Aztec Blood

by Gary Jennings

  It was Mateo, the picaro who had put on the play at the Jalapa fair.

  The mean-spirited Spaniard spoke to Mateo, and the two looked up at me with inquiring eyes. There was no explosion of recognition in the picaro's eyes. It had been three years since I had seen him, a long time ago for a skinny beggar boy who was fifteen at the time. I had no idea whether he recognized me. The last time I saw him, he had cut a man's head off for me. Perhaps this time he was going to cut my head off.

  Fearful that I had exposed myself, I left the stage and pretended to walk along the rows of merchandise lined up for sale. Mateo and the other Spaniard followed slowly behind me. I ducked down behind bales of wool and crawled along until I reached the end and then ran low down another line of merchandise. I peeked up and saw Mateo looking around, trying to find me. I did not see the other man.

  Running low along the merchandise, I saw a chance to make a dash to the heavy brush outside the perimeters of the fair. When I stood up to run, a rough hand grabbed me by the back of the neck and spun me around.

  The Spaniard jerked me close to his face. He stank of sweat and garlic. His eyes bulged a little, like fish eyes. He put his knife under my throat and pressed until I was standing on my tiptoes and staring at him wide-eyed. He let go of my neck and smiled at me, keeping the pressure of the dagger under my chin. He held up a peso with his free hand.

  "Do you want your throat cut or the peso?"

  I couldn't open my mouth. I motioned at the peso with my eyes.

  He released the knife from my throat and handed me the peso.

  I stared at the peso—a veritable fortune. I had rarely had a silver reale in my hand, and a peso was worth eight reales. An indio would work a week for less. Men were sometimes killed for less.

  "I am Sancho de Erauso," the Spaniard said, "your new friend."

  Sancho was the friend of no one, of that I was certain. A large man but not tall, bulky, there was no piety in his eyes, no mercy in his face. The picaro Mateo was larcenous but had the manners and airs of a rogue and gentleman. Sancho had no pretense of being a gentlemen—or even human. He was a cutthroat, a man who could share with you a meal and a glass of wine and then kill you for dessert.

  Mateo found us. No recognition showed on his face or in his eyes. Could he really not remember the boy he had killed a man for? Yet what would be his motive for not recognizing me? Perhaps he regretted his act and feared that I would expose him as the real killer. Perhaps he was going to kill me. And it was possible that like so many Spaniards, an indio or mestizo was as distinguishable to him as one tree from another in a forest of trees.

  "What do you want of me?" My tone to Sancho was subservient, an indio speaking to a master who wielded a heavy hand.

  Sancho put his arm around my shoulder, and we walked along together with Mateo on my other side. My nose was close to Sancho's armpit, and it smelled worse than a sewer hole. Did the man never bathe? Or wash his clothes?

  "My friend, you are most fortunate. I need a small favor. You are a poor, miserable indio with no future except to break your back for the gachupin and die young. For this little favor, you will earn so much money you will never have to work again. No more stealing, no more whoring your mother and sister. You will have money, women, and not just pulque to drink, but the best Spanish wines and Caribbean rum."

  The man was evil, el diablo and Mictlantecuhtli in one. His voice had the texture of Chinese silk, his face the charm of a rattlesnake smiling. His sincerity was as genuine as a puta's lust.

  "We have a small task for you, something that only a slender youth who can twist his body like a corkscrew can do. We have to travel a few days to get to where you will perform your task. In less than a week you will be the richest indio in New Spain. How does that sound, amigo?"

  It sounded like I was going to be roasted over a flame while wild dogs gnawed on my cojones. Still, I smiled at the bully. Elevating him to a man of respectability, I added the honorific "don" to his name. "Don Sancho, I am a poor indio. When you speak of great wealth, I thank all the saints that you will let me serve you."

  "I don't like the looks of this one," Mateo said. "Something about him strikes me wrong—his eyes—he looks more conniving."

  Sancho stopped and faced me, looking for the conniving in my eyes. "He's the best we've seen." He moved in closer and I forced myself not to be repelled by the smell. His grabbed me by the throat, and I felt his knife against my groin.

  "The old man with the snakes, is that your father?"

  "Sí, señor."

  "You can run fast, Chico, but the old man can't. Each time you annoy me, I will cut off one of his fingers. If you run away, I will cut off his head."

  "We have to travel south, to Monte Alban in the valley of Oaxaca," I told the Healer later. "Spaniards have hired me to do a task. They will pay me well."

  I told him that Sancho wanted me to retrieve something he had lost. I couldn't tell him what the task was because I did not know, but as was his custom, he asked no questions. At these times I had the feeling that rather than a lack of curiosity, he knew exactly what was happening. No doubt a bird had been listening to the conversation and reported to him.

  It was hours before the fair would close for the night, and I spent the time wandering around, looking at the many wonders, trying to figure a way out of the trap. There was no acting troupe in evidence, and I supposed that they had separated company with the poet-swordsman or by now had taken their turn on the gallows.

  Mateo seemed grimmer than when I had first seen him. And his clothes were not as fancy and well kept. Perhaps the last several years had not been good to him. I had not forgotten that I owed him my life.

  As I wandered about the fair, a commotion broke out and a crowd gathered. During an archery contest, a man, an indio, had been shot by an arrow that went astray. People surrounded him to stare, and I squeezed in close to watch. The man's friend knelt beside him and started to pull out the arrow. Another man stopped him.

  "If you pull out the arrow that way, you will tear his insides and he will bleed to death."

  The speaker, a Spaniard about forty years old and dressed like a wealthy merchant, knelt and examined the wound. I heard someone call him "Don Julio" when he instructed men to help him move the injured man.

  "Move him over here. Stand back," he told those of us crowding around.

  Always fascinated by medicine, I helped Don Julio and two others move the wounded man behind the line of merchant tents so he would be out of the sight and path of people.

  Don Julio knelt and examined the arrow wound.

  "What position were you in when you were shot?" Don Julio spoke Spanish with a slight accent, and I recognized that he was probably Portuguese. Many Portuguese had come to the New World after the Spanish king inherited the throne of that country.

  "Standing up."

  "Were you straight up? Standing tall? Or bent a little?"

  He groaned. "Maybe bent a little."

  "Straighten out his legs," he told us.

  When we had the man's legs straight, he had us do the same for the upper body. Once he had the man in the position that most likely reflected what he was like when the arrow struck, Don Julio carefully examined and probed the area when the arrow met the flesh.

  The man's friend impatiently snapped, "Pull it out before he dies." He spoke in the rough Spanish of rural indios.

  I answered the man. "He has to remove it in the same line that it entered, or he will create a bigger wound."

  By removing the arrow in the same path it entered, he would reduce tearing more flesh. The man already had a wound that would probably kill him no matter how carefully the arrow was removed. Increasing the size of the wound would reduce his chance of surviving.

  Don Julio glanced up at me. I had inadvertently spoken in my polished Spanish rather than deliberately mispronouncing words as I had done with Sancho.

  He tossed me a half-reale. "Run to a cloth seller. Get me a piece of clean
white cotton."

  I returned quickly with the piece of cloth. I did not offer the change.

  After he removed the arrow, Don Julio dressed the open wound, cutting pieces of the cloth to create a cover for it.

  "This man cannot walk or even ride a mule," he told the indio's friend. "He has to lie still until the bleeding stops." He took aside the man's friend. "He has only a small chance of survival, but he will not survive at all if you move him. He can't be moved for at least a week."

  I saw the friend exchange looks with another man. Neither of the two men appeared to be indio farmers. They had the look of léperos, perhaps men hired from the streets by merchants to bring merchandise to or from the fair. The chances of them staying around until the man could travel were not good. As soon as the fair broke up, they would throw dice for his boots and clothes, smash his skull, and drag him into the woods for wild animals to dispose of.

  As the crowd around the man moved away, I heard a man look in the direction of Don Julio and whisper contemptuously to another, "Converso."

  I knew this word from discussions with Fray Antonio. A converso was a Jew who had converted to Christianity rather than leave Spain or Portugal. Sometimes the conversion had taken place generations before, but the blood taint was still there.

  The fact that this wealthy doctor, which is what I took him to be, also had a blood taint naturally endeared him to me.

  I left the fair and walked toward a mound that had once been a small temple for a military outpost or a merchant's rendezvous. I sat for a while deep in thought about the predicament I was in with Sancho and Mateo. I was less worried about myself than I was of any harm coming to the Healer. I had of course lied when I told Sancho that the Healer was my father, but in a way there was truth to it since I thought of both him and Fray Antonio like a father.

  I had no illusions about what my reward would be once I had completed the task for Sancho. Both the Healer and I would be killed. Ay, it was not a happy situation. The Healer moved very slowly and would go nowhere without his dog and his donkey. My only recourse was to await the opportunity to stick a knife in Sancho's fat gut and hope that Mateo would not harm the Healer even if he cut off my head.

  I spotted Aztec picture writing engraved in stone on the side of the wall of the ruins, and I moved aside brush to read it. I had learned to read Aztec picture writing from the Healer, who showed me pieces of paper with writing on it that was done before the conquest. He told me that the empire centered at Tenochtitlan required a vast amount of paper to run, for its army, merchants, government administration, and that hundreds of thousands of sheets of blank paper were received each year as tribute from vassal states.

  The fray had also been interested in Aztec picture writing and paper. He had been excited once when another fray showed him a piece of it. Paper was made by soaking the bark of certain fig trees in water until the fiber separated from the pulp. The fiber was pounded on a flat surface, folded over with a sticky substance in between, flattened more, and then smoothed and dried. Good quality paper had a whitish substance spread over it.

  A bundle of these papers bound together was called a codex by the Spanish, being a Latin word for a type of book. Only a few indio codices had survived the fanatical zeal of the Christian priests, Fray Antonio told me. Picture drawings were done in bright colors—red, green, blue, and yellow—and having seen a few pages possessed by the Healer, I can only envision that the codices saved from the ravages of the priests must be works of great beauty.

  Aztec writing itself was nonalphabetical, picture writing much like the Egyptians used. A series of pictures had to be read together to reveal the message or story. Some objects were represented by a miniature of the object, but most situations required something more complex: a black sky and closed eye was night, a wrapped mummy figure was a symbol of death, seeing was expressed by an eye drawn away from the viewer.

  The picture writing inscribed on the wall near the fair showed an Aztec warrior in full battle dress pulling the hair of a warrior from another city—thus war and battle were raging. An Aztec king or noble whom I could not identify, although I knew that each Revered Speaker had a personal symbol, was speaking. This was indicated by a little scroll coming from the mouth of the speaker. I had also seen it expressed as a wagging tongue. After he spoke, Aztec warriors marched, shown by footprints, toward a temple atop a mountain. The temple was burning, indicating that the tribe that owned the temple had been conquered.

  As I read the tale aloud in Spanish, which was the language I thought in, I was startled when I caught another presence out of the comer of my eye. Don Julio was standing nearby watching me.

  "You can read Aztec sign language?"

  Pride loosened my tongue. "A little. The inscription is a boast—and a warning. Probably put here by the Aztecs to impress upon traveling merchants of other tribes what happens to towns that don't pay their tribute."

  "Very good. I also can read the pictures, but it's almost a lost art." He shook his head. "My God, the history, the knowledge, that was lost when the frays burned them. The library at Texcoco was enriched with literary treasures gathered by the great king, Nezahualcoyotl. It was the New World equivalent of the great library of antiquity at Alexandria. And it was destroyed."

  "My Aztec name is Nezahualcoyotl."

  "An honorable name, even if it labels you a hungry coyote. Your namesake was not just a king, but a poet and writer of songs. But Like so many kings, he also had human vices. Lusting for the wife of one of his nobles, he sent the man into battle with secret orders to his captains to see that the man was killed."

  "Ah, the crime the Comendador Ocana tried to commit against Peribanez."

  "You know Vega's comedia?"

  "I—I heard it described once by a priest."

  "A priest interested in any drama but a passion play? I must meet this man. What is your Spanish name?"

  "Sancho," I said, without hesitation.

  "Sancho, how do you, as an indio, feel about the fact that the Spanish have come and the indios' culture and monuments were destroyed or abandoned?"

  He called me an indio. That made me comfortable talking to him again.

  "The Spanish god was more powerful than the gods of the Aztecs."

  "Are the Aztec gods all dead now?"

  "No, there are many Aztec gods. Some were vanquished, but others merely went into hiding to wait until they regain their strength," I said, mimicking what the Healer had told me.

  "And what will they do when they regain their strength? Drive the Spanish from New Spain?"

  "There will be another great battle, like the wars in Revelations where fire and death and famine stalked the earth."

  "Who told you that?"

  "The priests in church. Everyone knows that there will be a great war between good and evil someday, and only the good will survive."

  Don Julio chuckled and walked along the ruins. I followed along. I knew I was supposed to avoid being around gachupins, but the man had a depth of knowledge and wisdom not unlike that which I had sensed about the Healer and Fray Antonio.

  It had been several years since I had been around people with the European-type knowledge that the fray had possessed. Like the fray, this man was a scholar. I bubbled over with enthusiasm to display my own knowledge.

  "Besides the Bible," I said, "it is also said that the Jaguar Knights will drive the Spanish from this land."

  "Where did you hear that?"

  There was an inflection in his voice that suddenly made me cautious. But he only smiled when I looked at him with a question in my eyes.

  "Where did you hear that?" He asked again.

  I shrugged. "I don't remember. In the marketplace, I guess. There is always talk like that among the indios. But it is harmless."

  Don Julio gestured at the ruins. "You should be very proud of your ancestors. Look at the monuments they left. There are many more like this, and many others that are the size of cities."

  "The
priests say we should not be proud; that our ancestors were savages who sacrificed thousands of people and even ate some. They say we must be thankful that the Church has stopped this blasphemy."

  He murmured his accord to what the priests said, but I had the impression that he was only giving the sort of respect everyone gives the Church, even if one disagrees.

  We walked among the rains for a moment before he spoke. "The Aztecs did practice savage rites, and for those there is no excuse. But perhaps they would look at us Europeans, at our wars with each other and the Infidels, at the cruelty and violence, and ask if we should cast the first stone. But regardless of how we judge their actions, there is no doubt that they built a mighty civilization and left behind monuments that, like those of the pharaohs, will survive the sands of time. They knew more about the movement of the stars and planets than we do today and had a more accurate calendar than us.

  "Your ancestors were master builders. Along the eastern coast was a nation of people who harvested rubber from trees at a time when Christ was born. They were the ancestors of the Aztecs, Toltecs, and other indio peoples. They left behind great monuments. Like the Aztecs, they intricately carved the stone of monuments. But with what? They had no iron or even bronze tools. How did they etch the stone?

  "Like the Aztecs, they were people without carts or beasts of burden. Yet they hauled great blocks of stones weighing as much as hundreds of men, stones so heavy no cart and team of horses in Christendom could carry them. They transported them great distances, up mountains and down the other side, across rivers and lakes, many leagues from the source of the stone. How? The secret was no doubt revealed in those thousands of books burned by the frays."

  "Perhaps there was an Archimedes among them," I said. Fray Antonio had spoken of the accomplishments of the indios who built pyramids that violated the heavens and compared them to Archimedes. "Perhaps in those days there was such a man who, if he had had a long enough pole and a place to stand, could have lifted the world. Omnis homo naturaliter scire desiderat."

  "Man naturally inclines to know more and more," Don Julio said, translating the Latin phrase. He stopped walking and locked eyes with me. There was a glint of humor in them. "You read Aztec picture writing, speak of an ancient Greek, quote Latin, and have knowledge of Spanish literature. You speak Spanish without an indio accent. A moment ago I lapsed into Náhuatl, and you spoke the language without even thinking about it. You are taller and lighter than most indios. These accomplishments are as mysterious as how these giant stones were moved over mountains."