Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary - Страница 54
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"If you must," she said resignedly.
"And you, Tiptoe, please just remain inconspicuous. Let the white men hunt their own game for their night's meal. Please do not take out a thunder-stick to show them your mastery of it."
The officer—his name was Tallabuena, and his rank was only teniente, but I kept on ingratiatingly addressing him as Capitan—sat beside me at the campfire. While the two of us gnawed on juicy roast deer meat, he confided quite freely what I wished to know about that Governor Guzman:
"No, no, he has not come this far north. He is still safely resident in New Galicia. The canny Guzman knows better than to risk his fat culon up here in the Tierra de Guerra. But he has established his capital right on the northern border of New Galicia, and hopes to make a fair city of it."
"Why?" I asked. "The old capital of Michihuacan was on the shore of the Lake of Rushes, far to the south."
"Guzman is no fisherman. His home province of Galicia back in Old Spain is silver-mining country. It follows that he expects to make his fortune here from silver. So he founded his capital in a region near the coast, where his prospectors have discovered rich veins of that and other ores. He has named it Compostela. So far, it consists just of himself and his favorite fawning compinches and his cadre of troops, but he will be rounding up native slaves to toil underground to mine the silver for him. I pity those poor wretches."
"So do I," I murmured, while deciding that Tiptoe and I would set our direction more north of west when we moved on, not to stumble into that Compostela. Still, it troubled me that the butcher Guzman had set his new city so close to my native Aztlan—no more than a hundred one-long-runs distant, as best I could estimate.
"But come, Don Juan," Tallabuena said now. "Come and meet the heroes of the hour."
He led me to where the three heroes sat eating. They were being devotedly attended by a number of lesser-ranking soldiers, who plied them with the choicest portions of deer meat and poured for them wine from leather bags and jumped to fulfill their every least request. Also in attendance on them was a man in the traveling dress of a friar, who seemed even more servilely to seek their favor. The heroes, I could see, had originally been white-skinned, but they were now so sunburned that their complexion was darker than my own. The fourth man, who would also have been accounted a hero, I suppose, if he had been white, sat eating alone and apart and unattended. He was black and could not have been burned any blacker.
I would never see these several Spaniards again after this one night. But though I could not have known it then, the tonali of every one of them was so linked with mine that our separate future lives—and numberless other lives, and even the destinies of nations—would inextricably be intertwined. So I will tell here of what I learned about them, and how I befriended one of them, in the brief time before we parted.
XVI
The leader of the heroes was respectfully addressed by everyone else by his Christian name of Don Alvar. But when he was introduced to me, I wondered why any Spaniards should have laughed at Tiptoe's name, because the surname of this man Alvar was Cabeza de Vaca, which means "Cow Head." Despite that inauspicious appellation, he and his fellows truly had done a heroic feat. I had to piece together their story from their converse with the soldiers attending them, and from what the Teniente Tallabuena told me—because the three heroes, after having greeted me politely enough, did not once thereafter speak directly to me. And when I knew their history, I could hardly blame them for wanting nothing to do with any indio.
I know that Florida means "flowery" in the Spanish tongue, but to this day I do not know where the land of that name is situated. Wherever it is, it must be a terrible sort of place. More than eight years before, this man Cow Head, his surviving companions and some hundreds of other white men, together with their horses and weapons and provisions, had sailed from the island colony of Cuba, intending to settle a new colony in that Florida.
From their first setting sail, they were beset by vicious springtime storms. Then, when they finally landed, they encountered other dismaying troubles. Where the countryside of Florida was not dense with nearly impenetrable forests, it was laced with swift rivers difficult to ford, or hot and stinking swamps, and in such wilderness their horses were next to useless. Rapacious woodland animals stalked the adventurers, and snakes and insects bit and stung them and lethal swamp fevers and illnesses assailed them. Meanwhile, the native inhabitants of Florida were not at all happy to receive these pale-skinned invaders, but picked them off, one after another, with arrows discharged from ambush among the concealing trees or, in open country, frontally attacked them in force. The travel-exhausted and fever-weakened Spaniards could fight back only feebly, and they were increasingly debilitated by hunger, because the indios also carried away their own domestic animals and burned their own crops of maize and other edibles, ahead of the white men's advance. (It seemed incredible to me, but the would-be colonists were evidently incapable of feeding themselves from the bounty of animals, birds, fish and plants that every wilderness offers to men of initiative and enterprise.) Anyway, the numbers of the Spaniards so alarmingly diminished that the remainder abandoned all hope of surviving in that place. They turned about and retreated to the coast, only to find that their ships' crews, doubtless having given them up for lost, had sailed away and left them marooned in that hostile land.
Discouraged, sick, fearful, besieged on every side, they determined on the desperate expedient of building new boats for themselves. And they did—five boats—of tree limbs and palm leaves, lashed together with ropes braided from the horses' manes and tails, caulked with pine pitch, rigged with sails made of their clothes sewn together. By this time, they had slaughtered their remaining horses for their meat, and had used their hides to make bags for carrying potable water. When the boats cast off, their five masters—Cow Head was one—took them not far out to sea, but kept within sight of the coastline, believing that if they followed it far enough westward they must eventually reach the shores of New Spain.
They found the sea and the land alike inimical, both earth and water frequently pounded by storms—cold winter storms now—of scouring winds and torrential rains. Even in calm weather there were rains—of arrows—from indios in war canoes that came out to harass them. Their scanty food supplies gave out, and their untanned leather water bags soon rotted, but every time the Spaniards tried to land to replenish their provisions, they were repelled by more swarms of arrows. Inevitably, the five boats were driven apart. Four of them were never seen or heard of again. The remaining boat, carrying Cow Head and some number of his comrades, after a long time did manage to get ashore.
The white men, now barely clothed, almost famished, cold to the bone, weakened to near decrepitude, found an occasional native tribe—a tribe as yet uninformed that it was being invaded—that was willing to shelter and feed strangers. But, as the white men dauntlessly forged westward in hope of finding New Spain, they were more often savaged than succored. As they crossed wooded lands, vast grasslands, unbelievably broad rivers, high mountains and parched deserts, they were captured by one tribe or roving band of indios after another. The captors would enslave them, put them to hard labor, mistreat and beat and starve them. ("The damned red diablos," I heard Cow Head remark, "even let their hellfry brats amuse themselves by yanking out tufts of our beards.") And from one after another of those captivities the Spaniards had to contrive to escape, each time losing one or more of their number to death or recapture. What became of those comrades they left behind, they never would know.
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