The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  “Your Eminence, I beseech this favor!”

  The bishop’s eyes were closed. His lips were stiff and unmoving. He had sealed them. He had spoken the last word on the matter, confident that he was in the right. Confident, too, that I knew he was in the right.

  Yet I was tempted to speak to him again. “You can hear the crowd clamoring for your life,” I said. “You can see the high priest standing over you, anxious to use the sacrificial knife. This is not a play by Cervantes on a Seville stage nor a masquerade in the queen’s garden. Once more I make the request.”

  There was no answer. He still twisted the beautiful ring round and round on his finger.

  “Are you playing the role of a martyr?” I asked him. “Do you really seek martyrdom?”

  Pedroza opened his eyes. He looked at me. It was only a glance, but in it, before he turned his gaze toward heaven, I read the answer to my question.

  Pital, clutching the black obsidian knife in both his hands, peered down at me, waiting to use it. I put the jaguar mask on. I raised my fist and gave the signal.

  That night, in the darkness, I went back to the god house and removed the amethyst ring.

  CHAPTER 10

  XICO, THE FASTEST AND MOST TRUSTWORTHY OF MY ROAD WEASELS, arrived by sailing canoe shortly after dawn of the following day.

  He brought word that two Spanish ships were anchored in a cove opposite the island, some nine leagues away. He had stumbled upon them by chance in the heavy fog that had settled on the coast during the night. Actually, he had sailed between the two caravels, close enough to hear the Spaniards shouting. When he did not answer them, they sent a round of shot through his sail.

  Our enemies were unfamiliar with the coast. They had taken refuge from the fog and would not dare to leave until it lifted. When it did, probably within an hour or so, they would be able to sight the two landmarks they certainly had heard about and would be looking for—the Temple of Kukulcán and the fiery crest of St. John the Baptist. It was Xico’s opinion that we could expect the Spaniards sometime before noonday.

  With Flint Knife striding along behind me, I immediately set off to inspect our little army. In spite of the festivities, ending with Chalco’s funeral, during which ample quan tities of palm wine had been consumed, I found it in good shape. I alerted the captain of our fifty canoes, whose warriors were armed with spears, the guards at the main gate, and the cannoneers stationed on the walls to right and left, as well as the sailors aboard the Delfín Azul. The Santa Margarita, an chored far out at the entrance to the harbor, I could not reach because of the heavy fog.

  The inspection took half the morning. As soon as it was over, I rode to the terrace, tethered the stallion, and took up a position on the roof of the god house, the highest point in the city, from which, once the fog had lifted, I would have a clear view of all the shorelines, the harbor, and the channel between the island and the coast.

  To keep in contact with the nacom,I placed a squad of fleet-footed boys on the terrace, close at hand. When the fog began to lift I dispatched one of them with a message for the Santa Margarita, telling the dwarf that Cortés was on the coast, prepared to move against the island. Recalling how he had outwitted Emperor Moctezuma, I had already warned Cantú that he must not be allowed to enter the harbor under any pretext or excuse, and if necessary to block the entrance by sinking the Santa Margarita.

  I waited impatiently for a clearer vision of the channel. Fog still hid the harbor, but beyond it there were now and then glimpses of open sea and the mainland coast. Nowhere did I catch sight of Spanish sails. It was possible that Cortés was not planning an attack upon the island. He had sent me no honeyed letters as he had to Moctezuma. No threats nor ultimatums. Perhaps because I myself would undertake such an attack were I in Cortés’s shoes, I had concluded that it was something he would do.

  The same misgivings that plagued me when I attacked Don Luis de Arroyo at Tikan plagued me now. The same rules of battle did not apply here—Caesar’s dictum, celeritas, swift ness and surprise. At Tikan I had led an attack. Here I must repel one. Or did the rules apply equally to attack and defense?

  In my mind, from the moment I discovered that Pedroza was a high-placed churchman and a friend of the governor of Hispaniola, even to the last, when the two of us were enemies in a war of wills, I had harbored the thought of using him, should I ever encounter Hernán Cortés. But now Cortés was anchored across the strait only a few leagues away, and Pedroza lay dead.

  I felt no remorse at Pedroza’s death. He had hankered after it. He had courted it. He had willed it. In his cold eyes at the very last I had detected a glint of the ultimate vanity—a consuming desire for martyrdom. I had no doubt that he would achieve his desire. Someday his bones would be sorted out of the thousands stacked in the ossuary—not a difficult task, since they would be quite different from those of the Indians, especially the domelike skull—gathered up, and sent back to Spain, there to be decked out with flowers and worshipped by those who would never know that Pedroza was stubborn, truculent, and vain, a man so steeped in himself that he couldn’t tell the love of ritual from love itself.

  The temple drum sounded the midday hour. Though wisps of fog still drifted over the bay, I could make out the Delfín Azul tied at the wharf, her lombards and falconets trained westward, the flotilla of canoes between her and the harbor entrance. But the feathered poles that marked the entrance were barely visible. The Santa Margarita I could not find at all.

  Sun shone in the channel and on the far blue line of the mainland coast. There was no sign of Spanish sails. Cortés might have passed us by and headed south for the shores of Guatemala and the river Polochic, where Moctezuma had told him in my hearing, not once but several times, that vast amounts of gold were to be found.

  For most of a long hour, I stood on the roof of the god house, waiting for the harbor entrance to clear, to make certain that the Santa Margarita was in the right position if attacked. At last a messenger came clambering up the temple steps. He arrived on the terrace so out of breath that he could not speak, only raise his hand and point.

  In the brief time I had watched him climb the stairs, the sun had burned away the last of the fog and the entrance stood clear. The Santa Margarita was not in sight. My first thought was that the dwarf had moved her to a different position. Possibly she had slipped her moorings and drifted away in the night or during the morning fog. I searched the harbor in vain.

  “Where is the ship?” I shouted to the messenger. “The Santa Margarita ?”

  “Gone,” the messenger shouted back, waving his arms to imitate a bird in flight. “Gone.”

  “Cantú, the dwarf ?”

  “Gone!” the messenger said.

  The stallion was tethered at the far end of the terrace. Leaping to his back, I took the shortest of the three trails that led out of the temple, spurred him into a gallop when I reached the square, and rode pell-mell for the harbor. Flint Knife was waiting for me on the deck of the Delfín Azul.

  “I sent the message,” he called down. “It is true. The dwarf has left. Two of our traders came from the north part of the island and said this. They were paddling along this morning. They were taking their time in the fog. A great white cloud rushed past them. It was whiter than the fog and had sails. It had a name, but it was not Maya and they could not read it.”

  The traders, who stood beside him, shook their heads.

  “The Santa Margarita is gone,” Flint Knife said. “It must have left around midnight. These traders were coming here. The ship was going the other way. It must be going to Hispaniola.”

  Flint Knife related all this in a toneless voice, stone-faced, calm, as though in the space of one night we had not been dealt a cruel and staggering blow. Half of our cannon were gone. Half of our muskets and gunpowder. Our best sailors were gone and our most experienced fighting men.

  “I never liked the dwarf,” Flint Knife said. “His eyes were too big. Like a woman’s. And he made those sou
nds—he, he, he—like a monkey sitting up in the tree with more bananas hanging around than he can eat. This one did not cause me any surprise.”

  Nor was I surprised by what the dwarf had done, not really surprised. I was more surprised at myself for trusting him with a shipload of treasure worth millions and millions of pesos de oro. It was my fault to have put this great temptation in his way. If only he had chosen a better time to desert us!

  The day steamed. Sweat ran down me in hot rivulets. “Move the Delfín Azul to the entrance,” I said, more to show that I had not been rendered helpless by the bad news than by any faith in the procedure. “She is not so sturdy as the Santa Margarita and mounts lighter cannon. But we have no choice.”

  “What if we took up the marking poles from the channel?” Flint Knife said. “This Cortés does not know that we have a channel and that if you do not keep in the channel, then, bang, you go sailing onto the rocks.”

  “Good,” I said. “And you take charge of the Delfín Azul. I’ll go to the gate and back you up. We’ll let Cortés find the channel for himself. If we’re lucky he’ll not find it and go aground.”

  “A citam. A pig.”

  “Yes, a wild pig who will try to root us out of our home.”

  “And eat us alive?”

  “Yes, alive.”

  CHAPTER 11

  HERNÁN CORTÉS, IN COMMAND OF A SHIP UNDER THE BANNER OF King Carlos the Fifth, in the name of the Holy Virgin, whose blessing he invoked before such encounters, came into sight in the early afternoon.

  Watchmen on the god house roof announced his presence by three long blasts from their conch-shell trumpets. The winds were light, and more than an hour went by before the ship was visible from the deck of the Delfín. A second hour passed before the Holy Virgin appeared at the harbor entrance.

  Cortés did not attempt the narrow passage. Instead, with a great clamor of voices and clanking of chains, the ship anchored squarely at the mouth of the channel. She was within a few short varas of where the line of markers began, the first of those we had removed in the hope of grounding all ships that tried to run the passage.

  Flint Knife grunted. “How do these fellows know where to stop? The water is not clear. They cannot see to the bottom. They must have a soothsayer. What do you think, Lord of the Winds? You do not think? Well, I think so. Likewise, that we should give them some shots before long.”

  “Their guns are trained on the city,” I said. “First, send mes sengers and order everyone indoors, especially the women. No one is to stay on the streets.”

  Messengers went out posthaste. A short time later Cortés came ashore in a longboat, flanked by a guard of musketeers. He landed near the stern of the Delfín and came on foot to our gangway, the guard following in his wake. A standard-bearer preceded him, holding aloft a banner emblazoned with a gaudy crest.

  Cortés looked much older than I remembered him, and more of a dandy in his red doublet with large white ruffs at neck and wrists. He recognized me at once, though I was wearing my jaguar mask and stood above him on the deck. He smiled, his lips curled nearly shut.

  “We meet again,” he said, “under far happier circum stances. Had I known when we met in Tenochtitlán that you were the king of La Ciudad de las Serpientes, I would have supplied you with a bodyguard and a more commodious dwelling.” He bowed with a stiff, curt movement of his head. “I ask your forgiveness.”

  I ignored the apology. “You have come here for provi sions?” I said. “You’re in need of water and food? We have both.”

  “We are in need of both,” Cortés said, “but before food and water, be it known to you that I have come from distant lands at the bidding of my emperor, Carlos the Fifth, and of his Lord and Protector, Jesus Christ.”

  I had heard these words before. He used them whenever he marched into an Indian village, speaking them by rote, from a long memory. Saying them now, he glanced from bow to stern with a practiced eye, counting the cannon, appraising the crew that served them, the numbers of men with muskets, slingstones, and javelins.

  He straightened his white ruff and glanced up at me. “Be advised,” he said, “that from this moment, henceforth and forever, La Ciudad de las Serpientes is a possession of the emperor, Carlos of Spain.”

  He paused, as I had often seen him do, to allow a guard to sound a flourish on a small silver trumpet. Whereupon a volley of musket shots answered from the deck of his ship. Clouds of smoke rose up and drifted toward us.

  I removed my mask. I waited until I caught his gaze, which had been shifting back and forth between the caravel and the warriors in plain view at the gate.

  “Señor,” I said, “this city and island and the seas that surround them are already in the possession of King Carlos. His Majesty took possession of them years ago. The day that I set foot upon these shores.”

  A flush appeared on the captain’s pale cheeks. He spat on the stones and wiped his mouth on a handkerchief he took from his sleeve.

  “You had no patent,” he said, raising his voice from the monotone he had been using. “You had no license to claim anything in the name of the king. Not so much as a grain of sand on the beach.”

  He looked away, running his eyes over the Delfín, her masts and bulwarks, her name freshly painted on the stern.

  “This is the caravel,” he announced, turning to an officer behind him, whom I had not noticed before but now recog nized as Pedro de Alvarado, the crudest of his captains. “It fits the description I received from Governor Velásquez. It’s the same ship that disappeared mysteriously a few days after reaching Yucatán.”

  Cortés turned away from Alvarado and looked at me. “This ship was stolen,” he said. “Are you the thief ?”

  Flint Knife had understood none of the conversation, but when I was accused of thievery, as Cortés raised his jeweled hand and pointed at me, he whispered a quick warning.

  “The citam gets ready to seize you. I can kill the pig before he takes one more breath.”

  Flint Knife had never seen the skills of these fierce swords men, who wore Damascus steel under their fine velvet doub lets, who were unacquainted with fear.

  “Hold off,” I said. “These are not children who face us.”

  Cortés apparently knew nothing of the Maya language, for his expression did not change.

  “On the ship that you stole,” he said, “on whose deck you now stand, there was a distinguished passenger—Rodrigo Pedroza, bishop of Alicantara, a dear friend of mine. I have recently learned from Governor Velásquez that he carried a message for me from King Carlos, whose purport I also learned. Having seized his ship, you must know what became of him.”

  Cortés had lowered his voice and was speaking now in the kindly tone I had heard him use with Moctezuma, with the Cholólans before he slew them and their blood sloshed in the gutters.

  I didn’t hesitate to answer. “Pedroza was here on the island for weeks. I saw little of him. He was a man who wanted to be by himself.”

  “Where is he?” Cortés said.

  “He disappeared,” I said. “He could be with the saints. He was a saintly man.”

  Cortés did not care for this remark. His bony cheeks took on a deeper hue—I marveled that the ruthless captain had not lost his ability to blush. His light-colored eyes searched me over, strayed off, and came back to focus on my hand.

  “I observe that you are wearing a bishop’s ring,” he said. “I have been watching you as you twisted it on your finger. May I inform you that this holy ornament is not worn on the left hand and not on the third finger, but on the right hand and the fourth finger.”

  A chill ran through me. I had forgotten the amethyst.

  “It reminds me of a ring Bishop Pedroza wore,” Cortés went on. “It was unique. Unusual in shape. Cut squarely. I admired it when the bishop gave me his blessing on the day I set off on my voyage to Yucatán.”

  Cortés had described exactly the ring I was wearing.

  “Pedroza owned many rings,” I sa
id. “He was vain about rings, also about clothes. He had clothes for every day. A chest full of clothes—surplices and cassocks and vests. And a little leather bag filled with rings.”

  “I’ve never heard this about him,” Cortés said. “But you are right about his soul. It would be with the saints if he were dead. But he is not dead, and Governor Velásquez has charged me to find him.”

  “I’ll be pleased to help you in your worthy search,” I said.

  “Pedroza, was he there when the ship was captured?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was here on the island and then disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  Cortés mumbled something to Pedro de Alvarado, then started to say something to me, then thought better of it. After a moment he turned his back and strode away, followed by his captains and men, and climbed into the longboat, which sped off up the channel. A short while later the caravel raised anchor and sailed toward the south on a brisk wind.

  “There are things I do not understand,” the nacom said, disappointed that Cortés had run away without a fight, with not so much as a skirmish. “This man comes and talks and does nothing. His people carry weapons they do not use. The ships carry big thundersticks they point at us and do not fire. Then they flee like scared rabbits.”

  “Cortés has experienced much,” I said. “He is a warrior. While he talked, he was busy counting our cannon, our spearmen waiting in the canoes. He studied the walls around the harbor, guessed at their height, counted their defenders, the ones he could see, knowing there would be double that number he could not see. He missed nothing. He decided we were ready for battle and that his chances of capturing the city were not good.”

  “He can change his mind,” Flint Knife said, “and return.”

  That Cortés would return was certain. His hunger for gold had not been satisfied by the treasures of Tenochtitlán. The hunger of his men, upon whom victory depended, was insa tiable. We mined no gold, yet he knew that we had it stored away in secret chambers and buried in ruined temples. He would not rest until it was found.