Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

“The ship to the Philippines?”

  “They’re selling us to it.”

  “We’re going to be crew on the ship?”

  “No. Slaves. Doomed slaves on a death ship. We’ll never make it to Manila. That’s why they have to buy forced labor. Mostly criminals sentenced to death or long prison terms are used.”

  “Why are you so depressed? It’s better than hanging.”

  He shook his head.

  “You think you are getting a reprieve from death? All that has happened is you’ll be sentenced to torture, starvation, and unbearable thirst, to wither away slowly and miserably as your bones break and disease rots your skin.”

  “It’s still better than dying.”

  Luis fixed me with a long hard stare. “As you shall see, young friend, there are worse things than death.”

  PART X

  A GHOST SHIP OF THE DAMNED

  FORTY

  CLUBBED INTO UNCONSCIOUSNESS, Luis and I had been taken from the struggle at the inn’s stable to a mule train that carried us to Acapulco and a ship moored in the harbor. Dragged aboard, we were hurled unceremoniously into the stinking, dark, and dank hole.

  I came to in the ship’s slave hold, where the bilge slaves were quartered.

  I counted three dozen of us, wretches chained to thick heavy iron eye-bolts—each circular eye six inches across, forged out of inch-thick steel. Bolted into the hold’s deck, a half-dozen chains were padlocked to each wide thick “eye”. Each coffle chain passed over the leg irons of each of the six prisoners. We were effectively chained to five other slaves as well as to two deck bolts.

  Our clothes were little more than filthy bloodstained rags. My head boomed and throbbed like a bass drum, each beat a thunder-crack from hell.

  The thunder-cracks were the excruciating beat of my pulse in my ears.

  Putting my hands to my temples I felt damp clotted blood covering my cheeks and neck. I glanced at Luis through blurred, bloodshot eyes. He lay groaning and looked even worse. One eye was so lividly swollen I feared it might be blind. Some irate husband or gambler had clearly wreaked violent revenge on my erstwhile employer.

  The man lying next to me, on the other hand, felt no pain at all.

  He felt nothing.

  His nose, ears, and mouth were covered with clotted blood, and his glazed eyes glared sightlessly at the overhead bulkhead—into an abyss of nothingness.

  He was as dead as he would ever be.

  One man was doing a little better. He was young—he looked barely twenty—and dressed in relatively clean rags. At least they were clean relative to the bloodied, befouled, ripped, and frayed garb the rest of us wore. He sported a short dark ratty beard and disheveled hair. Despite his youth, both hair and beard were streaked with gray. Studying us with a sardonic smirk, he said, “Welcome aboard, mates.”

  “Aboard what?” I grunted.

  “A ghost ship of the damned.”

  “Fuck me,” Luis rasped, starting to come to.

  “Oh, yes, you are truly fucked,” the man said.

  “How?” I asked. “Where are we?”

  “You’re on a galleon bound for hell … that Infernal Region whose earthly name is Manila. A voyage of the dead, you sail without hope or respite or redemption, amigos. You’re headed to wherever it is the dead go. For people like us, that means straight to hell.”

  “What are we doing here?” Luis asked. “Who are you?”

  “I am Arturo, and we are bilge slaves on a decayed derelict that once sailed the seven seas proudly but now leaks like a sieve, topside and belowdecks. The bilge fills so fast and furiously it continually threatens to sink us. No pump can empty it quick enough. One day without our bailing and this tub would be sailing on the seafloor itself.”

  “You seem in relatively good shape, Arturo,” I said.

  “I was a crew member, and they look after me.”

  “What did you do to get here?” I asked.

  “Someone filched some water and limes from the captain’s private store. I was the one blamed.”

  “What do we do here?” I asked.

  “You’re part of the bucket brigade. We bucket out the foul stuff, and pass the buckets from hand to hand through a long line of more bucket slaves to a small compartment just belowdecks—just above the waterline—where the strongest, toughest, and meanest of these wretched slaves on the rail hurls the slop through a hole.”

  “Which slave is that?” I asked.

  “My mate, the one who actually filched the water and limes, then tried to pin the pilferage on me.”

  “How did they catch him?”

  “Someone spoke lies about him. But it seems he had a cache of limes hidden in his own seabag he never told the captain about.”

  “I’ve died and gone to hell,” Luis moaned, clutching his head.

  “Make no mistake, you have. No doubt this place smells worse than hell. The bilge is filthy and foul-smelling, the air poisonous and oppressively hot, the lower holds swarm with rats—as big as dogs. By the end of the voyage, the majority of us bilge slaves will either die or the work, foot rot, and scurvy will cripple us for life. We have it worse—far worse—than galley slaves who used to man oars.”

  “If we make it,” I asked, “what’s Manila like?”

  “Another bilge. You’ll die in their cane fields or swamps from black fever or the snakes. Trust me, here or in Manila, we are sentenced to a slow, foul death—without remorse or reprieve.”

  “Then we might as well fight,” I said. “We die either way.”

  “Resistance is useless. We are chained when we are not working. We are outnumbered and outgunned. We can’t even look them in the eye. Meet their gaze, and they will spread and bind you against the mast, then flay the flesh from your bones with a flogging cat. Your bones will grin through your blood and tattered flesh as white as winding shrouds. Resist a second time, and they will feed you to the sharks. Anyway, in a few days resistance will be academic. We will all be too sick and weak to resist.”

  “You’re surviving.”

  “They look after me to some extent. It won’t last long, however. One day I’ll catch the contagion which is rife down here. I’ll cough and crap my insides out.”

  “Why were the limes and water stolen?” Luis asked.

  “The voyage back is worse than the voyage over, and this last one was hell. We got stuck in the tropics—in doldrums, stock-still, dead-still. In scorching heat, we sat immobile—without a breath of breeze, with sails slack, the sea bewitched. Racked by scurvy and dehydration, we were all dropping in our tracks from bloody bowels, bloody urine, our skin falling from our faces and backs.

  “The captain hoards kegs of aqua pura and barrels of limes in his cabin. I was accused of sneaking into his quarters and liberating a water cask and a bag of limes, then passing them out among the crew. Whoever did it saved the crew from certain death. Some of the crew have not forgotten that a thief saved their lives. Whether I did it or not, they are appreciative. I am paying, however, for their salvation. Unfortunately, the person I spoke of leaked my name to the captain as the thief.”

  “Tough luck,” Luis said mordantly.

  “I’m saying to you, never forget: They hold all the cards. You have nothing in your hand. Mess with them, you’ll lose—and curse your mother for giving you birth.”

  “Suppose I stack the deck,” Luis said.

  “Amigo, I can tell you are a fighter,” our bilge mate said. “My advice is do not fight them. I’ve tasted their flogging-cat. Your pointless resistance will not be worth the price. Believe me.”

  “How do you know we aren’t in hell?” Luis asked.

  “Hell begins at dawn. For now it’s evening. Do as they say, and you may see Manila. Don’t fuck with them, whatever you do. Hear me, amigo. Because you are gachupine, they will assume you are a criminal sentenced to the galleon for despicable crimes against the Crown. Toward you they will be more pitiless, more brutal.”

  “But I’m a Spanish s
ubject of the Crown,” Luis said, indignant.

  “You were a subject of the Spanish Crown. You are now a worthless wretch. They know you will die. The only question is when and where. They aren’t concerned about tales you might tell later.”

  “I shall survive this voyage,” Luis said firmly.

  “Even if you survive this voyage and are not sold off to the Manila slave plantations—where you would die within months anyway from the heat, the swamps, the cane fields, and the fever—you would not survive a return voyage. It is far worse—heat, doldrums, typhoons. Even if all of us die on this voyage, it means nothing to the captain. He’ll just buy replacement slaves in Manila—for next to nada. There are always criminals and men who have offended the viceroy. Like the viceroy in Mexico City, the one in Manila rules as if he were an Oriental potentate.

  “Señor, understand this: Since you are doomed to die anyway, you are inherently expendable. To them, you are less than nada. You are already dead.”

  FORTY-ONE

  LUIS, AS USUAL, didn’t listen. As soon as we were unchained the next morning he approached the bilge master, Emile.

  “My friend, I am a nobleman—a colonial gachupine of august lineage. My presence here is a farcical fiasco of preposterous proportions. As one gentleman to another, could you get me a meeting with the captain so I can get out of this disgusting hole.”

  The bilge master brought his wrist-quirt’s butt stock—weighted with lead shot—down across Luis’s already bloodied, battered, and bedraggled head.

  He pointed at three bilge slaves. “Haul this lying piece of shit topside.”

  Our bucket brigade was suspended for a half hour so we could line up before the mast and watch Luis’s shirt stripped from his back, his arms and chest spread on the mast, and the flesh of his back flayed all the way down to the spine and ribs.

  We were turned in our traces and marched back into the bilge to recommence the bucket brigade.

  When I saw Luis again, two sailors were hauling him down to our so-called sleeping quarters, his back packed in rock salt. His teeth were clenched tight against the pain, and his eyes blazed with hate and rage.

  I poured a bucket of bilge water on his back. It was dirty, but cool.

  FORTY-TWO

  AT DAWN THE bilge master unchained us from the deck’s eye-bolts. Rations were hardtack, thin gruel, an occasional piece of salt pork, and rank water. The hardtack was broken off in uneven hunks and was often harder than our teeth. The best hope was to bang it on the deck and hope to break off small chunks to soak in your gruel. You had to somehow hammer the foul stuff into the smallest pieces possible.

  The hammering also drove out the weevils, which had burrowed their way into the hardtack and honeycombed its interior. On one hand, the weevils were nauseating, but on the other hand, they alone made the hardtack semi-edible. With enough hammering, honeycombed hardtack would eventually shatter. Without those weevil tunnels, the tack would have been impervious to any fragmentation and therefore too big for ingestion.

  The weevils we digested no doubt supplied nutrition as well.

  The salt pork and salt herring were indispensable to our nutrition. They also had a negative side effect, however. The officers issued miserably minute water rations, and we were continually, agonizingly dehydrated. The salt-encrusted pork and herring aggravated our thirst unbearably.

  I saw starving men ingest the pork without sufficient water to wash it down, then go mad with feral suffering.

  As with Luis, the captain cured the thirst of men who complained by spreading them against the mast, flogging their backs to the bone, then salting their flayed flesh, as if they were the pork or herring that had so mercilessly unhinged them.

  If starvation and dehydration weren’t enough, the backbreaking drudgery of filling and passing the buckets—each one thirty-five pounds—in the sweltering heat of the holds was unbearably brutal.

  All the while, the bilge master, Emile, and his henchmen were on our backs, cursing us on in the foulest terms, describing the hideous sexual perversions that they claimed to have inflicted on our mothers, wives, and daughters. When their threats and curses failed to accelerate our floundering labors, they happily applied their ubiquitous wrist-quirts, which they seemed to wear around the clock.

  Our laboring lungs ached for oxygen, which deep in the foul bilge was painfully unplentiful and so putrid it sickened you to breathe it in.

  Laboring in lightless, airless holds and suffocating gloom, our bodies were starved for water and food, our lungs for air, and our eyes for light. And Lord knows our labors were necessary—if the ship were to stay afloat. Truly a ghost ship of the damned, that old tub was porous as a colander—top and bottom—and storms flooded the bilge so frighteningly that I often thought the ship was sinking.

  The captain must have thought so, too. After a storm, the bilge drivers harried us like harpies from hell, working themselves almost as hard as we did—except their exertions went into thundering curses into our ears and laying the lash across our naked bleeding backs.

  Everything Arturo told us had come true. We were on a voyage of the dead. Within two days, rebellion was hopeless.

  We were too sick, too starved, too exhausted.

  That first day Luis had bragged to Arturo that he would survive this ordeal no matter how horrendous it was. More and more his boast sounded like pompous braggadocio. The question I secretly asked was more relevant to the reality of our Death Voyage.

  Should we even try to survive?

  Increasingly the ocean-wide looked like a wondrously enticing terminus—a pleasant swim, then an end to pain.

  At what point would we choose that long swim over this death voyage to hell?

  FORTY-THREE

  I HAVE TO say this much for Luis—he was nothing if not resourceful.

  If you had something he wanted, you underestimated him at your peril. Arturo’s treacherous shipmate in particular. The bilge slave with the safest job, he worked dumping the buckets out a hole just above the waterline. He had the kind of job that might mean the difference between life and death on that hell-ship—he never should have turned his back on a man as resourceful as Luis.

  One night during an especially violent storm—when we were forced to work a night shift on top of our day labors—Luis sneaked up behind him with a stolen belaying pin. Caving in his skull, Luis shoved the man through the hole where the bilge water was dumped.

  When Emile asked where he’d disappeared to, Luis explained that the man had been despondent for some time—no doubt racked with guilt at having robbed the captain. In despair, he had apparently opted for the long swim.

  Nor was the murder of Arturo’s shipmate the only card Luis had to play. For weeks he had worked his wiles on the bilge master. Reading Emile’s palms, he convinced him he could foretell his future. He promised him his predictions would bring him wine and women, health, and wealth. Soon Emile was eating out of Luis’s hand.

  Luis even inveigled extra rations out of the whip-swinging swine.

  Luis brought me along as he moved up the food chain—literally. Ayyo—in truth I had helped shove the man through the hole.

  Soon the two of us worked the hole together, dumping buckets of bilge into the sea. The work was hard, but at least we inhaled clean sea air and felt the ocean breeze in our faces.

  Nor did the indomitable Luis despair.

  “We’re getting out of here, amigo. This job is better than working in the bilge, but we’re still in peril. Just sleeping in that sweltering vermin-ridden disease-infested hold will kill us. Stay there, we will starve, sicken, and die.

  “Nor is surviving this run to Manila a solution. Remember what Arturo told us about this voyage and the one back? The return passage from the Philippines to Acapulco is even worse. The world’s longest sea voyage without landfall, we have to sail almost halfway around the world, crossing ten thousand miles of water without sight of land. That’s if we don’t end up as fever victims or crocodile
food in the swamp at a jungle plantation.

  “We need a way to get topside—and stay there. Think, Juan, think. We must think of something. There must be something we can do.”

  “A special skill,” I said, “if we knew something, could do something of irreplaceable value so that we would be indispensable to their survival or their success.”

  Luis looked at me sadly—but not without kindness. He ruffled my hair with his palm, affectionately. “But then where would an ignorant indio such as yourself get such special indispensable skills.”

  “Indeed,” I said, “where would I have acquired such extraordinary craft and knowledge?” I hadn’t told Luis I was an expert gunsmith.

  “Nowhere, which means I must conjure some trick from my infinite trick bag. Whom can I deceive? What preposterous tale can I contrive? How can I convince them we are everything they need?”

  “Touch their hearts and advance their fortunes?”

  “Well said, amigo. I can see, if nothing else, my mentoring has improved your discourse. Now help me invent a plan.”

  We returned to dumping the bilge in the sea.

  FORTY-FOUR

  LUIS DIDN’T KNOW it, but I was considering other possibilities. I’d taken a liking to the talkative Arturo and had plied him with questions about the ship—its officers and crew, the positions and functions, their hierarchy and organization.

  Some ideas had begun to churn in my brain.

  At bottom, I was as desperate as Luis to find topside sleeping quarters—even more so. I had a reason for wanting to return to New Spain.

  Maria.

  She was there, somewhere with Guerrero’s army. I had to find her. She needed me, and, yes, I loved her.

  Moreover, Luis and I were favorably placed on the ship.

  The powder room was in a ship’s hold above the bilge and not far from where we poured out the buckets. Luis and I could actually see into the powder room when the ship’s cannon master entered or left his compartment.