A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  Guerrero was excited, and therefore impatient with Aguilar. For Aguilar was cringing. To him it was as though someone had suddenly slit a bull’s throat in the middle of a mass. It was a little more of religion than he wished to know about.

  Guerrero, Aguilar, and the others were driven into the middle of the square and up some steps to a platform. In the middle of the platform was a large wooden cage, ten feet on a side, seven feet high, and barred at the top. They were shoved into this and the gate fastened behind them.

  Guerrero looked around him. The Spanish were in love with death. But these people must be terrified of it, to have to make so much of it.

  From the elevated cage he could see the pyramid, which was low and crudely made. He could even see the stone at the top of it, where four blue priests were waiting, for the stone was placed to be seen from below.

  Valdivia and Léal had reached the foot of the stairs.

  The drumming stopped. There was not even an overtone to ripple out into that sudden hush.

  The party went up the steep stairs towards that stone. The sun was risen now. The priests helped the men up.

  Léal was sacrificed first, being the lesser man, and then Valdivia. That procedure was a customary honour. But Valdivia was a gentleman, one who made an idol of self-control, he had therefore made an effort to throw off the effects of the drug, had succeeded, and therefore saw what was to be done to him.

  The crowd was motionless. Then, it was to be expected, not a mass bell sounded, but a single note on a double drum.

  Guerrero looked up.

  The priests had laid Valdivia on the stone, holding him down by his wrists and ankles. The stone was convex, so that his head and feet hung down, and his chest thrust up as though straining towards heaven. He did not flinch.

  The high priest stepped forward and made an expert upward incision with an obsidian knife. Valdivia screamed. His body twitched. But he was not yet dead. The priest groped his right hand into the incision and tore out the heart. Valdivia’s soul flew out of the top of the life tree, like a bird, as may be seen in the códices. The priest held the heart up and then passed it to an attendant.

  It is unforgettable to hear a self-controlled man scream.

  Aguilar began to mumble the office for the dead, turning his back on everyone.

  The four assistant priests flung the empty body down to the courtyard.

  There other priests took the body and flayed it, peeling it from the back. The drumming and chanting began again. The corpse was carted off, red and fatty, except for its feet and hands, which had not been skinned.

  The Spaniards sat down in their cage. Now they knew what was in store for them, and it left them without the desire to go on watching. One of them was sick.

  Only Guerrero remained standing.

  Except that he did not want to die, and did not intend to, which gave him confidence, what he had seen did not distress him. It was easier to take than the Inquisition. The Inquisition was a system of oppressive punishment. Being self-righteous, the Church offered you dirt, filth, squalor, torture, and damnation. This hazard was different. It was a risk you took, everybody believed in it, and at least you were fed properly until it was over. The victim was drugged. It took only a moment. And besides, he understood: to watch someone else die violently was a way of being reborn yourself. It wasn’t a punishment, but a communion. It did not, like the Inquisition, cast you out, but took you in.

  He knew now why they were in the cage. They were in the cage to be fattened up. He went on watching.

  The priest came down the steps of the pyramid, surrounded by his acolytes, who at the bottom closed in around him.

  Again there was silence, and again, the sudden shrilling of pentatonic flutes, the snake-like slither of rattles. The acolytes moved away into their ritual positions.

  Then the high priest began to dance, slowly, solemnly, and wet with blood.

  He was wearing Valdivia’s flayed skin, fastened over him at the back, with the face drawn over his own face. Slowly he forced Valdivia’s appearance into the movements of another world, the beard waggling up and down, quite dead, a rod through his nose, but the body alive, and his thighs quivering with the hieratic movements of a sad, gentle, and yet wryly hopeful ritual. Please, death, the flutes seemed to say, let us live, now that you have this offering, for life is so beautiful. It was something Valdivia alive would never have thought to say, something no Christian would ever have said, for to Christians Man was the earth’s Manichee, to whom loveliness was only a heap of cinders, and the moon an ash dump for souls.

  Aguilar had turned around, white faced and round eyed. He had seen the Devil at last, and it had almost destroyed his faith in God. He had always suspected the two were identical twins.

  But it is something after all to see the devil dancing in a dead man, particularly when that man was an hidalgo and in some wise your friend. The little beard wagged up and down, and Guerrero almost envied Aguilar. He was almost sick himself.

  For everything is so easy for people who believe in the Devil. For them the problem of good and evil is solved, because for them it exists. And then, it is so much easier to believe in evil than in good. But if one is a realist, and therefore believes in neither, and yet in both, then one has to face events for one’s self. That is harder.

  Not that Guerrero thought of it that way, but there was something here he understood. He heard it in the sound of the flutes and trusted it. And as for the horrors, he had seen worse horrors, and these people were like flowers. There was something absurd and touching about the way they opened so uxoriously to the sun.

  He meant to live.

  It was to be many years before he realized why.

  V

  They spent a month in that cage.

  It was better, at any rate, than a Spanish dungeon, or being kept below decks, in the bilge, as discipline. They had the sun and the nights were warm. Guerrero became brown as an Indian, which was what he wanted.

  They were fed and watered like animals, but like animals in captivity, began to bore their captors. After a week the life of the town went on around them as though they were not there. Guerrero set himself to learning what he could of the language, and made rapid progress. Aguilar would only learn the names of things he wanted. The rest of the men made no effort at all. They had no ingenuity, and felt hopeless without weapons. They did not have any idea where they were, and only by the sun and at night the stars, whether they were north, south, or east. At night sometimes they could hear the susurration of the gentle surf, below the cliffs.

  By asking questions, Guerrero managed to make friends of the townspeople who used the square as a market. Except for their religion, they seemed a gentle, humorous, and interested people. They moved with an indolent but wiry grace, perhaps because they were so short, as Guerrero was himself.

  Aguilar was tall and lean. Naturally, because it was foreign to him, he complained of the food, but that did not prevent him from stuffing himself with it. But it did not make his body any pleasanter, and his cassock was in shreds.

  The men did not entirely realize, because they did not want to know, why they were there. Aguilar, in particular, acted as though he expected to be ransomed, and therefore had nothing to fear. They were now a party of eight.

  The others had become so apathetic, that Guerrero feared drugged food. Yet he ate the same food, and his mind was watchful and sharp.

  Once every five days the priest and the doctor came to inspect them. The men were fleshing up, and he himself seemed an object of close attention. Somehow he knew they would save him until last. He did not know why.

  It was because they thought him a leader, and so particularly attractive to the gods.

  As the days went by and nothing happened to them, the men began to grow restless. Their cage was small, and they had nothing to do but listen to Aguilar talk to them about God and how He would save them. Guerrero said nothing to that but he did not agree. This country, he susp
ected, could be reached only by accident or storm, and a force washed ashore would be in no position to rescue anyone.

  On the nineteenth day, at sunset, they were taken back to the house from which they had come, stripped, bathed and fed. Their clothes were taken away from them, and they were given the sandals and breechclout of the country. Guerrero tied his without any trouble. He was observant and had no pudeur. He also had a narrow waist, which made the fold easier to hold up. The ends of his cloth were more elaborately fringed than those of the others. Aguilar refused to part with his tattered robe, which was his sole distinction, but which now made the other men seem more naked and self-conscious.

  They were inspected and then taken back to the cage, though two were left behind.

  The others did not spend an easy night. The weather was hotter than usual, and the mosquitoes a worse plague. The only light was the signal beacon on top of the temple, for the moon was merely a nail paring above them. At night they could hear jungle noises not audible by day, strange unexpected wooden sighs, frogs, and distant prowling screams.

  Aguilar lay on the paving, curled into a ball, but he was not asleep. He was staring sightlessly in front of him. Guerrero watched him suspiciously, and then, with his hands gripped round the bars, stared at the temple stairs across the square. A few priests flitted up and down them, even during the shallow watches of the night. They came and went like the shadows of prowling animals, and sometimes the beacon fire would crackle up, or hiss with incense, as a breeze blew the resinous smell across the square to the cage.

  No one else slept much either.

  At dawn the square began to fill up with people. Aguilar cleared his throat and said his office. The morning grew longer, but still nothing happened.

  At eleven the music began, and the crowds lined up. The two sailors were led up the stairs and sacrificed, though not flayed. Nor did the priest dance afterwards. Guerrero knew in whose skin the priest meant to dance, and the knowledge gave him an odd feeling of being possessed, as though the priest were inside him already. He looked down at his hands and feet. They were strong hands, but they trembled.

  Aguilar did not tremble at all. Guerrero knew that kind of hysteria, and now that they were reminded of what they might expect, and of why they were being fed so well, few of them could eat their dinner when it was served.

  The priests had long since gone, but most of them had been in prison or the stocks at one time or another. They knew there was no way out of a prison. They began to feel like the animals one or two of them, as farm boys, had tended. That made them eager to confess their sins, while Aguilar absolved them in a corner.

  Guerrero did not join them. He had no objection to what God might know, but no desire that Aguilar should know it too. Aguilar was the wrong kind of priest.

  At last, when the darkness was thick enough, they slept.

  Guerrero did not know what woke him, but he did know what he heard, the sound of a low, continual, and insane sobbing. He sat up. The others still snored, but over against one end of the cage someone was huddled against the wall, and from the blackness of the shadow, he knew it must be Aguilar. He got softly to his feet and went over there.

  The temple beacon was burning low. What light it gave was directed towards the sea. There was no moon, and though the stars were bright, the buildings were a series of architectural ghosts which cast the cage into deep shadow.

  Aguilar was very close to the bars. His shoulders heaved, tears streamed down his face, and he gave little gasping noises. His bony hands were clenched round the bars, and he was chewing at the knotted binding of the uprights.

  Guerrero pulled him back and looked for himself. The cage was made of upright lengths of cane, socketed in the platform, braced at the corners, and held in place by lengths of interwoven sisal worked in a warp and woof pattern. The roof was made of the same bars, with the join bound with the same hemp.

  The cage had been built to receive them. That was why they had been kept at the house overnight. But in twenty days the green cane had turned dark brown, and the sun had made the hemp almost frayed. Aguilar had been trying to gnaw through the hemp, which was slimy with spittle.

  There are advantages to being born outside of a culture in which you find yourself. No native would have thought of doing such a thing. But Aguilar had thought of it.

  There was nothing to be done with him. He was more than a little crazy. Guerrero leaned his own face to the bars and began to chew. Aguilar gave him an odd look. Plainly he did not want to share his secret way out, but unless he did, none of them would escape. Quietly Guerrero went to wake the men and to explain.

  He knew now at what intervals the priests came to tend the fire. He set the men to work, grateful that there was no moon.

  The hardest task was to release the ceiling bars in order to work the uprights loose. Guerrero had to hold a man on his shoulders, and the work was slow.

  From the fading of the stars, they saw it must be only a short time before dawn, which did not give them much chance to go unnoticed for long. They worked faster.

  The roof bars gave. Gently they eased out two uprights, which gave them enough room to slip out and drop the three or four feet to the courtyard. One of the men broke his ankle in jumping. He was a good man. He made no complaint when they left him there. But now there were only five of them, against a whole society.

  Flitting from building to building, they reached the sacbe, the raised causeway through the cornfields. It was the only way out, but Guerrero did not care to use it. There would be merchants about soon, with their guards, and the agricultural slaves would be going out to the fields. But Aguilar was out ahead and there was no way to stop him.

  He seemed to be looking for something, found it, and darted to the left, down a ramp to the ground. He was heading back to the beach.

  On the other side of the fields loomed the forest.

  “Not there, you fool,” said Guerrero. “They’ll find you at once.”

  “The boat,” shrilled Aguilar. To him the beach meant the sea, with Spaniards on the other side of it. Guerrero knew they could never escape that way, even if the boat was still there. These were busy trading waters, and they had no sail.

  The men sided with Guerrero. It was the jungle or nothing.

  Aguilar would not agree.

  “Then go by yourself. At least this way we have some chance,” said Guerrero. He jumped off the sacbe, on the maize-field side. Some men are born leaders, but others have to do their best, when there is nobody else to command. That was his role now and the others followed him. They wanted to live.

  Aguilar plopped down in his turn and hurried to catch up, but said nothing.

  Neither did Guerrero.

  The maize was tall enough to close over their heads. It was also ripe. He told the men to snap off a few ears and stuff them into their breechclouts. There was no telling what or when they would eat again.

  For half an hour they worked their way through that field. Aguilar’s cassock caught on everything. He stumbled and tucked it up round his girdle, but even so, it was too bulky. It caught on the corn plants, so that anyone on the sacbe could have told where they were going by the movement of the tassels above them; whereas half-naked, the men made less commotion in the stalks.

  Guerrero halted and told him to strip. He would not and the men refused to strip him. Angry, Guerrero did it himself, while Aguilar rolled his eyes up to heaven. The men did not interfere. He might be a priest, but they were tired of him.

  Still, he had saved their lives. Guerrero ripped out a length of the cassock and gave him that to wrap around him, since modesty seemed more important to him than survival. Clutching his breviary and his beads, Aguilar plodded on. From the look he gave Guerrero, he would cause trouble as soon as it was safe for him to do so, but then he would have done that in any case.

  They came to a small clearing. At the other end of it was a thatched hut on the raised stone platform of the country. A man appeared in i
ts doorway, carrying a jar. When he saw them, he called out for help.

  Guerrero had to strangle him. In the hut they found another man, trying to break out through the thatch, whom they also killed. Then they searched for food.

  Guerrero preferred to search for a weapon, but could find only a flint knife, badly chipped and dull, but better than nothing. He stuck it through his breechclout, and then gave the first peasant’s loincloth to Aguilar.

  What food they had been able to find Guerrero shoved into a woven sack, which he slung over his shoulder. They would be missed by now. There was no time to form any plan. The essential thing was to pretend that he had one, so as to keep the men in order. What they must do now was to sleep by day, travel by night, and hide until they knew their way about. He led the party into the jungle.

  Aguilar might trust in God, but Guerrero put his faith in providence. With providence one could improvise, with God never. He had learned enough of the language to know that the country was divided into a series of squabbling provinces whose hobby was war. He had the advantage that to him war was not a hobby, but a profession. If he could find the enemy, any enemy, perhaps he could barter their services for their lives. The trouble was to find the enemy, and in any such plan Aguilar was a dead weight.

  He went right on being a dead weight.

  VI

  That part of Yucatan, on the north-west, near the coast, but more deeply inland than Tulum, was a rain forest. It was something outside their experience, a rain forest, except in Panama, beyond the boundaries of their wretched town there. It dripped day and night and was crowded with foliage. On that first march they did not get much farther than a mile or two.