The Seven Serpents Trilogy (36 page)

Without delay, taking the dwarf by the hand, I quietly pushed through the excited crowd. Outside the chamber, we ran through the dimly lit passage that led back to the bridge we had crossed a short time before, to stairs that wound downward from the bridge to the canal.

Here we stopped and looked back. There was no sign that we were being followed.

A double canoe festooned with pennons was nosing up to the wharf, a feathered carpet was spread out, and a lord and his large retinue of servants, musicians, and guards were making ready to come ashore.

We waited until everyone was on the wharf and drums were beating.

Beyond the canoe was a line of barges tied to stone rings. The canal ran beneath the emperor's palace, and at its far end was a glimmer of sunlight. Judging that the lake lay in that direction, we slipped through the crowd and raced along the wharf toward the end of the tunnel.

We came upon a barge piled high with garbage that was being pushed along by two men with poles. We waited until, having run out of space to walk, they turned about, trotted forward to the bow, and set their poles again.

With Cantú in my arms, I made a leap from the wharf to the moving barge, with good fortune landing on my feet. The two bargemen had not seen us, but they were toiling slowly along the deck. We could either grapple with them or try to hide.

We clawed into the garbage, dug away until we reached bottom. We pulled the rank stuff over us, lay quiet, and waited. Bent over their long poles, grunting as they came, the two men reached the stern, turned around, and went forward to start poling again.

The barge moved into the sunlight. The air freshened.

Peering out through a hole I had left myself, I saw the temple of Uitzilopochtli behind us. To the left was a causeway crowded with people, to the right an expanse of water with white houses beyond and some small tem ples.

We covered our heads now that we had left the half-light of the tunnel, but the smell grew stronger and I began to cough. There were no sounds from the dwarf. For a while I thought he might be dead. Then he said something that sounded as if he were out of his wits and whispered, “He, he.”

We were moving along faster at this time, in water no deeper than my waist. I thought about wading ashore, carrying the dwarf on my back, but we were still too close to the main part of the city.

An hour must have passed, the two Indians tramping back and forth with their long poles, when one of them, a squat young man dressed in a breechclout, hesitated as he reached the stern, fell to his knees less than an arm's length away, then looked squarely at me, blinking his eyes in surprise.

Lacking any choice, I squirmed out of the garbage, picked up the startled Indian, who was half my size, and threw him overboard. The second Indian turned back when he heard the splash, and as he reached me I wres tled him along the deck and finally into the lake.

With the poles we went on for half a league and guided the scow ashore. We washed ourselves, which took a long time, and, finding that we had been this road before, found the causeway that led on to Cholólan.

Fires burned in the courtyards we passed, but few people were on the road. We traveled until it was too dark to see, then found a place to sleep.

It was near a hut where a woman was selling maize cakes, but I had nothing to pay for food except the one pearl left from the hoard I had started with. Since we would be traveling in the guise of
pochtéca
and needed merchandise and decent clothes, we could not part with it. We slept, therefore, on empty stomachs.

At the marketplace in Ayotzingo I traded the pearl for two sets of rough clothes, including sandals for the dwarf, who had somehow lost his, traveling staffs, and a bundle of trading goods. By noon we were on the road again, walking eastward in bright sunshine toward the town of Amecameca.

We went fast, much faster than when we had been traveling toward Tenochtitlán weeks before.

Fear sped our footsteps. Fear that Lord Tzapotlan had sent his men in search of us. Fear that the men whom the Spaniard Cortés had left behind would ven ture out and in time happen upon the
Santa Margarita.
Fear of Chalco, who by now must have found his way back to the island.

On the fourth day, as we were leaving a grove of trees, there were rapid steps behind us. We hid in the bushes until two youths passed by. I recognized them by their blue headbands as the emperor's runners.

Not long afterward, another pair passed us going in the opposite direction. I tried to stop them, thinking that they might be carrying news about Hernán Cortés, but with a wave of their hands, they sped on.

People we talked to in Amecameca when we stopped to buy food recognized us.

Children, attracted by the giant and the dwarf, gath ered around and followed us through the streets, shout ing friendly words, entreating us not to leave them. But we went on as rapidly as Cantú's short legs would permit—some five leagues each day, traveling from dawn to nightfall—with me worried that he would collapse on the trail, unable to take another step.

When we came to the high country between the snowy peaks of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, we suf fered from the cold and could only travel at midday, when the sun was warm.

One morning, halfway through the high pass, the dwarf could not get to his feet. Fortunately, there was a village nearby where I located two strong young men who agreed to carry him in a litter.

We traveled faster now. And since we were leaving the cold peaks behind and the trail trended down, we covered more leagues each day than at any time since we had left Tenochtitlán.

Near the city of Cholólan we came upon four of the runners, who were passing bags to each other on the trail. We stopped, and I asked the two members of the team running westward from the coast if they had heard news of men with beards who were riding on the backs of deer. Both men shook their heads.

In Cholólan I asked a youth if he had heard anything of bearded men carrying sticks that made thunder and spouted fire.

“Tell me more about these men who carry thunder sticks,” he said.

“There is much to tell,” I said, “but there is no time.”

The first we heard of Cortés was when we came to the city of Texcála. Though Cantú was on his feet once more, we had been held back by a
norte
, a freezing wind that covered the land with dust.

It was shortly after dawn when we reached Texcála, but torches flamed on the temple steps, drums were beating, and people crowded the streets. I thought that it must be a festival day. Before we had gone far, however, we discovered that the city was under siege.

Hernán Cortés and his army stood at the gates.

 

T
HE ONLY ROAD TO THE SEA WAS BLOCKED BY THE
S
PANIARDS AND THE
Texcaltéca, which made it necessary for us to find a way around the two armies.

We wasted the rest of the day discovering that a trail used by deer hunters skirted the city. It led for a league and more in the opposite direction from the way we had to travel, made a winding loop back through a steep ravine, but at last came out on the trail.

With the armies at our backs we made haste along the road to the sea.

There were signs that farmers had been harvesting their fields when Cortés came by and that the Spaniards had stopped to raid the crops and burn the huts where the Indians lived. There were no farmers in the fields, and the only life I saw was a stray dog that stared at me from behind a tuna bush. The big, black-winged
zopilotes
had begun to gather in the sky.

We had not gone far when I saw a spiral of yellow haze less than a league in front of us. The road was soft from the tramping of feet and horses' hooves. I thought that the wind, which had shifted around and now came from the east, was blowing dust toward us.

The dwarf thought differently. “It's not wind,” he said, “or men marching. It's men on horses. And being on horses they are Spaniards.”

“I think you're wrong about the horses,” I said. “The army has gone by. Days ago, judging from the signs.”

“A nest of stragglers. Every army has them.”

“One or the other, we should not stay here.”

We increased our pace and while we were talking, the clear sound of hooves came to us on a gust of wind. There was a hut close at hand, sitting back in a corn field. Two other huts nearby had been burned to the ground, but this one was standing.

Like all Indian huts, it had a straw mat for a door. The mat had been torn and was hanging loose. As I pulled it aside, I saw in the back of the hut a man sitting hunched against a wall. Beside him lay a woman and a child. The child was breathing but the woman was dead.

We went in and I fixed the curtain straight. I spoke to the man. He did not answer, though he tried, putting his tongue out and parting his lips.

I glanced through a hole in the mat.

The horsemen had slowed down. They wore helmets and breastplates and carried lances across their saddles. They were laughing about something, then they stopped and one of them pointed to the hut. The same man rode through the field, talking over his shoulder to the other soldiers, who were watching from the trail.

I opened the curtain as he rode up and greeted him in Spanish. “We're Spaniards.”

“I can see that you aren't Indians,” he replied.

He was a very young man, not much older than I, and had a cut on his chin that had not yet healed. He spoke in the accent of Seville, clipping his words off at the ends.

“Who are you?” he asked, glancing past me at the man and the woman and the child. “Why are you here in all this?”

“We saw the hut,” I said. “It's the only one that hasn't been burned. We're looking for water.”

“I mean, who are you?”

“My name is Julián Escobar, from Seville in Spain.”

“I know Seville's in Spain. You don't need to instruct me.” On his breastplate, which had a dent in it, was an officer's insignia. “What are you doing on the road? Where are you going?”

“I'm a
pochtecatl.
I trade goods.” I pointed to the bundle lying beside the door. “We're on our way to Tzompantzinco.”

“You look like a deserter,” the officer said. “We've met a couple since we left Vera Cruz. You must belong with Cortés. Or why are you here?”

The dwarf spoke to me in Maya, but because he spoke the language so poorly, I understood only a single word—
citam.
It meant “wild pig,” and I assumed that he was reminding me that I was dealing with one.

“And you,” the officer said, as if he had not seen the dwarf before. “Who are you and where do you come from and why?”

“Guillermo Cantú,” the dwarf said and then repeated what I had already said about myself, adding the information that we were both castaways from a Spanish ship.

The officer, worrying about the cut on his chin, kept touching it with a dirty finger. He stopped as something stirred his memory.

“You are not with the ship that sank with Aguilar?” he asked me.

“Aguilar?” I said cautiously, as if I might or might not know him.

“Gerónimo de Aguilar,” the officer prompted me. “He was from Ecija in Spain and was cast away in Yu catán three years ago. He's been living with the Indians. Now he's with Cortés as an interpreter.”

“I don't know Gerónimo de Aguilar. My friend and I are castaways.”

The officer turned his horse and rode back to his six companions and talked for a while. I couldn't hear their conversation, but from their gestures all of them were in favor of letting us go on our way. I expected that the of ficer would give us a wave and ride on. Instead he rode back to the hut and said that he was taking us to Texcála.

“The royal notary has a listing of all our men,” he said. “I want to see if he has your names.”

“We're not on the notary's list.”

“No doubt, but I'll make certain.”

The man who was hunched against the wall of the hut made a motion of his hands, asking for water.

“What are we going to do with this man and his sick child and his dead wife?” I said.

“Leave them,” the officer said.

“Do you have water?” I asked.

The officer signaled to the men on the road and one of them came with a gourd, which he gave to the man. Then the officer rode back to his comrades.

The dwarf and I buried the woman. The earth was hard and we had nothing to dig with, so we put her in a shallow place and covered her with cornstalks. I said a prayer for her and took the child in my arms.

The man had gotten to his feet and the four of us went out through the field and started up the trail to Texcála.

“We are in trouble,” the dwarf said.

We arrived at the Spanish camp in midafternoon and within a few minutes the dwarf and I proved that we were not and never had been soldiers in Cortés's army. This freed us from one problem, but plunged us into another far worse.

In a brief ceremony, we were pledged to the service of His Majesty King Carlos the Fifth. The dwarf was set to scouring pots in a nearby stream, while I was given a sword and assigned to guard duty on a wind swept hill.

The hill, less than a league from the outskirts of Texcála, commanded a view of all the approaches to the beleaguered city. Scattered over its crest were numerous fires around which small groups huddled against the wind. Sidling up to one of the fires, I found myself in the company of two ragged soldiers, both with wounds, both surly, whose names were Juan Borrego and Raul Carrasco.

They were silent young men, but I managed to pry out of them answers to the two questions that had plagued me since the moment I first heard of Cortés. I learned that the Spanish fleet had sailed from Havana directly westward to the mainland.

“Did you pass any islands on the voyage?” I asked them.

“Water only,” said Juan Borrego. “Lots of water.”