War God: Nights of the Witch

by Graham Hancock

  As they watched, Alvarado loudly cursed his broken left arm which hung uselessly in a sling, turned to Little Julian, who was doing his best to keep up with him, drew the big falchion he liked to carry and dealt the interpreter a hard blow to the buttocks with the flat of the blade. Julian squealed and jumped and Alvarado went after him, sheathing the cutlass and pummelling Julian about the ears so hard with his right fist that the Indian fell half stunned to the ground.

  Díaz sighed and exchanged a weary look with Mibiercas and La Serna. ‘I think I’d better go and see if I can restore some sanity to the situation,’ he said.

  Alvarado couldn’t believe it! He’d come all this way, braved all manner of risks, even eschewed fifteen thousand pesos of the bribe offered him by Don Diego de Velázquez, only to discover at the end of it all that there was no gold here!

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  But to add insult to injury, it seemed that this monkey interpreter couldn’t interpret to save his life. Only the hayseed farmboy Bernal Díaz seemed to have the faintest inkling of what he was saying. As a result, and it was intolerable, in order to communicate with the native chief he was obliged to state his demands in Spanish to Díaz, who would then put them into some sort of pidgin for Little Julian who then put them to the chief. The whole laborious process then began again in the other direction as the chief’s replies were filtered through Julian and Díaz back to Alvarado and the end result was: ‘Humble apologies, great lord, but we have no gold here on Cozumel.’

  The chief’s name, Alvarado had managed to establish, was B’alam K’uk or some such barbarism. Not that he cared two hoots what the tall, rangy, straight-backed, grey-haired savage with the hooked nose and the blue cotton loincloth called himself. He wasn’t fit to polish boots, in Alvarado’s opinion, and had confirmed this the moment they met by throwing himself down in front of the hovel he’d emerged from, scrabbling at the filthy earth of the street and stuffing a handful of it into his mouth. Dear God! Whatever next? But this was the sorry creature in charge of Cozumel and here he was, back on his feet again, insisting there was no gold. In a sudden fit of anger, Alvarado strode forward, thrust out his good right hand and gripped the subhuman by his scrawny throat. ‘What do you mean there’s no gold?’ he yelled.

  Eventually the answer came back through Julian and Díaz. There really was no gold.

  ‘Lies!’ Alvarado stormed. ‘Lies and mendacity.’ He tightened his fingers around the man’s windpipe and spoke slow and clear and loud: ‘You,’ he roared, ‘will … deliver … up … all … your … gold … by … noon … tomorrow – or I will burn your miserable town to the ground and butcher every man woman and child … Do you understand?’

  The threat went back via Díaz and Little Julian to B’alam K’uk, who squirmed and choked in Alvarado’s iron grip.

  ‘Yes,’ the chief finally managed to reply. ‘I understand. Tomorrow at noon there will be gold.’

  Early in the morning of the sixth day, after the mass sacrifices on the great pyramid, Moctezuma’s spies were back with reports not only that the weeping woman had been heard again but also of a new development. Certain elders living in different wards of the city had been overheard speaking to one another about identical dreams they had all shared during the previous two nights. It seemed these dreams touched upon the security of the Great Speaker’s rule.

  This smacked of treason!

  Moctezuma summoned Cuitláhuac from his vigil at Guatemoc’s hospital bed and gave orders for the individuals concerned to be rounded up and brought to the palace. It was late morning by the time they arrived and he had them wait in the audience chamber while he composed himself. How dare they question his reign? When he was ready he entered with Cuitláhuac by his side and saw four wrinkled old men and three ancient crones cowering on the floor.

  They had about them the smell of age and sickness, which he could not abide. Since their dreams were shared, he instructed the women to nominate one of their number who would speak for the rest, and the men to do the same, and sent the others shuffling out backwards to wait in the courtyard.

  The man spoke first. He was very small, bird-like, with thin wispy hair, a weather-beaten, deeply lined, toothless face and the lumps of some canker protruding from the bones of his skull. ‘Powerful lord,’ he said in a voice that was surprisingly loud and strong, ‘we do not wish to offend your ears or fill your heart with anxiety to make you ill. However, we are forced to obey you and we will describe our dreams to you.’

  ‘Proceed!’ snapped Moctezuma. ‘You have nothing to fear.’

  ‘Know then,’ the old man continued, ‘that these last nights the Lords of Sleep have shown us the temple of Hummingbird burning with frightful flames, the stones falling one by one until it was totally destroyed. We also saw Hummingbird himself fallen, cast down upon the floor! This is what we have dreamed.’

  Maintaining his composure with great difficulty, Moctezuma next ordered the old woman to speak. ‘My son,’ she said, ‘do not be troubled in your heart for what we are about to tell you, although it has frightened us much. In our dreams we, your mothers, saw a mighty river enter the doors of your royal palace, smashing the walls in its fury. It ripped up the walls from their foundations, carrying beams and stone with it until nothing was left standing. We saw it reach the temple and this too was demolished. We saw the great chieftains and lords filled with fright, abandoning the city and fleeing towards the hills …’

  ‘Enough of your ravings, woman!’ Moctezuma snapped. The symbolism could not have been more obvious. He turned to Cuitláhuac: ‘You know what to do.’

  The fate of the elders had never been in doubt. They had, after all, engaged in a conspiracy of dreams! Cuitláhuac gave the command and the palace guards dragged all seven of them off across the courtyard. A small dungeon had been prepared for them a mile away in the northern quarter of the city, and they would be kept there without food or water until they shrivelled up and died.

  Observing from a window, Moctezuma saw that the old man who’d spoken in the audience chamber was dragging his feet, protesting in his astonishingly loud voice. With a mighty struggle, revealing unexpected strength for one his age, he brought the whole procession to a halt as they reached the edge of the courtyard. ‘Let the Lord Speaker know what is to become of him,’ he harangued the guards. ‘Those who are to avenge the injuries and toils with which he has afflicted us are already on their way!’

  As he heard these awful words, Moctezuma’s sense of impending doom deepened. He had put on a brave face for Cuitláhuac but it was all he could do to control himself now.

  The guards beat the old man to the ground and carried him away, senseless, but what he had said seemed to linger, linger, in the sullen noontime air.

  Around noon on Wednesday 24 February, the sixth day after the fleet’s departure from Santiago, Cozumel’s chieftain B’alam K’uk presented himself to Alvarado and Father Muñoz on the San Sebastián at the head of a delegation of four of the town’s elders. There was much oohing and aahing, accompanied by fearful glances cast at the glowering Inquisitor, as the dignitaries, ferried out from shore in a longboat, were hauled up to the great carrack. Though they had of course seen Spanish ships when Córdoba called here, it seemed they had never before been on board, and the experience was so overwhelming for them that they threw themselves face down, as the chief had done yesterday, and attempted to gather and eat dust from the deck.

  Disgusting, Alvarado thought. He turned to Muñoz. ‘Shall I kick them to their feet,’ he asked, ‘or would you like to have that pleasure, Father?’ But before the friar could respond, the Indians popped up again and stood there bobbing and grinning like monkeys. Unprompted, Little Julian said something in the local lingo, at which B’alam K’uk stuck a hand inside his sopping wet breechclout – wet from the sea, Alvarado hoped! – and pulled out a little cloth bundle, also wet. He proceeded to unwrap it, revealing a yellow gleam.

  The bundle contained a few trin
kets of poor-quality gold – a miserable necklace, two ear-spools, a figure of a bird no larger than a man’s thumb and a little statue of a human being which, on closer examination, proved to be made of wood covered with gilt!

  ‘A sorry start,’ said Alvarado, keeping his voice even. ‘Now show me the rest.’

  The usual gibbering interchange involving Julian, Díaz and the chief followed, in which Julian looked increasingly frantic as Díaz kept plying him with questions while the chief and the elders answered with eyes downcast. Finally Díaz turned to Alvarado and said, ‘I’m afraid that’s all they have, sir.’

  ‘All they have?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Julian’s Spanish is very hard to understand but he’s clear enough on this. He says these islanders are very poor and anyway the Maya don’t much value gold.’

  ‘Don’t value gold, eh? Bloody liars!’ With a sudden rush of anger, Alvarado stepped in on the chief, grasped the waist of his loincloth, lifted him screeching from the deck, strode to the railing, threw him overboard, and watched with satisfaction as he hit the water with a tremendous splash. His only regret was that he hadn’t had the use of both hands so he could have thrown the savage further and harder. ‘Father,’ he said to Muñoz. ‘The time has come for you to attend to the souls of these poor benighted bastards. God help them, but if you find they’ve turned their backs on the Christian faith, you may do as you wish to them and their temple, and their gods. You have my blessing.’

  Muñoz was in a holy rage. At last, at last, the time had come to strike!

  But it was mid-afternoon before the three hundred conquistadors he’d asked for were mobilised and landed and the remainder of the force deployed to guard the ships.

  Finally, with Alvarado at his side, the Inquisitor led the way up the hill into the maze of hovels of the Indian town. The streets were deserted and the reason why soon became clear. A babble of voices, hoots and cries, drums and whistles, was heard ahead and, as the phalanx of conquistadors entered the main square, a great throng of islanders, almost the whole population it seemed, surged forward to bar the approach to the pyramid.

  ‘Do something about this, Alvarado,’ Muñoz said, and watched with approval as the handsome captain ordered twenty musketeers forward in two ranks, one kneeling, one standing, and had them fire a salvo that cut a great swathe through the crowd and sent hysterical Indians running and screaming in all directions. When the smoke cleared the square was empty but for the dead. Muñoz raised his cross, shouted, ‘God wills it!’, and the conquistadors charged with a great yell.

  The seventy-two steps were steep and narrow – one had to pick one’s way with care – and as the Inquisitor reached the top of the pyramid only a little out of breath, he saw at once that Saint Peter had spoken true. The Indians had indeed reverted to their heathen abominations.

  The first proof of this was the life-size stone sculpture of a man with leering face and jug ears that half sat and half reclined near the edge of the summit platform holding a stone plate across his chest. In the plate, surrounded by a thick puddle of blood, sat two freshly extracted human hearts, one it seemed still palpitating.

  As the conquistadors gathered round with expressions of horror, Muñoz pointed an accusing finger at the idol. ‘Who will do God’s work?’ he thundered, and immediately a dozen men put strong hands on the statue and began to rock it back and forth. It was heavy but, as Muñoz watched with approval, it was broken free of its plinth, lifted and then thrown forcefully down the steps. It rolled over and over, pieces breaking off it, cracking and smashing, gathering speed as it went, until it exploded into a thousand fragments in the plaza below, scattering the crowd that had once again begun to gather there and evoking from them a dreadful chorus of superstitious howls and groans.

  Alvarado had already pressed on into the dismal, dark temple that crouched in the midst of the summit platform like some monstrous toad, its narrow doorway decorated with hellish carvings of fiends and devils. The single rectangular room, measuring perhaps ten paces in length and five in width, had a beastly stink about it, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light he saw that a huge figure that was not quite human, arms outstretched, massy hands and fingers curled into claws, reared up close to the back wall. There came a sudden, unearthly screech, and out of the figure’s towering shadow darted something hunched and capering with naked feet and long, matted hair, dressed in filthy black robes. Alvarado drew his falchion in a trice and, as this shrieking apparation plunged towards him, wielding what he now recognised as a long stone knife, he raised the point of his weapon and punched it forward into his attacker’s face, catching him between the eyes so that it split his skull and drove deep into his brain.

  The Indian – and it was an Indian – fell dead on the spot. So firmly lodged was the falchion that Alvarado had to brace his foot over the man’s mouth in order to pull the heavy blade free.

  He looked again at the enormous figure at the back of the room. For a moment he’d thought it was alive, but now his eyes, always quick to adjust, revealed the banal truth. It was just an idol, ugly and malformed like any other pagan mummery. The face, jaws and teeth were those of some species of dragon; the body, though scaled, was more or less human. At its feet sprawled the corpses of a young woman in her twenties and a girl child of perhaps six years of age, their breasts split open, no doubt to extract the hearts that had sat in the plate held by that other idol outside. Blood pooled on the floor, was smeared everywhere on the smoke-blackened walls of the chamber, and a flagon or two of it had been set aside in a large stone basin. Also laid out were assorted cloths, likewise sopping with blood, certain fruits and a collection of dried skulls and human bones.

  Alvarado sheathed his falchion and placed his right hand over his nose. Gods! The smell of this place! He advanced into the gloom, kicked aside a pile of cloth to the right of the idol and quickly picked up and pocketed three gold objects that had been hidden there, one resembling a lizard, one fashioned in the form of a panther, and one representing an erect human phallus, rather short and thick. They were, he observed, of noticeably better quality than those the lying chief had brought to him this morning.

  ‘So you have your gold?’ said a sibilant, lisping voice behind him.

  Alvarado whirled and saw Muñoz in his black habit silhouetted in the doorway.

  ‘I do, Father, though precious little of it. Have you any objection?’

  ‘Oh none,’ Muñoz said. ‘None at all. I am always ready to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.’

  Díaz, Mibiercas and La Serna were conscripted, along with many more of the soldiery, to take a hand in the destruction of the great idol of the temple. Díaz was willing enough; he prided himself on being as good a Christian as any of them. Still, he dreaded what must come next when the Indian town rose in outrage, as he knew it would, against the interlopers.

  The business with the idol didn’t go well. Fifty men dragged it forth from the temple with ropes, sweating and heaving, singing verses from the book of Numbers that Muñoz had taught them: ‘You will drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish their high places. And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it.’ With a mighty effort, even while they still sang, the conquistadors brought the huge heathen statue, which must have weighed close to a ton, to the edge of the steps, where it tottered dangerously. Down below the square was now packed full with townsfolk, so that there was no room for them to move, no space for those at the base of the steps to flee even if they wanted to.

  Díaz let go his rope and walked over to Muñoz. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘we must wait to throw this vile thing down.’ He pointed to the crowd standing in stupefied silence, the men, the women, the elders, the children of the town gazing up, horrified, frozen in place. ‘If we throw it down,’ Díaz added, ‘people are going to die – a lot of people. Let me take a squad in
to the square and clear the Indians out of there. When they’re gone, that’s the time to smash the idol.’

  ‘No,’ said Muñoz, his buck teeth protruding beneath his moist upper lip.

  ‘No, Father? Why in Heaven not?’

  ‘Don’t you dare invoke Heaven to me, boy!’ Muñoz thundered.

  ‘But this is not a Christian act, Holy Father! We cannot simply slaughter these innocents.’

  ‘They are far from innocent!’ Muñoz roared. ‘You were here with me, were you not, when we came with Córdoba?’

  Díaz nodded. ‘I was here,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then you know these heretics accepted our faith. You know they accepted the destruction of their idols. You know they placed the cross of Christ and the icon of the Virgin in yonder temple behind us …’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ said Díaz wearily. ‘I know these things.’

  ‘Yet the cross is no longer there. The icon of the Virgin is no longer there. Instead we see this … this’ – Muñoz turned his basilisk glare on the idol – ‘this enormity in their place, this vile thing, this manifestation of evil. And it is they’ – he was spraying spittle now as he pointed down at the massed Indians in the square – ‘it is they alone, of their own wicked choice who have done this. So on their own heads be it!’ And with a loathsome smile that would afterwards haunt Díaz in his nightmares, Muñoz gave the signal, and the conquistadors gathered around the idol, laughed with glee and gave it a final muscular heave – God save them – and it was launched on its journey down the steps, a ton of stone tumbling and bouncing, gathering speed, flying high into the air until it pounded down in the thick of the screaming, panicking crowd, smashing into a dense knot of people and transforming them in an instant into blood and bone and brain matter and smearing them like some obscene condiment over the flagstones of the plaza.