War God (52 page)

‘Tell me, my son …’

Those eyes, like black whirlpools, seemed to suck Muñoz’s brain out of his head. ‘Holiness,’ he said, ‘you know my mind already …’

‘Still I would hear you speak the words.’

‘As you command, Holy Father. This matter concerns the blackamoor Melchior, who once before tempted me to carnal lust, and the page Pepillo. That little Judas! My own servant turned against me! Two days ago, when I was seeking out the first Indian child, I observed the pair of them watching me. Following me! I evaded them. But last night Melchior followed me again, this time alone …’

‘And you evaded him once more and took a second child?’

‘I did, Holy Father, but I cannot allow this spying to continue. I fear others will soon be informed of my … appetites. Melchior harbours a deep hatred for me—’

‘Because you had carnal knowledge of him?’

‘To my shame, Holiness … On the Córdoba expedition, my lust for the blackamoor was great and he tempted me to the sin of Sodom.’

‘The only sin is that you failed to kill him on the day you had him! I permit you these … pleasures, Muñoz, because you do God’s work, but I expect you to be efficient. I expect you to be … discreet.’

‘Will you absolve me then if I kill the blackamoor now, though he is a converted Christian? Will you absolve me if I kill the page Pepillo, also a Christian and reared amongst my own Dominican brothers?’

Muñoz felt the familiar warmth of a strong, calloused hand resting on his head. ‘
Ego te absolvo
,’ the saint pronounced, ‘
a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
’

The jungle chimed and trumpeted with birdsong and reverberated with the grunts and roars of wild beasts, while high above, long-haired black monkeys swung howling from branch to branch amongst the trees.

The road through this hostile, poisonous, alien realm was almost as astonishing as the jungle itself, somewhat raised above the surrounding ground level, two lances wide and surfaced, Sandoval discovered on investigation, with iron-hard limestone stucco over a stone and rubble fill. Brabo had joked earlier that even should it prove to be as good as a king’s highway, it would not be practical to bring the cannon. Yet the workmanship of this
sacbe
, as Hope and Star called it – the word apparently meant ‘white road’ – was far superior to any of the great thoroughfares that Sandoval had travelled on in Spain and surely testified to the presence of a high civilisation with advanced engineering skills.

He found the thought a chilling one. The assumption had been made by Cortés that the Indians of the New Lands must be at the same low level of culture as the Taino of Cuba and Hispaniola; the first encounters made by Córdoba, and even this morning when the falconets were fired, had seemed to confirm this. Yet the
sacbe
sent a very different message.

Through the limited interpreting services of Little Julian, Sandoval attempted to question Hope and Star on the matter as the little group of expeditionaries pushed on at a forced march. His worry increased as he learnt that dozens of roads, just as well made as this, crisscrossed the Yucatán; however, the knots of tension that had settled at the base of his neck gradually began to dissipate as the guides explained that the
sacbes
had been built hundreds of years earlier by the ancestors of the Maya and that although they were still maintained and kept free of jungle growth, none of the tribes possessed the skills, organisation or technology to make such wonders today.

‘Why?’ Sandoval asked. ‘What happened here to bring about this change?’ But Hope and Star merely shrugged. Their ancestors, they said, were ‘giants’, but the gods had brought them low, and the Maya now inhabiting the Yucatán were ordinary mortals living simple lives, much as they themselves did on Cozumel, amongst the mighty memorials of their long-lost glory.

‘We can be grateful for that at least,’ Sandoval said to Brabo, and the sergeant nodded. ‘Indeed, sir. Our numbers are small. It’s the superiority of our arms and military discipline we must rely on to bring us victory.’

There was a chorus of agreement from the men and Miguel de La Mafla, the bright-eyed young adventurer who led the five musketeers in the squad, said, ‘Don’t worry, Sergeant, we’ll see them off for you. Judging from what happened this morning, they’ll run at the first sound of gunfire …’

‘Just as well,’ Brabo grinned, ‘seeing as you boys can’t hit a barn door at twenty paces!’ He put his hand to the hilt of his broadsword: ‘Until your aim improves, I’ll put my trust in good Toledo steel.’

Rearing above them, the dense foliage of the great trees, overgrown with creepers, all but blotted out the sky, so the Spaniards marched in a deep emerald gloom through which the rays of the sun rarely penetrated directly. This made it difficult to know the time of day, but from his glimpses of the sun’s position, Sandoval estimated it must already be an hour or more past noon. Despite the shade there was no refreshing breeze down here on the jungle floor, not even the slightest movement of air, and the heat and humidity were becoming insufferable. The armoured dogs, which led the column, straining at their leashes, panting, constantly snarling and snapping at the unfamiliar scents and sounds, were plainly distressed, their pink tongues lolling, saliva dripping from their fangs. Sandoval and Brabo came next, and behind them the twenty-five members of the squad marched in their customary square of five ranks of five. Several men had already stripped themselves of their armour, which they now carried awkwardly as they trudged onward, and Sandoval, itching and sweating, was seized by an overwhelming urge to unstrap his own heavy steel cuirass within which he imagined he was slowly baking like a crab in its shell.

‘Stay alert, men,’ Brabo warned casting a suspicious eye on the dense undergrowth hemming in the road on both sides. ‘They say these savages use poison darts …’

‘Which they bend over and blow out their arses at their enemies,’ joked Diego Martin, a thickset, powerfully muscled crossbowman. As with the musketeers, there were five specialists with this weapon in the squad, and Martin had made a name amongst them for his accuracy and speed of reloading.

Esteban Valencia, one of the squad’s two scouts, held a finger to his lips. ‘Let’s keep it quiet, boys,’ he said. ‘We’ve been marching nigh on five hours. Can’t be far to where we’re going now.’

Sandoval turned to Hope and Star and beckoned Little Julian closer. ‘Ask them how far,’ he said.

‘Will know when get there,’ came the answer after a muttered and urgent exchange in the Mayan language. ‘Jungle all look same to them.’

Since they were in the midst of hostile territory, unknown except to the two fishermen (who had seemed lost themselves from the moment they left the sea behind), Sandoval had decided not to send the scouts ahead on the road. They were, in his opinion, more likely to be picked off than to return with any useful information. The strategy therefore remained much as Brabo had proposed it at the outset – move fast, hit the enemy hard in the hope of aweing them into the same sort of panicked precipitous flight they’d provoked with the falconets on the beach, find the shipwrecked Spaniard and withdraw at a forced march to the waiting brigantines.

The likelihood of all this unravelling in dangerous and unpredictable ways was, of course, extremely high, but short of turning up here with the entire expeditionary force, which had never been an option as far as Cortés was concerned, Sandoval couldn’t think of any better way to do things. He was brooding on what might go wrong, and constantly glancing left and right into the undergrowth, when he thought he caught a flash of movement deep amongst the trees. The moment he focussed on the spot where he’d seen it, however, it was gone. Just leaves, thick bush, hanging creepers – nothing more.

Then … flash, flicker – there it was again on the other side of the road. This time he could have sworn he saw a human eye glaring at him out of the foliage, felt the shock of being watched, of a definite connection, but again when he focussed there was nothing there.

He might have gone on doubting himself if the dogs hadn’t suddenly started baying all at once. Vendabal shouted a command, the handlers stooped to let a pair of heavy mastiffs off the leash, and with eager barks they bounded away, one to the left, one to the right, into the jungle. They were instantly lost to sight, crashing through the undergrowth, their course marked only by swaying branches; then there came a terrified yell, then another, followed by a horrible cacophony of snarling and snapping and men screaming in terror and pain from both sides of the road.

Vendabal was standing alert, listening, watching. It sounded as if the mastiffs had brought two of the spies down, but more crashing in the undergrowth revealed others trying to make their escape. Sandoval didn’t hesitate: ‘Put more dogs after them,’ he yelled.

As the rest of the dogs sped left and right into the jungle, yapping with excitement, Brabo turned to Sandoval with a knowing leer. ‘It’s like I said, sir. They’re trained to relish the flesh of the Indians.’

‘Very well, Sergeant,’ Sandoval said ruefully as more terrible screams rose up. ‘I admit your point. I’m thankful for the presence of the dogs – and sooner than I expected to be …’ He grimaced, and Brabo grinned, at a particularly hideous, gurgling cry from somewhere to the left of the road. ‘Well, let’s get after them and see what they’ve found.’

Brabo led a team of five men off to the left, Sandoval took another five to the right. He drew his sword and used it to push the dense green vegetation aside, sometimes having to hack through thick creepers and branches to clear a path, but the dogs and their victims were still making so much noise they were easily found.

There were two Indians here. The first was already dead and being disgustingly eaten by the two snarling mastiffs and the greyhound that had brought him down. The second, with only one dog on him, a big lurcher that had him by the shoulder, was a boy of barely fifteen years, and still very much alive. His thin body was naked but for a loincloth and his moon face, dotted with acne, daubed with stripes of green paint and framed by straight black hair, was contorted with terror as the beast shook him like a rag doll. One of Vendabal’s handlers surged forward yelling staccato commands, striking at the dog with a whip. It released the boy and stood over him, its jaws dripping blood and saliva.

The youth was trembling, his eyes rolling in mute entreaty, as the conquistadors dragged him to his feet, bound his arms behind his back and marched him to the road. There Brabo had already rejoined the main squad with two more prisoners, both severely mauled, one with his throat so badly torn it seemed impossible he could survive.

‘I suppose we’d better try and question them,’ said Sandoval. ‘If Little Julian’s interpreting skills are up to it.’

Brabo nodded brusquely. ‘Be nice to know what sort of reception’s waiting for us ahead.’ He barked an order and the Indians were forced to their knees in the middle of the road. Before Sandoval could stop him, the sergeant had drawn a dagger from his belt, seized the hair of the boy who’d been taken by the lurcher and sliced off his left ear, producing a spray of blood and horrified screams from the captive.

‘What the hell …?’ Sandoval gasped.

‘Just letting them know we mean business, sir,’ said Brabo. ‘If you don’t have the stomach for this it’d be best to leave the interrogation to me.’

With feelings of shame, Sandoval shrugged helplessly and stood back while the horror unfolded. Did Little Julian even understand the questions Brabo put to him? Did he translate them correctly to the captives? Were they brave men, or simply confused when at first they didn’t reply? And when speech finally tumbled from them as an eye was gouged out here, a hand hacked off there, were the answers they gave truthful and did Little Julian translate them accurately?

Within minutes all three of the Indians were dead and Sandoval knew what he could already have guessed – that refugees fleeing from the coast had brought warning of the approach of the Spaniards, that the town of Mutul was alert and prepared, and that two hundred warriors, armed and ready for battle, were waiting to annihilate them.

For a moment Sandoval considered the possibility of flight. But only for a moment. To return to Cortés without even having attempted to win the prize was too shameful an outcome to imagine. Better to die here than be branded a coward for the rest of his life. He took a long swig from his water bottle and turned to Brabo. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.

‘Nigh-on thirty Spaniards and ten dogs against two hundred painted savages?’ The sergeant’s sneer said it all. ‘I reckon we march right in and kill them all, sir.’

After a mile the jungle began to thin and Sandoval and his squad, all fully armoured again and ready for war, soon found themselves in open terrain obviously cleared by human hands. There were signs of recent slash and burn, with blackened tree stumps still standing out a cubit or two above the acres of charred waste that lined both sides of the road, but ahead lay regular fields with the first green shoots of new maize – a crop already known to the Spaniards from Cuba and Hispaniola – pushing through the earth.