War God (73 page)

‘Musketeers!’ he yelled. ‘A volley! A volley
now!
’

Cortés was finding it difficult to stay calm. For the past quarter-hour he and his riders had been hearing cannon fire, yet they still remained stuck on the track that ran east and then south out of Potonchan, curving through forest and dense bush for two miles before reaching open fields. There had been no musket fire, which meant the Mayan and Spanish front ranks were not yet engaged, but he knew the clash could not be delayed much longer. He cursed under his breath as, for the seventh or eighth time since leaving the town, the whole troop was forced to dismount in order to clear trees that had been felled across their path.

This was a bad development. Alvarado and Davila had both made use of the track yesterday, and Alvarado again this morning, and they had reported it narrow but free of obstacles and passable by horses riding in single file. It followed that the enemy – Cortés could not guess how many – had penetrated the forest within the past few hours. Might there be enough of them to stage an ambush? The dismounted riders were vulnerable. Or might they be planning a flanking attack on the town?

Both possibilities loomed large in Cortés’s imagination; however, the greater worry was the time it was taking to get his cavalry into the field – far, far longer than anyone had anticipated! Once battle was joined in earnest in front of the town, the foot soldiers could not hold out indefinitely against the overwhelming numbers of the Maya. Cannon might delay the inevitable but only a decisive charge of heavy horse could swing the balance and demoralise the enemy completely enough to give victory to the hard-pressed Spaniards.

Sandoval and Escalante wrestled aside the last of the felled trunks and the troop mounted up again.

‘I don’t like this,’ said Puertocarrero, glancing nervously into the dark mass of trees pressing close to the track. ‘Forest is no place for cavalry.’

‘Who cares whether you like it or not?’ growled Alvarado, touching his heel to Bucephalus’s flank and causing the white stallion to surge forward into the rump of Puertocarrero’s silver-grey mare.

‘Silence, gentlemen, please,’ said Cortés. In the distance they all heard the bark of muskets.

Where was the cavalry? This was the question at the forefront of Díaz’s mind. Despite the carnage wrought by the cannon, the gigantic, howling torrent of Mayan warriors had engulfed all four of the squares, flowing round them as a river in spate flows round islands in its midst, hammering at the Spaniards on every side. He smelt them – rank, fetid, like dead meat; saw their furious eyes, their bared teeth, filed to sharp points, their brown skin glistening with sweat, their lean, painted bodies, the barbaric splendour of their plumes and standards, the flash and gleam of their primitive stone weapons – here an axe, here a dagger, here a spear – lunging and battering at his men, breaking against armour, deflected by good Spanish shields. He was sorely tempted to unleash the twenty-five war hounds held barking and straining at the centre of his square, but the signal Ordaz had arranged, three blasts on the bugle, had not been sounded, and there was more work yet for gun and sword.

Responding to his command, his twelve musketeers had pushed their way forward, three on the north, three on the south, three on the east, and three on the west side of the square, and now fired a volley in unison, tearing holes in the press of the enemy, creating points of weakness and confusion into which his swordsmen charged, hacking and slashing wildly. The madness of battle was on him, the agony of his leg wound dulled, and Díaz found that he too had surged out of the protection of the square to attack the disrupted enemy ranks, shield in his left hand, sword in his right, a lunge to a man’s throat, a slash across a bare abdomen, smash his shield into another’s face, hack down with his blade to take off a leg at the knee …

Then suddenly he was cut off, alone, surrounded by a wheeling knot of the foe, and he felt a spear thud and shatter against his cuirass. In the next instant a flint knife somehow found a way through his
pauldron
and embedded itself in his left armpit with a shock of intense, burning pain, and some great club smashed against his helmet, knocking him sick and dizzy to the ground, stars flashing before his eyes.

What was this?
What was this?
Dirty bare feet, hairless brown legs, a man’s crotch bound in a breechclout, strong hands gripping his upper arms, dragging him away, excited voices jabbering in the barbarous tongue of the Maya.

The realisation dawned on Díaz that he was being taken.
Dear God!
They’ll sacrifice me! They’ll cut out my heart!
But just then he heard a great roar of ‘Santiago and at them!’, saw an Indian’s head go thumping and rolling, the stump of a neck gushing blood, long black hair cartwheeling, saw a hand sliced off, an arm amputated at the shoulder, saw another painted warrior hacked clean in half as Mibiercas, like the angel of death, did terrible butchery with his longsword, yelling furious insults with every massive blow, clearing a wide space into which La Serna and three others charged and bore Díaz aloft and carried him back into the square.

There was no let-up, the press of the enemy resumed at once, but then someone shouted ‘
Now!
’ and Díaz sensed rather than saw the three falconets trundled forward to the edges of the square, heard the roar of their percussion and the whistle of grapeshot and the terrible screams as their tempest of fire was unleashed.

At point-blank range, the effect of the shrapnel storm was calamitous for the Maya. Huge gaps a dozen men wide opened up in their ranks into which, once again, poured the flying squads of Spanish swordsmen, Mibiercas to the fore. They hacked mercilessly at their dazed foes until they began to form up again and then withdrew to the protection of the squares.

Ignoring the thudding pain in his leg, ignoring the hot blood dripping from under his left arm, Díaz was on his feet near the middle of the square where his friends had set him down, using his height to get a sense of the ebb and flow of the battle. He saw that wherever the Maya kept their discipline and dashed in good order against the outer ranks of the Spanish formations, they were met by solid walls of shields over the top of which long spears and pikes were thrust into their faces from the ranks behind, while the men directly confronting them gutted and hamstrung them with sword blades. Meanwhile the musketeers and crossbowmen, firing sequentially in groups of six, kept up almost continuous withering volleys that tore yet more holes in the Mayan ranks, which were again exploited by groups of swordsmen until the falconets were once more ready to fire, restarting the whole cycle of death and destruction.

Díaz felt proud of his comrades, so proud that tears leapt to his eyes and his breath caught in his throat. They were men of the finest mettle, men who refused to break, no matter what fearsome odds they faced, men who would not give way, men who did not know the meaning of defeat.

Yet even men such as they could not possibly survive this terrible onslaught. Had they killed a thousand of the enemy with their cannon and muskets and swordplay? Two thousand? It did not matter. They could kill three thousand or even five thousand and the odds would still be close to a hundred to one and the final outcome certain.

Unless the will of the foe broke – and only the cavalry, Díaz was sure, had the power to bring that about.

Mesa was ready to fire the lombards again and Pepillo put his fingers back in his ears. He could see the shots were becoming more difficult for the artilleryman now the enemy swirled so close to the Spaniards. Still, they were legion, stretching back in a disordered mass at least five hundred feet south of the squares.

The two huge guns bellowed flame and smoke, sending the lethal seventy-pound balls whistling low to crash down amidst the Mayan ranks just a hundred feet south of the Spanish formations.

My goodness
, thought Pepillo,
that was a close thing!
But again the cannon balls and the massive roar of the big guns had a stunning effect on the enemy, causing even those locked in direct combat with the squares to pause and look up.

Some were pointing at him! Then his eye was caught by a horde of warriors, a thousand strong, leaving the centre of the battle and pouring north across the intervening mile directly towards the town.

Directly towards the pyramid.

‘Captain Mesa!’ he yelled. ‘There! Look there!’

Seeing the threat, the artilleryman scrambled to crank down the elevation of the barrels as the gun crews frantically reloaded.

Malinal watched spellbound as the battle unfolded. If they were not gods, she thought, these Spaniards were certainly proving themselves to be brave men with exceptional, indeed almost superhuman, fighting skills. Against all logic and reason, their squares would not break before the overwhelming numbers of the Maya, and somehow continued to hold out against them in the midst of the ferocious scrum of hand-to-hand combat.

‘Look,’ Ah Kinchil suddenly gibbered to Cuetzpalli. ‘Look!’ Despite his great age the paramount chief of the Chontal Maya was far-sighted and was now dancing up and down with joy and pointing towards Potonchan. ‘My warriors go to recapture the pyramid of King Ahau Chamahez from the invaders! The white men there will die! Their terrible weapons will be thrown down!’

Stupid old fool!
thought Malinal.
What do you know?

Weirdly she found her loyalty to the Maya had become so detached she actually
wanted
the Spaniards to win! Well, why not? What had her own people – even her own mother! – ever done for her? They had sent her into slavery and humiliation and danger and when she had returned they had slaved her again! They deserved the punishment the white men were inflicting on them. They deserved to lose this battle!

Except it still did not seem possible that the huge Mayan army could lose, even in the state of chaos the white men’s guns were reducing it to, because Ah Kinchil was right. At least a thousand warriors had formed up into a block and were pouring across the open fields north of the battleground and making for the town. It wouldn’t take them long to reach the pyramid and the white men on its summit.

In minutes they covered half the distance. Malinal watched anxiously with her knuckles pressed to her mouth, daring to hope that more Spaniards might usher forth from the town to intercept them; but none appeared and Muluc’s triumphant words echoed in her head –
‘they have no reserves!’
It seemed that nothing could stop the attack on the pyramid when the guns on its summit billowed smoke again, and she almost cheered as glittering death crashed down amongst the charging warriors, pounding them, crushing them, annihilating them, scattering the survivors like chaff.

Yet, even as she admired the Spaniards, she could not suppress the pride she felt in her own people’s courage when she saw that some of the shattered column still ran on towards the pyramid, while others picked themselves up from the ground and followed.

‘Good shooting, Captain Mesa!’ yelled Pepillo. Though it had been worth the attempt, he’d doubted the artilleryman could hit the fast-moving Mayan column with even one of the huge cannon, but in the event both had been perfectly on the mark, causing bloody mayhem.

Even so, hundreds of enemy warriors were still coming on and were now so close – less than quarter of a mile away – that the lombards couldn’t be depressed far enough to target them.

Mesa had placed four of his eight falconets around the base of the pyramid, deploying the other four to the southern outskirts of Potonchan, overlooking the battlefield. It was unlikely they’d be enough to stop what was left of this attack completely, but the Maya must be demoralised by the colossal losses they’d already suffered, and anything was possible. The guns were hidden from Pepillo’s view by the buildings at the edge of town, but now he heard their choking roar and saw the onrush of the enemy falter as the four one-pound balls smashed into them.

Dozens of men went down but not enough, not nearly enough. ‘Reload!’ Pepillo found himself shouting. ‘Reload with grapeshot!’ But just then Melchior came charging by, grabbed Mesa by the elbow and pointed east.

Just minutes away, their war cries already audible as they approached along the east–west avenue running through the centre of Potonchan, was another band of Indians, at least two hundred of them, armed with spears and clubs and obsidian-edged longswords.

Mesa bellowed a warning to the falconet crews around the base of the pyramid, called to arms the squad of forty injured men waiting in the shade of the little temple on the summit platform and led the way down the eastern stair.

Somewhere Melchior had found two round wooden bucklers and two eight-foot spears and thrust one of each at Pepillo. ‘Know how to use these?’ he asked.

Pepillo shook his head dumbly.

‘Well you’d better learn fast,’ said his friend.

At last, after throwing aside three more hurdles, Cortés led his cavalry out into the open fields. Though they had several times caught glimpses of painted warriors moving amongst the trees, no attack had materialised – perhaps because the steel-clad horses and riders appeared so alien and menacing to the Indians. What was certain, however, was that Potonchan was entirely unprotected at its east side and that the force mobilising in the forest must be there to attack the town. For the hundredth time, Cortés found himself wishing he had left Mesa with more than forty men – every one of them injured! – to defend the lombards. But the Spaniards were stretched so thin he’d been unable to spare a larger number and now the only hope for all of them was a stunning coup by the cavalry.

Cortés saw the battle raging just two miles to the northwest, where the Spaniards were perilously hemmed in on every side, but the fields here at the edge of the forest were broken and treacherous, cut through by irrigation ditches that the horses couldn’t leap without risk of serious injury. Any charge attempted across such terrain was doomed to failure. Cursing inwardly, he ordered the troop to ride another mile due west to the foot of a ridge of low hills where the track intersected the main highway running into Potonchan from the south.