The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  Finding nothing and no one, and under assault from winds that threatened to uproot the masts, they had finally, reluctantly, set a westerly course again, not knowing if the other ships were searching for them in like manner or had fallen to the wrath of the storm. Every man on board had felt the cut of separation far more sharply then than when they had first sailed from the harbour in Seville six weeks before.

  Sailing alone was a different thing, like walking along a cliff’s edge in a gale with no guard rail for safety. In the beginning, Owen had found the sense of isolation unnerving, but a week’s peace and the quiet assurance of de Aguilar’s captaincy had changed that until he felt the exhilaration and freedom of their aloneness, and never wanted it to end.

  Only the blue heart-stone wanted more. Its urgings had woken him before dawn, bringing him out to this place at the masthead where he could look out across the black void of sea and sky, to the place on the undefined horizon where they merged.

  Never before had he been in night so complete. The dark-light boundary of the horizon was gone, welding sea and sky into one. Endless constellations reflected in the ocean and back up to the sky, so that Owen was surrounded by pinpricks of light in a darkness that had no ending.

  Only at one place was there a difference: ahead and a little off the port bow was a light that looked more orange than the stars, and flickered occasionally in a way that mimicked fire.

  He was watching that, and wondering as to its nature, when the blackness broke apart, letting the first knife-edge of sun streak out across the water. Displayed for his admiration alone was the priceless moment when the sea abandoned the inky mystery of the night and opened to the blinding blue and gold of the dawn.

  It was heart-stopping in its beauty. Lacking any sense of a god to be worshipped for its benevolence, Cedric Owen followed a lifetime’s habit and opened his heart to give thanks for it to the blue stone that had brought him here in the face of all improbability.

  ‘It is worth it all, just for this, is it not?’ The soft Spanish came from his left side, where the dawn was not. Fernandez de Aguilar could always traverse his own ship quietly.

  Owen startled and settled and found he was not entirely unhappy to have shared the moment. He said, ‘If I were to die now, having seen this, I would not feel my life ended too soon.’

  De Aguilar clucked his teeth lightly in reprimand. ‘You should be careful what you say. An invitation to death is not a thing to give lightly. We will make land by nightfall, did you know?’

  ‘I thought as much. Do you know where we are headed, now that the storm has sent us so far from our original course?’

  ‘I would be a poor captain if I did not know where I had brought my ship.’

  The Spaniard slid his back down the mast to sit with his heels drawn in and his knees clasped against his chest. He was the most casually dressed Owen had ever seen him; his white shirt tails hung loose about his hose, with the cuffs open and dangling and the collar wide. He still favoured his broken arm, but the bandages were thinner than they had been, and Owen believed they could be dispensed with by the end of the month.

  ‘We were due to berth in Campeche,’ de Aguilar said. ‘It lies north of here and along the western side of the peninsula. We have not food and water left to reach there, so we are headed instead for the city named Tulum by my grand-uncle, for the vast wall that stretches around it. The natives call it rather Zama, which means dawn, and I suspect we have just seen the reason why. At night, those who live there keep the coasts safe by warning ships of the rocks. If you look across the port bow, away from the sun, you can still see the fire they keep burning in the tower that looks over the sea.’

  ‘It is a fire, then? I had wondered. I had not imagined the savages to understand the concept of a lighthouse.’

  ‘They understand a lot you might not imagine from what we are told of them. It is to the King’s advantage to make them seem as primitives, whom we may freely scorn. My grand-uncle began his time here thinking them ignorant brutes, fit only to be slaves to the grandeur of Christendom. His comrade, Gonzalo de Guerrero, realized soonest how wrong that was and fought for thirty years alongside the natives against Spain.’

  ‘Even so, you come amongst them to conquer?’

  De Aguilar shook his head. ‘Never that. I come to make us and them rich in the new world which will destroy the old. The ones you name as savages are not stupid. They have painted their entire city blood red, as a warning to their neighbours not to attack, and yet they keep the coasts safe by an effort of engineering that would leave our architects weeping with envy. The lighthouse whose fires you see is not a rude column such as mars the coastlines of England and Spain, but a square-sided pyramid, of a size and grace that would match any of our cathedrals. The carvings and murals are of a complexity to outdo Egypt, and their writing is as opaque to our understanding as the paintings on the walls of the pyramids. The beauty of it is that these people are alive and may teach us what their carvings mean, when all of Egypt’s antiquity is beyond our ken.’

  ‘And will they teach us? Or do they offer war, as they did to Hernan Cortés?’

  De Aguilar picked a sliver of grit from beneath one fingernail. Looking up, he said, ‘I hope they will not offer war, but have no certainty. Zama perches on the edge of the ocean and faces east so that its citizens have seen every morning that with which we have only now been blessed. I would like to believe that being bathed in the light of a sunrise such as this on every day of one’s life predisposes a man to reflection and farming, rather than war, but I may be wrong.’

  ‘Then, in case you are, we had better make the most of what we have.’

  Owen too slid down the mast to sit with his face to the sun. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes against the familiar blue of the sky. The wider, vaster, internal blue of the heart-stone stretched out and became tinged with red at the edges, only a little, but enough to be a warning.

  With his eyes still closed, Owen said, ‘However they paint their walls, I think the natives are not our only danger.’

  ‘No. If my information is correct, there is a priest in Zama who is second only to the bishop of Yucatán in his desire to bring the Inquisition to New Spain. He is a Jesuit who fears the deterioration of the mother church in Europe, where the Germans, Dutch and English are sacking the monasteries and stealing their gold. He seeks to replenish her coffers with treasure from the New World. He does not say so openly, of course; in his letters home, he writes that he seeks to bring heathen souls to God and so save them from an eternity of burning. To do that, he will inflict on as many of them as is necessary the more temporal burning of death at the stake.’

  There was a pause. Owen heard a rustle of cloth as de Aguilar turned a little to face him. Then came the quiet, eloquent voice: ‘You should be careful, my friend. Many of those who have died have not had such a thing as a skull of pure crystal to carry with them into the executioner’s fires.’

  There had been no warning. Owen opened his eyes and stared up at the impossible blue of the sky.

  After a while, he asked, ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Nearly a week. If you remember, there was a night of calm before the second, worse part of the typhoon. I excused myself then from dinner. I do not expect your forgiveness, but you must know that I could not risk taking my ship and its men on an unplanned, poorly charted leg of the voyage without knowing for whom, or for what, I was doing it.’

  ‘And so you went to my cabin and sought out the stone?’

  ‘It was lying in the open, waiting to be found. I did not touch it; such a thing would be sacrilege, but I felt from it a welcome such as I have only before received from Deaf Pedro, who taught me all I know of the sea and still welcomes me into his home like a beloved grandson when I return to visit him.’

  Owen turned his head a little, to bring the other into view. ‘Every man I have met, with the exception of Nostradamus, has either feared that stone or desired to possess it. A
re you, then, another exception, or has the skull lost its power to command the minds of men?’

  There was silence, and the slapping of waves on the hull. Presently, de Aguilar said, ‘If I had a wife of exceptional beauty and wisdom, such that you saw in her everything you had ever desired in a woman, would you wish to take her from me?’

  ‘I would take nothing from you, but especially not a free heart, freely given.’

  ‘So, then, why would I not do likewise? The stone is clearly yours in all ways. It is not that I do not see it as desirable, but that I choose not to desire it.’

  Owen said, ‘Your integrity shames me. You are captain of this ship and I owe you my life. More than that, I have seen how you treat your men and respect every aspect of what you do. I would not have kept the knowledge from you, but—’

  ‘But it is hard to know whom to trust, I know. And perhaps you would not wish so to burden a friend?’

  Owen had not thought of Fernandez de Aguilar as a friend, nor imagined he might be considered so in return. Spoken aloud now, after all that had just passed, he saw the truth of their friendship and could trace its growth in the series of meaningless conversations that yet held meaning and honesty; in the slow, cultivated growth of his respect.

  As he had once feared, he had been wooed, and had succumbed, and did not regret it. He said, ‘Why did you do this?’ and was grateful that de Aguilar did not pretend misunderstanding.

  ‘You saved my life; is that not reason enough?’ The Spaniard shrugged. ‘And you present a naivety that is easy to believe, but there is a strength beneath it that is the worth of a dozen vanities.’

  ‘I would never love you as a man loves a woman.’

  ‘I know that. I would not ask it of you. Nor, actually, would I want it; I, too, will find a wife one day. But there is such a thing as a meeting of minds between men of equal valour that holds easily as much value as the immersions of flesh, and may outlast the heady days of carnal love. I had hoped we might share such comradeship, and that, in doing so, you might find that you could tell me a little of your blue stone’s history, as much as is safe.’

  ‘I might … indeed I might.’ Owen swept his hands across his face and had no idea how young that made him look, or how uncertain. ‘I have lived with the weight of the stone’s existence all my life. I love it and all that it brings, but I would not inflict that burden lightly on another, particularly not on a man I admire. And yet … That night, when I came to dinner, I did not leave it in the open – it was as well hidden as it has always been.’

  ‘The stone let me see it?’

  ‘It would seem so.’

  There was silence a while, and the slice of the boat through water and the lift and rock of the sea. The cries of the sea birds returned, more insistent than before, the birds themselves faded scribbles on the horizon.

  De Aguilar reached into his shirt and brought from an inside, hidden pocket something of gold.

  ‘The priest at Zama is a Father Gonzalez Calderón. By all accounts the man is a fanatic who revels in the pain of others and I believe we should tread very carefully in his presence. At the least, we should appear to be men of God. If it does not offend you greatly, perhaps you could accept this?’ A small gold crucifix of quite exceptional workmanship dangled from his fingers. ‘It was my mother’s,’ said Fernandez de Aguilar simply. ‘But a man may wear it.’

  The sun caught the cross as it turned slowly in the freshening breeze and made of it a small penumbra of light, far beyond the metal of its making. Cedric Owen reached for it and the blue stone, which had recoiled from every other artefact of religion, did not flinch from this one.

  ‘Thank you,’ Owen said. ‘I would be most honoured.’

  10

  Zama, New Spain, October 1556

  ON CALM WATER that sparkled under a noon sun, the Aurora slid slowly into the small natural harbour below the city named Zama for its view of the dawn.

  High white limestone bluffs stood as sentinels of purity, drawing them in to a city of startling blood-red stone, walled on three sides and faced on the fourth by the vast, red, pyramidal tower that was its lighthouse.

  On board, men lined the port and starboard sides from bow to stern, taking soundings with leads dipped in soft wax, that they might find both the depth and nature of the sea’s floor beneath them.

  A relay of quiet voices sent reports back to de Aguilar, who stood with Juan-Cruz at the wheel: ‘Port stern, third man, five fathoms, sand’; ‘Port bow, fourth man, four and a half fathoms, lost the sand, probably rock’; ‘Starboard bow, first man, three fathoms, weed and mud.’

  From this uncertainty, inch by careful inch, did the captain bring his ship in to a place where he could safely anchor and set down the small-boat for himself and his favoured companions to make first landfall.

  Their arrival was not unannounced. For the last hours, since they had been able to see the harbour, they had seen also the growing crowd of natives awaiting them, dressed in colours bright as birds and with a quantity of green feathers set about the crowns of their straw hats, so that Cedric Owen, who had been at sea far too long, fondly imagined them to be women, and the things that they carried to be for trade.

  He had no such fond imaginings now. This close, it was clear that every one of those waiting was a man and that the things they carried were the arms of war. At least a dozen in the foremost rows held guns as if they knew how to use them. The rest, for the most part, bore spears or long wooden clubs made black at the edges.

  ‘They call them maquahuitls,’ said de Aguilar quietly. He stood at Owen’s side in the bow of the small-boat with a coiled rope in his hand, ready to leap ashore. Behind him, six men rowed in trained synchrony. ‘My great-uncle described them as the greatest hand-held weapon he had ever seen in action. They’re made of hardwood with blades of obsidian set along the edges. The warriors of the Maya are not large men, so they wield them two-handed, which gives a greater arc and more force to the strike. Pedro de Moron, who fought with Cortés, had his horse decapitated by a single blow from one of these. Cortés had offered iron swords to those of the natives who swore him fealty, but they believed their obsidian to be sharper and stronger. It took a dead horse to prove to him that they spoke the truth.’

  ‘And now they wait to prove the same to us,’ Cedric said. ‘They’re hard to count all crowded together like that, but I’d guess we’re outnumbered at least three to one and they do not look to me welcoming, however bright their clothing or their feathers.’

  De Aguilar nodded peacefully. ‘Then we will die swiftly, having seen that blazing dawn. I would prefer it to the alternative. The man walking through them now, dressed all in black with a fortune in silver at his neck, is Father Gonzalez Calderón. In his presence, we have to hope that if they hate us, we are given a native death of swift black stone, not a European one of torture and fire. What does your blue stone say?’

  ‘That it is nearing home, and cannot reach land soon enough,’ said Owen, who was having trouble thinking through the wild singing in his head. ‘It says nothing of how welcome we may be when we take it there. Are you going to throw the rope to the priest?’

  ‘Who else?’ asked de Aguilar, grinning. ‘Watch closely, and learn what it is to speak softly to the natives.’

  The wooden jetty was so new that the barnacles had not yet set up residence on it. The black-robed priest stood at the farthest end from land, and caught deftly enough the rope that was thrown him. Two native men stood a pace or two behind. Alone among their brethren, their trousers and smocks were of plain, uncoloured cloth and they bore no weapons.

  The priest leaned back on the rope and made it taut. There was a moment’s drifting impact and then Fernandez de Aguilar jumped lightly to the wooden planks and stood there, rocking gently for a moment, as if the sea still moved him. Then, before them all, he swept the lowest, most elaborate court bow Cedric Owen had ever seen performed by any man.

  ‘I present myself, sir, Fernandez
de Aguilar, a ship’s captain of little worth, but I bring with me Señor Cedric Owen, our ship’s physician and most astute astrologer. He comes with a recommendation from Catherine de’ Medici, the Queen of France herself. I commend him to you and your friends in that vein. You, of course, are Father Gonzalez Calderón, priest of the mother church in Zama, New Spain. We were speaking of you only this morning and of how pleased you would be to meet our esteemed passenger. Wait, we will set down a plank so that the good doctor can come to land.’

  ‘No.’

  There fell a silence even the gulls dared not break.

  The priest was an ox of a man, broad of back and girth and all of it sinew and muscle. His neck was thickly corded with a layering of chins. Across the broad, black sweep of his chest lay a crucifix in raw silver that was the largest and heaviest Cedric Owen had ever seen.

  His single word held all the harbour still. Watched now by every man on boat, ship and land, he coiled the rope in his hand and threw it neatly back to Cedric Owen’s feet.

  Raising his voice to be heard, he said, ‘You should know that we have had smallpox here. It has passed now, but before it did so, God took to Himself over half the men, women and children of our city. We are wary, therefore, of incomers who might bring the same again, or worse. Can your so-esteemed physician swear to me in the name of God that you carry no disease?’

  The priest addressed de Aguilar, but his gaze, resting on Owen, was hot and angry, as if the pox held his mind in thrall.

  The sudden scream in his mind’s ear was of a different pitch from any Owen had ever heard. In an effort to escape it, he lifted his gaze beyond the black-garbed priest and on to the two native men who stood immediately behind—

  —and stopped, because thought had become impossible.

  The two men behind the priest were dressed plainly in trousers and smocks of unbleached cotton; both were clean-shaven with wide faces and wider eyes and dense black hair that hung plumb-straight to their shoulders. The one on the left fingered a small wooden cross at his chest and stared without interest at the Aurora and her crew.