Aztec Revenge

by Gary Jennings

  I felt the pull on my ankles from the fallen angel in hell getting stronger. Ay, el diablo wanted me to know he will welcome me with open arms and a place at his hearth.

  “I told you that the mare followed me because it was attracted to the stallion and the little tune I hum.”

  “That mare didn’t jump the fence; you took down a rail,” the loud-mouthed—hang him without a priest—hacendado said.

  “No! I never touched the rail. It was already on the ground; I swear by the holy mother—”

  “Speak the Madre Santa’s name in vain and I’ll cut off your tongue before we stretch your neck.”

  I got a grip on my panic. “Señor Caballero, like you, I am a lover of horses and would never—”

  “Listen to this slick-tongued, lying dog of a mestizo. He thinks he can talk his way out of what our eyes saw. Time for a hanging!”

  “A confession! I need time to confess to a priest!” I protested, as the loud man stepped up to the horse’s flank with his whip. “I’m a good Christian, a benefactor of the church!”

  The lie flew from my mouth along with a spray of spittle. I pressed my legs against my horse’s flanks. “Steady, amigo, don’t move,” I said under my breath. That was useless, of course; my mount would bolt the moment it got a good whack from the braided whip.

  Perhaps I did need time in the confessional box more than most men, eh? Truth be told, I had many things to confess—sins besides the stealing of horses, even matters of the flesh that would shock—and titillate—a priest.

  Ayyo! If I were a king, I would give my kingdom for just a few more gasps of life before I burned in the fires of hell.

  PART 2

  OAXACA, NEW SPAIN

  A.D. 1556

  LÉPEROS

  These street people, who huddled, starved, and begged on every corner of the towns of New Spain, were known as léperos. Social lepers, they begged, did odd jobs, and robbed … They were the first Mexican bandits … The Lépero lived as he could … ready to cut either a throat or a purse, begging for food or work, screaming under the whips of the town authorities who frequently ordered them chastised …

  Ironically, the Léperos were to survive, grow, and finally, inherit modern Mexico. They proved, not the degeneracy of man, but mankind’s tenacity in the face of hideous adversity.

  —T. R. Fehrenback, Fire and Blood

  FOUR

  “BASTARDO! HIJO DE una puta!”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been called the bastard son of a whore, and the accusation didn’t bother me. Not only was it true, but the speaker had the same birthright as I did, as did most of the other léperos on the street.

  We léperos were not made on the streets, but we were born into a state of infamy.

  The insult flew at me as I’d given the other bastardo an elbow in the face as the pack of us beggars charged into the street to plead for alms from people in a passing carriage.

  There were ten of us, and I was in the lead on the wet, muddy street because I had spotted the coach before the others. It was an open carriage with a single coachman and carrying a man and woman who, from their dress, appeared to be on their way to a society ball.

  It had been a miserable day, which is to say a lot when almost every day of my young life would have been called miserable by most people.

  Sitting on the stone wall to the well in the town square, watching the movement of animals and people, I had been waiting for a passerby who would throw me something to eat or a copper coin.

  Like all léperos who survived for any length of time on the streets, I had a finely honed sense of who was more likely to throw a bone to you or give you a bone-crunching kick with a boot.

  Women had soft hearts but were quicker than men to slap a begging hand when they had little to give. Men were most likely to toss a copper when they were alone than in a group, and more likely to deliver a kick from a pointed-toe boot or a blow from a braided leather riding crop when other men were watching. Perhaps they didn’t want to expose a side to themselves that might make them appear weak.

  People on their way to enjoy a ball were often in a good mood and more charitable than they might ordinarily be, so I put in some extra effort to get to them first.

  “For the sake of all that is holy, show God your charity!” I screeched as I neared the carriage, running as fast as I could.

  Running alongside the carriage, I whined, “For the love of the Son and his Virgin Ma—”

  Someone slammed into me, maybe the whole pack, and I skidded, my feet slipping out from under me as I slid toward the carriage and my legs went under, missing being run over by the front wheels.

  I tried to pull back as I saw the big rear wheel coming and screamed as it rolled over my leg.

  The carriage kept going down the street, the pack of léperos running alongside, loudly pleading for food or a coin as I lay in the mud too shocked and in pain to move.

  I twisted onto my stomach, screaming as the movement sent a shock of pain through me from my leg. I started crawling back for the wooden sidewalk as another carriage came down the street. The pack of beggars abandoned the carriage that had rolled over me and raced back to get to the oncoming one without even glancing at me as I crawled in the mud, with tears from pain, not sorrow, wetting my eyes.

  I would not have given a helping hand to any of the other léperos if I had been in their place. The first commandment of living and dying on the streets is that whether you were man, woman, or child, you killed your own snakes.

  I crawled, dragging my bad leg behind me, until I reached the sidewalk and then pulled myself on it, crying out as my damaged leg hit the corner.

  My breath coming in gasps from the pain and effort, I scooted on my rump until I got to the wall of the grain store. Leaning back, I whimpered because my leg screamed with pain—and it was a way to get a handout.

  Passersby ignored me even though I whimpered loudly and held out my hand for a coin. Finally, a wrinkled old indio woman knelt beside me and tore her head scarf into two pieces, using the material to wrap the bleeding wounds on my legs.

  The grain-store owner came out with a stick and whacked me with it.

  “Get away from my store!”

  Screaming from the pain and indignation, I refused to move until he threw me the core of the apple he had been eating.

  FIVE

  HUNGRY. AN EMPTY feeling that has been with me every day of my twelve years of life. Even the times I felt full were not satisfying because to get that way I had eaten too much of something not very appetizing. Sometimes what I ate would not have been appetizing to the wild dogs that roamed the streets and competed with us beggars for scraps in the gutters.

  I live in Oaxaca, a town with an indio name that the Spanish find hard to pronounce. “Wa-ha-ka,” is the correct pronunciation, though to hear the word spoken by a Spaniard sounds much different than when a Zapotec indio speaks it.

  Oaxaca is not a big city, not as large as Puebla, Guadalajara, or Guanajuato, and only a tiny fraction the size of Mexico City, the grand capital that lies three hundred miles to the north—about a week’s journey from the capital during the dry season—but it is the extent of the world that I know. I have never been beyond its streets, not even to the fields and farms beyond the town.

  Other than the whorehouse where I was born and the stable I sometimes sneaked into, I have lived my entire life on the streets of Oaxaca—streets where only the lucky and cunning have survived. And right now I was a wounded animal being watched by a pack of hungry beasts.

  The mud had been deep and the load small, or my leg would have been snapped in two. With broken bones and no one to care for me because I was an orphan, I would have been dragged to the churchyard and left there to die a slow, agonizing death as the demons that invade wounds attacked me.

  Had I been Spanish or even indio I would have been taken by the nuns to the hut where they cared for the homeless sick. But as a casta, a half blood, and street trash, there w
as no sanctuary for me because I was damned by God.

  I hobbled a few feet into the alley next to the store and crawled to a spot where I lay and slept until night fell.

  When I awoke later I still kept up the pretense of being asleep because I knew the pack was watching me. The “pack” were léperos who shared the streets with me. I called them a pack, but, unlike wolves who cooperate and kill as amigos, léperos would run after the same morsel and fight each other over it even if it was enough to share.

  I clutched a rock as I pretended sleep to let them know that I was capable of fighting if any of them came at me. The rock was only for appearances—tucked inside my shirt was a flint arrowhead attached to a hand’s length of wood shaft. I had found the broken arrow on the outskirts of town after a group of Zapotecs had ambushed travelers.

  For what purpose did I have the arrowhead?

  If I was attacked, I would fake holding the rock with one hand while I shoved the piece of arrow into the gut of my attacker with the other.

  As long as no Spaniard saw me, I would not even be hassled by the town constable—léperos who died on the street were dragged off to a pauper’s grave. Like swatted flies, no one cared much about who killed them. It was assumed léperos were killed for offending a Spaniard or they had died fighting over a scrap of food.

  I knew why the pack was watching me—they were looking for a sign that I was too helpless from my injuries to stop them from taking the rags from my body or finding a tortilla hidden under my filthy shirt.

  That was how we lived and survived. If one of them had been injured, I would have showed the same lack of mercy. And avariciousness.

  If I didn’t steal well and fight every attack desperately, as if I was backed against a wall and facing the hounds of hell, I would not be alive to experience my twelfth birthday—though in truth I really didn’t know when my birthday was, nor had it ever been celebrated.

  One of the pack, called Juan the Mongrel because his twisted, ugly face had a big, flat nose like a dog, stayed to watch me even after the others left to hunt for a handout. With few having given names, most of us were called Juan, the most common name in the colony.

  Like all the others, Juan the Mongrel was an old man even though he was only in his late teens. Few women lasted long as beggars because they were not as strong as the males—and few boys survived into anything more than a young manhood in which they looked old and battered.

  The Mongrel didn’t know what I was up to, but his instincts told him that I had found a source of food. I knew he caught on yesterday morning when I had not run for a bit of meat left on a chicken leg thrown by a passerby on the street.

  He was right. I had found a source of food and didn’t dare let anyone know it.

  After a while he left to join other léperos outside a pulqueria where sour indio beer was sold. The hope was that a drunk might throw them a copper or be so intoxicated that they could follow him down a dark street and rob him.

  As soon as the Mongrel disappeared around the corner, I forced myself up and crept down the dark alley. It was hard going—my stomach empty, my legs weak, and my head full of angry pain.

  Using the walls of buildings for support, I limped along, glancing back frequently to see if I was being followed.

  Night had fallen, but that only gave predators on the streets more places to hide.

  That I was up and on my feet, able to hobble along stiffly, was a result of hunger that I could satisfy only by one means—stealing.

  SIX

  THIEVERY WAS MY birthright. I possessed nothing except the rags on my back and the dirt between my toes.

  I had no family or even a memory of being loved except a vague feeling sometimes as I lay on the cold ground at night—a feeling of being held at a time when I had a mother. I saw other women carrying babies and was sure that what I felt was having been held in my mother’s arms, pressed against her tender breasts as she hummed a tune.

  The tune had stayed with me, helping me stay unafraid in the darkness, with a warm feeling that I had once belonged to someone.

  I had no recollection of the features of the woman who had held me, although sometimes on the street I would see a woman who, for reasons I couldn’t define, stirred in me a feeling of familiarity and created a longing to be held tightly. But I had no mother I could put a true face on even in my imagination.

  The feeling of being held and loved and protected lasted only for a moment before I would roll over on the hard ground and go back to sleep, often dreaming of gorging myself with so much food that the hollow pit in my stomach no longer ached.

  One might think that we street people would huddle together for companionship as I said wolves did, but the truth was that street dogs got along better than we two-legged animals. Since there was not enough food to feed all the beggars, one killed under a horse’s hooves or wagon’s wheels or by a foul disease that left him screaming with his brain on fire and boils on his skin until el diablo yanked his soul only meant there was one less scavenger to fight for garbage.

  It bears explanation that this caste of people who begged on the streets for scraps and were barely recognized as human by the government, church, and other people came not from divine intervention by God but the bawdy urges in the loins of Spaniards.

  From the first time the Spanish landed on the shores of what was then called the One-World by the indios, the invaders came without women but not without their lust for female flesh.

  Even after the conquest and total destruction of the indio nations and the creation of a slave state the king in Spain called a colony, Spanish men came to the land they named New Spain in far greater numbers than the women of their country.

  Not only did that encourage the men to bed down with the conquered indio women, but the fact that the women were helpless against rape made it easy and convenient for Spaniards to relieve their urges by spreading the legs of indio women.

  Not all the women were taken by rape, of course. Some were attracted to the male conquerors, perhaps out of the hope that they would make them legitimate wives. But marriage in the eyes of God, which the Spanish priests tell us can only be sanctified in God’s house, happened rarely for the indio women.

  The product of those rapes and other unions created people like me, a person of mixed blood that the Spanish called mestizos.

  Ayyo! It would have been better for me to have dog’s blood in my veins than the blood of two races.

  The pure bloodline of a murderer is more respected by the Spanish than that of a saint who possesses the blood of two different ethnicities.

  The Spanish hatred of mixed blood runs deep in their history and emotions, while the sight of the offspring of Spanish men and indio women is an insult to the indio. The result is that few with mixed blood are fortunate enough to be accepted as respectable members of the colony by either the Spanish or indios.

  That left mestizos in a state of utter poverty, disgrace, and infamy. Looked down upon as inferior and even cursed by God, unable to find respectable employment, we end up on the streets as beggars—a notorious breed shunned as lepers and contemptuously called léperos.

  The umbrage toward street people was even reflected in the names we were known by. I was called Juan the Lépero. The Spanish could have added the more respectable appendage of Bastardo instead of Lépero because I was conceived in sin rather than holy matrimony, but a lépero bore much more disrespect than a mere bastard.

  As I said, the reason léperos were shunned like lepers and those people called Untouchables in the land on the other side of the world called India was because of their mixed blood and because a loathing of what the Spanish called impure blood ran deep in a Spaniard’s character.

  I have been told that this aversion of the Spanish for mixing blood arose because Spain—which many Spaniards refer to as the peninsula and those born there as peninsulares to distinguish them from those of Spanish blood born in the New World—had a mixture of different peoples.


  For the past thousand years the peninsula had been occupied with people of conflicting race, religion, and culture. Three different religions thrived in the region—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. And a wide range of skin color was present—the darker complexion of the Muslim Arabs called Moors from North Africa dominated the southern part of the country, the lighter-complexioned Christians of European stock held sway over the northern regions, and those of the Jewish faith were spread throughout the region.

  After long and bloody wars, the Christians won the entire peninsula and drove out the Moors and Jews who refused to convert to Christianity.

  The end result was a country that was a part of Europe and had been made Christian by sword point, but whose people had a wide assortment of skin color, ranging from lighter skin in the north to the olive and darker complexions of many of the peoples of the southern Mediterranean regions.

  To impose social order on a nation with such diversity, the Spanish monarchs classified people by racial blood lines rather than skin color. From a social and legal perspective, what made one inferior was having a mixture of blood. Pureza de sangre—purity of blood—was more important than the color of skin.

  The clever Spanish carried this concept of the “color” of blood deep, not just in their social attitudes, but in implementing laws that defined a person’s status by the purity of blood, with those of mixed blood at the bottom of the ladder.

  In Spain or in the colony, to be considered for high office or marriage to a full-blooded Spaniard of European ancestry, one was subjected to the limpieza de sangre. If your blood was mixed—and by that the Spanish meant “tainted” by the blood of Moors or Jews—you were considered socially inferior and lacked the same legal rights as those with pure blood.

  However, it was only the mixing of blood that was prohibited, not the ethnicity of it. Thus those of “pure blood” were not ostracized regardless of whether their bloodline was Moorish or European, as long as it was pureza de sangre—pure blood.