War God (45 page)

First light on the morning of Thursday 25 February, the seventh day since the
Santa María’
s departure from Santiago de Cuba, revealed the island of Cozumel less than four miles ahead. Eerily, the Indian town that perched on the low hill on the northeast side of the island was
exactly
as it had appeared to Cortés in his last dream of Saint Peter.

Exactly, that is, except for one thing – the thick pall of smoke that now rose above the whitewashed, flat-roofed houses like a symbol of divine wrath.

‘What do you make of that, Don Antón?’ Cortés asked the grizzled pilot who stood by his side leaning on the newly repaired oak rail surrounding the navigation deck.

Alaminos shrugged. ‘Looks like trouble,’ he said.

Cortés could only agree. Alvarado, whose love of gold was only exceeded by his love of violence, would have assumed the position of captain-general in his absence. And with a man like that in charge of this great expedition … Well, anything was possible.

Worse, Muñoz was also on board Alvarado’s ship.

Cortés looked across the dancing waves to the pyramid that towered above the smoking town. Stepped, not smooth-sided like the famous pyramids of Egypt, it too was exactly as Saint Peter had revealed in his dream. Equally disturbing were the squat familiar contours of the dark stone edifice perching on the pyramid’s summit. The saint had described it as ‘the temple of the heathens’ and had made a point of singling out Muñoz as ‘the cure for their idolatry’.

Muñoz in his dark robes! Muñoz with his cross!

(And his bags of knives and gruesome trophies!)

Was Cortés never to be free of him?

Was he only to conquer, as Saint Peter had intimated, if he made an accommodation with that vile man?

As the
Santa María
rounded the headland, the other ten ships of the scattered fleet, about which Cortés had fretted for these past seven days, came into view in the sheltered bay, with Alvarado’s
San Sebastián
placed closest to shore. All this, too, was exactly as it had been in the dream, but for the happy crowds of Indians with their garlands, who were nowhere to be seen on this bright morning, and that ominous pall of smoke looming above the town and sending down a rain of fine ash.

‘It’s good to be back on dry land,’ Gonzalo de Sandoval said.

‘Still feels like the deck’s swaying under my feet,’ replied García Brabo, the tough Extremeno sergeant whom Sandoval had begun to count as a friend since the battle with Velázquez’s guards on the road outside Santiago harbour. Clearing his throat noisily, Brabo spat a copious gob of phlegm. ‘Sea’s not a natural place for a man to be,’ he added. ‘If it was, we’d be born with fins and scales like fish.’

‘Reckon I’m going to learn to swim,’ said Sandoval, who had always hated the ocean with its vast impersonal power and its raging unpredictable moods. He’d felt sure the
Santa María
would go to the bottom and he would drown, during the frightful storm that had battered them as they left Santiago. One great wave had washed completely over the ship, but by then he’d been clinging for dear life to the foremast and had survived – unlike the unfortunate soldier whom he’d seen swept overboard, his screams snatched away by the wind as the heaving vessel somehow ploughed on.

‘Don’t see the point of swimming,’ Brabo said after a moment’s thought. ‘Ship goes down and you’re dead anyway. Better drown fast and get it over with than drag it out for another day.’

The two men were marching side by side up the hill towards the burning Indian town. Wearing his steel cuirass and a broadsword strapped to his hip, the caudillo himself strode a few paces ahead, leading the way. Behind came the other eighty soldiers who’d survived the journey from Santiago. Left to guard the
Santa María
in the anchorage were Cortés’s manservant Melchior, the young secretary Pepillo and the full crew of twelve sailors under the command of Alaminos. From words exchanged with sailors guarding the other ships, it seemed that there had been a major battle here in Cozumel the night before and that Don Pedro de Alvarado and Father Gaspar Muñoz had ordered almost the entire expeditionary force up to the town to witness some kind of ‘punishment’ that was about to be meted out to the local inhabitants.

As they reached the outskirts, the smell of burning became stronger and more pungent. There was a reek of roasting flesh that Sandoval had been trying to ignore as they’d climbed the hill, but that now began to impress itself on him forcefully. Suddenly nervous, no longer quite so happy to be on land, he peered ahead through wreaths of smoke. ‘Think we’re going to see any action here?’ he asked Brabo as they entered a narrow street between two rows of simple flat-roofed houses, which appeared to be constructed of wattle and daub plastered over with adobe.

‘Nah,’ said the sergeant. ‘We’d have heard it by now if there was still any fighting going on. It’s all done and dusted. Look – there!’ He pointed to the corpse of a small, thin Indian woman sprawled half in and half out of a doorway. Her throat had been cut. ‘What the hell …’ Sandoval muttered as more bodies began to emerge from the smoke – a grey-haired elder spread-eagled in the middle of the street with a massive head wound, two boys spitted by crossbow bolts, four young men who’d been badly mauled by sword blows, their guts hanging out, piled in a heap.

Up ahead, looming above the single-storey native dwellings, the temple on the pyramid came into view. Now cries of terror and gruff Spanish jeers began to rise up from that direction.

‘With me, lads,’ yelled Cortés, breaking into a run. ‘At the double.’

Bernal Díaz was opposed in principle to the notion of burning human beings to death. He’d seen it done a number of times during his career as a soldier, and once in his youth in Medina del Campo, the region of Castile where he’d grown up, when a group of heretics, condemned by the Inquisition, had been burnt at the stake. Unlike his friends and fellow soldiers, who often relished such scenes, Díaz had always been sickened by them. Perhaps it was because he had an over-active imagination, whilst others often seemed to have none, but when he considered what was involved in death by burning – the slow, prolonged agony, the melting of the flesh from the bones, the body fat itself becoming fuel for the fire – he simply could not understand why anyone would wish to inflict such a terrible fate on others. Surely human kindness and Christian charity required quite the opposite – that one would rush to rescue the victims, no matter how hateful they might be or how disagreeable their views, rather than stoke the flames?

So Díaz felt acutely uncomfortable to find himself amongst the small army of conquistadors now gathered in the plaza at the base of the pyramid to witness the town’s leaders and heathen priests being burnt at the stake. The rest of the population of two thousand – most had survived the night – had also been herded into the plaza and stood there under guard, shivering and crying out in fear.

Though Díaz had refused to participate in the lynch mob, five wretched Indians had already been chained and thrown into the embers of one of the buildings set alight around the plaza. Three of these unfortunates were still alive, their flesh slowly roasting, and as their screams rose to heaven some twenty more, including the chieftain B’alam K’uk and the man identified by Little Julian as the high priest, were tied to stakes and surrounded by a mountainous pile of logs. Meanwhile Muñoz marched up and down in front of them, holding an open Bible, loudly deploring the abomination of human sacrifice – but what was burning at the stake, Díaz wondered, if not a form of human sacrifice? – and declaiming some pious nonsense about how it fell to the Inquisitor to be a physician of souls, how heresy was a disease and how the flames were a specific remedy for it.

Positioned at the edge of the massed soldiery, Díaz stood amongst a small group of hardened veterans who, like him, had sailed with the Córdoba expedition and already knew all too well the trouble Muñoz was capable of causing. Turning to his friend Alonso de La Serna he whispered: ‘It’s all happening again.’

La Serna rolled his eyes: ‘And there’s still nothing we can do about it.’

Francisco Mibiercas was listening. ‘Maybe there is something we can do,’ he offered.

Díaz and La Serna both turned to him in surprise, but Mibiercas appeared unruffled. ‘We’re all agreed this friar’s no good, right?’

‘He’s evil,’ nodded Díaz.

‘And he’s going to get us killed,’ added La Serna.

‘So let’s kill him first then.’ Mibiercas quickly glanced around. ‘Not here, obviously. Not today. But a chance will come and when it does we’ll take it.’

As Díaz registered that the swordsman was completely serious, there came a commotion on the eastern edge of the plaza and a large group of armed men spilled out of a side street and came on at a run. At their head was Hernando Cortés. Just behind him Díaz recognised Gonzalo de Sandoval.

‘What the hell’s going on here, Pedro?’ Cortés demanded. He walked right up to Alvarado and stood just inches away from him, his right hand on the hilt of his broadsword. He noticed that his old friend, whose left arm was in a sling, had likewise placed his right hand on the hilt of his sword – or rather cutlass, for he was wearing the falchion he’d taken from Zemudio.

‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ Alvarado replied innocently. ‘I’m prosecuting the business of this expedition in your absence.’ His blue eyes had a cold, dangerous glint but he smiled, showing white, even teeth. ‘Welcome back, by the way. We’ve missed you, Hernando.’

Although Cortés was seething with rage, his mind was clear, quickly sifting through his options and making decisions. His intentions for Cozumel had been entirely peaceful – to win the hearts of the inhabitants and make them his allies so that he could fall back on the island as a place of safety if necessary. Instead he found himself confronted by a scene of murder and mayhem, with that strutting fool Muñoz about to burn a large group of Indians, apparently with Alvarado’s full support.

The first and most important matter, Cortés realised, was to impose his own authority on this situation at once, otherwise he would lose face in front of the men, something that he could never allow. That meant publicly countermanding Alvarado. He was reluctant to humiliate such a good and true friend, but he was left with no alternative. Muñoz would also have to be humbled and Cortés felt some reluctance here too, on account of his strange dreams, but again he could see no other option.

‘Don Pedro,’ he said, speaking formally and in a loud voice, ‘you have done wrong here and acted against my wishes.’

Alvarado’s face flushed and he spoke in a whisper: ‘What are you saying, Hernán? The men are listening. Don’t make a fool of me in front of them.’

Ignoring the appeal, Cortés pointed to the piles of meagre booty lined up in the plaza, to the captive townsfolk and to the twenty who were about to burn. ‘This no way to pacify a country,’ he boomed so that everyone could hear, ‘robbing the natives of their possessions, taking them prisoner, razing their town …’ He turned to Muñoz who was standing frozen nearby: ‘And you, friar! Is it really your plan to burn these poor Indians as though they were Bogomils or Albigensians?’

‘They are filthy heretics!’ screeched Muñoz. ‘They accepted the faith when I came to this island with Córdoba, but they have relapsed.’

‘I see no heretics here,’ Cortés yelled back. ‘I see ignorant savages in need of further teaching, in need of Christian love and understanding, not the flames.’

The Inquisitor raised the Bible and thrust it out in the direction of the condemned men, who gazed at him with fear and fascination like rabbits hypnotised by a snake. ‘Light the fire,’ Muñoz screamed at a soldier who stood by with a burning brand. ‘Let us purge their souls in the flames so they may stand purified before the Lord on the day of judgement …’

The soldier moved the brand towards the kindling.

‘Don’t light that fire,’ Cortés warned him. ‘There’ll be no burning today.’

The soldier looked around uncertainly.

‘I speak as your Holy Inquisitor,’ roared Muñoz. ‘Light the fire, man!’

‘And I speak as your captain-general,’ said Cortés. ‘Light that fire and I’ll see you hanged.’

The soldier cursed and stepped back sharply, setting the brand down on the plaza. Muñoz rushed to pick it up but, at a nod from Cortés, García Brabo was suddenly in his path. ‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘You heard the caudillo. Nobody’s getting burnt today.’ Muñoz growled with frustration and tried to push past, but Brabo grappled with him, twisting his arm so sharply behind his back that he gasped with pain. ‘I wouldn’t struggle if I were you,’ advised the lean, grey-haired sergeant. ‘Just do as the captain-general says, there’s a good friar.’

Cortés turned to Alvarado, speaking quietly now: ‘You were too hasty, Pedro. You should have waited for me before taking such drastic action, and now you’re going to have to make reparations to put everything right.’

‘Reparations? What on earth do you mean?’ From the thunderous look on Alvarado’s face, Cortés half expected his friend to challenge him, but he pressed on. ‘You can start by cutting those men loose from the stakes. It’ll look better for you if you give the order than if I give it over your head.’

Alvarado’s handsome face contorted in a furious grimace and his mouth worked as though chewing on a tough lump of meat, but at last he barked the command and soldiers scrambled over the heaped logs to free the elders. Cortés nodded with satisfaction. ‘Free the townspeople you’re holding under guard as well, please. All of them. There’s been some killings I see?’

‘Yes,’ Alvarado admitted. ‘We burned five –’ he gestured towards a smouldering building – ‘and a few score died in the fighting last night. It’s their own fault. They should have surrendered.’

‘Would you surrender, Pedro, if our home town was attacked?’

‘That’s different. We’re Christians, they’re heathens—’

‘Heathens whom we need as allies, not as enemies. Heathens whose knowledge of the lands and peoples that lie ahead is of vital importance to us. We’ll have to pay blood money to satisfy them on the dead. Work with Little Julian to find out what they’ll accept.’