by Scott O'Dell
He laughed his croaking early morning laugh and tapped his chest, where, if by chance he had a soul, it might reside.
“And the devil likewise,” the dwarf said.
He had lost some weight during the past dreadful days, but still he looked much the same as he had that morning on the beach, a lump with two legs and two long arms. If the devil was not just an emanation, if the devil had a true and recog nizable shape, then he would appear exactly in the shape of Guillermo Cantú.
“Tell me,” he said, “how you feel about this subject of human sacrifice, now that you have been among the mighty Azteca.’’
“How I felt before, my friend. It is an abomination.”
“What about the sacrifice of animals—monkeys, peccaries, deer—instead of humans?”
“I am against this also.”
“But not the pricking of the finger?”
“No, the blood on your finger belongs to you. It comes from your own veins.”
“Yes, it comes from there. Consequently, it belongs to the donor, to the one who gives it. But do you think it really strengthens the sun?”
“It strengthens those who give the blood. That is important.”
The dwarf pondered, one eye on the mare that carried the sacks crammed with gold. “I wonder,” he said, “how the consistory would look upon this.”
“The priests of the consistory sit far away across the seas,” I said, “in comfort, never having met an Indian nor heard a maman drum nor mindless thousands shouting their wild, spine-freezing chants.”
I was standing with my hand raised to the brightening coast when a party of Maya came up the trail from that direction. Without speaking, they paused at the cruciform tree, choosing its thorns carefully.
After all had given their salutations to the sun, one of them said to me, “You are a white man. Where do you come from?”
“From Tenochtitlán.”
“My name is Xacal and I hear of fighting in that city,” he said. “We have salt to sell. Should we go to Tenochtitlán to sell it?”
“Sell it in Cholólan,” I said. “Or some other place. There’s trouble in Tenochtitlán.’’
“Trouble in Ixtlilzochitl also,” he said, pointing toward the east. “There.”
“People dead in the lagoon,” said a young man who had Xacal’s yellow, close-set eyes and appeared to be his son. “Many people dead.”
Ixtlilzochitl was the trading center where the Santa Margarita lay anchored, at least when we had left her.
I drew a picture of the caravel, using my finger in the dirt. “A big canoe,” I said to the boy. “In the lagoon beyond the river. Have you seen it?”
“Two,” he said.
“Two big canoes?”
“Two,” his father said and drew a picture beside mine. “Two big canoes.”
“Which means that the Santa Margarita is still there,” the dwarf said. “The dead men mean that there’s been fighting.”
“Did you see the white men fighting?” I asked Xacal.
He cupped his ear, indicating he had only heard of it. I pressed him for other details, but I had difficulty with his dialect and learned little more except that loud noises and black smoke came out of the ships and that one of them had a hole in its side.
Eyeing the mare that carried the dwarf ’s gold, Xacal said, “Are you pochtéca?” and before I could answer, “What do you trade? I see gold on the back of the animal. Do you like salt? Everybody likes salt. We trade.”
He spoke softly, but underneath lay a threat. One of the party tapped the sack with his cudgel. The sack held a temple bell, which gave off a lively ring. The man tapped the sack once more. Again the bell rang. He glanced at the dwarf and then at me, measuring us. We were white men with a load of gold.
Before the bell stopped ringing, we were in the saddles, moving off down the trail, the three mares close behind. Shouts and rocks flew after us. We did not look back.
Before long we came to the place where we had hidden our ceremonial attire and changed into pochtéca garb for the journey to Tenochtitlán months before. Everything of mine was in good shape, the quetzal plumes as beautiful as ever. However, I had left my mask on the Santa Margarita and had to borrow Cantú’s, a jaguar mask with a sneering mouth and red fangs. I would have preferred to wear the elaborate mask decorated with turquoise, emeralds, and gold that Chalco the high priest had hidden, but we couldn’t find it.
“He’s come this way and picked it up,” the dwarf said.
“Somebody has. Indians likely.”
“If Indians took it, they would have taken my mask also.”
The dwarf fared less well with his clothes. Yet, elated that at last we were within two short leagues of Ixtlilzochitl, he failed to notice that something with sharp teeth had nibbled on his rear feathers.
We rode hard toward the coast under a hot sun, through clouds of stinging insects.
CHAPTER 2
WE FOUND THESANTA MARGARITA RIDING SAFELY AT ANCHOR IN THE lagoon, not far from where she lay when we began our journey to Tenochtitlán. The second caravel, oddly named Delfín Azul—the one the Indian trader had described—sat on a sandbar a quarter of a mile away, listing to port, the morning sun shining into a broad hole in her side.
Flint Knife, the nacom,had spied us from afar. Black and yellow flags flew from our masts—ones I had never seen before, apparently made while we were away. As the longboat bore us across the lagoon, a shot rang out from the ship, fol lowed by a second shot, a series of shots that passed harm lessly over our heads. Flutes, rattles, and drums set up a horrendous clatter.
Flint Knife was on his knees to greet me. Behind him, painted in all colors, bedecked in bangles and feathers, the crew lay prone as I came aboard; with wild mutterings they pressed their faces against the deck.
“It was a ghost we saw on the shore,” the young nacom said, sobbing between words. “We thought you dead. I could not believe my eyes when I saw you get down from the horse there on the shore.” He paused, overcome. “Everyone believed Chalco when he told us that you were sacrificed in Tenochtitlán by the Emperor Moctezuma. Everyone except me. I clung to hope.”
“Chalco brought news that I was dead?”
“Sacrificed as a tribute to the war god. He described how brave you were as you lay there on the altar and the knife descended.”
“When did you see him?”
“He came after the rains. With dozens of Azteca carrying jars of tecuítcal, the green moss. He wheedled me into taking him to the City of the Seven Serpents and then tried to keep me there, but I slipped away in the night.”
The nacom paused, overcome once more. I think he would have jumped to his feet and embraced me, so great was his delight, had I not turned away. As it was, he clasped me around the knees, saying, “God of the Evening Star, Lord of the Twilight, mighty Kukulcán, do not leave us again.”
Watching some five or six paces away, but not on his knees, was a lone figure with his back against the mainmast. At first I took him to be a priest, one of the Dominicans I had seen following Cortés around during the siege in Tenochtitlán. It was possible that one of them had survived the disaster and had fled this far from the battlefield.
I adjusted the jaguar mask, which, because of its small eye holes, was difficult to see through, and cast another glance in his direction. To my surprise, a man some ten years older than I, not an elderly Dominican, confronted me.
From what I could make out, he had a forehead shaped like a turret and a jutting chin—a bigoted Spanish face as white as a fish’s belly. I wondered how anyone exposed to the fierce weather of New Spain could look washed out, like a scholar after years spent among books. Yet it was not these things that held my eye. The young man was dressed in the black cassock and violet vest of a church dignitary.
A glare from the sea danced in the rigging and along the deck, changing the shape of everything. I adjusted the mask again. Neither the glare nor the mask had deceived me. No, I was face to fac
e with a churchman. What’s more, a bishop!
Taken aback, but concealing my surprise, I asked the nacom, “Who is this man? Where does he come from?”
“This man,” the nacom said, “came on the ship. It is there on the sandbar with a big hole in its side. Many warriors came also. Twentynine. Sixteen are dead. The others are in chains.”
When the nacom went on to describe the battle, I turned to the bishop. As I approached him he muttered a few fervent words in Latin, as if he were fending off not just a feathered figure he had never encountered before, but the devil himself.
His words escaped me—I was surprised that my Latin had become so rusty—but they carried the unmistakable tone of authority. For a moment I was a meek seminarian, confronted by a lordly bishop. Then I recovered myself and looked hard at him through the eyeholes of my feathered mask.
“My name is Rodrigo Pedroza,” the man said. “I am the bishop-designate of the province of Yucatán, sent hither at the instigation of the Council of the Indies, with the consent of the governor general of Hispaniola.”
He said all this in a churchly voice, in clear, graceful Spanish, which by shaking my head I pretended not to under stand. The gold cascabeles attached to my mask set up a clatter to bear me out.
I asked in Spanish, “Do you speak Maya?”
“No,” the bishop said, “but since you are a Spaniard I don’t need to.” He gave me a searching look and waited for me to reply, to show some sort of emotion—surprise, consternation, guilt. When I didn’t he continued, “You cannot be astounded that I know who you are. Everywhere, even in Seville, people speak of the seminarian who by chance has become a god among the savages.”
He cast a scathing glance at the crew that still groveled on the deck, chanting my name; at the nacom, on his knees at my side. Unexpectedly, he thrust out his hands. For the first time I saw that they were bound tight with rope.
“An outrage,” he said, as if he expected me to unbind him at once and fall over myself in the act. “A barbarism! Untie me.”
Bishop Pedroza was accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. I let him stand there with his hands outstretched. From the moment I saw his black cassock and violet vest, I had made up my mind that he was an enemy. Even more of an enemy than Hernán Cortés. Cortés was an adventurer in dis favor with both the king and the governor of Hispaniola. But Pedroza, for all I knew, had the full and far-reaching power of the church behind him. I intended to treat him with courtesy, yet mindful that he could be a mortal adversary.
“Why should I unbind you?” I said. “You’re a prisoner captured in battle. Fortunately, not dead like the others.”
“Unbound, I can speak as a free man,” Pedroza said.
“For a while, speak as a prisoner,” I told him. “You say you’re a bishop. For all I know, you might be a soldier dressed up in a bishop’s garb.”
Pedroza withdrew his hands. His long, white face did not change. It was as much a mask as the mask I wore.
He spoke in a quiet voice, avoiding my eyes, which stared at him through the jaguar slits.
“Whatever your role among these savages may be,” he said, “whether it is Lord of the Evening Star or Rider of the Winds—I have even heard you called a god—you remain a Spaniard by birth, a subject of King Carlos the Fifth, and thereby subject to his laws. As well as to the laws and reg ulations of the governor of Hispaniola, set down by him for all those who live within the boundaries of New Spain.”
“On the contrary, I do live within the king’s laws and the governor’s regulations,” I said, holding back my anger. “You do not. Otherwise you would not be a prisoner on my ship.”
“The battle was an accident,” the bishop said. “It happened because of a misunderstanding, which I tried to prevent and failed.”
“What does he say?” the nacom asked.
“He says that the battle was not his fault.”
“This is true. The crew of his ship learned from the Indians in the village that we carried gold. They fought hard to seize it. He could do nothing.”
“Spaniards fight hard for gold,” I said. “For gold first. Then for Holy Mary. Then for the king. Their lives last.”
“These got no gold,” the nacom said. “Only wounds and death.”
“Good,” I said. “And the ship, what is the condition of their ship? Can it be repaired?”
“Men are working now.”
“How many days will they take?”
The nacom held up ten fingers. “Less, perhaps.”
“Make it less. Half that time. We have none to lose.”
Chafing his wrists against his lean stomach, Pedroza was growing very impatient with us. For a prisoner in a dangerous situation, he had an arrogant tilt to his head. There was some thing that he badly wanted to say, but I gave the nacom further instructions, all of them unnecessary, and let the bishop wait.
He writhed within his black cassock. He began to twist the large, violet-colored stone he wore on the fourth finger of his right hand—the amethyst ring of a bishop. His voice rising to a shout, he burst out with, “I carry a message of grave importance.”
I let him wait a while longer. “You carry this message where?” I said at last. “In a letter? If so, bring it forth.”
“I carry it in my head.”
He had a huge head, long and narrow. In such a turret he could easily carry many things.
“I have a message from his honor, the governor of Hispaniola, to Hernán Cortés,” the bishop said. “It is of great urgency. If you would kindly put me onshore, I will proceed to deliver it. And may I remind you that any interference with this mission will go hard with you.”
“Cortés,” I said, giving the name a derisive ring, “will be difficult to find. I have just come from Tenochtitlán, where his men were slain on the causeway and drowned in the frigid waters of the lakes that surround the city. When I saw him last he was hiding among the trees, freezing beside a meager fire. Captain Cortés has no need of a message. What he needs is a new army.”
The bishop’s expression did not change at this, as if he had heard the news before. But he couldn’t have heard it.
“By chance,” I said, “this message you carry about in your head, which is a bad place for it should you be killed, does it concern Lord Kukulcán?”
“Any message from Governor Velásquez to Captain Cortés would certainly concern Kukulcán,’’ the bishop said, omitting my title, deliberately I assumed.
“Since it does concern me,” I said, “kindly let me hear it.”
“The message is meant for Captain Cortés only,” the bishop said.
The answer nettled me. Suspicious, I called to the nacom. “Search Pedroza’s ship,” I said. “Search every cabin and likely hiding place for letters. Have the dwarf assist you in the search. He’s clever at that sort of thing.”
Flint Knife set off at once in the longboat. He was gone only a short time, during which I left Pedroza and went below to make certain that the gold had not been stolen. The nacom and the dwarf returned with a letter addressed to Captain Cortés, sealed by a red ribbon and a daub of wax upon which Governor Velásquez had left his broad thumbprint.
“Is this the letter you were commissioned to deliver?” I asked Pedroza.
He answered by tightening his lips.
“Do you wish to read it or shall I?”
The bishop was silent.
I broke the seal and read, having some difficulty with the governor’s affected flourishes, “Esteemed Captain, it has come to the attention of His Catholic Majesty the Emperor Don Carlos, and thus to me, that Julián Escobar, a native of Arroyo in Spain, has seized upon an island near the coast of Yucatán, first sighted by Admiral Grijalva, and there set himself up by various cunning devices as king. Furthermore, it is said on evidence that he has secreted an amount of gold, in excess of ten thousand ounces, upon which he has not paid the royal fifth. I suggest that at your earliest pleasure you take this Escobar into custody and
deal with him as you wish. I am privy to the fact that you have said in the past, ‘It would be better not to know how to write. Then one would not have to sign death sentences.’ Yet I also know that with the scoundrel Montijo you displayed no mercy and had his feet removed.”
“It seems,” said the dwarf in his execrable Maya, “that we must put an end to this messenger who brings us threats of quick disaster.”
A shadow dimmed the bishop’s eyes. It told me that he had some knowledge of the Mayan language and had caught the gist of Cantú’s words.
“On the contrary,” I said, “we should treat Bishop Pedroza with the utmost courtesy. He only brings us a message. He is not here to execute it.”
I walked to the rail, tore the letter into pieces, and tossed the pieces into the sea. I did so to warn the bishop that while he was to be treated with courtesy, he was no longer protected by the laws of King Carlos and the governor of Hispaniola. The act was not lost upon him. Pieces of the letter, a length of ribbon, floated away on the tide. Standing stiff and silent by the mainmast, he watched them disappear.
The sun shone on his violet vest. A flash of color blinded me. I suddenly remembered the words Don Luis de Arroyo had spoken on an April morning long ago. “This I promise you,” he had said to me, “one day you yourself will become a bishop. As powerful as the bishop of Burgos.”
For a fleeting moment the memory was a bitter one. Then it faded in the sound of the crew’s quiet chanting, “Kukulcán, Lord of the Lightning and Thunder, protect us from evil gods…”
“On your feet,” I shouted to them. “Bring the horses on board. Put out your hands,” I said to Bishop Pedroza, “and I’ll unbind them.”
CHAPTER 3
WE ARRIVED AT THE ISLAND OF THE SEVEN SERPENTS NEAR EVENING on a day of sultry heat and tumbling clouds.
Viewed from a distance, with the sun setting, the city looked unchanged from the hour I had left it. But as we turned toward the harbor I noted that the feathered poles that marked the channel were draped in black.
The wharves and embankment were deserted. Along the thorough fare that wound upward into the heart of the city not a light showed. The god house on the roof of the Temple of Kukulcán was dark. The temple itself I could not make out; it seemed a part of the falling night. The only light came from far away, murky flames that crept along the crest of St. John the Baptist, the fiery mountain. I expected to find a city in mourning, since my death at the hands of Moctezuma had been reported by high priest Chalco, but I was not prepared for the scene that now lay before me.