Aztec Revenge

by Gary Jennings

  Less than an hour upriver the water flowed by a road that Mazatl knew many Spaniards traveled on, often with animals carrying loads, but he had never climbed the steep cliffs to walk on the road.

  The hut where his wife suckled their babes and made their tortillas was not far from the river, alongside six other huts. They led a simple life, raising maize, fishing, doing a little hunting.

  Too poor and too remote for even encomienda status, the small group lived simple lives.

  At first he had been frightened by the white man’s presence, wondering where he had come from. The river for sure, but there were no white settlements up or down the river as far as Mazatl had walked except for a church with a Spanish priest a half a day’s walk from where Mazatl lived with his family.

  He knew what a Spaniard was, had seen them on occasion, although the only one he had ever spoken to was the priest who spoke his indio language at the village church.

  He recognized that the man he discovered near the river was a Spaniard from his skin color and that the man did not wear the same clothes as a priest. The man was young, perhaps in his middle twenties.

  At first Mazatl thought the man was dead, but then he heard him groan and saw him stir. It was obvious that the man had crawled out of the water and onto the embankment after spending some time floating downstream.

  Along the way, the man had been battered and bruised—from the way his left leg at the knee was twisted, it appeared broken to Mazatl.

  The man was helpless and would die if he was left alone, abandoned on the embankment.

  At first Mazatl tried to help him to his feet so he could get him back to the half dozen huts that the indio settlement was composed of, but the man was too weak and in too much pain to stand.

  He told the man in Nahautl that he was going back to his people to get help carrying him.

  * * *

  The Spaniard didn’t understand a word Mazatl had said. He thought he was being abandoned when the indio disappeared into the bushes.

  He tried to get to his knees as he shouted, “Come back! For the love of God, don’t leave me!” but collapsed back to the ground.

  Antonio de los Rios sobbed, certain that he would die.

  FIFTY-THREE

  BACK ON THE street, I got back my composure, cursing myself for being a victim of my own fears. Getting myself into a better mood, I wasn’t even annoyed when a howling pack of léperos descended on me.

  They came at me like a pack of hungry wolfhounds from hell. The sheer number of them was daunting. The wails that came from their mouths would have even driven el diablo to tears.

  I threw coins over their heads and kept going, unmolested as the beggars ran back and fought to get to the money.

  There but for the grace of God go I. In a strange twist of human fate, it took blood on my hands to change me first from a stable boy to a bandido and then to a gachupin.

  And I was certain the killing wasn’t over. Carlos or whoever killed Antonio had to have been desperate. Sooner or later the killer would come after me and I would have to fight for my life. Or my fraud would be exposed and I’d have to shoot my way out of the city.

  Either way, more blood was waiting to be poured and some of it might be mine.

  I gave some serious thought to the difficulty of getting out of the city if I needed to in a hurry and with constables on my tail. Surrounded by water, with only a few causeways leading off the city-island, I had a feeling of being closed in, even without a posse after me.

  Cortés must have had even stronger feelings when he was trapped in the city and had to get out before the Aztecs made him an evening meal. He found out that getting off an island isn’t easy, especially when your men are loaded to the gills with stolen treasure and there are thousands of angry warriors on your tail.

  I had heard the story from Gomez, the stable owner who cared for me and again from the viceroy’s aide on the way to the capital.

  The Spanish called it La Noche Triste, the Night of Sorrows, and had it gone just slightly differently, the city would still be called Tenochtitlán and my indio ancestors would be eating gachupins rather than serving them.

  Cortés had managed to bluff all the way to the Aztec capital and into Montezuma’s palace, holding the indecisive Aztec emperor a prisoner in his own house.

  While Cortés was in the city, news came from the coast that the governor of Cuba had sent a force to arrest Cortés for “insubordination.” Eh, the other Spaniard wasn’t concerned about whether Cortés was following orders but had gotten wind of Cortés’s incredible find of indio empires ripe for looting and wanted to grab them for himself.

  Cortés left the capital with much of his force and met and defeated the opposing Spanish contingent on the coast. True to his daring style of leadership, Cortés convinced the defeated Spaniards to join his army by telling them of the fantastic city of gold that awaited them.

  Before Cortés got back to Tenochtitlán, the officer he left in command, Pedro de Alvarado, was told that there was a plot brewing by Aztec nobility to rid the city of the Spanish. Being both impetuous and a lover of violence, Alvarado had his men ambush the cream of the indio nobility during ceremonies at the main temple, slaughtering hundreds of them.

  Shortly after Cortés arrived, the Aztecs attacked and the Spanish holed up in the emperor’s palace. When Cortés sent Montezuma onto a balcony to speak to the indios, rocks were thrown, one of them striking the emperor, a blow that caused his death a few days later.

  Of course, that was the Spanish version of the emperor’s death. The indios believed the Spanish had killed him because he was going to rouse the entire empire against them.

  Cortés made a decision to abandon the city, but not the enormous treasures in gold and gems his men had gathered, a fateful decision that would make fleeing the city more difficult.

  As Cortés led his force onto a causeway to get out of the city, the Aztecs attacked, literally surrounding the conquistadors by attacking at both ends while warriors in hundreds of canoes attacked from the sides, hurtling spears and sending arrows until the sky was black with death falling from the sky.

  Cortés lost 154 Spaniards, about a quarter of his small army, and his indio allies suffered casualties of about two thousand. A brutal reality about how the Aztecs and other indios conducted wars was that they fought to wound and capture the enemy rather than outright killing them, so the prisoners could be sacrificed and eaten after the battle.

  The strategy was a double triumph for the winning side because the prisoners could be sacrificed, thus pleasing the gods and ensuring more victories, and the victorious warrior could eat the heart of the foe he captured and gain even more strength.

  The indio strategy of capture rather than kill would ultimately be one of the causes of their defeat by Cortés at the battle of Otumba, but it worked well enough on the Night of Sorrows for the Spaniards to look back at the city and see their captured comrades taking their turn up the steps of the temple where their hearts would be cut out.

  Such a defeat would have spelled the end for any commander less daring and utterly determined than Cortés, but he soon defeated the Aztec army at Otumba, saying he managed it because he personally killed the indio’s commander, a feat that created panic and confusion in the indio ranks.

  The Night of Sorrows was no doubt made even more sorrowful than the mere loss of men by the fact that a great deal of the treasure the Spanish had gathered was also lost.

  I didn’t want to suffer the loss of either my life or my newfound fortune, so I needed to find a quick way off the island city. To scout out the routes, I started at one side of the city and began to make my way around, keeping close to the lake as I checked out each of the three causeways.

  During Aztec times, the city was laced with canals so that most places in the city could be reached by either foot or canoe. A large number of those canals still existed with bridges over them.

  As I rode around the city, what I had first conclu
ded about an escape route proved true—there was no easy path.

  The fastest route was over one of the three causeways, but that was also the quickest and easiest way constables could stop an escape. The posts for collecting tolls were maintained day and night, and there was one at the city side of each causeway.

  Although the purpose of the posts wasn’t to protect the city, but to collect tax on goods coming and going, they also served as guard posts to stop all movement on the causeways when the bells of the cathedral rang an alarm.

  The only way I would make it over the causeway was if I went before the alarm was sounded. And that meant moving quickly—and not with a posse on my tail.

  The other escape route was interesting, but had its drawbacks: escaping over the water.

  Pausing on a bridge over a canal, I thought about a canoe escape as I watched dozens of the small craft being paddled and poled up and down the canal.

  As I watched, a carriage came up beside me and stopped. Two things immediately struck me about the carriage—unlike most of the city carriages, the passenger section was fully enclosed, like the coaches that carried travelers between cities, and it was black with just modest silver trim. The passenger window curtain closest to me was slightly parted.

  Taller in the saddle than the passenger space, I bent down to look in the window and give a friendly greeting, but the carriage pulled away as I spoke.

  The incident made me uneasy, because I wondered if the occupant had recognized me.

  Thinking about escaping by water, I could easily have indios with a canoe standing by at all times to take me out of the city on short notice, but it would mean leaving Rojo behind. I wouldn’t do that, but I thought about having the stallion stabled outside the city so I was free to leave by canoe—and rejected the idea. Canoes were not as swift as the stallion, and a canoe would be easily observed from land, permitting a posse to be waiting for me on shore.

  Another escape route was swimming—not by me, but Rojo, pulling me along with him as I floated and hung on to the saddle. I had broken the stallion into swimming for the times I would need to cross a river with constables on my heels.

  The stallion was strong and would probably carry me to land, especially since the lake was not very deep for a good distance from shore, but it was a method I would use only in case of the most dire circumstances, since it meant I could only take treasure that could be stuffed into my pockets. It also meant swimming in waters that stank worse than a lépero.

  No matter how I tried it, getting out of the city in a hurry with mules loaded with treasure was very likely to end with me in the viceroy’s dungeon rather than a ranchero.

  I was preoccupied, chewing over the fact that, like the conquistadors, I had planned to be weighed down with cumbersome treasure when I fled, in my case two loaded mules that would cut Rojo’s speed in half, when I saw a woman that sent a shock through me.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  PONDERING THE INJUSTICE of the gachupins in making it difficult for me to acquire a dishonest fortune, I spotted a mop of red hair and a pair of startling green eyes in a passing carriage.

  I froze in my saddle as stiffly as I would have had a constable stuck a pistola in my face.

  Ayyo! It was her—the redheaded she-demon, the wildcat who came at me with dagger, claws, feet, and fists, and that beautiful mouth full of such demeaning remarks about my character.

  She had left me with not only a scar to remember her by, but a wounded heart that would never heal—eh, what a poet I am.

  I was sure it was her, in a carriage sitting next to another young woman and facing two more gachupin belles, no doubt on their way to the paseo to parade their beauty and throw flirtatious smiles at toy caballeros on prancing horses.

  She passed, looking up at me, laughing about something as the carriage rumbled past me, going in the opposite direction.

  Stunned, I foolishly turned in the saddle to see if she had also looked back and was about to begin screaming “bandido!” but she didn’t turn her head. She had been looking toward me as we passed, but we never made eye contact.

  I kept going, resisting the temptation to turn and look back again or, worse, to wheel Rojo and pursue her. In truth, the redheaded wildcat had been in my thoughts a thousand times since we tangled.

  She could not have gotten more than a quick glance as I passed. Would she recognize me as the bandido if I approached and tipped my hat? I pondered that question.

  She had pulled my mask down below my nose, but it still left half of my face covered.

  I touched my cheekbone. She had left her mark there as sure as if she had carved her initials into a tree. I don’t scar easily, so the mark was narrow and faint, but it was still obvious to anyone looking at my ugly face.

  “But many men have scars,” I told Rojo. And I am not a bandido; I am a gachupin, a man of great wealth and pure blood. When she looked at me, she would see the Spaniard in me, not the mestizo.

  Right now I could race back to the carriage and ride alongside, flirting with her as if I was a caballero on my way to the paseo. And all she would do is act shy and giggle—

  No, she would start screaming for the constables, too, with her friends joining the chorus. Seeing me on a big stallion instead of a paseo pony and not dressed as a caballero dandy would stimulate a memory of being manhandled and robbed by me.

  Despite my feelings, I had to keep out of her sight. That would not be difficult, not only because Mexico was a big city but also because women of quality led very sheltered lives. It was improbable that I would ever pass her on foot on the street, and there was only a slightly better chance of her seeing me on horseback.

  Sí, I was perfectly safe. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t satisfy my curiosity and at least find out what the hellcat’s name was.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  “I WANT TO know the señorita’s name,” I told my majordomo. “And I don’t want anyone to know that I’m seeking it. She may be married, spoken for; I’m new to the city and don’t want to be meeting at dawn at the field of honor until I know the lay of the land.”

  “Sí, señor, I will be very discreet.”

  I described the carriage to him, and he asked about a coat of arms.

  I shook my head. “No coat of arms.”

  “Then none of the señoritas were of the nobility,” he said. “Young women of titled families generally do not socialize on the paseo with the girls of the merchant class.”

  “You’re saying she’s a merchant’s daughter.”

  “That is the likely conclusion, señor. The young women tend naturally to also socialize with others of the same financial status. Your description of the coach suggests that it is a very fine one; thus she is probably very wealthy.”

  “She could have been the daughter of a rich hacienda owner,” I threw in to show off my own knowledge.

  “Of course, señor, of course. But…”

  He paused and gave me a cautious look. It was the expression he used when he feared he might offend me.

  “As with the merchants and nobility,” he said, “not only do the daughters of hacendados go to the paseo together, but most haciendas have been given a name by their owners and an emblem on their carriage doors similar to a coat of arms.”

  He added that the carriages of the rich silver-mine owners were so decorated with the precious metal that they were also easy to spot.

  “Where was she seated in the carriage?” he asked.

  The question puzzled me, but I told him she had been seated closest to the center of the road, facing me as we passed.

  “Then her family owns the carriage. That is the seat closest to a caballero who would pause his horse and speak to the young women aboard. It is occupied by the coach owner.”

  This time I shook my head in amazement. The majordomo, who was an indio, as were the other servants, would have made a fine bandido with his ability to assess people.

  “Your uncle, señor, told me that is how coaches are oc
cupied in Spain also. Is that not true?”

  Eh, I could have told him that he knew more about what happens in Spain than I did, but I only confirmed my uncle’s information.

  “Find her,” I told him.

  “With your permission, señor, I will start at the marketplace.”

  “The marketplace? A young woman of good breeding would hardly be found picking through ears of maize.”

  “No, señor, but her servants would. Servants gather and gossip about their masters.”

  “Excellent, then she should be easy to identify. Ask about a redhead with a temper as fiery as her hair.”

  It was his turn to be puzzled, and I realized I had slipped and said something about her that I shouldn’t have known.

  “All redheaded women have fiery tempers,” I said. “God made them that way.”

  Daughter of a rich merchant. A señorita with a temper as hot as her flaming red hair. Mexico was a big city, but that would reduce the odds a bit, though red hair was not uncommon among the Spanish.

  The next morning I waited impatiently for the majordomo to come back from the marketplace. When he returned to the house, I kept myself from pouncing on him and hid my eagerness as he went about his duties.

  I had already made too many mistakes around the house in terms of acting like a gachupin; it made me wonder what the marketplace gossip was about me.

  “There is a young woman named Mercedes, the daughter of a rich cloth merchant, Bartoleme de la Cruz. With great respect, señor, the servants of her house say she is a fine young woman, pretty, but is quick to lose her temper.”

  “And her eyes?”

  “Bright green, and she has a coach that matches the description of the carriage you saw.”

  Ayyo!

  The majordomo told me the location of the merchant’s house, and I immediately went to the stable and saddled Rojo, ignoring the look the stableman gave me as I once again did the work of a servant.