“What frightened the Aztecs most and continues to alarm people like you who come here, is the fact that no one knows who exactly built the city. Is that not incredible, Juan? We stand in the middle of a great city, with towering pyramids, and no one knows what race of man built it or even what name they gave it.
“As your master told you, your Aztec ancestors didn’t build it. They came to the Valley of Méjico thirteen, even fourteen centuries after the city was built. Do you realize that Teotihuacán is the largest city that ever existed in the Americas before the time of Columbus? It was larger than the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán and would have rivaled Rome at its fullest splendor. Not even Méjico City, Havana, or any other city of the Americas today has as many people as this ancient city had.”
“How many people do you think lived here?” I asked.
“Some scholars believe over two hundred thousand people populated the city at its height.”
¡Ay! That was a lot of ghosts.
We talked as I cleared brush to expose the inscriptions on the side of a wall. I remembered something else Raquel told me.
“The pyramids here, they were what the Aztecs and other indios copied for their cities. At least, this is what I was told.”
“You are correct, though the copies are smaller than the Pyramid of the Sun here in Teotihuacán. Think of it, Juan, the great and wondrous monuments of all the indio empires were copied from a city that was built by people no one knows. Look at the Pyramid of the Sun.”
The huge structure was on the east side of the Avenue of the Dead, dominating the central part of the ruined city. Carlos told me that the structure was over two hundred feet high and that each of the four sides of its base was over seven hundred feet. From the ground, a man standing atop it looked like an ant on the roof of a hut.
At the north end of the wide avenue was the Pyramid of the Moon.
“The pyramid dedicated to the moon is actually shorter than its sister sun, but it appears to be of equal height only because it’s on elevated ground. The Pyramid of the Sun is the third largest pyramid on Earth. While not as tall, it is almost as voluminous as the Great Pyramid of the Pharaoh at Giza in Egypt. Do you realize, Juan, that the largest pyramid of all—one that is even bigger than the pharaoh’s pyramid—is not on the Nile, but in New Spain, at Cholula, where we will be journeying soon.”
“Why did they build these pyramids? To take people to the top and rip out their hearts?”
“Yes. Human sacrifice was practiced, but other than that heinous institution, the pyramids were really places of worship, as our churches are to us of the true faith. They built them to please their gods. Unlike the pyramids of Egypt, which were built as tombs for kings, religious ceremonies took place atop the pyramids of New Spain. That’s why they’re flat on top, so the indios could built temples of worship on them. As for sacrifices,” he shrugged, “unfortunately, that became part of their religion.”
“For blood,” I said, remembering the one part of Raquel’s lecture that really interested me.
“Exactly. They believed that the sun, rain, and other gods were nourished by blood. The indios relied upon their crops for survival and believed that if they gave blood to the gods, the gods would thrive and bequeath to them weather conducive to raising crops. A blood covenant—human blood for rain and sunshine—was the agreement between the indios and the gods.”
“Pure ignorance,” I said.
“Perhaps.” Carlos looked around to make sure there was no one else in hearing. “But ignorance abounds in many places.”
I suspected he was talking about the Inquisition, which burned people at the stake during autos-de-fé.
“I am told that atop the Pyramid of the Sun,” I said, “there once was a great gold disk, a tribute to the sun god. It alone was worth a king’s ransom. Cortés seized it and had it melted down.”
“Sí, scholars confirm that tale. Your master was well informed about the ruins.”
“Will we ever know who built this city?” I asked.
“Only God can answer that question. The mystery of who could have built such enormous monuments is as puzzling as why the city’s citizens abandoned it.”
“You say abandoned, señor. Can it not be that the people simply fled from a stronger enemy?”
“Perhaps, but if war desolated the city, one would expect to see more of war’s devastation. One must also wonder why the conquerors did not occupy this prodigious prize.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps they did not wish to live cheek by jowl with ghosts.”
The scholar studied me with quizzical amusement.
Belief in ghosts was new to me. When I was leading the life of a caballero, I seldom considered anyone or anything, and certainly not anyone in the hereafter. Perhaps I was changing. In the past, an impregnable shield of money and power had protected me, leaving me indifferent to the rest of the world. But now I lived my life, watching my back trail for constables and bandidos, searching the eyes of other travelers to see if they viewed me as their prey or if their suspicions would alert the viceroy’s police. Now, on a street named for the dead, in a city long deserted by the living, I sensed the same sort of presence that had made Aztec emperors pay trembling tribute on bended knee to unseen ghosts.
Carlos patted my shoulder as we parted. “I’ve enjoyed our conversations. I regret that I have already hired Pepe for the journey. But with him knowing the route . . .”
I left the scholar, muttering to myself that he was a naïve fool and the lépero was the Mother of Liars. Other than being sentenced to road construction for drunkenness and theft each time he was scraped out of the gutter, that piece of human garbage had never been more than a league from the spot where he was born. I had told Carlos he’d be safe as far as Cuicuilco because the town was close to the capital. After Cuicuilco, the expedition planned to traveled to Puebla, perhaps a journey of sixty or seventy leagues, along probably the most traveled road in all the Americas. That route was safe, too. But south beyond Puebla, each league took the traveler farther from the heart of the colony until . . . eh, even I didn’t know what lay ahead by the time one reached the hot, wet jungles, except that most of those trackless wastes had not been explored.
But I did know that the expedition needed more protection than the soldiers I saw, and only Christian charity impelled me to dignify them with the title “soldiers.” If they had actually served in the army, they had been scraped off stockade walls and barracks-brothel floors, then foisted on this expedition by officers who wanted them off the post.
Either way, I had to see that the young scholar got to his destination, at least as far as Puebla, from which the main road to Veracruz runs. From Veracruz, ships plied the Caribbean and Europe sea routes.
The viceroy’s constables would not spot me as long as I was part of the expedition. I would be safer traveling in a large well-armed caravan, and if I had trouble duping the constables and customs officials, I could, if necessary, “borrow” the young scholar’s documents and dinero for both my journey on the Veracruz road and my passage out of New Spain.
To win employment with the expedition, I had to eliminate the lépero. Preying on Carlos’s soft-hearted naiveté, the lépero convinced him he needed his earnings to support a brood of children. Eh, if this thieving scum had had children, he would have sold them into slavery for a jug of pulque. But I couldn’t take the risk of alienating the scholar by exposing the lépero’s lies and his own naiveté. My only recourse was to ensure that the lepéro could not physically make the trip. A dagger slipped across his throat would do the job.
Who said that necessity is the mother of murder? I believe it was Juan de Zavala.
THIRTY-FIVE
FOR TWO DAYS I watched the lépero, and the constable watched me. I had unpacked my load of clothes from the mule and set them out on the ground in the market where other vendors sold trinkets and goods to the travelers who visited the great pyramids. When the constable came by to question me, I feign
ed respect for his high office, though he was doubtless hired by a local hacendado and was not an actual government official. I paid the mordida, giving him one of my better shirts as a token of my “respect.” But I still sensed skepticism in his eyes. Perhaps my manner was too arrogant, my eyes too shrewd. Taller than most peons, my height may have raised suspicions.
He was approaching me again, probably to extort more bribes and to hammer me with questions I didn’t want to answer. I hurried over to the young scholar, who was drawing on paper the carvings and paintings portrayed on the temple walls.
“Are you able to read the pictures, Don Carlos?” I asked. I added the honorific “don” to ingratiate myself with him. He didn’t appear to be the type of gachupine who was arrogant about his position, not a wearer of sharp spurs as I had been, eh? But no man is totally without ego, as I well know.
“Unfortunately, I cannot, and neither can my fellow scholars. Several of us can decipher the picture writing of the Aztecs and other indio groups that were present at the time of the Conquest. These symbols, however, predate those hieroglyphs. Also much of the picture writing is illegible, worn away by time and weather or defaced by vandals and curiosity seekers.”
“More likely treasure hunters,” I said. “Who has not heard the story of Montezuma’s lost treasure and lusted for it?” I nodded toward the léperos. “Thieves, not scholars—when those men hear of buried treasure, they come to loot, not learn. These swine would destroy the Parthenon to find a silver spoon.”
I thought the reference to the Athenian temple was clever. Raquel had shown me a picture of it when she was talking about places of wonder in the world. I marveled now that I had learned so much from her. Fortunately for me, she had come to Teotihuacán with her father. In her case, a woman’s education had not been an entire waste.
“You’re a perceptive hombre, Juan. Thieves are truly the bane of antiquity, not just here in New Spain but throughout the world. They’ve done more damage to archeological sites than flood, fire, earthquake, and war.” He patted my shoulder. “I’m sorry I’ve promised the position to another. You would have made a fine servant.”
As I walked away Pepe the Lépero came toward me. He looked like a man with a mission.
“Stay away from my patrón,” he hissed, “or I’ll put a dagger in your gullet.”
I tried to look frightened but could not keep from laughing. “You would have to steal one first.”
The lépero’s fellow swine mimicked his threatening stare. That they had closed ranks with Pepe was odd. I knew this kind from my time in jail. Lépero scum were notoriously disloyal. Pepe had no doubt promised them something of value. After disloyalty, lépero scum favored laziness. Refusing to work, they would not lift a finger for anything except money for pulque or the means to avoid a prison flogging post.
So Pepe’s offer to work for Carlos on the expedition was a lie. Such a trip would require more work in a few days than the parasite had rendered in his lifetime. And the notion of traveling to Cuicuilco would have been as incomprehensible to Pepe as a voyage across the great western ocean to the land of the chinos or a trip to Jupiter’s moons.
Since he would not work for Carlos’s money, Pepe and his men planned to steal it.
I squatted next to my pile of clothes, pretending not to notice what went on around the site. Carlos continued his work at the stone wall, copying the engravings. Pepe the Lépero huddled with his friends, drinking pulque. Occasionally, they shot greedy glances at Carlos.
Late that afternoon, the léperos left, all save Pepe. He hung around, cadging handouts from the capital’s visitors. I wandered over to where Carlos was packing up his drawing materials.
“You quit a little early, Don Carlos.”
“Sí, the man who is to be my porter wishes to introduce me to his wife and family before we part for Cuicuilco. I sup with them tonight.”
“Ah, supper with his wife and children.”
I nodded and smiled like it was the most natural thing in the world for a lépero to take home a gachupine for dinner. I doubted that Pepe had a home other than the dirt his filthy body wallowed in when he passed out at night.
The young scholar wore what any modestly well-off gachupine would wear: a gold necklace with a pendant, a silver ring with a red stone, another silver ring with a lion’s head on it, and a money pouch. Not great wealth, but to that swine herd, it was a lifetime’s worth of thieving and begging.
I bid good-bye to Carlos and went back to my pile of goods, which I had paid an indio to watch. I saddled my mule and left the site, starting in the direction I had seen the pack of vermin go, but veering off so I wouldn’t run into them. I climbed a small hill with trees for cover.
I slipped the machete out of its sheath. Spitting on my whetstone, I honed the blade to a razor’s edge. Bigger, stronger, and longer than whatever the léperos would wield, I had something else they lacked: I was a trained horseman and swordsman, as skilled in these arts as any caballero in New Spain. Still these léperos were dangerous in a pack. While none of them owned a knife or machete—such items were too valuable to trade for pulque—they would arm themselves with clubs spiked with razor-sharp pieces of obsidian and with obsidian knives. They could also fall back and pelt me with rocks.
Mostly, I feared their obsidian knives. The indios had long used the volcanic vomit for weapons. The Aztecs had refined its effectiveness, embedding it in wood to make swords, daggers, and spears that sliced better than a finely honed sword. Made of sharp black volcanic glass, their obsidian knives would be especially lethal at close quarters. And this was a region in which obsidian was found.
The léperos would use the obsidian to cut Carlos’s throat after they clubbed him to the ground. Then they would rob him. The odds were they would be caught later and hanged, but I had met enough of them in jail to know they did not fear hanging the way people whose brains weren’t pickled by evil-smelling indio brew.
I watched as Carlos and the lépero came out of the antiquity site, walking together. Since Carlos was not on his horse, the lépero must have told him that they were not going far. A village, which I assumed was their alleged destination, lay just beyond the hilly crest of their trail. A cluster of boulders, bushes, and small trees stood just before that crest. I stared down at it, certain the léperos waited there in ambush. A repeated stirring in the bushes confirmed my suspicions.
I saw their game. They would charge out of their hiding place and kill Carlos, perhaps giving Pepe a small cut to avert blame from him. Pepe would stagger back to the expedition’s camp and cry out that he and Carlos were ambushed by bandidos.
No! Not bandidos. That wasn’t going to be their cover story. Lepéros survived because they were devilishly clever and manipulative. They’d accuse me of the attack. And I had played right into their hands. If I had stayed back at the site, others would have seen me. And where would I be when the attack took place? Hiding alone in the trees nearby.
Now I was doomed if Carlos was murdered.
As Carlos and Pepe neared the crest, I gave the mule a kick with my heels. My mount moved faster but didn’t propel itself into a gallop, and I had no spurs or quirt. Slapping it on the flanks with the flat of my machete, I yelled every obscenity I knew at it. It finally picked up its pace as it galloped downhill.
I must have looked like a madman, thundering downhill on a mule, waving a machete, screaming obscenities loud enough to wake the damned. I looked so deranged that the three léperos, charging out of their hiding places and about to stab Carlos, stopped dead in their tracks with weapons raised and stared.
Pepe yelled, “Bandido!” and ran. The other léperos scattered to the wind.
As I galloped toward Pepe on a course that would take me past where Carlos was standing, the Spaniard pulled his dagger and got atop a boulder to meet my charge. I steered the mule away from Carlos, shaking my head in wonderment at him as I went by. Was he was going to fight a mounted man armed with a machete with his dagger?
Pepe was running for his life up to the crest of the hill as I came up behind him. He glanced back in stark terror when he heard my mule hammering up to him. He veered off the road, climbing onto rocks along the edge of the crest of the hill. I went after him, still on the mule, going between the boulders until I couldn’t go any farther on the animal. Dismounting, I tied its rein to a bush and went onto the rocks, machete in hand, to follow him. He again glanced frantically over his shoulder before jumping a narrow crevasse, his feet landing on loose gravel. He slipped, teetered for a moment, his arms flailing, and then pitched backward off the ledge, disappearing into the crevasse.
I turned around and went back to the mule, not bothering to see what happened to him. His crazed yell echoed a few seconds up the crevasse, long enough for me to know it was not a short drop.
When I came back down, Carlos had come off the boulder. He still had the dagger in his hand. On his face was a look of consternation and puzzlement. I halted the mule and saluted Carlos with the machete.
“At your service, Don Carlos. As you can see, I’ve lost my horse and my sword and must fight battles in even a poorer state than the patron saint of poor knight entrants, Señor Don Quixote himself.”
Carlos stayed rigid for a moment, not completely certain of what had come down, but the intentions of the léperos were obvious. Pepe’s amigos were still racing over the hillside. Not far from us lay a wood club, a limb with a wicked wedge of obsidian embedded in it like an ax blade.
“A crude but nasty weapon,” I said. “A well-aimed swipe could decapitate a man.”
Carlos stared down at the club, a perplexed smile spreading across his face. He saluted me with his dagger.
“I am in your debt, Don Juan.”
That night Carlos filled a pot heaping with succulent beef, pork, chiles, and potatoes. And there was also a big chunk of bread—real bread, not corn tortillas, but bread made from wheat flour. We took the food and went a good distance from the camp to share it. I ate ravenously, having supped for weeks on tortillas, beans, and peppers, the sustenance of the poor.
Aztec Rage Page 18