War God (30 page)

With a feeling of dread he recognised one of them as Muñoz.

He heard Cortés and another voice he did not recognise. It was an argument about money. There was a sudden bustle of activity, heavy footsteps pounded on the deck and down the gangplank. More shouting – it seemed the fleet would sail tonight without the governor’s blessing! – then a thunder of hooves as a horse took off at a gallop.

Taking care not to make a sound, Pepillo crawled out from behind the piled ropes, snaked forward on his belly, wincing at his bruises, and found a spot where he could look down on the navigation deck without being seen.

Five men stood there – Cortés, Muñoz and three others he did not know. It was obvious at once from the tension in their bodies that the argument was far from over, and now Muñoz shouted, ‘You can’t do that to me!’

Cortés said strongly that he could do anything he wanted, then lowered his voice. Amidst gusts of wind, Pepillo heard only the words, ‘Córdoba expedition’, ‘terrible’ and ‘page’, before Cortés leaned closer and whispered in Muñoz’s ear. He must have said something frightening because the Dominican gasped, blanched and stumbled back. Then the impossible happened. In a tone of disgust, Cortés said, ‘Take him’, and two of the other men leapt forward. Pepillo’s breath caught in his throat and hope surged through him as they seized Muñoz by the arms and frogmarched him from the ship. The Inquisitor’s strident protests continued but were soon snatched by the wind and lost to hearing as he was led off along the pier.

In this way Cortés was finally left alone with the thin, weather-beaten man, who at once told him that to sail this night, in this weather, would be suicide – advice the caudillo clearly did not want to hear.

‘Come come, Alaminos,’ he said. ‘Has easy living stolen your courage? You’ve sailed in worse gales than this!’

‘I have,’ the man called Alaminos admitted. He looked to the troubled sky now overcast from horizon to horizon, the light of the moon entirely swallowed. ‘But we’re only at the birth of the storm. It’s going to get worse. Much worse.’

‘If the month were August or September I’d agree with you,’ Cortés said cheerfully. ‘But this is February, man. February! Think about it. Since you sailed with Columbus, how many great storms have you witnessed in these waters in February?’

‘None,’ Alaminos admitted.

‘March then, or April? Even May? Come now, be honest. Have you ever seen a real storm hit Cuba or any of the islands before the month of June?’

Again Alaminos was forced to admit he had not. ‘But there’s always a first time,’ he said, ‘and I have a bad feeling about this storm, Don Hernán. A very bad feeling. I’m a pilot, and a good one—’

‘A great one!’ Cortés interrupted.

Alaminos ignored the compliment and pressed on: ‘… because I trust my feelings. That’s why I’ve never lost a ship. If you insist on sailing this night then I give you fair warning – you will sink your entire fleet and drown every one of us with it.’

‘Fie, man! Don’t say such things!’

‘It’s not the saying that matters, but the hearing, Don Hernán. Hear me well, I beg you! Delay our departure until the storm clears.’

Cortés walked to the rail of the navigation deck and stared out over the darkened harbour, across the agitated waters, into the teeth of the wind. He stood silent, his head held high, like a hero of old, like a Caesar or an Alexander. Seeing him like that, indomitable, fearless and strong, Pepillo believed in his heart what Alaminos doubted – that this great caudillo would vanquish the storm in the same confident way he had vanquished Muñoz.

‘I’m grateful for your advice,’ Cortés now said, still gazing into the night. ‘It is good advice and well meant, but mine is the burden of command and there are other matters you know nothing of that I must consider.’ He turned and walked back to join Alaminos, who was standing by the whipstaff that steered the great ship; he clapped him heartily on the shoulders. ‘Besides,’ he said, holding up a finger to the gale, ‘this is a strong wind, but a fair one in my judgement – it’s blowing our way. Once we’re free of the harbour and out on the open sea, it’s going to take us straight to the New Lands.’

‘So we sail then?’

‘Posthaste, Alaminos. The ebb tide will speed our departure. Don’t you see how everything is going our way?’

Alaminos still looked gloomy.

‘Well?’ said Cortés. ‘What is it, man? Speak your mind.’

‘Even if we’re not sunk,’ said the pilot, ‘you can be sure the fleet will be scattered. I have to plot a course to a rendezvous point and the course must be shared with all the captains before we sail or we’ll never find each other again.’

‘I’ve been giving thought to that. There was an island you visited with Córdoba in sight of the coast of the New Lands. Friendly natives, you said. Plentiful game. Sweet water. Sounds like just the spot for us.’

‘The natives call it Cozumel,’ Alaminos answered immediately. ‘The island of swallows, or some such meaning, as best we could understand it through signs and pointing. It’s a good place.’

‘Quick about it then! Plot a course for Cozumel. Make copies for each of the captains. I’ll have a rider standing by to distribute them across the fleet and then we sail.’

The ship had become a hubbub of rapidly increasing noise and activity, with sailors swarming in the rigging and working together on ropes to complete a hundred different bewildering tasks that Pepillo couldn’t understand. So far, however, the aftcastle wasn’t the focus of any of this, so he crawled back to his hiding place and tried to make a plan.

One thing was sure – Muñoz was no longer on board the
Santa María
and therefore posed no immediate threat to him. Pepillo realised he could now walk about freely, if he wished, without risking another beating. But if he did that, then might not he too be thrown off the ship? After all, what use was a page without a master?

He heard Cortés’s voice again, now on the main deck, shouting for a despatch rider. A little later a horse galloped off and all the time the frenetic pace of preparations continued. Pepillo knew no way to make himself useful in any of this, even if he weren’t a mass of bruises and pain, so all in all, he decided, the best thing he could do was stay exactly where he was, stowed away behind the coiled ropes.

Once out at sea he couldn’t be sent back.

He was beginning to think he might actually get away with it, when he heard men climbing from the main deck to the navigation deck, heavy footsteps and a stream of foul oaths.

‘Where’s those bloody ropes?’ someone said.

Acolmiztli and Tree sprinted downslope to the unguarded thorn barrier and tore it apart, opening the way for the rest of the squad to stream through in a compact mass.

No turning back now
, Shikotenka thought. He stretched out his legs and took the lead, flashing past neat ranks of tents and bivouacs ranged east and west of the wide central avenue. Glancing at young Tochtli running proudly beside him, he felt for the first time the full weight of the danger he’d asked his men to face and the threat of imminent failure. Tlascalans were the greatest runners in the world, and these were the best of the best, but even they would need three minutes or more to cover the two thousand paces to Coaxoch’s pavilion.

All round them harsh shouts and cries of alarm filled the air and torches flared and guttered in the rising wind. The moon, troubled by clouds, still shed enough light to show hosts of warriors, intermingled with a rabble of camp followers, merchants and pleasure girls, crowding through the tented alleys towards the edge of the southeastern sector where Guatemoc lay. Drawn by the commotion, many more were surging across the avenue from the southwestern sector, but none seemed to suspect the rapidly advancing Tlascalans in their guise as jaguar and eagle knights, simply making way for them as they pounded past.

It was an astonishing dereliction of duty, yet another sign that the Mexica were falling short of the legendary discipline Shikotenka so much admired – almost all the sentries along the avenue had left their posts to join in the general melee. Here and there, a few were still in place, novices conspicuous in their white cotton armour, who stood around awkwardly clutching their spears and casting anxious glances towards the southeast. Several actually saluted the Tlascalans and Shikotenka heard Chipahua snigger, ‘Mexica arseholes!’

Five hundred paces out from the pavilion, a heavy burst of rain spattered down like an avalanche of small stones, soon settling into a drenching, insistent downpour, and in the same instant the last gap in the clouds closed, completely obscuring the moon and plunging the camp into darkness.
Perfect
, thought Shikotenka. Further evidence that the gods indeed blessed his plan. Campfires and torches were quickly doused to dull red points by the squall, but the great pavilion towered directly ahead, bright as a beacon, its walls of thick maguey-fibre sheeting, and its soaring conical roof stretched over a frame of poles lit up brilliantly from within by a multitude of lanterns.

There was a sudden shouted challenge and a troop of Mexica spearmen, silhouetted against the pavilion’s glow, loomed out of the dark. There were no more than twenty of them, perhaps thirty, all novices judging from their uniforms, but still enough to put up a fight and hinder the attack. ‘Step aside, fools!’ yelled Shikotenka at the top of his voice. He disguised his Tlascalan accent and summoned his most regal tones. ‘We’re here to protect the Snake Woman.’

‘Let’s just kill them,’ hissed Tree.

‘Maybe we won’t have to,’ said Shikotenka, his mind working furiously, and as they closed with the other group he brandished Guatemoc’s
macuahuitl
and yelled again: ‘Step aside! Tlascalan attack in the southeast quadrant. We’re here to protect the Snake Woman!’

He wasn’t even surprised when the ruse worked. In this army of novices, the uniforms of jaguar and eagle knights commanded immense respect, and with hair and faces hidden by their distinctive wooden helmets, there was nothing to identify his squad as the enemy. After only the slightest hesitation, the block of spearmen divided before them, some of them raising their right arms in hasty salutes as the Tlascalans shot through the gap. ‘Reinforce the southeast quadrant at the double,’ Shikotenka yelled back through the rain. ‘Heavy fighting there. Prince Guatemoc’s been killed!’

Chipahua gave another snigger. ‘Arseholes,’ he said again. The word boomed emphatically inside his eagle-beaked helmet.

Yes
, thought Shikotenka.
Arseholes. A whole host of arseholes.
Come rain or shine there should be hundreds of sentries around the Snake Woman’s pavilion, blocking every road. Instead it seemed that Coaxoch was so confident of his power, so secure in the midst of this huge army, that he’d not thought to take additional precautions.

The pavilion’s entrance was a great square, twice the height of a man, veiled with gaudy curtains and approached under an immense awning borne up on rows of gilded wooden pillars, thick as tree trunks. Protected from the rain by the awning, each pillar supported a guttering lantern; by the light of these, Shikotenka saw that a dozen men had taken shelter here. They wore the distinctive yellow and black livery of the Snake Woman’s personal guards and were peering out into the storm, plainly disturbed by the general commotion in the camp, but apparently not yet aware of what had happened because their spears were held at rest and their
macuahuitls
still sheathed. Better still, Shikotenka realised, the lanterns that made the guards so visible to him must make him and his squad invisible to them.

He didn’t need to give orders. His Tlascalans all knew instinctively what to do and bore down on the pavilion at a dead run, the sound of their footfalls muffled by the driving rain. They were less than twenty paces out when they were spotted, so close the guards had no time to deploy their weapons.

The slaughter began.

A big Mexica charged with clawed hands, yelling defiance, his teeth bared, but Shikotenka brought his
macuahuitl
crashing down on the man’s head, spilling his brains. Tugging the weapon free he glimpsed Tree flailing about mightily to left and right with his huge war club, and Acolmiztli jerking his knife out of a guard’s stomach followed by a coil of guts. Tochtli whirled his
macuahuitl
in a classic training-ground manoeuvre; he struck off another guard’s leg above the knee and half severed his neck as he fell, abruptly silencing his screams. With fifty against twelve the fight was over in seconds. Shikotenka saw Etzli slip in a pool of blood and the last Mexica still standing thrust a spear down at him as he hit the ground. The Tlascalan rolled to avoid the blow and, as the guard thrust again, Tochtli sprang into his path, deflected the spear with his
macuahuitl
, drew his dagger left-handed and stabbed the man repeatedly through the chest.

Etzli picked himself up and clapped Tochtli on the shoulder. ‘Good work, little Rabbit,’ he said. ‘You’ll make a warrior yet.’