Pastwatch_ The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus Part 19

Yet none of the sailors seemed disposed to give him credit for his navigation. They were still sullen over the matter of de Triana's reward. Well, let them pout. There would be wealth enough for all before this voyage was done. Hadn't the Lord promised so much gold that a great fleet could not carry it all? Or was that what Cristoforo's memory had made up for the Lord to have said?

Why couldn't I have been permitted to write it down when it was fresh in mind! But Cristoforo had been forbidden, and so he had to trust his memory. There was gold here, and he would bring it home.

"At this lat.i.tude, we must surely be at the coast of c.i.p.angu," said Cristoforo to Sanchez.

"Do you think so?" asked Sanchez. "I can't think of a stretch of the Spanish coast where there would be no sign of human habitation."

"You forget the light that we saw last night," said Don Pedro.

Sanchez said nothing.

"Have you ever seen such a lush and verdant land," said Don Pedro.

"G.o.d smiles on this place," said Cristoforo, "and he has delivered it into the hands of our Christian King and Queen."

The caravels were moving slowly, for fear of running aground in uncharted shallows. As they moved closer to the luminous white beach, figures emerged from the forest shadows.

"Men!" cried one of the sailors.

And so they obviously were, since they wore no clothing except for a string around their waists. They were dark, but not, Cristoforo thought, as dark as the Africans he had seen. And their hair was straight, not tight-curled.

"Such men as these," said Sanchez, "I have never seen before."

"That is because you have never been to the Indies before," said Cristoforo.

"Nor have I been to the moon," murmured Sanchez.

"Haven't you read Marco Polo? These are not Chinese because their eyes are not pinched-off and slanted. There is no yellowness to their skin, nor blackness either, but rather a ruddiness that tells us they are of India."

"So it's not c.i.p.anga after all?" said Don Pedro.

"An outlying island. We have come perhaps too far north. c.i.p.angu is to the south of here, or the southwest. We can't be sure how accurate Polo's observations were. He was no navigator."

"And you are?" asked Sanchez dryly.

Cristoforo did not even bother to look at him with the disdain that he deserved. "I said that we would reach the Orient by sailing west, Seor, and here we are."

"We're somewhere," said Sanchez. "But where this place may be on G.o.d's green Earth, no man can say."

"By G.o.d's own sacred wounds, man, I tell you that we are in the Orient."

"I admire the admiral's certainty."

There it was again, that t.i.tle - admiral. Sanchez's words seemed to express doubt, and yet he gave the t.i.tle that could only be given to Cristoforo if his expedition succeeded. Or did he use the t.i.tle ironically? Was Cristoforo being mocked?

The helmsman called to him. "Do we head for land now, sir?"

"The sea is still too rough," said Cristoforo. "And you can see the waves breaking over rocks. We have to circle the island and find an opening. Sail two points west of south until we round the southern end of the reef, and then west."

The same command was signaled to the other two caravels. The Indians on the sh.o.r.e waved at them, shouting something incomprehensible. Ignorant and naked - it was not appropriate for the emissary of Christian kings to make his first overtures to the poorest people of this new land. Jesuit missionaries had traveled to the far corners of the East. Someone who knew Latin would surely be sent to greet them, now that they had been sighted.

About midday, now sailing northward up the western coast of the island, they found a bay that made a good entrance. By now it was clear that this was an island so small as to be insignificant. Even the Jesuits couldn't be bothered with a place so small, so Cristoforo was reconciled to waiting another day or two before reaching someone worthy of receiving the emissaries of the King and Queen.

The sky had cleared and the sun shone hot and bright as Cristoforo descended into the launch. Behind him down the ladder came Sanchez and Don Pedro and, shaky as ever, poor Rodrigo de Escobedo, the notary who had to make an official record of all deeds done in the name of Their Majesties. He had cut a fine figure at court, a promising young functionary, but on board ship he had quickly been reduced to a puking shadow rushing from his cabin to the gunwale and staggering back - when he had strength to rise from his bed at all. By now, of course, he had got something like sea legs, and he even ate food that didn't end up staining the sides of the caravel. But yesterday's storms had felled him again, and so it was an act of sheer courage that he could come to sh.o.r.e and perform the duty for which he had been sent. Cristoforo admired him enough for his silent strength that he determined that no log of his would record the fact of Escobedo's seasickness. Let him keep his dignity in history.

Cristoforo noted that the launch put away from Pinzn's caravel before all the royal officials had made it down into his launch. Let Pinzn beware, if he thinks he can be the first to set foot on this island. Whatever he thinks of me as a sailor, I am still the emissary of the King of Aragon and the Queen of Castile, and it would be treason for him to try to preempt me on such a mission as this.

Pinzn must have realized this halfway to the beach, for his launch lay still in the water as Cristoforo's pa.s.sed him and ran up onto the beach. Before the boat staggered to a stop, Cristoforo swung over the side and tramped through the water, the low breakers soaking him up to the waist and dragging at the sword at his hip. He held the royal standard high over his head as he broke from the water and strode forward on the smooth wet sand of the beach. He walked on until he was above the tide line, and there in the dry sand he knelt down and kissed the earth. Then he rose to his feet and turned to see the others behind him, also kneeling, also kissing the ground as he had done.

"This small island will now bear the name of the holy Savior who led us here."

Escobedo wrote on the paper he held on the small box he had carried from the caravel: "San Salvador."

"This land is now the property of Their Majesties King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, our sovereigns and the servants of Christ."

They waited as Escobedo finished writing what Cristoforo had said. Then Cristoforo signed the deed, and so also did every other man there. None had the temerity to dare to sign above him, or to sign more than half as large as his bold signature.

Only then did the natives begin to emerge from the forest. There was a large number of them, all naked, none armed, brown as treebark. Against the vivid greens of the trees and underbrush, their skin looked almost red. They walked timidly, deferently, awe obvious on their faces.

"Are they all children?" asked Escobedo.

"Children?" asked Don Pedro.

"No beards," said Escobedo.

"Our captain shaves his face, too," said Don Pedro.

"They have no whiskers at all," said Escobedo.

Sanchez, hearing them, laughed loudly. "They're stark naked, and you look at their chins to see if they're men?"

Pinzn overheard the joke and laughed even louder, pa.s.sing the story on.

The natives, hearing the laughter, joined in. But they could not keep from reaching up and touching the beards of those Spaniards nearest them. It was so obvious that they had no harmful intent that the Spaniards permitted their touch, laughing and joking.

Still, even though Cristoforo had no beard to attract them, they obviously recognized that he was the leader, and it was to him that the oldest of them came. Cristoforo tried several languagaes on him, including Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and Genovese, to no avail. Escobedo tried Greek and Pinzn's brother, Vicente Yanez, tried the smattering of Moorish he had learned during his years of smuggling along the coast.

"They have no language at all," said Cristoforo. Then he reached out to the gold ornament the chief wore in his ear.

Without a word the man smiled, took it out of his ear, and laid it in Cristoforo's hand.

The Spaniards sighed in relief. So these natives understood things well enough, language or not. Whatever gold they had belonged to Spain.

"More of this," said Cristoforo. "Where do you dig it out of the ground?"

Met by incomprehension, Cristoforo acted it out, digging in the sand and "finding" the gold ornament there. Then he pointed inland.

The old man shook his head vigorously and pointed out to sea. To the southwest.

"The gold apparently doesn't come from this island," said Cristoforo. "But we could hardly expect a place as small and poor as this to have a gold mine, or there would have been royal officials from c.i.p.angu here to oversee the labor of digging it."

He laid the gold ornament back into the old man's hand. To the other Spaniards he said, "We'll soon see gold in such quant.i.ties as to make this a trifle."

But the old man refused to keep the gold. He pressed it upon Cristoforo again. It was the clear sign he was looking for. The gold of this place was being given to him by G.o.d. No man would freely give away something so precious if G.o.d had not impelled him. Cristoforo's dream of a crusade to liberate Constantinople and then the Holy Land would be financed by the ornaments of savages. "I take this, then, in the name of my sovereign lords the King and Queen of Spain," he said. "Now we will go in search of the place where the gold is born."

It was not the safest group of Zapotecs to run into in the forest - they were a war party, bent on finding a captive for sacrifice at the start of the rainy season. Their first thought would be that Hunahpu would make a splendid victim. He was taller and stronger than any man they had ever seen before, quite suitable for an offering of exceptional value.

So he had to preempt them - to appear to them as one who already belonged to the G.o.ds. In the end, he virtually had to capture them. He had been blithely confident back in Juba that his plan would work. Here, when he was surrounded by the birdcalls and whining insects of the marshy land of Chiapas, the plan seemed ludicrous, embarra.s.sing, and painful.

He would have to imitate the most savage royal sacrifice ritual anywhere that didn't actually leave the king dead. Why had the Mayas been so inventively self-abusive?

Everything else was ready. He had hidden the library of the lost future in its permanent resting place and sealed the opening. He had cached the items he would need later in their weatherproof containers, and memorized all the permanent landmarks that would allow him to find them again. And the items he would need now, for the first year, were bundled in packaging that would not look too bizarre to the eyes of the Zapotecs. He himself was naked, his body painted, his hair feathered and beaded and jeweled to look like a Maya king's after a great victory. And, most important, on his head and draped down his back were the head and skin of the jaguar he had killed.

He had thirty minutes before the war party from the village of Atetulka would reach this clearing. If his blood was to be fresh he had to wait until the last minute, and now the last minute had arrived. He sighed, knelt in the soft leafmeal of the shadowed clearing, and reached for the topical anesthetic. The Mayas did this without anesthetic, he reminded himself as he applied it liberally to his p.e.n.i.s and then waited a few minutes for it to become numb. Then, with a hypodermic gun, he deadened the entire genital area, hoping that he would have some opportunity to reapply the anesthetic in about four hours, when it began to wear off.

One genuine stingray needle and five imitation ones made of different metals. He took them one at a time in his hand and pushed each one crosswise into the loose skin along the top of his p.e.n.i.s. The blood flow was copious, dripping all over his legs. Stingray needle, then silver, gold, copper, bronze, and iron. Even though there was no pain, he was dizzy by the end of it. From loss of blood? He doubted it. It was almost certainly the psychological effect of perforating his own p.e.n.i.s that made him feel faint. Being a king among the Mayas was a serious business. Could he have done this without anesthetic? Hunahpu doubted it, saluting his ancestors even as he shuddered at their barbarism.

When the hunting party trotted silently into the clearing, Hunahpu stood in a shaft of light. The high-intensity lamp pointing upward between his legs caused the metal spines to glint and shimmer with the trembling of his body. As he had hoped, their eyes went right to where the blood still trickled down his thighs and dripped from the tip of his p.e.n.i.s. They also took in his body paint and, just as he had expected, they seemed to recognize at once the significance of his appearance. They prostrated themselves.

"I am One-Hunahpu," he said in Maya. Then he repeated himself in Zapotecan. "I am One-Hunahpu. I come from Xibalba to you, dogs of Atetulka. I have decided that you will no longer be dogs, but men. If you obey me, you and all who speak the language of the Zapotec will be masters of this land. No longer will your sons go up to the altar of Huitzilopochtli, for I will break the back of the Mexica, I will tear out the heart of the Tlaxcala, and your ships will touch the sh.o.r.es of all the islands of the world."

The men lying on the ground began to tremble and moan.

"I command you to tell me why you are afraid, foolish dogs!"

"Huitzilopochtli is a terrible G.o.d!" cried one of them - Yax, his name was. Hunahpu knew them all, of course, had studied their village and key people in the other Zapotec villages for years.

"Huitzilopochtli is almost as terrible as Fat Jaguar Girl," said Hunahpu.

Yax raised his head at this mention of his wife, and several of the other men laughed.

"Fat Jaguar Girl beats you with a stick when she thinks you have been planting corn in the wrong field," said Hunahpu, "but still you plant corn where you want."

"One-Hunahpu!" cried Yax. "Who told you about Fat Jaguar Girl?"

"In Xibalba I watched you all. I laughed at you when you cried under Fat Jaguar Girl's stick. And you, Flower-eating-Monkey, do you think I didn't see you pee on old Great-Skull-Zero's cornmeal and make them into frycakes for him? I laughed when he ate them."

The other men also laughed, and Flower-eating-Monkey raised his head with a smile. "You liked my revenge joke?"

"I told of your monkey tricks to the lords of Xibalba, and they laughed until they cried. And when Huitzilopochtli's eyes were filled with tears, I jabbed him with my thumbs and popped out his eyeb.a.l.l.s." With this, Hunahpu reached into the pouch hanging from the string around his waist and brought out the two acrylic eyeb.a.l.l.s he had brought with him. "Now Huitzilopochtli has to have a boy lead him around Xibalba, telling him what he sees. The other lords of Xibalba set obstacles in his path and laugh when he falls down. And now I have come here to the surface of Earth to make you into people."

"We will build a temple and sacrifice every man of the Mexica to you, O One-Hunahpu!" cried Yax.

Exactly the reaction he had expected. At once he threw one of the eyeb.a.l.l.s of Huitzilopochtli at Yax, who yelped and rubbed his shoulder where it had hit him. Hunahpu had been a pretty good Little League pitcher with a decent fastball.

"Pick up the eyeball of Huitzilopochtli and hear my words, dogs of Atetulka!"

Yax scrabbled around in the leafmeal until he found the acrylic eye.

"Why do you think the lords of Xibalba were glad and didn't punish me when I took the eyes of Huitzilopochtli? Because he was fat from the blood of so many men. He was greedy and the Mexica fed him on blood that should have been out planting corn. Now all the lords of Xibalba are sick of blood, and they will make Huitzilopochtli go hungry until he is thin as a young tree."

They moaned again. The fear of Huitzilopochtli ran deep - the success of the Mexica in war after war had seen to that - and to hear such terrible threats against a powerful G.o.d was a heavy burden to place upon them. Well, they're tough little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, thought Hunahpu. And I'll give them plenty of courage when the time comes.

"The lords of Xibalba have called upon their king to come from a far country. He will forbid them to drink the blood of men or women ever again. For the King of Xibalba will shed his own blood, and when they drink of his blood and eat of his flesh they will never thirst or hunger anymore."

Hunahpu thought of his brother the priest and wondered what he would think of what was happening to the Christian gospel right now. In the long run, he would surely approve. But there would be some uncomfortable moments along the way.

"Rise up and look at me. Pretend to be men." They arose carefully from the forest floor and stood looking at him. "As you see me shed my blood here, so the King of Xibalba has already shed his blood for the lords of Xibalba. They will drink, and never thirst again. In that day will men cease to die to feed their G.o.d. Instead they will die in the water and rise up reborn, and then eat the flesh and drink the blood of the King of Xibalba just as the lords of Xibalba do. The King of Xibalba died in a faraway kingdom, and yet he lives again. The King of Xibalba is returning and he will make Huitzilopochtli bow down before him and will not let him drink of his blood or eat of his flesh until he is thin again, and that will take a thousand years, that old pig has eaten and drunk so much!"

He looked around at them, at the awe on their faces. Of course they were hardly taking this in, but Hunahpu had worked out with Diko and Kemal the doctrine he would teach to the Zapotecs and would repeat these ideas often until thousands, millions of people in the Caribbean basin could repeat them at will. It would prepare them for the coming of Columbus, if the others succeeded, but even if they did not, even if Hunahpu was the only one of the time travelers to reach his destination, it would prepare the Zapotecs to receive Christianity as something they had long expected. They could accept it without giving up one iota of their own native religion. Christ would simply be the King of Xibalba, and if the Zapotecs believed that he bore some small but b.l.o.o.d.y wounds in a place not often depicted in Christian art, it would be a heresy that the Catholics could learn to live with - as long as the Zapotecs had the technology and the military power to stand against Europe. If the Christians could accommodate the Greek philosophers and a plethora of barbarian holidays and rituals and pretend that they had been Christian all along, they could deal with the slightly perverse spin that Hunahpu was putting on the doctrine of Jesus' sacrifice.

"You are wondering if I am the King of Xibalba," said Hunahpu, "but I am not. I am only the one who comes before, to announce his coming. I am not worthy to braid a feather into his hair."

Take that, Juan Batista.

"Here is the sign that he is coming to you. Every man of you will be taken sick, and every person in your village. This sickness will spread throughout the land, but you will not die of it unless your heart belonged to Huitzilopochtli. You will see that even among the Mexica, there were few who truly loved that gluttonous fat G.o.d!"

Let that be the story that would travel with and explain the virulent therapeutic plague that these men were already catching from him. The carrier virus would kill no more than one in ten thousand, making it an exceptionally safe vaccine as it left its "victims" with antibodies capable of fighting off smallpox, bubonic plague, cholera, measles, chicken pox, yellow fever, malaria, sleeping sickness, and as many other diseases as the medical researchers had been able to pile on back in the lost future. The carrier virus would remain as a childhood disease, reinfecting each new generation - infecting the Europeans, too, when they came, and eventually all of Africa and Asia and every island of the sea. Not that disease would become unknown - no one was foolish enough to think that bacteria and viruses would not evolve to fill the niches left by the defeat of these old killers. But disease would not give an advantage to one side over the other in the cultural rivalries to come. There would be no smallpox-infected blankets to kill off annoyingly persistent Indie tribes.

Hunahpu squatted down and picked up the high-intensity light from between his feet. It was enclosed in a basket. "The lords of Xibalba gave me this basket of light. It holds within it a small piece of the sun, but it only works for me." He shone the light in their eyes, temporarily blinding them, then reached one finger into a gap in the basket, pressing it on the identification plate. The light turned off. No reason to waste batteries - this "basket of light" would have only a limited life, even with the solar collectors around the rim, and Hunahpu didn't want to waste it.

"Which of you will carry the gifts that the lords of Xibalba gave to One-Hunahpu when he came to this world to tell you of the coming of the King?"

Soon they were all reverently carrying bundles of equipment that Hunahpu would need during the coming months. Medical supplies for pertinent healings. Weapons for self-defense and for taking the courage out of enemy armies. Tools. Reference books stored in digital form. Appropriate costumes. Underwater breathing equipment. All sorts of useful little magic tricks.

The journey wasn't easy. Every step caused the weight of the metal spines to tug at his skin, opening the wounds wider and causing more bleeding. Hunahpu toyed with having the removal ceremony now, but decided against it. It was Yax's father, Na-Yaxhal, who was headman of the village, and to cement his authority and place him in the proper relationship with Hunahpu, he had to be the one to remove the spines. So Hunahpu walked on, slowly, step by step, hoping that the blood loss would remain minor, wishing that he had chosen a location just a little closer to the village.

When they were near, Hunahpu sent Yax on ahead, carrying the eyeball of Huitzilopochtli. Whatever jumble he might make of the things that Hunahpu had said to him, the gist of it would be clear enough, and the village would be turned out and waiting.

Waiting they were. All the other men of the village, armed with spears, ready to throw them, the women and children hidden in the woods. Hunahpu cursed. He had chosen this village specifically because Na-Yaxhal was smart and inventive. Why would Hunahpu imagine that he would believe at face value his son's story of a Maya king from Xibalba.

"Stop there, liar and spy!" cried Na-Yaxhal.

Hunahpu leaned back his head and laughed, as he inserted his finger into the basket of light and activated it. "Na-Yaxhal, does a man who woke up with painfully loose bowels twice in the night dare to stand before One-Hunahpu, who brings a basket of light from Xibalba?" With that he shone the light directly in Na-Yaxhal's eyes.

Six-Kauil's-Daughter, Na-Yaxhal's wife, cried out, "Spare my foolish husband!"

"Silence, woman!" answered Na-Yaxhal.

"He was up twice in the night with loose bowels, and he groaned with the pain of it!" she shouted. All the other women moaned with this confirmation of the stranger's secret knowledge, and the spears wavered and dipped.

"Na-Yaxhal, I will make you sick indeed. For two days your bowels will run like a fountain, but I will heal you and make you a man who serves the King of Xibalba. You will rule many villages and build ships to sail to every sh.o.r.e, but only if you kneel now before me. If you do not, I will cause you to fall over dead with a hole in your body that will not stop bleeding until you are dead!"

I won't have to shoot him, Hunahpu told himself. He'll obey and we'll become friends. But if he makes me, I can do it, I can kill him.

"Why does the man of Xibalba choose me for this greatness, when I am a dog?" called out Na-Yaxhal. It was a very promising rhetorical position for him to take.