War God: Nights of the Witch

  ‘My herald told me you were loading heavy hunters on board that carrack of yours,’ the governor said suddenly. ‘The San Jorge?’ His right eye twitched, as though in sympathy with Alvarado’s scar.

  ‘The San Sebastián,’ Alvarado corrected. What game was Velázquez playing here? Did he really not remember?

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. The San Sebastián. A fine ship, which my generosity helped you buy. So my question is …’ A long, silent pause. That weird twitch again. ‘Since our expedition to the New Lands is purely for trade and reconnaissance, what possible use do you have for cavalry horses?’

  The last words came out in a rush, as though Velázquez were embarrassed to raise the matter, and Alvarado launched smoothly into the lie he’d rehearsed with Cortés just that morning – the lie that half the fleet already knew by heart. ‘For self-defence,’ he said. ‘Córdoba’s men took such a beating last year because they didn’t have the advantage of cavalry. We’re not going to be caught out the same way.’

  Velázquez sat back in his throne and drummed on its arms with thick, ring-encrusted fingers. ‘I want to believe you, Pedro,’ he said. ‘You came with me from Hispaniola and you’ve been a loyal ally to me all these years in Cuba. But I still don’t understand why you were loading the horses today or why another six were seen going on board the Santa María at the same time. Why load the horses now when you’re not sailing for another week?’

  Alvarado spoke in his most honeyed tones, as though reassuring a lover: ‘What your informants saw was a routine training exercise, Don Diego! Nothing more sinister than that. If the horses are to serve us we must be able to get them on and off our ships quickly without broken legs. It’s an exercise we’ll practise daily until we sail next week.’

  There was another long silence during which Velázquez visibly relaxed. Finally he made a horrible attempt at a smile. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be involved in anything dishonourable, Pedro,’ he said. ‘That’s why I called you here. I need a man I can trust.’ He rang a little bell and from a curtained doorway a native Taino Indian, clad in a white tunic, appeared carrying a wooden chair. He crossed the audience chamber with a peculiar bobbing motion and the slap of bare feet, placed the chair behind Alvarado and retreated. Alvarado sat down but his flesh crawled at the proximity of the indigene. These creatures were, in his opinion, barely human.

  Velázquez reached beneath the table and with a grunt pulled out a bulging silk moneybag, opened its drawstrings and poured the gleaming, jingling contents in a flood onto the table. The river of gold was heavy and bright. Involuntarily Alvarado leaned forward in his chair, his eyes widening as he tried to estimate its value.

  ‘Five thousand pesos de oro,’ said Velázquez, as though reading his thoughts. ‘It’s yours if you will assist me in a certain matter.’

  Five thousand pesos! A small fortune! Alvarado’s love of gold was legendary. He licked his lips: ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You’re a close friend of Don Hernando Cortés?’

  ‘Yes, he’s my friend. Since we were boys.’

  ‘That’s what I hear. But is your friendship with Cortés more important to you than your loyalty to me?’ Velázquez began to sweep the golden pesos back into the bag.

  Alvarado’s eyes followed the money. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He’s planning to betray me,’ stormed the governor, ‘though God knows I’ve loved him as if he were my own son.’ Once again his face had taken on the congested look of a man about to burst into tears. ‘Believe me, Pedro, what I have learnt this past day has been like a thousand daggers through my heart.’

  Alvarado feigned shock: ‘Cortés? Betray you? I don’t believe it … He’s told me many times he loves you like a father.’

  ‘Words, mere words. When the fleet reaches the New Lands I have sure intelligence he will no longer act as my viceroy but will declare the expedition his own. Too late by far for anyone to stop him! So I need your help now.’ Velázquez drew the strings of the moneybag closed and rested his hands proprietorially on top of it. ‘But first I must know … Can I trust you? Do I have your loyalty? Will you deliver your friend to me if I ask you to do so?’

  ‘Friends come and go,’ said Alvarado smoothly, ‘but gold is a constant companion. If you don’t trust me, trust gold …’

  ‘If you do exactly what I ask,’ said Velázquez, ‘then all this is yours.’

  Alvarado sat back in the chair, his eyes fixed on the bag. ‘Ask me,’ he said.

  ‘Invite Cortés to join you for dinner on the San Sebastián late this evening. Shall we say around ten p.m.? Make some pretext, something private you want to discuss. Get him intrigued …’

  ‘Why so late?’

  ‘Fewer people around, less chance for things to go wrong.’

  ‘What if he’s otherwise engaged?’

  ‘Then you must move the invitation to tomorrow instead. But do all you can to persuade him to join you tonight. Dine in your stateroom. Serve him wine.’ Velázquez searched in his robes and brought out a little glass phial containing a clear, colourless liquid. ‘Pour this first into the wine you will give him. Within an hour he will be … indisposed.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘No! I want the blackguard alive! The draft will make him puke his guts out, run a high fever, sweat like a lathered horse. You’ll send a man to fetch a doctor – Dr La Peña. You know him, yes?’

  Alvarado nodded. La Peña was a turd. He wondered how much Velázquez was paying him for his part in the plot.

  ‘He’ll come at once,’ the governor continued. ‘Whatever time of night it is. But when he examines Cortés he’ll say he can’t treat him on board ship and he must be brought to his hospital in town … The doctor’s own carriage will take him there.’

  ‘Cortés’s people aren’t going to like that.’

  ‘They’ll have no choice. Their master will be ill, close to death …’

  ‘Some of them are going to want to ride with him.’

  ‘No matter. When the carriage is clear of the harbour, a squad of my palace guard will be waiting for it at the roadside. Anyone with Cortés will be killed; he’ll be brought to me here for questioning; and you, my dear Pedro’ – Velázquez patted the bag – ‘will be an even richer man than you are already.’

  ‘You have thought of everything, Don Diego.’

  Perhaps detecting a little of the scorn buried deep in Alvarado’s tone, Velázquez frowned: ‘It’s underhand but necessary,’ he explained. ‘Cortés has become powerful since I gave him command of the fleet. If I arrest him openly there’s going to be a fight …’

  Alvarado hastened to agree. ‘He’s recruited more than five hundred men, signed them up with bribes and promises and dreams. Their loyalty is to him before anyone else …’

  ‘That’s exactly why he’s so dangerous! That’s why this poison has to be rooted out now!’

  ‘But I see one great weakness in your plan.’

  Velázquez bristled: ‘Weakness? What weakness?’

  ‘It only works if I’m the sort of man who would betray Cortés for five thousand pieces of gold.’

  Velázquez was hunched forward now, an ugly scowl making him look suddenly monstrous. ‘And are you not such a man?’ he said.

  It seemed a good moment for some drama, so Alvarado sprang to his feet, sent his chair crashing back and towered over the table, his right hand resting on his sword belt. ‘Five thousand pesos is a paltry price to betray a friend.’

  ‘Ten thousand then.’

  ‘Twenty thousand, not a peso less.’

  Velázquez made a strangled sound: ‘It’s a lot of money.’

  ‘You’ll lose a thousand times more if Cortés does what you fear.’

  Alvarado could see the idea of paying out such a huge sum was almost too horrible for the old man to contemplate. For a moment he wondered if he had gone too far, asked too much. But then Velázquez reached under the table again and with great effort pulled out three more large mo
neybags, setting them down beside the first. ‘Very well,’ he coughed. He seemed to have something caught in his throat, ‘twenty thousand it is. Do we have a deal?’

  ‘We have a deal,’ said Alvarado. As he spoke he sensed danger and spun round to find the governor’s personal champion, bodyguard and bullyboy, a gigantic warrior named Zemudio, looming silently over him. The man was as big as a barn door, bald as the full moon and stealthy as a cat. He’d been in Cuba for less than a month, joining the governor’s service direct from the Italian wars where he’d won a fearsome reputation. As yet he’d fought no bouts in the islands.

  ‘My, my,’ said Alvarado, annoyed that he had to crane his neck like a child to see Zemudio’s stubborn, oafish face. ‘Where did you come from?’ Another of those creepy curtained doors, he thought. He looked the champion up and down. The brute wore light body-armour – knee-length breeches and a sleeveless vest, both made of padded cotton with hundreds of small steel plates riveted into the lining. He was armed with an old-fashioned falchion that was exceptionally long and heavy in the blade. Though crude, and unsuited to a gentleman, this cutlass-like weapon wielded by a strong, experienced hand could do terrible damage.

  For a moment Alvarado locked stares with the champion, testing his will. Small, brown, patient eyes glared back at him, unblinking, flat as buttons, filled with stupid self-confidence.

  As the aura of threat between the two men became palpable, Velázquez spoke: ‘It’s all right, Zemudio. Don Pedro and I have reached an accommodation.’

  At once the huge bodyguard stepped back.

  Alvarado retrieved his chair and sat down. ‘Why was any of that necessary?’ he asked. His neck and shoulders prickled under Zemudio’s violent stare, but he refused to acknowledge him.

  ‘I couldn’t be sure you’d deal,’ said the governor. ‘If you didn’t …’ He drew his hand meaningfully across his throat.

  ‘You’d have had me killed?’

  ‘Of course. But all that is behind us now. You give me Cortés, I give you these twenty thousand gold pesos …’

  ‘Who leads the expedition – when Cortés is gone?’

  ‘Your question is to the point,’ said the governor. He pulled a sheet of vellum from a thick heap on the table in front of him, dipped a quill in an inkwell and began to write in a small, spidery hand. As the quill grated across the calfskin, Alvarado tried to read the words upside down but couldn’t make them out. Velázquez frowned with concen- tration, pushing the tip of his tongue out between his lips like a schoolboy in an examination.

  When the governor was done, he read through what he had written, blotted the page and placed it in a document wallet. A motion of his finger was sufficient to bring Zemudio surging to his side. ‘Go at once to Narváez. Give the wallet to him. He’ll know what to do.’

  As the bodyguard placed the wallet in a leather satchel and strode from the room, Velázquez turned back to Alvarado. ‘I’ve chosen a man I can trust to lead the expedition,’ he said. ‘My cousin Pánfilo de Narváez. Zemudio takes my orders to him now.’

  Narváez! A complete ass! Incompetent, vainglorious and foolish! In every way the antipodes of Cortés! But Alvarado kept these thoughts to himself and instead asked slyly, ‘Who will be second in command?’

  ‘I thought perhaps you, Don Pedro, if you agree.’

  Alvarado didn’t hesitate: ‘Of course I agree. It will be an honour and my privilege to serve under a great captain like Narváez.’

  Velázquez grasped one of the fat moneybags, rose from his throne and walked round the mahogany table. Alvarado also stood and the governor passed the bag to him. ‘A quarter of your payment in advance,’ he said. ‘You’ll get the rest when you’ve delivered Cortés.’ He awkwardly embraced Alvarado and told him to return at once to his ship. ‘Send your invitation to Cortés. Make ready for tonight.’ He clapped his hands and the great formal doors of the audience chamber were swung open by two iron-masked guardsmen armed with double-headed battle-axes.

  Alvarado didn’t return to his ship.

  When he’d passed the last of the governor’s guards and made certain no one followed him, he led his white stallion Bucephalus out from the palace stables, secured his gold in a saddlebag and rode at full gallop after Zemudio.

  The only way to get to Narváez’s estate lay across dry, hilly country, partially overgrown with groves of acacia trees and intercut by a series of shallow ravines. The champion had left a trail a three-year-old could follow, so quite soon Alvarado started to get glimpses of him – that broad back, that bald head, that air, obvious even from afar, of unshakable self-confidence.

  Let’s see how confident you really are, thought Alvarado. He touched his spurs gently to Bucephalus’s flanks; the great war horse thundered forward as fast as a bolt from a crossbow, and the distance began to close rapidly.

  Chapter Eleven

  Santiago, Cuba, Thursday 18 February 1519

  A glance at the sun told Pepillo it was well past two in the afternoon, perhaps nearer three. He felt bone weary, his arms already protesting at the weight of the two big leather bags he’d finally retrieved from the Customs House after hours of frustration and confusion involving five different officers, three different batches of paperwork and a lengthy temporary misplacement of the bags themselves.

  Which he still had to carry to the pier!

  He groaned. The distance was close to a mile! Worse still, this second pair of bags was even heavier than the first, but they clunked and clanged in the same way, as though filled with metal objects.

  The road thronged with people coming and going between the town and the harbour. For the most part they were Spaniards but there were Taino Indians amongst them and Pepillo passed a file of Negro slaves, naked but for loincloths, marching up from the docks with huge bundles balanced on their heads. An open coach drawn by a pair of horses sped by carrying a young noblewoman and her retinue of giggling favourites. Then an ox slowly plodded past, pulling a cart. It had ample space for a passenger and his baggage, but when Pepillo tried to steal a ride, a ferocious dog jumped back from the driver’s platform and threatened him with bared teeth.

  Pepillo resigned himself to walking. He had walked this morning and he would walk again this afternoon, but he did hate the way the bag in his right hand kept banging against his shin. The assortment of loose metal objects that Muñoz had packed it with seemed maliciously placed to bruise him and make him miss his step. ‘Aargh!’ he grunted as the bag smacked into him again. In a fit of temper he dropped it and threw its companion down after it.

  The clasps of the second bag burst open as it hit the ground.

  Inside the bag were steel knives – tiny knives so sharp that their blades cut at the slightest touch, hooked and barbed knives, butchers’ knives the size of small swords, knives like saws, daggers with jagged edges, stilettos, cleavers, spikes, skewers …

  Pepillo realised immediately he was in a dangerous situation. Santiago was a tough town, filled with fighting men, and there were weapons here that any fighting man would want to possess. As he crouched by the bag, struggling to close it, hastily rearranging its contents, fumbling with its catches, he noticed some strips of dried skin, with hair attached, lying inside. How extremely strange!

  Pepillo looked back and saw a figure approaching, a shimmering black ribbon silhouetted by the sun. He felt threatened. The knives mustn’t be seen! With a flurry of effort he succeeded at last in closing and relocking the bag just as a man materialised at his side and stood over him.

  ‘Is there a problem here?’ the man asked. He was Castilian. His voice was subtle, pleasant, educated, but pitched high and with perhaps the slightest hint of a lisp.

  Pepillo looked up and was reassured to see the stranger wore a friar’s habit. No knife-stealing ruffian this! ‘I had an accident, Father. I dropped my master’s bags, one of them came open, but everything seems to be in order now.’

  The friar still had the sun behind him and his face was hidden in dee
p shadow. ‘Do you know what your master keeps in this bag?’ he asked.

  Some instinct made Pepillo lie: ‘I don’t know, Father, I just fumbled it closed again as quickly as I could.’

  ‘You’d better thank Providence you did!’ the friar suddenly shouted. He punched Pepillo hard in the face, knocking him on his back, then ran forward and kicked him in the ribs. ‘That’s for dropping my bags,’ he yelled.

  As a bolt of pain exploded in his side, Pepillo understood what he should have realised at once. This was Father Muñoz he’d run into! And at the worst possible moment! Father Muñoz returning from his mysterious, day-long absence – where he’d been up to no good if Melchior was any judge.

  Pepillo lay curled on the road in a defensive ball, wincing at the thought of another kick as he looked at the Father’s large, dirty feet and cracked, broken toenails strapped into heavy-duty hobnailed sandals. Muñoz wore the black habit of the Dominicans, which he’d hitched up to his knobbly knees for walking, exposing scrawny ankles and calves overgrown with short black hairs and crosshatched with small blue veins.

  Stick legs like a crow, Pepillo thought.

  The little fat belly that Melchior had described was also there. It bulged through the Father’s woollen habit and overhung the length of rope tied round his waist as a belt.

  Muñoz was thirty-five or forty years old, sallow-skinned and clean-shaven, with a broad forehead and a thick crown of greasy black hair encircling the dome of his tonsure. His two upper front teeth protruded, much as Melchior had described, and his upper lip, which was red and moist, was drawn back around them in a fixed snarl. He had a receding chin and rather chubby cheeks that made his face look weak, but his large nose with its prominent bridge and wide nostrils sent the opposite message. There was the same ambiguity about his eyes. At first glance they were warm, kindly, wrinkled at the edges by smile lines, but when he turned to meet Pepillo’s furtive stare, they emptied of emotion in an instant and became hooded and cold.