A Signal Victory

by David Stacton

  It left him with a bad conscience, but Negroes were expensive and Indians cheap. No one need ever know.

  Before he had time to feel relief, news came both that Chichen Itza was in revolt, and that his nephew was cut off there.

  If his nephew were murdered, then what was the use of turning Yucatan into a private holding company? There would be nobody to leave it to.

  Not, exactly, that Montejo the Younger was taken by surprise, but he, too, had felt secure, and the Maya had been subtle. In the beginning they had told him only that supplies were difficult to get. The region, they said, had been disturbed. There was nothing they could do.

  Then they smiled. They smiled so very agreeably that it was eight weeks before he learned that anything was wrong.

  But one cannot hide hatred for ever, even in the interests of revenge. Nacon Cupul, the chief of the Cupul, could take insolence only for so long. He was a man of immense dignity. Montejo, he could see for himself, was not. He was common, coarse, and arrogant. In Yucatan he could never have been anything but a merchant. Here he thought he could buy and sell anyone.

  One evening it became too much. Montejo, who had given him one order too many, turned his back. His sword rested against the wall. Nacon grabbed it and swung.

  There were soldiers in the room, as always, and a cutlass is a heavy instrument. Nacon felt nothing, but staggered. Then he had time to see his right arm on the floor, bleeding, while the sword rattled away, and put his hand to the stump of his shoulder, before the soldiers moved in to kill him. Montejo merely watched.

  On hearing that, the Cupul throughout the province rose at once. They knew they could not defeat him in an open stand, but they did not have to. They let him put them down. Then they cut his communications, refused either labour or supplies, and began to starve him out.

  Montejo could get nothing to eat. He had to send out foraging parties. The Indians picked them off, and the more heavily they went armed, the less food they could bring back. The Cupul poured in from everywhere. Guerrero had arrived at Saci, their religious centre, and the revolt had turned into a religious crusade. They moved their men closer and closer to Chichen Itza.

  Montejo tried to parley. He said he was willing to compromise with the Cupul demands. That pleased the Cupul. It meant he must be growing weak in there, in the sacred city. But there could be no compromise. They moved closer still.

  Then they attacked, swarming towards the city, and killing ten Spaniards before warning could be given. There was no room in the defences for Montejo’s Indian slaves. They could only hide. The Cupul ferreted them out and killed all of them, while the Spaniards watched.

  It was all they could do. They lived in a state of siege, while the Maya taunted them from barricades and breastworks thrown up around the city.

  The siege lasted five months. There was no reason to attack. The Maya knew the Spanish were starving. There was no need to risk their own men. Hunger would win for them.

  There was nothing for Montejo to do but counter-attack. This he did, even if it meant his men would die in front of him. He tried to choose a favourable time. But no time was favourable, for Guerrero was watching on the other side, and there were too many natives. Reinforcements had come from Sotuta and the other neighbouring provinces. The Spanish came out of their barricade into a sea of obsidian and blue-green battle plumes. No matter how many they cut down, there were always more arrows, more Indians, and more plumes. It was as futile as to try to fight the jungle itself, and this jungle had sharp edges.

  They were forced to fall back as swiftly as they could into the Ball Court which was their stronghold. Out of two hundred, they had lost one hundred and fifty men. Nor did all of those fall on the field.

  Chichen Itza is a vast city, but the Ball Court is in the great court which leads to the Well of Sacrifice. In front of it is a skull rack, on its right, the Castillo, a considerable pyramid, but two hundred metres in front of it, on the other side of the square, is the Temple of the Warriors.

  Tonight, by torchlight, that majestic building rising out of its grove of columns was used for the next to last time. From the walls of the Ball Court, the Spanish could see the company gathered there, as it went into the peristyle hall and then emerged, above the roof line, struggling up the stairs. At the top the priests of Saei were waiting, and the sacrificial knife plunged.

  This time no one had drugged the captive soldiers, and their curses and screams were quite audible, even over the rattles and drums. There was not one of the weakened men in the Ball Court who could not hear them. It was useless to fire at the temple. They would need their ammunition to save themselves.

  The Maya were in no hurry. The torches burned all night.

  Montejo stayed in the Ball Court all next day. The Maya made no attack. They usually rested after a battle. That night the Spanish fled. Ignominiously or not, they no longer cared. All they could do was save themselves, and few of them believed they had much chance of doing even that.

  Before they left Montejo tied a starving dog to the clapper of a bell, and placed some food just beyond its reach. It was a primitive stratagem, but it worked. The Maya thought they were rallying to attack, made their own preparations, and that allowed the Spanish to get away.

  Not too far away, however, for the trick was discovered at dawn, and the Indians were soon on their trail. But though Montejo had been foolhardy, he was not foolhardy now. It is possible to learn wisdom at the last moment. He got his men through, and into the province of the Chel. He had expected a fight there, but found the Chel friendly. He soon found out why.

  His father was in the province, near the ruins of an abandoned city called T-ho, with a party of 120 men.

  XXVI

  When he heard that story Guerrero merely smiled. It is something to get one’s own country back again, when even you believe that the invader means to keep it. But it is not very much, for somehow nothing is ever quite the way it was before. The goods, though returned, have been damaged in transit.

  There was a sacrifice of thanksgiving, in the Temple of the Warriors. He attended.

  Chichen Itza was the most sacred city of the New Empire. Only long-abandoned Copan and Tikal were revered so much. And yet Chichen had not been occupied for well over a hundred years.

  The costumes were splendid, but the panoply was hushed. Even he, treated with deference, himself rustling as gorgeously feathered as any of them, could not help but notice that curious hush. Captives to be sacrificed, copal, the attendants, everything was of the best quality. But the music was swallowed up by those immense masonry courts, the voices of the chorus sounded far away and lost, the steps of the temple were cracked and overgrown with weeds, the gypsum of the walls was no longer clean, and at dusk the bats skewed shrieking through the air.

  Why had they let it fall into ruin? It could not merely be because they were too old any longer to manage it. And there was something wistful and furtive about the movements of these processions, something like the manner of someone who comes back, while the new tenants are away, to see the old house, rented out because it was too large and expensive to keep up, and alien to its original owners now.

  No one seemed comfortable at Chichen. It was too big. There were not enough of them to fill it, perhaps not enough life left in them to fill it. They seemed uneasily aware of that.

  He remembered that night so long ago, in Coba, in the storm, and the joy of his lonely walk through it, the next day, when he had discovered a world.

  What had happened to Aguilar he wondered?

  Aguilar, set up in Mexico, had lived long enough to denounce Cortés to the world, for not allowing the basement of his house to be turned into a church, and had then died of buboes and ulcers, an embarrassment to his Church and a disgrace to himself.

  But the world was full of Aguilars.

  In the shadow of that immense portico, in front of the Temple of the Warriors, he looked across, towards the Ball Court where Montejo the Young had been cooped
up. And it occurred to him, during all his time in Yucatan, he had not seen that sacred game of ball.

  It, too, was not played any more.

  The shadows on the plaza became solid. It was night. A thousand little lamps sprang up, here and there, but they could not push back the darkness. As the moon rose, the buildings glittered, distinct, exact, the assured relics of the world that made them.

  In the jungle something chattered, far away, but the jungle itself was getting closer. It was growing back over the town, as the grass grows back over all of us.

  It was a great moment for the Maya. And yet they were so silent.

  At the Well of Sacrifice there was a single, solitary splash, and then once more the algae healed over the surface of that cyclopean, deep-socketed, sacrificial eye, in a cataract coloured green.

  He tried to shake the mood off. He felt cold.

  Yet, the curators of a world too big for them or not, now they were roused, they meant to fight.

  The whole of the provinces were now in revolt, even Sotuta, of whom even the Spanish were wary. Montejo, it was said, had paid a visit to Mani, and had had a conference with Ah Dzun Xiu, the twentieth generation of that wily clan that knew what power was and meant to keep it. Nobody trusted the Xiu. They were not trustworthy. But it is sometimes easier to outmanœuvre the ambitious and the worldly than the contented and simple, for they have their own naïveté.

  The Xiu would remain loyal, for they were now so doubly hated for conspiring with the Spaniards against their countrymen, that if the Spaniards were to be defeated they could not long hope to survive among their own people, and they knew it. Montejo no doubt planned to fob them off with a title, which cost nothing, and sap their power at his leisure. But right now he needed them, even as they needed him.

  Indeed, they kept their title. They even got their provincial Spanish palace, in the end. But it was nothing to what they had once held at Uxmal, and the forty-first generation of the Xiu now lives in a wattle hut with a dirt floor. Time has its own punishments. It was a title nobody honoured but themselves. They could as well have hanged themselves in an empty room, as have expected any advantage from it.

  But for the moment they were treacherous. They had to be watched. There was no telling what they might do, if they saw any advantage to themselves from turning on their fellows.

  They were watched. But mostly the Maya watched Montejo instead. He had refounded Ciudad Real, on the coast, at Dzilum. With what was left of Montejo the Younger’s forces, he now had 220 experienced men.

  He also had Davila.

  When he learned that, Guerrero was furious. For it frightened the Maya. It did no good to explain that Davila was no Cortés, that he was a man, and therefore mortal, that he could be defeated.

  They did not take that view of men. And perhaps, being a realist, neither did he, which made his heart sink and explained his rage.

  For yes, it is true, some men seem invincible. Nothing can turn the tide against them, except death. They had thought him lost at sea. Now, after two years of privation in Honduras, he was back again. He had not died. Perhaps he did not know how to die, and that was what kept him going.

  Such a man is protected by his reputation. It is his luck. Rather than attack him, others fall back. No doubt that explains why most assassinations fail. How could they succeed, for how can one desperate and shaky murderer succeed, when he aims at the legend and not at the man?

  With everyone around him but Lerma, who would not answer letters sent to him, and was seizing his last illegal catch of slaves, on the east coast, to be sure of a profit no matter what happened, Montejo, the land he held growing smaller around him every day, counter-attacked.

  For a while he was successful. He was not a soldier of genius, he was not a soldier at all, but Davila was, and he had the Xiu as allies, who knew the country well. He soon had Champoton, Campech, Ah Canul, Ceh Pech, Ah Kin-Chel, Chakan, Hocaba-Homan and Acalan as firmly as ever.

  It was Davila. The natives fell back before Davila. For he had about him some of the madness of a god.

  It was a deadlock. The Maya held the rest of the peninsula, but neither side could win.

  Guerrero supervised the seige of Ciudad Real. For a month he had had news neither of his wife and daughter, nor of his younger son. The elder son he had with him.

  It was the elder son who kept him going. For though they did not understand each other, they understood each other well enough, and he wanted a world left for his son to live in, the world that Yucatan had seemed to be at first, when he had first arrived. Let it be rotten at the pith, given only that it still be. Given that his son might be.

  He wanted that. He only wanted that.

  And yet he could not seem to win. The Maya did not have the will.

  Then something happened inside Ciudad Real. So Yucatan was saved, as men often are, not by their own efforts, but by something altogether outside themselves.

  It took Guerrero a month to find out what that something was. And when he did, what could he do but laugh?

  For greed had brought the Spanish there, and greed took them away, just as it lost Montejo everything. In Peru Pizarro had at last discovered not only the Incas, but the Inca gold, in Peru the temples were walled and roofed with gold, the garden of the Temple of the Sun had golden flowers.

  The soldiers were ready to war anywhere. Yucatan was not to their taste. It was not rich, and they were not farmers. Montejo had evacuated them from Ciudad Real to Salamanca de Campeche. They had only to look around them, to see themselves in the same sort of poverty-stricken Spanish town they had come to the New World to get away from. They cast about for some means to escape, and soon learned that Pedro de Alvarado, the conqueror of Guatemala, was getting together an expedition to wrest away from the Pizarros the wealth that they had ripped away from the Incas.

  They knew who Alvarado was. He was not Montejo. He was a real man. He could steal, and be stolen from, and what he wanted he got.

  Montejo ordered them to stay. It was a futile gesture. He could not hold them, for they, in their turn, were the only means he had of enforcing his orders against them. They began to flee the city, at first in secret, then more openly, some overland, others along the coast in canoes.

  Guerrero let them go. Indeed he did everything he could to assist them. Then he moved in closer.

  There were only a hundred men left.

  Montejo was desperate. He was sixty-seven, and a bankrupt. He could not afford to flee. Yet what else could he do? Now that he must lose it, he turned against Yucatan.

  “In these provinces there is not a single river, and the hills are dry and waterless,” he wrote. The inhabitants were abandoned and treacherous, never killed a Christian except by foul means, and never made war except by artifice. Not once had he questioned them on any matter but that they had not answered, yes, with the purpose of causing him to leave them and go elsewhere. In them he had found no truth about anything.

  It was true enough, but what else could he expect? But he did not look at the matter that way. Yucatan had been given to him by Charles V, who had of course never seen it. He had, and it was his.

  Against all hope he held out, with Davila, his son, and that small group he had given land, and who therefore had some reason for staying, or would have had, had they been able to hold the land against the Indians who stubbornly persisted in believing that you cannot give away another man’s goods.

  But the soldiers refused to obey them.

  There was nothing to do but leave. Montejo embarked first for Tabasco, and then for Mexico.

  To the Maya it was wonderful. They had at last driven the invader out. Their country was their own again. For a little while they could relax, before going back to their familiar occupation of fighting against each other.

  It was the turn of the Xiu now, to look behind them everywhere they walked. It was they, now, who would have to go in fear, and hide that fear as best they could.

  Even to Guerrero it se
emed a victory. Who cared how or from what causes it had been won?

  How was he to know in what manner the poor of this world, in the name of everything from social reform to God, will do anything to grow rich at the expense of their betters who, it is true, were once as they?

  Of the gods of history, only Shiva informs us that for one to come, another must go, endlessly. So those who have no knowledge of Him, persist to believe that they rise not in response to natural process, as another goes down, but for ever, out of such little idiotic principles as truth and right. Neither Guerrero nor any other man in that world had any concept of such a thing as endless change.

  His heart-break was to be more personal than any abstract truth could ever be.

  XXVII

  But for the moment he felt only relief and joy. It was unbelievable. But he had won. The Maya had won. The world therefore would be livable for a little while again.

  He watched them go. Unlike the Maya, he knew they would be back. Montejo might give up, but in time there would be no more gold to find. Then they would try again, for even land in a poor country is better to steal than nothing there for the taking at all. Nevertheless, to see them go at all was a pleasant thing.

  Campeche had no harbour and no port, but it did have a narrow white beach, between the jungle and the low, incessant waves. It was a day like any other, clear, sunny, bright, with the echo of a breeze that stirred the dry scrub forest only tenderly. The world had a scrubbed new look, and the white sand stretched untrodden around the slight curve of the bay. There was no one about but the Spanish, huddled close together, for the Indians had not come to say good-bye. The Spanish had with them a few slaves, that was all.

  It took them all morning to load themselves and their effects on to the waiting ship. Only one ship had been required. It was a little as though Pandora had repacked her chest, with the difference that now it was hope who was let out, and the demons who were put back in. The Maya were patient. They had waited a long time to see them go, and it was a pleasure to wait this little longer. Drawn up just inside the forest, they watched.