The King's Fifth Read Free Page B

Seville ... Everywhere. Overnight you would win renown. A boy of sixteen, yet renowned in all the world."
    I gathered myself, and almost against my will, took one step forward.
    There was a long moment of silence. Then Alarcón doffed his plumed hat, bowed low in the direction of Captain Mendoza, and strode off along the deck.

3
    A T NOON OUR LITTLE BAND , six in all, moved away from the galleon
San Pedro.
We would have left much sooner except for the business of the horses and Captain Mendoza's clothes.

    The Captain owned many changes, each of different color and cut, entire from boots to plumed hats. Each needed to be carefully packed, as well as breastplates and morions. For myself, I took only a set of instruments, cartographer's supplies, a journal, and the clothes I stood in, knowing that I must carry everything on my back.
    Loading of the two horses, a blue roan from Barbary and her foal of three months, required care. Many times they were lowered over the side of the ship, up and then down, suspended from the slings in which they had traveled from Acapulco, before they were secure in the longboat. Yet they and Torres, their keeper, were safely ashore and the boat was returning as we made ready to leave the galleon.
    To mind the sails, for we were all landsmen, the Admiral sent one of his men. From the rail he called down his last instructions.

    "I sail for another day and night," he shouted. "For a week I lie at anchor. Tell this to Coronado if by chance you meet."
    He smiled and waved a jeweled hand. There was still no sign that he had triumphed over Mendoza. Nor did Mendoza himself show that he had been outwitted. He stood in the bow of the longboat, his jaw outthrust, and with a last prideful gesture called to his three musicians—Zuñiga who played the flute, Lunes who strummed a guitar of five strings, and Roa the drummer. At his signal the three struck up a lively tune.
    The
San Pedro
dipped her flag, her crew cheered—wondrous loud, I thought, because they were not leaving—and on a light wind we moved away.
    The cheers slowly faded. The galleon grew smaller on the horizon and then, as we rounded an islet, suddenly was lost to view. One by one the musicians stopped playing. Seated in the bobbing stern, my few possessions gathered around me, I stared at the place where the ship had been. I thought of my cabin and the map I had left on the table, unfinished.
    Mendoza turned and swept us with a glance.
    "Comrades," he said, "put the ship out of your minds. For in this life you shall never see it again. Fix your thoughts instead upon the task of getting ashore and upon the land of the Seven Golden Cities that lie beyond. And mark this well, each of you. We shall find these cities if it takes a year or five. If we walk through the soles of
our boots and to live have to eat the parts that remain."

    Again he signaled the musicians and turned his back upon us.
    To a brisk tune we left the islet. A rocky beach lay ahead, at a distance of half a league. Beyond it a defile wound steeply upward to a treeless promontory. There against the sky I saw three small figures, Torres and the two horses.
    I idly noted that the sky above them was changing from blue to white. Clouds were beginning to move through this pearly mist on a wind that did not blow here on the sea. Ulloa's sailing instructions, left behind in the cabin, I could not remember. Yet I was certain that both wind and haze were portents of foul weather, in which these seas abound.
    We then came upon a series of low-lying islets. As we entered a winding corridor between them—a place of remarkable beauty where the water was clear like air and fish of every hue darted—at that very instant I heard a prolonged hiss. It was the sound of a monstrous snake.
    There was a second prolonged hiss. And then in a moment's brief time came the sound of a thousand serpents venomously breathing upon us. The moving sea flattened and from its surface