Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  In fact, the sultan hated the cannibals as much as we did.

  “The cannibals have raided his villages—for booty and human flesh both—and the sultan continually dispatches hunting parties to rescue the captives. Some cannibals are killed for sport. Some of them, our elephants trample to death.”

  Those who survived were eventually sold at slave auctions, where the man-eaters brought high prices.

  “Slave masters,” Sergeant Marquez explained, “dote on cannibals, frequently making them slave drivers. The only thing a lazy slave fears more than an overseer’s whip is a cannibal licking his chops and flashing his razor-sharp teeth at him when he’s slacking off.”

  In other words, the sultan’s soldiers hunted cannibals for fun and profit, and one of these hunting parties had saved us from the dinner pot.

  During the long walk Luis amused Sergeant Marquez with obscene tales of the women he seduced, the men he killed, the wars he won, most of which I no longer dismissed as the demented illusions of a fevered brain.

  Soon the good sergeant was captivated.

  “I will help you prosper in our fair land,” the kindly sergeant said. “Due to your country’s military presence in the nearby Philippines, the sultan is continually trying to improve his facility with your language. His most favored aides all speak Spanish and wish to improve their command of the tongue as well. I will suggest that were he to keep two enterprising Spanish-speaking men around his court, he and his advisers could increase their fluency in the Spanish tongue.”

  PART XVII

  Are you saying there is no such thing as dirty money?

  —Juan Rios

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  SERGEANT MARQUEZ WAS good as his word. He got us an appearance before the sultan. Moreover, he was sympathetic to our plight. He loved Luis’s tale about buying dhows and opium in Hong Kong, blowing up the pirates, convincing the cannibals of our preternatural powers, our refusal to marry his daughters, and our escape across the swamp.

  We stayed in the palace over half a month, eating, sleeping on daiwan cushions and sheets of finest silk. Each day we appeared before the sultan where we—mostly Luis—discussed and answered questions not just about Spanish weapons, warships, and battle tactics, but those of Europeans in general.

  It became obvious that the sultan was not just improving his Spanish, but getting information he could use in future wars.

  One night, however, after a glorious evening of music, laughter, and storytelling, we were told the soft treatment was over.

  Marquez told us that the sultan considered letting us stay in the palace, as he was impressed especially with Luis’s abilities and his stories. “He is bored with his tedious courtiers and viziers and you amuse him. But as foreigners, you would not survive palace intrigues.”

  The kindest thing that could be done for us would be to find us positions where we were safe.

  “Slavery,” Luis said, after Marquez finished. “We’re being sold into slavery.”

  We were taken to the auction block in chains to await our turn.

  “I spoke to a merchant named Anak who trades with foreigners,” Marquez said. “I assured him that buying you two would be good for his business. He often deals with weapons of war. There is much need of such instruments in our land. And knowledge of languages.”

  Both of us spoke Spanish, of course, and knew a bit of Latin because most of our education came from priests, but Luis had traveled widely and knew other tongues, as he demonstrated so well in Hong Kong.

  Luis counted off the situation on his fingers as we waited for Anak the merchant to finish his haggling with the slave auctioneer.

  “One, the sultan’s affection for us didn’t prevent him from selling us to the highest bidder. Two, his war with Spain doesn’t prevent his people from profiteering off that war. Thirdly, his kingdom is at war with everyone all the time. They live in a constant state of eternal conflict.”

  “So much for loyalty,” I said. “The sultan had gotten all the information he wanted from us and now is going to make a little dinero. No doubt Marquez received a cut, too.”

  Luis, much more the experienced blackguard than I, shrugged off being sold into slavery by our new friends.

  “It’s the way of the world,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t sell a man into slavery.”

  “How about Madero, the viceroy’s spy and torturer?”

  “I’d kill him but not sell him.”

  Anak, a trader originally from Bali, resembled a short squat ball of brown fat rather than a wealthy, influential businessman. We soon learned that he was a typical trader who worshipped before the altar of greed.

  When Luis and I went to work for him, he made his moral priorities clear.

  “You are men from far away. You will interpret for me business negotiations in the many foreign tongues I am told you speak. You will translate not just the terms presented, but by interpreting body language, you will inform me of the tricks the presenters employ.

  “If you cost me money—whether through negligence or the subornation of baksheesh—or if you work your wiles on my wives, you will eat your penis, testicles, scrotum, and excrement … before you die. And you will die a thousand times.”

  Anak suddenly backed away from us.

  “You stepped on my shadow,” he said to me, his face working in rage. He shoved his index finger into my chest hard enough to hurt. “The shadow is my bodily spirit. Step on my shadow, you step on me. If you step on the sultan’s shadow, he will have you cut into a thousand pieces.”

  Anak told us that the sultan not only provided a safe harbor for the Manila pirate crews who attacked our galleon but he shared in the booty. No one viewed piracy against foreigners as a crime but as a profitable enterprise.

  The European brigands were worse than the Asian pirates because their ships were bigger. They paid for trading goods when they had to, but if they could commandeer them at gunpoint, they preferred that rate of exchange. It was more profitable.

  We had been kept in the palace compound and now it was interesting to walk through the city with Anak orientating us. The sultan’s capital was exotic in the extreme—a place out of the Arabian Nights. Besides native islanders, Chinese, Malay, and Europeans participated in its trade—when not at war with the sultan.

  The city was a frenzied hive of activity. A receiving and distribution point for the Spice Island trade, the city’s crowded markets, warehouse districts, and docks reeked with the sweet and pungent smells of nutmeg, mace, clove, and pungent peppers. The world market for these goods was inexhaustible and ludicrously lucrative, and the source of these riches grew literally on bushes and trees.

  Money bushes.

  The major world powers fought and killed each other continually in their efforts to control the islands, while native rulers collected unimaginable riches.

  In the harbor, baksheesh, the Asian version of New Spain’s notorious mordida, was a way of life. Pirates swaggered openly up and down the streets, having bribed the sultan and his minions for that right. A Portuguese man-of-war would moor beside a Chinese junk, which dropped anchor next to a Malay sampan, while scattered in the bay were English, German, French, and Dutch vessels. For safe harbor and friendly access to rum and provisions, they all paid the sultan’s bitter tariff.

  “Don’t think because you see European ships dropping anchor in the bay that you can escape to them. If you attempt to escape, you will wish you were back in the hands of cannibals. The sultan decrees death for escapees … a slow death.”

  While the ruling family and governing class were Malays, the merchants were mostly foreigners—Chinese traders predominating but also the Dutch, Indian, Arabic, and Persian. Slaves of all colors—including light-complexioned slaves—abounded.

  Greed was the only true motivating force. The Spice Islands’ easy wealth pitted every person against every other person.

  And then there were Eurasian women—the most exotic-erotic women on earth. As God
and Quetzalcoatl are my sacred witnesses, I shall never forget the vast array of bountiful beauties bouncing along those boardwalks in their flamboyantly flower-printed sarongs. Most of the women were bare-breasted, golden brown, eyes dark and cunningly slanted.

  Many of these dazzling women were readily available … for a price.

  Of course, they also shared the streets with glowering melancholic Dutch merchants, inscrutable Chinese traders, grinning, nodding Indians, frenetic French, and arrogant English.

  The mud-and-straw buildings were a sun-splashed beige—not unlike the adobe buildings of New Spain—but with an Oriental cast—looming three and four stories above narrow, twisting passageways that were packed with stalls where vendors sold everything from live chickens and tropical fruit to hashish and snake oil—the common cure for every ailment under the sun.

  Eerie Eastern and Near Eastern music permeated the stalls—the metallic discords of the Arab refrains, the eerie flute of an Indian shaman hypnotizing a cobra, the jarring jangle of chime and bells.

  Local industries produced gold jewelry, cotton and silk fabrics, lamps, engraved copper bowls, and sword blades that merchants hawked with arm-waving shouts and avaricious abandon.

  While the weather was endless summer and often balmy, black violent thunderstorms blazing with sheet lightning, slanting layered sheets of rain, and gale-force winds were also common occurrences—just as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, and tsunamis routinely ravaged the sultan’s domain.

  Like the geography, the commerce too had a frenzied quality. Make your money before things change … catastrophically.

  The religious beliefs were as confused as the music. The region was originally animistic, which held that three superior gods oversaw creation, agriculture, and war. Countless numbers of lesser spirits ran the forests, rivers, rice paddies, earth, and sky—some inherently good, some intrinsically evil. Foremost in their beliefs was the theme that everything has spirit—rivers and forests, even the rocks and earth themselves.

  Hinduism arrived with its pantheon of gods, and their worship merged with local beliefs. When Islam arrived, rather than displacing the existing religious elements, it meshed with them.

  From what I saw, none of the religions were taken seriously in the islands. Islam took hold—but with none of the righteous fervor that had so enthralled the Middle East. When the Islamic muezzin called the faithful to prayer five times a day from the balcony of a towering minaret, only about half of the faithful bothered to kneel toward Mecca and recite their prayers.

  In conversation with servants of Anak who claimed to be Muslims, most of them did not seem to know or care where Mecca actually was.

  Hindus, who were supposed to view the bodies of meat-eaters as graveyards for dead animals, devoured meat as quickly and voraciously as any heathen. They were equally enthusiastic about drinking.

  Superstitions, however, were obeyed in deadly earnest—even by the most religiously unobservant. Superstition carried with it the true force of faith, I learned.

  In fact, superstitions far outnumbered faiths in the islands, especially among the people who lived inland, and superstition frightened any islander far more than the most devout Christian could ever dread hell.

  Anak explained countless superstitions for Luis and me—in hopes that we would not violate and bring eternal rack and ruin down on him.

  One of the strangest superstitions was that dreams are living realities in which your soul departs your body, returning only when you awake. Since the events in dreams really happened, the maiden you violate in your dream has lost her maidenhood … the man you kill is dead.

  Hence, you must never wake your master suddenly because his soul may lack the time to return to his body, and he may well die.

  To avoid waking their masters suddenly, slaves approached by shuffling their feet or muttering quietly.

  Anak held the veracity of superstitions to be self-evident. None of his impassioned beliefs, of course, prevented him from trading with and profiting from heathens who subscribed to none of his myths and whose lives he might have very well terminated in his dreams or whose daughters’ maidenhoods he might likewise have terminated during his slumber.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  LUIS AND I settled into a small hut in the back of Anak’s residential compound. The warehouse where he counted his goods—and his money—was at the docks.

  Our plan was simple: To bide our time until we could escape and ship back to New Spain. We knew the harsh penalties we’d endure if we failed; we had to make it the first time because there wouldn’t be a second chance.

  “I see incredible amounts of dinero jingling in the pockets of heathen merchants and pirates that should be in the pockets of righteous souls like ourselves,” Luis said. “It would be un-Christian of us not to carry back some of this wealth in our own pockets, no?”

  Our most immediate problem, however, was sexual: Anak had failed to impregnate any of his several wives. The lack of a male heir created an atmosphere of gloom and discord in the family compound.

  His wives had long ago lost all patience with him. They railed endlessly against his failings as a man for their inability to conceive. Anak said he was defenseless against their accusations because none of them had conceived. The only reasonable actions, he said, were to beat them frequently and find a way to make them conceive.

  Anak described in detail each and every position of the Kamasutra that he and his wives had unsuccessfully attempted.

  Another time Anak took me to a curtained-off stall where he showed me four small gold hollowed-out balls that he’d had stitched up and under the foreskin of his penis. The balls reputedly formed a stiff “ring” around the penis just below the head, which the surgeon had guaranteed would turn his women into his sex slaves.

  Moreover, the hollow balls contained a smaller metal sphere that caused them to tinkle like tiny bells.

  I never understood the workings of these tiny balls, but sure enough when he shook his member, they … tinkled.

  Another appliance Anak had employed was a “penis ring” that also promised rock-hard virility. Joyfully intertwined dancing girls—lutes and hip harps slung over their winged shoulders—carved in exquisite bas-relief adorned the jade ring fitted around his member’s base. The ring’s secondary purpose was the stimulation of the woman’s “Jewel Terrace.”

  “When I engage in sex,” Anak said, “I always concentrate on a picture of a person or thing of beauty and grace, an element which the Javanese call ‘alus.’ It means refined, pure, exquisite, and ethereal. That will assure that a boy with beauty and power will be conceived.”

  The opposite effect was “kasar,” which meant impolite, rough, uncivilized—like the sort of badly played music that habitually brutalized our throbbing eardrums. Negative thoughts result in kasar.

  “Kasar,” Anak said, “produces ugly, impotent offspring.”

  In his darker moments Anak feared he was produced through a long, dark night of kasar.

  On another occasion, Anak used a Chinese aphrodisiac called the “bald chicken drug” that made a seventy-year-old man so virile that he made so many demands on his young wife, she couldn’t sit down anymore.

  “But it just makes my member limp,” he whined.

  In his hunt for remedies, Anak explored the yin-yang tradition of China. Women’s yin essence was presumed to be inexhaustible while a man’s yang—his essence, his semen—was finite. Ideally, a man would draw the sex act out as long as possible. The longer he remained inside the woman, the more yin—or essence—he would absorb from her.

  “When the Chinese methods fail,” Anak told us, “I attempt to follow the Hindu Cult of the Phallus. They attempt to incorporate sex into their religious practice.”

  He showed me a temple, which had numerous phallic representations inscribed on its walls and a giant statue of a stone phallus. Some of the members were so fanatical that they castrated themselves at the temple and threw their severed pe
nis and testicles onto the altar.

  One of the phallic symbols was that of the snake. Women who followed the rite adopted a cobra to help them conceive. So the merchant brought a cobra into the house for each of his wives. He gave up the practice after he lost a wife and two servants to lethal bites.

  While Anak was desperate to have his wives impregnated, he wasn’t willing to have it done by someone else. To ensure their chastity, when he had to be away from home overnight he had their vaginas sewn almost closed.

  Anak told us he was seriously considering the Hindu practice of suttee, in which the widow is forced to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.

  He believed the suttee sacrifice would stop his wives from plotting his death. If he did not impregnate them soon, he feared they would poison him and find a man who would satisfy them.

  PART XVIII

  ARMS MERCHANTS

  SEVENTY-SIX

  ANAK HAD A sprawling warehouse packed with assorted merchandise along the wharf. Much of his business consisted of Chinese imports, including fine Shantung silks and exquisitely carved jade. Artifacts for Chinese religious occasions and celebratory festivals were especially popular among the islands’ Chinese immigrant population.

  We soon learned commercial disputes were resolved differently than in our own culture.

  After we arrived, Anak fell out with another merchant over the ownership of a slave—each claiming they had purchased the man. Ownership was to be determined by “an ordeal of divination.” The two parties simultaneously lit equal-sized candles. The owner of the candle that outlasted the other in the burn-down was judged the true owner of the slave.

  Anak described to us another method for settling disputes: a white stone and a black stone were placed in a bucket of boiling water. The two disputants were required to reach in and grab a stone. The person who came up with the white stone was judged the winner.