It was a most strange and wondrous labyrinth, winding through solid rock, its walls cold and damp with condensation, glittering with veins of gold and quartz and infused with a soft, enigmatical luminescence that enabled her to see where she was going – which was … ? Which was … ? She paused for a moment, suddenly perplexed. Where, in fact, was she going? Why was she here? She knew it must have something to do with the serpent that had bitten her, but she could not say exactly what. And if she was not in her earthly body with its distant messages of pain and suffering, then what was this body she inhabited now – this dream body, this vision body, so very like her form of flesh and blood, yet certainly not the same? Moreover, there was the problem of choosing her direction, because every few paces she had walked so far there had been side passages, forks, branches in this huge system of corridors, any one of which she could have taken and perhaps should have taken. What made her think that the passageway she found herself in now was the right one out of the hundreds, thousands of ways that opened up all around her?
She began to walk forward again, a feeling of uncertainty haunting her. Very soon she came to a crossing. A corridor branched to the left, another to the right. Another seemed to go straight ahead. She heard Huicton’s voice: ‘Your feet will know the way.’ But did her feet really know the way, or was she impossibly, hopelessly lost? And was any of this real or was she just out of her mind with snake venom and sunstroke?
She chose the left-hand path, which rapidly became winding and sinuous with a steep decline. Again there were options – at the next junction she counted no less than fifteen different side passages, bewildering in the complexity of the choices they offered her. She chose one which continued to spiral downwards, ever more precipitously, the light from the walls growing dim, red, hellish, as though she were descending into Mictlan itself. The corridor, which offered no further side branches, progressively narrowed as she followed it. Soon she had to turn sideways in order to continue to pass, until finally she could force herself forward no further. She edged her way back in the direction she had come, but that way also the corridor now seemed narrower than before, and again she found she could not pass.
An overwhelming sensation of horror gripped her, and she screamed.
* * *
Santisteban swiped his staff viciously left to right as he charged in, aiming to deal a crushing mid-body blow. Pepillo was only just able to block it by hastily rotating his elbow up and dropping the tip of his stave down, thus adopting the guard called Hanging Point to protect his right side. Santisteban followed through with another tremendous swipe, this time from right to left, and again Pepillo blocked him with Hanging Point, then adopted a Long Point guard by rotating his elbow down. He immediately went onto the attack, sliding his left foot forward and executing a lunging thrust at the full extension of his arms that drove the tip of his stave into Santisteban’s mouth, splitting his lips and smashing his upper front teeth.
Spitting blood, Santisteban staggered back, windmilling his staff wildly, and Pepillo followed with a series of rapid lunges that the older boy, panic now showing plainly on his face, only just managed to bat aside. Each time their staves connected, however, though Pepillo tried hard to disguise it, horrendous pain surged through his right hand.
This was where he was weak.
This was where he would truly be in danger.
In the two-handed grip he was used to after weeks of practice with Escalante, it was his left that was presently doing most of the work, while his right forefinger had been splinted and bound so that it stuck out rigidly, leaving only the other three fingers and the thumb of his right hand to grip the hilt. Up to now he had managed to override the pain, but the repeated clash and shock of the staves was taking its toll and he could already feel the force of his own counter-strikes weakening. Sensing this, Santisteban’s crazed eyes suddenly seemed to light up and he rushed in on the attack again, sweeping his staff low at Pepillo’s ankles, forcing him to jump back, and then throwing himself bodily at him, shoulder-charging him, grappling him, taking one hand off the hilt of his weapon and snaking it out to make a grab for Pepillo’s finger.
* * *
Tozi calmed herself. This was a vision. It was not real. And she had the power of magic. These corridors had been made by her mind and could be reshaped by her mind. She began to chant – Hmm a hmm hmm, hmm hmm, hmm a hmm hmm, hmm, hmm – invoking the spell of invisibility, her voice growing deeper, hoarser, more intense, her dream body fading, losing substance, until she found that she was free, untrammelled by any physical constraint, and could move along the narrow corridor with ease. It seemed, moreover, that she was no longer walking but floating, drifting like smoke – indeed, she realised, she was being drawn through the labyrinth at greater and greater speed, its walls flashing by her on either side until suddenly, without warning, she was debouched into a vast underground cavern, illuminated by a soft but pervasive glow that seemed diffused everywhere. The domed ceiling overhead glittered with a thousand stalactites of pure, transparent crystal. From the floor, made of the same substance and towering above her, soared a forest of stalagmites. At the same moment, her state of being changed from chimerical, tenuous vapour to something more solid, and she was back in her dream body again.
‘Welcome,’ said a voice. It was a woman’s voice – warm, kind and strangely familiar. ‘You have travelled far, you are tired; you may take your rest here.’
‘What is this place?’ Tozi asked.
‘Don’t you know?’ that beautiful voice replied, so poignant with memory it made Tozi’s hair stand on end as she caught a flash of movement; some shape, some form, a hint of flowing red robes; someone, some being – some god? – slipping momentarily into view from behind one of the massive stalagmites, only to disappear behind another.
‘I know nothing,’ Tozi said. ‘I was in the desert, I was bitten by a serpent. I killed the serpent and now I am here.’
‘The serpent was sent to you by Quetzalcoatl to bring you to me,’ the voice replied. ‘Do not trouble yourself that you killed her. Our lord has taken her spirit back into himself now.’
‘What is this place?’ Tozi asked again.
‘It is Aztlán,’ the voice replied. ‘Homeland of our people and of the gods. You are in the Caves of Chicomoztoc.’
* * *
As they grappled, and as his hand snaked out, Santisteban’s pock-marked, sweating face was pressed against his own, and even as he felt the older boy’s cruel grip take hold on his bandaged finger and begin to twist and tear, even as he screamed in renewed agony, Pepillo reacted instinctively. Yes, his finger was broken, but Santisteban’s nose was broken too! Without hesitation he opened his jaws wide and bit down hard on that hooked, twisted blob of bloodied flesh and cartilage, sunk his remaining teeth into it and shook his head violently the way a terrier shakes a rat.
The reaction was instantaneous. Santisteban let go of the finger, dropped his own staff, howled and tried to pull away, beating ineffectually at Pepillo’s head with his fists, and in the process tearing his ruined nose still further. Pepillo clung on, chewing, and only when his mouth filled up with so much blood that it threatened to choke him, did he at last unclench his jaws, spit out a lump of something vile and slide back three steps, raising his stave into the Roof Guard with his hands held at the level of his shoulder, his left foot and elbow forward and the tip of the weapon angled up behind his head.
Santisteban was roaring and sobbing, both his hands clamped over his ripped and bleeding face. Pepillo could easily have transitioned from the Roof Guard into the Master Strike to the head that Escalante had taught him, the strike called Zornhau – the Strike of Wrath – by the German schools. It would have finished the fight there and then but, not wishing to be accused of taking unfair advantage, Pepillo slid back another step and nodded to Santisteban’s staff where it lay fallen on the ground. ‘Pick it up,’ he said. ‘We’re not done yet.
* * *
Tozi hurried
through the forest of stalagmites with an increasing sense of urgency. She knew that kindly voice. She knew it! But why did it touch her so deeply? And why did it have the power to reach into the core of her being where so much loss, so much grief, lay stored?
Ahead of her she caught a glimpse of red robes again, a slim figure with honey-coloured skin and long black hair moving rapidly, elusively from one place of hiding to the next. Now there was a burst of laughter echoing from the walls and ceiling of the great cavern, a rippling, gentle laugh filled with love and joy. ‘Follow me, Tozi,’ the voice said. ‘Follow me, my dear.’
Tozi followed, her blood pounding in her veins, her breath rasping in her chest. The stalagmites were growing less numerous now and, up ahead, a great tunnel opened, leading out of the cavern, a tunnel filled with light that seemed to emanate from some distant source beyond this netherworld.
It was strange indeed! Tozi was so short of breath she thought she might actually die in this vision – and what would happen to her then, if she did? Yet she could not give up and take her rest as the being she was pursuing had offered, for she had to know – she had to know! – who it was who spoke to her, and why she felt this haunting, anguished sense of remembrance.
The figure ahead became, briefly, clearly visible in the tunnel, lit by that radiance from beyond, but she was moving incredibly fast and now, with a whirl of her robes, she faded and vanished as though she, too, could work the spell of invisibility. Dogged and determined, Tozi continued to stumble forward – what else could she do? – but her breath came only in tortured gasps and her heart was beating with a deadly, irregular rapidity as she emerged at last into what seemed another world, with a blue sun in a burnished sky. A little way off was a vast lake, dark as midnight, with a rock rising out of it near the shore. Seated on the rock, dressed in red robes, was a woman with her back turned, her bare feet dangling in the water. The woman had long black hair, which she was combing, combing, and there was something so known, so familiar, so wistful in the motion of her hands that it clutched at Tozi’s racing heart … and stopped it.
Her vision swam and she collapsed on her back on the roasting sand and the sun blazed down on her, a burnished sun in a blue sky. As her consciousness fled, a man’s voice, filled with urgency and wonder, addressed her in a language that was Nahuatl yet not Nahuatl, and she felt a powerful blow strike her chest.
* * *
Santisteban didn’t pick up his staff. Instead, with a sob of fury, he charged forward again, so fast yet so erratically, that Pepillo’s strike to the head missed and glanced off his shoulder, failing to stop him. Santisteban barrelled into him with tremendous force, knocking the breath out of his body, and Pepillo had to take his left hand off his stave, continuing to hold it only in his injured right, in order to grapple with him. Even so, he managed to unleash a powerful downward slice that caught the older boy a hefty blow on the shin, and was about to hit him again, despite the shocking jolt of pain in his hand, when Santisteban writhed, reached behind, drew a wicked-looking dagger that he’d kept concealed down the back of his pants and stabbed Pepillo savagely in the ribs.
‘Ahhh!’ Pepillo yelled, jerked back with more strength and power than he knew he possessed, smashed his left fist into Santisteban’s jaw and broke free of the grapple. As he did so, Santisteban wrenched the dagger from his side – another massive shock of pain – and rounded on him once more, lunging wildly.
Pepillo could feel his strength draining away even as he saw the shocked look on the faces of the stunned, immobile circle of spectators. Time, motion, the world itself seemed to slow down. Someone shouted, and Escalante, Cortés, Alvarado all began to move in to disarm Santisteban, but they seemed to be sleepwalking and had too much ground to cover, way too much; they’d never make it. With nobody to rely on for his own salvation but himself, Pepillo rapidly back-stepped twice, opening up a little distance from his attacker, and used it to rap Santisteban’s right wrist hard with the edge of his stave, took a further step back as the bastard still came at him and struck him again, this time succeeding in knocking the blade from his hand. There was still strength in the unbroken fluid arc of the strike, and Pepillo followed it through, bringing up his stave and flowing immediately into a thrust, both hands gripping the hilt, arms extended, stepping powerfully forward with his left leg, the knee bent, right leg out almost straight behind, driving the tip of his weapon deep into Santisteban’s throat with the combined colliding momentum of their weight.
With a strangled gasp, Santisteban dropped to his knees. Pepillo surged forward in the full grip of battle rage, his stave raised to dash his enemy’s brains out, but the older boy cowered, holding his hands over his head, and croaked, ‘Yield!’ Pepillo stopped in his tracks, lowered his weapon and stepped away.
‘By God! The boy’s a warrior,’ he heard Alvarado say, ‘and a gentleman. Well worth my thousand pesos to see that fight!’
Cortés made some approving reply, but Pepillo didn’t hear it clearly. His head was spinning, blood was pouring from the stab wound in his side and his legs quite suddenly buckled beneath him. He would have joined Santisteban on the ground, but Escalante caught him as he fell. ‘You did well, lad,’ the captain said. ‘I’m proud of you.’
* * *
With Escudero and Cermeno’s dangling corpses already showing the first signs of rot in the suffocating summer heat, with the remaining Velazquistas thoroughly chastised and humbled, and with the letter he had circulated unanimously signed by all the colonists, Cortés had no concerns for the outcome of the public meeting that took place at noon on Monday 12 July, a few hours after the fight. Pepillo was in no shape to keep the minutes, but Diego de Godoy, the expedition’s notary, volunteered for the role and lent a certain gravitas to the extremely brief and otherwise rather informal proceedings.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ Cortés said when everyone was settled, ‘it’s very hot, we all have things to do and we’ve all given our agreement in writing already, but I’ll just ask one more time for the record,’ a glance at Godoy who sat with his pen poised: ‘Does anyone still object to the plan to win the king’s blessing for our enterprise by giving him the treasures we’ve thus far accumulated? Raise your hands any who do.’
Not a single hand went up. Ordaz, Olid, De Grado and the other prominent Velazquistas, who were sitting bunched up together on the first pew, all shifted their buttocks uncomfortably.
‘Very well,’ Cortés continued, ‘I’d now like a show of hands from all those in favour of the plan – again, for the record.’
This time every hand shot up, with the Velazquistas demonstrating particular eagerness to comply. Under his breath, Cortés chuckled. ‘Good,’ he said in ringing tones, ‘so that’s agreed then. Now to the details. I propose we delegate two loyal members of this company, Don Alonso Hernández Puertocarrero and Don Francisco de Montejo, to carry the treasure to Spain, since both are of the nobility, with better access than most to the court of King Carlos. By a show of hands, please, are there any objections?’
No hands went up.
‘All in favour of the motion.’
Again every hand in the room was raised high.
Cortés turned once more to Godoy: ‘Let the minutes show that by unanimous vote of the colony Don Alonso Hernández Puertocarrero and Don Francisco de Montejo will serve as our representatives to carry our gift to King Carlos. The vessel Santa Luisa, belonging to Don Alonso, will be the treasure ship.’ A glance in the direction of Martin Lopez, the expedition’s chief carpenter: ‘Don Martin, how long do you think you’ll need to complete the repairs on the Santa Luisa?’
‘We’re working night and day, Don Hernán. Like all the ships, she’s in poor condition, though in better shape than some. I reckon we’ll have her seaworthy within twenty days.’
‘Faster, if you please, Don Martin. I’d like to see her ready to sail within two weeks – which will be, let me see, Monday 26 July. Do you think that’s possible, Don Martin?’
&nb
sp; ‘Perhaps, Caudillo, if we suspend repairs on all the other ships.’
‘Very well then, make it so.’
In the midst of this short exchange with the carpenter, the germ of an idea had come to Cortés. It was a radical idea, potentially dangerous. But what was the expedition itself if not a radical and dangerous undertaking and, without great risk, was it not rightly said that there never could be great gain?
Since there was no further business to transact, he expressed the colony’s gratitude to Puertocarrero and Montejo for agreeing to be the couriers of the treasure and declared the meeting closed.
* * *
It was mid-afternoon, the meeting had gone well, luncheon had been served afterwards – the Totonacs of Huitztlan were nothing if not generous in their provision of food to the colonists – and Cortés appeared to be in an excellent good humour. He and Malinal were alone in his pavilion and he had a certain light in his eyes that she knew very well. Before she gave him her body, however, she was determined to raise the matter of Pepillo and his dog. Cruelty had a place in time of war; she recognised that. But the caudillo’s unkindness towards the boy disfigured his own character and served no useful purpose; the fight this morning offered a chance to change that.
‘You happy with Pepillo?’ she asked now.
Cortés grinned. ‘Yes. Who would have guessed it? He has the makings of a first-class swordsman ... And he earned me a thousand pesos!’
‘But badly injured,’ Malinal said, composing her face into an expression that she hoped combined concern, commiseration and winsomeness.