War God (64 page)

‘To shore!’ yelled Sandoval to the rowers as the anchor was pulled up, and the brigantines surged across the current to the devastated waterfront, piled high with the broken and dismembered dead.

Alvarado cursed his broken arm that meant he could not hold a buckler and fell automatically into the swirling Talhoffer style of
messer
combat he’d learned in Zurich years before and practised many times on board ship since he’d set himself the task of mastering Zemudio’s falchion. Though crude, with the weight of a battle-axe, the heavy steel blade offered a skilled user – such as he had become! – all the flexibility and speed of response of a sword, and he used it now to carve a broad, bloody path through the heaving mass of filthy Indians who’d surrounded his twenty and who continued to pour out, in vast, unexpected numbers, from the adobe houses lining both sides of the street.

He’d made every one of his men an expert with the sword in the years they’d been with him; they were all heavily armoured and, though they were outnumbered at least ten to one, Alvarado was confident they would win through. He delivered a killing blow slanting right to left, cutting an opponent down from the base of his neck to his ribcage, then immediately reversed the blade and slashed another man’s belly open, brought the point up in a ferocious lunge into the face of a third, withdrew and began a new cycle of blows with a clean decapitation of a fourth. ‘
Yes!
’ he yelled, ‘
yes!
’ as he saw his foes backing warily away from him. ‘This is what I live for!’

He was enjoying himself so much that he’d completely forgotten about Davila and the other eighty men hidden in the undergrowth, but now there came a tremendous crash of musket fire. Bullets whirred through the air, passing perilously close to the Spaniards, ploughing into the mass of their attackers and – predictably! – causing consternation amongst them. What was it with these Indians, Alvarado wondered, that made them so afraid of a few loud bangs? The actual killing power of the muskets was, in his opinion, fairly negligible; they were hard to aim and they took an unconscionably long time to reload, but their terrifying effect on the natives could not be denied.

A few well-aimed crossbow bolts followed, and then Davila’s men, coming on in a compact square, hit the Indians from the rear with all the force of a battering ram.

Alvarado killed and killed again, the remaining Indians fled, and suddenly there was no one left to fight. Davila swaggered over wearing an I-told-you-so look.

‘Well?’ said Alvarado.

‘Got yourself in a bit of a tight spot there,’ said Davila disapprovingly.

‘I’ve been in tighter.’

‘Perhaps,’ – a sneer – ‘but I’d say it’s just as well the rest of us were here to get you out of this one.’

Pompous fool
, thought Alvarado. Hot words rose to his lips but, before he could utter them, Davila held up his hand and gestured:
Listen
.

There could be no mistaking the rumbling roar of the cannon salvo that echoed forth from the western side of Potonchan.

As they broke into a run, their men streaming after them, the guns fell silent and shouts and musket fire carried to them on the sluggish afternoon breeze.

Then the falconets boomed again, signalling the start of the general attack. ‘Santiago and at them!’ yelled Alvarado. ‘Santiago and at them!’ yelled Davila. ‘Santiago and at them!’ yelled their hundred men in unison, now at a full charge towards the distant sounds of battle.

Cortés had watched with satisfaction as his falconets billowed fire and the pair of one-pound balls exploded into the centre of the barricade, smashed apart a section of heavy fencing and transformed it into a deadly weapon from which a hail of lethal splinters and shrapnel tore into the enemy ranks and plunged them instantly into ferment.

Followed by the infantry in a disciplined mass, the gun crews hurriedly wheeled the cannon forward, swabbed out the barrels and reloaded while the musketeers and crossbowmen picked off milling, terrified Indians through the breach. Amidst clouds of smoke and the fearful din of battle, the second volley from the falconets, now at point-blank range, demolished two further segments of the defences and set off a terrified, stampeding retreat.

‘Santiago and at them!’ Cortés yelled at the top of his voice. His men wrenched apart what remained of the Indian defences and he led the charge into a broad street beyond. At the end of it, a hundred paces distant, stood another row of barricades, barely waist-high and much flimsier than the first, behind which, and atop the neighbouring houses, the Indians – poor fools that they were – had rallied.

There was no time or need to bring up the falconets. As the infantry square once again formed and surged forward, Cortés gave the signal to Vendabal, and eighty ferocious war dogs raced ahead. Some, following their noses, found entry to the houses that lined the street, from which wails of terror were immediately heard; others leapt the barricades and tore into the defenders, snarling and snapping like demons from hell. The infantry followed, swords flashing, pikes and battle-axes gleaming in the sun, and fell upon the scattered and broken enemy, squads peeling off to root them out of the houses, others tearing their miserable barricades apart.

As quickly as it had formed, the square disintegrated into ever smaller units, each pursuing separate objectives in what seemed to be a generalised rout of the enemy, when suddenly – a trap! – fresh war cries were heard and a thousand or more Indians converged in great masses from three different side streets and charged down on the conquistadors, seeking to exploit their temporary loss of coherence and pressing them hard.

‘Square!’ Cortés yelled, ‘Square!’, making himself a focal point in mid-street to which his men could rally, but also attracting the attention of dozens of the enemy who seemed to recognise him as the Spanish captain and surrounded him with single-minded intent, jabbing at him with spears and knives. For an instant he stumbled and nearly fell as a great wooden club smashed into the side of his head, but surged up with a roar, rammed his buckler into his attacker’s face, hacked the edge of his broadsword at the man’s knee and killed him with a thrust to the heart. As more of the enemy closed with him he heard a voice – ‘I’m with you, Hernán’ – and his friend Juan de Escalante fought his way through the melee, long black hair hanging loose to his shoulders, broadsword dripping with blood, to stand at his side.

Precious time was lost mooring the brigantines, detailing skeleton crews to guard them, and disembarking the rest of the men as the sounds of battle from the western sector of town into which Cortés had led the main attack grew fiercer and more urgent. ‘Santiago and at them!’ Bernal Díaz was at last able to yell, and led the charge across the waterfront – though at first the Spaniards struggled to make headway, so high and so tangled were the heaps of dead and dying Indians left by the ships’ guns.

During the action this morning, Díaz had been shot in the muscle of his right thigh by an Indian arrow. He had pushed the barbed head through, broken off the shaft and extracted both pieces of the little missile, so he was reasonably sure, if he could dress the wound cleanly in the next few hours, that there would be no infection. Meanwhile he ignored the pain, as he had long ago learned to in the heat of battle, and let his ears and sense of direction guide him towards the sounds of heavy fighting, charging through Potonchan’s deserted main square and past the looming stepped pyramid into a maze of mean alleys and small adobe houses. Finally, rounding a corner with Sandoval at his side and seasoned troops behind him, he saw Cortés’s infantry barely a hundred paces away at the convergence of four streets. By some misjudgement or accident they had lost their formation as a proper fighting square and were beset by a large Indian force. ‘Santiago and at them!’ Díaz yelled, and at the same moment, to his immense relief, he heard the ancient battle cry of his forefathers echoed not only by Sandoval and his own men but by another Spanish contingent – Alvarado and Davila! – charging into the fray from the east.

In an instant the tide turned and the enemy, losing heart, fled in a mass towards the south.

Díaz heard Cortés shouting, ‘Get me prisoners!’ and saw a dozen warriors who’d not yet broken out of the melee tackled and brought down. Exulting in their sudden victory, a large squad of conquistadors set off in hot pursuit of the rest, but the caudillo called them back. He looked strong and cheerful though blood dripped from beneath his helmet. ‘We’ve done enough for one day,’ he said. ‘We’ll finish this tomorrow.’

Cortés strode into the main square of Potonchan as the afternoon shadows lengthened and brought his troops to a halt before the forbidding terraces of the pyramid where a giant silk-cotton tree grew. Pointing to it he asked Aguilar if it had any significance, and the interpreter replied that it was sacred to the Maya. ‘For them it is the tree that connects the underworld, the earth and the heavens.’

‘Pretty idea,’ said Cortés thoughtfully. He looked up into the branches for a moment, made certain that Godoy, the royal notary, whom he’d summoned at the double from the camp, was present to witness the act, then drew his sword and slashed three deep cuts into the tree’s broad trunk. Speaking loudly, and in a firm voice, he said: ‘I have conquered and I now take possession of this town, and this land, in the name of His Majesty the King. If there is any person who objects I will defend the king’s right with my sword and my shield.’

Huge shouts of ‘Hear, hear!’ followed from the mass of the men, passionately affirming that he did right and that they would aid him against any challengers. But, he noted, some of the friends of Diego Velázquez, lead by the glowering, lantern-jawed Juan Escudero, had gathered in a tight group and were plainly offended that Cortés had failed so conspicuously to mention the governor. ‘See the upstart,’ he heard Escudero bark, ‘who usurps Don Diego’s rights. Something must be done to stop this treachery.’ The man had made no attempt to lower his voice, but the other Velazquistas around him, including Diego de Ordaz, Cristóbal de Olid, and the governor’s cousin Juan Velázquez de León all averted their eyes when they saw they were observed.

Cortés smiled cheerfully and pretended nothing was amiss, but a reckoning was coming – and not only with the Indians. Sensing trouble, his own close allies, Pedro de Alvarado, Juan de Escalante and Alonso Hernández Puertocarrero came to stand on either side of him as, in the distance, from the surrounding countryside, they all heard the sound of drums and the ululations of warriors. ‘The town is ours,’ Cortés said, clapping his friends on their shoulders, ‘but it seems our fight here is far from over. Time to bring the horses ashore and get them exercised. I’ll wager we’ll have need of them tomorrow.’

Four days after agreeing the plan with Huicton, Tozi left Tenochtitlan and crossed the Tacuba causeway amongst busy early evening crowds. She was visible, but invisible, a dirty beggar girl of no consequence who came and went as she pleased. No one noticed as she made her way into the warren of side streets off Tacuba’s main square, blending in amongst the other beggars. With night falling she followed a narrow, dark alley choked with rubbish and came at last to a green gate in a wattle fence. She knocked and the gate swung open. Looking neither left nor right, Tozi passed through the gate, nodded a greeting to the burly middle-aged woman who admitted her, made her way across a yard where sheets, blouses, loincloths and a threadbare cotton cloak hung drying and entered the simple dwelling. A lantern flickered in the single large room that served as bedchamber, kitchen, dining area and parlour, and here Huicton was waiting, seated at a rough-hewn table sipping from a cup of pulque.

‘So, Tozi,’ he said. ‘Are you still willing to charm Prince Guatemoc?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ she replied.

An hour later she was ready, dressed up in the finery of the goddess Temaz, her cheeks painted with yellow axin pigment, her lips reddened with cochineal, black bitumen applied to her eyelids.

‘Gods!’ said Huicton. ‘I myself could believe you are Temaz. You have the look of a woman of twenty – a wise and beautiful woman! – not a girl of fourteen. You know what to say? You know what to do?’

‘You’ve prepared me well, Huicton. I’ll go to Cuitláhuac’s estate at Chapultepec, wait until after midnight, enter the mansion, climb to the second floor and find Guatemoc’s room in the south wing. I’ll do all I can …’

‘He’s deeply estranged from Moctezuma after the attempt to poison him. It shouldn’t be too difficult to work on his mind and detach his loyalties further.’

‘I’ll do everything in my power …’

‘The only thing I ask you, Tozi …’

She frowned. ‘We’ve been through this already. You don’t want me to speak of Quetzalcoatl. But why should I not?’ She was aware her lower lip was sticking out in a stubborn, childish way.

‘It would be too soon. It might scare him off.’

‘Tonight I am a goddess,’ she said. ‘I will speak of what I wish.’