Both of us had freedom to come and go from the palace because we were constantly hunting down supplies, but we also knew that the wharf area was being closely watched for escape attempts.
I did not see the Mage that day or night and she was not at the workshop when Luis and I arrived that morning to launch our escape. The Portuguese ship was sailing with the tide and the time was right, but we both were hesitant because Luis was unsure about the ship’s captain.
“He lost so much at cards, he won’t be satisfied with just the gold we offer. He’ll want everything we have and a promise to give him our firstborn as bond servants. He’d rip out my teeth if he knew I had a gold filling.”
I had not slept well but had terrible nightmares of nagas and other creatures tormenting me.
Ashamed, I had not mentioned my agony of learning the truth about the Mage to Luis … and good friend that he was, he ignored the subject and told me funny stories about his life as a picaro on the city streets of his beloved Spain.
We were surprised to find the Bendahara’s chief aide waiting for us when we arrived at the workshop.
“The Bendahara commands that you prepare a demonstration for the sultan today to show him how the killing powder will launch balls from cannons and muskets. It will take place in two hours.”
The boot-licking bastardo paused and gave us an arrogant smile.
“He commands that you use the metal cannons, not the wood toys you have been playing with.”
As soon as he strutted away, Luis and I stared at each other.
There was no possibility of firing the weapons with full charges. And to load a cannon with less than a full charge would show that they were worthless … as were the cannon masters.
The avaricious Portuguese merchantman captain had suddenly become our only hope.
“I’ll get the explosions going,” I said.
“I’ll get the gold and meet you at the dock.”
After Luis hurried off to get “supplies” for the demonstration to make for the captain, I went into the workroom to set the fuses and make final preparations.
The fuse I selected that would trigger the smoke and fire volcano was a slow one. It was for the powder I’d kept dry but had diluted the explosive power of because I wasn’t trying to blow up the building, just start an inferno that spread faster than a contagion of the plague.
I lit the slow fuse and turned away to get my cloak that was hanging from a hook. The cloak would come in handy to keep off rain and to hide my European features from people on the street.
Then I heard something that caused me to turn around.
The sound of the fuse—it wasn’t the fizzle of a slow fuse but one that was racing.
I froze and gawked at the incredibly fast rate the burning was speeding for the gunpowder container.
The door was closer to me than the end of the fuse. I jerked it open, pulling it toward me and got one step toward getting around it when I felt as if I was hit by a bolt of lightning, a fireball from hell.
Then I heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing.
Time passed, I don’t know how much, a great deal of time to me, but perhaps only seconds for an observer.
The light faded, darkness came, and my mind shut down. At last light came again.
I couldn’t hear anything, but my body was on fire.
I pushed up with my hands and the heavy door slid off me.
The smoke was blinding, and I was choking.
But choking was good. It got my lungs working, my body functioning. As Luis once told me, pain was good—it told me I was alive.
Secondary explosions from batches I’d planted around the area were detonating one by one. I knew these things rather than saw them because the smoke was already black and thick.
I realized the blast blew upward and out, knocking off the roof and flattening the walls in every direction. The door had shielded me from most of the blast.
I crawled and choked, stumbled and staggered to get away from the heaviest concentration of the bellowing smoke. Panic was all around me. People ran and shouted, men and women cried out in fear and panic, trying to escape what they believed was an inferno. At the moment, I had no idea of how much damage had been done or if the entire palace compound was going up in flames.
My lungs were on fire by the time I got out of the palace gate and past the now abandoned guard post.
My feet kept me moving as if they were wise and all-knowing because my mind wasn’t able to direct them or anything else about my body. I knew I was hurt, that I had been scorched by the blast, perhaps so much flesh had been ripped off I was a skeleton.
I saw a man on horseback, then literally ran into the horse as the man stared at the flames and smoke erupting from the palace. He shouted in surprise as I pulled him off the horse. He fought back and I pulled my knife from its scabbard and slashed his cheek. He ran and I took his horse.
When I slipped off the horse at the wharf, Luis ran from the dinghy he had tied to the dock to help me.
“Dios mio! What happened?”
“The Mage,” I croaked. “She spiked our powder in secret and replaced our fuses.”
“Why?”
I stared into his eyes, silent.
Luis stared back, nodded once—and said nothing.
He understood.
NINETY
LUIS HAD BEEN right about the Portuguese captain. He had not actually held us upside down to shake coins from us, but had gone a step better—after we boarded the ship and Luis gave him half the gold from Anak’s well, he took the other half also and then had us stripped naked to make sure we weren’t hiding even a copper.
Stripping me down had exposed innumerable wounds and burns. Not even Luis has escaped uninjured—the right side of his face was slightly swollen from a blow he took when he ran into a guard at Anak’s.
After I finished howling from being washed down with salt water on the deck by Luis, we retired to the cubbyhole assigned to us—a room just big enough for two canvas bunks.
The room stank of the sea and sailors but I was able to crawl into the narrow bunk and “enjoy” the pain.
“The Bendahara gave you the torture of a hundred thousand cuts,” Luis joked.
Ayyo … worse than my pain was the knowledge that we would have to become bandidos when we got back to the colony. No, bandidos in Portugal because we have no dinero left to pay for passage from Lisbon to Veracruz.
“Señor Azteca, never fear and never doubt your amigo,” Luis said.
He had been practicing dealing cards by the light of a candle and now placed the candle by me. He spit into his hand and the “swelling” of his jaw disappeared.
Bloodred rubies glowed in his hand.
“Madre dios,” I whispered. “Anak had a treasure in the well.”
“Not Anak. A gift to me from the sultan’s harem girls.”
I gaped. “You didn’t—”
“Amigo, I earned these gems a hundred times over.” He grinned. “That’s how many of his wives needed to be serviced.”
NINETY-ONE
LOTUS BLOSSOM HAD told me that great beauty was unerringly bloodthirsty.
At the time, I didn’t understand or appreciate her wisdom, though she was obviously an example of the expression’s truthfulness.
Now I had been blinded by great beauty; when I stared into the sinfully sensuous eyes of the Mage, I was mesmerized by her perfect features, unearthly charms, and seeming innocence.
At the time I was making love with her, however, I had become increasingly preoccupied. My distraction had less to do with her than with my revulsion at life under the sultan and the Bendahara, my self-loathing at having to bend to their vile will, and my desperate longing to leave the islands and return to the land of my youth and the woman I truly loved.
I could, of course, explain none of my loathing to the Mage.
The islands were her world. Whether she loved them or loathed them, she was in them and of them. They were her li
fe, and were I frank with her, I would challenge everything around her.
For all I knew, she might have conveyed my feelings to the Bendahara.
I would have found cold comfort there.
Instead I said nothing, but in my obsession to escape the islands, I drifted away from the woman I lusted after.
She didn’t replace my love for Maria. I learned that there were different forms of love and that my feelings for the Mage were different from what I felt for Maria. I wanted to make love to the Mage, but Maria was the woman I wanted to spend my entire life with.
She had used the knowledge I gave her of the killing powder to set a trap for me, of course, replacing my slow fuse with one that suddenly raced and enriching the potency of the gunpowder I had prepared.
It was a miracle I had survived. Had I loaded the powder in a cannon and fired it, the flying iron shrapnel would have sent me to the Nine Hells in a hundred pieces, much like I sent the ship’s cannon master and his assistant when I altered his brew.
“She tried to kill me,” I told Luis.
He shook his head and pulled his mustache. “Perhaps it is even more complicated. Who knows? Maybe the Dutch governor is not a fool and paid that eunuch bastardo Bendahara to kill the sultan’s new cannon masters. Perhaps kill the sultan himself. Didn’t that scheming bastardo of a chief minister say we were to demonstrate the gunpowder for the sultan himself?”
My amigo, as a master of skulduggery, had great insight into the minds of others with a like mentality.
The next morning as I stood at the railing and let a cool ocean breeze fan my raw skin, I read the note I’d found in the pocket of my cloak.
Gunsmith,
If you read this note, it means you escaped my revenge and that I am no longer on this earth because I will have followed the only path open for me to wipe clean the dishonor that failure to kill you has brought me.
By now you will have guessed that I prepared the killing powder to take your life.
You make a mistake when you toy with a heart that loves you—especially in our remote realm. Our smiles, caresses, and words mean nothing to you. Nothing is ever as it seems. We each live in a box which is in another box within another box.
Never assume you understand our dreams, our lives, or our land. Most of all never believe you know our hearts. Or that you know the last word of any human heart …
To break a heart is to break the universe.
Never forget …
The One Who Loved You
In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to her fragile feelings, her vulnerable heart.
Great beauty is bloodthirsty and I had taught her the bloodiest of arts—the art of war.
PART XXI
VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN
NINETY-TWO
Veracruz, 1820
OUR PORTUGUESE PIRATE ship took us from the Spice Islands to Goa on the Indian coast, past the Horn of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the west coast of Africa to Lisbon. At the Portuguese capital, we boarded a ship flying the royal Spanish flag that took us to Veracruz.
We sailed on the Canción de Málaga—the Song of Malaga—a four-hundred-ton merchantman ship with a crew of thirty and a dozen guns.
Luis had considered going back to Spain rather than the colony but eventually decided against it.
“In the colony I am a wearer of spurs,” he said with a malicious grin, “flogging and roweling a fortune off the backs of your bastardo Aztec brothers and puta sisters. In Spain I might as well be an Aztec.”
For Luis, Veracruz was only supposed to be a stopover on the way to Mexico City and for me a short stop before I passed through the capital for the China Road. From conversation with the Spanish sailors, little had changed in the colony in the two years I had been gone. The viceroy still ruled as a potentate in Mexico City while General Guerrero conducted hit-and-run guerrilla operations in the region extending from Acapulco on the west coast up and over the Sierra Madre del Sur to the Valley of Mexico.
Two years separated me from Maria. I wondered for the thousandth time where she was … and who she was with. Did she have a husband? Child? Had the harsh guerrilla’s life broken and destroyed her? Had the royal militia captured and killed her? If she was still alive, could I even find her, would she want me, love me?
One thing was certain—politically and socially the colony had not changed. The gachupines still ran everything, the criollos still chafed at their traces, bits, and whips but silently suffered their humiliation for the sakes of their prize horses and fine haciendas. My Aztec brothers and sisters still sweated dirt and blood while their children starved and their masters reveled in luxury and leisure.
“Ten years ago the priest Hidalgo proclaimed independence and a hundred thousands of my kind—myself included—rose up against the Spanish,” I told Luis as we sighted the fortress island Castillo de San Juan de Ulua that commanded the approach to Veracruz harbor. “Guerrero has been fighting for ten years, five under the priest Morelos and the last five as generalissimo himself.”
“And you Aztec aboriginal savages are still under our Spanish heel.” Again, my good amigo gave me his most devious grin. “God must be telling you that you deserve no less.”
“Señor Picaro, call me a savage again and I shall rip the heart out of your chest in the manner of my Aztec ancestors.”
Luis grinned. “Don’t spoil my resurrected aristocratic status. I have to get used to being a wearer of sharp spurs again.”
Most of the talk in Lisbon and on the voyage to the colony revolved around events occurring in the Americas at places besides New Spain. Revoluciónarios were breaking Spain’s South American empire apart at the seams and liberating colonies from their gachupine masters.
Simón Bolivar, a thirty-six-year-old criollo from a wealthy, aristocratic Venezuelan family, had defeated a Spanish army at the Battle of Boyacá and entered Bogotá in the South American Spanish province of New Granada. Much of the northern region of South America was joining Bolivar’s independence movement.
The flames of revolution were spreading from the Isthmus of Panama to the tip of Tierra del Fuego.
Ayyo … while much of the Americas was a pandemic of revolutionary fever, in New Spain the revolution had stalled, stuck in the mud and jungles along the China Road on the west side of the colony where Guerrero periodically took control of the road, only to have it wrestled loose again when the viceroy sent an army to escort imports as a ship arrived.
The vital trade route on the east coast, from Veracruz to Jalapa, had briefly been under control of guerrilla leader Guadalupe Victoria, but the Spanish had finally managed to overwhelm the outnumbered guerrilla forces. Victoria had been driven into the jungle and was rumored to be dead.
We heard other rumors about startling events in Spain. In 1819, the king prepared to send large forces from Cadiz to New Spain to put down the rebels. But on January 1, 1820, Rafael Riego, the commander of a battalion at Cadiz, proclaimed a liberal constitution—and the concept had spread like the revolutionary firestorms in South America. “Liberals” had gained the reins of government, commanding the Spanish legislature in Madrid called “the Cortes.”
The Cortes had taken actions against the Catholic Church, suppressing the Jesuits and decreeing that the Church fell under civil authority. Issuing pardons to participants in New Spain’s ten-year rebellion, it invited the colony to send representatives to it.
“The decrees of the Cortes in Madrid have no effect in New Spain,” Luis told me, after he talked to other passengers. “With the king busily battling the liberals, the viceroy knows he must answer to the colony’s powerful gachupines and criollos, not political usurpers on the continent.”
As we approached the sandy coastline of Veracruz, the talk shifted to a more imminent threat—black vomit, the scourge of Veracruz. Characterized by sky-high fevers and black, bloody vomiting, this plague had threatened—and often killed—anyone who came near the Veracruz coast.
; The Spanish called it La Ciudad de los Muertos, the City of Death, and passengers and ship crews often went ashore sniffing vinegar pomanders or handkerchiefs soaked with aloe. Both Luis and I sneered at the prevention methods—if the remedies had worked, thousands would not have died each year from the infliction.
“These true believers claim God decides who lives and dies,” Luis said. “Still they sniff vinegar in an attempt to fend off God’s judgments.”
Religious pronouncements from a man who broke God’s laws with joyful abandon.
“I’ve faced pirates and enemy warships and never flinched. I tremble, however, every moment I breathe the toxic air of Veracruz,” the ship’s captain said. “It’s the unhealthiest place in the Spanish world.”
The rich gachupines who controlled most of the commerce didn’t live in the city year round, but had houses at Jalapa, a coastal mountain town sixty miles inland. Mountainous altitude saved Jalapa from the suffocating heat, brutal winter winds, and vicious mosquitoes of the coast.
“They come down from Jalapa to the tierra caliente only when business forces them,” Luis said, repeating what he learned about the region from the captain, “and only in the winter season.”
Tierra caliente, the hot region, was also what they called the China Road area where it ran down to Acapulco.
“How come people living in Veracruz can breathe the miasma and only small numbers die?”
“They’re intermarried with Aztecs. Indio blood is more lethal than the miasma,” Luis said.
I didn’t know if he was serious or still practicing being a gachupine.
Luis slammed me on the back. “Don’t worry, amigo, it’s the dry season and the miasma is not so potent.”
He said that for five months, May to October, the rainy season, the risk was much higher.
“But we must still be careful on our way to the capital. They tell me that on the way to Jalapa one passes swamps that stink of the poisonous miasma.”
The “dry season” was also the time of el nortes, the savage storms that came in off the sea during the winter months. The captain kept us out to sea for three days to avoid being driven aground by the violent winds that blew landward.
Aztec Fire Page 24
