The Seven Serpents Trilogy (52 page)

“The city is quiet,” he said. “I sent Doña Marina ashore at dawn. She returned with an interesting story.”

My head was bursting. I could not focus my eyes on anything in the cabin.

“What I am about to relate,” Cortés said, “is important. You miss it at your peril. Are you listening?”

“I listen as well as my head permits.”

“You are fortunate to have a head. Alvarado was instructed to bring you here alive, but one of his aides lost his wits and almost, nearly…”

Cortés had not come alone. I made out the figures of two men, one of them carrying a lantern, the other, a chain slung over his shoulder. The lantern light hurt my eyes.

“Again I remind you to listen,” Cortés said. “Doña Marina went to the temple at dawn. She was very helpful. She talked to the elders. She told them that you, the god Kukulcán, had left the island as you had left it once before, long ago. And that you would return, not in your present guise of a tall, blond youth, but as an elder, wise with the experience of age.”

The man dumped the chain he was carrying. It was heavy and made a clatter. His companion turned up the lantern, put it on the floor, and stepped away to avoid the heat.

Cortés said, “So you need not worry about the welfare of the Indians. They are in my care and will be treated kindly, as I treated the Indians of Tenochtitlán.” He spoke with feeling, as if he really believed every word. “Except for those that deserved punishment.”

He waved a lacy handkerchief, heavy with scent, under his nose, then called to the guard, who came forward with his lantern and held it at arm's length, close to my face.

“Before when we talked,” Cortés said, “I asked about Bishop Pedroza. You replied that he had been here on the island but had disappeared. You said that if he were dead he would be with the saints. An evasive answer. You also said that you would be pleased to help me find him. Where, señor, shall we look? Where shall the search begin? Here? Now?”

I winced and turned away from the searing heat. “Ask the high priest. Ask Pital,” I said. “He will know.”

The man at the door picked up his chain, sauntered across the cabin, and stood behind Cortés.

“This high priest,” Cortés said. “Where is he?”

“In the temple. He is always there. He lives there,” I said.

“Hold the lantern closer.” Cortés bent down to examine my hand. “I observe,” he said, “that you still wear the amethyst ring.”

The lantern came closer. Big and made of iron, it burned my flesh.

“Pedroza's ring!” Cortés said. “I see the stone is beveled where it meets the band. And etched with a cross.”

His voice sounded from far off, from outside the cabin. I tried to answer, but choked on the words.

“The iron fist,” Cortés said. “Bring it. We'll get an answer.”

I remember that the guard dropped the chains, that he felt around in his tunic, then passed something to Cortés. I remember that I tried to make an unyielding fist but failed. The iron hand clamped shut on me.

I remember nothing else until later when it was night again. I wasn't sure whether it was the night of the second day or the third.

It must have been the pain that brought me awake. My arm throbbed with pain, my whole body throbbed, but my hand was on fire. Then vaguely I began to wonder if I still had a hand. People who had lost some part of their body—an arm or a leg or a hand—felt at first and even later that it had not been lost, that it was there yet, waiting to be used.

I reached down and felt around. It was there, twice the size of my other hand, still doubled up into a hard, unyielding fist. On my finger was the amethyst ring.

Through the deadlight I could see a storming sky. Rain beat on the cabin roof and ran in the scuppers. Drops of water were falling on my bunk, one slow drop at a time, from a seam overhead.

I struggled up from the bunk and, finding that I could walk, went to the door and put my ear against it. I heard nothing except the running water and a stiff wind in the rigging. Then I opened the door a crack.

The catwalk leading into the cabin was deserted, as was the deck below. But after a moment I heard voices. I shut the door and went back to my bunk. By the feeble light of a lamp swinging in the gimbals, I noticed a tray of food that someone had set on the floor while I was asleep. It looked gray and old and turned my stomach.

While I was sitting there, perhaps an hour later, in pain and fear, knowing that Cortés and his bullies would return at any time that suited them, with a rush of wind the door suddenly opened, then quickly closed. Doña Marina stood there, her long hair wet and windswept. She held her fingers to her lips in silent warning.

She said, “Do as you are told, señor. Guards are on the deck. They are everywhere except by the stern. Ayo is by the stern with a canoe. Ayo is the one who took Don Luis and me across to the mainland. That was the night we fled. In the corner behind you is a crawl-through. It leads to the rudder.”

I started to speak. I wanted to ask a hundred questions.

“Go,” she said. “They are coming back for you. They will be here before the night is over. They have a place for you where they can hang you upside down by your feet. Cortés has found the bishop's body, and he is very angry. He is an grier than I have ever seen him.”

Again I started to speak. She had gone. I watched her run along the catwalk, climb down the ladder, and disappear in the rain, her long black hair streaming.

I closed the door. I stood there, unable to move. Moments passed. I roused myself, fearing that by now the Indian and his canoe would be gone, and found the crawlway—I knew where it was because Cortés's ship and the
Santa Margarita
were built alike. It led to a cramped space, mostly taken up by the arm that worked the rudder. Where it was attached to the rudder, below the gudgeon that it turned upon, was a space large enough to squirm through. The broad face of the rudder was strapped with iron bands. On these slim projections I must lower myself.

The rain had lessened but the wind blew strong. Grasping the rudder's edge, I climbed out on the first of the straps. I saw nothing below except black water. The canoe could be hidden under the ship's counter. It might have gone.

Lowering myself one strap at a time, I had gone only half the distance when a gust of wind swept me into the sea. I went under and after an endless time came up. A hand reached out of the darkness and clutched my hair.

A frightened voice, which I recognized as the voice of the young priest Ayo, humbly said, “I beg your forgiveness, Lord of the Wind of Knives, for grasping you in this unseemly way. But I fear that you will drown unless I do so.”

“Hold on!” I shouted.

Inching along on his knees, a helper appeared out of the gloom, and among the three of us I managed to scramble over the side.

Ayo took up his paddle. “We cannot stay here,” he said. “Where, Lord of the Evening Star, do you wish to go? In which of the four directions?”

I sat silently in the bottom of the canoe, bilge water sloshing over my legs, aware that any moment we might be discovered, yet powerless to decide what I should do. There was a chance I could rally the warriors and drive Cortés from the city. Perhaps I had more than a chance.

“What has become of my warriors?” I said.

“They are scattered,” the young priest said. “When the
nacom's
body toppled into the sea, they lost spirit. When you fell on the deck and lay quiet, as though you were dead, they laid down their weapons.”

“I will ask them to take up their weapons again.”

“The white soldiers roam the city. They ride around on big deer, carrying thundersticks, with big dogs running along be side them.”

“I can gather warriors. They outnumber the white soldiers. They will answer if I call them. We will gather in the jungle secretly.”

“It is too late for gatherings.”

“Why?” I said angrily. “Are you carrying on my feud with Chalco? Are you my enemy?”

“I have always been your friend,” Ayo said, hurt by my words. “Otherwise, King of the Wind of Knives, I would not be here in the storm, in danger of my life.”

Rain was falling again. The city was a vast black shadow. A single fire showed on the god house roof.

“As a friend,” I said, “you doubt that the warriors will answer me?”

“You can see that the streets are deserted,” Ayo said. “The citizens are hiding. Farmers have gone back to their farms. The temple fires are out, all save one. The people mourn.”

“They have much to mourn. Flint Knife's death. My wound ing. The temporary loss of the city. This and more.”

“Yes, much, but it is your leaving that truly grieves them.”

“I haven't left. I am here, waiting.”

“We are all waiting,” Ayo said, “and it is a bad thing. Let us go away from the ship and take our chances elsewhere.”

We moved out into the channel against the tide, slowly be cause the canoe was heavy—fashioned as it was from a hol lowed log—and half full of water. I began to bail, using my good hand.

“The people grieve because they think you have left the island,” Ayo said. “They thought you were dead when they saw you lying on the deck and you did not move and were carried away. They thought that the white men had hidden your body. Then Ceela Yaxche went to see the three elders and high priest Pital. She is called Doña Marina now. And she has changed. She is no longer a Maya. Now she calls herself a Christian woman and has a string of beads with a cross around her neck. She is different now, very important, but she is still a Yaxche and my cousin. She said to them that you had not been killed. You were alive. Then after three days…”

“I was on the ship three days?”

“For three days and three nights,” Ayo said. “Then Ceela told them that you had disappeared. In the middle of the night you had sailed away on a snakeskin raft, like the raft you had when you left before. Only this time you said that when you came back you would be in a different form. Not young as now. You would be an old man with much experience who would bring them many beautiful gifts.”

We moved up the winding channel to the entrance, past the first of the anchored ships. We were close enough to be hailed. We didn't answer. A musket shot struck the water behind us, but we did not stop. By the light from their stern lantern, I caught a glimpse of the young priest. His looped earrings glit tered. His face was serious, and when I looked at him he averted his eyes.

“Where is the snakeskin raft?” he said. “In the cove by the volcano?”

“You think that it is time to go?” I said.

“Three days now,” Ayo said. “The night they carried you away, there was a great fire in the volcano. Seven fiery flowers burst out of its mouth, one after another. They filled the sky. It was a sign to us all, given by you, Lord of the Winds.”

I sat in a canoe within sight of the city, injured but alive, yet to the priests who read the signs of the fiery flowers and the people to whom they were reported I had sailed away as I had done before, long centuries in the past. Even to the young priest kneeling scarcely two arm's lengths from me, I was only a shadowy presence.

The fire on the god house roof was dying out. Gray shadows covered the white stones of the terrace. Only a short time ago—was it two years or three?—I had stood there with Cantú the dwarf, looked out upon the ruined city, and dreamed of gleaming temples, of a port that sheltered caravels from all the ocean seas, of high walls built to withstand every foe, of treasures wrested from the tyrants of a hundred towns.

We passed the last of the enemy ships. The fire on the god house roof had died out. The city was now dark. The only light came from far away, from the burning crest of St. John the Baptist, whose name I had used and whom, in pride and lust, I had failed.

 

W
E RAISED A SAIL WHEN THE ENEMY SHIP FELL ASTERN AND REACHED
the coast at dawn, after a stormy night. Having seen this part of the coast in the past, I chose a sheltered place to land, much like the cove where I had been tossed on the beach years ago in the wreck of the
Santa Margarita
.

“The snakeskin raft?” Ayo said as we parted company. “Do you wish me to wait until it comes?”

“It may be days,” I said.

He took a handful of cacao beans from his gown. “You may need these on your journey,” he said.

I was about to refuse them, then thought better of it. I was no longer a god. Wherever fate took me, I would need money.

“I always planned,” I said, accepting the dark little nuts, “to make money out of gold, as they do in Spain. Coins they call them. Ducados, pesos, castellanos.”

“You can do this when you return someday,” the priest said.

“There are many things to do if I return, but this will not be the first.”

Ayo bowed, touching his forehead to the sand. He got into the canoe and put up the sail. Only then did he wave farewell. I watched him for a long time, until he disappeared in the sun.

I stood on the shore alone. The sky had cleared. Heat came out of the jungle in breathless waves, and already the sun shimmered like brass.

On the far horizon St. John the Baptist glowed red. As its fiery crest sent forth clouds of smoke that drifted down upon the city, I was assailed by a bitter thought: if only it would erupt and bury the island beneath a mountain of burning lava. Yes, all of the island—the jungle and the bay where the Spanish caravels were smugly anchored, triumphant Cortés and his captains. Yes, the whole ungrateful city itself—yes, and the thousands who had witnessed my humiliation. All buried deep beneath mountains of fire!

I stood for a time, gazing about at the unfamiliar beach and the jungle that came down to meet it. I was hungry—from what Ayo told me, I had not eaten for three days and nights. I saw nothing that was dry enough to use for a fire and noth ing to cook if I had one.