by Manda Scott
He was doing it as a distraction, drawing all possible interest and approbation away from his physician and on to himself, and successfully so. Owen watched the priest make a physical effort to look away from the fantastic vulgarity of de Aguilar’s earrings and felt a stab of remorse for his own earlier, identical prejudice.
Still, if all that had been said of the priest was correct, there was a danger in the captain’s exuberance and Owen did not want his friend to come to harm on his account. Seeking harmless conversation, he said, ‘This building is not painted red like all the others. Did you ask for it so?’
‘Of course. I required it of Diego and Domingo when first I took this place as my own. They painted it with limewash made to my own recipe and have done so annually on that same date ever since.’
‘But they continue to paint the remainder of the city in the colour of blood. Is it a reminder of human sacrifice, or—’
Owen spoke in all innocence, repeating only what all of Spain knew of the natives. He regretted it at once, so suddenly and catastrophically did the thunder blacken the priest’s features.
Quietly, venomously, Calderón said, ‘My children do not seek, and never have sought, the death of others in appeasement of their gods. They were untutored, but they were not barbarians, unlike their enemies to the north and west, the Culhua-Mexica, known to incomers as the Aztecs, who were so successfully subjugated in God’s name by his lordship Cortés and whose gold now rests with his most elegant majesty of Spain.’
Twelve years at Cambridge had taught Owen that honest ignorance served best when confronted by the anger of men who like to know most. Tipping his head a little to one side, he asked, ‘Then why have they chosen such a violent colour for their decorations?’
The priest favoured him with a graceless stare. The great silver cross surged on the prow of his chest.
‘Being more thoughtful and less savage than their neighbours, the people of Zama have come upon the idea that if they paint their buildings blood red, they will seem as do the temples of the devil-worshipping barbarians whose steps are slick with human blood. By mimicking them in this way, my children hope to deter any attackers who may— Thank you, Diego. Please do come in.’
On the order, the scar-faced native – Owen did not believe that Diego was his birth-name – slid shadow-like through the grass screen that hung to fill the doorway, bearing on a tray three clay beakers and an opened bottle of wine.
The priest treated him as any lord might treat his servant: as an obdurate child, to be seen but not heard. Cedric Owen would have been glad to do likewise, but that the piercing eyes carved holes in his mind and made deafening the background song of the blue stone.
With an effort, he lifted his wine from the tray and fixed his attention once again on the priest. ‘Does it work?’ he asked. ‘Painting the houses red?’
‘I have been here nearly ten years and the only enemy we have fought has been the pox. Therefore we can conclude that it works,’ said the priest, with glorious illogic. ‘And now we must deliver your captain from his knees, for otherwise there will be no part of the floor free on which to place the table. Have you found the riddle of the mosaic yet, señor?’
‘I regret not.’ Fernandez de Aguilar stood with evident reluctance. His eyes flashed with an excitement that was only slightly exaggerated. Stepping a little back from the design on the floor, he said, ‘I think perhaps I have the beginnings of it, but it is opaque to my mind. Señor Owen, will you bend your physician’s logic to the puzzle on my behalf before our host divulges its secret?’
Thus, inattentively and with his mind set all awry by the unsettling gaze of the scarred native, did Cedric Owen come to stand before the image that changed for ever the trajectory of his life.
From a distance it had looked like a child’s painting done in stone; a haphazard collection of pebbles, picked for the clarity of their colour and then arrayed in stick-figure images over an area of perhaps four square yards. Here, goggle-eyed men and fantastical beasts writhed in gross, overstated struggles, eyes aflame, teeth gnashing, limbs entwined in an eternity of conflict.
On closer inspection, the shapes proved to be more complex than they had seemed. In the centre a fire was laid out in red and yellow stones, prettily lifelike, with an encircling rim made of green leaves woven thinly. About the perimeter in a deep, wide band was a map of the heavens with the constellations and planets laid out in an array that promised great understanding if studied in depth.
In the middle, between fire and sky, stood the two futures of man, held in eternal balance. To the one side, conflict, war and misery stood depicted in fierce and warring figures. To the other stood the battle’s antithesis, a summer meadow carpeted with coloured flowers too beautiful to name and too many to count. A child knelt in the centre of it, peaceful in the solitude.
Separating these two was the barest thread of a dividing line, an erratic rift of black and white tiles with a thread of fat, coloured pearls strung along it, in the seven colours of the rainbow, with black and white set together at the end.
From nowhere, Owen remembered an upstairs room in a lodging house in Paris, and the smell of roasted pigeons and almonds and a delicate voice.
The colours of the world are nine in total; the seven of the rainbow, plus the black of no-light and the white of all-light. To the blue was given the heart of the beast, and the power to call together the remaining twelve parts of its spirit and flesh.
It was then, swayed by the memory, that Owen made the mistake of looking up. Scar-faced Diego stood in a corner of the room, an invisible shadow, armed with pitiless knife-eyes that flashed and flared as much as anything in the stone-painting.
Under their gaze, it was impossible not to see the truth laid out so plainly before him.
‘My God …’
The image was not a child’s drawing. For a single heart-stopping moment, it crystallized into something quite different.
‘What do you see, my friend?’
Fernandez de Aguilar asked it quietly, with the same voice he had used on the ship’s deck in the morning. He was no longer clowning. If the priest saw it, if he wondered at the change in the Spaniard and his English physician, if he planned their deaths by fire and rack as a result, neither of them cared.
The question freed Owen’s tongue. He said, ‘I see the moment before the world’s end; the held breath before the onset of Armageddon. I see a map of the heavens that gives us the date and time exactly. And I see the means by which there may be hope to avert the ultimate evil.’
He looked up at the priest. In Europe, he would have burned at the stake for even this much indiscretion. Father Calderón’s black eyes were reflective, but not yet vengeful. He lifted his silver cross and kissed it. ‘Pray continue.’
Owen drew breath. ‘I see first the sun, greatest light of all, shining down a long, dark tunnel to the place from whence all matter is born. I see Venus, the Morning Star, in wide embrace to Mercury, the Messenger, and these two dance in opposition to Jupiter, the Golden Benefactor. I see Jupiter seated at the apex of a Finger of God, with Saturn, the Great Constraint, at one arm and—’
The words snagged in his throat. ‘I see the planets and constellations set in a pattern that will not happen in my lifetime, nor in many yet to come.’
The scar-faced native was watching him still, but it was Father Gonzalez Calderón who said softly, ‘This shape is not made in God’s heaven for four hundred and fifty-six years. What is it that the stars and planets herald?’
Owen bent back to the wonder before him. ‘The image shows a frozen moment in time, as if the world has been caught on the brink of disaster and there is but this single thread of hope to save it. To the west, we see the conflict of the final Desolation. Here, men fight against all of creation, each one consumed with greed, lust, avarice, the lack of care for others, the willingness to inflict pain on them – even to take pleasure in so doing – heedless of their plight and, in the end, to trample
on all that exists. This is the force that will lead to the destruction not only of all that is good in the world of men, but of the world.’
‘And is there no redemption?’ asked the priest.
‘There may be, for set against the horror is a place of peace.’ Owen laid a hand on the southern quadrant. ‘Here, in the east, a girl child kneels in a summer’s meadow playing knucklebones, right hand against left. She is the epitome of Innocence, of the unstained human soul that might yet be saved, and so save the future of the world.’
‘It is a girl, not a boy?’
‘I believe so.’
‘And therefore not the young Christ. A mistake, clearly. We will change that, one day, perhaps.’
The priest held his hands clasped about the silver cross. The straight end emerged from between his steepled fingers as a pointer. He jabbed it at the image, once to each direction. ‘You have spoken only of the background. What can you say about the four beasts who make the greater part of the image?’
‘Ah …’ What could he say of such things? Owen had not seen them at first, such was the wonder of the mosaic, where images hid within others. Only under the scarred native’s stare had their outlines begun to shine. Now, the four beasts dazzled him, in all their might and wonder. Here was the animation, the power, the light to brighten the darkest of worlds. The words came to Owen slowly, striving to encompass the wonder he saw.
‘I spoke of a thread of hope in the picture and, in truth, the greater part of the mosaic is given over to the manifestation of that hope. Here we have four beasts, joined and yet not joined. Up here in the north-east corner is a spotted lion, a hunter to exceed all others, of sleek pelt and bright eyes. Next, in the southeast, is a serpent, long as a ship and thick as a man’s waist, banded in emerald and ruby. Opposite these two an eagle sits to the northwest, its wings as wide as this house and its talons fit to lift a wolf, its eyes of sharp gold. Last, in the south-western corner sits a lizard large as a horse, with teeth that could tear a man in half. When these four join together …’
Even as he spoke, the beasts erupted from the mosaic; flat stone could not contain their might. They met, all four together in volcanic concatenation of flesh. Limbs entwined with wings, heads with hearts, talons and tails together.
For one luminous, heartbreaking moment, the four became one, to make a beast that was infinitely greater than all apart.
It was too bright. Owen closed his eyes against the blinding light. When he opened them again, the earth-serpent was gone, and all sign of the beasts that had made it.
The mosaic was a child’s drawing again. Dizzily, Owen knelt in the band of the star map, taking care not to touch the greater picture, and ran the flat of his palm across the thread of coloured stones, half expecting shards of lightning to flash into his fingers, or a song to emerge from his blue stone.
On both counts, he was disappointed; what life there had been in the image was gone. He risked a look to the shadows beyond the priest and was not surprised to see that the scar-faced native was no longer there. Where he had been, a single bright green feather lay on the floor, pointing in, towards the fire at the heart of the mosaic.
Owen stood, feeling light-headed and a little foolish. De Aguilar was studying him in silence, his gaze sharper than Owen had ever seen it. A shadow crossed them both, breaking the intensity of the moment. Father Calderón stood in the doorway, his ox-bulk blocking both entrance and exit. His arms were folded across his chest as they had been on the pier.
‘Are we to die, Father?’ asked de Aguilar quietly.
‘Possibly, but not at my hand. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Father Bernardino de Saguin commends us, his children, to know the ways of the natives that we might better teach them the clear path to Christ. I have lived in Zama nearly seven years and in this house for four of those and yet I have only lately come to perceive what your ship’s physician has so clearly seen at first sighting.
‘With my greater knowledge, I can tell you that the spotted beast is not a lion but a jaguar, which is sacred to my children, the Maya, as are the three other beasts: the eagle, which represents the air, the serpent, which is fire, and the crocodile, which is water. The jaguar, of course, holds power over the earth. They are taught that at the End of Days, which you so clearly divined in their stone painting, these four will come together to form one beast. Can you imagine, sir, what might arise out of the union of these four?’
The presence of Nostradamus cooled the shining light in Owen’s mind that he might speak calmly of what he had seen. ‘Plato named it the Ouroboros,’ he said. ‘The many-coloured serpent which encircles the earth in endless compassion and swallows its own tail that it might never be separated. In my land, we would know it rather as a dragon or a wyvern, a beast with the body and claws of a jaguar, the head of a crocodile, the tail of a serpent and the wings and grace of an eagle. I was sent here to find how these four might join to make one, and now, having seen it, I cannot remember.’
‘It would arise, perhaps, like the Phoenix, from the flames of the fire?’ asked de Aguilar. A glance from Owen showed that he was not making fun of him.
‘Indeed.’ The priest smiled thinly. ‘Or our Lord might simply call it to His hand. Such things are not for us to know, although we may praise their happening. In the lands of my children, the four-in-one is the feathered or rainbow serpent known as Kukulkan, or also Quetzalcoatl, a beast which would make a fitting mount for Christ, were He to return to save us from our own ruin.’
The priest bowed to each of them fluidly, and stepped aside from his own doorway. ‘And now I have committed easily as great a heresy as yours, and we are in each other’s debt. It will make for an easier evening, I believe, which is as well, for here is Domingo with our meal. The staple here is beans served with hot peppers and chillies. It will seem to you very pungent after the rude fare of the sea. Be assured that if you take to it well, all food will seem bland afterwards by comparison. In the meantime, it may help if you drink water as you eat.’
14
Zama, New Spain, October 1556
‘THIS, MY FRIEND, is the green gold that will make us the richest men in Europe, and our children and grandchildren after us.’
Fernandez de Aguilar squatted on his heels in the dust and grit of a barren landscape. A mule stood behind him, flapping its ears and flicking its tail at the insects. It had been a gift, or at least a loan, from Gonzalez Calderón, along with its saddle, bridle, and breast strap, all in local-made leather, with silver buttons at the junctions and a small image of the crucified Christ at the mid-point of the breast.
Cedric Owen leaned over and studied the plant that had taken his companion’s eye. It looked no different from any of the others that grew in the arid desert around him: a fistful of long, leathery, sword-blade leaves sprouted from a thickened husk of a stem. It was small, too; this one grew no higher than a man’s knee although some of those around grew to head height, so that to walk among them was to risk losing an eye on the sword-pointed leaves. The whole thing seemed designed to be inedible by man, beast or insect.
Cedric Owen took the opportunity to dismount and stood in the shade cast by his gift-mule. The flies were fewer here than in the city, but the dust more. He sat down on a flat rock with his back to the high, hot sun and skipped a pebble across the desert. He tried to imagine being rich, and failed.
‘How?’ he asked. Heat was teaching him an economy of language that Cambridge had never done.
De Aguilar was in expansive mood again. His arm swept the horizon. ‘Do you see anything else growing here?’
Owen made a show of scanning the stretching landscape. For a long, long way in every direction, he could see rock and dust in profusion. Dotted here and there were the sword-plants of which de Aguilar was so enamoured. ‘Very little,’ he said drily.
‘That’s because you don’t have great vision or great breeding. Fortunately, I have both.’
Grinning, the Spaniard stood up, sweeping the dust
extravagantly from his legs with the brim of his hat.
‘For most of his life, my great-uncle believed that his sojourn here in New Spain brought more pain than it was worth; that the savages would never allow us to live here in peace and the earth yielded nothing more than dust, peppers, and the chillies the priest fed us last night that so offended your tongue. There is no silver to speak of and little gold; all the bullion is to the south or deep inland in the stores of the Aztecs, and Cortés has taken most of it. The art is beautiful, but it’s painted on the walls or carved on the stones and, in any case, it’s idolatry and the Church will destroy it all as soon as they are sure there is nothing they want to learn from it. Every member of my family has taken my great-uncle’s opinion to heart and none has ever set sail away from Seville.’
‘Except you,’ said Owen. ‘Why?’
‘Because I listened to the letters and I saw the things my ancestor did not when he spoke of the sword-leaved plants that grow in the desert. There are two kinds of these plants, my friend. One can be distilled to a kind of spirit-drink more potent than the best of brandies; one beaker could leave a man insensate and two would make him wish he had never been born. The other kind is used by the natives to make a type of rope, like hemp. Cortés used this on his ships as he sailed home.’
De Aguilar went to his mule and lifted from it the coiled rope that hung across the pommel.
‘This is what can be made with this plant. They call it sisal. Here, feel …’
It was rope. Cedric Owen was not equipped to tell one from another. He passed it between his fingers and said, ‘Is it good?’
‘The best. Sisal is better than hemp in every way, stronger, coarser, hardier, more fit for the needs of the ocean-going boats than anything we produce in Europe. We will grow this plant in the way the natives grow their beans and we will make ropes to fit the navies of all Christendom and beyond. We will be the richest men in Europe, trust me. Look to my birth stars and tell me I am not bound for greatness.’