A Signal Victory (3 page)

Guerrero found it an interesting problem: how long could a Franciscan live without water? There was something in the man’s eyes Guerrero did not wish to see, something thirsty, greedy, and obscurely shy. The man hated everything, and yet he wanted to live. It seemed incredible.

Between them the others lay piled over each other, faintly awash at the bottom of the boat.

He knew he had to stay awake, but he couldn’t. He looked at the sun, all the spots before his eyes merged into each other, and he became unconscious.

Aguilar pursed his lips. He wasn’t really staring. He wasn’t really thirsty. He could see things only as a blur, and he had forgotten the taste of water. But he saw Guerrero’s thick bronze neck twitch and topple, and that pleased him in an idle, drifting kind of way. If they all had to die, he at least wanted to be last, and now he was. Nor did he care for strong animal men, or anyone not like himself. He suspected sometimes that perhaps they were not devout.

He went on staring, and seeing less and less.

It must have been the fog that revived him.

It was a thin, eddying, almost invisible fog, and condensed in long seminal streamers, here and there, clotting in the air, recruited with a sudden spurt into visibility, until the boat was drifting through a corridor of cobwebs. The air was suddenly cold.

The sound of the surf was louder.

According to Ptolemy, the world is surrounded by a river, which, since its symbol is a snake with its tail in its mouth, must always be cold. According to Strabo, there is nothing at the end of the world but England, and beyond England, ice, a solid wall of ice. Someone must have seen it once. It stretched from Norway to Greenland, and sometimes came as far south as Reykjavik.

Is there really such a place as Reykjavik? Do the people there have one foot and one eye?

According to Dante, the lowest circle of hell is merely ice, solid ice, and you sit there up to your neck, suffering for your sins.

Aguilar stirred and opened his eyes. He was too weak to believe what he saw, but he felt much better. He was not damned. He had always thought it impossible that he could be. Only other people were damned, for he had been careful always to avoid sin, and since, like all fanatics, he thought in negatives, therefore he was one of the saved.

For Bishop Brendon, that obscure Irish cleric, has his own vision of Ultima Thule. Sailing due west he beached on Hy Brasil. And Hy Brasil, as we know, was paradise, an island with steep cliffs, heavily forested, ecclesiastically scented, with great white cliffs, and nothing but innocence everywhere.

The surf was now louder. It was a low surf, imminently booming. Aguilar stared with a certain horror. The fog had gone. It was evening, the soft, purple evening of the tropics. The cliff was shaggy, and abrupt. It was draped with foliage. And shimmering there, against a hovering sky, already faint with stars, were the towers and battlements of a white and quiet city.

He heard drums. He heard wisps of chanting, lonely, empty, and far away. He heard the great entry of a conch, but he had never heard a conch before, and thought it a trumpet. Was that the way a trumpet sounded in heaven?

He glanced down the boat. No, it was not there after all. It was a mirage. For if it was heaven, then how could a common sinner be here in the boat with him, and Guerrero was still there.

The surf was threatening now. There must be a barrier reef. Saved or damned, Aguilar did not want to drown. He found that he could move. The trouble was that he could not move enough. He could just raise his arm, and no more. The Japanese at that period, when their voyages failed, or so they claimed as a joke, kept themselves alive by eating their own lice. But Aguilar had no sense of humour, and his lice merely clotted his sleeve. He had had nothing to eat for days.

Starvation was to save his life, but now he only thought it meant he was going to die anyway. Whatever else he might be about to become, he did not want to die, for no matter how reduced he might be, Aguilar would always have the strength to feel afraid.

Painfully he tried to move his cracked tongue, and some sound must have come out. Guerrero stirred.

Or perhaps the conch wakened him. It did not seem to him a strange sound. It seemed to him a sound he had always expected to hear.

He saw Aguilar’s quivering hand. He heard the surf, felt the water choppy under the keel, and grabbed the tiller with a chapped and blood-clotted hand.

The next minutes were quick, sure work. Even so it was not his skill that brought them through. In those sudden waters he had no skill. It was his luck.

Being a realist, and so able always to make the better of any choices, Guerrero always had luck.

When he straightened up, the reef was behind them, and they were in quiet water, though water with a slight surge, enough, at any rate, to bring the boat to the shallows.

It’s amazing how much strength you have at the last moment. Guerrero jumped out and tried to beach the boat. He couldn’t stifle a slight scream, for since the skin of his legs was sun-dried and salt-caked, the warm water split it up the bone, as though slitting the belly of a fish.

He paid no attention. He knew they should get under cover. There was no way to tell where they were, or who lived here, and he had had enough of natives in Panama. Unfortunately he was too weak to do more than count the living, and see if Valdivia was among them. Valdivia was his captain, and though he did not need orders, if there was anybody to give them, it was his place to take them.

He squinted up at the cliffs and caught a glimpse of the white buildings. As far as he was concerned, they were just buildings, but he didn’t like the abrupt silence up there, and the night was full of watching.

A narrow, snake-like line of light caught his eye, undulating against the cliff face. He knew what it was. Fresh water.

Behind him he heard the most peculiar sound, a muffled, high-pitched giggle. He turned around. It was Aguilar, crying with joy, because he wasn’t in paradise after all, this wasn’t Bishop Brendon’s island, and he was still alive.

There was no gratitude in that sound, for such salvation,
but only triumphant hatred of a world that had once more not quite put him down.

With a shrug of disgust, Guerrero dragged himself up the beach towards the ribbon of water.

They had beached at Tulum. It was a pitiable little city, jerrybuilt and holy, eight hundred years old, and half deserted now, for no noble could be bothered to live there. Yet it was the end of that long pilgrim road from Chichen Itza and the interior which led to the embarkation point for the sacred island of Cozumel, so perhaps it was not so pitiable after all. It still had its priests, and the temple of the Diving God was whitewashed every year. It was powerful enough to overwhelm fourteen men weak from exposure on the beach below.

Of all this Aguilar was unaware.

He was one of those men who, having no character of their own, but only a vast desire to be safe, derive one from precedent, and take on the character of whatever shell they find that fits them. Like the hermit crab, they scuttle along from birth towards the nearest conformable security, isolate and terrified, In his case that shell was the Church, which gave him a precedent for everything, and a weapon against everything he was afraid of. That was what made him so useful to anyone conservative enough to hire him. He had an absolute terror of anything he had never seen before which, when he felt secure, turned into hate. He was a groveller by nature. He would have grovelled to God, until the proper time came, and he was secure enough to put Him in His place.

Meanwhile, he had that shell, the Church. So he knew exactly what to do in an emergency. In an emergency one had merely to follow the proper forms. He decided to say mass.

It was almost dawn, which in the tropics brings the colour up as suavely as does a flood of varnish. The sea glistened
and the land crabs swept away. One hungry sailor might reach to crack a scuttling shell and suck the claws, but not Aguilar. Aguilar was looking for a flattened stone.

Valdivia, who was hungry enough to suck a crab himself but too weak to get one, propped himself up to watch, sweltering in what was left of his armour, in that sudden lobster heat, and waiting for Guerrero to bring him water. Behind them the cascade dribbled down the cliff.

“What is he doing?”

Guerrero shrugged, grunted, and looked at the men, some of whom were still too weak to leave the boat.

“He wants to say mass.”

Valdivia did not object. Not only was the saying of mass appropriate, but it would give him time to think, and Christ might serve to pull the men into order, for certainly at the moment he could not.

Wearily the men lined up, facing that flat stone which Aguilar had chosen as an altar, so that it was he who first saw what was behind them.

He faced problems in his own way, by putting in front of them little contrived problems small enough for him to handle, out of which he could make enormous tasks. It was true that under such conditions anything capable of being swallowed and digested could serve as a Host, but what in this alien bright green world was edible? Even though starving, he had saved a piece of hardtack. Now he offered it up and smashed it to bits with a stone. Then he was ready.

He looked around him with satisfaction. Life was settling into its accustomed place, and later, no doubt, when the men found food, they would feed him.

Guerrero was standing beside Valdivia, who closed his eyes. Aguilar had seen that courteous gesture of impatience before. It is all very well for a prelate, but a common priest cannot feel at ease with gentlemen, for it is too hard to hold their attention. Nor was the look in Guerrero’s eyes any more reassuring. Aguilar turned his back on his congregation and stared blankly at his stone.

When he turned round to administer the Host, they were there, just behind the men. They were not devils. He could see that at once. They had too much dignity.

Though he had no courage, he was stubborn and narrow-minded, which sometimes does just as well. He affected not to notice and chanted on, even while he watched.

Behind the kneeling men the wall of the jungle was every shifting shade of green. It rustled in the morning breeze. But some of those leaves detached themselves, they flowed differently, with a high and undulating motion, out of the wood, and became the feathered head-dresses of a small party of coffee-coloured men. These drew aside, and there was carried from the wood a kind of papal palanquin, of that sort derived from ancient Rome. Indeed the party was senatorial in its gravity, as though made up of the judges of some secret court.

Having administered his last crumb of wafer, Aguilar straightened up, made the sign of the cross, and delivered himself of a palindrome against dragons, in his best Latin. He was perhaps feverish, but even so a little magic did no harm.

The men turned round to look, but the party did not vanish. Instead it rustled uneasily and then stood still. An old man looked out of the palanquin.

In his nose he wore a long carved rod, a dragon with a waving tongue hung out of his lower lip, his ears were distended with wide jade plugs, and his head-dress was taller and more elaborate than that of his escort. He looked venerable and extremely jolly. Unlike the rest of his party, he was not armed.

He said something and then jerked back out of sight, without waiting for an answer. Clearly he was accustomed to obedience. His bearers manœuvred the palanquin back into the jungle, while his escort moved forward.

So did Aguilar. He had much to say, all of it in Latin.

It was the month of Zul, sacred to Kukulcan, celebrated according to the Mexican usage, which made their arrival convenient, but he had no way of knowing that.

Guerrero moved to stop him. It was useless to antagonize people who might be friendly but could certainly overwhelm them. It was better to follow, as they were beckoned to do, than to treat them to a harangue. Valdivia agreed.

Indeed, they soon saw, so long as they followed peaceably, no harm did seem to be meant. On the contrary, these feathered men were considerate and seemed extremely pleased. Their language was unintelligible, flexible and high-pitched, like the language of birds. St. Francis might have been able to speak to them, but Aguilar could not.

The jewelled warriors closed behind the Spaniards, the jungle closed behind them, and the palanquin was far ahead. They began to climb.

The jungle was not so venomous as that at Panama. It looked domestic and weeded out. As they ascended the cliff path, the leaves of the trees became a healthier and larger green. The air was less damp.

In about half an hour they left the jungle and found themselves on the edge of a large field crowded with corn tassels. The corn was high. They could see nothing over it. Led by the palanquin, the party advanced to a ramp, mounted it, and turned to the right.

The Spanish now stood on a broad causeway, not in very good repair, slightly topped by corn tassels on either side. Before them, at no great distance, rose the glittering gypsum walls of a sizeable city, with beyond those, several tall towers on which people were standing. One could pick out only the quivering masses of those enormous head-dresses, as though the sky were a sea, and these natives anemones at the bottom of it.

The world seemed curiously hushed.

The only clean cities Aguilar had ever seen were Moorish, and so infidel. He crossed himself.

In those days the Spanish had not yet invented Spain, or even, for that matter, the habit of being Spanish. They had lived by sacking each other and the Moors for so long, that carpet bagging and flight were the only ways they had yet
found to display their dignity. The exigencies of such a life meant that they took with them no private possessions but their God, and so they were always confronted by devils. Aguilar felt weak. Converting the infidel with a group of Spanish gentlemen no better than
condottieri
at one’s back was one thing, being on the wrong end of a crusade was quite another.

Guerrero, on the other hand, felt no such doubts. What he felt was a thrilled and yet familiar wonder. The sun was hot and he liked what he saw. He was one of those men born into the wrong world, who spend their lives searching for the right one. They may not even be aware of their own discontent, but if by chance they encounter the right one, they recognize it at once, because for the first time in their lives they feel at ease. He felt at ease.