The Seven Serpents Trilogy (45 page)

“Hostage?” I said. “The thought, I must confess, has never occurred to me. But it's a good one. If worse came to worst and Cortés was about to burn the city, Your Eminence might stay his hand rather than be burned yourself.”

I waited for the bishop to answer, but his face had grown even paler and some emotion too strong for words kept him silent, his eyes fixed upon the wall.

 

TWO DAYS BEFORE HE DIED IN HIS SLEEP, AH DEN YAXCHE HAD composed a message, which was delivered to me that night as I ate dinner. The hieroglyphics were painted on a scroll of the finest fawnskin paper, saved, no doubt, from the days when he was a high priest. There were only two glyphs in all, but the temple drum sounded the hour of midnight before I managed to make head or tail of them.

Ah den Yaxche, his blunt manner made more blunt by the shadow of death, and to the last refusing to address me as “god Kukulcán,” had painted one of the parables in yellow and blue, showing a ruined cornfield, an empty hut, and a fat crow picking at an ear of corn. I interpreted it to mean that a farmer who leaves his land at harvest time will find upon returning that he has been robbed—a clear reference to my recent journey.

The second parable, limned starkly in yellows, reds, and blacks, showed a broad causeway branching into two paths, and a perplexed traveler standing at the fork, trying to decide which one to take. The path on his left was peopled by sleep ing figures, happy beneath a bountiful tree, and beyond them low in the sky stood a warm, welcoming moon. The path on the traveler's right swarmed with fanged bats and eyeless snakes. But high in the heavens shone a gemlike star, bright as a ruby, whose rays touched the earth.

I puzzled over this parable into the night, slept upon it, awakened to it, then in the light of day put it out of mind.

The celebration that had started the previous night grew during the day. People came from distant parts of the island, from the mainland villages of Tikan, Zaya, Uxmal, and from the country of Mayapán. Wild cries and thundering drums beat against the palace walls like a summer
huracán
.

During this time Bishop Pedroza never left his room. Fearful after two days had passed that he had fallen ill, I went to his quarters and found him on his knees in prayer, his meals uneaten, the bed not slept in.

Seeing him there on his knees, hands clasped and pale face raised toward the sky, I was seized by a Christian impulse. Spanish blood joined us together. We were brothers in the faith. We both prayed to Mary, Mother of Christ. In Christ's name I should set him free.

The impulse lasted only an instant. It fled at the thought of Cortés and his army of brigands, who had sacked the city of Tenochtitlán, spreading fire and death among the innocent, who would do the same, if given the chance, in the City of the Seven Serpents. Quietly closing the door, I left the bishop on his knees.

The celebration lasted for more than a week and ended with the sacrifice of twenty-five slaves. I did nothing to stop the ritual, which pleased Chalco so much he made a special visit to the palace to thank me for my new attitude about the rite and to apologize for having deserted me in Tenochtitlán. I accepted both his thanks and his apologies with a nod.

“I hope you don't blame me for what happened there in the mountains,” he said, speaking in a mousy voice through the open beak of his macaw mask, going on at length about his misfortunes.

“Why should I blame you?” I said. “You see me here, sit ting in my favorite chair and in good health and spirits.”

“You learned things from your journey to Moctezuma? You found him a bright and gentle man?”

“Gentle, but not bright. He lived by the stars, but the stars offered him bad counsel and in the end deserted him. You know that he's dead?”

“With sorrow I have heard,” Chalco said, pausing to think. “The army that rides on the back of deer and carries thundersticks that spit fire, have you encountered it?”

I nodded.

“Do you believe that someday it will come here?”

“Someday.” I knew, though I couldn't see the face behind the brilliant feathers of the macaw mask, that Chalco had given thought to this and was already laying plans, plans that would profit by Moctezuma's mistakes. “Someday soon,” I added.

I had learned that after leaving Tenochtitlán and returning to the island, Chalco had spent his time courting the favor of the priesthood, which numbered close to nine hundred. By various deceits and promises of advancement, he had attracted a following of a dozen or more ambitious young priests. They felt that if I won the populace away from the Mayan gods, they would find themselves with nothing to do, no ladders to climb.

The island and the city were threatened. All my strength, I felt, must go into meeting the onslaught of a barbarous army led by a brutal captain, whether they fell upon us in a month or a year. This was no time for a test of power between me and High Priest Chalco and his ambitious cohorts. No time to waste on Christian thoughts. Christ was patient. He had waited for centuries. He would not mind waiting now, or so I concluded.

The dangerous journey to Tenochtitlán had been in vain. All I had learned about the nation that extended for a hundred leagues in every direction, about Moctezuma, its unstable king, to whom a thousand villages paid tribute, who with a single blast from a conch-shell horn could summon half a million warriors to his side—all this meant nothing. Everything I had seen—the fountains and running water, the lagoons blooming with hyacinth, the gardens along the streets and causeways and even on rooftops, the sky alive with feathered kites and flags—everything I remembered and hoped to bring to the City of the Seven Serpents now must be laid aside.

I ground my teeth in frustration and paced the palace floor. In anger, I then began the hateful task of turning a peaceful city into an armed camp.

I called the
nacom
to the palace and instructed him to be gin fortifying the city at once. “In all directions,” I said. “Strengthen the sea walls that have fallen. And devise a plan to protect us from attack by land.”

“How much time to do all this?” the
nacom
said.

“Six months, no longer.”

“But you told the man Pedroza that Cortés's army had been destroyed. In six months' time he cannot find a new army and march to the coast from the high mountains and get into ships and come here, not in six months.”

“Cortés is an inventor of miracles,” I said. “We may feel his hot breath sooner. In six months or less.”

Under Flint Knife's watchful eye, repairs were started on the ruined walls between the city and the sea. In places they were little more than mounds of rubble overgrown by creep ing vegetation. It was close to planting season, so I could not ask the farmers for help as I had before. Instead, the prisoners and slaves were set to work clearing the jungle and putting the stones back in place. With bitter disappointment I watched them leave the site at El Caracol and abandoned my plans of uncovering the series of mounds that lay beyond.

Heightening the harbor wall by two feet and lengthening it on both flanks called for more stones than were lying around. We sent masons to the ancient quarry, used hundreds of years before when the city was built, and cut slabs twice as large as those already in the walls. In the old days, stones had been hauled from the quarry to the building site on sleds. I has tened the operation by introducing the wheel, which for all of their brilliance the Maya had never thought of, or out of super stition never used. Or perhaps it was because some ruler had deemed it wise to give his restless subjects added work. In any event, carts on solid wooden wheels proved to be a vast im provement over sleds dragged by ropes.

The wall devoured stones, and while masons worked in the quarry we sent out carts and workmen to scrounge in the meadows around the palace, where huge buildings that once connected with it now lay in heaps. During this operation, which went on all day and by torches at night, Pedroza con fronted me one evening as I sat down to dinner. I had not met the bishop since the day I left him on his knees, though I had seen him walking slowly through the meadow between the palace and the sacred lake, hands clasped behind his back.

I invited him to join me. He looked thinner than I remembered, and if possible, his face had a paler cast than usual.

“I have eaten,” he said. “And now I would like to sleep. I have not done much of that lately, since the carts began rumbling all night.”

“I'll have your quarters changed to the north wing of the palace,” I said. “It will be quieter there, though you'll have no view of the lake.”

“I'll stay it out,” the bishop said, then paused, and a little color came into his face. He wore the large amethyst ring, which he began to twist. “However, since you are gathering stones for some reason, perhaps you could gather up the ob ject that stands outside my window. Except for this unsightly pillar I would have an excellent view of the lake.”

The object he referred to was really not a pillar at all, but a length of light green malachite, four times as tall as a tall man, carved in the shape of a male organ. Dozens of these fertility statues were scattered about the city.

The bishop backed toward the door. “I fail to see how you can countenance such an obscenity. And on the palace grounds.”

“I'll have it taken down, carted away, and put in our wall,” I said as he disappeared. “It will be gone by morning.”

The wall progressed steadily until the day the bad news came. The road weasels I had sent to Tenochtitlán returned with word that Cortés was busy collecting the remnants of his army and, far from admitting defeat, planned another attack upon the Azteca.

The news spurred us to greater effort. Working hours were increased. Fires were built and men toiled in shifts. Silver smiths laid down their tools, fishermen put aside their nets, farmers deserted the fields, everyone joined in to finish the wall that would hold off the army of Hernán Cortés.

In the midst of all this feverish toil came the rites of spring. I wished to delay them for a week, but at a meeting of the Council of Elders the three old men questioned the wisdom of such a delay. The rites were centuries old, they said; the magic chain should not be broken, lest the gods be outraged and vent their wrath upon the city. I would have won out, however, had it not been for High Priest Chalco.

In a black robe, a jaguar mask with catlike eyes and terrifying fangs that covered his sensitive face, he strode back and forth in front of the throne, jerking his short arms, stopping to stare at me from time to time, speaking in a feline voice not his own.

“The city cowers,” he said. “It quakes. It trembles. All be cause this white man appeared mysteriously out of the east, saying that he was sent by a powerful god and king to rule over all the Indian lands, the Azteca, the Toltéca, the Maya, over this city, over everyone. This white man…” Here Chalco paused to let these last words settle in the minds of the three elders. “This white man,” he repeated, “that Moctezuma to his sorrow mistook for the god Quetzalcóatl, known to us as Kukulcán…” Again Chalco paused. My name hung in the air. “…This white man was driven from the streets of Tenochtitlán by the brown Azteca, humiliated and his army slain. Yet our proud city trembles at the word
Cortés.
And out of fear cannot stop work long enough to greet Xipe Totec and the coming of spring. Shame upon us!”

Two young priests standing to one side of him said, “Shame,” in quiet voices. The three old men whispered to each other. The dwarf crouching at my side said, “
Cuidado
.” I was silent.

A gentle rain was falling, but through the windows I caught a glimpse of Bishop Pedroza walking bareheaded in the meadow. I saw him stoop to pluck a flower, then cast a prayerful look toward the heavens.

Chalco, following my gaze, said, “We worry about a white man, without an army, far off in Tenochtitlán. But here among us—” He pointed to the meadow. The three elders turned to look. “—we have a white man who has been heard to laugh at our dress. At the way we conduct ourselves. And worse, who scoffs at our gods!”

An elder said, “The rites of spring will be celebrated. Is it possible to rid ourselves of the one who walks in the rain without a cloak, who picks flowers, and who scoffs at the gods?”

“It is possible,” said Chalco.

I rose to my feet. “It is not possible,” I said quietly, aware, should Pedroza die, that I would lose my chance of taking the orders of priesthood. “If this man who walks in the rain with out a cloak is so much as touched, I will see that the one who does the touching pays for it with his life.”

A sweep of my hand dismissed the assemblage.

“God forgive me,” I said, “but I wish this Chalco had breathed his last. Will no one rid me of this upstart priest?”

“Sometimes I, too, have this wish,” the dwarf said. “I have had the wish for some time. He, he, he.”

The dwarf spoke in his usual jocular way, yet beneath the simpering words I detected a note that I had never heard before.

 

W
HILE WORK ON THE GREATSTONE WALL WENTON DAY AND NIGHT
, the damaged caravel, which we had towed back from the bay of Ixtlilzochitl, was not neglected. New masts were made. Women set up looms in the square, as they had before, where all could admire their work, and wove new sails, using the best of cotton, blending into them the insignia of Kukulcán, Lord of the Evening Star, a red ball surrounded by a sunburst of golden rays.
Delfín Azul
was not a fitting name for a Maya caravel, but since it brings ill fortune to change the name of a ship,
Delfín Azul
she remained, with a blue dolphin as a figurehead.

I was in dire need of workers. The corn from last year's harvest was running low. Chalco's
tecuítcal—
the nourishing green moss he had brought from Tenochtitlán—had flour ished, but there wasn't enough of it yet to feed the city. To meet the problem of impending hunger I was forced to send the fishermen—some sixty of them—back to sea.