The Seven Serpents Trilogy (56 page)

The artists couldn't keep up with the orders I brought in. We ran out of feathers, and Zambac went off with a caravan of fleet-footed porters to purchase more. The porters returned before he did, with news that the warrior, the one who had visited Petén and left his lame animal, had sailed into and out of the harbor while they were in Quintana. To my questions they replied that he had sailed northward, his men saying that they were on their way to Vera Cruz and Tenochtitlán. It was welcome news. At last I could put Hernán Cortés behind me. At last!

Zambac returned soon afterward, accompanied by two dozen Quintana porters loaded down with more feathers. He was in high spirits and full of new plans.

“There was Zambac,” Zambac said, thumping himself on the chest. “There he was looking at the most wonderful feathers ever seen—macaw, tanager, hummingbirds blessed by tails three feet in length, doves, crested parrots, seven egrets, seven quetzals of a beauty never surpassed. And cheap. Cheap, sir! Then Zambac remembered…”

He was speaking of himself as someone else, as a third per son, to lessen the effect upon me of bad news, I presumed.

“Then Zambac remembered that he had not shared our profits since the day the business began. And he said to him self, this must be talked about the day he returns to Petén. The hour, perhaps.”

“So you bought the beautiful feathers,” I said, amused.

I was in no need of money—I never got used to thinking of cacao beans and snippets of tin as money. I lived comfortably in a lean-to located at the back of the courtyard. I ate my meals with Zambac and usually overate—he could consume a small turkey without help. At dawn I walked out to the plaza, where people were on their knees praying before the stone horse, waiting for sunrise. Sometimes I joined them in their rites to the sun. This period, I think, was the happiest of my life in the land of the Maya. I had nothing. I wanted nothing.

“And, sir, we will dispose of them at beautiful prices,” Zam bac was saying. “In places you have not been ever. Like Tikal. Like Copán. Even as far as Coclé. And the places on the sea—Homoc-nac-kaknab, where the sea boils yellow.”

We were forced to buy a room across the way to store our feathers and hire another artist to fashion them into cloaks. We branched out into headdresses, which proved to be more profitable than the cloaks, since they required less work. With two items to sell and our customers at a distance of a day or more from Petén, I was on the trail much of the time.

Before the summer rains began, I journeyed to Tikal, three days' hard travel to the south. Tikal—from what I had seen and heard from travelers—had been the largest of the Maya cities, reaching out for a dozen leagues in all directions.

It was now mostly a jumble of mounds and ruins, like the City of the Seven Serpents. But in a vast central plaza, situated between two towering heaps of stone that had once been tem ples, people from the surrounding jungle met to sell things and to worship before an effigy of coiled snakes.

The bustling settlement had a horde of black-robed priests, as blood caked as those in the City of the Seven Serpents, many lords, and a powerful cacique, Ah Machika. On the morning I arrived in Tikal I saw him striding through the plaza in a feathered robe and plumed jaguar mask, a stiff, impressive figure attended by a retinue of slaves and guards. I met him soon afterward as he sat on a stone slab in one of the ruined buildings, holding court among a crowd of petitioners and wrongdoers.

My turn to be heard came last, just after Ah Machika had banished a young man from the settlement for stealing a bowl of corn cakes and sentenced a woman to have her hair shorn off for meeting the eye of a traveler, a stranger she had not seen before.

Others had approached him on their knees, and I did the same. But before I had crawled halfway toward him, he mo tioned me to stand. He removed his mask, revealing a typical Maya head—a long, heavy beak of a nose thrusting out from a slanted brow, the result of having it squeezed between boards as an infant. But his eyes, instead of being crossed in the fashionable mode, stared straight at me, little pieces of ob sidian black as night and cold.

“I have heard words about you,” he said in a rumbling voice that befit his size. “You are here to sell me something I do not want.”

“No, I have come because I have heard of you, as you have heard of me, honorable cacique. To see for myself the man who is known everywhere, as far away as the Isle of Petén, for his kindness and generosity and a mind sharp like a serpent's tooth.”

I had heard these same compliments when I was Kukulcán. I had spoken them in Tenochtitlán to the Emperor Moctezuma. They had impressed me and also Moctezuma, but they did not impress Ah Machika. He stared at me with his black eyes.

“I had news from people that you were tall,” he said, “and I saw a tall man in my thoughts. But you are taller than a man. You are tall like a tree.”

I had a suspicion that the cacique considered me a freak, as others had before him, and that as such I was about to be offered inducements to remain in the village of Tikal. My sus picion was partly correct. Before I left the next day, with an order for two hummingbird cloaks trimmed in the silky fur of araguatos, red-bearded howling monkeys, the cacique in an elaborate ceremony made me a lord of the realm and prom ised me fabulous gifts should I return.

“This city is where the gods have stored their gold. Only here in Tikal,” he said. “You are a white man, and you will know what to say to the white men when they come here and ask for gold. As they have done elsewhere.”

“You know about the white men?”

“I have heard.”

“About Quintana?”

“Yes.”

“About Cortés, who came to Petén and burned the tem ples?” “Yes, about Cortés,” the cacique said. “About him I have heard much.”

 

N
EAR THE END OF SUMMER, WHEN OUR STORE OF FEATHERS BEGAN
to run low, Zambac departed for Quintana. After he had been gone for several weeks, a runner brought word from him that he had found the warehouses bare—the few feathers to be had were of an inferior quality, mostly from small, dull-colored parrots.

During the summer, in the jungles north and south of Panama, there had been a series of fierce hurricanes, each more devastating than the one before. Fruit trees had been leveled. Insects swept away. Flowering bushes ripped from the earth. Struck down by the horrendous winds or starved by lack of food, birds perished by the millions. A meadow had been seen where a flock of hummingbirds lay in a gray carpet, rot ting in the sun.

One bright morning, a few days after the runner appeared, Zambac returned empty-handed except for one small, pathetic bundle of parrot feathers. But to my amazement, after he had washed off the grime of a week's journey and slept soundly through the afternoon, he came to the supper table that night showing no signs of disappointment. He sat down and took up his knife, cut a slab of iguana, which he doused on all sides in a pyramid of salt, maneuvered the meat into his mouth, and thoughtfully began to chew, meanwhile smiling at me across the table.

Zambac was a happy man—he even woke up in the morning with a smile. As the day progressed, the smile broadened, but on this night it seemed broader than usual.

“We cannot make feathered cloaks without feathers,” I said. “And it will be a long time before we can buy more.”

Zambac counted out the twenty days of the Maya month from Imix to Ahau. Then he added up the months until he came to a
tun
, 360 days. Then he doubled the
tun
and held up two fingers, which brought the total to 720 days in Spanish numbers.

“A long time,” I said.

“Long,” he said, and called to a servant to bring him more salt. “Long.”

“Long enough to starve,” I said.

He nodded, cut himself a second slab of meat, and went through his ritual of dousing it with the salt the servant brought. Torchlight shone on his forehead, which now began to show a fine coating of sweat.

“What plans for not starving did you bring back from Quintana?” I asked him.

“I have many plans from Quintana,” he said between chews. “But only one shines out like a bright star in the sky.”

He finished his mouthful and took a draught of mild
balche
wine. Then he sat back and fixed his one good eye on my amethyst ring, glowing like a crystal flower in the light from the torches.

“It is very difficult, this plan. It has more points than ten porcupines,” he said. “You can get yourself stung with this plan. Both of us, but you mostly.”

He rinsed his mouth with
balche
and spat it out. He glanced at the iguana briefly, then his eye again fixed itself on the amethyst. During the time I had lived in Petén not a day had passed without some mention of the ring—its beauty, how it came into my possession, its worth, on and on. He was ob sessed with the amethyst ring.

“Down below in Quintana,” he said, “the first day I was walking in the market looking for feathers—the two women do well in your stalls making hats, by the way—on that first day in the morning this white man who came here to Petén and left his animal that they made a statue of…”

“Cortés.”

“Cortés, yes. This man was walking in the market also, and he came up to me and said that he remembered when he was up in Petén that he got a cloak from me. I think it was the eye he remembered…He said he bought a cloak from me—he bought a cloak, that is true, but did not pay…Anyhow, he wished to know if I had ever seen a tall man, a very tall white man, or heard of such a tall white man…”

Zambac squirmed out of his jacket and tossed it away. The night was very hot. Bats were swooping about, chasing insects in the jacaranda bushes. Insects were flying into the torches, making little frying sounds as the flames consumed them. Zambac pushed the iguana aside and put his bare elbows on the table and called for a fan.

I waited for him to continue. Usually he spoke rapidly, biting off the ends of his words. Tonight they were oozing out of his mouth. He had something to tell me, but didn't know how to go about it.

“And of course,” I said, “being my friend, you waited until you knew exactly why Cortés was asking about me. You didn't say right off that you had seen a tall white man roaming around in the streets of Petén. That…”

“Oh, no, sir,” Zambac said. “Oh, no, sir.”

“What did you say?”

“I said…” Zambac paused. “I did not answer Cortés at once. I wrinkled my forehead and thought. Then something came to me right out of the sky . . .”

He glanced up at the dark sky hovering above the light from the torches, as if he expected something more to come tumbling down to him.

“ ‘I have not seen this tall white man,' I said to Cortés. ‘But I have heard that others have seen him. Not in Petén. In places farther to the south.' Cortés said, ‘In Tikal?' And I said, ‘Yes, in Tikal.' Then this Cortés went away, but the next morning he came up and asked if I could find you. If I could find you and bring back…not you exactly, but something. Your hand that has the ring on it.”

“My hand would show that you had found me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was his offer for this small service?”

“Big,” Zambac said, making a sweeping gesture that took in the world. “I will be the cacique of all Quintana. Of Petén likewise.”

“You
will
be or you
would
be?” I asked.

The distinction between the two was lost on Zambac, and I had to repeat the question in different words.

He laughed, took a hearty drink of
balche
, and said, “I asked him, this Cortés, if he would be pleased with the ring only. He shook his head. I said I would bring a finger. But he shook his head again. He wished everything—the ring and the hand both.”

“Where is Cortés now?”

“Going to Tenochtitlán.''

“If he is going to Tenochtitlán, how can you give him my hand?”

“He has fast runners down there in Quintana waiting now.”

“And when they get the hand they will run fast to Tenochtitlán and give it to Cortés,” I said, half-amused at the whole idea.

Zambac had quit smiling and was slowly getting himself drunk.

“How do you become the cacique of Quintana and also Petén if Cortés is up in Tenochtitlán? Did he tell you that?”

“Yes, he told me. In Quintana there is a white captain now and his men. Twenty men. Cortés left them when he went away, and they rule Quintana. Cortés took me by the arm to this captain and gave him a command to make me the cacique of Quintana and likewise Petén when I was finished with things.”

The servant was standing behind him, waving a big pal metto fan. Zambac wore his hair in a bang and the breeze from the fan kept moving it up and down.

“
Alala
,” Zambac burst out. “This is what came out of the sky.”

He glanced up at the sky once more and then down at the ring. I moved my hand out of sight.

“It came to me,” he said, for some reason lowering his voice, “that you will give me the ring. Take it off and give it to Zambac. Then Zambac will search around and find a hand somewhere and put the ring on it…You see what came out of the sky?”

“The hand you search for, Zambac, and find hereabouts will be the hand of an Indian. Not the hand of a white man.”

“I have thought about this, sir. This will not be hard for Zambac. He will change the hand from brown to white by the milk of a ficus tree. Then he will dry the hand in the sun. Per haps he will put a white man's tattoo on it. How would a cross be, like the crosses this Cortés left around everywhere in Petén?”

“The cross is an inspired thought,” I said. “Did it also come from the sky?”

“From the sky,” Zambac said, pointed overhead and or dered a second gourd of
balche
and another fan. “Down from the sky, sir.”