I felt like saluting the French woman cracking the orders but merely gave her a “Oui, madame.”
I rushed through the door, my boots banging on the steps. I paused at the bottom, but instead of going out to the garden where a saddled horse awaited, I silently crept back up the stairs.
Many things bothered me, the most humiliating of which was that Rosa and the countess treated me as if I were inconceivably stupid, a naïve colonial bumpkin, at best. While my education was mostly in the saddle, as Casio pointed out, I had had the agility of a cat in adversity.
I was told the countess wouldn’t copy the war document because she feared that the handwriting would expose her as a Spanish spy if the messenger was caught. Ay, that rang true enough, I suppose. But how did she know exactly where the document was in the attaché case? She reached in and grabbed it without even searching for it.
A high-ranking officer would be carrying more in his attaché case than a single piece of paper. In fact, I saw a thick stack of papers when she opened the case. Yet she blindly pulled out the exact sheet we needed. The only way she would have known its exact location was if she had been shown where to find it. Or if she had planted it in the case herself.
And what had she said about the guards at the gate? They would be expecting a messenger to ride through. Who had the authority to give them such an order? Only a high-ranking French officer.
My final suspicion had been the way Rosa entered the room. Rosa was at best a daughter of the working class. The countess was high nobility. But their body language, their silent acceptance of each other’s presence, not a word between them . . . their actions connoted to my dense colonial mind an informality, even a familiarity I found paradoxical for two women worlds apart on the social and financial scale
Back upstairs, I listened at the door but heard nothing. I quietly opened the door a crack and listened again. Once again I heard the sounds of a woman in sexual ecstasy. Had the general awoken? I wondered. I could not get a view of the bed from the doorway. I crawled back into the dimly lit room. As I came around the corner of a chest, I stopped and stared, stunned.
It wasn’t the countess and the general making the love noises; it was the two women. The countess was lying on her back on the bed, naked. Her legs were spread, and Rosa knelt between them, her face palpating the countess’s undulating passionflower.
“What are you doing?” I snarled out loud.
My question cracked in the room like a pistol shot. Both women looked at me, startled. Rosa recovered first. She flew off the bed with the speed of a jungle cat, grabbing her dagger from a pile of her clothes on the floor.
She came at me in a low crouch to stick the blade up between my legs. I stepped sideways and hit her. I had never hit a woman before, but Rosa was no mere woman, she was a wild she-demon exploding out of hell.
My roundhouse punch, thrown off a pivot, hammered her temple. She went down like a thunder-smitten oak and would not rise for a while.
The bathroom door suddenly opened up, and General Habert, as naked as the two women, appeared in the doorway. I rushed him. As I grappled with him, the other she-devil assaulted me, leaping on my back and clawing at my eyes. Normally I wouldn’t find it offensive to have a naked woman clawing at me, but the momentary distraction gave the general the opportunity to hit me in the nose. He made a dash to get around me as I staggered back. I flipped the countess over my shoulders, slamming him to the floor with her body. While they both floundered on the floor, I kicked the general in his Adam’s apple. The countess bolted like a banshee and ran screaming for the bedroom door.
While the general rolled on his back, gagging and clutching his throat, I ran back toward the lover’s alcove and grabbed the attaché case, knocking over a table and lamp as I rushed by. I swatted another oil lamp with the attaché case, sending it flying into the drapes before I went through the secret doorway.
Coming off the steps and into the garden, the saddled horse was waiting for me. With hell detonating in my wake—screams, flames, and a barrage of boots thundering down the stairway—I swung into the saddle and wheeled the horse around, sending it back toward the door to the stairway. As a guard came out the door, I hammered him in the head with the attaché case.
I raced for the front gate at a high lope. To the rear, flames shot out of the windows of the countess’s upper-level bedchambers. As I galloped at the guards lining up at the gate, I yelled, “We’re under attack! I’m going for reinforcements!”
I rode by them but one of them, brighter or deafer than the rest, fired his musket. The shot missed, but a mounted patrol was quickly on my tail. I had to stay on the road because of the darkness. I rode faster than I should have, any pothole could have sent the animal head over heels with me crushed under him.
The patrol was closing the gap, almost on my heels, when I rode into a blaze of musket fire, and my horse went down.
SIXTY-EIGHT
YOU COULD HAVE killed me!” I yelled at Casio.
We were at a house an hour’s ride from the palace, a peasant’s cottage in a village of a dozen such houses. Casio and his men had waited for me. They had ambushed those French hellhounds dogging my heels. I wasn’t angry because they had accidentally shot my horse out from under me but that they were blithely indifferent to the peril they’d put me in.
“If I was not certain of your loyalty to me as a fellow freedom fighter,” I said, “I would suspect you had orders to kill me along with the French.”
Casio shrugged. He clearly did not care whether I lived or died. However, after I went through the attaché case with him, reading to him the French emperor’s real orders because he couldn’t read French, the guerrilla leader’s attitude toward me changed. He was almost affectionate.
“As you can see, my suspicions were correct,” I said, smugly. “The countess is still a French agent. The report she arranged for us to steal was a trick. When you compare the emperor’s seal on the other documents in the attaché case, you can see that the report she gave me is a forgery. These real orders here to the commanders from the emperor differ from her fraudulent order. Rosa and the countess were part of the plan to dupe us. This poor colonial pícaro before you,” I grinned modesty, “is a greater patriot than those two seditious strumpets.”
“I am greatly disappointed in Rosa,” Casio said. “I can understand the countess—she is Spanish only by marriage—but Rosa was one of us. I suspect that after she was raped—”
“The French raped Rosa?”
“Our own guerrillas raped Rosa or at least a bandido gang who claimed to be partisans. She carried a message to them from me, and they rewarded her for risking her life by passing her around the camp.”
“The bastardos should be castrated.”
“The bastardos are dead. Rosa saw to that. And she will join them if we catch her. For her sake, I hope she flees to France with the countess.”
I had not told him of Rosa’s lovemaking with the countess. I kept quiet out of loyalty to her brother, Carlos. He would have wanted it that way. His mother had lost a son. Carlos would not have wanted me to further compound the old woman’s inevitable disgrace at her daughter’s treason . . . with lewd lurid gossip.
“Our knowledge of their plans will be a serious setback for the French,” Casio said. “They plan a major campaign against Gerona, a surprise attack after feigning that they will simply keep it under siege.”
“They’ll just change their plans,” I said.
He shook his head. “It’s not that easy. The emperor keeps tight control over troop movements, despite the fact that he’s far away and our guerrilla activity constantly disrupts his lines of communication. His generals will have to follow his standing orders. Besides, General Habert will not disclose the theft of the plans. Napoleon would have him shot for such a blunder.”
“What are you going to do about Gerona?” Gerona was the major town between Barcelona and the French border. It had held out heroically against French assaults.
“Warn them. The emperor’s orders are for a French division to join with the present army besieging the city and for the bulk of the force to take the fortifications at Montjuic, part of the city’s defensive perimeter. We need to warn our defenders there of the impending action. Manuel Álvarez, who commands the city’s defenses, knows that Gerona will fall someday, but each day he keeps the French tied down in the siege reduces their forces in the rest of the peninsula.”
Casio left me alone while he went to another house where his lieutenants were quartered. “I must tell them the news,” he said.
I was grateful for the respite from his watchful eyes. I had found something else in the general’s case: besides messages shuttled back and forth between the Catalán command and the emperor, were two velvet pouches. I opened the pouches after Casio left. One pouch contained an assortment of scintillating jewels: diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. I could easily imagine the source: France’s General Habert, their top-ranking commander, who extorted “gifts” from Spain’s traitorous nobility as well as the booty from the marauding troops.
The second pouch contained an even more stunning surprise: a gorgeous gold necklace strung with large diamonds. A note in the pouch explained that the necklace was a gift arranged for Napoleon’s new wife, the Austrian princess Marie Louise, from the now disgraced Spanish prime minister, Godoy. Godoy was being held captive in France along with the Spanish royal family but had arranged for the necklace to be sent to Napoleon, no doubt to curry his favor. The necklace had once belonged to the similarly named Spanish queen, María Luisa of Parma.
I slipped the pouches under my shirt. These royal gems were now the property of a disgraced caballero-lépero-pícaro named Juan de Zavala; and I had earned them. Was I to risk my life battling two hell-forged vixens, a French army, an ungrateful gang of kill-crazed guerrillas, the Spanish crown, the Holy Inquisition, New Spain’s viceroy, and my gachupine persecutors, then walk away with my pockets empty as my hell-black heart?
I had a slug of brandy straight out of the jug, congratulating myself on both my successful mission and my newfound riches. The door opened, and Gusto, a lieutenant of Casio’s, entered.
“Where’s Casio?” he asked.
“Looking for you and his other commanders,” I said.
He was tense, his eyes darting around the room. “Is there anyone in the other room?”
I picked up the brandy jug, suddenly tense myself at the tone of his question and his stiff body language. “Join me in a toast to celebrate my success.”
He grinned. “I have something for your success.”
He pulled out his blade, and I flung the brandy jug. It caught him not in the head but only on his shoulder. His thrust diverted, he cut only my side instead of gutting me like a stuck pig. I shouldered him in the gut, and a shot went off. I froze, stunned by the sudden explosion in the room.
Gusto dropped to his knees and pitched forward onto the floor, face down, hemorrhaging from the throat. I stared at Casio, who was framed in the doorway. The guerrilla leader stepped in, pulled another pistol from his waistband, and shot Gusto in the back of the head.
“Another French spy?” I asked.
Casio shook his head. “Cádiz sent an order that we were to execute you after we finished using you. They believed you couldn’t be trusted. We believed you would cooperate on the mission because we had your sister and mother—Carlos’s family, of course, not actually yours—in our grasp. I have countermanded that order for two reasons: your actions were heroic, and they sent the order to Gusto as an affront to me. They refuse to recognize me as a leader of the Barcelona movement because I refuse to recognize them as having authority over Catalonia.”
Ay, Raquel was right. Politics were wonderful, especially when it worked to my advantage.
SIXTY-NINE
Cádiz
YOU HAVE ANOTHER chance to martyr yourself for the resistance,” Casio told me three days later, when I thought I was shipping out to Cádiz.
To keep enemy communications across the Pyrénées in disruption, Casio led attacks along the route from Barcelona to Gerona.
“The maneuver will show you first-hand how a small band of motivated fighters can inflict damage on larger forces,” Casio said. The guerrilla target was a French courier escorted by a company of light cavalry.
At an obvious ambush spot that provided excellent defilade for the ambushers, Casio deliberately exposed one of his men to the courier’s advance patrol. The advance scouts would rush back to the main body. After their report of an ambush ahead, the entire unit would wheel around and retreat back in the other direction, right into an ambush of 150 guerrillas.
“They thought we were ahead of them,” Casio said, “and that the route behind them was safe. Of course, this strategy only works if you leave no survivors to spread the word of how we do it.”
I learned something of soldiering and battle tactics running with the guerrillas. I already knew about small arms, the tools of that trade. My hunting weapons, however, were better treated, of higher quality, and had greater accuracy than their military arms. But they were not as lethal in battle. The French and the better-equipped Spanish units used a muzzle-loading, smooth-bore, flintlock musket. The muskets were a little over forty inches long and weighed around twelve pounds. The lead ball they fired weighed an ounce.
To load the musket, a soldier would take a wrapped cartridge that held a ball and black powder from a belt pouch and rip off the part with the lead ball with his teeth. Keeping the ball in his mouth, he would pour a little of the black powder into the musket’s flashpan, which was on top of the weapon. He then poured the rest of the powder down the barrel and packed it down with his ramrod. The musketeer then spit the lead ball into the barrel and rammed that down. When he squeezed the trigger, the flint snapped down, struck metal, sparking and igniting the powder in the flashpan, which in turn ignited the powder in the barrel. The explosion blew the ball out the barrel.
The musket fired the ball about a half a mile but with very poor accuracy. But, eh, they were not shooting the eye of a hawk but firing into lines of men. Loading and firing was a slow process, which is why they shot in rows, with one row firing, then ducking down to reload as the row above them fired, after which the third row of troops discharged their muskets. They repeated the drill as long as necessary.
A three-deep line was the order of battle for most infantry and cavalry. If the lines were only two deep, gaping holes appeared, and if they were four or more deep, movements were too awkward.
“When the weapons are fired by the hundreds, it creates a scythe of death that mows down line after line of men,” Casio said. “But the worst death is not from a lead ball or from the long bayonet at the end of the musket, but from a ramrod.”
“A ramrod kills?”
“In the rush of battle, a musketeer will sometimes forget to remove the ramrod from his barrel, which then comes flying out. During one battle a French musketeer left the ramrod in when he pulled the trigger. The metal rod flew through my compañero’s throat like a bayonet.”
Occasionally the weapon with the ramrod exploded in the face of the shooter.
I fought alongside the guerrillas when we faced the armed invaders, but I turned away when the French who surrendered were killed. I didn’t fault the guerrillas for their revenge. Many of the guerrillas had lost loved ones or close friends to the invaders. Both sides fought a war without quarter, without mercy, what they called “war to the knife.” But it was their war, not mine. I no longer thought of myself as Juan de Zavala, a Spanish-born caballero. I no longer cared who or what I was. Having dealt with so many different people and so many different kinds of hate, I no longer respected birthrights, bloodlines, religious creeds or inherited titles. People like Carlos and Casio worked harder for Spanish freedom than their kings and nobles. They believed that Napoleon’s legions would never defeat the spirit of the Spanish people.
“We will drive them from our countr
y,” Casio said, “and then we will go over the mountains and loot their churches, rape their women, steal their treasures. Then Señora Justice will smile, no?”
I was returning to Cádiz a hero. Of course, the search for me was still going strong. The French desperately wanted the rogue who fled the countess’s palace with the general’s attaché case and who ambushed their courier’s military escort, so I hid for two weeks at the monastery at Montserrat, the “sacred mountain” northwest of Barcelona. The monks concealed me despite the continual threat that the French cannons would level the monastery if they ever discovered that the monks were aiding the resistance.
When the threat cooled down, a fishing boat returned me to Cádiz as a hero, no less. A stellar reward for subduing two tempestuous temptresses and an obese French general with a limp manhood, then absconding with the emperor’s battle plans, no? And an even better reward was in a pouch I hid near my own “family jewels.” The “king’s ransom” in gems would keep me in fine wine, roast beef, and passionate putas in the years to come, long after the Spaniards’ praise rang cold.
Aboard the boat, I gave my first thought to what I would do in Cádiz. I wanted to return to the colony for sure. The war between Napoleon and the Spanish rebels was too dangerous for a poor colonial outcast. Cádiz was still the only place in Spain not under titular French control. Who knew what my next assignment from the Cádiz authorities would be? The last one they sent me on was not only suicidal but homicidal on their part . . . just in case I survived.
Well, Casio did protect me in the end. He now assured me I would get a hero’s welcome and I could parlay my hero’s status into a return ticket to New Spain, pardon in hand. There, I would reunite with my darling Isabella. I still took loving care of the boots she’d lavished on me.
I knew my fate as soon as I saw Baltar on the Cádiz dock, the inquisitor-priest I thought I had killed. Last time I saw the bastardo, he was lying in a foul alley after flying face-first off a whore’s balcony. As he stood on the wharf and pointed me out to Colonel Ramírez and a squad of soldiers, I could see that the priest’s near-death experience had not improved his ugly disposition.
Aztec Rage Page 34
