A Signal Victory (16 page)

The Spaniards began to march for the coast. That, too, pleased everyone. Perhaps they were leaving.

Whatever they were doing, though they might be good fighters, they were quite contemptible. All the tribes agreed to that. They had no manners.

Guerrero, by now, was desperate. Who would think it
would take such an effort to kill so few men? It made one believe that perhaps they were invulnerable. Not because of their nature. They were men like himself, and their nature was contemptible. But because they were the new thing, that always overwhelms the old.

There remained Loche. He went to Loche. Perhaps Montejo could be ambushed there.

The cacique of Loche would not even see him.

It was his usual procedure with anyone not of his own family. He could not demean himself by fraternizing with those of inferior rank, and who was not inferior to Loche? It made no difference that his province covered at most a few square acres, or that those outside it did not honour his pretensions. Since he never travelled, he was not faced with such dilemmas. He was so eaten up by the pretensions of his house, that he scarcely regarded himself as a person. He was Loche. That was enough. There was only himself and the gods. To whom else would Loche speak? No one else was sufficiently exalted.

He sent Guerrero away. Nor did he receive Montejo either. He was of very high rank. He was of very old family. Why on earth should he deign to see such people? For the sake of diplomacy, he had to receive them, but he did so lying in a litter, protected from view by gauze veils. True, he had a certain curiosity. They were odd-looking men. It was easier to answer directly than to speak through his aides. But he answered from behind the veil, with a fine verbal contempt.

Unfortunately the Spanish did not know the language well enough to catch the cool insolence of the phrasing. But they were amused. They had gotten their confidence back and they were amused. They named Loche the town of Grave Doings. Two systems of snobbery had at last met, both indefensible, and therefore dangerous.

Guerrero when he heard about that was far from pleased, if only because he understood it. It exasperated him. Such behaviour had fifteen hundred years of precedent. How
could he possibly make them afraid of the might of an enemy they did not even know the name of? He looked round Chetumal and wondered how long it would be before the Spanish heard of it.

It was not to be very long.

Montejo was marching for the coast. He had heard of other states, Mani and Sotuta, that were stronger than anything he had yet seen. He was not without prudence, and he had learned much. Besides, he had not yet found the ideal site for Salamanca. For several days he passed through heavily populated country, and then entered a band of forest where there seemed to be nobody at all.

It disturbed him. He feared some sort of ambush. And he now had only sixty men. He would need reinforcements. He tightened his lips, drew his party defensively together, and marched on.

The jungle began to grow yellow and porous, and abruptly the company marched out into the plaza of an enormous city. He was wary. At first he thought that the enemy had fled into an ambush, as before.

He had stumbled on Chichen Itza, abandoned for a little over three hundred years, in one of the returns of Katun 8 Ahau, but still sacred, and still the object of pilgrimage. It was kept in repair. The circular Temple of the Snail was still standing. The light of Venus could still be sighted through its precisely aligned windows, and the rise and setting of the sun. It was like a clock that goes on ticking out the days even after the family has left. The vast shadowy colonnades of the Temple of the Warriors and of its plaza were still in place. In their own deep shadow, they looked inhabited. Grass grew up through the paving, but the little temple above the Well of Sacrifice was in good repair. It was still used once a year. The gods in their temples were undisturbed.

It was too big and desolate. It seemed to swallow up a mere sixty men. They found themselves whispering, and glancing fearfully around them.

Half-heartedly they smashed a few idols, But the idols only shattered into silence, or rolled down the steep stairs of a temple they had climbed as a lookout, and came to rest at the bottom, staring up at the sky. There were too many of them for sixty men to destroy.

They looked down into the Well of Sacrifice. There was no surface water in this land. The horses suffered as a result. The water welled up from underground, or rained into the cenotes. The cenotes were damp and dark, traversed by watersnakes, their walls heavy with ferns, and the men did not like to go down into them, even to get water for the horses. The water was thick and black. They could not know how many generations of the sacrificial dead lay down there, nor even with what treasure.

They stayed the night but they did not like it. It was like being in a cathedral without a roof. It gave them a glimpse of something too big for them.

It was too big for Guerrero, who had followed them. In that vast city, the most sacred of the New Empire, and deserted now, in which desertion there was some meaning which bothered him, but he did not want to think of it, he had been able to keep out of sight, and yet he had heard their voices. Those voices sounded lost and insignificant, echoed back by those waiting buildings. It sobered him, that sound.

For there was something abroad in the world he had never understood, even in Spain, a new spirit, an approach to the world that was not his. And the world he had joined was an old one. It had no new spirit. It sat surrounded by its own ruins and its own traditions, which these new men rendered meaningless to anyone but those who shared them.

Well, he shared them. But still, this past was too big. It overwhelmed you. It left you no room to move, let alone to fight.

And yet they must fight, if only to prove something which, because it was no longer true, would always be.

But how? But how?

Next morning Montejo marched out along a sacbe which seemed to lead towards the coast, the last procession that would ever tread it, though neither they nor the Maya could know that. Even the sacbe was too broad for them. It swallowed them up. It called for confident plumed processions, not an anxious and irritable company of sixty tattered and ill-kempt men.

Montejo had the drummer set a beat, and there was a flute player in the company. But that did not help much. Around them the jungle creaked, and the sound was not merry. Cortés, on his march to Honduras, had taken an entire orchestra, complete with violins. They hurried on.

At last they reached Salamanca. Those at Pole were lost, but Salamanca was safe. The men were dissatisfied. Their six months’ forage had killed most of them, but that was not what was wrong. What was wrong was that it had not made the survivors rich. They could not even hope to become rich, even in land, unless they got reinforcements.

Even Montejo could not hold them.

Then a ship appeared in the roadstead, sent out in search of him. It brought both men and supplies.

Montejo gave no one time to think. He went down the muster roll, and split all malcontents into two parties. He was still looking for a place to put a city, and from the Indians he had at last heard of Chetumal. It sounded ideal.

Davila was to march towards it along the coast. He himself would take the relief boat, and sail down the peninsula. At the Bay of Chetumal they would combine forces and seize everything.

The worst disaffected of the men he left behind, with instructions to build a small boat and then follow. That left the choice up to them. If they did not build a boat, they would die of fever or be starved out by the Indians and then picked off. If they did build the boat, there was nowhere for them to go, but to follow their commander. They had neither the knowledge nor the means to face the open sea. He was well pleased.

So was Guerrero. It was a relief to face the enemy at last, and besides, he now had a plan, for unlike the Maya, and unhampered by precedent, he could improvise.

But the man Davila made him thoughtful. He had seen Davila often during those desperate weeks. And Davila was his own kind of man, unaccountably in the service of this pusillanimous weakling, to whom he would, because he was that sort of man, despite his own interests, be loyal, and that made him an opponent worth bothering about.

Montejo was not worth bothering about. Guerrero hurried overland, to prepare Chetumal against the invader.

They were glad to see him back. But they did not like what he had to tell them.

Nor did Nachancan care for what he had learned. It was so plain to see that disillusionment in what before had been always interested eyes. When that special sparkle goes, in a man of confident maturity, even though he does not know it himself, one can see it, and it is as distressing, as futile, to be touched by that, as by the look children have, who, always having seen the world for the first time, no matter what we do to protect them, no matter how we love them, no matter how they love themselves, then see it for the second, and though they are still delightful children, still that look which turns a knife in the heart, which makes us tremble for the safety of the joy of being, is never quite the same again.

At that age, six or seven, they first learn about the Performance, that imitation of life with which we solace ourselves even when we are gay and most absorbed, for the impossibility of life itself. It can be very beautiful, the performance, but it is never quite the same thing as life itself, as those first years of experiencing our future lines, which then seem reality, but are only the rehearsal.

And yet that is why we admire a good performance, because we also went through the rehearsal, we feel for the
players, and know that in their parts we should not have done so well.

But if a man of forty learns what the world is, particularly if it is a world in which he believed, that is different. That is a little sad.

Guerrero had been young so long; and Nachancan, so long old. They had been father and son for so long. But now experience had made them equals. It left them with so much not to say. It made them father and son the more, in that collaboration which is possible, only when we have learned enough of the world not to hate our parents. When and if that point has been reached, a man and his son may be blood brothers.

That point had been reached. And it saved them time. They found that they agreed.

Guerrero had found the disunity of the peninsula a shock, but there was no time to indulge in such a thing as shock. Montejo was on his way. The city would have to be defended. The strategy of the bay would have to be planned. And, since he could not hold the natives against a determined force, he sent out messengers every day and planned a ruse. It might work and it might not. But if it did work it would give him a little more time to intrigue among the provinces.

Montejo was coming by sea, Davila by land, and they expected to meet at the Bay of Chetumal itself. Montejo, though willing to fight, would not fight unless he had to. He had not that nature. But Davila was a fiery man. He was what in those days was called a man of honour, that is, a man without prudence, who having no thoughts and few ambitions, could justify himself in no other way than by always taking the offensive. But such men are happy only in a world which contains nothing but people they can beat and people they cannot. Confronted with the world itself, their nerves snap and their self-assurance begins to change into something a little more desperate.

And the coastal landscape between Salamanca de Xelha and Chetumal was so desolate and inhospitable, that even
the Indians themselves, who knew how to maintain themselves in such places, avoided it, a low, feverish coast, reptilian and rank, full of sluggish waters, salt lagoons, quagmires, sandbars that heaved out of the sea, at low tide, with a flabby flop, and almost no vegetation that was edible.

The people of such lands would obey Chetumal, and small bands of natives could be sent in, as decoys. Guerrero first had Davila’s food supplies cut off, not entirely, but capriciously, so that he could never know whether he was to eat that night or not. Let him paw in the sand for turtles’ eggs, which would make him sick, and drink brackish water which would make him double over with pain. Dysentery was no way to calm the nerves.

Between friendly natives who had no food, and hostile natives who picked off his men, but never came close enough for an open battle, Davila began to sweat. His eyes would have a different look now, a worried, irritable look. He did not know the language. He could not therefore know where he was, or how far he had to go. And in particular Guerrero shut off any messages from Montejo, coasting comfortably down the coast.

Those of Davila’s men who had picked up a little Maya, were beginning to ask questions about Montejo along the coast.

Guerrero judged it time for his stratagem. He did not send a messenger to Davila. He had a more convincing plan. He let the Spaniard come up on a small group of natives, fishing at the shore. They tried to flee but Davila caught them. That, too, was part of the plan. Then their carefully rehearsed story came out.

No, Chetumal was at least a week’s march away, over difficult territory, heavily armed.

And a ship? A big thing that looked like this? They inspected a
graffito
drawn in the sand with a stick, and then beamed with comprehension. Yes, they had seen such a thing. They had been out on the ocean, in a canoe, fishing. The thing, what was it called, a ship?, had appeared on the
horizon, coming towards them. Then, suddenly, the sea was rough, it had foundered and gone down. They had not dared to go too close. They were too busy saving their own lives. But yes, they had seen it. There was no doubt.

There was nothing for Davila to do but turn round and go back to Salamanca. He could not persist in this country without reinforcements. The lagoons and sandbars and shallows cut off all sight of the sea.

That taken care of, Guerrero settled down to deal with Montejo, for whom he had planned other surprises.