Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  As an added incentive, Jen had let them know that the survivor would go free.

  The real purpose behind his visit, however, was to discuss the ongoing torture of a Dutch prisoner. The major power in the East Indies, Dutch influence had waned during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Four years ago, however, after the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, the Dutch had begun to reassert their influence. The region’s native rulers had resisted renewed Dutch hegemony, and wars against the Dutch were breaking out.

  The prisoner was a sergeant, commanding guards at a Dutch fort. Jen was torturing him in hopes of getting more details on the Dutch military buildup.

  At present, however, he had something else on his mind.

  “Keep your knives and pinchers red-hot,” Jen said to his black-hooded torturer. “I will have two Spaniards for you to work on—if they don’t do what I ask of them.”

  EIGHTY-ONE

  AS WE WALKED up the street toward the sultan’s palace where the Bendahara was also quartered, a shockingly anxious Anak told us: “Do not forget, when you meet the Bendahara in his chambers, you must kowtow to him. Do it respectfully. Your physical safety and well-being depend on it. The Bendahara is the last man on earth you want to antagonize. Offend him, and you will die a hundred thousand times.”

  Bowing and scraping did not go over well with Luis.

  “Get me in a room alone with him for five minutes,” Luis snarled. “We’ll see how tough he is.”

  “This is no time for false vanity or your stupid Spanish machismo,” Anak said logically, fearfully.

  “I still don’t see why I have to grovel for anybody,” Luis muttered under his breath.

  I personally didn’t see that we had any other alternative. I also thought Anak was more right than he could ever know. After all Luis and I had gone through, I didn’t see that either of us had anything left to be pretentious about. Our ordeal with the cannibals alone should have vanquished the last vestiges of our macho vanity.

  We had heard the Bendahara’s name spoken during our earlier brief stay at the palace, but had not seen him because he had been gone from the city on a task for the sultan.

  Luis was intractable about not kowtowing to “Bastardo Bendahara,” one of his gentler epithets for the sultan’s much-feared chief minister whom he had yet to meet.

  The attitude escalated Anak’s stress to the breaking point.

  “You two have brought me nothing but misfortune,” he whined. “Not only is the sultan expropriating two expensive slaves—and from whose labors I had expected to profit handsomely—those same two slaves have now brought me under the Bendahara’s notoriously savage scrutiny. What will be next? The tender ministrations of his Infamous Mage?”

  I understood that “a Mage” was a preternaturally powerful wizard, but the word “Infamous” as part of the title threw me off. I asked Anak who or what the Bendahara’s “Infamous Mage” was but he was too agitated to respond clearly. He could only grunt frightened incantations to whatever deities he worshipped—and it seemed to me he was willing to worship any and all gods if he thought they would save him from the Mage’s “black arts, blacker heart, and foul sorcery.”

  The only advantage we had was that many palace officials spoke Spanish. Spain’s presence in the region had been so widespread for so long, the language had become the international lingua franca—second only to gold.

  A huge, ferocious-looking guard led us into the Bendahara’s reception room where the court official was seated on an elevated gold chair.

  After we kowtowed before Jen—Luis wisely joining the head-to-floor bumping—the minister told us that we no longer belonged to Anak but to the sultan.

  Anak bowed and exclaimed eternal gratitude to the Bendahara as he hurried away after he was summarily dismissed.

  “Your first new duty,” Jen said, “will be to teach our Mage the secret arts of making killing powder and firearms.”

  The Bendahara stared at us, his eyes half-closed as if he was filtering our images.

  “You must obey without question. If you had tried to escape Anak, you would have been severely punished … but not killed. For Anak, even after an escape attempt, you would have had a value and he would have stopped short of having you killed. Cutting off your noses would have sufficed.

  “If you try to escape the sultan’s service, however, or if you were to fail in your assignment, then you are of no worth and you will wish you were dead … you will loathe your existence and long for the grave.”

  Luis and I looked at each other. Neither of us doubted that an Oriental potentate had tortures that would make an Inquisition dungeon master envious.

  “You,” the Bendahara said to Luis, “will return to your shop with my guards and bring back the goods and equipment. You will no longer work at the shop owned by Anak. You,” he said to me, “will instruct the Infamous Mage on the magic of the powder that kills.”

  An ominous figure—attired head to toe in black—stepped out from the shadows of the chamber.

  The Infamous Mage had appeared.

  The Mage walked me around a fountain in a lush garden. There, the black silk face mask was removed.

  To my eternal surprise the Infamous Mage was a breathtakingly beautiful Chinese woman with large, black-almond eyes and small, delicate features.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  AS WE STROLLED around the fountain, she cast pristine flower petals into its clear depths, hardly taking her eyes off of me as she talked.

  “I already know how the killing powder your people call gunpowder works. It was an invention of Chinese alchemists. There was a book written almost nine hundred years after the death of the man Jesus called the Secret Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things. The manuscript tells us that the killing powder was discovered by Taoist alchemists searching for the elixir of immortality.

  “My people delighted in using it for smoke and fire during celebrations but made little use of it in wars. Flying fire was shot out of bamboo tubes and small balls of killing powder were thrown by hand in battles during the age when the most powerful weapon in the West was the bow and arrow.”

  “But your people never developed it as the power source for cannons and muskets,” I said. I knew some of the history myself from Felix’s books.

  “True, Gunsmith, the killing powder is a Chinese invention, but one we handled foolishly. Had we handled it wisely, we Chinese would rule the world today instead of kowtowing before the cannons of European warships.

  “With the killing powder, Genghis Khan would have blown down the castles of Europe and ruled the entire world.”

  She continued walking around the pond, silently casting petals, but still staring at me.

  I found her intense stares disconcerting—and wondered what she needed me for if she knew so much about gunpowder already.

  “You know quite a bit about black powder already,” I said politely, trying to fill the void.

  “I know of the killing powder as a scholar but have never made it. I have no interest in explosives. The weaponry of war and death do not intrigue me because my work is not in taking lives but extending them. However, one does not disobey the Bendahara.”

  “I will do anything I can to serve you,” I said. I spoke the truth, not doubting the chief minister’s threat that we would curse life if we didn’t meet his needs.

  She had said her work was in preserving life. I wondered if she was a doctor.

  “What is it,” I asked, “that you’re working on?”

  “I will show you.”

  She took me to her workplace, a room beneath her living quarters in a corner of the palace compound.

  The walls and ceiling were adorned with scenes from the Chinese horoscope and celestial map. I saw paintings of dragons and fish with wings, monkeys and tigers. On a table were oracle bones used in fortune-telling.

  A strange chair with the coils of a cobra as the seat and the fanned head serving as the back was against one wall. What made the chair
eerie was that the snake seat had real skin and eyes. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a large number of snakes had been skinned to cover a frame, but as I stared at the head and the eyes appeared to stare back … I wondered whose eyes they had been.

  Perhaps a hapless slave who didn’t prove his worth to the Mage and the sultan’s chief minister?

  She called the chair a naga. “The serpent spirit is a servant of Buddha. When Buddha approaches, the snake coils to make a seat and raises its hood to shade the master’s head from the sun.”

  The room, like the snake chair, had more the atmosphere of magic than practical alchemy.

  She showed me her worktable, which was almost covered with bowls and jars with liquids and dry substances.

  “The search for what I seek began even earlier than the discovery of the killing powder. Chinese emperors have long dreamed of a fabled elixir called Dancing Water. It is written that a few drops of this magic drink promises eternal life.”

  “You drink it and live forever? I see why emperors would want that.” If I had all their privileges, I’d like to live forever, too.

  “It was believed that a fountain of the elixir existed on an island found on no nautical charts. More than two centuries before the birth of the man Christ, the great emperor Ch’in Shih huang-ti sent the most powerful alchemist in all China to the Eastern Sea in search of it. It’s said that the alchemist found the isle called Nippon instead, though that is not proven because he never returned to China.”

  She pointed to a bowl containing a green powder. “This is jade. Because of its beauty and rarity it is believed that if a person ingests it, their life will be extended. The same for gold, cinnabar, and saffron. I use these substances plus many others, including the hearts of elephants and turtles, beasts known for their longevity, in my search for the elixir.”

  I cleared my throat. “People drink gold and jade?”

  She gave a quiet laugh. “Not in molten form, but only after it is turned into a fine powder and dissolved in rice wine. The most distinguished book on secrets of alchemy, the Tan Chin Yao Ch’ed, describes the concoction.”

  She went on to describe how sulfur, an ingredient in gunpowder, mercury, used in silver mining to separate silver from other ore, and the poison called arsenic were substances also used in the search for the elixir.

  Ayyo …

  She read my thoughts and gave me a smile that conveyed her own unspoken amusement.

  “Gunsmith, you are correct in wondering whether the powders of immortality can also be deadly. It is written that many Chinese emperors died from drinking elixirs concocted by their alchemists. I am very careful of what I give the sultan to drink because I would be tortured if he should fall ill after ingesting an elixir.”

  She indicated that her discourse and our walk were over. I returned the polite bow she gave me and she said in parting: “Tomorrow you will begin teaching me about the killing powder. The sultan has some weapons called muskets and pistols gathered over the years but few work. You and your companion will repair the weapons and show me how they are made. At other times, you will give me instructions about the killing powder while your companion works with the weapons.”

  EIGHTY-THREE

  WE ARE IN trouble,” I told Luis after I joined him in the small, dark monk’s cell-like room we shared in the palace compound. I whispered, knowing that the walls have ears.

  “I can teach the Mage to make black powder, but in this climate where it’s always so wet you can almost drink the air, keeping the powder dry will be a constant problem. I’ll never be able to show her how to make powder as good as what I made in the colony. As for cannons and muskets, they lack not only the makings of a foundry, but even if they had a foundry, they don’t have the iron, bronze, or steel to produce weapons.

  “The best I can do is give them hand bombs they will never keep dry and bamboo cannons and muskets that will shoot a ball about the same distance they can spit.”

  “Anything that explodes will impress them.”

  “True—until they duel with the Dutch or Spanish, pointing their bamboo cannons at ships with real ones. The same with the firearms. The Mage is an alchemist who thinks in terms of mixing a few ingredients together, maybe some iron and copper and poof! A musket pops out. She would need a blacksmith’s shop, a foundry, and—”

  “Don’t worry,” Luis said, displaying his eternal confidence that he would have a trick up his sleeve to save us, “we need only to stall them long enough to arrange an escape. With significant gold in our pockets to ensure that we return to New Spain in a grand style.”

  He locked eyes with me. “Amigo, from this moment on, we must watch our backs and plan our escape. We must get off this island even if we have to swim.”

  I didn’t point out that the Bastardo Bendahara had probably already guessed that we would make escape plans as soon as we were out of his sight.

  The next morning I got up early, met with the Mage, and began instructing her on the curious art of black powder manufacturing.

  To my surprise, the shop was against a wall inside the palace compound. Used to skulduggery and machinations, the Bendahara wanted to make sure that he could keep an eye on our activities. The fact that we might accidentally blow up the palace had not occurred to him. I said nothing because I didn’t want to begin my task by showing up a man who loved to torture underlings.

  Luis worked in an adjacent shop, servicing the sultan’s old muskets and pistolas.

  Ayyo … a stray bullet into my powder room and Luis and I would leave the island like Chinese rockets.

  Luis also had five iron cannons to work with, purchased by the sultan from pirates who took them off a European merchant ship.

  I had only the opportunity to walk by the cannons and had kept a straight face when meeting Luis’s eye. The cannons were worthless. Cracks had been sealed with lead … which worked fine if you wanted to keep out water, but did almost nothing to keep in the combustion of gunpowder.

  The Mage told me they had six iron cannons until the sultan’s chief general had his men load one with black powder bought from the same pirates. The general and his “cannoneers” had not survived the explosion.

  Clearly they didn’t know how to mix and handle black powder, nor how to gauge whether a cannon was safe to fire.

  The cannons bought from the pirates were not repairable. They could have been melted down and recast in a proper foundry to produce poor quality but usable barrels, but a foundry didn’t exist on the island. From the stories I heard, I was certain none existed anywhere in the Far East or Pacific islands.

  They had four other cannons, small, inferior Chinese models that a glance at their thin, rusted, iron castings told me would explode the moment they were fired with enough power to send a ball against a fortress or a ship.

  Knowing that my lifespan was directly connected to how enthused the sultan and Bendahara were about the munitions project, as the Mage showed me junk firearms and black powder that you could hardly blow a nose with, I did a lot of smiling and nodding and making nonsensical listening responses.

  Luis, of course, outperformed me. I could hear his exclamations of wild enthusiasm as he talked to a military officer about the worthiness of the firearms—muskets and pistols we both knew couldn’t be repaired because there were no spare parts or a way to make parts. Cannibalizing parts from one weapon to another would result in only a few usable weapons—for which they had little usable gunpowder.

  “We’ll need bamboo and hardwood in large and small sizes to test the killing powder,” I told the Mage. “That way we will be certain we have the correct proportion of ingredients before we test it on the sultan’s expensive firearms.”

  I didn’t add that it would permit us to stall disclosure of how worthless the armory would be. By strapping more hardwood or bamboo on the barrels to be fired, I would be able to make cannons that would fire a deadly blast of pebbles, seashells, and whatever other small items we could stuff into it.
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  After the sultan’s army challenged with wood cannons a typical European warship like a “French 74,” a two-deck ship of the line armed with 74 guns capable of hurtling a ball over a mile, the punishment Luis and I would receive from the sultan would strike terror even in Aztec priests who had skinned people alive.

  Knowing the Chinese love and awe for rockets, and figuring it might also buy us a few days delay, I told the Mage I had ideas for developing and deploying explosively tipped bamboo rockets.

  The Mage suddenly bowed deeply and I turned to find the Bendahara had appeared. I gave him a small bow.

  “Your Excellency,” I said.

  “Walk with me and tell me your impressions of our armaments.”

  I joined him on a path in the compound and talked about the state of the weaponry. He was no fool, so I didn’t inflate my evaluations of the weapons. By now, other Europeans would have told him what was wrong with the arsenal. Much of it was obvious. The knowledge he wanted was my ability—and inability—to make the necessary repairs and provide effective gunpowder. And I had no intention of cutting my usefulness short by telling him I couldn’t meet his goals.

  Ayyo … I saw no percentage in explaining to professional torturers the folly of their ways.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  THE BENDAHARA TOOK me to a courtyard where two men awaited.

  “You will be witness to a duel,” he told me, explaining that the two men were nobles who each claimed that the other had offended him. They were going to settle the dispute by a fight to the death.

  “The choice of weapons is knives,” the chief minister said.

  That would have been my choice, too, considering how fast gunpowder turned damp in the tropical climate.

  As servants prepared the men for the match, the Bendahara explained to me, “One man is bigger than the other. His longer reach gives him an advantage over the smaller man. To ensure that the fight will be of equals, I have had them bound as you see.”