War God (44 page)

‘All they have?’

‘Yes, sir. Julian’s Spanish is very hard to understand but he’s clear enough on this. He says these islanders are very poor and anyway the Maya don’t much value gold.’

‘Don’t value gold, eh? Bloody liars!’ With a sudden rush of anger, Alvarado stepped in on the chief, grasped the waist of his loincloth, lifted him screeching from the deck, strode to the railing, threw him overboard, and watched with satisfaction as he hit the water with a tremendous splash. His only regret was that he hadn’t had the use of both hands so he could have thrown the savage further and harder. ‘Father,’ he said to Muñoz. ‘The time has come for you to attend to the souls of these poor benighted bastards. God help them, but if you find they’ve turned their backs on the Christian faith, you may do as you wish to them and their temple, and their gods. You have my blessing.’

Muñoz was in a holy rage. At last,
at last
, the time had come to strike!

But it was mid-afternoon before the three hundred conquistadors he’d asked for were mobilised and landed and the remainder of the force deployed to guard the ships.

Finally, with Alvarado at his side, the Inquisitor led the way up the hill into the maze of hovels of the Indian town. The streets were deserted and the reason why soon became clear. A babble of voices, hoots and cries, drums and whistles, was heard ahead and, as the phalanx of conquistadors entered the main square, a great throng of islanders, almost the whole population it seemed, surged forward to bar the approach to the pyramid.

‘Do something about this, Alvarado,’ Muñoz said, and watched with approval as the handsome captain ordered twenty musketeers forward in two ranks, one kneeling, one standing, and had them fire a salvo that cut a great swathe through the crowd and sent hysterical Indians running and screaming in all directions. When the smoke cleared the square was empty but for the dead. Muñoz raised his cross, shouted, ‘God wills it!’, and the conquistadors charged with a great yell.

The seventy-two steps were steep and narrow – one had to pick one’s way with care – and as the Inquisitor reached the top of the pyramid only a little out of breath, he saw at once that Saint Peter had spoken true. The Indians had indeed reverted to their heathen abominations.

The first proof of this was the life-size stone sculpture of a man with leering face and jug ears that half sat and half reclined near the edge of the summit platform holding a stone plate across his chest. In the plate, surrounded by a thick puddle of blood, sat two freshly extracted human hearts, one it seemed still palpitating.

As the conquistadors gathered round with expressions of horror, Muñoz pointed an accusing finger at the idol. ‘Who will do God’s work?’ he thundered, and immediately a dozen men put strong hands on the statue and began to rock it back and forth. It was heavy but, as Muñoz watched with approval, it was broken free of its plinth, lifted and then thrown forcefully down the steps. It rolled over and over, pieces breaking off it, cracking and smashing, gathering speed as it went, until it exploded into a thousand fragments in the plaza below, scattering the crowd that had once again begun to gather there and evoking from them a dreadful chorus of superstitious howls and groans.

Alvarado had already pressed on into the dismal, dark temple that crouched in the midst of the summit platform like some monstrous toad, its narrow doorway decorated with hellish carvings of fiends and devils. The single rectangular room, measuring perhaps ten paces in length and five in width, had a beastly stink about it, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light he saw that a huge figure that was not quite human, arms outstretched, massy hands and fingers curled into claws, reared up close to the back wall. There came a sudden, unearthly screech, and out of the figure’s towering shadow darted something hunched and capering with naked feet and long, matted hair, dressed in filthy black robes. Alvarado drew his falchion in a trice and, as this shrieking apparation plunged towards him, wielding what he now recognised as a long stone knife, he raised the point of his weapon and punched it forward into his attacker’s face, catching him between the eyes so that it split his skull and drove deep into his brain.

The Indian – and it was an Indian – fell dead on the spot. So firmly lodged was the falchion that Alvarado had to brace his foot over the man’s mouth in order to pull the heavy blade free.

He looked again at the enormous figure at the back of the room. For a moment he’d thought it was alive, but now his eyes, always quick to adjust, revealed the banal truth. It was just an idol, ugly and malformed like any other pagan mummery. The face, jaws and teeth were those of some species of dragon; the body, though scaled, was more or less human. At its feet sprawled the corpses of a young woman in her twenties and a girl child of perhaps six years of age, their breasts split open, no doubt to extract the hearts that had sat in the plate held by that other idol outside. Blood pooled on the floor, was smeared everywhere on the smoke-blackened walls of the chamber, and a flagon or two of it had been set aside in a large stone basin. Also laid out were assorted cloths, likewise sopping with blood, certain fruits and a collection of dried skulls and human bones.

Alvarado sheathed his falchion and placed his right hand over his nose. Gods! The smell of this place! He advanced into the gloom, kicked aside a pile of cloth to the right of the idol and quickly picked up and pocketed three gold objects that had been hidden there, one resembling a lizard, one fashioned in the form of a panther, and one representing an erect human phallus, rather short and thick. They were, he observed, of noticeably better quality than those the lying chief had brought to him this morning.

‘So you have your gold?’ said a sibilant, lisping voice behind him.

Alvarado whirled and saw Muñoz in his black habit silhouetted in the doorway.

‘I do, Father, though precious little of it. Have you any objection?’

‘Oh none,’ Muñoz said. ‘None at all. I am always ready to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.’

Díaz, Mibiercas and La Serna were conscripted, along with many more of the soldiery, to take a hand in the destruction of the great idol of the temple. Díaz was willing enough; he prided himself on being as good a Christian as any of them. Still, he dreaded what must come next when the Indian town rose in outrage, as he knew it would, against the interlopers.

The business with the idol didn’t go well. Fifty men dragged it forth from the temple with ropes, sweating and heaving, singing verses from the book of Numbers that Muñoz had taught them: ‘You will drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish their high places. And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it.’ With a mighty effort, even while they still sang, the conquistadors brought the huge heathen statue, which must have weighed close to a ton, to the edge of the steps, where it tottered dangerously. Down below the square was now packed full with townsfolk, so that there was no room for them to move, no space for those at the base of the steps to flee even if they wanted to.

Díaz let go his rope and walked over to Muñoz. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘we must wait to throw this vile thing down.’ He pointed to the crowd standing in stupefied silence, the men, the women, the elders, the children of the town gazing up, horrified, frozen in place. ‘If we throw it down,’ Díaz added, ‘people are going to die – a lot of people. Let me take a squad into the square and clear the Indians out of there. When they’re gone, that’s the time to smash the idol.’

‘No,’ said Muñoz, his buck teeth protruding beneath his moist upper lip.

‘
No
, Father? Why in Heaven not?’

‘Don’t you
dare
invoke Heaven to me, boy!’ Muñoz thundered.

‘But this is not a Christian act, Holy Father! We cannot simply slaughter these innocents.’

‘They are far from innocent!’ Muñoz roared. ‘You were here with me, were you not, when we came with Córdoba?’

Díaz nodded. ‘I was here,’ he admitted.

‘Then you know these heretics accepted our faith. You know they accepted the destruction of their idols. You know they placed the cross of Christ and the icon of the Virgin in yonder temple behind us …’

‘Yes, Father,’ said Díaz wearily. ‘I know these things.’

‘Yet the cross is no longer there. The icon of the Virgin is no longer there. Instead we see this … this’ – Muñoz turned his basilisk glare on the idol – ‘this
enormity
in their place, this
vile thing
, this manifestation of evil. And it is they’ – he was spraying spittle now as he pointed down at the massed Indians in the square – ‘it is they alone, of their own wicked choice who have done this. So on their own heads be it!’ And with a loathsome smile that would afterwards haunt Díaz in his nightmares, Muñoz gave the signal, and the conquistadors gathered around the idol, laughed with glee and gave it a final muscular heave – God save them – and it was launched on its journey down the steps, a ton of stone tumbling and bouncing, gathering speed, flying high into the air until it pounded down in the thick of the screaming, panicking crowd, smashing into a dense knot of people and transforming them in an instant into blood and bone and brain matter and smearing them like some obscene condiment over the flagstones of the plaza.

A shocked silence fell.

Then a wail of horror.

And then, as Díaz had expected, a roar of outrage and a surge of armed men up the steps.

There was only ever one possible outcome to the wild fighting that followed. The conquistadors were armoured, disciplined, ruthless, and equipped with vastly superior weapons, and with Alvarado leading them, his falchion dripping blood, they were merciless and profligate in their anger. By nightfall the Indians with their stone knives and primitive bows had suffered at least a hundred dead, large parts of the town were in flames, and the elders and the priests who served the temple had been captured.

On the morrow, Muñoz announced triumphantly, they would all be burnt to death for their sins.

‘Let the Lord Speaker know what is to become of him,’ the old man had warned. ‘Those who are to avenge the injuries and toils with which he has afflicted us are already on their way!’

Moctezuma had brooded on these baleful words for the remainder of that day and the long, troubled night that followed.

Avengers? Already on their way?

In this fated year of One-Reed he could not ignore the possibility that here was yet another omen of the return of Quetzalcoatl. The next day, therefore, the seventh after the failed holocaust at the great pyramid, he sent Cuitláhuac to the dungeon to interrogate the elders again. Was it men or gods who were coming? What road would they follow? What were their intentions?

The interrogation should have lasted most of the morning, but within the hour Cuitláhuac was back bringing terrible news.

The prisoners had vanished during the night.

Every one of them.

‘What of the jailers?’ Moctezuma demanded.

Cuitláhuac had already caused them to be arrested, he said, but they most vehemently protested their innocence and, for what it was worth, he believed them. They were loyal men whom he himself had appointed to the task. The prison gates had been firmly locked and the bars were secure. Cuitláhuac had inspected the floor carefully but no tunnel had been burrowed through it – and besides, the elders would never have had the strength for such a task. The roof was intact. In short, the explanation offered by the jailers themselves – namely that the prisoners must have been powerful sorcerers who had used magic to make their escape – seemed the most reasonable one.

‘What is to be the fate of the jailers, lord?’ Cuitláhuac asked.

‘Send them to kill the families of the sorcerers,’ Moctezuma said. ‘Husbands, wives, children – all are to be killed. They’re to dig in the places where their houses stood until they reach water. All their possessions are to be destroyed.’

But it turned out that not one of the elders had any living family, most were in fact beggars, their houses were poor places barely worth destroying, and they had almost no possessions.

After ordering Cuitláhuac to have the jailers skinned alive, Moctezuma fell into a black mood and retreated to his secret chambers in the depths of the palace. He took with him a basket of the sacred mushrooms called
teonanácatl
, ‘Flesh of the Gods’, which had proved so helpful in facilitating his audiences with Hummingbird.

Each day for seven days after she had been reprieved from death beneath the sacrificial knife, Tozi spent every moment she could spare from her work with Huicton flowing invisible and undetected amongst the prisoners in the fattening pens of Tenochtitlan, searching for Coyotl. The women’s pen where she had been held was still quite empty, though slowly being restocked, and it required only a short visit to satisfy herself that Coyotl was not there. Then she turned to the four pens holding male prisoners, all of them stuffed to bursting point, and searched each one of them systematically, but again without result. Finally she moved on to the five further great pens scattered around the city outside the sacred plaza and crisscrossed each of these repeatedly, but never once did she see any sign of the little boy who had been so cruelly snatched away from her by Ahuizotl.

Yet, like a ghost who would not be laid to rest, Coyotl continued to haunt her.