Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  When Marina and I set out, we had to ride past most of the army. A remarkable sight—tens of thousands strong, miles long, like some enormous primeval beast—our army stretched forever, its teeth bared all the way. There were fewer than a couple hundred military uniforms in the entire horde. Wives and children accompanied many soldiers in this war. A man carrying a crude club with one hand might cradle a child in his other arm. Some herded sheep, carried a quarter of beef over a shoulder, or led a cow on a rope, all acquired from the haciendas we passed. Almost everyone carried sacks of maize. Others shouldered plunder from the previous towns: men and women carried chairs, tables, even doors on their backs.

  Had I seen this ragtag army when I was a young caballero, I would have had a hearty laugh later with my amigos in a tavern. But now, having seen firsthand what rage simmered beneath the calm exteriors of the expressionless Aztecs, knowing what hopes and dreams were in their hearts and minds, I suspected that the padre was right, that the barefooted horde possessed a power that would surprise the criollo officers.

  It was smart of the padre to send a spy mission to Guanajuato. One of the great cities of the Americas, one of the richest in all the world, the government and mine owners would be prepared to defend their hoard of silver.

  On our way to the mining city, we stopped briefly to buy tortillas and beans from a pulquería hut on the roadway. Pretending to be ignorant peons—a condition not far from the truth—I listened to the conversation of two criollo merchants while Marina pretended to scowl over a feigned disagreement. What I heard was not surprising but still unsettling. New to both his office and Méjico City, the viceroy had put huge rewards out on the leaders of the insurrection—dead or alive—along with a pardon for anyone who killed or arrested them. The church had reportedly excommunicated the leaders as well.

  “Excommunication will trouble them most,” Marina said. “Now they will not only risk their heads . . . but their souls.”

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  WHEN WE WERE half a day from the city, I sold our mule and purchased a donkey. A mule was beyond the means of most poor people.

  We arrived in Guanajuato on the Marfil road, the route I believed the padre would choose for his army. Soldiers had erected a checkpoint, questioning everyone who entered. I told them that my wife and I came from a village between Guanajuato and Zacatecas. I chose the village because I was familiar with it. The hacienda I once owned was in the region.

  “Who’s the alcalde of your village?” the sergeant who questioned me asked.

  “Señor Alonso,” I said.

  “And your village priest?”

  “Padre José.”

  “Why have you come to Guanajuato?”

  “To see a curandero for my wife.” A curandero was a healer who used magic to exorcise sickness.

  Sitting on the donkey with her face down, Marina looked up and exposed red blotches on her face.

  “¡Dios mí! Get along with you!”

  Once we were out of the soldiers’ sight, Marina got off the donkey and wiped berry juice off her face.

  “It’s a good thing you knew the alcalde and priest of that village,” she said.

  “I knew nothing. I made up the names, but he didn’t know them either. He wanted to see my reaction, to judge whether I was lying.”

  “Fortunately, you are a seasoned liar.”

  Panic reigned in Guanajuato. Major streets were barricaded, stores closed, doors and windows boarded up. People hurried here and scurried there. A rider in a military uniform galloped by, carrying a message to an outpost or perhaps the capital, no doubt relaying pleas for help.

  We roamed the city, talking to people, learning only that rumors were as numerous as the people retelling them. The lower classes were less fearful than the merchants and landowners. Many of the wealthier citizens believed Hidalgo to be a French sympathizer who would hand the colony over to Napoleon. I assumed Riano, the governor of the city and province, had intitiated those stories.

  I considered tactics and terrain while we surveyed the city. Unlike Méjico City and Puebla, which had broad thoroughfares, Guanajuato featured short, narrow streets. While the defilade and cramped battle theaters seemed at first to favor the city’s defenders, two conditions worked against them. Guanajuato sat in a canyon, whose surrounding heights favored an invader. Even the cathedral in the central plaza stood below a high, vertical cliff. Many houses were perched on slopes so steep that the ground floor of one was level with the roof on another. This unique topography gave the high ground to the invader, a tremendous advantage if the besieging forces had good cannons—something the army of liberation almost entirely lacked but a fact Riano might not know.

  The second defect in the defense was the lack of defenders: It would take either thousands of regular troops to defend a city of this size, or the residents themselves would have to be behind the defenses.

  Despite Riano’s allegations that the padre’s army was a Trojan horse for the French, most of the population was aware that Hidalgo and Allende planned to drive the gachupines from the country. Few of the common people would line up to die to defend Spaniards. The city had a significant criollo population that might remain loyal to the viceroy because it was to their advantage, but not a great number of those colonial Spaniards were willing to die for European Spaniards.

  A visit to the pulquerías near the military barracks gave me information that I found hard to believe: Business was bad because there were so few soldiers. Most estimates were that there were fewer than five hundred soldiers in the city. The nearest significant detachment was a great distance away, under the command of Brigadier Feliz Calleja at San Luis Potosí.

  “We don’t know if Calleja is already on the march to relieve the city,” I told Marina, “but it’s a good possibility he’s not. Riano has sent a request for his troops, but you can bet the general won’t move without orders from the viceroy in the capital. Venegas, the new viceroy, has only been in the colony a short time. With all the confusion and the fact that Méjico City would obviously be the main target of the revolt, it’s more likely the viceroy would have Calleja move to secure the capital rather than Guanajuato.”

  But that left Riano’s tactics a puzzlement to me.

  “It’s not possible he has only hundreds of men. He can’t defend the city with so few.”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t plan to defend it,” Marina said. “I understand he’s a friend of the padre’s. Perhaps he’ll turn it over to Father Hidalgo.”

  I shook my head. “No, I know Riano. I’ve been at the balls that he and his son, Gilberto, have thrown. He’s stubborn and resolute, he wouldn’t surrender the city without a fight. To do so would not be honorable in his eyes. We must discover how he plans to fight with so few men.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” she teased.

  I stroked my chin. “Maybe I will . . . or at least get him to show me without me asking.”

  Diego and his companion had followed us into the city. We made contact with them, and I gave Diego instructions to leave immediately and return the next morning, bearing a message.

  Marina did not hear my conversation with Diego and asked me later, “What did you tell him?”

  “Just a simple instruction. I told him to appear at the Marfil road barricade in the morning with the exciting news that he had spotted a vast army of Aztecs approaching the city.”

  “You’re insane! Why did you do that?”

  “When you’re hunting, sometimes it’s necessary to flush out the game before you can get a clear shot.”

  The next morning a guard from the Marfil barricade rode up to the governor’s palace as if the devil dogged his tail. We watched the city from a hillside so we’d have a good view of the barracks and other strategic points. In less than an hour, I understood Riano’s plan for defending the city. It came as a shock.

  “He’s not going to defend the city,” I told Marina.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s goin
g to defend only the alhóndiga.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The alhóndiga de Granaditas—the granary.”

  I took her to the hillside above the building. The governor stored maize and other grains in the alhóndiga to ward off famines. Although the granary was situated on a rise, the Cuarta hillside—which looked down on it—was close by. Had we deployed real cannons on that high hill, the granary would have been indefensible. That meant Riano had spies, too; he knew we didn’t have significant artillery.

  This area was said to be named Cuarta, which meant “quarter,” because a bad hombre had been drawn and quartered with one of his four body parts posted on the hill as a lesson for others. Not a very happy thought for one such as myself who had been accused of crimes far worse than those this unnamed bandido probably committed.

  The alhóndiga was large, with two very high stories, perhaps a hundred paces in length and two-thirds that in width. Its walls were tall and strong, its windows small, appearing stark on the outside, almost without ornamentation.

  “It looks like a fortress,” Marina said.

  “It is a fortress,” I said.

  The building had been under construction for nearly ten years and had only recently been finished, but I had been in it a number of times to select feed for my horses because parts of the building were in use before the whole structure was completed. It had only a partial roof, because half of the rectangular-shaped building’s roof was open air. I had heard the open-roof design described as similar to that of a Roman atrium.

  “Inside, it’s divided into storerooms on two levels,” I told Marina. “Two big stairways lead to storerooms in the upper level and an open-air patio in the middle of the building. The walls are massive. We’d need cannons to breach them, real cannons. For us, it might as well be a fortress, because we have nothing to breach the walls with.”

  The false alarm I raised had revealed the governor’s plan. Riano had rushed to the alhóndiga, as had armed gachupines, some criollo supporters, and almost the entire uniformed military.

  “He has only about six or seven hundred men,” I said. “About half of them are infantry, maybe another hundred dragoons—the mounted soldiers you saw with short muskets—and fewer than three hundred armed civilians. That’s why he won’t defend the city. He’d need a force five to ten times that size to put up a viable defense. No doubt that he’s supplied the granary with enough water and food to hold out for months, and he only needs to do so until the viceroy can send a relief force.”

  The only practical way we could attack the granary was from the front, at the main entrance facing a street. The front door was massive. The other entrance was sealed. Most windows were too high to reach and all were small, making them difficult and slow to crawl through.

  Riano had done other work to defend the granary. He had approaches from nearby streets closed off with masonry, including his perimeter of defense, the premises and two buildings behind the granary: the house of Mendizabal and the main building of the hacienda de Dolores, a mining facility. He put up barricades at the bottom of a hill in an attempt to cut off an approach from the Río de la Cata.

  “He should have destroyed the Mendizabal and Dolores buildings and knocked down the walls to prevent us from hiding behind them,” I told Marina. “He has to split his forces to defend them.”

  The alhóndiga was already well guarded before my false alarm, more heavily than necessary to protect food and water. “He has the city treasure in the building,” I said. “He didn’t send it by mule train to the capital because he doesn’t know which roads the padre controls.”

  “His honor only extends to the Spanish who will hold up in the granary. He’s abandoning the city, only protecting Spanish treasures and Spanish lives. His duty was to protect the whole city. Now he will cost lives on both sides,” Marina said.

  “He obviously disdains our army,” I said. “To him, we’re a mob of indios led by a priest and a few renegade officers. We don’t even have any officers from the regular army, just low-ranking colonial militia officers. He must have heard what happened in the towns along the way, know that there was no real fighting and that the indios are armed with the crudest of weapons.”

  Being a former Spaniard, I knew how he’d think: Riano believed that the indios would cut and run when they were hit with a barrage of musket fire that dropped men by the hundreds with each volley. I wondered about that myself. Untrained and without real weapons, once the indios saw the effects of musket fire, their enthusiasm for this revolt might quickly dissolve. But these were not things I could say to this firebrand Aztec without fear of getting my cojones cut off.

  “We are many, tens of thousands,” Marina said. “We will outnumber them fifty, a hundred to one.”

  I had wondered whether Riano’s decision to stand and fight an overwhelming Aztec force—with about the same number of men Cortés had had—might have been deliberate. If successful, he could carve his own place in history, alongside Cortés and Pizzaro, the conqueror of the Incas.

  When news arrived that Hidalgo’s forces were two days away, Riano abandoned the city. Under cover of night, the granary became Castillo Guanajuato.

  “The governor says the city must defend itself,” an angry mestizo shoemaker told me as we passed his hut. “They’ve taken all the muskets and most of the food in the city. They don’t care about us.” He spit. “Now we don’t have to care about them.”

  EIGHTY-NINE

  WHEN THE ARMY of liberation reached the outskirts of the city, I went out to meet them at the Burras hacienda. Father Hidalgo and Allende listened attentively as I described Riano’s defensive strategy. I drew a map of the alhóndiga and the surrounding streets and showed them where barricades were set up and accesses sealed.

  “You are certain that they have only about six hundred men? Nearly half of whom are civilians?” Allende asked. “And he’s defending three different buildings?” The look he gave the padre questioned my sanity.

  I laughed. “I’ve seen their preparations with my own eyes.”

  I understood their wonderment. One of the richest cities in the world, the third city of the Americas, a city with seventy thousand people, was being defended by a small force.

  “But don’t assume taking the granary will be easy. It’s a fortress, and they’re well armed. They have more muskets than our entire army, and real marksmen. And they’re well provisioned. Without cannons for a breach, we can enter only by battering down the front door. Synchronized volleys from hundreds of muskets will cut the attackers down like scythes, especially when the defenders fire from the many small windows and from the roof.”

  I started to say it would be a slaughter but felt I owed the padre too much to impugn the wisdom of his actions.

  Father Hidalgo asked me to accompany the two representatives who were conveying a surrender offer to Riano. If they surrendered, they would be treated humanely. If they resisted, they would be killed with no quarter given.

  He handed me another note. “This is a personal note to Señor Riano. I know him and his family. I believe you do, too.”

  “I socialized with them at a few balls. We weren’t friends.”

  “Nevertheless, you’ve met the governor and his son and know that they’re honorable men. Give this note to Riano and show it to no one else.”

  The personal note to Riano read: “The esteem which I have ever expressed for you is sincere and I believe is due to the high qualities which adorn you. The difference in our ways of thinking ought not to diminish it. You will follow the course which may seem most right and prudent to you, but which will not occasion injury to your family. We shall fight as enemies, if so it shall be decided, but I herewith offer to the Señora Intendente an asylum and assured protection . . .”

  I led the two emissaries to the alhóndiga. Me and one of the emissaries were allowed to enter blindfolded. They did not remove our blindfolds until we reached the roof of the building and faced Riano and his so
n, Gilberto. Riano gave no sign that he recognized me, though Gilberto squinted at me as if my appearance triggered a memory; but he didn’t recognize me behind the heavy beard.

  After reading the padre’s demands, Riano had his comrades-in-arms assemble on the roof. He read them the note and paused, waiting for a reply. Prompted by an officer, the regular troops cried, “Viva el rey!”—Hurrah for the king. Then he consulted with the civilians, who responded unenthusiastically: “We will fight.”

  Riano’s written reply stated that he was duty bound to fight as a soldier. He also gave me a private note for the padre, which I hesitated to read but did. Was I not a spy?

  Riano’s private note told the padre he was grateful for his offer to protect his family but that he would not need our protection, that he had already sent his wife and daughters out of the city.

  Before long two couriers came out of the alhóndiga and whipped their horses frantically to race in different directions. One of the courtiers was shot out of the saddle before he reached the outskirts of town. A message was retrieved from him, and I read that, too, on my way back to the army’s encampment.

  The message from Riano was to General Calleja at San Luis Potosí. He wrote: “I am about to fight, for I shall be attacked immediately. I shall resist to the uttermost, because I am honorable. Fly to my succor.”

  During our negotiations, I confirmed my estimate that Riano had no more than about six hundred men, of which at least two-thirds were soldiers. They were pitted against an army that now numbered in excess of fifty thousand. Only a few hundred of us were soldiers or were men like myself, armed civilians familiar with weapons.

  Father Hidalgo had left Dolores with an army numbering in the hundreds, and in a twelve-day march to Guanajuato, the army had increased a hundredfold. But we’d had no time to train or discipline his turbulent sea of warriors.