War God (62 page)

He had prepared carefully for this moment. The expedition’s hundred war dogs were caged below deck, fifty on each of the moored brigantines. Their barks and howls echoed through the camp but it was clear the Maya had no idea what sort of animals were producing these sounds. Vendabal and his assistants had orders to bring them ashore after Muluc’s departure.

Earlier Cortés had put a squad of fifty soldiers on board each of the brigantines and placed them under the command of Díaz and Sandoval. Men were ready at the oars to row the boats upstream to Potonchan as soon as the dogs had been disembarked. Each brigantine was also armed with three falconets, one amidships, one at the bow and one at the stern. Cortés had given firm instructions to Díaz and Sandoval to set human feelings aside and use all six cannon to enfilade the town with two full salvos of grapeshot before landing.

Once again, as he’d expected, Muluc refused to accept the perfectly reasonable request that the Spanish be allowed to enter Potonchan peacefully. On the contrary, the stubborn Indian turned his back and stalked down to the river’s edge, where his retinue waited in a small fleet of canoes. They paddled out to midstream and held still, then Muluc put a conch to his lips and blew a mighty blast.

It was, as Cortés expected, the signal for a general attack. Giving vent to chilling shrieks, yips and ululations, the massed Indian ranks surged across the fields, unleashing slingstones and spears, some of which reached the camp despite the extreme range. What Cortés had not expected was the second large force in canoes concealed amongst the
manglars
on the opposite side of the river that simultaneously put out into the water and began to paddle rapidly towards them.

Even so, correct form had to be followed. With a yell, Cortés summoned the expedition’s notary, Diego do Godoy, and ordered him to begin reading the
Requerimiento
.

Moored by the steep bank below the Spanish camp, Bernal Díaz was in the foremost of the two brigantines commanding fifty soldiers. His force included five musketeers and five crossbowmen. He had three falconets on board, each cannon loaded and fired by a two-man crew. Sandoval, who also had three falconets at his command, was right behind him in the second brigantine with an identical force. Their task, after disembarking the dogs from their cages below decks, was to row the mile upstream to Potonchan with the greatest possible despatch, bombard it from the river with the falconets and then force entry. Meanwhile, Cortés would lead a charge of the main land force of some two hundred men, supported by the armoured dogs, directly along the bank into the town’s western suburbs. Pedro de Alvarado and Alonso Davila would lead a subsidiary force of a hundred men on a flanking manoeuvre through the fields to the south of the town and then round behind it into its eastern suburbs.

This was the theory.

But as he heard the loud blast of the conch, Díaz realised that Muluc had seized the initiative and that matters would not be going to plan. As though conjured into sudden existence by some sorcerer, a thousand howling Indians in a hundred canoes were on their way across the breadth of the river, homing in shockingly fast on the port side of the brigantines. Already spears and arrows were arching up out of the canoes and, if they were falling short now, they would not do so for much longer.

At this range, a broadside of grapeshot from his three falconets, and the same from Sandoval’s three, would sweep the river clear of attackers in an instant. Unfortunately, however, all the cannon were arrayed on the starboard side of the ships, ready to enfilade the town, and while their crews swivelled and moved them, losing precious seconds, Díaz ordered the rest of his force to port to repel boarders, and the muske-teers and crossbowmen to open fire immediately. A glance from the corner of his eye showed him that Sandoval had done the same and the ten muskets roared almost simultaneously, with the crossbows firing a second later.

Sandoval had reported the almost magical effects of gunfire during the rescue of Aguilar from the town of Mutul, but Díaz had no such expectations here. The Indians of Mutul had never faced firearms before, whereas these devils of Potonchan had not only faced muskets and cannon but had faced them down and driven Córdoba’s forces, Díaz amongst them, back into the sea.

Cortés was not Córdoba, however. His army had fifty musketeers, against Córdoba’s lowly seven, and fifty crossbowmen against Córdoba’s five. Another crucial difference was artillery. Córdoba was able to deploy only two ancient hand cannon, whereas Cortés had eighteen of the small, mobile falconets and three great lombards designed to demolish castle walls.

As the musket balls whirred amongst the Indian canoes, ploughing through flesh and blowing heads apart in explosions of blood and bone, the awful boom of the percussion rolled and echoed. It was gratifying, despite having knowledge of guns, that hundreds of the attackers panicked at once and threw themselves into the water or wheeled their canoes and began to paddle furiously upstream towards the town. Even as they did so, however, there came a gigantic rolling crash from the shore as the twelve falconets defending the camp were fired in a single barrage – at what target Díaz could not immediately see. The effect of these new detonations, a thousand times louder than any musket, and of the accompanying eerie whistle of grapeshot, was to disrupt and bewilder even further the attack the Indians were attempting to mount from the water.

Still enough of them came on to overrun the ship. Díaz drew his broadsword.

Godoy didn’t finish reading the
Requerimiento
, and of course there was no time for Aguilar to translate any of it into Maya. After the notary got to the part explaining how Pope Alexander VI had given all the lands and peoples of the New World to Spain and Portugal, the Indian horde charging across the fields was at point-blank range and really had to be stopped, so Cortés was obliged to order the falconets fired.

As the smoke began to clear, he surveyed the harm done to the massed enemy and felt inspired to offer a short prayer of gratitude for the incredible advancement of science that God had permitted to the European powers. Without their twelve small cannon, the Spanish in the camp might easily have been overwhelmed by the five thousand homicidal savages who had poured in on them. But now, instead, the front ranks of that vast attacking force had been transformed by the maelstrom of grapeshot into an eerily silent, bleeding ruin of mangled bodies cut down in swathes before the guns, the fallen lying in indiscriminate heaps of guts, dismembered limbs and shattered skulls, the living stumbling dazed and addled over the dead, and great smears of gore splashed through the young maize as though by some giant paintbrush.

The Indians’ battle experience against Córdoba’s two pathetic little hand cannon hardly stood them in good stead for this! Seized by panic, the middle ranks, though quite unscathed, had dissolved into a full and chaotic retreat, yet the numbers committed to the attack had been so great, and the mass and momentum of their charge so huge, that the rear ranks were still coming on. A fearsome, tangled collision ensued across a wide front, from which piteous screams rose up as hundreds were trampled and crushed.

It was, Cortés thought, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse had descended upon that place and the last days of the world had come. Even Alvarado, falchion in hand, was impressed. ‘God in heaven,’ he said, ‘that’s as fine a sight as ever I saw.’

Still there were thousands of survivors, most already in flight along the riverbank back to Potonchan. Wanting to press home his victory at once before they had time to regroup and mount a proper defence of the town, Cortés whirled towards the brigantines. ‘
Vendabal!
’ he yelled, as he grasped the extent of the parallel attack that was under way there, ‘
Get those dogs amongst the enemy!
’

His eyeline into the camp obscured by the steep riverbank, Díaz had only the haziest idea what was going on there and little time to care. More than a hundred Indians, plumes of bright feathers in their hair, their bodies and faces fearsomely striped with black and white paint, had boarded the brigantine and hand-to-hand fighting raged all across the deck. Ducking low, as a swarthy, sweating, wild-eyed savage swung a huge club at his head, Díaz backhanded the edge of his broadsword across the man’s naked belly, spilled his guts, stepped in and trampled him down. Now two more were coming at him, flanking him. He felt something strike his right thigh hard and sharp, ignored the pain, cut the legs out from under the man on his left, put the point of the sword neatly through the second man’s chest, and with a roar shoulder-charged a third, sending him cartwheeling over the rail and into the river.

In a second of breathing space he saw that not a single Spaniard was down. Although hard-pressed they were winning the fight! The enemy were for the most part naked but for loincoths, and their flint daggers and wooden batons edged with obsidian were little better than children’s toys, quite unable to penetrate the plate and chain mail with which the Spanish were armoured – and no match for Toledo steel. He saw Mibiercas wade into a mass of the enemy, ignoring spear thrusts that slid harmlessly off his cuirass, swirling his great longsword before him, hacking left and right, left and right, cutting a man clean in half here, taking an arm off a shoulder there. Right behind him came La Serna, who’d snatched up a pike and was jabbing its vicious point down overhand into the faces of the attacking warriors, piercing one through the eye, tearing the throat from another.

‘To me!’ Díaz yelled, ‘to me! Avenge Córdoba!’ And in twos and threes his men rallied to him, formed up almost automatically into a square bristling with steel and harm, and swept forward along the deck in an armoured mass. The Indians still outnumbered them, but they lacked coordination and were already wavering, on the brink of panic, when Vendabal appeared like an evil genie from the hold with fifty of his armoured dogs streaming before him. He’d starved the animals the night before and now Díaz understood why. As they leapt, snarling and baying upon the enemy, as lions upon lambs, the huge animals spread the contagion of utter terror amongst them, tumbled at least a dozen on their backs and began at once to devour them. All the courage and bravado drained out of the rest in an instant. With howls of despair they threw themselves overboard onto the muddy bank and into the water, where Cortés and a hundred conquistadors from the camp waited with swords drawn to slaughter them.

In the rush, Cortés had forgotten his buckler; he fought with a dagger in his left hand, a broadsword in his right. He had also lost a sandal somewhere on the riverbank, but hardly noticed it as he closed with a glowering, barrel-chested savage, chopped off his arm at the elbow with a firm downward sword slash and slit him open from groin to navel with the dagger. The man gave a horrible yell and lurched forward – absurdly still trying to grapple with him! – but Cortés contemptuously swept him aside and advanced through the cloying mud towards a slim, long-haired Indian youth who stood hip-deep in the river with his back turned. Armed with a sling and a bag of stones, this veritable David had, in the past few moments, singlehandedly brought down three conquistadors on the deck of Sandoval’s brigantine, where the last of the boarders were still being dealt with. The youth was whirling the sling above his head again, concentrating, taking careful aim, inexperience making him oblivious to danger, when Cortés hacked the edge of the sword into his neck where it joined his shoulders, releasing a spray of arterial blood. As the muddy water blossomed red around him, the boy turned and sank down into it, still gripping the sling, his eyes rolling in horror.

Cortés stalked on in search of new prey, but the fight had become a mopping-up operation. Those of Vendabal’s dogs that could be separated from the Indians they were eating on Díaz’s brigantine – now joined by the other dogs from Sandoval’s hold – had been set on the fleeing remnants of the very large force that had attacked the camp. They would pursue them to the outskirts of Potonchan before Vendabal finally called them off. The last of the Indians who’d infested Sandoval’s brigantine had also been killed.

As Cortés searched for and retrieved his lost sandal from the mud, he resolved to press home the attack on the town at once. Muluc’s pre-emptive strike across the river had taken him by surprise and caused some disruption to his plans, for which indignity he intended to make the inhabitants pay dearly.

Action at last
, thought Alvarado as he led his force of a hundred men at the double through the fields of the dead. The effects of the cannon fire on the enemy had been spectacular, but there was no substitute for cold steel and the press of battle. He grinned as he remembered the surprised faces of the five Indians he’d cut down in the fight around the boats – the heavy blade of the falchion was perfect for the brutal slaughter of such foes with their puny stone weapons and no concept of the science of warfare. But his blood was up now and he was in the mood to kill more.