Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  When they were completely blended, the mixture was formed into cakes, the liquid pressed out, and the cakes allowed to dry.

  Rather than a fine powder, gunpowder works best when it is “corned” into small granules. Corning is accomplished by grinding and tumbling the mixture, then passing the granules through different-sized wire screens. The resultant grains can range from the size of a grain of corn to a powder.

  The requisite size of the grains depended on the powder’s purpose. Cannons required a coarser, relatively large grain, muskets a medium grain, and pistols a finer grain.

  I determined the powder’s potency by firing a musket ball into clay to see how far the powder drove it in. Afterward, I adjusted the mixture accordingly.

  Some gunpowder we worked with was reprocessed powder. When the powder on merchant vessels and warships became damp, it had to be revitalized. Felix bought the defective powder and reprocessed it for use in the silver mines. We added urine and saltpeter to the flawed powder, then remixed and screened it, sometimes blending in the other ingredients when it failed our tests.

  Another customer, however, was desperate for our merchandise—even more desirous of it than the rich marques and our filthy-rich mine owners. A customer who could not pay and whom Felix and the viceroy’s secret police must never know I was supplying.

  For the sake of my safety and theirs, I had hidden the saddlebags beneath the table—then kicked them in even farther.

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN I HEARD a shout that the marques had arrived, I handed the gun in its case to Felix.

  I expected no credit for my work, and Felix never surprised me with any. He kept the torrents of praise—which our customers lavished on him as his just due—utterly to himself as a miser might hide and hoard his gold. Even when our grateful customers lauded his alleged labors to my face, he never acknowledged my contribution after they left.

  I sometimes wondered if he had deceived himself into actually believing he had forged and fabricated the weapons.

  Even in the ways by which the Spanish gachupines evaluated manhood, I was more hombre than Felix. I was a better gun-maker than he, more skilled with a knife, a gun, or bare fists. I’d proven it in combat where I had killed better men than he.

  From the way Felix’s woman stared at me when he was away, I believed my garrancha would probe more deeply and more ecstatically than his, too.

  Not that my life was as bad as most peons in the colony. Even though I was an indio or a mestizo—depending on which of my uncles had indeed spawned me—I performed work that gave me great satisfaction. Since I lined Felix’s pockets with dinero and drenched his ego in undeserved praise, he could not abuse or mistreat me too egregiously.

  He gave me enough to eat, a roof over my head, and kept me clothed.

  True, my accommodations were not lavish. I lived above the stable … not where Felix housed his fine horses, but the stable in the compound for the mules that pulled our wagons or carried our products to market.

  Living with the stench of manure is just the peon’s lot in life … at least, according to the gachupines. But I was not born and raised a “tame” peon. I was taught the Way of the Warrior. A warrior doesn’t walk in the droppings of another man … or the man’s animals. A warrior rewards with respect those who have honored themselves in battle, not the thieves and liars who sell them defective guns made of weak wrought iron.

  I wanted respect. I wanted to walk down a sidewalk and not have to step into the gutter because a Spaniard was coming. I tired of bowing and scraping to Spanish nobles and hacendados whose contribution to their titles, their fortunes, and their honors was simply the condition of their birth.

  Father Hidalgo, Father Morelos, and the other heroes and heroines of the revolution knew that the only way to win our freedom was to kill Spaniards until they understood we were equal enough to drive them from our soil, that all people were created equally.

  Because they could kill equally.

  Which is why there were two hundred lead balls in one saddlebag and a copper canister of black powder in the other.

  If every shot hit home, the bags contained enough to kill two hundred Spaniards.

  Ayyo … the lieutenant who argued with the commanding officer at Tula that I was infected with rebel blood was correct. They should have hanged me, and perhaps one day I would dance the hangman’s jig—after a Spanish torturer stripped my flesh with whips, knives, and hot pincers.

  While Felix busied himself impressing the marques with his exquisite craftsmanship, I slipped the saddlebags out from under the shop table and into a secret hiding place in the mule stable.

  Why had I stayed and walked in Felix’s shadow? The good servant, the loyal indio, humble peon? Because I learned something the day that my uncles fought the Spanish—and lost. The Spanish beat them with superior weapons, muskets that permitted them to stay out of range of my uncle’s efforts.

  To beat the enemy we needed better weapons.

  FIFTEEN

  WHILE FELIX WAS off to town to purchase supplies—and see his current mistress—I prepared to make my delivery. After cleaning up, I loaded the sheathed muskets onto my favorite mule, Rodrigo, and set off for the hacienda of the marques. The two saddlebags were hidden beneath a rolled-up canvas tarpaulin.

  Along the way, I veered off the road to a hillside where I came alone to practice my shooting skills. I used two pistols that I had made. Indios were not permitted to possess arms, so I concealed them inside my loose-fitting peon garb, one in a holster tucked under my arm, the other in an ankle holster under my trousers. Both were rifled flintlocks, their gunmetal forged with melted horseshoe nails and wagon springs. I had made my pistolas with loving care, making them deadly accurate and remarkably reliable.

  Any Spaniard would have scoffed at them. I had superimposed rust and scratches on them, eschewed any and all embellishment, making them appear as crude as I knew how.

  Targeting small hillside rocks, I loaded, aimed, and fired my weapons. We test-fired all guns we made or repaired at the compound, and once in a moment of foolish bravado, I had showed off my shooting skills to Felix. He had been stunned.

  And angry.

  I was not only a better marksman than he was, he maintained I was better than the Count de Moreno, who was arguably the best marksman and duelist in the colony.

  “He showed his skills at a party I attended,” Felix said. “I thought he was unrivaled but you are better.”

  He then forbade me from practicing or even test-firing a pistol—except into our barrel of clay.

  “You are to tell no one or demonstrate for anyone your marksmanship,” he said.

  The wearers of sharp spurs would not be happy to know that the best shot in the colony was a peon.

  Or that he had the deadliest brace of pistols in all of New Spain.

  From Felix’s books, I learned much about the history and manufacturing of firearms. The basic problem with pistols and muskets had been the same for centuries. They are cumbersome and time-consuming to load.

  Loading them had always been a laborious process, which involved pouring powder down a barrel from a horn or flask. A ball and wadding was then rammed down the barrel with a rod. Priming powder was put into the flashpan. The weapon was then cocked and fired.

  Dampness, however, often destroyed the powder’s effectiveness, and residue frequently fouled the barrel.

  The typical soldier required up to a minute to load and fire their muskets.

  That was fine for armies firing volleys at each other, but in individual combat with an advancing foe, your enemy would run you through with a sword before you were able to fire and reload.

  If a shooter, however, loaded his weapon at its breech end—the end of the barrel closest to the flint firing mechanism—the shooter could reload it much faster than a muzzle-loading weapon.

  Over the centuries breech-loading weapons had been designed, even fabricated, but they had proven too difficult and expensive to
manufacture and too unreliable for military use. Most breech-loading firearms were toys for kings. The English king Henry VIII and a Louis of France both had owned breech-loaders.

  I had studied and experimented with the various types of breech-loaders that I’d read about in Felix’s books. The one created for the English king three centuries ago especially intrigued me. Rather than opening the breech and pouring powder and a ball inside, an iron tube called a cartridge was inserted under the hammer. The tube containing the powder charge and ball was held in place by a wad at the front.

  I soon discovered why the cartridge never came into general use—making them by hand was a long, laborious process that required expert workmanship.

  I found a more practical design on a powder delivery trip to the Guanajuato silver mines with Felix. I had observed one officer from an army of the United States—the colony’s neighbor to the northeast—on a map-making expedition. He carried what he called a breech-loading flintlock musket.

  Felix and I had camped near the norteamericano’s group, and I saw the weapon when the man purchased powder from me while Felix was away collecting payment from a mine owner.

  That an indio was so curious about his breechloader—and so obviously knowledgeable about firearms construction—surprised the officer. I piqued his interest enough that he answered my question. He explained that an inventor named Hall had designed the unusual weapon. The chamber at the front of the barrel elevated to receive the charge and was then snapped back down.

  I couldn’t duplicate the weapon because I couldn’t see its exact mechanism, but it inspired me to design a breech-loaded pistol. I created a hinged chamber that lifted up during loading but was tightly sealed and after firing was pushed back down. To covertly create the correct tolerances for the metals took me many months.

  For ammunition, the hand-carved ebony butt was hollowed and contained a supply of small paper packets that each held a charge of ball and powder. I also carried extra packets in a deerskin pouch.

  To load a pistol, I ripped open a packet with my teeth and poured it into the open breech chamber, ball first. Because the barrels were rifled and would easily foul, the balls were slightly smaller than the barrel and were greased and wrapped in a piece of cotton cloth. Consequently, the smaller greased round left minimal residue in the barrel while the expelled cloth cleaned the barrel as it passed through.

  The time for loading the weapon was greatly reduced, but I still had to manually open the flashpan, shake in priming powder, and close it. If a mechanism could have loaded the powder into the primer pan without disrupting the shooter, the loading would have been accelerated.

  Over the centuries gunsmiths had struggled with the concept of a self-priming firearm. A Scot minister named Forsythe might have come closest to perfecting the self-priming firearm. I followed his model. I made a small metal box slide over the flashpan and deposit priming powder when the hammer was cocked.

  Naturally, I had mixed the finest batch of pistol powder for my handguns—the powder Felix kept for his wealthiest and most important buyers.

  Nothing was too good for a thief, eh?

  Able to fire a pistol six times a minute, two or three times faster than most skilled shooters, I could now boast—to myself—that I was not only the best shot in the colony, I was also the fastest.

  Leaving my practice area, I returned to the road and urged Rodrigo to hurry to the marques’s hacienda. I had an important rendezvous later—one that could only be accomplished under cover of darkness—and I needed to return to the compound before arousing Felix’s suspicions.

  SIXTEEN

  I DID NOT come to the revolution on my own.

  I was never a scholar, and in my formative years I required tenacious teachers. To educate me, my uncle, Fray Diego, often had to knock knowledge into my head. But I always enjoyed history in which heroes and villains battled it out, and I remembered well his lecture on the region I now lived in.

  During those school days in the one-room mud hut that served as our village school, the good fray told me Guadalajara’s history differed from other regions in the Valley of Mexico, which was why Guadalajara so quickly answered the Grito of Dolores. The city is about 320 miles from the capital.

  “The indios in the Valley of Mexico,” the fray had explained, “had numbered in the millions. They had large cities like Tenochtitlán and a high culture in terms of science and the arts. New Galicia, which the Spanish originally called the Guadalajara region, had a much smaller population and no large cities. However, like the Mexica and Toltecs, the indigenous people spoke Nahuatl.”

  Because of the smaller population, rancheros and small farms developed rather than the sprawling haciendas that characterized other regions. Owning land instilled in them the belief that the gachupines should respect their rights.

  The Spanish spur-wearers felt differently.

  In 1529, eight years after Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs and the Valley of Mexico, Nuño de Guzmán, a Spaniard who was jealous of Cortés’s fame and treasure, set out with a force of over ten thousand from Mexico City to explore the region and bring it under Spanish control.

  Guzmán was a brutal, murderous tyrant who used torture and death to subdue the region. Called Señor de la Borca y Cuchillo because he conquered and ruled by the noose and knife, Guzmán plundered the land, assuming a noble title, Marqués de Tonala, to ape Cortés. He looted villages relentlessly, enslaving the indios in the encomienda system, by which the Crown granted a Spanish soldier or colonist a tract of land or a village together with its Indian inhabitants.

  Guzmán was arrested and sent back to Spain, but his savage tactics and those of his successors ultimately provoked the great uprising of indios in the region. Called the Mixtón War, it erupted in 1541 and was led by Tenamaxtli.

  The indios rose to drive the invaders from the land, taking many towns and besieging Guadalajara. Spanish forces—backed by large numbers of Tlaxcaltec and Mexica warriors—suppressed the revolt.

  Not only did Guadalajara answer Fray Hidalgo’s Cry of Dolores for independence sooner than most areas, it remained loyal right up to the final battle at Calderon Bridge. From Guadalajara the legendary priest and warrior for freedom led the march with a grand army—only to lose the dream and the war when a lucky cannon shot hit a rebel wagon carrying gunpowder. But the brave people in the Lake Chapala region continued the fight long after the heroes of 1810 were captured and executed.

  Late in 1812, people in Mezcala—a small island town on the lake, about twelve miles east of the town of Chapala—received word that a Spanish force was marching on the town to punish it for aiding a rebel leader.

  The town raised a force of about seventy volunteers armed mostly with primitive stone weapons and clubs. They met the Spanish force of nearly twice its size yet inflicted a severe defeat on the trained soldiers.

  Within days they battled another Spanish force, defeating it again with primitive weapons. They had captured some flintlock muskets but—not knowing how to load and fire them—found them useless as anything except clubs.

  Spanish troops continued to attack Lake Chapala’s rebels, and the rebels persisted in defeating them. When the rebels consolidated their forces on the small island of Mezcala, the battles turned into naval warfare, with large Spanish contingents attacking the rebels in small boats.

  After the frustrated Spanish ravaged a village in revenge for the island’s defiance, the defenders attacked and captured the brutal officer, executing him and a number of his men.

  I had made contact with the defenders after working for the gunsmith for a few months. Sneaking powder and ball to them, I began to secretly repair their weapons. Since my compañeros could have informed on me or divulged my name under torture, I was known to the rebels only as the Alchemist.

  And I never permitted them to see my face.

  After nearly five years of fighting, about a year ago, following an epidemic that had taken a severe toll on the defenders, a peac
e was finally negotiated whereby the defenders were granted a pardon.

  But not all the defenders had given up. And to those bitter-enders, I was still a supplier of weapons, though I arranged for larger amounts of powder and shot to be directed south to Guerrero and his brave army of resistance in the China Road region.

  Playing a dangerous game, I knew that it was just a matter of time before I would need my pistols for more than target practice.

  SEVENTEEN

  I WAS ALLOWED inside the marques’s house only because the majordomo was too lazy to carry my muskets into the house. Perhaps the main house of the hacienda was not a palace to the marques. After all, he had actual palaces in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Still, from my poor peon’s viewpoint it was a dwelling for a king—no, a god.

  And the marques had not donated a drop of sweat—much less shed his blood in conquest—to acquire it. Ayyo, I didn’t understand why people like him who had so much had done so little and why people like me worked so hard for almost nothing.

  Sí, I resented the gachupines and their criollo brothers, not so much for what they had, but for the way they exploited the powerless. Some of them were brutal bastardos who despoiled the dispossessed, riding roughshod over them, pillaging their land, their labor, their women. Many committed a far less violent but nonetheless devastating sin: They treated us as stupid children who belonged to them as a pretext for our exploitation and enslavement.

  Their big haciendas were run as feudal domains—not just places of work but small communities, often with their own chapels.

  People were born, married, died, and buried on them.

  Debt peonage kept many laborers enslaved to haciendas. Due to almost nonexistent wages and inflated charges for living expenses, the bond laborers could never discharge their debt to the hacienda owner. They were effectively tied to the hacienda as inextricably as a shackled slave.