War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent

by Graham Hancock

  Vaguely aware that Moctezuma had given an order and that the four captives had been tumbled howling and thrashing into the pit where they would be held in place by the spears of the guards and roasted alive, Tozi turned and fled.

  * * *

  It was late, and the Velazquistas were long gone, when Cortés had Pepillo bring Juan de Escalante to the pavilion. Escalante had saved Cortés’s life on the first day of fighting at Potonchan, when a sudden ambush had threatened everything, and was the most trusted of his captains and friends – more trusted even than Alvarado, who had too much self-interest ever to be entirely reliable. Escalante was also a discreet, confidential man, who’d been dead set from the beginning against the Velazquistas, who was not given to boasting and loose talk like Alvarardo, and was therefore in every way ideal for the task that Cortés now had in mind for him.

  ‘Juan,’ he said, ‘welcome. My apologies for disturbing your rest at this late hour.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said the other man. ‘I wasn’t sleeping anyway.’

  ‘May I offer you a little wine? I have a very fine Galician red from my private reserve.’

  ‘That would be nice, Hernán.’ A smile. ‘I’m guessing you want something from me.’

  ‘Yes … well, as it happens I do, but let us drink first. Pepillo! See to it.’

  Escalante was long-limbed and lean, almost gaunt, with prominent cheekbones, a wolfish, heavily bearded face and startlingly blue eyes. He was somewhat vain of his appearance and his straight black hair hung down to his shoulders in order to conceal the sword wound from the Italian wars that had left a deep scar along the side of his skull and deprived him of the top two-thirds of his right ear.

  ‘To the success of our expedition,’ Cortés said, raising his glass, ‘and to the glory of His Majesty Don Carlos.’

  ‘And to the confusion of our enemy Diego de Velázquez,’ Escalante added. ‘May he grow boils on his backside and may all the schemes of his sycophants and supporters come to naught.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that!’ Cortés laughed. They drained their glasses at a draught and he poured again. ‘Indeed, a strategy to confuse and confound Velázquez further is very much on my mind at the moment, since I’ve spent the evening dealing with Escudero and his gang; it’s why I’ve called you here.’

  Cortés proceeded to tell his friend about the meeting with the Velazquistas and about the distraction from their endless complaints that the surprise arrival of the Totonac embassy had brought. ‘But I fear this respite will be brief,’ he concluded, ‘and since I have offered a vote on whether to return to Cuba or not—’

  ‘A hostage to fortune if ever there was one!’ Escalante interrupted.

  ‘Since I have offered a vote,’ Cortés continued, ‘I intend to do everything in my power to make certain it goes our way. It occurs to me that one factor weighing against us is the extreme discomfort of our present quarters here on these unwholesome dunes.’ He slapped at a mosquito to make his point; indeed both men were surrounded by clouds of the biting insects that infested the camp, making everyone’s life a misery.

  ‘Bloodsucking little bastards,’ agreed Escalante with feeling. ‘Just when the mosquitoes are done with us at dawn, the sandflies take over for the rest of the day. There’ll be a big boost in morale if we can find another site.’

  Cortés nodded. ‘We’re also too close to Cuetlaxtlan, with its large Mexica garrison. We could thrash them, I’ve no doubt of it, but I’d prefer to do so at a time of my own choosing. I don’t want to tempt them to some folly by staying in this godforsaken shit-hole a moment longer than we need to.’

  ‘So you want me to go and recce some other sites?’ said Escalante, divining Cortés’s purpose.

  ‘Yes, Juan, absolutely. Find us a site, and not just for another camp. I believe we must put down permanent roots in this land, establish a colony—’

  ‘A colony! Now there’s an idea that will drive the Velazquistas mad!’

  Establishing a colony had been explicitly ruled out by Velázquez when the mandate for the expedition had been granted, but then so had just about everything else that Cortés had in mind.

  ‘Escudero will oppose it tooth and nail,’ he conceded. ‘He’ll stir up trouble. He’ll claim it as yet another sign of my perfidy, but I think I know a way to outmanoeuvre him – so yes, Juan, please find us a site where we can build a town. The sooner the better. Go north. That’s where our newfound Totonac allies say they’re strongest. Their chief city is called Cempoala. It’s two days’ march from here and somewhat inland, but I learned from them of another city they control on the coast – what was its name, Pepillo?’

  Pepillo consulted his notes. ‘Huitztlan, sir.’

  ‘Very good, yes, Huitztlan, a few hours’ march north of Cempoala. That’s where I’d like you to head for, Juan. I’ve reason to believe it will provide a safe anchorage for our fleet and a good place to plant our first colony in these new lands.’

  ‘How will I know it when I see it?’

  Cortés could not resist a broad grin of self-satisfaction. ‘I have a guide for you,’ he said, ‘none other than the Totonac emissary Meco himself. I told Malinal to ask him to return the day after tomorrow. Will you be ready to sail by then, do you think?’

  ‘My Santa Theresa’s full of leaks like the rest of the fleet, but nothing the pumps can’t handle, so I’m happy to sail. But how am I to communicate with this … what’s his name – Meco?’

  ‘Malinal must stay with me,’ Cortés said. ‘I need her here in case further negotiations are called for with the Mexica, but my page speaks a few words of the Nahuatl language – eh, don’t you Pepillo?’

  ‘Yes, sir, a few.’

  ‘More than a few I’d say. You were very helpful tonight. And it seems Meco speaks Nahuatl too … ’

  ‘He does, sir.’

  ‘So there you are, Juan. Pepillo will accompany you to serve as your interpreter and I wish you sweet sailing and a swift return.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Pepillo hesitantly.

  Cortés frowned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I would like to take my dog with me, sir, that is if you and Don Juan do not object.’

  ‘Your dog?’ frowned Cortés. ‘What use is a dog on a ship, lad? Leave him here I say. It’s high time he was put in with the rest of the pack anyway.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘I’ll tolerate no buts from you, boy. The dog stays. You go.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Friday 14 May 1519 to Sunday 16 May 1519

  ‘We’ll have that cur of yours for the pack,’ Miguel Hemes yelled. ‘The caudillo won’t protect you much longer.’ A filthy, ragged, lice-infested, pimply urchin of fifteen, one of Telmo Vendabal’s assistant dog handlers, Hemes had been following Pepillo around the camp on his errands all morning, taunting and tormenting him. Now, suddenly and ominously, he was reinforced by two of the others, fat Francisco Julian, also fifteen, puffing and perspiring as he appeared over the top of a dune, and Andrés Santisteban, Vendabal’s senior apprentice, nigh on seventeen years old, whose sparse black beard did nothing to hide the mass of smallpox scars on his face, but whose constant smile successfully disguised – for those who did not know him well – a vindictive and malicious nature.

  Of the three, Pepillo feared Santisteban the most because of the consistent bullying he meted out: the kicks, the sly shoves and kidney punches when no one was watching; the choke holds and the dirty tricks designed, whenever possible, to put Pepillo in a bad light with the caudillo. It had all got so much worse in the past three weeks; Melchior’s courage and fighting spirit during the kidnap attempt by the Tlascalans had only served to inflame Vendabal’s desire to possess the young lurcher and it seemed that Cortés was persuaded by the hunchback’s arguments. His refusal to let Pepillo take Melchior on the voyage north in Escalante’s carrack, his insistence that it was time for the dog to join the pack and the fact that the promised intervention by Bernal Díaz had also failed to materi
alise were bad signs. Although Melchior had not yet, in fact, been wrested away from him, Pepillo had decided to take matters into his own hands.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he yelled as he hurried through the dunes towards the beach. He broke into a run but Santisteban soon caught up with him, grasping him firmly by the shoulder. ‘Not so fast,’ the older boy said. ‘We want to speak with you.’

  Pepillo struggled to free himself but Santisteban was much stronger than him; he kicked Pepillo’s legs out from under him, forcing him to his knees on the sand. ‘Give up your dog,’ he said. ‘Bring him to Don Telmo tonight, make a gift of him, and we’ll leave you alone. Otherwise—’

  ‘Otherwise what?’ Pepillo spat. ‘You’ll beat me up again?’

  Santisteban punched Pepillo square on the nose, a hard blow that drew blood. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ll beat you up again.’

  ‘Beat me up all you like,’ Pepillo was defiant. ‘I don’t care.’ He used his sleeve to wipe blood and snot from his face. ‘I’ll never give you Melchior.’

  ‘Then we’ll kill your precious Melchior. Don Telmo’s orders. If he can’t have him for the pack, he doesn’t see why you should have him as a pet.’

  ‘We’ll poison him, see?’ It was Hemes speaking now, his voice going high and low, still not fully broken. ‘We got wolfsbane to put in his meat.’

  ‘But it’ll be dog’s bane for him,’ tittered Francisco Julian. ‘Unless you do what we say.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Pepillo protested. ‘It would be a waste of a good dog. I’ll tell the caudillo you did it. You’ll be punished.’

  ‘He’ll never believe you if you tell him,’ said Santisteban, reaching down to punch Pepillo again, this time low in his belly, knocking all the wind out of him and leaving him sprawled, gasping on the sand. ‘No one will believe you. It’ll just be one of those accidents that can happen to a dog.’

  After the three boys had gone, Pepillo picked himself up, dusted off his clothes, wiped his face again and made a beeline for the beach. Wolfsbane was deadly. A few drops on a piece of meat would be enough. Melchior, growing larger and heavier by the day, had a huge appetite; he would gobble down any scraps he was offered so fast he wouldn’t even notice the foul taste of the poison.

  But at least that wouldn’t be happening tonight. A stiff wind was blowing from the southwest, a good wind for sailing and, as he’d arranged earlier, Malinal was waiting for him by the longboat with his bounding, happy dog. ‘You be in big trouble with caudillo about this,’ she said as she passed the leash to him. ‘He no like disobey.’

  ‘I know, but I have to disobey him. I just have to. Thank you for understanding.’

  ‘Sweet boy,’ said Malinal. She kissed his brow and dabbed, with a look of concern, at the blood drying under his nose. ‘Sail well. Come back safe.’

  The Totonac warrior Meco had taken his place in the longboat and the crew were at the oars ready to row them out to Don Juan de Escalante’s carrack Santa Theresa, which was bobbing at anchor in the bay. ‘Come on, Melchior!’ Pepillo yelled. The dog barked excitedly and the two of them charged through the surf and leapt aboard.

  * * *

  Guatemoc watched the small boat move out through the surf towards the fleet of vastly larger vessels in the bay and noted two things with interest. First one of the war animals, undoubtedly some monstrous species of dog if its behaviour was anything to judge by, was being carried in the boat. Second, a Totonac warrior was also a passenger. What were the implications of this, Guatemoc wondered. He’d ordered all the local labourers away from the camp, and they’d done as they were told, but this man had the look of a Cempoalan, and the Cempoalan Totonacs were a bloody-minded lot.

  Guatemoc narrowed his eyes as the small boat bumped against one of the giant ones and its passengers climbed to the deck above by means of a rope ladder; the dog was last to follow, hauled up in a basket. Moments later came the sound of shouts carried distantly across the water, and men could be seen scurrying to and fro in a frenzy of activity. As though by magic, huge wings of cloth, which billowed as they caught the breeze blowing off the shore, sprouted from the three tall poles soaring high above the mountainous vessel, and suddenly it was on the move, slow at first but soon gaining speed, cutting through the waves like a knife, sending up a spray of foam to either side and leaving a lasting trace of its path in the bay behind it. Guatemoc watched spellbound – he had to admit that he was impressed – until the giant craft rounded the headland and disappeared northwards in the direction of Cempoala.

  The forced march back to the coast had been as fast as any Guatemoc had ever achieved, with Cuetlaxtlan reached soon after dawn. Leaving his five hundred Cuahchics to catch their breath and enjoy Pichatzin’s reluctant hospitality, he’d then hurried forward with Mud Head, Big Dart, Man-Eater, Fuzzy Face and Starving Coyote to observe the interlopers at close quarters. There was nowhere to hide five hundred Cuahchics out here – their presence would have amounted to an open declaration of war – but he and his friends were light enough on their feet to conceal themselves amongst the dunes, avoiding the regular patrols of white-skins mounted on strange deer sent out to scout the terrain between the camp and Cuetlaxtlan. After observing the pattern and regularity of the patrols, following a few of them at a distance, Guatemoc satisfied himself that they almost never consisted of groups larger than just three mounted men – more usually two – and that they typically ranged a few miles southwards, coming within sight of the outskirts of Cuetlaxtlan before turning back. He resolved that tomorrow, or at the latest the day after, he would deploy a hundred of his Cuahchics to ambush one of these patrols close to Cuetlaxtlan, snatch the men and the beasts they rode, and then kill them in such a way that a response from the main force would be inevitable.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked his friends after he’d shared the idea with them. ‘Can it be done?’

  They all agreed that it could. Admittedly the battle skills of the foreigners and their deer were unknown, other than the rumours – surely exaggerated – of their prowess against the Maya at Potonchan; but it seemed inconceivable that one of the smaller two-man patrols could outfight a hundred Cuahchics.

  ‘By the gods, we’ll be no better than women if we can’t pull this off,’ exclaimed Mud Head.

  ‘Indeed I will personally volunteer to bend over and let them fuck me up the arse if we fail,’ said Starving Coyote with a straight face.

  * * *

  The raiding party was three hundred men strong, all of them Chichemec mercenaries recently hired by Moctezuma to reinforce his armies. They were bandits, not trained warriors, but they were seasoned snatchers of victims for human sacrifice, and they were used to getting their way in the defenceless villages they targeted.

  Villages like Teolo where Shikotenka had finally caught up with them. It was their last call before fleeing back over the Mexica border with their shameful haul of a thousand captives, all of them women and girls.

  Teolo, a poor hamlet of a few hundred wattle-and-daub huts encircling a muddy central plaza, lay at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by densely forested slopes providing excellent cover for the fast-moving Tlascalan force of two hundred picked men that Shikotenka led. Tree and Ilhuicamina were still recovering from their wounds, and Acolmiztli was dead at the hands of the accursed white-skins, so the only one of his original captains to accompany him on this rescue mission was Chipahua, his right forearm still bound in bandages but healing fast.

  ‘We’re outnumbered,’ Shikotenka observed to his friend.

  ‘Not that we’ve ever been bothered by that,’ Chipahua replied, clenching and unclenching the fist of his right hand twice before reaching back over his shoulder to draw his obsidian-edged macuahuitl broadsword from its leather scabbard.

  After slaying the handful of guards posted around the edge of the forest by the overconfident Chichemecs, Shikotenka had sent contingents of men to encircle the village so that when he gave the signal to go in they could do so from
all sides at once. Under normal circumstances, given the disparity of numbers, he would have preferred to launch a couple of atlatl volleys into the mass of the enemy milling in the plaza, but that was unfortunately out of the question today, since their captives were there with them, bound and huddled in a pathetic mass, while the last of the villagers were rounded up. The mercenaries, many already drunk on looted pulque, were well ahead with the butchery of men, boys and mature women, while the younger women and girls, screaming in terror and outrage, were being herded into place with the other prisoners who, again, were all females.

  ‘No rapes,’ Chipahua observed.

  ‘As has been the case elsewhere,’ Shikotenka mused. He’d been inclined to discount the reports he’d heard about this new and strange behaviour, but now he was seeing it for himself. Mass rapes were a hallmark of the Chichemecs, something they regarded as a perk of the service they gave the Mexica. With such an abundance of female prisoners at their disposal, there must be some very good reason why they were acting so delicately.

  The mercenary leader was easily identified, strutting about in the middle of the plaza, striking off the heads of a row of kneeling men with savage blows of his macuahuitl and bellowing with pride whenever he managed it at a single stroke. He seemed to be taking real pleasure in the task.

  ‘Let’s try to grab that one alive,’ Shikotenka said to Chipahua. ‘I’ve got some questions for him.’

  Chipahua grinned, a gruesome sight since many of his front teeth were broken. ‘So,’ he said, ‘are you going to give the signal?’