Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  Luis brandished the open chest packed with our glittering “gold” coins of polished brass. He even opened the barrel of flour that at this distance would pass as opium. So they would understand what we were giving them, he shouted: “Gold! Opium!”

  The other two pirate dhows edged closer to the flagship, their leaders no doubt planning to board when the booty was handed over to the captain.

  We were a moment away from coming alongside the pirate vessel when Luis whispered, without breaking his glittering smile, “Now.”

  Using the slanted sail as a cover, I lit the ten-second fuse on my canvas hell-burner—the slanted triangular sail blocking the pirates’ line of sight—and ran it up the mast with a block-and-tackle. Swinging the boom around, I dangled the canvas-packed bomb directly over the pirate dhow—until the bomb touched the base of their triangularly slanting mainsail.

  The pirate captain went into action, shouting commands.

  Arrows flew as the five of us went overboard on the side of the dhow away from the pirate boat. One of the crewmen Arturo had chosen screamed as an arrow caught him between the shoulder blades.

  By the time I came up to the surface, Luis was already twenty feet from his dhow, swimming like a shark, our dhow still providing cover from the fusillade of arrow fire from the pirate ship.

  I went back under as the biggest explosion I ever heard sounded behind me. A horrendous hailstorm of wood and rusty scrap iron hammered the seas around me; the underwater concussion from the blast waves pounded, shook, and convulsed underwater.

  When the iron hail ceased and my breath ran out, I surfaced. Like Lot’s wife, I could not resist looking back. I almost turned into a pillar of wet gasping smoke-choked sea salt. Gathering together had doomed all three pirate boats.

  The trio of pirate dhows—composed of tar-caulked planks, greased rigging, and highly flammable canvas—had converged all of those combustible components into three colossal red-orange fireballs.

  Around me dropped and drifted a scattering of charred spars and other burnt-out wreckage of the pirates’ dhows.

  Even at a hundred feet, the heat from monstrous-size fireballs blazed like smoking, scorching forges.

  Otherwise nothing.

  My canvas-shrouded bombs had vaporized the brigands.

  The pirates and their dhows had simply ceased to exist.

  I could not see one dead floating body.

  All I saw was Luis, Arturo, and the third seaman swimming furiously for the galleon, looking forward to a welcome mug of brandy.

  And Luis said it was not a Chimneys of Hell, I thought.

  PART XV

  IMMODERATE WRATH

  [I]mmeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, the wrath that passes exhausted but never appeased—the wrath and fury of the passionate sea.

  —Joseph Conrad, Typhoon

  SIXTY-FIVE

  FOR TWO DAYS we plowed a furrow of rapidly fading foam across a tranquil turquoise sea. The captain and Luis both now believed we were safe. We were a half day from the entrance to the Manila Straits and at least two days from landfall. The voyage was going well—fair winds and calm seas.

  But nothing lasts.

  Slowly, perceptibly, the weather began to change. The air grew damp and dense. The sky turned dull, dreary, leaden, and dead. Suddenly, angry and slate-gray, the sea was riven by rising swells.

  Even more ominously, the wind and swells died—for nearly three hours.

  That lack of wind, however, was short-lived. The wind began to build again but this time with mounting menacing power.

  Within an hour the swells recommenced. First they were random and isolated. Then they struck in multiples and grew in size until our ship was then rocked by violent unending rolls … one after another.

  The waves burgeoned all around us in height and force, breaking and banging over the deck, hard enough to tear the riggings loose—until the canvas howled and the spars shrieked, the swells knocking us off our feet.

  Arturo quickly gave lifelines to Luis and me to wrap around our waists and lash to the mainmast. He shouted something—no doubt profane—at us but the groaning ship and the storm’s roar drowned out his words as if he had never uttered them.

  The last coherent word I heard any human being speak was when Capitán Zapata roared over the tumultuous blast of the storm: “TY-Y-Y-Y-P-H-O-O-O-O-O-N!”

  Typhoon—the most terrifying word in any sailor’s mind.

  No longer turquoise and tranquil, the dark sea overreached, overpowered, and overmastered. The tall, curling waves sailors called combers rose forty, fifty, sixty feet high and more, towering over the ship, breaking over us like avalanches, flooding us not with molten magma but Himalayan mountains of salt water.

  Occasionally one of these climbing waves would lift us up onto its precarious peak—as high as fifty and sixty feet—where we would balance on its foamy summit, and then be dropped like a rock into the depths of the wave’s trough … either to be lifted up again on the back of another crest for another hair-raising rise-and-fall or wait in the trough for more collapsing waves and their hammer blows of hell. Despite the rope around my waist, I was lifted off my feet and thrown up, hitting my head and crashing my shoulder into the mast.

  How long we rode it out, I do not know.

  Seconds ticked off like minutes. Minutes, like hours. Hours like days.

  Time on loan from hell.

  The sun died and darkness reigned—universal, undifferentiated …

  At some point, the sea turned unusually calm. For the first time in untold hours, I heard a man’s voice.

  “The typhoon’s dead eye,” Luis said.

  We floated in black nothingness … a ship of the dead on an unmoving sea.

  When the sea awoke again, we longed for the stillness of the typhoon’s eye. Starless and sunless, the sea rose in its unchained dead-of-night wrath, black as India ink.

  We couldn’t see, but we could hear—the rumbling roar of the rushing wind, of masts and rigging ripping and howling above the sea and the wind, of spars breaking and crashing to the deck, of men screaming with the terror.

  I was lifted, slammed back down, whipped around, and banged against the mast as the wave crashed against us and almost vertical waves rolled us.

  Every bone in my body felt broken.

  The sea was flogging us all to pieces, bloodying our backs with its cruel cat-o’-nine-tails on the flogging rack of its hellish fury.

  Just when it couldn’t seem to get worse, the waves returned for a second, even more brutal, attack. They crashed down on us from all sides at once—from heights of sixty feet and more.

  The ship groaned and screamed, throbbed and sobbed like a dying animal, raging at its fate; and periodically piercing the groaning and roar of the ship and sea—as if in eerie replication of the ship and sea—I would hear the hideous shriek of a dying man.

  Not that the sea or the night cared. Into the impenetrable dark of a night sea without end, we were banged and slammed.

  When the storm brewed, I had asked Luis why we didn’t take cover down below, but he told me the holds were even more treacherous than the sea-slick wave-crashing deck. The cargo had all broken loose. Everything was blasting through the compartments as if fired from cannons—pots, pans, knives, shoes, guns, chairs, cups, buckets, barrels of provisions, silver coins, bloodied, sea-battered and -bloated corpses.

  Capitán Zapata needed me and Luis from time to time in the pilothouse. We crawled there, tying our lifelines from support to support. Holding the wheel steady took every muscle in a man’s back and shoulders, legs and arms, fists and wrists. He and Arturo needed relief, and we all took agonizing turns at that torture instrument struggling in pain to hold the wheel steady … for dear endangered life.

  The gale had long ago ceased to be a mere act of an indifferent nature but the blood-crazed revenge of a living, breathing beast in its death throes, up on its hind legs, clawing at the world with final violence and brutal rage, the s
hip’s horrendous howls at times strangely and eerily emulating the genuinely human howls that occasionally cut through the ear-cracking sounds of the storm and the sea.

  All the while the breaking waves and cross-waves had swollen in both force and fury. When we caught a crest, we rode to breathtaking heights—fifty, sixty, seventy feet. The crash back down cracked every joist and spar, plank and beam of the ship.

  Still the waves increased in both frequency and size.

  We survived two eighty-foot monsters—but the last drop cracked the main mast a dozen feet above the main deck.

  If the typhoon kept up, it would not only strip the ship piecemeal, the galleon would break up and sink—vanish forever into a sea that leaves neither hole nor trace nor proof of life.

  “Eh, amigo,” Luis yelled.

  I looked up from my own darkness and was shocked that I could actually see my friend grinning at me on the other side of the thick but now cracked oak mast. He was looping his lifeline repeatedly around the mast. Tying it off, he lashed the loose end of my lifeline to it.

  We were now tightly secured to that main spar.

  “Amigo,” Luis said, “you have to tell me one thing—you know, before we die. Between amigos. After all, we have nothing more to conceal. That girl you disguise as a boy. You go to a lot of effort to keep her alive. She must be much woman in bed, no?”

  He treated me to his widest, wickedest grin.

  “You’ll never know, you picaro bastardo.”

  He treated me to a long laugh, echoing high above the devastating din of the typhoon.

  Another wave swelled under the ship, lifting us with torturous deliberate speed up onto its crest. The wave was like a slowed-down wild bronco, who, in his vertically rocketing leap, jackrabbitlike breaks free of the earth, achieving the highest, hardest buck of his whole hell-bent life—except in my wild wrenching awareness everything was now radically slowed down, as if by supernatural intervention.

  Seen through my distorted senses, the great, curling wave raised above the raging sea with godlike languor.

  The ship rode the bronco’s arching back—riding perhaps the highest wave in earthly history, a tsunami of a curling, breaking swell, first 40, then 50, then 60, 80, 100, then an unbelievable 120 feet in the air.

  We hung there in abeyance, poised for all eternity, it seemed, on the froth of that peak.

  God, this is beautiful, I said softly to myself.

  And then God dropped us.

  The drop would have been bad enough. The trough beneath was impossibly deep and improbably distant—no creature on this earth could have survived such a steep plunge—but even worse, high above us was also an entire Pacific Ocean of a wave, collapsing like the Mountains of the Moon into the Valley of the Shadow on mortal men.

  I wanted to pray. Christ was out of the question. Jesus would never countenance my warped view of His Peaceable Kingdom—my joy at the bombs I built that vaporized both brigands and dhows or my delight at the Inquisitor’s long, lethal, late-night swim.

  Quetzalcoatl? I suppose I could have prayed to him, but I didn’t.

  I had never heard that Quetzalcoatl had a sense of humor.

  Which a god would need now—were he to understand me and my life.

  Or that of Luis.

  Or of my blessed, beautiful, and forever beloved Maria.

  So be it.

  I prayed to no god, no mortal being, no divine everlasting—nothing, nobody.

  I didn’t pray at all.

  Triple-lashed to the cracked remains of the mainmast, I stared into Luis’s mad laughter and mischievous grin—a grin that finally reached his dead-as-the-grave eyes.

  Grinning back at my friend, we both waited out our rapidly approaching decline and fall.

  Or more accurately, we rode the fall.

  To the end of time.

  “You know I always liked you,” Luis shouted.

  “Señor,” I said, allowing Luis a sardonically savage smile. “If you liked me less, I would be back in the colony eating tortillas and drinking pulque.”

  Again, his laughter howled high above the storm.

  “I do want to thank you though,” I shouted over the howl of the typhoon, “for everything you’ve done for me—my enslavement into the bilge gang, my murdering of the powder and cannon masters, my massacre of the pirates and their dhows, and now my pointless death in the midst of a howling typhoon. I want you to know—I want you to know—”

  “—know what?”

  Luckily, with the wind-whipped rain lashing my face, he could not see the tears flooding my face—tears of joy and love and laughter.

  “I would not have missed it … for … the … w-o-r-l-d,” I roared at the top of my lungs, stretching the last word out.

  “Me n-e-i-t-h-e-r,” Luis bellowed above the storm.

  “Then I’ll see you in hell,” I howled into his laughing, leering face.

  “I’ll keep it hot for you.”

  Luis’s insane laughter cracked and rolled like thunder through the hammering rain and raging wind.

  His hysterical laughter was infectious, and I found myself joining him.

  Yet even as the last of our laughter rang through the night, I paused to consider Luis’s remark and ponder what hell would be like.

  Would the Nine Hells be my fate?

  I found the subject curiously fascinating. My mind was working clear as a bell, and I meditated on its implications.

  But it was no matter.

  Soon Luis and I would both have more definitive responses.

  After all, the ship’s terminus in the trough and death wave’s crash were now at hand.

  Then the answers would come for sure.

  The closest I came to an answer was Luis’s last reverberating words, roaring at the top of his lungs:

  “Remember me when the lights go out!”

  I heard no more, and I never felt the ship hit.

  Or the biggest wave in the world—possibly in the history of earth, being, and time—that was about to break over me.

  The crash knocked me cold.

  Everything went black.

  Time and the night closed over me—a giant fist dragging a lost soul down, down, down into a nether sea.

  Eternity closed, and the night that knew no end finally knew an end.

  It knew nothing.

  My wildly wrenched, violently deranged awareness went black … black … black …

  … black as the abyss.

  The abyss grabbed me by the throat and pulled me toward it.

  I went along for the ride.

  The spinning pit beckoned.

  Beckoned.

  Beckoned.

  And I dived in.

  PART XVI

  Out of the night that covers me.

  Black as the Pit from Pole to Pole …

  —William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”

  SIXTY-SIX

  WHEN I CAME to, I was lashed stomach down onto the shattered spar that had once been the galleon’s mainmast. The beam’s forward end—two feet above my head—had cracked and broken off at a sharp ninety-degree angle, creating a crudely pointed prow.

  I wasn’t in a mood to appreciate our good fortune. My temples rang like church bells … which all the harpies in hell were currently hammering on.

  Luis stared at me.

  For once he was not grinning like a skull.

  “I thought we’d lost you, amigo,” he finally said. “You were bleeding from the nose, ears, and mouth when I spread-eagled you atop this spar.”

  “You should have fed me to the fishes,” I groaned. “I hurt all over.”

  “Enjoy it. The hurt says you survived the storm and the shipwreck. The hurt says you’re still alive.”

  “I never thought we’d survive that last wave. We still haven’t made it.”

  “Really? Look to your starboard.”

  Through pain-blurred vision, I stared over my right shoulder … at white shining sands backed by dense green
jungle.

  “That’s either the Garden of Eden, the Kingdom of God—or I’ve lost my mind,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s a ways off. A half-mile?”

  “More, and you never know about these ocean currents. They could sweep us back out to sea. Can you swim?”

  “The dead man’s float maybe.”

  “Your head hurts, eh?”

  “Like it was run under a drop forge.”

  “Okay, I’m going to back-kick this log toward the island as best I can. I have to find us a hospitable cove where we can beach—not reefs or rocks which will cut us to pieces. If I feel us being sucked out to sea, however, I’m pulling you off your seafaring throne and you’re joining me in the drink. You’re going to have to swim. We’ll make it. I never thought we’d make it off the bilge gang.”

  … We’ll make it.

  Luis had lashed me belly down on the spar in the dead of night in a typhoon, somehow kept me on top of it all night and morning, and now was propelling me—still strapped to the spar—toward a sunny sandy beach and lush lavish greenery.

  All my life I had judged people not by the strength of their faith, the grace of their bravery, or the size of their soul, but by their appearances.

  I had judged Luis by his appearances.

  And had sold him short.

  He was my friend—the only one I’d ever truly had—and I had sold him short …

  “Luis, leave me.”

  “What is it you are hiding from me, amigo?” he said, both hands on the shattered beam, kicking us toward land with his feet. “What is it your amigo does not know about, eh? A fortune in gold bullion? Now you want to cut me out, no? Maybe you have a rich beautiful widow desperate to have her tarot read, her fortune told.”

  “Luis, I can feel the current pull—away from land, back out to sea.”

  “Never fear, amigo. My tutelage is serving you well. We will get to shore and prosper. We will swim not in salt water but in putas and pistols, brandy and dinero, wine and song. I know about these things.