Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  While inventorying the warehouse, I noted Chinese firecrackers and festival rockets employed a very low grade of black powder for combustion.

  When I asked Anak why he didn’t manufacture cannon and musket powder, he said that the formula was a closely guarded secret of the Europeans and that the islanders not only lacked that formula, they didn’t have the ingredients and manufacturing know-how as well. As for firearms, they didn’t know how to produce iron or steel or how to fabricate firearms from the materials even if they were available.

  I knew the formula was not secret at all but that acquiring and mixing the ingredients—obtaining and incinerating the correct wood for charcoal, gauging the purity of sulfur and saltpeter by color and smell, and “corning” the powder into the appropriately sized granules—did require extensive training, skill, and the proper equipment.

  Unless the materials are handled correctly, you end up with low-grade powder for fireworks, the likes of which Anak imported.

  Fabricating firearms was different. Anak couldn’t simply set up a factory and produce firearms. Even with my knowledge of weapons, such an enterprise would take money and equipment as well as both processed and raw materials. But I knew black powder could power weapons other than iron-forged firearms. During Father Hidalgo’s revolution, my compañeros fired reinforced wood cannons when iron weapons weren’t available. The wood cannons were best suited to shoot out a batch of nails and pebbles—lethal at close range.

  Moreover, the islands were rife with hollow bamboo thick as a man’s arm. By stuffing black powder and iron scrap into bamboo I knew I could manufacture crude cannons and bombs. Luis and I both knew that the weapons would pale in killing powder to the ones Europeans used. But …

  “Patrón,” I said to Anak, “I am a master black powder- and firearms-maker by trade. Luis is a skilled firearms expert as well. We could set up a powder- and weapons-making business.”

  Anak insisted that I demonstrate my skill. I told him I couldn’t manufacture and demonstrate effective weapons with his low-grade explosive. With sulfur, high-quality charcoal, and saltpeter I could fabricate my own black powder.

  He gave me money for sulfur, and I burned hardwood for charcoal. I was able to separate the saltpeter from urine, which I collected from the cesspit under the pissoirs and the latrines behind the main house.

  I mixed the saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur by weight in ratios of 15:3:2.

  We took Anak into the countryside. Luis and I reinforced an eight-inch bamboo shoot with hardwood strips. We mounted the butt end in the ground at an angle and packed it with fragments of seashells. I put fire to the powder in the touch hole and it went boom! The blast shredded a “scarecrow” of clothes propped up ten feet in front of the barrel.

  I then placed a bamboo bomb filled with seashells in a small abandoned wood hut. My bomb blew the wood hut to pieces.

  Anak stared at the remains of the hut with gapping jaws.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  THE CAPTAIN OF a ship of the line would have howled with laughter at our bamboo weapons. But Anak boasted of our weapons to potential buyers as if they would strike fear in the hearts of Pirate Alley denizens.

  Since we had to purchase the ingredients for the powder and other supplies as well, Anak had to trust us not only with his money, he had to allow us to roam the island in search of what we needed. He wasn’t happy about it, however. And would only trust us so far.

  He assigned us a huge hulking companion with a shaved head and big curving scimitar, which he carried slipped though his waist sash of crimson silk. Favoring white, loose-fitting garments, he habitually wore a red cylindrically shaped hat. Anak told us the man had worn the same clothes when he was a harem guard, which meant to me that he was a eunuch. Ktut was particularly ill-tempered, and I never felt comfortable enough to ask him about his past sexual history.

  Luis suggested that we owed ourselves some rest and relaxation. To Luis that meant an erotic odyssey through the local alleyway where prostitutes hawked their wares.

  Luis referred to this thoroughfare as “Calle Puta.”

  The prostitutes plied their trade in gaudily painted sailcloth stalls—lined up like big bird cages. Each cage had just enough space for a bed and a waiting prostitute. The prostitutes rented the space from the stall’s owner, and their trade was openly tolerated. The Hindus believed that a person’s dharma—the religious and moral law governing their personal conduct—determined the person’s role in life. Thus a prostitute was “born” to be a whore.

  As the old adage went, a prostitute is no better than she was meant to be.

  Male prostitutes of varying ages and dimensions also rented stalls and practiced their own specialized trade. Occasionally we caught Anak entering their enclosures.

  Luis and I quickly discovered that overpopulated Asian countries, such as China and India, routinely sold girl babies into sexual slavery. Purchased and raised by the pimps, they were employed as servants until they were old enough to ply their assigned trade.

  In Calle Puta, fortune-tellers also abounded. They belonged to a bizarre tribe from Borneo and were known as basirs. Having both male and female sexual organs, they dressed and acted as women. Deemed intermediaries between heaven and earth, they claimed to unite in their own person the feminine element, earth, with the masculine element, heaven.

  One stall housed a retired Portuguese sailor who sold linen penis sheaths, which he claimed prevented both conception and venereal disease. If so, the man should have used his own product. Horrendous syphilis scars scored his face, which it seemed to me undermined his claim that his sheaths prevented “the French Disease.”

  We passed a woman in a stall who promised to train women to tighten their Jewel Chamber by building up their vaginal muscles. The women who practiced the art claimed they could mount a man and achieve mutual orgasm by merely manipulating certain muscles.

  Our guard, Ktut, told us the most expensive women were not in these cages, but inside a building. They had been trained by the woman in the stall.

  I chose a woman trained in the muscle art.

  Luis was nothing, however, if not self-destructive. While I was experiencing a loving art in Calle Puta, Luis visited Anak’s beautiful Balinese wives.

  In truth, he had never gotten them out of his mind.

  He’d become obsessed. Even though I made him promise to leave them alone, he couldn’t control himself. Climbing a vine-covered wall to their balcony one night, he entered a window and entertained them. As he read their tarot—he’d swindled “a Tomorrow-Teller” on Calle Puta out of her devil-card deck—they played a new game he had invented: strip tarot.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  AS LUIS AND I built our gunpowder shop, I was so involved in acquiring supplies and equipment, I didn’t have time to worry about Luis’s nocturnal activities.

  Not until a neighbor told Anak he saw a man climbing up the wall.

  Luis, myself, and all the other men in the household denied guilt.

  Anak announced that he would conduct a test to see who was lying. He had all of us line up one by one while he applied a heated spoon to our tongues. The theory being the guilty one’s tongue would be dry.

  It hurt like hell, but all of us passed—including Luis.

  Luis later told me the fallacy of the test was that everyone had a guilty conscience for their bad acts. He boasted that he didn’t have one.

  Next Anak said he would test his pregnant wife—but not with the spoon. That test was for men. The Hindu code of honor required the wife to pass through fire to prove her fidelity to a jealous husband—getting burnt would be regarded as proof of guilt.

  Luis and I had to get the wife out of the compound.

  Or find a way for her to pass through fire without getting burnt—which couldn’t be done.

  But I was nothing if not resourceful.

  I procured an ingenious Chinese black powder concoction known as “False Fire,” which simulated thick flames and generat
ed blinding smoke, but did not actually ignite. His young scantily-clad wife quickly and easily passed through the falsely flickering flames.

  Everything went well after that because I was producing profitable black powder. Anak had three children on the way, and his only serious concern was how much money he would take in from our labor.

  Luis and I had learned a great deal about the city and the ships in the harbor, including the way the sultan’s guards kept an eye on the bay for slaves attempting to escape to a foreign ship. But we still had not figured out how to get the dinero to bribe a ship’s captain. Stealing it from Anak was the most obvious route—as soon as we found out where he hid it.

  Then word came from the sultan’s palace that Luis and I appear before the Bendahara.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  Anak didn’t respond.

  He only shook in terror.

  We sat in his courtyard, sipping tea, waiting for him to explain. I finally repeated my question: “Who is the Bendahara?”

  “Chief minister to the sultan.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He finally met my gaze. “It means that you are in serious trouble.”

  PART XIX

  Offend the Bendahara, and you will die one hundred thousand times.

  —Anak the Merchant

  SEVENTY-NINE

  JEN MENG-FU, THE Bendahara, kowtowed before Sultan Agung.

  The servile deference literally meant “knocking one’s head,” which was how Jen performed it, prostrating facedown and touching his forehead to the floor.

  He was reporting to the sultan about the foreigner “alchemist” who was able to turn the rawest, most inexpensive of materials—including the residue of common piss—into a powerful explosive.

  “Great One,” the Bendahara said, “the merchant Anak boasts that two slaves he obtained are repairing muskets and cannons and will soon forge their own firearms. The young assistant to the older Spaniard is even said to be a magician with killing powder.”

  “When you were gone, I had the two men stay in the palace and questioned them. I found out everything they knew about the guns and killing powder that Europeans use.”

  “I know that, Great One, there was nothing left to discover from these fools after you questioned them.” Jen knew better than to infer the sultan had failed in some manner. “Because of your genius in bringing them before you to be questioned, another use of them has arisen.”

  “Which is?”

  “To put them to work making killing powder and weapons.”

  “That would mean they would know what we have in armaments—and what we don’t have. You know I don’t permit Europeans to become familiar with my arsenal.”

  “A wise decision. However, we would have nothing to fear from these two. We only need them for the action we are planning against the Dutch. After they finish …”

  He didn’t have to elaborate on the fate of the two Spanish slaves.

  The sultan stared at his Bendahara and pursed his lips. “War with the Dutch is coming. We will need these slaves to make weapons for the battle to come.”

  The Bendahara expected no credit for his scheme. Running the island nation while the sultan hunted animals and dallied with the women of his harem was reward enough.

  Excused by a wave of the sultan’s hand, Jen backed out of the room. Bent low, he never turned his back to the sultan.

  Jen, who was Chinese by birth, was a gift to the sultan from the Chinese emperor twenty years earlier. Jen had ably served the emperor’s father for a number of years. The new emperor had told the sultan, on presenting Jen to him, that Jen’s administrative skills would surprise him.

  At first the sultan had suspected Jen of spying for the emperor. While Jen was coldly calculating, the sultan quickly realized, however, he could not be an effective double agent. Jen was too reflexively brutal and uncontrollably cruel. He lived to inflict pain.

  Cruelty was his primary motivational force—his second blood.

  When Jen first came to the palace, his proclivities were apparent. Jen’s abuse of his servants combined with the sheer viciousness of his political infighting shocked even the sultan … who was hardly a paragon of compassion.

  In the end, however, the sultan changed his mind about Jen. He concluded that the Chinese emperor, Chia-ch’ing, had sent Jen to him not because he feared the sultan but because Jen scared the emperor.

  Jen sometimes even scared the sultan—and nothing scared the sultan.

  Still, the sultan had to admit, Jen had his uses.

  Like many high-ranking Chinese governmental administrators, Jen was a eunuch. As such, he brought to the sultan’s East Indies island a three-thousand-year-old Chinese eunuch tradition—political skulduggery.

  An educated man, Jen knew that palace eunuchs were not restricted to China or the Islamic Ottoman Empire in Europe. Commonly employed in Rome, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, Italian boys training to become adult soprano singers—otherwise known as “castrati”—were gelded yearly.

  Men in some Christian sects had themselves castrated because they believed it would permit them to better serve God.

  Eunuchs rose to great power in empires because they guarded their ruler’s most prized possessions: power, women, and treasure.

  Jen—who had risen to power in China during the long reign of Ch’ien-lung, the father of the current emperor—had guarded the emperor’s private and public domains with unparalleled effectiveness but also with frightening ferocity.

  Tens of thousands of eunuchs served the emperor and the great princes of China. Many, like Jen, had themselves castrated. They simply hired a man who specialized in cutting off the testicles and often even penises. Those who were castrated involuntarily, such as prisoners of war or for punishment of crimes, often had their penis also removed. Chinese doctors had developed a technique whereby they created an opening for the castrated male to urinate after their penis was cut off. Sometimes they simply used a straw.

  Jen was a “three treasure” eunuch—his penis and both testicles were cut off. After the slicing, the groin was dressed with a cloth that had been dipped in an oil and pepper mixture. If the new eunuch was able to urinate by the next day, he usually survived.

  Not uncommonly, castration led to serious medical problems and even death. Even worse for those who had had it done voluntarily, it did not always create the opportunities expected. Many of the newly created eunuchs ended up homeless and suicidal after they were rejected for government service.

  For Jen, self-castration was a road out of poverty. But not all those who chose self-castration had been poor: Many men who were not underprivileged had it done to increase their opportunities to rise to power and privilege. Emperors trusted their eunuchs because usually the eunuch’s entire life centered on the master they served.

  Following the castration, Jen presented himself at the palace at the age of twenty. After being examined to ensure that his “treasure parts” had been permanently removed, he entered government service in the imperial palace itself.

  The Forbidden City, the vast palace compound in the heart of Peking, was staffed by thousands of eunuchs who performed services ranging from domestic servants to palace guards.

  Because they were known for their servile flattery to their masters—and utter ruthlessness toward their enemies and even treachery toward their friends—eunuchs were viewed with caution and even apprehension by other palace officials.

  Still young and in good physical shape—strong and tall—years from the sedentary lifestyle enjoyed by high-ranking eunuchs, Jen entered the palace guard service. He rose to officer rank and ultimately organized a system of spies that worked to uncover disloyalty within the palace.

  A national organization of secret police known in China as the Tung-ch’ang, the Eastern Depot, had operated for centuries under the control of palace eunuchs. The Eastern Depot sniffed out sedition not only in the palace, but in the entire country. Its torture
chambers were called Zhenfusi, and it ran its own prisons.

  The eunuch at the head of the Eastern Depot reported only to the emperor’s chief minister, usually another eunuch, and the emperor himself.

  Jen’s success in uncovering palace intrigues—real or imagined—brought him to the attention of the Eastern Depot. Five years later, he had the head of the Eastern Depot tortured until he confessed to being a traitor—and Jen took his place as the emperor’s spymaster.

  As an old Chinese adage went, “Serving an emperor is like serving a tiger.” One mistake and you are devoured.

  Jen ran the secret police with savage alacrity.

  As soon as he had the badge of authority in hand, he carried out a “cleansing” of the imperial staff in the Forbidden City. Hundreds of officials were put to death or driven out of office.

  When the old emperor died and his son ascended the throne, Jen’s competitor for remaining as head of the Eastern Depot was the eunuch that acted as the tutor and mentor to the new emperor. Jen lost his position. For his years of service, rather than being forced to commit suicide, he was given the opportunity to carry gifts and advice to the sultan … with the understanding that should he return to China, he would be executed.

  Jen’s reputation as head of the notorious Eastern Depot preceded him to the island—and the sultan welcomed him because Jen had qualifications that warmed the cockles of the hearts of Oriental despots …

  Over the years, Jen had grown fatter and slower, and he found kowtowing more difficult to do gracefully … only his voice grew younger and higher pitched.

  EIGHTY

  JEN WENT DOWN the steps of a dark, dank dungeon—his own Zhenfusi torture chamber—where his resident torturer practiced the ancient mysterious and esoteric arts of brute punishment and coercive interrogation.

  One cage had originally held four prisoners. It was now down to three. Jen had suspected the men inside of plotting against his authority and of undermining his relationship with the sultan. However, he had not brutalized them. He simply left the four men in a cage and withheld food, only allowing them water—which meant their sole source of food would be … each other.