War God (16 page)

It all happened so fast –
like disarming a child!
– that Zemudio was taken completely by surprise. He made a clumsy grab for the fallen weapon but Alvarado got his boot under it and kicked it out of reach. Zemudio put his head down and charged, hands outstretched, and Alvarado reacted instinctively with a clean, straight, powerful lunge, rapier and right arm extended, right leg sliding ahead, left leg and left arm stretched out behind, propelling his body forward. The needle point of the rapier pierced the padded outer fabric of Zemudio’s vest where it covered his belly, glanced off the overlapping steel tiles sewn into the lining, slid a span, found a tiny gap and –
ooof!
– punched deep into the champion’s body. Alvarado was unstoppable, all his power and weight behind the lunge, and as he went to full extension he felt the point ripple through Zemudio’s guts and burst out of his lower back. There was slight resistance as it hit the armour at the rear of the vest but again, like a worm, the flexible blade found a way through, and the champion was spitted.

Alvarado was close to him, very close, close as lovers. Wrapped in the rapier’s guard, his fist was right against the dying man’s belly and the tip of the blade stood out a cubit from his back. Ecstasy! A kind of ecstasy! Zemudio’s little pig eyes gazed into his own with more puzzlement than anger, his stupid oafish mouth gaped, and he groaned like a woman being pleasured.

‘Still think I’m all piss and farts, do you?’ yelled Alvarado. He sawed the blade of the rapier back and forth.

Zemudio gasped.

‘Still think I’m a pretty boy?’

‘Aaaah …’

The mist of death was clouding Zemudio’s eyes. Alvarado could always recognise it. With a yell of triumph and a vicious twist of his wrist, he hauled out the rapier, drenched with gore, and stepped back.

He expected Zemudio to fall, but the great ox of a man just stood there blinking, blood oozing through the front of his vest, guttering out of the gaping wound in his leg and dropping
pitter-patter, pitter-patter
into the dust at his feet.

‘Very well,’ said Alvarado, ‘if that’s how you want it.’ The rapier still needed more trials with armour and now was as good a time as any. Throwing his right foot forward he slid into another lunge, easily found another weak point and ran the man through. He withdrew, lunged again, slight resistance from the armour, quick workaround, found a gap and –
ooof!
– another healthy dose of steel administered direct to Zemudio’s vitals.

As Alvarado stood back to inspect his handiwork, Zemudio shouted something indistinct and collapsed to his knees.

‘What was that?’ said Alvarado, taking a step closer.

Another incoherent yell.

Alvarado frowned. ‘What?’

Zemudio looked up at him in mute appeal, mouth gaping.

‘What?’ Alvarado took another step, put his ear to Zemudio’s lips.

‘Bastard,’ whispered Zemudio.

‘Biggest bastard this side of the Ocean Sea,’ agreed Alvarado. He straightened, swept the rapier up over his right shoulder, swung it almost lazily down and hacked the razor edge of its clever Nuñez blade into the side of Zemudio’s thick, muscular neck. There was a smacking sound, almost like a slap, a spray of blood as the jugular was severed, some resistance and a grinding sensation as the blade cleaved vertebrae, then much more blood and a tremendous acceleration as the sword flashed out on the other side of his neck, taking his head clean off.

It bounced when it hit the ground, rolled twice and came to rest upside down against a rotten tree stump, the surprised, reproachful eyes still glaring.

‘
Yes!
’ Alvarado shouted, because somebody had to praise that perfect
coup de grâce
.

Such precision. Such elegance. Such economy of effort.

He doubted if there were three other swordsmen in the world, maybe not even two, who could have matched the blow.

Though headless, Zemudio was still on his knees and the satchel containing the Velázquez documents still hung by its strap around what was left of his neck. Blood was bubbling up, getting everywhere, already completely drenching the satchel, but Alvarado was a one-armed man now. He first wiped the blade of the rapier clean on Zemudio’s body, and sheathed it, before he stooped over the corpse and pulled the dripping satchel away.

The buckles were slippery and proved near impossible to open with only one functioning hand, until Alvarado had a brilliant idea. He turned back to Zemudio’s kneeling corpse, kicked it over in the dust and used the cloth on the ample seat of the champion’s breeches to clean the satchel and his own fingers. When he was satisfied he’d done enough, he turned back to the buckles, opened them easily and peered inside.

The document wallet was there, safe and dry, no blood yet staining its contents. Alvarado fished it out and opened it.

Inside was the single page of vellum on which Velázquez had scrawled his orders for his loathsome favourite Pánfilo de Narváez –
Captain-General
Narváez, no less! – the despicable fool who was supposed to take Cortés’s place. As he read, Alvarado’s face darkened, but when he’d finished he put his head back and laughed for a long time. ‘Sweat of the Virgin,’ he said as he slid the page back into the wallet. All that trouble to kill a man and at the end of it he’d learned nothing more than Velázquez had already told him. Still, Cortés was going to be impressed to see the proof in writing.

Alvarado pushed the wallet into Bucephalus’s saddlebag alongside his gold, and was about to mount up and ride for Santiago when he remembered Zemudio’s falchion.

It had turned out to be a damn fine weapon.

Indeed Alvarado could imagine situations – a crowded battlefield, a press of combatants – where it would be the best weapon a man could possibly have and where a rapier might be useless. He looked around the blood-smeared scene and a ray of late-afternoon sunlight glanced off the big blade where it lay in the dust. He walked over and picked it up. It felt heavy and unwieldy, yet Zemudio had handled it as though it were a tin toy! It would take some getting used to, Alvarado supposed, but he had yet to encounter an edged weapon he couldn’t master.

He glared down at Zemudio’s headless body –
so much for the hero of the Italian wars!
– and paused to give the corpse one more kick. ‘Who’s the bastard now?’ he yelled. Then he stuffed the falchion into his sword belt, marched to Bucephalus and climbed into the saddle.

The sun was sinking into the west and it was an hour’s ride back to Santiago, with visibility falling and evening coming on. Alvarado spurred the great war horse into a reckless gallop.

Cortés was dreaming.

Strangely he was both within the dream and an external observer of it.

Stranger still, it seemed he could change aspects of the dream simply by thinking about them!

For example, he was at this moment walking through a green meadow covered in lush grass laid over firm turf. He thought,
Perfect riding country
, and at once found himself on the back of the grey mare, Altivo, which he’d ridden when he was a boy in Extremadura. All the sensations were completely realistic – the smell and the feel of the horse, the sun on the grass, the wind in his hair.

Then, inexplicably, Altivo vanished, the scene changed, and he found himself inside a giant Gothic vault, all delicate ribs and soaring arches like the great vault of the Cathedral of Plasencia, but made entirely of dazzling white crystal and enclosing a vast space that seemed filled, flooded, engorged with the purest and most perfect light. Cortés was at the centre of the nave. Rows of empty pews, likewise of crystal, surrounded him, their ranks marching two hundred paces forward to the edge of the transept. Straight ahead, on the left side of the crossing, where the nave, transept and choir all met, was a pulpit, full five fathoms high, approached by a slender spiral stairway, sculpted, it seemed, from a single mass of transparent ruby.

At the pulpit, but almost too blinding for the eye to tolerate, stood a figure, human yet not human, from whose body rays of intense white light burst forth in splendour.

Do I gaze on God Himself in his Heavenly Church?
Cortés thought. And he remembered Moses on the Mount, who had also seen God face to face, and he felt fear.

It wasn’t like battlefield fear, which he’d learned to master better than most. It was something else, something he could not name, something arising from the tremendous radiant power emanating from this being of light who seemed to reach out and entrap him as though in an invisible net and then draw him forward.

Cortés watched the crystal floor of the nave slipping by beneath his feet, hints of buried rainbows swirling in its depths, but felt no physical contact, seemed to be floating as much as walking – which was strange until he remembered this was a dream. He tried to change the setting again but the trick wouldn’t work this time and he was pulled irresistibly towards the base of the pulpit.

As though the wick of a lamp had been lowered, the radiance surrounding the figure dimmed as Cortés drew closer, becoming more bearable to the eye, finally revealing a tall and robust man standing in the pulpit. He had a rugged demeanour, more like a soldier or a labourer than a cleric. He was clean-shaven and fair-haired, perhaps forty years old and dressed in a simple hemp tunic, yet he projected an unassailable aura of charisma and authority – that quality of exceptional personal presence and spiritual power that the Moors call
Baraka
.

‘I’ve been watching over you all your life,’ said the man. ‘I’ve seen that you’ve done well …’ His voice was quiet and his tone intimate – as a father speaking to a son, or a friend to a friend – yet it seemed effortlessly to fill the entire vault, and there was something about it that was arresting, unsettling, almost physically probing.

Cortés came to a halt at the edge of the crossing and gazed up at the extraordinary ruby pulpit poised in space thirty feet above him, and at the awesome and terrifying man who stood in it. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. He fought down his fear. ‘Are you God? Are you an archangel?’

‘You already know who I am …’

‘I do not know you, sir, I swear it. But give me some hint, some clue, and I will place you …’

The man laughed and it was a deep, rich sound. ‘You had an episode of sickness as a child, Cortés, do you remember?’

‘I remember.’

‘A fever of the lungs brought you close to death, a priest was called, the last rites were spoken?’

‘Yes.’

‘But your nurse called down heavenly help.’

It was true. She’d been called Maria de Esteban and she had called on Saint Peter to save the dying child who miraculously recovered.

Even as Cortés gasped, suddenly getting it, he had to remind himself again that this was a dream. Only a dream. ‘You are … the blessed Saint Peter?’ he asked.

‘I am the rock on whom Christ built his Church and the powers of Hell cannot prevail against me … Your own patron saint, Cortés – yet only now you know me!’

‘But why? How …?’

‘Never mind all that. What I need you to remember, is that all of this’ – his voice suddenly boomed – ‘
is by no means only a dream
. On the contrary, Don Hernando, all of this is very real. All of this is very serious. You are to do God’s work.’

‘Thank you, Father,’ said Cortés. ‘I have tried to do God’s work in these islands.’

‘And with great success! The Taino were too deeply sunk in idolatry and superstition for their souls ever to be saved …’ Peter hesitated. ‘I see, though, that some still live?’

‘Only those who willingly accepted the faith and were ready to serve us …’

‘Oh well, good then. Very good. Besides … a far greater task lies ahead of you …’

‘In the New Lands, Father?’

A faraway look had come into Peter’s eye. ‘You will be the sword of God there, Don Hernando. Overthrow the heathens and the devil-worshippers, bring them the word of Christ and you will be rewarded in this world and the next.’ The saint turned, descended the ruby stairway, his simple tunic hitched up over bare feet, and he came to stand opposite Cortés in the midst of the crossing. His eyes were utterly black, calm, steady, like deep pools of midnight, but his skin was pale and somehow bright, even dazzling, as though lit from within by the heat of some immense banked-down fire.

He placed his huge, calloused hands – soldier’s hands, labourer’s hands – on Cortés’s shoulders. ‘I have great plans for you,’ he said.

‘I am honoured, Father, and ready to serve.’

‘But there is a condition.’ Peter’s eyes held Cortés prisoner. ‘The friar Muñoz has a part to play in this. You must set aside your dislike for him. He is rough and crude in his ways but a tireless worker for God. Heaven will not bless your expedition without him.’