The Seven Serpents Trilogy (25 page)

Ceela did not wait for her grandfather to ask the question. She answered it immediately, but still speak ing to him, not to me.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “in the morning when the sun rises.”

It occurred to me as I sat there that it would be sensi ble to have the Spanish language taught in the lords' school. The conquistadores within a year, two at the most, would make their appearance. If some of our peo ple, the brightest, were able to talk to the Spaniards in their own tongue, it might prove helpful. But who would do the teaching? There were only two who spoke Span ish—the dwarf and myself.

“Your granddaughter,” I said to Ah den Yaxche, “should have new clothes. She must not look like a vil lage drab to the sons and daughters of the noble fami lies. Children can be little snobs about clothes.”

Ceela was not pleased with these words and didn't an swer until prodded by her grandfather.

“You dragged me away in a hurry,” she said with some spirit, “and my other dress was left behind.”

There were three dressmakers in the city. I had them summoned at once, and they set to work taking mea surements, showing different cloths and styles. Peasant girls wore the
kub,
a single piece of decorated cloth with a square-cut opening for the shoulders—the same style of dress as their noble sisters, but of coarse material. I saw to it that Ceela chose the best.

While this was taking place, disturbing news came from the road weasels who had been spying upon Tikan.

It was brought to me by the captain of the Mayan army. The
nacom
was not much older than I; he had reached this pinnacle through his father, who had been the
nacom
before him. He was a vigorous youth, tattooed on both arms and legs, with a nose plug and a jade ring in one of his ears.

“Our weasels,” he said, “arrived early this morning from Tikan. They report that the enemy has stored up hundreds of hornet nests and is now strengthening the walls and deepening the trenches that, except for the harbor, encircle the city.”

“When do they plan an attack?”

“Not for a month,” the
nacom
said. “Now the stars are unfavorable.”

“Stars can mean nothing much to this Don Luis de Arroyo,” the dwarf said to me.

“On the contrary,” I said, recalling that many of his decisions were made by an astrologer, “he's a great be liever in the stars.”

“One way or the other, I think we should waste no time in floating the
Santa Margarita
.”

Nor did we. Early the next morning we left for the harbor, borne on litters with guards marching before us.

A litter as it bobs along one way and another is worse than the deck of a ship on a windy day. It is better to walk, but the dwarf felt that walking was unseemly for a god and for him as well.

A flotilla awaited us, each of the canoes filled with pearl divers. Most of the fog had blown away and white clouds cast shadows on the motionless waters of the strait, which were as transparent as air and the same blue color as the sky. The feathered tufts on the poles that marked the channel hung limp in the windless morning.

We arrived at the wreck of the
Santa Margarita
before noon. The tide was low, which gave us a good view of her through shallow water. She had shifted a little toward the stern since I had last seen her, because of the gold that was stored abaft of midships. Otherwise she looked the same.

Her bow still rested upon the reef, held there by coral, long and sharp as a spear, that had sliced through her bow. Her masts lay aslant the deck in a tangle of lines and rotted sails.

At the foot of the main ladder was the skeleton of Baltasar Guzmán—mossier now than it had been be fore, but upon its chest, held tight in a bony grasp, was the nugget.

The dwarf saw the glint of gold as soon as I did. He gasped and for a moment was unable to speak.

At last he whispered, “Moses in the high mountains,” and turned to me, his voice rising. “You never spoke of this. Everything, but not of gold.”

He then shouted to the pearl divers, calling one by name. When the young man swam over, he pointed to the skeleton lying there beneath us, with fish, like small pieces of rainbow, darting in and out of its ribs.

“Muzo, do you see the man?”

The Indian nodded.

“Bring the thing he holds so tightly to his chest.”

The ship lay in some three fathoms of water and in less than a minute Muzo had reached the deck, made his way to the foot of the ladder, and stood beside the skele ton. He took hold of the nugget, tugged, but could not wrench it free. At last he broke off the hand bones at the wrist and came shooting up to toss them into our canoe.

The dwarf placed his foot on the hand, broke the nugget free, and held it up. It was half the size of an apple, with deep veins turned dark with verdigris, but the surface, worn clean by shifting sands, shone bright in the sun.

Cantú stood staring at the nugget, turning it over and over in his fist. Then he held it out, muttering that the treasure belonged to me. When I refused to take it, he quickly hid it away in his cloak—hid it from whom I do not know.

“I've been thinking,” I said. “It may not be necessary to take the ship apart plank by plank. Perhaps the dam age she suffered can be repaired. She carries a pump. I know because once I helped work it in a storm.”

“Where would it be?”

“I last saw it in the bow.”

The dwarf called to Muzo, who was resting in his canoe, and told him to examine the hole in the bow and look for a pump, which I described as best I could.

The young diver was thin and small, but he had a powerful chest. He stood up in the canoe and began to breathe in great gulps of air, until his chest seemed twice its size. Then he let the air out with a long
whoosh
, tak ing the wind, it was called.

Muzo grasped a rope that was tied to his canoe and had a large stone fastened to one end. Holding the stone, he let himself over the side and sank fast to the ship's deck. We watched him descend the ladder and disap pear.

“Some stay down four minutes,” the dwarf said. “Muzo stays down five.”

There was a tightening of the rope and Muzo's helper let out coil after coil, as the diver worked his way toward the bow of the caravel.

Fish began to dart about. A spotted shark cruised idly out of the hold. Sea dust glinted in the light.

I counted the seconds—one minute, two minutes, then three. The helper still let out coils of rope. He stopped and I counted another minute. There was a jerk on the rope and the helper began to pull it in.

Muzo trudged up the ladder and stood on the deck. Dropping the stone, he shot to the surface, climbed into his canoe, and took a long breath.

“The hole is as big as this,” he said, holding his hands spread apart. “I saw the thing you spoke of, the thing with the snout.”

The dwarf laughed, “He, he,” and would have burst into his little dance had he been standing anywhere but in a canoe.

“The hole we can plug,” I said. “If the pump works after all these months, we can pump the water.”

“But first we should lighten the ship,” the dwarf said. “Bring up the gold.” He glanced in my direction. “Is there more?”

“Yes,” I said, since it could be concealed no longer. “Tons of gold. You'll find some at the foot of the lad der.”

“Bring it out,” the dwarf shouted to the divers, hold ing up Guzmán's nugget for them to see. “All of it!”

Beyond the wreck, clouds shadowed the strait and the island, but when the sun broke through I caught glimpses of the cove where I had lived after the
Santa Margarita
went down—the stretch of white beach, the rocky headland that loomed above it like a sentinel, the cross I had placed there, the clearing in the jungle where the statue of Ix Chel, the goddess of fertility, lay in ruins.

I imagined that everything was unchanged since the day I had destroyed it—the serpent's scaly jaws and forked tongue lay in the dust beside a small skull cra dled in the mouth of a jaguar and a foot that ended in talons instead of toes. One breast was left of all the four, and atop the fragments lay the head of the goddess, her half-closed eyes peering out.

In patches of sunlight I made out the stream winding down from the forest, the meadow where the stallion had grazed, my hut standing high above the beach.

I imagined myself at the door looking in at the walls bright with the pictures Ceela had painted of the stallion running with her on his back under a blue sky among blue trees.

My fire beside the house would be dead now and the ashes scattered. The tracks of the coatimundi would show that he had come to the door and, finding no one, had left.

During my past weeks in the palace of Kukulcán, with the drums beating and the throngs chanting my name, I had wished sometimes in a weak moment to be back again in the quiet meadow, beside an open fire. But now, as I stood looking at the beach and the meadow and the thatched hut, thinking of my life there, I smiled to myself and never thought of it again.

 

T
HE GOLD CAME UP FROM BELOW PIECE BY PIECEUNTIL THE LARGEST
of the canoes was loaded to the gunwales.

Since it was close to midafternoon and nothing else had been done toward raising the ship, I sent divers down to salvage the pump. Would it work after months in the sea? Would the hose be long enough to reach into the hold? If not, how could it be lengthened?

We found it in good order, but the hose too short by some thirty feet. Remembering that hollow-stemmed cane grew in a lagoon at the northern end of the cove, I sent men ashore to cut a bundle of stalks. While they were gone, divers went down and broke off the coral spear that had been driven into the ship's bow.

The men worked until dark at this task. They wished to go back to the city for the night, but to save time I had them camp on the beach and begin work again at dawn.

It took all that morning to cut the ship free. The hole that was left, however, was the size of a man's body. Not only the planking had been torn away, but also two of the oak ribs. The divers covered the hole with a patch twice its size, using mats fetched from my hut, plastered thick with pitch, and set down in a wooden frame.

Night fell as this work was finished, but, doubtful that the patch would withstand the tides, I had the men con tinue by torchlight.

During the time the work went on these Indians never looked at me, at least to my knowledge, never came within two arms' length. They acted, indeed, as if I were not in their midst, although they heard my instructions and obeyed them instantly. It was a strange feeling, this being alone, sealed off from people by a wall of silence.

The canes brought from the lagoon were fitted into the mouth of the hose, into each other, nine lengths of them, then wrapped tight with reeds and sealed with pitch. They reached well into the bilge at the deepest part of the hold.

The pump handle had room on each side for two workers. I thought about taking a place on the first shift to encourage the men, who now were tired. I thought better of it after an admonition from the dwarf. “It is hard work,” he said, “and you'll sweat. Gods, you must remember, don't sweat.'

We started the pump near midnight. One of the hatches leaked and we had to stop to caulk it again. The dwarf made himself a bed on the pile of gold and fell asleep. The men stretched out in their canoes, resting while they waited their turns. Torches shone on the sea and fish of every size, from fingerlings to sharks, swarmed around them.

Divers toiled in shifts. The pump coughed, groaned, and spewed a broken stream of water throughout the long night. The caravel rose slowly, first the stumps of her masts showing, then her rail and hatch covers.

Near midday she began to list from port to starboard, hung precariously as if she were bent upon sinking again, then with timbers creaking floated free. Standing atop his golden pyramid, the dwarf let out a sound much like a rooster's crow, scuttled up the ladder, paused to light a torch, and disappeared into the hold.

We met at the foot of the companionway, where Guzmán's bones were wedged.

The torch shone on a mound just beyond the com panionway. It was as high as the dwarfs head and covered with seaweed. Small crabs, startled by the light, stared out at us from its crevices. It looked like a pile of stones placed there for ballast.

The torchlight caught glints of metal. The dwarf crept forward and parted the trailing weeds, then stood up and faced me.

“
Jesú!
” he whispered. “It's gold. Pieces larger than the melons of Estremadura.”

He called the divers.

“If you remove the gold,” I said, “which will require all our men for days, where do you store it?”

Cantú chewed on his knuckles. He wanted to take the treasure away, to handle it, to sit and contemplate it. He could not bear the thought of leaving the gold behind.

I made up his mind for him. “Leave the gold,” I said. “It will not wander away.”

At the stern of the caravel were the remains of our horses. I counted nine carcasses, which meant that the only horse to survive the wreck was my stallion, Bravo. And that Don Luis was therefore on foot, without a mount.

While Cantú held his torch I counted the skeletons that lay heaped up against the stern bulkhead, as if all the men had tried to escape at once. The entire crew must have huddled there as the sea rushed in upon them, upon all those except Baltasar Guzmán.

The tide ran out. We waited until it ebbed. With help from the canoes, a slight breeze, and an incoming current, we steered the
Santa Margarita
ashore. Good fortune attending us, we careened her on a sandy part of the beach, the patched hole in a position where it could easily be reached. Since the hull lay on its side, at a slant too steep to work on, we had the patch unfastened so that the hole could be used as a quick way to come and go.