The Seven Serpents Trilogy (43 page)

He handed the thorn to me, surprised that I did not hesitate to use it and then to hold my bleeding finger to the sun.

“God fashioned the sun,” I said. “He set it in place and started it moving majestically through the heavens. All life comes from the sun. Nothing lives without it, not even the blind creatures in the dark caverns of the sea. The sun is God's creation. God, in one of His many forms, is the sun. It is proper to greet the sun after its long journey through the night and the gates of hell. The sun is exhausted and needs strength.”

“It is said in the Book, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.' ”

“The sun is not graven,” I said, “and not an image.”

“You have given the matter thought, I observe,” the dwarf said. “And I am in agreement. God is everywhere. Even in me.”

He laughed his croaking early morning laugh and tapped his chest, where, if by chance he had a soul, it might reside.

“And the devil likewise,” the dwarf said.

He had lost some weight during the past dreadful days, but still he looked much the same as he had that morning on the beach, a lump with two legs and two long arms. If the devil was not just an emanation, if the devil had a true and recog nizable shape, then he would appear exactly in the shape of Guillermo Cantú.

“Tell me,” he said, “how you feel about this subject of human sacrifice, now that you have been among the mighty Azteca.''

“How I felt before, my friend. It is an abomination.”

“What about the sacrifice of animals—monkeys, peccaries, deer—instead of humans?”

“I am against this also.”

“But not the pricking of the finger?”

“No, the blood on your finger belongs to you. It comes from your own veins.”

“Yes, it comes from there. Consequently, it belongs to the donor, to the one who gives it. But do you think it really strengthens the sun?”

“It strengthens those who give the blood. That is important.”

The dwarf pondered, one eye on the mare that carried the sacks crammed with gold. “I wonder,” he said, “how the consistory would look upon this.”

“The priests of the consistory sit far away across the seas,” I said, “in comfort, never having met an Indian nor heard a
maman
drum nor mindless thousands shouting their wild, spine-freezing chants.”

I was standing with my hand raised to the brightening coast when a party of Maya came up the trail from that direction. Without speaking, they paused at the cruciform tree, choosing its thorns carefully.

After all had given their salutations to the sun, one of them said to me, “You are a white man. Where do you come from?”

“From Tenochtitlán.”

“My name is Xacal and I hear of fighting in that city,” he said. “We have salt to sell. Should we go to Tenochtitlán to sell it?”

“Sell it in Cholólan,” I said. “Or some other place. There's trouble in Tenochtitlán.''

“Trouble in Ixtlilzochitl also,” he said, pointing toward the east. “There.”

“People dead in the lagoon,” said a young man who had Xacal's yellow, close-set eyes and appeared to be his son. “Many people dead.”

Ixtlilzochitl was the trading center where the
Santa Margarita
lay anchored, at least when we had left her.

I drew a picture of the caravel, using my finger in the dirt. “A big canoe,” I said to the boy. “In the lagoon beyond the river. Have you seen it?”

“Two,” he said.

“Two big canoes?”

“Two,” his father said and drew a picture beside mine. “Two big canoes.”

“Which means that the
Santa Margarita
is still there,” the dwarf said. “The dead men mean that there's been fighting.”

“Did you see the white men fighting?” I asked Xacal.

He cupped his ear, indicating he had only heard of it. I pressed him for other details, but I had difficulty with his dialect and learned little more except that loud noises and black smoke came out of the ships and that one of them had a hole in its side.

Eyeing the mare that carried the dwarf 's gold, Xacal said, “Are you
pochtéca
?” and before I could answer, “What do you trade? I see gold on the back of the animal. Do you like salt? Everybody likes salt. We trade.”

He spoke softly, but underneath lay a threat. One of the party tapped the sack with his cudgel. The sack held a temple bell, which gave off a lively ring. The man tapped the sack once more. Again the bell rang. He glanced at the dwarf and then at me, measuring us. We were white men with a load of gold.

Before the bell stopped ringing, we were in the saddles, moving off down the trail, the three mares close behind. Shouts and rocks flew after us. We did not look back.

Before long we came to the place where we had hidden our ceremonial attire and changed into
pochtéca
garb for the journey to Tenochtitlán months before. Everything of mine was in good shape, the quetzal plumes as beautiful as ever. However, I had left my mask on the
Santa Margarita
and had to borrow Cantú's, a jaguar mask with a sneering mouth and red fangs. I would have preferred to wear the elaborate mask decorated with turquoise, emeralds, and gold that Chalco the high priest had hidden, but we couldn't find it.

“He's come this way and picked it up,” the dwarf said.

“Somebody has. Indians likely.”

“If Indians took it, they would have taken my mask also.”

The dwarf fared less well with his clothes. Yet, elated that at last we were within two short leagues of Ixtlilzochitl, he failed to notice that something with sharp teeth had nibbled on his rear feathers.

We rode hard toward the coast under a hot sun, through clouds of stinging insects.

 

WE FOUND THE
SANTA M
ARGARITA
RIDING SAFELY AT ANCHOR IN THE lagoon, not far from where she lay when we began our journey to Tenochtitlán. The second caravel, oddly named
Delfín Azul—
the one the Indian trader had described—sat on a sandbar a quarter of a mile away, listing to port, the morning sun shining into a broad hole in her side.

Flint Knife, the
nacom
,had spied us from afar. Black and yellow flags flew from our masts—ones I had never seen before, apparently made while we were away. As the longboat bore us across the lagoon, a shot rang out from the ship, fol lowed by a second shot, a series of shots that passed harm lessly over our heads. Flutes, rattles, and drums set up a horrendous clatter.

Flint Knife was on his knees to greet me. Behind him, painted in all colors, bedecked in bangles and feathers, the crew lay prone as I came aboard; with wild mutterings they pressed their faces against the deck.

“It was a ghost we saw on the shore,” the young
nacom
said, sobbing between words. “We thought you dead. I could not believe my eyes when I saw you get down from the horse there on the shore.” He paused, overcome. “Everyone believed Chalco when he told us that you were sacrificed in Tenochtitlán by the Emperor Moctezuma. Everyone except me. I clung to hope.”

“Chalco brought news that I was dead?”

“Sacrificed as a tribute to the war god. He described how brave you were as you lay there on the altar and the knife descended.”

“When did you see him?”

“He came after the rains. With dozens of Azteca carrying jars of
tecuítcal
, the green moss. He wheedled me into taking him to the City of the Seven Serpents and then tried to keep me there, but I slipped away in the night.”

The
nacom
paused, overcome once more. I think he would have jumped to his feet and embraced me, so great was his delight, had I not turned away. As it was, he clasped me around the knees, saying, “God of the Evening Star, Lord of the Twilight, mighty Kukulcán, do not leave us again.”

Watching some five or six paces away, but not on his knees, was a lone figure with his back against the mainmast. At first I took him to be a priest, one of the Dominicans I had seen following Cortés around during the siege in Tenochtitlán. It was possible that one of them had survived the disaster and had fled this far from the battlefield.

I adjusted the jaguar mask, which, because of its small eye holes, was difficult to see through, and cast another glance in his direction. To my surprise, a man some ten years older than I, not an elderly Dominican, confronted me.

From what I could make out, he had a forehead shaped like a turret and a jutting chin—a bigoted Spanish face as white as a fish's belly. I wondered how anyone exposed to the fierce weather of New Spain could look washed out, like a scholar after years spent among books. Yet it was not these things that held my eye. The young man was dressed in the black cassock and violet vest of a church dignitary.

A glare from the sea danced in the rigging and along the deck, changing the shape of everything. I adjusted the mask again. Neither the glare nor the mask had deceived me. No, I was face to face with a churchman. What's more, a bishop!

Taken aback, but concealing my surprise, I asked the
nacom
, “Who is this man? Where does he come from?”

“This man,” the
nacom
said, “came on the ship. It is there on the sandbar with a big hole in its side. Many warriors came also. Twentynine. Sixteen are dead. The others are in chains.”

When the
nacom
went on to describe the battle, I turned to the bishop. As I approached him he muttered a few fervent words in Latin, as if he were fending off not just a feathered figure he had never encountered before, but the devil himself.

His words escaped me—I was surprised that my Latin had become so rusty—but they carried the unmistakable tone of authority. For a moment I was a meek seminarian, confronted by a lordly bishop. Then I recovered myself and looked hard at him through the eyeholes of my feathered mask.

“My name is Rodrigo Pedroza,” the man said. “I am the bishop-designate of the province of Yucatán, sent hither at the instigation of the Council of the Indies, with the consent of the governor general of Hispaniola.”

He said all this in a churchly voice, in clear, graceful Spanish, which by shaking my head I pretended not to under stand. The gold
cascabeles
attached to my mask set up a clatter to bear me out.

I asked in Spanish, “Do you speak Maya?”

“No,” the bishop said, “but since you are a Spaniard I don't need to.” He gave me a searching look and waited for me to reply, to show some sort of emotion—surprise, consternation, guilt. When I didn't he continued, “You cannot be astounded that I know who you are. Everywhere, even in Seville, people speak of the seminarian who by chance has become a god among the savages.”

He cast a scathing glance at the crew that still groveled on the deck, chanting my name; at the
nacom
, on his knees at my side. Unexpectedly, he thrust out his hands. For the first time I saw that they were bound tight with rope.

“An outrage,” he said, as if he expected me to unbind him at once and fall over myself in the act. “A barbarism! Untie me.”

Bishop Pedroza was accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. I let him stand there with his hands outstretched. From the moment I saw his black cassock and violet vest, I had made up my mind that he was an enemy. Even more of an enemy than Hernán Cortés. Cortés was an adventurer in dis favor with both the king and the governor of Hispaniola. But Pedroza, for all I knew, had the full and far-reaching power of the church behind him. I intended to treat him with courtesy, yet mindful that he could be a mortal adversary.

“Why should I unbind you?” I said. “You're a prisoner captured in battle. Fortunately, not dead like the others.”

“Unbound, I can speak as a free man,” Pedroza said.

“For a while, speak as a prisoner,” I told him. “You say you're a bishop. For all I know, you might be a soldier dressed up in a bishop's garb.”

Pedroza withdrew his hands. His long, white face did not change. It was as much a mask as the mask I wore.

He spoke in a quiet voice, avoiding my eyes, which stared at him through the jaguar slits.

“Whatever your role among these savages may be,” he said, “whether it is Lord of the Evening Star or Rider of the Winds—I have even heard you called a god—you remain a Spaniard by birth, a subject of King Carlos the Fifth, and thereby subject to his laws. As well as to the laws and reg ulations of the governor of Hispaniola, set down by him for all those who live within the boundaries of New Spain.”

“On the contrary, I do live within the king's laws and the governor's regulations,” I said, holding back my anger. “You do not. Otherwise you would not be a prisoner on my ship.”

“The battle was an accident,” the bishop said. “It happened because of a misunderstanding, which I tried to prevent and failed.”

“What does he say?” the
nacom
asked.

“He says that the battle was not his fault.”

“This is true. The crew of his ship learned from the Indians in the village that we carried gold. They fought hard to seize it. He could do nothing.”

“Spaniards fight hard for gold,” I said. “For gold first. Then for Holy Mary. Then for the king. Their lives last.”

“These got no gold,” the
nacom
said. “Only wounds and death.”

“Good,” I said. “And the ship, what is the condition of their ship? Can it be repaired?”

“Men are working now.”

“How many days will they take?”

The
nacom
held up ten fingers. “Less, perhaps.”

“Make it less. Half that time. We have none to lose.”

Chafing his wrists against his lean stomach, Pedroza was growing very impatient with us. For a prisoner in a dangerous situation, he had an arrogant tilt to his head. There was some thing that he badly wanted to say, but I gave the
nacom
further instructions, all of them unnecessary, and let the bishop wait.