Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  There had been no sign he recognized me—but I wouldn’t expect there to be. I was no longer the skinny indio boy he’d seen long ago, but in any event, most Spaniards were blind to indios—they thought we all looked alike … as did their cattle.

  He had finished off the crippled mule with a shot and left it lying on the bridge. “Let the army remove it,” Iturbide said. “The bridge should have been guarded. They probably abandoned their posts … their pockets full of bandido mordida.”

  He told me he thought Guadalupe Victoria himself was behind the attack. “The devil is supposed to be dead, but he has more lives than a cat.”

  I doubted it was the work of the insurrection leader but didn’t offer my opinion. Bandidos and rebels frequently ambushed their victims at bridges. Had I thought the attackers rebels I would have hesitated killing them.

  At any rate, to Iturbide, “rebel” and “bandido” were synonymous.

  I had offered to take the place of the dead guard next to the driver but Iturbide insisted I ride with him. “The rest of the road is safe,” he said.

  I told him that I had worked as a clerk for a merchant who had perished from the black vomito en route from Veracruz. Iturbide was treating me as an equal, but he was still in the throes of gratitude for my rescue. Tomorrow, if we met on a street, he would probably give me a brief glance and wonder where he had seen me before.

  “It’s the blood that steadies your aim, señor,” Iturbide said. “I assume you are pure-blooded. And that confirms what we all know—that blood makes the man.”

  The purity of blood was something he wanted to believe. The Spanish were fanatical about judging other Spaniards’ blood, believing that while pure blood was superior to mixed blood their pure blood was richer than any other.

  I was surprised that he mentioned race. He knew that an indio was not allowed to possess a firearm—unless the indio carried the weapon in the service of a Spaniard.

  Mestizos, on the other hand, had no restrictions.

  Iturbide asked me to attend a party given in his honor at a hacienda outside Jalapa. “I wish my friends to meet my new amigo.”

  I begged off, claiming I had urgent business in the capital. My feeling was that the Spaniard wanted me there to show me off—like a prize stallion whose bloodlines went back to the Conquistadors.

  I was no doubt now the Grand Criollo’s new possession—at least in his eyes.

  Iturbide leaned forward and spoke earnestly. “Joaquin, I know what you are thinking—we are of two different worlds. But men like us have a common ground—the battleground. And we have met there not as enemies, but as compadres. I am greatly in your debt. Tell me … what can I do for you? Not to repay you, I can do that only by saving your life but to thank you.”

  I couldn’t ask him for his aid in finding Maria. The request required too many explanations about who Maria is … and my identity.

  “I am set,” I said. “But I thank you.”

  “Are you a rich man?”

  “Not at all. But I have some coins in my pocket. I won’t accept a reward, if that’s what you are offering.”

  “Certainly I want to reward you, but if you have sufficient dinero, I won’t insult you by offering gold. But there is something I can offer you that is longer lasting than the coins jangling in your pocket. A steady income.”

  “To work for you?” I asked.

  “To work for yourself. You’re an outstanding marksman. It’s a rare talent and one that could earn you a good income. The capital is full of rich men who count their ability with a firearm as one of the proofs of their manhood. You could make a handsome income showing them how to shoot. Unless you own a silver mine, you would do well to take this opportunity. They would especially welcome lessons from an indio.”

  “Why?”

  Iturbide grinned. “A strange sort of pride. They would resent a Spaniard who was far superior to them in shooting.”

  But not an inferior indio. A twisted sort of pride.

  I liked the idea. Not that I cared about rich Spaniards, but I didn’t know what I would be up against in the capital or what it would take to find Maria. Iturbide was a very important man and it would be wise for me to keep in contact with him. For all I knew, Maria was wasting away in the viceroy’s dungeon. If that was the case, Iturbide and his social circle of powerful friends might be able to help me free her.

  The same went for myself. I didn’t know if the hangman would be waiting on a causeway, sitting on a chair, dangling a rope between his legs. It would give me a cover story for my presence in the city.

  “You understand,” Iturbide said, “it’s an excuse to keep you for myself. I actually don’t want to share you with my friends, but I will do so only to line your pockets … if you promise to keep some of your methods secret and only reveal them to me.”

  Laughing and talking to the charming man as we drank good brandy and smoked Cuban cigarros, I was reminded of the casual way he had opened my cheek with his quirt, hanged my uncles … and then sold me into slavery.

  In short, I did not trust him—not for a single second.

  I wondered what he really wanted from me.

  NINETY-SEVEN

  Jalapa

  ITURBIDE PURCHASED A mule at a ranchero to replace my horse and I parted company with him. He was going off the road to a friend’s hacienda and I was proceeding into Jalapa and on to the capital.

  When we parted, he gave me a lingering quizzical look and I wondered if finally something about me had ignited the memory of a boy whose face he scarred, but he said nothing. I decided his look was just that of a rich Spaniard appraising a bull he considered buying.

  Despite my hostility toward the Spanish who refused to share the colony’s political reins and economic opportunities, I found much in Iturbide to admire. He had both personal charm and manliness. And I had to remind myself that despite his charm, the man had not only helped keep peons chained economically to rich merchants and haciendas, but as I knew personally, was infamous for brutality and summary execution of rebels.

  Despite the man’s courtesy and gratitude, Iturbide saw himself as an aristocrat and saw me as a peon. As a man who supported both the conservative government and the ultra-conservative church, he would not hesitate to have me arrested and punished if he thought I was a threat to his own kind.

  The road into Jalapa was in excellent condition and bordered by full green trees and thick shrubs. I paused at the crest of a hill and observed Jalapa in the distance. The city was picturesque, set against grand white-capped volcanic mountains—Perote and Orizaba and other volcanic mountains.

  As in Veracruz and most colonial towns, houses were two and three stories, typical Spanish style with enclosed courtyards, but unlike Veracruz, the roofs of these houses were not flat but slanted and tiled.

  Cool and refreshing after the heat and mosquitoes of Veracruz, Jalapa was nearly a mile above sea level.

  I checked into an inn, another almost empty room, just a rough table and a bench for a bed but I was lucky to get that. Visitors were pouring into Jalapa for the annual trade fair. During that period, the population of thirteen thousand doubled.

  I had my clothes washed in an enormous laundry facility; 144 washerwomen, mostly doing clothes sent up from Veracruz. Each washerwoman was supplied with a constant stream of water conveyed by pipes to a stone vessel in which the linen was soaked. Added to this was a flat stone on which they washed. At the end, a piece of lemon was rubbed on the clothes.

  The next morning I stopped on my way out of town for a shave and a haircut. I wanted more from the barber than a trim. Barbers were good sources of gossip, and this barber was exceptional.

  “Colonel Iturbide is an admired hero,” he said. “But there are stories that the militia forced him into early retirement for the misappropriation of funds, some of that money extorted from merchants.”

  A forced retirement? Money problems?

  What does a hero without a command do?

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p; NINETY-EIGHT

  AGUSTIN DE ITURBIDE was a man at the crossroads of life. And an attempt to rob and murder him had brought him to a decision in which the indio with amazing marksmanship skills would play a part.

  Unlike most wealthy criollos, he had not wasted his time in mindless social events and hunting parties. He had commanded army units against the insurrectionists—even though he had been offered generalships by the rebels.

  As a soldier and a hunter, he appreciated Joaquin’s ability to handle a weapon. And he knew that Joaquin could not be who he claimed to be—a clerk for a merchant. The story was false, but Iturbide didn’t care. He assumed the man calling himself Joaquin had reason to cover his identity—that the sharpshooter was a rebel.

  Iturbide knew his own strengths and weaknesses—and his greatest strength and most vulnerable weakness was his extreme ambition. He had a profound belief in his destiny.

  Like other criollos, he resented the gachupines. And he had even more reason than some. Despite his family’s claim of pureza de sangre, purity of blood, there had always been talk of indio blood in his ancestry, and rumors that his mother was a mestizo. The family angrily denied the rumors but unlike his father, his mother was born in the colony, which fueled the accusation.

  He was now thirty-seven years old and he could no longer wait for Accident and Fortune to answer his prayers. He had to do something far-reaching—even desperate—to keep his life from slipping into oblivion.

  The standards for all aristocratic Spaniards seeking glory and fortune were the feats of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec Empire, and Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Inca Empire.

  Cortés had burned his own ships so that he and his men would have to conquer indio empires—less than six hundred men against empires that had a population of twenty-five million. His capture of Montezuma, after entering the emperor’s city under the guise of peace, was also a brilliant and daring maneuver.

  Pizarro emulated Cortés’s methods twelve years later when he invaded Peru and set out to entrap the Inca emperor, Atahuallpa. While Atahuallpa was enjoying the hot springs in the small Inca town of Caxamarca in 1532, Francisco Pizarro entered the city with a force of about 180 men. Pizarro invited the emperor to a feast in his honor.

  Atahuallpa accepted and arrived at the appointed meeting place with several thousand unarmed retainers, walking into an ambush Pizarro had prepared.

  When Atahuallpa rejected demands that he accept the Christian faith and the sovereignty of Charles V of Spain, Pizarro signaled his men to attack. They fired their cannons and muskets against the unarmed indios and charged with their horses. The strange, deadly weapons, noise, and four-legged beasts terrified the indios who panicked and ran.

  Pizarro’s force captured Atahuallpa and slaughtered thousands of his men.

  The Inca king offered to fill a room with gold as a ransom for his release. Pizarro accepted the offer, and the Incas brought gold and silver statues, jewelry, and art objects from across the empire.

  Pizarro had the Indians melt it all down into bullion and ingots, accumulating twenty-four tons of gold and silver, the richest ransom ever received.

  Once the full amount was acquired, Pizarro ordered Atahuallpa burned at the stake for being a heathen. When Atahuallpa was tied to the stake, a priest offered to garrote him instead if he converted to Christianity.

  Atahuallpa agreed to the conversion and was strangled—a less painful death. The event marked the end of the Inca civilization.

  Iturbide knew his own birth year, 1783, was the same as that of Simón Bolivar, the Liberator of the northern region of South America. His own background as an upper-class criollo was similar to Bolivar’s.

  The Iturbides were minor nobility in the Basque region of Navarre in Spain. Agustin was proud of the fact that his father, José Joaquín de Iturbide, was born in the mountains of Navarre—the legendary pride of the region is the Battle of Roncesvalles where Basques wiped out the rearguard of a French army. The epic legend of the hero Roland immortalized the feat.

  His father came to the colony, settled in Valladolid, acquired a hacienda, and was a member of the municipal council. Agustin attended the Valladolid Theological Seminary and learned a little Latin.

  In 1797, at age fourteen, he was appointed a second lieutenant in the provincial militia that had eight hundred men in an infantry regiment. He was commissioned at so young an age because he was from a wealthy, aristocratic criollo family.

  The regiment hired a few professional soldiers while the criollos were only paid for their yearly month of service.

  He married Ana Muñiz Huarte, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a provincial governor. She was not only a beauty, but an heiress—she came with a dowry that included precious jewels. From time to time the wealthy father also gave them loans and gifts of money.

  Soon after the marriage he purchased the hacienda of San Jose de Apeo near Maravatio in Valladolid province. He paid a hundred thousand pesos. His father-in-law and the dowry helped with the purchase.

  In 1808–09 in what became called the Valladolid Conspiracy, some young militia officers conspired with others in the community to rebel. The conspirators were arrested after “a criollo with whom they had dealings” informed upon them.

  Iturbide reputedly informed on his fellow young officers.

  He later claimed he had arrested one of the conspirators himself.

  As the son of a prosperous hacienda owner, a hacendado himself, the son-in-law of a wealthy, important gachupine governor, and a product of a Roman Catholic education, his natural instinct was to preserve all those traditions. He was not a political fanatic or libertarian; he was not going to join revolutionaries that wanted to get rid of the society that he was part of.

  Iturbide fought the rebels with no quarter asked or given. When he captured a bandido-revolutionary leader named El Manco, named because he had a crippled left hand, Iturbide had him shot, quartered, his head put on a city gate, and his crippled hand exhibited in other cities.

  He spread terror among the population through swift condemnation and summary justice. When he captured a rebel position, he often executed the rebels on the spot.

  He defeated Morelos in 1813 at the Battle of Valladolid, though Morelos carried on the insurrection two more years.

  The criollo officer even showed his ruthlessness with female rebels. Refusing the plea of another officer to spare a woman, he said that in the time of war noble sentiments must always be sacrificed to ugly duty … and had shot a beautiful rebel spy, Dona Maria Tomasa Estevasp—among others.

  His capture and execution of El Manco brought him prominence and fortified his feelings that he was a man of destiny.

  By 1816, a colonel and widely admired, he was appointed commander of the militia “Army of the North” in the silver-rich province of Guanajuato. But a scandal erupted when he was accused by the head of a Guanajuato cathedral, a man who hated him from school days, of financial crimes, burning haciendas, seizing and selling livestock, using troops to convey his own goods, being brutal to prisoners, including female prisoners. The viceroy “cleared” him of the charges but “retired” him.

  After falling from grace with the viceroy, he squandered much of his fortune on high living and gambling.

  It was 1820 and much of the New World burned with revolutionary fever. Revolutions brewed on half the continent and were progressing on the other half. A time of opportunity, this tempestuous age had launched the careers of Napoleon Bonaparte and Simón Bolivar.

  Now opportunity hammered on his door.

  Ten years of continuous insurrection had taken its toll on the Spanish commanders who dominated the upper echelons of the officer class. Their reluctance to fight mounted even as rebels dominated the tierra caliente zones in both the Veracruz and Acapulco regions.

  Fighting an enemy that one moment held a gun and the next minute was plowing a field, who disappeared into the jungles at will, had dispirited the military commanders.<
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  To say nothing of living with the heat, mosquitoes, and fever in those regions.

  Ordinarily, the gachupines hoarded the best military commands for themselves. Gachupines in Guanajuato resented a criollo in command and had engineered his fall.

  Now Count Venadito, the viceroy, however, had offered him the Army of the South. But he knew he would find no glory in his new position. The stalemate would continue: Fighting an animal that could not win but who would not be defeated either was not a recipe for glory or career advancement.

  The command stretched from the silver mining town of Taxco, about a three-day journey from the capital, to the port of Acapulco, which took over a week to reach. The terrain was difficult, ranging from mountains to jungle. It came with guerrilla raids, dysentery, raging fevers, terrible heat, torrential downpours, bad food … but the lack of glory was the main drawback.

  Gachupine officers had begged off, pleading illness, family demands, even poverty. No one wanted a command that offered nothing except a holding action.

  After the last of his reputation and assets were squandered in a hopeless military action … then what? Retire to a hacienda and fight off creditors until he drank himself to death?

  No. He would not treat the viceroy’s offer as glory’s end but as an opportunity.

  He had an idea for turning his stalled career around, and the sudden appearance of the Aztec sharpshooter had pushed him into a decision.

  His passions were ignited.

  Like Cortés, he would burn his ships.

  NINETY-NINE

  I HAD HEARD countless stories of the capital and its wonders, not just when I was a provincial at Lake Chapala but from the crews and passengers on ships that carried me back to the colony and on the wharfs of Lisbon. With more than a hundred fifty thousand people and ten times that in the surrounding district, it was the beating heart and sacred soul of the colony. From the far reaches of the northern deserts to the jungles of Guatemala, little occurred in matters of politics and the law that was not mandated in the capital.