War God (68 page)

‘If they’ve never seen heavy horse in action, Don Hernán, no amount of telling will prepare them for the shock.’

Cortés laughed, his mood suddenly improving, and clapped the younger man on the back. ‘Let’s hope you’re right!’ he said and then asked: ‘How is it you don’t own a horse yourself, Gonzalo?’

‘Can’t afford one,’ said Sandoval honestly, ‘but I grew up on horseback before my family fell on hard times.’

‘You’ve trained with the lance? You’ve practised the charge?’

‘I have, Don Hernán, more often than I can count.’

‘Well, who knows? You may find yourself in the saddle again before too long.’

With just twenty soldiers now assigned to guard the ships in the bay, made up of a few who had fallen sick and a dozen too badly injured to go immediately into battle again, the troops mustered in the main square of Potonchan numbered some four hundred and eighty determined, filthy, bearded men, formed up in sixteen ranks of thirty at the base of the pyramid. After they had heard Father Bartolomé Olmedo say Mass, Cortés reminded them it was the feast of Our Lady, thanked them fulsomely for their efforts the day before, which had been crowned with success, and told them to look forward to an even greater victory today. Cupping his hand to his ear at the drums and ululations of the Indians beyond the town, he said: ‘Hark to the noise the heathen make! We gave them a beating and they ran but now they’re back full of bluff and bluster, building their courage to attack us again. I say we don’t stay cooped up here to await their assault but take the battle to them instead. Do you agree, men?’

There was a ragged cheer, some of the soldiers thumped their spear shafts into the ground, others beat their swords against their bucklers.

‘Very well,’ Cortés continued. ‘For those who missed the activity last night, our horses are all offloaded from the ships’ – he gestured towards the palace – ‘and put to pasture to get the aches out of their joints. They’ll be ready for battle in a few hours – I expect by noon. Meanwhile I want two companies of a hundred men each – volunteers all! – to conduct reconnaissance in force and learn the number and dispositions of the enemy.’

From the reports of his spies, who’d been out around the campfires during the night, Cortés knew that some of the Velázquez faction had been busy sprinkling the wormwood of fear and doubt on the courage of his stalwart troops. Juan Escudero in particular had been working on the faint of heart, suggesting that further action against the Maya was ill-advised, that there was no gold to be had from them, and that it would be better to move on elsewhere rather than risk annihilation here. But Cortés had also been doing the rounds during the night and was reassured that the majority of the men were still solidly with him, their caudillo, and believed his leadership would bring them victory, honour and wealth. He therefore felt inspired to end his address with some verses from the eleventh psalm.

‘In the Lord I take refuge,’ he recited, sending his voice ringing out across the square:

There was no shortage of volunteers for the reconnaissance in force. Appointing Alonso Davila to lead one company and Alvarado the other, Cortés summoned Francisco de Mesa, his chief of artillery, a short, stocky, middle-aged man with thinning hair, a spade beard and a broad, unemotional, sunburned face. After the horses had been brought ashore last night he had taken a brigantine out to the bay and returned with two of the lombards and sixty Taino slaves who would be needed to move the heavy cannon into battle positions. Mesa’s expression was, as usual, deadpan: ‘I expect you’ll be wanting me to arrange the fiery coals and burning sulphur to rain down on those wicked violent Indians,’ he said.

Bernal Díaz, who judged the wound in his thigh to be superficial, had refused evacuation to the fleet and felt moved enough by the caudillo’s speech to volunteer for Davila’s hundred. Mibiercas and La Serna came with him, for what La Serna described as ‘a breath of country air’.

Well, it was proving to be a great deal more than that. About three miles from Potonchan, the great north–south highway they were following skirted an outcrop of low hills, concealing them from the town, and a mile further south they were approached and attacked by a band of a thousand howling warriors. Huge numbers of arrows, darts and slingstones began to hail down on their armour and shields and they soon found themselves completely encircled.

Having tasted Toledo steel the day before, Díaz understood why the Indians were avoiding hand-to-hand combat and preferred to harm the Spaniards from afar. Moreover, the strategy was working, since half a dozen men already bore minor injuries and one, knocked senseless by a stone, had to be carried by his comrades, slowing everyone down. Making a virtue of necessity, Davila brought the square to a halt, had ten of his twenty musketeers move to the flanks and ordered them to fire on the enemy. Every bullet found its mark but what was noticeable, and worrying, was that the flash and roar of the heavy muskets had nowhere near the same terrifying effect on the circling horde as it had yesterday. To be sure ten fewer Indians were now on their feet, but that still left nine hundred and ninety of them, none of whom were running away as Díaz had hoped!

Further volleys from the muskets and crossbows produced no better results and the arrows, spears and slingstones continued to pour in.

‘Damn,’ Díaz heard Davila mutter. ‘We should have brought a pack of hounds.’ Indeed the idea had been discussed and turned down in favour of mobility. Too often the dogs would stop to eat their prey and it took time, and kicks and blows from their handlers, to call them off.

‘Let us be the dog pack,’ Mibiercas yelled to Davila. ‘Let me take a flying squad and get in amongst them.’

Davila nodded and, moments later, after another crashing volley from the muskets, Mibiercas, Le Serna, and ten others drew their swords and sprinted towards the mass of Indians. Too slow for such a mission because of his thigh wound, Díaz felt faintly guilty as he watched his friends go.

Since Davila’s squad had marched south, Alvarado reconnoitred towards the east. He passed for about a mile along the same forest track he’d used to enter the town the day before, but where it looped back towards the south he left it and continued, as Cortés had ordered, in an easterly direction. For some hundreds of paces his men had to cut a passage through heavy bush with their swords. By the time they emerged into the open again Alvarado was itching to impale a few Indians with his new Nuñez rapier, which he’d strapped on today for the first time since besting Zemudio back in Cuba.

Annoyingly, however, there seemed no immediate prospect of running anyone through. Extensive fields of young maize stretched ahead, vanishing in the distance into the morning haze, with not a single enemy formation visible anywhere.

Alvarado yawned with frustration. Overnight he had removed the splint and cast from his left arm and confirmed to his relief that he could move the limb, though it was somewhat wasted from a month of inactivity. He made a fist. God’s blood! He was weak! But he had sufficient grip to hold the reins of Bucephalus for the cavalry attack that Cortés had promised for this afternoon.

And just as well
, he thought, since there was no action to be had here. After advancing a further mile through the fields he was so thoroughly bored that he decided to do his reconnoitring in force elsewhere and turned his men back the way they had come.

Where the falconets fired ball or grapeshot weighing about a pound, the lombards fired ball or grapeshot weighing up to seventy pounds. Not for nothing, thought Cortés, were these heavy smoothbore cannon called ‘wallbreakers’! He had brought three of them as the main artillery of the expedition, and of these two now stood in Potonchan’s main square. Alongside them were the eighteen falconets that had already seen service against the Maya the day before, but whereas the latter could be fired, and even moved if necessary, by their own two-man crews, the lombards were so unwieldy that each required teams of thirty bearers to haul their massive carriages and transport their prodigious ammunition and bags of gunpowder.

‘I’d stick to the falconets if I were you,’ Mesa was saying. ‘This country’s too broken with irrigation ditches to move the big cannon – especially with bearers as reluctant as these.’ He jerked his thumb towards the sixty Taino slaves, who were sitting under the silk-cotton tree in their loincloths looking sullen and stupefied.

‘I know,’ said Cortés, ‘it’s going to be difficult, but my mind’s made up on this. We’ll be badly outnumbered today, and the Indians have already seen the falconets in action. I want something that’s really going to surprise them and I expect the lombards to do that.’

‘Ball or grapeshot?’ asked Mesa without comment.

‘Oh … both I think,’ said Cortés. ‘You know, horses for courses …’

Mibiercas’s flying squad hit the circle of Indians in wedge formation and Díaz saw his friends start the work of killing: Mibiercas, the angel at the east of Eden with his flickering, whirling
espadón
, La Serna beside him, his gleaming broadsword licking out to taste the enemy. A huge Indian, transformed into a piebald demon by the striped paint of his face, came at Mibiercas with a long two-handed weapon, one of those batons edged with sharp flakes of obsidian that Díaz had encountered the day before. They seemed equally matched in size and strength but Mibiercas was a master of the longsword, a man who had made this weapon his lifework, and he fell upon his foe like a landslide, split his skull from crown to chin with a single blow, snatched out the glittering blood-smeared blade and cut down two more men before the first yet knew he was dead.

In this way the twelve valiant Spaniards, confronting the enemy hand to hand at last, wrought havoc amongst them, while the archers and musketeers of the main squad reloaded and let fly another devastating volley. Yet Díaz saw that the Indians had courage and determination in no smaller measure than the Spaniards, and they did not fall back, despite their losses, but rather rallied and pressed all the harder around Mibiercas and his men, who all of a sudden seemed like rocks hemmed in on all sides by a rushing, roaring murderous tide.

Seeing that they would soon be engulfed, Davila yelled, ‘Santiago and at them’, and led the whole squad pounding across the field to their rescue. Díaz’s thigh pained him as he ran, the ground beneath his feet rough and uneven, filled with the brittle stalks of young corn. ‘Santiago and at them!’ he bellowed raising his sword. ‘Santiago and at them.’

Melchior hauled Pepillo up in front of him and, with a click of his tongue, set the huge stallion to a walk. Unnerved by the peculiar, rocking gait, Pepillo looked down. The ground seemed very far below!

‘Hold on,’ said Melchior as they passed beneath a tree. Pepillo sensed his friend’s heels knock once, twice, against Molinero’s sides and suddenly the animal’s progress became even stranger, bumpy and uncomfortable, nearly jolting Pepillo from the saddle as its back dropped between steps, rose rapidly with the next, and dropped again. ‘That’s called a trot,’ Melchior said, ‘nice for the horse; not so nice for the rider.’ His arms extended forward on either side of Pepillo, his hands loosely holding the reins. ‘Now we’ll try a canter.’ His heels urged Molinero’s flanks again and at once they were moving much faster, Molinero’s hoofs hitting the ground in a staccato three-beat rhythm, Pepillo clinging tight to the pommel at the front of the saddle, feeling nervous but at the same time excited, wanting to laugh. They’d crossed to the side of the orchard during the trot and there was now a clear avenue ahead of them between the wall and the trees as far as the river. ‘Want to try a gallop?’ said Melchior.

‘Yes!’ shouted Pepillo, for the wind was already whipping past his ears.

Melchior moved his hands, still holding the reins, and lifted Pepillo a little. ‘Then here we go,’ he said. The horse surged forward and all at once they were flying.

Flying!

All the jolting unevenness went out of the ride and the great destrier tore towards the river at unbelievable speed, so fast that the trees and the wall blurred as they shot by, so light and free and boundless that joy bubbled up in Pepillo’s chest and he couldn’t stop himself whooping and yelling his excitement to the wind. Then before he knew it the muddy brown expanse of water lay ahead and he thought for a moment they would soar across it like winged Pegasus, until he felt Molinero hesitate a fraction, lean into an exhilarating, sweeping turn, then straighten again in the wonderful mile-eating four-beat gait of the gallop, the river flashing past beside them. In what seemed no more than seconds, the other wall loomed up; Melchior gently twitched the reins, letting Pepillo drop back into the saddle, and the horse slowed its pace through canter and bumpy trot and came to a halt.

‘My goodness!’ said Pepillo after a moment to catch his breath. ‘So that’s riding!’

Melchior was stepping down. ‘It is what I who was a slave truly call freedom.’ Holding the reins he began to adjust the stirrup. ‘Stay in the saddle if you like.’

Pepillo’s heart, already thudding, beat a little faster. ‘On my own?’ he asked.

‘Yes, silly mammet. Is anyone else up there with you?’ Melchior moved round to the horse’s other side and adjusted the second stirrup. ‘Use these. I’ll lead you for a bit.’