War God (81 page)

War God
is a novel about an extraordinary moment in history but it is not a history book. Rather it is a work of fantasy and epic adventure in the tradition of
Amadis of Gaul
, the post-Arthurian tale of knight-errantry in which the conquistadors of the early sixteenth century saw their own deeds reflected as they pursued their very real and perilous quest in the strange and terrible lands of Mexico.
¹
Wherever I felt it served the interests of my story, I have therefore not hesitated to diverge from a strict observance of historical facts. Let me give a few examples.

Malinal (who was also known as Malinali, Malintzin and La Malinche and whom the conquistadors called Doña Marina) was more likely a Nahua woman of the Mexican Gulf coast who had learned the Mayan language than a Mayan woman – as I have her – who had become fluent in Nahuatl. On the other hand, her biography as I relate it – daughter of a chief, disinherited and sold into slavery by her own mother after her father’s death (because her mother favoured a son by her second marriage) – conforms to the facts as they have been passed down to us.

Likewise, while I write of the disastrous Córdoba expedition that visited the Yucatán prior to Cortés, I make no mention – it would have been too cumbersome to do so – of the second expedition, under Juan de Grijalva, that also preceded Cortés. I have, however, conflated some details of the Córdoba and Grijalva expeditions, and in doing so I do not think I stray far from the spirit of the facts.

In a similar way, and for similar narrative reasons, I have telescoped the story of the departure of Cortés’s fleet from Cuba into the single dramatic night of 18 February 1519, when in fact it was a more long-drawn-out affair. The fleet did leave Santiago precipitously, Velázquez did try to prevent this, and Cortés did confront him from a small boat, much as I describe these events.
²
The story that I tell of Velázquez sending a messenger cancelling Cortés’s command and putting another man in charge, together with the killing of this messenger
en route
by one of Cortés’s allies and delivery of the papers he was carrying to Cortés himself, is well attested in historical sources. The same goes for the raid on the slaughterhouse and seizure by Cortés’s men of all the meat and livestock on the hoof.
³
However, these events did not occur on 18 February 1519 but on 18 November 1518, Bernal Díaz does not admit in his memoirs to leading the raid on the slaughterhouse,
⁴
and the killing of the messenger was not done by Alvarado (although he was certainly capable of such an act and responsible during his lifetime for many like it), but by Juan Suarez, another of Cortés’s close associates.
⁵
It is correct that the fleet did finally leave Cuban waters on 18 February 1519, as I state in
War God
, and that it was that night scattered by a storm,
⁶
but it had first spent three months sailing around Cuba, evading Velázquez’s authority by various means while Cortés collected further supplies, men and horses. I saw no need to burden my story with these details and complexities.

Other similar examples could be cited here (for instance Guatemoc was probably Moctezuma’s cousin, not his nephew) but, by and large, while responding to the narrative needs of a fantasy adventure epic, I have worked hard to weave my tale around a solid armature of historical facts. This is not to say that the fantastic and the supernatural are not prominent themes in
War God
– because they are! – but there is nothing ‘unhistorical’ about this. Such concerns were of prime importance both to the superstitious Spanish and to the Mexica. Indeed Mexico-Tenochtitlan has, with good reason, been described by Nobel Prizewinner J. M. G. Le Clezio as ‘the last magical civilization’.
⁷

Take the case of Tozi the witch, one of my central characters. Some might think that an obsession with sorcery, animal familiars (even transformation into animal forms), the ability to make oneself invisible, the concoction of spells and herbal potions by women and the persecution of women for such practices were purely European concerns; but in these matters – as in so many others – the Spanish of the sixteenth century had much more in common with the Mexica than they realized. Witchcraft was widespread in Central America and endemic to the culture of the region.
⁸

Then there is the matter of human sacrifice, a recurrent theme throughout
War God
. Do I make too much of this? Do I dwell on it at a length that is not justified by the facts? Honestly, no, I don’t think I do. The facts, including the fattening of prisoners and their incarceration in special pens prior to sacrifice, are so abhorrent, so well evidenced and so overwhelming that the imagination is simply staggered by them. In saying this I recognise that the prim hand of political correctness has in recent years tried to sweep the extravagant butchery and horror of Mexica sacrificial rituals under the table of history by suggesting that Spanish eyewitnesses were exaggerating for propaganda or religious purposes. Yet this cannot be right. Let alone the mass of archaeological evidence and the surviving depictions of human sacrifice, skull racks, flaying and dismemberment of victims, cannibalism, etc, in Mexica sculpture and art, we have detailed accounts of these practices given to reliable chroniclers within a few years of the conquest by the Mexica themselves. Both Bernardo de Sahagún, in his
General History of the Things of New Spain
,
⁹
and Diego Duran in his
History of the Indies of New Spai
n,
¹⁰
based their reports upon the testimony of native informants, and both give extensive descriptions of the grisly sacrificial rituals that had been integral to Mexica society since its inception, that had increased exponentially during the fifty years prior to the conquest, and that the conquistadors themselves witnessed after their arrival. The historian Hugh Thomas sums up the matter soberly in his superb study of the conquest.
¹¹
‘In numbers,’ he writes, ‘in the elevated sense of ceremony which accompanied the theatrical shows involved, as in its significance in the official religion, human sacrifice in Mexico was unique.’
¹²

Political correctness has also tried to airbrush out the Quetzalcoatl mythos of the white-skinned bearded god who was prophesied to return in the year One-Reed, and Cortés’s manipulation of this myth, as largely a fabrication of the conquistadors – but this too cannot be correct. Again Sahagún’s immense scholarship in his
General History
contains too much detail to be ignored.
¹³
But there are many other sources too numerous to mention here, and we should not forget the universal iconography of the ‘Plumed Serpent’ throughout central America. Some of it – for example at La Venta on the Gulf of Mexico – is very ancient indeed (1500 BC or older) and is associated with reliefs of bearded individuals with plainly Caucasian rather than native American features.
¹⁴

Other ‘fantastical’ aspects of my story, such as Moctezuma’s visionary encounters under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms with the war god Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird), and Cortés’s conviction that he was guided by Saint Peter, are also thoroughly supported in numerous historical sources.

Last but not least, there is the matter of the incredible disparity of forces – the few hundred Spaniards against vast Mayan and later Mexica armies and the apparent miracle of the conquistadors’ triumph. But, as I show in
War God
, this ‘miracle’ was really science. The guns and cannon the Spaniards were able to deploy, their terrifying war dogs,
¹⁵
and the stunning impact of their cavalry gave them decisive advantages. No dogs larger than chihuahuas had previously been known in Central America, and whereas European infantry had accumulated thousands of years of experience (and had developed specialized tactics and weapons) to withstand charges of heavy horse, the armies of Mexico were completely unprepared for the seemingly demonic beasts and supernatural powers that Cortés unleashed on them.

But there was something else, ultimately more important than all of this, that brought the Spanish victory.

If Moctezuma had been a different sort of ruler, if he had possessed a shred of kindness or decency, if there had been any capacity in him to love, then he surely would not have preyed upon neighbouring peoples for human sacrifices to offer up to his war god, in which case he could have earned their devotion and respect rather than their universal loathing, and thus might have been in a position to lead a united opposition to the conquistadors and to crush them utterly within weeks of setting foot in his lands. But he was none of these things, and thus Cortés was almost immediately able to exploit the hatred that Moctezuma’s behaviour had provoked and find allies amongst those the Mexica had terrorised and exploited – allies who were crucial to the success of the conquest. Of particular note in this respect were the Tlascalans, who had suffered the depredations of the Mexica more profoundly than any others and who were led by Shikotenka, a general so courageous and so principled that he at first fought the Spanish tooth and nail, seeing the existential danger they posed to the entire culture of the region, despite the liberation from Moctezuma’s tyranny that Cortés offered him. Only when Cortés had smashed Shikotenka in battle did the brave general finally bow to the demands of the Tlascalan Senate to make an alliance with the Spaniards, an alliance that soon put tens of thousands of auxiliaries under Cortés’s command and set the conquistadors on the road to Tenochtitlan …

These events, and many others even more remarkable, will be the focus of the second volume of this series,
War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent
.

References

1
See, for example, Hugh Thomas,
Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico
, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York and London, 1993, pp. 61–62 and 702.

2
Ibid, pp. 141–142.

3
Ibid, p. 141.

4
Bernal Díaz,
The Conquest of New Spain
, translated by J.M. Cohen, Penguin Classics, London, 1963, p. 49.

5
Thomas,
Conquest
, p. 141.

6
Ibid, pp. 157–158.

7
J. M. G. Le Clezio,
The Mexican Dream: Or The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations
, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2009, p. 41.

8
See for example, Jan G. R. Elferink, Jose Antonio Flores and Charles D. Kaplan,
The Use of Plants and Other Natural Products for Malevolent Practices amongst the Aztecs and their Successors
, Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, vol. 24, 1994, Universidad Nacional Autónomo de México. See also Daniel G. Brinton,
Nagualism: A Study in Native American Folklore and History
, MacCalla and Co, Philadelphia, 1894. And see David Friedel, Linda Schele and Joy Parker,
Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path
, William Morrow and Co., New York, pp. 52, 181, 190, 192–193, 211, 228. See also Le Clezio,
The Mexican Dream
, pp. 104–108

9
Fray Bernardo de Sahagún,
General History of the Things of New Spain
(Florentine Codex), translated from the Aztec into English by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, School of American Research, University of Utah, 1975. See for example book 12, chapters 6, 8 and 9.

10
Fray Diego Durán,
The History of the Indies of New Spain
, translated by Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas, Orion Press, New York, 1964. See, for example, pages 99–102 (from where the oration given to sacrificial victims in chapter 28 of
War God
is quoted), pp. 105–113, 120–122, 195–200 and many other similar passages.

11
Thomas,
Conquest
, pp. 24–27.

12
Ibid, p. 27.

13
Sahagún,
General History
, see for example chapters 2, 3, 4 and 16.

14
See for example Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia,
Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilisation
, Michael Joseph, London, 1998, pp. 38–42.

15
An excellent source on the conquistadors’ use of dogs trained for war is to be found in John Grier Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner,
Dogs of the Conquest
, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.