Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  I nodded. “The map, however, does not show the difficulty of the terrain. We will journey from this high plateau to the colony’s jungle heart, from temperate mountains to the hot-wet, tropical jungle and rivers of the Isthmus and Tabasco. By the time we reach these indio ruins you seek, we may discover that the black vomit of the coast is less dreadful than the sweltering jungles we will face.”

  Most of the journey toward San Juan Bautista was uneventful, but we were only days from the town when the rains started. After we descended from the plateau, rain came down continuously in showers, deluges, and mists, but this time the floodgates of heaven opened and water thundered down on us as if the Mayan gods cursed us for violating their territory.

  In mud up to our knees, our mules would sink up to their bellies, and we would struggle to extricate them from the muck. ¡Dios mío! Insects ate us alive like rabid beasts; snakes, dangling from tree limbs, hunted us even as we walked beneath their bows. Those big, brutal, dragonlike demons of the rivers and swamps stalked us at every turn.

  When your mount is up to its belly in mud, you have no choice but to get off and battle the muck yourself. Soon even the gachupines got their feet wet.

  The wounds from the whipping were still raw and painful when we reached the dense tropics. Each night as I squirmed in agony from their itch, or bled when the wounds reopened, I thought about the fray who caused them.

  We crossed floodplains, rivers, lagoons, marshlands, and swamps, sloshing through the mud, swimming river fords alongside our mules. At some of the streams, when their horses couldn’t carry them, we porters hauled the expedition members across on our shoulders. Only Carlos crossed all the streams on his own feet.

  Often we hacked our way through vegetation so thick that only birds in flight could have negotiated our route. Swelteringly hot, dripping wet every moment, day or night, we were too far removed from the northern mountains and the great seas that hammered the coasts to breathe clean, cool air. We saw few people of European stock, encountering only an occasional mestizo trader and once a hacienda’s criollo majordomo, but mostly we encountered indios from the scattered villages. A people time has forgotten, they lived no differently from the way they did when Cortés landed three centuries before or when God’s Son trod the shores of Galilee.

  The savages wore scant clothing and spoke no Spanish. Not that I called them “savages” in Carlos’s presence. He regarded them as the “indigenous people” whom we had conquered, ravaged, raped, and exploited and whose culture we had shamelessly annihilated.

  I personally cannot judge or evaluate their cultural achievements, but I must assert that the indios I met were physically impressive. Modest in stature, they were nonetheless powerfully built and obviously fit—all this despite the sickeningly hot climate, pestilential insects, and ubiquitous predators, such as alligators, jaguars, and pythons, which dogged them—and us—at every turn. Still, I could not share Carlos’s glowing admiration for them. Their conspicuous absence of clothing, their ludicrous lack of weaponry and horses, combined with their pervasive profusion of blood-red body tattoos, which they colored with a foul-smelling ointment made from gum tree residues, inclined me to view them as less than civilized.

  I found their criminal justice system barbaric as well. To punish the unjustified killing of a person, the killer was sentenced to be delivered to the relatives of the deceased. Once in the hands of the victim’s family, the killer either had to pay his way out or was put to death. A thief had to pay back not only the value of what he stole but was indentured as a slave to the victim for a period of time, his internment determined by the value of the theft.

  “An eye for an eye,” Carlos said.

  “Not if you buy your way out of it,” I muttered under my breath.

  For adultery, the guilty men were tied to a pole and delivered to the aggrieved husband. The husband had a choice of forgiving the crime or dropping a large rock on the adulterer’s head from a goodly height, thus killing him. Abandoned by the husband, the unfaithful wife lost the protection of her village, which led inevitably to slow, agonizing death.

  I found it odd that in most villages the young men did not live in the same households with their parents. Instead, they were housed communally until they married. When Carlos asked a priest why they lived that way, the priest denounced the practice rather than provide an explanation.

  This ignorance incensed Carlos. “The priests try to convert the indios to our faith, but the priests refuse to understand their old gods. Maybe if the priests knew the reasons for the customs better, they would convert more of them.”

  Tempers were short, food moldy, and—except for the local indios—whomever we hired fell victim to fever and returned home. I endured the unendurable cheerfully, which surprised Carlos. I couldn’t explain to him, of course, that living on the run, continually looking over my shoulder, accepting insults and humiliation from my inferiors, made our jungle trek seem relatively bearable.

  I also assumed a new role, one that freed me from the camp’s petty problems. The soldiers had proven so singularly inept at both tracking and marksmanship that Carlos had handed me a musket, powder, and ball and commanded me to bag the camp’s fowl and game.

  The rain, which now showed no sign of letting up, prevented our clothes and boots from ever really drying. It did give us temporary reprieve from the pestilential mosquitoes that plagued us day and night, biting and sucking our blood until our exposed hands and faces were covered with lividly inflamed, wickedly infected sores.

  Each night before darkness fell, I hung an oiled tarp for Carlos to eat and sleep under. He invited me to share it with him, even though the inquisitor-priest and Fray Benito both frowned at Carlos’s kindnesses to a peon.

  I soon discovered that Carlos wanted me close by at night so he could talk. I knew more than he suspected but kept my tongue still. I asked few questions and mostly listened. A burden in him fought to escape, devils he had to exorcise one day.

  Drinking more and more, Carlos leaned sideways on his bedroll, talking and sucking on a brass brandy flask. Brandy loosened his tongue, so much so that I sometimes feared he would get us both in trouble. Sitting up with my back against a tree, I listened to his whispered confidences and the buzz of mosquitoes.

  As he stared up at the starry sky, he told me something that made me wonder if he had completely lost his mind.

  “You know six planets circle the sun, don’t you, with Saturn being the farthest from Earth?”

  I didn’t know, but I pretended I did.

  “Despite the nonsense they speak in churches about heaven above, astronomers with telescopes have discovered an incalculable number of suns, solar systems, and worlds like our Earth in the universe. The astronomers state with perfect logic and clarity that if life thrives on our Earth, then life must exist on other planets as well. Let me read you something from a set of knowledgeable books published by the British a few years before I was born called the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

  He read from a piece of paper:

  To an attentive confiderer, it will appear highly probable, that the planets of our system, together with their attendants, called satellites or moons, are much of the same nature with our earth, and destined for like purpose. For they are solid opaque globes, capable of supporting animals and vegetable.

  He was so excited, his voice trembled. “Juan, there are people on other planets. Listen, it goes on to say that people even live on the moon!”

  On the surface of the moon, because it is nearer us than any other of the celestial bodies, we discover a nearer resemblance of our earth. For, by the assistance of telescopes we observe the moon to be full of high mountains, large valleys, and deep cavities. These similarities leave us no room to doubt, but that all the planets and moons in the system are designed as commodious habitations for creatures endued with capacities of knowing and adoring their beneficent Creator.

  He stared at me, wonder enveloping his face. “Don’t you find t
hat incredible, Juan? Scholars with telescopes have discovered that we are not alone in the universe. The church doesn’t want us to know this, that’s why they prosecuted Galileo after he asked the bishops to peer through his telescope. The bishops weren’t afraid they would see heaven; they feared sighting habitable planets.”

  I didn’t tell him I found it more frightening than incredible. People on the moon and Mars? An infinite universe rather than heaven? If the inquisitor-priest got his hands on the paper Carlos had read from, he’d rack us both right there in the jungle and broil us at the stake.

  “I told you about encyclopedias, about how scholars in many nations are following the lead of the French and producing them, compiling and organizing the wisdom of the ages so that all may access and learn from it. What I didn’t tell you is that I am working on two Spanish encyclopedias.”

  “Two? At the same time?”

  “Yes, two. One for the king and the other for all mankind. The version the king gets will have been censored by the Inquisition and the pack of narrow-minded court hangers-on who find it to their advantage to keep the people in intellectual darkness. But the other, Juan, the one I compile in secret will be the truth. Do you know what that is, what I mean by the truth?”

  I shrugged. “As things are, señor?”

  “Yes, as they really are, not what the narrow dogma of the Inquisition says is truth, not what the professors who teach lies in our schools and universities say is the truth because they are too ignorant or too afraid to speak the truth.”

  I rubbed the stubble on my chin and looked around the camp. Most of the men were sweating in their tents, suffering the heat to hide from the mosquitoes.

  My friend Carlos was getting more complicated every day. It would be better if I carried the bags of a priest rather than those of a heretic.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Juan, that I am bait for that Inquisitor over there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the inquisitor-priest’s tent. “But I don’t care; I’m tired of being afraid, of hiding in the dark. Because of men like him I have had to hide knowledge like a thief hides his plunder. Do you know what they did to my teacher, the man who first took me by the hand and showed me the light beyond the darkness of religious dogma? One night they came to his house and took him to their dungeon, the place the Inquisition maintains to frighten us. They accused him of giving forbidden books on the Church’s ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum’ to his students to read—”

  “A lie, of course.”

  “No, it was true. He gave us forbidden fruit. But do you break a man’s bones for reading a book?”

  FORTY-FIVE

  AS WE NEARED the ruins of the ancient city, Carlos told me that like Teotihuacán, the true name of the place had been lost in time. “It’s called Palenque because that’s the name of the nearest settlement of any consequence, San Domingo de Palenque, an indio pueblo three or four leagues from the ruins. If the bishops had not been so intent upon destroying every vestige of indio history and culture after the Conquest, we would know the real name of this great city.”

  Nearing the ruins, we traversed a less relentless country, part savannah, part forest. We crossed streams and a small river, a respite from the swamps and mires we had trudged in for days.

  One night we stayed at the casa of a hacienda, camping against the outer wall. Like other haciendas in underdeveloped regions, the amount of ground owned by the hacendado was vast, but only a small fraction of it could be used for crops and cattle. A hospitable gentleman, he roasted two cows over an open fire for our dinner.

  That night as we lay in the darkness, Carlos expanded on the culture that built Palenque and the other Mayan centers.

  “The Mayas rose as a great civilization hundreds of years before the Aztecs,” Carlos said. “In terms of the history of the indios, the Aztecs had been a mighty empire for only a relatively short time, perhaps a century or so, prior to the Conquest. But many scholars believe the Mayas had been a powerful empire centuries before, reaching back to the time of our Lord Christ.”

  He explained that the Mayan culture rose to power sometime after Christ’s birth and reigned supreme up to the beginning of Europe’s Dark Ages.

  “The first stage of Mayan civilization lasted up to around 900 a.d. During that time, at least fifty significant Mayan cities dominated this region, places like Copan, Tikal, and Palenque, some with populations of fifty thousand or more. After that period, most of the great Mayan centers were abandoned for reasons we don’t know.

  “During the next stage, the wondrous city of Chichén Itzá became a Yucatán center, along with the cities we call today Mayapán, Uxmal, and others. The civilizations of the Mayas extended from the neck of territory between the two great oceans, the isthmus, to the Yucatán Peninsula and down to the Guatemala region.”

  The Mayan society had rituals similar to those of the indio civilizations to the north, he said. “Like their cousins the Mexica, Toltecs, and other indio civilizations, the Mayas practiced human sacrifice as part of the blood-for-corn covenant with the gods. They frequently fought savage wars, yet like the other indios, the Mayas were also passionate seekers of knowledge. Their observations permitted them to construct an amazingly accurate calendar. Like the Aztecs, the Mayas preserved their great wells of knowledge in books and encriptions. And, just as the zealots of the church destroyed the evidence of other indio accomplishments, they committed the same sin against the Mayas.”

  He shook his head. “Do you not find it unbelievable that our knowledge of the rich culture of the Mayas is lost because of zealots?”

  Having lost everything, including my bloodline, not so long ago and having learned that my life had been a folly and a fraud perpetrated by a man consumed by grotesque greed, I found nothing my fellow man did unbelievable.

  FORTY-SIX

  AS WE CAME to our destination of the ancient city, Carlos said, “I found out from the majordomo last night that Cortés had passed near here several years after the Conquest of the Aztecs. A fascinating man, I suppose the great conquistador exemplified what it took to discover, conquer, and exploit new worlds. Are you familiar with his Honduras trek?”

  “Once again, I confess my ignorance.”

  “Like so many events in the era of the Conquest, it is a tale of adventure, murder, and perhaps even a bit of madness. It began when Cortés sent one of his captains, Cristóbal de Olid, to start a colony in Honduras. Far removed from Cortés’s supervision, Olid swelled with ambition, and his good senses took flight. Cortés learned in Mexico City that his captain would no longer obey his commands, that he was now acting independently.

  “I tell you, Juan, Olid was foolish. He knew how tough Cortés was, knew the conqueror was so tenacious that he burned his own fleet to force his men to fight the Aztecs after they became frightened and wanted to return to Cuba.”

  No guts, no glory, eh.

  “Olid thought that, given the distance between himself and Cortés, he could defy him. He was wrong. Cortés first sent a trusted captain, Francisco de las Casas, to show Olid the error of his ways. Shipwrecked on the coast, las Casas fell into Olid’s hands. Even though he was held captive, las Casas still rallied Olid’s men, raised an insurrection, arrested Olid, and beheaded him. However, only word of the shipwreck reached Cortés in Mexico City, so he set out for Honduras with an army of about a hundred and fifty Spaniards and several thousand indios along with a troupe of dancers, jugglers, and musicians. Still the rough terrain made the journey a miserable one.

  “Guatemozín, the last emperor of the Aztecs, was with Cortés, possibly because Cortés feared leaving him in the capital.

  “When the men became exhausted and near starving, Guatemozín and other indio notables, plotted to kill the Spaniards and to parade Cortés’s head on a stake all the way back to Mexico City, stirring the indios to rally against the Spanish.

  “Cortés learned of the conspiracy, again through Doña Marina. Holding an impromptu trial, in which Guatem
ozín protested his innocence, Cortés had him and other leaders hanged.”

  Carlos shook his head. “Whether Cortés was correct about Guatemozín’s guilt, the Cholula plot, or the many other victories and atrocities attributed to him, for certain he was a man of decision. He shared three attributes with the Emperor Napoleon, character traits that have made Napoleon the conqueror of Europe—decisiveness, boldness, and utter ruthlessness.”

  Each time Carlos mentioned the amazing feats of Marina, I was reminded of the touch and courage of my Marina.

  When we finally arrived at Palenque, I felt like Columbus when he spotted land after his nightmarish voyage. Another city of the dead, long abandoned by its occupants, perhaps even centuries before, Palenque had been swallowed whole by the jungle. Unlike Teotihuacán, whose towering pyramids dazzled everyone, even from a distance, the ruins had to be cleared of their entanglement to be observed.

  It would have taken a small army to hack the city free of the jungle’s grip, a luxury we were short of, forcing the scholars to choose only specific parts of edifices to be cleared and studied.

  Carlos told me these ancient ruins were discovered shortly after the Conquest, but two centuries passed before a priest, Padre Solís, was sent by his bishop to examine the site. Little came of the mission; like so many of the antiquities of the New World, no one cared about the sites once they had been stripped of treasure.

  How large had the city been? It wasn’t possible for us to tell, but we discovered structures overrun by jungle for a league in each direction.

  “They call this the Palace,” Carlos told me as we examined a huge complex. An enormous oblong structure with tall walls surrounding buildings, courtyards, and a tower, the Palace, like other structures of Palenque, was covered by a coating of a stucco that dried hard and kept its shape for long periods. The structures were dark and dank, with many halls and rooms, including a series of underground storerooms.