Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  Renato grabbed the rope that held the bucket used to retrieve water from the well. He cut the bucket off and handed the rope to one of the men who had dragged me. “Tie it to his legs. Roll him over so I can tie his hands.”

  As I lay face down in the dirt, Renato knelt down beside me and tied my hands behind my back with a leather thong.

  “Eh, Señor Lépero, son of a whore, I knew you would come back to me.”

  “I’ll die before I tell you anything.”

  “Yes, you will die soon but not until I am finished with you. Before I am done, you will beg me to send your soul to hell.”

  He stood up and kicked my thigh wound. I gasped involuntarily from the pain.

  “Pull him up,” he told his two aides, “and lower him into the well headfirst.”

  Headfirst?

  The bastardo was going to drown me. He was a smart hombre. Drowning was particularly nasty. I was told by my guerrilla friends in Spain that it was better to be chopped up or beaten to death than to be tortured by water. When you are cut or hit, you pass out or your body goes into shock, and the pain dulls. Not so with drowning because your body has a constant need to breathe, death being the only escape, and Renato would keep me from giving up the ghost until he was ready.

  My feet went up first as the men pulled the rope. When they had me in the air above the ground, they released the rope, and I fell headfirst into the dark pit. On the way down I scraped my shoulder against the sharp edge of a rock that protruded from the well’s inner wall. I didn’t have time to yelp with pain as my shoulder ripped open before I hit the water.

  For a moment the water was cool, a welcome relief from my wounds. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to suck in and hold a breath of air before I was submerged, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Water got into my nose immediately, and I gasped out whatever air I had. When air went out, water came in. I sucked it in, and my brain exploded in a flash of sparks. I jerked violently, compulsively, like a great fish that had just been hooked through the tail.

  I suddenly realized I was being pulled up. When I was back at the top, Renato leaned over the edge and spoke to me.

  “Where is my treasure? If you tell me, I’ll let you live.”

  I spat water and vomit at him.

  They dropped me again, and I flew back down, ripping my back and snagging my wrists so hard on a protruding rock I thought I’d broken my arms before I hit the water. This time I went all the way, and my head hit the bottom. The blow gave me a brief flash of comfort as my body went dead, but a second later my lungs—against my will—sucked in water and burst into flames.

  Through the fog enshrouding my brain, I realized that I had been hauled up and Renato had ordered the men to permit me to catch my breath. Like any good dungeon master, he knew that torture only worked on the living.

  “Tell me where the treasure is, and I’ll let you lead me to it,” the devil whispered in my ear.

  “I will lead you to your grave.”

  He ordered another plunge into the dark pit.

  Wrestling with death, I fiercely pulled at the wet leather thong around my wrists and felt it yield. During the last drop, the wrist thong had briefly caught on one of the sharp stone protrusions jutting out from the inner well wall, and, yanking my arms up, I’d feared the caught thong would dislocate my shoulders, even as blinding agony seared through my joints. But then I’d felt the thong give as I broke from the sharp outcrop and continued my fall. I yanked again at the thong, and suddenly my hands were free.

  When I was hauled back up, Renato leaned over the edge to taunt me. “This is your last chance, son-of-a-whore, if you don’t—”

  I reached out. Getting a hold on his jacket, I pulled him to me. He came over the short wall, grabbing onto me. As he fell toward me, I pushed him down, but he grabbed my waist. The weight was too much for the two men pulling the line. I heard a yell, and then Renato and I flew down the shaft. He struck the rock extending from the side of the wall with a thunk.

  When we hit the water, we both went under, but I was jerked above the water line by the men with the rope. I got an arm around Renato’s neck and held on. The men above couldn’t pull us both up. He didn’t struggle like a man with all his strength, and I realized he must have been stunned by the protruding rock. With my arm around his neck, I kicked off from the side with my feet and bashed his face into the stone wall again and again all the while it took them to haul us up.

  The haulers had hooked a mule to the rope to haul us up, but I was the only one that made it. When we’d reached the top, I let go.

  I lay on the ground, my wrists tied again, as they lowered a man to get Renato. They brought him up, dead . . . just the way I wanted the bastardo to be.

  From the conversations around me, I picked up that they awaited orders from Lt. Colonel Elizondo. My brain was waterlogged but was working well enough for me to recognize the name of the officer in charge of the region for the revolution. He was to greet the padre and Allende when they arrived at the wells.

  That a revolutionary leader would team up with Renato to steal money designated for the revolt wasn’t implausible; men are universally greedy. To do it so blatantly, however, was strange. That I had been lured away from the army, captured, and tortured, would circulate through the camps tonight. How would Elizondo explain his actions?

  A feminine voice from my past asked when the colonel would arrive. I twisted on the ground. She sat on a chair, shaded by an umbrella. On a table beside her were a bottle of brandy and a full glass. She fanned herself and smoked a cigarillo.

  She had watched her lover torture and murder her husband, watched him torture me, watched her lover dragged dead from the well . . .

  Her eyes lowered and met mine. They stared blankly at me. I could have been one of the peons she used as a doormat.

  A troop of men entered the courtyard, and the man guarding me uttered Elizondo’s name.

  The crunch of boots, expensive boots, stopped next to my head. I twisted and looked up at the officer standing over me. He wore the insignia of a lieutenant colonel.

  I had overheard from Allende’s criollo officers that Elizondo had been a captain before the revolt and had asked Allende to make him a general. Allende had refused and promoted him merely to lieutenant colonel, saying he needed more soldiers, not more generals. Allende had made a bad decision, no?

  “You are either very brave or very stubborn, señor,” he said.

  “I am neither. The treasure belongs to the revolution and is in the hands of the padre. Renato never understood I could not give it to him. I didn’t threaten the man with retribution from the padre. That would just have hastened my death.

  “The revolution is over. In a short time the treasures stolen from the king will be in the proper hands.”

  “Traitor!”

  “No, a realist. The royals have won. Long live the king.” He smirked at me.

  “The padre has a large army approaching—”

  “The padre is not in command, Allende is. And the army is strung out for miles. I have instructed the leaders to come forward with their mounts and carriages to drink first so the wells can refill before the main army arrives. They’ll find a surprise at the wells.”

  It was a good plan. The leaders would fall into the trap. Once they had the heads, the army would be useless.

  I grinned up at him. “You’ll get your reward in hell for betraying your compañeros.”

  “Actually, my reward from the viceroy will be quite handsome.” He turned to Isabella. “As you have heard, señora, your husband’s treasure is gone. But perhaps I will be able to make your stay in the north . . . more pleasant than it has been.”

  Without looking in my direction, she pointed at me with her foot. “Is there a reward for him?”

  ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

  Mountains Where the Cougars Lurk, 1541

  MY SOUL FLEW with the night wind, carried along as the breeze moaned and whistled through the mountains. My
people believe the wind’s eerie song was the wail of spirits as they are swept to the Underworld. Their weeping was an evil omen to those who heard it because it attracted Xipe, the Night Drinker who drinks the blood of sinners during the hours of slumber.

  Ayya! I had no fear of the vampire’s thirst—my life’s blood had been left on the battlefield when I brought down the Red Giant and the great warhorse he had ridden. Don Alvarado had broken his neck when he hit the ground, but taking his life had also cost my own. My journey now was to Mictlan, the Dark Place, where the skull-faced Mictlantecuhtli reigned. But the Dark Place was not where souls came to rest—it was a vast, gloomy Underworld divided into nine hellish regions that had to be traversed during a four-year journey fraught with violent trials.

  In the golden days when the gods of the Aztecs ruled the heavens, a warrior who fell in battle did not suffer the torment of the nine hells. Instead, the afterlife was a pleasant one. He ascended to the House of the Sun, one of the thirteen heavens, and traveled across the sky with the Sun God from dawn to dusk, as an honor guard for the fiery spirit. During the hours of darkness, they engaged in mock battles for enjoyment. There was feasting and the companionship of comrades and women. Women who died in childbirth, people who drowned or were struck by lightening, and those who went willingly to the sacrifice slab also found a place in the thirteen heavens, though not one so grand and privileged as that of the warrior.

  After four years in the heavens, they were transformed into birds with rich plumage and descended back to earth, flitting from flower to flower, partaking of the nectars.

  But Aztec gods no longer ruled the heavens. The Christian deity called the Almighty was King of Heaven. Aztec souls—and Aztec people—were now consigned to hell.

  The daunting trials in Mictlan I must endure in the afterlife that awaits me dominated my thoughts as I flew into a crack in the mountain. The first eight hells in the Underworld are physical challenges—I must make my way between two mountains clashing together, swim a raging river, crawl among deadly snakes and hungry crocodiles, climb a cliff with jagged edges as sharp as an obsidian blade, survive a frozen wind that cuts like knives, battle raging beasts and eaters of hearts. After four years, if I survive and find my way to the ninth hell, there I will prostrate myself before Mictlantecuhtli, the King of Terrors.

  If he finds me worthy, he will give me the Peace of Nothingness by turning my soul into dust and scattering it on the sand and dirt in the parched land that lies to the north . . . that place called Chihuahua.

  Chihuahua, 1811

  ELIZONDO’S AMBUSH WENT off as planned. As the main army slowly brought up the rear, one after another, the revolutionary leaders were ambushed and captured as they approached the wells.

  Two of the leaders displayed great courage. Father Hidalgo, warriorpriest that he was, tried to fight. He drew his pistol to engage the enemy, but the horsemen with him, seeing they were outnumbered and out-gunned, pleaded with him to put down the weapon.

  Allende also showed rock-hard courage. Refusing to surrender, Allende fired off a shot at Elizondo before he was overpowered. But his recklessness cost the life of his son, Indalecio. The twenty-year-old was killed when bullets struck the carriage he rode in.

  The leaders of the revolution were herded across the desert, like shackled cattle led to slaughter, to the governor at Chihuahua. The purpose was to keep the padre far away from the heart of the colony for fear its indios would rise up in his support.

  As for me, I was an inconsequential criminal of no importance, except for the hope that I would reveal where the marqués’s treasure was located. Sí, it didn’t take long for my captors to find out that I had not delivered the treasure to the padre. So rather than executing me immediately, the fate of so many lesser revolutionaries, I was taken in shackles with the padre, Allende, and the others as an animal is led to its abattoir.

  For six hundred miles we slogged across a barren, parched wasteland to Chihuahua. Chained hand and foot, we marched, day after day, week after week, our bodies aching, our mouths and muscles burning.

  It broke my heart to see the padre tormented as a common criminal. He was older than the rest of us—twice as old as most of us—and the trek was hardest on him. Allende and I had a determination and machismo that kept us from complaining, but we couldn’t match the padre for sheer courage. He had a moral strength and an iron will that none of us possessed.

  Someone with an unofficial interest in my welfare accompanied the military expedition to Chihuahua. Isabella rode in the coach with Elizondo as his “special guest.” My former love had obviously recruited a new inamorato to assist her quest for the gold. How long would this bitch flog my soul with sharp spurs and a barbed whip?

  Chihuahua: home of a breed of small dogs with a big bark and snapping jaws. A provincial town of about six thousand cradled in a valley nearly a mile high, it was in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by desert. It was a mining center but on a smaller scale than Guanajuato. Its northern location made it a natural place to sympathize with the revolution, but that movement was now in chains.

  We were marched in shackles down the main street, paraded in dust and rags, worn and beaten bloody for all to observe. The governor issued a warning to the populace: watch the prisoners being paraded but show no support.

  I was not angry at my humiliation; whatever disgrace I suffered, it was less than I deserved. But my heart burned for the padre.

  They watched silently, these common people whose hearts and dreams the padre had fired by his vision of freedom for all but who were now disillusioned. Despite the prohibition against emotional displays, sobs and tears poured out as the padre staggered down the street—like the rest of us—in wrist shackles and leg irons, weak with pain from the deprivation of our desert crossing. But like Christ shouldering his cross, the padre did not falter. Squaring his shoulders, he kept moving forward, refusing to show any weakness, still inspiring us all.

  I silently mourned Marina’s death, the brave sacrifice she had made for me. I was grateful that she had not lived to see the padre in chains.

  REQUIEM

  ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

  I’M TOLD THIS prison cell is my last stop before hell’s inferno. Nothing would please the guards more than to see me burning in a lake of fire. For five months the inquisitors have visited on me, day and night, their own version of hellfire everlasting as they tried to pry from my lips the location of the marqués’s treasure. Theirs has been a thankless job, for I have cursed their fathers, questioned their manhood, and spat in their faces.

  Yesterday a priest came, offering me “a final opportunity” to cleanse my soul and purge my heart . . . by disclosing the treasure’s whereabouts. I told him that when he brought me physical proof that God commanded me to tell him, that God had granted him a license to remit sins, I’d cheerfully tell him where the treasure was.

  ¡Ay! Instead of taking me up on my generous offer, he fled, shouting that I was a heretic who would burn forever in balefire. He wouldn’t have long to wait to get his wish. Tomorrow my execution would be celebrated.

  Was I ready give up the ghost? Ready for the goddess of justice to drag me to judgment? To punish me for my innumerable transgressions? No, not until I transgressed one last time on this planet we call home.

  Before I started this long confession, did I not say I would avenge myself on the one who had betrayed me?

  It’s said the devil taunts those who leave unfinished business on earth, that his mocking words are daggers in your heart. El Diablo is one clever bastardo, no? He knows that it is not our triumphs we carry beyond the grave but our regrets.

  I heard voices outside my cell and the rattle of a key in my cell door. The door swung open, and a priest in a hooded robe entered. Seeing another one of his ilk did not please me.

  “Hijo de la chingada!” I growled. “Chingo tu puta madre!” Calling him the son of a wanton woman, I then told him what he could do with his mother.

  “S
uch language, señor, to a man of the cloth.” A delicate hand pushed back the hood, revealing a lovely face.

  “Raquel!”

  A key to the cell door, a sharp sword, and a fast horse might have been more welcome . . . but not by much. After we hugged each other for what seemed to be an eternity, she pulled bread, meat, and wine from under her robe. We sat down so the condemned man could enjoy his final repast.

  “Tell me about the padre and the others,” I said.

  The criollo officers had been shot in the back because they were considered traitors. They had met their maker over a month ago.

  “Allende, of course, was defiant to the end. He became so angry at the judge that he broke the manacles holding him and struck the judge with a piece of chain before the soldiers could subdue him.”

  Only one of their officers had disgraced himself. The criollo officer Mariano Abasolo, to save his hide, testified that Allende forced him to participate in the revolt. The supplications of his beautiful wife, Doña María—and no doubt a payment in gold—obtained for him a prison sentence in Cádiz.

  Unlike the spineless Abasolo, the padre had faced the military court with dignity and grace. Brought in chains before the judges, he stood tall and assumed responsibility for the revolution. He freely admitted he had raised armies, manufactured weapons and ordered gachupines executed in retaliation for the murder of civilians by the Spanish commanders.

  “He regretted that thousands had died for the cause of liberty,” Raquel said, “but he believed that God would have mercy on him because the cause was just.”

  Because the padre had to be defrocked by a church process before he was executed, the officers had been executed first. The court ordered the officer’s heads pickled and preserved in brine until the head of the padre joined them.

  At daybreak on July 31, 1811, the guards led the padre from his tower cell to the prison courtyard. When the commandant asked if he had anything to say, the padre requested that candy he brought be given to the firing squad when they finished.