War God (72 page)

‘I’m not armed, sir.’

‘Then take this.’ Cortés reached into the top of his boot and pulled out a small, wicked-looking dagger.

‘Won’t you need it, sir?’

‘I carry a second,’ said Cortés, patting his other boot. He passed the knife to Pepillo. ‘Use it on yourself if you have to.’ With a raised finger he mimed the motion of a man cutting his own throat. ‘Believe me, it will be better than letting the Indians capture you.’

Pepillo gulped. ‘On
myself
, sir?’

‘Yes, if you have to.’ A confident chuckle: ‘But you won’t have to! We’ll win today, you’ll see. I want you to observe everything that happens – the top of the pyramid will be a good place for that – and tonight you’ll help me write to the king.’

The rest of the squadron had already formed up two by two behind him, their armour glittering in the sun. Cortés waited for Alvarado to fall in at his side, raised his left hand above his head, signalled ‘forward’ and nudged Molinero into a trot.

Holding the little knife, testing its keen edge, Pepillo stood dumbfounded at the thought of taking his own life with it as he watched the riders file out through the gate of the orchard and clatter across the square. They increased their pace to a gallop, scattering dust, and turned onto the main avenue leading east out of Potonchan.

Ah Kinchil and Cuetzpalli had decided to watch the battle from the Xaman Hills, really nothing more than a fold or a wrinkle in the plains. The tallest peak in the little range was barely a hundred feet high, but offered an excellent vantage point across the maize fields that stretched three miles north from here to the outskirts of Potonchan. There was a copse of ancient ahuehuetl trees on the summit to provide shade, and even a little bubbling spring. All in all it could hardly have been more idyllic.

‘We will devour them,’ said Ah Kinchil, echoing Muluc’s comment of the night before.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Cuetzpalli replied. Having been carried up here by their sweating litter-bearers, the two men were now standing side by side at the edge of the copse with their retainers gathered nearby and Malinal placed between them to translate their every word. Ah Kinchil had detached two hundred warriors from the rearguard of the immense army Muluc was leading into battle, posting them around the base of the hill and keeping his personal bodyguard on sentry duty amongst the trees. Muluc’s steward Ichick was present – primarily, Malinal suspected, to keep a close eye on her and make sure she had no opportunity to escape before being sold to Cuetzpalli tomorrow and sent on her way back to Tenochtitlan. All twelve of Cuetzpalli’s Cuahchics were in attendance, along with a scribe and an artist whom he had instructed to keep a record of the main events of the battle.

Malinal was unable to imagine any way in which the situation could fail to be utterly hopeless for the white men – unless they really were gods. Their entire army, which they had divided into four small square formations of a hundred men each in ten tightly bunched ranks, had marched one mile south of Potonchan and taken up position between the town and Muluc’s advancing army. Each of the squares looked to be about thirty feet wide and thirty deep and even though they were divided one from the other by horizontal gaps of approximately twice that width, their entire combined front still stretched no more than three hundred feet across the fields. Moreover Malinal realised that the little squares were not even deployed in a single formidable row, but in two pairs, with the second pair some distance behind the first and offset diagonally, creating a front that was staggered rather than straight. Why, she wondered, would the Spaniards have adopted such a vulnerable formation? Surely being divided like this into four tiny, isolated units would only make it easier for Muluc’s men, who formed a block two thousand feet wide and a thousand deep, to surround and ‘devour’ each one? Indeed each of the eighty Mayan ranks contained five hundred men, thus alone outnumbering the entire Spanish force!

It was almost as though the white men were offering themselves for sacrifice!

Out of the corner of her eye, Malinal noticed Cuetzpalli’s artist rapidly sketching the scene. Here they were on the Xaman hills with Muluc’s army a mile and a half to their north, marching rapidly across the open fields and already manoeuvring into a vast convex formation to flank and engulf the Spaniards. Approximately half a mile of empty fields came next and then – appearing even smaller in the painting than they did in real life – the four squares of the unlucky Spaniards.

Her first intimation that things might not go the way that numbers and common sense suggested came a moment later when she saw five clouds of dirty grey smoke rise up a little distance in front of those tiny squares. This interesting phenomenon was followed almost instantly by some ripple or perturbance in the Mayan front ranks; though she could not see the cause, it was obvious that men had fallen. Finally, a fifteen count after the smoke had appeared, she heard a tremendous rolling, crashing blast, a sound like the thunder of doom, and knew she was witnessing in action the weapons the white men called ‘guns’.

Well, Muluc’s men were prepared for this. They now knew – for the intelligence Cit Bolon Tun brought had been passed to every one of them – that there was nothing supernatural about these ‘guns’; they were just weapons like any other, albeit very dangerous ones. After they had been fired they had to be reloaded, which took time, and during the intervals the white men would be vulnerable.

As she had expected, the entire Mayan force, which had been approaching at a fast march, surged forward into a wild charge. Immediately, five more clouds of dirty grey smoke rose up from before the squares.

Had Cit Bolon Tun been lying?

No, Malinal thought. The more likely explanation was that the Spaniards had ten ‘guns’ and were reloading the first five while the second five were fired.

Again she saw that mysterious perturbance in the Mayan ranks – more noticeable this time than before; it seemed that many men had fallen and that these powerful weapons worked their harm not only on those directly facing them but in long narrow strips extending five or even ten ranks back into the charging mass. Even so the charge did not break – and it still had not broken after a fifteen count when the devastating reverberating roar of the guns reached her.

What was becoming obvious, however, was a distinct closing-up, a definite
compression
, of the forty-thousand-strong army. To Malinal’s eye it seemed that the front ranks had slowed their onward rush somewhat while the rearmost ranks had, if anything, increased their pace, and the result was that the whole force had now become more dense, compacted into a space somewhat less than a thousand feet deep, as it bore down in a mass on the white men’s squares.

That was when Malinal saw two much larger clouds of smoke billow from the top of Potonchan’s ancient pyramid and sensed a blur in the air as two objects, moving incredibly fast, crashed into the very heart of Muluc’s army.

What was this? She blinked, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. There! And there! Two glinting objects bouncing and rolling with unbelievable force, mowing down hundreds – hundreds! – of Mayan warriors amidst bright splashes of blood, spreading disorder and rampant terror amongst them. Cuetzpalli gasped and leaned forward, shading his eyes with his hand; Ah Kinchil’s face turned grey and his toothless jaw sagged.

And then came the sound …

A sound beyond imagination and nightmares.

A sound like the end of the world.

Pepillo pulled his fingers from his ears, shook his head to clear the infernal ringing that had set in and surveyed the damage that the first two seventy-pound balls from the lombards had done to the massed enemy. Already visibly discomfited by the ten one-pound rounds from the falconets, he saw they were now in a state of some distress, not exactly falling apart but definitely lacking the aggressive certainty and cohesion they’d shown moments before.

He and Melchior had very little to do and looked on in amazement as Mesa’s gun crews worked like demons, swabbing out the big barrels and loading new charges. Down on the plain the enemy front line, still manoeuvring from a block into a horned formation, was quarter of a mile from the four Spanish squares and coming on at a full run. But the falconets had been reloaded and now Ordaz fired all ten at once, a concentrated salvo that smashed through the advance, cutting deep swathes into the ranks, raising screams of confusion and terror, causing some men to halt and others to turn back, transforming the Mayan army almost instantly from an organised coherent force into a melee. Meanwhile the crews were reloading the little cannon and, from now on, Melchior explained, they would fire grapeshot at point-blank range, doing terrible damage.

But the Maya did not lack courage and large elements of their wavering front line still pressed forward, now less than a thousand feet from the Spanish squares. Behind, in a seething, tumultuous, curving band, seven hundred feet deep and two thousand wide, the rest of the huge force struggled with itself, some advancing, some retreating – a giant flux of close to forty thousand men into the midst of whom, keeping the seventy-pound balls as far from the Spaniards as possible, Mesa must concentrate his fire.

The lombards were ready again. Melchior and Pepillo returned their fingers to their ears.

Ah Kinchil, Cuetzpalli, the scribe, the artist, the Cuahchics, Ah Kinchil’s guards and retainers, Malinal, even the litter-bearers, in short everyone on the hilltop regardless of rank or station, had now pressed forward to the edge of the trees and stood silent, riveted in place by the events unfolding on the plain below. Whereas moments before it had seemed certain that Muluc’s army must sweep the white men away like saplings before an avalanche, it was now obvious that the forty thousand Maya warriors were in some kind of serious, unprecedented, unknown trouble.

Malinal saw the smoke plumes that told her the ten guns in front of the Spanish squares had fired again, all of them together this time, felt in her viscera the hammer blows that struck the Mayan front ranks, making them reel back, and sensed the shock waves radiating rearwards from there through the whole army, causing men far from the impact to stumble and fall as though pushed by giant, invisible hands while others – thousands! – turned in blind panic and ran.

‘Fight!’ Ah Kinchil croaked, ‘Fight!’ – as if anyone could hear him; as if it would make any difference if they did! But perhaps in some way the paramount chief’s feeble command had got through, for those who ran on towards the Spaniards, Malinal realised, still far outnumbered those attempting to desert.

Cuetzpalli was whispering urgently to his artist – ‘Paint everything! The Lord Speaker will reward you!’ – when Malinal saw two huge plumes of smoke rush up again from the top of the distant pyramid and, in the same instant, with intimations of horror, witnessed the same shimmer in the air she had seen before, presaging the same mysterious phenomenon of shining metallic spheres tearing through the Maya ranks, bowling over whole rows of men twenty or thirty deep, crushing some, decapitating or dismembering others, bouncing high, crashing down, bouncing and rolling again.

‘Fight!’ Ah Kinchil was still screaming, spittle running out of his mouth and down his chin. ‘Fight for the honour of the Chontal Maya!’ Cuetzpalli looked on, his fists clenched so tightly that the knuckles had turned white. Malinal saw that the chaos in the midst of the ranks was multiplying out of control as the metal spheres spread their doom and those running away collided with those running forward. Yet so huge was the army that tens of thousands at the front were still swept onwards by the vast momentum of the charge – onwards like some great ocean wave that must crash down on those tiny, seemingly defenceless Spanish squares and wipe them utterly from the face of the earth.

Bernal Díaz knew he should have stayed behind with the injured men assigned to defend the pyramid, but his pride and his infernal sense of honour had got in the way when Mesa made his selection. Instead of admitting he could hardly walk, let alone stand and fight for hours on the plains, he’d kept his head down and let the dour chief of artillery choose others, fitter than himself, for the garrison.

Worse still, he’d said yes when Ordaz had picked him to lead the hundred men in the westernmost of the four squares. Well, how could he refuse? Most of the officers were away with the cavalry – and where the hell
was
the cavalry, come to think of it? – leaving precious few with enough experience to command large groups of infantry.

Ah, pride! Ah, honour! Díaz winced and closed his eyes for a moment against a wave of dizziness as another stabbing pain ran the length of his throbbing, hugely swollen leg. When he looked again the onrushing mass of Indians, like some turbulent, surging tide, was just five hundred feet away, their shrill cries and whistles and the terrible beat of their drums ringing in his ears, and he saw Ordaz’s sword come slashing down, the signal to the gunners, and the ten falconets ranged in front of the squares again fired in unison amidst clouds of smoke, their coughing, booming roar echoing forth, their charges of grapeshot spreading out and tearing into the massed enemy, cutting them to bloody ribbons as though a thousand keen-edged knives had been hurled at them. The attack faltered but did not break and the gun crews wheeled the little cannon back on the double, three into the protection of Díaz’s square, two into the next, three into the next and two into the last, just ahead of the Indian front rank, which threw itself against the Spanish pikes with suicidal fury.

Gods!
Díaz thought, sweeping aside a spear thrust and hacking his broadsword into a screaming, painted face.
Are these men or devils?
And suddenly his square was engulfed – all the squares were engulfed – by countless thousands of the enemy. The fighting was so intense, so furious, so close that Díaz forgot the crippling pain of his leg, forgot the fever and nausea that shook him, and fought like a madman for his life, aware as he parried and thrust that the crews of the three falconets inside his square were feverishly reloading.