The guards were asleep in the portico and Malinal barged past them without a second thought. ‘Caudillo,’ she shouted, ‘be awake. Trouble. Danger.’ At once Cortés sat up in the bed, the dim light of the candles revealing a chubby Totonac girl by his side. Malinal felt an instant stab of jealousy – that should be her place! – but ignored it. ‘Caudillo! Caudillo! Come quick. Pepillo! Great danger!’ Melchior scurried around her feet, barking, and Cortés at once jumped up, his tepulli half-engorged, swinging from side to side, his ahuacatl large and heavy. Hastily he donned a pair of breeches, boots, and strapped on his sword. He asked no questions, just charged outside, slapping the guards about the head. Within seconds there were a dozen men around him, all armed, some holding blazing firebrands, and they streamed down across the dunes towards the beach after Melchior, Cortés calling over his shoulder: ‘Vendabal! Follow with the dogs!’
* * *
As the two Indians charged towards him, one small and wiry, the other massive and heavily muscled with a tangle of wild hair, time seemed to slow, as it often did in battle, and Alvarado had a moment to wish he’d brought his heavy falchion with him this night rather than the slim and elegant rapier now gripped in his right hand. The rapier was a fine weapon to be sure, the work of the great swordsmith Andrés Nuñez of Toledo, but it was not well suited to a fight with savages. The way it had become trapped in the first scuffle for example. Not good! Not good at all! He’d have to make damn sure that didn’t happen again or they might yet get the better of him. If he’d had the falchion it would have broken that wooden sword in half, leaving him free to carve its owner into mincemeat, but – well – he didn’t have the falchion, so he’d just have to make the best of a bad job.
The first man swung at him, another of those infernal wooden swords, but since the blow was aimed at his chest where his cuirass protected him, he allowed it through, feeling the obsidian blades shatter harmlessly. He spun sideways and let the Indian’s own momentum carry him past, dodged left to avoid a whistling blow from the other attacker’s huge club, shoved Pepillo roughly out of the way, fell into a stance, his right knee flexed, his left leg and left arm extended almost straight behind him, and executed a rapid powerful lunge, the long blade of the rapier thrust out ahead, its needle point seeking, questing for flesh to pierce, for vital organs to puncture.
But the wiry little Indian with the sword was fast – damned good, in fact! – and swivelled to avoid the strike, backhanding a second useless blow into Alvarado’s cuirass even as the other came in yelling, whirling that monstrous club. They thought they had him now – Alvarado could see it in the triumphant glint of their eyes – but he was an accomplished athlete; he threw himself into a backflip, a technique that had saved his life more than once in battle, landed poised on the balls of his feet and went at once into the counterattack, slashing the razor edge of the dagger in his left hand across the face of the Indian with the club, tearing loose a great flap of skin, then leaping high into the air and – Yes! Yes! – perfectly skewering the other man. The point of the rapier slid in just below the savage’s Adam’s apple and emerged from his lower back, doing terrible damage along the way. Alvarado had already whipped the blade out before his feet hit the ground and, as the giant Indian with the club came at him again, he struck him through the belly, not centre mass as he would have preferred, but somewhat to one side, a blow that would not be immediately fatal but that would surely slow him down.
The smaller of the two attackers had already collapsed to his knees, making the choking, gurgling sounds of a man drowning in his own blood, and Alvarado was about to deliver the coup de grâce to the giant when he was shocked to discover his sword arm seized in a powerful grip and the rapier snatched from his grasp. Where the hell was the boy Pepillo, who should have warned him of this, he thought furiously, even as he switched his dagger to his right hand and swung to face his new assailant.
* * *
Creeping up on the boy was easy. He didn’t make a sound when Shikotenka smashed his fist into the side of his head, laid him out flat, and rushed forward to grab the golden-haired warrior’s sword arm just in time to stop him killing Tree. With the advantage of surprise, Shikotenka wrestled the strange metal weapon from his hand but, not being practised in its use, he cast it down and faced the white-skin knife to knife. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tree advancing, bleeding mightily from face, thigh and side, while Ilhuicamina and Chipahua also edged closer. ‘Stay back!’ Shikotenka commanded. ‘He’s mine.’
Everything about the white-skin’s stance, the calm, steady glare of his pale eyes, the relaxed way he moved, light on his feet, poised, deadly, told Shikotenka that he confronted a practised knife-fighter, a slayer just like himself. This was not going to be easy, and what made it even more difficult was the silver armour that sheathed the other man’s torso. Pointless to attempt another thrust for the heart. Shikotenka knew that if he were to kill this enemy, he would have to strike home to his unprotected legs, or throat or head, while he himself would remain vulnerable to a body blow throughout the contest.
They were still circling – each looking for an opening in the other’s defence, knives lashing out, probing, neither yet committing to a full attack – when Shikotenka saw something that made his blood run cold: a line of men holding blazing torches aloft, running full tilt towards them along the beach from the direction of the camp. Behind them, further back, was a shadowy mass of other figures, and from their midst arose the horrible baying of the white-skins’ wolves.
Shikotenka made an immediate decision. Although it was dishonourable, Acolmiztli’s corpse would have to be left behind. He did not know how fast the war animals of the white-skins could run, but Tlascalans – even injured! – were the fastest runners in the world, and the wind would carry their scent away from the beasts, not towards them.
He issued the order, broke off the fight, nodded to his opponent and said: ‘This isn’t over, white-skin. We’ll meet again.’ Then he turned and ran. Glancing back he saw the man’s golden hair gleaming in the moonlight and heard him call out in his foreign tongue. The words themselves meant nothing to him, but their tone of mockery was unmistakable and the skin of Shikotenka’s face grew hot with shame.
Chapter Thirteen
Wednesday 28 April 1519
Following the attempted abduction of Pepillo, which Alvarado – and the dog Melchior – had spectacularly foiled, many of the Spaniards wanted to attack the town of Cuetlaxtlan that very night, kill its governor Pichatzin and wipe out the large Mexica garrison there. Just as well for Pichatzin, then, Malinal thought, that Alvarado had slain one of the abductors whose breechclout, hairstyle and tattoos left no doubt, as she herself was able to affirm, that he was a Tlascalan warrior, a sworn enemy of the Mexica. It was unthinkable, therefore, that the Mexica were in any way responsible for his actions and, in the end, after Malinal had explained this to Cortés through Aguilar, reason prevailed. Not that she cared much one way or another whether the Spaniards fell upon the local Mexica, but ultimately it was Tenochtitlan and Moctezuma she was after, not a provincial town and its poor harassed governor.
The hunt for the rest of the little Tlascalan war band was soon called off. Somehow they’d escaped into the darkness, even evading Vendabal’s bloodhounds, and must now be well on their way back to their mountain stronghold. Why they’d launched the assault in the first place was not clear, but Malinal suspected it must be to do with the close cooperation that seemed to have been struck up between the Spaniards and the Mexica. The two thousand Totonac labourers, whipped into line by Mexica overseers, busily at work constructing the temporary town of wooden dwellings on the dunes, the teams of bearers bringing food and other supplies out from Cuetlaxtlan, the women sent as bedslaves, even the frequent visits Pichatzin himself made to the camp – all would have been regarded as highly significant. The Tlascalans might have heard the rumours, rife throughout the area, of the return of Quetzalcoatl, but nothing they could have seen wou
ld have persuaded them that the Spaniards were here to overthrow Mexica tyranny. On the contrary, witnessing all the activity, only one conclusion would have been possible – that the strangers were not gods but powerful men and that the Mexica were in the process of forging a strong alliance with them that must surely, sooner or later, be turned against Tlascala.
Yet still, even with her own eyes wide open to the truth, Malinal could not quite shake off the astonishing ways that Cortés, with his striking pale skin and handsome bearded face, seemed such a plausible fulfilment of the prophecy of the return of Quetzalcoatl. Nor was it simply a matter of appearances, or the fact that he and his companions had arrived in great boats that moved by themselves without paddles in the year One-Reed – or any of the other eerie resemblances. Whether it was pure coincidence, or resulted from the workings of some supernatural design, Cortés also shared what was probably the most important and the most distinctive of Quetzalcoatl’s legendary characteristics. Malinal had hardly begun to understand the Christian faith the caudillo professed, his reverence for the tortured god-man depicted nailed to a cross, and the frequent sermons, translated by Aguilar, that he directed at her. One thing was completely clear, however, and this was his abhorrence of human sacrifice as practised by the Maya, the Totonacs and most particularly by the Mexica, under whom, as she had informed him, it had been elevated to the status of a national obsession, with tens of thousands going under the knife each year.
Now, two days after the attempted abduction of Pepillo, Malinal sat with Cortés in his newly built wooden pavilion, roofed with fine cloth, provided by Pichatzin. The caudillo was listening with rapt horror, making occasional remarks such as ‘disgusting’, ‘vile’, and ‘an abomination’, as Malinal told him of her own close escape from the killing stone in Tenochtitlan on that terrible night, months before, when the hearts of more than two thousand women had been plucked from their breasts. The air within the pavilion was redolent of split pine, refreshed by the soft morning breeze that blew in off the ocean and ruffled the canopy over their heads, but as Malinal relived those hours of horror and dread, she smelled again the awful reek from the tide of blood that had washed down the steps of the pyramid, and imagined she could hear the beat of the snakeskin drum and the screech of the conch. Speaking slowly, allowing Aguilar time to grasp her meaning fully in Maya and put it into Castilian, listening closely as he did so in order to add to her growing vocabulary in this strangely soft, lilting language spoken by the Spanish, she explained how she had been imprisoned in the fattening pen with her friend Tozi, how they had mounted the steps with all the other women and how at the last moment they had been freed by the intervention of Huitzilopochtli – ‘Hummingbird’ – the very god to whom the sacrifices were dedicated.
Her grasp of the Castilian tongue was already sufficient for her to realise that Aguilar was disparaging her even as he translated her words to Cortés, suggesting indeed that she was making the whole story up. Anger gripped her and she exclaimed in Castilian: ‘No! Not make up. Truth! All truth!’
A flicker of a smile crossed Cortés’s face and he said something to Aguilar about her being a ‘clever woman – very clever.’ But she couldn’t follow the rest. Then he put a question directly to her, waiting to see if she could understand it, which she could not. Finally Aguilar translated: ‘Explain why this devil Hummingbird whom the Mexica worship should wish to set you free?’
She shrugged: ‘I don’t know. Who can comprehend the ways of gods or devils?’ An idea occurred to her which she thought might prove persuasive to Cortés, so she looked him straight in the eye and said: ‘I think perhaps it is because your god, the god of the Christians, is more powerful than Hummingbird. I think he made Moctezuma release us so we could help you to defeat him.’
Cortés allowed that this was indeed possible, since Malinal had already helped him a great deal with the descriptions she had provided over the past days about the vast wealth of the Mexica and their treasure houses filled with gold, silver and jewels – which made him all the more determined to visit them – coupled with her accounts of their vile and diabolical religion, with its addiction to human sacrifice, which was an abomination and which it was his duty as a Christian to suppress. In addition he had learned much from her about the size, weapons and disposition of the Mexica armies, which had made him aware that he must proceed cautiously and in strength. In all this, he said, he could indeed see the hand of god and of divine providence at work.
At this point Aguilar, who Malinal already disliked because his jealousy had unnecessarily kept her apart from Cortés for so long, objected in Castilian, and then again in Mayan for her benefit, that pure coincidence seemed a better explanation than any god-directed process for her presence in Potonchan at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival. He also wanted to know why she considered her supposed ‘friend’ to be relevant, since she wasn’t even here.
A lengthy argument followed between the two Spaniards, during which the caudillo spoke in the special rolling, lilting tone that Malinal had noticed he liked to use for sermons. When he seemed to be finished she said in Castilian, ‘I speak now?’ and Cortés, with another smile that she very much liked, waved her on. Reverting to Mayan she turned to Aguilar: ‘This is important,’ she said. ‘Please try to translate what I say very carefully and very exactly into Castilian because your idea about coincidence is wrong and I will tell you why and the caudillo needs to know this.’
Aguilar looked at her with much the same dislike that she felt for him. He had status because he was, or had been, Cortés’s chief interpreter; he feared, now they had moved out of the lands of the Maya and into territories ruled by the Mexica, about whose language and culture he was ignorant, that he would no longer have a role. Well, he was right! She’d always had a good ear for languages and she already understood much more Castilian than he realised.
For the moment, however, she still needed him, so she told him what she had to say in Mayan and listened very intently to his translation into Castilian, not only to improve her vocabulary but also to be sure the caudillo was not being misled.
‘There is something,’ she said, ‘that neither you, Aguilar, nor you my lord Cortés, know yet, and this concerns a god whom the Mexica fear and respect almost as much as the demon Hummingbird. I will tell you about this god – who is called Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent – not only because what I have to say about him proves that it was not coincidence that brought me here, but also because if you Spaniards arm yourselves with this knowledge, it will help you to lay low the great armies of the Mexica and destroy their powerful cities and take their wealth and make it yours and end forever their cruel and evil reign in these lands.’
She then recounted the whole story of Quetzalcoatl, and his human manifestation, so similar to that of the Spaniards, as a bearded, pale-skinned man who detested human sacrifice. She told of the ancient prophecy that the god and his companions would return in this very year, in great ships that would come from the east, moving by themselves without paddles. Lastly she spoke of the promise that Quetzalcoatl was said to have made – to overthrow the wicked and bloodstained cult of Hummingbird and replace it with a religion of peace and love such as the Christian faith as Cortés had repeatedly described it to her.
When Aguilar had put all this into Castilian, the caudillo leaned forward in his chair, rubbing the point of his beard with his left hand, and the two Spaniards again talked animatedly for several minutes. Cortés then had Aguilar explain to Malinal in Mayan that it was possible, in his opinion, that a ‘saint’ – a holy man – called Thomas had visited these lands one thousand five hundred years before to preach the Christian faith and that it was his memory, and a promise that he had no doubt made to return, that was preserved in the story of Quetzalcoatl. He then invited Malinal to continue. She said that whether Quetzalcoatl was this Saint Thomas or not, the prophecy of his return was believed by all the Mexica, and especially by the Great Speaker, who was utterly terrified of wh
at it would mean for him. She described how she had been called to the palace in Tenochtitlan the year before to serve as a translator when a message had been brought to Moctezuma from the Chontal Maya concerning the first visit to these lands of white-skinned, bearded strangers. They had been fewer in number than Cortés and his men; nonetheless, they had defeated a Mayan army ten thousand strong.
Cortés slapped his thigh with his hand as this was translated for him, and said something in Castilian about a captain called Hernández de Cordoba.
After that, Malinal continued, Moctezuma had been seized by a terrible foreboding that those strangers, who had arrived near the end of the year called Thirteen-Rabbit in the Mexica calendar, had come to announce the return of Quetzalcoatl, which was therefore to be expected this year – which happened to be the year One-Reed as the prophecy had long ago foretold. Driven mad with fear that he was about to lose his throne, Moctezuma had initiated a new cycle of sacrifices, intended to strengthen Hummingbird with human hearts and blood and win the war god’s support to drive Quetzalcoatl and his companions back into the sea. Malinal repeated that she and her friend Tozi would have been amongst those sacrificed for this cause, but for the mysterious intervention of Hummingbird himself – surely compelled by the one and only true god of the Christians. After they had been released from the killing stone, she told Cortés, she and Tozi had pledged to do everything in their power to bring about the overthrow of Moctezuma and the end of human sacrifice. To this end Tozi had remained in Tenochtitlan to work what harm she could against the Great Speaker, while Malinal had made the long journey overland to Potonchan, her hometown, to welcome Quetzalcoatl, should he appear there, and help him to win back his kingdom.
War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent Page 9