Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  “TR-U-U-U-S-T M-E-E-E-E-E!!!!” Luis thundered, dragging the words out as he steered us toward the island across a placid pristine sea.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  IN THE LAST quarter mile the currents forced us to abandon the spar. I left it oddly ambivalent. I had not forgotten that Capitán Zapata had lashed Luis against that spar and flogged him to the bone.

  Yet that same spar had later saved both our lives—an irony I would not forget.

  In the end, however, the spar drifted back out to sea—from whence all three of us had come—with a merciless sluggish speed.

  “Amigo,” Luis said, “I know you hurt, but you must swim like all the hounds of hell were at your back. At dusk, sharks enter these shallow waters and feed on the fat straggling bottom-feeders. We have no time to lose. The sun is fading fast.”

  We were fatally exposed, but more important, I did not want to let Luis down. We had been through too much, and he had done too much.

  With almost superhuman effort, I began to swim—arm over arm, hand over hand, struggling to match him stroke for stroke, kick for kick. My leg and shoulder muscles blazed like balefire. I was not only sick and exhausted, in truth I’d never swum all that well. Luis, on the other hand, was a strong, skilled swimmer, and studying his strokes, I attempted to imitate him.

  Luis had told me once that the containment of pain was the highest of all the fighting arts, and I had not understood what he meant.

  I understood now.

  I hurt.

  I hurt all over.

  Unfortunately, pain was a luxury I could not afford. Since Luis would not abandon me, our survival meant I had to defeat my pain. Not that I had any confidence that I could accomplish that. I was not brave enough to swim through so much agony and exhaustion.

  In the end pain would break me down and wear me out.

  Unless I could contain it.

  Contain it how?

  Contain it where?

  Elsewhere.

  Well, if so, I had a lot of pain to contain. My head throbbed unbearably. My shoulders and thigh muscles burned, rivaling the agony between my temples.

  In fact, my limbs hurt so much I almost forgot the blinding agony in my head.

  Contain the pain, I said silently to myself.

  You can’t control the world, but you can control yourself, Luis had told me another time. You can control yourself.

  Almost without willing it, I felt my awareness detach from my body—in fact leave my body. Even as I swam, my awareness was projecting itself high overhead, where it watched my pain-racked body hack haltingly at the water, forcing itself toward the shore.

  Put the pain elsewhere, a voice whispered in my brain, no, … to my brain. Contain it elsewhere and … kill it.

  Suddenly the pirate dhow sailed into my awareness. I was back on our own dhow with Arturo and about to blow up the brigand’s boat.

  Put the pain there. Let the pirate dhow own it.

  I stared at the pirate dhow’s huge slanting triangular sail.

  And placed the pain … there.

  Adios, brigands.

  Adios, dhows.

  Adios, pain.

  Again, the fire-burner’s blast.

  Again, the pirate dhow detonated and disappeared into the … sea.

  The pain disappeared.

  The containment of pain was the highest of the fighting arts.

  Renewing my efforts, I strengthened my kick and lengthened my stroke.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  WE REACHED SHORE shortly before dusk—and before the sharks came out in force. We were both so drained and dehydrated, we weren’t thinking clearly. All we thought about was water, food, and sleep.

  We headed into a lush, thick green jungle of reeds and palms, stringy vines and flamboyant fronds. Finding a stream, we dropped to our knees and lowered our faces into it. I would have drunk till I burst, but after a half-dozen slurps, Luis pulled me back.

  “Drink too much at one time, and you’ll founder like a horse,” he said.

  Next, Luis scaled a coconut palm. He hurled two nuts down onto some rocks below, splitting them like apples. Afterward we cleaned out the white meat inside.

  I never ate anything better in my life.

  Sleep overwhelmed both of us almost at once. Falling asleep by an open stream with no protection from predators—animal or human—is never wise, but we seemed to have no choice.

  Once we got water and food in us, we collapsed.

  Our limbs and eyelids became heavy as lead. Blind exhaustion and black oblivion buried the horrors of the last two days.

  We slept.

  Luis later told me that at the time our sojourn in Morpheus’s arms seemed like a gift from the Greek gods of yore.

  “Beware all Greeks bearing gifts,” he said.

  We might have slept three days for all I know.

  There would come a time in which I wished we’d never awakened.

  When I came to, it was late morning. The sun was shining, tropical birds that looked curiously like flamingos fluttered around the stream. After all those months at sea, my eyes were starved for color, and that jungle stream had color in abundance.

  A dazzling rainbow spectrum of garish hues.

  The gaudy jungle, however, was not what held my attention. Instead, it was a man bending over me, smiling—but with the tip of a short scimitar-looking knife pressed firmly against my throat.

  “Lovely day,” I said pleasantly.

  He smiled back with equal pleasantness, and for a while I wondered if we would not get along … despite the strange thornlike adornments impaling his nose, lips, and ears. Bones, I thought, he’s wearing pieces of bone.

  A dozen or so strange, grayish, potato-shaped fetishes were festooned to his belt.

  Unfortunately, the longer I stared at that belt and its appendages, the more I was disturbed.

  The potato-shaped objects adorning his belt were … shrunken heads!

  “Don’t panic,” Luis said calmly. “We shall get along famously. I can tell. In fact, I believe they are about to invite us to … dinner.”

  SIXTY-NINE

  WE DIDN’T SUFFER an overly long march to their village—though I, for one, was in no burning hurry to get there.

  The smell of roasting meat permeated the village. A disproportionate number of the thatched-roof grass huts boasted cook fires just in front of their entranceways—fires framed by big spits with turning handles, on which were turning and roasting choice cuts of meat.

  That the village boasted so many meat-roasters wasn’t reassuring. In coastal villages, game was rare and the villagers—I had understood—typically supplemented their reduced meat intake with fish, which were available in abundance.

  I was even more dismayed when we turned a corner, and I gazed on our new lodgings: A huge bamboo cage, which already housed six captives.

  The fierce-looking warriors with shrunken heads for decorations gave us each an inhospitable shove into the cage.

  The occupants we joined in the cage were similar in color but wore different body decorations and tattoos than the spearmen who took us captive.

  Luis immediately struck up a conversation with a man who spoke some Spanish. His name was Raphael. He had been a worker at a Philippines mission run by Spanish priests before he washed ashore on the island after the fishing boat he was on sank in a storm.

  “Where are we?” Luis asked him. “What in God’s name is going on?”

  “Whatever’s going on, I assure you,” the man said, “it has nothing to do with God—not unless your God advocates the consumption of human flesh.”

  I chose not to explain that my Aztec gods had demanded precisely that from their subjects.

  “They feed us as much as we can hold—and then some,” Raphael said. “But not out of their love of humanity. They’re fattening us up.”

  With long hair, dark eyes and skin, a broad nose and mouth, and high, wide cheekbones, the Spanish-speaking native could have passed for one
of the island cannibals who had captured us.

  “How did the other men end up on this godforsaken island?” Luis asked.

  “Their ship needed food and water,” he said. “The captain sent them ashore to forage for provisions and a small army of these heathen hellhounds descended on them. When the captain saw how many there were, how ferociously they attacked, and how they were manning their outrigger canoes, he pulled anchor and sailed off, leaving them to face their man-eating fury. What about you two?”

  “Shipwrecked survivors,” Luis said.

  “A typhoon sank our ship,” I elaborated, “and we made landfall on a sinking spar.”

  “You were better off in the typhoon,” Raphael offered.

  SEVENTY

  AS THE DAYS passed, our newfound friend regaled us with tales of this most inhospitable of regions. The rivers were so crocodile-infested as to be unswimmable. Consequently, escape from this cannibalistic death trap demanded the negotiation of dense, swampy, largely impassable jungles.

  The tribesmen themselves were bronze-complexioned with long black hair, wide noses and cheekbones, and small deep-set eyes. They seemed somewhat shorter than Europeans. The hornbill head feathers, which the males favored, indicated social status and pecking order within the tribe. Each feather represented one head which the wearer had decapitated—just as the heads themselves would festoon the wearer’s grass hut.

  The upper back, shoulders, and upper legs of the men and women were heavily and elaborately tattooed with blue-black bloated scars.

  I learned that the local pirates—who were notorious throughout the region for their ferocity—were not from the island but from a more “civilized” island. Known as Sea Dayaks and Ibans, they hailed from a large island called Borneo. Led by Malays, they marketed the slaves and goods they seized.

  The cannibals were a similar group but not seafarers.

  Nor had anyone ever accused them of being civilized.

  Luis and I quickly realized that the typhoon had swept our ship far away from the Manila Straits.

  Once—from the vantage point of our palatial abode—we witnessed one of their cannibalistic rituals.

  It was hardly inspiring.

  During the ceremony several captives—who had been caged and fattened far longer than ourselves—were led up stone steps.

  Several warriors seized and subdued them, then unceremoniously brained them with clubs.

  Then butchered and dressed them out like newly killed deer for dinner.

  When their various loins, tenderloins, and sweetbreads were spitted and rotated over the cook fires—till their body fat crackled, smoked, and popped—the smoky smell of their roasting flesh was stomach-wrenching.

  Luis said, “We are getting the hell out of here, amigo. You and I, we are impaling no cannibal’s spit.”

  And I agreed, saying to myself, I don’t care how many victims my ancestors slew and devoured, I will not be one of them.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  CAGED, WE HAD too much time to worry about our fate. Small, harmless snakes occasionally slithered in and Luis worked off some of his boredom by trying to make one into a pet.

  Once a day warriors would poke us with spears until we undressed. When we were stripped utterly naked, the village women collected around our cage, where they excitedly ranked our respective male organs.

  Raphael explained, “When these cannibals cut off our male parts, the pieces are apportioned solely to the women of the tribe in the deluded belief that devouring a male stalk will help make them pregnant.”

  “A thousand putas have gnawed on my garrancha,” Luis grumbled, “and none of them got pregnant.”

  “The most monumental member is reserved exclusively for the chief’s wife and is to be eaten first. The rest are devoured in descending order, the smallest to be ingested last,” Raphael said.

  The women seemed unsettled by my member … not so much by its immensity—which was not inconsiderable—but by its complexion, which was lighter than their males’, who were almost as dark-complected as africanos.

  They feared that my manhood’s coloring would clash with their duskier hues, bestowing variegated light-and-dark blotches on their babies like the zulzi snake.

  The women’s fear of my organ had one positive effect. They were determined to kill, cook, and consume me next to last.

  Luis was to be last. His member was not only lighter than mine, it was so shockingly stupendous as to intimidate stud bulls and jack mules.

  We stood in line, watching our cell mates barbarically brained, then brutally beheaded. Soon—despite the ferocious fears our male stalks provoked—we were at the line’s head.

  They were ready to bash, behead, and dissect us.

  But Luis was nothing if not resourceful. He had already figured out that these cannibals would not eat anyone who was sick. He prepared a scenario that he was sure would deceive even the most cynical savage.

  While we were waiting, he forced me to eat poisonous berries, which not only sent me into convulsions, it made my face blotch in the exact same manner the cannibal women feared my manhood would discolor their babies. While I convulsed in genuine agony, Luis went into action. Bending over me, he began sucking one of our pet snakes out of my ear.

  The trick was pretty weak, but my convulsions and discoloration were genuine, which distracted Luis’s audience from his sleight-of-hand.

  They now believed Luis a genuine sorcerer.

  Communicating with body lanuage and grunts, they named Luis head shaman. He promptly appointed me deputy shaman. Instead of feeding them, we would be feted.

  My amigo was nothing if not resourceful.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  LUIS AND I quickly learned these cannibals had strange sex customs and brewed lethal varieties of liquid spirits.

  We discovered both these facts that very night during a ritual celebration in which the chief intoxicated us with some of their potent drinks and forced us to perform sex on his wives.

  As best as I could tell from the sound, the names of the wives were Bari, Bati, and Badi. The chief now believed that if we inseminated them with our supernatural seed and godlike organs, the offsprings would be divinely endowed.

  The wives weren’t that bad-looking, but something about copulating cannibals repelled even my sexually liberal amigo. Not even Luis—whose ethical standards in erotic encounters was ludicrously low—could stand the lustful demands of the cannibal life.

  Especially when the three cannibalizing wives pondered our private parts, licked their lips, and slavered hungrily.

  The next night in the wee hours before dawn—after the natives had collapsed from drink and debauchery—we fled into the jungle and the dark.

  Unfortunately, the cannibals knew the surrounding rain forest like monkeys know mangrove swamps and sharks know the sea. By dawn, they were almost on our heels, and gaining fast.

  Every step of the way was agony: We were eaten by mosquitoes, blood-sucked by leeches, gnawed by ants, spat at by snakes, snapped at by crocodiles.

  The sweltering tropical heat melted us right down to our marrow until we resembled tallow-dripping candles.

  By late morning the cannibals’ wolfish howls were reverberating up our back trail.

  Moreover, Luis—accustomed to horses and carriages—had never raced through swamp-choked thorn-ridden jungles barefoot. His feet—soft and spoiled from a lifetime of leather boots and thick socks—were bleeding and blistered.

  Once negotiating a high vinetangled ridge we slowed down and caught a downhill glimpse of our pursuers.

  It was hardly an inspiring sight.

  Besides long composite bows and quivered arrows, the cannibals brandished eight-foot hardwood blowguns, as lethally and meticulously reamed-out as rifle barrels. Their arrows and darts were both poison-tipped, their favorite toxins distilled from the fermented flesh of rotted corpses.

  As we paused for a second look, a crossbow bolt almost hit Luis. A crossbow was a complex weapon,
second only to a firearm in its lethal abilities. It wasn’t a weapon that the primitive islanders would have.

  Someone other than the cannibals were chasing us.

  I groaned miserably.

  Trained warriors armed with crossbows and prehistoric savages were both dogging our tracks.

  And both were trying to capture and kill us.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  ALMOST AS SOON as Luis ducked the crossbow bolt, an elephant came crashing through the foliage. It came right at us, knocking Luis aside and nearly trampling both of us. A dozen soldiers quickly surrounded us, their lances and nocked arrows pointed at our chests.

  “Look on the bright side,” Luis said. “They may kill us but at least they won’t eat us.”

  Trussed up by the neck and wrists with heavy hemp ropes, we now marched with the soldiers of the local sultan. Luckily, their sergeant was the offspring of a Spanish sailor who had jumped ship in the sultan’s domain and a local woman. His Spanish was rough, but serviceable.

  We had a long, hot, tedious walk back to the sultan’s palace, and the sergeant-at-arms, Sergeant Marquez, was as miserable as the rest of us. Tall, angularly thin, in a tan baggy uniform with a cylindrical military hat and tight breeches shoved into black knee-high boots—his clothes, like ours, were drenched in sweat.

  Luis proceeded to entertain him with dazzling sagas of personal heroic deeds. Having served six months on a Manila slave-labor plantation as an overseer—Marquez had no love for the Spanish overlords, but respected them as a power in the region. As Luis related to him our miserable misadventures at the hands of Spaniards, the sergeant was genuinely sympathetic—Luis having managed to get around the fact that he was also Spanish.

  Moreover, Marquez had soft eyes, a ready laugh, and a decent soul. He described our predicament to come and offered some useful advice.

  “The sultan,” Sergeant Marquez explained, “will be interested in your capture by and escape from the cannibals.”