Aztec Blood

by Gary Jennings

  Another would be working the tunnel with me.

  Eh, did I catch you by surprise? Tunnel, you ask? Sí, just as you thought, the explosions were our admission into the mint. But did you think we were going to blow our way into the building? We were not that loco. The guards would certainly be on the second floor or on the roof watching the play, but an explosion against a wall would shake the whole building. The explosions would be used to attract the attention of the guards inside the building and make noise to cover our clandestine activities.

  True, the walls were thick, the windows upstairs barred, but amigos, did I not tell you that the lower floor was wood? Do you not. remember that the dirt of the city is so soft and moist you can dig it with a spoon? The dirt was hauled away in the same wagons that brought our wood for the stage.

  The entire tunnel was only seven or eight feet long and less than three feet wide. Hardly a challenge to a human mole like myself who had tunneled through a hard-rock mountain and had squirmed down the narrow passageway of an ancient tomb to rob it. The tunnel led from a covered hole behind the stage, under the wall, and into a room—the room noted during our inspection, where the gold and silver were stored until they were taken to be assayed or processed.

  Our biggest fear was that it would fill with water.

  In these situations I sometimes feared that the Aztec gods would repay me for desecrating their temple at Monte Alban.

  When the play commenced, I looked out from the curtain for Eléna. Most plays were performed during the day, but this time we needed the darkness. The stage was ablaze with candles and torches, so the audience could see Mateo and the other actors struck by thunderbolts.

  I knew that the subject matter would not interest her, but since so few plays were presented, I hoped she would appear out of simple curiosity. As a lady of quality, she would have sat in a window or balcony of a building, fronting the lot. In the darkness I could not distinguish any of those people. I could not see much of the audience. They sat shrouded in darkness while the stage was ablaze with light. But my eye caught two familiar figures in the front roll—the mint inspector and the mint director's assistant.

  I realized that the indios had drastically miscounted the days.

  Ay! It only got worse. Mateo, damn his thespian soul, was of course not one to put on a simple performance, but was determined to win accolades. As he strutted back and forth on the stage, his cowl had slipped down and his face was exposed.

  ¡Madre de Dios! The mint inspector had spent days with us when we wore no disguise. He could see Mateo's face now. My heart thumped in my throat as panic gripped me. I could not run without warning my friend, but each time I hissed his name the explosions drowned me out. I would have had to light the black powder under his feet to get his attention anyway—he was so overtaken by his role as the voice of God that he would pay no attention to me.

  My eye darted to the mint inspector to see if he was on his feet denouncing Mateo. To my astonishment, the man was calmly sitting and staring up at the stage as if nothing was wrong. Eh, perhaps there was nothing wrong. In his eyes. The man was blind as a bat, was he not? I watched him intently. Nothing in his expression revealed that he found anything amiss. He stared blankly up at the stage, his head moving to follow Mateo's dynamic strutting.

  But what if the servant was in the crowd? He had good eyes.

  And how many others could identify the picaro who was supposed to be sweating or buried in Manila?

  I ran for the hole behind me. Enrique, my bandito helper, was waiting. We used a bucket tied to a rope to reduce the water in the hole so I would not drown if my progress was slow.

  Taking hold of an iron bar and a hooked pole, I crawled into the hole. The tunnel was already filled with water, but I wiggled through it quickly and into the darkness on the other side. I could see nothing, but quickly felt where the joints were. I timed my prying to the explosions at the comedia, quickly tearing out enough of the floor so I could squeeze into the room. From inside the room, the explosions were amazingly muted.

  Using a flint and steel and a small vial of oil, I lit a fire and used it to light candles in the room. I knew from the inspection that the walls of the room were about a foot thick, double the thickness of the other interior walls of the mint. The door was closed and bolted by the mint director when he left at night, deterring the night guards from gaining access. I could light the room and move around without fear of disturbing the guards, who were undoubtedly watching the play from the upper windows.

  I fished into the water with my hook and brought out a heavy leather sack filled with empty bags that Enrique extended to me with a hooked pole from his end. I filled the empty bags with gold, most of it from chests filled with coins, because it was many times more valuable than silver. Filling a sack, I pushed it down into the water of the hole and splashed the water to signal Enrique to pull it out. When I had sent five sacks of gold out, I turned to the silver and filled six more with silver coins and bars.

  A black metal box with its key inserted caught my eye. I opened the box, and it took my breath away. It was filled with gems, diamonds, rubies and pearls. A paper inside the box listed the inventory of the valuables and the name of the owner: Holy Office of the Inquisition. There was also a list containing the names of the previous owners—people who had been tried and convicted by the Holy Office and who had had their property confiscated.

  I locked the box, put the key in my pocket and placed the box in my last sack. After the sack was pulled through, I got down on my stomach to wiggle back through the tunnel. It was now more than half filled with water. As I started down I realized something was terribly wrong. Dirt and rocks were being thrown in from the other side.

  Our plan included a pile of dirt and rocks to fill the tunnel with once we finished so it would not be noticeable to someone entering the rear area of the stage. But Enrique was not supposed to fill it until after I emerged.

  Léperos were not intelligent beasts, but unlike the indios who released the mint inspector prematurely, they could do simple arithmetic. Dividing the treasure four ways gave them a greater share than dividing it five ways. I did not know if trapping me in the mint was Enrique's idea or he had schemed with the other two. The move was too clever for Enrique to have planned. I suspected that the three banditos had decided to kill Mateo and myself after the robbery, and the opportunity to eliminate me suddenly arose.

  The dirt and rocks thrown into the other side rose the water level on my side until it came up to the floor. I could not even get into the tunnel and try to dig through because I would drown.

  The door to the rest of the mint was locked. Only the mint director had the key. When it was unlocked, he would find me in their treasure room with a rather large hole in the floor and a good portion of the treasure missing.

  Even the Inquisition would be outraged because their box of gems was gone. The only controversy would be whether the viceroy had me drawn and quartered or the Inquisition burned me at the stake.

  I was completely trapped.

  ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

  The explosions outside had stopped. That meant I would be abandoned momentarily. The plan was for us to move out as soon as the play was finished. We had a donkey cart standing by. Under the pretense of putting our costumes in it to take back to the inn, we would load the treasure aboard and start back toward the inn.

  But halfway back we would detour.

  It would not be possible to get the cart off the island across the causeways because it would be searched. So we had bought an indio boat to load the gold and silver aboard. We would take it across the lake ourselves where we had horses waiting.

  Mateo would not willingly abandon me, but what was he to do when the lépero swine told him the tunnel had both filled with water and caved in? I knew how Mateo's mind worked. Once I was captured, he would do something to help me. Perhaps try to ransom me with the treasure. Or bribe the jailers.

  But he would never get that chan
ce. The moment the gold and silver were loaded on the boat, they would knife him in his back.

  I sat down on the floor and gave the matter some thought. I could make another hole in the floor and tunnel out. I had no shovel and, in truth, while the ground was soft enough to be dug with a spoon, it would take a shovel to get me out by morning. I could use the iron bar and my hands, but the digging would go so slow, the water would probably fill the hole as quickly as I cleared it, and I had no bucket to empty it.

  Ay, curse the classical education the fray gave me. An unpleasant comparison with my own perilous situation came to me from those books I'd devoured with my eyes and mind so long ago. King Midas had a love for gold. He was known to the Greeks for his greed and foolishness. He had an opportunity to exercise both of his vices when he captured Silenus, a satyr who was the companion of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. To gain Silenus's release, Dionysus had granted Midas a wish. The king's wish was that everything he touched turn to gold. But Midas of the golden touch soon regretted his wish. He had to touch food in order to eat it, and it turned to gold.

  Eh, the gold was all gone, but I had plenty of silver to eat.

  If I could not dig my way out, the only other exit was through the door. The door was thick, locked, and iron plated. But wait—it was iron plated on the outside. There had been no reason to plate the inside.

  I examined the door with candlelight.

  A slender crack existed between the door and the frame. Wiggling back and forth with the iron bar, I would be able to widen it. If I could break away enough of the wood, I would be able to push back the metal locking device with the bar. But I would not have the noise from the explosions to cover my prying. And the guards would no longer have their attention drawn to the play.

  During the inspection, we had failed to ask where the guards slept. I tried to remember if I had seen beds anywhere, but nothing came to mind. It made sense that one would sleep on the ground floor and the other on the upper floor. But when it came to the Spanish bureaucracy, common sense and common practice were not always the same.

  There was also the front door to consider, but it would be an easier task than the vault door. It was held by two iron bars rather than a lock, because a lock would not be strong enough. If the front door of the mint was to be attacked, it would be by battering ram from the outside. But inside, the bars were easy to slip aside.

  I had no choice but to attack the storage vault door immediately, praying that the two guards would drink a little wine or beer and discuss the play before going to bed.

  Using the bar, I broke away wood, making as little noise as I could. When the bar scraped the iron lock, my excitement increased, but it would only scrape. I could not get the lock to slide back. Anxiety took the place of excitement, and panic threatened to overwhelm me. Aaaak! I jabbed the iron bar in deep enough to kill the door and jerked the bar to the side. The lock broke, and I swung the door open. But I had made enough noise not only to wake the guards, but the twenty thousand sacrificial victims of the last great Aztec human feast.

  I ran down the mint hallway for the front door, the cool air on my sweaty face. Pushing aside the door bars, I heard a shout behind me. A club smacked the door as I flung it open and rushed out. I ran by the corral. It was deserted.

  Shouts followed me, but I paid no heed to them as I ran down the street and around a corner. I had to make it to where the boat would be loaded before Mateo got a knife in his back and I was captured by soldados.

  Three men were beside the boat when I came running up to it. They were shadowy figures to me in the darkness. I could not tell if Mateo was among them.

  "Mateo!" I shouted.

  "Bastardo! You made it."

  Bravo! Mateo was still alive.

  "Did you think that—" I heard footfalls behind me and spun out of the path. Enrique was behind me. His dagger caught air as I twisted away.

  My own dagger was in my hand, and I charged against him, shoving it into his gut. He grunted and stared at me. I could see the whites of his eyes and smell sour salsa on his breath as he gasped.

  I jerked the knife out and stepped back. Another of the banditos was on the ground in a gathering pool of blood. Mateo's sword flashed in the moonlight, and the other one caught the blade on the side of his neck. The wounded man staggered backward and fell into the lake.

  "Are you all right?" I asked Mateo.

  "A scratch to my back. I suspected Enrique's story was false. When I started to question him with my blade, he ran into the darkness."

  Horses hooves and shouts filled the night air.

  "Andale!" Mateo said. "We have a lake to cross."

  After we reached the other side of the lake where our horses were pastured, Mateo was philosophical about the loss of our three comrades in arms.

  "We would have had to kill them even if they did not try to stab our backs. After we divided the treasure, they would have soon been captured with their share because they would have exposed their wealth to others. It would have been a waste of thievery to give treasure back to the viceroy after we so cleverly stole it."

  We packed most of the Holy Office's confiscated gems and enough gold ducats to fulfill our needs to be gentlemen of quality for a lifetime. The rest of the booty, a great quantity of gold and silver and the remainder of the jewelry, we placed in a cave, carefully concealing the existence of the cave with rocks and brush.

  We rode for Veracruz, hoping our booty would not be found by an indio who thought he'd stumbled onto Montezuma's lost mine.

  We had booked passage with a lobo boat that crisscrossed the ocean in between the annual voyages of the treasure fleet.

  Our destination was Seville, the queen of Cities.

  ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

  I would ride a dragon across the Fire Mountains before crossing an ocean in a boat. For three weeks we were tossed like a cork on waves the size of mountains, blown by winds sent by the gods to punish me for my innumerable transgressions. The sea's vomit-sickness ravaged me. What little I could eat, I vomited. By the time we reached the peninsula that housed Spain and Portugal, I had lost weight and any interest I ever had in being a sailor.

  Mateo had served on both land and sea for the king. He was singularly unaffected. "I was just a boy when I had to leave the city of my birth and find sanctuary from a blood feud and the king's constables," he told me during the voyage. "A fleet was leaving to fight the Turkish sultan, and I had a berth on one of the ships."

  He declined to reveal what had caused his youthful flight from justice, but my experiences with Mateo told me that a woman was somewhere in the comedia of his early life.

  "The captain disliked me instantly, no doubt for some youthful indiscretion, and assigned me to the fireboats during the battle with the Infidel fleet. The boats were equipped with wooden cannons painted black, but we were the vanguard of a great naval victory over the Turks."

  Wooden cannons? Fireboats? I had never heard of these machines of war and found Mateo's tale fascinating.

  "In our age of ships that are the size of small castles, it is hard to sink a ship in battle. A lucky shot to the powder room will send a ship to the bottom, in pieces. But ships are made of wood and wood burns, compadre. Fire is a greater threat to a ship than being outgunned. You can sail out of cannon range, but you can't flee fire onboard. And there is no place to go if the fire gets out of hand. I have seen men onboard ships engulfed in flames throw themselves into the sea to drown rather than have the flames tickle their feet."

  A "fireboat," he explained, was a ship refitted so it burned quickly and easily. "Ships are equipped to minimize the flammable material on board. But a fireboat is equipped to maximize burning."

  The refitted ships were typically merchant vessels of little value in a battle. "We gutted the ship below deck and built wood chimneys from the hole to above the main deck. We constructed wood troughs in the hole that led to the portholes and the chimneys; then we packed the hole with anything that woul
d burn easily.

  "But we had to keep a ship looking like a man-of-war. We painted logs black and mounted them at gunports to make it appear that we were heavily gunned when, in fact, we were unarmed."

  "What was the purpose of the troughs under the deck?"

  "We poured oil in the troughs and lit it. The oil fires ran down the troughs, spreading the fire throughout the hole, even pouring out of the portholes to put the sides of the ship ablaze. The chimneys were stuffed with flammables and a little black powder."

  When the sea battle began, the fireship would set a course for its victim. It would take many hits as it came at the opposing ship, but by the time the enemy realized the danger, that it was not engaging an ordinary warship, the fireboat was beside it. When it came alongside, topside grappling hooks would snag the other ship's rigging, locking them in a lethal embrace.

  "We had to set the fires before our lines tangled with those of the other ship, and the timing had to be perfect," he said. "We had to abandon ship in a rowboat and were at the mercy of the enemy guns if we left too soon. We would be consumed by fire and explosions if we were too late."

  Once the hooks had tangled the other ship's masts, a powder charge in the chimneys was ignited. "That blasted fire out of the chimneys' mouths into our own sails and the other ship's rigging. The flaming sails meant the end of both ships. Only half a dozen of us manned the vessel; and as soon as the chimneys blew, we jumped into a longboat we had been towing."

  Fireboat crews got double pay and bonuses. "But our casualty rates were 50 percent. Most often the crews consisted of men like me who were being punished."

  Mateo stared out at the sea, remembering the past. "We Spaniards were the masters of the fireboats, using them against the Infidels in many battles, but we became victims of our own cunning when we fought the English."