by Scott O'Dell
The river was about two hundred paces in width and ran faster than a man can walk. Gray rocks broke its surface and below the surface unseen rocks were marked by whirlpools and white water. The sound of its running was like the groans of a thousand demons.
"We can never reach the far bank," said Roa.
"Nor do we need to," Mendoza answered. "Unless the city lies there."
"If it does, then we will never see it," Roa said.
"If it does, having come this far, we shall," said Mendoza.
"God be with us," said Zuñiga.
Southward the river ran between high bastions, but to the north were stretches of beach. Setting out toward them, we had gone for an hour when fog overtook us. Since we could not see farther than a few steps, we made a fire and camped.
"What I wish to know," Roa said, standing beside the burning driftwood, "is how we carry gold back to the mules."
Looking up at the ramparts we had left almost two days before, a thin line nearly lost in the sky, I wondered also.
"We carry it on our backs, of course," Mendoza said. "One arroba to the man. More, if need be."
"I have much trouble carrying myself," said Father Francisco.
"If we die, as we may," said Zuñiga, who often spoke foolishly, "we will become angels. Then we can fly straight up with the gold."
"Angels," said Father Francisco, "have no use for gold." He turned to Mendoza. "How does a man carry one arroba of gold back along the way we have come?"
"Gold," Mendoza said, "can be very light. The lightest burden of all."
The first stars came out. It is said that stars seem brighter when seen from the bottom of a well. Of this, I do not know. I do know that these were as bright as wondrous jewels.
With night a wind rose and blew along the river. It carried a smell, faint yet familiar.
"Indian fires," Zia said. "Mizquitl wood."
Mendoza jumped to his feet and shouted.
His voice was drowned in the roar of the river. It made no difference. The Indians of Nexpan already had seen us.
It was still dark beside the river as dawn broke, but above us light swept the bastion's rim. There, like figures of burnished copper, stood three men. They were too far away to hear us so we waved, beckoning them to descend. In answer they pointed down river and vanished.
It was a moment of excitement. The chieftain, for all our doubts, had spoken the truth. We had found the scarlet cliffs, the mighty river he had described. The Indians proved that a city lay near at hand. It was a moment of caution also, for Háwikuh we still remembered.
We did not wait to eat but set off down the river, singing. Our only lack was music—drum and flute having been left behind. Within the hour we sighted three spires on the far side of the river, and at the same time, a place where the bastion was cleft.
The cleft was not much wider than my outstretched arms. Its sides towered straight toward the sky, black as a raven's wing. Through it coursed a swift stream which flowed into the river over black, gleaming stones. Beside the stream was a path worn by many feet.
This path we took and once inside the cleft found ourselves in half-darkness. Giant ferns that grew along the stream dripped water, and cold mist wet our faces. The stone path was slippery underfoot.
Soon the defile narrowed and closed over our heads. We could only find our way by touching the dank walls. The stream thundered beside us, as we scrambled along in utter darkness. Abruptly we came into sunlight.
Before us lay a vast meadow, more than a league in breadth and in width, enclosed on all sides by high, rock bastions, like those that enclosed the river. Through it wandered the stream we had followed and along the banks grew cottonwood and willow and ripening berries. Brown, wheatlike grass stretched away to the far bastions like a placid lake, broken only by islets of grazing deer and mountain sheep.
Speechless, I stared at the peaceful world that lay before me.
"Paradise," Father Francisco said, "must have looked like this on the first day."
"But where," said Mendoza, "lies the city?"
I pointed to a blue cloud above a distant field.
"Smoke," Mendoza said, "but not house or hut."
He set the matchlock and fired. Deer foraging nearby raised their heads and looked at us curiously.
"That will bring someone," Mendoza said.
Before the echo of the blast died away, an Indian rose up from behind a tree and came to where we stood and touched his forehead to the earth.
He said nothing in reply to Zia's questions, of which there were many. Nor did he show surprise at the deafening blast. Nor at the object that caused it. Nor at our strange presence. He looked at each of us in turn, out of eyes that were like the eyes of a lizard, then he started up the stream, motioning us to follow.
Zia said, "He understands nothing of what I asked. I used three languages and still he did not understand. We shall have much trouble, I fear."
"Without words," Mendoza said, "we shall have less trouble. With signs there is no loose talk."
"You do not wish me to talk?" Zia said.
Mendoza smiled, a rare thing with him. "Talk, if it pleases you. I will not listen."
"It does not please me much to talk," Zia said. "It would please me more to sit on a saddle. The same as you do. On the back of the blue roan's daughter. And say no words while I am there. No words, in any language."
"The daughter is too young to ride," Mendoza said.
"When will she not be too young?"
"Soon," he said.
"Then I can sit on her?"
Mendoza did not answer.
"Already I have a name for her," Zia said. "It is Blue Star."
Mendoza no longer was listening. From his pack he had taken a round, silver badge, the size of a small platter and polished to reflect the sun. A silver chain was fastened to it and this he hung around his neck.
When we reached the far end of the meadow where the fires burned a crowd of men and women moved toward us out of the trees. Mendoza held up the badge so that the sun struck it and threw back a flash of light into their faces. Most Indians were worshipers of the sun, and he had devised the badge to thus impress them.
The Indians stopped as the light blinded their eyes. Except for a tall man, who kept on toward us. He was not young yet he was strongly proportioned, the true color of copper, and walked lightly on his feet like an animal. When he reached us he did not touch his forehead to the earth, as had the first Indian.
Captain Mendoza said, "I am the Son of the Sun. Likewise an emissary of the noblest of Kings, and of Christ, Lord of the World."
Zia changed his words into the dialect she had used at Háwikuh, but the Indian shook his head. She tried three other dialects before he nodded and said that his name was Quantah and that he was the cacique of Nexpan.
Mendoza bowed low, then gave him a string of bright beads and two small pieces of mirror. "Ask," he said to Zia, "where the city is which he rules."
To this Chief Quantah answered with a proud sweep of a hand and one brief sentence.
"The sky, the clouds," Zia said, "the high bastions, the stream, the milpas and meadows, the beasts that graze among them, are the city he rules."
Mendoza took a long breath. "Ask him then where his people live."
Chief Quantah pointed to a grove of cottonwoods.
Zia said, "His people live among the trees. They have no need of houses because here the sun shines always."
"If they have no need of houses," Mendoza said, "then they have no need of gold. But ask him."
Zia spoke to the chief. He shook his head.
"Show him this," Mendoza said, taking a gold medallion from his neck.
Chief Quantah still shook his head. He was glancing at the matchlock which Zuñiga held. He now wished to know if it were this that made the noise of thunder.
Seizing the weapon, Mendoza set it, aimed at the trunk of a young cottonwood some twenty paces away, and fired. Smoke billowed. The co
ttonwood swayed and crashed at Chief Quantah's feet.
"Now ask him if he has gold," Mendoza said. "The matchlock may have improved his memory."
Quantah looked at the tree with mild surprise, then at the weapon, but said nothing more. And when Zia asked him again about gold, again he shook his head.
15
WE ATE THAT EVENING among the trees, from mats heaped high with food we had not seen since long before in Avipa.
During the meal a band of young braves danced and two old men plucked thin tunes from gourdlike drums. Mendoza ate little, and I doubt that he saw the dancing or heard the music. Later, after we were shown a place to camp beside a stand of willows, he left us and hurried off toward the stream.
The night was warm and a half moon shone, so we did not build a fire, but stretched out in the deep, sweet-smelling grass. From long custom on the trail I put my sword within reach.
Roa laughed. "What is it that you fear? Snakes? Wild animals? Surely not the Indians of Nexpan, who have no weapons."
"They may possess stones," I said, "like the ones at Háwikuh."
Roa had come through the battle unscathed by stone, arrow or club. He was shaped like a barrel, a good oaken cask from Jerez de la Frontera, and even the march from Cortés' Sea had not lessened his girth. He was the only fat Spaniard I have ever known.
"If they do have stones," he said, "they will not use them. Not if they remember the matchlock. How one shot sent the tree crashing down."
"The business of the tree," Father Francisco said, "I did not like. It was not an act of friendship."
"Indians know nothing of friendship," Roa said.
"The matchlock speaks louder than pious words," Zuñiga said.
"It speaks a language which I do not understand," Father Francisco answered.
The three went on, and as I lay there and half-listened while the moon wheeled down the sky, I was overcome with foreboding. This is the beginning of trouble between Father Francisco and the others, I thought. And I was right, thinking it. In the days to come trouble lay in store for them, for us all.
The moon dropped behind the bastions. From the dark sky stars sprang forth. It was deep in the night and I heard Captain Mendoza coming through the meadow. The rest were asleep. I raised myself on an elbow. He knelt beside me and put his hand on my shoulder.
"When we came up the stream at dusk," he said, "I thought that I saw bright glints in the water. In the sand on the bed of the stream. Now, by the moon's light, I have seen them again." He paused, his hand was trembling. "As God is my witness, it is gold I saw. The stream carries gold!"
Mendoza must have slept little that night, for whenever I was awake I heard him pacing. With the first gray light he roused the camp.
"Gold," he shouted. "Bring your helmets and fill them with gold."
Roa and Zuñiga, on their feet in an instant, found their helmets and stumbled off after Mendoza, who had already reached the stream.
Zia was still asleep and Father Francisco pretended to be. As for myself, I settled back into the fragrant grass and thought about the journey from Háwikuh to the ramparts of the Abyss, of the mountains we had crossed, the streams and mesas, of the notes I faithfully had put down in my journal and the map I would make from them. As I rose and went to bathe, the map was clear in my mind—its size, its colors, the Lullian nocturnal, everything. It would be the finest map I had ever limned.
In the gray light I saw the three men wading along the stream, about a furlong below me. They would stop and bend over, raise up, put their heads together, then slowly move on. They looked like three herons fishing.
The sun had not risen, yet on the stream's sandy bottom I made out an object, a dull glow of metal. I reached down and grasped it. It was the size and shape of a chestnut, a large chestnut, rough to the touch, covered with dark pocks and crevices, and very heavy. There was no mistaking it.
For months, wherever men gathered, I had heard little except the talk of gold. In the taverns of Mexico City, on shipboard or on the trail, even in the streets of Seville when I first came to that city to take up my studies, it was on everyone's tongue. Yet never before had I held a piece of the metal in my hand. Nor seen it, save after it had been fashioned into medallions or the King's castellanos.
The nugget lay heavy in my palm. I turned it over, examining all its sides, the sharp edges, the pocks, the crevices. To be certain, I put it between my teeth and bit down. With strange elation I saw that I had left a mark upon it. This was the test Mendoza had once described to me.
I looked at the nugget, at two others lying on the stream bed nearby, and a curious feeling seized me, which I cannot explain. It was like a fever and a sickness. It was as if all the stories of gold that men had told me, all their dreams of power and wealth, had suddenly come alive in my own blood.
"In a short time," I said to myself, "I can fill my helmet. I will search the stream and fill many helmets. Tomorrow is soon enough to work on the map."
While I stood and gazed at the nugget, feeling its massy pull against my hand, a boy came with a message from Chief Quantah. But for this I would have stayed there on the stream all day, searching the sandy bed for gold.
16
THE BOY SHOWED the way to a place beyond the cottonwood grove.
Here in a grassy swale the people of Nexpan were gathered. They knelt in a half-circle below a stone altar festooned with greenery and wild flowers. On the altar stood Chief Quantah, his arms held out toward the sun which had not yet risen. Everyone was silent. Every face was turned to the east and the dark stone bastion.
Zia knelt beside me in the grass. I had thought to kneel also, but Father Francisco nudged my arm.
A thread of light showed along the bastion's rim. A murmur ran through the throng. The thread widened. The bastion was suddenly ablaze and the murmur swelled to a chant. It was a cry of wonder and delight, as if the sun had never risen before.
The worshipers fell silent and the cacique spoke three words slowly, three times over. After he had finished, the people went singing to the grove, where pyramids of fruit were already set out, and gourds filled with a custard made of sheep's milk and piñon nuts.
Quantah asked us, as we sat on the grass, about our leader. With Zia's help Father Francisco told him that Mendoza had gone to search for gold. The chief shook his head.
"This gold," he said, "why is it of such value that a man goes hungry to search for it?"
"Gold," Father Francisco replied, "can be traded for gold castellanos. If a man has many castellanos, he can buy many things. If he can buy many things, he is a rico, a person of wealth and of power over others."
Chief Quantah nodded, but I doubt that he understood what was said. Though later he did understand much of Father Francisco's little sermon.
During the time when we had waited for the sun to rise, Father Francisco had held the cross in front of him. He held it as a shield against the pagan sun, the kneeling figures and the worshipful chant. On his face was a look just as intense as the look of Captain Mendoza when he had left that morning to hunt for gold.
After we had eaten, Father Francisco took the cross and led Quantah to the stone altar. Among the boughs and flowers he planted the cross, which was taller than he and made from a cottonwood branch.
He then told in simple words, as Zia changed them into Quantah's language, the story of Christ, the Son of God. How He had lived and how He had died on a cross like the one there before us.
Chief Quantah listened and from time to time nodded his head, saying that he understood.
Then Father Francisco told how when Christ died on the cross, at that moment, at midday with the sun shining, how the sky grew dark and the earth moved and the hill where the cross stood was rent asunder. He told how they buried Christ in a tomb hewn out of the rock and in front of it rolled a large stone.
Chief Quantah looked at the sun and afterwards at the cross, which he touched with his hand.
"On the third day after Christ
was buried," Father Francisco said, "as the sun rose on that day, the watchers saw that the stone had been rolled back from the tomb and that the tomb was empty."
Quantah said, "Who was it that took the man from the tomb in the rock?"
"He was not taken away by anyone," Father Francisco said. "The rock fell apart and He rose from the dead."
Quantah asked Zia to repeat these last words. When she did he said, "I understand the death and the darkening sky and the tomb. But I do not understand how a dead man rises."
Father Francisco was silent, too puzzled to know what more to say.
A bee was seeking honey in one of the flowers, and seeing it, he reached down and caught it up. He asked for a gourd of water, and when it was brought, he held the bee under the water until it grew still, then set it on a rock.
A limp ball of fuzz and gauzy wings, it seemed dead. But slowly, as the sun's heat dried it off, the bee began to stir, to move one wing and then the other. Suddenly it rose on its legs and flew away.
Chief Quantah made a gesture toward the sky. "This man who was dead and then was alive and then flew away, I would like to talk with."
"Any day or any night you can talk to Him," Father Francisco said. "We can talk to Him now."
He took Chief Quantah's hand, the two men knelt beside the cross, and Father Francisco prayed.
The prayer over, Quantah said, "I heard you speak to Him, but though I listened carefully I did not hear Him speak to you."
"When you yourself pray," Father Francisco said, "then you will hear Him."
"Will He speak in the language of Nexpan?" Quantah asked.
"He speaks in many languages," Father Francisco said. "In all the languages spoken by men."
Chief Quantah said, "I would like to know more about this man. When He went through the land, before He was slain, what did He say to people?"
