War God by Graham Hancock Read Free Book Online

seemed supernaturally strong and howled like a demon. There were not enough enforcers to stop the many other fights spreading like wildfire through the crowd.
    ‘Now we get out of here,’ said Tozi. She swept up Coyotl, still in a deep sleep, and signalled to the woman to follow her.

Chapter Six

The Kingdom of Tlascala, Thursday 18 February 1519
    The hill was steep, filled with hollows and overgrown with tall, feathery grass. That was why Shikotenka had been drawn to it. He’d found a deep crevice about halfway up the slope and snaked his lean, hard-muscled body into it just as dawn was breaking, hiding himself completely from view to observe the Mexica as they converged in the vast natural amphitheatre below. There were four regiments,
each at their full strength of eight thousand men, and he counted them in as they approached one by one through passes in the surrounding hills, a huge and fearsome war machine the size of a city, mustering here as the day wore on to bring murder and mayhem to Tlascala.
    Dressed only in a loincloth and sandals, his thick black hair drawn back from his brow in long, matted braids, Shikotenka’s chest, abdomen, legs and arms, now pressed tightly into the soil and rock of his homeland, were criss-crossed with the scars of battle wounds received in hand-to-hand combat against the Mexica. At thirty-three years of age he had already been a warrior for seventeen years. The experience showed in the flat, impassive planes of his face and the determined set of his wide, sensual mouth, which masked equally the cold cruelty and calculation of which he was capable as well as the bravery, resolve and inspired flights of rash brilliance that had led to his election, just a month before, as the battle king of Tlascala. A man of direct action, he had not thought of delegating a subordinate for today’s assignment. The very survival of his people depended on what happened in the next day and night and he would trust this task to no one else.
    Eyes narrowed, he watched as teams from the first of the enemy regiments used ropes and pegs to mark out the perimeter of a great circle on the open plain. The circle was then divided into four segments. Thereafter as each regiment arrived it was directed to its own segment of the circle, and the men at once set about pitching tents that varied in size from compact two-man units to enormous marquees and pavilions, where the standards of leading officers were raised. Meanwhile scouts were sent out in small, fast-moving squads to comb the nearby hills for spies and ambushes. Five times already, men beating the bush had passed uncomfortably close to where Shikotenka lay hidden.
    Was it possible, he wondered, to hate an entire people as intensely as he hated the Mexica, and yet still admire them?
    Their organisation, for example. Their toughness. Their efficiency. Their obsidian-hard will. Their absolute, ruthless, uncompromising commitment to power. Their limitless capacity for violence.
    Weren’t these all admirable qualities in their own right?
    Moreover, here in force, in their tens of thousands, he had to admit they made a stunning impact on the senses.
    His vantage point was five clear bowshots from the edge of their camp, yet his nostrils were filled with the reek of copal incense and putrid human blood, the characteristic stink of the Mexica that clung about them like a half-articulated threat wherever they gathered in large numbers.
    Also rising off them was a tremendous cacophony of sound – drums, flutes and songs, the buzz of fifty thousand conversations, vendors shouting their wares in four makeshift markets that had sprung up across the plain like strange exotic growths.
    With thousands of porters, water-carriers and personal slaves, and a ragged host of camp followers including butchers and tailors, astrologers and doctors, cooks and odd-job men, vendors of all manner of foodstuffs and services, and a parallel army of gaudily dressed pleasure girls,