War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent

by Graham Hancock

  ‘Tell him,’ Cortés said wearily, ‘he should release those poor crones and that we are here on behalf of Christ and the king of Spain to teach him and all the people of this land not to sacrifice humans or eat human flesh any more. Tell him also that we are men of flesh and blood, precisely like him. Tell him this is the truth and that I have always told the Tlascalans the truth. Tell him that I wish to be their friend and that they should not be stubborn fools for they will only suffer greatly by more fighting. Have they not seen how many of them have died and how few of us. Do they really wish to continue in this way?’

  ‘I will pass your words to my king,’ said the man with the false nose, who gave his name as Ilhuicamina. ‘Now, please, since you are men, eat of our bread, eat of our turkeys.’

  While the baskets were unpacked, the delegates in the black cloaks wandered freely round the compound, looking everywhere, and Cortés, who seemed to have contracted a fever in the night, felt his mood suddenly darken. Malinal was right about these men. They were spies – he was sure of it now. They had entered his camp under the guise of friendship and reconciliation, offering food, seeming to consider his proposals, and all for the purpose of treachery! With a surge of anger he ordered their arrest and placed them under strong guard, selecting one of the youngest, who gave his name as Yolotl, for interrogation. Despite loud protests from Ilhuicamina, this youth was taken aside into a small closed building, off the courtyard, where Cortés had him savaged by two ferocious mastiffs and interrogated through Malinal. Very quickly he admitted he was indeed a spy. He had come here with all the others to see and note the weak points in the defences through which the army of Tlascala might most easily attack and destroy the Spaniards.

  More of the delegates, subjected to the same treatment, told the same story adding, furthermore, that Shikotenka was bringing ten thousand of his crack troops to attack the hill of Tzompach this very night.

  It was enough for Cortés. Without further talk, ignoring their appeals, he had all fifty lined up in front of a chopping block, summoned Guillen de Laso and ordered him to strike off their hands with his battle-axe. Many fainted as the blade came down and their bleeding stumps were cauterised with a bar of red-hot iron.

  Ilhuicamina was the last to be brought struggling and kicking to the block. ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ he asked Cortés through Malinal. ‘You speak to us of friendship, you speak to us of truth, you condemn our sacrifices and yet you cut off the hands of brave soldiers and upright citizens?’

  ‘I do it,’ Cortés fumed, ‘because it is unworthy of brave soldiers and upright citizens to dress in the robes of priests and stoop to the odious stratagem of spying.’

  Ilhuicamina did not cry out, did not say another word, when the axe fell. ‘Tell Shikotenka we are ready to receive him in battle at any hour,’ Cortés shouted, spraying spittle. ‘By day or night, whenever he wishes to come, he will see what manner of men we Spaniards are.’

  As the delegates left the hill of Tzompach, reeling with the shock of their injuries, their bearers and even the five old women who were to have been sacrificed hurried after them.

  * * *

  The priests, wizards and soothsayers of Tlascala had worked their witchcraft, consulted their charms, cast their lots and, at the end of it, told Shikotenka what he already knew: the white strangers were men, not tueles as the Totonacs claimed; they ate turkeys, dogs, bread and fruit; they spurned the flesh, hearts and blood of warriors they killed, and if he continued to fight them he would in the end defeat them. The sorcerers did, however, add one useful and novel piece of information – the formidable powers and great courage of the white men deserted them after sunset and in the night they had no strength at all.

  Many Tlascalans disliked fighting at night when ghosts and vampires walked abroad, but Shikotenka had never shared this superstition and, many times, though not yet against the white men, had led his warriors into battle during the hours of darkness. He therefore resolved to make a night attack on the hill of Tzompach. Even if the wizards were wrong – highly likely in his view, since they were rarely right about anything – things could hardly go worse than in the catastrophic battles he’d already fought against the white men in daylight. To be sure, they were not gods, but they seemed to lead charmed lives: their weapons, particularly the large fire-serpents, made them nigh on invincible, and their coordination and tactics were superb. Why, therefore, should he not try to take them at night? At least the sorcerers’ mutterings would give his warriors heart, and perhaps the spies he’d sent in this afternoon with food and other distractions would gain useful intelligence on the state of the white men’s defences. So he’d assembled ten thousand of his best warriors in a valley just out of sight of the hill of Tzompach, and now, as the day wore on, he waited for Ilhuicamina to return and join the battle lines.

  He did not have to wait long.

  * * *

  After sending the spies back to their master in a condition that would make any reasonable man think twice, Cortés mustered his entire force in the courtyard on the hill of Tzompach. ‘Feast on the enemy’s food,’ he told them, indicating the generous heaps of turkeys and maize cakes. ‘You’ll need all your strength, for I have sure intelligence we’ll be attacked tonight.’

  ‘I thought these savages never fight in the dark,’ growled Guillen de Laso, who stood leaning on the long haft of his axe.

  ‘Don’t speak of us as savages,’ Malinal spoke up sharply, ‘when you’re savages yourselves.’ She pointed to the bloodstained chopping block. ‘To take men’s hands like that. It’s not right.’

  ‘Tell her to hold her tongue, Don Hernán,’ complained the axeman. ‘I’ll take no lessons from a woman, least of all a woman of her colour and race.’

  ‘Shame on you, De Laso.’ Bernal Díaz strode furiously towards him. ‘She has more manly valour than half of us soldiers. Though she hears every day how the Indians will kill us and eat our flesh with chillies, and though she’s seen us surrounded in recent battles and knows we’re all wounded and sick, yet she betrays no weakness.’

  It was as though, Cortés realised, Pandora’s box had been opened, as the argument between the two men spilled over into a general debate about the conditions that the Spaniards faced here at Tzompach. To his extreme annoyance, the endlessly vacillating Alonso de Grado, who he’d so recently pardoned for joining the Velazquista rebellion, seized this opportunity to press for an immediate retreat to Villa Rica, where they might sail the one remaining ship to Cuba to summon help. ‘We’re all weary and wounded,’ he grumbled, ‘some of us with two, even three wounds; some who will die soon if not properly tended to. We’re all ragged and sick from disease and chills and the cold of the mountains – yourself included, Hernán, if I’m not mistaken. It’s going to be a tough business to march to Tenochtitlan and defeat the Mexica with their huge armies when we cannot even defeat the Tlascalans, who the Totonacs told us would be our friends! It’s true God has given us victory in each battle, great and small, since we left Cuba, and by his mercy has continued to support us while we’ve been amongst these fierce Tlascalans, but we ought not to tempt him so often, or our fate might be worse than that of Pedro Carbonero.’

  ‘This is unexpected from you, Alonso,’ Cortés said, and his one-time friend, who had fair skin and thin blond hair, flushed with embarrassment and looked as though he wished he had not spoken. Still, the barb had sunk home, and a murmur of discontent swelled across the courtyard – for Pedro Carbonero, fighting to expel the Moors from Spain a century before, had unwisely led his men deep into enemy territory where they’d been surrounded and killed. Since then his name had been synonymous with any military venture that overextended itself and ended in disaster.

  Cortés was deeply hurt by the insinuation. He considered ordering De Grado flogged, or even hanged for incitement to mutiny in a time of war, but relented when he sensed the mood of the camp might not support it. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this is no time for such talk. We fac
e imminent attack and we must prepare for it.’

  Sandoval, Alvarado, Davila and Díaz had moved to stand at his side, De Grado mumbled an apology and Guillen de Laso laid down his axe. For the moment, as the men fell upon the food the Indians had brought, soon laughing again as they filled their bellies, the insurrection was over.

  * * *

  ‘Look what they’ve done to me,’ Ilhuicamina said, hunched with pain as he showed his bloodied stumps. ‘I won’t even be able to wash my arse, let alone fight again. I might as well be dead.’

  Speechless with rage, Shikotenka wanted to rush at once up the hill of Tzompach and butcher everyone there, but that was something easier thought about than done, and all around he sensed a loss of heart amongst his men. The harrowing battles they’d fought in the previous days, their friends and brothers killed, the villages and towns the white men had destroyed, the women and children they had so cruelly murdered, the strange and awesome weapons they deployed, the blast of death unleashed by their fire-serpents, and now this wicked harvest of hands – it all added up to something hitherto unknown, a dark and horrifying threat, the very shape of which defied comprehension.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Tree, as though reading Shikotenka’s thoughts. ‘Wait until dark, as we planned, when the white men are weak – then we’ll have our revenge.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you – that they’ll be weak?’

  ‘I believe it,’ said Tree, his big scarred face showing no expression, ‘and besides, the night attack will take them by surprise – the way we took Coaxoch.’

  Ilhuicamina groaned. ‘No it won’t! Some of our men were mauled by their wolves and gave away the plan. It’s not a surprise. Not any more. We have to call it off.’

  ‘Call it off?’ said Shikotenka. ‘Never. We wait until midnight, when the moon will be high. Then we go in.’

  * * *

  It was another disaster.

  At first, as Shikotenka’s warriors surrounded the hill of Tzompach and advanced slowly and stealthily up its sides towards the fortified temple, all went well. The compound was plunged in the deepest hush and it really did seem possible that the white men and their beasts slumbered, bereft of their powers, while lady moon reigned in the heavens.

  Then, off on the left flank, a sandal slipped on the gravel and there was a sliding, scraping fall followed by a burst of whispers and abrupt silence. Everyone stopped, ears straining for any hint of a challenge from above, but nothing came, nothing, and after a moment, cautious and careful, they began to climb again.

  It must be true, Shikotenka was thinking, they must lose their powers after dark – for if it wasn’t true, then surely their wolves, which the Tlascalans had already observed to possess the most acute senses, would have heard that clumsy fool and raised the alarm?

  Except, of course, they had heard, because exactly at that moment there came an urgent, choking, coughing roar – the by now all-too-familiar sound the wolves made when the white men unleashed them – and suddenly the slopes were alive with the streaking figures of the powerful beasts, their armour glinting in the moonlight, their fangs like rows of arrowheads set in their great, gaping mouths, and a shadowy form leapt from above and bore Shikotenka down on his back in a cascade of furious snarls. Shikotenka heard screams of terror and agony all around as he instinctively defended his face and felt the snapping teeth of the monster sink into his forearm and shake him violently, rending his flesh, spraying hot drool. He stabbed the creature once, twice, thrice in the flanks, but each time the blow glanced off its shining metal armour, leaving it unharmed, until Tree’s huge hands appeared out of the dark, prised open its jaws, snapped its neck with a single mighty twist and smashed its limp body into the ground.

  Shikotenka was scrambling to his feet when he heard the deep reverberating battle cry of the white men and saw a line of them, silhouetted by the moon, as they exploded out of the temple courtyard on the backs of their gigantic and unearthly deer. They came thundering down the hill like some unstoppable avalanche, and crashed into the already devastated and reeling Tlascalans, hacking and slashing with their glinting swords and forcing them back into the ranks below in a stumbling, chaotic, disordered retreat. Behind the riders came the foot soldiers, killing machines clothed in metal, wielding swords, maces and axes, grimly clubbing and impaling and dismembering men, turning the retreat into a shambles and the shambles into a panic-stricken, terrorised rout.

  Shikotenka could only run – as Chipahua was running, as even Tree was running, as all his ten thousand men were running – in a blundering, careening flight from the slopes and out onto the open, moonlit plain below, where the silver figures of the riders, fast as the wind, were already amongst the fugitives, cutting them down. Obedient to a trumpet call from the fortress, they called off the chase and returned to the hill for a brief moment, while the fire-serpents roared and flames belched forth and death whistled amongst the Tlascalans – taking some, leaving others – and then came thundering back, remorseless, unbelievably fast, easily overhauling the fleetest runners, giving no quarter, butchering them without mercy.

  And Shikotenka ran as they all ran, weaving away from the shining riders, dodging and ducking their flashing swords, and the bile of dishonour rose in his throat and tears of shame leapt from his eyes.

  * * *

  Cortés could not rest. Fever burned his brow, chills shook his body, fury churned in his heart.

  In the slaughter of the night attack, hacking heads and necks until his arm grew weary, trampling the foe until blood drenched Molinero to his fetlocks, he had many times sensed the presence of a ghostly rider at his side, a rider with dark eyes and glowing skin and soldier’s hands – Saint Peter himself, emerging from the world of dreams into the world of flesh to urge him on.

  ‘Your work this night is not done,’ the rider whispered when Cortés at last called off the chase. ‘I have given you victory; now I would eat the fatted calf.’

  ‘The fatted calf, Holiness?’

  ‘There are towns nearby you have not yet attacked.’

  It was true. On the previous days of raiding and burning, Cortés had seen and chosen to bypass three towns, one of them very large, all within five miles of the hill of Tzompach.

  ‘Those towns,’ continued Saint Peter, ‘and all who dwell in them, are the fatted calf you must kill and offer up to me.’

  Sudden understanding flooded through Cortés, energising and exciting him. An offering … yes … It was appropriate.

  He stood in Molinero’s stirrups and looked around. Bright moonlight flooded the plain where mobs of Totonac auxiliaries moved amongst the heaped bodies of the Tlascalan dead, looting their feathers and weapons. Alvarado, Velázquez de Léon, Davila and three other cavalrymen sat their horses in a line nearby. Two hundred infantry were forming up in their companies, making ready to return to camp.

  ‘Our night’s work is not done,’ Cortés bellowed. ‘I need a hundred volunteers to help me teach these Tlascalans a lesson they’ll never forget.’

  Alvarado trotted over on Bucephalus. ‘Count me in, Hernán.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Davila, as the other riders followed suit and foot soldiers clustered close, eyes aflame with the lust of killing.

  * * *

  Much later that same day, Sunday 5 September, Cortés led the men back to the hill of Tzompach. The fatted calf had been killed and offered up in the greatest massacre of civilians Spanish forces had yet conducted in the New Lands. It had, he supposed, been a massacre of the innocents, but he felt no shame or regret, knowing he had done the work of God, commanded by Saint Peter himself, and there was no sin in it. Besides, good results had immediately been seen, results he hoped would bear fruit very soon. As he stripped off his blood-drenched armour and clothing, and bathed in the clear icy water of the temple spring, he took it as confirmation of the rightness of his policies that his fever had abated and he felt well and strong again.

  Bubbling with renewed energy, he sele
cted two more prisoners, asked Malinal to give them a strong and passionate message of peace for Shikotenka, and sent them off with the hope that at last his stiff-necked enemy might see sense. Then he summoned Pepillo and dictated the next section of his letter to King Carlos, describing the cowardly night attack by the Tlascalans, the valiant Spanish counterattack that had driven the savages back with heavy losses and, finally, though he chose not to share every detail, the massacre.

  ‘In the hours before dawn,’ he intoned as Pepillo’s quill dipped and scratched, dipped and scratched, ‘I attacked two towns where I killed many people, but I decided not to burn their houses as the fires could have warned other towns nearby. At sunrise I came upon another large town, this time with more than twenty thousand houses. As I took the inhabitants by surprise, they fled their houses unarmed, and the women and children ran naked through the streets, and I began to cause them some harm. When they realised there was no use in resisting, some men of rank came to me to implore me by signs not to harm them any more because they wanted to be my friends and vassals of Your Highnesses. They recognised that they were responsible for not having wanted to serve me, but assured me that thenceforth I would see how they would fulfil my commands made in the name of Your Majesty, and they would be your very loyal vassals. More than four thousand of them then came peacefully and they took me to a fountain where they served me a good meal and told me that the name of the town was Teocacingo. Afterwards I made them understand that they should go to Shikotenka, the Tlascalan Captain, and tell him of my mercy and urge him to accept my offers of peace. To this they readily assented and thus I left them pacified and returned to our camp … ’