Muñoz whimpered. The pressure on his head was unbearable. He felt himself driven down through the rough planks of the floor. ‘I am sorry, Holy Father. In my zeal for God I spoke beyond my station.’
The pressure was lifted as quickly as it had been applied. ‘You are forgiven, my son. But you must reach an accommodation with Cortés. You and he are my sword and my shield in these New Lands. You have both been called according to God’s purpose.’
A man like Cortés, Muñoz thought, called to God’s purpose? How can that be?
‘This is not given to mortal man to know,’ replied Saint Peter, from whom nothing was hidden. ‘It is a secret thing that belongs to the Lord our God.’
The saint’s glow was beginning to fade, his immense spirit withdrawing to heaven whence it came. ‘Know that I visit Cortés in his dreams,’ he said as he slipped away, ‘know that I speak with him. Know he loves me, even as you love me. And know that all things work together for good to them that love God …’
It was the afternoon of Tuesday 23 February, the fifth day since their departure from Santiago de Cuba. Five days! Cortés thought. Five bloody days! Alaminos had estimated that Cozumel lay not much more than three hundred nautical miles due west of Santiago, and under normal conditions it should have been possible to sail such a distance in four days. Instead here was Cortés’s proud flagship the Santa María, quite alone in the midst of the ocean sea, and with at least two days’ hard sailing still ahead of her!
It was the storm on that wild night of Thursday 18 February that had changed everything. Miraculously all the horses, braced in their stalls by slings under their bellies, had lived through it without serious injury, and only one man had been lost; the toll could have been so much higher! But once the wind and the waves had died down it became clear that the Santa María had been separated from the rest of the fleet and blown very far to the south of her original course – indeed so far south that the next morning, Friday 19 February, she lay within sight of the Spanish settlement of Seville on the north coast of the island of Jamaica. They’d been obliged to put in to this undesirable shanty town filled with rats, thieves and mosquitos while the ship’s carpenter, Martin Lopez, made good the worst of the storm damage, including a raging leak below the waterline that would have sunk them in a few more hours if they’d attempted to sail on.
The repairs required two days to complete so they’d not finally been able to put to sea again until Sunday 21 February, and in the two days since then they’d made slow progress. The winds on the voyage had been variable, sometimes dropping away completely and leaving them becalmed, as was the case this afternoon, frustrating Cortés, filling him with impotent rage and leaving him prey to all manner of anxieties. His greatest fear was that the rest of his fleet had been destroyed in the storm, that his enterprise was therefore already over before it had begun, and that his remaining men might force him to return to Cuba where Diego de Velázquez waited to hang him.
The only refuge from these uncharacteristically pessimistic and negative thoughts was in sleep and, since there was little else to do, and a dour humour was upon him, Cortés had resorted to his hammock for what he hoped would be a lengthy siesta this afternoon of Tuesday 23 February.
At first, however, sleep eluded him, and after a short while he understood why. Although his stateroom had been restored to its original spacious dimensions since Pepillo and Melchior had smashed down and removed the central partition, the evil emanations of Father Gaspar Muñoz still clung about the place. In particular they seemed to arise from the friar’s four large leather bags. Miraculously these had not been washed away when seawater had flooded in on the night of the storm, and Cortés had retained them with some vague notion that he might return them to the Inquisitor when and if they were reunited.
The bags were stacked side by side in a corner at the back of the stateroom, where a jumble of Cortés’s own belongings – heaps of clothes, a rack of hanging cloaks, assorted weapons and miscellaneous sacks and valises – shielded them from common view. Now, with a sigh, he extricated himself from his hammock, strode over to the untidy pile, pulled the bags free from their hiding place – ye gods they were heavy! – and lined them up in the middle of the floor.
They were padlocked, but that was scant impediment and their owner, if not at the bottom of the sea, was too far away to object. Cortés found a short steel dagger and, after further searching, a slim crowbar. In less than a minute he had the bags open.
How strange! Here were flensing knives, slim and wicked, razor sharp; here scalpels, each fine blade in its own miniature leather sheath; here lancets, here stilettos, here bone saws, here hatchets, here a selection of butcher’s knives as long as a man’s forearm, the blades of some smeared and matted with dried blood; here cleavers, here daggers of many different designs, and here were instruments of torture – hooks, screws, spikes, steel garrottes, heretics’ forks, tongue pliers, eye-gouges, hammers and many more.
Cortés could have believed, or could at any rate have persuaded himself, that all these ugly devices were possessed by Muñoz for the purposes of his work as Inquisitor – work for the Lord, it should not be forgotten – were it not for the trophies of human skin and hair that he also found in the bags, not even hidden away but simply lying there in plain view. These appeared to be strips cut from the scalps of Indians, judging from the hair – thank God not from Spaniards – and though some were desiccated, others seemed relatively fresh and exuded a mephitic stink.
Holding his hand over his nose, Cortés placed everything back inside the bags, closed them as best he could with the broken padlocks, concealed them once again at the rear of his stateroom and retired to his hammock with his mind in turmoil.
What on earth – or in heaven or hell for that matter – was Muñoz up to?
Even as this question crossed his mind, sleep stole up on Cortés – not with its usual gentle seduction but brutally and fiercely – and took possession of him like an enemy seizing a prisoner. As this happened and his eyelids fluttered closed, he felt the hair on the back of his neck rising, as though he were in the presence of danger, and became convinced at some deep level of his awareness that something intelligent, something that was not human and not friendly, had entered the stateroom and now stood over him where he lay in his hammock.
I’m dreaming, he thought. And though he slept – and absolutely knew that he slept – though his body lay paralysed and he knew he could not move a muscle, he also knew, with that same sense of complete certainty, that all his faculties of reason and memory remained intact and could be deployed to probe and perhaps even understand the high strangeness of the moment. He remembered his dream of a few days before when Saint Peter had appeared to him, and immediately recognised certain similarities and a familiar flavour to the experience, most notably the sense of being both within a dream and an external observer to it.
But there was nothing familiar about what happened next.
With the peculiar, sinuous, unfolding motion of a serpent shedding its skin, Cortés’s hammock transformed itself into a great broad table upon which he lay immobilised by tight iron shackles fastened around his ankles, knees, wrists and elbows. An intense crackling, buzzing sound filled his ears and, instead of the timber ceiling of his stateroom, he found himself looking up at an immense flat object, completely covered in intricate geometrical patterns somewhat like a huge painting, that hung suspended over his body and occupied his entire field of vision. His eyes followed the patterns which he now saw were formed from very fine lines, or filaments, brick-red in colour, etched into or in some other way fixed upon an ivory background, forming boundaries or tracks, between which were placed multitudes of bone-white clock faces with strangely bent and twisted black hands pointing to hours and minutes.
It was terrifying, although Cortés could not at first understand why, until it came to him that this colossal, convoluted, labyrinthine, machine-like image was sentient and that its attention was focussed upon
him in a manner hellish and menacing. He thought he glimpsed a hint of eyes and of vibrating antennae, like those of some great predatory insect, and he began to feel deeply uncomfortable and restless. But he was unable to struggle against the irons that held him in place.
Then – again subtly and sinuously – the scene began to change, the giant effigy faded from view and Cortés, who still felt himself to be both inside and outside the dream at the same time, a participant and yet also an observer, caught glimpses of the space in which he was confined. Whatever and wherever it might be, this vast and umbral chamber, its floor littered with the rusting hulks of strange engines, its smoke-blackened walls dimly lit by flickering sulphurous flames, was no longer his stateroom, no longer, perhaps, even of this earth, but a place of horror where hunched fiends darted towards him through the shadows, chattering furiously in unknown tongues as they surrounded the table on which he lay prone and immobile.
‘Stop,’ Cortés wanted to shout, ‘Please stop this! Show me no more!’ But the words could not escape his mouth. Instead, seeming to emanate from everywhere and nowhere within the colossal, echoing chamber, he heard a rumbling, portentous voice, deep and ominous, yet filled with a sort of malicious glee, that said to him plainly and clearly: ‘You’re mine now.’ And as though this were a signal, the figures surrounding him fell upon him and he had the sense that his body was nothing more than some huge, bloated cocoon and that these hunched, faceless beings were all over it, tearing it apart, clawing away lumps of matter and throwing them aside, gaining access to the real Cortés, the hidden Cortés, the demonic, sinful, wilfully wicked Cortés that he had striven so hard for so many years to conceal from the world.
And he thought: This is the place of absolute truth. This is the place where everything about me is known. This is the place where every thought and every deed throughout my whole life is utterly transparent. This is the place where I am to be weighed and measured and found wanting. But at that very instant, as the last vestiges of his protective outer husk were stripped away, Cortés heard another voice clear and pure, strong and filled with joy, that announced in the tones of a proclamation at court: ‘Now the great transformation will begin!’ And suddenly Saint Peter was with him, Saint Peter his saviour, Saint Peter his protector, Saint Peter his guardian, and he felt himself swept up from that hellish table and that infernal realm into the high blue empyrean, up, up to some immeasurable height from which he looked down upon the green, sparkling ocean and there, far below him, dancing across the waves, sails billowing in a good following wind that must have sprung up while he slept, was his own fair and elegant Santa María speeding towards the New Lands.
‘Come,’ said Saint Peter, ‘let me show you that all is well for those called to God’s purpose,’ and he cradled Cortés in his huge hands, and carried him off through the vault of the firmament, across the face of the ocean, and brought him down in the blink of an eye to a great green island and a sheltered sandy bay lined with waving palms. In the bay, safe at anchor, with Alvarado’s San Sebastián in pride of place, bobbed the carracks and caravels and brigantines of the expeditionary fleet – all ten of the lost ships intact after the storm, though some were wave battered, their crews busy on deck, squads of soldiers in armour going ashore to be welcomed and presented with bright garlands by great crowds of smiling and seemingly friendly Indians.
Above the bay rose a low, wooded hill, skirted by fields and capped by a town of white-walled, flat-roofed houses. At the centre of the town loomed a great stone tower in the form of a pyramid and on its summit squatted a dark, ugly building. ‘That,’ said Saint Peter, ‘is the temple of the heathens. And this man’ – in a trice the saint brought Cortés down to the bay again where Father Gaspar Muñoz stood on the strand – ‘is the cure for their idolatry.’
Tall and severe in his black robes, his face shining with the uncompromising light of faith, Muñoz held aloft the cross of Christ.
‘By this sign you shall conquer,’ Saint Peter whispered, and in a flash Muñoz, the bay, the ships all dissolved, as though they were no more substantial than mist, and Cortés awoke in his hammock in his stateroom, sweat pouring in rivulets from his body, his heart thudding in his chest and the light of late afternoon pouring in through the open window.
He sensed the onward rush of the ship, heard the creak of the masts and the flap of the sails in a fair following wind and knew that in some sense his dream had touched on true things.
But what did it all mean?
What was that terrible shadowy chamber he had found himself in, where his soul had been stripped bare? What spiritual horror had Saint Peter rescued him from? And was he to understand that not just the promise of a successful conquest, but the price of his own eternal salvation, was some accommodation with that foul creature Muñoz, whose bags of blood-blackened knives and grisly human trophies seemed to lurk in hiding like savage beasts in their corner of the stateroom?
Muñoz had been holding up the big wooden cross all afternoon, making it a rallying point for the men as they disembarked. Around a hundred and fifty of them had assembled behind him now, most wearing the colourful garlands of fragrant flowers hung around their necks by the happy crowds of welcoming islanders. Astonishingly, these bare-arsed Cozumel Indians were actually singing and dancing with joy at the sight of the Spaniards, and had already brought basketloads of food and drink to the beach for their refreshment. Fools! thought Alvarado. The smiles would be on the other side of their faces once everything of value they possessed had been transferred to him – but meanwhile, he had to admit, their naïve gentleness was useful and made his job easier.
The same could not be said for Muñoz, who had already commandeered that squint-eyed ape Little Julian, slouching near him on the sand, for what he clearly intended to be a major investigation of the health of the faith on Cozumel. That was all very well, of course – Alvarado had no philosophical objections – but experience on Hispaniola and Cuba proved that searches of temples, the destruction of idols and other such business of the Inquisition stirred up resentment in these native races, and that once resentful they were inclined to hide their gold.
Alvarado had already assembled two hundred soldiers, all eager for booty, and now strolled over to Muñoz and took him aside. ‘I’ll be needing these men,’ he said with an eye to the column lined up awaiting the friar’s orders, ‘and the interpreter.’
‘You may not have them,’ said Muñoz somewhat pompously. ‘I intend to search the temple. I must know the fate of the cross and the icon of the Virgin I left here last year. I can’t do such work alone.’
‘Your search of the temple can wait until tomorrow, Father. In Cortés’s continuing absence I am captain-general here and my need is greater than yours.’
‘Ha! What need?’
Alvarado looked up. The sun was distinctly in the western sector of the sky. It had taken much longer than expected to prepare the fleet for a full-scale landing at Cozumel and get sufficient men disembarked. There were now less than three hours of daylight left and he wanted every house in the town searched before darkness fell. ‘Today we look for gold,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll give you all the men you need to save souls.’ He rested his hand on the hilt of the great falchion hanging in its scabbard at his waist. ‘Don’t try to gainsay me, Father,’ he added somewhat sternly. I’ll have my way on this with your agreement or without it.’
Díaz could feel the atmosphere changing, the islanders becoming more agitated and suspicious with every passing minute as the squads of conquistadors went from house to house turning everything upside down, often brutally, with vulgarity and anger. He did everything in his power to be polite, respectful, even apologetic as his own men played their sorry part in the searches, but the fact was that nothing like this had happened here last year and the Indians were unprepared.
‘Not that everything was roses,’ Alonso de La Serna reminded him. ‘Muñoz gutted their temple and smashed their idols and generally gave them hell
.’
‘They were the lucky ones!’ said Francisco Mibiercas, whose unusually broad shoulders and muscular arms were the result of hours of daily practice with the espadón, the long, two-handed sword that hung in a scabbard at his back. ‘Compared with what he did down the coast at Potonchan, he was an angel of mercy here.’
La Serna rolled his eyes. He was a tall, clever, cynical young man with a mop of fair hair, his otherwise handsome face marked by the scars of an old smallpox infection, and like all of them he hated Muñoz. ‘Compared with what he did at Potonchan,’ he said, ‘the devil himself would have seemed an angel of mercy.’
Díaz could only agree. The three of them had been together at Potonchan when Muñoz’s excessive zeal had so provoked the Chontal Maya that they had risen in their thousands, killed more than seventy of Córdoba’s conquistadors and fatally wounded Córdoba himself. But at Cozumel, which Córdoba had planned to cultivate as a safe haven, Muñoz had been kept on a short leash, and the soldiery had been strictly enjoined against looting.
All of which went to explain why the fleet had been welcomed earlier today and why looks of stupefaction, hurt and disappointment had wiped the glow from the Indians’ faces. Sprawling over the island’s only hilltop, its narrow streets running higgledy-piggledy between rows of simple whitewashed adobe homes, the town of Cozumel had perhaps two thousand inhabitants. Every one of them – men, women and children who not long before had been hanging garlands around the Spaniards’ necks – now stood by, sullen and resentful, as their simple possessions, consisting mostly of bales of cloth, cotton garments and wall hangings of little value, crude ceramics, green-stone ornaments, and a few objects of copper, as well as a handful of trussed turkeys, were turned out, raked over and trampled into the dust.
‘God help us if Cortés does not return,’ said La Serna, with a nod towards Alvarado, who was storming through the streets, followed by his personal crew of hardened, brutal killers, demanding ‘gold, gold, gold’. The blond-haired captain did not seem able to understand that a place like Cozumel could never be, and had never been, rich in that substance. ‘I’m told he’s a gifted swordsman,’ said Mibiercas wistfully, ‘but he’s not the stuff of which a good captain-general is made.’