The Cortés Trilogy: Enigma Revenge Revelation

by John Paul Davis

  Danny joined Ben in the fourth bedroom. He saw Ben rubbing his leg. “Everything okay?”

  “Just a bit sore.” Ben grimaced. “Where’s he gone?”

  “Along the corridor. You’re gonna have to start trusting him sometime.”

  Ben raised an eyebrow. “Between you and me, I’m still raw from the last time I trusted one of his compatriots.”

  *

  He headed along the corridor, looking for Juan. Most of the doors were closed, one at the far end the only exception.

  “Juan?” Ben entered the room and saw Cortés standing quietly at the centre of an oak floor, whose boards creaked beneath him as he made contact with his walking stick. The room was larger than the others he had seen; purple curtains covered double bay windows that faced away from the setting sun, while overhead lights illuminated a large ornate setting, distinctly scholarly. Large bookcases were arranged along much of the length of the walls, the biggest standing at the far right of the room close to a Queen Anne desk.

  The books aside, the first things that caught Ben’s attention were the wall decorations. Unlike the paintings downstairs and on the stairway, he saw everything from charts and maps to photographs and press cuttings to things that would have looked more at home in a university library. An A3-sized colour map of the Isles of Scilly was affixed to the right wall, its content partially obscured by a second antique desk on which there was a yellow globe that showed the states of America as they were during the time of the Confederacy, and Antarctica before the expedition of William Speirs Bruce. Looking at the map, he instantly recognised the near-perfect horseshoe outline of St Lide’s. A series of pins had been placed in various parts of the isles, the majority around Hell’s Bay.

  Colts sure spent some time analysing the possibilities, he mused.

  A few metres away, a second, much larger map was pinned on the adjoining left wall, its size dwarfing everything around it. Unlike the first, it covered a significantly larger geographical area: extending from Hadrian’s Wall to the DR Congo, and from Mexico to parts of Jordan.

  Ben assumed it had probably once been a world map that Colts, or his predecessor, had cut down in size.

  Like the map of the Isles of Scilly, a series of coloured pins had been inserted at various points, some accompanied by markings with either a felt-tip pen or a luminous yellow highlight. The first thing he noticed was that the area that surrounded Godolphin had been highlighted.

  Considered apparently, but unconfirmed.

  In addition to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, two further areas were marked in detail.

  The first, somewhere in the Extremadura region of Spain.

  The second, somewhere in Mexico.

  Cortés was standing a few metres to Ben’s left, gazing out through the nearby window that overlooked the closest of the neighbouring houses. There were several bookcases in the centre of the room, their shelves filled with hardback books, the majority highly illustrated. Colts hadn’t let an inch of space go unfilled. The wall surrounding the window was so heavily decorated, its colour was almost impossible to determine. Accompanying a series of diagrams, artwork and photographs were a seemingly endless collection of papers on which were handwritten questions.

  All apparently unanswered.

  As Ben approached, he noticed one piece that stood out from everything else he had seen. The drawing was clearly an original, but instinct told him that Colts had drawn it himself. It showed two silhouettes standing in the shadow of an altar in a grand and ornate Aztec-style temple constructed of heavy stone. The first thing that struck him was the artist’s attention to detail, how even the gaps in the stonework had been arranged to represent evidence of past trauma, and how every shadow seemed to be perfectly in perspective.

  At the heart of the altar were four large idols, of differing colours but similar shape and brightness. Light glowed from each like a primitive light bulb, reminding him of what he had first witnessed not thirty-six hours earlier. A fifth stone joined them, slightly smaller, but brighter. The similarities were intriguing.

  It was as though the so-called Stone of Fire had once had four sisters.

  “The Tollan Stones!” Cortés said.

  Ben thought he was hearing things. “What did you say?”

  Standing alongside him, Cortés was practically shaking. “When the first conquistador army returned from the New World, they brought with them stories of a great civilisation that existed centuries before the Aztecs. Never in my wildest dreams did I realise that the great treasure could include such legendary items from that earlier time.”

  A new set of questions began to form in Ben’s mind. The stories Colts had told him, both at Godolphin and during that first conversation in the Gibbous Moon, had prepared him only for one event in history: the Noche Triste, the killing of at least five hundred Spaniards and Cortés’s temporary retreat to the coast. Most of the treasure they had acquired had been lost, retaken by the Aztecs or tossed in the great lake that once surrounded the city. The rest had been either evacuated or hidden.

  Some of it reclaimed sixty years later by Cortés’s granddaughter.

  And buried on St Lide’s.

  Ben placed his hand gently on the sketch of the five stones. Whoever had drawn it had used an A2-sized sheet of white paper; he concluded it was pastel based. There was evidence of faint pencil lines; he assumed once part of the preparatory work, which the artist had later rubbed out. Common sense told him that what he saw was a copy of a photograph; either that or the artist had simply used his imagination. He looked again to his right and focused on Colts’s unanswered questions. They all concerned the same greater question.

  What became of them?

  Ben’s attention was now fixed on the stones. “The Tollan Stones, this can’t be real?”

  Cortés turned to face him. “Tell me, Professor, what reason do you have for your doubting?”

  Ben knew he had his pick of choices. “The city of Tollan is a myth. Just like Chicomoztoc.” He spoke of the mythical place of the seven caves that curiously seemed to have been replicated around the castle at Hell’s Bay. “Thanks to your countrymen’s book-burning skills, only limited accounts survive of how the great Mesoamerican civilisations actually evolved and, sadly, most of them fail to distinguish between history and myth.”

  Cortés responded cautiously. “It is true that the methods used by the conquistadors to put an end to paganism seriously reduced the evidence now available to modern historians, but you cannot, nevertheless, confirm with any certainty, Professor, that the great city did not exist. Just because one has not seen something, does not mean one can disclaim it.”

  “I don’t need to disclaim it any more than I do Middle Earth. And stop calling me professor – no one makes professor at thirty-two. I’m just an ordinary doctorate.”

  A wry smile formed on the Spaniard’s lips. “My apologies. Had I understood your position correctly earlier, I would have made greater allowance for your past misjudgements.”

  Ben faked a smile. “If you’re going to call me anything, call me Ben.”

  “That is what your friends call you?”

  “It’s what most people call me.”

  “Then answer me this, Ben: when you have a civilisation that becomes so uncontrollably big . . .”

  “Presumably you’re talking about the Aztecs?”

  “There have been a number in that region over the centuries; on that I’m sure we can agree. When you have a civilisation that evolves into something so great, how do you begin to identify its roots? After all, according to many, the legendary caves of which you have spoken have been found, have they not?”

  Ben was aware that a number of locations that matched some of the basic characteristics had been identified. “The caves themselves were part of a loose and relatively modern myth about the origins of the Aztec civilisation. In the beginning, the caves were all there was; everything great sprang from there. It was their Garden of Eden, a land from wh
ich they, ironically, were destined to be cast out . . .”

  “Cast out?”

  “Just like Eden, the Aztecah never returned to their cave. Even if it did once exist, there’s no way now to connect it to what came later.”

  “And what of their creation – in your academic opinion?”

  Ben shrugged. “The earliest historical accounts we have were written by native scholars who had attended the new Spanish-governed school system in the mid-1520s. Not only were they less experienced than their forebears as historians, but they had a motive to look to the past to justify their history. We now know for a fact there were many pre-Columbian tribes and settlements who set up home in the Valley of Mexico, dating back to the hunter-gatherers of twenty-three thousand years ago. Their existence has long been known. At least for the last century.”

  “And the original city? It is a myth?”

  Ben stared at Cortés and laughed. Despite recent discoveries, the last thing he wanted was to open up a can of worms.

  “Your countrymen must have heard a lot of legends over there; who knows, maybe they invented one or two themselves. If anything, your ancestor would have had good reason to encourage such myths. If the King of Spain believed undiscovered riches remained hidden, Hernán Cortés would have had more chance of obtaining their backing to return.”

  Juan laughed. “Believe me, my friend, had my ancestor wished to fabricate or confirm rumour, his achievements would have seemed far greater than history now records. When the great Marco Polo returned from the east, he captivated all the known world with his tales of three-headed monsters and how the armies of Tartarus lay in wait beyond the great rivers, preparing to unleash a great wrath on civilisation.”

  Ben took that with a pinch of salt. “Even by 1520, I think the world had moved on from Marco Polo. But anyway, your ancestor didn’t need to invent something like Tollan. He already had something more tangible.”

  “Ah, yes, the city on the great lake.” Juan spoke of Tenochtitlán. “But even at that time, there was more than one great city known to exist in the kingdom. As a man with your expertise is surely already aware, the great cities of Mexico did not always belong just to one civilisation.”

  “What exactly are we talking about here: the Maya? The Olmecs? The Toltecs?” Ben realised what he was getting at. “Teotihuacán?”

  Cortés smiled; his eyes once again returned to the pastel drawing. From the diagram alone, it was unclear what age and civilisation it was connected to.

  Only that Colts appeared obsessed by it.

  Ben remained sceptical. “The city of Teotihuacán is an enigma. Even to this day, no one really knows who built it.”

  “A perfect candidate for the legendary city of Tollan.”

  “Not really.” Ben was confident. “A city of Tollan we now know did exist; it was founded close to the city of Tula by the Toltecs, but that city was far more basic than the Tollan of later myth. In any case, there’s absolutely no evidence the Aztecs had anything to do with Teotihuacán. Not only is it completely in the wrong location, but it was abandoned far too early.”

  “Its age is surely a factor in its favour,” Cortés suggested.

  “Well, I guess it predates their own capital city, if that’s what you mean? But really no one has even the remotest clue who built it. Your own people even attributed it to the Toltecs, despite it coming almost a thousand years too late.”

  “An obvious miscalculation, I agree, but the city itself has other merits.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” Ben remarked indignantly. “You may like to kid yourself with half-baked theories, but believe me, you’re dealing with nonsense. Things like this only hinder your quest. Examine the city yourself with your own eyes and you’ll understand exactly what I mean. The Pyramid of the Sun is the largest thing you’ll ever see; it’s the Empire State Building of its day, back then probably the scariest thing known to man. The Avenue of the Dead is like a pagan Champs-Élysées; when the Aztecs first saw the raised platforms that lined its sides, they actually mistook them for tombs – a strange mistake to make when returning to your legendary homeland.

  “Aside from the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, and I know what you’re gonna say about winged serpents, there is not a shred of evidence connecting it with anything close to what you’re looking for. You talk of merits, I’ll give you merits: the treasure of Montezuma has been found, at least part of it; its existence, amazed as I am to admit it, was actually well signposted. The city of Tollan, you have the opposite problem. Not only are you looking for something that no two people have ever agreed about, but, even more importantly, we have no idea where to look or what time period it dates from.”

  “I understand your concerns, but the subject of archaeology has never been an exact science. Remember, until Schliemann made his chance discovery, Troy was considered a great fable. The existence of such places should not be dismissed without thorough investigation.” Cortés glanced again at the drawing. “Your friend clearly thought it worthy of his own time.”

  What about Colts? Ben wondered. For the last few minutes he had been so wrapped up in ancient mythology, he had almost completely disregarded Colts’s motivation. The evidence suggested Colts had been the artist; one of the two silhouettes in the foreground matched Colts’s build. The other was an older white man of classic archaeological leanings.

  Ben assumed, his predecessor.

  The artwork was a work of fiction; that was one possible hypothesis. Colts had done it for show, inspired by his love of the subject and his wild imagination. If the drawing was old, he couldn’t rule out the possibility he was working on an old lead.

  No, Ben decided. Colts had clearly placed emphasis on the question.

  How?

  Clearly Colts had directed him to his house and study in order for him to witness it first hand.

  He looked at Cortés, suddenly intrigued. “So, what are they? The stones? A minute ago, you seemed pretty taken by them.”

  “You do not know?”

  “Matter of fact, till now I’d never even heard of them.”

  Cortés stared back smugly, adopting an air of scholarly contempt. “There were only four stones in the beginning. One of which may be more familiar to you.”

  “The Stone of Fire?”

  “At the time of my ancestor’s arrival in the New World, the Stone of Fire was reputed to have been located in Tenochtitlán itself, in a chamber below the great temple, though its existence was said to date back to the earliest times. Once every fifty-two years it was brought into the temple and then paraded through the city in a celebration called the New Fire Ritual, where the high priest on a chariot would hold it aloft. People used to come from all around to witness it. It was celebrated because of its connection with the winged serpent god. The only thing in the city of connection to the creators.”

  Ben was vaguely familiar with the story of the ritual. “The only thing of connection to the creators . . . What of the others?”

  “At some point in its history, the Stone of Fire became separated from its brothers. It was partly for that reason, the knowledge became lost.”

  “How the hell do you know all this?”

  Cortés reached inside his jacket pocket and retrieved the book by Díaz. He waved it in Ben’s face.

  Ben was suddenly curious. “He mentions this?”

  “Not in the detail I would like.”

  Ben folded his arms. “The conquistadors were never concerned with the old legends. The great treasures were all brought to them; the only exception was Pizarro’s chase for El Dorado, and that wasn’t in Mexico.”

  “It may surprise you to learn, Ben, that our knowledge of the Aztecs is not limited to what you might consider mainstream. What great things my countrymen saw in their time there really did little more than whet the appetite. The valley alone was capable of concealing many secrets. Even today, who knows what is still out there?”

  “Be that as it may, you still have
one almighty problem. Even Colts was stumped by this one. You still have no proof they exist.”

  Cortés looked Ben in the eye. “That is where you are perhaps mistaken.”

  The Sixth Day

  20

  Mérida, Extremadura, 12 p.m.

  “It is just up here on the right,” Valeria instructed the taxi driver in her native Spanish. She offered him her loveliest smile as he made the turn, knowing the chances of a reduced fare were suddenly improved.

  Not that she was short of cash.

  The city of her birth had always felt like a part of her soul. Though three years had passed since her last visit, the good memories resurfaced immediately, as though she had never been away.

  The sights never changed. The midday sun beat down strongly on the famous Roman amphitheatre, its ancient walls casting an iconic dark shadow across the nearby trees. People moved quickly along the Puente Romano footbridge, crossing the Río Guadiana that flowed quickly beneath. Tourists congregated in the usual places: hordes surrounded the famous Temple of Diana, photographers snapping away at leisure, while others negotiated the nearby Acueducto de los Milagros, some enjoying a picnic on the lush grass in the shadow of the ancient stonework.

  A pleasant breeze blew softly through the air vents, gently caressing her naked arms that were already starting to tan. The air conditioner had been set to 17°C; she estimated the outside temperature was at least ten degrees warmer. Sunlight shone down intensely, the sky a clear expanse of azure that stretched uninterrupted across the horizon. She recalled her conversation with Ben in the bar of the Gibbous Moon, how he had quipped that she was the only person ever to emigrate from Spain to England. She allowed herself momentary pleasure at the memory, the harmlessness of the moment.

  At least now, she would never have to return.

  *

  Seated behind Valeria, Chris cut a forlorn figure. Though the luxury hotel bed had done wonders for his muscles, his spirit had reached a new low. In a way, the extra rest was the last thing he needed.