Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  Walking by one of the bunk stands, I took a close look at their assorted occupants. Dressed in black loose-fitting shirts and trousers, the droopy-eyed smokers stared sightlessly at nothing, their mouths twisted in strange, melancholy half smiles.

  “Young friend,” Luis said. “Hung’s men will offer you an opium pipe and invite you to smoke. I will say we are here to buy, not smoke. This is dangerous business. Keep your mouth shut. Open it to talk or smoke, and you will be smoking the red-hot business end of my smoking pistola.”

  I believed him. But I didn’t need the offer of an opium pipe to experience the substance. Ayyo … it was enough just walking through the den. The attendants were no doubt immune to the effect after working in the den, but I felt myself getting not just dizzy, but calm and relaxed, with a feeling that life was good …

  I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes as a distinguished-looking elderly Chinese man materialized seemingly out of nowhere. Hung Pao, too, was dressed in black, loose-fitting shirt and trousers, and his gray hair was pulled up tight at the top of his head in a pigtail, which Luis referred to as his “topknot.”

  Luis had warned me not to touch or stare at the topknot.

  The Chinese were sensitive about their hair.

  “Dishonor a man’s topknot, you dishonor his whole family. Men have been killed for less,” Luis said.

  He and Hung Pao gave each other polite, curt bows and Luis did not attempt to shake Hung’s hand. He had also warned me that in the Orient and in Arabia handshaking was considered disrespectful.

  After an exchange of pleasantries—in a language that sounded like squirrel-chattering to my ears—they got down to business.

  To my amazement Luis was completely fluent in squirrel-chattering.

  Luis had explained earlier that the Chinese consider protracted negotiations an insulting breech of decorum. Both sides are supposed to recognize the proper value of the merchandise and settle on it expeditiously and politely.

  So I wasn’t entirely surprised when they quickly came to terms.

  Almost immediately Hung bowed, and both men were headed for the door. I quickly caught up with Luis. I was light headed after breathing the air in the opium den.

  “Hong Kong has a lot of opium smokers,” I said.

  “It’s against the law, but they smoke it anyway. The drug grips them with iron jaws. They can’t give it up. It’s evil stuff—a true scourge.”

  “Should we be buying it then?”

  “It’s only evil if you misuse it. If you are in extreme pain, you’ll need opium like you need blood in your veins.”

  “I hope we never need to smoke or eat it.”

  “I don’t know. The times I smoked it was rather pleasant,” Luis said, smiling.

  Once more I understood how little I knew about my friend.

  After we went through the door, Luis grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Where are you heading?”

  “Back to the ship.”

  “Not yet. Now it’s your turn to do some work around here.”

  I stared at him skeptically.

  “What kind of work?”

  “You have to honor an ancient Mandarin ritual—actually a sexual ritual. Old Hung demands that you make love to his young, recently widowed daughter.”

  “What? Is he insane?”

  “Not by the terms of his own kind. You see, she lost her husband and bereavement has driven her into suicidal despondency, and old Hung is convinced the only thing which will console her is to have her coals stoked by an innocent youth such as yourself. You see, the old dotard is really quite smitten with you. He mistakes your youth for innocence and your blank-faced stare for inexperience. He thinks you’re too pristine to besmirch her. I volunteered my services but unfortunately the old man knows too much about me. He thinks I’m wicked. Also I have moral qualms about matters such as these.”

  “Moral qualms?” I asked, incredulous.

  “To me, it’s a matter of monetary morality, young friend. I object strenuously to bedding women down without direct, immediate financial gratification. It’s a matter of personal honor—the code of the profession, so to speak.”

  “She could also be homely as hell.”

  “A face that would knock a buzzard off a meat wagon? Not likely. I’ve seen old Hung’s wives. They are all spectacular. I expect nothing less from his daughters.”

  “Why am I dubious?”

  “A bad attitude indeed.”

  “This will not end well.”

  Luis treated me to his widest, brightest, most ingratiating smile. “Young Powder Master, have I ever let you down?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “You will unless you plan to swim back to the colony and your true love.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  OLD HUNG’S MAJORDOMO—a middle-aged man in black robes, a long black topknot, a fierce-looking goatee, and narrow suspicious eyes—led me to a room in the back of the Harbor Lord’s spacious living quarters.

  “My master dotes on his daughter excessively. Fearing she might—in her inconsolable grief—take her life, he has taken her back in under his roof. However, she remains melancholy, staying in her room twenty-four hours a day. Shading the windows, she allows almost no light into the room. She simply lies on her bed and despairs. My master hopes that the charms of a kind and innocent youth might mitigate her misery. Young man, understand you are on a mission of mercy. You may be her last best hope.”

  I was still incredulous, but as Luis indicated, we lived on old Hung’s sufferance. Without his help, we would not leave with our dhow and opium. We would not even survive Hong Kong’s harbor.

  “How will I communicate?” I finally asked.

  “We are a cosmopolitan trading port, young trader. We all speak many tongues, my master’s daughters included. Hiring many governesses for his children, our Harbor Lord saw to it that all his children spoke English, French, and Spanish from childhood on.”

  I studied him intently, still dubious about his and Hung’s purposes, but I read nothing in his inscrutable face—and even less in his expressionless eyes. Nonetheless, my misgivings mounted ominously.

  “Lotus Blossom,” he said, knocking on her door, “I have a young man here.”

  He pushed the door open and eased me in. Lying on black silk sheets and black cushions was the most impossibly beautiful Eurasian woman I had ever seen in my life … also the saddest-looking. With sad sloe almond eyes, exquisite cheekbones, long ebony-black tresses flowing down the small of her back, and an amazingly delicate mouth, she was as astonishingly stunning as she was disconsolate.

  And she was naked.

  It took me a moment to reconcile that with the fact I was being invited into her room. I supposed despair had distracted her so much she didn’t even realize she was disrobed.

  The majordomo quickly bowed and departed.

  “I’m sorry, young man, that I cannot greet you more hospitably,” she said, pulling a black dressing gown of fine silk over her waist and pear-shaped breasts. “Anyway, I seem to be in disarray. But come in. My father has asked me to talk to you. Tell me where you have been, where you have traveled.”

  My life’s story would hardly buoy her spirits. Still, I did not know what else to talk about, and who knew, perhaps my wandering tale of woe might divert a girl who had spent so many years in the seclusion of a single city. My life, so far, had often been frightening, always difficult, but never dull.

  I told her how I was captured by Spanish militia and sold into slavery; how, as a slave, I illegally mastered the powder- and gun-making trades; how—fleeing my bondage—I rescued my fair love from certain death; how we traveled New Spain’s China Road in search of the rebel leader; and how, with my amigo Luis, I was sold as a slave again, this time to a Spanish galleon.

  I even told her how we had blown up the powder and cannon masters and taken their jobs, but how we were now headed toward Manila where who knew what lay in store for us.

  “What will happen
to you and Maria?” she asked.

  “Who knows?” I said. “If I make it back to the colony, I will look for her. But by then she may be old and married with a dozen children and have long forgotten me.”

  “She will be young and beautiful and waiting for you with open arms.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “You. A woman would be a fool not to wait for one such as you. She is not a fool.”

  “Bereavement has robbed you of your wits.”

  “Or made me see things as they are.”

  She cuddled against me and placed my hand over her breast. It seemed natural, as if Maria had done it.

  When I kissed her, she kissed me back with unexpected intensity, her lips parting and her tongue pirouetting into mine. Holding me and kissing me tightly, her hand then reached between my legs.

  She paused in our lovemaking to smoke deeply from a hookah, after which she extended the tube to me.

  “It is only hashish, my friend. It won’t hurt or enslave you but will heighten your senses and your pleasure.”

  If my senses were heightened any higher, I would black out. I’d learned long ago however not to disagree with my masters. I was in her father’s house and did what I was told. I smoked deeply, and she was right about one thing: It did heighten my senses. Time lurched, and suddenly everything appeared to me in threes.

  Lotus Blossom’s two arms were now six, her rapturous lips were not two but six as well, her delicious tongue that so dexterously tickled and tantalized my own were doing so in triplicate. I was not only staring into two dazzlingly sensuous eyes, I was tumbling into six bottomless voids.

  When I kissed her breasts, worked my way down her stomach and abdomen, then feasted on the delicate bud between her legs, I savored three of those as well.

  When she returned the pleasure, three mouths were kissing and caressing my trembling manhood, my pleasure throbbing three times the intensity.

  When she sat astride my hips—taking my manhood into her threefold loins and then bent down to kiss me again—not one woman enveloped me but four.

  Four?

  Where did the fourth come from?

  And why was the fourth perceptibly cooler than Lotus Blossom?

  The shades were drawn and the room so dark I could barely see Lotus Blossom. The silk sheets were immaculately and impenetrably black, and absorbed what little light fell on them rather than reflecting it.

  Still I could feel a woman coiling herself around my chest and stomach like a … like a …

  Ayyo! I could make the coiling lady out now.

  It wasn’t a lady at all.

  It was a snake!

  A macabre monster of a snake!

  While I had been bending over Lotus Blossom to address her flower, a twelve-foot python had looped six iron coils around my torso.

  “There’s a snake wrapped around my stomach and chest,” I hissed to Lotus—not unaware that this was the second time a snake had injected itself into my love life.

  “He’s my friend, Fu,” Lotus Blossom explained. “My protector and guardian, he comforts me in my melancholy.”

  “Tell your friend to let me go. He’s starting to crush me.”

  “If he thinks you don’t love me enough and decides you are not good for me, he might very well crush you.”

  “He’s crushing me already,” I hissed. “He’s cutting off my air.”

  “That’s because he can tell you’ve stopped loving me and that you’re too worried about yourself to truly care about me.”

  “How can a snake possibly know things like that?”

  “He intuits that your pena is softening.”

  I gave my manhood two energetic pumps, and miraculously, the little beggar leaped enthusiastically back to life.

  As my member rose, Fu loosened his stranglehold on my chest.

  “When did you first learn of Fu’s protective nature?” I gasped, my oxygen-starved brain starting to fill with feverish forebodings.

  “Well, Fu did perceive my late husband to be a poor and inattentive lover. At least, I assume that was the reason he crushed the life out of him.”

  “When did Fu pull off that feat?”

  “One night after one of my husband’s inept attempts at lovemaking.”

  “Fu killed your husband in front of you?”

  “While I was in my husband’s arms.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Not really. It wasn’t Fu’s fault, you know? I explained to my husband that very night that Fu constricted his coils only because my husband failed to heed my amorous needs. I told him he must stop being so erotically erratic, so self-indulgently self-centered, and most of all to stop obsessing so much about Fu’s embrace. ‘Fu will loosen up when your python perks up!’ I shouted at my esteemed husband during that last evening. I had told him continually throughout our marriage—night after night after night: ‘Focus on your lovemaking, my dear! You’re losing your concentration! Do you have to be so distracted all the time? Pay attention!’ But he was always stubborn. He wouldn’t listen. I’d hoped Fu might make him listen, but my husband still wouldn’t. He wouldn’t attend to my needs. Like myself, Fu finally ran out of patience with him.”

  “You have to help me,” I whimpered. “I can’t breathe.”

  “You can only help yourself, young sir. If you wish to survive Fu’s ecstatic embrace, you must not, like my late husband, succumb to insensitive impotence. Do not, like that poor wretch, be a poor and inattentive lover.”

  “You knew Fu would do this,” I hissed between clenched teeth. “You have deliberately done this to me!”

  “You chose to enter my bedroom … You chose to ensnare my heart and to enthrall my loins.”

  “I didn’t think you were this cruel.”

  “What did you think I was?”

  “The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

  “But then you should have known. You should have understood.”

  “Understood what?”

  “Great beauty is unavoidably, unyieldingly bloodthirsty.”

  “Why unavoidably? Why unyieldingly?”

  “It’s the nature of the beast. We have no choice in the matter. If our beauty allowed us to behave otherwise, it would not be ‘great beauty.’ It’s brutal ruthlessness that makes our radiance so ravishing.”

  That last statement stunned me to such a degree my lovemaking faltered and my manhood minutely, imperceptively weakened.

  Instinctively, Fu tightened his viselike coils so agonizingly that I almost blacked out from oxygen loss.

  Instantly, automatically, without my even realizing it, my stroke accelerated, my manhood stiffened, and his coils loosened.

  “Courage, innocent youth,” Lotus Blossom said. “No regrets. Never look back. Be of stout heart, and, who knows, you may survive the night. And think of how much ecstasy you will endure …”

  “How did I get into this?” I groaned, pumping my pelvis with pain-racked effort.

  “You’re drawn to great beauty like a moth to the flame. Did it surprise you when your wings were singed?”

  “I did not seek this!”

  “You sought me.”

  “Why is this happening?”

  “Because of your nature. You’re a man. Because you’re a man, you could not help but seek me—a paragon of inconceivable beauty.”

  “I wish I’d never seen you or Fu. I wish I’d never come here.”

  “It’s too late for self-pitying and self-loathing. You must deal with the situation at hand.”

  “I hate the situation at hand.”

  “Of course, you do. What man wouldn’t? If it makes you feel any better, however, know that you never had a choice.”

  “What?”

  Luis had grabbed my arm and pulled me away from fierce-appearing Mongol warriors on horseback coming down the narrow street.

  “Where were you? I found you wandering down the street in a daze. What happened? You breathe too many fumes?”


  I shook my head, trying to clear it.

  “Luis, did I … did you …”

  “What, amigo? Spit it out.”

  “Never mind.”

  I had the strangest sensation—my abdomen hurt like Hades. When I had a chance, I ducked around a building and pulled up my shirt as if I pretended to relieve myself.

  I had red welts around my waist.

  Ayyo …

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  LUIS TOOK ME with him in his search for a dhow, and again the negotiations went surprisingly well.

  As Luis had explained, Hong Kong Harbor teemed with these vessels—the simplest but most efficient sailing ships on earth. Brought to China by the Arabs centuries before, the dhow quickly came to dominate the East as thoroughly as they dominated Hong Kong Harbor. The most popular sailing ships in all of Asia, we had an ample selection of these amazing boats.

  To my amazement, Luis—whom I had dismissed as the most treacherous man alive—was good as his word. Everything he said he would do, he did.

  Luis purchased a larger vessel, called a baggala. Sharp-bowed with both a forward and upward thrust, the dhow had disproportionately large sterns, slanted triangular lateen rigging, and an unexpectedly large mainsail—significantly larger than the mizzen.

  We acquired the cheapest oceangoing dhow available. We needed it for only one voyage, not for longevity or endurance.

  Luis didn’t haggle over its condition. He pretended instead not to know the difference between a derelict and a seaworthy ship. He didn’t need a solidly built commercial vessel with which to transport cargo thousands of miles through treacherous storm-tossed seas. As long as the boat would survive a single voyage to Manila, he was content.

  He bought it so cheap, and his sellers seemed so grateful to part with it, I assumed the boat was stolen.

  Ironically, everyone in the harbor trusted this swindler.

  Even the crooks selling us the dhow seemed to trust him.