Calavar; or, The Knight of The Conquest, A Romance of Mexico

"Here's that which shall fetch them back, if they be men!" exclaimed Botello, catching up a port-fuse not yet extinguished, striking it on his arm to shake off the ashes, and whirling it in the air till it glowed and almost blazed. "It will show them, there be some living yet; and, with God's blessing, will scatter yon ambushed heathen like plashing water-drops. Ojala! and all ye fiends of air and water, of earth and of hell, that are waiting for pagan souls, carry my hail-shot true, and have at your prey!"

So saying, the conjurer applied the match. The roar of the explosion was succeeded not only by the yells of Mexicans, dying in their broken canoes, or paddling away from so dangerous a vicinity, but by Spanish shouts, both on the rear and in front.

"On, brave hearts!" cried Cortes; "there be bold knaves yet at the ordnance!"

The next moment the little band of horse that headed the relief, sprang into the lake, and swimming aside, so as to avoid the sunken bodies, and the bales still floating in the ditch, crossed over to the cannon; while a large body of men, arranged with such order, that they blocked up the whole causeway from side to side, came marching up from the rear, fighting as they fled, and still valiantly resisting the multitudes that pursued both on the dike and in the water.

"Thanks be to God!" cried Don Hernan, rejoiced that so many lived, and yet appalled at the numbers and ferocious determination of the foes, who still, like venomous insects following the persecuted herd, pursued whithersoever the Christians fled. "Art thou alive, De Leon? – Praised be St. James, who listened to my prayer! Turn ye now, and let us succour the rest."

"They are in heaven," said De Leon, with a faint voice, for he was severely wounded, as indeed were all his crew. "Push on, in the name of God, all who can swim. – The others must perish."

"Hold! stay!" exclaimed Cortes. "Fling the cannon into the sluice. – Think not of the enemy. Heave over my good falconets: they will make a bridge for ye all."

The wounded footmen seized upon the guns, with the energy of despair; and flinging over the ropes to that company of their fellow infantry who had followed Don Hernan, and now stood on the opposite side, the pieces were pushed and dragged into the water, and, together with the mass of corses already deposited in that fatal chasm, made such a footing for the infantry as enabled many to pass in safety. Among these was Don Amador de Leste, his hand grasped by the faithful magician, who perceived that he was sunk into such sluggishness of despair, that he must have perished, if left to himself.

It is not to be supposed that this passage was effected without opposition and loss. On the contrary, the barbarians redoubled their exertions; and while many rested at a distance, shooting whole clouds of arrows, others pushed their canoes boldly up to the gap, and there slew many taken at such disadvantage.

Nevertheless, the passage was at last effected, and the footmen, joining themselves to their fellows, and forming, as before, twenty deep, followed the horsemen towards the shore.

"Hold!" shouted Botello, when the party was about to start. "Save your captain, ye knaves of the rear! – Save De Leon! the valiant Velasquez!"

A few, roused by this cry, and heedless of the shafts shot at them, rushed back to the brink, and beheld the wounded and forgotten captain, in the water, struggling in the arms of two brawny barbarians, who strove to drag him into a canoe. While his followers stood hesitating, not knowing how to give him aid, the little vessel, agitated by his struggles, which were tremendous, suddenly overset, and captive and capturers fell together into the water. The two warriors were presently seen swimming towards a neighbouring canoe; and De Leon, strangling under the flood, heaved not his last groan on the gory block of sacrifice.

The fugitives paused not to lament; they resumed their march, and gained the last ditch.

The events of that march, and of the passage of that ditch, are, like the others, a series of horrors. Enough has been narrated to picture out the dreadful punishment of men who acknowledged no rights but those of power, and preferred to rob a weak and childish race with insult and murder, rather than to subdue them, as could have been done, by the arts of peace. In the sole incident which remains to be mentioned, we record the fate of an individual whose influence had been felt through most of the events of the invasion, in many cases beneficially, but, in this, disastrously enough. This was the enchanter, Botello, – a man just shrewd enough to deceive himself; which is, in other words, to say, that he mingled in his own person so much cunning with so much credulity, that the former was ever the victim of the latter. The devoutness of his own belief in the efficacy of his arts, was enough to secure them the respect and reverence of the common herd, as well as of better men, in an age of superstition. How much confidence was given to them by Cortes, does not clearly appear in the older historians; but it is plain, he turned them to great advantage, and had the art sometimes to make the stars, as well as Kalidon of the Crystal, furnish revelations of his own hinting; and, it is suspected, not without grounds, that this very nocturnal flight, projected originally under the impression that the barbarians would not go into battle after night-fall, and, when the later events of the siege had disproved this hope, still persisted in from the persuasion that no Mexican would handle a weapon on the day of an emperor's burial, was conceived in the brain of the general before it was counselled by the lips of Botello.

At all events, the enchanter did not, this night, manifest any doubt in his own powers. With a strange and yet natural inconsistency, he seemed to rejoice over the slaughter of his countrymen, as over the confirmation of his predictions. Twice or thrice, at least, he muttered, and once even in the thick of combat, to Don Amador, by whose side he ever walked, at the head of the retreating party, —

"I said, this night we should retreat – we have retreated: I said, there should be death for many, and safety for some – the many are at rest, (God receive their souls, and angels carry them to the seats of bliss!) – and some of us are saved."

"Be not over-quick in thy consummations," said Amador. "We are here now at the third ditch, which is both wide and deep, and no bodies to bridge it; and seest thou not how the yelling curs are paddling in to oppose us?"

"Bodies enow!" cried the enchanter. "To-morrow, at midday, when the sun is hottest, ye shall see corses lying along on both sides of the causey, like the corks of a fisherman's net; and at the ditches, they will come up like ants out of the earth, when a dead caterpillar falls at their door. Yet say I, we shall be saved, and thou shalt see it; for I remember how thou didst carve the back of that knave that lay on me in the streets of Mexico; and I will carve a dozen for thee in like manner, ere dawn, on this causeway."

"Boast no more: such confidence offends heaven; for thy life hangs here as loosely as another's."

"The star! the star!" cried Botello, "the dim little star! is it not shining? The morning comes after it, and the eagles are waking on the hills. They will snuff the battle, they will shriek to the vultures, to the crows, and the gallinazas, and down will they come together to the lake-side and the lake. At eventide, ye will see dead men floating about in the wind, and on the breast of each a feeding raven; but devils shall be perched on the corses of the heathen!"

"Heaven quit me of thy wild words, for they sound to me unnatural and damnable, as though spoken by one of those same demons thou thinkest of. – Speak no more. – Look to thy life; for it is in jeopardy."

"Hast thou not seen me in the battle? and, lo you now, I have not a scratch!" said the enthusiast. "I have fought on the dike, when there were twelve men of us, good men, bold and true: eleven were slain, but here am I untouched by flint, unbruised by stone, unhurt by arrow. I fought three screeching infidels in the water, hard by to where two valiant cavaliers were pulled off their horses, and so smothered; and yet strangled I my heathens, without horse to help, or friend to say God speed me. The life that is charmed is invulnerable; the star shines, the eagle leaves her nest, and Kalidon-Sadabath laughs in the crystal. – Viva! Lo now, how Sandoval, the valiant, will scatter me yon imps in the boats! He spurs into the water; Catalan the Left-handed, Juan of Salamanca, Torpo the Growler, Ferdinand of Bilboa, and De Olid the Devil's Ketch, they spring after him! – There they go! Dance, Kalidon! thy brothers shall have souls, to be fetched up from the mud as one rakes up clams of a fish-day. Crowd hell with damned heathens: – there be more to follow!"

Never before had such life possessed the spirits of Botello. He stood on the edge of the causey, shouting loud vivas, as the bold cavaliers rushed among the canoes that blocked up the sluice. The novice, though shocked at such untimely exultation, was not able to avoid it; for he was enfeebled, and Botello held him with a fast and determined gripe.

"Unhand me, conjurer," he cried, "and I will swim the ditch."

"Tarry a little, till the path be made clear: thou wilt be murdered else."

"I shall be murdered, if I remain here; and so wilt thou. – Hah! did that shaft hurt thee?"

"Never a jot; how could it? There flies not the arrow this night, there waves not the bludgeon, that can shed my blood."

"Art thou besotted? – God forgive thee! – this is impiety."

The magician held his peace; for about this time, the Mexicans, knowing that this band, diminished, disordered, and divided by the ditch into two feeble parties, was the sole remaining fragment of oppression, and determined that no invader should escape alive, rushed upon the causeway on all sides with such savage violence as seemed irresistible. Those who had not yet crossed, broke in affright, and flung themselves into the sluice with such speed, that, in a few moments, Don Amador began to think that he and Botello were the only Christians left.

"Why dost thou hold me, madman?" he cried. "Let me free."

"Hark! dost thou not hear? – there are Christian men behind us," said Botello. – "Courage! What if these devils be thicker than the thoughts of sin in man's heart, fiercer than conscience, deadlier than remorse; yet shall we pass them unharmed. – Patience! 'Tis the voice of a Spaniard, I tell thee, and behind!"

"It is in front: – hark! 'tis Don Hernan!"

"It is behind, and it is the cry of Alvarado! Let us return, and give him aid. Ho, ye that fly! return! the Tonatiuh is shouting behind us: will ye desert him? – Return, return!"

Before Amador could remonstrate, the lunatic, for at this moment, more than any other, Botello seemed to deserve the name, had dragged him to the top of the dike, where he stood exposed to the view and the shots of the foe. A thousand arrows were aimed at the pair.

"Thou art a dead man!" said Amador.

"Dost thou not see the star?" cried the magician, impatiently. "Not a bird hath yet flapped her wing, not an eagle hath fled from her cliff; and my star, my star – "

As he spoke, he let go his hold of the cavalier, to point exultingly at the diminutive luminary. At that very instant, an arrow, aimed close at hand, struck the neophyte on the breast, entering the mail at a place rent by blows of a previous day, and, without wounding him, forced its way out through links hitherto uninjured.

"Hah!" said the cavalier, as the arm of Botello fell heavily on his shoulder. – "Art thou taught wisdom and humility, at last? Let us descend, and swim."

As he moved, he became sensible that the shaft was still sticking in his hauberk. He grasped the feathered notch – the head was in the astrologer's heart. The stout wood snapped, as Botello fell. It struck him in the moment of his greatest hope. He dropped down a dead man.

While Amador stood confounded and struck with horror, he was seized, he knew not by whom, and suddenly found himself dragged through the water. Before he could well commend his soul to heaven, for he thought himself in the hands of the enemy, he beheld himself on firm land, while the voice of Cortes shouted in his ear, —

"Rouse thee, and die not like a sleeper! Hold me by the hand, and my good horse shall drag thee through the melée – I would sooner that my arm were hacked off than that thou shouldst sleep in the accursed lake: enough of thy blood rests in it, with Don Gabriel."

"Ay," thought the unhappy cavalier, "enough of my blood, and all of my heart. Don Gabriel, De Morlar, Lazaro, Lorenzo, and – ay, and Leila! Better that I were with them!"

A sudden cry from beyond the ditch interrupted his griefs.

"Pause, pause!" cried the voice. "Leave me not! – I am nigh! – I am Alvarado!"

The cavaliers looked back at these words, and beheld a man come flying, as it were, through the air over the ditch, perched on the top of a long Chinantlan spear, the bottom of which was hidden in the water. He fell quite clear of the sluice, after making a leap which even his comrades, who had not individually seen it, held impossible for mortal man, and which, even to this day, has preserved to the spot the name of the Salto, or leap, of Alvarado.

The appearance of the Tonatiuh was hailed with shouts of joy; and the Spaniards, receiving it as a good omen, closed their ranks, and slowly, for every inch was contested, fought their way to the shore. When they trode upon the firm ground, the little star had vanished in the gray beams of morning; and a thick mist rising up from the water like a curtain, concealed from the eyes of the fugitives, along with the accursed signal-fire, the fatal towers and temples of Mexico.

Thus closed a night of horror and wo, memorable as the Noche Triste, or Melancholy Night, of Mexican history, and paralleled perhaps, in modern days, if we consider the loss of the retreating army as compared with its numbers, only by the famous and most lamentable passage of the Berezina. More than four thousand Tlascalans, and five hundred Spaniards, were left dead on the causeway, or in the lake. Of the prisoners, but two or three escaped; two sons and as many daughters of Montezuma, with five tributary kings, as well as many princes and nobles, perished. All the cannon were utterly lost, left to rust and rot in the salt flood that had so often resounded to their roar; and of more than an hundred proud war-steeds that champed the bit so fiercely at midnight, scarce twenty jaded hacks snuffed the breath of morning.

With this broken and lamenting force, with foes still hanging on his rear, and ever flying from his front, Cortes set out to seek a path, by new and unknown mountains, to the distant Tlascala. He turned his eyes but once towards the lake, – the pagan city was hidden among the mists, and the shouts of victorious Mexicans came but faintly to the ear. He beat his breast, and shedding such tears as belong to defeated hopes and the memory of the dead, resumed his post at the head of the fugitives.

CHAPTER LXII

We draw a curtain over the events of the first five days of flight, wherein the miserable fugitives, contending, at once, with fatigue, famine, and unrelenting foes, stole by night, and through darkling by-ways, along the northern borders of the fair valley, from which they were thus ignominiously, and, as it seemed, for ever, expelled. Of the twenty mounted men, each, like a Red-Cross Knight, in the ancient days of the order, bore a wounded companion on his crupper; and Don Amador, himself, on a jaded beast that had belonged to Marco, – for Fogoso had been lost or killed in the melée, – thus carried the only remaining servant of himself and his knight, – the ancient Baltasar. Other mangled wretches were borne on the backs of Tlascalans, in rudely constructed litters.