A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  So Guerrero prospered. There are advantages to being outside a culture, particularly if one is a soldier. One has only to see through the ethics of the opposite side, do something unheard of, and not only does one win, but one is quite safe. He soon got his cloak and club back again. He also enjoyed himself. He was becoming one of them. He was better fed and housed than he had ever been. He flourished. He was made much of. But he remained a slave. Taxmar refused to let him leave.

  So long as Taxmar remained alive, to be a slave did not disturb him. In Spain he had been worse than a slave, and worse treated, for poverty makes slaves of us all. Here he had everything. There were even compensations. There were, for instance, women. Adultery was punishable by death, but Taxmar had concubines, and Guerrero was very fond of women. They were little women, plump but delicate, whose life consisted in pleasing. As a race, the Maya were sensuous, but not sensual, so Guerrero, who was both, given the opportunity, was a novelty again. He pleased.

  That made Aguilar furious. Aguilar was by nature chaste, but only from a lack of desire. Yet the suspicion that the carnal may know something that the chaste do not drove him, as it always does the ascetic, but never the austere, to a frenzy. Never mind. It would be something to denounce later.

  It was to please the women, really, or at any rate one of them, that Guerrero had his ears pierced and distended. It was not something he thought about. The world in those days was a bigger place, and having left one world, he naturally wanted to conform to the practices of another. Only low slaves were so plain as he, and even a slave, if a captive of war, which in a way he was, may have rank. The Spanish, he foresaw, would not come back for years, and might never come. Besides, he had one ear pierced already. Sailors did, by custom, and because it was supposed to improve their sight. For a year the distenders annoyed him. After that he wore jade tubes with flaring lips, and thought no more of the matter. They felt heavy and joggled when he walked, but that was not unpleasant, he grew used to them, and the women were delighted.

  Tattooing came next. He did not mind that either.

  He was beginning to move as they did, gravely, and with some pomp. An aristocracy is so. One way or another, it weighs itself down to the proper pace. Slave or not, he was one of them. It was something, after all, to become a gentleman, or at least, for he had always been such if in the wrong world, to be recognized as one. He found that condition suited him very well.

  Aguilar was not one of them. He was put out to work in the fields. This he regarded as a martyrdom, and perhaps he was right. He had become a priest to escape such things. Now he was back at them again, and they did not please him. Still, even he had a certain novelty value. It was because he was celibate.

  Taxmar could not understand that. He persisted, out of curiosity and a sense of fun, in attempting to find out whether the man was a eunuch or merely impotent. He must be one or the other, for a spiritual eunuch was something the Maya had never heard of. One might lacerate the flesh to please the gods, but certainly one did not deny it. To do so was unnatural, and therefore unthinkable.

  Yet physically Aguilar seemed complete, and Taxmar was not without his informants. The man had wet dreams, so he could not be impotent. There must be some other explanation.

  Guerrero, though amused, thought that investigations of that sort went too far.

  Taxmar did not think they went far enough. He wished to try an experiment.

  Aguilar tried to explain, but since he had refused to learn the language of a people he still called idolators and devils, could not explain very well. He looked ill. Forced labour had made him thin, and he had, even more than before, a tendency to cringe. Guerrero avoided him. He did not like to see people degrade themselves.

  Aguilar grovelled.

  To Taxmar, this was not priestly conduct. Priests did not grovel, except, of course, to each other. There must be some other explanation. He sent Aguilar out late at evening, to catch fish, and made sure that he would have to camp out overnight. He also sent along a concubine, with orders to tempt the man.

  Aguilar was away for five days.

  Taxmar awaited the result with the liveliest interest. But the concubine reported that he had merely gnashed his teeth and said something about St. Anthony, so they decided he was an idiot, and put him in charge of the harem.

  Perhaps by this time he was one. A lust for revenge that goes unsatisfied for years can make a man so. At least the work was easy, and when they laughed at him, he could think of them as devils, which was some help. The Church was full of precedents for that sort of thing. But to be an anonymous martyr is full of futility. One wants at least to be on the official rolls. Would the Spanish never come?

  Guerrero hoped not.

  Then, unexpectedly, Taxmar died.

  Guerrero put out to sea the same night. He had become a valuable person. He could win wars. Taxmar’s successors were not likely to let him go, and he wanted to be free. He wanted to go on in this world, and knew not only what he was worth, but what he would be worth, when at last the Spanish came, when and if they did.

  They would certainly try to, for though Yucatan had no gold, they did not know that, and though they had found a little among the Caribs whom they had slaughtered in the Indies, that had only made them reach out for more.

  Guerrero did not know what he would do then, but he did know what he meant to do now. He meant to rise. Nor was he improvising any more, as he had at Coba. He had learned much of this country in the last two years, and he had decided where to go.

  Taking five slaves with him, and such wealth as he could lay his hands on, cocoa beans mostly, but some trinkets and jewels, he got into a sea canoe and started south. He was ceremonially dressed in the full costume of a warrior, with rich cloak, shield, head-dress, and ornamented loincloth and sandals. His weapons were beside him. He lacked only the nose rod and tattooing of a noble of the first class, and those, as a slave, he was not allowed to have. He did not mean to be a slave again.

  The north-east coast had estuaries, savannahs, sandbars, and dangerous shoals. They passed Tulum by night, and saw the temple beacons from the sea. But even had he been captured, he would not have been sacrificed now. He was too useful.

  On impulse he had the paddlers turn towards the sacred island of Cozumel, to which pilgrims went from Tulum. Reaching it, he rested for the night, and then went to one of the temples to offer sacrifice. He now looked like an Indian and was taken for one. Even the priests, who two years ago would have torn his heart out, took him for one.

  Before leaving he took a long look at those templed gods. They were his now, and they were the ones he had always preferred. It was just that previously he had not known their names. And looking at them, he discovered his capacity for gratitude. Nothing had evoked it before, in his short life, but now that the emotion had sprung into being, he did not think that it would die.

  Meanwhile there were adventures to be had. Of Aguilar he thought not at all.

  Nor did he think of his European past. It never had been his past, and it was certainly not his now. This world was his now, and he was delighted with it.

  He set out again. Beyond Cozumel a current caught his canoe and swept it far out to sea. He was often out of sight of land on that two-week journey, but that did not bother him. The water was calm, the sky marvellously young at night, the air cool, and he had brought much food. His slaves would get him back to shore.

  To the south lay Chetumal, on a large bay, and he had heard much of Chetumal. It was the largest and the most secure of all these states along the eastern shore. He did not think they would make him a slave there. Its ruler did not sound that sort of man.

  He had an Empire around him, and that being so, he found the world good. Why should he not? He was healthy, he was young, and he was loyal. To show that loyalty, he needed now only to be loved and love.

  But loyal to what?

  He was about to find out.

  VIII

  The state of Chetumal live
d by trade, but had the advantage of being beyond the main periphery of Maya affairs, at the mouths of several navigable rivers, down which the merchants came from Guatemala, or overland from Mexico and the western coast. It was protected from the avarice of adjacent rulers by a series of savannahs and almost impassable swamps, and had been founded during the Lesser Descent of the Old Empire, in the sixth century.

  Of its ambitious neighbours there were five, the Xiu, who had cast the Mexicans out and now wished to rule the peninsula in their stead; the Cocom of Sotuta; the Canek of Tayasal, who lived at Lake Peten Itza, in Guatemala; the Chel; and the Pech. Chetumal traded with all of them, and had been defeated by none. Its own borders and subsidiary fiefs stretched west of Lake Bacalar, and for some distance north and south of it.

  Of all these dynasties, Chetumal felt close only to the Canek Itza, who had retreated to Guatemala from the holy but now long-deserted city of Chichen Itza, and who were the original colonists of the peninsula, both in the Lesser and the Greater Descent.

  The name and title of the ruler of this land was Nachancan. There are different grades of nobility, from the ostentatious and therefore nervous, through the correct, to the true. From what Guerrero had heard, Nachancan belonged to the small company of the exact, who are so congruent with themselves, that we may always trust them not to budge from what they are.

  He was excited.

  Until a certain age, anyone of any sensibility is aware of his own life as a rehearsal. One plays the same scenes over and over again, but it does not matter what one does, for one will do it differently when the curtain goes up. But then comes a moment when one realizes that the play is on, and that the curtain, unnoticed, rose some time ago. By then one notices with a certain detachment both what will be done to one, and what one is doing. One scarcely knows then whether one is the puppet master of one’s self, or the only possible person for the role, but one enjoys it so much, that all thought of audience or applause is forgotten. One’s only left desire is to meet the other members of the cast on cue, and so take up one’s lines. One knows where it will end, of course, but meanwhile one inhabits a world.

  It is a mystery play but it includes, as do all things devout, much loving comedy.

  All unknown to himself, Guerrero had reached both Chetumal and that point.

  The city was a good fifty miles from the open sea, through a narrow passage and across a salty bay. When he had reached the sandbar which separated the bay from the sea, Guerrero beached his canoe and sent one of his slaves ahead with gifts, to announce his arrival.

  As the efficient ruler of a trading state, Nachancan had as many sources of information as there were traders in the peninsula. He had long known who Guerrero was and was ready to receive him. Guerrero, who had rather expected that he would be, paddled up the bay.

  He saw order, well cultivated fields, and prosperous villages. Chetumal itself, when he came to it, though large and populous, was not one of the great sacred centres of Yucatan, but a commercial town, often rebuilt, but stubbornly secular. Its temples were of a medium size. It did not go in fear of the gods, but preferred to bargain with them.

  That too was good.

  On landing he was surrounded by a small crowd which had come to see him and then taken to the palace. The crowd had come to see him as they would have flocked to any zoological curiosity. Legend had it that though their world would not end until 1697, which was comfortably far away, their new rulers would come out of the ocean and would be, as he had been, white skinned. But all the crowd saw was an Indian much like themselves. They went away disappointed.

  Nachancan saw something more.

  He had expected an oddity. Instead he found a healthy young man with good legs, strong arms, and a determined but innate sense of dignity, a little too young perhaps, a little gauche, but then the person one becomes is not the person one was, and neither has anything to do with the person one is. Nor was dignity to be overlooked, for it was not in itself a quality, but a shape the mind has which even the self cannot hide. Nachancan liked the man and saw that the man, on sight, liked him. It gave their meeting a quality of predestination, for it is something in this lonely business, life, that spark of recognition. No wise man would stamp it out, for it can rekindle those fires in us which from neglect have almost burned out. To meet a lover is to have the illusion of youth back again, but to meet someone of one’s own sort makes maturity endurable.

  Besides, Nachancan was a practical person, and if his spies were accurate, Guerrero would be useful.

  Affection and pragmaticism are not mutually exclusive. In fact they shore each other up. Guerrero saw a slightly wrinkled, but tight-skinned and amiable man of forty-five, sitting cross-legged on his bench of office, surrounded by his nobles, polite and smiling. He had come here to advance, and saw all would be well, but he also found something he had never had, and had never felt the want of, until now when it sat before him. He felt suddenly warmed inside. He had found a father.

  Instantly he was at his ease. There was so much to say, that would not have to be said.

  It was not something either of them ever bothered to consider, that recognition. It was not necessary. But there was, after that, no question of his being made a slave. Of course there were court jealousies to be dealt with, but they were dealt with, and besides, Guerrero was not ambitious in that way. Once the courtiers discovered that, even Nachancan’s fifteen-year-old son relaxed. They, too, though warily, became friends.

  For the next four years Guerrero became himself. It is something, after all, to find out where one belongs at the age of twenty-six, and he made the most of it. In doing so he became a grandee of that place, and a man of thirty.

  He directed their battles and defences, and directed them well, for now he had so much to lose, he wished to make sure that he would not lose it.

  Only sometimes, now that he had the ease, he would remember Spain, not his life there, which was not worth the remembering, but the country itself. As time went by he remembered it less and less. Born into the wrong environment, he had had the good luck to fall into the right one. He never tired of discovering how right it was.

  He had first to prove his worth, and did, not once, but many times. He became adept at war. The object of native war was to capture the leader of the opposite side, for only warriors and great men made suitable sacrifices, the commonalty being good only for slaves. If the leader was captured, the others, not wanting to be slaves, deserted.

  Most such expeditions were small, no more than foraging parties out to stock the gods’ larder. In Mexico those sacrificed to the gods were sometimes used afterwards to feed the zoo. And for that matter, was not any pantheon, Christian or otherwise, good or evil, merely a theological zoo, which men stocked with one epitome each of the rarer of their own desires, either for amusement, or to assist by example the hunt?

  Guerrero tried another method, capturing the rival party by ambush, which left the leader isolated and easy to pick off. In a war for such a purpose, men used their weapons defensively. They were easily bested by an aggressive European technique, which did not promise well for the future, when it should come. But it had not come yet.

  Occasionally there was a real war, though Chetumal was so geographically secure, that such skirmishes were usually punitive. He had to put down the rebellious sub-chiefs of Lake Bacalar, which meant hand-to-hand fighting, which he enjoyed. The warriors were coated, so was he, with ornamental paint, which made them slippery to get away. Try to take them captive, and they wriggled off like eels.

  There, too, Guerrero could think of things to do no native would have thought of doing. Reaching for his opponent’s nose rod, he yanked. The man gave a grunt, stumbled, and fell. He turned out to be the leader of the uprising, so Guerrero had a string of victims to hand over to the priests.

  Suitably bound with tufted cord, they were sacrificed the next day. Not that the priests, the people, or even the idols were bloodthirsty. It was merely that, like Aguilar,
whom he had almost forgotten, and perhaps the Saints, they went through the proper forms. At the head of the pantheon there were deities so remote that, like God, they were never worshipped, for what was the point of it; they had no interest in human affairs.

  After the affair at Bacalar Nachancan created him a noble and warrior of the first class. Since the high priest performed the ceremony, it was a little like being baptized by an archbishop, the distinction was so great, the event so trivial.

  Yet it was a rite of some importance. They dressed him as a warrior and painted him a sacrificial colour. He remembered, for the first time, that cage in the plaza at Tulum, with the difference that now this was his world, whereas before he had merely gone to feed it.

  He crossed the flagstones of the plaza with Nachancan’s son on one side of him and the high priest on the other. That the high priest, who was very old, should officiate now was a mark of especial favour.

  He was taken not to the temple altar at the top of the pyramid, but to another, on a landing half-way up. There he had to lie on the curved sacrificial stone, head up. He saw the intense sky above him, his head swam, his legs trembled, and he thought of Valdivia. No assistants held his wrists and ankles, nor was he painted that mortal blue, but no doubt Valdivia’s heart had pounded in much the same painful way. He tensed himself, determined not to cry out, but felt so dizzy, that he seemed to fall down into the sky.

  The priest held his nose and jabbed swiftly through the septum with a large bone awl. The pain felt hot, Guerrero’s eyes smarted and began to weep, but he did not cry out. There was not much blood. Dead cells swam in his eyes, and he saw all the gods in concentric circles in the flickering sky above him. It was a vision, but it was not insight. The man who has lived in more than one culture, can believe only in a God beyond the gods of either.

  The priest whipped out the awl and inserted a temporary plug. For a few days the wound smarted and seeped with ichor. Then it began to feel itchy, natural, and pleasant.