War God (57 page)

The route Muñoz had taken led through an area of terracing on the lower slopes of the hill where the Indians of Cozumel grew vegetables for the town, and although well camouflaged in his black habit, the friar had left deep sandal prints in the rich red earth that were easy enough to follow in the starlight.

‘Quick,’ said Melchior, ‘he’s too far ahead of us. We’re going to lose him if we don’t get closer.’

‘But not too close!’ Pepillo felt compelled to warn. ‘If he hears us we’re done for.’

‘Silly mammet!’ hissed Melchior, increasing his pace. ‘We’ve got to get close to kill him.’

Pepillo scrambled after his friend, doing his best to keep quiet even though he was already panting with the effort and his heart pounded frightfully against his ribs.
You must be mad
, he said to himself as he ran.
You’re going to get yourself killed
. Every rational instinct, every bone in his body, every straining, terrified nerve urged him to turn and slink back to the ship. But he couldn’t do that, could he? Because if he did he would let Melchior down in the worst possible way and reveal himself for the coward he was.

They were out of the terraces now, speeding up an open grassy slope. There! Ahead! A surging column of darkness deeper than the rest. That had to be Muñoz! Melchior had seen him too and raced faster, fairly pounding up the hill, widening the gap between himself and Pepillo who was thinking,
Even if we do kill him, what then? Won’t my soul be damned forever for the murder of a religious?
And he heard inside his head, like a drum roll, a deep, portentous voice that seemed to say over and over again,
Damned! Damned! Damned!
and
Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!

A hundred paces above them loomed the ominous, massy gloom of a swathe of woodland, and with a chill Pepillo recognised it as a different quarter of the same wild copse in which they’d found the body of the murdered child two days before. The shadow that was Muñoz slipped amongst the trees and was gone.

‘Melchior!’ Pepillo wanted to shout as he ran. ‘Stop, for pity’s sake! We dare not follow him there.’ And he thought –
It would be like tracking a lion to its den
. But he couldn’t call out for fear of giving their pursuit away, and to his horror he saw his friend, so far ahead now that he too seemed little more than a shadow, making straight for the spot where the friar had vanished.

Twenty seconds later Pepillo reached the edge of the trees and skidded to a halt.

By the uncertain glimmer of the stars he saw the entrance to a path, no wider than the span of his arms, leading deep into the wood.

He squinted but he couldn’t see Melchior.

In fact he couldn’t see anything!

The darkness amongst the close packed, thickly tangled trees was near total. Worse still, although the forest was alive with all manner of strange and frightening crepitations, rustlings, clicks, squawks and snuffles, he couldn’t identify any sound that was obviously Melchior pushing ahead through the undergrowth.

‘God help me,’ Pepillo whispered, and felt he was about to be sick as he took his first step on the path. Immediately something clutched his face and he slapped it away, gasping with horror before he had time to register it was nothing more than a creeper hanging down from above. The urge to vomit grew stronger, but the fear of being judged a coward by Melchior, and worse still the fear that his friend might be in danger and in need of his help, was stronger than the fear of what lay ahead, so he pressed on, carefully testing the ground at his feet with each step, sensing the soft detritus of fallen leaves, feeling the brambles tugging at his ankles. On both sides now the trees seemed to close in and when he looked back he found he could no longer see the start of the path.

He held tight to his hatchet, pushing branches and thick clusters of rough leaves and clinging tendrils aside as he walked. Then with no forewarning he heard a slow, vibrating
whirr
– very close! – and something about the size of a small bird flew right over the top of his head, disturbing the air with the flap of its wings. There were bats here, the sailors said, that drank human blood – yet surely such creatures were the least of his worries when a true monster like Muñoz lurked in this terrible close darkness, and when Melchior, on whose strength and courage he depended, was nowhere to be seen.

‘Melchior!’ he hissed, risking all. ‘Where are you?’

Nothing.

Deciding he would take ten more paces before making his way back to the ship, Pepillo began to count – one … two … three … four – when suddenly he heard … what? A footstep? A crackle of branches compressed under a heavy sandal?

‘Melchior?’ he croaked. ‘Melchior?’ Icy terror gripped his bowels and a strangled whimper rose in his throat. He turned to run but a strong hand fell on his shoulder out of the night and held him in place.

‘Ahhhh!’ Pepillo shrieked. ‘Let go, let me go.’ He struggled desperately, flailed and lashed out but it was useless. ‘Please,’ he begged, ‘please, Father, don’t kill me.’

A hand was on his other shoulder now, shaking him, and he heard a deep, familiar chuckle. ‘Don’t shit yourself, you daft mammet,’ said Melchior. ‘It’s only me. Muñoz has gone. We’re not going to catch him tonight.’

In an instant Pepillo was wildly angry, and planted a kick on his friend’s shin that sent him hopping amongst the bushes. ‘You swine!’ he yelled at the older boy, ‘you scared me. Creeping around like that! What were you thinking of?’

‘Just a jape. Don’t take on so!’

‘A jape? A
jape?
You’d jape about this?’ Pepillo felt indignant, foolish and furious all at once, but most of all, he realised, he felt relieved. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get—’

He didn’t finish his sentence. Something came
whoosh
out of the darkness, there was a solid
clunk
and he sensed rather than saw Melchior crumple to the ground beside him. A second of mute incomprehension followed, and then a moment of sudden, horrific realisation before a blow crashed into Pepillo’s jaw, lifted him off his feet, exploded bright lights inside his head – strangely reminding him of the time, years before, when he’d run full tilt into a stone wall – and plunged him, finally, into absolute, enveloping blackness.

As he swum up into consciousness, Pepillo couldn’t at first remember where he was or understand why he was lying naked on a surface of broken branches and leaves, on his stomach, gagged, with his knees bent, his wrists and ankles bound together behind his painfully arched back, and a noose around his neck seemingly connected to the tether at his ankles so that any attempt to struggle or straighten his body brought on immediate strangulation. It was very dark but the flicker of some faint light nonetheless reached his eyes. He heard a man’s voice, lisping, horribly familiar –
Muñoz!
– and the events of the night came back to him in a stupefying flood. A great cry burst from his throat, only to be stifled by the thick bundle of foul-tasting rags that stuffed his mouth.

The Dominican was speaking in an almost pleasant, conversational tone. ‘See blackamoor! Your young accomplice awakes to witness your punishment. By the time I have him he’ll be
oozing
with fear.’

Pepillo thought –
Have him? Have him? What does that mean?
– and heard an incoherent, choking roar which he understood must be Melchior, gagged like himself. He thrashed his head left and right, tightening the noose, coughing and wheezing, as he strained to find his friend whose own struggles he could hear somewhere behind him.

But he saw Muñoz first, sitting two paces away on the thick trunk of a fallen tree, his hand resting on a Bible, his black habit drawn up exposing the knobs of his knees and his face hellishly illumined by the quivering gleam of two altar candles positioned on either side of him.

‘Ah,’ the friar said, ‘allow me to oblige.’ Suddenly standing, he loomed over Pepillo, raised a foot, placed the sole of one heavy-duty sandal on his shoulder and gave him a powerful shove, spinning him round half a turn on his belly until Melchior came into view, facing him, also naked and hogtied. Unlike Pepillo, the older boy showed no fear, only a brooding anger that burned through the reflected candle flames in his eyes and contorted his proud features.

With a strange chuckle Muñoz crouched and put his mouth close to Pepillo’s ear – the same ear he’d bitten in Santiago, brushed now with the same soft heat of his lips. ‘See how your friend hates me,’ he said. Casually he placed his open hand between Pepillo’s hunched shoulder blades, moved it slowly down his body, caressed his trussed wrists and brought it to rest on his buttocks, making him flinch as though burned with a hot iron. ‘Why do you think he hates me so?’ the Inquisitor continued.

Because you’re a wicked sodomite
, Pepillo would have said if he wasn’t gagged, but Muñoz clearly didn’t expect an answer. ‘He hates me,’ he mused, his voice instantly raised to a shout and ringing in Pepillo’s ear, ‘because I had him
for a peso
in my cabin when we sailed with Córdoba. He’d do anything for coin when he was a slave –
wouldn’t you, blackamoor?
– but now he’s free the poor boy can’t bear the shame.’

Another furious roar from Melchior, who was struggling desperately, hopelessly, against his bonds, the noose biting so hard into his neck it had drawn blood.

‘That’s why he wants to kill me,’ Muñoz sneered. ‘With
this.
’ He held up Melchior’s rusty dagger, then pushed his mouth closer to Pepillo’s ear. ‘I expect he told you otherwise, yes? Some high-principled story about defending the Indians? Was that what brought you out here tonight? Well, now you know the truth, boy!
Now you know the truth!
’

He cast the dagger aside and suddenly he was on his feet again, pacing about the clearing where he’d obviously dragged both of them after knocking them out, shadows dancing across his coarse features as the candles glimmered. ‘The great dragon was hurled down,’ he said, his voice rising, ‘that ancient serpent called the devil who led the whole world astray.’ As he spoke he strode close to Melchior and kicked him twice in the ribs with such incredible violence that Pepillo distinctly heard something crack followed at once by a terrible groan of pain. ‘You are tempters,’ Muñoz boomed, ‘
tempters
, I say, who have wickedly tempted me, and the flesh is
weak
.’ He raced across the clearing, drew back his foot and Pepillo winced and moaned as two kicks now thudded into his own ribs. He felt a gush of vomit rising up his throat and bit it back, fearing he would choke and die.

But of course he was going to die anyway. They were both going to die, he and Melchior, here in the dark woods at the hands of this evil madman.

Muñoz was muttering to himself, and this was even more frightening than his shouts and yells. ‘In that day,’ he intoned, ‘the Lord with his sore great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent, and he shall slay the dragon.’ Through the tears pouring from his eyes, Pepillo saw the friar’s hand disappear inside his habit and emerge holding a straight razor. Then in a single step he surged back to Melchior’s side, planted a hand in his thick hair and flicked the razor open so that its long steel blade glittered in the candlelight. ‘A man who lies with a man,’ he said, ‘has committed an abomination and shall surely be put to death.’

As he placed the blade at Melchior’s throat there came a rush of footsteps and a huge sword lanced in seemingly from nowhere, pierced the Inquisitor’s back and emerged through his belly. The man wielding it was tall, bearded and powerfully muscled. He dipped the hilt of the weapon and, holding the friar impaled, forced him screaming to his feet.

‘Mercy,’ Muñoz shrieked. ‘Mercy! In God’s name.’

Two other men had closed in around him, their faces grim. They held daggers which they now used to stab him repeatedly, while he still wriggled on the sword blade like a gaffed fish.

It took some minutes, and a great deal of blood, before he was finally still.

The bearded, hard-eyed soldiers who had killed Muñoz were Bernal Díaz, Alonso de La Serna and Francisco Mibiercas, the latter being the owner of what Pepillo would ever afterwards think of as the sore great and strong sword. Although they sailed with Alvarado, Pepillo remembered Díaz from his visits to the
Santa María
, most recently over the matter of the murders in Cozumel, and it seemed that Melchior knew all three men from the Córdoba expedition.

The first thing they did after they had cut the boys free and allowed them to dress was very strange. ‘Are these yours?’ asked La Serna, holding up Pepillo’s hatchet and Melchior’s dagger.

They admitted ownership of the weapons.

‘And what did you plan to do with them?’

Melchior looked at Muñoz’s gashed and bleeding corpse lying face down on the forest floor. ‘We followed him here,’ he said. ‘We were going to kill him.’

‘Why?’ asked Díaz.

‘We hate him,’ said Pepillo. ‘He is – I mean he was – a murderer. Two days ago we saw him track and kill an Indian child. He killed another last night and he … he …’

The three soldiers shared meaningful glances.

‘He was a filthy sodomite,’ said Melchior.

‘He said he was going to “have” me,’ Pepillo added, ‘after he’d killed Melchior.’

La Serna held out the dagger and the hatchet. ‘Right, boys,’ he said. ‘Take your weapons and do what you came here to do.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’ asked Pepillo. The hatchet weighed heavy in his hand. Heavier than he’d remembered.

‘You came here to kill him,’ said Mibiercas, who was cleaning the blade of his sword on Muñoz’s habit. ‘Now’s your chance.’

‘But he’s already dead, sir,’ Pepillo objected.

‘Just do it,’ growled Díaz. ‘Do your part.’

Melchior needed no further urging. His breath was already coming in short fast gasps, low moans rising in his throat, and now he fell on Muñoz in a rage, burying his dagger over and over again in the friar’s inert, bloodied back. Pepillo saw tears running down his friend’s cheeks and great sobs racking his chest. Before he was done La Serna nodded. ‘You too, boy,’ he said.