A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  It was too late.

  The flotilla had already been sighted, moving up the bay. In those circumstances the townspeople did what they always did. It was not that they lost their heads, but that they blindly followed precedent. When an army is on the way, you evacuate the town.

  The flotilla was now so near, that they could hear the roll of Indian drums across the water. They left at once, taking the north road, which mercifully ran between fields high with maize.

  Guerrero could not hold them, for they moved without confusion, and he did not even know what had set them on the move, or what had happened. Before him was the temple. He clambered as swiftly as he could up the stairs.

  It was deserted, but from the top he could see everything. On the land side the crowds had moved out the gates, destroying his barricades. They were streaming rapidly out along the sacbes, towards the fields and forests beyond. They had even taken part of the army with them. His men he could pick out by their nodding plumes.

  In the other direction the sun sparkled off the bay. There was no fog now. He could see everything. Davila’s flotilla was perhaps a quarter of a mile off, paddling swiftly towards the town. The sun caught the glitter of lances, and glinted off two cannon. The horses, swathed in cotton armour, stood neighing in sets of lashed canoes, and behind the party, came the more numerous canoes of a large Indian host.

  Beside him, a priest stood there, holding in his hands two incense balls, with a look on his face Guerrero would never be able to forget. It was his son.

  There was no one else there.

  Grabbing him by the wrist, Guerrero plunged down the stairs and back to the palace. He found the slaves had already shouldered Nachancan’s litter, but the old man had held them, waiting for him. Except for Ix Chan, his concubine, and other members of the family, the nobles had all gone. Even Guerrero’s younger son had slipped away.

  Nachancan did not even bother to turn around, as they left the city. Neither did Guerrero. It was his duty now to look after the old man, who was obviously bewildered, and to clear a way, for the road was clogged.

  The city was still there, yet it might almost have vanished, this rout had been so swift. If they were to gain safety, it must be even more swift.

  Fortunately, at the prospect of loot, Davila’s Indian allies had broken away, and blocked him in their eagerness to enter the city. He could not follow.

  Not everyone had been able to leave, after all. The sounds that floated across the air were not pleasant, and everybody knew what they meant.

  Nachancan, at least, still commanded respect. After all, in his own person, he was the nation. The crowds let them through, and they entered the shelter of an untrimmed stretch of jungle.

  Now they were safe, Guerrero knew what to do, and could turn his attention to other affairs. He had months ago selected and prepared their final redoubt.

  XXIII

  It was at Chequitaquil, a strongly defended, stone built village twelve miles north of Chetumal, so well hidden that for two months Davila did not even hear of it.

  There they tried to put the world back together again.

  It was like living in an armed camp. There were only three habitable buildings there, but at least they could depend upon the surrounding natives to feed them.

  That gave Guerrero an idea. The corn was not yet ripe in the fields, and in any event, the Spanish would not know how to harvest it, or when, They scorned agriculture as beneath the dignity of an hidalgo. He had only to cut off supplies, to starve them out, and when they were weak, direct raids against them. He was not in a position to have his orders obeyed, but the priesthood was.

  Nor did the priesthood raise any objections. From now on they were to be his most reliable allies. Now that he thought he had subdued the whole country, Davila was at last able to give the friars who travelled with him their head. It did not do to displease the Church, and besides, he was devout himself, once more urgent matters had been seen to. He too was eager to stamp out idolatory, once it was safe to do so.

  For every idol that toppled, Guerrero had another Maya priest on his side. But he was not quite ready to move yet.

  There was a certain irony in it. No Spaniard realized that in smashing the religion, they were also wrecking their own food supply. It was the priests who told these people when to plant and reap their crops.

  For it isn’t easy to put a world back together again from the top. For eminence is a shell. The longer one has it, the more hollow it becomes, for you soon find that the world has sucked all the substance out of it, the way one does with an egg. When it cracks there is nothing left inside to hold it up, except that tensile strength of the shell that is now diminished, because flawed.

  To make matters worse, Nachancan had decided to fight in person. Perhaps he was tired of being bland. Perhaps he was angry with his treacherous princelings. Perhaps he preferred either to win or be lost, but not to lose and himself survive. He did not say. He still accepted Guerrero’s advice, but in this matter he would have his own way.

  There was nothing to do about it except caution prudence. If the old man were to be captured or killed, Guerrero would be without authority.

  He kept his elder son by him always now. Him he knew he could trust. Of his other son, though he saw the high priest daily, he could learn nothing.

  That worried him. His younger son had become a sanctimonious fool. There was no telling what he might do.

  Meanwhile, though he sent out foraging parties. Davila seemed content to remain in Chetumal and convert it into the usual colonial slum. The only distinction of his newly founded Spanish town was that he called it Villa Real, instead of Salamanca.

  Guerrero waited. He also prepared the army, for by now warriors were beginning to drift back to Chequitaquil, in search of Nachancan, and the old man had sent out messengers to rally them. They were well fed, and Davila, Guerrero knew from his own spies, was beginning to run short of supplies. His foraging parties wandered a little deeper into the woods, and seemed a little hungrier. They had the look of rationed troops.

  He let his own men pick off a few, but mostly he was content to wait. He tried to hold the resistance back. But once again events got the upper hand of him. It was heartening, but inopportune.

  On the other and west coast, Nachi Cocom, the Lord of Sotuta, had learned what his enemies the Xiu had done. He moved at once. He in his turn was not so foolhardy as to move against the Xiu themselves, who were stronger than he. Instead he decided to destroy their allies, the Spanish. He was on the move through the forest to Campeche, with a force of 10,000 men.

  No one had ever defeated Sotuta. Even the Xiu had not really been able to do that in the Great Revolt of 1461. Every lordling and city in Uaymil and Chetumal rose spontaneously at the news. They had got what they wanted, freedom from Nachancan. Now they wanted freedom from Davila, too.

  All food supplies to Davila ceased.

  It was both too late and too soon. Unknown to Guerrero or Nachancan, one of Davila’s foraging parties had picked up hostages, and learned at last of Chequitaquil. He had moved at once, and unlike the Indians, he had no objection to the night. It was, as far as he was concerned, the best time for a surprise attack.

  Guerrero had thought him at Maganahau, whose lords had been the first to rise against Chetumal. He knew Davila was worried, for he had himself ordered to be killed messengers Davila had sent across the peninsula to Montejo. They had been struck down at a town called Hoya, while they were eating among people they still thought to be their allies. So savage had that sudden attack been, that the horses had been slaughtered too.

  It filled them all with hope, to know just how desperate Davila must be, and how securely now he was cut off. Guerrero went to bed well pleased.

  He did not know what waked him. At such moments he knew there was always a reason. He heard unfamiliar sounds, reached for his studded club, and went outdoors. Then, with a shout, the attack began.

  The camp was on the alert, but eve
n so, had no warning. At first he did not understand it. Then he heard the explosion of a gun.

  Somebody shot a flaming arrow. It caught on a thatch roof, and the flames took hold and shot up in a vertical wave, casting a lurid glow everywhere.

  Guerrero saw Nachancan, in full battle regalia, yelling his head off, and striking against some crouching figure that was not even a Spaniard, but an Indian mercenary, who was trying to escape.

  The Spanish would not try to escape. He sent three men over to relieve Nachancan, told them where to come, and got his wife and daughter out of there. There was nothing else for him to do. The treasure of the temples and palace had to be abandoned. So did the men. His whole policy now depended upon Nachancan remaining alive.

  With a few men, he fled for the wall of the jungle, with Ix Chan and his elder son beside him. Then he had to swerve. Some bearded, cuirassed, tattered Spaniard reared up in the darkness beside him.

  His son cut the man’s leg tendons with one swipe of an obsidian trimmed club. They ran on. All the jungle began to scream around them, wakened by the shouting and the glare. They dared neither to stop nor to look back.

  The rendezvous was at a deserted temple, half overgrown, at some distance in the jungle. He knew that at least for the time being they would be safe there.

  The hours went by, and still there was no news of Nachancan.

  At last he was brought in, in an improvised litter, severely wounded. In that condition he could not be removed until he had had care. They had to stay where they were.

  The temple, which dated back to the days, eight hundred years before, when the Itza had first colonized this country, was sacred to the rain god, Tlaloc, and stood beside a cenote, or natural well opening through the limestone into the water table below. The cenote had been deserted for a long time, and its walls were thick with ferns. These they gathered and stuffed into Nachancan’s wounds.

  The old man bore it without complaint. He even seemed to rally. He seemed more determined to fight back than ever. And so did his warriors. During the next two or three days they began to gather there.

  His body would not obey him, but he persisted anyway. His eyes had the bright look of doomed intelligence. He must know very well what was happening to him, but he had faced nothing before. It did not bother him. He kept his daughter by him, saw his great-nephew, whom he nominated his successor, with Guerrero to advise him, extorted compliance from his nobles, and asked for a cup of cocoa. They were still living in an improvised bivouac. By the time the cocoa was ready, he had died.

  Guerrero stood there, with the hot cup the servant had given him in his hand, and stared at his wife. He had never before seen her weep.

  He had never before wept himself.

  These people had a protocol for grief and he did not.

  He could not stay there. He had loved the old man too much. He wanted to be alone. He set down the cup and walked out into the jungle.

  When he had stayed there long enough, he came back. He could hear the wailing from far away. When someone died, they always wailed, for to them death was the inexplicable event, which reminded them, who behaved always as immortals, that they were only mortal animals. It did worse than to cut them down to size. It cut them to a shape that did not suit them.

  Yet perhaps all that noise was just as well. The chief thing about such honours is that they give the survivors something to do until life goes on again.

  Next day they buried him under the temple floor. It was then Guerrero learned that the Sotuta had not won at Campeche. They had attacked on St. Bernebe’s Day, hoping to pull Montejo down and sacrifice him. The Lord of Sotuta was proud. He would learn no new way of fighting. And so he had lost.

  The people of the west coast knew their only future lay in alliance with either the Xiu or Sotuta. The Xiu had been proven the stronger. They therefore joined the allies of the Xiu. For the moment Montejo was in a better position than ever.

  Guerrero did not know what to do. He knew the nobles would not obey Nachancan’s nephew unless they had to, and he had no way of enforcing either his or Nachancan’s will upon them.

  To his surprise, though they would not accept him or his son, they did want his advice. The defeat of Sotuta had hardened instead of panicking them. Such things sometimes do happen so. The whole province was ready to revolt, and they wanted him to direct the campaign.

  There were only one or two who doubted his loyalty, for to those one or two, Nachancan was dead, and loyal only to particular men, they could not believe that anyone could be loyal merely to a principle.

  Perhaps it was not a principle. But on the other hand loyalty need not stop with death.

  Davila had moved up country, to Bacalar, in an effort to put down the revolt. He did not yet realize that for once it was too widespread for him. He was on his way to Hoya.

  That soldier Guerrero’s son had cut down, though he might never walk again, had at least told Davila what he had seen, and messengers said that the Captain was trying to find out if Guerrero was still alive.

  Guerrero gave them orders to say that he was dead. It was almost true. Only he and Nachancan any longer remembered what he had once been, and that past had died with the old man. From now on he would never remember it again.

  He sent his wife and daughter to a place of safety, a fishing village half hidden away on the relatively uninhabited coast, between Chetumal and Tulma. Then he set off across country, with his son, towards Hoya. It was right to say he was dead. To the Spanish, he was. They had destroyed a world, and he would serve anyone against them. About that, he had no doubts. It did not even matter whether or not the Maya won, so only the Spanish might suffer.

  XXIV

  Hoya was a small town, on the borders of Cochuah which before the murder of the messengers had been of importance to no one. It seems the fate of such anonymous places always to be the scene of some famous but futile last stand.

  A few of them have even been the scene of great victories, as for example, Issus. As soon as he had arrived, Guerrero or rather Ah Ceh as he would always be now, immediately began to plan both the campaign and his defences, but in a day or two learned that the reason for that surprise and disastrous raid upon Chequitaquil was that Davila had marched swiftly on Hoya earlier, from Bacalar, only to be dismayed at signs of rebellion on the way, and to turn back to Villa Real de Chetumal.

  In order to lure him into ambush it would therefore be necessary to trick him, and that soon, if the concentrations of troops round Hoya were to be held together.

  Fortunately Davila tricked himself. He was worried now, and also very angry. He sent out more messengers, in an effort to reach Montejo, and these also Guerrero intercepted and killed, so that Davila found his position untenable, and decided upon a punitive expedition against Hoya. That would sound well, and whether he could punish Hoya or not, he did not intend to stay there, but to push on rapidly to the west coast and Montejo, before the Indians realized what he was doing and could rally in enough numbers to stop him.

  He did not tell even his men what he planned to do, for it would be necessary to leave some of them at Villa Real, to keep up the fiction that he was not leaving for good. If he told them, they would not stay, and unless he got through to Montejo, they might all be slaughtered. As it was, those left behind stood a chance of being picked up by boat later.

  He had an easy enough conscience about that.

  Having decided what he was going to do, he next sent out messengers to all the caciques of the supposedly conquered provinces. They were to assemble at Villa Real de Chetumal. Surprisingly enough they complied, first because their priests and advisers told them to, and second because the Spanish, whatever their present condition, had enormous prestige. One could never tell what they might be able to do next.

  Davila gave them an harangue. It did not occur to him as ridiculous that they should meekly listen to him in the ruins of their own capital, a force of noblemen who by themselves alone outnumbered his own troops tw
o to one, and who had never even entered such hovels as those which the Spaniards had built to live in, against the white plaster of buildings more complex to construct than they could have understood. It did not impress the noblemen as being ridiculous either, but they were not so docile as before.

  Davila sensed that. As it happened, he did not even know that Nachancan, his chief opponent, was dead, but with Guerrero out of the way he felt much better. There was only one way to treat these men, and that was with a bluster of force.

  The bright sunlight made him squint, but he had washed and trimmed his beard.

  He told them briskly that he intended to avenge the murder of his messengers by the destruction of the Hoya. Those chiefs who had sworn fealty to the Spanish could best prove their loyalty by falling in behind. Apparently he had not even heard of the destruction of his latest attempt to get through to Montejo.

  It was exactly what the nobles wanted to hear, and they had their instructions. They fell in behind in such numbers that Davila became suspicious, and whittled their number down to six hundred, and those mostly chieftains and their retainers. His official excuse was that there would not be enough water or food along the way to keep such an army going. That sounded sensible enough. In actuality he feared a trap.

  It was one.

  As soon as he received word, Guerrero began to make his final plans. He would need a great many men. And here again the priests helped him. They were eager to help now, for they too had received news. They always received such news first, for unlike the caciques, who were always at each other’s throats, they maintained a sodality which seldom if ever failed or gave way.

  Far to the north, across the border from Mani, lay Chichen Itza, one of their oldest and most sacred cities. It had been abandoned several times, in response to the prophesies and katun cycles, the last time in 1185, at the third return of the fatal Katun 8 Ahau. But it was still holy. It was still kept up. It was the city of the Sacred Well, and the city of ultimate prophecy, the home of Kukulcan, the saviour, and of the magic books of Chilam Balam, by which they foretold everything.