Aztec Autumn a-2

by Gary Jennings

  It was a battle fought by profile shapes, not full-rounded figures, just the outlines of us warriors, black against the sheet of fire still consuming the grove. So every man soon dropped his heavier weapons, lest he find himself stabbing or slicing one of his own comrades. All resorted to knives—most of them obsidian; a few, like mine, of steel—and fought hand to hand, sometimes the opponents grappling on the ground. I personally slew the Arrow Knight Tapachíni. And the battle was a short one, because my men far outnumbered Yeyac's. As the last of those fell, the great blaze also began to die down, as if its accompaniment was no longer required, and we all found ourselves in the near darkness of early night.

  Doubtless through god-arranged coincidence, I found myself standing next to the perfidious G'nda Ké, still alive and entire, evidently spared from the slaughter only because she wore woman's garb.

  "I should have known," I said, panting. "Even in furious battle, you remain unscathed. I am glad. As your friend Yeyac said just now, I shall have privacy and leisure in which to slay you slowly."

  "How you talk!" she chided me, with maddening composure. "G'nda Ké lured Yeyac and his men into this trap, and what thanks does she get?"

  "You lying bitch!" I snarled, then told two warriors nearby, "Take this female and hold her tight between you and march her with us when we leave here. If she disappears, so will you two, and in fragments."

  Next moment, I was being tightly embraced by the Cuáchic Nochéztli, as he exclaimed, "I knew the white men could not long hold captive so valiant a warrior as my lord Tenamáxtzin!"

  "And you have proved a more than capable substitute in the meantime," I said. "As of tonight, you are my second in command, and I will see that our Order of Eagle Knights bestows on you its accolade. You have my congratulations, my gratitude and my esteem, Knight Nochéztli."

  "You are most gracious, my lord, and I am most honored. But now—let us make haste away from this place. If the Spaniards are not already on their way, their thunder-tubes could fling their missiles as far as here."

  "Yes. When our men have retrieved all their weapons, rally them and start a withdrawal northward. I will catch up to you as soon as I have attended to one final matter."

  I sought among the throng until I found Ualíztli, and asked him:

  "What of that dear, brave girl, Pakápeti? She saved both our lives, tícitl. Was there anything you could do for her at the last?"

  "Nothing. She was dead and at peace before she hit the ground."

  "But that other—whatever caused her assailants such horror. What was—?"

  "Hush, my lord. Do not ask. You would not wish to know. I wish I did not." He gestured toward where the trees had been, now only charred poles amid a bed of smoldering embers. "I gave over everything into the hands of the kindly hearth goddess Chántico. Fire cleanses the earth of even unearthly things."

  Nochéztli had recovered from the site of the Spaniards' ambush, besides the numerous arcabuces, the slain warrior Comitl's horse. So he and I were both mounted as we led our men off into the night—though I soon wished fervently that I had a saddle between me and the horse.

  I again praised the new knight for having shown so much initiative during my absence, but added, "To make any use of those weapons you acquired for us, we must mix the powder for them and somehow find a source of lead."

  "Well, my lord," he said, almost apologetically, "as to the first necessity, I know nothing whatever of making the powder. However, lacking any orders to the contrary, I decided, while we waited for news of you, to put the time to profitable employment. So we do have the lead, a good supply of it."

  "You astound me, Knight Nochéztli. How ever did you contrive that?"

  "One of our older Mexíca warriors told me he was the son of a silversmith, therefore he knew that lead is often found in the same mines from which come the more precious silver, and the lead also is used in the process by which the mills refine that silver."

  "By Huitztli! You actually went to the Spaniards' mines and mills?"

  "Remember, my lord, I once before acted as your quimíchi among the white men. I and others of our troop stripped down to our loincloths and sandals, and dirtied our faces and bodies, and, one by one, slipped past the mine guards and in among the laboring slaves. That was easy enough. The guards were hardly expecting anyone to sneak into slavery. The getting out again was rather more difficult, especially because lead is so heavy. But, thanks to my experience as a quimíchi, we managed that as well. At least two twenties of the men behind us are carrying a lead ingot apiece in their provisions bags. And that Mexícatl son of a silversmith says he can easily melt the metal and cast it into balls with simple molds made of wood and wet sand."

  "Yyo ouiyo ayyo!" I exclaimed, delighted. "We are much nearer to being equal in armament to the white men than I could have hoped. The compounding of the powder will be far less of a problem than the one you have already solved. Listen, now, and memorize this and share it with any under-officers whom you trust, in case something should happen to both you and myself. What the Spaniards call pólvora was thought by our elders to be truly thunder and lightning, captured and confined, to be let loose when it suited the bearer. And those Spaniards still would not wish any of our race to know the secret of its making. It took me a long and weary while to discover it, but that process is simplicity indeed." I went on to explain about the three substances, how they were to be ground fine, and the proportions in which they were to be mixed.

  Then, when I judged we were sufficiently distant from Compostela to stop for a night's rest, I went among the men and selected two twenties of those well muscled and with long legs, and told them:

  "Tomorrow, when you have slept and refreshed yourselves, prepare to leave us and do some swift traveling. Give your arms and armor to your comrades and take only your mantles."

  The first twenty I ordered to journey to the volcano Tzebóruko, which few of us had ever seen but all of us knew by reputation, from its so frequently erupting and causing great devastation in the villages around it. I was sure Tzebóruko's slopes would be thickly crusted with that mineral called azufre. The volcano is in the Nauyar Ixú region of what was now New Galicia, meaning that those twenty men would have to traverse Spanish-held territory.

  "So I suggest that you go straight west from where we are now, to the coast of the Western Sea, and there commandeer boatmen to carry you south to the volcano, then back north again, bearing your mantle-loads of that yellow substance. You are not likely to encounter any enemy patrols on the sea."

  To the other twenty I said, "You will betake yourselves directly to Aztlan. Since our fishermen there are accustomed to making salt to preserve some of their catch, they are certain to know of the bitter kind of salt that is called first-harvest. You are to load your mantles with that."

  I added, to all those men, "You are to rejoin the army at Chicomóztotl—you know it, 'the place of the seven caverns'—in the mountains east of Aztlan, in the land where the Chichiméca tribe called the Huichol lives. The army will be there waiting for you. I urge you to get there, with your burdens, as soon as you can."

  To Nochéztli I said, "You heard. Now give all our warriors leave to sleep, but widely dispersed among the trees, and with sentries staying awake by turns. Tomorrow you will march the army toward that Chicomóztotl, because I have other places to go. While you wait there for my return, put the men to work at forging lead balls and burning charcoal. Those mountains are amply forested. When the bearers bring you the azufre and salitre, start making supplies of the pólvora. Then let the warriors already familiar with the arcabuz start training all others who show any aptitude in its use. In the meantime, send recruiters around among the Huichol and every other Chichiméca people farther afield, to persuade their men—with the promise of much killing and looting—to join our army of insurrection. The doing of those several preparations should keep everyone well occupied until I get back, and I hope to be bringing many more warriors with me. Right now,
Nochéztli, have the two men holding that witch-woman G'nda Ké fetch her here. They need not do it tenderly."

  They did not. They roughly hauled her before me, and they continued to grip her upper arms tight, even when she addressed me with an immodest request that she obviously intended to scandalize the most hardened and worldly of men.

  "If you are about to offer G'nda Ké a choice of ways to die, Tenamáxtli, she would like to be raped to death. You and these two stalwarts employing her three orifices for the purpose."

  But nothing she could say or do would surprise me in the least. I only said stonily, "I have other employment for you, before I cram your three orifices full of fire ants and scorpions. That is to say, you will go on living just exactly as long as you obey my orders. Tomorrow you and I will start for your Yaki country."

  "Ah, it has been a long time since G'nda Ké last visited her homeland."

  "It is well known that the Yaki detest outlanders even more than they detest each other, and that they prove it by ripping off the scalp of any imprudent stranger, before doing worse things to him. I shall rely on your presence to prevent any such misadventure, but we will take along the Tícitl Ualíztli, should it happen that his ministrations are required. These two stalwarts will also come with you—to guard you—and whatever else they do with or to you along the way, I do not care."

  XXIII

  The distance from our starting place to the Yaki lands is three times the distance between Aztlan and the City of Mexíco, so my going there and my returning constituted the longest journey I ever made in my life.

  I let G'nda Ké do the guiding of us, because she had come that way at least once before. For all I knew, generations of G'nda Kés had made the journey back and forth innumerable times during the sheaves of sheaves of years since that infamous first G'nda Ké had arrived among my ancestors in Aztlan. Those G'nda Kés' collective memory of this whole western part of The One World might well have been inscribed on this G'nda Ké's brain at birth, as plainly as a word-picture map.

  It seemed that she might truly be eager to see her homeland again, because she did not—as certainly could be expected—try to make the journey as tiresome or uncomfortable or hazardous or endless as she could. Except when she directed us to veer around a tar pit ahead, or a quaking sand, or some other obstacle, I could tell by the sun that she was keeping to a course as directly northwestward as was possible, through the valleys of the coastal mountain ranges. The distance would have been shorter if we had followed the coastline west of the mountains or the flat Dead-Bone Lands to the east—but either way would have taken more time and been far more arduous for us, sweltering in the seaside swamps or shriveling in the mercilessly hot desert sands.

  Nevertheless, and even without G'nda Ké's attempting to add hardships to it, the journey was rigorous and tiresome enough. Climbing a steep mountainside, of course, strains and cramps a body's muscles, seemingly all of them. You reach the crest with a sigh of heartfelt relief. But then you discover, going down the steep other side, that your body has countless other muscles to get strained and cramped. G'nda Ké and I and the two warriors—they were named Machíhuiz and Acocótli—endured those travails well enough, but we frequently had to stop and let the Tícitl Ualíztli regain his breath and strength. None of those mountains is high enough to wear a perpetual crown of snow, as does Popocatépetl, but many of them rise as far as the chill regions of the sky where Tlaloc reigns, and many were the nights that we five shivered sleepless, even wrapped in our heavy tlamáitin mantles.

  Often and often, at night, we would hear a bear or jaguar or cuguar or océlotl snuffling inquisitively about our camp site, but they kept their distance, for wild animals have a natural abhorrence of humans—of live ones, anyway. Other game was plentiful by day, however: deer, rabbits, the masked mapáche, the pouch-bellied tlecuáchi. And there were abundant growing things: camótin tubers, ahuácatin fruits, mexíxin cress. When Ualíztli found some of the herb called camopalxíhuitl, he mixed that with the fat of our slain animals and made an ointment with which to soothe our sore muscles.

  G'nda Ké asked him for some of the herb, to squeeze juice from it into her eyes, "because it makes them more dark and lustrous and beautiful." But the tícitl refused her because, he said, "Anyone fed a bit of that herb can soon be dead, and I would not trust you, my lady, to have it in your possession."

  There were many waters in those mountains, both ponds and streams, all of them cold and sweet and delicious. We were not equipped for netting their fish or waterfowl, but the axólotin lizards and frogs were easily caught. We also dug amóli root and, cold though the waters were, bathed almost every day. In short, we never lacked for good food and drink and the pleasure of being clean. I can also say—now that I am no longer having to climb them—that those mountains are surpassingly lovely to look at.

  During most of our journey, we were hospitably welcomed by the villages we came to. We slept under roofs, and the local women cooked for us many delicacies that were new to us. At every village, Ualíztli immediately sought out its tícitl, and begged various medicaments and implements from his colleague's stores. Though Ualíztli muttered that most of those backwoods tíciltin had pathetically antiquated notions of the physician's art, he was soon again carrying a well-stocked sack.

  The person I sought to befriend in every community was its headman, or chief, or lord, or whatever he called himself. During most of our journey, we were traversing the lands of the peoples called the Cora, the Tepehuáne, the Sobaípuri and the Rarámuri, which is why they were amicable toward us, all those nations and tribes having long had dealings with Aztéca traveling traders and, before the downfall of Tenochtítlan, with Mexíca traders as well. They all spoke different languages, and some of their words and phrases I had learned—as I have earlier told—from their scouts sent to get a look at the white men, when those scouts and I resided at the Mesón de San José in the City of Mexíco. But G'nda Ké, because of her many and extensive travels, was much more fluent than I in all those languages. So, untrustworthy though she was at any responsible task, I employed her as my interpreter.

  The message I wished to convey to every headman was the same: that I was collecting an army to overthrow the alien whites, and would he lend me as many strong, brave, truculent men as he could spare? Evidently G'nda Ké did not spitefully mistranslate my words, because almost all the headmen responded eagerly and generously to my request.

  Those who had sent scouts south into the Spanish-held lands had already heard vivid firsthand reports of the white men's brutal oppression and mistreatment of those of our people who had survived the Conquest. They knew of the enslavements in obrajes, the killings, the whippings, the brandings, the humiliation of once-proud men and women, the imposition of an incomprehensible but cruel new religion. Those reports had naturally circulated among all the other tribes and communities and nations nearby, and, even at secondhand, had fired every manly and able-bodied man with an ardor to do something in retaliation. Now, here was their opportunity.

  The headmen hardly had to call for volunteers. As soon as they relayed my words to their subjects, I would be surrounded by men—some of them mere adolescents, some old and rickety—enthusiastically shouting war cries and waving their weapons of obsidian or bone. I could take my choice, and those I picked I sent southward, with directions—as precise as I could make them—to enable their finding Chicomóztotl and joining Nochéztli there. Even to those too old or too young, I assigned an important errand:

  "Go and spread my message to every other community, as far abroad as you can take it. And to every man who volunteers, give those same directions I have just given."

  I should remark that I was not collecting men who merely wanted to be warriors. All of these were well accustomed to battle, because their tribes so often fought with neighboring ones, over territorial boundaries or hunting grounds or even to abduct each other's women for wives. However, none of these rustics had any experience of mass warfa
re, of being a component in an army, of serving in organized contingents that would act in disciplined concert. I was relying on Nochéztli and my other knights to teach them all they would need to know.

  I suppose it was only to be expected that as we five travelers made our way farther and farther to the northwest, I would find my message received with more incredulity than enthusiasm. The communities in those distant reaches of The One World were smaller and more isolated, one from another. They apparently had little wish or need for mutual intercourse or trade or even communication. The few contacts between or among them occurred only when two or more had occasion to fight each other—as did those communities we had previously visited—usually for causes that more civilized people would have thought trifling.

  Even the numerous tribes of the Rarámuri country—the name means the Runner People—seemed seldom to have done their running very far from their home villages. Most of their headmen had heard only vague rumors of strangers from beyond the Eastern Sea having invaded The One World. Some of those men felt that if any such thing really had happened, it was a disaster so distant that it was of no concern to them. Others flatly refused to believe the rumors at all. And eventually our little group arrived in regions where the resident Rarámuri had heard nothing whatever of the white men, and several of them laughed uproariously at the notion that whole hordes of uniformly white-skinned persons could exist.

  The prevailing attitudes of indifference or skepticism or outright disbelief notwithstanding, I continued to reap harvests of new recruits for my army. I do not know whether to credit that to my urgent and persuasive argument, or to the men's having got tired of fighting their neighbors and desiring new enemies to vanquish, or to their simply wanting to journey far from their old familiar and unexciting haunts. The reason did not matter; what mattered was that they took up their arms and went south toward Chicomóztotl.