War God (60 page)

A woman’s voice raised in anger could be heard within, a child crying, a man speaking in indistinct, urgent tones. Shuffling to attention, Ahmakiq and Ekahau tightened their grip on Malinal’s arms and she prepared herself for the first sight of her mother in five years. She supposed she had loved her once – doesn’t every child love her mother? – but all that had long ago been burnt away and she was surprised to discover she felt nothing for her, not even hatred any more, not even curiosity, just cold and disdainful contempt. All the rage she felt was focussed on her loathsome stepfather! He’d got the better of her five years ago and most unfortunately it appeared he was going to get the better of her again today.

However, it was not Muluc who emerged from the door of the palace but the worried-looking steward who’d been sent to fetch him, closely followed by Raxca whose attention was focussed on a bawling babe swaddled in her arms. Trailing behind, and gripping a fold of Raxca’s skirt tightly in his chubby fist, was a fat and exceptionally ugly little boy – he took after his father! – with the sniffles and a smear of snot drying on his upper lip. He looked to be about five or six years of age and could be none other than the usurper Nacon.

Despite the danger of her predicament, Malinal enjoyed that special pleasure that sometimes comes from another’s discomfiture as her mother looked up from the babe. Clearly the steward had summoned her without daring to mention who was at the door, but now she gave a startled shriek and stepped back sharply, standing on her son’s foot and eliciting a high-pitched yowl of protest. ‘Gods!’ she gasped.

Once thought a great beauty, Raxca had grown plain and dumpy, with greedy eyes and the puffed-up cheeks of an agouti. Her jaw trembled and her complexion turned fish-belly pale as guilt, shame and fear fought a brief skirmish on her face. ‘Is it Malinal?’ she asked over the sniffles and incessant grizzling of Nacon.

‘Yes, mother,’ Malinal replied wearily, ‘I’ve come back to haunt you.’ She wasn’t sure why she said that, except that she did, somehow, feel like a vengeful ghost returned from the dead.

It was a bizarre situation. Malinal had been sent into slavery by Raxca five years before, yet here she was, in her mother’s audience chamber on the first floor of the palace, drinking a bowl of chocolate with her in the late afternoon as though nothing had happened!

Well, not quite nothing, perhaps, because there were guards at the door and Raxca was in the process of making it very clear that Malinal remained a prisoner. ‘We shall have to wait until Muluc returns, then we will decide.’

‘Mother, let me go!’ Malinal said urgently. ‘I have no interest in the chieftainship of Potonchan. Nacon may have it when he matures, for all I care. I’m no threat to him, or you, or your darling Muluc. My only interest is in these white men, or gods, or whatever they may be.’

‘Well Muluc is interested in them too,’ Raxca said severely. The colour had returned to her chubby face, which was set in its usual mode of fanatical devotion to her husband. ‘He’s making plans to attack them if they dare to come here. I don’t think he’d want you to contact them directly. No. I’m afraid you must stay, my dear.’

She had been breastfeeding the baby, but now Nacon stamped possessively to her side and pawed at her teat, and to Malinal’s amazement she hugged the little boy close and allowed him to suckle too. Raxca smiled as she settled back on the couch, cradling her children. ‘Tell me about Tenochtitlan,’ she said, as though Malinal had returned from a sightseeing trip instead of five years of slavery and prostitution. ‘I’ve heard it’s a very beautiful city.’

Little by little as the afternoon wore on, and Raxca steadfastly refused to be drawn into anything other than small talk, Malinal began to realise something she had never fully appreciated as a child – that her mother was a very stupid, small-minded, parochial woman. No wonder Muluc had found it so easy to manipulate her to his own ends!

Shortly after nightfall he stormed into the audience chamber, as ugly as she remembered him, muscular and scarred, with beetle brows and bulging eyes, dressed in full war regalia of body paint and feathers. ‘You!’ he said pointing a finger at Malinal. ‘How dare you show your face in my palace!’

‘I wouldn’t have done so,’ she replied modestly, ‘if your guards hadn’t arrested me and brought me here by force. They seemed to think you’d reward them well for doing that. I can’t imagine why.’

With a few harsh words, Muluc sent Raxca and the children from the room. ‘Tell me your purpose here,’ he said when they were gone. ‘Surely you can’t imagine you’ve any claim to the chieftainship after all this time.’

‘I have no claim,’ said Malinal, ‘and no interest.’

‘Then what do you want?’

Malinal saw no need to tell the whole truth to this oaf. ‘I was sent from Tenochtitlan,’ she said, ‘to make contact with the strangers …’

‘But how could anyone in Tenochtitlan know the strangers would be here? They only returned in their boats today …’

‘The Great Speaker heard of their visit to Potonchan last year,’ Malinal said carefully. ‘He believes they are gods in the retinue of Quetzalcoatl and wonders if Quetzalcoatl himself is about to return. He sent me to find out more …’

Muluc’s mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘The Great Speaker sent you?’ he laughed ‘
You
? A mere slave?’

‘I’m a slave no longer,’ Malinal bluffed. ‘I’ve been gone five years and much has changed.’ She was making up the lie as she went along. ‘I work for the Great Speaker now.’

‘So you’re what? His ambassador? Show me your papers and insignia then.’

‘I have no papers and insignia.’

‘Ha!’

‘I have no papers and insignia because I’m on a secret mission to treat with the strangers.’

‘I wonder why I don’t believe you?’ said Muluc. He laughed again. ‘You know, you should stop wasting my time! Just admit you came back to oust me, but you got caught and now you’re making up stories about the strangers to try to wriggle out of the trouble you’re in.’

‘I’ve told you already,’ Malinal protested, ‘I’m not here to oust you.’ She tried flattery. ‘I know I have no chance against a powerful man like you.’

Muluc rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a full-blown emergency on my hands.’ He gave a loud whistle and the two guards Ahmakiq and Ekahau marched into the room. ‘Put her in the palace jail tonight,’ he told them. ‘I’ll review her case tomorrow.’

‘Have a care before you go into battle with the strangers,’ Malinal called over her shoulder as they dragged her out.

‘Why?’ scoffed Muluc.

‘Because if they are gods they will kill you all.’

‘Bah!’ said Muluc. ‘I’m not afraid of them. We’ve killed them before and proved they’re just men like us. If they choose to fight, they’re the ones who will die.’

The Spaniards rowed upstream against the swift current of the Tabasco river, sweating in the close morning heat and fending off clouds of tiny bloodsucking insects. The river was broad and smelled of rot, winding in serpentine fashion between banks lined with the stunted swamp trees called
manglars
in the native Taino language of Cuba and Hispaniola. Sprouting from multiple exposed roots, like interlinked tripods, these ugly trees were filled with gaudy, shrieking birds and grew promiscuously in thick clumps out of rich, glistening, silty mud. Amongst them, with angry glowers, uttering hostile whoops and yells, moved immense crowds of Indians.

An arrow struck the deck of the brigantine but failed to penetrate the stout timbers. It bounced, slid and skittered to a halt at Cortés’s feet. Curious, he picked the little projectile up, studied its head of brittle obsidian – quite shattered by the impact – and threw it dismissively overboard. He considered for a moment firing a few rounds of grapeshot into the massed foe but relented. King Charles would expect more restraint from him than that and, besides, if he wished to engage the Indians, he was legally obliged to read them the
Requerimiento
, a tedious piece of bureaucratic nonsense that gave them the option of avoiding battle by accepting the authority of the Spanish crown.

He was certain there was going to be a fight – in part because that was exactly what he had come here for, but in part also because these savages, in their body paint and feathers, armed only with crude weapons, seemed completely unafraid of the invaders. And little wonder! They knew the Spanish were mortal, having given Córdoba such a sound thrashing last year, and thousands of them had mustered here on this morning of 22 March to repeat their victory – ten thousand, at least, visible on the river banks alone, and God alone knew how many more were waiting in the hinterland.

Córdoba had come here with a hundred and ten men and left with forty.

Although Cortés had five hundred men, he’d only been able to bring two hundred with him this morning because the river wasn’t deep enough for navigation by the carracks and caravels which he had therefore been obliged to leave at anchor in the bay, with most of his army still on board. The two brigantines did have a sufficiently shallow draught and were, in addition, superbly manoeuvrable under oar-power, so he had crowded fifty soldiers onto each, taking temporary command of one himself and giving charge of the other to Alvarado. The rest of his flotilla consisted of five good-sized longboats, borrowed from the largest ships, each carrying twenty soldiers.

Until a beachhead could be established and reinforced, the odds weren’t much better than Córdoba had faced, but mistakes had been made in the debacle of 1518 that wouldn’t be repeated in the event of a massed enemy attack today.

Most notably, Córdoba had been ill equipped, being able to bring only two small, outdated cannon to bear on the foe, whereas Cortés had loaded five good falconets, and their gun carriages, on each of the brigantines, and had many more besides waiting to be ferried out from the ships in the bay. He had also brought along Vendabal with the first thirty of his armoured war dogs – Córdoba had none – and these, Sandoval assured him after the battle he had fought to rescue Aguilar, would terrify the Maya.

Potonchan lay less than three miles upstream, where a long straight stretch of the river began; even battling against the current, the Spanish flotilla came in sight of it before noon. Alarmingly the town was large – far larger than the Córdoba veterans had remembered it, unless it had grown enormously in the past months. Sprawling for more than a mile from west to east along the bank and half a mile inland to the south, it consisted, Cortés estimated, of some twenty-five thousand houses. Although these were for the most part built of adobe thatched with straw, he spied many substantial stone structures amongst them, including a towering stepped pyramid standing at the heart of a great ceremonial plaza.

He turned to Sandoval, Brabo and Aguilar who stood by him on deck. ‘Looks quite impressive,’ he said. ‘One might almost imagine these people possess a culture.’

‘Not as we know it, Don Hernán,’ Sandoval replied. ‘As I’ve come to understand the matter, their ancestors were indeed civilised, with many great achievements of architecture and engineering, but the Maya of today have fallen far from that high estate …’

‘They are brave enough warriors though,’ added Aguilar, pointing to a fleet of thirty large canoes, each with ten armed men on board, paddling down towards them. ‘I don’t suggest you underestimate them.’

The Indians surrounded the Spanish boats while they were still almost a mile west of Potonchan. Again Cortés was tempted to disperse them with grapeshot and again he decided to wait. Let them make the first move.

Amidships the largest canoe, a tall painted warrior now got to his feet. Aged about forty, he had an air of authority. He was dark and muscular, with many scars on his body, straight hair falling in braids over his prominent brows and fierce, rather bulging eyes. He leaned on a long spear and shouted a harsh challenge up to the brigantine where all the conquistadors were at action stations, lining the rail, swords drawn, muskets and crossbows levelled.

‘What does he say?’ Cortés asked Aguilar.

‘He wants to know our business here,’ the castaway replied. ‘He says we look like the men who tried to force the Chontal Maya to worship their god last year. He says the Chontal Maya don’t want any gods except their own, so they put those men to flight. He asks if we would like them to teach us the same lesson.’

‘Cheeky bugger,’ said Brabo.

‘Tell him I heard a different story,’ said Cortés. ‘Tell him we know the Spanish were few yet it was they who put his people to flight.’

‘I’m not sure that’s wise, Don Hernán,’ said the interpreter.

‘Tell him.’

‘He says let’s not waste time talking about past events,’ Aguilar translated when he’d received the warrior’s reply. ‘If we wish to force our god on them again, and test their mettle, then they’re ready to fight us now and we will see who flees and who stands at the end of the day.’

Cortés frowned. ‘When this is over he will accept our God! But don’t tell him that yet! Tell him instead we are only an advance party and that we have many more men and much larger ships out in the bay. He knows this already but I want you to tell him anyway, and tell him if we’re attacked that the rest of our force will fly to our aid. Tell him not to start a war or he’ll be sorry, but also tell him – and convince him of this, Aguilar! – that we don’t seek battle. You’re to say we’ve been long at sea and we require only provisions – fresh water, for the river here is salt, and meat for our men. Tell him we’ll gladly pay for these things.’

A long exchange followed and at the end of it the Indians applied themselves to their paddles and the canoes shot back towards the town.

‘Well …?’ said Cortés.

‘I’ve persuaded Muluc – that’s the spokesman’s name – that they’ll have more to lose than gain by fighting us,’ Aguilar replied. ‘He’s gone to put the matter to their chief. He says we’re to anchor midstream and wait for their return.’

‘Right!’ said Cortés, rubbing his hands. The riverbank here, so close to the town, had been cleared of
manglars
and was more sandy than muddy, with flat fields of young maize growing beyond. There were crowds of Indians about but it looked a good place to set up and fortify a camp. He ordered the brigantines and longboats into shore and the cannon unloaded.