‘That’s irrelevant,’ spluttered Velázquez de León. ‘I am steadfast in my opposition to Cortés and steadfast in support of my cousin the governor.’
‘Oh yes, yes of course,’ Alvarado replied. ‘Steadfast. I don’t doubt it for a moment. You are steadfast; Escudero here is steadfast. If I am right, Diego de Ordaz is steadfast too … ’
‘His Excellency assigned him to the expedition specifically to keep watch on Cortés,’ said Escudero pompously. ‘He won’t hesitate to declare for us when the time is right.’
‘And Cristóbal de Olid, I presume?’
‘We may count on him absolutely,’ blustered Velázquez de León. ‘Olid was the governor’s major-domo. His loyalty to our cause is not in doubt.’
‘And who else?’ asked Alvarado. ‘Who else can we count on?’
Another shifty glance.
‘Well come on, gentlemen!’ Alvarado urged. ‘If I’m to throw my lot in with you, the very least I need to know is who my associates will be.’
That look again. Finally Escudero spoke: ‘The question, Pedro, is whether you are with us or not. If you are with us, then we’ll make you privy to our plans and give you the names of all our senior people, but while there’s doubt—’
‘While there’s doubt,’ Velázquez de León cut in, ‘we’ve already told you too much.’
‘It seems, gentlemen,’ said Alvarado,‘that we have reached an impasse. You want me to commit to your cause absolutely, without full knowledge of those I will be committing myself to. But I, for my part, require that knowledge before I am willing to com—’
‘Damn you, Alvarado!’ exclaimed Escudero, ‘I’ve had enough of your procrastination.’
‘I do not procrastinate! If I’m to turn against my lifelong friend, and risk being hanged as a mutineer, I want to know I’ll be doing it for men I can respect and rely upon. Olid, Ordaz, Montejo, the two of you – there’s nothing new here. Any fool can guess whose side every one of you is on. But you must trust me with new names if you want me to trust you.’
Without explanation, Escudero took Velázquez de León by the arm and walked off a few paces with him. Ridiculous, Alvarado thought. Like children! He looked on in disbelief as the two men engaged in a heated, whispered conversation. When they returned, Escudero said: ‘We’ll think on your request, Don Pedro. Meanwhile we must have your vow of silence. Our meeting tonight—’
‘What meeting?’ asked Alvarado.
Velázquez de León uttered an awkward, braying laugh. ‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘It never happened.’
And with that the two plotters turned away and walked briskly back towards camp, leaving Alvarado alone under the stars.
Fools, he thought. They still don’t realise I’m playing them. And then he thought: But I can’t spin this out much longer.
In a way it was a miracle, and a tribute to his own superior negotiating skills and capacity for dissemblance that he’d managed to keep the plotters on the hook as long as he had. But unless something changed, and changed radically, they were going to see through him very soon.
Unless, after all, he did join them.
He began to whistle cheerfully, loosened his fine Toledo rapier in its scabbard and set off down the dunes towards the beach. He was wide awake, his mind full of plans and schemes. Before retiring to his bed, he decided, he’d walk for half an hour, enjoy that southern breeze that was blowing and get the sour stink of Velázquez de León and Escudero out of his nostrils.
Chapter Eleven
Monday 26 April 1519, night
Still struggling for breath, Ishtlil staggered to his feet, his fingers fluttering at his throat, his face flushed. ‘A demon!’ he gasped. ‘Your girl is a demon. No human can do what she did to me. No human can disappear like that.’
‘She is human, lord,’ Huicton said. Tozi was touched by the worried look on her mentor’s wizened face. ‘She’s just a girl like any other. A sweet girl. A good girl with a kind heart, but blessed by the gods with special powers to aid our cause.’
Shielded from their eyes by the spell of invisibility, Tozi had not left the tent, had not, in fact, moved at all, and she did not move now as Ishtlil lurched towards her, his arms sweeping the air in front of him. When she made herself invisible her connection to the stuff of the world became different, more complicated, than when she was in physical form. Her clothes and the contents of her pockets always faded with her, and she had learned she could spread the field of magic to other things, and the people around her, if she concentrated her will. She could pick up objects and use them if she chose to do so, but she was also able to make herself as insubstantial as thought, and flow in this form even through solid matter, or allow solid things to flow through her. In every case, she had discovered, the keys to control were focus and intention, so she focused now, as Ishtlil’s huge, groping hands passed through her body, giving him no clue that she was even there. The Texcocan rebel leader then careered around the tent, rather comically Tozi thought, his arms spread wide, groping and feeling but finding nothing. ‘Has she gone?’ Ishtlil eventually asked. ‘Or is she still here?’
‘Well, that’s the thing with my Tozi,’ Huicton said mildly. ‘When she’s invisible you never know where she is—’
‘Which is why she makes such a good spy,’ Ishtlil mused. He was beginning to calm down now. Tozi read his mind and found no anger there towards herself, none of the suspicion about witchcraft he’d begun to radiate earlier, just surprise, some lingering fear and … and … What was this? Something like greed? Something like cunning? What Ishtlil’s reaction most reminded her of, she realised, was the opportunistic pleasure of a street trader who has just made a winning deal. He was calculating how he might use her, and in immediate confirmation of this he turned to face Huicton and said: ‘How about we get this Tozi of yours to kill Moctezuma? She could enter his bedchamber undetected, slit his throat and be gone with no one any the wiser.’
‘With respect, lord,’ Huicton replied, ‘we’ve already thought of that and decided against it.’
‘Against it?’ Ishtlil sounded aghast. ‘Why?’
‘Consider this, Lord Ishtlil. Moctezuma is the weakest and most incompetent Speaker the Mexica have produced in a hundred years. If Tozi were to kill him as you suggest, then anyone else they might put on the throne – Cuitláhuac, perhaps even Guatemoc – would do a better job than him. If we’re truly to end Mexica power, then it may be that the best way to do so is to let Moctezuma live and exploit his deficiencies and his failings, his superstitions and his fears … Indeed, lord, that is what we are already doing, and very successfully. Tozi has the power – I think she showed you this just now? – to magnify a man’s fears—’
‘Ha! She showed me all right!’ Ishtlil looked around the tent again. ‘Girl!’ he said. ‘Are you there? Are you spying on us?’
Tozi said nothing, preferring to keep Ishtlil guessing.
‘If you won’t slit Moctezuma’s throat,’ the Texcocan rebel leader now said, still addressing empty air, ‘how about slitting Cacama’s throat? How about that, girl? Would you do that for me?’
I’m not an assassin, Tozi thought. But then she remembered how she’d killed the corrupt high priest Ahuizotl by the lakeside on the night she and Malinal had escaped sacrifice and she thought: Why not?
Huicton spoke again. ‘Kill Cacama, lord,’ he told Ishtlil, ‘and risk a more effective leader being placed on the throne of Texcoco to confront you. Cacama and Moctezuma are both great fools and they both serve our cause better alive than dead.’
Ishtlil glowered, then grinned. ‘Ha! I suppose you’re right,’ he said finally. ‘Clever Huicton! What would I do without you?’
The two men’s talk soon turned to strategy. It seemed Ishtlil needed no more convincing of the value of the intelligence Tozi had brought. Some new force had entered the land, perhaps indeed the god Quetzalcoatl and his divine companions. Huicton was therefore to make his way to the coast where these tueles had set up ca
mp, attempt to speak to their leader and offer him Ishtlil’s support in overthrowing the tyranny of the Mexica. ‘Go by way of Tlascala,’ Ishtlil added. ‘Try again to forge an alliance with Shikotenka. With the prospect of a god on our side, perhaps he’ll reconsider our offer … ’
Tozi’s heart was thudding with joy. The coast! The coast! She would travel with Huicton, she would be reunited with her dear friend Malinal and she would see the face of the god Quetzalcoatl himself. She was suddenly so excited she could not keep still, and rushed out of the tent to run unseen through the night where the hosts of men at Ishtlil’s command sat around their campfires taking their evening meal. A great army was building to overthrow evil and usher in a new age, so of course that stubborn Shikotenka would want to be part of it! Once she and Huicton convinced him of the truth about Quetzalcoatl, any other outcome was unthinkable.
Chapter Twelve
Monday 26 April 1519, night
This was what terror felt like. He had known it before when he had nearly been washed overboard during the great storm that scattered the fleet on the night they’d set sail from Cuba. And he’d known it again when he lay hogtied on the forest floor on the island of Cozumel while Father Muñoz strode back and forth, ranting and mad. But tonight, terror had reached a new peak for Pepillo, when his moments of quiet reflection overlooking the ocean had been suddenly cut short by a muscular Indian who’d thrown him onto his back while another had clamped his mouth shut, stifling his cries of alarm, and his nostrils were filled with the musky, alien smell of his attackers and they had dragged him off through the dunes and down onto the smooth, hard sand of the beach, lifting him bodily when he lost his footing, spiriting him away, he knew not where or why, at tremendous speed.
He guessed there might be four of them, or five; in the rush and the confusion he could not be sure. They spoke little amongst themselves, but when they did he thought he recognised snatches of their words. Their language was the same Nahuatl that Malinal had begun to teach him, or something very like it, yet these rough men seemed wilder, more savage by far than the semi-civilised and officious Mexica whom Pepillo had grown used to seeing around the camp, and he feared he was about to be murdered. ‘Let me go,’ he tried to say. ‘What have I done to you?’ His words were Spanish, and of course they would not understand, but even if by some miracle his abductors spoke the King’s own Castilian, that massive, uncompromising hand clamped across his mouth prevented him from uttering anything more than stifled grunts and sobs.
His feet slipped from under him and he was lifted bodily again, his head almost wrenched from his shoulders, when there came a snarl, menacing and low, and his pup Melchior launched himself out of the darkness, a missile of fur and teeth and fury, and seized that clamping, stifling hand and tore it loose in an instant, extracting a bellow of pure horror from its owner and allowing Pepillo to shout at the top of his voice: ‘Help! For God’s sake, help!’ In the same instant, Melchior let go the hand and dropped back to the beach, sinking his teeth into one of the attacker’s ankles. There came another shriek and suddenly Pepillo was free, stumbling over his own knees, then rising and running and shouting again and again: ‘Help! For God’s sake, help!’ The breeze was still blowing, carrying his cries away from the camp, which now lay hundreds of paces to the south, so there was little chance he would be heard, but it was his only hope.
* * *
As Alvarado strolled down from the dunes towards the beach, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir – something was amiss here – and his hand fell to the hilt of his rapier. He had long since learned to trust his instincts, but at first he wasn’t sure what it was that troubled him except perhaps a sense of motion, of agitation – and that not very far away. Then he heard a dog snarl and a yell of surprise followed by a boy’s voice, high-pitched and terrified, shouting ‘Help! For God’s sake, help!’
Alvarado drew his steel and broke into a run. In seconds he had reached level sand. Directly ahead of him, not fifty paces distant and dimly lit by the crescent moon, he made out a scrum of figures – Indians, by the look of them, naked but for breechclouts and feathers. Closing he saw a small figure break free, heard again that high-pitched plea for help and now recognised the boy Pepillo, Cortés’s own page, running and stumbling away, still calling for aid and seemingly unaware that his wish had been granted. The boy was followed by two of his attackers, while the other three seemed fully preoccupied with the furious dog, no more than a pup, that was amongst them, snarling and snapping its teeth, and clearly doing some harm.
Alvarado changed direction, put on a burst of speed, and came up with the boy just as one of the filthy savages, streaking after him, reached to grab him. ‘Not so fast, my lovely,’ Alvarado said, striking down on a dusky arm with the edge of the rapier and feeling the satisfying resistance of human flesh. ‘Pick on someone your own size, why don’t you?’ The second heathen came at him with a hideous yell, wielding one of those crude wooden paddles edged with blades of obsidian that the Indians used as swords. Alvarado parried, but the rapier lodged with a clunk deep in the wood of the other man’s weapon; for a moment he could not pull it free, and suddenly he was surrounded by a press of stinking Indians thrusting at him with their primitive stone knives. Just as well, he’d buckled on his cuirass this evening! He felt the blades break and turn on his armour, ducked to avoid a huge club that came whistling at his head, drew his own dagger of Toledo steel, plunged it into a leg here, a torso there, and was rewarded with cries of pain and a sudden drawing back of the men around him. In the same instant, with a twist and a jerk, he pulled his rapier free and dropped into the guard position fencers call the plough, holding the slim blade out before him, hilt down close to his centre of gravity, point up, turning through three hundred and sixty degrees to see where the next threat was coming from.
He glanced at Pepillo. The boy was still with him, still alive. ‘You’re doing good, lad,’ he said, ‘but I want you to run now. Run back to camp. Yell at the top of your voice all the way. Get us help. I’ll keep these bastards busy.’
‘No, sir. With respect, sir. I don’t see my dog.’
‘Bugger your dog, lad. Dog’ll look after himself. Get running, unless you want us both to end up in the cooking pot.’
‘Very well, sir. As you say, sir … ’
But it was already too late. Their attackers had formed a rough circle around them and there was no way the boy was going to make it through. Alvarado laid a gloved hand on his shoulder. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘Stay close. Watch my back. It’s hard to credit but it looks like these Indians know how to fight.’ He raised his voice. ‘Come on, you godless barbarians. Have at me if you dare.’
* * *
Shikotenka was beginning to wonder whether the white-skinned, bearded, golden-haired man confronting them might after all be some kind of tuele. With odds of five to one, the five being without a doubt the flower of Tlascalan warriors, their opponent should be lying, bleeding his last, in the sand by now. Instead he was standing there taunting them, apparently uninjured and protecting the boy they’d snatched. The boy was human, no doubt about that, but this man, if he was a man, seemed possessed of supernatural powers. Shikotenka had aimed a thrust straight at his heart – a good thrust, a true thrust – and yet his war knife had been turned by the stranger’s metal armour.
Surely some witchcraft must be at work here, some sorcery – for while the white-skin was as yet untouched, Chipahua had taken a deep wound to the muscle of his right forearm, forcing him to switch his macuahuitl to his left hand, Tree had been stabbed through the thigh, and Ilhuicamina between the ribs.
And what was that monstrous animal that had come at them and then disappeared? Shikotenka looked down at his own ankle, bleeding copiously where its fangs had slashed him. Was it some species of wolf that the white-skins had enchanted to their service? And where was it now? He hoped it had not gone to fetch others of its kind.
He looked around at his crew, closing
in for the kill. All were still in the fight and none were complaining, but they were losing blood and time. Only Acolmiztli remained completely uninjured. ‘I can take him,’ he hissed. ‘Give me my chance, Shikotenka. Great honour in it for me when I bring this one down.’
‘Shit on honour,’ growled Tree. ‘I say we all just rush him, club him into the ground … ’
But Acolmiztli wasn’t listening. Raising his macuahuitl in a two-handed grip, he uttered a shrill battle cry and darted forward.
With a roar, Tree followed him.
Signalling Chipahua and Ilhuicamina to stay back – their injuries made them liabilities in a fight with an opponent as skilled as this – Shikotenka circled silently out into the darkness, aiming to get behind the white-skin.
* * *
Deep in a claustrophobic dream in which a fiend hunted her through narrow corridors and passageways, Malinal heard the sound of whining and scratching at the door of the wooden hut she shared with Puertocarrero. She was immediately wide awake, her mind working fast, sensing trouble. She leapt out from the bed, ran naked to the door and opened it to find Pepillo’s dog Melchior standing there shivering, covered in blood. The moment it saw her it turned and ran off a few paces, then turned back, looked at her and barked.
Malinal had no doubt what this meant. Pepillo must be in some terrible danger. ‘Puertocarrero!’ she yelled, ‘wake up!’ She realised she’d spoken the words in Castilian, even as she dashed back to the bed, pulled off the sheets and gave the hairy slumbering figure a shove. No reaction! She was already pulling on a tunic and slipping into her moccasins; moments later, with a final shriek at Puertocarrero, she ran out into the night, heading for Cortés’s nearby pavilion. Melchior followed at her heels.
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