Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  “It’s huge,” I said to Carlos, as I slowly grasped the Palace’s scope and significance. “You could put Méjico City’s whole main square into it.”

  “It may have been the administrative center of the empire the city ruled,” Carlos said.

  Near the Palace was the Temple of Inscriptions, a pyramid consisting of nine successive terraces, the ancient indios used to communicate and record important events. Over fifty feet high, it contained hundreds of hieroglyphic carvings.

  A smaller pyramid, the Temple of the Sun, almost matched its vertiginous height when the spacious chamber at its top was included. To the left and right of the entrances, life-size human figures were sculpted in stone. The sun was sculpted in bas-relief, ten feet wide and over three feet high. Carlos called it a “masterwork of art.”

  Immersion in the ancient indio culture was slowly transforming me. As I stared at the magnificent edifices from the past, I realized that, starting weeks ago at the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacán, a new world had begun to open up for me. I now understood that everything I’d been taught about the indios was wrong. Rather than the dray animals and jungle savages I thought them to be, they were a magnificent people who had been horrifically harmed. I also finally understood why the padre in Dolores insisted that, given the chance, the Aztec was as capable as anyone else.

  Too bad I came to these revelations one step ahead of the hangman.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Río Usumacinto

  AFTER TALKING TO a trader, I informed Carlos that the only practical way to return to the coast was by boat. “We can trudge through muck for weeks, chopping our way through jungle, or we can hire boats and have a smooth trip down the river that would take just a few days.”

  No one wanted to hack their way back to the coast.

  “How big is this river you would have us take?” Carlos asked.

  “I’m told it’s muy grande. The Usumacinto is wide and deep and has a strong current to the sea. It will be a pleasure trip, amigo.”

  I didn’t mention that I was also told the river was infested with indio pirates who swarmed boats in canoes, crocodiles two or times as long as a man, mosquitoes said to be as huge as humming birds and voracious as vultures. Eh, I was tired of hacking through jungles, pulling mules out of mud, and carrying gachupines on my scarred back.

  It took several days to sell the mules and arrange passage on three long river boats, each about forty feet long and crewed by three men who used long poles to push their boat through calm waters and push off from the riverbank and sand barges.

  We began the journey not in the mighty Río Usumacinto, but a small, shallow, muddy waterway. The men manning the poles pushed us along the brown water while we baked in the sun and were bitten to the point of madness by the relentless mosquitoes.

  In that moment of temporary madness, I asked the inquisitor-priest why God would create mosquitoes, and he snapped at me, “To question God’s acts is a sacrilege!”

  We finally linked up with the big river and began to float down it, with a light breeze keeping us mosquito-free. Things were quite pleasant if you did not count the hundreds of crocodiles that lined the riverbanks or stared darkly at us from the water.

  “¡Ay de mi!. They are monsters,” I told a pole man.

  “Truly,” he said. “Once in a while we lose a passenger overboard. Unless he gets back aboard instantly, he is pulled under, and the water boils red with his blood. Some of these creatures are big enough to swallow a person whole. One hunter killed a big one, and when they cut it open there was a fully clothed man inside.”

  In the middle of the afternoon, the sky quickly turned black as Hades. A strong wind rose without warning, whipping stinging rain at us. We were only a couple feet above the water, and the wind whipped the river into a furious frenzy that nearly capsized the boats and sent us all into croc-infested water. But the violent storm passed as suddenly as it had risen. One moment the Furies flogged us; the next, brilliant sunlight shattered the Stygian gloom, and the sky was blindingly bright.

  Like the jungle, the air on our River Styx was hot and humid, so thick you bathed in it. But we found no hint of shade, no vestige of relief.

  We passed no towns our first two days down the river and viewed nothing on the banks save crocs, endless vegetation, and random scatterings of indio hunters and fishermen.

  On the third day downriver, we reached a village called Palisadas, a depot for logs cut on the river, where an unpleasant surprise greeted us. A posse of constables with indio guides was waiting as our boats slid up to the embankment. I was almost ready to take my chances with the crocs when I saw them. Almost, I say. Only the inevitability of being ripped to pieces by those giant fiends kept me from diving into the water.

  Believing I was to be arrested, I shrugged and shot a “sorry, amigo” look at Carlos, who gaped at the constables and then at me, his face filled with questions.

  “Manual Díaz, step forward,” the chief constable said.

  As I stepped forward reflexively, I caught myself; He was asking for Díaz the military engineer, whom they soon had in their custody, chained, and whose baggage they began searching while Díaz stared about dazed, a cow culled for slaughter.

  Long conversations took place among the constables, the engineer, and Señor Pico, the head of the expedition, before we cast off again and started downriver. After we were underway, Carlos and I found a private space at the rear of the boat, where we lay upon baggage as he explained what happened.

  “There is shocking news, a great deal of it,” he said. “The military engineer Díaz has been arrested for spying.” Carlos stared at me with a mixture of raw emotion—fear, horror, wonderment—”The customs inspectors searched a man trying to board a French ship at Veracruz and found plans for New Spain’s military installations in his possession.”

  Shades of Countess Camilla. They obviously had found only a messenger, not the true spy. The countess had probably vouchsafed her passage by bedding the viceroy.

  “Díaz has been arrested for treason, accused of supplying the French with the secrets of the colony’s defenses.” He spoke as if the words were being pried out of him, as if someone other than himself were speaking. He knew Díaz was innocent, and it was ripping him up inside.

  “We also have news from Spain. Something terrible has happened. The French have seized the country.” He stared at me, his face a mask of anguish. “Napoleon has taken both King Carlos and Ferdinand captive and is holding them in France, at Bayonne. Then he commanded that all the royal family be brought to France. In Madrid, the people learned that the king’s nine-year-old son, Prince Don Francisco, was to be taken to France. Disturbed by the French takeover of the nation, and with their leaders doing nothing to resist it, the citizens gathered by the royal palace. When the carriages pulled up to carry the young prince and his party away, the people intervened.” Carlos began to sob.

  “It occurred on the second day of May. People barred the French from kidnapping the prince, and the French troops opened fire on them with muskets and cannons, killing butchers and bakers and store clerks who were only trying to protect their country,” he said tearfully.

  “When word of the massacre spread, people—men, women, and even children—grabbed whatever weapons they had. With kitchen knives and ancient muskets, clubs and shovels, and some with only their bare hands, they faced the finest troops in Europe, soldiers of the Emperor Napoleon, and fought them. For two days it was a terrible massacre. The French army slaughtered thousands of my people.”

  Carlos broke down. I could see the same news was being discussed on all the boats. Some men cried, others shouted angry words, others just stared out at the river. But the tears did not last long; a cold rage seemed to settle down among the Spaniards.

  Ay, if they knew Carlos had spied for the French . . .

  My friend and mentor fell into a deep depression and remained in that black abyss most of the day. He did not speak to me again until late a
fternoon.

  “I must tell you something,” he said.

  “You should tell me nothing.”

  In truth, I wanted to forget the subject. Carlos was too emotional. He might decide to confess to spying and get us both arrested . . . No, we would not be arrested, considering the present mood of the men on the expedition; we would be given a Viking funeral . . . while still alive.

  He stared at me. “For some reason, I trust you. I know the face you show to the world is, like mine, a mask.” He waved away mosquitoes, a useless gesture that all of us made. “I am the spy they seek, not the engineer.” He blurted out the statement, expecting a reaction.

  I gave him a sigh. “From your admiration of Napoleon and his reforms, I knew you had French sympathies. But why spying?”

  He shook his head. “I told you about my professor, the one who died in an Inquisition dungeon. He introduced me not only to forbidden literature but to others of a like mind, people who had read the literature of revolutionaries. We met in secret and discussed ideas that could have been expounded upon in any coffee shop in Paris or Philadelphia but could have sent us to the rack in Spain.

  “Do you understand my frustrations, Juan? We were only permitted to read books approved by the king and church. Those books taught the infallibility of kings and popes, traits we knew to be lies! And across our borders, a man had sprung from the fires of the French revolution and was transforming Europe.”

  I had never thought of Napoleon as a savior for justice and truth, but as a man dedicated to conquest and power. He put the crown on his own head, not the people’s. But Carlos was in no condition to have his ideals challenged.

  He rubbed his face with his hands. “We started out posing as a literary society, but we weren’t just a book club, we met to discuss forbidden ideas. Some of these meetings took place at the home of a noblewoman, a person of high rank.”

  Yes, and I had met her. She had stabbed me once with her knife, and I had stabbed her back with my own tool.

  “She is a woman of great . . . persuasion and great passion, for many things.”

  Poor fool, I thought. She must have bedded him, and he thought she loved him.

  “When the opportunity came to join this expedition, she called on me to stand up for my ideals.”

  She did “call” upon him: She coaxed him into bed, grabbed his garrancha and humped it as she whispered in his ear. Men are fools when it comes to a woman’s wiles. When the countess got through with him, he would have sold his mother and sisters to French soldiers.

  “It is my duty to confess my treason.”

  I gasped aloud, feeling the rope they would put around his neck also tightening around mine. I instinctively made the sign of the cross to let Our Savior know I was still one of His needy sheep.

  “That would be foolish, amigo.”

  “I can’t let Manuel Díaz take the blame, he’ll be hanged.”

  I waved aside Manual’s stretched neck. “That’s not true. You copied his fine drawing in a rough hand, no?”

  He stared up at me. “How did you know?”

  I shrugged. “Just a guess. Your awkward copying will save the engineer. How can they accuse him of giving drawings to the enemy when it is obvious that they were not done in his hand? As soon as they compare the engineer’s drawings with the ones seized from the spy, they will see that the plans are the stolen ones.”

  His face lit up. “Are you certain?”

  “Certain?” I leaned toward him. “Don Carlos, it happens that I have some considerable knowledge and experience with the work of constables in the colony. You may rely upon my word as if the Lord God Himself chiseled it in stone.”

  “So Manuel will come to no harm?”

  “Mi amigo, rest assured, Manuel will get special treatment.”

  Very special treatment. The constables were probably already breaking his bones because they were not getting the answers they wanted. As for comparing the original and stolen sets of drawings, if Manuel had money and family, they might eventually intervene and save him from being drawn and quartered, the punishment for traitors, but only after he had been broken on the rack and he had rotted in a prison dungeon for years.

  But I saw no point in bothering Carlos about such things and having him regurgitate confessions that would get us arrested and do nothing to help Manuel. I was surprised that Carlos didn’t know that I was aware of his spying. For whatever reason, the countess had not gotten the information to him.

  Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know, Juan. I’m still afraid for Manuel—”

  “Be afraid for her, amigo.”

  “Her?”

  “Your noblewoman. If they take you and torture the truth out of you, as they surely will, what will happen to her?”

  He gasped. “You’re right. They would arrest her. They—”

  He couldn’t say it so I made a cutting motion across my throat. “First they will take advantage of her, each of the jailers, those stinking, filthy creatures that are born and die in dungeons. When they are finished, they’ll pass her around to any prisoner who has the price. Then, when it is time to carry out the king’s justice, they’ll draw and quarter her, tying each of her arms and legs to a different horse. Whipping the horses to the four cardinal directions, the beast will rip off her limbs, dragging away only her bloody stumps—”

  He turned pale as a ghost, and his breath rasped like a death rattle. I thought he was going to faint, and I was prepared to catch him. Instead, he leaned over the railing and gagged into the river. I sucked on a foul-tasting indio cigarro and held his collar while he puked.

  Did I not tell you what fools men are when it comes to petticoats? Now, Carlos would never confess to the king’s men and jeopardize the countess. But I would be fortunate if I could just keep him alive; like any good man with a conscience, his next thought would be suicide.

  ¡Ay! Those hellhounds had sniffed out my trail once again and would soon be snapping at my heels. I would have to move fast, and the expedition moved very slowly. As soon as we reached the right place, I would flee the scholars and mosquitoes and board a boat bound for Havana.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The Yucatán

  WE CONTINUED DOWNRIVER, poling and flowing from the broad Río Usumacinto and Río Palizada to the Laguna de Términos, a large, shallow lagoon separated from the sea by a narrow bridge of land some called Términos and others called Carmen.

  Though many leagues in each direction, the lagoon was only about seven feet deep. While its depth was shallow, its dangers were many: one side of it was mangrove swamps infested with crocodiles. El norte storms routinely battered the lagoon, capsizing boats and fattening its flotillas of crocs, but we made the crossing on an uneventful day.

  As soon as we cleared the mud banks of the swamps, we hoisted our sails and caught a fresh breeze. The island of Términos came low on the horizon, its white houses vividly visible.

  “Many pirates have held Términos,” Carlos told me. “English, French, Dutch, even Spanish ones took turns holding the island in the century following the Conquest. Less than a century ago, a Spanish don expelled the pirates. Most of the interest in Términos, besides as a base to attack shipping, was control of the wood that was cut upriver and brought down by boats.”

  The island’s main town consisted of two long parallel streets of houses and other buildings, with a fort guarding the entrance to the harbor. Ships drawing more than nine feet had to stay a distance offshore, where they were loaded and unloaded with small craft called ships’ tenders.

  In town, I found no ships making the Havana run. Instead I would have to take a coastal boat to ports where the ships visited more frequently, either to Veracruz or to the ports of Campeche or Sisal in the Yucatán.

  I didn’t want to ship out of Veracruz, which was no doubt packed with the king’s constables, all of whom were on the lookout for spies. The expedition’s plan was to proceed by boat to Campeche, the closest Yucatán port, then travel overl
and through various ancient Mayan cities before terminating the journey at Mérida, the main city on the peninsula, and its port of Sisal. My only recourse was to stay with the expedition as far as Campeche, for sure, and perhaps even on to Sisal if there was no ship available at Campeche.

  For the trip along the coast to Campeche, the entire expedition was loaded into one boat, called a bungo, a two-masted flat-bottomed craft of about thirty tons that carried logs downriver and along the coast. Once again, mules were left behind, sold to a mule trader for a much lower price than they would have brought at Campeche.

  Carlos had little to say after his confession on the river. Most of the expedition members had taken badly to the jungle conditions, Carlos among them. The whole bunch looked sick and wane, and most were plagued by fevers. I found it interesting that the porters, myself included, suffered through the jungle miasma better than the gachupines.

  Two days of sailing along the coast toward the Yucatán Peninsula took us to Campeche, a town built on the coast between two raised fortified areas. We landed at a long stone pier that extended about 250 paces out into the bay.

  Before the Conquest, Campeche was a major town of the province of Ah Kin Pech, which meant “serpent tick,” in reference to a pest that infested the Yucatán region. The community that existed before the Conquest was said to have been sizable: several thousand dwellings.

  Spaniards took longer to subjugate the Yucatán than they did the heart of the colony. It took two years of bloody contention to conquer the Aztecs. In the Mayan Campeche region, battles raged over a couple of decades before Francisco de Montejo conquered the area in 1540–1541 and founded the town of Villa de San Francisco de Campeche on the site of the Mayan village of Kimpech. Campeche became one of the main ports on the Gulf, controlling the Yucatán trade in its own region, with salt, dye-wood, sugar, hides, and other products passing through it.

  Pirates had routinely pillaged the town. In the seventeenth century, Sir Christopher Mims took the town for the English, and other buccaneers took it twice more over the next twenty years. In 1685, pirates from Santo Domingo set fire to the town and ravaged the surrounding countryside for five leagues. They burned enormous stores of hardwood because the authorities would not pay the ransom they demanded for the wood.