Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  When Carlos could no longer run, I helped him up a tree and climbed up after him. We sat high in the branches and listened to the shouts and footfalls of the indios. The sky opened up, and a great downpour engulfed the jungle, concealing us and our trail. Hopefully, soon the indios would tire of sloshing in the water.

  We stayed in the tree until the break of light, uncomfortable but occasionally dozing. I had not heard any movement for hours and decided it was time to climb down.

  Carlos fell the last ten feet. His leg wound had ripped open, he was trembling from malaria, and I discovered he had another wound in his back. He had taken an indio arrow there, and I didn’t realize it until I examined him in the light of day. !Ay! His shirt and pants were soaked with blood. He had lost too much blood to go on. My own wound was superficial . . . as long as it did not become infected.

  “Go,” he said. “Hurry, they may still be hunting for us.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  He grabbed the front of my shirt. “Don’t be the fool you have always believed I am. I know who you are, Don Juan de Zavala.”

  “How—”

  “In Teotihuacán, the constables asked for a man by that name. I knew from the description it was you. Besides, you strutted like a damn caballero. And those boots,” he whispered.

  I grinned. “Then for certain I cannot leave you. I have to get you to Mérida so you can claim the reward.”

  He coughed, and blood spilled from his mouth. “The only reward I will get is a season in hell for betraying my country,” he said with great pain. He hung on to my shirt, pulling me down. “You must go there . . . to my city, Barcelona. Take my ring, my locket . . . give them to my sister, Rosa. Tell her that I was wrong . . . what she’s done is not a sin . . . It’s God’s will . . . the path . . .”

  He never told me what God had willed for his sister before he coughed one last time and his life left him in a single protracted sigh.

  I dug a hole as best I could and covered him with limbs. The animals would find him, but I didn’t think he’d mind. He had given up the ghost, and now his only care would be for his soul. I took Carlos’s rings, locket, identity papers, and money pouch. I said good-bye to my amigo-scholar, saluting him for his courage and his ideals, and fled into the jungle.

  I knew that Mérida was somewhat east of the ruins, several days journey even for a man in good health. As I pushed through the jungle, thickets ripped at my flesh, opening my shoulder injury, giving me a bleeding wound. I was baked by the heat, soaked by great downpours of rain, and starved. I grew weaker and even more miserable when I came down with fever. Staggering through the jungle, I was hardly aware of who I was or where I was. Finally I fell to the ground and was unable to rise. My mind slipped its moorings, and I vanished into a black void.

  When I awoke, the earth was trembling. Strange noises filled the air. I panicked, believing that the earth was opening up, that a volcano was exploding under me. I pushed myself up and saw a horned beast charging. I crawled out of its way and found shelter behind a tree. The “horned beast” was followed by dozens of others—cattle—being herded by vaqueros.

  One of the vaqueros spotted me and almost fell off his horse. He shouted in surprise. “Fantasma!”

  “No!” I shouted, “not a ghost, but a Spaniard!” And then I passed out again.

  FIFTY-TWO

  I AWOKE IN a hut outside the casa of a hacienda. The owner lived in Mérida, and the majordomo was visiting him. The majordomo’s wife, a lonely angel of mercy, tended to my wounds. As soon as I was strong enough to sit up, she climbed into my bed to assure that my manhood was intact.

  When I could stand, a vaquero helped me onto a mule. Riding behind him, he took me to the nearest village. The only doctors in the entire Yucatán were in Mérida and Campeche, so the village priest ministered to my injuries as best he could.

  He believed me to be Spanish, one Carlos Galí, a gentleman and scholar from Barcelona. Word had come of the ill-fated expedition. The priest knew of no other survivors.

  For a week I lived in a village hut, one room built of upright poles, with a steep roof of thatched palm leaves. I slept in a hammock and drank water from a pot, after waiting for the insects to sink to the bottom.

  A quiet village, it was little different from many others the expedition had passed through. During the hot afternoons, siesta time, indios swung in hammocks in the shade of their huts while a man in a doorway thrummed a homemade guitar. Dogs, chickens, and naked, dirt-encrusted children played in the street.

  When I was able to travel, four village men transported me to Mérida on a hand-carried “coach” of cut poles, horses and mules being more valuable and expensive than men. The villagers laid two poles side by side, three feet apart, connecting the spread poles to crossbars at each end with unspun hemp. They secured a grass hammock between the poles. When they finished, the four men raised it to their padded shoulders.

  On the way to Mérida, we passed large carts loaded with hemp and drawn by mule teams. Hemp, which would be later woven into rope, was the region’s staple crop.

  Mérida was an attractive town with well-constructed buildings and large houses with balconies and patios, some two-storied with balconied windows. Many houses were built of stone and were only one tall story high.

  Like most colonial towns, Mérida had a large plazuea in the center that measured over two hundred paces in each direction. The plazuea featured a church, the bishop’s palace and offices, and a palace for the governor and his officials. Mérida’s main streets, which radiated out from the square were lined with homes and businesses. Nearby was the Castillo, a fortress with battlements of dark gray stone.

  One of the city’s more unusual features was its carriages. I had seen similar vehicles in Campeche and was told they were unique to the Yucatán. Called calesas, they were the only wheeled carriages in the city, large wooden structures, commonly painted red, with bright, multicolored curtains. The awkward-looking vehicles were drawn by a single horse with a boy riding it.

  When they plied the alameda, the carriages each carried two or three ladies, Spanish of course. The women rode without hats or veils but had their hair trimmed with flowers. They comported themselves with a modesty and simplicity that women lacked in the larger cities to the north. The many india and mestiza women on the streets—always unpretentious, often pretty—again lacked the sophistication of the women in the larger cities, such as the capital and Guanajuato, but made up for it with their sincerity and simple charm.

  Mérida welcomed me as a hero. They believed I was Carlos, and since the king authorized the expedition, they also believed the viceroy would reimburse the local government for any bills I incurred.

  After a week in Mérida, I was transferred by diligencia, a calesa coach, to Mérida’s seaport, Sisal. The trip would take a full day, and I was anxious to get away from the city. News traveled slowly to Mérida, which was at the far end of the colony, but I heard many stories of French conspiracies to seize New Spain. I was now Carlos, the man I knew to have spied for the French. I was anxious to leave before they hanged me for his crimes . . . or my own were exposed.

  No ships were departing for Havana. My next best choice, though by no means a perfect one, was Spain itself, and at Sisal the ship’s tender transported me to a Spanish-bound vessel.

  Spain, in many ways, was like saying “heaven.” As a colonist, I was raised in the belief that the Iberian Peninsula, home to Spain and Portugal, and the Garden of Eden were one and the same. However, I would have boarded the ship with more enthusiasm if I hadn’t feared for my European reception.

  War raged in Spain with the people of Spain battling the dreaded Napoleon, one of history’s greatest conquerors. And I was going to Spain in the guise of Carlos Galí, a scientist on an expedition of monumental scientific importance . . .

  A man who had made a heroic escape from a horde of cannibals . . .

  And who was a French spy.

  NAPOLEON’S
ULCER

  The Spaniard is brave, daring, and proud; he is a perfect assassin. This race resembles no other—it values only itself and loves only God, whom it serves very badly.

  —General de Beurnonville,

  Army of Napoleon

  FIFTY-THREE

  Madrid, Spain, May 2, 1808

  AS PACO, A twelve-year-old street urchin, left his slum hovel and walked up the street, he gnawed at a small morsel of fatty meat on a bone, given to him by a neighbor whose chamber pots he emptied. His mother was dead, and he was mostly on his own. He lived with his father, who shoveled manure in a stable, but his father was at best an absentee one who often failed to return home after work. Paco was accustomed to going out in the morning to find his father sleeping off a drunk in the gutter.

  The boy was tall and gangly for his age, almost as tall as most men, but rail thin because he rarely had enough to eat. As he walked toward the central plaza, the Puerta del Sol—Gateway of the Sun—people converged on it from all directions. From the plaza, the mass of people moved up Calle Mayor and Calle Arenal, streets that led toward the royal palace.

  While Paco followed the flow of the crowds, he heard excited talk, heated words, as people lamented the seizure of the Spanish king, queen, and crown prince after Napoleon had invited them to France on a pretext and the next French move against Spanish sovereignty: the seizure and transport of a child-prince to France.

  As he listened to the angry words swirling around him, Paco was unaware that he and those around him would soon initiate six years of brutal warfare on the Iberian Peninsula, warfare that would smash the dreams of an empire of one of the greatest conquerors in history.

  Under the pretext of preparing for a joint invasion of Portugal, French troops had occupied Madrid and other key points throughout the country. Now the people’s passions blazed at French treachery. They jeered and booed General Murat, head of the French occupation of the city, as he entered the city in his golden coach. Murat had thirty-six thousand French troops under his command in the city, as compared to Spain’s three thousand. Moreover, the king’s administrators had ordered the Spanish army to stand down and not to oppose the French takeover.

  “For shame, for shame,” people cried at the news that their army wouldn’t fight to defend their nation and that the royals had renounced their rights in return for generous pensions.

  Spain’s wealthy grandees compounded the cowardice of the royals by also acquiescing in France’s conquest of the country, in part because Napoleon had promised them they could keep their assets, privileges, and power. Of Spain’s political institutions only the church, which Napoleon degraded and looted in other parts of Europe, strongly opposed French occupation.

  “They’re taking our Paquitito!” the boy heard repeatedly.

  Prince Francisco, the youngest son of King Charles, was housed at the royal palace. Word had spread through the crowd that the young prince was to be taken by coach to France. The nine-year-old prince was a particular favorite of the people of Madrid. He was called by an affectionate nickname: Paquitito.

  Though he was called Paco by his father, the twelve-year-old street urchin, like the prince, was also actually named Francisco.

  As Paco flowed with the angry crowd, he saw French troops, cavalry and infantry, moving into position along with a line of cannon. Although some people expressed fear at the sight of the soldiers, this day the impressive body of troops only inflamed the crowd’s wrath.

  When he reached the square, Paco climbed atop a statue across from the palace to get a better look. To one side, lines of French troops deployed in musket squares, muskets at the ready, and a line of dragoons with their horses prevented the crowd from expanding. Behind the soldiers’ lines were cannons.

  Coaches lined the front of the palace entrance. Shouts of “They’re taking Paquitito!” rang through the crowd. People near the coaches began to cut at the harnesses with knives. With no warning, the French squares opened fire, the front line of troops firing, then dropping to their knees to reload as the second and third lines followed the same pattern. The musket balls ripped into the crowd, a ball going through one person and then another and sometimes even killing a third. After all three lines had fired, the musketeers melted back behind the cannons.

  French cannons thundered point-blank into the densely packed crowd, shrapnel and shell blasting people to pieces. Holding onto the statue, Paco froze, his mouth gaped. Blood, bone, and flesh of men, the blasted bodies of women and children lay spread across the cobblestones.

  As quickly as the cannons quit firing, the musketeers stepped forward and fired another series of volleys, knocking down hundreds of people. When the last volley sounded, the cavalry surged forward, chasing the people as they ran in panic, cutting them down with their sabers, trampling those who fell.

  After the mounted troops had passed his statue, Paco jumped down to make his way toward home through the panic and chaos. People on the street were bloodied, frantic men searched for their wives, women screamed for their children.

  Soon, however, he saw another spirit rise from the masses: As the panic faded, a ferocious fury rose. Men and women came out of their dwellings wielding kitchen knives, axes, clubs, anything they could fight back with. Women and children stood on balconies and rooftops to rain street stones down on the advancing troops.

  The boy watched in wonderment as people whom he recognized as bakers and store clerks, stable workers and barmaids, challenged the crack French troops with kitchen utensils, stones, and sometimes just their bare hands. Soon his wonderment turned to anger and horror as he saw people falling under the barages of musket fire and trampled by horses or cut down by the sabers of charging dragoons.

  Paco followed a group that ran toward the barracks of a small artillery unit of the Spanish army. A Spanish captain met them, shouting at first that they were under orders not to engage the French in battle. As French cavalry stormed into the area, trampling and cutting everyone that got into their way, the Spanish captain relented and ordered five cannons directed at the advancing French troops. His cannon tenders sent off first one, then another volley that cut into the ranks of the attackers and sent them reeling back.

  The Spanish cannons kept up the fire until a white flag of parley was raised by the French, and the Spanish captain was invited to talk. A senior French officer stood at the front of a detail of musketeers with bayonets at the ready and awaited the Spanish artillery commander. The commander, whom Paco recognized as a captain named Laoiz, went forward to discuss terms with the French officer. The French officer, a general, suddenly shouted a command. Musketeers with bayonets stabbed the Spanish officer to death, and French cavalry charged the Spanish cannon positions, catching the batteries by surprise.

  Numb and in shock, Paco left the carnage at the artillery barracks and made his way toward the tenement where he lived with his indigent father. Even as fighting erupted all around him, civilians with crude implements and makeshift weapons were fighting the finest troops of the greatest military power on earth. As he neared the tenement, he heard another cry of outrage explode around him. Mamluks!

  He stood rooted and gawked as they charged into the crowd, the infamous infidel troops whose very name sowed terror in Spanish hearts. The wild, murderous French Moslem troops from North Africa charged into the crowd, cutting people down with their curved scimitars.

  Muslim troops attacking Spaniards! He had been raised to believe Moors were demons. Spanish kings struggled for seven hundred years to drive the infidels from the peninsula. Now the French were sending them to kill Christians.

  Paco never went to school, but from street talk, he knew a little of the history of the infamous warriors, though he didn’t know that the word mamluk itself meant “slave” in an Arabic tongue. The original Mamluks were slave units that fought for the sultans and sometimes became their palace guards. Often they were Christians, captured and enslaved. Like the praetorian guards of the Caesars, the Mamluks eventu
ally became the real rulers of the Turkish and Arabic kingdoms, and the sultans merely figureheads. Sometimes Mamluk generals even assumed royal thrones. Napoleon encountered the fierce fighters during his Egyptian campaign and eventually incorporated small units of them into his armies. However, the Mamluks were so fierce and uncontrollable he had never deployed them in force.

  Paco watched as women on the rooftop of a house threw rocks down on the troops. Three Mamluks dismounted and invaded the house. Paco knew what would happen in the house: The women would be raped and murdered. It was the house of the woman who had given him the bone.

  His eyes went to a kitchen knife in the gutter. He picked it up and shot into the house. On the stairway a screaming woman struggled with a Mamluk who tore at her clothing. A young man whom Paco recognized as the woman’s brother was crumbled at the bottom of the stairs, dead.

  Paco ran up the stairs and aimed his knife-thrust at the infidel’s spine, the blade instead sinking into the wide leather belt around the Mamluk’s waist. He pulled the blade back as the Mamluk twisted around. Paco saw the cutting edge of the curved sword coming at him, just a flash of light off the blade before it connected with his neck.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Zaragoza

  IT WAS ALMOST midday. María Agustina had heard the continuous bombardment as she made her way down an alley and onto the boulevard that led to Zaragoza’s Portillo Gate. She was twenty years old, and the French siege of the city was her first memory of war. She carried with her a freshly made bucket of stew and a jug of watered-down red wine for the young artilleryman she had fallen in love with.

  Zaragoza lay on the Río Ebro, Spain’s longest river, about two hundred miles northeast of Madrid. Portillo was not the only gate in the city besieged; the city was being attacked on all sides. The war had come to Zaragoza in the middle of June, less than two months after the people of Madrid rose up against the French invaders. Dos de mayo was that day, when madrileños had fought bravely but futilely against trained troops, men fighting with little more than sticks and stones, women and children throwing rocks and pouring hot water from rooftops and balconies. The next day the angry French had taken revenge on the city, grabbing people off the streets or dragging them out of their homes capriciously, dragging them to death behind horses or hanging and shooting them with hastily assembled death squads. Thousands of madrileños died, but the French general’s belief that if he killed enough civilians, the rest would be cowed, proved to be seriously flawed.