Aztec Autumn

by neetha Napew

  "No, no, he has not come this far north. He is still safely resident in New Galicia. The canny Guzmán knows better than to risk his fat culón up here in the Tierra de Guerra. But he has established his capital right on the northern border of New Galicia, and hopes to make a fair city of it."

  "Why?" I asked. "The old capital of Michihuácan was on the shore of the Lake of Rushes, far to the south."

  "Guzmán is no fisherman. His home province of Galicia back in Old Spain is silver-mining country. It follows that he expects to make his fortune here from silver. So he founded his capital in a region near the coast, where his prospectors have discovered rich veins of that and other ores. He has named it Compostela. So far, it consists just of himself and his favorite fawning compinches and his cadre of troops, but he will be rounding up native slaves to toil underground to mine the silver for him. I pity those poor wretches."

  "So do I," I murmured, while deciding that Tiptoe and I would set our direction more north of west when we moved on, not to stumble into that Compostela. Still, it troubled me that the butcher Guzmán had set his new city so close to my native Aztlan—no more than a hundred one-long-runs distant, as best I could estimate.

  "But come, Don Juan," Tallabuena said now. "Come and meet the heroes of the hour."

  He led me to where the three heroes sat eating. They were being devotedly attended by a number of lesser-ranking soldiers, who plied them with the choicest portions of deer meat and poured for them wine from leather bags and jumped to fulfill their every least request. Also in attendance on them was a man in the traveling dress of a friar, who seemed even more servilely to seek their favor. The heroes, I could see, had originally been white-skinned, but they were now so sunburned that their complexion was darker than my own. The fourth man, who would also have been accounted a hero, I suppose, if he had been white, sat eating alone and apart and unattended. He was black and could not have been burned any blacker.

  I would never see these several Spaniards again after this one night. But though I could not have known it then, the tonáli of every one of them was so linked with mine that our separate future lives—and numberless other lives, and even the destinies of nations—would inextricably be intertwined. So I will tell here of what I learned about them, and how I befriended one of them, in the brief time before we parted.

  XVI

  The leader of the heroes was respectfully addressed by everyone else by his Christian name of Don Álvar. But when he was introduced to me, I wondered why any Spaniards should have laughed at Tiptoe's name, because the surname of this man Álvar was Cabeza de Vaca, which means "Cow Head." Despite that inauspicious appellation, he and his fellows truly had done a heroic feat. I had to piece together their story from their converse with the soldiers attending them, and from what the Teniente Tallabuena told me—because the three heroes, after having greeted me politely enough, did not once thereafter speak directly to me. And when I knew their history, I could hardly blame them for wanting nothing to do with any indio.

  I know that Florida means "flowery" in the Spanish tongue, but to this day I do not know where the land of that name is situated. Wherever it is, it must be a terrible sort of place. More than eight years before, this man Cow Head, his surviving companions and some hundreds of other white men, together with their horses and weapons and provisions, had sailed from the island colony of Cuba, intending to settle a new colony in that Florida.

  From their first setting sail, they were beset by vicious springtime storms. Then, when they finally landed, they encountered other dismaying troubles. Where the countryside of Florida was not dense with nearly impenetrable forests, it was laced with swift rivers difficult to ford, or hot and stinking swamps, and in such wilderness their horses were next to useless. Rapacious woodland animals stalked the adventurers, and snakes and insects bit and stung them and lethal swamp fevers and illnesses assailed them. Meanwhile, the native inhabitants of Florida were not at all happy to receive these pale-skinned invaders, but picked them off, one after another, with arrows discharged from ambush among the concealing trees or, in open country, frontally attacked them in force. The travel-exhausted and fever-weakened Spaniards could fight back only feebly, and they were increasingly debilitated by hunger, because the indios also carried away their own domestic animals and burned their own crops of maize and other edibles, ahead of the white men's advance. (It seemed incredible to me, but the would-be colonists were evidently incapable of feeding themselves from the bounty of animals, birds, fish and plants that every wilderness offers to men of initiative and enterprise.) Anyway, the numbers of the Spaniards so alarmingly diminished that the remainder abandoned all hope of surviving in that place. They turned about and retreated to the coast, only to find that their ships' crews, doubtless having given them up for lost, had sailed away and left them marooned in that hostile land.

  Discouraged, sick, fearful, besieged on every side, they determined on the desperate expedient of building new boats for themselves. And they did—five boats—of tree limbs and palm leaves, lashed together with ropes braided from the horses' manes and tails, caulked with pine pitch, rigged with sails made of their clothes sewn together. By this time, they had slaughtered their remaining horses for their meat, and had used their hides to make bags for carrying potable water. When the boats cast off, their five masters—Cow Head was one—took them not far out to sea, but kept within sight of the coastline, believing that if they followed it far enough westward they must eventually reach the shores of New Spain.

  They found the sea and the land alike inimical, both earth and water frequently pounded by storms—cold winter storms now—of scouring winds and torrential rains. Even in calm weather there were rains—of arrows—from indios in war canoes that came out to harass them. Their scanty food supplies gave out, and their untanned leather water bags soon rotted, but every time the Spaniards tried to land to replenish their provisions, they were repelled by more swarms of arrows. Inevitably, the five boats were driven apart. Four of them were never seen or heard of again. The remaining boat, carrying Cow Head and some number of his comrades, after a long time did manage to get ashore.

  The white men, now barely clothed, almost famished, cold to the bone, weakened to near decrepitude, found an occasional native tribe—a tribe as yet uninformed that it was being invaded—that was willing to shelter and feed strangers. But, as the white men dauntlessly forged westward in hope of finding New Spain, they were more often savaged than succored. As they crossed wooded lands, vast grasslands, unbelievably broad rivers, high mountains and parched deserts, they were captured by one tribe or roving band of indios after another. The captors would enslave them, put them to hard labor, mistreat and beat and starve them. ("The damned red diablos," I heard Cow Head remark, "even let their hellfry brats amuse themselves by yanking out tufts of our beards.") And from one after another of those captivities the Spaniards had to contrive to escape, each time losing one or more of their number to death or recapture. What became of those comrades they left behind, they never would know.

  When at long last they reached the far outskirts of New Spain, there were only four of them left alive: three whites—Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo—and Estebanico, the black slave belonging to Dorantes. Except for my overhearing Castillo's comment that "we have crossed an entire continent"—and I have only the vaguest idea of what a continent is—I have no way of estimating how many leagues and one-long-runs those men so painfully traversed. All that I—and they—know for certain is that it took them eight years to do it. They would have made the journey in less time, of course, if they had been able to keep to the shore of the Eastern Sea. But their various captors had passed them from hand to hand, among ever more inland-dwelling tribes—or their escapes from those captivities had impelled them ever farther inland—so that they were very nearly at the shore of the Western Sea when finally they encountered a group of Spanish soldiers patrolling daringly deep in the Tierra de Guerra.


  Those soldiers—awed, admiring, almost incredulous of the strangers' story—escorted them to an army outpost, where they were clothed and fed, then brought them to Compostela. Governor Guzmán gave them horses and a more numerous escort and the friar, Marcos de Niza, to see to their spiritual needs, and set them on the cross-country trail toward the City of Mexíco. There, Guzmán had assured them, they would be feasted and honored and celebrated as they deserved. And, all along the way, the heroes had been telling and retelling their tale to every new-met and eager listener. I listened as avidly as any, and with unfeigned admiration.

  There were many questions I would have liked to ask those three white men, if they had not been so sedulously ignoring me. But I could not help hearing that Fray Marcos was asking some of the very same questions I had in mind. He seemed frustrated—and so was I—when the heroes protested their inability to supply this or that piece of information the friar wanted. So I went over to where the black man, Estebanico, sat apart. Now, the -ico that the Spaniards appended to his name is a condescending diminutive such as is used when speaking to children, so I took care to address him properly, as an adult:

  "Buenas noches, Esteban."

  "Buenas...," he mumbled, looking rather askance at an indio who spoke Spanish.

  "May I talk with you, amigo?"

  "Amigo?" he repeated, as if surprised to be addressed as an equal.

  "Are we not both of us slaves to the white men?" I asked. "Here you sit, disdained, while your master preens and revels in the attention he is getting. I should like to know something of your adventures. Here, I have some picíetl. Let us smoke together, while I listen."

  He still regarded me warily, but either I had established some comity between us or he was simply yearnful to be heard. He said, "What would you wish to know?"

  "Just tell me what happened during the past eight years. I have listened to the Señor Cow Head's recollections. Now tell me yours."

  And he did, from the expedition's first landing in that place called Florida, through all the disappointments and disasters that afflicted and decimated the fugitive survivors as they crossed the unknown lands from east to west. His account differed from the white men's only in two respects. Esteban clearly had suffered every hurt and hardship and humiliation that the other journeyers had endured, but no more and no less. He rather stressed this in his telling, as if to assert that those mutual sufferings had conferred on him an equality with his masters.

  The other difference between his account and theirs was that Esteban had taken the trouble to learn at least some fragments of the various languages spoken by the peoples in whose communities they had spent any time. I had never heard the names of any of those tribes before. Esteban said they lived far to the northeast of this New Spain. The two last—or nearest—tribes that held the wanderers in captivity called themselves, he said, the Akimoél O'otam, or River People, and the To'ono O'otam, or Desert People. And of all the "damned red diablos" encountered, he said, they were the most devilishly diabolico. I tucked the two names into my memory. Whoever those people were, and wherever, they sounded like apt candidates for enlistment in my private rebel army.

  By the time Esteban finished his story, everyone else around the fire had rolled himself in his blankets and gone to sleep. I was just about to ask the questions I had not been able to put to the white men, when I heard a stealthy footfall behind me. I spun about, and found it was only Tiptoe, asking in a whisper:

  "Are you all right, Tenamáxtli?"

  I answered in Poré, "Of course. Go back to sleep, Pakápeti." And I repeated that in Spanish, for Esteban to hear, "Go back to sleep, my man."

  "I was asleep. But I woke in sudden fear that the beasts might have harmed you or trussed you as a prisoner. And ayya! This beast is black!"

  "No matter, my dear. A friendly beast, for all that. But thank you for your concern."

  As she crept away, Esteban laughed without humor and said jeeringly, "My man!"

  I shrugged, "Even a slave can own a slave."

  "I do not give a ripe, fragrant pedo how many slaves you own. And a slave that one may be, and as short-haired as I am, but a man she is not."

  "Hush, Esteban. A pretense, yes, but only to avoid any risk of her being molested by these tunantón bluecoats."

  "I should not mind doing a bit of that molesting myself," he said, grinning whitely in the darkness. "A few times during our journey, I got a taste of the red women, and found them tasty indeed. And they found me no more distasteful than if I had been white."

  Probably so. I supposed that, even among the people of my own race, a woman lewd enough to be tempted to sample a foreign flesh would hardly think black flesh any more freakish than white. But Esteban apparently took the women's unfastidiousness to be another token—however pathetic a token—that there in the unknown lands he had been the equal of any white man. I almost confided to him that I had once enjoyed a woman of his race—or half black, at any rate—and found her no different inside than any "red" woman. Instead, I said only:

  "Amigo Esteban, I believe you would like to return to those far lands."

  It was he who shrugged now. "Even in brute captivity there, I was not the slave of any one man."

  "Then why not just go back? Go now. Steal a horse. I will not raise any outcry."

  He shook his head. "I have been a fugitive these eight years. I do not want to have slave-catchers hunting me for the rest of my life. And they would, even into the savage lands."

  "Perhaps..." I said, ruminating. "Perhaps we can concoct a reason for you to go there legitimately, and with the white men's blessing."

  "Oh? How?"

  "I overheard that Fray Marcos interrogating—"

  Esteban laughed again, and again without humor. "Ah, el galicoso."

  "What?" I said. If I had understood the word, he had described the friar as suffering from an extremely shameful disease.

  "I was jesting. A play of words. I should have said el galicano."

  "I still do not..."

  "El francés, then. He comes from France. Marcos de Niza is only the Spanish rendering of his real name, Marc de Nice, and Nice is a place in France. The friar is as reptilian as any other Frenchman."

  I said impatiently, "I do not care if he has scales. Will you listen, Esteban? He kept prodding your white comrades to tell him about the seven cities. What did he mean by that?"

  "¡Ay de mí!" He spat disgustedly. "An old Spanish fable. I have heard it many times. The Seven Cities of Antilia. They are supposedly cities of gold and silver and gems and ivory and crystal, situated in some never-yet-seen land far beyond the Ocean Sea. That fable has been repeated since time before time. When this New World was discovered, the Spaniards hoped to find those seven cities here. Rumors reached us, even in Cuba, that you indios of New Spain could tell us, if you would, where they are. But I am not asking you, amigo, mistake me not."

  "Ask if you like," I said. "I can answer honestly that I never heard of them until now. Did you or the others see any such things during your travels?"

  "¡Mierda!" he grunted. "In all those lands we came through, any mud-brick-and-straw village is called a city. That is the only kind we saw. Ugly and wretched and squalid and verminous and odorous."

  "The friar was being most insistent in his questioning. When the three heroes protested ignorance of any such fabulous cities, it seemed to me that Fray Marcos almost suspected them of keeping something secret from him."

  "He would, the reptile! When we were at Compostela, I was told that all men who know him call him El Monje Mentiroso. Naturally, the Lying Monk suspects everyone else of lying."

  "Well... did any of the indios you encountered even hint at the existence of—?"

  "¡Mierda más mierda!" he exclaimed, so loudly that I had to hiss at him again, for fear that someone would awaken. "If you must know, yes, they did. One day, when we were among the River People—we were being used as pack animals when they moved from one unlovely riverbend t
o another—our slave-drivers pointed off to the northward and told us that in that direction lay six great cities of the Desert People."

  "Six," I repeated. "Not seven?"

  "Six, but they were great cities. Meaning that to those estúpidos the cities probably each had more than a handful of mud houses and perhaps a dependable water hole."

  "Not the wealth of that fabled Antilia?"

  "Oh, but yes!" he said sarcastically. "Our river indios said that they traded animal hides and river shells and bird feathers with the inhabitants of those elegant cities, and got in return great riches. What they called 'riches' being only those cheap blue and green stones that all you indios so revere."

  "Nothing, then, that would arouse the avarice of a Spaniard?"

  "Will you hear me, man? We are talking of a desert!"

  "So your companions are not withholding anything from the friar?"

  "Withholding what? I was the only one who comprehended the indios' languages. My master Dorantes knows only what I translated to him. And that was little enough, for there was little to tell."

  "But suppose... now... you were to take Fray Marcos aside and whisper to him that the white men are being secretive? That you know the whereabouts of really rich cities."

  Esteban gaped at me. "Lie to him? What profit in lying to a man known as the Lying Monk?"

  "It is my experience that liars are the persons most ready to believe lies. He already seems to believe in that fable of the Antilia cities."

  "So? I tell him they do exist? And that I know where? Why would I do that?"

  "As I suggested a while ago, so that you can return to those lands where you were not a slave—where you found the native women to your taste—and return there not as a fugitive."