Captain from Castile (57 page)

jostling, swaying column. He could feel a stirring of fear and tried to spread reassurance. The bridge was on its way forward; the march would be soon continued; nothing to be afraid of—they'd reach the mainland in an hour.

Hearing his voice, Catana called to him as he passed.

"Get under cover," he shouted—"under one of the cannon."

"There's where I am, seiior—snug as a hen in a coop . . ."

The noise of the fighting along the embankment cut off her voice.

Finally, a blacker mass in the night, rose the clump of lances that marked the position of Cortes.

"Ha, son Pedro!" returned the General when de Vargas had reported. "That's a right comforting word. I'd begun to wonder about the bridge. Carry the news to Sandoval and then stay with him. There's nothing more you can do until we're off the causeway. We'll have to untangle the column then. Adios."

De Vargas continued his progress along the causeway until at last he reached the vanguard and found Sandoval, wnth Ochoa still clinging behind him, engaged in a hot skirmish, not only on his flanks but in front where the Aztecs' canoes filled the water of the gap.

"You've come in good time," chafed the young hidalgo. "In another minute, by God, we'd have taken to the water and swum over in spite of these bastards. If I could only see them! Here we've been waiting for an hour with nothing to do but kick them down the embankm.ent and stand their fire. It's cost our Tlascalan friends heavily, poor devdls!"

A javelin glanced from his helmet.

"Hey, arquebusiers!" he yelled. "Shoot all together now. You can't fail to hit, even if you can't sight. Santiago! Vargas! Sandoval!"

Shouts of defiance answered from the lake. "Xiuhtecuhtli!" someone howled, recognizing Pedro's name and adding several epithets in Nahuatl.

A volley from the arquebuses brought forth cries and the sound of splashing bodies.

"Santiago! Ochoa!" yelled the small boy, who was covering himself with a buckler.

"Keep firing," Sandoval ordered. "At least, for one of us, they'll pay with ten of theirs. Why in hell didn't we make our retreat by day! That's Botello's doing, and a damned bad horoscope. . . . Shoot all together. ... I wish that blasted drum would burst!"

The minutes passed, spun themselves into a quarter of an hour, half an hour, three quarters of an hour. The assault from the lake grew heavier and harder to throw back. The Narvaez companies, weighed

down by their gold, began to crack. And the harried column swayed from side to side shouting for the bridge. But no bridge came.

"I'll ride back and see what's up," Pedro said.

But at that moment something new happened. It came with the rapidity of a cold wind sweeping forward along the column. It came at first like disembodied fear, a moan rising to a cry, swollen into a tempest of panic.

. There was no bridge! Crushed down into the embankments by the passing of the army, it could not be raised. Margarino and his men were slain, Alvarado's cannon captured. A horde of Aztecs from the city were on the causeway. The rear guard had been swallowed up. The Aztecs were on all sides. No hope. Sdlvese el que pueda!

And at once the army, as an army, vanished. It became a frantic mob, elbowing, yelling, trampling, shouldering.

"Adelante!" yelled Sandoval. "Follow me! Hang on, Ochoa!"

He slithered with his great war horse down the ten-foot steep shoulder of earth and stone into the water. The others, horse and foot, plunged after him. A tumult of splashing, grappling with canoes, oaths, blows, and shouts, sounded in the darkness.

Gripped by a fear such as he had never known, Pedro was on the point of following, when a second, greater fear drove the first one out. Catana! Where was she in the crush? What would become of her?

Turning Soldan against the torrent, spurring him, crashing a foot or two forward at a time, he managed at least to hold his own not far from the edge of the opening.

"Catana!" he kept shouting. "Catana!"

No longer like individual human beings, but merely as particles of a mass plunging helplessly from the lips of a chute, the column was emptying itself into the gap. Weighted with their gold, men sank like stone or struggled vainly, for a moment, in a tangle of baggage and bodies. Horses rolled from the embankment on top of them; while on either side of the breach the relentless canoes plied spears and clubs and arrows. A long-drawn scream rose from the water—a scream compounded of every cry which human lungs can give. And the death chute still volleyed its particles into the gap.

"Catana!"

For a moment Pedro was aware of Cortes's voice somewhere to the left. His world might have gone mad and be crashing around him, but the great captain remained true to himself.

"This way, you fools! Head toward me! The water's fordable here . . ."

But his voice might have been ten times as powerful—the fear-crazed mob could not hear it; or, if a few heard, they were swept along by the rush of the others.

"Catana!"

Doom! Doom! Doom! Doom! pulsed the great drum of the War Gk)d, roaring across the water. If it would only stop its beating inside one's head!

By now the gap had been horribly filled up. The hundreds of oncoming survivors, Spaniards and Tlascalans, could wade, floundering across on a dreadful footing of bodies, to the second segment of the causeway. They dribbled forward, so to speak, out of the pitched battle that raged on the first segment. For the Aztecs from the city and from the canoes had gained too firm a foothold to be shaken off. They occupied the dike on even terms with the fugitives, infiltrating the ranks, interlocked pell-mell, so that the causeway had become a solid writhing of agonized life fighting for itself.

LX

A SUDDEN RAGE took posscssion of Pedro. It had more to do with despair than with courage, but he was unconscious of either. Spurring Soldan and guiding him along the edge of the dike, where he could be surer of riding down enemies than friends, he pushed back into the melee nearest him, swinging at ghostly figures with his heavy sword.

"Santiago! Vargas!"

Holding his buckler and Soldan's reins with his left arm and hand, half-wheeling in his saddle to give greater force to the down stroke of his sword, he kept blindly on. Minutes? A half hour? An hour? Time had stopped for him. Drugged by action, he forged ahead with no purpose but fighting—

Then all at once he realized that he could see. The night was no longer pitch-black. Forms emerged: Soldan's neck and head, shadowy bodies in the tangle of the battle.

"Santiago! Vargas!"

An eagle-hooded warrior close by was locked in struggle with a Spaniard. In the faint light Pedrp could make out the curving beak above the Indian's forehead and the steel cap of the Castlllan. Then a broad-shouldered corslet intervened, and at the next glimpse the Aztec was down while Broad-shoulders held his comrade around the waist, evidently supporting him. But—God in heaven! 

"Catana!" Pedro shouted. "Catana! Juan!"

At that instant, Soldan reared, striking out with his forefeet, then screamed and sank, stabbed from beneath. But Pedro was clear of the saddle. In a moment he had reached Catana and Garcia, who stood back to back with a small knot of other Spaniards in what was apparently a forlorn hope.

Catana, half-leaning against Garcia, looked up, her face haggard. Evidently, in the rout, she had stuck to her refuge under the cannon. She gave a little cry of recognition and said something that Pedro did not catch.

"Why are you waiting here?" he yelled. "Fall back, join the column."

"What column?" Garcia roared. "We've been cut off for this half hour. It's a case of holding on till we drop. Look around you."

For the first time since the berserker mood had gripped him, Pedro took in the situation. A few scattered groups of Spaniards were making a last stand here and there. Otherwise, the Aztecs held this part of the causeway, and retreat was cut off. The Spanish dead lay everywhere, their packs broken and the fatal gold scattered about them. It was this that gave the particular group where Pedro found himself a respite from attack, for the Aztec plundering of the Spanish bodies had begun.

"There're no more of us," Garcia went on. "Juan Velasquez is dead. Alvarado lost his horse and fell back with the last of the column. We were caught and couldn't make it."

"Por Dios we will make it!" Lifting his vizor, Pedro cupped his hands and put all the strength of his lungs behind them. "Santiago and Spain! Rally on us, cavaliers! This way for retreat! March all together! This way! Espana! Espana!''

The summons had its effect, all the more as Garcia lent his mighty voice to it. Singly or in small squads, the remaining fighters began edging in that direction. One by one, they hacked their way through until at last the original group had grown to twenty swords, forming a compact circle. Upon this, the storm raged, but could not break it.

"Now, fall back, gentlemen. Foot by foot. No hurry. Thrust at their faces. Blind the dogs. Give them a shout. Santiago! Espana!''

Daunted by the fierce cry, which they had learned to dread, the Aztecs yielded ground, and some twenty yards were gained.

"We cut them like cheese, sirs. If they can't stand up to your voices, what will they make against steel! Let's show them what a Spanish rear guard can do with the help of Santiago!"

He struck the right note. A dram of aguardiente through their parched lips would not have had so great an effect. Foot by foot, yard by yard, they advanced, though now and then one crumpled and fell, and the circle grew smaller.

"Look you, sirs, we've reached the first gap. Now, across with you. Garcia and I will hold them at the edge. But keep together."

Through a sheet of missiles from the causeway, hard-pressed by the Indian dugouts that did not hesitate to ram them and capsize in an effort to break the ring, somehow they got across, staggering and stumbling on the ghastly bottom, dragging up the opposite embankment to the second segment of the dike. But ten only were now left, and they at the point of exhaustion.

Happening to glance around, Pedro saw Catana swaying back and forth in the tussle, corpse-pale with fatigue, but still handling buckler and sword.

Sometimes the enemy fell back to re-form for the next rush, and the little band made relatively good speed. Perhaps because of the effort itself, the pounding of his pulses, the strain of every muscle, certain fragments of the causeway stamped themselves sharply on Pedro's mind.

In the growing dawn, he caught sight of his friend, Francisco de Morla, lying dead, a broken sword in one hand; and further off Master Botello, outstretched between the legs of his horse, giving the lie to his horoscope; near him lay Cervantes the fester with a gaping mouth, as if frozen in a last grimace—magician and fool on the same level.

Dead men everywhere, well-known faces and many less familiar who had come with Narvaez. They were tripped and trampled over by the little company plowing its way on. But the third and last gap of the causeway was now in sight.

Pedro grew aware that the attack centered more and more on him. Well-known to the Aztecs, he could hear his name shouted in a swelling volume of sound. "Xiuhtecuhtli! Fire Lord!" He was aware too that they were trying to capture, rather than kill him. Such a noted prisoner would be especially pleasing to the gods. Perhaps it was this that had preserved him. Half-blinded with sweat, exhausted, bruised, his vizor torn off, his buckler dented and warped, he could otherwise hardly have escaped the thicket of javelins and hail of blows that felled one after the other of his comrades.

"Vivaj senores!" he gasped. "We've made the course. Look—"

A suffocating, stinking wave of human flesh, gaudy featherwork, and animal skins surged against them. "Xiuhtecuhtli!" With head, shoulder,

knee, foot, sword and buckler, drawing on a last unsuspected reservoir of fury, he beat it back, and, charging in turn, cleared a circle.

"Now, cavaliers, to the water!"

Then, as he glanced around, his heart momentarily stopped. Only four were left: Catana, Juan Ruano, of the old company, Garcia, and a Narvaez recruit who at that moment, struck in the throat by a javelin, plunged forward to the causeway.

Turning his back to the Indians in front of him, Pedro dashed toward Catana, caught her by the waist.

"Keep her between us," he yelled to Garcia.

The three of them, with Ruano, hurled themselves against the thinner line of Aztecs separating them from the edge of the gap twenty yards distant, burst through, and leaped down into the water.

He was vaguely conscious of the roar behind them; of relief when he struggled to his feet on some kind of yielding object and found the water no higher than his waist; of struggling forward, still keeping a grip on Catana, with Garcia on the other side of her; of sinking sometimes to his shoulders and rising sometimes to his knees on the cluttered bottom; of the lilt of hope on seeing the opposite embankment lined with Spanish soldiers.

But escape would not be that easy. Pursuers were in the water behind them, and now a couple of canoes shot in from opposite ends of the gap. Pedro saw Garcia grapple with one of these and heave it over. The other sheered off, as if choosing its moment to strike. Ruano had disappeared. With bucklers gone, but with swords and daggers active, Pedro, Catana, and Garcia somehow waded, scrambled, dragged their way across, returned blows, shook off the eager hands and arms for a last time, reached the foot of the embankment..

Lord! Why didn't that fellow in complete armor up there lend a hand ? He was evidently one of the Narvaez captains; but his vizor eas closed and Pedro did not recognize his harness. The men with him, a rear guard left to hold the embankment against the enemy, were also newcomers. They gave shouts of encouragement, but what Pedro wanted was the butt end of the lance on which the steel-clad captain was leaning. Too short of breath to speak, he stretched up an arm. At the same time, glancing back, he saw the remaining canoe manned by eight paddlers closing in.

"Your lance," he croaked, stretching his free arm further up and holding Catana with the other.