Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  To ward off pirate attacks and defend against England’s threat on the high seas, Campeche developed into a well-fortified town. Surrounded by a wall and a dry ditch, Campeche had four gates, including one that opened on the pier. Well protected against attack by both land and sea, forts to the east and west—with two batteries beneath the western one—commanded the high ground.

  Entering the town, I found it to be a handsome community with some buildings in the Old Moorish and Spanish style: buildings surrounded a square in the center, with piazzas on each side of the square and a fountain and tropical garden in the middle.

  Carlos and the other expedition members were settled into two inns across from each other, near the main square, while I was given a room at a nearby stable.

  “You are privileged to sleep among the animals,” Carlos said, grinning. “Did not our Lord Jesus first come to us in a stable?”

  While I wandered the town, I ate a local favorite, a taste I had not experienced before: young shark stewed with garlic and chile. I drank a bottle of wine and leered at lovely señoritas. Soon, I found myself at the port, inquiring about boats to Havana and was told that one would be leaving tomorrow at first light.

  I would be on it. The ship, which drew much more water than the flat-bottomed bungo that brought us to the town, could not moor closer than a couple leagues. I arranged for a small boat to row me out to sea so I could board before dawn. It took nothing to book passage but my presence and dinero. I was short on money, but I had served Carlos well, saved him from the hangman, no less, and my conscience would not be offended if I helped myself to some of his gold.

  When I went to the inn where Carlos was staying, I found him in bed and suffering from the fever that had plagued many of the expedition. His skin was burning hot, and he was shaking and suffering shakes and chills. The attack could go on for hours, perhaps until the next morning. I gave him a dose of the medicine we used for the fever, a substance obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree.

  Coming down the stairs, I heard words spoken among expedition members in the main room that put a chill worse than malaria down my spine.

  Constables! Díaz, the engineer, had convinced authorities that his plans had been stolen and copied. A search was going to be made of the baggage of all members of the expedition.

  I rushed back upstairs. Was it possible that Carlos still had the plans in his baggage? Not even he could be that naïve and foolish, I told myself.

  I was wrong, María Madre de Dios! He still had the drawing of a fortification near Puebla. The fool should never have left Spain; he was a danger to himself when he stepped outside the hallowed halls of a university.

  Alternatives flew through my mind, including climbing out the window and getting to the port to find a rowboat that would take me out to the Havana-bound ship immediately. But I couldn’t leave Carlos sick and helpless; he’d become my amigo, and I didn’t have many in my brief life. I couldn’t leave him to face the danger alone.

  I thought about burning the papers, but that would leave tale-tell ashes, not to mention I had no fire going in the room. By the time I got one lit, the constables would be at my side. Even if I ate the paper, the constables would be relentless unless they had their criminal and the evidence. They needed to complete their mission.

  The only thing to do was to give them the evidence and the culprit and hope that would satisfy them. If the constables were still around tomorrow asking questions, and Carlos had broken the fever, fool that he was, he would end up telling them his sins, and we’d both get arrested.

  Taking the contraband plan, I left Carlos’s room and quickly went down the hallway to the door from which I had seen Fray Benito exit earlier. He was now downstairs with the other expedition members, speaking to the constables. His arrogant tone as he discoursed on what should be done to traitors carried all the way up the stairs.

  I rummaged through his baggage and found the book that bore the false title about a “saint’s” life. Slipping the book out of its cover so the pornographo contents would be obvious, I put the plans between the pages and put it back into the baggage.

  I left the room and barely got back to Carlos’s room when I heard the stamp of the boots of the constables coming up the stairs. I was sitting beside Carlos, wiping sweat off his face, when the constables opened the door.

  “My patrón is sick, señor,” I told the constable standing in the doorway. He looked back at another man behind him. Neither man looked eager to enter a sick man’s rooms.

  “Tell the servant to throw out the bags,” the other man said. “We’ll search them first, then have the man moved so we can search the room.”

  With a couple “Sí, señors,” I put Carlos’s bags in the hallway. They were going through them when another constable came rushing out of Fray Benito’s room.

  “I found them!” he shouted. “And look at what else I found. A pornographos!”

  I can’t tell you how watching the fray being dragged from the inn, his hands and feet in chains, soothed the scars on my back. I made the sign of the cross as they led the stunned fray by me. The head of the expedition and the sergeant in charge of the guard saw me, and they both made the gesture. No doubt they thought I had asked God to save the poor fray’s soul. Truthfully, I was thanking God; I knew now that, for certain, heaven sided with me.

  I admit that I amazed myself every time I survived some demonic plan that could bring a hangman’s rough rope against the soft flesh of my neck. The only thing I could attribute my abilities to was the many times I hunted wild beasts. None of the two-legged animals I had encountered were as hard to anticipate as a jaguar or a wolf.

  The ship to Cuba sailed without me, and I was at Carlos’s bedside the next morning. He felt well enough to sit up and drink chocolate. I could not flee and leave Carlos to find out that another man had been arrested for his sins. I had to be there to explain what happened.

  I told him about the fray. “Don Carlos, I confess I was driven to do this thing in part because I knew he was an evil man. And besides my desire to protect you, I knew it was necessary to once more give the viceroy’s men a diversion so they did not seek out the countess. We both must pray—” I made the sign of the cross. I felt it implied I had God’s blessing.

  He listened quietly, quite surprising me by the calm manner in which he took the news. After I was finished, he said, “I have met many good priests, often finding that those at the parish level have led lives of hard work and sacrifice for their flock, but Fray Benito was the worse kind of priest, as bad as the Inquisitors. The world will benefit if they take his robes. I am just relieved that Díaz, the engineer, has been cleared of the charges.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “I, too, am relieved. Now, let me get your breakfast.”

  I got up, but he stopped me as I opened the door.

  “How did you know she was a countess?”

  I paused and raised my eyebrows. “Señor?”

  “I don’t recall mentioning her title.”

  “You did it when you were delirious.” I lied and started out.

  “Don Juan.”

  I stuck my head back in. “Señor?”

  “You are a very dangerous man.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  I closed the door and went quickly down the steps.

  Now what did he mean by that?

  FORTY-NINE

  FRAY BENITO WAS shipped to Veracruz, and I wanted to put distance between us and Campeche in case he talked his way out of being a spy. Carlos told me that the inquisitor-priest had written a letter to the bishop at Veracruz, vouching for the fray and asserting someone had planted the map and porno-graphos on him. I don’t think the Inquisitor wrote the letter out of friendship; I had seen him and Benito huddled together with books, and I’m sure he feared the fray would implicate him.

  Before we left Campeche, we heard stories that a rebel chieftain had taken the name of a warlike Mayan king of old, Canek, and had been terrorizing th
e Yucatán, practicing the “old ways”: war and human sacrifice. The governor in Mérida had sent soldiers to capture him but stated publicly that the chief and his followers had fled to Guatemala.

  I told Carlos he should argue for more soldiers to accompany us, but he said the expedition didn’t have the dinero. “Besides, the warring chief has fled.”

  “The same two feet that took this bloodthirsty devil south can bring him back again—if he left in the first place.”

  Carlos ignored my concerns. As I’ve said, he was very intelligent . . . when it came to book learning.

  “We’ll encounter many ancient sites in the Puuc Hills region on our way to the ancient city of Chichén Itzá,” Carlos told me when we were en route. “We’ll examine only a couple of them because the expedition can’t go on forever. Many of us are anxious to return home now that our country has been invaded. You understand, don’t you, what side I’ll be fighting on?”

  He was one hundred percent Spanish and would fight the French. I noted that he had stopped talking about Napoleon as someone he admired and now referred to the emperor’s armies as “invaders.” Still weak from his bouts with fever, I insisted he ride a mule. Faithful servant that I was, I walked beside him, occasionally stepping in the droppings left by the mules ahead.

  At night, mosquitoes so plagued us that we sewed our sheets into a bag and slept inside the bag, hot and sweating as if from a raging fever. Tiny black fleas swarmed my pants bottoms whenever I took a step. Worse than fleas and mosquitoes were the blood-sucking ticks, called garrapatas, that attacked us from the bushes and vegetation.

  Added to the horrors of the insect kingdom were armies of ferocious black ants that had a bite to equal beestings and large, lethal-looking, hairy black spiders that crossed one’s path looking very much like a walking hand. If the insects didn’t get you, there were snakes that brought death in a heartbeat with a single bite.

  I must admit the evening fireflies were beautiful. Never had I seen ones to match those legendary luminaries we encountered en route to Palenque and now in the Yucatán. Shooting down dark corridors, they were a dazzling spectacle. Carlos claimed one could read a book by the light of three or four of them, and I believed him.

  The first stop we made was the ruin called Labna. The most prominent structure at this ancient site was an overgrown pyramidal forty-five-foot-high mound. We climbed the pyramid, clinging to vines and branches, until we reached a narrow pinnacle. An imposing structure twenty paces in width and ten front to back surmounted the pyramid. Partially in ruins now, one section had collapsed, but three doorways and two large chambers remained inside.

  What was most curious about the temple on the crest were the stone carvings of skulls. I didn’t know the answers to the scholar’s questions about the name of the people who built the city, but there was one thing I knew about their character: “Their religion seethed with violence and death. Why else would they have carved death heads on their temple?”

  “Skulls and skeletons play a role in the artwork of many Christian churches, too.”

  I guess that is why I called him the scholar. He had an answer for everything, even the mysteries of the ages.

  Forty paces from the pyramidal structure was an impressive building with an arched entrance. The structure, which Carlos simply named the Gateway at Labna, was of such artistic merit, it could have served as a cathedral entrance.

  “Amazing,” Carlos said, as we stood back and gazed at the impressive stone edifices. “This kingdom of snakes and spiders was once a proud city, as were many like it in this region. But we face the same puzzle we did when we stood before the pyramids at Teotihuacán: Who built it? Here we are, in the middle of what was once a city, a community built by an intelligent and talented race, and not one word about it appears on the pages of history!” He was so excited, he almost jumped off the ground. “Think of it, this place will be known for eternity by what I write about it in the encyclopedia! I will mention your name, amigo, as one of the first explorers of the site.”

  Wouldn’t the viceroy’s constables love that.

  We camped in the midst of the ancient ruins but couldn’t get any indio to enter the ruins at night, much less camp beside us.

  “Ghosts,” their headman told us, “spirits of the long-dead dwell here. The stone places are their homes. They don’t come out in the daylight, but at night they seek those who trespass on their domain. We hear their music. I once sneaked up to see why the music was playing and saw warriors of the long-dead dancing.”

  The truth was the indios knew little about the past except a few stories passed along around the fire at night. This became evident when an indio clearing brush saw the stone features of an ancient god and began striking it with his ax.

  Carlos stopped him and demanded an explanation. The man said that he was told by his priest that the ancient figures all represented evil and he was to smash them.

  Carlos walked away, shaking his head. “Don’t they understand they are destroying history?”

  We spent two days exploring Labna before moving on to large caves the indios called demon caves.

  Using lamps burning with tree pitch, we descended into the caves through a rift in the ground. I had been in caves before on hunting trips but nothing like what I beheld while descending to the demon’s lair. A couple hundred feet below the surface, we came to eerie formations and fantastic shapes, cones resembling huge icicles hanging from the ceiling and erupting from the floor. Carlos called them stalactites and stalagmites, “from a Greek word for ‘dripping,’” the scholar said, deposits of dripping minerals.

  The cones and other fantastic shapes seemed to take life as the flickering light from our fiery torches struck the strange formations.

  Carlos and the other expedition members made much fuss over the beauty of the caverns, but I found them haunting and was relieved when I again saw the light of day.

  I came out of the caves chilled despite the hot-wet jungle air. The eerie caves reminded me of the Aztec hell I had nightmared about so many times. Perhaps the Aztec gods were trying to tell me something.

  FIFTY

  CARLOS TOLD ME more of the grisly history of the early Spanish in the Yucatán region as we moved across the peninsula. “Columbus never set foot on the dirt of the American continent, his movements were restricted to the islands of the Caribbean. The Yucatán Peninsula itself was discovered around 1508 by Juan Díaz de Solís and Vincent Yáñez Pinzón. Pinzón had commanded the Niña for Columbus in the original discovery of the New World. Solís and Pinzón sailed along the coast of the Yucatán and down to the area of Central America in search of a passage to the Spice Islands. Fortunately for Pinzón, he and Solís disagreed, and Pinzón returned to Spain. Solís went ashore while exploring a river region of South America. Charrua Indians attacked and captured him and his men, eating them one by one in plain view of the other sailors. Only one man escaped to tell the tale.”

  Ay! What thoughts went on inside the heads of the sailors as they watched their shipmates being cut up, cooked, and eaten . . . knowing their turn was coming? More important, what was the character of the one man who escaped to tell the tale?

  “After the defeat of Montezuma, the crown gave one of Cortés’s captains, Don Francisco Montejo a royal commission to conquer the people of the ‘islands’ of Yucatán and Cozumel. Montejo was soon to find that the Yucatán indios were the most fierce and warlike in all of New Spain. Everywhere he went, he encountered resistance. Foolishly, he sent one of his captains, Dávila, to Chichén Itzá, from which Dávila ultimately retreated with many casualties. After more years of fighting—and losing—by 1535, the indios had driven the Spanish out of the Yucatán.

  “Around 1542, sixteen years after Montejo first received the royal license to conquer the Yucatán and twenty-one years after the fall of Montezuma, the Spanish had subdued enough of the region to occupy with some confidence the areas around Campeche and Mérida.”

  We left Mayapán and
began a trek through the tropical forest to the city Carlos most desired to see: Chichén Itzá.

  Carlos educated me about the city as we traveled. “Chichén Itzá is a large site, I’m told,” he said. As we walked, he pushed a serpent tick off his pant leg. “As we have seen, the Yucatán possesses little water. Violent deluges frequently fall during the rainy season, but the peninsula’s terrain doesn’t hold water. The only year-round water source for much of the region are cenotes, sinkholes in limestone formations. Chichén Itzá was built on the site of two such water sources. And those sinkholes gave the city its name: chi, which means ‘mouth’ and chen, which means ‘wells.’ Itza refers to the tribe that lived there.”

  “So, the name means ‘the people at the mouth of the wells,’” I said.

  “No one knows for certain how long the city had been inhabited, but we estimate it was founded over a thousand years ago, about the time barbaric hordes were overrunning the last tattered remnants of the Roman Empire and Mohammed’s armies were conquering North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. By the time we conquered the region, most of the major cities had been abandoned and people were living in smaller communities. Once again, we don’t know the reason for the inhabitants’ flight.”

  Nothing had prepared me for the wonders of the ancient city called Chichén Itzá. The ruins covered more than a square league, and the vegetation that hid much of the other sites had been cleared from magnificent edifices in the heart of the ruins.

  “Strange,” Carlos said. “Someone has gone through the great effort of clearing El Castillo and other structures of growth.”