A Signal Victory (7 page)

Ecab was a handsome, prosperous place. Like all the Maya, the people were terrified of death, but also like all the Maya,
this made them convivial and jolly. Except at night, when the gods of death were about, and Ah Puch watched everyone, they were a happy people, totally enthralled by small children and by flowers.

Guerrero underestimated neither them nor himself, but having at last found a place where he felt at ease, he meant to rise. He became a warrior. It was not difficult. Their wars were simple things, because they had a simple purpose. In a society like that, Guerrero towered up as a genius at strategy. His advancement was certain.

The purpose of war was offerings. It was the Mexicans who conquered them who had taught them what to do about death. They had always been a little puzzled about the matter before. The Mexicans were not. One offered death human hearts. Ah Puch ate them, and left you alone. And that was what the wars were for, to take captives for the altars. One only needed four or five at a time, for the monthly festivals. And since, after having thrown off the Mexican yoke fifty odd years before, the Maya had fallen into a series of mutually contentious states, all struggling for pre-eminence, but none strong enough to re-establish the Empire, there were many little skirmishes available.

So Guerrero prospered. There are advantages to being outside a culture, particularly if one is a soldier. One has only to see through the ethics of the opposite side, do something unheard of, and not only does one win, but one is quite safe. He soon got his cloak and club back again. He also enjoyed himself. He was becoming one of them. He was better fed and housed than he had ever been. He flourished. He was made much of. But he remained a slave. Taxmar refused to let him leave.

So long as Taxmar remained alive, to be a slave did not disturb him. In Spain he had been worse than a slave, and worse treated, for poverty makes slaves of us all. Here he had everything. There were even compensations. There were, for instance, women. Adultery was punishable by death, but Taxmar had concubines, and Guerrero was very
fond of women. They were little women, plump but delicate, whose life consisted in pleasing. As a race, the Maya were sensuous, but not sensual, so Guerrero, who was both, given the opportunity, was a novelty again. He pleased.

That made Aguilar furious. Aguilar was by nature chaste, but only from a lack of desire. Yet the suspicion that the carnal may know something that the chaste do not drove him, as it always does the ascetic, but never the austere, to a frenzy. Never mind. It would be something to denounce later.

It was to please the women, really, or at any rate one of them, that Guerrero had his ears pierced and distended. It was not something he thought about. The world in those days was a bigger place, and having left one world, he naturally wanted to conform to the practices of another. Only low slaves were so plain as he, and even a slave, if a captive of war, which in a way he was, may have rank. The Spanish, he foresaw, would not come back for years, and might never come. Besides, he had one ear pierced already. Sailors did, by custom, and because it was supposed to improve their sight. For a year the distenders annoyed him. After that he wore jade tubes with flaring lips, and thought no more of the matter. They felt heavy and joggled when he walked, but that was not unpleasant, he grew used to them, and the women were delighted.

Tattooing came next. He did not mind that either.

He was beginning to move as they did, gravely, and with some pomp. An aristocracy is so. One way or another, it weighs itself down to the proper pace. Slave or not, he was one of them. It was something, after all, to become a gentleman, or at least, for he had always been such if in the wrong world, to be recognized as one. He found that condition suited him very well.

Aguilar was not one of them. He was put out to work in the fields. This he regarded as a martyrdom, and perhaps he was right. He had become a priest to escape such things. Now he was back at them again, and they did not please
him. Still, even he had a certain novelty value. It was because he was celibate.

Taxmar could not understand that. He persisted, out of curiosity and a sense of fun, in attempting to find out whether the man was a eunuch or merely impotent. He must be one or the other, for a spiritual eunuch was something the Maya had never heard of. One might lacerate the flesh to please the gods, but certainly one did not deny it. To do so was unnatural, and therefore unthinkable.

Yet physically Aguilar seemed complete, and Taxmar was not without his informants. The man had wet dreams, so he could not be impotent. There must be some other explanation.

Guerrero, though amused, thought that investigations of that sort went too far.

Taxmar did not think they went far enough. He wished to try an experiment.

Aguilar tried to explain, but since he had refused to learn the language of a people he still called idolators and devils, could not explain very well. He looked ill. Forced labour had made him thin, and he had, even more than before, a tendency to cringe. Guerrero avoided him. He did not like to see people degrade themselves.

Aguilar grovelled.

To Taxmar, this was not priestly conduct. Priests did not grovel, except, of course, to each other. There must be some other explanation. He sent Aguilar out late at evening, to catch fish, and made sure that he would have to camp out overnight. He also sent along a concubine, with orders to tempt the man.

Aguilar was away for five days.

Taxmar awaited the result with the liveliest interest. But the concubine reported that he had merely gnashed his teeth and said something about St. Anthony, so they decided he was an idiot, and put him in charge of the harem.

Perhaps by this time he was one. A lust for revenge that goes unsatisfied for years can make a man so. At least the
work was easy, and when they laughed at him, he could think of them as devils, which was some help. The Church was full of precedents for that sort of thing. But to be an anonymous martyr is full of futility. One wants at least to be on the official rolls. Would the Spanish never come?

Guerrero hoped not.

Then, unexpectedly, Taxmar died.

Guerrero put out to sea the same night. He had become a valuable person. He could win wars. Taxmar’s successors were not likely to let him go, and he wanted to be free. He wanted to go on in this world, and knew not only what he was worth, but what he would be worth, when at last the Spanish came, when and if they did.

They would certainly try to, for though Yucatan had no gold, they did not know that, and though they had found a little among the Caribs whom they had slaughtered in the Indies, that had only made them reach out for more.

Guerrero did not know what he would do then, but he did know what he meant to do now. He meant to rise. Nor was he improvising any more, as he had at Coba. He had learned much of this country in the last two years, and he had decided where to go.

Taking five slaves with him, and such wealth as he could lay his hands on, cocoa beans mostly, but some trinkets and jewels, he got into a sea canoe and started south. He was ceremonially dressed in the full costume of a warrior, with rich cloak, shield, head-dress, and ornamented loincloth and sandals. His weapons were beside him. He lacked only the nose rod and tattooing of a noble of the first class, and those, as a slave, he was not allowed to have. He did not mean to be a slave again.

The north-east coast had estuaries, savannahs, sandbars, and dangerous shoals. They passed Tulum by night, and saw the temple beacons from the sea. But even had he been captured, he would not have been sacrificed now. He was too useful.

On impulse he had the paddlers turn towards the sacred
island of Cozumel, to which pilgrims went from Tulum. Reaching it, he rested for the night, and then went to one of the temples to offer sacrifice. He now looked like an Indian and was taken for one. Even the priests, who two years ago would have torn his heart out, took him for one.

Before leaving he took a long look at those templed gods. They were his now, and they were the ones he had always preferred. It was just that previously he had not known their names. And looking at them, he discovered his capacity for gratitude. Nothing had evoked it before, in his short life, but now that the emotion had sprung into being, he did not think that it would die.

Meanwhile there were adventures to be had. Of Aguilar he thought not at all.

Nor did he think of his European past. It never had been
his
past, and it was certainly not his now. This world was his now, and he was delighted with it.

He set out again. Beyond Cozumel a current caught his canoe and swept it far out to sea. He was often out of sight of land on that two-week journey, but that did not bother him. The water was calm, the sky marvellously young at night, the air cool, and he had brought much food. His slaves would get him back to shore.

To the south lay Chetumal, on a large bay, and he had heard much of Chetumal. It was the largest and the most secure of all these states along the eastern shore. He did not think they would make him a slave there. Its ruler did not sound that sort of man.

He had an Empire around him, and that being so, he found the world good. Why should he not? He was healthy, he was young, and he was loyal. To show that loyalty, he needed now only to be loved and love.

But loyal to what?

He was about to find out.

The state of Chetumal lived by trade, but had the advantage
of being beyond the main periphery of Maya affairs, at the mouths of several navigable rivers, down which the merchants came from Guatemala, or overland from Mexico and the western coast. It was protected from the avarice of adjacent rulers by a series of savannahs and almost impassable swamps, and had been founded during the Lesser Descent of the Old Empire, in the sixth century.

Of its ambitious neighbours there were five, the Xiu, who had cast the Mexicans out and now wished to rule the peninsula in their stead; the Cocom of Sotuta; the Canek of Tayasal, who lived at Lake Peten Itza, in Guatemala; the Chel; and the Pech. Chetumal traded with all of them, and had been defeated by none. Its own borders and subsidiary fiefs stretched west of Lake Bacalar, and for some distance north and south of it.

Of all these dynasties, Chetumal felt close only to the Canek Itza, who had retreated to Guatemala from the holy but now long-deserted city of Chichen Itza, and who were the original colonists of the peninsula, both in the Lesser and the Greater Descent.

The name and title of the ruler of this land was Nachancan. There are different grades of nobility, from the ostentatious and therefore nervous, through the correct, to the true. From what Guerrero had heard, Nachancan belonged to the small company of the exact, who are so congruent with themselves, that we may always trust them not to budge from what they are.

He was excited.

Until a certain age, anyone of any sensibility is aware of his own life as a rehearsal. One plays the same scenes over and over again, but it does not matter what one does, for one will do it differently when the curtain goes up. But then comes a moment when one realizes that the play is on, and that the curtain, unnoticed, rose some time ago. By then one notices with a certain detachment both what will be done to one, and what one is doing. One scarcely knows then whether one is the puppet master of one’s self, or the only
possible person for the role, but one enjoys it so much, that all thought of audience or applause is forgotten. One’s only left desire is to meet the other members of the cast on cue, and so take up one’s lines. One knows where it will end, of course, but meanwhile one inhabits a world.

It is a mystery play but it includes, as do all things devout, much loving comedy.

All unknown to himself, Guerrero had reached both Chetumal and that point.

The city was a good fifty miles from the open sea, through a narrow passage and across a salty bay. When he had reached the sandbar which separated the bay from the sea, Guerrero beached his canoe and sent one of his slaves ahead with gifts, to announce his arrival.

As the efficient ruler of a trading state, Nachancan had as many sources of information as there were traders in the peninsula. He had long known who Guerrero was and was ready to receive him. Guerrero, who had rather expected that he would be, paddled up the bay.

He saw order, well cultivated fields, and prosperous villages. Chetumal itself, when he came to it, though large and populous, was not one of the great sacred centres of Yucatan, but a commercial town, often rebuilt, but stubbornly secular. Its temples were of a medium size. It did not go in fear of the gods, but preferred to bargain with them.

That too was good.

On landing he was surrounded by a small crowd which had come to see him and then taken to the palace. The crowd had come to see him as they would have flocked to any zoological curiosity. Legend had it that though their world would not end until 1697, which was comfortably far away, their new rulers would come out of the ocean and would be, as he had been, white skinned. But all the crowd saw was an Indian much like themselves. They went away disappointed.

Nachancan saw something more.

He had expected an oddity. Instead he found a healthy
young man with good legs, strong arms, and a determined but innate sense of dignity, a little too young perhaps, a little gauche, but then the person one becomes is not the person one was, and neither has anything to do with the person one is. Nor was dignity to be overlooked, for it was not in itself a quality, but a shape the mind has which even the self cannot hide. Nachancan liked the man and saw that the man, on sight, liked him. It gave their meeting a quality of predestination, for it is something in this lonely business, life, that spark of recognition. No wise man would stamp it out, for it can rekindle those fires in us which from neglect have almost burned out. To meet a lover is to have the illusion of youth back again, but to meet someone of one’s own sort makes maturity endurable.

Besides, Nachancan was a practical person, and if his spies were accurate, Guerrero would be useful.