The+King's+Fifth

A band of seven individuals, all on a quest to find the Seven Golden cities of Cibola each for their own reasons.

In the mix, the Spanish Captain Mendoza and his 3 soldiers whose lust and greed for treasure are unquenchable. The travelers are tempered by Father Francisco who goes with them for the love of the souls he hoped to save. Our hero, Esteban de Sandoval, whose story this is, thought only of the maps he would draw of the countries sill unseen and scarcely dreamed of in the courts of Spain; and Zia, the Indian girl, their guide an interpreter, who saw more clearly than the others the hazards of the dangerous journey.

For Esteban it was all a glorious adventure until that moment when he held in this hand a peace of the gleaming metal and for the first time felt its awful alchemy. As one city after another are conquered by the conquistadors in their search for the shining metal, sacrifice all for the lust for gold -- blood, honor, sanity -- life itself. But even as Esteban survives the hardship of mountains and desert, the evil of ruthless men, so does he make his way across the country of the mind. The two journeys follow parallel courses, and for each it seems that a maker of maps, no matter what his skill with cross staff and astrolabe or knowledge of the stars, still needs a guide to find his way. 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 you men of Spain, but they lived their lives on the very edge of eternity with style and uncommon courage.