Aztec Revenge

by Gary Jennings

  As I rested, the horse smells of straw and manure rose to my nostrils from the stalls below. Odious to others, to me it was a friendly scent because my love of horses was the only comforting feeling I had about life.

  The sole public stable in town, the inn for horses was a long narrow building with a front entrance facing the street. The owner’s house was attached to the right side of the building.

  The stable entrance had a set of double barn doors that opened into the receiving and working area. A space on one side was used for carriages brought in for repairs, with the other side of the room utilized for an anvil, furnace, and other blacksmith equipment along with saddles, bridles, harnesses, and other tack for sale or brought in for repair.

  Beyond the front entrance were two parallel rows of stalls facing each other across a space open to the air. Each stall had its own door split so the upper half could be left open. The horse owner’s tack hung on the wall next to the door. Saddles and harnesses studded with silver and turquoise were usually taken to the inn or wherever the horse owner was staying.

  For me, the stalls were a virtual palace! I had never enjoyed the luxury of sleeping in an enclosed area with a roof, walls, and a door like these kingly animals had. There was even hay to lie on.

  Most of my nights were spent under the roof of an open-air alcove behind the inn. The innkeeper had a pig tied there to receive the slop from the kitchen each day.

  The pig permitted me to snuggle up next to him for warmth at night, but nearly took off my fingers when I tried to reach for a bit of meat on a bone in the slop. Had he known that he was simply being fattened up to be served to the inn guests he might have been more generous.

  When I made my late-night visits to the stable, I normally jumped from the flat roof down to a stack of hay, but tonight my legs would not take the impact. Instead, I crawled to the rain gutter and shimmed down a drain pipe, whimpering with pain as the rough-surfaced clay pipe rubbed against my leg wounds.

  Hobbling on my feet in the courtyard, I half-filled a copper ladle with water from a trough and added maize from a horse’s feed bin, then placed the ladle on the dying coals in a blazer in the horseshoeing area.

  Blowing air at the coals with a handheld bellows as I’d seen the stable owner do, who was also the blacksmith, I heated the concoction until it softened into a corn mush.

  I greedily gobbled up the cornmeal and whatever bugs infested it as I sat on a bench with my back to the stall wall. Another ladle and my stomach felt warm and full.

  I topped off my dinner with a sour apple taken off the ground.

  Ayyo! Maize was the food of the gods! And a privileged horse got more of it every day than what I begged and stole in a month.

  “Gracias,” I whispered to the horses, thanking them for their contribution to a fine meal. No king had enjoyed a banquet more than I did on the food I stole from the horses that night.

  Despite my body telling me that it was broken, I felt myself relaxing because I loved the stable, with its smell of horses, their snorts and neighs as they spoke to each other, the sound of their hooves as they shifted their weight in their stalls.

  Humans were unpredictable and not infrequently brutal and dishonest, but horses lacked vices.

  Since I left the house of ill repute when I was eight years old and had to fight for survival on the streets, I had never felt safe and comfortable until a month ago, when I sneaked into the stable, cooked my corn mush dinner, and slept peacefully.

  I was careful to awaken before the crack of dawn to get out before the stable owner arrived to open for business and feed the horses.

  I yawned, ready to curl up, my eyes heavy when I heard the snort and whinny of a stallion—a sound full of power and arrogance.

  I knew immediately that this was no ordinary horse.

  ELEVEN

  HOBBLING OVER TO the stall where the stallion was being boarded, I stopped and stared at the tack hanging on the wall.

  Mi Dios! Never had I seen such a saddle and bridle.

  I ran my hand over the smooth and velvety leather, the finest I had ever seen hanging in the stable or on horses in the streets. And while caballeros were generous about enriching their horse tack with silver and semiprecious stones like turquoise and jade, the pieces on this one also had diamonds and pearls.

  Even I knew that this was not the horse equipment of a caballero, but that of a king.

  Still more mysterious, besides who owned the tack, was why he would leave it hanging in the stable. Stealing a fine saddle would get a rope as tightly wound around one’s neck as stealing a horse, but men still did such things.

  To leave such richness casually hanging outside a rented stall was so incredible that I could only imagine that no amount of riches would impress the wealthy owner—or the owner was so greatly feared no one would dare steal from him.

  The stall itself was the only double one in the stable and was reserved for mares about to give birth.

  I heard the snorting and stomping of great hooves as I drew closer. Peeking over the open upper half of the stall door, I could see that it was no mare, but a king of horses.

  The stallion’s coat was the reddish-brown called chestnut, and it was the biggest horse I had ever seen—at the withers, the point where the neck meets the shoulders, it was taller than me. And the beast was broad, what I imagined Cortés’s own warhorse to have been like from the stories that were told.

  More than just size, the big stallion possessed a powerful spirit and energy, with rippling muscles. It stared at me and stomped its big hooves, trembling the ground beneath my feet. Snorting, it gave me a contemptuous glare, as if it dared me to invade its territory.

  Something else struck me.

  “You have a bad temper,” I told the stallion.

  The horse snorted.

  I knew a lot about horses just from hanging around the card tables on the sidewalk in front of the inn. Horses, women, and luck at cards dominated the table conversations.

  A horse was called a colt or a filly up to four years old, and after that it was called a stallion or a mare. Stallions developed into more powerful horses than either mares or geldings, which were castrated males. And stallions were inherently more aggressive than other horses.

  It was easy to tell from the way the horse was staring at me and impatiently stamping his hooves that this one was obviously more territorial than most, even in a stable stall.

  While stallions were the largest and most aggressive horses in a herd, the leader of a herd was a mare called the boss mare. A stallion protected the herd from predators and the attempt by other stallions to take over, but it was the boss mare that led the herd to food and water and decided the direction to take from danger.

  The stallion looked at me like I was a coyote ready to be stomped.

  “I am your amigo,” I told him.

  I undid the lower door bolt and slowly opened the door just enough for me to slip in and pull the door shut behind me.

  The stallion stamped its hooves impatiently, volatilely, as if it was ready to break into violence and stomp me into tortillas. I felt as if I was facing a keg of black powder on a short fuse.

  Horses are big—the bigger ones ten times the weight of a grown man—and this was a big stud whose size alone would make it desirable for breeding.

  The stallion took a step forward, and I went back against the door I had latched behind me, my painful knees trembling.

  I began to hum the tune I had learned from my Aztec-Zapotec mother. Still the stallion snorted and pounded its hooves. I felt like a bug about to be squashed.

  Barely able to keep my knees from giving way, I continued humming and stepped forward, not aggressively but slowly, reaching out with a shaking hand to touch the horse’s broad chest.

  The image of a hummingbird suddenly came to me. I don’t know how or why or where the image came from—I had never gotten it before—but as the tune came out of my mouth, the sound became louder, piercing, and I got a v
ision of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec war god, who appeared as a hummingbird.

  I had seen drawings of Huitzilopochtli on indio pottery, but I had never thought of the ancient god before.

  I heard a voice in my head, a soft, warm female voice, telling me that Aztec mystics had used the hummingbird war-god tune to quell the rage of jaguars.

  I knew then for certain that it was my mother who had whispered the sound into my ears and that, for reasons I could not decipher, she had had the knowledge of ancient kings.

  HUMAN TREASURE

  [The Conquistadors] carried with them a detailed account of their hungry periods, their wounds, even their scratches; they talked incessantly about their perils and their incredible exploits; they composed moving stories of their immense efforts and sent them to the king. In exchange for their suffering, they solicited him for a small piece of land and a handful of Indians out of the millions they had won for him and for Christianity by the might of their swords.

  —Fernando Benítez, The Century After Cortés

  TWELVE

  SANCHO, A MULETEER coming up the street toward the inn, had just left the town whorehouse. It was already daylight, and he had to pick up his bedroll at the inn and get back to his animals.

  He had treated himself to a night at the inn after a hard two-week journey leading a pack train of cantankerous mules—the only kind God made—from Mexico City to Oaxaca. However, human nature had taken its course, and instead of spending the night in a comfortable bed at the inn he had chosen a softer bed in the arms of a prostitute, or two or three—he couldn’t remember how many.

  Men of his ilk were the lifeline that kept the commerce of the colony flowing. Starting at Vera Cruz for the vast shipments that arrived from mother Spain, or at Acapulco for the periodic Manila galleon that brought the riches of the Far East, goods were unloaded from mules to be put aboard the ships, and the mules were then reloaded to haul the products from ships through the thousands of miles of dirt roads in the colony, many of them little more than goat paths.

  Head muleteers like Sancho who came over from Spain to earn more money in the New World were invariably Spanish and assisted by indios.

  Sancho had working with mules in his blood. His family boasted that they had been running pack trains in the Granada region of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain since the time of the Romans. He had come to the New World with a brother to start the business here and had spent the last twenty years at the task that kept him on the road most of the time, with an occasional stop to spend time with his wife and children at their small rancho half a day from Mexico City. His two boys were old enough to help his wife tend the herd of mules being raised at the rancho.

  He was nearing the inn when he saw a man come out of the building and turn in his direction.

  Sancho almost stumbled. He had seen the man in Mexico City months before, pointed out to him as the man rode a horse in the capital’s main square. The man was of such great distinction that Sancho had made a special trip home to tell his wife and children whom he had seen. Encountering him here on the street created an instant social dilemma for Sancho.

  Among the Spanish community, a muleteer—even with his own animals— ranked low on the social scale, below a small merchant, above a common laborer, but, for sure, not a person of importance.

  The man coming down the street was the second most famous man in the colony. And a possessor of vast wealth.

  More than name recognition and riches, the man carried the blood of Hernán Cortés, the immortal conqueror himself, a legendary hero whose name was spoken in a reverence used for God and with more awe than mention of the king.

  Sancho was about to pass Martín Cortés the Elder—son of the conqueror.

  There were two sons of the conqueror … both named Martín.

  The man Sancho was about to pass was the first son born.

  Had the man been the second son, Martín the Younger, Sancho would not have had any question or hesitation about how to greet the man: he would have stepped off the wood sidewalk to give the son of Cortés the full width, even though the walkway was wide enough for two men to easily pass, then removed his hat and dropped to one knee as if the man were an archbishop or prince of royal blood.

  Sancho would have been correct in his show of respect because Martín the Younger carried the noble title of Marquis del Valle de Oaxaca.

  As the marquis passed by, Sancho would have lowered his head and said, “God bless you, Great Sir.”

  But being the firstborn son of Cortés raised an issue of blood—his mother had been an india girl; thus the elder Martín carried the taint of mixed blood.

  Sancho, a lowly muleteer, was a full-blooded Spaniard.

  A Spaniard of pure blood, whether a nobleman, merchant, or a stable hand who shoveled manure, had higher social rank than a person of wealth and power who carried the blood taint.

  That the “indias girl” was Doña Marina, an india princess who was a heroine of the conquest and whose help in translating and advising Cortés about the plots and conspiracies of the Aztecs helped bring victory, did nothing to raise the elder Martín’s social status.

  The muleteer would have considered the Holy Mother herself beneath him had she been of mixed blood.

  THIRTEEN

  MARTÍN CORTÉS THE Elder recognized the muleteer’s dilemma as he approached the man on the sidewalk. He had experienced it since childhood, when his younger brother, son of Cortés’s Spanish wife, was treated as royalty while he was treated as a curiosity—one that commanded respect and even a degree of awe, though not the reverence given the Spanish son.

  Although he bore the same name as his younger brother, his status was perfectly described by the name by which he was universally known:

  El Mestizo.

  The name implied both a description of his bloodline and a historical point of interest: the mating of Cortés, the Spanish conqueror, and Doña Marina, the indias princess, had created the first person to carry a mixture of Spanish-indio blood.

  More mating would follow as the conquistadors lay with indias and more sons of Spain came to the colony, until now there were many thousands of mestizos in the colony, though the number of them was small compared to the huge indio population.

  As the muleteer approached El Mestizo, the Spaniard touched his hat, lowered his eyes, and muttered, “Buenos días, Señor.”

  “Buenos días,” El Mestizo said.

  The responses between the two men were about par for the way El Mestizo was acknowledged by even higher-ranking Spaniards. While he carried the blood taint that made all mestizos less than respectable and léperos outcasts, he still had the blood of Cortés in him. Cortés the conqueror had been dead for nearly ten years, and his Spanish son had assumed the title. That made El Mestizo the brother of the most respected living personage in all of New Spain—and anyone who showed disrespect to him would be treated as if they had shown it to the marquis.

  El Mestizo was well aware not only of how the Spanish thought of him but also that indios had even less respect for him because they considered his indias princess mother to be a traitor.

  Thirty-five years had passed since the 1521 defeat of the Aztecs by his father, Hernán Cortés, and his father’s conquistadors, but the tale of how the brave and cunning Cortés conquered twenty-five million indios with fewer than six hundred Spanish soldiers, fourteen horses, and fourteen cannons was still being told and retold, with no Spaniard tiring of the most trivial detail.

  El Mestizo was always secretly amused whenever he heard a Spaniard tell the story, leaving out the fact that the Aztecs were defeated not just by Cortés’s small force, but by the thousands of indio warriors who fought beside the Spanish because they hated the much-feared Aztecs. The Spanish versions also left out how much of the victory was accredited by Cortés himself to the incredible ability of the indias girl Doña Marina to correctly interpret the actions of the Aztecs.

  But he also knew that the assistance Corté
s got from the indios took nothing away from the courage and strength of the conquistadors or of their daring leader. In one of those moments in history in which a leader showed more intrepidness than Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon or Hannibal climbing the Alps with elephants, Cortés had his own ships burned to keep his men from fleeing when it appeared they were hopelessly outnumbered.

  Ayyo! His father was quite an hombre! The man had cojones bigger than cannon balls. He was lucky that his men didn’t cut off his cojones and shove them down his throat after they found out he deliberately burned their ships, stranding them with their backs to the sea to face a hundred thousand Aztecs.

  Unlike his father, who was a leader of men, or his brother, who was a leader of society, El Mestizo was rather quiet, dignified, conveying a soft-spoken strength that commanded respect.

  His first love was horses, and the bloodline of his horses was recognized as among the finest in the land.

  It wasn’t the power of the horse that attracted El Mestizo, though horses could make a man—or a race of mankind—dominate others. More than anything else, the horse represented superiority of the Spanish over the indios and mestizos. On a horse the ordinary Spaniard was almost twice as tall as most indios. And the Spanish instinctively guarded their predominance over the indios whom they stole the land from and over the mestizos whom they stole dignity from.

  For El Mestizo, it wasn’t the horse rider’s dominance over others, but the beauty of the great beast, its power and rhythm as it galloped, flowing almost as if it were a piece of storm, a tornado, knocking down any man or animal that stood in its way.

  El Mestizo was rarely in Oaxaca despite the fact that his brother, the marquis, had inherited a vast estate from their father and El Mestizo managed much of the marquis’s property. Like his brother, he had a palatial home in the capital and a horse ranch an hour’s ride from there.

  Most of the family wealth didn’t come from the ownership of land, though El Mestizo and all the Cortés family had large haciendas, but from the encomienda originally given to his father following the conquest.