War God (43 page)

Muñoz had been holding up the big wooden cross all afternoon, making it a rallying point for the men as they disembarked. Around a hundred and fifty of them had assembled behind him now, most wearing the colourful garlands of fragrant flowers hung around their necks by the happy crowds of welcoming islanders. Astonishingly, these bare-arsed Cozumel Indians were actually singing and dancing with joy at the sight of the Spaniards, and had already brought basketloads of food and drink to the beach for their refreshment.
Fools!
thought Alvarado. The smiles would be on the other side of their faces once everything of value they possessed had been transferred to him – but meanwhile, he had to admit, their naïve gentleness was useful and made his job easier.

The same could not be said for Muñoz, who had already commandeered that squint-eyed ape Little Julian, slouching near him on the sand, for what he clearly intended to be a major investigation of the health of the faith on Cozumel. That was all very well, of course – Alvarado had no philosophical objections – but experience on Hispaniola and Cuba proved that searches of temples, the destruction of idols and other such business of the Inquisition stirred up resentment in these native races, and that once resentful they were inclined to hide their gold.

Alvarado had already assembled two hundred soldiers, all eager for booty, and now strolled over to Muñoz and took him aside. ‘I’ll be needing these men,’ he said with an eye to the column lined up awaiting the friar’s orders, ‘and the interpreter.’

‘You may not have them,’ said Muñoz somewhat pompously. ‘I intend to search the temple. I must know the fate of the cross and the icon of the Virgin I left here last year. I can’t do such work alone.’

‘Your search of the temple can wait until tomorrow, Father. In Cortés’s continuing absence I am captain-general here and my need is greater than yours.’

‘Ha! What need?’

Alvarado looked up. The sun was distinctly in the western sector of the sky. It had taken much longer than expected to prepare the fleet for a full-scale landing at Cozumel and get sufficient men disembarked. There were now less than three hours of daylight left and he wanted every house in the town searched before darkness fell. ‘Today we look for gold,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll give you all the men you need to save souls.’ He rested his hand on the hilt of the great falchion hanging in its scabbard at his waist. ‘Don’t try to gainsay me, Father,’ he added somewhat sternly. I’ll have my way on this with your agreement or without it.’

Díaz could feel the atmosphere changing, the islanders becoming more agitated and suspicious with every passing minute as the squads of conquistadors went from house to house turning everything upside down, often brutally, with vulgarity and anger. He did everything in his power to be polite, respectful, even apologetic as his own men played their sorry part in the searches, but the fact was that nothing like this had happened here last year and the Indians were unprepared.

‘Not that everything was roses,’ Alonso de La Serna reminded him. ‘Muñoz gutted their temple and smashed their idols and generally gave them hell.’

‘They were the lucky ones!’ said Francisco Mibiercas, whose unusually broad shoulders and muscular arms were the result of hours of daily practice with the
espadón
, the long, two-handed sword that hung in a scabbard at his back. ‘Compared with what he did down the coast at Potonchan, he was an angel of mercy here.’

La Serna rolled his eyes. He was a tall, clever, cynical young man with a mop of fair hair, his otherwise handsome face marked by the scars of an old smallpox infection, and like all of them he hated Muñoz. ‘Compared with what he did at Potonchan,’ he said, ‘the devil himself would have seemed an angel of mercy.’

Díaz could only agree. The three of them had been together at Potonchan when Muñoz’s excessive zeal had so provoked the Chontal Maya that they had risen in their thousands, killed more than seventy of Córdoba’s conquistadors and fatally wounded Córdoba himself. But at Cozumel, which Córdoba had planned to cultivate as a safe haven, Muñoz had been kept on a short leash, and the soldiery had been strictly enjoined against looting.

All of which went to explain why the fleet had been welcomed earlier today and why looks of stupefaction, hurt and disappointment had wiped the glow from the Indians’ faces. Sprawling over the island’s only hilltop, its narrow streets running higgledy-piggledy between rows of simple whitewashed adobe homes, the town of Cozumel had perhaps two thousand inhabitants. Every one of them – men, women and children who not long before had been hanging garlands around the Spaniards’ necks – now stood by, sullen and resentful, as their simple possessions, consisting mostly of bales of cloth, cotton garments and wall hangings of little value, crude ceramics, green-stone ornaments, and a few objects of copper, as well as a handful of trussed turkeys, were turned out, raked over and trampled into the dust.

‘God help us if Cortés does not return,’ said La Serna, with a nod towards Alvarado, who was storming through the streets, followed by his personal crew of hardened, brutal killers, demanding ‘gold, gold, gold’. The blond-haired captain did not seem able to understand that a place like Cozumel could never be, and had never been, rich in that substance. ‘I’m told he’s a gifted swordsman,’ said Mibiercas wistfully, ‘but he’s not the stuff of which a good captain-general is made.’

As they watched, Alvarado loudly cursed his broken left arm which hung uselessly in a sling, turned to Little Julian, who was doing his best to keep up with him, drew the big falchion he liked to carry and dealt the interpreter a hard blow to the buttocks with the flat of the blade. Julian squealed and jumped and Alvarado went after him, sheathing the cutlass and pummelling Julian about the ears so hard with his right fist that the Indian fell half stunned to the ground.

Díaz sighed and exchanged a weary look with Mibiercas and La Serna. ‘I think I’d better go and see if I can restore some sanity to the situation,’ he said.

Alvarado couldn’t believe it! He’d come all this way, braved all manner of risks, even eschewed fifteen thousand pesos of the bribe offered him by Don Diego de Velázquez, only to discover at the end of it all that there was no gold here!

It didn’t bear thinking about.

But to add insult to injury, it seemed that this monkey interpreter couldn’t interpret to save his life. Only the hayseed farmboy Bernal Díaz seemed to have the faintest inkling of what he was saying. As a result, and it was intolerable, in order to communicate with the native chief he was obliged to state his demands in Spanish to Díaz, who would then put them into some sort of pidgin for Little Julian who then put them to the chief. The whole laborious process then began again in the other direction as the chief’s replies were filtered through Julian and Díaz back to Alvarado and the end result was: ‘Humble apologies, great lord, but we have no gold here on Cozumel.’

The chief’s name, Alvarado had managed to establish, was B’alam K’uk or some such barbarism. Not that he cared two hoots what the tall, rangy, straight-backed, grey-haired savage with the hooked nose and the blue cotton loincloth called himself. He wasn’t fit to polish boots, in Alvarado’s opinion, and had confirmed this the moment they met by throwing himself down in front of the hovel he’d emerged from, scrabbling at the filthy earth of the street and stuffing a handful of it into his mouth. Dear God! Whatever next? But this was the sorry creature in charge of Cozumel and here he was, back on his feet again, insisting there was no gold. In a sudden fit of anger, Alvarado strode forward, thrust out his good right hand and gripped the subhuman by his scrawny throat. ‘
What do you mean there’s no gold?
’ he yelled.

Eventually the answer came back through Julian and Díaz. There really was no gold.

‘Lies!’ Alvarado stormed. ‘Lies and mendacity.’ He tightened his fingers around the man’s windpipe and spoke slow and clear and loud: ‘You,’ he roared, ‘will … deliver … up … all … your … gold … by … noon … tomorrow – or I will burn your miserable town to the ground and butcher every man woman and child … Do you understand?’

The threat went back via Díaz and Little Julian to B’alam K’uk, who squirmed and choked in Alvarado’s iron grip.

‘Yes,’ the chief finally managed to reply. ‘I understand. Tomorrow at noon there will be gold.’

Early in the morning of the sixth day, after the mass sacrifices on the great pyramid, Moctezuma’s spies were back with reports not only that the weeping woman had been heard again but also of a new development. Certain elders living in different wards of the city had been overheard speaking to one another about identical dreams they had all shared during the previous two nights. It seemed these dreams touched upon the security of the Great Speaker’s rule.

This smacked of treason!

Moctezuma summoned Cuitláhuac from his vigil at Guatemoc’s hospital bed and gave orders for the individuals concerned to be rounded up and brought to the palace. It was late morning by the time they arrived and he had them wait in the audience chamber while he composed himself. How dare they question his reign? When he was ready he entered with Cuitláhuac by his side and saw four wrinkled old men and three ancient crones cowering on the floor.

They had about them the smell of age and sickness, which he could not abide. Since their dreams were shared, he instructed the women to nominate one of their number who would speak for the rest, and the men to do the same, and sent the others shuffling out backwards to wait in the courtyard.

The man spoke first. He was very small, bird-like, with thin wispy hair, a weather-beaten, deeply lined, toothless face and the lumps of some canker protruding from the bones of his skull. ‘Powerful lord,’ he said in a voice that was surprisingly loud and strong, ‘we do not wish to offend your ears or fill your heart with anxiety to make you ill. However, we are forced to obey you and we will describe our dreams to you.’

‘Proceed!’ snapped Moctezuma. ‘You have nothing to fear.’

‘Know then,’ the old man continued, ‘that these last nights the Lords of Sleep have shown us the temple of Hummingbird burning with frightful flames, the stones falling one by one until it was totally destroyed. We also saw Hummingbird himself fallen, cast down upon the floor! This is what we have dreamed.’

Maintaining his composure with great difficulty, Moctezuma next ordered the old woman to speak. ‘My son,’ she said, ‘do not be troubled in your heart for what we are about to tell you, although it has frightened us much. In our dreams we, your mothers, saw a mighty river enter the doors of your royal palace, smashing the walls in its fury. It ripped up the walls from their foundations, carrying beams and stone with it until nothing was left standing. We saw it reach the temple and this too was demolished. We saw the great chieftains and lords filled with fright, abandoning the city and fleeing towards the hills …’

‘Enough of your ravings, woman!’ Moctezuma snapped. The symbolism could not have been more obvious. He turned to Cuitláhuac: ‘You know what to do.’

The fate of the elders had never been in doubt. They had, after all, engaged in a conspiracy of dreams! Cuitláhuac gave the command and the palace guards dragged all seven of them off across the courtyard. A small dungeon had been prepared for them a mile away in the northern quarter of the city, and they would be kept there without food or water until they shrivelled up and died.

Observing from a window, Moctezuma saw that the old man who’d spoken in the audience chamber was dragging his feet, protesting in his astonishingly loud voice. With a mighty struggle, revealing unexpected strength for one his age, he brought the whole procession to a halt as they reached the edge of the courtyard. ‘Let the Lord Speaker know what is to become of him,’ he harangued the guards. ‘Those who are to avenge the injuries and toils with which he has afflicted us are already on their way!’

As he heard these awful words, Moctezuma’s sense of impending doom deepened. He had put on a brave face for Cuitláhuac but it was all he could do to control himself now.

The guards beat the old man to the ground and carried him away, senseless, but what he had said seemed to linger, linger, in the sullen noontime air.

Around noon on Wednesday 24 February, the sixth day after the fleet’s departure from Santiago, Cozumel’s chieftain B’alam K’uk presented himself to Alvarado and Father Muñoz on the
San Sebastián
at the head of a delegation of four of the town’s elders. There was much oohing and aahing, accompanied by fearful glances cast at the glowering Inquisitor, as the dignitaries, ferried out from shore in a longboat, were hauled up to the great carrack. Though they had of course seen Spanish ships when Córdoba called here, it seemed they had never before been on board, and the experience was so overwhelming for them that they threw themselves face down, as the chief had done yesterday, and attempted to gather and eat dust from the deck.

Disgusting
, Alvarado thought. He turned to Muñoz. ‘Shall I kick them to their feet,’ he asked, ‘or would you like to have that pleasure, Father?’ But before the friar could respond, the Indians popped up again and stood there bobbing and grinning like monkeys. Unprompted, Little Julian said something in the local lingo, at which B’alam K’uk stuck a hand inside his sopping wet breechclout – wet from the sea, Alvarado hoped! – and pulled out a little cloth bundle, also wet. He proceeded to unwrap it, revealing a yellow gleam.

The bundle contained a few trinkets of poor-quality gold – a miserable necklace, two ear-spools, a figure of a bird no larger than a man’s thumb and a little statue of a human being which, on closer examination, proved to be made of wood covered with gilt!

‘A sorry start,’ said Alvarado, keeping his voice even. ‘Now show me the rest.’

The usual gibbering interchange involving Julian, Díaz and the chief followed, in which Julian looked increasingly frantic as Díaz kept plying him with questions while the chief and the elders answered with eyes downcast. Finally Díaz turned to Alvarado and said, ‘I’m afraid that’s all they have, sir.’