War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent

  That same fear, inspired by the earlier omens, had led him to initiate a holocaust of two thousand female victims on the pyramid sixty days before. The great sacrifice had produced its desired effect. Hummingbird had appeared to him and promised to fight at his side, and in return Moctezuma had sworn to the war god that an even larger harvest would follow – a harvest consisting entirely of virgin girls. He’d felt confident he would be able to keep his word because Coaxoch, his greatest general, had then been in the field commanding an entire army with a full complement of four regiments, each eight thousand men strong, dedicated to the sole purpose of seizing huge numbers of additional victims. But what Moctezuma had not known that night, what he could not even possibly have imagined, was that Coaxoch’s army of thirty-two thousand fighting men would be annihilated the very next morning by a superior Tlascalan force – demolished so completely by the Tlascalan battle-king Shikotenka that barely three thousand demoralised survivors had limped back to Tenochtitlan. Nor could Moctezuma have predicted the puzzling escalation in fighting that erupted soon afterwards, much closer to home, with the rebel forces led by Ishtlil, the treacherous prince of Texcoco. This flare-up had so preoccupied the five remaining Mexica armies that there had been scant progress in the further search for sacrificial victims.

  Deep in his roiling guts, Moctezuma knew he need look no further to explain why, despite all his efforts and his desperate need for reassurance and advice, Hummingbird had not reappeared or even sent him a single unambiguous sign. It was obvious the war god would remain remote until he received the large basket of virgins promised to him. Henceforward, Moctezuma resolved, he would once again devote four full regiments of his best men exclusively to that sacred task.

  * * *

  When Cuetzpalli’s report was complete, Moctezuma spoke gently to him. ‘You have suffered fatigue,’ he said, ‘and you are exhausted from your long journey, so you may go now and rest and when I have need of you I will call you again. But know this. What you have said to me tonight and what you have shown me has been in secret. It is only within you. His glance took in Teudile and Namacuix and he made his voice stern: ‘No one shall speak anything of this. No one shall let it escape his lips. If any here present lets any of it out, they will die. Their wives will be killed by hanging them with ropes. Their children will be dashed to pieces against the walls of their houses and their houses will be torn down and rooted out of their foundations.’

  As he stood to leave, Moctezuma’s eyes fell on the boa constrictor in the pit. He noted with interest that the agouti had proved too large to swallow and the serpent’s gullet had burst explosively open.

  Both creatures now lay dead.

  Chapter Four

  Wednesday 21 April 1519, night

  Guatemoc sat alone on the roof garden of his townhouse in the royal quarter of Tenochtitlan, gazing up at the starry sky. In the midnight depths of the darkness, the glittering Mamalhuaztli, the seven bright stars of the Fire-Sticks constellation, were setting and would soon enter their period of invisibility when they would be seen no more until the late summer.

  Strange, Guatemoc thought, how the stars came and went – now seen, now not seen. They were as inscrutable and mysterious as Temaz, the goddess of healing and medicines, to whom he owed his astonishing recovery from the terrible wounds inflicted on him two months previously by Shikotenka, battle-king of Tlascala, and also from the deadly cotelachi poison he’d been given while he lay convalescing in the royal hospital. His uncle Moctezuma had, of course, denied any direct involvement in the plot, had ordered the royal physician Mecatl to be flayed alive for administering the poison, and had presented the doctor’s skin to his nephew as a token. Even so, Guatemoc and his father Cuitláhuac, whose loyalty to Moctezuma had hitherto been unshakable, both knew perfectly well that the Great Speaker had been behind the whole scheme.

  Ah Temaz, Temaz … Guatemoc couldn’t believe how lovesick he had become! He was sitting out here actually sighing under the night sky! He was missing her, longing for her sweet touch, remembering the uncanny healing warmth that had poured from her fingers into his wounds, bringing him back to life. More than fifty days had passed since their first encounter in the royal hospital, when she had come to him to expose Moctezuma’s plot. Then, after he’d been taken to the safety of his father’s estate at Chapultepec, she’d materialised thrice more to give him further healing and to speak to him of impossible things – of the return of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, the god of peace, who, she said, would overthrow Moctezuma. Even now, so many days later, though he had not seen her again since that last extraordinary night, her words still echoed in his ears: ‘You must not, Guatemoc, you must not place yourself in opposition to Quetzalcoatl. A war is coming and you must be on the right side. You must be on the side of peace.’

  ‘Peace?’ Guatemoc had been genuinely puzzled. ‘I am a warrior, my lady. I can never be on the side of peace … ’ Besides, ‘What sort of god of peace would resort to war in the first place? Surely if he wishes to rid the world of Moctezuma, he will find a way to do that by peaceful means?’

  ‘Moctezuma is evil,’ Temaz had insisted, ‘and sometimes evil overwhelms good, and when it does it can’t just be wished away peacefully. It has to be fought and it has to be stopped, and that’s what Quetzalcoatl is returning to do.’

  ‘So Quetzalcoatl, then, is a god of war, just like our own war god Hummingbird?’

  ‘No … Yes!’

  ‘Which is it to be, my lady? Is this Quetzalcoatl of yours a god of peace? Or is he a god of war? He can’t be both!’

  ‘Then he is a god of war! But his fight is against Hummingbird himself, the wicked ruler and authority of the unseen world, who contaminates and pollutes everything he touches with evil and darkness, whose puppet Moctezuma is, just as the physician Mecatl was Moctezuma’s puppet in the plot to poison you … So the question you must ask yourself, Guatemoc, is this – will you, too, be Hummingbird’s puppet in the great conflict that is to come, or will you fight on the side of the good and the light?’

  ‘Lady Temaz,’ Guatemoc had replied, ‘if you are asking me to fight against Moctezuma, then I will tell you now I am ready to do so! He is a weakling and a fool and, besides, he sought to murder me! But if you are asking me to fight against Hummingbird, my lady … well, that is quite another matter and by no means so easily undertaken.’

  ‘The time will come, Prince, when you will have to choose,’ Temaz had said. ‘I can only hope you choose wisely.’ He remembered how she’d pressed her fingers one more time against the wounds that scarred his naked belly, sending more healing warmth into his body. ‘I will see you again,’ she’d said, straightening, relinquishing the contact.

  And then …

  Well, then he’d kissed her, a passionate kiss, deep and filled with hunger – his hunger, her hunger – which could only be satiated in one way, which should have been satiated in that way, except that at that precise moment the Lady Temaz had turned to smoke in Guatemoc’s arms and disappeared, leaving him embracing empty air.

  What just happened? he remembered thinking. Who is she? A goddess, as she claims? Or something else?

  He’d touched his lips again, glowing, alive, tingling with sensation. But when he brought his fingers away he saw they were smeared with red.

  He’d frowned. What was this? Blood? He’d tasted his lips with his tongue. No! Not blood! Something else. Something familiar.

  He’d found an obsidian mirror and examined himself. This red stuff, whatever it might be, was not confined to his lips but smeared all round his mouth. He’d tasted it again and suddenly he had it. Tincture of cochineal! Rare and exotic, yes, but quite definitely a woman’s lip paint.

  Why would a goddess need lip paint?

  He’d pondered that question back then, and pondered it still, but had not yet come to any definite conclusion. It remained possible that he had been healed by a goddess. But his intuition suggested another, even more extraordinary, pos
sibility: that the goddess Temaz had all along been a human woman in disguise. A witch, perhaps, with some strange power to render herself invisible and visible at will?

  Guatemoc sighed again. The thought that he might have been duped would ordinarily have plunged him into a rage but, in this case, strangely, it did not. The single, unassailable truth was that this Temaz, whoever she was – whether goddess or woman, phantom or witch – had brought him the miracle of healing and saved his life.

  He ran the tip of his tongue around his lips. Even now, after so much time had passed, he often imagined he could taste her sweetness and feel the hot, wet warmth of her tongue roiling against his.

  And, on occasion – was it also his imagination, or something more? – he was overtaken by a strong intuition that she was present, invisible, watching silently over him. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Was now one of those times?

  ‘Temaz,’ he said softly. ‘Sweet goddess. Show yourself to me.’

  There! What was that? A disturbance of the air? A hint of form emerging out of shadow? Was tonight the night the goddess would return to him? Guatemoc sat forward eagerly, his eyes probing the darkness. ‘Are you there?’ he asked, surprised by the tremor in his voice. He stood, walked hesitantly to the place where he thought he had seen her, reaching out with his arms. ‘I have longed for you,’ he said – but then immediately felt foolish because there came no reply and the night air was still again, the shadows just shadows and empty of substance.

  Enough! He was behaving like a callow youth.

  It was time to put this nonsense behind him. Tomorrow, he resolved, he would begin to involve himself in affairs of state again. Moctezuma would resist, but Moctezuma’s days were numbered. If Quetzalcoatl was indeed about to return, then a true warrior must step forward to confront him.

  As to women … well, women were as plentiful as the fish in the sea. Guatemoc had held himself aloof from them long enough because of his foolish loyalty to Temaz.

  Might as well be loyal to a dream!

  He was ready to move on.

  Chapter Five

  Thursday 22 April 1519

  The great lord called Cortés, wearing the gleaming metal jacket that these Spaniards called a cuirass, was seated under an awning on the same grand and ingenious folding chair that Malinal had seen him use for his diplomatic encounter with the defeated chiefs of the Chontal Maya. But time had passed since then, and the man in front of Cortés today, seated cross-legged on a mat on the ground and thus obliged to look up at him from a position of inferiority, was no Maya. Instead this was a plain and stocky middle-ranking noble of the Mexica, Pichatzin by name, whom Moctezuma had appointed as provincial governor of the coastal town of Cuetlaxtlan. In her five years as a sex slave of the Mexica, Malinal had attended a number of dinner parties in Tenochtitlan at which Pichatzin had been present before he was sent to rule this far-flung outpost of the empire. But, since his rank amongst the pipiltzin – the noble social class – was too low for her ever to have been given to him as a lover, it was not certain he would remember her. For the same reason, she knew none of the five other relatively low-ranking nobles accompanying him as an entourage, who were presently obliged, for want of space, to stand outside the awning in the full glare of the afternoon sun. In addition, Pichatzin had brought along an artist who was also squatting in the sun and working industriously on a series of paintings.

  Cortés’s own entourage consisted of red-bearded Puertocarrero, who Malinal knew all too well, and the lords Alvarado, Escalante, Ordaz and Montejo, whose names she had memorised. Though standing, they had all found a place under the shade of the awning. The boy Pepillo, who was never far from Cortés’s side, except when tending to his injured pet dog, sat on the ground clutching a pen and a sheaf of papers, ready as always to keep a record of his master’s doings. In addition the interpreter Aguilar was present; however, since he spoke only Castilian and Maya, while Pichatzin and his entourage, like most Mexica, spoke only Nahuatl, he presently had very little to do. It was obvious from the repeated use of sign language and frustrated smiles that the two groups did not understand each other at all well.

  Spying on the meeting over the steam rising from the cooking pots, and between the bustling figures of the other serving girls in the makeshift kitchen of the Spanish camp, Malinal saw the chance she had been denied until now to prove her worth to Cortés. In her first extraordinary glimpse of the white men on horseback twenty-eight days before, it had been the eye of Cortés himself that she had caught as he rode past her, clothed from head to foot in shining metal armour, to join the great battle outside Potonchan. The very next day she had been presented to him as a peace offering by her stepfather Muluc, the ruler of Potonchan, who had of course survived the fighting in which so many thousands of the Chontal Maya had died. Along with her had come heaped jaguar skins, bales of costly cloths, a chest full of precious jade objects, some gems, some small items of gold and silver, and nineteen other women – all of them, like Malinal herself, offered as slaves to be used for any purpose the Spaniards saw fit. ‘You said you returned to us to meet the white men,’ Muluc had reminded her, ‘so now you’re going to get your wish – and good riddance to you. I hope you’re as much trouble to them as you’ve been to me.’ Her mother Raxca had wept but had raised no objection as her repulsive husband got Malinal out of the way permanently and placated a powerful enemy at the same time – thus, he gloated, ‘killing two birds with one arrow.’

  Malinal had found it hard to conceal her joy. After she and her friend Tozi had narrowly escaped sacrifice at the hands of Moctezuma himself, she had walked all the way from Tenochtitlan to find these white ‘gods’, only to be diverted from her quest by Muluc – yet fate had now conspired to make him the very instrument that would put her into their hands! For a moment everything had seemed to be moving smoothly towards its foreordained conclusion but, soon after she had been marched from the regional capital Cintla back to Potonchan, and delivered to the Spaniards, Malinal’s sense of being swept up in some divine scheme was again rudely shattered. The special connection she had felt with the Spanish leader as she’d watched him ride into battle, the way he had turned his bearded white face towards her, the way his eyes had seemed to fix on her and root her to the spot, had filled her with hope and a strange yearning. Yet, when she had been brought before him in Potonchan, he had accepted her from Muluc as a gift of less importance than the jade, gold and jewels (which themselves had seemed to please him very little), paid her no special attention, rejected her attempt to speak to him through Aguilar and finally given her to his friend Puertocarrero.

  Thereafter she had seen little of Cortés during the twenty-three further days the Spaniards had remained in the lands of the Chontal Maya. He had spent much of his time away from Potonchan, often in the company of his cruel but handsome second in command Pedro de Alvarado. She soon learned from servants who Muluc had sent to work for them in the palace that the Spaniards were ransacking all the towns of the region for gold – which seemed to obsess them as much as it obsessed the Mexica, though it was of little interest to the Maya. It was even said that Muluc and the paramount chief Ah Kinchil had been tortured to persuade them to surrender stores of gold the white men believed they had hidden – but of course they had none to give. She neither knew nor cared if these reports were true; the two chiefs had conspired to ruin her life and, in her opinion, deserved whatever bad things came to them.

  When not hunting for gold, Cortés’s other favourite activity – to which he showed great dedication – was destroying the idols of the gods kept in the temples and preaching to the people of Cintla and Potonchan about his own strange and incomprehensible religion. Since everyone was terrified of him, he won many converts.

  On the occasions when he was not preoccupied with these activities, Malinal several times asked Aguilar’s assistance to approach Cortés and speak to him. From the very first day, however, the Spanish interpreter had been unhelpful.
She’d made him understand she was fluent not only in Maya but also in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, yet for some reason she couldn’t grasp, he was obviously determined not to let her talk to Cortés.

  Then she’d found out why.

  One evening Cortés had made an announcement to the assembled army, which Aguilar had been required to translate for the benefit of all twenty of the female slaves who would be accompanying them; he’d said that the Spaniards had concluded their business with the Chontal Maya and would soon be moving on to the lands of the Mexica. They would go first by ship to the coastal town of Cuetlaxtlan – everyone must be ready to embark in just three days’ time – and from there they would strike inland to Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital. This they would seize by force, take its emperor Moctezuma ‘dead or alive’, and help themselves to the vast hoard of gold his empire was reputed to have amassed.

  Reputed? Malinal had thought, even as her heart soared. Reputed! If she’d been allowed to talk to Cortés she could have told him weeks before that it was not just a matter of ‘reputed’. The Mexica were the richest people in the entire world, Tenochtitlan overflowed with gold and Moctezuma’s treasuries were stuffed to bursting point with it.

  Clearly Aguilar had acted so strangely because he knew Malinal was fluent in Nahuatl – which he spoke not a word of – and could see she was already learning Castilian. The foolish man must have feared, since it was inevitable the Spaniards’ lust for gold would sooner or later lead them to the Mexica, that she would then usurp his privileged place at Cortés’s side. While not actually lying to his master about the fabulous wealth of Tenochtitlan, the interpreter had therefore done all he could to divert and delay this important intelligence and to prevent Cortés from discovering how indispensable Malinal might prove to the Spanish cause.