War God

by Graham Hancock

  Action at last, thought Alvarado as he led his force of a hundred men at the double through the fields of the dead. The effects of the cannon fire on the enemy had been spectacular, but there was no substitute for cold steel and the press of battle. He grinned as he remembered the surprised faces of the five Indians he’d cut down in the fight around the boats – the heavy blade of the falchion was perfect for the brutal slaughter of such foes with their puny stone weapons and no concept of the science of warfare. But his blood was up now and he was in the mood to kill more.

  According to Brabo’s scouts, the track he was following would lead first to a point about three miles south of Potonchan and then a mile to the northeast across fields before looping back again a further two miles or so through dense forest and brush into the town’s eastern suburbs. Alvarado was to begin his assault there as soon as the sounds of muskets and cannon told him the other two prongs of the attack – from the river to the north and along the bank to the west – had begun. To avoid the danger of Spanish troops being hit by their own guns, it had been agreed that the falconets on the brigantines, and with Cortés, would fire only two salvos before the offensive was pressed home simultaneously on all fronts.

  Alvarado had marshalled his men into two columns of fifty, each consisting of ten ranks of five, but had them bunch into a defensive square of ten ranks of ten as the track approached a major thoroughfare. Here, some three miles due south of Potonchan, and close to a range of low hills, they encountered large groups – hundreds – of Indians in disorganised bands, many injured and bleeding, some missing limbs or so badly wounded they must be borne on stretchers, evacuating the town. A few of the refugees carried pathetic bundles of belongings, none offered any challenge, and those who were able broke into a shambling, panicked run at the sight of the Spaniards. Alvarado was tempted to give chase and kill as many as possible before they could shelter in the hills, but Alonso Davila, to whom Cortés in his wisdom had given joint charge of the flanking party, dissuaded him. ‘There’s no honour in it, Pedro,’ he said, ‘and it’s not what we’re tasked with. Let’s press on.’

  A mile further on, having turned northeast, the track left the open fields behind and narrowed sharply as it entered the forest Brabo had warned of, obliging the conquistadors to break formation into double and even single file in places. Here the enemy might easily come at them unseen out of the undergrowth, ambuscades were to be expected and Alvarado ordered a full alert. Yet still there was no attack. ‘Cowards!’ he said to Davila. ‘They dare not confront us.’

  ‘Judging from those refugees,’ said the other man, ‘their spirit’s broken … Still, the real test won’t come till they’re forced to defend their town.’

  Two hours’ hard march from the Spanish camp, the track emerged from the forest and the eastern outskirts of Pontochan came into view across a strip of cleared land two hundred paces wide. There was no sign of any defending enemy forces, absolute silence reigned, and the empty streets leading due west towards the ancient stone pyramid and the rich structures around it in the main square beckoned Alvarado to gold and glory. ‘You know what?’ he said to Davila. ‘Why don’t we just go in and seize this shithole ourselves before the others get here?’

  As he spoke they both heard the sound of distant musket fire.

  For speed of movement, Cortés made the difficult decision to leave all but two of the falconets in camp with fifty men and twenty of the dogs to guard them. He gave Alvarado and Davila a head start of more than an hour because of the long indirect route they would have to follow to get their flanking party into position, then set Díaz and Sandoval on their way upriver in the brigantines and ordered his own force of two hundred men to advance the mile directly along the bank to the western edge of the town.

  At first the Indians were silent, and it seemed they might all have fled, but soon a great mass of warriors, some two thousand or more, rushed out to meet them, shrieking their war cries. As they ran they sent up clouds of arrows and spears, which seemed fearsome but could effectively be ignored since they did little damage against Spanish armour and shields and were no match for the riposte that Cortés had prepared. Ten musketeers were on the brigantines, and ten with Alvarado, but the remaining thirty out of the expedition’s entire complement of fifty were with him. Shouting rapid orders, he brought the infantry square to a halt and arrayed the musketeers to the front with one rank of fifteen kneeling and one rank of fifteen standing. As the enemy closed, both ranks fired simultaneously into their midst, shattering their charge, and stepped back into the protection of the square to reload while thirty crossbowmen strode forward, fired and likewise retreated. The foe were increasingly used to gunfire, and not all broke and ran when the muskets crashed, but, as Cortés ordered the square into motion again, those hundreds who came on were met and utterly destroyed by the massed pikes, swords and axes of his disciplined and unbreakable infantry. Cortés himself was fighting in the front rank of the square, using his buckler to protect the man to his left just as the man to his right protected him. A huge warrior came at him, brandishing a flint-tipped spear, but before he could get close a pikeman in the rank behind reached over Cortés’s head and killed the attacker with a thrust to the chest. Two more of the enemy rushed in. Cortés smashed one away with his buckler, knocking him dazed and bleeding to the ground, and ran the other through with his broadsword as the square surged onward, trampling over both of them and many others who had fallen, reducing them to broken, bloody pulp.

  Now the musketeers and crossbowmen had reloaded. Picking their aim carefully over the shoulders of the infantry, they began to fire independently from within the moving square – which Cortés realised must seem like some great armoured beast to the Indians, a myriad-legged monster spitting fire and death. And at its very heart, trundled along by their gun crews on wheeled carriages, were the two falconets – those even more terrible instruments of destruction – and with them eighty war hounds, still leashed and held in check by Vendabal’s handlers, but baying and barking furiously, maddened by the smell of blood.

  Neither dogs nor cannon would be needed, Cortés decided, until the next stage of the assault, but this would come very soon. The initial fury of the Indian attack had already been broken, and moments later he smiled with satisfaction as the survivors turned in a mass and fled back along the bank, taking shelter behind crude barricades and fences of heavy timber set up to protect the town.

  As he brought the infantry to a halt a hundred paces from the enemy, slingers darted out through gaps in the defences, sending a hail of stones towards them, and he saw two of his men drop stunned and bleeding from heavy blows to their helmets. ‘Shields!’ he shouted, ‘Shields!’, as flights of arrows and spears followed. Again there were a few injuries, none of which looked fatal. Shrugging off the hail of missiles, he ordered the falconets loaded with ball.

  Following Díaz in the lead brigantine, Gonzalo de Sandoval scanned the banks of the river for more fleets of canoes, but perhaps through fear of the cannon only a handful came out against them and these were easily kept at bay by musket and crossbow fire. One that approached too close was ploughed under the water by the bows of Díaz’s ship and all the Indians in it disappeared from view; another became tangled in Sandoval’s starboard oars and managed to unleash a few futile arrows before its crew were shot to pieces.

  In this way, facing little opposition, the two brigantines drew level with Potonchan and dropped anchor midstream, from where they observed Cortés’s square break the massed attack of the Indians and come within striking distance of the town’s western limits.

  Sandoval studied the waterfront where he and Díaz must soon land their forces. It was thick with Indian warriors carrying their primitive weapons, blowing trumpets and conches, beating tattoos on their drums and yelling defiant war cries. He felt almost sorry for them in their naïve bravery, for even having seen and experienced the deadly effects of cannon they seemed not to have learnt their lesson and were
obviously intent on stopping the Spaniards getting ashore.

  Defended from a hail of arrows, spears and slingstones by a line of soldiers carrying big adarga shields, the gun crews on the bank were now rolling Cortés’s two falconets forward. Though their target was concealed from him by rows of simple native houses, Sandoval had a good view of the crews and saw they were feverishly unloading canisters of grapeshot from the barrels of the weapons and reloading with ball. He would not do the same with his own three cannon since he judged grapeshot – unfortunately for the savages – to be the right ammunition to clear the waterfront.

  He was about to signal to Díaz so they could order their crews to fire simultaneously when he noticed that Cortés, again braving arrows and spears, had walked in front of his own guns with another conquistador – Aguilar! – and seemed to be attempting to address the foe within the town.

  What in heaven was the caudillo doing?

  A few more moments passed and the salvos of cannon fire that were to signal the general attack on Potonchan had still not been heard. The muskets had also fallen strangely silent. ‘Damn it!’ said Alvarado. ‘Let’s take this town while the others are dallying.’

  ‘No, Pedro,’ Davila insisted. He was handsome and daring but argumentative, with a habit of disputing every point. ‘You know I’m as eager as you are for a fight but we must wait. We’ll end up getting our men killed by our own guns if we go in now.’

  ‘In war,’ said Alvarado, ‘it does not pay to hesitate. Think, Alonso! What if the other attacks have run into unexpected trouble? Our assistance may be needed.’

  Davila was biting his lower lip, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. ‘Bide awhile, Pedro,’ he said finally. ‘Those are our orders. We’ll hear the signal soon enough.’

  ‘Bah! Orders!’

  Twenty of the hundred conquistadors in the flanking party, top-flight swordsmen every one of them, belonged to Alvarado’s personal squad. He called them to him and, without another word to Davila, led them out of hiding in the undergrowth and across the open ground to the eastern edge of Potonchan. They had not gone fifty paces into the town, however, when war cries rose up all around them and Indian warriors, grimacing furiously, burst forth from the adobe houses on both sides of the seemingly deserted street.

  From his position, Cortés could see both brigantines clearly with Díaz and Sandoval on deck. All that remained was for him to fire his own guns and they would enfilade the town with grapeshot.

  But he hesitated.

  Despite an intense, restless desire to inflict mayhem on Potonchan, as Saint Peter had commanded in his dreams, it troubled him that Godoy had not finished reading the Requerimiento before the earlier engagement and that there had been no time for Aguilar to render the text into the Mayan tongue. His Royal Highness and Most Catholic Majesty King Charles V of Spain was known to be a stickler for such matters and, without the monarch’s support, the conquest would ultimately be doomed. Godoy had the Requerimiento in his possession and had remained in camp, now almost a mile behind them, but Cortés wanted to be able to claim justification for the harm he intended to do. Since Aguilar had accompanied the infantry, though not in a fighting role, he therefore summoned the interpreter to join him in front of the guns.

  A slingstone whizzed past Aguilar’s head as he came ducking and weaving forward, and one of the curious darts – launched from the clever little spear throwers with which the Maya were so handy – smacked into the earth between the two men. ‘Tell them,’ Cortés told the interpreter, gesturing towards the feathered and painted Indians who could be seen in dense ranks peering through gaps in their hastily erected defences, ‘to let us enter their town, buy water, buy supplies and speak to them about God and His Majesty.’

  ‘There’s no point, Caudillo!’ Aguilar protested. ‘They’re determined you will not come in.’

  ‘Tell them anyway.’

  The interpreter raised his voice and bellowed a few sentences in Mayan, which were answered by laughter, hoots of derision, drum beats and more flights of missiles from behind the barricades. With considerable force, an arrow bounced off Cortés’s helmet and three infantrymen came forward with adarga shields to offer protection.

  Cortés waved them back. He would not show fear or weakness. ‘Tell the Indians,’ he said to Aguilar, ‘we are going to enter their town whether they like it or not. If they attack us, and if in self-defence we have to kill or hurt more of them, it will be their fault not ours.’

  Aguilar’s speech was met by a renewed hail of slingstones and both men were hit about the body, though their armour protected them. ‘Very well,’ said Cortés, taking the interpreter by the arm and leading him back behind the falconets, ‘I commend their souls to God.’ As the Indian drums beat more wildly, conches blew and the howls of the warriors went up in a continuous wall of sound, he called Vendabal and the dogs forward and ordered the gunners to fire.

  An instant after the first salvo from Cortés’s two falconets, Sandoval signalled to Díaz on the forward brigantine, received his answering signal, and both men simultaneously ordered their crews to fire. The wheels of the gun carriages had been jammed to stop the weapons careening back across the deck, but Sandoval, who had his hands pressed to his ears to shut out the mighty sound, felt the whole ship rock under his feet with the recoil. Fire and smoke belched from the barrels, the smell of sulphur filled the air and the murderous barrage of grapeshot, like some deadly hurricane, spread out as it whistled the two hundred paces across the river and tore into the enemy ranks massed on the waterfront, reducing them to blood and offal, shredding the adobe walls and thatched roofs of the houses beyond and bringing many down to their foundations in a whirling avalanche of dust and masonry.

  There was no time to conduct more than the most cursory assessment of the damage. Cortés’s orders were clear that a second barrage must follow as closely as possible upon the first. Already the sweating crews had covered the fuse holes and the ends of the falconets’ barrels to suffocate any residual burning matter. Now, with huge bursts and hisses of steam, they pushed damp sponge rods into the barrels to cool them and clean out any hot debris. Next, bags of powder were forced down to the base of the barrels with ramrods, then the clusters of grapeshot in their canvas tubes and, finally, after the weapons had been aimed again at the shore (and no great precision was required at this range), new fuses were inserted and lit, and with a tremendous roar the killing wind burst forth again upon the unlucky Indian town and its doomed inhabitants.

  ‘To shore!’ yelled Sandoval to the rowers as the anchor was pulled up, and the brigantines surged across the current to the devastated waterfront, piled high with the broken and dismembered dead.

  Alvarado cursed his broken arm that meant he could not hold a buckler and fell automatically into the swirling Talhoffer style of messer combat he’d learned in Zurich years before and practised many times on board ship since he’d set himself the task of mastering Zemudio’s falchion. Though crude, with the weight of a battle-axe, the heavy steel blade offered a skilled user – such as he had become! – all the flexibility and speed of response of a sword, and he used it now to carve a broad, bloody path through the heaving mass of filthy Indians who’d surrounded his twenty and who continued to pour out, in vast, unexpected numbers, from the adobe houses lining both sides of the street.

  He’d made every one of his men an expert with the sword in the years they’d been with him; they were all heavily armoured and, though they were outnumbered at least ten to one, Alvarado was confident they would win through. He delivered a killing blow slanting right to left, cutting an opponent down from the base of his neck to his ribcage, then immediately reversed the blade and slashed another man’s belly open, brought the point up in a ferocious lunge into the face of a third, withdrew and began a new cycle of blows with a clean decapitation of a fourth. ‘Yes!’ he yelled, ‘yes!’ as he saw his foes backing warily away from him. ‘This is what I live for!’

  He was e
njoying himself so much that he’d completely forgotten about Davila and the other eighty men hidden in the undergrowth, but now there came a tremendous crash of musket fire. Bullets whirred through the air, passing perilously close to the Spaniards, ploughing into the mass of their attackers and – predictably! – causing consternation amongst them. What was it with these Indians, Alvarado wondered, that made them so afraid of a few loud bangs? The actual killing power of the muskets was, in his opinion, fairly negligible; they were hard to aim and they took an unconscionably long time to reload, but their terrifying effect on the natives could not be denied.

  A few well-aimed crossbow bolts followed, and then Davila’s men, coming on in a compact square, hit the Indians from the rear with all the force of a battering ram.

  Alvarado killed and killed again, the remaining Indians fled, and suddenly there was no one left to fight. Davila swaggered over wearing an I-told-you-so look.

  ‘Well?’ said Alvarado.

  ‘Got yourself in a bit of a tight spot there,’ said Davila disapprovingly.

  ‘I’ve been in tighter.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ – a sneer – ‘but I’d say it’s just as well the rest of us were here to get you out of this one.’

  Pompous fool, thought Alvarado. Hot words rose to his lips but, before he could utter them, Davila held up his hand and gestured: Listen.

  There could be no mistaking the rumbling roar of the cannon salvo that echoed forth from the western side of Potonchan.

  As they broke into a run, their men streaming after them, the guns fell silent and shouts and musket fire carried to them on the sluggish afternoon breeze.

  Then the falconets boomed again, signalling the start of the general attack. ‘Santiago and at them!’ yelled Alvarado. ‘Santiago and at them!’ yelled Davila. ‘Santiago and at them!’ yelled their hundred men in unison, now at a full charge towards the distant sounds of battle.