War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent

by Graham Hancock

  Sandoval, Alvarado and some of the other cavaliers had dismounted to listen to the envoys’ story. ‘Gentlemen,’ Cortés said, ‘to horse! Let’s scout ahead and learn what awaits us here.’

  * * *

  The foot soldiers were following at a fast march and should now, Sandoval estimated, be about six miles west of the wall. It was already past noon. Eight of the horsemen – half the cavalry – had remained with the infantry, but the other eight, Sandoval amongst them, had been riding at a brisk trot for more than an hour – their mounts could keep this pace up all day if necessary – and were now some twelve miles west of the wall.

  As always, Sandoval was immensely happy to be riding Llesenia, the chestnut mare the caudillo had allocated to him at Potonchan and allowed him to keep ever since. Ortiz, nicknamed ‘the musician’, who owned the animal, was less happy with the arrangement, but a bribe from Cortés had persuaded him to go along with it. The fact was that Ortiz was a poor rider, while Sandoval had been born to the saddle.

  He looked around, taking in the feel and flavour of the country; it reminded him, in its harsh, untamed beauty, of the remote uplands of Cantabria. A fast-flowing river, its waters whipped into white foam, ran through a deep gorge a mile downslope, and in the distance jagged peaks and high forbidding cliffs clutched the sky.

  It felt good, Sandoval thought, to ride free like this, scouting unknown terrain, with men he admired, men he knew would stand by him through thick and thin, on a quest of high adventure! Cortés was up ahead on Molinero, Alvarado beside him on Bucephalus, the two huge stallions neck-and-neck while their riders talked and joked. Fanned out behind them came Olid, Velázquez de Léon, Morla, Moran, Davila and Sandoval himself.

  Suddenly Cortés was gesturing, pointing. A group of Indians, fifty warriors armed with spears, their heads plumed with feathers, stood silhouetted on a ridge a mile ahead. They were visible only for a moment and then vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.

  Cortés and Alvarado spurred their horses and went after them, riding like demons, stretched out at full gallop, lances levelled. With a thunder of hooves, Sandoval and the rest of the troop followed.

  * * *

  Damn but these Indians could run! As Alvarado reached the ridge where the warriors had showed themselves, he saw them streaking away across the wild moorland, which sloped down into a long, gentle valley then up again towards a second higher ridge about a mile further west. They were still maintaining a good lead. He glanced at Cortés, who rode close beside him and yelled: ‘Kill them or catch them?’

  ‘Catch them,’ Cortés replied, the wind snatching at his voice. ‘We want peace with these fellows if we can have it.’ Deliberately he put up his lance.

  Well and good, Alvarado thought, putting up his own lance. But what do we do with them when we’ve caught them? He glanced back and saw that Sandoval, Davila and Olid were close, Morla, Moran and Velázquez de Léon a little further behind. All, following Cortés’s example, had put up their lances.

  The Indians were indeed incredibly fast on their feet, but the galloping horses were much faster and the gap between them began to close rapidly. Alvarado grinned, knowing the fear the big destriers provoked in primitive minds. None of the riders were fully armoured themselves – cuirasses seemed enough to enter what had, until they’d passed the wall, been thought of as friendly territory – but both he and Cortés had taken the precaution of having their mounts fully barded before leaving Xocotlan this morning; so too had Sandoval and Davila, and their shining armour, gleaming in the sun, made a magnificent and no doubt terrifying sight. Olid, Morla, Moran and Velázquez de Léon all rode unarmoured horses, but the savages would be so intimidated by the animals themselves it would make no difference.

  Maintaining a surprisingly disciplined formation of ten ranks of five, the Indians were naked but for loincloths and sandals, their bodies painted a gruesome shade of red, bright green feathers fixed in their long black hair. All carried spears and all were armed with daggers hanging at their waists and their simple broadswords, made of wood with obsidian blades, slung in sheaths on their backs. Unlike other natives who Alvarado had run down on Bucephalus, they weren’t peering anxiously over their shoulders, but seemed focused on their flight, arms and legs pumping, still covering a lot of ground very fast.

  As the distance closed to a hundred paces, then fifty, Cortés signalled for the riders to split into two files – Sandoval, Davila and Velázquez de Léon following him to the left, Alvarado, Olid, Morla and Moran to the right. They galloped along the flanks of the Indian band, dropping their speed to a canter as they drew level. Now at last some of the warriors turned to look at them, but without panic, their fierce faces, daubed with stripes of black and red paint, showing no fear whatsoever. Interesting, thought Alvarado. We might have a fight on our hands here.

  ‘Hey,’ Cortés yelled, as if they could understand him. ‘Stop! We just want to talk. We mean you no harm.’ He switched his lance and Molinero’s reins to his left hand and held up his right hand, palm outwards, in a sign of peace. But the Indians paid no attention, just kept on running, grim and silent.

  Waste of time, thought Alvarado. With a nudge of his knee he swerved Bucephalus sharp left into the midst of the fleeing column, aiming to knock a few men down and make them listen to reason, but they were amazingly agile; the ranks simply melted away from the warhorse, and suddenly a big Indian, missing his front teeth, was attacking him with vicious, sweeping blows of his broadsword. Just as Alvarado realised that he recognised the man from the night fight on the beach back at Cuetlaxtlan, one of the cuts connected with the steel plates of the crinet protecting Bucephalus’s neck, and he was obliged to swerve away as another slashing blow narrowly missed his own unarmoured thigh and crashed into the barding just in front of his saddle. ‘What the hell?’ he yelled as he spurred the animal clear.

  * * *

  Seeming to realise there was no point in continuing flight, the Indians stopped running and quickly formed up into a disciplined, defensive circle, bristling with spears. Real soldiers! Cortés thought. Not like the Maya. The ridge they’d been making for still lay half a mile upslope to the west but, though they’d been caught in the open, they seemed calm and unafraid. Hoping to take them alive, he again made signs of peace and waved his horsemen back until they formed a skirmish line fifty paces below the Tlascalans – he assumed they were Tlascalans – who brandished their weapons and shouted war cries.

  ‘I think at least one of these fellows was amongst the band who tried to snatch Pepillo on the beach at Cuetlaxtlan,’ said Alvarado. ‘If it’s them, then they know how to fight. Shall we have at them?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Cortés but, as he spoke, out of the corner of his eye he saw Olid level his lance. ‘No Cristóbal!’ Cortés warned, but Olid wasn’t listening. With a whoop he charged in towards the Indians, the hooves of his sorrel mare kicking up clods, and in the same instant a tall, massively built warrior, the braids of his long hair tangled and filthy and a great scar down the left side of his face, leapt out from the circle and ran to meet him, blocking his path with a ferocious aspect and a horrible yell, making the mare rear and whinny before he could thrust.

  ‘That’s another one of those bastards I fought on the beach,’ Alvarado had time to say before something shocking and incredible happened, something completely unprecedented in all the battles the Spaniards had faced since their arrival in the New Lands. While Olid was still struggling to regain control, the huge Indian took an unexpectedly graceful step forward, shifted his weight to his right forefoot, pivoted half a turn, whirling his heavy wooden sword with its wicked obsidian blades, and struck the horse such a monstrous blow on its unarmoured neck that the animal was cleanly decapitated. Its head dropped with a heavy thud to the turf, its severed arteries jetted a tremendous gushing shower of blood, and its body toppled over so fast that Olid couldn’t jump free and lay struggling vainly with his left leg trapped beneath its flank.

  Se
nsing a disaster in the making, Cortés was already at full gallop before the mare went down. He mis-aimed his lance and settled for barging Molinero into the attacker, sending the man stumbling as he swung to kill Olid on the ground. A dozen Indians darted out towards them from the defensive circle, screaming hate, but the other riders thundered down on them, brushed aside their puny spears, killed five with lance thrusts, scattered the rest and charged on, lances levelled, into the main mass, thrusting and stabbing. In the pandemonium Cortés vaulted down from Molinero and, with a mighty effort, pulled Olid free, but immediately came under attack from three fierce-eyed, painted warriors who, far from running as he’d expected, were already back on the offensive. Drawing his sword, he ran the first of them through, disembowelling him, while Alvarado, who had lost his lance, rode Bucephalus between the other two and cleaved their skulls with his falchion. Davila charged in, reached for Olid and hauled him across his saddle. Snatching up Olid’s lance – Alvarado would need a replacement – Cortés at once remounted and shouted an order to the rest of the troop to disengage.

  * * *

  The white men rode a distance of three hundred paces downslope to the east before wheeling their strange deer and forming a line again. ‘Well,’ growled Tree, ‘at least they’re mortal – the deer anyway.’ He was examining the teeth of his bloodied macuahuitl, unbroken after scything through the animal’s neck.

  ‘Watch out for their armour though,’ said Chipahua. He held up his own macuahuitl. It was badly damaged where he’d slashed it against the hard, shiny clothing of one of the deer. ‘It’s like the metal the white-skin we fought on the beach at Cuetlaxtlan was wearing.’

  ‘I think the same man’s amongst them today,’ said Shikotenka. He pointed. ‘There, with the golden hair, the one you just attacked. Don’t you recognise him?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Chipahua. ‘I didn’t get a good enough look at him on the beach to be sure, but now you mention it – and the way he fights – yes, it’s him.’

  Shikotenka was remembering that night, how the white-skin had squared up to him at the end after Acolmiztli was killed, the challenge he’d shouted in his strange language. He offered a silent prayer to the gods that the man would come under his knife today and surveyed the battlefield without emotion. Twelve of his men, mostly new recruits who’d joined the squad after the raid on Coaxoch’s pavilion six months before, lay dead. Three others were too badly injured to put up a fight. He looked up again at the line of riders.

  ‘I suppose we should count ourselves lucky these ones aren’t carrying fire-serpents,’ observed Ilhuicamina.

  ‘If they have fire-serpents at all,’ challenged Chipahua. ‘I think it’s a story the Chontal Maya made up to explain their defeat.’

  Tree was standing nearby. ‘Fire-serpents or not,’ he said, ‘it looks like they’re getting ready to charge us again.’

  Shikotenka narrowed his eyes. The one whose deer Tree had killed had been placed on the ground, where he sat nursing what was obviously an injured leg. The other seven had split into two units, one of four, one of three, and this second smaller unit now surged forward at a tremendous pace, the animals’ hooves thundering upon the earth. They charged past the Tlascalans’ right flank at a distance of a hundred paces and pulled up three hundred paces above them to their west.

  ‘They’ll come at us from both sides,’ said Shikotenka. Normally he would have laughed at the suicidal notion of seven men doing battle with a force that was still thirty-five strong, but these strangers couldn’t be judged by normal standards. He was quite sure they weren’t gods, but he’d seen enough to know they were brilliant, disciplined, deadly warriors, utterly formidable on the backs of their rapid, heavy deer and armed with weapons of immense killing power. ‘Throw your spears on my signal,’ he said, speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, ‘then grab the bastards’ lances as they come in. Grip them tight and don’t let go no matter what they do. Try to pull them down where we can deal with them.’

  There came a shout from the leader of the white men, and both groups charged at once, lances levelled, closing in on the Tlascalan circle with stupefying speed. Shikotenka wasn’t afraid; he felt sure none of his squad was afraid. They had come here to confront a new challenge and learn how to deal with it.

  He gave the signal, and thirty spears flew through the air, enveloping the riders in a storm of wood and flint. Most of the projectiles bounced harmlessly off their metal armour, but one drove home into the shoulder of an unprotected deer, causing it to swerve and run off madly at a tangent, while another took a man high up in the leg and stuck there, though he wrenched it free and did not break formation.

  ‘Hold,’ Shikotenka yelled, ‘hold,’ as his attention focused on a gleaming lance tip, aimed at his chest, being driven towards him with tremendous force by a big brute of a man whose frowning, black-bearded, green-eyed, white-skinned face glowered at him like some fiend out of Mictlan. There was no time to think, only to act. Shikotenka’s body reflexes took over and he swivelled sideways, letting the thrust slip past him, pulled his dagger from its sheath with his right hand, grasped the shaft of the lance firmly in his left and continued to swivel, accelerated the turn, extended his left hand with a sudden jerk, sensed the resistance and heard the harsh cry of the man holding on at the other end, felt the hot breath of the deer on his head, swept the lance tip sharply down, and suddenly found himself exactly where he wanted to be. He stabbed rapidly right to left across his own body, buried his dagger to the hilt four times – tac! tac! tac! tac! – in the deer’s neck, pulled the rider out of his seat and brought him crashing to the ground. With a snarl of pure joy, Shikotenka fell on the man and, seeing his upper body was heavily armoured, slashed open his right leg from knee to groin, opened the big artery there and released a rush of bright blood. Knowing he would be dead within minutes, Shikotenka leapt to his feet, saw with satisfaction that the deer too had collapsed, and was bleeding out, and stalked off in search of other prey.

  * * *

  When Cortés saw Pedro de Moran and his horse both brutally slaughtered by a lean, muscular savage, he immediately disengaged his remaining cavalry and withdrew them three hundred paces downslope to where they’d left Olid. The loss of not just one but two of their precious – and presently irreplaceable – mounts was a grievous and unexpected blow; he needed to preserve the remaining horses and their riders. Olid was on his feet now, so it seemed he had at least not suffered a broken leg, which might have put him out of action for several months. But Velázquez de Léon had a deep cut in his forearm and his unbarded horse had been speared through its shoulder, Morla had taken a spear in the muscle of his thigh, and his horse – also unbarded – had sword cuts to its rump and withers. Davila had been stabbed through his boot, and Moran was dead! Quite a tally for a skirmish with a band of primitives. Only Alvarado, Sandoval and Cortés himself were uninjured, but all three of their horses, though barded, had cuts about their lower legs and had only escaped hamstringing by a miracle.

  The Indians had taken heavy losses, too, with a dozen men killed in the first clash, ten more in the second, and at least a further ten suffering lance and sword wounds that were more or less debilitating. The plain truth was, however, that as many as twenty-five were either completely uninjured or still sufficiently able-bodied to brandish their weapons, shout threats and begin a hostile advance on the Spaniards, rapidly closing the distance from three hundred to less than two hundred paces.

  Cortés could not contemplate leaving the field, though the horses would see them clear in moments. To run, even from this little battle, even as a prelude to a larger attack with his whole force, would signal cowardice and bring disaster in its wake. The Mexica would hear that the feared cavalry of the Spaniards was far from invincible against a determined foe, while the formidable Tlascalans would gain heart and meet any further attempt to penetrate their territory with even higher morale and even more martial valour than they’d shown already. He made some
quick calculations. Though it had felt like only moments, the pursuit and the two engagements here had consumed the best part of an hour, which meant the infantry, proceeding at the fast march he’d ordered, should now be only two miles behind them – a distance that a horse at full gallop could cover in less than five minutes. ‘Davila!’ he barked. ‘Your horse is in the best shape. Ride like the wind back to the army, bring the rest of the cavalry up to reinforce us at once and order the infantry to come on at the double.’

  Davila nodded, threw his lance to Morla, who’d lost his own in the last affray, wheeled his mount and was gone.

  Cortés was calculating again. Five minutes there, a few minutes to make things clear and five minutes back with the other eight cavalry – it meant they should be reinforced within fifteen minutes. The foot soldiers would require a little longer to cover the two miles but, even so, if they hurried, they would be here in thirty to forty minutes. Meanwhile, with Moran and two mounts dead, and Davila temporarily out of the picture, Cortés had just five men on horseback and one – Olid – on the ground, to see off the howling mob of Indians who had now broken into a run and were closing rapidly.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Hold your lances short, aim them at the enemy’s faces as we break through the ranks and give repeated thrusts. If your lance is seized, use all your strength and put spurs to your horse; then the leverage of the shaft beneath your arm and the headlong rush of the horse should let you tear your lance free or drag the Indian along. Above all keep moving. Charge and withdraw, charge and withdraw. Don’t let them swarm you … ’