War God by Hancock Graham

Author:Hancock, Graham [Hancock, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2013-05-29T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Forty-Six

Cozumel, Thursday 25 February 1519

First light on the morning of Thursday 25 February, the seventh day since the Santa María’s departure from Santiago de Cuba, revealed the island of Cozumel less than four miles ahead. Eerily, the Indian town that perched on the low hill on the northeast side of the island was exactly as it had appeared to Cortés in his last dream of Saint Peter.

Exactly, that is, except for one thing – the thick pall of smoke that now rose above the whitewashed, flat-roofed houses like a symbol of divine wrath.

‘What do you make of that, Don Antón?’ Cortés asked the grizzled pilot who stood by his side leaning on the newly repaired oak rail surrounding the navigation deck.

Alaminos shrugged. ‘Looks like trouble,’ he said.

Cortés could only agree. Alvarado, whose love of gold was only exceeded by his love of violence, would have assumed the position of captain-general in his absence. And with a man like that in charge of this great expedition … Well, anything was possible.

Worse, Muñoz was also on board Alvarado’s ship.

Cortés looked across the dancing waves to the pyramid that towered above the smoking town. Stepped, not smooth-sided like the famous pyramids of Egypt, it too was exactly as Saint Peter had revealed in his dream. Equally disturbing were the squat familiar contours of the dark stone edifice perching on the pyramid’s summit. The saint had described it as ‘the temple of the heathens’ and had made a point of singling out Muñoz as ‘the cure for their idolatry’.

Muñoz in his dark robes! Muñoz with his cross!

(And his bags of knives and gruesome trophies!)

Was Cortés never to be free of him?

Was he only to conquer, as Saint Peter had intimated, if he made an accommodation with that vile man?

As the Santa María rounded the headland, the other ten ships of the scattered fleet, about which Cortés had fretted for these past seven days, came into view in the sheltered bay, with Alvarado’s San Sebastián placed closest to shore. All this, too, was exactly as it had been in the dream, but for the happy crowds of Indians with their garlands, who were nowhere to be seen on this bright morning, and that ominous pall of smoke looming above the town and sending down a rain of fine ash.

‘It’s good to be back on dry land,’ Gonzalo de Sandoval said.

‘Still feels like the deck’s swaying under my feet,’ replied García Brabo, the tough Extremeno sergeant whom Sandoval had begun to count as a friend since the battle with Velázquez’s guards on the road outside Santiago harbour. Clearing his throat noisily, Brabo spat a copious gob of phlegm. ‘Sea’s not a natural place for a man to be,’ he added. ‘If it was, we’d be born with fins and scales like fish.’

‘Reckon I’m going to learn to swim,’ said Sandoval, who had always hated the ocean with its vast impersonal power and its raging unpredictable moods. He’d felt sure the Santa María would go to

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