Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  Was he playing this game of death for love of liberty or petticoats? The woman, this Countess Camille, was an attractive woman. Did she recruit him in bed? Of course, Carlos could be the leader in the scheme, but my common sense balked at the idea.

  The countess’s involvement was bad news, no? I have never fought, let alone killed, a woman. Could I frighten her away with a knife to her throat and a warning that I would cut off her head if she didn’t leave Carlos alone? I thought for a moment about the woman who had nearly blown my face off with a pistol the last time we tangled and decided that a warning would not scare her away.

  Maybe I would have to kill her.

  I was hidden behind the balcony curtains just inside the open door when she returned to the room, sooner than I expected. Midnight had not tolled, yet as soon as she entered, she undressed. I realized she had returned to change so she could go to another ball in a different dress, which was the current vogue. She muttered aloud about her “stupid maid.” No doubt the maid was out enjoying herself.

  As I watched her remove the dress and her layered petticoats, I could understand why Carlos would steal secrets for her. Eh, if I were less concerned about the Inquisition’s red-hot pincers and the viceroy’s dungeon, I would kill and steal for a woman like this.

  The balcony door was open, creating a draft. I stood paralyzed behind the curtains as she suddenly came over to close it. She shut the door and with one jerk, moved the drapes to cover it, exposing me!

  I flew at her before her hand had even left the drapes, getting my hand over her mouth. She bit my hand and kicked me in my most sensitive extremities.

  ¡Ay de mí! What a devil this woman was! We fought across the room until I had her on the bed and was atop her.

  “I know what you’re up to,” I gasped. “Call for help, and you’ll hang as a spy.”

  Her teeth clenched down on my hand again. I yelped and let go. She stared at me, getting her breathing under control, and I continued to hold her down. Her scent filled my nostrils and clouded my reasoning. I felt my manhood rising and my eagerness to do battle fading. Once again my male part took command of my judgment.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “A friend of Carlos.”

  One of her breasts had come loose from her inner garment, and I stared at it like a man stranded on a deserted island spying a fresh-water spring.

  My eyes met hers. I wasn’t proud. It had been a long time since I had lain with a woman. She read the desire in my eyes, the lust in my heart, the weakness in my soul.

  My mouth eagerly found her breast. Her hands went to the back of my head.

  “Suck harder,” she whispered.

  Her nipples grew hard and firm as my tongue wrapped around them. Many times I enjoyed sticking my garrancha in a puta’s mouth, then firing fusillade after fusillade. Now I had the sensation of this woman’s large nipples growing against my tongue.

  My hand found the moist treasure between her legs. I could feel the little garrancha burgeoning between her legs swell. I had never experienced a love button that was this long and hard—or this eager. I had to taste it. I moved down, sticking my head between her legs. I was sucking on heaven when I heard a pistol cock.

  I rolled off the bed, pulling her with me, catching the wrist of the hand that clutched a pistol. I twisted the pistol out of her hand. “Bitch.”

  “Take me.” Her mouth found mine.

  ¡Ay! What can I say in defense of myself? The woman despises me, tries to kill me, insults me, . . . and like a dog, I take the whipping and continue humping her leg.

  While I contemplated my depraved debasement, she leaped on top of me and pulled my garrancha out of my pants. Straddling my manhood, she catapulted herself up, then, tightening her legs and squeezing my manhood like a vise, she allowed gravity to drop her down.

  She rose and fell, rose and fell, my manly sword detonating in time, in perfect union, in harmonious concord with her rising and falling, over and over and over again, a symphonic cannonade from hell. My vision blurred, then exploded again, this time with a thousand crimson comets colliding with one another, bursting into fireballs, into flames . . . red . . . red . . . red . . . as . . . blood?

  Blood was pouring down my forehead into my eyes. The puta had brained me with a brass urn she’d knocked off a nearby table.

  Twisting her viselike treasure between her legs violently on my male part, the pleasure in my crotch turned to blinding agony, and I feared she would rip my penis from my body even as she again picked up the pistol.

  I hammered her across the side of the head with my fist. She went off me, rolling across the floor. I grabbed the pistol and pulled up my pants. She sat up rubbing her head, her eyes burning, her upper lip bleeding.

  “¡Ay! Woman, you’re a man-killer. Why can’t you just lie back and enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy it? You think I could enjoy coupling with Aztec trash? I’ve seen more manly members on squirrels.”

  I was speechless. I considered hitting her again, but staring at her there, fire in her eyes and blood in her mouth, I wondered instead whether I might lure her back into bed for a second round. In short, my weakness for women defeated me.

  “Puta!” was the best I could muster. It was an impotent remark, sí, but it was all I could think of.

  I turned away from her, and for the first time in my life I had my tail between my legs. You can kill a man who insults you, but what can you do to a woman with a vile mouth?

  I was at the window when I looked back and saw her fumbling with another pistol. This she-devil had more guns than Napoleon’s Praetorian Guard.

  I leaped out the window and went over the edge of the balcony, gripping the railing for a second to help break my fall to the alley below. I hit the ground and was running when I heard her shouting “Rapist! Thief!” and a shot sounded. Fortunately, the alley was deserted, and the celebration on the crowded streets would drown out cannon fire.

  Twisting my foot in the fall, I limped back to camp, humiliated by the defeat I had suffered at the hands of this woman. But my shame faded when I remembered my pleasure pumping out of me over and over and over again. I always lacked basic moral fiber when it came to women.

  FORTY

  THE NEXT DAY, Carlos and I rode the short distance to the pyramid at Cuicuilco. Once again, had he any knowledge of my meeting with the countess, he kept it to himself.

  I expected Cuicuilco to be another prodigious pyramid, like those of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán. Significantly smaller, it was perhaps a fourth the height of the Pyramid of the Sun. Still a formidable structure, basaltic lava blanketed at least a third of it: Overgrown with jungle vegetation, it was taller than a dozen men.

  Because of the lava and vegetation, it looked less like a pyramid than a stony hill. Had I not been told it was a man-made structure, I would have thought it a small volcano. Not eerily haunted like the great pyramids of Teotihuacán, it was grimmer, starker. A gloomy foreboding enveloped it.

  “Cuicuilco, in the tongue of the indios, means ‘the place of song and dance,’” Carlos said.

  “Much lava surrounds it,” I said.

  “True, but mystery shrouds it, too, like the pyramids at Teotihuacán. We don’t know who built it or even why it was built, though one would suppose it had religious significance. And you must understand, Juan, older than any other of the colony’s pyramids, it commands our respect.” He pointed at the mound. “The oldest man-made structure in the entire New World, this pyramid is older than the time of Christ, perhaps even older than the pyramids of the Nile River valley. A mighty people bequeathed it to us.

  “You have never been to Spain, but we have great cathedrals there, magnificent monuments of our great past and others in the colony that are also glorious, but none are as old as this pyramid. It was here a thousand years, perhaps even two thousand years, before they were built.”

  He waved a hand at the magnificent edifice. “Think of it, Juan, in New Spain there is blood
of two great civilizations, the indios of the New World and the Spanish of the old. What do you say, Don Juan the Aztec?” He looked at me intently. “Are you not proud of your blood?”

  “Very proud.”

  Sí, I was proud that my blood still coursed through my veins and not across the floors of the jail from which I’d so recently escaped or on the walls of an Inquisition torture chamber. But I said nothing, letting the scholar go on about the accomplishments of people on both sides of the Atlantic.

  When I cease fleeing the hangman, perhaps I will appreciate my blood’s past wonders.

  FORTY-ONE

  Cholula

  WE MADE GOOD time traveling to Puebla from San Agustín, a distance of thirty leagues or so.

  A wealthy town, Puebla de los Ángeles—Place of the Angels—lies on a broad, flat plain in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental. In terms of size, Puebla, east-by-southeast of the capitol, claimed to be the second city of New Spain. When the mining villas surrounding Guanajuato are included, however, Guanajuato marginally exceeded Puebla’s population.

  Positioned en route between the capital and the colony’s main port in Veracruz, Puebla had been a potential chokehold for enemy forces. It would be a small wonder if the military engineer had not drafted drawings of those fortifications for the crown, and if Carlos was not stealing them for the countess and Napoleon.

  Still, no mention was made of my carnal encounter of her. Earlier, I had half-expected Carlos to offer me my choice of pistols or swords and demand satisfaction on the field of honor, but he offered and demanded nothing. Nor was I certain that his motivation for stealing the plans of the colony’s fortresses had a sexual aspect. Obsessed with politics, history, and science, Carlos struck me as too scholarly and idealistic for mad, passionate love. His lack of romantic interest in the legions of señoritas we encountered seemed to confirm that. His work preempted everything.

  In Puebla, unlike Guanajuato, with its mining-town terrain, the roads broke up the town into a classic colonial pattern. A patchwork of broad, straight streets intersecting each other, Puebla had paved them in either checkered or diamond-shape designs.

  It reminded me of the capital. As we approached the central plaza, I could see that most of the houses were three stories. Some were painted with vivid, vibrant colors, their balconies—rimmed with black wrought-iron railings—overreaching the streets. Tiled roofs overhung the streets.

  Grand carriages manned by liveried servants and pulled by fine, tall mules, some of which stood sixteen hands, demonstrated that, like Méjico City and Guanajuato, Puebla was a rich city.

  Carlos and I quartered in a private home: he in a room on the third floor and I in the back of a leather shop on the first.

  As we were walking to the main cathedral, Carlos said, “Puebla’s fine architecture is said to be similar to that of Toledo, one of the great cities of Spain.”

  I could have told him that I had something of a connection myself with that famed fortress-city. Raquel’s father was from Toledo, his fortune founded upon the fine blades that had long been produced there.

  From the cathedral’s high tower, we studied the two volcanic peaks: dominant Popocatépetl, “the smoking mountain,” and its smaller companion, Iztaccíhuatl, “white woman.” From that height we studied another imposing house of worship, this one surmounting a distant pyramid.

  “Cholula,” Carlos said, pointing to it, “the largest pyramid in the world. Its base and volume exceed even those of the largest Egyptian pyramid.”

  “It looks like a hill with a church on top.”

  “Sí, it’s even more densely covered by vegetation than even the pyramids at Teotihuacán. We’ll look more closely at it tomorrow.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe it’s a pyramid.”

  “It’s the king of pyramids. Indio structures were either torn down so the building materials could be used for churches, or the jungle was allowed to reclaim them so the indios would never know the true splendor of their extraordinary heritage.”

  We came out of the cathedral and into the main square. The church, which forms one side of the square, had a simple exterior with little architectural ornament. Its interior and furnishings, however, were elaborate: a magnificent altar of silver and lofty columns with plinths and capitals of burnished gold.

  “With sixty churches, numerous religious colleges, and over twenty monasteries and convents,” Carlos said, as we walked in the main square, “Puebla is known as a city of churches.”

  Too many churches, his tone implied. That would not be a surprising conclusion for an admirer of the French emperor, who was known for his war on churches.

  I lacked his contempt for religious institutions. Churches provide comfort to women, old people, small children, and those who fear the final reckoning. Knowing that my own soul was irrevocably and inescapably damned, I, of course, had never felt the need for religious solace.

  Once we had arrived in the square, we purchased mango and lemon fruit juice. The female vendors kept the juices, along with pulque and chocolate, in small jugs contained within large red earthenware vases filled with water and buried in sand. Flowers, mostly poppies, were stuck around the drinks.

  Carlos was very taken by Puebla. “I find the slower pace more charming than the frantic pace of the capital.”

  After satisfying our thirst, we went to the bishop’s palace, where Carlos had arranged to view the library. The library, a truly handsome room, was quite enormous, at least a hundred paces long and perhaps twenty wide. As one who prided himself on never having read a book—a fact I never volunteered to the scholarly Carlos—I found the library to be overstocked with interminable tomes, many bound in vellum.

  A monsignor, who identified himself only as the bishop’s chief librarian, showed us around the room. One area—off limits to even the priests of the diocese—contained books and other writings considered too indecent for good Christians to read. Carlos later told me that many of the materials had been seized from colonists or by Inquisitors who met ships and checked their cargo for what the church considered to be improper materials.

  “I understand that there are thirty-two volumes of indio hieroglyphic pictures, dating back before the Conquest,” Carlos said to the librarian.

  “Those materials are not available for inspection,” he answered in a monotone.

  Carlos stiffened and met his eye. “I have a commission from the king himself to examine and catalog items of indio antiquity.”

  “Those materials are not available for inspection.”

  “What do you mean? I have a royal privilege, a commission from the crown, to inspect them.” Carlos was so angry, he stammered.

  “Those materials are not available for inspection.”

  We left the library, and Carlos did not speak all the way back to our house. I wanted to inquire what was so important about some old Aztec picture-books but wisely kept my counsel, knowing that his interests extended beyond mine, which seldom strayed beyond women, wine, horses, and weapons.

  Carlos later notified me that he would remain in his room for the rest of the day and read. At loose ends, I attended to two of my four basic needs: I visited an inn for vino and a puta.

  The next morning we returned to the great square, where small muledrawn coaches were available for hire. Even early in the morning, the market vendors were busy, selling everything needed for a household, from food to clothing. Many of the indios placed their merchandise directly on the ground or on blankets, and protected themselves and their goods from sudden downpours with crude umbrellas.

  Unlike the capital, where léperos befoul the streets, here the indios were clean and neatly dressed.

  We purchased items for our lunch later. Carlos was hungry for fish, which was not plentiful in Puebla, since it was far from the sea, but he was able to purchase a coarse paste pie filled with fish that was carried to the city only half-baked from a great distance. The baking process was finished while we filled
out the rest of our lunch needs with wine, cheese, a roasted hen, and fresh-baked bread.

  Carlos was in a lighter mood than when we left the bishop’s palace the previous afternoon.

  “I owe you an apology, Juan, for permitting my anger to dominate me yesterday.”

  “You owe me no apology, Don Carlos. I am merely—”

  “Don’t give me that poor peon servant act; your breeding is evident. And despite your efforts to appear humble, you’re cockier than those gamecocks we saw in San Agustín.” He held up his hand, silencing my protestations. “I don’t want to know your life story, the hearing of which would no doubt compel me to call the constable or risk imprisonment myself. Those are choices I don’t want to make, but Juan, do not misjudge me, I’m neither ignorant nor naïve. The only truth you have thus far uttered is your unmistakable disdain for all things important: history, literature, politics, religion. Were it not for brandy and swords, pistolas and putas, your head would be as empty as your heart. Don’t ask me why, but I would still like to fill that howling void between your ears with something other than violence and lust.”

  I gave him my best, most scintillating grin. “Frankly, amigo, you’re not the first to call me ignorant or the first to encourage book learning. Only through great perseverance have I prevented the dead weight of books from weakening my strong sword hand.”

  “Juan, Juan,” he shook his head, “you weaken your brain, not your sword hand, with your fear of truth and of learning.”

  “I fear nothing.”

  “No, Juan, you don’t fear the great beast you Aztecs call jaguar nor a bad hombre’s pistol leveled at your dead-empty head. When it comes to books, however, you’re like a cat on a fiery grid who won’t leap into a puddle below because it dreads the unknown. Do you know what I mean when I refer to that movement called the Enlightenment?”

  “Of course,” I said, annoyed at his condescension. I thought Raquel or Lizardi had mentioned the word, but, in truth, I wasn’t sure. A reading lamp, perhaps? Fortunately, Carlos didn’t wait for me to expose my ignorance.