War God (23 page)

‘Be my guest,’ sneered Escudero with a wave of his hand. ‘Given enough rope, you’re bound to hang yourself.’

Cortés smiled again.
When we reach the New Lands
,
he thought,
we’ll see which one of us hangs
. But instead he said: ‘Something’s come up – a great danger to us that we must deal with at once. Under such circumstances our official Instructions, written by Don Diego himself, vest full emergency powers in me to take whatever actions I decide are in the best interests of the expedition.’ He brought out a scroll from his pocket, pushed it into the middle of the table. ‘Clause twenty-three,’ he said. ‘It’s on this basis, though I hold him in the highest personal regard, that I’ve decided not to consult Don Diego tonight. Neither the interests of the expedition, nor his personal interests, will be served by involving him. What’s needed now is swift action, but he’s the governor of Cuba, busy with a thousand things, and if we put this to him he’ll bog us down for days. We all know he’s a man who doesn’t make decisions quickly …’

‘I’ll second that,’ said Cristóbal de Olid. He was short, squat and gnome-like, with a wild black beard and twinkling blue eyes. ‘Takes him three months to sign a simple requisition sometimes.’

‘I’ve waited three years for a proper grant of Indians,’ complained De León.

Puertocarrero agreed: ‘What Velázquez promises and what gets done are two different things.’

Cortés moved swiftly to capitalise on his gains. ‘You touch upon my exact point, Alonso. This emergency is such we can’t waste a single minute waiting for His Excellency to make up his mind.
We have to sail tonight!
’ He leaned forward over the map table, his voice low and urgent. ‘My shipping agent, whom I trust with my life, has returned this afternoon from Santiago de La Vega on the island of Jamaica. He reports that Pedro de Arias has installed himself there, recruited close to fifteen hundred men – the scum of the earth, so it seems – and gathered together a mixed fleet of twenty good carracks and caravels. They’re bound for the New Lands.’ He paused for effect. ‘Nigh on ready to sail. If we don’t beat them to it, there’ll be no prize left for us to win.’

‘Oh very good, Cortés, very good,’ said Escudero, performing a slow handclap, ‘but you don’t seriously expect us to believe any of this, do you?’

‘I see nothing to disbelieve,’ snapped Juan de Escalante. A lean, rangy, blue-eyed man, he wore his black hair straight and long to his shoulders, framing a wolfish, heavily bearded face and concealing the sword wound from the Italian wars that had deprived him of the top two-thirds of his right ear. ‘We all know what Pedrarias did in Darién. We all know he’s been gathering men. We all know he’s looking for fresh pickings. Why not the New Lands?’

‘There’s a way to settle this we’ll all believe,’ said Ordaz. His cold grey eyes rested on Cortés again. ‘Simply produce your shipping agent and have him repeat his story to us …’

It was Cortés’s experience that some truth in a lie makes the lie stronger, and he would have told a different lie if his shipping agent, Luis Garrido, had not in fact returned from Jamaica that very afternoon. It helped that Garrido was himself an accomplished liar, having sworn falsely on Cortés’s behalf in many business disputes. He had also recently fallen into debt – a problem that Cortés could help him solve. Best of all, Garrido had met Pedrarias the previous year and was able to describe him.

‘I’ll be happy to oblige,’ Cortés answered Ordaz. ‘He’ll be down on the main deck taking his dinner.’ He signalled to Sandoval. ‘Would you go and fetch him please? Ask for Luis Garrido. Any of the crew will know him.’

Sandoval was short with a broad, deep chest. His curly chestnut hair had receded almost to his crown, making him look peculiarly high-browed, but as though to compensate he had grown a curly chestnut beard, quite well maintained, that covered most of the lower half of his face. Although he presently owned no horse, lacked the means to purchase one and had enlisted as a private soldier, Cortés noted that his legs were as bandy as his own – the legs of a man who’d spent most of his life in the saddle.

When fat, perspiring, moustachioed Garrido entered the stateroom, he was in the midst of heaping complaints on Sandoval, wringing his hands and lamenting that he’d already told his story to Cortés and only wanted to finish eating his dinner and have a good night’s sleep.

Several of the captains had met Pedrarias, and others were familiar with the anchorage where he was supposedly mustering ships and men, but Garrido didn’t wilt under their close questioning, even naming and describing most of the vessels in his fleet. There was a danger of being caught out here – Garrido need only mention a single carrack or caravel that one of the captains knew for sure was not in Jamaica and his credibility would fall into doubt. Get two wrong and the whole exercise would become a fiasco. But so complete was the agent’s knowledge of shipping movements in the region, so accurate the details he reported and so fresh his recollections, that his imaginary fleet proved unsinkable.

Bravo
, Cortés thought as Garrido left the stateroom to return to his dinner.
A masterful performance.
And, looking round the table, where an excited buzz of conversation immediately ensued, he could see that most of the captains were swaying his way – that escaping tonight on the ebb tide, to get a foothold in the New Lands and be the first to stake a claim there, was suddenly beginning to make sense to them.

In the end Escudero was the only Velazquista who still felt the matter should be reported to Velázquez. But he accepted the decision of the majority, and the authority of Cortés under clause twenty-three of the Instructions, to sail at once without informing the governor. ‘Under duress I accompany you,’ he said, ‘and under duress I stay silent. But what we are doing is not right. I fear we will all pay a price for it.’ He turned on Cortés. ‘You, sir,’ he said, ‘have no more conscience than a dog. You are greedy. You love worldly pomp. And you are addicted to women in excess …’

At this last remark, which seemed so irrelevant to the matter in hand, Alvarado burst out laughing. ‘Addicted to women in excess! What’s wrong with that, pray tell? If it’s a sin then I’d guess a few around this table are guilty of it! But what would you know or care of such things, Juan, when I’m told your own preferences run to little boys?’

Crash! Over went Escudero’s chair again and he was on his feet, lurching round the table towards Alvarado, his sword drawn, his knuckles white on its hilt. He didn’t get far before Puertocarrero, Escalante and Ordaz piled on top of him and disarmed him. Alvarado stayed where he was, one eyebrow sardonically raised.

‘Don Juan,’ Cortés said. ‘It seems you have forgotten.’

‘Forgotten what?’ Escudero was still struggling with his captors.

‘The agreement we all made an hour ago. Tonight we may trade insults with no man’s honour at stake. You have just insulted my conscience, for example, but do you see me at your throat with my sword?’

Escudero must have known he was trapped. ‘My apologies,’ he choked finally. ‘In my anger I forgot myself.’ He looked up at Alvarado: ‘But if you say such a thing tomorrow, I will kill you.’

‘Tomorrow is another day,’ said Cortés. He motioned to Sandoval. ‘Go and bring two of the men from the main deck, then take Don Juan below and lock him in the brig.’

‘The brig?’ Escudero spluttered. His face was suddenly purple. ‘You can’t do that to me!’

‘I think you’ll find I can,’ said Cortés. He unrolled the Instructions scroll, made a show of reading it. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘here it is. Clause seventeen: “Captain-General may, on his sole discretion, restrain and if necessary incarcerate any member whose conduct becomes disruptive or threatens the success of the expedition …” To my mind, attacking Don Pedro with a sword in his own stateroom is disruptive and threatens our success.’

De León tried to intervene. ‘Please, Captain-General. Your point is made. Surely it’s not necessary to—’

‘It is,’ said Cortés, ‘absolutely necessary.’

Ordaz also seemed about to object but Cortés waved him down: ‘I’ll risk no distractions! Don Juan will be released in the morning. He can resume command of his ship then.’

Cortés had been expecting at least token opposition from the other captains, but Escudero was not well liked. Now that the decision had been made to embark immediately, it seemed no one wanted to speak up for him.

With an inner sigh of relief, Cortés realised his gamble had paid off. His authority over this unruly group had prevailed – at least for tonight.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘thank you for your support. I’m heartened by it. We’re embarking upon a great and beautiful enterprise, which will be famous in times to come. We’re going to seize vast and wealthy lands, peoples such as have never before been seen, and kingdoms greater than those of monarchs. Great deeds lie ahead of us; great dangers, too, but if you’ve got the stomach for it, and if you don’t abandon me, I shall make you in a very short time the richest of all men who have crossed the seas and of all the armies that have here made war.’

Everyone liked the idea of getting rich, so the speech went down well.

As the last of the captains hurried from the stateroom to make their ships ready to sail, Sandoval returned from locking up Escudero.

‘Ah,’ said Cortés. ‘Is the prisoner settled?’

‘Settled is not the word I’d use,’ said Sandoval. ‘He’s shouting and pounding on the walls of the brig.’

Cortés shrugged. ‘He can pound until dawn if he wants to; nobody’s going to take a blind bit of notice.’ He grinned: ‘Now listen, Sandoval, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got soldier’s work for you to do tonight.’

Gonzalo de Sandoval was from a respected hidalgo family, albeit one impoverished in recent years by a property dispute. He was born and bred a cavalier and university educated – natural officer material on every count. He was also from Medellín, Cortés’s home town in the north of Extremadura, and the Extremenos were famous for sticking together.

All these things, thought Bernal Díaz, made it easy to understand why Cortés had singled Sandoval out for responsibility yesterday, despite his obvious youth.

What made less sense – indeed, so
much
less sense he feared an elaborate practical joke – was that at the same ceremony, Cortés had also singled out Díaz himself, a man of poor family and almost no education, and elevated him from common
soldado
to
alferez
– ensign – the same rank he had bestowed on Sandoval.

Now, tonight, hard on the heels of his unexpected promotion, Díaz had been given his first command – not a very glamorous or prestigious command, to be sure, but one that was important and worthwhile.

Respectable work that made sense to him.

Cortés and Alvarado had entrusted him with the fabulous sum of three hundred gold pesos with which he was to purchase the entire contents of Santiago’s slaughterhouse – all the butchered meat and all the animals awaiting slaughter. In the unlikely event that three hundred pesos did not prove sufficient to buy everything, then Díaz was to commandeer whatever remained, carrying it away by force if necessary, but leaving a promissory note to cover payment.

‘Any problems with that?’ Cortés had asked.

‘I don’t want to get arrested, sir!’

‘You have my word that won’t happen. We are God’s soldiers, Díaz, doing God’s work and God’s work won’t wait …’

‘But if there’s trouble, sir?’

‘No need to call me “sir”. Don Hernando will do. Hernán when you get to know me better. I like to keep things informal if I can. As to trouble, there won’t be any – and if there is, I’ll protect you. You have my promise.’

It seemed Cortés was a man who made promises easily. But he was also the caudillo, captain-general of this great expedition to the New Lands, and Díaz’s best hope for finding wealth. So he’d shrugged and said, ‘That’s good enough for me … Don Hernando.’

He was having second thoughts now, though, as he stood in the middle of the slaughterhouse floor, his boots soiled with blood and straw, carcasses of pigs, cattle and sheep suspended from hooks all around him, night insects throwing themselves suicidally into the torches that lit up the whole room. In front of him, Fernando Alonso, the director of the slaughterhouse, was so angry that spit sprayed from his mouth and a vein in his right temple began to throb conspicuously. ‘No, I will not sell you any meat!’ he yelled. ‘Not for three hundred pesos or for three thousand pesos. I have a contract to feed the city.’

‘But with respect, sir,’ Díaz persisted, ‘we
must
have this meat. And all your livestock on the hoof as well.’

‘Livestock on the hoof! So you’ll have the whole of Santiago go hungry not only tomorrow but for the rest of the month! What kind of men are you?’

Díaz sought around for an answer and remembered what Cortés had told him. ‘We are soldiers of God,’ he said, ‘doing God’s work. Would you have us go hungry as we do it?’

‘I would have you
honest
,’ shouted Alonso, unleashing another geyser of spit. He had one of those personalities that made him seem physically bigger than he was, but in reality he was a small, bristling, bald man with rather long hairy arms, hefting a big cleaver in his right hand and wearing a bloody apron. Díaz had been surprised to find him already at work, slaughtering beasts and butchering them for Santiago’s breakfast; he had hoped at this time of night he could deal with some junior who wouldn’t know what he was doing.