A Signal Victory Page 7

  On the seventh day Nachancan gave him a gold nose rod, elaborately carved, from Guatemala. It was of a material seldom seen in Yucatan, old, valuable, and rare, and for a few days it annoyed him, by intercepting his line of vision. Then he began rather to like it. It showed who he was.

  Life went on. There was some question of finding him a wife. He must have children. Children gave life a continuity that otherwise it lacked.

  Then, in 1515, without warning, came the great plague. It was their first benefit from Europe. The natives called it mayasimil, the easy death, for they were an old people, and so enjoyed irony. But there was nothing easy about it.

  They had had plagues before, the worst in 1480, but none so bad as this. It raged from one end of the peninsula to the other. There was no mistaking it. Great pustules broke out over the body, the legs and arms seemed to rot, and in four or five days the victims died surrounded by a great stench.

  Guerrero had only to look to know what it was. He had seen it often, though never in so bad a form. It was smallpox. Yet he did not think that he or his party had brought it, for it had occurred too long after their arrival. Those traders who went everywhere must have brought it back from some other Spaniard or infected Indian.

  The traders had always bothered him. They were bound to attract the Spanish some day. It was extraordinary that they should move about undetected. But then the Spanish were not observant, only the smell of gold, well worn, faint, like the smell of dirty linen, would bring them on, and the merchants had no gold.

  He tried not to think about the Spanish.

  He lived in one of the courtyards of the palace now. He was awakened by a great wailing. It seemed to come from the royal apartments. He went there, and found Nachancan alone and weeping. That in itself was usual. The Maya had a terror of the dark. Yet Nachancan sat in it. His son had just died of the plague.

  They sat there together, alone in the midst of all that necessary and terrible commotion. Lamps sprang into flame everywhere. They were a people terrified of death, perhaps in this flat rain forest they found it all around them, whereas in the mountains from which they had originally come, the fact of it was better concealed. They were healthy, they were careful about sanitation, but their world was damp. A little of it rotted away every day. Some people find one thing before the parable of life, and some another. They found death, and that left them with a passion for children. If they could not live for ever, perhaps their children could, for children know nothing of death.

  At what age does that moral necessity make itself felt? To the childlike, perhaps never.

  But Nachancan, an adult man, by some accident, and through no fault of his own, had had only one son.

  The body was shrouded, with jade beads placed in its mouth, and then burnt, an honour reserved for warriors. It was a great loss. He had been a pretty and agreeable boy.

  Nachancan did not appear in public, but at the end of the mandatory eighty days of mourning, he married one of his daughters to Guerrero. He must have grandchildren, and he must have them quickly, in order to see again what life looked like.

  It was a good marriage, for among the Maya, love came after the event, so that instead of dwindling into familiarity, it had the chance to grow out of it, and Guerrero had reached the age when we want permanence rather than novelty, though he had not realized that before. He began to discover his own ability to love, and found it larger than he had known. His wife was so fine.

  For two more years the world left them in peace. They had children.

  Indeed, when the news came from Ecab, Guerrero had just returned from the high priest, who had named his second son and cast its horoscope. The boy, it seemed, was to be a warrior, like his father, but not a ruler. He was to be called Hun Imix, after the day on which he was born.

  Nor was Guerrero called Guerrero. He had taken the name Ah Ceh, because it was the name of one of their ancient heroes and pleased him, a man who had gone down to the other side of the sea, as in a way he had done. It also meant “the deer”, an animal which to them was a sign of departure and loss.

  And who, watching a deer alert at the edge of a clearing, would have thought that it could mean anything else?

  He walked through the courtyards of the palace rather slowly, seeing things intensely, as we sometimes do in moments of stress. For now that the Spaniards had at last come, though he knew what he would do, he had yet to know exactly how he would feel. About his loyalty he had no doubts, but loyalty is not always what we want to do. If, in the act, we discover that it is, why then that is recompense enough.

  Yet he had been Spanish once. He wondered how he would look at them, if he ever saw them, and knew how they would look at him.

  That made him angry. To have anyone dispraise what we love always makes us angry. And Nachancan was such a wise man. He saw everything and said nothing, and somehow that made you love him, at least it was the sort of wisdom Guerrero could love.

  Between them they plotted what was to happen at Champoton.

  TWO

  IX

  It had never occurred to the Spaniards, since they were provincial, that any world could exist but their own, and since they had so recently put down all opposition to themselves in their own world, they did not expect much resistance from the world outside. The Moors had made them carpet-baggers for so long, that they were always indignant when anyone attempted to prevent them from stealing what they wanted, and what they wanted was to go home rich, for they thought no wider than their own native village.

  When baulked, they turned vicious, if only out of sheer astonishment, that anyone should not accept them on their own terms, for after all, were their terms not the only ones?

  Besides, they had Charles V behind them. In time he would retire into a monastery, leaving behind him nothing but a few Titians and an enigma, but at the moment he was an ambitious boy of seventeen who needed money. He could not get it all from the Fuggers, and so anyone who could give him a fine cow to milk would soon rise in the world. He loathed Spain, though he had invented it, but his subjects did not know that. Then, too, carpet-baggers are always looking for a cow to milk.

  They had not found it in the Caribbean. Therefore they searched on. They found the Caribbean unrewarding.

  For twenty-five years they had lived in daily expectation of the Indies, despite Darien, and the brutality of finding only an empty ocean on the other side of it. Yet the Pacific might still be the China Sea, and did not the Orient have islands as unprofitable as these, but close to the jewelled East? Like most people they were always waiting for someone else to find something worth taking away from him. In the meantime they ran their ranches, an occupation which suited them, for a gentleman is permitted to run ranches.

  In their own eyes they were all gentlemen. In Spain anybody who owns a horse is a gentleman. A few of them would even have passed for such at home, in Estramadura or Castille, which perhaps was why the others had emigrated.

  And went right on emigrating.

  Now, under Fernandez de Cordoba, they were out on the Caribbean, in search of slaves, for Indians did not make good slaves, they died off too quickly, and since no gentleman ever did his own work, had to be replaced.

  Secretly he hoped to find the Indies for himself.

  A storm caught up his three ships. The horses whinnied and tried not to fall down. The men were terrified. They prayed to St. Nicolaus, who like the Diving God of Tulum, of whom they knew nothing, swoops heavily out of the clouds to save the faithful. Waterspouts they had heard of, those fabulous snakes which hissed up out of the China Seas, but a hurricane filled them with dread.

  They knew nothing of navigation. That they left to the Portuguese. Their own means of self-preservation were more primitive. When there was something to shoot, they shot it. When there was nothing to shoot, they prayed.

  The storm caught them up and then released them. They spun out of it, with the sunlight before them like a carpet, and saw that low, shoaled, limestone
coast, with Ecab shining white and colourful before them, one of the coastal cities, topping the jungle with its pyramids. They thought it a mirage.

  There was nothing in Spain so grand nor so unexpected. In our time, only explorers of the Antarctic have seen a new world for the first time, its storms, its glitter, its lichens, and its miraculously open little lakes. We cannot know what they felt. But they were ruled by cupidity, and cupidity is incapable of wonder, which is selfless. Their only standard of civilization was that of the people they had destroyed. Luxury to them was Moorish. On the spot they called Ecab El Gran Cairo.

  Naturally they expected no difficulties. Now they had driven back the Moors, good Christians were welcome anywhere. They prepared to go ashore.

  Taxmar’s son was ready for them. His father had kept Guerrero as a source of wonder stories, but the son had a firmer grip upon reality. There was some prophetic nonsense about gods who were to come from the sea, he believed it, but he did not believe it now, and he also knew that these were not gods, but only another kind of enemy.

  He acted accordingly.

  It is strange how the Spaniards, who brought nothing but sorrow, expected to be greeted everywhere, even in the older and more sophisticated Orient, which they thought this was, with joy. That these fine nobles, with their jewellery, dignity, and plumes, should set out to meet them seemed to them altogether natural.

  Perhaps it was because to them sorrow was life’s best and most enduring joy.

  Yet they sensed that something was unusual. These people seemed too hospitable to be anything but savages, but they must know they were worth robbing, for the more richly dressed of them wore ornaments of gold.

  The Spanish prepared to march into Ecab.

  They never reached it.

  Taxmar had them ambushed, beat them off, took one captive for the fattening pens, and sent a messenger to Guerrero at Chetumal.

  The Spaniards, knowing nothing of Guerrero, got back to their boats and put out to sea. Though wary, they were pleased at what they saw. Surely such large stone cities must mean wealth.

  They did not put into shore. Protected by low forested sandbars, the shore did not seem worth putting into. Thus they passed the hidden cities of Conil, Dzilum and Yobain, and on St. Lazarus’ Day, came to Campeche. Campeche fought them off, so they thought it better to go on. “Castilan,” they had said at Campeche. “Castilan,” but it had not altogether sounded like a compliment.

  Guerrero had had time to prepare.

  Thus they came to Champoton and dropped anchor there, in the mouth of the estuary, near what they took to be a carved rock.

  It was not a carved rock. When Kulkulcan, the Maya Quetzalcoatl, god of wisdom and the morning star, promulgated by the Lords of Xiu, had left Yucatan he had built in the sea off Champoton, so legend had it, a temple, for he was also the protector of fishermen and Champoton lived off the day’s catch. The Spanish ignored it. No fanatic knows how many things in this world are sacred, and therefore dangerous, so they were doubly blind, being fanatics both for God and gold.

  The Couohes of Champoton were fanatic themselves. They loved war, and their temples always needed victims. Guerrero had known he could count on them, and he had not been wrong.

  The Spaniards saw before them only a large rich city set back from a shallow bay collared by white beaches. They put ashore to get water and supplies, their boats clumsy with long casks.

  When they landed they found the beach deserted. It was unmarked by so much as the footprint of a bird. Beyond the beach rose the scrub forest, beyond the forest, Champoton itself. A stream of sweet water meandered down aimlessly into the sand. They made for that.

  The Couohes blew their conches, separated themselves from the forest, and attacked.

  The Spaniards had scarcely time to drop their barrels and prime their guns. It was the first time they had seen these devils in battle formation, and devils is what they thought them, if only because they were not easy to defeat.

  The beach had a slight camber and the sand was loose. War being a ritual matter, the Indians were painted black, while their plumes and ornaments waved over their heads in a ripple of colour. They did not fight to kill, except to save themselves. They wanted Cordoba, for sacrifice.

  The guns either misfired or did not fire at all. The Spaniards had to use their swords, as they fell back towards their long-boats. The Maya made straight for Cordoba, who thus had the experience, rare in a military commander, of having to fight for his life. He was wounded thirty-three times, though not fatally, since the Couohes did not wish him dead.

  The boats finally got into deeper water. The Maya, being a short people, could not follow, but their arrows could. The firing of musketry did not seem to disconcert them. It was almost as though they had expected it.

  The Spanish had to row past that rock to reach their ships. They could see now it was no rock, but a building swarming with warriors. Cordoba received another wound and two men died at their oars. Somehow the Spaniards reached their ships.

  Their last glimpse of that beach was when the sea of feathers parted, and they saw that two of their number had been captured. The Indians had stripped them naked, painted them with black and white stripes, tied their hands behind their backs, and were prodding them up towards the jungle and the temple towers beyond.

  The Spaniards did not know about blood sacrifice yet, but they found the scene bitter enough. They were all wounded. There was nothing to do but to return to Cuba. The bay they named the Bay of the Losing Fight.

  Its real name was Potochan.

  X

  Nachancan, when he received the news, was delighted. He thought the matter over with. Their own wars were frequently won so.

  Guerrero said nothing, but thought not. He stood there, blinking in the light, while the messengers from Champoton told their story. They told it well. It was almost as though he were seeing what had happened. Indeed, he could see what had happened, for the messengers had brought with them a picture roll.

  It depicted the sacrifice of the two Spaniards who had been captured. The painting was painstaking, ritual, and exact. The little flat firmly outlined bodies lay over the sacrificial stone. They were painted blue, but to show they were Spaniards, had been drawn with their casques on and their beards neatly spaded. A lot of white showed to the eye.

  The drawing startled him. There they were, as the Indians saw them, and as he must see them now, as nothing more than foreign oblations to one’s own gods. In a way he did see them that way, but with a twinge of bitterness, he did not know about what or against whom.

  They made good victims, struck down by a god of whom, and to whom, for once, they could not make an excuse. He liked that, and yet an echo sounded at the back of his mind, the sound of home, which, whether we like it or not, is always the sympathetic overtone to what we do now.

  He had never had a home there. His home was here.

  He caught Nachancan’s eye, and thought: how can you trust me if you do not trust me. But he said nothing. Nachancan did trust him. Therefore he would have to set to work to teach these people a new use for war. It would not be easy. They had lived in anarchy now for too long to unite against anyone not like themselves. It was something they could not imagine. Even the Mexicans who had conquered them for so long had not come from an alien world. They had certainly not brought another world with them, as the Spaniards did.

  Nor would it do to trust allies such as the Couohes of Champoton, just because they were bloodthirsty and had owed Chetumal a favour. The favour was now paid back. It was Guerrero’s turn now to repay a favour.

  It was what he longed with all his being to do. But that would not make it any the easier to rouse the peninsula.

  Yet that picture roll of the Spaniards had unsettled him, and made him uneasy. He needed to see what he did believe in, in order to remember what he did not. It was as though his own life had suddenly become nothing but a masque in front of him. He looked down at these little painted stra
ngers captive on their sheet of paper, over the blurred outline of the nose rod that barred him inside what he was now. It was the life he had chosen, yet he felt sad and angry, not so much about the Spaniards, as about all those who love life but not the world they live in, and who so do something wrong. He needed reassurance. He went to see his children and his wife.

  His wife always made him feel gentle. They spent the long slow evening together.

  Her name was Ix Chan, and she was Nachancan’s daughter, which made her a princess in this country. At any rate she was a gentlewoman. She could not help treating him with a loyal courtesy which followed a tradition so ancient and alien that he could scarcely comprehend it. For what would seem to a westerner spontaneous affection, was to her only a matter of form, whereas those things which to a Spaniard would in her seem cold and impersonal, actually sprang from the shy wells of a controlled but passionate regard. The Maya were not physically demonstrative. What they really felt they showed only by the way in which they held a dish or twirled a flower. In the midst of sex they were never there. They were off somewhere, remembering a tenderness, glancing at what their own bodies were doing over their shoulder.

  It made them intangible and silvery, and made him ache with love. It was a little art she had, to make the now endless, by that being somehow somewhere else.

  It had taken him a long time to find out how much she loved him, for when she said she was proud of him, he thought she was poking fun, or when she massaged him, that she was being kind. He was at first a little in awe of her. She was so fine, and in Spain he had been told that he was not. In any fantasy about a woman of such quality, and he had had them, he had been the lackey let up the backstairs. So it took him longer to love her. It took him until he realized that here he was what he was, which for once was the part assigned to him, rather than the ill-cast thing Spain had made of him.

  He was only playing at being one of these people. It was not until he had to help to take care of them, not until right now, after Champoton, that he realized that simply because he never could be one of them, therefore he would be nothing else.