The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  We had not gone far when I saw a spiral of yellow haze less than a league in front of us. The road was soft from the tramping of feet and horses’ hooves. I thought that the wind, which had shifted around and now came from the east, was blowing dust toward us.

  The dwarf thought differently. “It’s not wind,” he said, “or men marching. It’s men on horses. And being on horses they are Spaniards.”

  “I think you’re wrong about the horses,” I said. “The army has gone by. Days ago, judging from the signs.”

  “A nest of stragglers. Every army has them.”

  “One or the other, we should not stay here.”

  We increased our pace and while we were talking, the clear sound of hooves came to us on a gust of wind. There was a hut close at hand, sitting back in a corn field. Two other huts nearby had been burned to the ground, but this one was standing.

  Like all Indian huts, it had a straw mat for a door. The mat had been torn and was hanging loose. As I pulled it aside, I saw in the back of the hut a man sitting hunched against a wall. Beside him lay a woman and a child. The child was breathing but the woman was dead.

  We went in and I fixed the curtain straight. I spoke to the man. He did not answer, though he tried, putting his tongue out and parting his lips.

  I glanced through a hole in the mat.

  The horsemen had slowed down. They wore helmets and breastplates and carried lances across their saddles. They were laughing about something, then they stopped and one of them pointed to the hut. The same man rode through the field, talking over his shoulder to the other soldiers, who were watching from the trail.

  I opened the curtain as he rode up and greeted him in Spanish. “We’re Spaniards.”

  “I can see that you aren’t Indians,” he replied.

  He was a very young man, not much older than I, and had a cut on his chin that had not yet healed. He spoke in the accent of Seville, clipping his words off at the ends.

  “Who are you?” he asked, glancing past me at the man and the woman and the child. “Why are you here in all this?”

  “We saw the hut,” I said. “It’s the only one that hasn’t been burned. We’re looking for water.”

  “I mean, who are you?”

  “My name is Julián Escobar, from Seville in Spain.”

  “I know Seville’s in Spain. You don’t need to instruct me.” On his breastplate, which had a dent in it, was an officer’s insignia. “What are you doing on the road? Where are you going?”

  “I’m a pochtecatl. I trade goods.” I pointed to the bundle lying beside the door. “We’re on our way to Tzompantzinco.”

  “You look like a deserter,” the officer said. “We’ve met a couple since we left Vera Cruz. You must belong with Cortés. Or why are you here?”

  The dwarf spoke to me in Maya, but because he spoke the language so poorly, I understood only a single word—citam. It meant “wild pig,” and I assumed that he was reminding me that I was dealing with one.

  “And you,” the officer said, as if he had not seen the dwarf before. “Who are you and where do you come from and why?”

  “Guillermo Cantú,” the dwarf said and then repeated what I had already said about myself, adding the information that we were both castaways from a Spanish ship.

  The officer, worrying about the cut on his chin, kept touching it with a dirty finger. He stopped as something stirred his memory.

  “You are not with the ship that sank with Aguilar?” he asked me.

  “Aguilar?” I said cautiously, as if I might or might not know him.

  “Gerónimo de Aguilar,” the officer prompted me. “He was from Ecija in Spain and was cast away in Yu catán three years ago. He’s been living with the Indians. Now he’s with Cortés as an interpreter.”

  “I don’t know Gerónimo de Aguilar. My friend and I are castaways.”

  The officer turned his horse and rode back to his six companions and talked for a while. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but from their gestures all of them were in favor of letting us go on our way. I expected that the of ficer would give us a wave and ride on. Instead he rode back to the hut and said that he was taking us to Texcála.

  “The royal notary has a listing of all our men,” he said. “I want to see if he has your names.”

  “We’re not on the notary’s list.”

  “No doubt, but I’ll make certain.”

  The man who was hunched against the wall of the hut made a motion of his hands, asking for water.

  “What are we going to do with this man and his sick child and his dead wife?” I said.

  “Leave them,” the officer said.

  “Do you have water?” I asked.

  The officer signaled to the men on the road and one of them came with a gourd, which he gave to the man. Then the officer rode back to his comrades.

  The dwarf and I buried the woman. The earth was hard and we had nothing to dig with, so we put her in a shallow place and covered her with cornstalks. I said a prayer for her and took the child in my arms.

  The man had gotten to his feet and the four of us went out through the field and started up the trail to Texcála.

  “We are in trouble,” the dwarf said.

  We arrived at the Spanish camp in midafternoon and within a few minutes the dwarf and I proved that we were not and never had been soldiers in Cortés’s army. This freed us from one problem, but plunged us into another far worse.

  In a brief ceremony, we were pledged to the service of His Majesty King Carlos the Fifth. The dwarf was set to scouring pots in a nearby stream, while I was given a sword and assigned to guard duty on a wind swept hill.

  The hill, less than a league from the outskirts of Texcála, commanded a view of all the approaches to the beleaguered city. Scattered over its crest were numerous fires around which small groups huddled against the wind. Sidling up to one of the fires, I found myself in the company of two ragged soldiers, both with wounds, both surly, whose names were Juan Borrego and Raul Carrasco.

  They were silent young men, but I managed to pry out of them answers to the two questions that had plagued me since the moment I first heard of Cortés. I learned that the Spanish fleet had sailed from Havana directly westward to the mainland.

  “Did you pass any islands on the voyage?” I asked them.

  “Water only,” said Juan Borrego. “Lots of water.”

  “Beautiful blue water,” Raul Carrasco added, “but many bad currents and no islands.”

  “Did you sight any ships?” I asked.

  They both agreed that no ships were sighted.

  “On the sea or after you landed?”

  “When the captain general raised the cross and founded the village of Vera Cruz, they came from everywhere by the hundreds.”

  “But no caravels, then or later.”

  “None,” Carrasco said.

  This settled my mind somewhat, but it did not mean that the men who were left to guard the fleet would not take it upon themselves to explore the coast and by chance find the Santa Margarita.

  “How many ships were in the fleet?” I asked, to con firm the truth of Moctezuma’s painting.

  “Eleven,” Raul Carrasco said. “But now there’s none left. Cortés destroyed them all.”

  “All but one,” Juan Borrego corrected him.

  “That’s a strange thing,” I said, thinking that they must be either telling a lie or joking. “I never heard of a captain destroying his own ships.”

  “He destroyed them,” Carrasco repeated. “ ‘Let all those who lose courage,” he said, ‘and wish to leave the expedition, let them have fair warning that their fates are sealed. Turn your backs upon home, for you shall not see it again until we are victorious.’ This is what he told us, standing by the cross.”

  If this were not a lie, if it were true that Cortés had sunk nearly all his fleet, then there was no need for me to worry about anyone finding the Santa Margarita.

  “To sink ten ships,” I sa
id, “almost his entire fleet, this Cortés must think that he has set off on a dangerous campaign.”

  “Yes,” said Carrasco, “and there are many who think likewise. Before us is an army of fifty thousand savages, some say more. And beyond is this Indian king who has ten times that many ready and waiting to cut off our heads.”

  “Cortés has plans to capture the big Azteca city, Tenochtitlán?” I asked.

  “That’s where we’re going,” Carrasco said, “to the big Indian city.”

  “That’s where you’ll find the gold,” Juan Borrego said.

  “The doorknobs are made of gold,” Carrasco said. “Imagine!”

  They reminded me of Baltasar Guzmán talking to the crew of the Santa Margarita before we reached Isla del Oro, describing to the men how the house of Lope Luzir had doors and walls fashioned of gold.

  They were not interested in who I was or where I had come from, only in the dream that had brought them more than two thousand leagues to this cold hillside, in sight of an enemy who vastly outnumbered them, in the province of the mighty Moctezuma, whose gods thirsted for their blood.

  CHAPTER 20

  AFTER A LONG HOUR DURING WHICH WE SAT IN GLUM SILENCE AROUND the fire, a musket shot rang out. It was a warning and it brought us scrambling to our feet.

  A party of Indians was moving along at the bottom of the hill, through a tuna grove. I counted forty, some in the black garb of warriors, others in blue and white robes, led by a masked cacique who reclined on a litter prettily decked out with flowers.

  They came slowly to the thud of wooden drums, stopped halfway up the hill, and announced their pres ence by the screech of many trumpets.

  At a walk, as if they did not wish to appear in a hurry, four Spanish horsemen rode past and down the hill to where the Indians were waiting. From the picture Moc tezuma had shown me, I recognized one of the Span iards, a man not much older than thirty, pale of countenance and stiff-backed, holding a tight rein with small, gloved hands, as the conquistador and captain general, Hernán Cortés.

  The Indians, we learned from word passed up the hill, had come with an offer of peace.

  “We’ve been waiting on the alert now for two days,” Juan Borrego said, “not knowing if they will attack us or not. We sleep in our clothes.”

  “The savages carry swords twice as long as my arm,” Raul Carrasco said. “They’re made of wood but they have stone teeth that cut deeper than steel.”

  “With one blow they kill a horse,” Juan Borrego said.

  “And did,” his friend added. “When we were fighting in a village near Cingapacinga, they killed one of our mares, cut her head off with a single blow.”

  “I hope they’re here to make peace,” Juan Borrego said.

  “This I doubt,” Raul Carrasco said. “More likely it’s a ruse.”

  Cortés and the cacique talked for a while, then the assemblage moved up the hill and gathered again not far from us. It seemed as if Cortés, not trusting the Texcaltéca, wished to surround himself with his own sol diers.

  The Texcaltéca, it developed, had come with word from their chieftain to say that in his heart he had only peaceful thoughts. As proof, he was sending now In dians with gifts of fowl, bread, fruit, many parrot feath ers, and four miserable-looking old women.

  The Indians burned copal incense in front of Cortés and delivered the cacique’s message, which, as I overheard it, contained these words:

  “All this is sent you by the Captain Xicoténca so that you may eat. If you are savages, as some say, and wish for a sacrifice, take these four old women, sacrifice them, and consume their flesh and hearts. But as we do not know in what way you do this act, we do not sacrifice them here before you. If you are men, however, eat these fowls and bread and fruit, and if you are not teules, devils, make your sacrifice with copal and parrots’ feath ers.”

  Cortés heard the message, spoken and then translated, with great impatience. Even his gelding was impatient and kept moving about in circles, the silver bell on its bit tinkling merrily.

  Cortés answered that he had not come to make war, that he came in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and Emperor Carlos. He thanked them for the food they had brought and warned them not to commit any foolish ness, but to make peace.

  As he talked, an officer rode up and gave him a mes sage. There was something about the rider’s drawling words and the way he sat stiffly in the saddle, as stiff-backed and arrogant as Cortés himself, that stirred my memory. But it was the horse he rode that I recognized.

  God being my judge, there before me on the windy hillside stood the black stallion, Bravo. And on his back, with his big-roweled Spanish spurs glittering, sat Don Luis de Arroyo.

  When I told the dwarf at supper that Don Luis was an officer in Cortés’s army and I had seen him in camp, he laughed.

  “You’re having visions like the Emperor Moctezuma. Either that or in our absence Don Luis has been sacri ficed and his heartless ghost has come back to haunt us.”

  The next morning Don Luis rode down the hill past my watch fire, and I called out to him. He glanced back over his shoulder but without recognizing me—there was no reason why he should, since I wore a helmet several sizes too small and a breastplate that belonged to someone half my girth. He rode on.

  I had not gotten over my surprise that he had escaped from his cage, found his way into Cortés’s army, and was riding around the camp on my black stallion.

  This surprise was small in light of the surprise that awaited me.

  Xicoténca had sent Cortés gifts of food and parrot feathers and old women as an act of friendship. It was thought, however, that all his Indians were quimíchime, mice, spies who came only to size up weapons, learn how many soldiers Cortés commanded, and find the ways into and out of the camp.

  One of these Indians was an old man who toiled up the hill leaning on a stick and asked if he could talk to the chieftain who rode around on a big gray deer. He was dressed in rags, but, thinking that he might carry an important message, I led him to the top of the hill where Cortés had pitched his tent.

  Cortés was talking to a comely young woman whom I had caught distant glances of before. She was dressed in a leather skirt and blouse that were remade from an officer’s uniform, wore fawn-colored sandals laced to the knees, and had her hair bound in a yellow and black neckerchief.

  Her name, I had heard, was Doña Marina, and she was Cortés’s interpreter, translating Maya and Nahuatl into Spanish.

  I led the old man up to Cortés. I was about to leave discreetly, when I caught the girl’s eye. She dropped her gaze and quickly turned away, yet in that brief instant, to my great surprise, I saw that the captain general’s interpreter, Doña Marina, was not a stranger but my friend Ceela Yaxche.

  I waited, thinking that I would have a chance to talk to her when Cortés was through with the old man. Why had she left the Island of the Seven Serpents? Had she left with Don Luis? How had she met Cortés, and why had she followed him to this place?

  I had no chance to ask these questions, for as soon as Doña Marina had translated the old man’s message, she hurried off.

  The man brought word that Xicoténca was planning to attack the camp by night, choosing that hour because the Spaniards believed that Indians never fought after the sun went down. As soon as Cortés heard the news, he had one of the Texcaltéca seized and taken into the hut where Doña Marina had fled.

  I heard talking between Cortés and the Indian, several quiet moans, then the men came out and Cortés called upon two of his officers.

  “The Texcaltéca who are standing there gaping at me are spies,” he said. “Line them against the wall and at tend to them.”

  The officers went about collecting the Indians—there were seventeen standing about—and herded them against the wall. Then two of the officers, wielding swords, stepped quickly down the line. They hacked off the hands of the first man, the thumbs of the next, the hands of the third, and so on.

  When
the officers were finished, Cortés said to the Texcaltéca, “Go and tell Xicoténca that this is punish ment for his audacity. Tell him also that if he wishes to come, for him to come any time, day or night. And if he does not come, I, Hernán Cortés, will seek him out in his own house.”

  By some mistake the old man had been lined up with the rest. Fortunately, he did not lose his hands, only his thumbs.

  He picked up his cane and went down the trail, a slow step at a time. The rest of the men fled in terror, clasping their arms across their breasts.

  Cortés and his officers began talking again. I stood there staring at them in disbelief until one of the officers with an oath ordered me back to my watch.

  Toward noon of the following day, while I sat hud dled half frozen over the hillside fire, I looked up to see Don Luis riding along the trail, erect in the saddle, his legs hanging free.

  As I stood up, he swung down from the saddle and grasped me in a tight abrazo.

  “I caught a glimpse of you yesterday,” Don Luis said, “but I was busy with the Indians—a stupid lot.”

  He paused to embrace me a second time. Stepping back, he glanced at my ill-fitting armor and the dented steel helmet that sat on top of my head.

  “How the gods have fallen,” he said. “But perhaps you’ll rise again somewhere, perhaps in another life, among the saints.”

  “You, señor, have risen already,” I said. “When seen last, you were dressed in remnants, had a broom in your hand, and on your face a very sour expression.”

  He did look more like himself—the jaunty nobleman for whom the world was a peach to be plucked. But events had put a bitter look in his eye and a long, white scar across his forehead.

  “When I saw you yesterday, Don Luis, I thought you were an apparition.”

  He smiled, the quick, charming smile that meant nothing. “In that case, if you saw an apparition, you must have thought me quite dead.”