Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  She would never tell Juan that, however.

  Nor would she use Gomez again to deliver her pamphlets.

  She’d be lucky now if Gomez didn’t break into her home, whip her like a dog, and use her like a puta.

  Maria didn’t say anything to Juan because she feared he would track Gomez down and kill him. An act of machoism that would bring the viceroy’s constables to both their doors. Juan would kill over a woman but not for the cause of freedom.

  And she despised him for it.

  She returned to her pamphlet, writing:

  Every man and woman who has the physical or mental ability to battle oppression in this benighted land must use their God-given gifts to drive the tyrannical viceroy and his greed-crazed gachupine slave drivers out of the colony.

  Her head pounded. She could not get Juan out of her head. Juan was so unforgivably selfish. Although Juan refused to discuss his job, a worker at the shop told her that Juan designed and fabricated exquisite firearms and powder that were famous throughout all of New Spain but for which Felix stole both credit and recompense. A gifted, industrious gunsmith/powder-maker, there was not another hombre who possessed skills more important to the revolution than Juan.

  Were he to commit those talents to the revolution, he would be the indispensable hombre.

  Damn you, Juan Rios. Why do you waste your talents, working as little more than a peon for the gachupine slave masters?

  She refused to conform to the strict dictates of the existing social order. Why couldn’t Juan be as courageous?

  “If you only had courage, Juan,” she muttered, fury flooding her veins, “you’d be a frontline soldado like myself!”

  Maria had to admit that she’d come out of a home environment in which freethinking and the equality of all people—even that most radical notion of all, the equality of women—had been openly discussed. And her father—a respected pillar of the community—had always earned a good living.

  Born of a Spanish father and an indio mother, she was a twenty-year-old mestizo. Nuns had taught her mother to read and write, and her mother had taught not only Maria but many of the local peons as well.

  Her father, Francisco, was a bookish man, more suited to be a professor than a businessman, but having the only printing press in the community and surrounding area, he not only did commercial printing but once a week put out two sheets of current events of community interest.

  He had founded the printing shop at Lake Chapala ten years after the first printing press was established at Guadalajara. Printing had come to the Guadalajara region later than other major cities of the colony. Mexico City started its first printing within a couple of decades of the Conquest, and Puebla the following century. Printing, however, was not established in Guadalajara for another couple hundred years, in 1773. Moreover, the government rigidly restricted the content of printed materials, limiting printers primarily to Church tracts, the viceroy’s pronouncements, and approved businesses.

  Nonetheless, Francisco owned the works of Rousseau, John Locke, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine—the thinkers who had done so much to inspire the American and French Revolutions. Maria read them, even though her father forbade her to mention the authors’ names when she left the house—or even mention that she had read them. Throughout New Spain men adamantly asserted that reading subverted a woman’s sense of self. Reading, many men argued, disoriented women and disrupted their equilibrium, making them anxious, angry, and restless.

  While her father held more liberal views, he also had a business to run and a family to support. To express opinions contrary to the viceroy’s or Church’s dictates could conceivably lead to the royal militia, or even the Inquisition, dragging the dissident out of bed in the middle of the night.

  People had been jailed and tortured for far less.

  Her father’s library contained only thirty-eight books, including seven in French, a language he had taught Maria to read and speak. Even so, the de Rosa library was the largest collection in the area. Though her family was far from rich, what extra money her father could squirrel away had not gone into secret hiding places but into buying books. Furthermore, books were exorbitantly expensive. Most of them had to be imported from Spain, which between duties and transport fees increased their cost exponentially.

  “These books are your most valuable inheritance,” her father had told her. “They are magic carpets to people you’ll never meet, places you’ll never see. They will teach you everything—from the printing and fabrication of books themselves to the construction of ships. However, they are not just storehouses of knowledge but the sacred repository of our culture and customs, of our science and mathematics, of our history and religion.”

  To Maria, the printed word was also a weapon. She wasn’t the subtle erudite thinker that her father was but a doer. Even her horseback riding reflected a preference for action over passivity. While men wore pants when riding a horse, women were not only denied the same privilege, they were forbidden to ride horses and therefore condemned to trudge the earth like dray beasts—a condition that was irrational, destructive, and unjust.

  Most women accepted this prohibition without protest.

  But not Maria.

  She designed and stitched together a split riding skirt, which allowed her to ride horses like a man. Scorning scurrilous remarks about her “failure to know her place,” she was her own person.

  She carried her uncomplicated way of thinking about horses and pants into life, love, and politics. To Maria the equality of people and the sexes was logical, reasonable, just, and self-evident. Inequality, on the other hand, was unjust—a social ill that she and her comrades needed to stamp out.

  Justice for all was her creed and cause, her heart and soul.

  Throughout his career, her father had resolutely refused to print controversial or seditious articles. Two years ago, however, a horse had thrown him, breaking his hip. An intractable infection set in, and the hip had never healed. Leaving him too incapacitated to run the print shop, Maria had run it for him, keeping up all his accounts—including the conservative weekly bulletin, which she printed at the royal government’s behest—to ensure that she did not offend the officious officials governing the area.

  But at night she wrote, typeset, and printed what she thought and felt.

  Her biggest customers were the church and the local government, both of which Maria privately despised. But she took their money, then plowed it back into her own clandestine operation, printing up pamphlets dedicated to their overthrow.

  Maria understood the consequences of her actions. The difference between her and her father was that she had something to say to the world—and was willing to risk all to say it.

  Moreover, she loved what she did—reveling in the lyricism of language, the satisfaction of finding the right word or forming the felicitous phrase, the potential for powerful language to inflame the passions, plant the seeds of revolt, challenge injustice, repudiate lies, and change the world. To arrange letters of movable metal type into sentences that expressed ideas and inspired dreams of freedom and incited deeds of honor and justice … that enterprise seemed to Maria the noblest undertaking any person could aspire to.

  Each of us must fight for freedom in our own way, she wrote. The curate, Fray Hidalgo, raised his voice on the steps of a church. I raise mine with my pen. You must use your own specific skills and personal cunning with which to depose the despots.

  Maria spent nearly an hour venting verbal violence onto paper with quill and ink.

  She honestly believed paper, ink, and a professional printing press could give wings to … truth.

  Well, Maria, if you wish to break truth out of prison, she thought, print the thing tonight.

  Time is a bandit—a fleeing bandit.

  Do it now!

  Her printing press had a wood frame with an iron platen. She’d heard that in Europe large printing companies had started using presses made entirely of iron, but such an advance had
not reached the colony.

  First Maria had to arrange her type letters into words, organizing them into the publication which she had composed. To that end, she placed them piece by piece in a composition stick—a long, narrow tray—into which she occasionally stuck in blanks, when she needed to straighten out or “justify” her right-hand margin. She next slipped in a wood brace which would hold the type tight when she had filled the tray.

  She placed the composing sticks faceup on the printing bed, inked the type, placed a sheet of paper on top, and brought the heavy metal platen down to press the paper against the inked type.

  When she was done, she had two printed pages of inflammatory fury, which urged the insurrection onward and upward.

  Maria printed one page at a time. When she finished, she set the pieces of type back in the type case, one by one.

  Printing was slow, tedious work … but so was setting fire to a nation. When she had completed her act of sedition, she sat back and shook her head. The more she thought about it, the more ashamed she was that she had kissed Gomez. What Juan must have thought of her …

  Leaving the shop to return home, she wondered what it would be like to kiss Juan.

  TWENTY-TWO

  AYYO! PULQUE—THE nectar of the gods! I could understand why Quetzalcoatl went loco in the cabeza after a night of this. I had a belly full of pulque and a brain fuming with jealousy and anger. And I didn’t have the capacity of a god. I didn’t even hold it well for a mortal man. The sour beer was enough to steal my wits even without the magic mushrooms, which Quetzalcoatl had also consumed along with the potent brew. Playing cards—losing at playing cards—had not improved my disposition either.

  I left the pulquería with two thoughts burning in my head: Find that traitorous bastardo, Gomez—and plant my boots deep into his cojones. No, I should kill him instead. Slowly. Painfully. While he begged and pled for mercy.

  Why not? I had killed men before in the service of the revolution—men whom I did not know and whom I did not hate.

  I knew Gomez, and to know him was to loathe him.

  My second thought was to find Maria, rip off her clothes, and have my way with her. Let her learn the way of a man and a woman. Let her learn what it’s like for a real hombre to mount and ride her … namely me. Let her know the screams of ecstasy—her screams of ecstasy—when I brought her to the passionate pinnacle she so clearly needed and … craved.

  Sí. I would avenge her affronts to my much-abused dignity.

  But when I reached my mule, hauled myself up, and took a few deep breaths of night air, the reality of my life hit me in full. Not Juan the Peon who cleaned up the shit of his Spanish patron. I cared nothing for that life.

  But Mazatl the Aztec Deer who ran arms and explosives for the rebellion, to me that person meant … everything. And the Deer could not jeopardize his fight for freedom over petty slights and hurt pride.

  Maria was half right.

  Half my life was a lie—and I did enrich my master making guns, molding bullets, and mixing gunpowder for the gachupine oppressors.

  I was on the main road leading out of town when I spotted a cadre of royal constables in front of the de Rosa print shop.

  I veered off onto a side street, tied Rodrigo to a post, and approached the shop on foot. Other residents in the town knew what was happening at the shop—like me they skulked in the shadows, watching the constables through dark windows or hid on balconies and roofs.

  Off his horse, holding the reins, Gomez stood in front of the building as other officers carried out the printing press, paper, and other supplies in a growing pile that would soon be a bonfire. He was talking to a man standing by a coach.

  I knew the name of the man Gomez was conversing with—Colonel Madero. I recognized his silver peg leg. I was right about Gomez. He was a royal spy, and he worked for the most infamous spymaster in the colony. Madero was the head of the viceroy’s secret police and spy network. He dressed in an ebony duster with silver-thread embroidery along the lapels, a matching linen shirt, and a broad-brimmed hat with a flat crown and hatband of two-inch silver conchos. Looped around his wrist was a jet-black rawhide quirt with three-inch triple-poppers.

  Over six feet tall, Madero had piercing wide-set eyes, an aquiline nose, and a sweeping coal-black mustache that made his teeth gleam white as burnished ivory. I’ve heard that his wide, glittering smile never reached his eyes and his hard obsidian eyes remained cold and wary no matter how dazzlingly his smile blazed.

  I’d never seen him in person before, but I had heard that his soul was “black as the grave.”

  A bad hombre for sure—with a heart dark as death.

  The most dangerous man in the colony, many averred.

  He was called El Toro … but this bull had a brain, too. His quest for malefactors who rebelled against the king was unrelenting, and once he got their scent he never forsook the hunt—even when the hunt was based upon rumor, gossip, and dubious evidence.

  The colonel had spies and informers throughout the colony … and was notorious for promiscuous torture, roadside justice, and summary executions—much of it pointless. People whom he merely suspected of plotting against the king and viceroy were routinely surprised with the nocturnal knock, the crack of his quirt, and the business end of his red-hot smoking pistola.

  Losing a leg while fighting the French invaders in 1808 during the Dos de Mayo uprising in Madrid had done nothing to improve his chronically grim mood or arrest the dark demons that haunted his pitiless soul.

  The loss of his leg had, I am told, made him even meaner.

  His peg leg was said to be solid silver, but that much silver would have cost a fortune and weighed a ton. I personally believed the peg to be silver-plated hardwood.

  Madero’s peg leg was also feared—given his alacrity for driving it into the kidneys and cojones of prisoners and suspects.

  And Gomez had led him to Maria.

  I was certain they didn’t have her yet. I knew she sometimes composed fiery tracts at night, but by this hour she was sure to be home. But they would have her soon.

  A constable came out of the shop with a sheaf of papers and showed them to Madero. I could guess what the papers were—fire-breathing pamphlets. Maria had printed a leaflet no doubt advocating revolution … in her usual incendiary style.

  Those pamphlets would now be her death sentence.

  Madero pointed toward the road out of town that led toward Maria’s house. Barking orders, he detailed Gomez and a patrol to arrest Maria and her father. Gomez and two constables mounted and headed down the road.

  Three armed men dispatched to arrest a woman and a crippled old man. I hoped they brought extra ammunition.

  The house was two miles down the road. The rough terrain would not allow me to cut around them. If I followed them and they heard me coming, they would ambush me.

  There was no way around it. They would get there before me.

  I had no choice but to ambush them after they apprehended Maria and her father.

  I made a promise to myself to kill Gomez first—just in case I couldn’t finish off all three.

  PART V

  THE SWORD VERSUS THE PEN

  TWENTY-THREE

  MARIA AND HER father lived in a Spanish-style casa consisting of two stories of whitewashed adobe brick and a courtyard, all of it surrounded by a high whitewashed adobe wall. What would the three men do when they got to the house?

  I followed them as closely as I could, pondering that question.

  The men would grab her and subdue the sick father. When they were unable to get the old man on a horse, they would have to load him onto the family’s small carriage and—

  No, there would be none of that. Those bastardos would kick open the front door and charge in. Maria would probably grab her father’s rusty old musket and get herself and her father killed.

  One thing was for certain—Gomez was a brutal swine. A beautiful but naïve rebel, Maria would be delivered to Colonel
Madero—a man who was arguably the most malevolent monster in the colony. Even the most murderous bandidos shuddered at the thought of falling into the hands of the man with the silver peg leg.

  Gomez would not be satisfied with simply taking a ripe young woman like Maria back to Madero. Not until he and his compañeros first had their way with her.

  And her father? They’d kill him rather than let him testify about the rape. Besides, it would be easier than dragging a cripple around.

  I gave Rodrigo my heels and swatted his rump. He barely broke into a trot.

  It was the best the lumbering old hombre could do. I had nearly busted its stump-broke heart eluding the Spanish patrol. Cocking my shoulder-holstered gun, I tucked it into my belt for quicker access. I also cocked the gun holstered to my leg and decided to hang on to it. That was two shots.

  There were three of them. I hoped and prayed I’d have time to reload.

  I was not optimistic.

  Gessoed a brilliant alabaster, the house and walls shone in the luminous moonlight.

  Then I heard the piercing screams.

  Maria came running out the wall gate. A man came out behind her and grabbed her by the hair, jerking her wildly back. She went down as two other men came out the gate. The man who had grabbed her hair jerked her arms behind her and held her as another man—I was sure it was Gomez—grabbed the bottom of her nightshirt and brought it up, baring her legs.

  They heard me coming. Poor Rodrigo groaned and blew long rolling snorts that targeted me as much as the blindingly bright full moon.

  The man still on his feet reached for his pistola.

  I could have picked him off with a shot—even with me on a charging mule—and I almost did. But I held my fire. If I killed him, that left two others—and I would have only one more shot.

  I took the reins in my teeth and pulled out the pistola, which I’d shoved under my belt. The ankle gun was still in my left fist.

  The next best thing was to drop the man without a shot. Using Rodrigo as a battering ram, I charged the constable, reins in teeth. The man got off one shot with his own handgun. I saw the flash and felt the impact on Rodrigo’s chest at almost the same time. I kicked my feet free of the stirrups and slipped sideways off the saddle as my old amigo went down.