The Seven Serpents Trilogy (58 page)

I had heard this tale on the deck of the
Santa Margarita
from one of the crew, long before I reached New Spain. It meant nothing to me then. It did now.

“But first you must find the place where the two great seas meet,” the sibyl continued, “and the man in a flame-colored doublet.”

“A Spaniard?”

“In a flame-colored doublet, who walks with a slight limp.”

“There are many such. What is his name?”

“His name escapes me. It has a meaning, however, like Uitzilopochtli. But it is not that, not Witchy Wolves. In a week, in six days, I will remember.”

“Only one man knows about the gold? A man in a red doublet?”

There was no answer. I asked the question again. Still there was no answer. I pressed my ear hard against the stone. I heard nothing but primordial silence, so deep that it sounded like a river rushing leagues below me under the mountain. I began to shiver from the cold. Scrambling to my knees, I crawled back through the passage, into the sunlight at last, and took the trail that led to the south, in search of a man in a red doublet.

A fierce storm had blown up, but I did not pause. The words of the seeress were burned into my flesh.

 

I
FOUND THE MAN WHO WORE A FLAME-COLORED DOUBLET AND WALKED
with a slight limp on my first day in the Spanish town of Pan ama. Indeed, as I came out of the jungle after four hellish weeks on the trail south from the cave of the Mayan sibyl, he crossed the street at a distance from me, a small figure in a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes against the noon time glare. Had I not stepped behind a tree and waited until he passed out of sight, we would have met there on the street.

I had two reasons for evading him at that moment. Stripped down to skin and bones from weeks of hard travel, my face swollen by insect bites, my lips cracked from the tropical sun, I was a poor specimen to ask a favor of anyone. Furthermore, since I had heard on the way that the town was populated by Spaniards lately come from Spain, there was a good chance that this man in the red doublet had learned from someone that I was being sought by Cortés and the governor of Hispaniola.

I slept the rest of the day at a hovel calling itself the Inn of the Virgin, burned my Mayan rags, and bought Spanish clothes with the next-to-last pearl I owned. That night, after a heavy rain, I ventured into streets that lay knee-deep in mud and visited a dive where I would run no risk of meeting the man in the red doublet.
La Perla
, the Pearl, a corral that stabled horses and had a long trestle on one side, served
balche
in earthen cups.

I learned that the man I sought was named Francisco Pizarro, that everyone in Panama knew Pizarro, that half the inhabitants hated Pizarro, the rest loved him, and with both he was feared as a man of dangerous pride, softhearted at moments, tough as Toledo steel, and always unpredictable.

A leathery young soldier—one dressed in quilted armor, at least, whose skin had been scorched by many suns—bought me a cup of
balche.
I thought I had seen him before in Tenochtitlán, but this proved to be wrong. He had never been north of Panama and had never heard of Hernán Cortés.

He said, throwing an arm around my shoulder, “When you came through the door,
amigo
, it gave me a start. I thought to myself, A tree, Sainted Mother, and it walks. It walks like a man.”

From this Tomás Calderón I learned much more than if I had gone straight to Francisco Pizarro and said, “General, I would like to hear about the gold that exists there in the land of the Inca Indians, which everyone speaks about and with which you are familiar, having been in this land.”

“The country,” Tomás said, “is vast beyond the telling. Mountains—they must touch the moon—rear themselves high in the east. To the west the sea surges for hundreds of leagues. Between them lies the rich country of the Inca. The nobles eat with gold knives from gold plates. They tread streets paved with gold. They wear gold sandals with gold tassels, and great gold loops hang from their ears.”

I asked about the prince who covered himself with gold each morning and bathed himself in a sacred lake, the one the sibyl had described.

“Yes, I have heard of this,” he said. “His name is Atahualpa. His people call him Lupe Luzir, King of Great Kings, Child of the Sun, Inca.”

“If all that gold lies there, why is Pizarro here?” I asked.

Tomás Calderón, though a young man, carried the signs of a veteran. Both cheeks bore scars, and his long nose, which he kept rubbing with one hand as he drank, had been broken in recent days.

“Pizarro's here because he is just returned from Spain. He has enemies, you know, dozens. He went to Spain to confound them by getting the king's blessing for his enterprises. And by God's mercy, he got it. Now he's governor and captain general of all of New Castile. Not of the country that lies north of here. That country's smaller, half the size of New Castile. Has a different governor.”

“Who?” I asked, though I knew it to be Hernán Cortés.

Tomás shrugged and drank down the cup of
balche
he had been holding. Then he drew out his sword, waved it above his head, and charged at a group of Indians at the far end of the trestle, shouting, “
¡Vayan, diablos morenos!
Out, brown devils.
¡Vayan!
”

I slipped away during the melee that followed, but the next night, having remained hidden all day, I learned at the same tavern all that I needed to know about Francisco Pizarro. My informant was a young Indian named Felipillo, Little Philip, who introduced himself as an interpreter for Pizarro. I asked him if the general was acquainted with Hernán Cortés.

He snickered, showing small white teeth sharp as a ferret's. “His mother is related by blood to Cortés. Governor General Pizarro has been in the New World for many years. He's ac quainted with everyone. He was at Balboa's side when that explorer discovered the ocean we can see here now, pounding on the beach out there in the dark. He has known Cortés for a long time. They are friends, these men.”

“When did they last see each other?”

“I have been with Governor General Pizarro for six years. And in that time the two have not met.”

“Or exchanged letters?”

“Letters? Ha. Where do you think you are, in Seville?” He squinted his eyes and gave me a quick look. “You ask a lot of questions, señor,'' he added as he left, a fine sword, which was nearly as long as he was tall, clanking at his heels.

I lay down on my flea-infested bed that night, easy in my mind for the first time since my arrival in Panama, certain that Pizarro had heard nothing about me from Cortés.

The next morning I went in search of the governor-general. I found him on the beach in the midst of a gang of workers loading the longboat of a ship anchored close offshore. Except for his red doublet, I would not have picked him out of the crowd. He was diminutive, even among the small Spanish workmen who surrounded him.

Catching sight of me from the corner of his eye, he turned his back and kept me waiting until the longboat was loaded, went on its way, and reached the caravel. Only then did he turn to stare.

“Your honor,” I said, holding my ground, deciding it would be better than if I approached him. “I have heard that you are looking for men.”

“Not looking,” he said.

It was a rebuff, delivered in a gravelly voice.

“Who are you?” he said, continuing to stare.

“Julián Escobar,” I said.

“From whence?”

“From Maya country. Near that of the Azteca.”

“Then you have encountered my friend Hernán Cortés.”

“Many times, sir.”

“A fine man. But overly ambitious. He ranges far. Too far.”

Pizarro walked to where I stood and looked up at me. It was done simply and without swagger, yet the effect was one of defiance, saying to me, “Young man, you are in the pres ence of the governor general of New Castile; take off your hat.”

I did so.

“We can use a man of your dimensions,” he said. “What do you do well? Set sails without climbing a ladder?”

“I have been a steersman.”

“On land, what can you do?”

“I am a good walker, sir. I have just walked here from five hundred leagues away and more.”

“A recommendation,” Pizarro said. “There is much walking to be done once we reach land. Through country wilder than the configurations of hell. How are you with a musket? There are things to shoot at. Thousands of brown ones.”

“Passable, sir.”

“You will learn quickly. Your life will depend upon it.”

Pizarro stepped back but kept regarding me. He was old enough to be my grandfather, a man sixty or more, wearing a scanty black beard threaded with gray, erect, narrow at the shoulders, stiff in his movements, and very small.

It was his eyes that held you. Black, penetrating, the eyes of a man quick to fury, and yet there was about them a trace of sadness, as if what he had seen had left him unsatisfied, a look of resentment that I didn't understand until much later, when I heard from his own lips that he had been born in a pigsty to an unwed mother, a bastard child whom life had buffeted about.

“Why do you wish to join this expedition? No
jira,
no picnic this one. I have made two journeys into Peruvian lands and have left more men there in the Indian wilds than I ever brought back. What is the purpose? What will hold you to gether when the trail grows steep?”

“Gold,” I said promptly. “There's enough in Peru, I hear, to meet the needs of all the kings in creation.”

“Not adventure?”

“I've seen enough adventure.”

“Good! Adventure wears thin. It rusts. Gold does not.”

I was certain that I detected in his words a hint that gold, no matter how much, would never satisfy him. And that deep in the glance he cast upon me was some soaring ambition that even his recently gained title of governor general of New Cas tile did not satisfy. Time proved me right!

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING AT DAWN
P
IZARRO GATHERED HIS FORCES, WHICH
numbered less than two hundred men, and celebrated the feast day of St. John the Evangelist. Under a clear sky and a favor able wind we then embarked for Peru, land of the Inca. I held the tiller of the largest of the three caravels.

We sailed for thirteen days, held back by contrary currents. In the Bay of St. Matthew, Pizarro went ashore with his men while our ships continued on course some distance from the coast.

After two weeks of sailing we sighted Pizarro again, loaded down now with gold and silver he had taken from the Indians during his march south.The treasure was divided among his men;
la quinta
taken out for King Carlos the Fifth was put aboard; and the fleet, to my great disappointment, was sent back to Panama to deliver the king's share to the royal treasurer.

We sailed south once more, taking with us, in addition to twenty recruits, the royal inspector and a host of high officers appointed by the crown to oversee Pizarro's adventure. I began to wonder if my lot was to be a permanent steersman between Panama and Peru, hauling traffic back and forth, transporting casks of gold and silver in which so far I had no share.

On the 24th of September, in the year 1532, I left the ship, walked up the beach into the small settlement of San Miguel, which had been established to house the king's officials, and presented myself to Pizarro.

He was standing in the plaza listening to the royal
veedor
, inspector of all gold and silver, who was waving his hands, explaining something or other. Pizarro's beard was neatly trimmed and he wore a clean red doublet. There was no sign that he had just finished a long hard journey through hostile country.

I would like to report that Pizarro smiled, pleased to find me there. The opposite is true.

“You haven't been paid,” he said. “You are here to com plain, like the others.
Jesú María
, will it never end!”

“I am not here to complain about the gold,” I said, “al though I have hauled tons of it to Panama and not seen so much as a pebble that I could call my own. I have left my job as steersman and wish to enlist in your army.”

“You have a soft job and you give it up?” he said. “You won't last long against the Indians. You're far too big a target for their arrows, but you have that look in your eye. Come and be cured of it. You'll get armor over there by the church, and as soon as one of the cavalry dies I'll have a horse for you.”

I received the horse sooner than expected. That night a cavalryman—the same Tomás Calderón who had chased the Indians out of La Perla—was killed in a brawl over dice. His horse was in good health and of fair dimensions, though not to be compared in any way to my stallion, Bravo.

We left at noon, I riding at the fore, carrying a flag em blazoned with the black eagle of the royal arms. It was an uncomfortable place to be, but Pizarro put me there, saying that my demeanor would impress the Indians, give them sec ond thoughts.

Under a cloudless sky we headed south into the foothills of the mighty Andes. Every man of our little army—the 110 on foot and the sixty-seven on horseback—was in high spirits. We knew where we were bound. Somewhere in the vast country that stretched before us, in the mountains piled upon mountains of Peru, lived Inca Atahualpa, ruler of all things beheld and not beheld by him, and, friend or foe, of our destinies.

His signs, as we went forward, were everywhere. We passed canals that brought water from the mountain streams and spread it in a network over orchards and grain fields. We traveled comfortably on a raised causeway and at every place of any size a royal caravansary was available to house us at night, as it housed the Inca when he was traveling through his domain. We also saw in several hamlets evidence of his iron hand—dead men hanging by their heels.