“We eat human meat only during special occasions—the flesh of our enemies after battle. The hearts of the best opposing warriors enhance our own strength and courage when eaten.”
He scoffed again. “My friends, whom your compatriots devoured, were not warriors on a battlefield.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps the villagers were hungry.”
He leaned closer and said, “Your people are going through hard times. Your crops are failing, and your people starve. Better watch yourself on the way back to Mayapán. Your roads are awash with cannibals. You might yet end up in a pot or roasting over an open fire like a chunk of venison.”
My rage was rising, and I could barely contain it. If in blind fury I killed the madman, however, I’d have to requite his master for the loss—a sum I did not possess. The master would therefore demand and receive me in the man’s place.
“What is your full name?” I asked, taking a deep breath.
“Jeronimo de Aguilar. In my language, it means ‘Jeronimo from Aguilar.’ ”
“This Aguilar, it is a place? Like Tulúm?”
“Yes, only larger.”
“Where is it?”
“In an even bigger place called Spain, which lies on the other side of what you call the Great Eastern Waters.”
“You are lying. There is nothing on the other side of the waters except the cave where the Sun God rests each night.”
“There is no cave, and the sun is not a god. It is a ball of fire that circles the world each day. This place you call the One-World is only a tiny part of a much, much bigger world. If you got on one of our boats, you would see they are not the kinds of toys you people hollow out of trees—”
“—but are the size of a palace?” I taunted the madman.
“Bigger. The size of your puny mountains.”
“Where would that boat take me?”
“If you sailed east to Spain, or west to China, you would come to lands a hundred times larger than the One-World. Because you don’t have boats large enough to cross oceans, you believe that you are alone in the world. You are not alone. You and your cousins to the north who call themselves Aztecs are just a tiny part of a big world.”
His ravings were the nonsense of a broken mind, but I let him ramble on so I could report them to Lord Janaab. Also he used a word from his language, ship, that he said meant the “giant canoes.” I could tell he was struggling to translate his meaning and descriptions from his own language into ours. While I did not understand everything he said, I got the gist of it. Recalling the great lord’s remark that the madman boasted of weapons that made our sharpest swords and spears puny in comparison, I asked him about the arms his warriors carried.
“Our ships have great weapons that can knock down not just your city walls, but the very cities themselves.” He pointed at Tulúm above the sea wall. “Our ships can lie out beyond the range of your spears and arrows and fire weapons that would destroy all of Tulúm.”
“Does your army fight with these boats alone?”
“No, most fighting takes place on land, and the ships are used to transport armies to the place where battles will be fought.”
“How are your warriors themselves equipped?”
“Our warriors have armor far superior to those quilted cotton vests your fighters wear. It is a material that your spears and arrows cannot penetrate.”
“What is this material?”
“It’s a hard metal that comes from the ground, harder than your silver and gold.”
“As hard as flint?”
“Harder—without brittleness and infinitely more resilient than flint. Imagine warriors encased in the limestone you use to make buildings. That’s what our ‘steel’ armor is like.”
“It would be so heavy, they wouldn’t be able to move.”
“Not the way we make the armor.”
“What other weapons do you have besides this stone armor?”
“You shoot arrows. Our people have weapons that shoot a small object.” He picked up a pebble. “Something like this, but made out of murderous metal.”
I scoffed. “Throwing pebbles is for children.”
“The pebbles our weapons fire can kill a man two thousand paces away. At close range, a single pebble shot out of what we call a musket can kill three men standing back to back.”
I burst out laughing. “You are a storyteller like me.”
“My stories are true.”
“So are mine. Our gods have destroyed the world four times with weapons more powerful than you have described.”
“Your gods do not exist. They are the creations of ignorant people who are unable to understand the world around them.”
I leaned closer and spoke harshly. “You blaspheme more freely than temple priests spill blood. Because of your madness, the gods have not punished you, but if you keep it up, you will be painted red.”
“I’m not afraid of your priests. I manage trade for a rich man who believes I bring him luck and profit. He won’t turn me over to your priests until I am too old or sick to enrich him. And I do not fear these imagined creatures you call gods. There is no god of rain, of maize, of the sun, the moon, or anything else. There is one god, the mighty Jehovah, whose son, Jesus, gave his life for all of us.” He leaned closer, almost spitting words at me. “He will rain fire and brimstone upon your infidel civilization because you are not believers.”
“Did your god send you here?” I asked, probing to see if he would admit that his god sent him as a demon in our midst.
“I serve God in my heart, but I am not fully ordained into the priesthood, so I still serve King Carlos with my body.”
“Your king sent you to spy on us,” I said.
“We are conquerors, not spies. We were en route to an island, Santo Domingo, when our ship went aground near Jamaica.”
“Where are these places you speak of?”
“Islands”—he gestured vaguely out at the Great Eastern Waters—“out there, too far for you to reach without a large boat with provisions.”
“Why have I not heard of these places?”
“Because you’re ignorant.”
I held my temper, but my patience was wearing thin.
He may have sensed my mounting fury, because he tempered his words. “To be honest with you, we have not known about you for that long either. I washed up in your One-World in 1511. Nineteen years before, in 1492, Captain Cristobal Colón discovered these territories for Queen Isabella, who has since ascended into heaven, God rest her soul.”
Female rulers were not unknown in the One-World, but what amazed me was that the man seemed to be claiming that the One-World belonged to her.
“Nineteen of us took to a small boat, one not much bigger than your coastal canoes. It drifted for more than two weeks before washing up on a beach on a large island down the coast from Tulúm. Only eleven of us survived the sea, and all my companions except one were devoured by your demented friends.”
“What happened to your companion who survived?”
“He became a traitor to God and king. He accepted your idolatrous religion, married the daughter of a chief, and acts as if he were a son of this primitive land.”
“You speak as though your warrior Colón conquered us for your now dead queen. If such an event had happened in the One-World, I would know about it.”
“What Colón discovered were the islands in this sea we call the Caribbean. We have already gained dominance over those islands and the Caribs, who live there. Our people are still exploring, moving west. They will be here soon.”
“Your gods are sending armies to conquer us?”
“I told you, we serve God with our hearts, and our king with our sword. My brethren will conquer you in the name of God but with weapons forged by men, not divine fire. Once you have been conquered, your pagan worship will cease, and we will raze your temples and altars.”
“Why are you so certain that your warriors are superior to ours?”
“Be
cause your weapons are so pathetically primitive.”
I showed him my sword. “I could cut off your head right now. Would your god stop me?”
“God permits all people to exercise free will. He will not stop you from decapitating me, but after you die, He will burn you eternally in the fires of hell for your sins.”
“Our swords have obsidian edges; our spears and arrows have tips of flint. Your big boats cannot come onto land to battle us. Before our warriors meet your warriors on the battlefield, we will ask our gods for their intervention. We will then destroy you.”
“Do you know what a deer is?”
“Of course.”
“Imagine an animal many times larger and more powerful than a deer, an animal with hooves that would kill you if they struck you. We call these beasts horses.”
I repeated the word and asked if his warriors would turn these giant deer upon us.
“Encased in steel armor and bearing weapons that can kill at two thousand paces, our men will come mounted on these great beasts. No weapons known to you can stop them. They will ride over your armies, killing all that don’t run like scared rabbits.”
“You’re mad!”
He stopped and locked eyes with me. “Why am I mad? Because I tell you there is a different world across the ocean than you know about? Because I tell you there are weapons superior to yours? Am I mad? Or are you simply ignorant?”
“You are mad.”
He leaned forward and stared me in the eye. “A man makes a big mistake when he thinks he’s seen everything.”
I took a deep breath to control my blazing rage.
He sneered at me. “Our God is mighty, our armies invincible.”
“Tell me the truth. Is this mighty god you speak of bringing destruction to the One-World? Stopping the rain so our crops wither?”
His eyes glittered with priestly fire. “The truth? The truth is that God is punishing you for your pagan acts. Cannibalism and human sacrifice are mortal sins. He will destroy your land and scourge it from the face of the earth unless you repent and allow him into your hearts.”
“When will your god come to destroy us?”
“God acts through his servants. I am one of them. Someday soon, there will be many thousands like me coming from across the sea in the great ships. Nothing in this land of yours, not your pagan gods or your primitive weapons, will be able to stop them. When your warriors are dead, your cities will be burned to rid the world of your filthy—”
I hit him. My hand flew up by itself, and I hit him across the face.
I walked away, leaving him kneeling in the palms and mumbling what I took to be a prayer to his god, Jehovah.
50
As I walked the beach, a sense of dread and impending doom chased me like a rabid dog snapping at my heels. Dark thoughts placed in my head by the strange man who called himself a “Spaniard” taunted me.
I went back to the heart of the city, knowing that I had not struck him in anger.
But in fear.
His crazed words and the mad, passionate conviction with which he spoke them frightened and panicked me. He was a lunatic. No sane man would have even imagined the strange things he spoke of. Still, he described these things with a certitude I could not deny.
And I had already encountered places and people beyond my comprehension.
A man makes a big mistake when he thinks he’s seen everything, the maniac had said.
I was shaken by those words.
I could not truly disprove his statements, because I had not seen everything he had. Given my ignorant upbringing, I understood better than most. In hard truth, none of us knew the world from which he came—not our king, not our priests.
Destruction of the One-World had happened four times in the past. What he had described was another destruction of the One-World, this time by conquest.
His demented diatribes haunted me. Why? It hit me all at once: He is intelligent.
Jeronimo was not a raving derelict wandering the streets, begging for handouts, and taunted by children. He had mastered our language in a remarkably short time and adapted to our lifestyle. Defying our priests and refusing to accept our gods, he had still avoided the sacrificial altar and held a high position as the head accountant to a rich merchant, a task that involved dealing with many people about valuable goods.
He had also not been irrational in any way except when he talked about the land of his people. When he spoke about the treatment he and his companions received when they were washed ashore, he had been angry, but his anger was justified.
An intelligent, rational madman who spoke of the end of the One-World in a short time? An invasion of invincible warriors on giant deer, brought to our shores in canoes the size of palaces and capable of destroying cities with weapons that shot huge objects? Was that what I was to report to Lord Janaab?
On a dark, morbid, overcast day, I left Tulúm.
Still no life-giving rain fell.
51
I attached myself to a merchant with a hundred salt-porters, but their slow pace frayed my nerves. I found myself getting ahead of them even though leaving them was dangerous. Starving villagers everywhere were taking up the bandit trade.
My dark mood deepened when I heard shocking news from travelers: Cobá had won the Flower War with Mayapán when it captured the War Lord of Mayapán.
Eyo! Such a disaster had never happened before in a Flower War. Small armies of each kingdom marched onto the field, but the wars were fought not as a bloody clash between them but as scrimmages in which a few dozen on each side battled at a time. There was even a festival atmosphere, in which bets were made on whom would be a victor.
The War Lord, once a powerful warrior, had been taken prisoner, while leading a force. Cobá’s king was to sacrifice him, and the warrior who captured him would eat his raw, beating heart atop the sacrificial temple.
To have a war lord fall in battle was a great defeat, almost as disastrous as the fall of the king himself.
Added to Mayapán’s drought and failing crops, the Cobá victory confirmed the people’s fear that the gods had spurned our kingdom and were deaf to our king’s implorations.
This was no small matter. Each day, the king went to the top of the main temple and asked the gods for favors. A king whom the gods failed to favor with rain, sunshine, prosperity, and peace would lose the respect of the people.
The plots to depose him would soon proliferate.
I had no feelings for the War Lord. To me, the news meant that Flint Shield had problems other than myself to deal with—the humiliation was so vast, the king might very well order the War Lord’s entire family and slaves painted red, including the warrior son.
While the War Lord’s disgrace might help me fend off his son, it had another possible effect, which I would hate to see happen: utter chaos.
As a storyteller, I knew well the history of kingdoms that lose their head. Most often, the throne passed from one usurper to the next, each looting the kingdom’s treasures, until a neighboring king spotted the weaknesses and invaded.
If history remained true, Mayapán would soon face chaos, which would bode ill for any of us who relied on the city for our sustenance and shelter.
Eyo! If Lord Janaab fell out of favor because the king was removed, the victor would customarily paint his family and chief aides red, then sell the rest of his servants into slavery.
I would be sold in a heartbeat.
I had outpaced the salt caravan when an arrow striking a tree a few feet from me shook me out of my meditations.
My hand went to my sword, but spotting the archer, I left the blade in its deerskin sheath.
The short, powerful stump of a man who looked like an oversized dwarf and the tall slender woman who shot arrows with murderous accuracy were on a hillock ahead of me.
The man had fired the arrow to get my attention. The man pointed down to something at his feet, and the two of them turned, then disappeared into the brush. r />
I pulled the arrow out of the tree and carefully shoved the point in and out of the dirt until the green poisonous tinge disappeared. I tucked it away as a token to remind me that the archers were not figments of my imagination.
I paused at the spot where the man had pointed.
The glyph of Huehuecoyotl, Old Coyote, had been drawn in chalk on the flat side of a rock. The God of Storytelling.
Ajul had called me Old Coyote when I went to live with him and he discovered my ability to remember tales.
They had let me know that they were in contact with Ajul.
I had already made that connection, and I had a question: Did Ajul give them the information about me voluntarily—or under torture?
52
Approaching Mayapán, I saw smoke rise from the fires at every temple. The fires were fed during times of sacrifice to alert the gods that a blood feast was under way. This time it was grim evidence that the king was wreaking vengeance on those who had plotted against him. From the king’s point of view, no doubt, those conspirators included rebels who had stormed the corn storage sheds for food after the corn prices had soared.
On entering the Mayapán marketplace, I asked a merchant I knew about the War Lord’s family—especially his son, the celebrated young warrior, Flint Shield.
The merchant provided fine Cholula dishes and bowls to the richest homes in the city and always seemed to hear everything, not from the men running Mayapán but from their wives.
“The War Lord’s son has fled the city,” the merchant told me. He looked around and then spoke to me in a whisper. “They say that the War Lord’s own guards were bribed to fall back and expose him during the battle.”
“So he could be captured and sacrificed?” I asked.
“Killed, preferably,” the merchant said. “The king found out there was another plot brewing. The War Lord planned to march the army back to Mayapán and take the throne as soon as the Flower War was over.”
At the palace of the High Lord, the majordomo related more rumors while I waited for Lord Janaab to summon me to his reception chamber.