Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  A horde of bandidos rode out of the village. Their mounts ranged from good hacienda workhorses and mules to donkeys. They came down the road five abreast with López front and center.

  “Everyone, aim for Lopez.” With him out front, it was a good bet that we’d hit something, men or horses.

  I ordered the men to hold fire until the bandidos were two hundred feet away. I gave the command for the first volley. Four of the muskets went off. Another sent a ramming rod flying; in his haste, the man had forgotten to remove it. López was knocked off his horse, and two other horses in the front rank went down.

  The second volley went off, and another man and horse went down. I grabbed a flask bomb, lit the fuse, and tossed it. It exploded harmlessly in the air a hundred feet from the nearest man, but it made a terrific noise.

  It wasn’t necessary; the whole pack had about-faced and headed in three directions of panic, all away from us.

  “To the horses!”

  I mounted Tempest and led the way to where the horses were waiting. The horses and mules were gone. So were Renato, Isabella, and Don Humberto. The vaquero whom I left with the horses lay spread-eagled on the ground, his throat slit.

  “Up there!” one of the men shouted.

  He pointed at riders cresting the hilltop, heading north around the village. Renato led the way, Isabella behind him on the horse with her arms around his waist. Renato led the marqués’s roan by a mecate. Behind the marqués, two other horses were rope-led. The mounts they didn’t take with them, they’d run off.

  The rabble army would soon find the courage to make another attack. I had eleven men and one horse among them, the horse of the vaquero who accompanied me into the village. Some horses that had been run off were still in sight, grazing.

  “We need to round up at least six horses,” I told the men. “You can ride double into León.” I held out my hand and helped a man mount behind me and the horsed vaquero did the same. I rode the man out to a horse, and he mounted it. When we had six horses for the eleven men, I gave them money to see them back to the padre.

  “Where are you going, señor?” one asked.

  “To avenge the murder of our amigo and the betrayal of the padre.”

  “Then God speed to you and your sword.”

  ONE HUNDRED AND THREE

  MANY TIMES I have traveled great distances from Guanajuato to hunt, losing myself in the wilderness. I preferred to hunt game with the same horn-backed bow that the Chihuahua Desert Apaches used with such murderous skill. But one didn’t shoot game from a great distance with an arrow. Instead, you had to sneak up slowly and take it by surprise. With a desert-mountain mule deer, you often had to track it for hours, or even days, following its hoofprints. This was how I now tracked Renato, Isabella, and Don Humberto.

  I followed the prints of their horses as they circled around the bandido village and continued north. The marqués was captured about twenty miles north of the village and had hidden his gold before he was taken. That meant by early tomorrow morning, they would arrive in the area where Don Humberto had buried the gold.

  I followed the tracks in no hurry. My objective was not to catch them. If I did, there would be a fight and the possibility that Don Humberto would be killed before I could learn his treasure’s location.

  So I just followed at a safe distance, keeping an hour behind them. As I did when I hunted deer, I would—when the time was right—go for the kill.

  The next morning I ate my hard biscuits and resisted the urge to chew on salted beef because it would increase my thirst. The region was arid but with some river valleys that produced stunted scrub trees and some sparse graze for Tempest. But I couldn’t count on finding water ahead.

  As the day wore on, I followed their tracks higher and higher. After crossing the timberline, thick groves of trees covered the ascending hills. My recollection was that I’d be able to quench my thirst on the other side of the hills, where a river forked into two smaller streams.

  A couple of hours before midday I heard a sound. I pulled Tempest to a halt and listened. It came again, a man’s voice, a cry of pain. No, not just pain but agony. The marqués. I hadn’t heard Don Humberto speak, but I was sure it was him. Renato’s voice I recognized.

  I slipped off Tempest. Rather than tying his reigns tightly to a branch, I tied them loosely so they would slip off if he gave them a good jerk. “If I whistle, come to me,” I told him. I never knew if he understood these things, but I did know he was smarter than most men I’ve known.

  The sounds had stopped. They appeared to have come from the rim of a sheer cliff, rising a hundred feet above me. It was too steep to climb. I backtracked, going down the same way I had come until I found a slope I could climb. When I reached the level I thought the sound had come from, I crept slowly through thick brush. I found him in a small clearing. He was on his back, lying by a campfire that had burned down to gray embers. Above the embers stood a tripod fashioned from crossed poles lashed crudely together with a rope dangling from its apex.

  He was alive: that much I understood from the slow rise of his chest. Not by much, however. I smelled burnt flesh. His feet and scalp were badly charred: they’d broiled his feet black in the fire, then hung him by his ankles from the tripod head down over the slow-burning fire.

  I also smelled an ambush.

  I saw only two possibilities: they had charred his feet in the fire to get the location of the treasure. When they couldn’t find it, they returned and hung him by his hocks over the fire. When he gave them a new location, they left him to search for it. The other possibility? They left him as bait for me.

  I relaxed my body and cleared my mind and lay completely still. This was how I hunted in areas I knew the game had passed; it permitted me to stay for long periods without fidgeting.

  Don Humberto’s respiration was raspy, a grating preamble to a death rattle. I sensed an ambush, but I had to enter the opening.

  I pulled out my sword and pistol. Taking a deep breath, I rose to a crouch and slowly dogtrotted toward Don Humberto, expecting a lead ball in my heart at any moment.

  The rasp was fading, weakening as I knelt beside him. “It’s me, Don Humberto, the man who ransomed you.”

  His eyelids slowly fluttered open. He didn’t make eye contact with me. I don’t know if he even saw me.

  “Why did they do this to you?”

  “I told him,” he whispered hoarsely.

  “You told Renato where the gold is?”

  “I told him.”

  “They went for the gold?”

  Something like a laugh burst from his throat. “He hurt me . . .”

  “Just relax, amigo; the pain will be gone in a moment.”

  His scrawny hand grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me closer. “I lied,” he whispered. “I spoke falsely.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Where the river forks . . . in a cave . . . indios hid it in the cave with rocks, where the rivers fork,” he said, barely loud enough for me to hear. “I . . . killed them.”

  I made the sign of the cross.

  “Will God . . . forgive me?”

  He didn’t wait for my answer. His life escaped with a last breath.

  I knew the spot the marqués spoke of. I’d camped at the fork of the river three years before. I didn’t remember a cave, but high water wore and gouged out many holes along the route carved by the river.

  Don Humberto had more cojones than I had credited him for, but I suspected he cared more about money than anything else. I wondered how much torture he would have taken before he gave up his wife.

  A scream came from the bushes behind me.

  Isabella!

  I ran toward the sound, again expecting an ambush and ready to face it head-on. I had reached my limit. It was time to make good on my promise and kill Renato.

  I caught a flash of him as I crashed into the brush like a bull, the mindless El Toro with the bleeding wounds Marina accused me of being. I fired the p
istol. The shot hit exactly where I aimed, right in the chest. Except that I instantly realized that there was no flesh behind the coat I had fired at. It was a ruse.

  I spun around, swinging my sword. He went under it, coming up as soon as the sword passed over his head. I leaned back as his dagger flashed. It sliced across my chest, cutting through my coat and shirt. I felt the sting of the blade as I fell backward, brush jabbing at my back. I knew what was coming, and I twisted and rolled before I hit the ground. The thrown dagger stuck in the ground next to me.

  I tried to roll away as he aimed his pistol. The explosion sounded and I couldn’t get out of the way. The ball hit me in the groin. I felt the burn and my mind exploded. I jerked to my feet and rushed him in a mindless rage. I had two things no man trespassed on—my horse and my manly pride.

  I hit him with my shoulder, sending a shock wave through my body from the pain in my chest. He staggered back, and I hit him in the face. He fell back, and, exacting eye-for-an-eye, I kicked him in his manhood. He dropped the sword and fell to his knees, clutching his painful parts with both hands. I grabbed the sword he had dropped. I had promised to chop off his dagger hand, but his neck looked too inviting.

  Before I could raise the sword I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A heavy tree limb, thick and solid as a musket butt, was being swung like an axe. Hammering my temple, it sent me flying to my left. As I went over a cliff, I caught a flash of Isabella with the crudely fashioned club in her hands, her eyes bright with excitation, a hint of a leer curling her upper lip.

  I dropped a dozen feet and hit a hard surface, excruciating pain exploding through both body and brain. I heard a scream and knew it was my own as I rolled off another ledge and continued to fall. I tumbled head over heels down the side of the incline.

  When I came to a rest, I lay still, a loud humming in my ears, my eyes seeing double. It took a moment before I realized I was a hundred feet down, not far from where I had tethered Tempest. I felt paralyzed. I groaned, unwound my arms and legs, and the pain came alive. I tried to whistle, and it came out as a whisper.

  “Tempest,” I yelled, but it was not much of a shout.

  Ready to scream, I got onto my knees and got another yell out for my horse. No reply. With the power of Hercules, I managed to get to my feet.

  I found Tempest near where I had tied him. He had gotten loose and was grazing. I staggered to him, ready to pass out. “Bastardo,” I told him. I pulled myself onto the beast with sheer will.

  I couldn’t manage finding and transporting the gold. It would weigh about eight hundred pounds. I needed men to load it, mules to carry it . . . and an army to protect it. I had to patch my wounds and get to León. Then back to the padre and his army.

  I was weak from pain and shock as Tempest carried me away. The image of Isabella came to my mind.

  Bitch. She was a slut who helped to fry her husband’s feet, then hung him by the hocks over a fire. May she herself burn in hell.

  ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

  I DON’T KNOW how long or how far Tempest carried me. I knew my life’s blood was running out of me. The only way I knew to stop the bleeding was to burn the wound with a hot iron or a blaze of black powder, and I didn’t have the strength to do either. I didn’t even have the strength to guide Tempest. Dark shadows slipped into my mind, threatening to drop my mind into a deep void.

  Thoughts and visions ran through my head as if I had journeyed from this world to the underworld my Aztec ancestors traveled in after they passed from the sorrows of this life: Carlos dying in my arms, a glass of brandy from Bruto, the screams and cries, the dead and dying at the granary . . .

  I came back to the present with words in my ears. My eyes and ears slowly made a connection with a voice and body. Tempest had stopped. I realized people stood around the stallion and were staring up to me.

  “You are seriously injured, señor.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  The world began to swirl around me, and I fell into a black, boiling, bottomless pit.

  Not one fine house in all of New Spain would have taken in an injured stranger. However, I didn’t heal in a house but in a peon’s hut in a small Aztec village. These simple, unpretentious people had taken in a stranger.

  When I was well enough, I checked my clothes and gear. Nothing was missing, and they had washed my clothes.

  I had no knowledge of how much time I had spent in that hut while the specter of death hung over me. It could have been days or weeks. I had a hard time communicating with the woman and her husband who cared for me. They didn’t speak Spanish.

  I was on my feet, a little unsteady, but determined to round up Tempest who was hanging around the village somewhere, when I heard horses galloping into the village. Thoughts of escape slipped away as the hut was surrounded, and I was told to come out of the hut.

  I stepped out and blinked under the power of the midday sun. A dozen men on horseback surrounded me.

  “Identify yourself!”

  I recognized the uniforms: royal militia. The speaker was a lieutenant. I knew his type: like Allende and the Aldama brothers, he was a criollo caballero. But he was fighting for the viceroy.

  I had been captured by the enemy. Next I would be dancing for the hangman.

  The lieutenant pointed his pistol at me. “State your name!”

  “My name?” I lifted my chin and straightened my shoulders. “Señor, you are addressing Don Renato de Miro, nephew of the Marqués de Miro.”

  That afternoon, I retold my story to Captain Guerrero, the commander of the unit, as we chewed on meat and bread washed down with wine. I went over what had happened to me, telling the same story I had given his lieutenant. Guerrero was another criollo officer. As the marqués’s nephew, I was a gachupine of noble blood, making him my social inferior.

  “The infamous bandido, Juan Zavala, ambushed my uncle and me. After murdering my beloved uncle, the blessed Don Humberto, he stole his gold.”

  “The beautiful Isabella?” Captain Guerrero asked, pouring us both another cup of wine.

  I crossed myself. “Murdered by the bandido.”

  “No! Not Isabella. Did he first—”

  “You know his evil reputation.”

  He shuddered. “That mestizo devil will pay for violating a Spanish woman. When we capture Zavala, I will personally squash his cojones with thumbscrews and gouge out his eyeballs with my dagger.”

  I prayed that bandidos had captured and killed Renato and Isabella. I gave the officer a blow-by-blow account of my heroic battle against the bandido Zavala and his murderous band of killers, making sure I gave him the same story that I gave his subordinate.

  He listened, commiserating as one caballero to another, and brought me up to date on the padre’s war of independence.

  “We have retaken Guanajuato and driven out the turncoat Allende and the other traitorous officers.”

  I pretended elation at the news, but each new defeat of our forces was a kick to my stomach. Things had not gone well since the padre refused to turn the horde loose on the capital.

  The consensus among Calleja’s officers was that the padre had gone to Guadalajara and that Allende would rejoin him there to regroup.

  I listened, ate, drank, and was about to tell the captain I needed to move on when an orderly entered and whispered in his ear.

  The captain raised his eyebrows. “As you know, General Calleja was your uncle’s close friend. The general has spoken fondly of Don Humberto. He would never forgive me if I didn’t notify him that we’d found you. He’s instructed me to send you to him, so you can tell the story of his amigo’s murder at the hands of the cutthroat Zavala. A full military escort will ride with you, assuring you a safe journey for your meeting with the general.”

  ¡Ay! He might as well have sentenced me to the scaffold. But I smiled bravely. “Where is the general?”

  “Guanajuato.”

  I smothered a groan. Life is a circle, no? How long would I last in that
fair city before someone pointed out that I was the brigand Zavala? On the good side, I had my beard back and long hair, had lost much weight, and my clothes looked like they had been slept in and befouled, all of which was true. Even Tempest had trimmed down because of sparse graze. We looked like we had gone through a war in a pig sty and lost. But I should not have been frightened of someone recognizing me, because things soon got worse.

  “General Calleja will want to know all the details of the terrible crimes, so leave nothing out.” He gave me a glance. “And since your family is one of the noblest in New Spain, no doubt he’ll want to discuss the marqués’s estate in his report to the viceroy. Did the marqués have children? Or are you his heir?”

  I shrugged and tried to look as if I wasn’t ready to foul my pants. I didn’t have the faintest idea of the composition of the marqués’s family. I still wondered whether Renato was the man’s nephew or a paid assassin, hired to kill the padre and help Isabella recover the gold. But whatever Renato was, as the marqués’s close friend, the general would know I was an imposter.

  Why is it that when my feet are in the fire, someone throws lamp oil on the flames?

  The captain refused to let me ride Tempest, which sent my suspicions soaring. They didn’t want me on a horse that could leave their own eating its dust. Furthermore, he accompanied me and the escort for the entire journey to Guanajuato.

  The last time I saw the city, I was part of a triumphant army that had killed hundreds of Spaniards in the granary. Now as I entered Guanajuato there were grim reminders that the gachupines had retaken the city. Bodies hung from makeshift gallows along the busiest street.

  The captain said, “This is just the beginning. By the time we finish, the only rebels in Guanajuato will be dead ones.”

  We paused near the alhóndiga. The air was thick with blood and revenge. Panicked prisoners were hurried out of the granary, which was now a jail, a priest beside them mumbling forgiveness in Latin as the men were shoved against a wall. As soon as the priest stepped aside, the prisoners were shot. Their bodies were hurriedly dragged aside to make room for the next stampede. The dead left behind brains and bone, guts and blood, on the cobblestones. Bodies were stacked like logs off to the side.