Captain from Castile

by Samuel Shellabarger; Internet Archive

  The picture sheet which he had asked about crossed Pedro's mind. He was beginning to piece things together.

  "I look for you in battle," the Indian went on. "I look for Diego de Silva. When I hear you taken, I turn back from de Silva to save your life."

  All at once de Vargas's eyes burned. He recalled the day long ago in the barranca near Jaen.

  "Cahallero!" he smiled.

  Coatl shook his head. "Caballero Castilian. I hate Castilians; I love my friend. Now we speak no more; we march—fast."

  It appeared that the sacrifice was supposed to have occurred at noon when the sun was at its height, and that the people of Coyoacan would have attended it. Perhaps some were already on the way. Therefore, it behooved the Zapotecs to cross the mountains before the fraud was discovered.

  "In what direction?" Pedro asked.

  "Where the sun goes." Coatl pointed west. "Long march." He held up three fingers. "So many days."

  "But if you could guide us to Hernan Cortes, to Malinche, he would greatly reward you, Coatl."

  "Reward from him!" The Indian's eyes smoldered. Then he folded his arms. "Malinche dead. Castilians dead."

  "Dead?" The word came from the lips of Catana and Garcia as well as from Pedro.

  "Dead. Tenochcas kill him at Otumba."

  Terrible as this news was, it was too much expected to be open to doubt. Solemnly Pedro made the sign of the cross.

  "Now we march," Coatl repeated. "We rest later."

  "The sefiora cannot march."

  "We carry her."

  Meanwhile, the thirty-odd warriors of Coatl's escort had stripped off their ceremonial trappings, rolled them into bundles, and now appeared in the scantier garments of the trail. They carried shield, bow, spear, and knife—evidently a picked troop. Coatl explained that the main body of Zapotecs had returned home after the battle.

  An improvised hammock litter was produced for Catana. A few minutes afterwards, the band, in single file, was winding southwestward through the labyrinth of the Pedregal.

  For a time, Pedro and Garcia walked on silently in the footsteps of their silent guides. One of the chief elements of life, the sense of a goal, even if that goal was death, seemed to have dropped out. At the moment, helpless and purposeless, they could only drift. They were reprieved from death, but life had become fog without landmarks. Behind them lay New Spain, the lost conquest, the dead companions. Before them, cut off in the barbaric world, lay what?

  "How about God now, Juan?" Pedro said after a while. "Suppose you had killed yourself last night. Suppose I had—" He thought of Catana and of what might have been. ''Que dices ahora de Dios?"

  Part Four

  lx;m

  The trail leading southwest from Cuauhnahuac (not yet corrupted into Cuernavaca) entered a world unknown to white men, an unimaginable country beyond the furthest horizon. It was almost impenetrable, a region of bare or forest-clad summits, subtropical valleys, headlong streams, narrow canons; a region rich in precious metals, rare woods, vivid flowers, and wild life; rich too in the secrets of vanished peoples and forgotten civilizations.

  After a day's grueling march from Coyoacan, up and down hill, fording streams and threading thickets, Coatl called a halt among the mounds of a ruined temple half-submerged in undergrowth. Fires were lighted, garments dried, and a ration of maize eaten. Then the Zapotec warriors filled paper-thin reeds with tobacco in token of relaxation.

  Squatting against a fragment of serpent-carved wall, Coatl, who had talked little on the trail, broke silence.

  "Now you are safe, seiior. Tenochcas not follow here." He made a wide gesture with his arm. "This Zapotec country. Welcome to you, and peace."

  Worn-out by the ordeal of the past days and of the recent march, it seemed to Pedro an effort even to voice gratitude.

  "My friends and I thank you, Coatl."

  "Thank him!" exclaimed Garcia, who was massaging his tired calves in front of the fire. "That's pretty pale! When he has worked the miracle of getting us out of hell! By God, Senor Cacique, when I forget what I owe you, call me dog!"

  "Not talk of debt," Coatl grunted. "Welcome in my country." He then added, "Two more days we get home."

  Catana caught Pedro's eye and smiled; but the word home echoed dolefully in his mind. Home! How long, he asked himself, would they remain here? How long had the interpreter, Jeronimo Aguilar, who had been marooned among the savages of Yucatan, remained? Eight

  years—until he grew like them, forgot his own tongue, painted his body, squatted like an ape. Eight years. And that was near the coast.

  Mechanically his fist clenched. "Home, Coatl?" he repeated. "I seem to remember that you did not call Spain home."

  The other exhaled and nodded. "I cannot send you to Spain, seiior. Perhaps someday Castilians come again. I send you to them. Now"— he opened his hands—"now, except here, you die."

  It was too obvious for debate. With the army destroyed, no help remained except the refuge offered by Coatl. Between this wilderness and the coast stretched leagues of enemies bent on offering any white man to the gods.

  "How will you know when ships come?"

  "After while I hear."

  Silence descended. The twilight turned dark, and fireflies showed more vividly among the ruins of the temple. The damp breath of night thickened. Somewhere on the mountain slope above, an ocelot wailed. Pedro thought of Aguilar.

  Two days later, they reached a large pueblo of cubical houses with flat roofs, spilling down from one of the lower ridges to the communal valley land. Other, smaller pueblos appeared on neighboring slopes within a circle of higher mountains. These villages, Coatl explained, were ancient seats of the Zapotec people, the greater number of whom had moved eastward to Oaxaca long ago. Looming above the housetops of the main town stood the tribal temple and, adjoining it, strung out along the ridge, the group of one-story adobe buildings which formed the palacio of the chief. In one of these, complete with its own terrace, azotea, and small, luxuriant rear garden, the Spaniards were housed.

  From the terrace next morning, de Vargas and Garcia gazed northward beyond the checkerboard of roofs at the labyrinth of mountains which they had just crossed.

  "Could you find your way back to Mexico without a guide, Juan?" Pedro asked. "At a pinch, I mean?"

  The big man frowned. "Not easily, comrade, though perhaps in time. It's a fair tangle, this land."

  "Aye," Pedro muttered, "and a cursed long way from the coast." His thought brooded disconsolately on the distance. "Might as well be in the moon." Then, struck by an idea, he added, "But mark you. Did we ask to come here? We did not. Had we any choice? No. Then clearly it is an act of God. To what purpose, ha?"

  Garcia shook his head. "I am an ignorant man."

  "I do not see it clearly myself/' Pedro admitted. "But that there is a purpose, I know—also what we must do first and at once."

  "What's that, comrade?"

  "Make one of our rooms into a chapel. Set up the Gross. Pay honor to Our Lady of Rescue."

  "It's well thought on," Garcia agreed. "We couldn't start better."

  In fulfillment, at least, of the divine purpose which had made them what they were, the three exiles consciously and unconsciously organized their life according to the Spanish pattern. By instinct they put first things first. Since religion chiefly gave character to Spanish life, they were careful in their devotions. Since clothes are the outward token of an inner attitude, it was not long before they called on Goatl's sewing women to furnish them with approximate Spanish dress. Since language determines thought, it was not they who learned Zapotec, but the Zapotecs who were taught Spanish. Since the dissolution of the company did not cancel their allegiance to the King, it behooved them to view this land as a future royal province, assay its resources, and plan for the day of its annexation.

  "You see how it is," said Pedro: "we'll have to watch ourselves. It reminds me of the swamp in Tabasco when our good horses all but foundered that day of the battle. T
he earth of this country sucking us in. It may be years; but we'll keep our heads up. We're Spaniards, and Spaniards we remain."

  In this effort, he was naturally the leader. Except for him, Garcia and Catana, who lacked hidalgo principles, might easily have succumbed. But he kept them to the mark. If Garcia yielded to the charms of native women, he was not allowed to forget that he must baptize before embracing them. Catana, who loved to dance, got a swingeing once when she participated in a stately Indian figure. Weren't the zarabanda and other Christian dances good enough!

  Partly to combat these tendencies, Pedro insisted on teaching his two friends their letters. He got nowhere with Garcia, who could never see the connection between sounds of speech and scratches on bark paper. Catana learned to print her name and to make words after a fashion. But the labor was great and the achievement small.

  To Pedro, chafing at his exile from civilized and military life, it seemed that his companions were much too content: Garcia, because the mines were rich and the girls amiable; Catana, because she had her lover more to herself than in the days of the company.

  "You're like the Lotos-eaters in that romance of Captain Ulysses," he told them once.

  "Who were they?" Garcia asked.

  "They were mutineers. Senor Ulysses, a notable cavalier, was trying to get his company home overseas after a war. He kept in mind his duty to the King. But they touched on a rich land where these lazy cantoneros settled down and went to sleep. It cost the good captain much trouble to pry them loose."

  "Aye," grumbled Garcia, who rejected the point of the story, "you've always got captains and cavaliers disturbing the peace of honest men."

  Meanwhile, the chief of the Zapotecs—Zociyopi in his own tongue, Coatl among the Aztecs—held an increasing place in the minds of his guests. Not only were they dependent on him, but he impressed them personally. They stopped identifying him with other savages and accepted him as an individual. His Spanish became more fluent with practice, so that he and Pedro had frequent talks, which often became personal and intimate. Seated cross-legged on a mat, a tobacco reed between his fingers, Coatl, except for his tawny skin and the turquoise in his lower lip, seemed hardly different from any other gentleman.

  "You ask me why I take trouble save your Hfe, Sefior Pedro," he remarked once when they were together on the rooftop of his quarters. "You say me not like other Indians and heathens you know. I ask why you save my life two times. You not like other Spaniards and Christians I know. Maybe someone cut out our hearts—find them alike."

  Coatl enjoyed recounting his escape from Spain, the voyage to Cuba, the desperate crossing in a stolen small-boat from San Anton to San Juan de Ulua.

  "I see nothing stop me after you give that gold, seiior. I surely get home. You give all you have. I see your purse empty. That bring luck to me—now to you." And noting Pedro's brooding expression, he would add, "You get home too, sefior. Perhaps then you be glad remember these days."

  On another occasion, Coatl asked oddly enough: "Tell me, my friend, what you want in life? You cross Great Water, fight Tenochcas, try take their land, work, suffer, lose everything, almost get killed. Maybe your god come, say, 'What you like me give you, Sefior Pedro?' What you tell him?"

  It took de Vargas back to his talk with Olmedo on the hill near Trinidad. The same question. He thought it over honestly but could hit on nothing truer than the usual answer.

  "Well, I suppose what I want most now is success in the world. As you know, my father is a great cavalier who brought the reputation of

  our family to a higher point than he found it. Starting where he leaves off, I'd like to equal him if I could. That takes doing, for Don Francisco has set me a hard course. Also it takes money. If I could have had my wish, it was to get back to Spain with a good record and a pile of gold." He added gloomily, "That's over now."

  Coatl made a careless movement of the hand. "In Spain, what you do with good record and gold?"

  Pedro dreamed on. "Rebuild the Casa de Vargas. Be decorated by the King. Get a command in the army. A noble marriage."

  With a gust of bitterness, the memory of Luisa de Carvajal crossed his mind. That too was over.

  "You leave the Senora Catana here?" asked Coatl.

  The question brought up a problem that Pedro always put off meeting. Catana did not fit in with the return to Spain. He realized, of course, that sometime the break must come. But until then—

  A long minute passed before he answered, "I don't know."

  "Well," Coatl observed, "you not want much. I think your god give it to you."

  LXIV

  In December these cordial relations with Coatl underwent an odd change. An Aztec embassy, the first in five months, appeared at the pueblo, and the Spaniards kept under cover while their enemies were present. It would not do, Coatl insisted, for the Tenochcas to learn that they had been cheated with regard to the prisoners' sacrifice, and that Captain de Vargas with his companions still lived. The Zapotecs, loosely tributary to the Aztec empire, had nothing to gain by raising an unnecessary issue with their overlords.

  But following the departure of the envoys, Coatl immediately summoned Pedro to his azotea. He wore the circlet and plume of his rank, the embroidered mantle, jeweled earrings and arm clasps. The heavy, graven features expressed an oflEicial attitude. He raised his arm in greeting but for a while kept silent. Without being sure, Pedro sensed embarrassment and chagrin.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  A queer, veiled look crossed the other's eyes. After a moment, he answered: "Senor, we Zapotecs are few leaves on an old tree. Not

  strong, not ready for war. The Tenochcas are many. We guard you from them, you and your friends."

  Pedro nodded. "Yes, of course: we owe you our lives."

  "Now they find out you here. Now they say give us back the white victims you not kill. We kill. The gods hungry. Give them back, or we come in war, burn your towns, take your young men to feed our gods."

  "Oho!" said de Vargas. "Well?"

  Again the shrewd look narrowed Coatl's eyes. "I say no. They leave angry. They mean war."

  Pedro's heart leaped. "Mark you, Coatl, if I can't hold the passes of this country with the men we have, aye, and feed the buzzards with those dogs' carcasses, call me no soldier. On my honor, we'll singe the Aztecs' tails and send them home yelping."

  "You train my men like Spanish hombreSj eh?"

  Pedro hesitated, thinking of the tough, even Spanish ranks. "Juan and I would do our best. At least they'd be trained as compared with the Aztecs, and better equipped. We'll leave them their glass-bladed macuahuitl baubles and get us hardened copper swords of the right shape. We'll get us fifteen-foot lances such as Cortes used in the Narvaez fight. There's a hedge to stop even horses."

  "You say horses, senor?"

  "Aye, horses, let alone the Aztec dogs. Then there's the proper marshaling of the square in support of slingers and bowmen; the management of night attack that our friends from the north don't relish. We'll show them a few sleights before we're done."

  "You make strong the passes?"

  "Not too strong. They must be lured in and trapped."

  Coatl's teeth showed. "Who can match white men! They live to kill. Your eyes happy, senor, at thought of killing."

  Suddenly Pedro found himself remembering Montezuma. Just as then, he had an impression here of something under cover, though he could not define it. Why, for one thing, did Coatl not seem incensed against the Aztecs or pleased at the prospect of defeating them? The smolder in his eyes was directed rather against the bloodthirsty craft of the whites. At the moment, it appeared even to include Pedro himself.

  "Aztecs call themselves warriors," Coatl added. "They children beside you."

  "We do our best," said Pedro dryly. "How long, do you think, before they'll attack?"

  "Who know?" shrugged the other. His vagueness sounded almost indifferent. "Maybe soon; maybe three-four months."

  Pedro and Garcia set themselves
with a will to the work of military defense, in which Coatl gave them every encouragement. De Vargas enjoyed war as an art, and Garcia was a born drillmaster. Officers were picked out and trained in the Spanish tactics. They in turn instructed others. A rough imitation of ordered ranks and evolutions was achieved. Equipment approximating Spanish weapons took the place of more primitive arms. The passes were fortified, and a strategy was worked out.

  But nothing happened. Weeks became months without a sign of impending attack from the north. Except for the fun of it and that various Zapotec warriors, becoming admiringly attached to Pedro, had themselves baptized, there seemed to be no profit or point in these warlike gestures.

  "By the mass, it's queer!" Pedro complained to Garcia. "We're supposed to be training against those hounds of the Valley, but our friend Coatl never mentions them. He talks only about us Castilians—how we do this or that. I sometimes wonder whether the Aztecs made any threats. And if not, what are we stewing for?"

  "Cosas de Indios!" Garcia grumbled. "They're a crooked race. You never quite know what they're up to. But don't worry, I expect the Aztecs won't give long warning. Then, by God's grace, we'll remind them of our dead comrades. I pity the cahron that falls into my hands."

  February and March passed—nine months since the flight from Mexico. Then down from the north in April came not the Aztecs but a trickle of other Indians, wretched, desperate, and exhausted, seeking refuge in the pueblo. De Vargas happened to meet them in the valley below the town, and at first glance he could see that they came from beyond the Zapotec territory. At sight of him and Garcia, however, standing fist on hilt beside the trail, the men cowered and slunk past. Apparently by now every white man went by Cortes's nickname, for they shouted something about Malinche and added other gibberish.