“What is the status of the fleet?” Hastelloy asked.
“We are ready to weigh anchor within the hour. We were just waiting for you to arrive.”
Chapter 34: The Hunt
NANOOK MADE HIS way through the dense jungle with slow, deliberate movements. His steps avoided twigs, branches, and even dried leaves lying on the ground that would have made noise. He rotated, raised, and lowered his upper body as he progressed between the trees and bushes to avoid any contact. He was tracking a notoriously skittish prey. Any sound or sign of movement could send it running.
He heard the rapid, light footsteps and rustling of bushes about thirty feet to his right. He took a deep breath and froze when it became clear that the sound was heading in his direction. The bushes straight ahead of him shook as if an angry wind from the gods was blowing through them until, at last, a three-foot-tall turkey burst through the foliage.
It paused to look around the tiny clearing before taking off toward the rising sun. Nanook eased his bow off his shoulder, drew an arrow from the quiver hanging from his waist, and notched the projectile. He drew the string back and cringed upon hearing a faint creek from his bow protesting the strain he was exerting on the weapon.
The turkey came to a full stop, turned its head, and looked around for the sound’s origin. Nanook used that momentary pause to take his shot. He let go of the taut string and felt his pulse quicken as the arrow sailed through the air. This would be his first solo hunting kill. His father would be so proud.
Nanook’s elation turned to concern when the turkey darted to the side at the last moment. Instead of striking the animal midbreast, the arrow tore through its tail and right leg.
The turkey squawked in pain and panic before dashing into the bushes heading east. Nanook took off after his prey, paying no regard to the noise or commotion he made. The arrow sticking though the turkey’s backside and leg told the clever creature all it needed to know about Nanook being nearby.
The rapid pitter-patter of the turkey’s cadence was now replaced with an awkward, heavy landing followed by a quiet pause before another heavy landing was heard. His target was limping and unable to make it far.
Nanook followed the limping turkey until the soil beneath his feet turned from hard dirt to loose sand. He looked up from the blood trail he had been tracking in time to step out of the jungle and onto a white sandy beach. The hobbling turkey was only twenty feet ahead of him, but that last step from the jungle onto the sand changed Nanook’s priorities dramatically.
White-crested waves crashed against the nearby shoreline and carried with them at least twenty large canoes loaded with men of pale skin. Beyond the nearby landing craft, Nanook saw eleven massive ships with towering masts supporting long, white canvases to catch the winds.
He had never seen anything like it before in his life, yet he knew who and what they were. The stories of white men with powerful boats and weapons coming from the eastern horizon were well known. Once welcomed as gods, Nanook and his people now knew better. They were just men; greedy men to avoid or fight, not to worship or obey.
Panic ran through Nanook when he realized that three of the landing canoes had already made it ashore. He felt his heart fall through his body when he saw a cluster of the white men from the nearest canoe pointing in his direction. In that terrifying moment, Nanook gave up on collecting his first hunting prize and focused on his survival.
As the white men took off running for him, Nanook spun around in the sand to head back into the jungle. The foliage was dense, and the ground uneven. If he could reach the tree line, he would be safe. Unfortunately, in his hurry and panic, Nanook lost his footing in the loose sand. He stumbled forward half a step and landed face-first in the white, powdery sand. He scrambled back to his feet again only to have one leg trip the other and send him back to the sand.
Nanook rose to his knees a second time and was about to push off when the weight of the world seemed to land on top of him. One of the white men wrapped him up in a hug around the waist and held on long enough for two others to jump on top of the pile.
He flailed and kicked with all his might, but it was no use. The white men were much bigger, stronger, and there were so many of them. Nanook chose not to resist any further because he did not want to anger these strangers. He knew the cruelty they were capable of rendering.
The white men carried Nanook back to their boats, where they retrieved a length of rope. They bound his hands and feet together to leave him in a seated position on the sandy beach. One man stood watch over him as the rest of the landing canoes made it ashore. There were hundreds of them.
Nanook watched one of the white men approach the turkey he had wounded. The animal had lost enough blood now that it barely moved. The man could have reached down and grabbed the game, but instead he produced a long metal rod with a wooden base. He pressed the wood against his shoulder, pointed it at the turkey and then blasted it with a fiery bolt of lightning that nearly cut the bird in two. What chance did his people have against these men and their terrible weapons?
After a long while, a man wearing a metal plate across his chest along with a large metal helmet stepped off a landing boat. He approached Nanook with an entirely different attitude than the others. This man did not look at him as some sort of animal to taunt or dominate. This man looked at Nanook with compassion behind his eyes.
The individual said some words to him for all the good it did. Nanook may as well have tried to understand the clucks and chirps of the turkey. The man tried three more sets of words, each sounding completely different from the others. The last dialect sounded somewhat familiar; probably the language of another tribe nearby, but Nanook had no talent for words. He was a simple hunter.
The man wearing metal looked frustrated for a moment, but then resorted to gestures. He pointed to Nanook, then gestured to his own mouth and then pulled a round orange fruit from his pocket. The stranger also pulled out a knife, but did not wield it in a threatening manner. The man cut into the orange ball to make a dozen slices out of it and then proceeded to eat one of the slices.
Nanook figured if the food was safe for this man to eat, then it would be for him as well. He reached out with his bound hands, took one of the slices and placed it in his mouth. His tongue instantly erupted in a delicious flavor unlike anything he had ever imagined. He chomped down on the entire slice and while the fleshy inside was delicious, the outer coating he found to be revolting.
He resisted the urge to spit it out. He did not want to offend the man by rejecting his gift. He looked at the man and noticed he kept the hard skin outside of his mouth and only ate the inside. Nanook gratefully followed the example and enjoyed the fruit as though it may be his final meal, which it very well could be.
Chapter 35: Language Barriers
FOR HASTELLOY, THE most valuable asset to his expedition would be his ability to communicate with the natives they encountered. His second priority was to make sure that those communications were, above all else, friendly. His six hundred men would not make it far if they had to do battle with every native they came across while traipsing aimlessly through the thick jungle.
Hastelloy had gotten his hopes up early when his men managed to apprehend a local almost the instant they stepped off the boats. It soon became obvious that the boy would not do as any kind of an interpreter though. Hastelloy had tried the five native dialects he knew on the boy, and he recognized none of them. Still, the encounter was not a total loss.
Hastelloy learned the boy’s name was Nanook, and the system of gestures they worked out let him enquire if Nanook knew of any other white men in the area. The boy stroked his bald chin, then pointed to Hastelloy’s short beard, and finally pointed northward to let him know that a tribe to the north had captured some men with beards eight years prior.
Nanook knew the area well enough to draw a map in the sand. Hastelloy transcribed it onto paper and was able to have the boy include landmarks along the path that would le
ad Hastelloy and his men to that village. He trusted Nanook because of how detailed and specific the map was. Hastelloy also figured that if he were in Nanook’s moccasins, he would leap at the chance to direct any newcomers away from his own village toward a rival faction. It was also possible that Nanook was directing them to a sizeable city with a powerful army that he hoped could dispose of the invaders. Time would tell.
Despite the language barrier, Hastelloy considered his encounter with Nanook a success. They were able to communicate, and the relations were cordial and friendly. Hastelloy shared an exotic fruit with the boy and in the end, set him free. The hope was that Nanook would return to his village and tell the tale of how these newcomers were not the devils from the sea that they had heard about, at least not this group of visitors.
In return, Hastelloy had a map leading to an invaluable asset. He reasoned that if there really were Europeans held captive in this village for eight or more years, then those unfortunate individuals had to know the local languages by now.
That fact made the village priority number one for Hastelloy and his men, but first there was a little matter of finding the right motivation for his hired soldiers to march off into the jungle. They were here under the pretense of reinforcing an existing settlement, not blazing a trail of conquest through the mainland in order to beat Juan to the punch. A good number of the men might choose to go back if given the opportunity.
To that end, Hastelloy ordered all eleven of his ships to be anchored in a tight, overlapping formation before every single crewman went ashore by landing boat. As the master commander, Hastelloy was the last to disembark. He made sure to spill the two remaining kegs of gunpowder across the deck of his flagship before climbing down to his awaiting landing skiff.
Before the rowers propelled the landing craft too far from the cluster of ships, Hastelloy pulled out a musket, took careful aim, and fired at the box full of gunpowder he had left sitting on the railing. A small explosion went off on the railing, which soon tracked along the trails of powder Hastelloy left across the deck until the entire vessel went up in flames.
The tightly anchored formation allowed the inferno to spread easily across the other ten ships until all eleven vessels were ablaze. From the shoreline, it looked as though the waters had parted and the flames of hell escaped to consume the soldiers’ only way back to the islands.
On the beach, the men made a feeble attempt to load their landing crafts and row for the main vessels to try to extinguish the flames. It was no use. By the time they were in their seats and put oars in the water, a towering inferno had consumed the fleet. All they could do was stand and stare in dismay.
“Why do you bother looking back?” Hastelloy bellowed when his craft neared the sandy shore. “Our fortunes lay ahead of us in the jungles of this mainland, not behind us on those tiny islands.”
Chapter 36: Coba
THREE DAYS. HASTELLOY took a measure of pride in the fact that it took his men only three days to cross forty miles of dense jungle amid soggy, uneven terrain. They accomplished it while pulling fifteen cannons with the help of only fifteen horses. It was a remarkable feat and a testament to how well motivated the men were now.
On the morning of the fourth day, Hastelloy took five men with him to scout ahead of his main force. So far Nanook’s map had been dead-on accurate, and it showed that they were getting close. It was time to determine if the boy was leading them into a trap or not.
The army progressed through the jungle by employing a line of twenty men in front using their swords to hack down everything within reach. This process was noisy and left a hundred-foot-wide path of destruction through the jungle that even a blind man could follow. Hastelloy and his fellow scouts opted to coexist and move among the foliage as they moved toward their destination for a covert look.
They made steady progress for an hour before Hastelloy heard voices coming from up ahead. He raised a clenched fist to freeze the others, and then crept his way forward until he ran out of jungle in which to hide.
Ahead of him in the narrow clearing was a road built of stone that spanned ten feet across. It rose six feet above the jungle floor and was even paved with white mortar. The engineers who constructed the elevated road were even sophisticated enough to build a slight crowning on the paved surface, which allowed rainwater to run harmlessly off the sides.
Twenty feet up the road, Hastelloy spotted two men pulling a cart full of corn. One of them had dark skin with black hair on his head, but none anywhere else on his body. The other man pulling the wagon had light skin tanned from years of laboring in the intense sun of this region. Also of note was the man’s hair; it was all over his arms, legs, chest, and face. The man was a European, which validated Nanook’s story, but the sophisticated road informed Hastelloy that this was not some insignificant village. This road led to a prosperous and likely powerful city.
Hastelloy let the cart pass him by before rejoining his fellow scouts, where one of them stated the obvious when he led them up to the road. “Even with our guns and cannons, we might have our hands full here.”
“Even a mighty elephant has its soft spots. It’s just a matter of finding that spot before the beast tramples you,” Hastelloy countered as he led them up onto the empty road to follow the cart.
They made excellent time walking the road until they saw a fifty-foot-tall tower built of stone up ahead. The watchtower stood at an intersection where five roads met. The structure rose far above the jungle canopy to afford the native lookouts a view for several miles in all directions.
At that point, Hastelloy led his men off the road to continue their progress toward the city within the jungle once more. The six of them were able to sneak past among the bushes and trees, but Hastelloy knew that his army of six hundred men with horses and cannons would stand out from miles away. That would result in a prolonged battle that his men could win but at significant cost of life and ammunition. A full assault was too high a price to pay for acquiring a few translators. There had to be a more elegant way to get what he needed.
After only five more minutes of sneaking their way forward, Hastelloy and his men reached the shores of a large lake. To the left of this lake was a gigantic clearing that hosted a thriving metropolis that was home to tens of thousands of natives. Stone houses and dozens of stepped pyramid-shaped temples stood tall and proud. They were all coated in the same mortar substance as the roads but were painted a dark crimson color that contrasted sharply with the white paved roads running between the structures.
People milled about the city streets hauling carts behind them, carrying armfuls of goods, or holding scrolls made out of what from a distance appeared to be papyrus paper. A long V-shaped structure appeared to serve as some sort of sports arena. Crowds lined the walls on either side as players down below used their hips in an attempt to hit a ball the size of their head through a stone ring built into the court wall.
Near the ball court, Hastelloy evaluated the tallest pyramid structure very carefully. It overlooked the sporting arena and had a single flight of steps leading up to the top from ground level. Near the bottom of the steps, he noticed the commoners were using a tunnel built under the stairway to cross to the other side.
The tunnel made no practical sense. The people could have easily passed in front of the temple steps, but none did. They all took the tunnel except for two men wearing long, flowing robes. They walked around in front and started up the steps.
Hastelloy figured they were priests of some sort, and a man who descended from a house built on top of the pyramid met them halfway. This man wore a lavish golden headdress, and when the commoners down below noticed, they immediately averted their eyes as if the very act of seeing this man could lead to their death.
“Why don’t they use horses or pack animals to pull those carts?” one of Hastelloy’s men asked of the group.
“These rustics wouldn’t know what a horse was even if one rode up and bit them you dolt,” another chastised.
“They don’t have them here.”
“That’s right,” Hastelloy confirmed. “Their defenses are set up to spot and stop attacks from slow-moving foot soldiers, not lightning fast cavalry rushes. Think about it, that watchtower is set up less than a quarter mile from the city. We’ll ride right past them before they even know what to think.”
“Then what? Our fifteen cavalry can’t do a thing to a city that size.”
“We can reach the elephant’s soft spot,” Hastelloy answered with a confident sparkle in his eye.
The next day, twenty men worked to roll a cannon out of the jungle and into a clear firing position. Once satisfied with the setup, Hastelloy gave his order. “When you hear my signal, fire, and your aim had better be true.”
“You can count on us, Commander.”
“All fifteen of us are counting on you,” Hastelloy added before mounting his horse. He looked back at the rest of his cavalrymen. “No matter what happens, we stop for nothing until we’ve reached the target. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir!”
“Now let’s introduce these rustics to their new reality of warfare. Charge!” Hastelloy ordered with his sword thrust forward down the road pointing toward the watchtower and the city beyond.
The road afforded the horses ideal footing to get up to full speed. Hastelloy’s stampede raced forward two across at speeds exceeding thirty miles per hour. The thunderclap of charging hooves made any native traveling the road toss their belongings to the wind and jump off the side.
Hastelloy was able to guide his mount around the abandoned carts without difficulty or loss of momentum. The charge blew past the watchtower without a single shot fired, but the guards did manage to sound an alarm bell that clanged repeatedly to alert the city guards.
Origins: Discovery Page 22