War God (10 page)

At once the huge bodyguard stepped back.

Alvarado retrieved his chair and sat down. ‘Why was any of that necessary?’ he asked. His neck and shoulders prickled under Zemudio’s violent stare, but he refused to acknowledge him.

‘I couldn’t be sure you’d deal,’ said the governor. ‘If you didn’t …’ He drew his hand meaningfully across his throat.

‘You’d have had me killed?’

‘Of course. But all that is behind us now. You give me Cortés, I give you these twenty thousand gold pesos …’

‘Who leads the expedition – when Cortés is gone?’

‘Your question is to the point,’ said the governor. He pulled a sheet of vellum from a thick heap on the table in front of him, dipped a quill in an inkwell and began to write in a small, spidery hand. As the quill grated across the calfskin, Alvarado tried to read the words upside down but couldn’t make them out. Velázquez frowned with concen- tration, pushing the tip of his tongue out between his lips like a schoolboy in an examination.

When the governor was done, he read through what he had written, blotted the page and placed it in a document wallet. A motion of his finger was sufficient to bring Zemudio surging to his side. ‘Go at once to Narváez. Give the wallet to him. He’ll know what to do.’

As the bodyguard placed the wallet in a leather satchel and strode from the room, Velázquez turned back to Alvarado. ‘I’ve chosen a man I can trust to lead the expedition,’ he said. ‘My cousin Pánfilo de Narváez. Zemudio takes my orders to him now.’

Narváez
! A complete ass! Incompetent, vainglorious and foolish! In every way the antipodes of Cortés! But Alvarado kept these thoughts to himself and instead asked slyly, ‘Who will be second in command?’

‘I thought perhaps you, Don Pedro, if you agree.’

Alvarado didn’t hesitate: ‘Of course I agree. It will be an honour and my privilege to serve under a great captain like Narváez.’

Velázquez grasped one of the fat moneybags, rose from his throne and walked round the mahogany table. Alvarado also stood and the governor passed the bag to him. ‘A quarter of your payment in advance,’ he said. ‘You’ll get the rest when you’ve delivered Cortés.’ He awkwardly embraced Alvarado and told him to return at once to his ship. ‘Send your invitation to Cortés. Make ready for tonight.’ He clapped his hands and the great formal doors of the audience chamber were swung open by two iron-masked guardsmen armed with double-headed battle-axes.

Alvarado didn’t return to his ship.

When he’d passed the last of the governor’s guards and made certain no one followed him, he led his white stallion Bucephalus out from the palace stables, secured his gold in a saddlebag and rode at full gallop after Zemudio.

The only way to get to Narváez’s estate lay across dry, hilly country, partially overgrown with groves of acacia trees and intercut by a series of shallow ravines. The champion had left a trail a three-year-old could follow, so quite soon Alvarado started to get glimpses of him – that broad back, that bald head, that air, obvious even from afar, of unshakable self-confidence.

Let’s see how confident you really are
, thought Alvarado. He touched his spurs gently to Bucephalus’s flanks; the great war horse thundered forward as fast as a bolt from a crossbow, and the distance began to close rapidly.

A glance at the sun told Pepillo it was well past two in the afternoon, perhaps nearer three. He felt bone weary, his arms already protesting at the weight of the two big leather bags he’d finally retrieved from the Customs House after hours of frustration and confusion involving five different officers, three different batches of paperwork and a lengthy temporary misplacement of the bags themselves.

Which he still had to carry to the pier!

He groaned. The distance was close to a mile! Worse still, this second pair of bags was even heavier than the first, but they clunked and clanged in the same way, as though filled with metal objects.

The road thronged with people coming and going between the town and the harbour. For the most part they were Spaniards but there were Taino Indians amongst them and Pepillo passed a file of Negro slaves, naked but for loincloths, marching up from the docks with huge bundles balanced on their heads. An open coach drawn by a pair of horses sped by carrying a young noblewoman and her retinue of giggling favourites. Then an ox slowly plodded past, pulling a cart. It had ample space for a passenger and his baggage, but when Pepillo tried to steal a ride, a ferocious dog jumped back from the driver’s platform and threatened him with bared teeth.

Pepillo resigned himself to walking. He had walked this morning and he would walk again this afternoon, but he did hate the way the bag in his right hand kept banging against his shin. The assortment of loose metal objects that Muñoz had packed it with seemed maliciously placed to bruise him and make him miss his step. ‘Aargh!’ he grunted as the bag smacked into him again. In a fit of temper he dropped it and threw its companion down after it.

The clasps of the second bag burst open as it hit the ground.

Inside the bag were steel knives – tiny knives so sharp that their blades cut at the slightest touch, hooked and barbed knives, butchers’ knives the size of small swords, knives like saws, daggers with jagged edges, stilettos, cleavers, spikes, skewers …

Pepillo realised immediately he was in a dangerous situation. Santiago was a tough town, filled with fighting men, and there were weapons here that any fighting man would want to possess. As he crouched by the bag, struggling to close it, hastily rearranging its contents, fumbling with its catches, he noticed some strips of dried skin, with hair attached, lying inside. How extremely strange!

Pepillo looked back and saw a figure approaching, a shimmering black ribbon silhouetted by the sun. He felt threatened. The knives mustn’t be seen! With a flurry of effort he succeeded at last in closing and relocking the bag just as a man materialised at his side and stood over him.

‘Is there a problem here?’ the man asked. He was Castilian. His voice was subtle, pleasant, educated, but pitched high and with perhaps the slightest hint of a lisp.

Pepillo looked up and was reassured to see the stranger wore a friar’s habit. No knife-stealing ruffian this! ‘I had an accident, Father. I dropped my master’s bags, one of them came open, but everything seems to be in order now.’

The friar still had the sun behind him and his face was hidden in deep shadow. ‘Do you know what your master keeps in this bag?’ he asked.

Some instinct made Pepillo lie: ‘I don’t know, Father, I just fumbled it closed again as quickly as I could.’

‘You’d better thank Providence you did!’ the friar suddenly shouted. He punched Pepillo hard in the face, knocking him on his back, then ran forward and kicked him in the ribs. ‘
That’s for dropping my bags
,’ he yelled.

As a bolt of pain exploded in his side, Pepillo understood what he should have realised at once. This was Father Muñoz he’d run into! And at the worst possible moment! Father Muñoz returning from his mysterious, day-long absence – where he’d been up to no good if Melchior was any judge.

Pepillo lay curled on the road in a defensive ball, wincing at the thought of another kick as he looked at the Father’s large, dirty feet and cracked, broken toenails strapped into heavy-duty hobnailed sandals. Muñoz wore the black habit of the Dominicans, which he’d hitched up to his knobbly knees for walking, exposing scrawny ankles and calves overgrown with short black hairs and crosshatched with small blue veins.

Stick legs like a crow
, Pepillo thought.

The little fat belly that Melchior had described was also there. It bulged through the Father’s woollen habit and overhung the length of rope tied round his waist as a belt.

Muñoz was thirty-five or forty years old, sallow-skinned and clean-shaven, with a broad forehead and a thick crown of greasy black hair encircling the dome of his tonsure. His two upper front teeth protruded, much as Melchior had described, and his upper lip, which was red and moist, was drawn back around them in a fixed snarl. He had a receding chin and rather chubby cheeks that made his face look weak, but his large nose with its prominent bridge and wide nostrils sent the opposite message. There was the same ambiguity about his eyes. At first glance they were warm, kindly, wrinkled at the edges by smile lines, but when he turned to meet Pepillo’s furtive stare, they emptied of emotion in an instant and became hooded and cold.

Muñoz drew his foot back. ‘What are you gawping at?’ he barked.

‘You, Father,’ said Pepillo. ‘You’re my master then?’

‘So it seems. Though I must confess I don’t see the point of a runt like you.’

‘I can read, Father, I can clerk, I can keep numbers—’

‘Splendid … splendid … But can you carry bags?’ Muñoz had moved round behind Pepillo and now kicked him low in the back. ‘Well, can you? It doesn’t look like you can. And if you can’t even carry bags, then what use are you to me?’

Although his tongue bled where he’d bitten down on it, Pepillo felt stubbornly proud that he hadn’t cried out. He rolled onto his stomach, slowly, laboriously, got to his feet and picked up both bags.

He could do this.

He shuffled his left foot forward, then his right, felt the bag bang into his shin. Left, right, bang, he did it again. He picked up the pace, blinked his eyes and focussed on the distant pier. He thought he could see the booms and derricks around the
Santa María
and the high sides of the
San Sebastián
. The ships were still far away, but not impossibly far. If he could just keep putting one foot in front of the other, he would get there in the end.

Without warning, Muñoz unleashed another kick. This time the foot in its heavy sandal connected with Pepillo’s buttocks like a blow from a sledgehammer, lifted him bodily off the ground and sent him sprawling on his face, losing his grip on both bags. He struggled to stand but Muñoz toyed with him, kicking his arms and legs from under him, making him collapse repeatedly.

‘Why are you torturing me?’ Pepillo asked.

Muñoz was all over him, straddling him, whispering in his ear. ‘You think this is torture? I’ll show you what torture is.’

‘But why?’ For an instant Pepillo’s resolve broke and he let out a strangled sob. ‘What have I done to you?’

‘You searched my bag,’ said Muñoz.

‘I didn’t! I swear!’

‘I saw you with your filthy hands in it.’

‘You’re mistaken, Father …’

A pause. Heavy breathing. ‘Swear it on the Holy Book!’

Pepillo must have hesitated because quick as a flash Muñoz rolled him on his back, reached down a long bony hand and seized him by the nostrils, applying painful, grinding pressure with his thumb and forefinger. Pepillo refused to cry out, but his eyes watered profusely and the pain got worse. He felt something twist, then break, high up near the bridge of his nose, and blood gushed down his face and filled his mouth. He spluttered, felt the blood enter his windpipe and began to cough and choke. How silly! He was drowning in his own blood! He struggled to turn his head to the side, wanting the stream to flow out of his body and into the ground, but Muñoz still held him fast by the nose and glared down at him with the light of madness dancing in his eyes.

Pepillo gagged and spluttered, but it hurt to struggle and anyway there was no strength left in his body. His sight grew blurred, a tremendous weariness stole over him and a great ringing filled his ears.

When Shikotenka propelled himself out of the crevice he was ready for anything, his knife back in his hand and a snarl on his lips. To be sure, it had been agreed this was to be a matter of honour between knights, but he still half expected to be bludgeoned into unconsciousness. He’d long since learned the bitter lesson that any treachery was possible when dealing with the Mexica.

But Guatemoc hadn’t betrayed him. Draped in a shimmering cloak of turquoise
cotinga
feathers, the prince was strolling up the hill and singing, passably enough if somewhat out of tune, the lyrics of ‘I Say This’.