FEATHERED SERPENT, page 1
FEATHERED SERPENT
A NOVEL OF THE MEXICAN CONQUEST
Colin Falconer
FEATHERED SERPENT was originally published
in the United States by Crown Publishing.
It was published for kindle as AZTEC by CoolGus Publishing.
When the time has come, I will return into your midst by the eastern sea, together with white and bearded men.
- proclamation to the Toltec people by their god-king, Feathered Serpent, circa 1000 AD.
1.
Tabasco province, in what is now Mexico: 1513
Malinali stared into the darkness, listening to the sounds of her own funeral.
It was the Eighth Watch of the Night, when ghosts walked and headless demons pursued lonely travelers on the roads. She was trussed on the floor of her mother's food store. Wicker baskets of vanilla pods were stacked against the adobe walls and the room was filled with their sweet, cloying smell.
A screech owl twisted its head and watched her from its perch on the carved cedar beam. Its yellow eyes blinked slowly. An omen. The owl was an envoy from the Lord of Darkness, come to lead her into the underworld.
She tried again to wriggle free but the thongs around her wrists and ankles only bit deeper into her skin.
Her mother wanted her dead.
She closed her eyes and listened to the dirge sounds, the bass boom of the conches, the hollow thrum of the drums, the shriek of whistles. She could hear someone shouting her name, then the crackle of flames. Someone else was blackening on the pyre in her place.
She heard whispers outside the hut. Her eyes blinked open and searched the shadows.
There was the flare of a pine torch as they entered. They were slave merchants, they had visited their village many times. Her father had always treated them with disdain. One of them was without an eye and the flesh was smeared pink around the ancient scar like cold grease.
The torches threw their faces into shadow. ‘Here she is,’ the one-eyed man said.
The gag was making her choke. One of the men laughed at her struggles but One Eye hissed at him to be quiet. There was no need for stealth. No one would hear them over the sound of the funeral drums.
They lifted her easily between them and carried her out of the hut into the darkness.
Do not be frightened, she reminded herself. This is not the destiny your father prophesied for you. Your life is in the hands of the gods.
Your future is with Feathered Serpent.
2.
Tenochtitlàn, now Mexico City: 1519
The owl man staggered, white froth on his lips. His hair, which reached to his waist, was matted with dried blood, and the black mantle around his shoulders gave him the appearance of a hunched and malevolent crow.
Montezuma, Revered Speaker of the Mexica, watched, the turquoise plugs in the piercings of his ears and lips reflecting the glow of the pine torches. He whispered his questions to Woman Snake, his prime minister.
Woman Snake repeated the questions carefully. ‘Can you see through the mists to the future of the Mexica?’
The owl man lay on his back on the floor, laughing hysterically, helpless in the grip of the peyotl liquor. ‘Tenochtitlàn is in flames!’
Montezuma shifted uneasily on the low carved throne.
The owl man sat up, pointed at the wall. ‘A wooden tower walks towards the sacred temple!’
‘A tower cannot walk,’ Montezuma hissed.
‘The gods have fled to the forest.’
Montezuma wrung his hands in his lap. He whispered another question to Woman Snake. ‘What do you see of Montezuma?’
‘He is burning and there is no one to mourn him. The Mexica spit on his body!’
Woman Snake stiffened. Even under the intoxication of peyotl juice the obscenity echoed around the cavernous room like thunder. ‘What other portents?’ he asked.
‘The Feathered Serpent returns!’ The owl man gasped the words between paroxysms of laughter. ‘There will no longer be a Tenochtitlàn!’
Montezuma rose to his feet, his face contorted into a grimace.
‘Our cities are destroyed, our bodies are piled in heaps!’
The owl man crawled towards the throne on his hands and knees, saliva smeared on his cheek. ‘See what is about to befall the Mexica!’
Montezuma hid his face in his hands. Woman Snake dared a glance at his emperor and saw that he was weeping.
‘Wait until the effects of the peyotl have worn off,’ Montezuma growled, ‘then skin him.’
He hurried from the chamber. The owl man lay on the floor, lost to his wild and fevered dreams, laughing at shadows.
Yucatán
Hernan Cortés steadied himself on the rail of the Santa Maria de la Concepción, the strange coast a grease-green border on the port horizon. He sniffed at the taint of tropic vegetation on the salt air. The canvas cracked like grapeshot in the yards above his head, his personal banner whipped from the mast. It bore a red cross on black velvet, with a Latin inscription in royal blue, the same words that had once graced the Emperor Constantine's own ensign:
Brothers let us follow the Cross, and by our faith shall we conquer!
This was the culmination of all his dreams. He was sailing to a hostile coast in uncharted waters and yet he felt as if he was coming home. This was his wind, carrying him to his destiny.
He looked down at the main deck, at Benítez and Jaramillo hunched in conversation. They were landed gentlemen – hidalgos - like himself, men with education and breeding but no inheritance. They had come to the Indies to find their fortunes and to escape boredom and poverty; to free themselves from the petty tyrannies of grandees and the harping of priests. They had fled to Cuba along with the other soldiers of fortune, bored planters and failed gold miners, looking for glory and profit.
It was adventure in the old style, with fame and riches and service to the Lord.
This was his hour, a good day to be alive.
Norte wanted only to die.
He retched again, spitting green bile into the ocean. Who would believe he had spent eleven of his thirty years as a sailor? But the last time he had stood on the heaving deck of a ship was eight years ago, in another lifetime.
It was not the oily pitching of the galleon that made him wish for death. It was a sickness of another kind, a sickness of the soul. He saw his new companions staring at him with their vicious eyes. They feared and hated him. In his way, he was a plague carrier, infected with a contagion worse than any black-blistered pestilence. A few of them spat at him as they passed him on the deck.
He felt an arm go around his shoulders. Aguilar.
‘Is it not good to be among Christians again?’ Aguilar used the Chontal Maya tongue, for Norte had forgotten all but a few words of his native Castilian.
Thy rancid and hairy balls! Norte thought. My dog spits them out! ‘Good? For you, perhaps.’
Aguilar wore the brown habit of a deacon. His shaved head and tobacco-dark skin were the only evidence that a few days ago he was the slave of a Mayan chief. He clutched the crumbling Book of Hours that had been his constant companion through his captivity in Yucatán. ‘You must leave that other life behind,’ Aguilar said. ‘Pray for forgiveness and it shall be given you. You succumbed to the Devil, but you may yet be saved.’
I would like to pitch him over the side, Norte thought, let God enjoy his company in heaven with the other saints. Does he not understand that I have no soul left to save? Just leave me alone.
‘Our Lord is boundless in mercy. Confess your sins and you may start your life anew.’
He retched over the side again.
Benítez watched Aguilar’s attempts to console the renegade. Norte disgusted him. Aguilar was merely insufferable, like most churchmen. The two men had been shipwrecked on the way from Darien to Hispañola eight years ago. They and seventeen others escaped the wreck in a longboat, but most died of thirst long before they reached the coast of Yucatán. They were the lucky ones. The survivors were captured by the Mayan natives, and the captain, Valdivia, and several others were murdered. Only Aguilar and Norte had escaped.
After a few days they were captured again, by a Mayan chieftain who proved a little more amenable than their first captor. He had even offered Aguilar his own daughter as a wife. As the deacon told the story, he had spent a whole night lying naked beside her in a village hut but had saved himself from the sins of the flesh by taking refuge in a tattered prayer book.
Norte had not been quite as resilient. Benítez could sympathize there, at least. He understood Norte's need of a woman better than Aguilar's self-imposed chastity. What he could not comprehend was how Norte could marry a heathen and have three children by her, how he could have his ears and lower lip pierced and his face and hands tattooed like a native.
The man was no better than a dog.
When Jaramillo and the rest of the landing party had found Norte on Cozumel Island, he had even tried to run away. Jaramillo would have murdered him with the rest of the natives if it had not been for Aguilar's intervention.
He is a Spaniard just like us, he had said, imploring them to mercy.
A Spaniard perhaps, Benítez thought. But not like any of us.
‘Cortés should have hanged him,’ Jaramillo said over his shoulder. ‘They could roast me over a small fire, I would never allow myself to be so humiliated. When I found him, he had stone plugs through his nose. And look at how his earlobes are torn. Aguilar says that it is a part of the devil worship in their temples.’
‘He even stinks like a native.’
‘I should have slit his throat on the beach and to hell with it.’
‘Cortés says we need him and Aguilar to help us talk with the natives.’
‘How do we know what he will say to them?’ Jaramillo spat into the sea. ‘I hear they sacrifice children in their temples. Afterwards they eat the flesh.’
Benítez shook his head. ‘I am no lover of priests but pray God we can bring salvation to these dark lands.’
Jaramillo grinned. ‘And Pray God also that we are well rewarded for doing Him such service.’
The fleet headed towards the mouth of a wide river. Another hidalgo, Grijalva, had voyaged here the year before and had beached in this spot. He said the natives, who called themselves Tabascans, had shown themselves friendly. The men gathered at the rail and watched the coastline resolve into palms and sand dunes. A New World waited for them, with dreams of gold and women and glory.
3.
There was a cluster of adobe huts, thatched with palm leaves, surrounded by a timber stockade.
The villagers had gathered on the riverbank, waving spears and arrows, many dressed in quilted cotton armor. Some jumped into war canoes and paddled out to mid-stream to block the way ahead. They heard war drums and the strident clamor of horns from inside the stockade.
Benítez watched Cortés. He wondered what sort of commander he would prove to be. He saw no fear on that proud face, only contempt, and it reassured him.
‘They do not seem disposed to treat as kindly with us as they did with Grijalva,’ Benítez said.
Cortés grunted. ‘We come here in peace. And they shall be likewise peaceful. We may have to kill a few to persuade them to it.’ He broke suddenly from his stillness. Two small guns, falconets, had been drawn up to the starboard side, facing the settlement. ‘Prepare your powder!’ he shouted. ‘Ordaz, get ready to lower the boats! Aguilar, Norte, come with me!’
They stood in the longboats, swords drawn, while the clerk, Godoy, dressed in an elegant black suit and silver buckled shoes, read the people of the Tabasco River the Requiremiento in its original Latin, Aguilar translating.
The Requiremiento was a document prepared by the Church and was required to be read in all new lands before their possession in the name of the Pope and the King of Spain. It began with a short history of Christendom up to the moment God gave Saint Peter the care of all mankind. It then stated that Peter's designated successor was the Pope, and explained that he had donated the islands and continents of the ocean to the King of Spain. The inhabitants of these lands should therefore submit to Cortés, as the legal representative of Charles the Fifth. If they submitted, they would be treated well and reap the benefits of Christianity; if not, they would be considered to be in rebellion and would suffer the consequences.
Benítez fidgeted, sweating in his armor. This would be his first battle. He prayed he would not show himself to be a coward. He was afraid of a painful death, he was afraid of a wound, he was afraid of showing fear. It made it difficult to concentrate on the words that the royal notary was reading from the scroll.
Aguilar could not make his translation heard above the drums and the war cries.
The Indians had approached to within a few yards in their war canoes, brandishing spears and leather shields. Their bodies were smeared with black and white grease.
‘They are painted for war,’ Jaramillo said.
Cortés stood with one hand on his hip, the other resting on the hilt of his sword. He might have been listening to a music recital. Benítez felt a surge of admiration for him.
Godoy had stopped reading.
‘Continue with it,’ Cortés snapped.
‘But they cannot hear me over this outcry.’
‘Read it!’
Godoy did as he was commanded.
‘This is foolish,’ Norte said.
A pulse swelled in Cortés’ temple. ‘Ah, so our renegade has re-discovered the language of civilized men. You think God's law is foolish, Norte?’
‘These people do not understand a word of what you are telling them. They have never heard of the Pope. It is ludicrous.’
‘I rejoice that you have learned to speak like a Spanish gentleman once more. But it is also a pity that you use our great language only to spout heresy.’
‘Is it heresy to argue for what is reasonable and just? This charade is just a sop to your conscience.’
‘One day soon I will see you hanging from a tree, Norte, and my conscience will still be clear.’
Godoy finished the Requiremiento. The noise of the drums and the whooping of the Indians had risen to a crescendo. Two arrows were fired at their longboat from the bank, falling short in the water. Aguilar turned and looked to Cortés for further instructions.
He seemed only irritated, as if the natives swarming around them were a cloud of bothersome mosquitoes. The plume that surmounted his steel helmet danced in the breeze.
Benítez tried to imitate his stance. Keep still, he told himself. Do not let your companions see you are afraid.
‘Tell them we come as friends,’ Cortés said to Aguilar, ‘and that we are only interested in obtaining food and water and establishing cordial relations with them once more.’
Aguilar tried to shout his translation over the din.
‘Tell them we have no wish to cause them harm and that as Castilians we are here to do only good,’ Cortés said.
Another volley of arrows sang from the bank and landed in the river. ‘By my conscience, if they persist with this violence, the fault for what follows is theirs! Tell them, Aguilar, that they must become peaceable or commend their souls to God!’
‘We cannot battle so many,’ Norte said.
‘What does a sailor and a renegade know about military matters?’
‘There are thousands of them and just a handful of us.’
‘If the handful of men are Spaniards, then the odds are always in their favor.’
A barrage of stones rained down, launched with slingshots from the bank. Some splashed harmlessly into the water, others clattered onto raised shields and steel armor. But a few found their mark. Benítez heard a man screaming in one of the other longboats.
‘Enough!’ Cortés said. He unsheathed his sword and raised it towards the brigantine, his signal to fire the cannon.
The falconets were discharged together, the heavy shot hissing across the river to explode with a crack among the mangroves. Leaves and tree limbs rained onto the banks. The effect was dramatic. The natives turned and ran.
Cortés leaped into the muddy water. ‘For Saint James and for Spain!’
The soldiers jumped from the longboats and splashed into the water after him. Benítez joined them, carried along in the moment.
But the natives, recovered from their initial fright, were already swarming back to the shallows. It seemed to Benítez that there were just too many of them. It was impossible to think they could overcome such a horde.
Terror made him light-headed, he was scarcely aware of what he was doing. He rushed towards a clutch of brown and painted bodies and slashed wildly with his sword. To his astonishment, one of the natives screamed and fell at his feet. Other soldiers rushed to join him. In moments there were bleeding and dying men everywhere and the river was stained the color of rust.
Benítez slashed again, leaving his guard open. He gasped as he saw a spear thrust towards his chest. But the obsidian blade shattered on his steel breastplate.
He thrust his sword towards his attacker, stumbled on a body floating in the shallows and fell. He scrambled desperately in the mud, choking on the river-water as he tried to regain his feet. He looked up and saw one of the warriors standing over him, holding a stone axe. His steel helmet was gone, lost in the water, and there was nothing he could do to protect himself.
Instead of delivering the coup, the warrior grabbed him by his hair and dragged him towards the bank. But then Cortés was there, and he buried his sword into his captor's body, to the hilt.
Cortés dragged Benítez to his feet.
