War God: Nights of the Witch

by Graham Hancock

  But now, when her third night as a prisoner was already well advanced, Ahmakiq and Ekahau came for her and dragged her out into the courtyard. Dozens of torches – fixed to the walls and in the hands of retainers – lit up the night, and Malinal saw that all the palace slaves, numbering more than fifty, had been gathered as bearers for the portable treasures of the household, which were already being apportioned amongst them. Beautiful statuettes, pectorals, earspools, ornamental weapons, face masks, belts, plates and serving vessels, all carved from the most precious jade, a few small gold and silver ornaments, fine ceramics, costly wall hangings, bales of rich fabrics, heaped jaguar skins, and much else besides, were hastily wrapped and placed in bundles on the shoulders and backs of the slaves. No doubt to make certain none of them attempted to abscond, and to protect the treasures wherever they were about to be taken, a hundred warriors wearing Muluc’s personal livery stood watchfully around, armed with spears and obsidian-edged macanas – the Mayan version of the deadly weapon known by the Mexica as the macuahuitl.

  Ahmakiq and Ekahau gripped Malinal firmly by the upper arms as they marched her across the yard, almost lifting her off the ground in their haste, and now manoeuvred her round the pile of treasures to a corner under a flickering torch where, with something of the manner of a dragon guarding its hoard, Muluc himself stood watching. He was once again dressed for war and his muscular body glistened with oil and paint.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Malinal! I don’t believe your story about working for Moctezuma. The white men certainly aren’t gods and the Great Speaker of the Mexica wouldn’t be such a fool as to imagine they are. All in all I think you’re here to cause me trouble …’

  She tried to protest but Muluc held up a large, grimy hand to silence her. ‘No! I don’t have time to listen to any more of your lies and excuses. Count yourself lucky I’m not ordering your execution – you’ve your mother to thank for that – but tomorrow I’m going to destroy the white men and then we’ll send you back to Tenochtitlan with the next Mexica trader who passes through. There’s one visiting Cintla now who always pays a good price for ripe female flesh.’ He laughed as though he’d said something funny, and Ahmakiq and Ekahau sycophantically joined in. ‘Meanwhile, as you can see’ – Muluc’s tone was becoming pompous – ‘I’m rather busy! We’ve decided to evacuate the palace ahead of the fighting and send some things of value down to Cintla, so I thought I might as well put you to use as a bearer with the rest of our slaves.’

  ‘I am not,’ Malinal said very slowly and deliberately, ‘your slave.’

  ‘You’re whatever I say you are,’ said Muluc. He gave her an appraising leer: ‘Including my bed mate, should I give you that privilege.’

  ‘I imagine my mother might oppose such a … privilege,’ Malinal said acidly.

  Muluc’s hand shot out and grasped her left breast as though it were a piece of fruit on a tree. ‘Your mother,’ he said rubbing his thumb roughly over her nipple, ‘respects my needs.’

  ‘Well I don’t,’ Malinal yelled. Thirty days of walking had made her lean and strong. With a twist of her body she broke free of Ahmakiq and Ekahau, clawed Muluc’s face and felt a rush of satisfaction as her long nails raked deep through his flesh. He yelped and jumped back, releasing her breast, then surged forward again and punched her hard in the belly. As she doubled over he took her by the hair and dragged her to the ground, roaring with rage.

  ‘Muluc!’ It was Raxca, wailing from an upper window of the palace. ‘You promised she wouldn’t be hurt!’

  On the morning of Wednesday 24 March, Muluc was back. Four parallel scores, deep and still bloody, disfigured the left side of his face. ‘Looks like he’s had an argument with his wife,’ said Alvarado. Cortés laughed and asked through Aguilar: ‘Are you well, Muluc? You seem to have been in a fight.’

  The Indian ignored the question and again presented eight turkeys and a small amount of maize. He pointed to the fields now seething with Mayan warriors, thousands of whom had approached within a few hundred paces of the camp. ‘Go now,’ he said, ‘or die.’

  As Aguilar translated this, Alvarado drew his falchion and showed Muluc the edge of its heavy steel blade. ‘Do we look like the sort of men to take orders from a bunch of savages like you?’ he said.

  The Mayan emissary didn’t flinch. ‘Leave our land,’ he insisted.

  ‘Come, come,’ said Cortés. ‘Where are your manners? Where is your hospitality? I tell you what – if you allow us to enter Potonchan, and provide food for my soldiers in your homes, I’ll give you good advice and teach you about my God.’

  ‘We don’t need your advice,’ Muluc replied stiffly, ‘we certainly will not receive you in our homes, and we heard enough about this god of yours last year to know we prefer our own.’

  ‘Ah, but you don’t know what you’re missing,’ Cortés said. ‘If you’ll only listen to me, you’ll prosper. Besides I have to enter your town. It’s my responsibility to meet your chief so I may afterwards describe him to the greatest lord in the world …’

  ‘And who is this great lord?’ asked Muluc with a sneer.

  ‘He is my king,’ replied Cortés, ‘who sent me to visit you here. He desires only peace and friendship with your people.’

  ‘If that is what he desires,’ replied the Indian, ‘then you should leave and not play the bully in our land.’

  ‘Enough!’ barked Alvarado. ‘Let’s stop sparring with this fool.’

  ‘I’m nearly done,’ said Cortés quietly. ‘Make certain all the cannon are primed and loaded with grapeshot.’ Alvarado grinned. As he set off around the perimeter, where a dozen falconets now pointed towards the advancing Indians, Cortés repeated his offer of peace and friendship, knowing it would be refused.

  He had prepared carefully for this moment. The expedition’s hundred war dogs were caged below deck, fifty on each of the moored brigantines. Their barks and howls echoed through the camp but it was clear the Maya had no idea what sort of animals were producing these sounds. Vendabal and his assistants had orders to bring them ashore after Muluc’s departure.

  Earlier Cortés had put a squad of fifty soldiers on board each of the brigantines and placed them under the command of Díaz and Sandoval. Men were ready at the oars to row the boats upstream to Potonchan as soon as the dogs had been disembarked. Each brigantine was also armed with three falconets, one amidships, one at the bow and one at the stern. Cortés had given firm instructions to Díaz and Sandoval to set human feelings aside and use all six cannon to enfilade the town with two full salvos of grapeshot before landing.

  Once again, as he’d expected, Muluc refused to accept the perfectly reasonable request that the Spanish be allowed to enter Potonchan peacefully. On the contrary, the stubborn Indian turned his back and stalked down to the river’s edge, where his retinue waited in a small fleet of canoes. They paddled out to midstream and held still, then Muluc put a conch to his lips and blew a mighty blast.

  It was, as Cortés expected, the signal for a general attack. Giving vent to chilling shrieks, yips and ululations, the massed Indian ranks surged across the fields, unleashing slingstones and spears, some of which reached the camp despite the extreme range. What Cortés had not expected was the second large force in canoes concealed amongst the manglars on the opposite side of the river that simultaneously put out into the water and began to paddle rapidly towards them.

  Even so, correct form had to be followed. With a yell, Cortés summoned the expedition’s notary, Diego do Godoy, and ordered him to begin reading the Requerimiento.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Potonchan, Wednesday 24 March 1519

  Moored by the steep bank below the Spanish camp, Bernal Díaz was in the foremost of the two brigantines commanding fifty soldiers. His force included five musketeers and five crossbowmen. He had three falconets on board, each cannon loaded and fired by a two-man crew. Sandoval, who also had three falconets at his command, was right behind him in the second brigantine with an id
entical force. Their task, after disembarking the dogs from their cages below decks, was to row the mile upstream to Potonchan with the greatest possible despatch, bombard it from the river with the falconets and then force entry. Meanwhile, Cortés would lead a charge of the main land force of some two hundred men, supported by the armoured dogs, directly along the bank into the town’s western suburbs. Pedro de Alvarado and Alonso Davila would lead a subsidiary force of a hundred men on a flanking manoeuvre through the fields to the south of the town and then round behind it into its eastern suburbs.

  This was the theory.

  But as he heard the loud blast of the conch, Díaz realised that Muluc had seized the initiative and that matters would not be going to plan. As though conjured into sudden existence by some sorcerer, a thousand howling Indians in a hundred canoes were on their way across the breadth of the river, homing in shockingly fast on the port side of the brigantines. Already spears and arrows were arching up out of the canoes and, if they were falling short now, they would not do so for much longer.

  At this range, a broadside of grapeshot from his three falconets, and the same from Sandoval’s three, would sweep the river clear of attackers in an instant. Unfortunately, however, all the cannon were arrayed on the starboard side of the ships, ready to enfilade the town, and while their crews swivelled and moved them, losing precious seconds, Díaz ordered the rest of his force to port to repel boarders, and the muske-teers and crossbowmen to open fire immediately. A glance from the corner of his eye showed him that Sandoval had done the same and the ten muskets roared almost simultaneously, with the crossbows firing a second later.

  Sandoval had reported the almost magical effects of gunfire during the rescue of Aguilar from the town of Mutul, but Díaz had no such expectations here. The Indians of Mutul had never faced firearms before, whereas these devils of Potonchan had not only faced muskets and cannon but had faced them down and driven Córdoba’s forces, Díaz amongst them, back into the sea.

  Cortés was not Córdoba, however. His army had fifty musketeers, against Córdoba’s lowly seven, and fifty crossbowmen against Córdoba’s five. Another crucial difference was artillery. Córdoba was able to deploy only two ancient hand cannon, whereas Cortés had eighteen of the small, mobile falconets and three great lombards designed to demolish castle walls.

  As the musket balls whirred amongst the Indian canoes, ploughing through flesh and blowing heads apart in explosions of blood and bone, the awful boom of the percussion rolled and echoed. It was gratifying, despite having knowledge of guns, that hundreds of the attackers panicked at once and threw themselves into the water or wheeled their canoes and began to paddle furiously upstream towards the town. Even as they did so, however, there came a gigantic rolling crash from the shore as the twelve falconets defending the camp were fired in a single barrage – at what target Díaz could not immediately see. The effect of these new detonations, a thousand times louder than any musket, and of the accompanying eerie whistle of grapeshot, was to disrupt and bewilder even further the attack the Indians were attempting to mount from the water.

  Still enough of them came on to overrun the ship. Díaz drew his broadsword.

  Godoy didn’t finish reading the Requerimiento, and of course there was no time for Aguilar to translate any of it into Maya. After the notary got to the part explaining how Pope Alexander VI had given all the lands and peoples of the New World to Spain and Portugal, the Indian horde charging across the fields was at point-blank range and really had to be stopped, so Cortés was obliged to order the falconets fired.

  As the smoke began to clear, he surveyed the harm done to the massed enemy and felt inspired to offer a short prayer of gratitude for the incredible advancement of science that God had permitted to the European powers. Without their twelve small cannon, the Spanish in the camp might easily have been overwhelmed by the five thousand homicidal savages who had poured in on them. But now, instead, the front ranks of that vast attacking force had been transformed by the maelstrom of grapeshot into an eerily silent, bleeding ruin of mangled bodies cut down in swathes before the guns, the fallen lying in indiscriminate heaps of guts, dismembered limbs and shattered skulls, the living stumbling dazed and addled over the dead, and great smears of gore splashed through the young maize as though by some giant paintbrush.

  The Indians’ battle experience against Córdoba’s two pathetic little hand cannon hardly stood them in good stead for this! Seized by panic, the middle ranks, though quite unscathed, had dissolved into a full and chaotic retreat, yet the numbers committed to the attack had been so great, and the mass and momentum of their charge so huge, that the rear ranks were still coming on. A fearsome, tangled collision ensued across a wide front, from which piteous screams rose up as hundreds were trampled and crushed.

  It was, Cortés thought, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse had descended upon that place and the last days of the world had come. Even Alvarado, falchion in hand, was impressed. ‘God in heaven,’ he said, ‘that’s as fine a sight as ever I saw.’

  Still there were thousands of survivors, most already in flight along the riverbank back to Potonchan. Wanting to press home his victory at once before they had time to regroup and mount a proper defence of the town, Cortés whirled towards the brigantines. ‘Vendabal!’ he yelled, as he grasped the extent of the parallel attack that was under way there, ‘Get those dogs amongst the enemy!’

  His eyeline into the camp obscured by the steep riverbank, Díaz had only the haziest idea what was going on there and little time to care. More than a hundred Indians, plumes of bright feathers in their hair, their bodies and faces fearsomely striped with black and white paint, had boarded the brigantine and hand-to-hand fighting raged all across the deck. Ducking low, as a swarthy, sweating, wild-eyed savage swung a huge club at his head, Díaz backhanded the edge of his broadsword across the man’s naked belly, spilled his guts, stepped in and trampled him down. Now two more were coming at him, flanking him. He felt something strike his right thigh hard and sharp, ignored the pain, cut the legs out from under the man on his left, put the point of the sword neatly through the second man’s chest, and with a roar shoulder-charged a third, sending him cartwheeling over the rail and into the river.

  In a second of breathing space he saw that not a single Spaniard was down. Although hard-pressed they were winning the fight! The enemy were for the most part naked but for loincoths, and their flint daggers and wooden batons edged with obsidian were little better than children’s toys, quite unable to penetrate the plate and chain mail with which the Spanish were armoured – and no match for Toledo steel. He saw Mibiercas wade into a mass of the enemy, ignoring spear thrusts that slid harmlessly off his cuirass, swirling his great longsword before him, hacking left and right, left and right, cutting a man clean in half here, taking an arm off a shoulder there. Right behind him came La Serna, who’d snatched up a pike and was jabbing its vicious point down overhand into the faces of the attacking warriors, piercing one through the eye, tearing the throat from another.

  ‘To me!’ Díaz yelled, ‘to me! Avenge Córdoba!’ And in twos and threes his men rallied to him, formed up almost automatically into a square bristling with steel and harm, and swept forward along the deck in an armoured mass. The Indians still outnumbered them, but they lacked coordination and were already wavering, on the brink of panic, when Vendabal appeared like an evil genie from the hold with fifty of his armoured dogs streaming before him. He’d starved the animals the night before and now Díaz understood why. As they leapt, snarling and baying upon the enemy, as lions upon lambs, the huge animals spread the contagion of utter terror amongst them, tumbled at least a dozen on their backs and began at once to devour them. All the courage and bravado drained out of the rest in an instant. With howls of despair they threw themselves overboard onto the muddy bank and into the water, where Cortés and a hundred conquistadors from the camp waited with swords drawn to slaughter them.

  In the rush, Cortés had fo
rgotten his buckler; he fought with a dagger in his left hand, a broadsword in his right. He had also lost a sandal somewhere on the riverbank, but hardly noticed it as he closed with a glowering, barrel-chested savage, chopped off his arm at the elbow with a firm downward sword slash and slit him open from groin to navel with the dagger. The man gave a horrible yell and lurched forward – absurdly still trying to grapple with him! – but Cortés contemptuously swept him aside and advanced through the cloying mud towards a slim, long-haired Indian youth who stood hip-deep in the river with his back turned. Armed with a sling and a bag of stones, this veritable David had, in the past few moments, singlehandedly brought down three conquistadors on the deck of Sandoval’s brigantine, where the last of the boarders were still being dealt with. The youth was whirling the sling above his head again, concentrating, taking careful aim, inexperience making him oblivious to danger, when Cortés hacked the edge of the sword into his neck where it joined his shoulders, releasing a spray of arterial blood. As the muddy water blossomed red around him, the boy turned and sank down into it, still gripping the sling, his eyes rolling in horror.

  Cortés stalked on in search of new prey, but the fight had become a mopping-up operation. Those of Vendabal’s dogs that could be separated from the Indians they were eating on Díaz’s brigantine – now joined by the other dogs from Sandoval’s hold – had been set on the fleeing remnants of the very large force that had attacked the camp. They would pursue them to the outskirts of Potonchan before Vendabal finally called them off. The last of the Indians who’d infested Sandoval’s brigantine had also been killed.

  As Cortés searched for and retrieved his lost sandal from the mud, he resolved to press home the attack on the town at once. Muluc’s pre-emptive strike across the river had taken him by surprise and caused some disruption to his plans, for which indignity he intended to make the inhabitants pay dearly.