Malinal watched spellbound as the battle unfolded. If they were not gods, she thought, these Spaniards were certainly proving themselves to be brave men with exceptional, indeed almost superhuman, fighting skills. Against all logic and reason, their squares would not break before the overwhelming numbers of the Maya, and somehow continued to hold out against them in the midst of the ferocious scrum of hand-to-hand combat.
‘Look,’ Ah Kinchil suddenly gibbered to Cuetzpalli. ‘Look!’ Despite his great age the paramount chief of the Chontal Maya was far-sighted and was now dancing up and down with joy and pointing towards Potonchan. ‘My warriors go to recapture the pyramid of King Ahau Chamahez from the invaders! The white men there will die! Their terrible weapons will be thrown down!’
Stupid old fool! thought Malinal. What do you know?
Weirdly she found her loyalty to the Maya had become so detached she actually wanted the Spaniards to win! Well, why not? What had her own people – even her own mother! – ever done for her? They had sent her into slavery and humiliation and danger and when she had returned they had slaved her again! They deserved the punishment the white men were inflicting on them. They deserved to lose this battle!
Except it still did not seem possible that the huge Mayan army could lose, even in the state of chaos the white men’s guns were reducing it to, because Ah Kinchil was right. At least a thousand warriors had formed up into a block and were pouring across the open fields north of the battleground and making for the town. It wouldn’t take them long to reach the pyramid and the white men on its summit.
In minutes they covered half the distance. Malinal watched anxiously with her knuckles pressed to her mouth, daring to hope that more Spaniards might usher forth from the town to intercept them; but none appeared and Muluc’s triumphant words echoed in her head – ‘they have no reserves!’ It seemed that nothing could stop the attack on the pyramid when the guns on its summit billowed smoke again, and she almost cheered as glittering death crashed down amongst the charging warriors, pounding them, crushing them, annihilating them, scattering the survivors like chaff.
Yet, even as she admired the Spaniards, she could not suppress the pride she felt in her own people’s courage when she saw that some of the shattered column still ran on towards the pyramid, while others picked themselves up from the ground and followed.
‘Good shooting, Captain Mesa!’ yelled Pepillo. Though it had been worth the attempt, he’d doubted the artilleryman could hit the fast-moving Mayan column with even one of the huge cannon, but in the event both had been perfectly on the mark, causing bloody mayhem.
Even so, hundreds of enemy warriors were still coming on and were now so close – less than quarter of a mile away – that the lombards couldn’t be depressed far enough to target them.
Mesa had placed four of his eight falconets around the base of the pyramid, deploying the other four to the southern outskirts of Potonchan, overlooking the battlefield. It was unlikely they’d be enough to stop what was left of this attack completely, but the Maya must be demoralised by the colossal losses they’d already suffered, and anything was possible. The guns were hidden from Pepillo’s view by the buildings at the edge of town, but now he heard their choking roar and saw the onrush of the enemy falter as the four one-pound balls smashed into them.
Dozens of men went down but not enough, not nearly enough. ‘Reload!’ Pepillo found himself shouting. ‘Reload with grapeshot!’ But just then Melchior came charging by, grabbed Mesa by the elbow and pointed east.
Just minutes away, their war cries already audible as they approached along the east–west avenue running through the centre of Potonchan, was another band of Indians, at least two hundred of them, armed with spears and clubs and obsidian-edged longswords.
Mesa bellowed a warning to the falconet crews around the base of the pyramid, called to arms the squad of forty injured men waiting in the shade of the little temple on the summit platform and led the way down the eastern stair.
Somewhere Melchior had found two round wooden bucklers and two eight-foot spears and thrust one of each at Pepillo. ‘Know how to use these?’ he asked.
Pepillo shook his head dumbly.
‘Well you’d better learn fast,’ said his friend.
At last, after throwing aside three more hurdles, Cortés led his cavalry out into the open fields. Though they had several times caught glimpses of painted warriors moving amongst the trees, no attack had materialised – perhaps because the steel-clad horses and riders appeared so alien and menacing to the Indians. What was certain, however, was that Potonchan was entirely unprotected at its east side and that the force mobilising in the forest must be there to attack the town. For the hundredth time, Cortés found himself wishing he had left Mesa with more than forty men – every one of them injured! – to defend the lombards. But the Spaniards were stretched so thin he’d been unable to spare a larger number and now the only hope for all of them was a stunning coup by the cavalry.
Cortés saw the battle raging just two miles to the northwest, where the Spaniards were perilously hemmed in on every side, but the fields here at the edge of the forest were broken and treacherous, cut through by irrigation ditches that the horses couldn’t leap without risk of serious injury. Any charge attempted across such terrain was doomed to failure. Cursing inwardly, he ordered the troop to ride another mile due west to the foot of a ridge of low hills where the track intersected the main highway running into Potonchan from the south.
From there, finally, they would be able to bear down unimpeded on the enemy masses where they swarmed, and now threatened to overrun, the four beleaguered Spanish squares.
Malinal had watched the thousand Mayan warriors – charging across the fields to Potonchan – reduced to hundreds when the big guns fired down on them from the pyramid. Moments later they were struck again as plumes of smoke revealed four smaller guns positioned at the southern edge of town. Finally they were struck a third time in some devastating way that felled almost all the survivors, leaving barely a hundred to press home the attack as she lost sight of them amidst the streets and houses.
She heard an urgent sound, like the rapid beat of some great drum, and a gasp from one of Cuetzpalli’s Cuahchics who babbled in Nahuatl the words ‘men of silver’ as another said, ‘deer-men!’ She turned towards where they were looking, a little to the east on the plains below the hill, and her eyes fell on something extraordinary, something unbelievable, something enchanted with the most powerful magic, something truly belonging to the world of the gods. This something, which she could barely comprehend, took the form of fifteen or twenty giant figures in a tight group racing at supernatural speed towards the Xaman Hills, and the figures moved on four legs, with an appearance somewhat like white-tailed deer, except their bodies were three times the height of the largest stags of that race, and rising up from the midst of their backs – though whether seated upright upon them or actually one creature with them it was hard to be certain – were gigantic human forms. Both the human and animal parts of these beings, which must be the ‘horses’ Cit Bolon Tun had spoken of, were covered from head to foot in some metal that shone brighter than burnished silver, and they held in their human hands long lances with tips of the same shining stuff.
Ah Kinchil had been growing steadily more deranged all afternoon, but now he uttered a high-pitched scream and threw himself to the ground, covering his head with his arms while his skinny legs kicked and thrashed. The Cuahchics, who usually knew what to do in any situation, seemed bewildered and confounded in ways wholly out of keeping with their status as ferocious warriors. The artist had stopped painting and stood gazing, not exactly in fear, more in awe and in puzzlement, at the onrush of the strange group of beings. Cuetzpalli was stumbling back into the shelter of the trees, apparently trying to get out of sight as quickly as possible, his handsome face filled with horror, and the slippery, evasive quality of his gaze transformed into frank, unabashed terror. Taking their cue from him, A
h Kinchil’s guards lifted the paramount chief bodily and ducked into the undergrowth with him, followed by his retainers and Muluc’s steward Ichick. The guards at the foot of the hill had fled and it seemed there was nothing to stop the metal beings charging right up the steep slope and destroying everyone.
Malinal stayed in the open, refusing to hide. ‘Come to me!’ she shouted. ‘Come to me! I am here because of you!’ And it seemed to her for a moment that the leader of the beings had heard her words, for he turned his metal head towards her and she saw his white, bearded face – the face of Quetzalcoatl! – and his eyes fixed on her and filled her body with fire, and rooted her to the spot.
But then in a roll of thunder and a storm of dust he was past, they were all past, and they turned onto the sacbe and charged north along it towards Potonchan, their lances levelled before them.
‘Aim for their faces!’ Cortés yelled. ‘Spit them but don’t waste time spearing fallen men. Just charge them and keep on charging them, put the fear of God into them, break up their formations, scatter them and ride them down!’
He glanced at the smooth white surface of the road flying by beneath Molinero’s hooves, saw his brave cavaliers flung out in a fighting wedge behind him, every one of them burning for battle, urging their mounts onward at a tremendous pace. They had covered the ground in a matter of minutes and the huge mass of the foe sprawled just five hundred feet ahead, already in a state of turmoil, boiling with confusion at the havoc wreaked by the lombards. These now belched fire for the last time from the top of the pyramid and sent a pair of seventy-pound balls into the midst of the enemy, bouncing and crashing, mowing men down like ripe wheat before the thresher, even as the falconets sewed death in their front line from the shelter of the squares.
The Maya were so preoccupied with the fight ahead, which they were close to winning by sheer numbers despite their terror of the cannon, that none of them even seemed to have noticed the doom that was bearing down on them from behind. ‘Santiago and at them!’ Cortés bellowed as Molinero thundered across the rapidly closing gap, and then, with a fearsome crash, the wedge ploughed deep into the already chaotic enemy rear. He felt the jolt as his lance took a turning man in the side of his face, and was filled with brutal joy at the terrified howls and screams that rose up all around him and at the shockwave that passed through the milling throng ahead. He jerked the lance free, speared another man, and spurred Molinero onward, the great destrier’s iron-clad hooves trampling the fallen, Alvarado riding Bucephalus roughshod over the huddled foe to his left, Escalante to his right, and there was Puertocarrero, and there Lares, there Olid and there Morla on his dappled grey, there was Montejo and there young Sandoval, a spearhead of armoured men sweeping out a great swathe in the very heart of the Mayan army, painted warriors fleeing away from them in all directions in panic-stricken mobs. Again Cortés’s lance struck; again he pulled it free as he smashed his heavy iron stirrup into an enemy’s face and impaled another so hard through the chest that the lance protruded a yard from the man’s back and for a moment he thought he might not retrieve it …
Alvarado saw Cortés struggling to withdraw his lance. He had already lost his own, buried in a savage’s head somewhere in the fray, but he didn’t care. As they were arming in the orchard, he’d once again set aside his Nuñez rapier, not at all a suitable cavalry sword, and brought along the falchion instead. Good choice! he thought, good choice! – for what a weapon the long heavy cutlass was proving to be in this pounding, trampling charge through the dense mass of a hopelessly undisciplined foe. Most were utterly demoralised and fleeing in every direction, but some, he was pleased to discover, pressed round him and still had the guts for a fight. He slashed left, opening a screaming warrior’s face in a great bloody gash from cheekbone to jaw, slashed right, taking a man’s head half off his shoulders, felt some pitiful stone blade shatter against his armoured thigh, hacked down the enemy who had wielded it and laughed out loud in sheer, mad, murderous joy as he urged Bucephalus forward …
Gonzalo de Sandoval saw the excitement, the sheer pleasure on Alvarado’s face and knew that he did not and never would love killing in that extraordinary, murderous, almost insane way. Although he had killed no men at all until a few weeks ago, Sandoval found himself surprisingly calm and collected as he killed again now, not because he wanted to, not because there was any satisfaction or relish in it, but simply because it was the job at hand, the job he was born to do and, now that the caudillo had given him his chance, it was a job he was determined to do well. He thrust forward, impaling a man through the throat, snatched the lance free in a single fluid movement and wheeled the chestnut mare to strike another warrior, plunging the tip of the weapon vertically down through the soft, vulnerable flesh between his neck and collarbone and into his heart.
Sandoval had practised such manoeuvres a hundred times in training exercises, when his Hidalgo family still had some remnants of wealth and power, and was amazed at the way everything was coming back to him now. The extra height that one gained on the back of a great destrier accorded the rider exceptional advantages over the foot soldier – and especially over foot soldiers such as these Indians who had never before faced mounted men, who indeed had never even seen horses before and were for the most part in a blind, superstitious funk.
Not all of them though! Twenty paces away, two wild, half-naked savages, who seemed to have identified Cortés as the leader, were swarming him in the midst of a dense pack of the enemy; one had leapt up behind him and was sawing at his throat with a flint dagger – but getting nowhere because of the steel gorget he wore – while the other clung to his left arm and sought to pull him down. Sandoval spurred his horse to a gallop, scattering groups of the enemy left and right, levelled his lance and killed the warrior on the ground with a massive thrust which swept him away, while Cortés, his left arm now free, reached inside his boot, pulled out a dagger and used it to stab the man on his back through the eye, drawing a gush of blood.
‘Well done, Sandoval!’ Cortés shouted. As he stood in his stirrups to throw down the dying man, whose blood poured in gouts over the shoulders of his armour, his elevated view showed him all four of the Spanish squares, the nearest only a hundred paces away, still beset on all sides, and all but overwhelmed, by great mobs of Indians. But now a bugle sounded and, out of the squares, held back until this critical moment, baying and snarling like so many demons released from hell, raced the four packs of dogs. The steel armour of the hundred furious, ravening animals glittered, and their great mouths, filled with jagged teeth, gaped wide, spraying saliva, as they fell baying and snarling, maddened with bloodlust, upon the press of the dismayed foe. Throats were snatched out in an instant, bowels worried from naked bellies, thighs and groins seized and ripped open, heads clamped and crushed.
His lance levelled, Cortés charged on towards the squares, vaguely aware of the other horsemen around him, smashing down and trampling groups of Indians in desperate flight away from the dogs – Indians who, indeed, no longer constituted a proper fighting force anywhere across the battlefield.
Quite suddenly, as though communicated by some mysterious telepathy, their spirit had broken, and what had begun as a fight, and come very close to total victory for the Maya, was ending as a rout.
Ah Kinchil, Cuetzpalli, Ichick and the guards and retainers emerged from their hiding places in the trees soon after the men of silver had thundered past. Thereafter, Ah Kinchil sat slumped, spittle drooling from his mouth, seemingly aware of nothing, but Cuetzpalli very soon regained his composure and watched the final stages of the battle keenly, giving a running commentary to his scribe and his artist who industriously set down everything that happened.
When it was clear, against all the odds, that the Spaniards had won the day and the immense Mayan army was in full flight across the battlefield, pursued, charged and speared at will by the terrifying silver beings, Cuetzpalli stood up, brushed grass and a few leaves from his rich tunic, and snapped his fing
ers for his litter to be brought. ‘Give the paramount chief my regrets,’ he said to Malinal with a gesture to Ah Kinchil, ‘and tell him I could not stay. Pressing business calls me back to Tenochtitlan.’ A sly smile: ‘Tell him I much appreciated the afternoon’s … entertainment. It has been – how can I put this? – most instructive. I am sure the Great Speaker of the Mexica will be eager to hear of these events.’
As the merchant turned to go, Muluc’s steward Ichick thrust himself forward, dragging Malinal by the wrist. ‘But lord, do you not want to buy this woman? You had an agreement with my master to take her off his hands.’
‘Your master,’ said Cuetzpalli coldly, ‘led forty thousand men into battle against four hundred … and lost. Quite an incredible achievement, wouldn’t you say? He has dishonoured the name of the Chontal Maya and, if he lives, which I rather doubt, he should kill himself. Entirely his choice, of course, but either way my agreement with him is void.’
With that he stepped into the litter and was carried off down the hill in the direction of Cintla, his Cuahchics jogging protectively along beside him.
Ah Kinchil remained in a stupefied state, but his retainers wasted no time bundling him into his litter too. On Ichick’s orders Malinal’s hands were tied, a noose was placed around her neck and two soldiers were detailed to guard her. Then, in great haste, the whole column wound its way off the hilltop, also heading south to Cintla.
There was no time to lose, for below on the plains the defeated Maya were likewise fleeing south in their thousands. Casting a last glance back, Malinal saw the men of silver abruptly break off the chase and turn away, thundering towards Potonchan. ‘Come for me,’ she whispered as she lost sight of their leader in the dust cloud of their charge. ‘Come for me.’
So vengeful were his cavalrymen, so furious in the wild hunt, that Cortés had great difficulty persuading them to break it off. But the battle was won and he feared for the men in Potonchan. There had been firing from the falconet battery he’d left with Mesa, but the guns had fallen silent and now, ominously, he saw Indians swarming up the flanks of the pyramid.
War God Page 55
