The King’s Fifth

Estaban, a seventeen-year-old cartographer, is awaiting trial for murder and withholding from the king the obligatory fifth of the gold found in Cibola. He vivdly 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.