The Seven Serpents Trilogy (54 page)

Matlazingo was bewildered. He quit chewing on his coca leaves and did not ask for more. He had met a Spaniard who wasn't like me or Gerónimo de Aguilar.

“My ears grow tired of hearing
nada
,
nada
,” the captain said. “Once more today I ask, where is the gold?”

Matlazingo glanced around in desperation. I believe he was looking for me, thinking that I could help him. But there was no way I could persuade the Spaniard that the cacique was telling the truth. And to walk out and face his inquisitor would put me in a dangerous situation. How could I tell if the cap tain wasn't one of Cortés's men, instructed, as he sailed down the coast searching for gold, to keep a weather eye out for me! I pressed back farther into the trees.

I heard nothing now of what was said between the two men, but I did see Matlazingo hold out a cluster of pearls, the Spaniard move his lips disdainfully, strike the cacique's out stretched hand, and scatter the pearls on the beach. He shouted at two of his men, who sprang forward and bound the cacique by his long hair to the tail of one of the horses. The horseman then spurred his mount into a gallop and dragged Matlazingo to the end of the street and back.

“Where do you hide the gold?” the captain asked.

Matlazingo lay on his side, covered with dust, still bound to the horse's tail. His bleeding lips formed a word, but he had difficulty saying it. The captain waited. He even stooped down to hear what the cacique had to say. What he heard dis pleased him, for at once he gave a sign. This time the horseman dragged Matlazingo toward the village square.

Meanwhile, the troops collected wood on the beach and built a fire. When the cacique was dragged back, they untied him from the horse's tail and tossed his limp body into the flames. The captain then glanced about for other Indians to torture, but everyone had fled. He called his troops together, roundly cursed the village, and went back to his ship.

That night, after the Spaniards had left, the Indians came back from hiding, and we buried Matlazingo's ashes in one of the temples. The village mourned for a week and a day. At the end of that time I was asked to take the cacique's place as leader and medicine man, which, as courteously as I could, I declined to do.

S
OON AFTERWARD ONE OF OUR SAILING CANOES LEFT
C
HICHÉN
-P
ALAPA
with a cargo of pearls to sell at a trading center three hundred leagues to the south. Though it caused the Indians much distress, I left with it, for I had lost my interest in the village since Matlazingo's death.

We arrived at Quintana after a week of good weather, in time for the opening days of the fair. The pearls, which were communal property, everyone owning a share in them, could have been sold out the day we arrived, but the Indians had come a long way and did not want to turn around and start back already. They wished to visit with old friends, take time with the bartering, and leave not a day before the last pearl had been sold. While this was going on, I decided I liked the town and the traders and travelers that came to it from every where in Maya country. I took my share of the profits, which were small, and stayed on when the canoe sailed home.

Quintana was located at the mouth of a tidal estuary, at the meeting of two large rivers. Its main street ran for half a league along a sandy strip between the rivers.

Some of it was taken up by guarded warehouses where the rich traders stored costly goods like ocelot skins and cloaks made of hummingbird feathers, but mostly it was filled with thatched arcades filled with stalls owned by the poor. The poorer yet spread blankets on the ground on both sides of the walkway that wound down the middle

Beside this walkway in front of one of the warehouses, I spread my own blanket. Unsure of what I wished to sell, and what would sell, I bought a variety of things that I thought might appeal to children—like noisemakers, dolls, clay ani mals, toy spears, and slingshots. It was a small beginning.

On the first day, because my long legs, sun-bleached hair, and blue eyes attracted the children, I sold merchandise to the value of six cacao beans, half of it profit, valued in Spanish money, as close as I could figure, at some sixty maravedís. On the second day I did even better, and on the third day ran out of stock.

Whereupon the weathered old woman squatting on a blan ket next to mine asked me to help her sell the straw hats she was weaving, which I did. Business was so brisk with the hats that she suggested we discard our blankets and open a stall with a roof.

“Then you can stand behind a counter like a true seller,” she said, smiling a toothless yet engaging smile. “And then you will not have to sit on a blanket like an old woman.”

“You only weave seven hats a day,” I reminded her. “That's not enough hats to do business in a stall.”

“I will find more weavers. Two more. Three. And I will make hats in all colors, like the rainbow. And not for women only, but for men and children, too. And you can stand up and sell them.”

The prospect of standing on my feet appealed to me—after two days of squatting on a blanket, I could hardly walk—so we bought a stall in a good location and went looking for weavers. The old woman—her name was Zoque—took me up the street to the slave market.

“Two big canoes came with slaves,” she said, “but now they are picked over. I want a young black one. You can teach them and they do not eat so much as the Indians eat.”

There were ten slaves in the stockade, two of them black women from Africa and the rest women from an island to the south.

Zoque chose one of the blacks, a handsome, muscular woman nearly as tall as I. I decided against her and tried to make a choice between a smiling, middle-aged woman of a happy disposition and a girl, scarcely a woman, although she held a child by the hand, so tightly that the child's fingers had turned white.

The mother's eyes were fixed upon some distant place, be yond the log platform she stood upon, the crowd that surrounded her, and the sharpened poles of the stockade. But the child gazed wonderingly at me, fascinated by what she saw.

The slave owner came to them last among those he was selling. “Sola Mulamé,” he said, turning the woman around so she could be observed from all sides, “is twenty-five, a good worker, and docile by nature. Her daughter, Selka, is twelve years old, and very healthy.”

Selka, on the contrary, was very sickly looking, with arms and legs like sticks, hip bones that pushed out against a cotton shift too small for her. The owner began to turn the child to show her off. She was gazing at me with black, unblinking eyes when he began and she was still gazing at me when she faced me again.

The old woman didn't care much for either of them. “The mother looks lazy,” she said. “The girl will die before the year has gone.”

A lordly Indian with a beautiful quetzal plume in his cap shoved forward and offered thirty cacao for the mother—for various reasons, he did not want the daughter. I paid the slave owner sixty cacao beans for both.

I had come to the mart out of curiosity, to humor the old woman—with no intention of buying slaves. Yet here I was the owner of two. Did I see something in the child's eyes? Did they mirror the depths of a Christian soul? Troubled, I took her and the mother away and left them with Zoque, who started that day to teach them the art of weaving.

They learned quickly, and within a month a steady stream of hats of all colors and sizes flowed onto our shelves. The trading center attracted crowds during fairs and fiestas, but there were always visitors on the street and, in a country of fierce sun and torrential rain, always a demand for hats.

During these first weeks Selka and her mother worked in the old woman's hut and I didn't see the child. I thought about her, however, wondering if it would be any use for me to in struct her in the Christian faith. Whenever the thought came to me, I remembered my failure with Ceela Yaxche—yes, with thousands of others—and promptly put it out of mind.

During one of the big fiesta weeks the old woman set the two weavers up in front to attract people who liked to watch other people work. The girl had changed. Her arms and legs were no longer sticks. Her hip bones didn't show anymore. The only thing that hadn't changed about her were her eyes. They still were black and unblinking. They sought me out—she had learned to weave without looking—whenever I was around. They followed me everywhere.

The day the fiesta was over and sales had slackened, I took her aside, tempted again, yes, again!

“Selka,” I said, “you worship the sun god and Itzamná, the god of learning, and now that you are a weaver, Ix Chebel Yax, the goddess of weaving. But there is another god mightier than they. He towers over them as the ceiba tree towers above the saltbush.”

“Where does this god live?” she asked, watching me warily.

“In the sky. In your heart.”

She touched her breast. “Here?” she asked.

“There. In your heart and your mother's heart. And in mine. He lives everywhere.”

“He is very busy,” she said, “to be everywhere.”

“Yes, very busy, yet never tiring.”

We talked about the village she had come from and how she became a slave. At the end, having made a hat during this time, she gave it to me. It was a little large for my head, but nicely woven and of striking hues of red.

I talked to Selka many times, telling her about God's Son and the Virgin Mary. She listened, watching me as she wove, asking questions that I tried to answer in ways she would un derstand. Her questions were more to the point than those of Ceela Yaxche, and she asked more of them. By the time winter arrived, I was certain that in her heart she had become a be liever in the power of God, the message of Christ, and the mercy of the Virgin Mary.

I opened a second stall across the street, since I learned that Indians liked to compare prices. For a small sum I had the town rulers issue word that Selka and her mother were no longer
ppentacob
, and as free people could run the new store. They ran it well, indeed it soon rivaled mine.

I had a cross made for Selka, which she put up in the stall, and a string of wooden beads she hung about her neck. I could do no more. I was still a seminarian, with no power to bring her God's grace. Often I found myself wishing that the haughty, self-righteous Pedroza, who had refused my humble request, was sojourning in hell.

Early in the spring a Spanish ship came out of the north. I had time to warn the town rulers, who sent word through the streets. No one was to raise a hand against the Spaniards. They were to be given all the gold the Indians owned. And above all, told that to the south, six days' sailing, they would discover a city where the streets were paved with gold and people ate from gold plates. I warned Selka and her mother to stay indoors and attend to their weaving, making a grim joke that the Spaniards wore steel helmets and not straw hats.

For myself, I went into the jungle and stayed hidden for two weeks. When I came out the Spaniards had gone, leaving the town stripped of its gold and all of its fowl, but the Indians unharmed. There were many who were sorry to see them leave, so amazing were the animals that could carry a man and the armor that shone in the sun.

About two weeks later, people everywhere in the town began to have pains and grew so hot that their skins burned. Then red bumps appeared on their faces and bodies, and these became pustules. It was a terrible sickness and ran through the town like a brush fire, leaving people dead.

One morning Selka complained of a fever. By nightfall her honeycolored skin was blotched and red. Although I had heard of the disease in Spain—it was called
viruelas—
I had no idea of what to do.

Sola Mulamé went in search of a medicine man, but so great was the plague that four days passed before one came. He sat down beside Selka's bed and took a parcel of monkey fur, dried frogs, and moonstones from a pouch and spread them on the floor. Then he asked her to name the gods whom she thought might be molesting her. Was it Ah Muzen Cab, the bee god? Was it the long-nosed rain god, Chac? Was it Itzamná himself ?

Selka turned her head and did not answer. The medicine man went away in disgust. I knelt beside the bed and held her hands and prayed, but I could do nothing to ease her pain. Because of the mulish Pedroza, who had sought out and courted martyrdom, I had never had the authority to baptize her. And now, as death stood by, I lacked the authority to speak of hope or comfort, not so much as a single word of the Christian rites.

She never took her gaze from me. It followed me about the room, and when I went out and came back it was still there, waiting to fix itself upon me again. Her face had become a hideous mask, but her eyes burned with the same trusting light. Her last words were, “Dear friend, please remember Selka in your prayers.”

 

T
HE INCANTATIONS OF WITCH DOCTORS AND THE THOUSANDS OF
fervent pleas to Mayan gods were in vain. In less than two months, half the people in Quintana were dead, hundreds were dying, and those who managed to recover, like the old woman and Selka's mother, rose from their beds with pocked and scarred faces. The incantations, however, were no more in vain than my Christian prayers.

I was saddened by Selka's death, but there was no time to mourn or even to worry about my own health. I left the stalls to the two women and joined the bands that collected the dead and built fires to consume them. The nights glowed with these lurid fires. The days were clouded by gray smoke.

The plague finally wore itself out and came to an end. Traders and merchants who had shunned Quintana during the sickness began to trickle back. Among them was a trader I had seen strolling through the marketplace followed by servants. I asked the old woman who he was.

“Zambac,” she said, “or some name like that. He comes from a place to the south. In the mountains to the south.”