And so said all of us. But then, in August, crisis struck and nearly broke us all apart into warring, hateful factions.
19. The Conquistador Who Acted like a Jerk
The trouble was triggered by a racial dispute between Utak and Azurara. Had it not been this it would have been something else, for by now, with the initial numbness of our strange imprisonment somewhat worn off, many of us were so frustrated we were itching for a fight. Deplorable no doubt, but there it is: of us all I think only Tari and Masanva were above such stuff; and perhaps Hyperia, while Othoon (who had still not yet decided to reveal himself in Circle) had the detachment that came from laughing at everything and everyone equally, himself included. In fact it was the fall-out of this crisis that finally persuaded him to join us, briefly, as the Joker of our lunacies… and his fate that turned us to escape.
One August afternoon in a pale blue room in the south block, some nine or ten of us, including Utak and Azurara, were being coaxed by our chaperones to tell our tales to tape-recorders and each other.
As I said, this had been going on for weeks. I and many others had already done our best, but some were recalcitrant and surly, unable or unwilling to speak in daily words or nightly Circle-images. These two had both been among the recalcitrants… but on this afternoon Utak was at last persuaded by his chaperone to tell how, over a thousand years ago, he’d been a ruler-priest at the Mayan city of Tikal, and how a popular revolt had forced him to flee… into Vulcan.
He was hard to understand, not only because of his guttural tongue and alien notions, but also because the more he said the more angry he got, standing and shouting at those of us with white skins.
Azurara understood none of it, for he held that Spanish was the only civilised language, and so refused to learn American. But he did not like Utak to begin with, associating the man with the Aztecs against whom he’d fought, considering him a bloodthirsty pagan cannibal. And after the group was over, with Utak hauled away still bellowing, the Spaniard approached me.
“Gilbert. Why is that fool so furious?”
“It seems,” I said, “that when he fled the ruin of his society he set to sea looking for some White God who had once brought civilisation to the Maya, called Kukulcan, or Quetzal”
“Oh yes!” Azurara laughed harshly. “Quetzalcoatl! It is a very strange thing, but when Cortés first came among those savages in 1519 they all thought he must be this White God, because the year he landed was exactly the year prophesied for Quetzalcoatl’s Return!” He shook his head. “Most peculiar, but it aided us greatly in our conquest, for because of this they were reluctant to resist us when we set out to destroy their demon ways in the Name of Christ! But—what exactly is this savage so angry about?”
“Well,” I said, “he appears to be most disappointed that the White God he finds here and now falls so far short of what he had expected… and also…”—I coughed delicately—“…having learned about the history of his people after his time he is angry at the way you Spaniards came and burned his holy books and, er, raped the land for the sake of gold.”
Yes, there was still some feeling in me about these things. But Azurara ignored it. Again he laughed, his lip curling.
“The fool!” he exclaimed. “He lived five hundred years before we came to “his” shores at all! So what if we burned a few stupid books of primitive superstition? They did not keep to their tenets either! I know about this Quetzalcoatl of theirs! He told them to stop sacrificing human beings—but when we got there the Aztec were tearing out hearts by the thousand, saying it was all for religion when the truth is they wanted a good meal! Disgusting, Gilbert! What has he got to complain about? We brought them their White God! Christ!”
“Evidently he hoped for something better,” I said.
“But we brought them Jesus Christ!”
“Yes… but perhaps it was… our Christ…”
“Gilbert, I don’t understand you at all. You carry your English Dissent too far! Christ is Christ, and Mary his Mother… and if that Egyptian woman tells me once more that her Isis and Horus are the model for Mary and Jesus, I swear I’ll take a crucifix and throttle her with the chain! As for these Moderns with their completely cynical atheism, the stake is not good enough for them. They are all very lost, Gilbert. It shows in their eyes—don’t you think?”
“Bernardino,” I said, “I think we are all very lost.”
But he was not convinced, and that was only the start of it. For Utak’s ire was well and truly aroused, and that night, for the first time, he burst into Circle with a storm of such vivid wild imagery that I was made utterly dizzy. It was by far the strongest sending any of us had yet put out or received, and its essence was the tale he’d told in group that afternoon:
Pyramid-temples, rain-soaked jungle, the fields in the clearings ablaze! There’s blood on the stones and a great hue-and-cry, with men in bright bird-feather robes fleeing or desperately fighting a naked mob! Then abruptly, with sharp sword-like mind and sense of earlier time, I Utak stand by night atop a pyramid, on a small platform above the uppermost chamber, high above the great city of Tikal! I am agitated! For many haab-cycles now we have kept back the clamouring jungle, but for how much longer? We must know! I must calm myself! With feather-robe about me I study the stars and mark how the wanderers have moved since the moon last died, I move numbers in my mind and calculate, for every number has its own god-face; some benevolent, others not so, each demanding a different sacrifice so that balance is maintained. Some want fruit, others, reeking hearts, or virgins in the well. Of late, nothing but Bad Numbers; we have responded correctly and taken many prisoners, but the people tire of war and accuse us of taking the brains and best cuts for ourselves. Can’t the fools understand? We must hold chaos at bay! We must build higher or fall into the terrible empty Zero! We must count, and calculate, or the Jungle will take us all again; Time will desert us and leave us frozen! Count! Measure Time by the wandering gods, find the Number for tonight! Count by tzolkin with 260 days, and by haab with 365, and by 52 haabs that combine the two and net us Time more tightly! And remember by the Long Count! 4113 haabs since 4 Ahau 8 Cumhu when HE left our Big Head ancestors and returned east in the Time of the Wind-Sun! He brought Number and Proportion but only a few would listen, so he left, promising to return, promising destruction by wind for the fools that would not hear! And where are those Big-Heads now? Lost in the Jungle, little men who can’t count, who can’t remember anything—turned into monkeys as he promised! The wind blew them down into monkeys! Must this happen to us too? Will he return in time? The stars say nothing! Three-quarters through Sun of Fire, still a thousand haabs more—enough to finish us! The fools! Don’t they see the danger? The reservoirs are dry, there are too many of us, the breadnuts bear no fruit, the ground’s too tired for the second crop! Where are you? You with your beard and white skin, and the discs on your head, and your Numbers of Power—where are you? Kukulcan! Huemac! Quetzalcoatl! You Bringer of Flying Thought who unveiled the mind’s subtle Serpent-Power to us—where are you? Must we lose everything? What did we do wrong? Kukulcan! Do you exist? Is our history a lie? Oh, not so, not so! Utak, a dark serpent in you thinks that! Cast it out! Out! But…
… riot, outcry, the city in flame, the people revolt! The mob rages through the streets, the temples, and the cries rise up! Kill the priests! Kill those who kill us with their wars and taxes, who keep the best for themselves! Yes! Yes! You fools, yes, do it! Break the Numbers! Let Time out! Destroy it all in one mad night! Now up the steps you surge to kill me, but the steps are steep, you slow down—and I plunge to meet you, and drive through you, and I break past you into the Jungle, with nowhere else to go! O Great Feathered Serpent, protect me from your little creeping brothers! The city flames bright behind me. Tikal the Glorious is dead—but Utak is not yet dead! I will not drop! There is a Perfect Number, yes, and I’ll seek it in the east! Kukulcan, I will find you…
… so fugitive I came to the sea, and took a boat e
ast past many isles until no isles were left, starving and thirsting and madly chasing the scent of the Perfect Number; the Number I had to find and speak aloud to call the White Saviour out of the Rising Sun before it was too late and the Maya forgot everything!—mad, mad, mad I was! The Number to answer all questions! On and on I went, numbers spinning incessant in me, faster and faster and round and round and on and on… into the explosion, the fire, the sea, the imprisoning by white devils in the deep… and now this hole in hell (blackness, electric light, gibbering white-suit faces), these tortures and mad practises (operating table, scalpels, masked faces, paper sheets of the letters of the American-English alphabet)—they want explanation in this American language of what cannot be explained in it—they want me to bow to their gods, to study quantities without qualities, to master their fast-counting machines—they tell me my people are dead, my temples crumbled, my books long-destroyed by a “holy” white man called Landa! Hah! The “white god” who came and obliterated us now wants me to tell him what he destroyed! His history tells how he came and conquered with disease and the sword. White God! And I invoked you! Mad at sea I invoked you, and the Castillas came and killed us and married us, and the English came and killed us and killed us, and Time escaped, and I am seized and shaken through a thousand haabs to the end of Sun of Fire! But they do not acknowledge the ages! They despise what went before, and do not see that Number is of Spirit, not Quantity alone! Now I lie here and play with little numbers in their machines, and they think me demoralised into their ways—but Number I hold in my mind, and every night I calculate! I calculate! I know what Time this is! I know that the Nine Fifty-Two’s are almost over! And the evil time is at an end! And the false white god in turn must bow! And I am a willing sacrifice on America’s altar! For I sought this, though I knew not what I sought! And now I know I was in error, for Time cannot be chained! For nothing stops! And change is unceasing! And I am Utak! A fool who loves Number! A fool who sought to freeze Time for fear of being frozen! And here I am among you all! And is there not a great joke in it?
And when the flood of all this ceased there was a great stunned silence in Circle, for the power of the images that suggested all this had us quite overwhelmed. Almost all of us were ready to leave it there for the night—but Azurara was not. When Utak’s flood poured over him he knew he must reply immediately for the sake of the dignity of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, European Civilisation, and, not least, Himself, for he felt personally demeaned and insulted by what this Indio had to say against the White Race.
So, almost as soon as Utak was done, just as most of us were preparing to slip out of Circle and into sleep, Azurara struck angrily back, surprising all of us, for he had never sent before.
His initial surge was violent, passionate, like a brutal bull butting at the half-closed gate of my mind. This uncouth approach irritated me, but I realised it was somebody new, and let in whoever-it-was. And in the next instant I was amazed by the grandiloquent appearance in my mind’s-eye of his name, all of it—SEÑOR BERNARDINO DE OVEIDO DE AZURARA—spelled out in large golden letters, the gold rimmed with ruby-red against an azure background, the whole being framed by elaborate green-and-brown foliated scrollwork. It was not so much the haughty self-insistence that amazed me as the artistry involved in this imagining! Clearly our conquistador had hidden talents! I was amused, but wary, sensing the approach of trouble—and trouble was what we got.
After this introduction his first image was neutral enough. Our proud Castilla showed himself in shining light armour, astride a fine black stallion on a hilltop, hand shading eyes against the setting sun as he surveyed the deserts and mountains and forests he’d come to claim for Spain. But then his anger took over. His subsequent images were confused, blurred—but clear enough for his purpose. In rapid succession he sent pictures of ugly stunted naked redmen hacking dead bodies to pieces which they roasted and ate; of pyramids with miles of captives lined up awaiting the tearing-out of their still-beating hearts by priests who all had Utak’s face; of huge piles of skulls in city squares; of Spaniards crossing themselves in disgust; of defeated savages bowing to the Cross and…
Of a sudden his sending was interrupted and overwhelmed. With a fierce and furious blast Utak blotted Azurara out of us and imposed his reply; he sent an image of Azurara crucified upside-down on a bloody cross; he sent pictures of cruel Spaniards raping Indian women, disembowelling children, burning men alive… and within a few seconds Circle was in chaos, with angry protest flying in all directions… until without warning Tari used her greater power, showing us all a knife that sliced through all this, telling us to shut up.
We did. We slept, uneasily.
Next day the crisis got worse.
In the afternoon the same group of nine or ten of us was brought together in the same South Block room as the day before. The tension was apparent to our baffled chaperones from the moment they ushered us in, Utak and Azurara glaring at each other, and Coningham, Herbie, Hyperia, Fernandez the Cuban, myself, and Jim Guerrero all obviously unhappy. Only Tari seemed her usual calm self. And before we could even sit down round the table, before anyone could turn on the tape-recorder or get a word in, Azurara was loudly demanding his chance to tell the tale which thus far he had refused to give—and, turning to me, he insisted that I and not Fernandez should be his interpreter. I saw disaster ahead and began trying to argue him out of it. Ernstein, learning what was demanded from Azurara’s Spanish-speaking chaperone, told me bluntly to “do it and stop wasting our valuable time.” I would have argued with him too, but Tari caught my eye and nodded very slightly. Later she said it was a risk we had to take: the more openly our spleen came out, the less reason our captors would have to suspect that much of this ugly passion had arisen in a manner unknown to them.
So, glumly, avoiding Utak’s glare, I set about the unpleasant business of translation as Azurara angrily told his tale:
“I am Bernardino de Oveido de Azurara!” he began, standing, staring about as though we were all his enemies, so impatient that he gave me hardly any time at all to tell what he said. “My blood is of Castile, my emperor Charles, my salvation Holy Church, my profession soldier! My first action was in the Year of our Lord 1527, when I went with the Imperial Army to ensure Rome’s continued allegiance! After this I went out to join the armies of Cortés in Mexico, the pacification of those Aztec heathen being not yet complete! And I can tell you our work was cut out, to destroy their bloody demonism and teach them the Mercy of the Lamb. During those years I saw the most frightful sights! I saw towers made of uncountable numbers of skulls cemented in lime, and piles of skulls in the plaza of Xocotlan numbering over one hundred thousand, and racks of skulls in Tenochtitlán numbering one hundred and thirty-six thousand! One hundred and thirty-six thousand! Yes! Yes! As counted, skull by skull, by Tápia and Gonzalo de Umbria! What were we to do but rid the land of such abomination? Yes! And we…”
It was then that Utak, understanding the drift if not all the words, abruptly stood and interrupted my stumbling translation:
“Bearded ‘white god’ was not Kukulcan!” he snapped across the table in Azurara’s reddening face. “Just greedy white man with gun! Now he says he is good, we are bad; he wants Utak to want Ph.D. In Pure Mathematic! Wants Utak in immunity-suit! We all prisoner here! Your doing, Spaniard Castilla—and yours, English!”
Fire in the Abyss Page 20