The King's Fifth: Chapters 11–16

Mendoza laughed, a laugh without mirth.

I was the last to reach it, sent sprawling as I was by a rock thrown from above, which would have killed me had I not worn a helmet.

Once there, finding that the matchlock was too cumbersome to handle, I threw it aside.

Blade in hand I crawled through the hole, a dark, winding passageway, filled with a dank and noisome odor.

Suddenly I was in the sun, on a wide parapet or terrace high above the ground, the roof of the first tier, which was strewn with rocks and spent arrows.

Roa pointed above, from whence rocks were raining.

Quickly I moved in with a feint I had learned in camp, thinking to rouse him from his crouch and thus place him for a fatal thrust. The feint was good but as I lunged forward he caught my sword in mid-air with a blow of the club and sent it spinning.

A hand reached my throat and as it tightened I gave a mighty buffet with my knee.

For a while we lay still on the hard earth of the parapet. I was glad of the respite, though my mouth was pressed against the dirt and a dull pain wandered through my skull.

I was aware only of the blood beating in my head and the sound was like a bell tolling.

He had been gone about a week when for the first time I was able to leave my pallet, to sit outside the tent for long hours in the bright summer sun.

If there was a special viand cooking on a fire anywhere in camp, like a haunch of venison, she would manage somehow to bring me a piece of it.

If there was a special viand cooking on a fire anywhere in camp, like a haunch of venison, she would manage somehow to bring me a piece of it.

One or two gave tongue to unseemly taunts.

The courtroom is filled with a throng of the curious.

“There are prisoners,” he says, “who have confessed to crimes, heinous ones, which they did not commit. They have confessed simply because they thought to gain importance in the eyes of the world.”

In the distance rose a series of cliffs, at the same height we were traveling, scarlet-tinted and oddly shaped, like spires, terraced walls, and battlements.

In the distance rose a series of cliffs, at the same height we were traveling, scarlet-tinted and oddly shaped, like spires, terraced walls, and battlements.

There we found a rampart of rock, shaped like a great sickle. Below its rim, as if sheared off in one mighty stroke, the rampart fell downward for more than a league.

Our first amazement gone, our thankfulness forgotten, we stood beside the cross and lamented our fate.

Before the sun was a lance high, we had descended deep along the crevice, scrambling from one tree to another.

Here there were no pines, only sparse-leaved bush, similar to those in the Valley of Hearts.

Next afternoon, having traveled the morning down a tortuous steep, we came to sand dunes and the river.

Southward the river ran between high bastions, but to the north were stretches of beach.

The cleft was not much wider than my outstretched arms. Its sides towered straight toward the sky, black as a raven’s wing. Through it coursed a swift stream which flowed into the river over black, gleaming stones.

We could only find our way by touching the dank walls. The stream thundered beside us, as we scrambled along in utter darkness.

Brown, wheatlike grass stretched away to the far bastions like a placid lake, broken only by islets of grazing deer and mountain sheep.

Captain Mendoza said, "I am the Son of the Sun. Likewise an emissary of the noblest of Kings, and of Christ, Lord of the World.”

Seizing the weapon, Mendoza set it, aimed at the trunk of a young cottonwood some twenty paces away, and fired. Smoke billowed.

Roa had come through the battle unscathed by stone, arrow or club.

He was shaped like a barrel, a good oaken cask from Jerez de la Frontera, and even the march from Cortés’ Sea had not lessened his girth. He was the only fat Spaniard I have ever known.

“The matchlock speaks louder than pious words,” Zuñiga said.

The three went on, and as I lay there and half-listened while the moon wheeled down the sky, I was overcome with foreboding. This is the beginning of trouble between Father Francisco and the others, I thought.

As for myself, I settled back into the fragrant grass and thought about the journey from Háwikuh to the ramparts of the Abyss, of the mountains we had crossed, the streams and mesas, of the notes I faithfully had put down in my journal and the map I would make from them.

In the gray light I saw the three men wading along the stream, about a furlong below me.

To be certain, I put it between my teeth and bit down. With strange elation I saw that I had left a mark upon it.

Then Father Francisco told how when Christ died on the cross, at that moment, at midday with the sun shining, how the sky grew dark and the earth moved and the hill where the cross stood was rent asunder.

Then Father Francisco told how when Christ died on the cross, at that moment, at midday with the sun shining, how the sky grew dark and the earth moved and the hill where the cross stood was rent asunder.

He told how they buried Christ in a tomb hewn out of the rock and in front of it rolled a large stone.

A limp ball of fuzz and gauzy wings, it seemed dead. But slowly, as the sun’s heat dried it off, the bee began to stir, to move one wing and then the other.