The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  I lunged from my pallet, taking my attacker, who by now had a good hold on my neck, with me. His feet were dangling from the floor as I walked to the window and tossed him out. The second assailant had already fled. At dawn, as soon as he heard my story, Ah Machika dispatched a band of fast runners and captured the pair. He sacrificed them weeks later to the spring god, Xipe Totec, and sent a severed finger from each to Zambac in Petén.

  Many months after this incident, when Ah Machika judged that I was getting ready to leave Tikal, he took me to the gold fields. Carried in litters, we traveled for hours until we reached a broad river. On both sides of the river were vast stretches of what appeared to be golden sand.

  “There,” the cacique said, extending his arms in a kingly gesture. “Feast your eyes!”

  The sun was overhead, pouring down upon fields of shining gold, windrows and swales and dunes of gold. There were no trails leading in or out of the glittering expanse. No sign of human tracks, though I did make out just beyond me the deli cate marks of a lizard’s claws.

  The scene blinded my eyes. It could not be. It was impossi ble that so much gold could exist in the world.

  And it was impossible. I had taken no more than a step when I realized that I was treading upon thin, dustlike particles—not like those I had seen in the riverbed on Isla del Oro. It was not gold that lay before me, shimmering in the sun, but worthless pyrites—fool’s gold.

  I concealed my disappointment as best I could. “Wonder ful,” I said, clapping my hands together like a child. “The gods have been kind to you.”

  “To us,” the cacique said. “We share the gods’ treasure. The two of us.”

  I wondered if he was being honest with me, if he really believed that the worthless stuff was gold. “You have never used it?” I asked him. “Made ornaments—beads or rings, anything at all?”

  “Tzelta the sibyl forbade me,” he said. “Long ago now she spoke a warning not to touch the gold. Not to come near that gold until the day.”

  “What day?”

  “The day a white cloud from the sky came down and walked like a man…”

  “I am the cloud?”

  “You are the white cloud that walks,” Ah Machika said firmly, as though he believed it. “We share the gold, yes?”

  “We’ll melt it into bars,” I said. “Beautiful gold bars.”

  “What will be done then?”

  “We’ll make ornaments of the bars. Rings. Necklaces. Gold plates to eat from.”

  The cacique’s black eyes danced.

  I left Tikal early the next morning, promising him to return in a few days to help collect our gold. I harbored no ill will toward Ah Machika. I was only angry at myself for wasting months, a year, almost two years on the wildest of chases.

  I took the south trail from Tikal, since the north trail would have led me back toward Petén. It was well traveled on this morning. Caravans were moving both ways, from as far north as Tenochtitlán and from distant places to the south.

  Late that afternoon I came to a fork in the trail, where several Indian caravans were encamped. Upon inquiring, I learned that the left fork led to Panama. Further inquiry dis closed that the right fork led to the cave of the sibyl Tzelta, and that all in the encampment had visited her that day.

  A small island to the north of the Island of the Seven Serpents housed a sibyl who counseled women who were either pregnant or wished to be. Married or unmarried, young or old, they poured in upon her from the mainland, from everywhere.

  I had never had an occasion to visit this sibyl, but I was acquainted with her reputation for prophecy and miracles. I recalled that Ah Machika had visited the sibyl Tzelta. Al though I was not impressed with the advice she had given him, in a bitter mood, still blaming myself for time wasted, I de cided to take the fork that led to her cave.

  I arrived there at dusk to find a dozen or more supplicants waiting to see her. The sessions went on through the night and through the next day. At dawn of the second day, I was led by two masked women dressed in yellow, diaphanous robes into an opening, no more than a crevice, in the face of a wooded mountain.

  I was escorted down a passageway, at the end of which was a row of candles set into a wall. Below the candles, which gave off a curious scent, was an even narrower passage, one that required me to get down on my hands and knees.

  The women left me, with instructions to crawl forward until I came to a room lit by only one candle. Here I was to lie prone, put my ear to the floor, and listen. I was not to ask questions. Questions resulted in misunderstanding. They led nowhere. They would not be answered. I was to give only my name and destination.

  Crawling forward into a dark room not much larger than a closet, lit by one small candle set in the mouth of a grinning serpent, I lay flat on the stone floor and listened. At first all I heard was a buzzing in my ears, caused by exertion. Then my ears cleared and I heard the rapid beating of my heart. The beating grew faint and suddenly was enveloped in deep silence.

  “My name is Julián Escobar,” I said, as I had been in structed.

  There was no answer, only the distant sound of my words and silence again. I remembered that I had been told to give my destination. I had none. The silence deepened. Then I re membered that I had been told that one of the forks in the trail led to a place called Panama. I said the strange name in a shaking voice.

  From far below me the name was repeated. It sounded like an echo of my own voice, yet it was the voice of a girl, some one very young and far away. I waited, scarcely taking a breath.

  “That land where the great seas meet,” the sibyl intoned. She spoke softly, in Maya but with the accent of an Aztecatl. “What is it you seek in this place?”

  I was silent, making certain that I answered her truthfully. I was not there in a musty cell, lying on a wet, hard stone, to give foolish answers.

  “You are silent. You hesitate and chew your thumb, not knowing why you go to Panama?”

  She no longer sounded like a sibyl but like a woman who, having encountered many Spaniards, was on the verge of anger.

  “Being a Spaniard,” she said, “you will know that you go for one reason. Spaniards search for one thing. Not for love. Not for friends. Not for land. Not to plant crops and harvest them. They search only for gold and nothing else.”

  “For gold, nothing else.” Then, forgetting that I was not to ask questions, I said, “Where can it be found?”

  There was a long silence. I feared that I had incurred her wrath.

  “Not in Panama,” she finally answered. “South from Panama, in another place, there’s a man who is called Inca. Each morning this lord is carried to a sacred lake. He takes off his night clothing and priests cover him with sweet oils. Then he is covered with gold dust, even his face and private possessions. Then, as dawn breaks, he walks into the lake and washes himself. Every day of the year he does this, except when he is on journeys. His father did this and his grandfather also. At the bottom of the lake gold lies thick.”

  I had heard this tale on the deck of the Santa Margarita from one of the crew, long before I reached New Spain. It meant nothing to me then. It did now.

  “But first you must find the place where the two great seas meet,” the sibyl continued, “and the man in a flame-colored doublet.”

  “A Spaniard?”

  “In a flame-colored doublet, who walks with a slight limp.”

  “There are many such. What is his name?”

  “His name escapes me. It has a meaning, however, like Uitzilopochtli. But it is not that, not Witchy Wolves. In a week, in six days, I will remember.”

  “Only one man knows about the gold? A man in a red doublet?”

  There was no answer. I asked the question again. Still there was no answer. I pressed my ear hard against the stone. I heard nothing but primordial silence, so deep that it sounded like a river rushing leagues below me under the mountain. I began to shiver from the cold. Scrambling to my knees, I crawled back through the p
assage, into the sunlight at last, and took the trail that led to the south, in search of a man in a red doublet.

  A fierce storm had blown up, but I did not pause. The words of the seeress were burned into my flesh.

  CHAPTER 21

  I FOUND THE MAN WHO WORE A FLAME-COLORED DOUBLET AND WALKED with a slight limp on my first day in the Spanish town of Pan ama. Indeed, as I came out of the jungle after four hellish weeks on the trail south from the cave of the Mayan sibyl, he crossed the street at a distance from me, a small figure in a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes against the noon time glare. Had I not stepped behind a tree and waited until he passed out of sight, we would have met there on the street.

  I had two reasons for evading him at that moment. Stripped down to skin and bones from weeks of hard travel, my face swollen by insect bites, my lips cracked from the tropical sun, I was a poor specimen to ask a favor of anyone. Furthermore, since I had heard on the way that the town was populated by Spaniards lately come from Spain, there was a good chance that this man in the red doublet had learned from someone that I was being sought by Cortés and the governor of Hispaniola.

  I slept the rest of the day at a hovel calling itself the Inn of the Virgin, burned my Mayan rags, and bought Spanish clothes with the next-to-last pearl I owned. That night, after a heavy rain, I ventured into streets that lay knee-deep in mud and visited a dive where I would run no risk of meeting the man in the red doublet. La Perla, the Pearl, a corral that stabled horses and had a long trestle on one side, served balche in earthen cups.

  I learned that the man I sought was named Francisco Pizarro, that everyone in Panama knew Pizarro, that half the inhabitants hated Pizarro, the rest loved him, and with both he was feared as a man of dangerous pride, softhearted at moments, tough as Toledo steel, and always unpredictable.

  A leathery young soldier—one dressed in quilted armor, at least, whose skin had been scorched by many suns—bought me a cup of balche. I thought I had seen him before in Tenochtitlán, but this proved to be wrong. He had never been north of Panama and had never heard of Hernán Cortés.

  He said, throwing an arm around my shoulder, “When you came through the door, amigo, it gave me a start. I thought to myself, A tree, Sainted Mother, and it walks. It walks like a man.”

  From this Tomás Calderón I learned much more than if I had gone straight to Francisco Pizarro and said, “General, I would like to hear about the gold that exists there in the land of the Inca Indians, which everyone speaks about and with which you are familiar, having been in this land.”

  “The country,” Tomás said, “is vast beyond the telling. Mountains—they must touch the moon—rear themselves high in the east. To the west the sea surges for hundreds of leagues. Between them lies the rich country of the Inca. The nobles eat with gold knives from gold plates. They tread streets paved with gold. They wear gold sandals with gold tassels, and great gold loops hang from their ears.”

  I asked about the prince who covered himself with gold each morning and bathed himself in a sacred lake, the one the sibyl had described.

  “Yes, I have heard of this,” he said. “His name is Atahualpa. His people call him Lupe Luzir, King of Great Kings, Child of the Sun, Inca.”

  “If all that gold lies there, why is Pizarro here?” I asked.

  Tomás Calderón, though a young man, carried the signs of a veteran. Both cheeks bore scars, and his long nose, which he kept rubbing with one hand as he drank, had been broken in recent days.

  “Pizarro’s here because he is just returned from Spain. He has enemies, you know, dozens. He went to Spain to confound them by getting the king’s blessing for his enterprises. And by God’s mercy, he got it. Now he’s governor and captain general of all of New Castile. Not of the country that lies north of here. That country’s smaller, half the size of New Castile. Has a different governor.”

  “Who?” I asked, though I knew it to be Hernán Cortés.

  Tomás shrugged and drank down the cup of balche he had been holding. Then he drew out his sword, waved it above his head, and charged at a group of Indians at the far end of the trestle, shouting, “¡Vayan, diablos morenos! Out, brown devils. ¡Vayan! ”

  I slipped away during the melee that followed, but the next night, having remained hidden all day, I learned at the same tavern all that I needed to know about Francisco Pizarro. My informant was a young Indian named Felipillo, Little Philip, who introduced himself as an interpreter for Pizarro. I asked him if the general was acquainted with Hernán Cortés.

  He snickered, showing small white teeth sharp as a ferret’s. “His mother is related by blood to Cortés. Governor General Pizarro has been in the New World for many years. He’s ac quainted with everyone. He was at Balboa’s side when that explorer discovered the ocean we can see here now, pounding on the beach out there in the dark. He has known Cortés for a long time. They are friends, these men.”

  “When did they last see each other?”

  “I have been with Governor General Pizarro for six years. And in that time the two have not met.”

  “Or exchanged letters?”

  “Letters? Ha. Where do you think you are, in Seville?” He squinted his eyes and gave me a quick look. “You ask a lot of questions, señor,’’ he added as he left, a fine sword, which was nearly as long as he was tall, clanking at his heels.

  I lay down on my flea-infested bed that night, easy in my mind for the first time since my arrival in Panama, certain that Pizarro had heard nothing about me from Cortés.

  The next morning I went in search of the governor-general. I found him on the beach in the midst of a gang of workers loading the longboat of a ship anchored close offshore. Except for his red doublet, I would not have picked him out of the crowd. He was diminutive, even among the small Spanish workmen who surrounded him.

  Catching sight of me from the corner of his eye, he turned his back and kept me waiting until the longboat was loaded, went on its way, and reached the caravel. Only then did he turn to stare.

  “Your honor,” I said, holding my ground, deciding it would be better than if I approached him. “I have heard that you are looking for men.”

  “Not looking,” he said.

  It was a rebuff, delivered in a gravelly voice.

  “Who are you?” he said, continuing to stare.

  “Julián Escobar,” I said.

  “From whence?”

  “From Maya country. Near that of the Azteca.”

  “Then you have encountered my friend Hernán Cortés.”

  “Many times, sir.”

  “A fine man. But overly ambitious. He ranges far. Too far.”

  Pizarro walked to where I stood and looked up at me. It was done simply and without swagger, yet the effect was one of defiance, saying to me, “Young man, you are in the pres ence of the governor general of New Castile; take off your hat.”

  I did so.

  “We can use a man of your dimensions,” he said. “What do you do well? Set sails without climbing a ladder?”

  “I have been a steersman.”

  “On land, what can you do?”

  “I am a good walker, sir. I have just walked here from five hundred leagues away and more.”

  “A recommendation,” Pizarro said. “There is much walking to be done once we reach land. Through country wilder than the configurations of hell. How are you with a musket? There are things to shoot at. Thousands of brown ones.”

  “Passable, sir.”

  “You will learn quickly. Your life will depend upon it.”

  Pizarro stepped back but kept regarding me. He was old enough to be my grandfather, a man sixty or more, wearing a scanty black beard threaded with gray, erect, narrow at the shoulders, stiff in his movements, and very small.

  It was his eyes that held you. Black, penetrating, the eyes of a man quick to fury, and yet there was about them a trace of sadness, as if what he had seen had left him unsatisfied, a look of resentment that I didn’t understand until mu
ch later, when I heard from his own lips that he had been born in a pigsty to an unwed mother, a bastard child whom life had buffeted about.

  “Why do you wish to join this expedition? No jira, no picnic this one. I have made two journeys into Peruvian lands and have left more men there in the Indian wilds than I ever brought back. What is the purpose? What will hold you to gether when the trail grows steep?”

  “Gold,” I said promptly. “There’s enough in Peru, I hear, to meet the needs of all the kings in creation.”

  “Not adventure?”

  “I’ve seen enough adventure.”

  “Good! Adventure wears thin. It rusts. Gold does not.”

  I was certain that I detected in his words a hint that gold, no matter how much, would never satisfy him. And that deep in the glance he cast upon me was some soaring ambition that even his recently gained title of governor general of New Cas tile did not satisfy. Time proved me right!

  CHAPTER 22

  THE NEXT MORNING AT DAWN PIZARRO GATHERED HIS FORCES, WHICH numbered less than two hundred men, and celebrated the feast day of St. John the Evangelist. Under a clear sky and a favor able wind we then embarked for Peru, land of the Inca. I held the tiller of the largest of the three caravels.

  We sailed for thirteen days, held back by contrary currents. In the Bay of St. Matthew, Pizarro went ashore with his men while our ships continued on course some distance from the coast.

  After two weeks of sailing we sighted Pizarro again, loaded down now with gold and silver he had taken from the Indians during his march south.The treasure was divided among his men; la quinta taken out for King Carlos the Fifth was put aboard; and the fleet, to my great disappointment, was sent back to Panama to deliver the king’s share to the royal treasurer.

  We sailed south once more, taking with us, in addition to twenty recruits, the royal inspector and a host of high officers appointed by the crown to oversee Pizarro’s adventure. I began to wonder if my lot was to be a permanent steersman between Panama and Peru, hauling traffic back and forth, transporting casks of gold and silver in which so far I had no share.