War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent

by Graham Hancock

  He was already at full gallop, Sandoval and Velázquez de Léon to his left, Alvarado and Morla to his right, when he saw a great mass of armed men, their heads dressed with wild plumes, pour over the top of the western ridge half a mile away and surge in ordered ranks down the slope towards them.

  * * *

  A man on horseback came galloping out of the west, the dazzle of the afternoon sun at first making him hard to recognise. ‘It’s Davila,’ said Díaz, shading his eyes. ‘He’s whipping all colours of shit out of that horse. Looks like trouble to me.’

  Moments later, the cavalryman reined in before the army. His mount was lathered. His own right foot had been pierced through his boot by some weapon and was dripping blood. ‘All the horse!’ he yelled. ‘With me now! Cortés is in danger. Infantry follow our tracks as fast as you can. Two miles to the west.’

  He was already wheeling his mount, the eight remaining riders mustering around him, when Ordaz, whom Cortés had entrusted with command of the infantry as he had done at Potonchan, shouted: ‘What are we dealing with?’

  ‘Scouts,’ Davila replied. ‘Maybe thirty of them still alive when I left the field. But they’re not like any Indians we’ve ever fought. Killed two of our horses already. If there’s a whole army like that, they won’t be easy to beat.’ He called for and was given a new lance and led the cavalry west at a gallop.

  Assigning Mibiercas and La Serna as his deputies, Ordaz gave Díaz command of a vanguard of two hundred Spaniards, including thirty musketeers and thirty archers, supported by all the Totonac warriors. ‘You’d better take Malinal with you as well,’ Ordaz said, ‘in case there’s talking to do. And make haste – if the enemy have scouts out, their army won’t be far behind. I’ll follow with the rest of the foot and the dogs, but the artillery’s going to slow us down.’

  Díaz set off at once, urging his men forward at a pace faster than a forced march, almost a run. It was a risk, for he must not exhaust them to the point where they’d be unable to fight, but Ordaz was right – scouts meant an army and there wasn’t a moment to lose. Malinal, he was pleased to see, kept up without difficulty, her face serious and intent.

  ‘Do you have a weapon?’ Díaz asked as she strode along beside him.

  She pointed at her mouth: ‘Speech is my weapon,’ she said.

  He smiled, realising – as he had a hundred times before – how much he liked her. She was a great beauty, which some might say was enough in itself, but she was also tough and smart – the speed with which she was learning Castilian was remarkable – and, like a good soldier, she never complained. She was Cortés’s woman, of course, and therefore beyond his reach, but that didn’t stop Díaz admiring her from afar. He felt annoyed the caudillo had not thought to arm her.

  ‘You should have something more than your tongue to defend yourself with,’ he said, and on impulse he took his pack from his back as they marched, found the short stiletto he kept hidden there and passed it to her.

  It was a fine weapon. She pulled its narrow blade from its sheath and examined it with a look of almost childlike wonder.

  ‘For stabbing,’ Díaz explained. He made a punching gesture with his fist. ‘Thrust that into a man’s gut and down he goes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She gripped the hilt and mimicked his punch. ‘Down he goes!’

  ‘That’s right.’ He fished in his pack again and found a leather thong. ‘Attach the sheath to this, loop it round your neck and keep it out of sight until you need it.’

  He looked away, surprised to find he was blushing as she followed his instructions. An awkward silence fell between them, and they hurried on, but moments later, carried on the light breeze, they heard distant shouts and then the unmistakable clash of battle. ‘Stay behind the men,’ Díaz warned. ‘You’re too valuable to lose to some skirmisher.’

  Malinal grinned and made the punching gesture again. ‘If skirmisher comes,’ she said as she fell back, ‘down he goes!’

  Summoning La Serna and Mibiercas to join him, Díaz scrambled up a long gentle slope to the top of a ridge and saw a second, higher ridge about a mile ahead to the west. In the valley between the two, Cortés and all the cavalry were heavily engaged with a large force of Indians. So much for thirty scouts, then! This was an army, as Díaz had feared.

  ‘How many do you reckon?’ he asked.

  ‘Three thousand?’ guessed La Serna.

  ‘More than that,’ said Mibiercas. ‘Four thousand, maybe five.’

  Cortés’s strategy was clear enough. The horsemen repeatedly charged the enemy, killing with their lances, withdrawing and charging again. Fourteen riders against so many seemed like lunatic odds, yet the truth was that everything about this campaign was a sort of romantic madness straight from the pages of Amadis de Gaula, where the few, if they had courage enough, could indeed sometimes prevail against the many. There was even, Díaz thought, a fairy-tale princess in the form of Malinal.

  He waved his men forward, signalling that they should spread out along the ridge, the Spaniards in two squares of a hundred each, the thousand Totonacs behind. The odds were much better than at Potonchan but, unlike the Maya, this new enemy fought in disciplined companies, holding their lines, none of them showing the slightest inclination to panic, break and run.

  Díaz called for his trumpeter. ‘Sound the advance,’ he said, ‘and make it loud. I want the caudillo to know we’re here.’

  As the first notes rang out, he drew his sword. ‘Santiago and at them!’ he yelled and, with Mibiercas and La Serna running at his side, he led the way down the slope.

  * * *

  Shikotenka wasn’t surprised to see more white men appear at the top of the ridge. He’d been expecting them and had mustered the biggest army Tlascala had ever seen to annihilate them.

  But not today. Today was just a skirmish to test their strength, get a clear idea of their skills, their weapons and their fighting spirit, and lull them into a false sense of security. This was why he’d first confronted them with his fifty, luring them on, and why, even now, he’d allowed only five thousand to come against them. In the end he would leave them the field, and let them think themselves the victors, but tomorrow he would bring them to battle against a hundred thousand warriors.

  A horn sounded up on the ridge and the ranks of the white men and their cowardly Totonac allies surged down towards him. At the same time the deer riders, realising they were reinforced, disengaged, drew back onto the lower slopes of the eastern side of the valley and waited for their troops to join them.

  Shikotenka barked orders that were relayed along the Tlascalan fighting line. ‘Hold! Hold here! Form up. Do not attack until you see the signal.’ He and his men occupied the lower slopes of the western side of the valley and were separated from the deer riders by no more than a hundred paces. If the other white men had fire-serpents, he thought, they would surely use them now.

  ‘Hold!’ he yelled again. ‘Whatever they put against us, hold! If any man goes in before the signal, he dies under my knife.’

  Ilhuicamina and Chipahua passed the command along. Tree stood by Shikotenka’s side, gripping his macuahuitl two-handed and glowering at the enemy.

  * * *

  ‘What in hell do they think they’re doing?’ asked Alvarado. He sat loosely in the saddle of Bucephalus, his bloodied lance resting on his shoulder.

  A hundred paces away, across the bottom of the valley, if this hollow in the moor could be dignified with the term ‘valley’, the Tlascalans were simply standing their ground, five thousand of them in straight ranks of two hundred – rank after rank, massed all the way up the western side of the valley, almost as far as the ridge. Only moments before, the air had been filled with their wild whoops and war cries, but now they were utterly and completely – almost oppressively – silent.

  ‘I’d say they’re challenging us,’ hazarded Cortés.

  Alvarado scoffed: ‘Challenging us to what?’

  ‘To do our worst?’
<
br />   ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Find out what we’re made of. Find out what we can do. It’s a reasonable tactic, actually.’

  ‘Well in that case,’ said Alvarado, ‘why don’t we show them?’

  ‘I want to try to parlay first.’ Cortés turned to Díaz who was standing close. ‘I hope Malinal’s with you, not following on behind with Ordaz?’

  ‘She’s here.’

  ‘Well, bring her forward. I’ve got a job for her.’

  Moments later, Malinal was at Cortés’s stirrup, looking up at him. Her face, Díaz saw, was radiant with some powerful emotion. Was it love? He felt a twinge of jealousy, but put it out of his mind.

  Cortés nodded to her: ‘Tell them we serve a great king who lives across the seas and we’ve come here in his name to seek their friendship. We seek their alliance in the war we will make against their enemy Moctezuma. Tell them we admire their long struggle against the tyrant and we’ve come to help them. Tell them our friendship will be greatly to their profit and that we will teach them and show them many wonderful things.’

  While Malinal put this into Nahuatl, her voice ringing out across the valley, Cortés turned to Díaz. ‘Are your musketeers and crossbowmen loaded and ready?’

  ‘They are, Caudillo.’

  ‘Pick the five best marksmen,’ Cortés said, ‘and have them take aim at whichever Indian replies to this. If it comes to a fight, they must make sure to kill him.’

  ‘And the rest of the shooters?’ Díaz asked as he strode towards the infantry, who were drawn up in two squares of a hundred men each.

  ‘They should spread their fire widely. Do all the harm they can.’

  * * *

  Shikotenka had heard from Huicton of this Indian woman who spoke for the white men, but he didn’t believe her honeyed words any more than he’d believed the Totonac emissaries. When she came to the end of her little speech, he was too angry to reply and turned to his standard-bearer. ‘Make the signal,’ he said, and as the man raised the attack banner of wicker covered in iridescent quetzal plumes, he gave a great yell, drew his macuahuitl and charged the enemy line. Responding instantly, the five thousand battle-hardened Tlascalan warriors, who he’d picked to test the white men’s strength that day, surged forward around him as one being, one blood, and he felt the air vibrate with the fury of their war cries and the ground tremble beneath his feet with the massed weight of their onslaught.

  For a moment, as he closed the distance, there was surprise, even shock, in the faces of the enemy. But only for a moment. Groups of them in each of the two defensive squares they’d formed were holding long objects to their shoulders, hollow metal tubes mounted on wood, and now smoke and flame belched forth from these, accompanied by a sound such as he had never heard before, an awful sound, a loud, popping, booming roar followed at once by an eerie, unsettling whirr as of a swarm of insects flying very fast. Something hot seared his ribs, something powerful that clutched at him and left the skin it had touched stinging as though he’d been whipped, sizzling as though he’d been branded, while men to his left, men to his right, men behind him were screaming, tumbling, skulls burst open, bodies broken, a mist of blood rising between them, and that hideous sound went on and on, echoing across the valley, reverberating off the ridges, swelling and multiplying as though it would never end.

  ‘Fire-serpents,’ he heard men whisper, ‘weapons of the gods,’ but even so they didn’t break – they were Tlascalans! – and the first rank, with Shikotenka in its midst, flung itself against the two squares with a tremendous crash, as shields smashed against shields and swords against swords. The second rank followed and the third and the fourth, enveloping the enemy, surrounding them, battling to break through on all sides even as the deer riders reared and wheeled their animals, charging into the melee with war cries of their own, their vicious lances jabbing and thrusting, while the Totonac auxiliaries danced round the outside of the fray, spearing and cutting the throats of Tlascalans who already lay sprawled and gutted, piled up in groaning heaps.

  Shikotenka hammered at the white men’s shield wall, hacked at their snarling faces and armoured legs with his macuahuitl in his right hand and his dagger in his left, twisted, dodged and parried as the metal swords of their front rank darted out wickedly, and as huge spears held by men two or even three ranks back stabbed down at his neck and his head. The macuahuitl he’d taken from Guatemoc all those months before, and which he’d once thought so lethal, so perfect, seemed like a useless toy in his hands. Its obsidian blades shattered against the unyielding metal of the white men’s bucklers, and once – only once – did he succeed in hooking his dagger past their defences and slashing open a bearded face.

  Everywhere it was the same – brave Tlascalans uselessly assailing the bulwarks of the squares, which seemed as immovable and impenetrable as cliffs, and which yet bristled with fatal points and edges that cut men down like maize at harvest. Unlike Tree, Chipahua, Ilhuicamina, Shikotenka himself, and the rest of his squad, all of whom wore only sandals and loincloths for speed, many of the five thousand who’d come over the ridge to reinforce them carried wooden shields and wore wooden helmets and quilted cotton vests that could frustrate all but the hardest macuahuitl blows and stop flint-tipped arrows. Such devices had served Tlascalans well in battle for centuries but proved useless against the white men’s metal blades, which cut through them as though they were paper, slicing to pieces the soft human flesh and bone within, while the Tlascalans’ own weapons were miserably ineffective, with even their arrows and spears and fire-hardened atlatl darts bouncing off the helmets and armour of the foe.

  Now, suddenly, men within the squares lifted their fire-serpents to their shoulders again, and some were holding those strange little bows like the one the Totonac emissaries had brought to Tlascala as a gift, and then the crashing, rolling thunder echoed out as it had before and a storm of death tore through the Tlascalan ranks.

  Shikotenka could only watch as close friends from his own squad, who’d lived through the raid on Coaxoch’s pavilion six months before, were now smashed down – Tlachinolli and Camaxtli, Milintica and Huitzlin, felled by the spears and the swords, the fire-serpents and arrows of the white men. With a great roar of fury, Tree was about to charge again, but Shikotenka held him back and ordered the standard-bearer, who’d stuck by him throughout, to signal the retreat.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Monday 30 August 1519 to Tuesday 7 September 1519

  Discouraged by their losses, or perhaps by the timely appearance on the eastern ridge of Ordaz and the remainder of the conquistadors with the artillery and the baggage train, the Tlascalans abruptly disengaged, retreated up the side of the valley and streamed away westwards. Cortés watched them go, leaving the field in good order, and refrained from mounting a pursuit as he regrouped with Ordaz. The afternoon was already drawing on and the men and horses were tired after the sixteen-mile march from Xocotlan and the fight at the end of it.

  A harder fight than he’d expected.

  Taking a quick inventory, Cortés found that a dozen of the Totonac auxiliaries had died and thirty more had been injured in the hand-to-hand fighting. Things had gone better for the Spaniards within the protection of the squares. Happily there were no fatalities, but twenty-three had been injured, two seriously. Since the army had no oil to dress their wounds, he ordered the corpse of a stout Tlascalan butchered and his fat used instead.

  Scouts reported no further hostile forces massing in the area so, after La Peña had finished doctoring the wounded, Cortés marched the army out of the valley in the tracks of the retreating Tlascalans and occupied a deserted village offering a good defensive position on an eminence overlooking a stream. The inhabitants had departed in haste, leaving behind more than a hundred small dogs bred for food, and these the Spaniards killed, cooked and ate, having first posted a strong guard.

  They were not disturbed that night but, before the men lay down in their armour to sleep, t
here was much talk around the campfires of the military bearing and superb discipline of the Tlascalans, and Cortés sensed an undercurrent of fear. The Spaniards had driven off an army of five thousand, but what if ten or twenty times as many of these ferocious fighters were to be thrown against them?

  Since the only answer to such concerns was action, Cortés had the troops under arms and on the march again before dawn the next morning, Tuesday 31 August. After less than a mile they came under attack, this time by a smaller force than the afternoon before – at most a thousand warriors, who burst out from behind a low hill and threw themselves furiously against the column, battered the shield walls for a few moments, fell back and then charged in again.

  The assaults continued in this manner, never halting but greatly slowing the Spaniards’ advance, goading and infuriating them with spears and arrows, assaulting their ears with the screech of conches and the beat of drums. After each onslaught, the enemy withdrew to cover in the broken rocky terrain and shadowed the column just out of musket range for a few hundred paces before charging in again. Finally there came a frenzied and sustained offensive. Upwards of fifty Tlascalans were killed and the rest of the force fled in apparent disarray into rough, broken country fractured by gullies and ravines.

  ‘No pursuit!’ Cortés yelled, ‘keep formation!’ But it was useless. With all the fighting and killing, after two hours of constant provocation, the men’s blood was up, and hundreds of them raced after the bolting Indians into a narrow defile, only to come under immediate attack from a force so immense its numbers could not be estimated. The squares quickly reformed but the terrain made it impossible to deploy the cavalry or artillery to good advantage. Cortés again found himself with no choice but to keep moving, with his little army surrounded on every side, smashing its way through the swarming ranks of the enemy by force of arms and will, deafened by hideous whistles and war cries and the loud insistent beat of drums.