Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  Midsize haciendas had about two hundred workers and another five or six hundred family members living on them. Larger haciendas had thousands of workers.

  Our Spanish masters did not frown on the flogging of workers unless perhaps it incapacitated workers, therefore costing them money.

  In the end, the hacienda was an attempt to dominate every aspect of our lives—to transform us into the stupid irresponsible children that our masters continually asserted we were.

  Some of us however had different ideas.

  Some of us rebelled.

  EIGHTEEN

  BACK ON MY amigo, Rodrigo, I left the hacienda and followed the main road until I reached a trail that would lead me down to the lake.

  I traveled the shore, sticking close to the dense conifers and scrub brush, keeping a close eye on both my front and back trails. I had to make sure the royal patrols weren’t tracking the rebels’ number-one gunrunner.

  I spotted a faint stirring in the dim distance. Fading quickly into the thick trees and brush to my right, I made out the movement of a royal militia patrol I estimated to be ten-man strong. The patrol did not stop or point. They gave no sign of having seen me.

  I did not know the exact rendezvous point with the rebels—only the general lakeshore area where they were to intercept me. Even though I was supplying the rebels—and admittedly risking my skin to do so—my risk paled alongside theirs. The viceroy’s troops hunted the rebels continually while I was not even under the remotest suspicion.

  The rebels could not afford to give anyone too much information as to their comings and goings. Were I to be caught with the contraband and knowing the rebels’ itinerary, the royal militia might well suborn or torture the information out of me.

  Once the militia patrol was gone, and I was sure I was alone, I would move back into the brush and tree line and light a candle. A boatload of rebels could spot it, but the vegetation would conceal the glow from most passersby.

  The viceroy’s men knew the rebels were supplied from this side of the lake. They had consequently increased the lake patrols, but they could not pin down the correct location.

  Not yet.

  I would have rather dropped the contraband along the shoreline—perhaps behind a stand of trees—and ridden off. I couldn’t however—not in good conscience. I had to make sure the ammunition got into the right hands.

  For reasons of self-protection.

  If the local fishermen or other boaters saw the light and spotted my stash, they might turn powder and balls over to the viceroy for a reward. There weren’t that many high-quality gun and powder-smiths in this remote region. They would recognize the powder and balls as premium ammunition and trace them back to Felix and his hard-used assistant in short order.

  My role in the brief Battle of Tula would quickly come out and my gachupine masters would stretch me out on the viceroy’s gallows or the Grand Inquisitor’s rack.

  I also needed to meet with the rebels. They sometimes had an important dispatch for me—information on the viceroy’s patrols or a weapon to repair.

  NINETEEN

  WHEN THE PATROL turned off and returned to the main road, I continued up the shoreline. The lake jutted in at one point to less than a hundred paces from the tree line. I led Rodrigo in among the trees there. Wrapping his reins around a tree limb, I cross-hobbled his rear hocks and removed the leather ammunition pouches from the saddlebags.

  Reaching the lake, I lit the candle, then moved away from the light. I hoped to spot the men the candle drew before they spotted me.

  Several minutes passed before I saw two men in a canoe, paddling toward the candle. After beaching its bow in the shore mud, one of the men slipped over the side and waded ashore, a musket in hand. I could see him plainly in the moonlight. He was dressed in peon garb, and he glanced nervously up and down the shoreline. He was clearly not a militiaman.

  I put a black scarf over my face.

  “Señor,” I whispered.

  He swung the musket at my voice.

  “Stop! I’m your amigo.”

  “El Alquimista,” the peon-rebel whispered.

  They had nicknamed me the Alchemist because it appeared to them that I could conjure ordnance and ammunition out of earth and sky.

  My apparition-like appearances and the weapons and gunpowder I so mysteriously produced must have seemed like acts of supernatural sorcery.

  I threw him the bags. “Adios, amigos.”

  Something crashed in the brushes. The frightened rebel turned and fired his musket.

  It was brown—a deer.

  Ayyo! The shot would be heard by all the king’s men in the province.

  I had to get away. I ran for the mule as the rebel ran for the canoe. His escape would be easier than mine.

  I urged Rodrigo through the dense trees and brush. I’d stay off the trail until I hit the main road. Traveling blind over broken tree- and brush-choked terrain, Rodrigo might very well flounder, but I had no choice. I needed cover.

  If there was a Spanish patrol in the area, they’d likely stay on the trail. As I rode, I unbuttoned my shirt—in the event I had to reach for the holstered pistol under my arm. Lifting my pant leg, I also had access to the smaller gun strapped to my leg.

  I hit a sheer rock wall and had to leave the trees and brush for the trail. As soon as I did, a militia patrol rounded a bend and the point rider spotted me.

  He raised a hue and cry, and I quickly slapped Rodrigo’s romp: “Andale! Andale!”

  Turning in the saddle, I unlimbered my shoulder weapon. I only had one ball in each pistol, and I had to make each shot count. Even with quick reloading, I’d have little chance of firing a third shot before horsemen were on me.

  I cocked the pistol. I couldn’t aim true, since I was bouncing up and down on Rodrigo’s back. Still, it was a maneuver I’d practiced before—pointing and shooting by instinct, not by sighting in the target.

  I pulled the trigger, the flint showered sparks over the flashpan, and the chamber powder detonated.

  My bullet blew the lead man backward—out of his saddle.

  No time to reload. I unlimbered the pistola from my ankle holster.

  Another man exploded backward out of his saddle, joining his comrade in royal militia hell.

  The rest of the patrol wheeled their mounts and fled.

  To the gachupine, the royal militia were little more than peon labor. No one ever accused their patrols of dogged determination or death-defying valor.

  Patting Rodrigo’s neck, I slowed him to a brisk trot in order to save his strength.

  And to reload my weapons.

  I’d killed Spaniards before and would no doubt kill them again. The fight would go on until the last gachupine was driven from our land—or had been hanged by his entrails from his palatial home’s crystal chandeliers.

  Still I took no pride in killing.

  It was just part of the job.

  Ultimately, I only wanted to survive.

  TWENTY

  NOT EVERYTHING IN my life was blood and toil. An hour later, returning to the village, I spotted a woman on horseback, someone whom I knew—and adored.

  Maria de Rosa.

  A pretty young mestiza—Ayyo!—I longed to court her.

  Or more truthfully, bed her.

  A hot-tempered firebrand with raven-hued waist-length tresses, her black eyes were hard and flat as a diamond-back’s. Even as she routinely ripped my ego to pieces with her superior learning, and patronizing insults, her mind-numbing beauty invariably reduced me to stupid stammering.

  She was on a painted pony, off to the side of the road, handing a bundle to a man on a bay mare. When she heard my mule coming, she turned. I was visible in the moonlight, but I decided to hail them anyway … in case the stranger—not knowing me—reached for a weapon.

  “It’s me, Maria, Juan Rios.”

  “What are you doing out here so late? Running errands for your gachupine master?”

  The vicious w
ords cut me to the quick. She thought me a humble servant, the “good indio” who humbly bowed his head and served the gachupines without objection.

  Maria was an impassioned revolutionary fighting for the shout of freedom the fray had made on the steps of a church at Delores.

  And her dedication to the revolution inflamed my desire for her even more.

  Like myself, she kept her activities secret to avoid arrest. To ensure that I did not jeopardize the rebels I was supplying, I kept my own activities secret even from her. The one time I had courted her, she ranted about “Aztec piglets” such as myself who “prostituted their talents for gachupine swine.” While I sought to entice her into my amorous arms, she worked her own agenda, trying to rally me to the revolution—to help her distribute revolutionary pamphlets in which she railed against the viceroy and his royal tyranny in tropes of fire and blood.

  How she managed to keep from being arrested when her father had the only printing press in the area was a miracle. Her father was bedridden, her mother taken by fever five years earlier, so she had free rein not only to run the print shop but to issue her politically charged leaflets.

  I had to play the good peon and reject her recruitment efforts since my role in that revolt, while covert, was far more critical than hers. Perhaps if I’d told her of my own deeds and dreams, my wartime work for the Hidalgo revolt and what it cost me, the guns I had run and the men I had killed, my hairbreadth escape from the viceroy’s slave mine, and how I still fought for the revolution, she might have viewed me in a more romantic light.

  But such confessions were impossible. Besides, Maria would have me turning out weapons by the hundreds—right up until I was hanged.

  Truth might set some men free, but all it would bestow on me was a taut noose and the hangman’s ghoulish laugh.

  She was a true witch. Whatever she did—or how she belittled me—she bewitched me. Her long dresses—while exquisitely feminine—were discreetly split in the middle to allow her to mount and ride a horse spread-legged.

  Like a man.

  Not that she in any conceivable way looked like a man. The love of my life looked like a man as much as I looked like the Virgin Mother.

  After I passed by, I turned in the saddle to bid the lovely señorita vaya con dios.

  She glared at me and leaned toward the other horseman, and gave him the bundle.

  Then kissed him.

  Ay caramba!

  I fought the impulse to pull my gun and shoot the bastardo out of the saddle.

  Instead I urged Rodrigo onward.

  Maria! Why do you torment me? I wanted to yell at her.

  I took deep breaths of the night air. The woman could read and write, ride and shoot. She was a firebrand, who did what she wanted—and what she wanted most was to be deemed the equal of any man.

  I admired her wild heart, her warrior soul. Aside from her sensuous beauty and voluptuous charm, I admired her … rebelliousness.

  Even though she undeservedly despised me.

  But when I saw her kiss another man, my double life tore at my soul—especially when I recognized him: Gomez, a small-time bandido who claimed to be a revolutionary but was more likely a double agent—a royal spy.

  I didn’t like or trust him—even before he kissed my woman. He hung around the village pulquerías, not drinking peon’s pulque, but Spanish wine. Eh, to choose wine over the juice of the maguey plant was good sense, even if pulque was the nectar of indio gods. Peons drank pulque not for its sour milk but because it was potent and cheap—we couldn’t afford to get drunk on good wine. This Gomez drank wine while buying pulque for the peons around him.

  He also sympathized openly with the insurrectionarios. Dangerous talk. So dangerous it was suspicious.

  He had obviously impressed Maria with his rebel talk.

  She had no doubt buried him alive in mountains of her virulent pamphlets.

  Madre Dios, if Gomez was a royal spy—as I had always secretly surmised—he would not only betray Maria to the militia, but her father, his print shop, and all those to whom she distributed her dangerous diatribes as well would all be in mortal peril.

  Ayyo! She could unintentionally lead the viceroy’s secret constabulary of police and spies to countless friends and colleagues.

  The thought of Maria swinging on a gibbet sickened me to my hell-bound soul.

  I pulled Rodrigo into the bushes off the road and waited for her. I resisted the impulse to ride back and confront her and Gomez with my suspicions.

  Had I found them conjoined, I would have killed him.

  I was still fighting the impulse when she came down the road. I called out her name gently to keep from startling her. The full moon still shone, but she had real courage. In this time of rebellion and outright banditry, most men would not ride at night, certainly not unarmed.

  She slowed her horse to a walk. As I came alongside her, I saw the pistol she had ready to use.

  “Why are you looking at me like that? You are not my master. I can kiss who I want.”

  “Gomez can’t be trusted.”

  “I’ll trust anyone I want. He’s a real man, not a woman in pants who makes weapons to be used against our people.”

  I took a deep breath and gritted my teeth. To call a man a woman was the worst insult in the colony. If she were a man …

  “Gomez can’t be trusted. He’s too eager to flaunt false sympathy for rebels,” I said.

  “Mind your business. Or your master’s business. That’s what you do best.”

  “Not all of us have a father who provides us with a business to run. I pay for my own frioles—and I’m under bond.”

  “I take care of myself,” she snapped. “And my father, too. Go your way, Juan Rios.” She waved the pistol at me. “I don’t need your concern or your protection.”

  “Gomez may well be a royal spy.”

  “Arturo is a brave patriot. He’s fought with Morelos and Guerrero.”

  “With Hidalgo, too, I’m sure.” I sneered. “No doubt he has stood before the viceroy’s firing squad more than once, caught the bullets in his teeth, spit in Death’s Eye, and has never known or shown fear. How many notches for dead militia does he have on his—”

  She made a very unladylike remark about my manhood—lack thereof—and whipped and roweled her horse away from me, leaving me on my slow-footed mule to eat her dust.

  I headed for the nearest pulquería to drown my pain.

  Perhaps Gomez would be there. If he was, we could discuss his many services to the insurrection—the parents he had lost, the jail time he had served, the wounds he had suffered, the men he had killed.

  He could tell me all that while I pounded his head on the floor.

  PART IV

  BOOKS AND RECORDS OF THE “SAVAGES” OF NEW SPAIN

  The Spanish invaders acted as if they had encountered a tribe of savages rather than nations populated by twenty million people when they arrived in what became New Spain and began to destroy the knowledge and culture of civilizations thousands of years old.

  Prince Ixtlilxochitl, the brother of the last king of Texcoco, a Nahuatl empire that competed with the Mexica for dominance in the Valley of Mexico, described the paperwork of an empire in his Historia Chichimeca:

  “They had scribes for each field of knowledge. Some dealt with historical records, the annals of the people and wars, others recorded the genealogies, the records of the lineage of rulers, lords, and noblemen … other scribes kept the law books and matters of rites and ceremonies. Priests recorded all matters concerning the temples, festivals, and calendars. And finally, the philosophers and learned men were charged with painting all the scientific knowledge they had discovered …”

  The recording, done with pictographs similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics, was done in books now called “codices.” A codex was a strip of paper made from fig tree bark, cloth from the maguey plant, or deerskin. Usually about six inches wide, it could run thirty feet or more. The strips were folded a
nd glued to wood covers.

  So many pages were needed for record keeping, the Mexica/Aztecs demanded nearly half a million sheets each year from states paying tribute.

  TWENTY-ONE

  BACK AT HER print shop, Maria finished the latest pamphlet savaging the viceroy and his royal minions. All her diatribe needed was her nom de guerre—the name under which she signed her furious pronunciamentos, using a male signature to cover her tracks: “El Revolucionario.”

  Her rabid rhetoric throbbed with blood and thunder and hellfire.

  Because it was late in the evening, Maria did not have enough time to typeset her torrid tirade. Hand-setting the movable type would take her at least two hours, and then she would have to print the pamphlets.

  Still, she was too energized for sleep.

  She turned to another pamphlet. Her conversation with Juan had given Maria a topic that rankled her to the bone: the failure of New Spain’s most talented people—including its brutally oppressed peons—to commit themselves and their abilities to the insurrection.

  Quill in hand, paper before her, she paused—and pressed her palms against her temples. She needed to get Juan out of her mind … particularly the shameful episode where she flagrantly—and maliciously—kissed Gomez in front of him.

  She had kissed Gomez because she knew Juan wanted her and she was angry at him—incensed that he refused to back the rebellion even though it needed him badly.

  She didn’t even like Gomez. He stank of soured sweat, garlic, and chewing tobacco. She kissed him to infuriate Juan.

  That she had used Juan’s honest and gentlemanly affection for her to torment him shamed her. Maria swore no matter how angry she became with Juan she would not do that again.

  Not that she’d gotten away with her ruse scot-free. As if to punish her for her charade, Gomez had tried to drag her off her horse as soon as Juan was out of sight. Hammering his temple with her pistol butt, she had ridden off, racing toward Juan.

  She’d hit Gomez hard enough to fracture his skull—and hoped that she had.