A Signal Victory (13 page)

He might not say anything, but it pleased him very much to see them there. Being vigorous himself, he did not envy youth. It touched him, like something fondly remembered.

Also, already, the older boy could fight. He was quite promising. And that was as well, since he might well have to.

The rite was simple, but took all day. Nachancan, who was growing old and portly now, was delighted to stand as sponsor. His chief duty was to give the feast, and he delighted in feasts.

The ceremony was held in the courtyard of that wing of the palace in which Guerrero still lived.

He found the patio swept out and strewn with fresh leaves. The boys of Chetumal were lined up on one side of it, and the girls on the other. His son was the fifth in line. A godparent was chosen for each sex.

Four priests sat at the four corners of the court, with cords held taut among them, to form a square, which the priest then blessed. It was a new high priest. The former one had died. Guerrero’s younger son was already apprenticed to him. An offering of incense and maize was made by the boys and girls. Guerrero thought his son held himself very well.

There was then an intermission. The court was swept out again, and again floored with fresh leaves. The evil spirits had been dispelled. It was now time for the blessing.

The priest returned, in a jacket and mitre of scarlet quetzal feathers, tall and wavering. An assistant handed him an aspergillum of holy water, which he flicked about with a stick trimmed with rattlesnake tails. They were a people who loved anything that rattled. They could sit hypnotized by the sound of gravel in a red fired pot, and who could tell where that rhythmic shaking took them? He had been among them now for seventeen years, he too found that something happened when he heard that rhythm, but he could not say where they all went, even he, when they left themselves. It took them back to an antiquity that was around and then behind their gods.

They lived in the fourth creation of the world, and there would be others. They had been here before and would be back some day. It made everything curiously familiar. It also made them a little sad. They knew everything repeated itself. Their history went in cycles, and they kept full records. At the beginning of each new twenty-year period, they would open the records from the last recurrence of it, 260 years before. And one day, they knew, they would open them and discover that this time their world was about to end. It was only a matter of filling in time. They knew they had passed their apogee. That was already written down for the benefit of the next future but one.

Still, they were not sad today. They were never sad
now,
and it was always now for them, for after all, if one is getting on, it cannot be helped, therefore one makes the best of it. Age has its compensations.

The four attendant chacs came forward and placed a piece of white cloth, woven by their mothers, on the head of each child. Ix Chan was adroit with a loom. The white cloths sparkled in the light. A few of the older children had sins to confess. That took time.

Guerrero found it difficult to believe in that fatality of cycles. He would have preferred to cut his way out. And yet he was content today himself.

Those dangerous invaders up there, to the north, in Mexico, even if they sacked whatever stood in their way, or found favour at Court, would not do so well as he.

As a child, in Spain, in Nieto, he had stood outside while the local count gave festivities in the courtyard, or in the aisle, while princes of the church pranced through whatever it was they did in the choir, behind the reredos, or in the sacristy, afterwards. Anyone who owned a horse in Spain, was at least a count, but you were never allowed into the closed circle of the great ones, which was the ultimate secret society, the inner council that planned the whole mummery for what it was, and yet even so, had a mumbo jumbo of its own. In Spain there was a way up, but no way in.

He had wandered through those turreted and whitewashed courtyards sometimes, when they were empty, as a stable boy, blinded by the mica in the walls. Then he had felt a hopeless awe.

The priest finished his sprinkling of holy water made of cacao beans and the attar of flowers, dissolved in rain water, and cut from each boy’s head the white bead that he wore there from the age of five.

His sons were now one with the Maya; Guerrero did not feel awe, or even gratification. He merely felt at ease.

The ceremony was followed by the feast. Nachancan presided well at a feast. It was a diet of deer, peccary, and turkey, smothered in rich sauces, salads, the avocado, and fruit, and there was a certain amount of drinking. It was hot, spicy, and savoury. He had never lost his taste for these good things. He knew how much they meant. He knew how much Nachancan meant.

The women ate separately, as they always did. It helped them to keep their glamour, not always to be there. Ix Chan was almost thirty now, but still wistful and gay. The boys would move away from home, for training; until they were ready to marry they would live with other boys. She would miss them, and he wanted to go to her.

It was late before he could do so. The moonlight was a spectral shade of blue and eddied over everything, for it was windy. The lamp guttered. The black frames of the night trees seemed to gutter too. The curtain in the doorway rustled and shook.

It would be six years before the boys could marry. Their wives had already been carefully chosen, but nothing could be done until the couples were of age.

A lot could happen in six years, but they must be able to go on. The Spanish must be driven out of there.

He began to think of them as the Spanish now, almost as though he had been born among them in exile, somehow gotten back, and knew from that captivity how dangerous they were.

It was so slow, that process of alienation, that he scarcely realized that it had taken place.

Ix Chan must have known that he would come. She must have gone to great trouble, to wake so gently and be so exactly as he would wish. It was that little imitation of surprise and spontaneity that moved him more deeply than could have any new experience. It made him feel worthwhile.

It is so charming of a woman to be clever, just for a man, and not because she has to. Usually a marriage is not so good and delightful a game. So few players realize the point of any game is not to win, but play.

He was so content.

And yet, there were the invaders up there, to the north. A man called Montejo had arrived. He was a little man, and no Cortés. He should not be hard to beat.

There Guerrero guessed wrong, and for a reason he could not know. The world was changing. Montejo belonged not to the old world, but to the new.

Therefore, ultimately, he would be impossible to beat.

Meanwhile, Guerrero set out, with a party, to make embassies, and to unite, what could not be united, that culture against the invader.

N
o-one could have united against Montejo. And the reason was simple. He was not a
conquistador.
He was not even, except in the counting house, a man of honour. He could not be fought on those terms. For he was that new thing in the world, a creature beyond values. Of his species he was one of the first, south of the Germanies, and the men there as Charles V had discovered to his chagrin, even while he bankrupted them, were only usurers. Montejo was an improvement on that plan. He was a business man. He, too, aspired, as Cortés had done, to title, but he saw his title less as a great house, than as a dynastic bank. As banks do, he had branches. There was not one Francisco de Montejo, but three, for his sister’s son, and his own illegitimate son, all bore that patronymic, and all entered Yucatan, so to speak, to learn the business from the ground up.

He had seen other men take Honduras, Guatemala, and the other lands. There remained Yucatan. No one else wanted it. He saw no reason not to have it for himself. He gave no thought to its real owners. Their title to it, because not Spanish, was not valid. He came from Castille. What other civilization was there?

His flotilla dropped anchor off Cozumel in September of 1527.

It was now sixteen years since Guerrero had been washed up on Yucatan, and eight since Aguilar had gone away for good. A good many things had changed. There was now a world around them, the Maya knew that, but they still thought of that world in terms of their own. And their own world was in its usual state of anarchy.

There were many states, some peripheral and impregnable, such as Champoton and Chetumal, but the two great states were Mani and Sotuta. Mani was ruled by the Lords of Xiu. In Yucatan now they were the oldest house. They had ruled the country once, until the league of Mayapan, and were proud to have come from Mexico, and to trace themselves back to the Toltecs, long ago. But they knew what had happened to Mexico. And they remembered very well for how many generations they had been prisoners in Mayapan, before they revolted and destroyed their Mexican overlords.

Sotuta was ruled by what was left of those overlords. They hated the Xiu as much as the Xiu hated them. But in their continual jockeying for advantage each left most of the rest of the peninsula in peace. There were those, too, who wished to be allied to neither, and who would therefore accept protection from anywhere, without asking about its nature.

Montejo found himself amiably received by Naum Pat, the cacique of Cozumel. He even behaved well in return, going so far as to refuse to allow his friars to smash the idols in the temples. For one thing he needed rest, supplies, and information. For another, they could do that later.

In those days men did not have either our sense of the holy or our sense of the beautiful. All holy objects were Christian, religious not because of what they were, but of what they depicted. As for beauty, that was anything made of the best materials in the latest taste, which was usually the Italian, and all the portraits were done either by Titian or the next best man.

Not all the priests felt the same way. A priest is a professional. He sees things from the inside. Gregorio de San Martin was a Carmelite friar. Such men are not aesthetes. But Montejo’s own chaplain was like those later colonial bishops, who kept a record of what they destroyed, in part out of scholarship, as an attaché writes a monograph on the country he is attached to, but in part because they were sorry. There was Landa, who wrote the Things of Yucatan,
and Sahagun, who diligently got the Aztecs a little mixed up as he wrote them down.

Juan Rodriquez de Caraveo wrote nothing down, but he was curious and peaceable by nature. He was also, in so far as the time and the place allowed for that, a sensitive. He could feel Cozumel was thought to be holy, which was almost as tolerant but not quite so wise as to know that it was.

The great temples it was unwise to approach. There was too much that was waiting and unknown at the top up there. But he wandered through a few small outlying shrines. Of those gods he could make nothing. Saintliness was a co-operative venture. He was used to the iconography of saints who had been martyred by their fellow men. But these gods seemed to have martyred themselves. They bristled with the attributes of animals, and like animals, they crouched there waiting by the watershed. The great gods of Christianity became so only when they died. But these were not dead. They were right here, all around him, and they did not intend to die. They would have to be destroyed.

He could see that. Perhaps if they no longer had any images, they would no longer lurk out there, in the rustling dark.

But he found a clay figure that pleased him. It was nothing but the first unfurling leaf of the corn plant, tall, pointed, and slim. Inside it sat a little benign spring goddess, like the Buddha on his lotus, though he had never heard of the Buddha, or Brahma popping out of the bud and sleeping on his lily pad, on the world ocean, but he had never heard of Brahma either.

It was so very vulnerable that it touched him, so he never said anything about it. There are a few things belonging to the enemy, even of the True Faith, that should not be destroyed, for they are our things, too.

These people, like their gods, had the matter of fact reality of farmers. It was both their wisdom and their wealth. You saw it in the fields of tasselled maize. It made
them fatally complacent towards an enemy. An enemy was not something to defeat, but to survive, like a plague of locusts.

Perhaps they were right.

Next day Montejo crossed to the mainland, and founded a town, a few miles north of Tulum, on the coast. It was called Salamanca. He was to move it many times, but it would always be called Salamanca. That was where he had come from, and what he understood, so of course somehow he must have the same thing here.

“España, España, España, viva,” cried the new mayor, and raised the royal standard.

The natives were not impressed. The site was unhealthy. It was only a foolish little invasion. It would not last long. In time the strangers would get tired of it and go away. España was the name either of their home or of their God, something like Quetzalcoatl, only feminine. There were so many gods.

Meanwhile the priest Caraveo wandered happily about in the mud, for he had discovered that first word of a language which is the key to everything, and with his monkish neatness he was busy labelling a world. The other Spaniards would not have thought to do that. They preferred either to give their own names to things or else destroy them.

“Machu cava,” he would ask, What is it? What is it? What is it called? and the natives, amused, for it was what children said, told him. It was a pretty language. He liked it.

Montejo approved and set three of the brightest men to the same task. They were not like Cortés, passing through. From now on they must be their own interpreters.

Guerrero was misinformed. He thought Montejo only another conqueror, like other men. And the principles of conquest were simple.

What one had to do was to fight back with better weapons.
He would have given anything then for a few cannon. But he had not the art to make them, and perhaps in that land, they would not have been efficient, anyhow.

Chetumal was so far away from the centre of Yucatan. It was the reason for its security, its happiness, and its complacency.

Now complacency might endanger everything.

Looking at him, Guerrero could not decide whether Nachancan was complaisant or not.

Looking at it, we see Yucatan as rather small. But to the invader it was not small, and to its inhabitants, it was an empire, an empire fallen into a series of anarchic states, but still, perhaps the more extensive for that fact, for though it had nothing so large, neither had it anything so small as the ferocious Germanies of that day.

Nachancan seemed very much disposed to let the rest of the peninsula fight as it would.

Guerrero wanted to send out embassies. He wanted to rouse the whole peninsula.

“And do you think you could do that?” asked Nachancan sceptically.

“It has to be done.”

“Which is not to say it can be.” Nachancan looked round the stone room in which they were sitting, sighed, and peered at the bright sunlight outlined against the open door. “We live well here. We always have. It is because we are out of that. For a thousand years we have fought against each other. Been invaded by the Mexicans. Thrown them off. Survived. And it is written that we will survive. No, you can do nothing with them.”

“But you don’t understand. I know what these people are. There is a great empire overseas. It can send supplies. They will never give up. They have to be beaten now.”

“But if they will never give up, then they cannot be beaten?”

“You don’t understand. We’ve got to drive them out.”

Nachancan smiled. It was a wistful smile. “Oh yes. I
understand. You have taught me a great deal. But what can one do? One plays greed against greed. And what do you have to play with? It is all we can do to hold our own provinces. And you will see. They will be driven out. For a little while. And what can we ever have of life, but a little while? Then we will be driven out. We are so old, you see. And the old can never fight the new. They have not the energy. Only the skill. But if the enemy has a different kind of skill….” He shrugged his shoulders. “Why then….”

“But you must do something.”

“That is not something to say to someone who is powerless,” said Nachancan. “You forget. We have been waiting a long time.”

It was not something to say to the young, who because they are young, think the world they live in also has the vigour to fight back.

“Very well. Send out your embassies. You must learn that way. But we get what we deserve,” said Nachancan.

“You don’t understand.”

“We only understand what we know. How could we understand anything else?”

“But
I
know them.”

“You would not be here, if you did. If you really knew them, you would be one of them. So you must only know about them.”

“It isn’t any time for philosophy,” shouted Guerrero.

“Can you think of a better one?” Nachancan went to the doorway and looked out, across the courtyard, at the temples and the jungle. “Oh yes, we shall fight them when they come. But not to win. Only not to lose. That is all our world can do.”

And Nachancan looked out across the city as though he had never seen it before.

“I don’t want you to leave,” he said. “I want you with me. I am an old man, and we are an old people. It is dreadful to think ever that we might see the young for the last time. And in a way you are my son.”

“But if the Sotuta and the Xiu knew the danger, they would drive them out of here.”

“But we never do know the danger,” said Nachancan. “We are too busy turning it to our own advantage. And then, we never believe we can lose, until we have lost.”

There was nothing Guerrero could do, but fret. There was nothing to be done with Nachancan. The man was too used to too much security. Yet was that because he knew too little, or too much?

Guerrero was a forthright man. He was not accustomed to doubt. It made him uneasy. He preferred action. Action cancelled doubt, and even if the action were the wrong one, at least it put an end to uncertainty.

He wanted the Spanish out of there.

Therefore, despite Nachancan’s advice, he set out across the peninsula, both to spy out the Spanish and to try to unite the Maya against them. Being a fighting man, he had no knowledge of diplomacy. So he had much to learn, all of it saddening.

That was what Nachancan did not want to have happen. He did not want to see him saddened so. Now there would be no choice. They could only hope that he would return safely, for he would be needed soon enough. That being so, he was foolish to risk himself on the field, but there was nothing to be done about that either. He must learn this way.

They did so want him to come back. They wanted everyone to come back who had ever had the privilege of living. For they found the world well worth the burden, which it would not have been, if, once having laid down that load, one could not pick it up again.

Hence their calendar, and hence their character. It is only your Christian who wants to live once, and as a reward for that condition which is reward enough in itself, were not every Christian too much a Manichee to see it, be given heaven. Whereas to them, the thirteen heavens, though honourable, were only a poor substitute for life, a consolation for mortality, but nothing more.

The Spanish were driven out of there, but not by him. The country had its own revenge on them, for that plague that they had brought, the easy death. For Yucatan had deaths of its own, and they were not easy.

They had come at the beginning of the rainy season. In that part of the world it was almost always the rainy season. They had had a vision of white skies, white cities, and rich fields whose corn was every colour from champagne to gold. But now that view was cut off from them. They were surrounded by rain that glittered as though they sat at the hub of a roll of steel mesh.

It cleared every two or three days only long enough for them to see where they could not go. And the rain rattled like those musical instruments the Maya loved, now an angry shake, and then the double incessant boom of a two-tongued wooden drum.

At home, in Spain, they were accustomed to drought. Now they understood why the worst of these idols about them, Tlaloc, the god of rain, was in some aspects a demon who took your life. There is more than one way to drown.

But to Guerrero, the rain meant nothing.

It was strange, since he was born in a yellow landscape, how he took to this, which was every shade of blue and green, which slithered with life, which was never still, and wherein a Cattleya burst out of a tree like a sour trumpet voluntary, shocking in the Byzantine mosaic of the jungle, where there are always glitters in the gloom, as though the vegetable world were a damp building, holy not to any idea of goodness, but to life itself, which is neither good nor bad. Decorated piers of mahogany, buttressed with liana, and a choir screen of snakes and vines, on which the monkeys perched like patron saints, lit some green fuse in him, which burst into an explosion of pleasure, despite a scorched youth.