Aztec Revenge

by Gary Jennings

  “The city worked well for the Aztecs because they had only their own feet and small boats in which to move people and goods. Surrounded by water and having no beasts of burden, it was supplied by foot over the causeways and with thousands of canoes. But as you know, Don Antonio, we are a nation of horses, mules, carts, and carriages that require hard-packed soil, hardly the ingredients of a city on an island laced with canals and frequently subject to flooding.”

  Eh, I was beginning to like the sound of being called Don Antonio. It had a nice ring to it, no?

  “But the great conqueror, the Marquis del Valle,” he said, “recognized that there was a compelling reason why the Aztec capital should become the center of the new colonial government. The city evoked both fear and obedience among the indios. They were used to obeying the commands issued from it.

  “Cortés was even wise enough to use a name that keeps the Aztec mystique alive. Some suggested giving the city a Spanish name, as Cortés did with the very first city he created, Vera Cruz, or even calling it New Madrid. But the clever conqueror called it Mexico, because, although we use the name Aztec, that breed of indio called themselves the Mexica.”

  I knew much of what he told me from the tales told of the conquest. What I needed more was a lesson on being a Spaniard.

  “I must warn you, Don Antonio,” the aide said, “you will find some resentment among criollos in general because you are a peninsulare.”

  “Why is that, Don Domingo?” I asked, taking a pinch of snuff he offered.

  “These colonials hate those of us who come over from Spain to serve the king in this distant place but plan to return home. When the previous viceroy died, they even had the imprudence to petition the king and ask that he permit them to govern themselves. Can you imagine the howls of laughter and ridicule the request created in Madrid?” He leaned closer and spoke in a confidential tone. “It’s the weather, you understand.”

  “The weather?”

  “The warm climate makes the colonials lazy and…”

  I could have told him that I already knew that the hotter it got, the lazier people got, but I only half-listened as he droned on about the inability of the colonials to govern themselves and their ignorance about the state of the world and struggles for empires. The struggle I was having was to keep from breaking out into an open sweat the nearer we got to the city. Eh, if he thought criollos were ignorant about the world, what was he going to think when I tripped myself up with my lack of knowledge and manners?

  After Riego had finished raking the criollos over the coals, he started in on how ungrateful the indios were for not appreciating all that the king was doing for them.

  “The indios would be in dire straits, indeed,” he said, “if we permitted the criollos to exploit them as much as the criollos tried.”

  He was too uninformed about indios to know that they didn’t distinguish between the injustices they suffered at the hands of criollos and the ones they suffered from peninsulares; that all Spanish were gachupins to them, wearers of sharp spurs; and that while the temples of their bloodthirsty gods of yore were gone, their beating hearts were still being ripped out in sacrificial rites as the Spanish gorged themselves on riches created by their labor.

  “Colonials boast that anything found in Madrid could be found in the city, except for the king,” Riego said.

  He went on to describe the Spanish ingenuity and prowess in building the city, speaking as if Cortés himself had rolled up his sleeves and had begun dismantling the great stone edifices of the Aztec empire and packing them on his back to build his palace and the city around it.

  Eh—there is an indio way of looking at the world and a Spanish way, with my mixed blood permitting me to peek at a bit of each.

  That Spanish image of how the city was built left out the fact that the invaders rounded up tens of thousands of indios to work as slaves to build the new city from the rubble of the old one, driving them with fear and the whip much the same way Sunday school priests say that the pharaohs of Egypt built their great monuments.

  The churches were built the same way, by thousands of indios the priests called converts and the indios called slaves being forced to dismantle the temples of their defeated gods and use the stone to build churches.

  It didn’t disturb the priests that the great blocks of stone from the pyramid dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec war god, which stood in what is now the Zócalo, were used as the foundation for the city’s main cathedral despite the fact that they had been stained with the blood of sacrifice victims.

  The indios knew that they had not shared in the prosperity and grandeur of the city that was the largest and richest in the “New World.”

  While the conquerors lived in grand houses and palaces, many only staying long enough in the colony to get rich, city-dwelling indios worked as servants and laborers and lived in squalid shacks, mostly made out of wood and cornstalks, although a few were of adobe.

  I was used to hearing the Spanish of Oaxaca speak of indios as if they were farm animals, but the tone of Riego was different. The aide’s “experience” with indios was limited to seeing them carrying merchandise on the streets and working as household servants. He did not see them as beasts of burden but had the mentality that indios were child-like and had to be protected even from themselves.

  He finally got around to something close to my heart.

  “The worst plague in the city is not constant flooding or the stench from the excrement that pours into the lake, but the dirty, disgusting, blood-tainted léperos.” He shook his head, in wonderment. “You have never seen anything like these creatures in Madrid or anywhere else. They loudly beseech for a coin for food and then use it for indio beer at a pulqueria. They eat little but multiply faster than their brother rats and lice. Truly creatures damned by God.”

  “And stupid, too,” I added. “From what I saw of the creatures in Vera Cruz.”

  MEXICO: A PROUD, RICH, AND FLAMBOYANT CITY

  It is a byword that at Mexico there are four things fair … the women, the apparel, the horses, and the streets …

  The streets are very broad, in the narrowest three coaches may go, and in the broader six may go in the breadth of them, which makes the city seen a great deal bigger than it is.

  The people are so proud and rich that half the city was judged to keep coaches, for it was a most credible report that in Mexico in my time there were above fifteen thousand coaches …

  The coaches exceed in cost the best of the Court of Madrid and other parts of Christendom; for they spare no silver, nor gold, nor precious stones, nor cloth of gold … for their horses there are bridles and shoes of silver.

  Both men and women are excessive in their apparel, using more silks than stuffs and cloth. Precious stones and pearls further this their vain ostentation; a hat-band and rose made of diamonds in a gentleman’s hat is common, and a hat-band of pearls is common in a tradesman.

  —Thomas Gage, Travels in the New World [circa A.D. 1625]

  FORTY-FIVE

  THE CARRIAGE RUMBLED along a long causeway, carrying us across the lake to where we would enter city streets. The bridge was crowded with people, pack mules, carts, carriages, horsemen, and even small herds of goats, sheep, and cattle on the way to be butchered.

  Just as in Aztec days, the most common “pack animals” were indios, who were capable of carrying large bundles, as much as half their own weight, for great distances.

  “Less expensive than mules,” Riego said, “and they eat less.”

  The lake and canals flowing into the city were almost as pressed with people as the causeway, on which swarms of watercraft, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of canoes piled high with vegetables, fish, firewood, and cloth, were bringing items to marketplaces.

  Señor Riego waved his hand at the waterline of the city as we got near the end of the causeway.

  “Now there is something that would be rare indeed in mother Spain or the rest of Europe, amigo. You see tha
t there are no defensive walls around the city or around our government buildings as there are on the coast.”

  “The city is an island and easy to defend?”

  “True, but also because the only threat is an attack from the sea, and we are far from the coastline. No other nation besides Spain has a large enough settlement in the Americas to be a threat by land. Even though we have indio problems up north and occasionally even small uprisings in other areas, the indios are no real danger to the might and power of the king’s army and the colonial militia.”

  I didn’t ask him why, if Spain’s military might is so great, that fighting of indios has been going on for over forty years with no end in sight. And how come the viceroy couldn’t make the Vera Cruz and Acapulco trade routes safe.

  “Are those of mixed blood a threat?” I asked, curious as to what he would say.

  “Flea bites, amigo, that is all the mestizos are capable of.”

  The city streets were as densely packed as the causeway, with Spaniards on horseback and in carriages joining the throngs that came in on the causeway. And Riego told me that there were other land bridges over the lake to the city.

  I had never seen so many people at one time in my life. Riego told me that there were more people entering and leaving the city across the causeways in the morning than there were in the entire city of Vera Cruz even when a fleet was in.

  “Most of the indio goods end up in the Tlatelolco, the largest of the native markets, one that dates back to Aztec times. Only servants and the lower classes shop there.”

  “Naturalmente,” I offered, “the common people must eat, too, no?” I made it sound like I regretted they had to be fed. Eh, I was not only dressed like a gachupin, I was beginning to talk and think like one.

  Riego pointed out a prominent structure near the entrance to the marketplace: gallows. Three bodies were swaying in the breeze.

  “In the time of the Aztecs,” he said, “their temples had racks of human skulls from heads that had once sat on the shoulders of sacrifice victims. It was a reminder not only to their false gods of the sacrifices they had made for them, but what would happen to themselves if they disobeyed the commands of the Aztec emperor.”

  He smirked. “Our gallows is a reminder to the indios that our justice is even swifter.”

  Despite my blood getting hotter the more I listened to the arrogant Spaniard boasting about the prowess of his people when I knew that, despite his boasts, compared to me he was a flea I could swat aside, I was stunned and awed at seeing the city.

  I already knew from my first view of it from a great distance that no city I had been in came anywhere close to the size and magnificence of the capital. But to see the streets, to be on them, ay di mio!—the major thoroughfares of Mexico City were as wide as the main square in most of the cities I had been in.

  I realized that Mexico City truly deserved its title as the queen and very heart of New Spain, a gem that has been polished with the wealth of the colony.

  To have heard homes described as “palaces” had little meaning to me until we rumbled by huge stone structures that the wealthy encomenderos, big hacienda owners, and silver-mine owners had built. Palaces were the size of city blocks in Oaxaca and Vera Cruz and were not made from flimsy materials as they were in most other cities.

  “It’s been over forty years since the conquest, and there are even still a few of the original conquistadors living,” Riego said. “The old warriors are treated with the respect given to popes and ghosts.”

  As soon as our carriage wheels began rumbling down city streets, we were besieged by filthy, ragged, disgusting léperos. They beseeched us in the most agonizing, pitiful, and heartrending terms, even claiming that charity to them would be blessed by God.

  They were the most vile and insufferable pack of thieves and beggars that I had ever seen. At their most obnoxious, the léperos of Oaxaca, Vera Cruz, and other cities I had been in paled in comparison to these demons of beggardom. I alone had had the whine and intonation in my best days to match these beggars.

  As they were beaten back by the guards, the viceroy’s aide used a rose-scented nosegay to block their stench.

  “Did I lie to you about these howling devils, Don Antonio?” he asked.

  “Truly creatures damned by God, Don Domingo,” I said, accepting a nosegay offered by the man.

  What horrible whining! What vile stench these creatures emitted! I took a pinch of snuff to relieve my poor nose.

  FORTY-SIX

  “I SHALL GET out here,” Riego said as the carriage pulled up to the viceroy’s palace. “The carriage will deliver you to your new home, where your loving relatives await you.”

  With knives, guns, and poisons, no doubt.

  I sat back in the carriage and gritted my teeth and rubbed my pistola with the itchy palm of my hand. I would have preferred to jump on Rojo, who was being pulled behind the carriage, and gallop away, but I had discovered a couple of things since I blundered into the attack on Antonio de los Rios.

  First, being a gachupin was an interesting change of habit for me.

  For the first time, I had gotten a true dose of what léperos were like from the point of view of respectable people. I had been a lépero, and in other cities I had had léperos whine and beg from me, but here, in the guise of a gachupin, I had truly experienced what these creatures were really like.

  Whew! They stunk.

  Second, I was actually intrigued by the murder of my namesake. Why was the real Antonio murdered? Greed? Jealousy? Vengeance?

  I knew I could ride away from it, but stepping into his shoes had made the killing of him personal to me. Not just because I was the next intended victim, but because I had fought for him, seen him die, worn his clothes, and used his name.

  For a certainty it wasn’t from a sense of honor that I decided to carry forth as Juan the Gachupin. Maybe I really had become a gachupin in a short time.

  Or maybe the fact that I had just inherited a business of fine blades— swords and knives—had a certain appeal to a man of my persuasion. I had always stolen whatever was handy and sold the loot for a fraction of its value because a mestizo could not have possessed things of value.

  But I was no longer a half blood. I was a gachupin. Which was the most important reason I was not running.

  Now I could steal things of greater value.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  BEING TRANSPORTED AS a person of quality in my carriage to my home, I wondered just how many houses I owned. And whether I had a hacienda. With fine horses?

  Most gachupins had a house in Mexico City even if their business of mining, hacienda, or merchandise required some care elsewhere in the colony. At the very least, wealthy gachupins spent more than half the year socializing in the capital.

  I wondered if I now had a hacienda that I could leave the city and stay at without raising suspicion.

  Of course, before I did that, today I had to face a host of relatives at my city dwelling. And tomorrow perhaps the hangman at that gallows Riego was so proud of.

  As the carriage pulled up to the grand house that I was master of, I tensed, wondering what the chances were that the elderly uncle from Guadalajara had arrived unexpectedly. It was too late to flee because people had gathered to greet me at the open gate to the house. Men, women, young, old, at least two dozen of them.

  At the head of the greeting line was Carlos de Rueda.

  The naked woman who pawed me in Oaxaca wasn’t with him.

  As I stepped down from the carriage, my knees shaking as they sensed “Imposter!” would soon be shouted, I put on a brave grin as they clapped and yelled “El héroe!”

  Carlos stepped forward. “Welcome, cousin. You have cheated death and slain dragons, and we honor you as a hero and conqueror.”

  He saluted me with a wide sweep of his hat.

  A matron stepped in front of him, pulling a teenage girl with her.

  “My daughter, your second cousin, twice removed. You must com
e to a party at our house, where you can get to know her better.”

  Ayyo! I’ve known horses I’d rather bed with.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  IT BECAME A blur of names that I would never remember, faces with smiles that I found more insincere than a beggar’s whine, marriageable daughters whose sole interest in me was the size of my fortune rather than my cojones, and questions I hated answering about how I managed to kill two bandidos when I had been employed in Spain as a keeper of a merchant’s accounts and once considered the priesthood.

  “God guided my hand,” I said, repeatedly.

  Carlos pulled me away from the mob and pointed at Rojo as the horse was being led into the stable by a servant.

  “I recognize your horse.”

  I froze, and my hand touched the pistola I had under my coat. I didn’t know what to say and gave him a stupid smile.

  “The bloodline, were you aware it’s colonial?” he asked.

  “Ahh,” was all I could manage.

  “They love our horses in Spain, eh. You could have saved the expense of bringing it over. I breed the finest horses in all of New Spain from a champion stud that carries the bloodline of the conqueror’s warhorse. Naturally, since you are family, the price would be insignificant compared to the value of you owning a horse with a royal bloodline.”

  “Gracias,” you lying bastard. I believed him as much as I did card cheats, picaro women, street beggars, and horse thieves.

  Perhaps it was my imagination ignited by suspicions and the fact that I knew from Oaxaca that he was a man of deceit, but I sensed animosity toward me from Carlos. No doubt I would have felt the same if I had lost out on a fortune during a time of great need because of the miraculous survival of someone else.

  Despite his pretense at civility, Carlos quickly let me know that he was of higher social rank than me and my other relatives, having been married to a member of the first family of the colony, the Cortéses.

  His sheer arrogance was enough to tempt me to ask if he had tried to have me killed because the rich, powerful family he married into was not bailing him out of his financial problems. I held my tongue, of course, but while he could get away with acting arrogant to Juan the Lépero, I, as a newly ordained gachupin, was tempted to cut him off at the knees.