The Other Time

by Mack Reynolds

  The Captain-General took him by the arm and led him about, introducing him to the others. There were too many of them for Don to retain all of the names, and most of them, with their beards and almost identical armor, looked so much alike that they were hard to distinguish as individuals. However, a few stood out.

  There were five of the Alvarados, but Pedro de Alvarado, who was evidently second in army command, was the only one that particularly impressed himself upon Don Fielding. He was in his early thirties, taller than the average of the Spaniards present, going possibly five foot eight, was crowned with as flaming red hair as Don could ever remember seeing, was more flashily dressed than his companions, and had a swaggering, swashbuckling air. His bow, when Don was introduced, was a grand flourish.

  Then there was Alonzo de Avila, noteworthy because of his quiet dignity, and Cristobal de Olid, aggressive and fierce in appearance. Don got the feeling that this one would be as dangerous to tangle with as anyone present. The second priest was Padre Juan Diaz, a younger man and obviously the junior of Fray Olmedo so far as the expedition was concerned.

  Introductions over, Cortes waved them all to the table, occupying the head of it himself and insisting that Don Fielding take the place of honor at his right side. The American couldn’t help feeling a certain tenseness in the air. Covert glances were shot at him from time to time, particularly by Alvarado and Olid. Sandoval, to the contrary, seemed to be secretly amused.

  Dinner, served by Orteguilla and another page, consisted of considerably more in the way of variety than Don had enjoyed earlier from the Indian women. After the blessing by Olmedo they set to work on roast venison, roast turkey, roast duck, various broiled fish, boiled beans done Indian-style with chili, avocados, and various tropical fruits. The Spanish were meat men and obviously scorned other fare.

  And, being soldiers, as they ate they complained. The tortillas, as a type of bread, they sneered at. When it came to fruit, they yearned for the citrus of southern Spain. When they came to the fowl, they hungered for the chickens of Europe as opposed to the dry flesh of the turkey. The wild duck presented was not up to the domesticated varieties of the land of their birth. They wished for their fish to be fried in oil, rather than broiled.

  Don was moved to wonder, inwardly, why the hell they hadn’t stayed home.

  Sandoval called down the table to Don, “Don Fielding, by my soul, I am astonished that you were able to lose your vehicle.”

  “So was I,” Don said sourly and in self-deprecation.

  All laughed. Pedro de Alvarado’s had a contemptuous quality. How could a grown man lose his means of transportation, even in a strange land, was the implication.

  Fray Olmedo said sympathetically, “You brought it all the way from this far land from whence you come?”

  “Yes.” Don took up another tortilla from the platter in the table center and wrapped some of the duck in it. The table was laid with small knives and two-pronged forks, but he enjoyed the Indian method of eating.

  “My faith,” Cortes said, beaming amiable charm. “Just how far is this far land?”

  “Some five hundred leagues to the nearest border,” Don told him.

  “Five… hundred… leagues,” one of the others got out. “And you come all that way without a weapon?”

  “Not exactly,” Don said truthfully to that. “I left my weapons in my vehicle.” He’d had a twelve-gauge shotgun in the camper.

  Cortes said idly, “Diego Ordaz tells me your country is rich in gold.”

  Damn it. Why hadn’t Don kept his trap shut! “Yes,” he said.

  The fierce-looking Olid said, “Are your people a warlike one?”

  Don finished his tortilla and duck and said, “Well, we like to think of ourselves as a peace-loving nation.”

  “As all should be,” Fray Olmedo said softly. The others ignored him.

  “However,” Don added, taking up an avocado, “there are some who would debate that.”

  “But you don’t utilize such weapons as steel swords, crossbows, arquebuses?” Alvarado pursued.

  “No, we don’t.”

  Ordaz looked about the table with an I-told-you-so expression.

  Dinner was over. It had been eaten with a speed and gusto that Don would have thought would have led to immediate indigestion. The Spaniards wiped their greasy hands on their clothing.

  Hernando Cortes leaned back in his chair and smiled his friendship at Don. He put a hand over his mouth politely and belched. He said, “Don Fielding, I have a treat for you.”

  He turned and called to one of the pages, “Ochoa, go forth and summon Botello Puerto de Plata.”

  The page scurried out.

  Cortes turned back to Don, “We have among our host an astrologer, or seer, if you will. Surely we must find what he will tell you. Perhaps he will foresee your return to your own land.”

  “My son,” Padre Diaz said in a chiding voice, “astrology is a heathen abomination and a device of the devil. It is said that the Pope, the Holy Father, will soon rule upon it.”

  Cortes chuckled it away. “Good Father, we do not take it seriously, of course. We are educated men. Only the saints can foresee the future. But it is known that Botello has a touch of gitano blood in him and all know the reputation of the gypsy.”

  The page, Ochoa, reentered, followed by one of the guards who had been stationed without. He was a shifty-looking, black-bearded man with abnormally long arms and pig eyes. His face was smallpox-marked and he looked like a stereotype villain out of a television show.

  All eyes went to him, and Cortes chortled, “My good Botello, observe! Here is the stranger about whom the camp has been abuzz. What do your arts tell us of him?”

  “My son,” the priest said again, reproach in his voice. But Botello approached Don, his small eyes smaller still.

  What was he going to do? Don wondered. Read his palm or something? He knew this was an age of superstition, and in spite of what the Captain-General had said to the priest, he suspected that all present, probably including the two men of God, believed in soothsaying.

  The foot soldier scowled at the newcomer and his mouth worked as though in puzzlement.

  “Well, Botello?” Cortes urged.

  The soldier said slowly and flatly to Don Fielding, “You are not of this world.”

  Don said, “Of course not. I come from way to the north.”

  The other shook his head in puzzlement. “No. You come from another world.”

  Chapter Five

  Don Fielding awoke, but from no deep dream of peace, in the early morning, and once again he had to orient himself. The happenings of the past few days were so bizarre that he simply couldn’t accept them. For long moments, lying there on the floor, his bush jacket under his head, he stared up at the triangular ceiling. It was an arch without a keystone, with the faces of the stone beveled and forming a perfect vault, and reared some twenty feet high above him. He wondered how many Indians had occupied this room before Ordaz, and now he, had taken over. Probably a couple of families of them. They crowded in, as their ancestors must have into caves. In fact, these rooms in Indian towns were little more than man-made caves. Windowless, dark, they were simply a shelter, no more, the most primitive type of architecture basically, no matter how ornately decorated with reliefs on the outside.

  He groaned and came to his feet. He felt sticky. It was three days, now, since he had been out of his clothes. What did the Spanish do in the way of laundry? The manner in which they had nonchalantly wiped their hands on their clothes the night before indicated they must have some way of having them washed. He assumed that the Indian women did it. He would have to find out. His socks felt absolutely stiff.

  The night before came back to him. Cortes and his captains had done all they could to pump him about his native land. It would have been laughable, if it hadn’t been so damned serious. Their cupidity was obvious. They drooled at the idea of a country as wealthy as he had reported only a thousand or so miles away.
Did they picture themselves marching over the desert to its conquest? Obviously, they did—once they had disposed of Montezuma and his Tenochas, or Aztecs, as they would one day be called.

  The story of Coronado and his search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, came back to him. Was it a result of what he had told the Spaniards last night that Coronado’s expedition had taken place? He shook his head in despair at the paradoxes. Had history been formed by his return here to the Mexico of 1519 and by his stories of riches to the north? He didn’t know, and thinking about it brought him nothing but confusion.

  He took up his jacket and shrugged into it and was about to leave the small room just as Diego Ordaz entered. The other was obviously tired.

  The Spaniard growled, “This night watch is an abomination, by my beard. Why doesn’t the Captain-General let that pet of his, Sandoval, take it over for awhile? Not that it’s even necessary. These Totonacs haven’t the guts to scratch their own fleas.”

  His speech was nonchalant enough, but Don Fielding detected a slight element that hadn’t been there the day before. Diego Ordaz was incapable of dissimulation; his face clearly reflected his inner thoughts. Something was wrong, and Don didn’t like it. What?

  He said, “How do I go about getting breakfast?”

  “Breakfast?” the red bearded husky snorted. “You rustle up your own. This cursed land has but one meal a day, ordinarily. Go out into the kitchens and see what you can scrounge. It has been all that we could do to arrange for the Indian bitches to prepare two meals a day for us. Aiii, when we’ve fully taken over, there will be some changes made!”

  Don was about to leave but Diego Ordaz said, an edge of cunning in his voice, “Is it true, Don Fielding, what you told us last night? That is, your nation is rich with gold and jewels but unwarlike in nature. What prevents your neighbors from attacking you?”

  Don sighed inwardly. He said, “Our neighbors to both the north and south have long been at peace with us. They are no more militarily inclined than are we. Perhaps less. We do not even have fortifications along our borders.”

  The Spaniard shook his head in wonder. “And they too are rich?”

  “Especially those to the north,” Don told him and pushed aside the mat which shielded the door.

  He’d like to see this bunch of rag-tail bandits take on a troop of the Royal Canadian Mounted.

  The early part of the morning passed uneventfully. He had gone around to the improvised kitchens and liberated a couple of large tortillas and some more of the turkey stew to wrap up in them and, finishing that in the way of breakfast, had located some water in which to wash his socks. That wasn’t particularly easy since the Indians had no soap, and if the Spanish had brought any along with them from Cuba, they had evidently by now used it all up. He had asked one of the Spanish footmen and received only a laugh in return.

  He sat on a lower step of one of the minor temples, his socks stretched out on the stone to dry, his bare toes absorbing the sun’s rays. His feet felt good to be out of the paratrooper boots for the first time in days. He looked at the socks and shook his head. They were of heavy nylon, but it was just a matter of time before they wore out, and they were undoubtedly the only pair in the country. Well, so would all his other clothing wear out. Sooner or later he was going to have to adopt the clothing of the Spaniards—or that of the Indians.

  That brought to mind the fact that eventually, if not sooner, he was going to have to join up with Captain-General Cortes and his expedition. Malinche had been right. Cortes, when he discovered that Don spoke Nahuatl, could use him as an interpreter. He didn’t really approve of this buccaneering expedition, or hadn’t when a student of it, but it was simply a matter of rationalizing his beliefs. The conquest of Mexico was inevitable. If Cortes didn’t do it, the next expedition would. If the Spanish didn’t pull it off, the English or the French or some other European country would. The Europeans were several ethnic periods ahead of these Neolithic Indians; it was inevitable that they be sucked into the cultural vacuum. All in the name of world progress, wasn’t it?

  A voice said, “Good morning, my son.”

  Don looked up. It was Fray Bartolome de Olmedo. For some reason, he had taken to this priest more than he had Padre Juan Diaz. Perhaps it was because the night before the eyes of the younger priest had gleamed just as avidly as anyone else’s at the table at the mention of gold.

  Don began to come to his feet, but the other made a gesture of negation with his right hand. “Remain seated.” He looked at the drying socks and then took in the rest of Don Fielding’s clothes. “Truly, the clothing of your country is remarkable, my son. However, it seems very practical.”

  Don said, taking up the socks to see if they were dry and finding them so, “We do not dress in this manner all the time. It is clothing suitable for tramping in rough country.”

  “The boots in particular seem sturdy,” the priest nodded. “Tell me, my son, are you of the Faith?”

  Don knew he was on thin ice now. Even as he drew on his socks, he let his mind race for answers. This was the age of the Inquistion. Heretics could be burned at the stake. So far as he knew, the Holy Office had no representatives with the Cortes expedition, but that didn’t mean that sooner or later, particularly after more of the Spanish appeared on the scene, there would not be such representation. If he recalled his history, the Inquisition had become notorious in New Spain shortly after Cortes had come to power.

  He said carefully, “As you know, Father, I am from a distant land. Those who think as I do have not received the message of Rome.”

  Evidently, it didn’t occur to the older man to ask where Don Fielding had heard of Rome.

  He said, “I am willing to baptize and to instruct you, my son.”

  Don was really on thin ice now. He knew that the two priests burned with the desire for new converts, with the desire to baptize the inhabitants of this whole country. The cynicism of a later age did not apply here. These men were zealots and fanatics.

  Sooner or later, once again, Don knew he was going to have to toe the line if he was to survive. The Reformation had not as yet come to Europe and not even in Germany and England were Protestants to be found, not to speak of atheists and agnostics. However, for the present he rebelled.

  He shook his head. “No, Father. Truly, you would not want it so, nor would I. It is one thing to take a barbarian, a slave, such as these people are, and baptize them without their truly knowing all the ramifications of your religion. But I am an educated man. You would not want me to accept your faith without truly understanding it and coming into it with both heart and brain, but for now we have not time for you to instruct me thoroughly.”

  The priest sighed. “Perhaps you are right, my son. When and if you do join us, I anticipate that you will be a strong arm of the Church, since, as you say, you are a man of education in your own land.” A twinkle came to his eye. “However, do not let Padre Diaz know. He would pester you into baptism before you so much as learned the names of the Holy Trinity.”

  A trumpet blasted from the entry to the enclosure and then a drum rattled—a military drum, not one of the Indian kettledrums.

  Don and the priest looked in that direction. A procession was entering.

  It was headed by two young men dressed in barbaric splendor, complete to highly colorful headdresses of Quetzal feathers. There were ornaments aplenty, but Don Fielding noted that they still wore the basic maxtli breechcloth, no matter how ornate, and the tilmantli mantle. And their legs were bare. Their sandals were rich with gold and stones, but they were still sandals. In their right hands they carried flowers which looked like roses, at least from this distance, and from time to time they smelled daintily of them. Don Fielding was reminded of movies he had seen portraying aristocratic fops in the French court of Louis the Fourteenth. Each of them had an attendant to one side and a bit to the rear, equipped with a fan to brush aside the flies.

  Following these came four older men, perhaps in their fo
rties, still richly dressed but not so much as the two leaders, who seemed to be in their early twenties. The elders wore no feather headdresses but had their glossy black hair tied in a knot of the top of the head.

  And following these came some twenty barefooted porters clad only in loincloths and bearing burdens.

  At a stately pace the procession headed for the main temple which housed Cortes and his captains.

  From the temple, also at an unhurried pace, came Captain-General Cortes done up in what was probably his richest best, his breastplate agleam, his helmet ashine. Flanking him, also in their finery, were Sandoval and Olid and, bringing up the rear, Malinche and an unarmed Spaniard Don didn’t recognize but soon decided must be Aguilar, the other interpreter. Padre Diaz was with them.

  The two groups approached each other and a page scurried forward with Cortes’s folding chair. He placed it and the Captain-General seated himself with controlled dignity, as though a king holding court.

  “Now, who is this?” Fray Olmedo muttered. He put his hands in the sleeves of his robe and, walking slowly, proceeded to join the Spanish group.

  Don hustled into his shoes, came to his feet. Others of the Spanish soldiery came up and stood at a respectful distance. Don joined them.

  The procession came to a halt and one of the two young leaders stepped forward. He had considerable sangfroid, and it came to Don Fielding that these were most certainly not the easygoing Totonacs.

  Malinche and Aguilar came forward and stood one to each side of Hernando Cortes.

  The Indian said, in Nahuatl, “I am Cuauhtemoc, of the Eagle calpulli of the Tenochas, and hence nephew of Motechzoma, the Tlacatecuhtli. And this”—he gestured to his companion—“is Axayaca, also of the Eagle clan. We come as a delegation from the high council of Tenochtitlan to enquire of the teteuh gods as to their purpose in this land and why they have turned the Totonacs against us.”

  Malinche made a light obeisance to him, then turned to Aguilar and spoke to him rapidly in, Don assumed, Mayan.