A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  Fortunately for them, the natives avoided the forest, and feared it. To the natives it was the garden of the house of death. They were among the enormous trunks of the palm, the cacao, and the mahogany. Lianas coiled down like snakes, and if a tree did not burst into gangrenous orchids, then it was a flight of parrots that whirled away screaming to blossom on some other tree. A peccary charged them, which they could at least see was some sort of pig, and a tapir ran away from them, a thing they could not identify at all.

  At night the howler monkeys made their uproar, as did, from various directions, keening bats, all chattering from the same leathery tree, and the jaguar, hunting. Underfoot and overhead the liana slithered to life as the python, the fer-de-lance, the moccasin, and the pit viper.

  On the second day Aguilar’s jaw began to swell. He had broken a tooth chewing the sisal of the cage. He could not stand the pain. In that damp the pain was incessant.

  Sandals were no protection against the fer-de-lance, so they had to watch one of their party go into convulsions. There was not enough soil in which to bury the body, though Aguilar said the office for the dead.

  At night they were plagued by ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, termites, and ants. Between the trunks of the trees they could see the lights of enormous fireflies, like those of some spectral search party.

  Once they felt safe from their captors, it exacerbated their nerves that they came across no one. The jungle was empty, inimical, and lonely. They caught ague from the hot, sticky, and metallic rain. Nor did they have any glimpse of the sky, from which to judge their direction. All they could do was to plod along until they had gone far enough to reach the boundary of some hostile state or, they were by now in such bad condition, of any settlement at all.

  Water would have been a problem, had the rains not been so frequent. But there was no lack of small game. Having no weapons but the knife, they fed largely on the very young, who could not flee, but even so, gorged on fowl and meat until both made them belch.

  Underfoot the ground began gently to roll.

  At night the jaguars roared to each other, from all around them, as though the whole forest were one ambush. They were now four, getting on each other’s nerves in all that green steaming wilderness. Aguilar was making a pious nuisance of himself. What was the point of grovelling piously to someone who is not even there? It was a waste of time, for this country had its own gods. They heard them every night.

  They began now to travel by day; and on the afternoon of their eighth, came out, without any warning, on the shores of a small lake. It was the first glimpse of the sky they had had in a week, but they drew back at once, for on the far shore of the lake rose the towers and platforms of an enormous city.

  The unexpected is always frightening. They decided to rest until night and then reconnoitre. There was nothing else they could do. They slept where they were, too tired to post a guard.

  When they woke the world was damp and dark. What most oppressed them was the stillness. The insects made their customary noises, but nothing else did. They worked their way along the shore, sensing that something was wrong, huddling close together, and moving as quietly as they could.

  The lake was a mile long and half a mile wide. The water glittered in full moonlight, each choppy little wave a row of metal teeth. More things stirred in that dark than they knew the shapes of, and though the supernatural exists, we can never be sure that our own system of belief is the right way to deal with it.

  It was curious to walk behind Aguilar. Some priests might be theologians stark naked, but not he. His shoulders showed his fear. It made even him believe in the powers of darkness, to be thrust among them in that way.

  The city, which cast no beacons towards the sky, but which loomed against it, as they came closer, began to sink beneath the trees.

  Guerrero looked around him. In this world we have the ability to watch. It is the ultimate luxury. A peasant can understand that attitude, because he has spent his life watching. It is only an intellectual who becomes bitter and confused when confronted by something to see. An intellectual wants the right to rule and can’t have it. But even after the young light in his eyes goes out, a peasant likes to watch. That’s why he wants to survive.

  Aguilar began to balk. It wasn’t that he was scared. They were all in too much danger to be scared. It was just that he resented being led by an inferior, or, for that matter, being one. Now they were approaching someone to observe them, he wanted to tell Guerrero what to do.

  Guerrero paid no attention to him.

  The borders of the lake were squishy and uncertain. Some distance to the left he caught sight of a dull glitter of stone, and lead his party that way.

  It was another sacbe, here perhaps eight feet high. Guerrero was for scrambling up to it. Aguilar was not. Aguilar wanted to dawdle. The thought of a second captivity had made him suddenly rebellious.

  They scrambled on to it, with Aguilar well behind. The surface of the road was cracked, broken, and choked with weeds, some of them two-foot shrubs, which in the distance looked like crouching men, but even so it glittered in the moonlight. Five hundred yards ahead of them it made a curve. They had no way of knowing what was beyond that curve.

  Guerrero was puzzled, but pretended not to show it.

  He was beginning to wonder if everything in this ponderous country was in disrepair. He led them through the shrubs.

  At the bend of the road they saw through the vines a ruined village. Its empty doorways stared at them, and a spider monkey darted forward and up the nearest tree, chattering.

  That set the invisible parrots screeching, as though to raise an alarm. Aguilar stumbled and fell. He did not get up at once. The thing that had tripped him was a stone road roller, cracked and left there who knew when.

  Beyond the bend they saw a well of light, glittering against the black jungle. It startled them. But it was not human light, it was only the moonlight on another lake. They reached an intersection and turned left, though there was nothing to see at the end of the new sacbe. The air seemed heavy, the jungle ominously hushed. They had walked into the middle of a lull. Aguilar began to pray.

  They were waiting now to be captured. The air felt warm, and they began to perspire. They were so dirty and so tired.

  Far off, somewhere, there was a crack of lightning, and the sky jumped into high relief. The thunder growled like a jaguar. The moon had gone. The sky was rolling with pendulous clouds.

  The sacbe did not so much end as seem to flow out among the trees. They found themselves in an extensive overgrown court with to their right, in a second sheet of lightning, the wide stairs of a large pyramid clogged with trees and shrubs, and shrouded in darkness, until another flash showed them the polychromed gods in their niches, high above them, gesticulating wildly in the electric chiaroscuro.

  It was Coba, founded nine hundred years ago, during the Little Descent, but abandoned for six generations now, a sacred city, inhabited only by bees.

  The storm opened like a weir and the rain poured down.

  Before the temple was a row of carved monoliths. Before two of these incense smouldered in cracked pots. Hunters had left offerings before the sacred stelae. Guerrero made a dash for one of the pots and covered it with his body. It could be fanned alive, and they would need fire, if they could find anything dry enough to burn.

  The downpour was too strong. Bending double, he dashed forward, the warm bowl to his belly, veered at the foot of the temple stairs, and then rushed straight up. The steps had very high risers. He crossed a wide landing, and then went up again, without looking behind him. The others could follow as they would. The stairs were broken and slippery, but the overgrowth of weeds and shrubs helped him. He tore off a large leaf and protected the pot with that.

  At the top, breathless, he stopped and then plunged into the temple, a roofed building open at the front. There he set down the bowl and began to blow on it. There were dry leaves on the floor, and other dead matter with which t
o get the fire going.

  As the coals began to glow, the flames to lengthen, the painted idols began to dance in the shadows, and with a high-pitched scream, bats detached themselves from the corbel vaulting and looped eccentrically out the doorway. He paid no attention.

  They spent eighteen hours there, huddled around the fire, while the rain came down, and they half choked from the wet wood smoke. The wait did not improve their tempers. Though some people think bats a delicacy, like most delicacies, they were not nourishing. Nor was it pleasant to be watched by those strange gods. There were stealthy movements, too, on the temple stairs beneath them.

  And then, with less ceremony than it had begun, the rain stopped. The sky cleared. There was sun, the shadowless sun of noon.

  Stiff, they crawled out into the healing light. From the front of the temple platform they could glimpse only the plaza and the lake. But from the rear, they could see that the temple was the prow of an extensive city. Steam rose up everywhere, as the sun dried out the stairs, the temples, the courtyards, and the symmetrical stone palaces. Beyond lay the waters of another lake, above the trees rose the tops of suburban temples the jungle had not yet climbed, but for the rest, the nap of the forest was healing back over the masonry scars in its endless furry skin, now heaving taut, now lax.

  There was no sign of life anywhere. And then Guerrero saw the bees.

  If bats inhabited the city by night, little gods who hung upside down in the underworld, that wooden hell, by day it belonged to the bees. In the past this had been the great honey producing centre of Yucatan. Now the bees made it for themselves, but with the same industry. Now they could put their hives anywhere they chose, in their own temple, or any other likely place.

  Guerrero started down the stairs.

  Aguilar wanted to know where he was going. He did not wish to be left behind. He was worried about whoever it was had left those pots of incense burning. In his hand he had a notched stick. He never let go of it. It was his last way of keeping European time, in a world that kept time some other way, but that did not matter to him, what was important was to know which saint’s day it was, since one of them might save him.

  Somehow Guerrero did not think so. Besides, he wanted to be alone. He wanted to go down there. When he left, Aguilar had turned his back on all that magnificence, and was thumbing his breviary, as though testing the edge on a saw.

  There are advantages to being illiterate. Guerrero walked right down into the city.

  The sun was hot and he began to feel himself again. He spent all day wandering across those platforms and courts. They made him thoughtful. He could see what he was up against. If a people could afford to throw away such opulence, what on earth had they kept in its stead?

  And yet it was an austere opulence. Wildly carved though it might be, there was something aloof and restrained about it. In particular he looked at the carvings. Mostly they were of a short, plump, well cared-for people, severe, oblique, and gentle. It was as though they were all acting out a charade, conscientiously and with great amiable care. You felt somehow that the charade was something that suited them, but also that they were eager to get through it, in order to relax and giggle later. Even the cruelty seemed a little disdainful.

  Perhaps Coba misled him. It had been abandoned before the Mexicans came, with their cult of human hearts.

  Yet in some sense he was right. They were a very old people. They had been doing the same things for two thousand years. Perhaps they were too old. They were a little hampered by themselves, by all that invariable time. What had once had meaning for them, was now only the traditional sensuous pleasure of the day. The things they had once rightly enjoyed doing, were now only the right things to do. That made them grateful for almost any harmless novelty that conformed to the ritual of their days, and that admired them.

  Well, he admired them.

  An individualist, born into a society, or a social class, to whose ideals and nature he does not conform, spends his life in solitary confinement. The world must be full of such individual padded cells, each containing nothing but a desperate man who could not, if he would, agree to the conditions of his release. He cannot demean himself even for freedom. But though he knows he is an anomaly, something tells him he is not, as others would tell him, an abnormality. There must be somewhere a society in which he would be normal, his critics or oppressors then beyond the pale.

  Looking at this sculpture, Guerrero realized that he had at last found it.

  It was Aguilar, here, who became the solitaire.

  All day he wandered. It was to be in a museum, a thing which in those days did not exist. Menageries they had, but not museums, unless any world be the museum of the future, in which there is no way of telling whether we will be something of value or something to fling away.

  For whatever reason the city had been abandoned, it had been abandoned complete. Foraging around, he found not only wild honey, but new sandals, weapons, and in a chest in a back room, a feathered cloak. These he put on. He liked the dusty rustle of the feathers, which gave him rank, though he did not know that.

  Next he explored the sacbes, searching for traces of whoever had left the incense lamps, and at last thought he had found them on a causeway which seemed to lead back to the coast, to judge by the position of the sun.

  He also found a better place for them to camp, so that night they feasted on fresh fruit and honey, and had a good fire. The fire helped to keep at a distance the reddish jaguar of which he had caught a glimpse, as it paced him all day.

  A weapon, it was the studded club of a warrior, made him feel much better. Seeing his costume, Aguilar had started and then glowered at him, suspecting him of having gone over to the enemy.

  Perhaps he had, but Aguilar had had all day to talk to the other two, who were now rested enough to be rebellious.

  Guerrero was for going on.

  The others were not. Aguilar cleared his throat and said they would stay where they were.

  “And do what? And why?”

  “We can pray for deliverance,” said Aguilar, and rolled his eyes upward.

  “To whose god?” Guerrero demanded scornfully.

  It was what Aguilar had wanted to hear. He was always looking for heresy. A heresy proved to him how snug and warm it was to be orthodox. He wanted so much to see the whole world burn.

  “You’d go over to them,” he screamed. “You’re a traitor.”

  It was absurd. It was also true, though he could not see how one could be a traitor to something one had never espoused. He shrugged. “They’re here,” he said.

  “You should pray.”

  “I’d rather eat,” said Guerrero. He walked out of there and left them. He wasn’t worried. He wandered through the moonlit ruins. There was no real fight in Aguilar, just a fear of being flayed. There was, of course, that danger, and Guerrero for a moment wondered how a priest would look dancing inside a priest. But he was not afraid for himself. He never had been, and he was not now.

  It was something these people admired, courage.

  Just the same he slept by himself that night. Courage is no defence against hysteria, and Aguilar was badly scared.

  The jaguar, wherever it was, was explicitly vocal. By morning Aguilar had talked himself into the glories of incipient martyrdom. He had a thin and holy look. He agreed to follow Guerrero, but insisted upon saying mass first. Guerrero did not object. Such a thing seemed to help the other two.

  Then he led them down the causeway.

  In five days they reached a city on the coast, and were taken before its chief, a young man named Taxmar. Guerrero managed to make himself understood. The town was Ecab and no friend to Tulum, so they were not martyred after all. Taxmar was bored and they were a novelty. He enslaved them instead.

  VII

  They stayed two and a half years at Ecab. First they were forced to shave their beards and trim their hair, for they were slaves, and beards distinguish only rulers and old men of a certain wisd
om. They also had to do without cloak and sandals, for those conferred rank. These, until Guerrero could prove his ability to fight, were taken away from him. But it did not take him long to prove that he could fight. He was enjoying himself. He enjoyed everything.

  As a result Taxmar made a pet of him, and then a friend. He was curious about legendary worlds. Guerrero was curious about the one he was in. So Guerrero fared well and Aguilar badly. In the second year the other two died. They could survive neither the climate nor enforced labour in the fields. Few Spaniards could. It was what made them hidalgos.

  Ecab was a handsome, prosperous place. Like all the Maya, the people were terrified of death, but also like all the Maya, this made them convivial and jolly. Except at night, when the gods of death were about, and Ah Puch watched everyone, they were a happy people, totally enthralled by small children and by flowers.

  Guerrero underestimated neither them nor himself, but having at last found a place where he felt at ease, he meant to rise. He became a warrior. It was not difficult. Their wars were simple things, because they had a simple purpose. In a society like that, Guerrero towered up as a genius at strategy. His advancement was certain.

  The purpose of war was offerings. It was the Mexicans who conquered them who had taught them what to do about death. They had always been a little puzzled about the matter before. The Mexicans were not. One offered death human hearts. Ah Puch ate them, and left you alone. And that was what the wars were for, to take captives for the altars. One only needed four or five at a time, for the monthly festivals. And since, after having thrown off the Mexican yoke fifty odd years before, the Maya had fallen into a series of mutually contentious states, all struggling for pre-eminence, but none strong enough to re-establish the Empire, there were many little skirmishes available.