Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  But the next day we dauntlessly determined to try riding again, and I was at least able to provide us with clothing more protective than the mantles that left our legs bare and abradable. I got out the various items of Spanish costume that I had packed. Though Tiptoe angrily refused to wear anything that the two frontier guards had bequeathed to us, I did persuade her to put on the shirt, trousers and boots that I had acquired at the Cathedral. They were far too big for her, of course, but they served. And I donned the military boots, the blue shirt and the trousers of one of those soldiers’ uniforms. When we set off, I tried riding the unsaddled horse that was carrying no pack, thinking that maybe I could better adapt to its bare back. I could not. Even at the walking gait, I soon began to fear that the horse’s roof tree backbone was cleaving me asunder from my buttocks all the way upward. I abandoned the trial and remounted my saddled horse.

  Ayya, I will not dwell on all the painful trials and errors that Tiptoe and I made during the next several days. Suffice it to say that we did at last get used to riding astride the animals, and so did our muscles and skins and buttocks. In fact, in time—as if to prove the truth of a remark she had once made to me—Tiptoe became a much better rider than I, and took delight in showing off her prowess. I at least managed to keep up with her, once I learned to urge my horse directly from the walk—not having to suffer the jounces of trotting—into the easier-to-sit gait of the galope.

  During those days, too, as our aches and pains diminished, I instructed Tiptoe in the charging and discharging of the arcabuz, letting her use one of those I had taken from the soldiers. Rather to my consternation, she proved to be better at that, as well, than I was. That is to say, she could make the lead ball hit whatever she was aiming at, even at a considerable distance, perhaps three times out of five, while I had long considered myself adept if I could do the same thing one time out of five. My masculine pride was salvaged, though, when I exchanged weapons with her, and our respective score of punctured targets changed accordingly. It was evident that the soldiers’ arcabuces were for some reason more accurate than the copy that the artisan Pochotl had made for me. I carefully examined all three of the weapons now in our possession, and could see no difference among them to account for that. But of course I was no expert on such things, and neither had Pochotl been.

  So, from then on, Tiptoe and I each carried one of the purloined arcabuces. I deemed it prudent to keep them hidden in our bedrolls, and we took one out only when we wished to kill game for fresh meat. Tiptoe liked to make that her task, and was inclined to flaunt her marksmanship by bringing down rabbits and pheasants. But I cautioned her that the pólvora was too precious to waste on such small creatures, especially because when the heavy ball did hit one, there was not much left of it to eat. Thereafter, she aimed at (and almost always hit) only deer and wild boars. I did not discard Pochotl’s weapon, so painstakingly handcrafted, but kept it also hidden among our packs, in case it should sometime be needed.

  On one of the nights of one of those days in the hinterlands, I again ventured to extend a caress to Tiptoe, in her blankets beside me, and again she fended me away, saying:

  “No, Tenamáxtli. I feel unclean. You must have seen—I have grown a stubble of hair on my head and… and elsewhere. I feel that I am no longer a properly immaculate Purémpe. Until I am …” and she rolled over and went to sleep.

  Exasperated and frustrated, I made sure, during the next day’s ride, to seek out an amóli plant and dig up its root. That night, when I roasted a boar haunch over our fire, I also set my metal flask of water to boil. After we had eaten, I said:

  “Pakápeti, here is hot water and here is a soap-root and here is a good steel knife, which I have whetted to utmost keenness. You can easily make yourself a properly immaculate Purémpe once more.”

  She said airily, “I think I will decline, Tenamáxtli. You have dressed me in man’s clothing, so I have decided to let my hair grow out and make myself look like a man.”

  I naturally remonstrated with her, pointing out that the gods had put beautiful women on this earth for other and better purposes than to impersonate men. But she was adamant, and I had to conclude that her defilement back there at the outpost had simply made the copulative act hateful to her—that she never again would couple with me or any other man. There was no objection that I could, in conscience, make to that. I could only respect her decision and, meanwhile, entertain two hopes. One was my hope that since Tiptoe now knew how to use an arcabuz, she would not take the whim to use it on the nearest male, that being myself. And I hoped that we would soon, in our journeying, come upon a town or village where the women had not, for whatever reason, decided to repel the advances of every man of mankind.

  Instead, what we came upon, late one afternoon, was something totally unexpected—a troop of mounted Spaniards, most of them armed and armored, riding through this Tierra de Guerra—and we encountered them so suddenly that we had no chance of evasion. They were not, as I might have anticipated, a body of soldiers pursuing us to wreak revenge for what we had done at the border outpost. I had never ceased keeping a wary lookout to our rear. If I had seen any sign of a patrol approaching from behind us, I could have taken care to avoid capture. But this troop rode up upon us from the farther side of a hill that we were ascending, and obviously they were as surprised as we were when we met at the top.

  There was nothing I could do except tell Tiptoe in Poré, “Keep silent!” then raise a comradely hand to the lead soldier—who was groping for the arcabuz slung across his saddle horn—and greet him cordially, as if he and we were accustomed to meeting thus every day, “Buenos tardes, amigo. ¿Qué tal?”

  He stammered, “B-buenas tardes,” and, with the hand that had been reaching for the weapon, returned my salute. He said nothing more, but deferred to two other riders—men in officers’ uniform—who shouldered their horses up beside him.

  One of them growled a vile blasphemy, “¡Me cago en la puta Virgen!” then, eyeing my partial uniform and the army brands on our horses, demanded impolitely, “iQuién eres, Don Mierda?”

  Disquieted though I was, I had wit enough to tell him the same thing I had told Padre Vasco, that I was Juan Británico, interpreter and assistant to the notarius who served the Bishop of Mexíco.

  The officer sneered and exclaimed, “¡Y un cojón!” a vulgar expression of disbelief. “An indio on horseback? That is a thing forbidden!”

  I was glad that our far-more-strictly-forbidden arcabuces were out of his sight, and said humbly, “You are riding in the direction of the City of Mexíco, Señor Capitén. If you like, I will accompany you thither, where Bishop Zumárraga and Notarius de Molina will assuredly vouch for me. It was they who provided these horses for this journey of mine.”

  I do not know if the officer had ever heard those two names before, but my speaking them seemed to mitigate his disbelief slightly, He was less gruff when he demanded, “And who is the other man?”

  “My slave and attendant,” I lied, grateful now for her having chosen to pose as a man, and gave her name in Spanish, “Se llama de Puntas.”

  The other officer laughed. “A man named Tiptoel How stupid these indios!”

  The first one laughed, too, then, derisively misspeaking my name, said, “And you, Don Zonzón, what are you doing here?”

  More composed by now, I was able to say glibly, “A special mission, Señor Capitén. The bishop wishes to ascertain the temper of the savages here in the Tierra de Guerra. I was sent because I am of their race, and speak several of their languages, but also am manifestly vested with Spanish and Christian authority.”

  “¡Joder!” he rasped. “Everyone already knows the temper of these savages. Their temper is ugly. Murderous. Bloodthirsty. Why do you think we travel only in unassailable numbers?”

  “Just so,” I said blandly. “I intend to report to the bishop that he might palliate the savages’ temper by sending Christian missionaries to do humanitarian works among them, in the manner
of Padre Vasco de Quiroga.”

  Again, I do not know if the officer had ever heard of that priest, but my apparent familiarity with so many churchmen seemed finally to dispel his suspicions.

  He said, “We too are on a humanitarian mission. Our Governor of New Galicia, Nuno de Guzmán, assembled this numerous company to escort four men to the City of Mexíco. They are three brave Christian Spaniards and a loyal Moro slave, long believed lost in the far-off colony called Florida. But, most miraculously, they fought their way hither—this close to civilization. Now they wish to tell the story of their wanderings to the Marqués Cortés himself.”

  “And I am sure you will safely deliver them, Señor Capitán,” I said. “But this day latens. My own slave and I had intended to proceed farther, but we passed a good water hole not a league back, sufficient for your whole troop’s camping. If you will allow, we will return there to lead you and, by your leave, camp there with you.”

  “By all means, Don Juan Británico,” he said, companionably now. “Lead on.”

  Tiptoe and I turned our horses about, and as the company came clanking and shuffling and clattering behind us, I translated to her what had passed between me and the officer. She asked, her voice again trembly because she was speaking of white men:

  “Why in the name of the war god Curicáuri do you wish to spend the night with them?”

  “Because the officer mentioned that butcher Guzmán,” I said. “The man who laid waste your land of Michihuácan and claimed it for his own. I had believed there were no Spaniards in these northern parts. I want to find out what Guzmán is doing, so distant from his New Galicia.”

  “If you must,” she said resignedly.

  “And you, Tiptoe, please just remain inconspicuous. Let the white men hunt their own game for their night’s meal. Please do not take out a thunder-stick to show them your mastery of it.”

  The officer—his name was Tallabuena, and his rank was only teniente, but I kept on ingratiatingly addressing him as Capitén—sat beside me at the campfire. While the two of us gnawed on juicy roast deer meat, he confided quite freely what I wished to know about that Governor Guzmán:

  “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 Alvar. 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 Alvar 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 otter 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 o
ut, 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 heilfry 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.