Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  I said, “I do not see why not, if you are indeed ready to employ your womanly attractions in our cause. But you will appreciate that I have not had time yet to think out any extensive plan of action. Most assuredly, there must be more of us. And to find more, I must go far beyond this land.”

  “I will come with you,” Tiptoe said decisively. “If I could rally this many women in such a short time, surely I can do the same among other peoples and nations.”

  “Very well,” I said, having no objection to the company of such an enterprising (and enjoyable) consort. “And since you and I will be traveling,” I added, magnanimously according her the rank of leader equal to myself, “I suggest, Pakapeti, that we jointly appoint a second in command here.”

  “Yes,” she said, and looked over the gathering. “Why not you, newcome comrade?” She pointed to the Yaki woman.

  “No, no,” said that one, trying to look modest and selfeffacing. “These gallant Purémpe women should be led by one of their own. Besides, like you and Tenamáxtli, G’nda. Ké will have work to do elsewhere. For the cause.”

  “Then,” said Tiptoe, “I recommend Kurupani.” She indicated the cóyotl-looking woman—another one egregiously misnamed, for that Poré word means “Butterfly.”

  “I concur,” I said, and spoke directly to Butterfly. “It may be a long time before we can wage real warfare against the white men. But while Pakápeti and I are scouring the country for further recruits, you will be in charge of mounting that campaign to procure weapons.”

  “No more than that?” the woman asked, and showed me the bowl of hot embers that was their only weapon at present. “Cannot we do some burning, as well?”

  I exclaimed, “Ayyo, by all means! I am heartily in favor of anything that will harass and worry the Spaniards. Also, your burning of army posts or hacienda buildings should distract their attention from whatever larger war preparations Pakápeti and I may be making elsewhere. Just one thing, though, Butterfly. Please do not molest any more of these villages here around Pétzcuaro. Neither Padre Vasco nor his tame Mexíca are our enemies.”

  The woman assented, if grudgingly. G’nda Ké frowned and looked ready to challenge my instructions, but I turned my back on her and spoke to Tiptoe:

  “We will go north from here, and we can start right now, if you are ready. I see you already have a traveling pack. Is there anything else you might require, anything I can provide for you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “As soon as possible, Tenamáxtli, I want a thunder-stick of my own.”

  XV

  “I INSIST,” SHE said, some ten or twelve days later. “I want a thunder-stick of my own. And this will probably be our last opportunity for me to get one.”

  We were crouched in some bushes on a knoll overlooking a Spanish guardhouse. That consisted of only a small wooden shack, in which were posted two soldiers, armed and armored, with a fenced pen alongside, containing four horses, two of them saddled and bridled.

  “We could also steal a horse for each of us,“ Tiptoe urged. “And surely we could learn to ride them.”

  We were at the northern border of New Galicia. Everything south of here was comfortably called by the Spaniards their Tierra de Paz, everything to the north was known as the Tierra de Guerra, and this area along the border was somewhat hazily described as the Tierra Disputable. From east to west along here, there was an army outpost like this one situated every few one-long-runs, and mounted patrols continuously prowled between them. All the soldiers were on the alert against any forays by war parties from the nations of the Tierra de Guerra.

  Years earlier, these same or similar guards had paid little heed when my mother, my uncle and I—obviously innocuous travelers—had crossed some part of this border, going southward. But I dared not assume that the soldiers would be so inattentive this time. For one reason, I was sure that even the most negligent guardsman would happily detain and search a young woman as conspicuously unusual and attractive as Tiptoe—and probably would do more than that to her.

  “Well?” she said, digging an elbow into my ribs.

  I grumbled, “I am not too eager to share you with someone else, especially a white someone else.”

  “Ayya!” she scoffed. “You did not hesitate to tell those other women to prostrate and prostitute themselves.”

  “I was not so intimately acquainted with those other women. Nor did they have any consorts to object to their going astraddle the road. You do.”

  “Then my consort can also rescue me before I am soiled beyond redemption. Shall we wait until one of those men leaves and you have only the one to deal with?”

  “I suspect that neither man gets relieved until a patrol arrives from some other post. If you are really determined on this, we might as well act now. My weapon is charged. Go and employ yours. Your seductive self. When you have got your victim thoroughly bedazzled, and the other gawking, give a cry—of ecstatic admiration, anticipation, whatever—loud enough for me to hear, and I will come bursting through the door. Be prepared to seize and entangle your man while I slay the onlooker. Then together we will overpower yours.”

  “The plan sounds simple enough. Simple plans are best.”

  “Let us hope so. Just do not get so carried away that you neglect to utter that shout.”

  She asked teasingly, “Are you afraid that I might perhaps enjoy the embrace of a white man? Even come to prefer it?”

  “No,” I said. “Once you have got close enough to a white man to smell him, I doubt that you will prefer him. But I want this done quickly. There will be a patrol arriving sometime.”

  “Then … ximopanólti, Tenamáxtli,” she said, mockingly taking her leave with utmost formality.

  She stood up from among the bushes and walked down the slope—slowly, but not at all formally—undulating her hips as if she were doing what our people call the quequezcuicatl, “the ticklish dance.” The soldiers must have glimpsed her through some peephole in their shack wall. They both came to the door, and except for one significant look that passed between them, they leeringly ogled her progress all the way, then very politely stepped aside for her to enter, and the door closed behind all three of them.

  I waited, then, and waited and waited, but heard no summoning cry from Tiptoe. After a considerable while, I began cursing myself for having made my plan too simple. Did the soldiers suspect that the comely young woman had not been traveling alone? Were they simply holding her hostage while they waited, weapons at the ready, for her presumed companion to appear? Eventually I decided that there was only one way to find out. Risking the chance that one of the men was still keeping a lookout at the peephole, I stood up in plain view of the shack. When there came no explosion of pólvora or shout of challenge, I scurried down the knoll, my own arcabuz at the ready. When still it seemed I had been unnoticed, I crossed the level ground before the shack and leaned an ear against the door. All I could hear was a sort of chorus of voices grunting. This puzzled me, but evidently Tiptoe was not being tortured to screaming, so I waited a little longer. At last, unable to bear the suspense, I gave the door a push.

  It was not fastened in any way, and swung loosely inward, letting daylight into the dark interior. Against the shack’s rear wall, the guards had built a shelf of planks, probably used by them alternately as a dining board and sleeping cot, but now being used for something else. On that shelf Tiptoe was stretched, her bare legs splayed apart and her mantle bunched up around her neck. She was silent, but she was squirming desperately, because both of the soldiers were raping her simultaneously. Standing at opposite ends of the shelf, one man had rammed his tepúli into her nether orifice, the other into her upper, and they were grinning lasciviously at one another while they pumped and grunted.

  Instantly I discharged my arcabuz, and at that close distance I could not miss my aim. The soldier standing between Tiptoe’s legs was slammed away from her and against the shack wall, his leather cuirass torn open and his chest abruptly bright red. Though the r
oom was as instantly clouded with blue smoke, I could see the second soldier also lurch back, away from Tiptoe’s head, and he also, curiously, was wet with much blood. Clearly he was still alive—he was shrieking like a woman—but he obviously posed no immediate danger to me, for he had both hands clutched to what remained of his tepúli, while it hosed out blood like a fountain’s spout. I did not take time to grab for my other weapon—the obsidian knife I wore at my belt—but merely reversed my arcabuz in my one hand, holding it like a club. I reached out my other hand to the agonized soldier, who stood teetering and screeching in my face, snatched off his metal helmet and beat his head with the arcabuz’s butt until he fell dead.

  When I turned from him, Tiptoe had clambered off the plank shelf and stood, also unsteady on her feet, letting her mantle fall to clothe her nakedness, while she choked and coughed and spat onto the dirt floor. Her face, where it was not slick with juices, was a sickly greenish color. I took her arm and hurried her out into the open air, starting to say, “I would have come sooner, Pakápeti—”

  But she only reeled away from me, still making strangling noises, to lean on the fence of the horse pen, where a hollowed-out log trough held water for the animals. She plunged her head under the water, then several times tilted her head back to gargle the water in her mouth and spit it out, and meanwhile, with her cupped hands, scooped water up under her mantle to wash her nether parts. When finally she felt clean enough or composed enough to speak, she did so, but disjointedly, gagging and retching between words:

  “You saw … I could not… shout…”

  “Do not talk,” I said. “Stay here and rest. I must hide the bodies.”

  The very mention of the men made her face go ill and greenish again, so I left her and went into the shack. As I dragged one dead man, then the other, by the feet out of the door, I was struck by an idea. I ran again to the top of the knoll, and could espy no patrol or any other moving being either east or west. So I ran back down to the soldiers and clumsily, but as quickly as I could, I unstrapped their various pieces of metal and leather armor. When I could get to the heavy blue canvas uniforms beneath, I stripped those garments off the bodies, too. Several pieces of the clothing were ruined, either rent by the blast of my arcabuz or drenched with blood. But I salvaged and set aside one shirt, one pair of trousers, and a pair of stout military boots.

  When they were unclad, the corpses were easier to move, but I was panting and sweating heavily by the time I had dragged each of them around to the far side of the knoll. There was thick underbrush there, and I thought I did a creditable job of hiding them and the remainder of their weapons in it Then, with a torn shirt of theirs, I went back over the traces of our passage—my own tracks, their smeared blood, the broken twigs and disarranged greenery—doing my best to make them unnoticeable.

  The smoke had cleared from the shack by then, so I went in and picked up the two arcabuces the soldiers had had no chance to use, and the leather pouches in which they kept balls and pólvora, and two metal water flasks and one fine, sharp steel knife. There was also a pouch of dried, fibrous meat that I thought worth taking, and some leather straps and lengths of rope. While I was collecting these things, I saw that the dirt floor was much splotched with clotting blood, so I used the knife to chop up the earthen surface, then started stamping it flat again. I was busy at that when something occurred to me, and I paused to look more closely around me on the ground.

  “What are you doing?” Tiptoe asked urgently. She was leaning against the doorjamb, limp, looking still sick and wretched. “You have hidden them. We must get away from here.” I could see that she was bravely trying to suppress those gut-wrenching spasms of nausea, but her breast throbbed with the effort of it.

  “I want to hide everything of them,” I said. “There is—er—one piece missing.”

  Tiptoe suddenly looked even sicker than before, and the heaves of her breast became again violent retches between her words: “Did not mean to… but… the thunder-noise … I bit… and then I…”

  She swallowed, with a phlegmy gulp, to fight down the gagging that strangled her next words. I did not need to hear the words. I had to swallow several times myself, to keep from vomiting most unmanfully.

  Tiptoe disappeared from the doorway, and I hurried to finish tamping the shack floor. Then I ran once more to the top of the knoll to make sure that we were not yet in hazard of being interrupted by any patrols or passersby. Though I was by now getting very tired, I continued trying to behave manfully, to inspirit poor Tiptoe, who was again gargling water at the horse trough. Manfully, I overcame what would have been anybody’s natural timidity around such huge and alien animals as horses, and approached those in the fenced pen. I was somewhat surprised, and much emboldened, when they did not recoil from me or strike out at me with their massive hooves. All four of them merely regarded me with deerlike looks of mild curiosity, and one of the barebacked animals stood submissively still while I bundled onto its back the various things I had plundered from the soldiers and the shack, tying them on with the bits of rope and straps I had found there. When the horse still showed no signs of objecting, I added to its burden my traveling pack and that of Tiptoe. Then I went to where she sat huddled and miserable beside the trough, and bent to help her to stand. She flinched away from my hand and said, almost snarling:

  “Please, do not touch me again. Not ever again, Tenamáxtli.”

  I murmured encouragingly, “Just get up and help me lead the horses, Pakdpeti. As you said, we must be away from here. And when we are safely distant, I will teach you how to kill Spaniards with your very own thunder-stick.”

  “Why should I stop with Spaniards?” she muttered, and spat on the ground, and added disgustedly, “Men!”

  She was now sounding uncomfortably like that Yaki witchwife, G’nda Ké. But she stood up and, evincing no nervousness at all, took the reins of one saddled horse and the rope I had tied around the neck of the pack animal. I led the other two horses, and kicked down a fence rail so we could get out, and away we all went.

  I was trusting that when a patrol did arrive at that outpost, those men would be confounded by the inexplicable absence of the guards and all their animals, and would waste some time waiting for the truants to reappear, before going to search for them. Whether or not the patrol found the two corpses, they would almost certainly assume that the outpost had been attacked by some war party from the north. And they would hardly dare to go chasing after them into the Tierra de Guerra until they had assembled a considerable force of other soldiers. So Tiptoe and I and our acquisitions should be able to put ample distance between ourselves and any pursuit. Nevertheless, I did not take us straight to the north. I had already calculated, from where the sun stood in the sky at every time of day, that we must be almost directly eastward of my home city of Aztlan. If I was to start recruiting warriors from the still-unconquered lands, where better than there? So it was in that direction that we went.

  On our first night in the Tierra de Guerra, we stopped beside a spring of good water, tied the horses to nearby trees—each on a long tether, so it could graze and drink—laid only a small fire and ate of the dried meat I had brought along. Then we spread our blankets side by side, and because Tiptoe was still being disconsolate and untalkative, I reached out a hand to give her a comforting caress. She irritably brushed the hand away and said firmly:

  “Not tonight, Tenamáxtli. We both have too many other things to think about. Tomorrow we must learn to ride the horses and I must learn to wield the thunder-stick.”

  Very well, next morning we loosed the two saddled horses from their tethers, Tiptoe doffed her sandals and put a bare foot into the dangling wooden piece provided for that purpose. We both had seen many Spaniards on horseback, so we were not entirely ignorant of the method of mounting. Tiptoe required a boost from me to get up there, but I clambered onto my horse by using a tree stump for a mounting block. Again the horses made no complaint; evidently they were accustomed to be
ing ridden not by a single master but by anyone who had need of them. I kicked my bare heels to make mine walk, and then tried to turn it leftward in a circle, to stay close to our camping place.

  I had seen other riders do that, apparently by pulling one rein to tug the horse’s head in the desired direction. But when I yanked hard on the left rein, I succeeded only in getting a sidewise stare from the horse’s left eye—an almost schoolmasterish look, mingling “you are wrong” and “you are stupid.” I took heed that the horse was trying to teach me a lesson, so I paused to reflect. Perhaps the riders I had watched had only seemed to jerk their horses’ heads this way and that. After a little experimenting, I discovered that I had to do no more than lay the right-side rein gently against the horse’s neck and it would turn left as I wished. I imparted that information to Tiptoe, and we both sat our saddles proudly as our horses sauntered around in leftwise circles.

  Next, I brushed my horse’s sides with my heels to make it move faster. It commenced the rocking gait that the Spanish call the trote, and I learned another lesson. Until now, I had supposed that sitting on a leather saddle, nicely curved to cup one’s backside, would be more comfortable than sitting on something stiff, like an icpéli chair. I was wrong. This was excruciating. After the trotting gait had jounced me for only the briefest while, I began to fear that my backbone was being driven through the top of my head. And clearly the horse c d not enjoy being under my thumping rump; it turned its head to give me another look of reproach and slowed to a walk again. Tiptoe had endured the same brief experience of being painfully hammered from underneath, so we mutually decided to postpone any attempt to proceed at speed until we had sufficiently practiced just sitting astride for some time.

  So, all the rest of that day, we rode at the walk, leading the two other horses behind, and all six of us were satisfied with that leisurely pace. But then, near sundown, when we found another watering place at which to stop for the night, both Tiptoe and I were shocked to find ourselves so stiff that we could only slowly and creakily get down from our saddles. We had not noticed until then how our shoulders and arms ached, just from holding the reins; how our ribs hurt as if they had been cudgeled; how our crotches felt as if they had been split with wedges. And our legs were not only cramped and trembly from their having clutched the horses’ sides all day, they were also almost bloodily raw from having rubbed against the saddles’ leather flaps. These pains I found hard to understand, since we had ridden so slowly and easefully. I was beginning to wonder why the white men had ever found horses useful as their means of transport. At any rate, Tiptoe and I were too sore even to think of taking up practice with the arcabuces right then, and that night Tiptoe had no need to fend off any amative overtures from me.