‘Stay alert, men,’ Brabo warned casting a suspicious eye on the dense undergrowth hemming in the road on both sides. ‘They say these savages use poison darts …’
‘Which they bend over and blow out their arses at their enemies,’ joked Diego Martin, a thickset, powerfully muscled crossbowman. As with the musketeers, there were five specialists with this weapon in the squad, and Martin had made a name amongst them for his accuracy and speed of reloading.
Esteban Valencia, one of the squad’s two scouts, held a finger to his lips. ‘Let’s keep it quiet, boys,’ he said. ‘We’ve been marching nigh on five hours. Can’t be far to where we’re going now.’
Sandoval turned to Hope and Star and beckoned Little Julian closer. ‘Ask them how far,’ he said.
‘Will know when get there,’ came the answer after a muttered and urgent exchange in the Mayan language. ‘Jungle all look same to them.’
Since they were in the midst of hostile territory, unknown except to the two fishermen (who had seemed lost themselves from the moment they left the sea behind), Sandoval had decided not to send the scouts ahead on the road. They were, in his opinion, more likely to be picked off than to return with any useful information. The strategy therefore remained much as Brabo had proposed it at the outset – move fast, hit the enemy hard in the hope of aweing them into the same sort of panicked precipitous flight they’d provoked with the falconets on the beach, find the shipwrecked Spaniard and withdraw at a forced march to the waiting brigantines.
The likelihood of all this unravelling in dangerous and unpredictable ways was, of course, extremely high, but short of turning up here with the entire expeditionary force, which had never been an option as far as Cortés was concerned, Sandoval couldn’t think of any better way to do things. He was brooding on what might go wrong, and constantly glancing left and right into the undergrowth, when he thought he caught a flash of movement deep amongst the trees. The moment he focussed on the spot where he’d seen it, however, it was gone. Just leaves, thick bush, hanging creepers – nothing more.
Then … flash, flicker – there it was again on the other side of the road. This time he could have sworn he saw a human eye glaring at him out of the foliage, felt the shock of being watched, of a definite connection, but again when he focussed there was nothing there.
He might have gone on doubting himself if the dogs hadn’t suddenly started baying all at once. Vendabal shouted a command, the handlers stooped to let a pair of heavy mastiffs off the leash, and with eager barks they bounded away, one to the left, one to the right, into the jungle. They were instantly lost to sight, crashing through the undergrowth, their course marked only by swaying branches; then there came a terrified yell, then another, followed by a horrible cacophony of snarling and snapping and men screaming in terror and pain from both sides of the road.
Vendabal was standing alert, listening, watching. It sounded as if the mastiffs had brought two of the spies down, but more crashing in the undergrowth revealed others trying to make their escape. Sandoval didn’t hesitate: ‘Put more dogs after them,’ he yelled.
As the rest of the dogs sped left and right into the jungle, yapping with excitement, Brabo turned to Sandoval with a knowing leer. ‘It’s like I said, sir. They’re trained to relish the flesh of the Indians.’
‘Very well, Sergeant,’ Sandoval said ruefully as more terrible screams rose up. ‘I admit your point. I’m thankful for the presence of the dogs – and sooner than I expected to be …’ He grimaced, and Brabo grinned, at a particularly hideous, gurgling cry from somewhere to the left of the road. ‘Well, let’s get after them and see what they’ve found.’
Brabo led a team of five men off to the left, Sandoval took another five to the right. He drew his sword and used it to push the dense green vegetation aside, sometimes having to hack through thick creepers and branches to clear a path, but the dogs and their victims were still making so much noise they were easily found.
There were two Indians here. The first was already dead and being disgustingly eaten by the two snarling mastiffs and the greyhound that had brought him down. The second, with only one dog on him, a big lurcher that had him by the shoulder, was a boy of barely fifteen years, and still very much alive. His thin body was naked but for a loincloth and his moon face, dotted with acne, daubed with stripes of green paint and framed by straight black hair, was contorted with terror as the beast shook him like a rag doll. One of Vendabal’s handlers surged forward yelling staccato commands, striking at the dog with a whip. It released the boy and stood over him, its jaws dripping blood and saliva.
The youth was trembling, his eyes rolling in mute entreaty, as the conquistadors dragged him to his feet, bound his arms behind his back and marched him to the road. There Brabo had already rejoined the main squad with two more prisoners, both severely mauled, one with his throat so badly torn it seemed impossible he could survive.
‘I suppose we’d better try and question them,’ said Sandoval. ‘If Little Julian’s interpreting skills are up to it.’
Brabo nodded brusquely. ‘Be nice to know what sort of reception’s waiting for us ahead.’ He barked an order and the Indians were forced to their knees in the middle of the road. Before Sandoval could stop him, the sergeant had drawn a dagger from his belt, seized the hair of the boy who’d been taken by the lurcher and sliced off his left ear, producing a spray of blood and horrified screams from the captive.
‘What the hell …?’ Sandoval gasped.
‘Just letting them know we mean business, sir,’ said Brabo. ‘If you don’t have the stomach for this it’d be best to leave the interrogation to me.’
With feelings of shame, Sandoval shrugged helplessly and stood back while the horror unfolded. Did Little Julian even understand the questions Brabo put to him? Did he translate them correctly to the captives? Were they brave men, or simply confused when at first they didn’t reply? And when speech finally tumbled from them as an eye was gouged out here, a hand hacked off there, were the answers they gave truthful and did Little Julian translate them accurately?
Within minutes all three of the Indians were dead and Sandoval knew what he could already have guessed – that refugees fleeing from the coast had brought warning of the approach of the Spaniards, that the town of Mutul was alert and prepared, and that two hundred warriors, armed and ready for battle, were waiting to annihilate them.
For a moment Sandoval considered the possibility of flight. But only for a moment. To return to Cortés without even having attempted to win the prize was too shameful an outcome to imagine. Better to die here than be branded a coward for the rest of his life. He took a long swig from his water bottle and turned to Brabo. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.
‘Nigh-on thirty Spaniards and ten dogs against two hundred painted savages?’ The sergeant’s sneer said it all. ‘I reckon we march right in and kill them all, sir.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
Saturday 27 February 1519
After a mile the jungle began to thin and Sandoval and his squad, all fully armoured again and ready for war, soon found themselves in open terrain obviously cleared by human hands. There were signs of recent slash and burn, with blackened tree stumps still standing out a cubit or two above the acres of charred waste that lined both sides of the road, but ahead lay regular fields with the first green shoots of new maize – a crop already known to the Spaniards from Cuba and Hispaniola – pushing through the earth.
Less than a mile away across the fields lay the town of Mutul, consisting for the most part of simple huts clustered round a towering stone pyramid with stepped sides, far larger than the pyramid of Cozumel. At the edges of the town Sandoval spied green patches that he took to be vegetable gardens, and an orchard planted with regular lines of tall, leafy trees. What most pressed upon his mind, however, was the great mass of people boiling from every quarter like ants out of a disturbed nest and, much nearer, at a distance of seven hundred paces, a disciplined force of about two
hundred heavily armed warriors clad in loincloths and skins, arrayed in four ranks of fifty, and rapidly closing on the Spanish column.
‘Orders, sir?’ said Brabo. His voice was terse.
Sandoval was still haunted by guilt at the torture he’d witnessed and failed to stop, but at least the spies had spoken true and he’d had time to think through a strategy in the last mile of the march. His men were few in numbers, but the sheer shocking strangeness of their appearance, their armour, their dogs and their science of warfare offered powerful advantages over the Indians.
There were five archers in the squad and their Genoese crossbows were lethal killing machines. They had an effective range up to four hundred paces against unarmoured foes and, even at two hundred paces, the steel bolts they fired could penetrate plate armour. Sandoval also had five musketeers, armed with Spanish-made arquebuses that fired lead balls about the diameter of a man’s thumb. These travelled much faster than crossbow bolts and often shattered on impact causing devastating wounds, but they were rarely effective at ranges beyond a hundred paces.
As to reloading, the muskets with their powder and ramrods and smouldering matchlocks, and the crossbows with their crannequins and windlasses to rewind the tough strings were equally cumbersome – both types of weapon requiring about a minute between shots. The great advantage of the muskets today, however, would come from the thunder and smoke of their firing. Since there had been no landing and no fighting when Córdoba’s fleet had recced Laguna Yalahau, it was safe to assume the inhabitants of Mutul had never faced guns and most probably never even heard rumour of such weapons. With luck the effects would be spectacular.
‘Crossbowmen and musketeers to the fore to form the first two ranks of the square,’ Sandoval barked. ‘Dogs and handlers stand to the side. Crossbowmen fire at two hundred paces, countermarch to the rear of the square and reload, musketeers fire at a hundred paces and countermarch to the rear. Then release the dogs.’
As they charged closer, the enemy began to shout war cries in their singsong language and to whistle and whoop in an eerie and disconcerting manner. When they were three hundred paces out, still beyond the effective range of the muskets, they deployed a weapon Sandoval was unfamiliar with – angled wooden sticks used to launch a hail of little spears that arched up into the sky and swooped down with alarming accuracy on the Spanish square. Reacting instinctively, the men in the rear three ranks raised their bucklers and big adarga shields to protect both themselves and the ranks in front. The barrage of darts, tipped with flint points, was easily deflected. Three of the dogs in the baying pack to the right of the square took direct hits, but their steel armour shattered the flint warheads leaving the hounds themselves unharmed. Then – click … whoosh – the crossbowmen let fly, and five of the onrushing enemy tumbled screaming to the ground, transfixed by the heavy steel bolts. As the crossbowmen stepped back through the square, a manoeuvre they had practised a hundred times, the musketeers fired a single massive, crashing volley into the heart of the enemy, now less than a hundred paces distant, and quite suddenly, through the thick clouds of foul smoke, Sandoval saw what he had been silently praying for, saw the Maya horde falter and stumble, saw the fear on their faces and their rolling eyes, heard their howls of terror.
On a European battlefield the toll taken by the guns would have been confined to those actually hit, and the charge would have continued unbroken, but here amongst savages who had never encountered firearms before, the effect was devastating beyond all proportion, almost as though the Spanish were not mortal men but gods throwing thunderbolts. The enemy front ranks instantly turned and ran, while the ranks behind, still carried forward by their own momentum, crashed into them in a jumbled, churning, panic-stricken scrum, upon which, snarling and baying, teeth snapping, armour gleaming, like demons released from hell, pounced the ten furious war dogs. Here a man’s throat was torn out, there the great artery in another’s thigh gushed blood, here a coil of guts spilled loose, there a wolfhound clamped a face in its massive jaws. Few of the Maya even tried to fight back against the onslaught, and those who did found their puny stone weapons unable to pierce the animals’ armour.
Sandoval watched awestruck for a moment as the huge beasts ravaged the enemy, spreading chaos and terror, then Brabo whispered in his ear, ‘Order the advance, sir.’
‘We can’t watch him all the time,’ said Pepillo. ‘You have your duties, I have mine, but Muñoz is free to move around as he pleases.’
‘I followed him last night,’ Melchior admitted suddenly.
‘You followed him? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You were working with Cortés; the chance came and I took it.’
‘Chance! Suppose he’d caught you? Are you mad?’
Melchior had a strange, sad look on his face. ‘No. Not mad. I wanted to stop him … doing what he does. But he gave me the slip and sure enough he killed again.’
It was the afternoon of Saturday 27 February, and they were in the paddock where the expedition’s eighteen precious cavalry mounts were penned. In the past two days, shaking off the stiffness and jitters that had afflicted them after the storm and the long journey from Cuba, the horses had thrived on the pastures of rich wild grass that grew plentifully around the foot of the low hill on which the town of Cozumel stood.
Melchior was an accomplished rider and spent several hours in the paddock every day, grooming and exercising Molinero, Cortés’s dark chestnut stallion. This afternoon other manservants were also present doing the same work with Puertocarerro’s silver-grey mare, Alvarado’s white stallion Bucephalus, Escalante’s light chestnut gelding with its three white feet, and Cristóbal de Olid’s sorrel mare.
Pepillo watched Melchior as he patiently brushed Molinero’s flank and realised he didn’t fully understand the depth of the older boy’s hatred for Muñoz. Of course the friar was evil! Of course he should be stopped before he murdered any more Indian children! But were he and Melchior the ones to do it, and what had driven his friend to take the awful risk of going after the friar alone? Even together, what chance did they really stand?
‘The only mercy,’ Melchior said after a long silence, ‘is he’s not going to find it easy to catch another child. There’s uproar in the town after last night’s murder, and the Indians are beginning to lose their fear of us.’
Pepillo thought about this while he held his hand under Molinero’s whiskery lips and felt the horse’s hot breath as he nuzzled him. He very much wanted to learn to ride and constantly pestered Melchior to allow him to climb up on the big animal’s back, so far without success. ‘Muñoz won’t stop,’ he said eventually. ‘I saw what was in his eyes when he was beating me and I don’t believe he’ll ever stop.’
‘You’re right,’ said Melchior with a fierce grimace, ‘but he’s not going to risk a murder when the sun’s up like he did the first day. Tell you what. If Cortés has nothing for us tonight we’ll sneak out and watch the San Sebastián. If Muñoz comes to shore we’ll follow him.’
Pepillo’s heart sank. Every instinct screamed this was a bad plan that could get them both into terrible trouble and possibly even dead. But he had to support his friend, didn’t he? And he didn’t want to seem a coward, so he nodded bravely and said yes.
As Sandoval broke into a run he heard himself yelling at the top of his voice ‘Santiago and at them! Santiago and at them!’
Behind him, with a clank of armour and the rasp of steel as weapons were drawn, the square of twenty-five seasoned veterans surged forward, every man echoing the rousing war cry with which Spaniards had gone into battle for a thousand years. They fell mercilessly upon the disordered mass of the Maya, some retreating, some still attempting to advance, cutting them to pieces with swords and battle-axes, impaling them on pikes, clubbing them down with spiked maces and iron flails.
In the thick of it, Sandoval found himself face to face with a bellowing wild-eyed savage, dressed only in a loincloth, wielding a long wooden sword with thin flak
es of some black stone set into its edges, and clearly ready to fight rather than run. The man was holding the weapon in a two-handed grip, slashing it madly through the air with tremendous power but no balance or style, so it was a simple matter for Sandoval to parry and deflect, slide his right foot forward as he had been taught, drive the point of his broadsword into the warrior’s heart and withdraw. Again that pluck of innards on steel that he’d felt when he’d killed his first man less than ten days before, but this time there was no remorse – rather a sense of exultation – as his enemy crumpled at his feet in a spray of blood.
Brabo shouted, ‘Behind you!’, and Sandoval whirled into a massive blow from another wooden sword that smashed against his cuirass, shattering every one of the stone flakes along the edge of the weapon but doing him no damage at all. The new attacker was a lean, lank-haired Mayan youth whose eyes locked on his in frozen disbelief as Sandoval hacked him near in half in the riposte.
Moments later it was over and the last of the Mayan warriors were in full flight across the fields. The musketeers had reloaded and fired another volley after them and the baying dogs charged on towards the assembled townsfolk, who also turned and ran uttering wails of horror.
Don Pedro de Alvarado sat out on the navigation deck of the San Sebastián, a length of sailcloth rigged to give him shade from the afternoon sun, while Doctor La Peña examined his broken forearm, and set about rebinding the splints with bandages thickly coated in a mixture of egg whites, flour and pig fat that would harden in the next hours into a rigid cast.
Leaning on the rail surrounding the deck, supposedly waiting for La Peña’s ministrations to various health needs of their own, but really here to further their other, more clandestine purpose, were lantern-jawed Juan Escudero and his massively bearded ally Juan Velázquez de León, the two ringleaders of the clique loyal to Diego de Velázquez, the governor of Cuba. Their approach to Alvarado the day before had come while he was still hurt and angry, indeed it had come precisely because he was hurt and angry, and they knew nothing of his reconciliation with Cortés this morning.