulty with paper. The early books, those painted four centuries before, were painted on fawnskin, which was as smooth as velvet and pleasing to the eye and touch. Since the art of making it had been lost, we settled for a coarser paper made from the bark of the fig tree.

  Events worthy of being painted were gathered by Ah den Yaxche.

  I still did not trust the old man. At any moment he could change his mind and decide that for the good of the city it was his duty to expose me. But I finally permitted him to go into the streets and bring back what ever news he could find. He gave me the information, which was usually meager, and I decided what should be painted.

  The only news of importance that he brought in during late summer and the month of November came from the constable of the stockade where Don Luis de Arroyo was kept.

  Don Luis appeared at the palace punctually every day to teach the class in Spanish, but at night, with the help of two companions, he had used his time to dig a hole through the bottom of his cage and a tunnel that led out of the stockade. The dirt that the three removed, using their hands until their fingers were worn to the bone, they concealed in the depths of the latrine.

  On the day when the old man gave me this news I had Don Luis brought to the palace. “Señor,” I said, “I un derstand that you are a good teacher of Spanish.”

  Arrogant as I had ever seen him, though his elegant clothes were now threadbare and at my request his scabbard was empty, Don Luis smiled.

  “Your students like you,” I said. “They seem to have learned something of our mother tongue.”

  He made a slight bow.

  “Otherwise,” I said, “I would see that your heart is removed. In two weeks, there’s a festival to honor the goddess Ix Chel. An excellent time to attend to this matter.”

  Don Luis smiled again. “A bad time, amigo. I still have much to teach the little savages. Their tongues have been twisted out of shape by such words as Tlancualpican and chalchitiuacuecan. I will need another year, at least, to get them into proper shape.”

  The temple’s huge drum noted the hour of twilight, five resounding booms that shook the walls and the stones of the floor.

  “A different sound from the silvery bells of Seville,” the young nobleman observed. “Do you ever think of them? Probably not, now that you have the big drum to remind you of the hours.”

  He began to pace the room, his hand resting on the empty scabbard. Shadows were falling and I could not see his eyes, but they must have shone with a bitter light. He stopped and came close and stood looking down at me.

  “I hear,” he said, “that you never leave this gloomy place. That you spend your time here poring over the books I see scattered around, and on your knees in prayer. And pray you should! For you deal with crea tures that are barely human.”

  “Creatures who are barely human,” I said angrily, “don’t build beautiful temples. Nor do they keep track of time—the months and years and centuries—better than we Spaniards do.”

  Don Luis blinked in mock surprise. “I am pleased to hear you speak as a Spaniard. I was afraid that you had begun to think of yourself as an Indian. I thought you had forgotten that you were born on my farm and studied in a seminary that my great-great-great grandfather built.”

  Don Luis began to pace again through the cavernous room, a hand on his empty scabbard. He paused at a window and glanced out at the cliff beyond the lake, where a full moon was rising. Emboldened by my si lence, he came back and stood over me.

  “These barbarians listen,” he said, “they dumbly lis ten while you sing the Ave Maria. Then they go back to their huts and sing the monstrous songs they learned in the cradle. They look at the picture of the Virgin, our Protectress, and titter among themselves because she is not cross-eyed and slant headed. The crosses you erect here and there are like the Mayan cross except that one has bulbous ends and the other hasn’t. The Indians see no difference between the two. Ours is the cross of Christ. Theirs is a sign, a marker, to show where two roads come together. And for the Indian, this is what the cross will always mean. Not what, with all your exhortations, you wish it to mean—not the symbol of salva tion and life everlasting.”

  Quietly, hiding my anger, I motioned the guards to take him back to his cage. At the far end of the room he pulled away and turned to face me.

  “Do not forget,” he said, “through all this masquer ade, that you are still a Spaniard and a Christian.”

  “And do not forget,” I said, “that if you dig more holes in your cage, you will likewise dig your grave.”

  “Your own may not be long delayed,” he answered. “There are those who at this moment are quietly preparing it.”

  “You among them!” I said.

  He was taken off, leaving me in an anger that persisted through supper. It changed into a spiritless mood that lasted until one of the servant girls, who had given birth to a boy, brought him forth to show me.

  Kneeling, holding up the infant, she said shyly, “You see I have not put his head between the boards. Nor has he a dangling bead to gaze at.”

  “Why is this?” I said.

  “Because,” she said, “I want him to look like the Lord of the Evening Star.”

  There was nothing I had done, the prayers I had prayed and the crosses I had erected, that meant so much to me as these words spoken by the kitchen maid.

  I did not let this happening blind me to the angry threat that Don Luis had shouted as he left the chamber that morning. Chalco was surely behind the plotting, but there were others among his assistants who might also wish me dead.

  The dwarf treated the threat more seriously than I did. He took it upon himself to appoint a food taster to sit at table and sample all the food that came in. Al though this protected me from violent poisons that acted immediately, it did nothing about the poisons that re quired weeks, even months, to work their way.

  “There are no such poisons on our island,” the dwarf assured me when I reminded him of this fact. “We have neither mercury nor arsenic. Everything is sudden here, like the poisons the Indians use to tip their arrows. It kills a monkey within seconds, a man in minutes.”

  I soon grew tired of the food taster—a toothless old man who wore earrings that rattled as he moved his jaws, who made munching sounds when he tasted, and smacked his fat lips when he finished. Tired of waiting for him either to be seized by deathly spasms or to go on eating.

  After he was dismissed I forgot about the warning Don Luis had shouted at me. Then unexpectedly on a bright morning while larks were singing in the flame trees just outside the window, as I was about to use the movable toilet that one of the servants had brought in, I was forcefully reminded of it. Looking down I saw below me the glint of two shining eyes, the flick of an or ange-tinted tongue. It was a water snake, not much longer than the length of my middle finger, but a deadly snake, the one the Indians called Seven Curses.

  The servant was dragged in and queried, but he knew nothing about the snake. He had received the cabinet from a servant, who had received it from a servant, who had taken it from someone else, and so on. We never found the culprit.

  I took precautions against this bizarre incident hap pening again but quickly forgot that my life was in dan ger. My spirits were enlivened by a second woman who came to show me that she no longer put her child’s head between boards or dangled beads before his eyes.

  Someday I would rule over a citizenry that was no longer slant headed and cross-eyed. I had made a small start on that long road.

  CHAPTER 13

  I HAD MORE THAN A START, HOWEVER, ON THE FIRST OF MY EXCAVATIONS. The workmen brought from Tikan, Uxmal, and Zaya, numbering nearly two thousand, had already cleared a road leading from the plaza through a jungle of thorn bushes and creepers to the outskirts of the buried temple.

  A stand of cypress trees had sprouted from its roof, with a nest of spiny agave clustered around their trunks. These had been cut away and burned. Columns that had fallen over the
centuries and lay hidden under mounds of moldering leaves had been dug up and put aside to use again. A wide staircase, the main one of three that led into the temple, stood revealed, glistening white as the day theantiguoswho built it put down their ham mers.

  To my great surprise, however, what was thought to be a temple turned out to be not a temple but a mam moth observatory. Because it was built with a rounded, shell-like dome, it reminded me of a snail. I therefore named it El Caracol , and thus Ceela put it down in the book of excavations she had begun for the year of our Lord 1519, in the reign of Kukulcán, God of the Eve ning Star.

  El Caracol rested on a platform twice my height, which in turn sat upon one somewhat shorter. The whole edifice measured 106 paces in length and half that number in width. It was made of fitted stone, ochre in cast, and still retained some of its original color—a light sea green—and around the doorway, yellow bands in the shape of sleeping serpents.

  A winding ramp led upward to a circular room, pierced by four apertures facing the cardinal points of the compass—north, south, east, and west. It was through these slits in the stone that the priests had watched the stars and made their observations.

  At the foot of the ramp a passage led down to a wide landing, to a second landing, and a third. Here, when the dwarf and I were inspecting El Caracol for the first time, we were confronted by a pair of alligators larger than life, carved from sandstone and fitted with green jade teeth, crouching on either side of a massive door, their open jaws enclosing a human head.

  The door had double panels and in the center of one was the print of a bright red hand.

  Half the size of mine, with the fingers spread out so as to show the clear lines of the palm, it was, according to Cantú, the mark, the signature of the architect who had built the observatory. I was to find this red hand in all the buildings we excavated, sometimes in a prominent place for everyone to see, often hidden away in a corner.

  The door, which was jammed by fallen stones, was broken open, and we entered a vaulted room that ex tended far beyond the reach of our torches. In the center of this vast room I made out what seemed to be a small god house.

  “A tomb,” the dwarf shouted, his words flying off into the darkness and returning in a ghostly echo. “A king’s tomb!”

  That is what he saw in the dim light and what he wanted to see—the sarcophagus of a mighty king, filled with treasure.

  But it was neither a god house nor a king’s sarcopha gus. It was a ship, more than twenty paces in length, with a high bow and stern, woven of reeds arranged in bundles heavily tied and set down in pitch.

  On a raised deck in the center of this canoe-like ship, with his back against a broken mast, sat a figure dressed in white. A plumed cap draped the skull and a tuft of dusty hair jutted forth from the jaws. In his lap, he held a delicate fan.

  I gasped. For a moment I saw Ah den Yaxche sitting there in a regal gown, his white beard curled, a replica of the drawing I had seen of an Egyptian prince. But the embroidered gown clothed a skeleton, and the beard adorned a gaping jaw.

  We did not remain long. The dry air burned our skins. The smoke from our torches and the dust we raised choked us.

  When we went again to the tomb it was to decipher a glyph on the prow of the ship. The day of the entomb ment was carved in Maya. It gave, counting in our time, the year 211 after the birth of Christ.

  The ship was wholly unlike the Mayan dugouts in size, construction, and materials. The bearded figure in the long white robe, embroidered with signs I had never seen before, did not look like a Maya. If he was not a Maya, who could he be? An Egyptian? If so, why was he here in the heart of an ancient city?

  Cantú clamored to search the tomb for gold and jewels, but to his great distress I decided to seal the door for the present.

  Ceela entered the discovery of the ship in our archives and left room for any answers to these questions that time and study might develop.

  The Indians were promptly put to work on the excavation of another mound, much larger than the observatory, which lay a short distance to the west and was connected to it by a raised causeway.

  There was a line of mounds beyond this one. Between the Temple of Kukulcán and the palace was the mound with the red roof and others that the dwarf had shown me the day I arrived. Dozens of mounds were visible from the temple god house, stretching away into the jun gle in all directions.

  But I needed workmen to unearth them, at least three times the number that I now had. I inquired among our pochtéca, who were trading along the coast, if they knew of any villages where prisoners could be taken.

  There was none large enough to bother with, they said, but they suggested that I consider an attack upon the city of Mayapán, which lay inland and some 110 leagues to the northwest.

  For many centuries in the past, I was told, Mayapán had been the capital of a confederacy of villages, towns, and city-states. But some sixty years ago a chieftain, Ah Xupan, had raised a revolt, claiming that the rulers were not natural lords and that they were selling their own people as slaves to the Azteca in Tenochtitlán.

  As a result, various factions fought bitterly among themselves. The city of Mayapán, which was protected by a twelve-foot wall extending for six Roman miles, had been destroyed from within, the confederacy bro ken up and now no longer extant. Its former inhabitants were scattered about, ready, so my informants told me, to be rounded up and taken prisoner, one by one.

  However, there were several difficulties connected with such a campaign.

  The villages of Uxmal and Zaya had been easy to capture because they were located on the sea, where they could be overpowered by the ship’s cannon. Tikan fell to us because its people had learned that a god had appeared among them.

  Mayapán presented a different problem.

  It was located far from the coast, in mountainous country difficult to reach because of poor trails and a desert of thorn bushes that had to be crossed. Furthermore, though he had not traded there for more than three years, one of my informants was certain that the city had not heard of Kukulcán’s return. Otherwise, he said, its people would have made the long pilgrimage to worship at my feet.

  I gave up the idea of attacking Mayapán. But the trader’s suggestion sparked a line of thought.

  Moctezuma had built an empire by conquering prov inces beyond the borders of his capital, Tenochtitlán. He ruled dozens of villages, towns, and city-states. As the god Kukulcán, with a more powerful presence than Moctezuma’s own, possibly I could restore the confeder acy of Mayapán and join it as a vassal to the Island of the Seven Serpents.

  Soon afterwards Chalco, the high priest, returned from his native province, a vassal city of Emperor Moc tezuma. He brought with him many jugs of tecuítcal, borne on the broad shoulders of ninety porters, fifty of them, to my amazement, Azteca.

  Our workmen built an earthen dike across the mouth of the lagoon in the cove north of the city and set out the green, mosslike tecuítcal in its brackish water. But when the planting was done and the Santa Margarita was ready to take the visitors on the first leg of the journey back to their home, they decided, since it was very cold in the mountains where they lived, that they wished to stay until the end of our beautiful spring.

  I made them welcome and put them to work—all were strong young warriors—on the excavation of the second mound.

  It was at this time that I decided to make a journey to the Azteca capital.

  The idea of restoring the confederacy of Mayapán and joining it as a vassal to the Island of the Seven Serpents had taken a strong hold upon me. If I could see the great city of Tenochtitlán, if I could talk to its nobles, perhaps to Emperor Moctezuma himself, I would learn by what strategies it had conquered its vassal states and kept them in subjection.

  Equally important, I would learn how my own city should be organized.

  It ran somewhat better than when I arrived, yet it still was a casual operation. Public servants, for instance—those who gath
ered copal to burn in the temple, the street cleaners, the drawers of community water—all took long siestas in the middle of the day. Treasury clerks, it was said, made a practice of nibbling small bites out of the city funds. Even Xicalanco, my irreplaceable archivist, filched pieces of our best paper. How, I wondered, did Emperor Moctezuma treat lazi ness and theft?

  Cantú and Ah den Yaxche were strongly opposed to my journey.

  “It’s a long one, 150 leagues or more,” the dwarf said, “through hot lands where disease is rife and mountains where the snows never melt. Where everyone you meet is a savage. And when you get there, if you do get there alive, what happens then with an em peror who slays twenty thousand people in a single day?”

  Ah den Yaxche added, “The Azteca are a warrior race. They have grown powerful by the sword. They live by the sword. The Maya, on the other hand, are not warriors. Once they were a brilliant people, superior to the Azteca in every way. But they have lost that bril liance. They are shiftless. They are content to live from one moment to the next. Be satisfied, therefore, to do what can be done with the poor material you have to work with. Do not try to rival the mighty Moctezuma.”

  Preparation for the journey took less than a week. I first convinced Chalco that it was necessary for me to go to Tenochtitlán, giving the reasons I have just stated.

  He was silent for a moment, scarcely believing, I am sure, what he had heard. “It’s a dangerous journey,” he said, repeating the dwarf ’s words.

  “All journeys worth making are dangerous.”

  Chalco shook his head. I could not see his face, hid den as it was behind his jaguar mask, but I knew that he was overcome by the happy prospect of being rid of me, if only for a time.

  “I forget, Knight of the Evening Star, that you are not mortal like the rest of us,” he said. “There are no dangers for a god. You should have a safe journey and learn many things from Lord Moctezuma, likewise from Xocoyotl, Cem-Anáhuac, Uey-Tlatoani, and the other nobles.”