War God (50 page)

The storm that had scattered the fleet on leaving Cuba had damaged several of the ships, and their captains requested at least a week longer in the sheltered anchorage of Cozumel to carry out the necessary refitting and repairs. Juan de Escalante’s carrack, with the expedition’s entire supply of cassava bread in its hold, was in a particularly bad way, close to sinking, and had to be unloaded and dragged up onto the shore to be made sound.

But two of the smaller vessels, both brigantines, were found to be fully seaworthy. Cortés put them temporarily under Sandoval’s command for the mission to seek out the bearded white man whom the natives called the ‘
Castilan
’, and they sailed from Cozumel at dawn on Friday 26 February. Antón de Alaminos, who knew these waters better than any other Spaniard, was the pilot. García Brabo and the same squad of twenty-five ruffians who’d been with Sandoval in the battle against Velázquez’s guards provided the main fighting strength. The guides were Yochi and Ikan, two wide-eyed Cozumel islanders, familiar only with local canoes, for whom the brigantines seemed, if Little Julian’s interpreting was to be trusted, ‘as large as mountains’. Last but not least, Cortés insisted that Sandoval also take along ten out of the expedition’s complement of a hundred ferocious war dogs whose snarling, howling and snapping disturbed and terrified the islanders even though the animals, which they described as ‘dragons’, were securely caged on deck.

Despite their fears and bewilderment, Yochi and Ikan, whose names meant ‘Hope’ and ‘Star’, proved to be excellent guides. Hope was the older of the two, perhaps in his fifties, and Star was much younger – barely out of his teens, Sandoval thought; both were fishermen who knew the Yucatán coast well. Meeting with approval even from Alaminos, they skilfully avoided powerful currents by guiding the ships steadily northward through the obstacle course of small islands lying just offshore.

During the night of Friday 26 February and the small hours of the morning of Saturday 27, Cortés was visited again by Saint Peter as he slept in his hammock. The dream came upon him suddenly in the midst of a jumble of meaningless, inconsequential images, and took him by compulsion to a place he did not know, an Indian town on a great river, at the centre of which, in the midst of a spacious plaza where a tall silk-cotton tree grew, stood a lofty pyramid rising in nine steep terraces and seeming to reach for the sky.

Saint Peter had appeared at first in his usual form as a tall and robust man, clean-shaven and fair-haired with the hands of a soldier. But then, as the aerial journey began, he transformed mysteriously into a hummingbird, brightly coloured with blue and yellow feathers, a blur of wings and a long, dagger-sharp beak. Exerting some powerful force, some magnetism, he drew Cortés in a swirling vortex of flight around the pyramid and whispered in his ear – or perhaps it was not a whisper, perhaps more a thought taking shape inside his brain – ‘I require your presence here.’

‘Holy Father,’ asked Cortés, ‘where is this place?’

‘This is Potonchan,’ said the hummingbird that was Saint Peter, hanging in the air. ‘Here Christian forces led by your predecessor Córdoba suffered the humiliation of defeat at the hands of the Chontal Maya.’

‘I have heard the story,’ said Cortés. ‘We all have.’

‘That defeat must not go unavenged,’ said Saint Peter. ‘If you allow it to do so, all your work for God in the New Lands will fail.’

And with that the scene changed and Cortés again felt himself transported through the air with the hummingbird by his side. He was carried over jungles and wide rivers, crossed immense mountains wreathed in snow and at last found himself looking down upon a vast green valley with a great lake at its heart. At the heart of this lake, built upon the water like an enchanted vision, he saw a jewelled and shining city, and at the heart of the city towered a pyramid of pure gold so high and so bright that it caught his eye by force, and astonished him, and stupefied him with wonder.

‘All these things God will give you,’ said Saint Peter, ‘when you have done the thing I require you to do.’

‘Command me, Holiness, and I will do it.’

‘You must punish the wicked ways of the Indians of Potonchan. You must lay my vengeance upon them. You must destroy them utterly until their dead lie thick upon the ground. Only then will you earn your reward.’

Early on the morning of Saturday 27 February, Sandoval’s brigantines rounded Cape Catoche and came in under oar to a shallow lagoon, named Yalahau in the Mayan tongue, which Alaminos had visited the year before when the Córdoba expedition had passed a night at anchor here.

Protected on its north side from Atlantic storms and currents by a long narrow island that the guides called Holbox, the five-mile-wide lagoon was sheltered and peaceful, fringed by white sand and palm trees and home to tremendous populations of large and colourful birds including species familiar to the Spanish such as long-legged pink flamingos and white pelicans. On the lagoon’s south side, where the Yucatán mainland stretched away into limitless distance, several villages were visible amongst the trees and, within minutes of the brigantines being sighted, great numbers of people had emerged to line the shore.

Sandoval ordered the crews to row closer and it soon became obvious the villagers were hostile. There were many women and children amongst them, but he also counted close to a hundred men waving spears and clubs. As the ships came within hailing distance, several flights of arrows soared up but fell short into the blue waters of the lagoon. ‘I think we’ll drop anchor here,’ Sandoval said to Brabo, ‘and give some thought to strategy while we’re still out of arrow range.’

‘Good idea, sir,’ agreed the sergeant, shading his eyes with his hand and frowning at the Indians on the shore. ‘But, if I may suggest, a few rounds of grapeshot fired into the midst of them would be likely to work wonders.’

Sandoval winced. Each brigantine was armed with two small cannon, one in the bow and one in the stern. With barrels four feet long, these weapons were called falconets because they fired metal or stone balls, similar in size to a falcon with its wings folded, weighing about a pound and lethal up to a range of a mile. They could also be loaded with canvas tubes containing clusters of smaller balls – somewhat like clusters of grapes in appearance – that broke up and spread out on firing and were utterly devastating against a massed enemy at close range. The Indians lined along the shore were less than five hundred feet away and if Brabo’s suggestion were followed many of them would die.

‘I’m not sure that will be necessary,’ Sandoval said. ‘Let’s see if we can scare them off with some ball fired into the trees.’ He turned to Alaminos: ‘Did you use cannon when you were here with Córdoba?’ he asked.

The pilot shook his head. ‘We didn’t land so there was no need.’

‘Well and good then,’ said Sandoval and gave the order for the falconets to be charged. ‘Let’s fire two rounds each from all four of them and see what happens.’

That same morning, Saturday 27 February, Cortés and Alvarado took breakfast together on board the
Santa María de la Concepción
.

‘Well,’ Cortés said with a smile, ‘are we friends again?’

Alvarado still wore a sulky, somewhat wounded expression. ‘You should not have shamed me, Hernán.’

‘You shamed yourself, Pedro, with your haste and your greed. Please forgive me for being blunt but that’s how I see it. Your actions here in Cozumel could have cost us dear …’

‘Dear? How so? The Indians were heretics. They deserved to burn. And their gold was ours by right of conquest. Why should I not take it? Why should I have been compelled to give it back?’

Cortés sighed. ‘Strategy, Pedro. Strategy … By making reparations we regained the trust that you had lost us, and because of that trust we were given vital intelligence. Nothing could be more central to our interests than a proper interpreter but I doubt the Indians would have breathed a word about this shipwrecked Spaniard if I’d left things the way I found them when I arrived …’

Alvarado sniffed. ‘Ah yes, your mysterious “
Castilan
” … If he even exists, which I very much doubt. I’ll wager you’ve sent Sandoval off on a wild goose chase …’

‘Really? A wager? How much?’

Alvarado grinned: ‘A hundred gold pesos.’

‘Come come! A mere hundred? There’s no sport in that!’

‘Very well then, let’s say a thousand.’

‘Done!’ agreed Cortés. ‘If Sandoval comes back with this “
Castilan
” you’ll pay me a thousand gold pieces; if he comes back empty handed you can take a thousand from me.’

Alvarado’s spirits had lightened, as they always did at the prospect of a gamble, but he was still visibly sulking. ‘A mere fraction of what you owe me,’ he said. ‘For your sake I passed up fifteen thousand gold pieces from Velázquez, risked my life and took an injury.’ He stabbed his knife into a slice of roast pork and glanced down at his splinted left arm hanging uselessly in a sling across his chest. ‘You conveniently forgot all that, Hernán, when you rebuked me in front of the men.’

‘I forgot nothing, but I am in command of our expedition and I carry responsibilities that you do not.’

‘You’d have no expedition to command if I’d done what the governor asked of me.’

Cortés slowly nodded his head. ‘I’m in your debt for that,’ he said. ‘I don’t deny it …’

‘And that debt is about to deepen! Juan Escudero and the governor’s cousin Velázquez de León paid me a quiet visit yesterday, you know. They’ve taken hope from our quarrel on Thursday. They can’t imagine I’ll ever forgive you for it, so they fancy I’m ready to join their side. They’re hatching some plot to arrest you and hinted they’d offer me joint command with Escudero if I play along with them. I’ve agreed to meet them on my ship this afternoon to hear more …’

Cortés laughed. ‘Somehow, old friend, I don’t see you ever joining such swine.’

‘I’m no Velazquista,’ Alvarado agreed. It was the derisive term the two of them used between themselves for the clique of cavilling and complaining officers loyal to the governor of Cuba. ‘And I’m no captain-general, either – “joint” or otherwise! Appearances to the contrary, I do know my limitations. I’m rash, hot-tempered, impatient; I like a fight, and frankly the burdens of command bore me. But I thought I’d string them along, find out more about what they want and give you a full report.’

‘So I can still count on you, Pedro? Despite the harsh words we’ve exchanged?’

The atmosphere in the stateroom lightened further as Alvarado gave another big grin. ‘You can count on me, Hernán. I’ll keep the Velazquistas guessing and strengthen your hand against them, but I ask you this in return – respect my pride, give me enemies to kill and don’t keep me too long away from gold!’

‘You will have gold! More than even you could wish for. And battles too. We’ll be refitting for a few more days here in Cozumel while Sandoval finds that shipwrecked Spaniard and brings him to us here—’

‘If,’ objected Alvarado, ‘if …’

‘Oh, he’ll find him all right, and when he does, I tell you what, I won’t even have my thousand pesos off you. You can keep it as a down payment on the fortune you’ll make in the new lands. Then we’ll sail the fleet north along the east coast of the Yucatán peninsula, round Cape Catoche – where Sandoval should be now, by the way – and thence south down the west coast of the peninsula to a place called Potonchan …’

‘Where Córdoba took a beating?’

‘Exactly. His defeat there sets a bad precedent.’

‘Some would call routing an army of ten thousand savages with a hundred men a victory …’

‘It was a defeat. Seventy Spaniards died in the fighting, the survivors fled back to their ships with their tails between their legs before the enemy could regroup, and Córdoba himself perished from his injuries on the return journey to Cuba. He was a brave man. All who were with him there were brave men; but, make no mistake about it, they were defeated, and they were seen to be defeated, and now those Indians know we can be killed. Such reverses happen on campaign, and they will happen to us, but if we are to conquer here then we cannot afford to let any reverse go unpunished. That’s why I intend to take revenge for Córdoba’s defeat and do great harm to the Indians of Potonchan. I’ll not hold you back there, Pedro, you have my promise. None will be spared until I receive their abject surrender, and we will have their gold, their silver, their jewellery – and their women for our beds.’

‘Bravo Hernán!’ roared Alvarado. ‘Now you’re talking.’ His grin was wider than ever, his teeth bared in a wolfish snarl, and he slapped his uninjured right hand on the table. ‘I’m not sure about their filthy women, though.’

Like all the Spaniards on board the brigantines, Sandoval was used to the crashing, explosive roar of cannon fire, to the pressure wave of the percussion as it struck the ears, to the whistle of the ball through the air, and to the foul, sulphurous smell of the clouds of smoke given off by the guns. So were the caged dogs, trained and habituated to war, and so also, though to a lesser extent, was Little Julian. But Hope and Star were completely new to the experience and threw themselves to the deck, their eyes rolling, their jaws slack, uttering high, keening wails of terror which drove the dogs into a frenzy, barking, snarling and pawing at the walls of their cage.

On shore the effects were even more dramatic. As the first four shots smashed into the dense trees that Sandoval had told the gunners to aim for, turning great swathes to matchwood in an instant, and as the shock of the explosions echoed round the lagoon, a tide of hysteria swept through the Indians, causing many to fall on their knees or their faces and many more to turn and run, barging into those behind them in what rapidly became a cascading, screaming, desperate stampede into the jungle. Within moments the white sand beach was empty, but for the fallen and the trampled, and very soon all the injured who were able to walk or drag themselves away were gone.

A ragged cheer went up from the Spaniards. ‘Looks like you were right, sir,’ said Brabo with a grim smile. ‘That worked a charm.’