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

by Robert Montgomery Bird

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?"