Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  He gave the fray a small piece of jade. “This goes in my mouth. I will need it to pay toll at the raging river at the first Hell.”

  Fray Diego pocketed the jade and worked his rosary as he muttered Hail Marys. He saw me staring and smiled. “My son, sheep who are lost seek their shepherd at the first sign of wolves.”

  “Go, boy, run, race back to the village,” Yaotl said.

  I hesitated and Yaotl gave me a stinging blow to my head. “Run!”

  SIX

  I RAN, BUT not far. I was not a boy but a man. Reaching bushes, I glanced back and saw that my uncles were no longer watching me but studying the oncoming horse horde. I slipped behind the bushes out of sight. This was the spot where I had cached my weapons: a pistol and a knife.

  I’d assembled the pistol myself in the days when we were rebuilding damaged guns in the village chapel for Father Hidalgo. But like all pistols, it fired only one shot and like most pistols, that shot often missed its mark or failed to fire at all. Still, I had the knife for when the pistol failed.

  Yaotl schemed to die from countless wounds, and the fray hoped to die quickly soon after slaughtering his fellow men. My dream of death was far more humble: I would kill one Spaniard before a musket ball blew away my brains.

  I crouched in the bushes, watching and waiting for my chance.

  My uncles prepared to face their foe. Yaotl stood tall—the heir to the tradition of mighty Toltec warriors.

  Fray Diego, meanwhile, readied his weapons. Ayyo … the good fray did not disappoint me. I almost howled with laughter as I watched him unlimber his arsenal. A man of erudition and imagination, he assembled an assortment of small bombs—clay pots packed with black powder sporting short fuses. Ignite the fuse, hurl the bomb, and duck the debris and blood.

  I did not ask Fray Diego if he expected a grateful greeting when he faced his God at the pearly gates in the afterlife.

  The horse-borne force suddenly fanned out, advancing in two long lines.

  They aren’t fools, I thought.

  Had they advanced in a solid column, Yaotl’s spear might have found flesh, and the fray’s bombs would have hit home. With the horsemen spread out, Yaotl’s spear was useless, and the fray’s bombs impotent.

  My heart sank as musket shots rang out. They had no intention of charging us and fighting it out. They would hang back and shoot.

  As if to confirm my fears, Yaotl screamed and sank, knocked off his feet by a musket ball. One bullet winged his arm, another his shoulder.

  The Spanish dogs were shooting him to pieces, but nonetheless bent on taking him alive. His journey through hell would begin not in the Nine Hells of Mictlan but in this life.

  The fray also understood. His countrymen were not fools … at least not the commander of this small company of militia cavalry. As the bullets smacked around him, the fray held up his hands to the heavens, as if imploring them for guidance, faith, and transcendent truth even at the hour of his almost certain death.

  Had I felt the urge to pray, I might have asked for something more substantive—perhaps a battery of heavy artillery.

  At that point, however, the horse soldiers rode up and dismounted. They kicked and cuffed and punched my uncles before dragging them up to the commander. A young officer who sat tall in the saddle, the commander stared down at the two prisoners, his face a mask of conceited contempt.

  Spanish officers in the colonies were often self-styled, self-equipped, and dressed as much to attract the ladies as to wage bloody war, while the common soldiers were uniformed in simple dark green long shirts and loose pants. The officer in charge was dressed as a god. Like the quetzal bird, he had a green coat and red vest. The epaulets on his shoulder were golden. He dressed to suit his vanity.

  Obviously, he didn’t fear the wrath of rebels—or Toltec warriors. He stood out like a rooster in a barnyard of hens. Dressed as if he were going to a parade rather than a battle, his mighty magnificence brought home the vast superiority of the Spaniards.

  Yaotl stared back at the commander in stony silence and brazen defiance.

  “Señor,” the fray said politely, “before Christ, we are your humble prisoners. You may do with us as you will—take our lives if you see fit. Please, however, spare our village.”

  The commander spat in the fray’s face.

  A tall sergeant, with a black sweeping mustache and diagonal dueling scars traversing his cheeks, dismounted. Unlimbering his member, he urinated on Yaotl.

  Pointing to a tree with long, low overarching bows, the magnificently uniformed commander shouted in his best parade-ground voice: “You have ropes. You have a tree. Hang them.”

  His men took two coiled ropes from the cross-bucks of their lone pack animal and tossed them over the overhanging bows.

  I raced from the bushes straight at the nearest cavalryman. He sat on his horse with his back to me. Too young and stupid to consider shooting a man in the back, I let out a war whoop that sent the startled soldier wheeling his horse to face me.

  When he turned, I fired the pistol.

  The shot went wild but the spooked horse bolted, throwing the rider off. Leaping onto the prone man, I raised my knife high, preparing to plunge it into his heart. I planned to execute him in the manner of my ancestors, who dispatched their adversaries by ripping out their hearts.

  Before I dealt the blow, however, my head exploded.

  SEVEN

  WHEN I AWOKE, my uncles were twisting in the wind, their heads cocked at hard right angles. Against my will, tears came. I whispered a prayer to Quetzalcoatl for Yaotl and the fray’s eternal redeemer, Christ Jesus. I prayed for Yaotl’s warrior’s heart and for Fray Diego’s saintly soul. I wished Yaotl good speed in the Nine Hells and the fray vaya con dios in Christ’s heavenly kingdom.

  I was trussed up tight, lashed to a tree. I listened as an officer argued with the commander over my life … and death.

  The commander cracked his riding crop against his boot top; he radiated the instinctive disdain, casual cruelty, and innate arrogance of a Spanish aristocrat. He glared at his men with withering condescension. Perhaps thirty years old, he was a ramrod-straight spit-and-polish martinet with the soul of a counting house and the compassion of a striking cobra.

  “It doesn’t matter if he’s a boy,” the lieutenant said testily. “He almost killed one of our men. He’s a rebel and should hang.”

  The captain’s glance shot right through me—a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. I read many things in his features … vanity, violence, viciousness, vindictiveness, the cynical sneer of cold cruel command. A supercilious aristocrat, he viewed soldiers as inferiors worthy only of relentless repression and indios as farm animals whose sole purpose in his blighted universe was as a beast of burden born to serve and suffer under the whips and rowels of brutal Spaniards such as himself or—in the case of our women—under their garranchas. We were dray animals and putas, for him and his kind to rape and flog, plunder and exploit, imprison and kill.

  All he respected was strength and confrontation. Cringing weakness was worse than open contempt.

  I met his glance with derision. “Let me go, Spanish pig, and I’ll cut your little garrancha off and feed it to a dog.”

  He laughed.

  And slashed my face with his riding whip.

  I choked back my pain, denying him the satisfaction of hearing me whimper. Blood flowed down my cheek and down my chest. Still I did not blink.

  “Let me loose—I’ll fight you man to man, you castrated male whore.”

  Slipping a boot out of the stirrup, he sneered—and kicked me in the stomach.

  “He has rebel blood,” the lieutenant said, “hang him now or we’ll face him in battle again.”

  “Why waste his financial worth on the end of a rope? He’s young and strong. We can sell him to the mines. He’ll bring a good price. Once he’s in the tunnels, he’ll never see the light of day again. He’ll be an old man in a year, dead in two, and will have served our countr
y well.”

  Bastardo. Being sold to the silver mines was a slow, agonizing, soul-destroying sentence—death by inches in an endless labyrinth of hot, sweaty, dust-ridden hell-pits. The slightest infraction of rules or hint of insubordination and they strung you up at a flogging post.

  “We’ll see who’s the puta, Aztec. Down in the mines, a young rabbit like you will bring out the macho wolves. The mines are full of them. We’ll see who’s the real man when they finish hammering your bruised and bleeding ass.”

  PART II

  AND INTO THE FIRE

  EIGHT

  HOW MANY DAYS I trudged, slogged, limped, crawled, and was half dragged over rough roads and broken country, up hills and through river fords to the transit holding pen of San Jacinto I could not say. Ten days I would guess. Those days passed in a blinding blur of hunger and hopelessness, dust and dehydration, sunstroke heat and bleeding road-blistered feet.

  When I didn’t keep up, there was also the downward slash of their plaited rawhide wrist-quirts.

  Nor was the San Jacinto holding pen much of an improvement. More a waist-deep dirt pit than an actual jail, it was surrounded by a wall of sun-baked mud-brick. Like myself, the sixty-odd prisoners were all as stunned by hunger and thirst, agony and fatigue, filth and heat. Diarrhea was rampant, and the two buckets could not contain the diseased excretions. Most of us lacked the energy to do more than sleep, scramble after the slop they threw at us twice a day, and drag ourselves to the buckets.

  Dogs and donkeys ate, drank, and slept better than we did.

  They suffered less, too.

  We waited in the walled pit of San Jacinto for transport to the silver mines—Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Pachuco. We did not know which one, nor did it matter much. They were all death traps. Prisoners went there to toil, suffer, and die.

  I would suffer in agony and ignominy.

  I would die in shame and in shackles.

  NINE

  AT THE END of my first week, I stood in a foul pit with other prisoners and watched a gunsmith struggling to shoulder and unload large kegs of gunpowder for the militia. Small of stature—almost dwarfishly diminutive—he had thin arms and a sunken chest. His eyes were haggard—almost haunted in appearance—his cheeks hollow and drawn. Swaying and staggering under the heavy barrels, his lungs wheezed—so much so I wondered if he was down with a contagion.

  Working before an open forge had befouled his face and hands, his tan shirt and trousers, with grimy sweat. He was clearly a man understaffed, overwhelmed, and overworked. He needed a helping hand.

  Furthermore, I knew his trade. I had once handled the same explosive for another army, albeit an army of liberation.

  “Shame about your apprentice, Felix,” a tall, sturdily built soldier said to him. “I hear the miserable wretch up and died on you this morning.”

  “Yes, and after all the work I put into him. He was just starting to learn the gunsmithing trade. Lord knows where I’ll find another. Not in this benighted town.”

  “You could have used his strong back today.”

  “Mine creaks like a cracked axle.”

  Ayyo. The poor Spaniard. He had to do a day’s work.

  I called to the man. “Señor Felix, I must talk to you.”

  He looked up but turned away, ignoring me.

  “Señor, I must talk to you.”

  He gave me a look, then strode over to me. “Shut up, boy, or you’ll talk to the business end of my horsewhip.”

  No one was close enough to overhear, so I whispered, “I know gunpowder and gunsmithing. I’m also muy hombre—strong as a macho mule. I can unload for you.”

  “Shut up, boy.”

  I watched him open a barrel and pour gunpowder into a musketeer’s flask.

  “Your black powder’s too fine,” I said, “so fine it should only be used in a pistol’s flashpan. Musket powder must be coarser, or the heat and speed of the discharge will split the barrel. The quartermaster will have your cojones for sweetbreads.”

  The man stared angrily at me, his eyes narrowing.

  Well, at least I had his attention.

  He finally looked around, confirming that no officers had overheard me. No one was within earshot, and I’d kept my voice low.

  He strode over to me. “Make trouble for me, boy, and I’ll have your cojones. Now.“He glanced around again, nervous. When he looked back at me, he asked: “What do you know about gunpowder and gun smithing?”

  “I made black powder and rebuilt weapons for the army of Generalissimo Hidalgo. That’s why they’re sending me to the mines.”

  “So you’re a bastardo bandido as well as an idiot Aztec indio.”

  “I thought the revolución would improve my character.”

  “The mines will improve your character.”

  “By killing me?”

  “Exactly so.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I improved your financial character, señor, and protected your aching back from protracted labor? You’ll work less. Your only burden will be the barrels of dinero I will shoulder through life for you. I tell you I know gunpowder like buzzards know carrion. I can rebuild—no, I can make—muskets and pistolas.” I lifted my chin with pride and whispered: “I have built a pistola all by myself and shot a militia officer with it. To death. I even mixed the gunpowder and molded the lead ball which I emptied into his gachupine skull.”

  “They hang men for less. Why not you?”

  “I’m young and strong. I’m worth more to them alive, so they sell me to the mines. But they’ll sell me to you instead—if the dinero is right.”

  “You say you can make black powder?”

  “And guns.”

  “The truth is not in you.”

  “If I lie, our Holy Mother ran a brothel.”

  Felix shut his eyes and crossed himself.

  “You are the devil,” he said, his eyes still shut.

  “Your devil indeed—but a devil skilled in your trade, and you need me. As you said, you can find no one else. You will find no one else.”

  “If you know so much, tell me what goes into gunpowder?”

  “Seventy-five parts saltpeter, fifteen parts charcoal, ten parts sulfur. But the mixture must be caressed because batches vary. Mix it too energetically it will energize you into Holy Hell.”

  “You have a strong back?”

  “Like a prize stallion.”

  “Cross me, you’ll wish you had died in the mines.”

  “I will make for you the highest quality of powder and the most magnifico weaponry in all of New Spain. You’ll make three times as much dinero as you bring in now and forge the finest firearms in the land.”

  “I’ll ask that slave driver of an overseer how much he wants for an ignorant indio Aztec with vulture vomit for brains.”

  “I’m a bargain, you’ll see.” I puffed up my chest. “I’m worth my weight in Aztec gold.”

  Shaking his head, he turned and walked toward the overseer.

  He was cursing the father I never knew and my mother in the foulest possible terms.

  PART III

  GOLD AND GUNS

  TEN

  Lago de Chapala, Intende de Guadalajara, 1818

  A MAGNIFICENT PISTOLA,” Manuel, my best assistant, said.

  Sí, another masterwork, by a master craftsman … namely me. A flintlock pistol, the walnut handle inlaid with ivory, embellished with elegant whorls of eighteen-karat gold, elaborately embossed staghorn stock and glittering with brass fittings burnished to a mirror-gloss.

  From the light filtering in through the shop window, I examined the gold plate containing the name of the gunsmith who had crafted this exquisite weapon: Felix Baroja of Eibar.

  No, my name was not Felix Baroja nor was I of Eibar, a town in Old Spain’s Basque country. I was Juan Rios, and to my Spanish masters I was an ignorant Aztec peon, which many Spaniards thought lower than the beasts. My name may have been Spanish, but my Spanish masters were quick to let me know I was in no w
ay Spanish and hence without any rights at all. I no longer answered to Mazatl because that name was unknown and unpronounceable to my Spanish masters. I lost that name when I lost my uncles to a taut noose and a gallows tree seven long years ago, and I was spared a mine slave’s ignominious death.

  I stared into a small handheld mirror that I used to peer down the pistol and musket barrels that I forged and fabricated. In my seven years as a bond slave, I’d grown to manhood. My hair was dark and thick, and since my beard was surprisingly coarse for an indio, I had to shave. My eyes, Felix continually warned me, were bold and wary as a hawk’s, not submissive enough for “an Aztec indio bastardo,” as he liked to refer to me.

  Once when he branded me “a bastardo”—due to my problematic paternity—I shot back: “In my case, señor, an accident of birth. You, however, are a self-made one.”

  He laughed derisively and only continued his endless assaults on the mystery of my true antecedents.

  The forge was in a dark, carefully concealed room situated between my work room and Felix’s office. I dreaded working the forge. Forge-building was not only dirty and sweltering, sometimes I had to work there in secrecy.

  The doors were locked and the windows shuttered. No one else had a key but Felix.

  And that enclosed forge shed—where I heated steel over blazing coals, then melted, shaped, and hammered it, often on anvils—was insufferably hot and filthy.

  The second shop, in which I otherwise toiled, was in a small building, sequestered behind Felix’s office and showroom. The window was draped off most of the time. Only when I unavoidably required light to probe and inspect my handiwork did I push the curtain aside—and only then when I was sure no one lurked outside.