The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  “What great misfortune has overtaken you?” he managed to ask.

  “A wrecked ship,” I said, which was a statement not far from the truth. “I am the only survivor of a wrecked ship.”

  “The big one? The one that carried thunder and lightning?”

  “Another one. Bigger. Much bigger.”

  “Very sad,” Matlazingo said, shaking his head and offering me a sheaf of coca leaves. “These will help you forget the sadness.”

  “Food will help me more,” I said.

  At a click of his tongue it came, platters of food—berries, fruit, more fruit, bowls of chili pepper and frijoles, raw fish, corn cakes, tall stacks of corn cakes. I ate in silence, but not much, since my stomach had shrunk during the long summer and the food did not taste as good as I had expected.

  “You will remember,” I said, “that when I came here be fore, months ago, I spoke about a Spaniard.”

  “Yes, his name was Cortés,” the cacique said. “I remem ber him. Hernán Cortés.”

  “Has he been here?”

  “No, I have not seen this great man.”

  “Have you heard anything about him?”

  “Much,” Matlazingo said. “A little. A big canoe came, not big like yours, but big. It was filled with Spaniards. They were looking for gold. I told them I had no gold. They were not happy about this. But I gave them a basket of pearls and they felt happier. I asked them about this one you told me about.”

  “Hernán Cortés.”

  “Yes. They said he was with the Azteca in Tenochtitlán. That is a place high in the mountains.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “The men said that he had been in trouble with the king, but he was not in trouble anymore. Now he is the cacique of everything.” Matlazingo spread his arms wide, seemingly to take in the world.

  If Cortés had returned to Tenochtitlán, given up any plans of moving down the coast—news that had the ring of truth—then I was in no immediate danger. I queried the cacique further, trying to make sure that he wasn’t dreaming. As fu ture events were to prove, he was not.

  Cortés had indeed been forced to hurry back to the Azteca capital. His numerous enemies, including the powerful bishop of Burgos, who accused him of taking one fifth of the booty as a captain and another fifth as king, had asked Carlos the Fifth to call him back to Spain. Instead, the young monarch had made him the governor, captain general, and chief justice of all the Indies. He was now in Tenochtitlán, there to con solidate his new power and to plan new campaigns.

  “Too bad,” Matlazingo said. “Now I will never see the great Spaniard, Hernán Cortés.”

  “He travels much, honorable cacique. You may see him yet,” I said.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE VILLAGE LIFE OF CHICHÉN-PALAPA, FLOWING LIKE A QUIET summer stream, appealed to me for a week. There was nothing I had to do. I slept comfortably in a hammock slung between two ceiba trees. I ate sumptuously with the cacique. I listened to his stories. He listened to mine. Fascinated by a world he had never seen, home of the Spaniards he admired, he asked endless questions and I answered them sometimes truthfully, sometimes not.

  I had only two temptations during this time. While walking among the ruins of what was once a flourishing city, I was visited by the urge to restore its temples and public structures. The urge did not last. The Indians, like those I had lived among for years, seemed to lack any desire to bring back ancient glories. They were content to farm their few acres, fish in the sea, and worship their heathen idols.

  The second temptation came one evening while I sat watch ing them emerge from their huts to wander around the village. I was tempted to sing the beautiful Salve Regina. The tempta tion lasted no longer than the first, as memories of my failures on the Island of the Seven Serpents flooded in upon me.

  Before another week had passed, I grew restless. Taking note of my condition, the cacique suggested that I assume some of his duties as a medicine man and soothsayer. I was no longer white skinned, but I was a blond Spaniard two varas tall.

  “Everyone,” the cacique said, “thinks that you were a speaker before somewhere. They want you to speak words to them.”

  “I’ve been a speaker,” I said, “and did not like it.”

  “You may like it better in Chichén-Palapa.’’

  “Less.”

  “You might go with the pearlers and dive for pearls. You are so tall you can stand on the bottom and need not dive.”

  The pearling season began with the end of the summer chubascos and lasted a month. Early on the last day of diving, as we were anchored at the mouth of the estuary, a ship flying a Spanish pennon sailed into our midst. Its captain appeared at the rail, stared down at us for a while, and then demanded gold.

  One of the Indians offered him a handful of pearls.

  “I have them,” the captain shouted in clumsy Maya. “I come for gold.”

  “There is no gold,” the Indian said, speaking the truth—during my weeks in the village I had seen none, in any shape. “No gold.”

  Smoke was rising at the far end of the estuary. The captain pointed.

  “You have gold there?” he shouted.

  The Indian shrugged, not understanding him. I understood but kept silent, and the ship sailed off toward the village. When we got back the captain was on the beach talking to Matlazingo, surrounded by a troop of his men. To frighten the Indians, he had brought three horses ashore and a pair of big staghounds.

  I was close enough to hear most of the heated words, but out of sight. The captain, who was swarthy and stout, kept walking back and forth, facing the cacique, then turning his back upon him, talking all the while.

  “I’ve been in this place long enough,” the captain said. “I ask you much. You answer nothing. The same always. You shake the head and say nothing. Nada. Nada.”

  Matlazingo was bewildered. He quit chewing on his coca leaves and did not ask for more. He had met a Spaniard who wasn’t like me or Gerónimo de Aguilar.

  “My ears grow tired of hearing nada, nada,” the captain said. “Once more today I ask, where is the gold?”

  Matlazingo glanced around in desperation. I believe he was looking for me, thinking that I could help him. But there was no way I could persuade the Spaniard that the cacique was telling the truth. And to walk out and face his inquisitor would put me in a dangerous situation. How could I tell if the cap tain wasn’t one of Cortés’s men, instructed, as he sailed down the coast searching for gold, to keep a weather eye out for me! I pressed back farther into the trees.

  I heard nothing now of what was said between the two men, but I did see Matlazingo hold out a cluster of pearls, the Spaniard move his lips disdainfully, strike the cacique’s out stretched hand, and scatter the pearls on the beach. He shouted at two of his men, who sprang forward and bound the cacique by his long hair to the tail of one of the horses. The horseman then spurred his mount into a gallop and dragged Matlazingo to the end of the street and back.

  “Where do you hide the gold?” the captain asked.

  Matlazingo lay on his side, covered with dust, still bound to the horse’s tail. His bleeding lips formed a word, but he had difficulty saying it. The captain waited. He even stooped down to hear what the cacique had to say. What he heard dis pleased him, for at once he gave a sign. This time the horseman dragged Matlazingo toward the village square.

  Meanwhile, the troops collected wood on the beach and built a fire. When the cacique was dragged back, they untied him from the horse’s tail and tossed his limp body into the flames. The captain then glanced about for other Indians to torture, but everyone had fled. He called his troops together, roundly cursed the village, and went back to his ship.

  That night, after the Spaniards had left, the Indians came back from hiding, and we buried Matlazingo’s ashes in one of the temples. The village mourned for a week and a day. At the end of that time I was asked to take the cacique’s place as leader and medicine man, which, as courteously as I
could, I declined to do.

  CHAPTER 16

  SOON AFTERWARD ONE OF OUR SAILING CANOES LEFT CHICHÉN-PALAPA with a cargo of pearls to sell at a trading center three hundred leagues to the south. Though it caused the Indians much distress, I left with it, for I had lost my interest in the village since Matlazingo’s death.

  We arrived at Quintana after a week of good weather, in time for the opening days of the fair. The pearls, which were communal property, everyone owning a share in them, could have been sold out the day we arrived, but the Indians had come a long way and did not want to turn around and start back already. They wished to visit with old friends, take time with the bartering, and leave not a day before the last pearl had been sold. While this was going on, I decided I liked the town and the traders and travelers that came to it from every where in Maya country. I took my share of the profits, which were small, and stayed on when the canoe sailed home.

  Quintana was located at the mouth of a tidal estuary, at the meeting of two large rivers. Its main street ran for half a league along a sandy strip between the rivers.

  Some of it was taken up by guarded warehouses where the rich traders stored costly goods like ocelot skins and cloaks made of hummingbird feathers, but mostly it was filled with thatched arcades filled with stalls owned by the poor. The poorer yet spread blankets on the ground on both sides of the walkway that wound down the middle

  Beside this walkway in front of one of the warehouses, I spread my own blanket. Unsure of what I wished to sell, and what would sell, I bought a variety of things that I thought might appeal to children—like noisemakers, dolls, clay ani mals, toy spears, and slingshots. It was a small beginning.

  On the first day, because my long legs, sun-bleached hair, and blue eyes attracted the children, I sold merchandise to the value of six cacao beans, half of it profit, valued in Spanish money, as close as I could figure, at some sixty maravedís. On the second day I did even better, and on the third day ran out of stock.

  Whereupon the weathered old woman squatting on a blan ket next to mine asked me to help her sell the straw hats she was weaving, which I did. Business was so brisk with the hats that she suggested we discard our blankets and open a stall with a roof.

  “Then you can stand behind a counter like a true seller,” she said, smiling a toothless yet engaging smile. “And then you will not have to sit on a blanket like an old woman.”

  “You only weave seven hats a day,” I reminded her. “That’s not enough hats to do business in a stall.”

  “I will find more weavers. Two more. Three. And I will make hats in all colors, like the rainbow. And not for women only, but for men and children, too. And you can stand up and sell them.”

  The prospect of standing on my feet appealed to me—after two days of squatting on a blanket, I could hardly walk—so we bought a stall in a good location and went looking for weavers. The old woman—her name was Zoque—took me up the street to the slave market.

  “Two big canoes came with slaves,” she said, “but now they are picked over. I want a young black one. You can teach them and they do not eat so much as the Indians eat.”

  There were ten slaves in the stockade, two of them black women from Africa and the rest women from an island to the south.

  Zoque chose one of the blacks, a handsome, muscular woman nearly as tall as I. I decided against her and tried to make a choice between a smiling, middle-aged woman of a happy disposition and a girl, scarcely a woman, although she held a child by the hand, so tightly that the child’s fingers had turned white.

  The mother’s eyes were fixed upon some distant place, be yond the log platform she stood upon, the crowd that surrounded her, and the sharpened poles of the stockade. But the child gazed wonderingly at me, fascinated by what she saw.

  The slave owner came to them last among those he was selling. “Sola Mulamé,” he said, turning the woman around so she could be observed from all sides, “is twenty-five, a good worker, and docile by nature. Her daughter, Selka, is twelve years old, and very healthy.”

  Selka, on the contrary, was very sickly looking, with arms and legs like sticks, hip bones that pushed out against a cotton shift too small for her. The owner began to turn the child to show her off. She was gazing at me with black, unblinking eyes when he began and she was still gazing at me when she faced me again.

  The old woman didn’t care much for either of them. “The mother looks lazy,” she said. “The girl will die before the year has gone.”

  A lordly Indian with a beautiful quetzal plume in his cap shoved forward and offered thirty cacao for the mother—for various reasons, he did not want the daughter. I paid the slave owner sixty cacao beans for both.

  I had come to the mart out of curiosity, to humor the old woman—with no intention of buying slaves. Yet here I was the owner of two. Did I see something in the child’s eyes? Did they mirror the depths of a Christian soul? Troubled, I took her and the mother away and left them with Zoque, who started that day to teach them the art of weaving.

  They learned quickly, and within a month a steady stream of hats of all colors and sizes flowed onto our shelves. The trading center attracted crowds during fairs and fiestas, but there were always visitors on the street and, in a country of fierce sun and torrential rain, always a demand for hats.

  During these first weeks Selka and her mother worked in the old woman’s hut and I didn’t see the child. I thought about her, however, wondering if it would be any use for me to in struct her in the Christian faith. Whenever the thought came to me, I remembered my failure with Ceela Yaxche—yes, with thousands of others—and promptly put it out of mind.

  During one of the big fiesta weeks the old woman set the two weavers up in front to attract people who liked to watch other people work. The girl had changed. Her arms and legs were no longer sticks. Her hip bones didn’t show anymore. The only thing that hadn’t changed about her were her eyes. They still were black and unblinking. They sought me out—she had learned to weave without looking—whenever I was around. They followed me everywhere.

  The day the fiesta was over and sales had slackened, I took her aside, tempted again, yes, again!

  “Selka,” I said, “you worship the sun god and Itzamná, the god of learning, and now that you are a weaver, Ix Chebel Yax, the goddess of weaving. But there is another god mightier than they. He towers over them as the ceiba tree towers above the saltbush.”

  “Where does this god live?” she asked, watching me warily.

  “In the sky. In your heart.”

  She touched her breast. “Here?” she asked.

  “There. In your heart and your mother’s heart. And in mine. He lives everywhere.”

  “He is very busy,” she said, “to be everywhere.”

  “Yes, very busy, yet never tiring.”

  We talked about the village she had come from and how she became a slave. At the end, having made a hat during this time, she gave it to me. It was a little large for my head, but nicely woven and of striking hues of red.

  I talked to Selka many times, telling her about God’s Son and the Virgin Mary. She listened, watching me as she wove, asking questions that I tried to answer in ways she would un derstand. Her questions were more to the point than those of Ceela Yaxche, and she asked more of them. By the time winter arrived, I was certain that in her heart she had become a be liever in the power of God, the message of Christ, and the mercy of the Virgin Mary.

  I opened a second stall across the street, since I learned that Indians liked to compare prices. For a small sum I had the town rulers issue word that Selka and her mother were no longer ppentacob, and as free people could run the new store. They ran it well, indeed it soon rivaled mine.

  I had a cross made for Selka, which she put up in the stall, and a string of wooden beads she hung about her neck. I could do no more. I was still a seminarian, with no power to bring her God’s grace. Often I found myself wishing that the haughty, self-righteous Pedroza, who had refused my
humble request, was sojourning in hell.

  Early in the spring a Spanish ship came out of the north. I had time to warn the town rulers, who sent word through the streets. No one was to raise a hand against the Spaniards. They were to be given all the gold the Indians owned. And above all, told that to the south, six days’ sailing, they would discover a city where the streets were paved with gold and people ate from gold plates. I warned Selka and her mother to stay indoors and attend to their weaving, making a grim joke that the Spaniards wore steel helmets and not straw hats.

  For myself, I went into the jungle and stayed hidden for two weeks. When I came out the Spaniards had gone, leaving the town stripped of its gold and all of its fowl, but the Indians unharmed. There were many who were sorry to see them leave, so amazing were the animals that could carry a man and the armor that shone in the sun.

  About two weeks later, people everywhere in the town began to have pains and grew so hot that their skins burned. Then red bumps appeared on their faces and bodies, and these became pustules. It was a terrible sickness and ran through the town like a brush fire, leaving people dead.

  One morning Selka complained of a fever. By nightfall her honeycolored skin was blotched and red. Although I had heard of the disease in Spain—it was called viruelas—I had no idea of what to do.

  Sola Mulamé went in search of a medicine man, but so great was the plague that four days passed before one came. He sat down beside Selka’s bed and took a parcel of monkey fur, dried frogs, and moonstones from a pouch and spread them on the floor. Then he asked her to name the gods whom she thought might be molesting her. Was it Ah Muzen Cab, the bee god? Was it the long-nosed rain god, Chac? Was it Itzamná himself ?