While awaiting trial for murder and withholding from the king the obligatory fifth of the gold found in Cibola, Esteban, a seventeen-year-old cartographer, recalls his adventures with a band of conquistadors.
In this deeply affecting novel Scott O'Dell envelops the reader in the heroic world of the conquistadors, a world that is at once somber and many-colored. ruthless they may have been, these steel-helmeted young men of Spain, but they lived their lives on the very edge of eternity with style and uncommon courage.
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