Perhaps Aguilar had even hoped the slaves would be left behind when the Spaniards continued their journey! But there was no way Puertocarrero or any of the other officers who’d been given women were going to do without their all-purpose cooks, cleaners and bed companions, and Cortés had made a point of confirming they would accompany the army in its advance on Tenochtitlan.
So once again, Malinal realised, she had been reunited with her fate. Very soon Cortés would meet the lords of the Mexica and find he was unable to talk to them. When he did, no matter how Aguilar might try to block her, she had resolved she would be there to take her rightful place in history.
Three days later, as Cortés had promised, they left Potonchan. Then had followed a sea voyage in the great boat, named the Santa Luisa, owned by Puertocarrero. This vessel was so much larger and grander than any Malinal had ever seen or dreamed of, that she had at first been overawed, even a little terrified, by its mountainous size and by the cunning way its wings of cloth caught the wind and drove it forward across the foaming waves.
Moreover, the Santa Luisa was only one of eleven such boats under the command of Cortés, with his own Santa Maria being the largest and most magnificent of them. All these ‘ships’, as the Spaniards called them, had sailed together along the coast of the Yucatán after departing from Potonchan and again, since they were on different vessels, there had been no opportunity for Malinal to speak with Cortés. What soon became clear to her, however, was that they were travelling faster than a man could walk and that they kept this speed up, hour after hour, day after day, and night after night, soon leaving the lands of the Maya behind and moving ever closer to territories settled and governed by the Mexica.
Finally, on the morning of the fourth day at sea, Cortés ordered the fleet to drop anchor off the coast a few miles north of Cuetlaxtlan and immediately began to disembark the larger part of his army. Within hours camp had been pitched high up on the sand dunes, Pichatzin and his entourage had arrived to find out what was going on, only to be frustrated by a seemingly insuperable language barrier, and Malinal, slaving over the cooking pots, had seen her opportunity to catch Cortés’s eye again, as she had on the day of the great battle outside Potonchan.
Then, as he’d thundered by on horseback, she might still have been persuaded that he and his fellow Spaniards were gods, but she knew better now. Indeed the smell of Puertocarrero’s farts alone had been enough to convince her that she was dealing with men, like any other men – with all the weaknesses, follies and stupidities of the male sex. To be sure, they looked very different from the Maya or the Mexica, and their language – which Malinal had already begun to master – was quite unlike any other she had ever heard. Admittedly, also, their customs and behaviour were strange. Although most of them never washed, with the result that their bodies were filthy and stinking, they were unusually disciplined and determined, and their weapons, their tame animals and their ships were extraordinary. Nevertheless, when all was said and done, they were men, and nothing more than men, and as such, no matter how fearsome and alien they might seem, they could be understood and manipulated.
Malinal checked her cooking pots one more time. The stew was ready. She ladled two generous helpings into the bowls she would offer to Cortés and Pichatzin, told the other girls to serve out the rest, and made her way across the sand to her destiny.
* * *
‘Surely there must be some common ground between the Mexica and the Maya?’ Cortés asked Aguilar. ‘Something you can use to communicate with these savages?’
‘No, Hernán,’ Aguilar replied. ‘Their languages are not like French and Italian, with many shared words. They are utterly different. I can’t make myself understood at all.’
‘Well we have a problem then,’ said Cortés. ‘If we can’t speak to the Mexica, we can’t negotiate with them or impress them with our arguments, or learn their minds. It will make them harder to defeat.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Alvarado, who was standing with Puertocarrero beside Cortés. ‘The language of the sword is plain. We need only speak to them in that and they’ll understand us well enough!’
Cortés laughed wearily. ‘I wish it were so simple, Pedro, but in my experience the tongue is a mightier weapon than the blade.’
As he spoke, Cortés saw the tall and very beautiful Mayan woman he had given to Puertocarrero approaching them across the sand; she was holding two steaming bowls of the afternoon meal he had ordered the kitchen to prepare. He had first seen this striking creature on the day of the great battle outside Potonchan, standing with a group of other observers atop one of the low hills that overlooked the plains, and he’d recognised her the following morning when the barbarian Muluc had brought her as a tribute. She had made an impassioned appeal to speak to him then, but Aguilar had persuaded him – against his own instincts – to ignore her. Now, noting again the elegance of her stride and the seductive curves of her body, Cortés reflected that he should have claimed her for himself. But rebellion was brewing amongst the Velazquistas – as he called the faction of conquistadors still loyal to his rival Diego de Velázquez, the governor of Cuba, who he’d betrayed by sailing from Santiago without permission two months before. His own friends outnumbered them, but they had to be kept sweet, and this decorative sex slave had been an easy way to satisfy Puertocarrero, who loved women at least as much as he loved gold.
She stooped under the awning, ignored the lustful stare she received from her master and brought the first bowl straight to Cortés, her eyes fixed on him. There was intelligence in those eyes and something else – some urgency, some attempt at connection, some message she seemed to wish to communicate. ‘Gods!’ Montejo muttered to Puertocarrero, ‘you’re a lucky man to take that one to your bed.’
‘Her tongue struggles mightily with my blade each night,’ agreed Puertocarrero. There was a general outburst of lewd sniggers from the Spaniards, but Cortés refrained from joining in. He sensed that the woman somehow knew she was being mocked. She turned to Pichatzin, stooping to offer him the second bowl. Then, as the Mexica reached out his hands to take it from her, she spoke some words to him in what sounded like his own language. His eyes widened, his thin lips narrowed, a beat of silence followed and then he replied. There was, Cortés thought, anger in his tone. The woman addressed him again. Her voice was husky, deep and rich, but at the same time soothing and gentle. Pichatzin relaxed and in a moment there was a smile on his face. He spoke further to the woman and she answered with a musical chime of laughter.
Cortés turned to Puertocarrero. ‘It seems your woman is quite the diplomat,’ he observed. ‘What’s her name?’
Puertocarrero shrugged. ‘Malinal … or something such.’
‘And this Malinal,’ Cortés addressed Aguilar, ‘she is Maya? She speaks the Maya tongue?’
‘She is Maya,’ Aguilar replied. There was something evasive in his tone. ‘She came to us with the other Maya slave women. You’ll recall she made a scene when they brought her. Since then she’s many times asked to speak to you – some nonsense about you being a god – but I didn’t think you’d wish to be bothered with the babble of a serf.’
‘That was a mistake,’ Cortés snapped, putting steel into his voice. ‘Make no such decisions for me in the future!’
Aguilar’s shoulders slumped: ‘Yes, Don Hernán. My apologies.’
‘It seems she speaks the language of these Mexica,’ Cortés observed. ‘Find out, therefore, if she truly does, whether she is fluent and where she learnt it.’ Leaning forward in his chair, with the Mexica officials also looking on eagerly, he watched and listened as Aguilar and Malinal held an animated conversation that lasted for several minutes.
‘Spit it out, man!’ Cortés said to Aguilar the moment they fell silent. He couldn’t hold down the impatience and rising excitement he felt.
‘She is of the Chontal Maya,’ said Aguilar. ‘But she claims to have complete mastery of the Mexica language, which she says is called Nahuatl. Sh
e claims to have lived in the Mexica capital city – this Tenochtitlan of which many have spoken – for five years and learnt it there.’ Aguilar lowered his eyes and added: ‘She also says she knows much about the Mexica that will be of value to you—’
‘Things I might have learned weeks ago if you’d done your job properly … ’
‘Yes, Don Hernán. I can only apologise … ’
Cortés nodded. ‘Very well, but let’s learn from this. In future you will tell me everything she says.’ He bounded from his chair, walked into the sunlight and paced restlessly. ‘The two of you will work together,’ he said to Aguilar. ‘When the Mexica speak, Malinal will translate their words into Maya and you will put them into Castilian for me, missing nothing out. When I speak you will translate my words into Maya and Malinal will put them into Nahuatl. Tell her! Tell her now this is the plan. Tell her if she accepts she’ll do no more menial kitchen work. She’ll be elevated to a place of honour amongst us.’
‘By all means she accepts!’ growled Puertocarrero. ‘I’ll give her a good slapping if she doesn’t.’
‘Fie, Alonso! That won’t be necessary. This is clearly an intelligent woman of some breeding. Any fool can see that! I would prefer she worked happily with us of her own free will.’
As Aguilar and Malinal talked, Cortés observed them closely, and he was happy to see a broad smile break out on her face and hear her laughter. Damn, but there was something about this girl that touched his heart! ‘What does she say?’ he asked.
‘She says, yes, of course,’ Aguilar replied. ‘She will be honoured to serve in any way that pleases you.’
* * *
Once introductions had been properly made by Malinal, Cortés had a much better idea about who he was dealing with. Pichatzin was the servant of that powerful king or emperor whom the Chontal Maya had spoken about with such reverence, whose title was the ‘Great Speaker’ and whose name was Moctezuma. It seemed this Moctezuma ruled vast territories and huge numbers of people from his splendid capital city Tenochtitlan, which stood on an island in a lake somewhat less than two hundred miles inland from the place where the Spanish were presently camped. There was no doubt in Cortés’s mind that this must be the same golden city Saint Peter had promised him in his dreams as his reward for punishing the Chontal Maya at Potonchan. As to Pichatzin, he had been appointed a year ago on Moctezuma’s orders to be the governor of the good-sized town called Cuetlaxtlan, lying a few miles further south down the coast and identified as such by Juan de Escalante in an earlier reconnaissance. Now Cortés learned Cuetlaxtlan had been conquered and settled more than seventy years earlier by Moctezuma’s race – the fabled Mexica, about whose great wealth in gold and treasure he had already heard so much. However, the majority of the inhabitants of this region were a subject people called the Totonacs, who were ruled by the Mexica and paid tribute to them.
Through Malinal, Pichatzin then asked Cortés what the Spanish wanted here, why they had come across the ocean in their ships and what their plans were.
‘We have come,’ Cortés lied, ‘because the fame of your emperor the great Moctezuma has reached us even across the ocean. I desire to see him and trade with him, and to this end in a very short while I propose to march with my men into the interior of your country and make my way to Tenochtitlan.’
Pichatzin replied that this would be unwise without the permission of Moctezuma, who commanded a standing army of more than two hundred thousand men. ‘Allow me to send a message to my emperor,’ he said. In the politest possible language, but nonetheless with a clear undertone of threat, he advised Cortés to keep the Spanish in their camp until they had received an answer.
‘If Tenochtitlan is two hundred miles away,’ Cortés objected, ‘this going to and fro of messages will surely take a long time.’
‘Not so long,’ said Malinal. Speaking directly through Aguilar, without reference to Pichatzin, she explained that the Mexica had excellent roads on which the journey could be made in six days – or sometimes less at a fast march. However, messages travelled very much faster than that. There were relay posts on the roads, separated by intervals of just five miles. A messenger would leave at once running at top speed. When he became tired he would stop and hand the message on to another runner, who would do the same at the next relay post – and so on. In this way Pichatzin’s message would be carried very quickly to Moctezuma, reaching him in less than twenty-four hours.
‘So we can expect a reply in two days and two nights?’ Cortés asked.
Malinal put the question to Pichatzin.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘In two days and two nights you will have the Great Speaker’s answer.’
‘If we wait,’ said Cortés, ‘my men will need food, water, better shelter than we have now. Can you provide us with these things?’
‘The Great Speaker is generous to his guests,’ Pichatzin replied. ‘I will see to it you have everything you need.’
* * *
Pichatzin proved true to his word. Within hours of his departure, hundreds of bearers arrived bringing huge quantities of fresh food and drink and the promise that at dawn the next day a gang of labourers would be sent to build temporary dwellings for the Spaniards. Meanwhile, though far from comfortable, and plagued by swarms of tiny biting insects, the camp occupied a good defensible position on the dunes. Francisco de Mesa, the grizzled and enormously competent chief of artillery, had already set up cannon around its perimeter to protect against any surprise attack.
All in all, Cortés decided, things could be very much worse.
With night already well advanced, he dismissed his captains and, despite some grumbles from Puertocarrero, summoned Aguilar and Malinal to his tent for a private meeting. If he was to take on the military might of the Mexica empire, then the brute force with which he had won his battles against the Chontal Maya would not be enough. Above all else, he needed to know Moctezuma’s weaknesses if he was to defeat him – and, in this, some intuition told him, Malinal had been heaven-sent to help.
* * *
It had been a long day for Pepillo, an exciting day that seemed lifted from the pages of Amadis de Gaula, that great romance of adventure and chivalry, of brave knights and monsters and of savage, exotic kingdoms, that Cortés kept in his travelling library and had allowed Pepillo to read. The Mexica ambassador and his entourage, so colourful, so barbaric in their bright feather cloaks and headdresses, with their lip-plugs of turquoise, with thin rods of gold and jade passed through their ear lobes and noses, with their strange weapons of wood, flint and obsidian, and their mellow, fluid language like a river running over stones and a breeze sighing through trees, had seemed unutterably alien, more alien even than the Maya, as though they were creatures not of this earth but of another realm entirely. How wonderful, then, that the slave woman Malinal not only spoke Maya but also spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, and therefore could work alongside Aguilar to make communication possible between Cortés and the dangerous savages whose lands he very soon intended to enter.
‘You may go, lad,’ Cortés had told Pepillo as he’d ushered Aguilar and Malinal into his tent to talk long into the night, and Pepillo, though curious, had been pleased enough to be set at liberty. Poor Melchior was still suffering from the whipping Vendabal had given him at sea, the stripes of his wounds open and raw. Indeed, since that day on board ship, Pepillo had feared for Melchior’s life. So he ran helter-skelter through the darkness to the shelter behind the kitchens where he kept the pup, crouched down beside him and loosened the chain that held him fast. ‘Come on, boy,’ he said, ‘let’s get you exercised.’
Melchior rose stiffly and a little unsteadily and nuzzled Pepillo’s hand. He was well fed on scraps here by the kitchen, and gaining weight, but his injuries pained him. Before taking him out onto the dunes to stretch his legs, Pepillo removed yesterday’s blood-caked bandages, cleaned the dog’s wounds, gently smoothed in the salve made from pig fat infused with herbs that Dr La Peña had g
iven him, and finally applied new dressings.
It was a fine, cloudless night, the bright stars glittering, the moon – past full – flooding the sky with its pale light, and a soft breeze blowing in from the ocean carrying the sound of gentle waves lapping against the beach.
Pepillo left Melchior off the leash and the two of them walked side by side, the lurcher occasionally stopping to sniff the sand or cock his leg and piss against a clump of sturdy grass. Before Vendabal had whipped him, the dog had been an irrepressible ball of energy, enthusiasm and curiosity, but now there was something cautious, something tentative, about his manner. Not fear exactly – Pepillo did not think that Melchior felt fear the way he himself felt fear – but a new understanding of the random cruelty and wickedness of the world.
After a little time they came to the edge of the dunes overlooking the moonlit ocean – the ocean that stretched away from here in an unbroken expanse encompassing the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola until it reached the shores of far-off Africa and Spain.
Africa, whence his best friend Melchior had been brought as a slave, only to die in the New Lands in that last great battle against the Maya.
And Spain, where Pepillo himself had been born, but which he could hardly remember now, only knowing, in a distant sort of way, that he had been orphaned there, and taken in by the Dominicans and brought across the ocean to start the new life that finally had brought him to this time and this place.
He rested his hand on Melchior’s floppy ears and scratched his brindled head – his new Melchior who could never replace the great friend he had lost, but who yet had become his only true companion in this strange and terrible world.