War God: Nights of the Witch

  ‘He is young, sire, he is strong, and Lord Cuitláhuac took three of my best surgeons with him to meet the caravan.’ The fool swelled with pride. ‘I trained them personally, sire. They did their jobs. Undoubtedly the prince will live.’

  ‘Come closer, Mecatl,’ hissed Moctezuma.

  A worried expression crossed the fat surgeon’s face as he shuffled on his knees to the side of the throne. ‘Have I offended you, sire?’

  Moctezuma ignored the question. ‘Know this,’ he said, ‘and know your life depends on your silence. It is better for the peace of the realm if young Guatemoc does not live.’

  Mecatl gasped. His shiny bald head glistened. A pulse of body odour rose from beneath his robes. ‘Yes, sire … Do you wish me, then, to …?’

  Moctezuma placed his thumb and forefinger beneath his nostrils to block the smell of fear wafting from the surgeon. ‘Nothing drastic, Mecatl. Nothing sudden. Nothing like the haemorrhaging venom we planned for Ishtlil. Nothing that would arouse suspicion. Some subtle poison that will sap Guatemoc’s strength little by little, would be my recommendation, so that his relapse is gradual, spread over days, and his death, when it comes, appears a natural thing. Poor boy. His injuries were grave. He struggled mightily but in the end he was overcome … You get the idea?’

  Mecatl gulped. ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘And you can administer such a poison?’

  ‘Yes, sire, but Lord Cuitláhuac has told us he will stay by Guatemoc’s side until he has more fully recovered. He has ordered that a bed be brought for him into the prince’s chamber. His presence will make it more difficult to do what you ask.’

  ‘We are in a time of crisis,’ Moctezuma said. ‘Lord Cuitláhuac has urgent State duties to perform that will stop him playing nursemaid to his son. We will allow him that privilege today but from tomorrow I’ll see to it he’s kept busy with other things.’

  ‘Thank you, sire.’

  ‘I hope you understand me well, Mecatl?’

  ‘I … I … I think so, sir.’

  ‘Do what I have commanded, work the death of Guatemoc so it seems natural, and I will reward you. Fail in this task, allow anyone else to know of our little arrangement, raise the slightest suspicion, and you will die.’

  Mecatl gulped again.

  ‘Go now,’ said Moctezuma, still holding his thumb and forefinger beneath his nose. ‘Report progress to me daily.’

  He felt a moment of quiet satisfaction as he watched the perspiring surgeon leave. He even began to hope things would soon start to go his way again. But within an hour his spies brought news to the palace of the recurrence of an omen of impending doom that had first troubled him a year earlier – a woman had passed through the streets of Tenochtitlan during the night, lamenting loudly, heard by many but seen by none. A year ago there had only been the sound of her weeping, but last night as she passed she had cried out in a terrifying voice, ‘My children, we must flee far away from this city … My children, where shall I take you?’

  On the morning of Tuesday 23 February, the fifth day after the expeditionary fleet had made its hasty departure from Santiago, the lookouts sighted a large island. Those who had been here before with the Córdoba expedition immediately recognised it as Cozumel. Beyond it to the west, stretching away into the hazy distance, lay a mainland of vast size and proportions.

  Observing the prospect from the navigation deck of his great carrack, the San Sebastián, Pedro de Alvarado felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. It was unfortunate Cortés was not here to share this moment, but the fact was the discovery of the New Lands had begun. As to Cortés, God only knew what had happened to him. Had he been sent to the bottom of the sea in the storm? Was he drowned? Was he shipwrecked? Was he lost? Only time would tell. Meanwhile the conquest must go on, and Alvarado intended to make certain it did.

  He turned to his good friend Father Gaspar Muñoz, whom he’d freed from the brig on their first day at sea and with whom he was now getting along famously. Not that Alvarado cared much for religious types but the Father was an exception – a hard man, no doubt, even a cruel man, if his reputation was anything to go by, but in many ways a man after his own heart. ‘Looking forward to your return, Father?’ he asked. ‘I’m told you converted the whole population when you came with Córdoba.’

  Muñoz was glaring at the island, his eyes screwed up against the spears of bright sunlight reflecting off the water. ‘I had some success when our soldiers were amongst them,’ he said. ‘But that was last year. I shall wish to discover if they’ve stayed true to Christ since we left.’

  Alvarado nodded. He’d heard how Muñoz treated converts who lapsed back to paganism and he thoroughly approved. You had to take a tough line with savages. Still, he was curious. ‘Forgive me for asking, Father,’ he said, ‘but how can you be sure you’ve converted the heathens at all when they don’t speak our language and you don’t speak theirs? You had no interpreters on the Córdoba expedition.’

  Muñoz gave him a strange look. It was a look, Alvarado thought, that a lesser man might even have found … chilling. ‘It is a matter my order has studied,’ the friar said eventually. ‘As you can imagine, we frequently find ourselves as missionaries in lands where there is no common tongue. We have developed certain methods, certain techniques and signs, to overcome these difficulties. Naturally we require our converts to destroy their idols.’ A fanatical glint appeared in Muñoz’s eye. ‘The zeal with which they do this – or their lack of it – speaks volumes. Then there are the symbols of our own faith. If they accept the cross and an image of the Virgin with glad hearts, we take it as sure evidence of conversion and after we are gone the sacred symbols continue to work wonders.’

  ‘So these Cozumel Indians – they were happy to destroy their idols?’

  ‘Most happy. And they understood they must desist in future from the vile cult of human sacrifice – did you know it is the practice of the Indians throughout these New Lands to cut out men’s hearts and offer them to the devils they worship as gods?’

  ‘So I had heard,’ conceded Alvarado.

  ‘I ended that abomination on Cozumel and afterwards we had the savages whitewash the blood from the walls of their temple and put the cross and an image of the virgin in the place where their principal idols had stood.’ That fanatic gleam again. ‘It will anger me if there has been any relapse.’

  ‘It will be all the easier to detect relapse,’ Alvarado offered, ‘and make fresh converts now we have our own interpreter.’ He nodded in the direction of the main deck, where the Indian kidnapped during the Córdoba expedition sat hunched in conversation with the young ensign Bernal Díaz, the farmboy whom Cortés had promoted above his station to the rank of ensign.

  ‘Interpreter?’ Muñoz said. His moist upper lip retracted to expose protruding yellow teeth as he sneered at the Indian. ‘That creature has no Castilian at all, so I fail to see how he can interpret anything.’

  Perhaps a slight exaggeration, Alvarado thought. During the creature’s enforced stay in Santiago, it had acquired a smattering of Castilian, but it frequently misused the few words it knew, and spoke with an accent so thick as to be almost unintelligible. Was it even fully human? It had crossed eyes and long greasy hair hanging in a fringe over a low, sloping brow. It walked with a deep stoop, its knuckles trailing apelike almost to the ground.

  Still, it would have to serve. Muñoz might face problems getting it to convey the rarefied spiritual notions he dealt in, but as long as it could put the words ‘bring out your gold’ into the native tongue, the stinking creature would be some use to Alvarado.

  The Indian’s name was Cit Bolon Tun but the Spaniards – those few who spoke to him at all – called him ‘Little Julian’. This shunning of the man, and his treatment by most as though he were lower than a dog, partly explained why he had learned so little of the Castilian tongue. But there was also, Díaz sensed, a stubborn, rebellious streak about him. Most likely he simply did not want to learn the language of his opp
ressors, preferring to sulk and slouch, his squint eyes locked on the tip of his own nose, watching everything but making as little effort as possible to become useful.

  Díaz had done what he could to remedy this state of affairs on the four-day voyage from Santiago, making a concerted effort to add to Little Julian’s vocabulary – ‘this is called a “dog”, this is a “horse”, this is a “mast”, those are called “waves”, that bird there is a “seagull”,’ and so on and so forth. As a campaigner from the Córdoba expedition himself, Díaz had been present when Little Julian was captured during a great battle fought on the outskirts of a town named Potonchan, but other than that name, which stuck in his memory, and the name of Julian’s tribe, the Chontal Maya, he knew next to nothing about the people and culture of the region, except that they were savages who practised the disgusting rite of human sacrifice. During the voyage, in return for the language lessons Díaz had given, Julian had added to this information, telling him that the Chontal Maya were just one part of a great confederation of Maya tribes. The land they inhabited, the ‘Yucatán’, another name Díaz recalled from the year before, was a very extensive country of jungles filled with wild beasts including deer – which Little Julian insisted were a species of horse – and panthers, as well as many other creatures large and small, fierce and timid, that were unknown to Spaniards. The jungles were interspersed by cultivated gardens and farms where the main crop, maize, was one that Díaz had already tasted in Cuba even before his part in the Córdoba expedition. As he had seen with his own eyes, there were also great towns and even cities in the Yucatán, of which Potonchan was one. There Julian’s two wives and seven children awaited his return, and it was his hope, Díaz learned, that he would be allowed to rejoin his family if and when the present expedition once again made its way to Potonchan.

  ‘Do they even speak your language here?’ Díaz asked, pointing to Cozumel now less than five miles dead ahead. It would be their first port of call, just as it had been the first port of call for the Córdoba expedition.

  ‘Cozumel peoples is Maya,’ Julian replied. ‘I speak them like my own home.’

  ‘Good. Very good.’ Díaz clapped the squint-eyed Indian on his narrow shoulder, then stood and walked forward to the forecastle for a better look at the island he had visited last year, now revealing itself as a large, tear-shaped landmass, narrowing to a point in the north but a good six miles wide in the south and twenty-five or thirty miles in length. Densely overgrown with lush green tropical forest, it appeared, for the most part, to be flat and featureless, but in the northeast a fair-sized town of whitewashed, flat-roofed dwellings was visible on a low hill. As was the case with the few other Indian towns that Díaz had visited with Córdoba, a stone pyramid surmounted by a squat dark temple stood at the highest point.

  In the Díaz family’s farmhouse near the Castilian town of Medina del Campo, there had hung a painting of the three famous pyramids of Egypt, inherited by Bernal’s father from his great grandfather, who had in turn – so the story went – inherited it from an even more antique relative who had been on the crusades to the Holy Land and had, at some time, passed through Egypt. Bernal’s own memory of the painting was faint, but it was enough to confirm for him that the pyramids of the New Lands belonged to the same general class of objects as the Egyptian pyramids. The latter, however, had no temples on their summits, which rose to a sharp point, whereas in these New Lands – and Cozumel was no exception – all pyramids were built in a series of steps with flat and spacious summits often accommodating large structures.

  Díaz could not forget the dismembered bodies and blood-splashed temple walls that had confronted him when he had first climbed to the top of the great pyramid of Cozumel – a scene that was all the more surprising for being so at odds with the seemingly friendly nature and gentle character of the island’s inhabitants. Equally terrible had been Muñoz’s fury at this proof not only of idolatry but also of human sacrifice. In view of the brutal chastisement of the natives that had followed, it was little wonder they’d converted so quickly and so willingly to the faith of Christ. Díaz hoped for their sakes, now Muñoz was returning, that they’d not relapsed.

  After two hours more easy sailing in a light following wind, the San Sebastián rounded a headland and Cozumel’s good anchorage revealed itself at the foot of the hill on which the town was built. The protected bay edged by palm trees presented an idyllic scene, the long, crescent-shaped beach of white sand packed with brown-skinned natives, many as naked as the day they were born, the more senior men in breachclouts, their women in simple blouses and skirts, and every one of them cheering and waving as though the Spaniards were long-lost brothers returning to the fold.

  How sweet and innocent they were! So different from the warlike mainland tribes of the Yucatán encountered by the Córdoba expedition when it had sailed on from here last year – tribes like the Chontal Maya from which Little Julian hailed.

  Díaz heard a scuffle of bare feet and turned to see the cross-eyed interpreter had come forward silently and joined him on the forecastle. But Julian wasn’t looking ahead at the crowded beach. Instead he was looking back along the ship to the navigation deck, where Father Muñoz still stood side by side with Don Pedro de Alvarado.

  A sudden epiphany afforded Díaz a glimpse of the captain and the friar as the Indian must see them now, both of them greedy and both hungry, the one for human souls, the other for gold – both of them monsters who would stop at nothing, who would have no compunction, who would do anything, anything at all, to gratify their desires.

  Muñoz placed his hand on Alvarado’s shoulder and moved his fingers down in a manner peculiarly intimate to touch the captain’s broken left arm where it hung, bandaged and splinted, in the sling fashioned by Dr La Peña. Some wordless communication seemed to be exchanged, then the friar turned, strode down the steps to the main deck and climbed through the hatch into the hold, the black sackcloth of his habit merging seamlessly with the shadows below.

  Above, the coarse yells and work songs of the sailors filled the air as the San Sebastián dropped anchor in the bay of Cozumel. Below, in the tiny dark prayer cell that Pedro de Alvarado had caused to be built for him in the bowels of the great carrack, Father Gaspar Muñoz knelt naked on the bare boards, repeatedly flagellating his own back with the knotted cords of a cat-tail whip, beating himself with such force that streams of blood poured down over his buttocks and thighs. Lacerations he had inflicted a few days before, and that had begun to scab over and heal, burst open again under the scourging, and new wounds opened up amongst them until his flesh was a mass of blood and bruises.

  He welcomed the pain – welcomed it and embraced it like a lover – and when it reached its crescendo he experienced, as he always did, a sudden detachment of soul from body, and entered into a state of holy and mystical union with the divine. A luminescence flared in the darkness, spreading and opening like the petals of some great night-blooming flower, and out of its midst, floating towards him and crossing in an instant the impossible distance between heaven and earth, appeared the shining figure of Saint Peter.

  Though gratified, Muñoz was not surprised, for the saint had chosed to commune with him in these moments of ecstasy, and sometimes in dreams, since his first visit to Cozumel last year. The purpose of their mystical encounters had been made clear from the outset. Muñoz had been called to do God’s work in the New Lands and the work was so important that Peter himself, the rock on whom Christ built his church, had been sent to guide him.

  Now, as his glowing form filled the darkened prayer cell, the saint laid his huge hand on Muñoz’s head, the warm, calloused palm bearing down, sending a tingling vibration through the kneeling friar’s tonsured crown, through his skull and into his brain, penetrating his spine with a liquid glowing heat that diffused rapidly to all parts of his body and rose to a delicious peak as it entered his member of shame.

  ‘Are you ready,’ asked the saint, ‘to begin the great work?’ br />
  ‘I am ready, Holiness,’ Muñoz murmured, ‘yet I fear I am not worthy.’

  ‘You are worthy, my son. I have told you this many times before.’

  ‘But I have desires, Holy Father. Unnatural desires. Are they not sinful?’

  ‘When you do the work of God,’ said Saint Peter, ‘there is no sin in it.’

  ‘Yes, Holiness.’ Muñoz laid the scourge by his knees on the floor and now peered with hope into the saint’s coal-black eyes. ‘May I go out then, tonight, and take a child?’

  A glint of fire sparked in the black depths of those eyes. ‘To take a child so soon after the fleet has anchored would excite suspicion even amongst your fellow Spaniards and that would not serve our interests. You must proceed with stealth and be seen to go about your normal business. Today you will inquire into the progress of our sacred faith since you first planted it here. You will find it has withered on the vine while the worship of idols and the cult of human sacrifice have flourished in your absence. Tomorrow you will punish these abominations. On the third day, in the uproar that follows, you may take a child. Afterwards wait a day, then take another.’

  ‘Thank you, Holy Father. You are generous.’

  ‘One thing further, my son …’

  ‘Yes, Holiness.’

  ‘I saved Cortés from the storm. Even now he makes sail for Cozumel.’

  Muñoz was suddenly confused, his head spinning: ‘You saved him, Father. Why? I had hoped I had seen the last of him. He is not the right man to lead this expedition! With Alvarado as captain-general, I would be so much better placed to do God’s work in the New Lands.’

  The pressure of Peter’s hand on Muñoz’s head increased. It was as though a great weight forced him down. ‘Such matters are not for you to decide,’ the saint said, ‘or even involve yourself in.’

  ‘But, Holiness, I must object …’

  ‘You object?’ Saint Peter’s voice became a roar like thunder and wind. ‘Take care, Muñoz, for you are a mere man and you enter deep waters here. Wade another step and you may drown …’