He started to give it back to me, but I said, "Keep the paper, padre. It was intended for the viceroy. It still is. If and when you can find a living white men, who can serve as your messenger, have him deliver that to the very illustrious Mendoza in the City of Mexíco. Until then, simply show it to every other Spaniard who comes this way."
He went out, the paper still shaking in his hand, and Pozonáli went with him. To Nochéztli I said:
"Help the girl gather and bundle together all this paper and the writing materials, for safekeeping. I shall have other use for them. And for you, child. You are bright and obedient and you did exceedingly well here today. What is your name?"
"Verónica," you said.
XXX
We left Tonalá a smoldering, smoking desert of a town, unpeopled except for the priest and what few slaves had elected to stay, only the two stone buildings still upright and entire. We left it, too, with our warriors looking rather flamboyant, not to say ridiculous. The Yaki were so heavily festooned with skirts of scalps that every man seemed to be walking waist-deep through a hillock of bloody human hair. The Purémpe women had appropriated the finest gowns of the late Spanish ladies—silks and velvets and brocades—so (although some had ignorantly donned the dresses backward) they made a gaudily colorful throng. Many of the arcabuz men and Aztéca warriors now wore steel breastplates over their quilted cotton armor. They disdained to avail themselves of the enemies' high boots or steel helmets, but they had pillaged from the Spanish women's wardrobes also, and now wore on their heads fancy feathered bonnets and ornate lace mantillas. All our men and women were carrying bales and bundles of plunder besides—every sort of thing from hams and cheeses and bags of coins to those weapons that Uno had called halberds, which combine spear, hook and ax. Our Swaddlers and Swallowers followed, supporting our less severely wounded men, and twelve or fourteen led the captured horses, bridled and saddled, on which rode or were draped the wounded who could not walk.
When we got back to our camping place, those wounded warriors were turned over to our various tíciltin, for most of the tribes composing the army had brought along at least one native physician. Even the Yaki had done so, but since their tícitl could have administered little more than masked chantings and prancings and rattlings, I ordered that the Yaki casualties be also attended by the more enlightened physicians of other tribes. As they had done before and would always do, the Yaki grumbled angrily at my disrespect for their sacred traditions, but I firmly insisted and they had to comply.
That was not the only dissension I would discover when my forces were regathered. The men and women who had participated in the taking of Tonalá wanted to keep for themselves all the booty they had collected there, and were much disgruntled when I ordered that the goods be distributed, as equitably as was possible, among the entire army and the slaves as well. But that enforced apportionment did not satisfy the many bands who had not participated. Though they had known, from the start, my reasons for using in this battle only a fraction of my available forces, the very success of our mission seemed now to have made them begrudge us that success. They muttered sullenly that I had been unjust to leave them behind, that I had shown undue preferment to my "favorites." I swear, they even evinced envy of the wounds the "favored" warriors had brought back, and there was no way I could order those shared around. I did my best to appease the malcontents by promising that there would be many more such battles and victories, that every contingent would eventually get its chance at acquiring glory, loot and wounds—and even god-pleasing deaths. But just as I had long ago learned that being a Uey-Tecútli was no easy occupation, so I was now learning that being the leader of a vast and conglomerate army was no easier.
I decreed that we all would stay in our present encampment while I pondered on where to take that army and use it next. I had several reasons for wanting to remain for some time where we were. One was to let the Purémpe women make another considerable store of the clay-ball granadas, because they had proved so effective in Tonalá. And since we now had an appreciable number of horses, I wanted more of my men to learn to ride them. Also, because we had lost many of our best arcabuz men—partly through my own fault—I wanted others to have ample opportunity to practice with our now-numerous armory of those weapons, and to learn to employ them in the manner the late Uno had recommended.
So I delegated to Knight Nochéztli most of the workaday responsibilities of command, thereby relieving myself of having to deal with petty complaints, petitions, quarrels and other such exasperations, conserving my own time and attention for those things that only I could command and oversee in person. Foremost of those was a project I wished to commence while we were still comfortably encamped. That is why one day I summoned you, Verónica.
When you stood before me, looking alert and attentive but demure, your hands behind your back, I said what I had said to so many others before, "It is my intention to retake this One World from its unwelcome Spanish conquerors and occupiers and oppressors."
You nodded and I went on, "Whether we succeed or fail in this endeavor, it may be that, at some time in the future, the historians of The One World will be glad to have available a true record of the events of Tenamáxtzin's war. You can write and you have the materials for doing so. I should like you to start setting down in writing what may be the only record of this rebellion that will ever exist. Do you think you can do that?"
"I will do my best, my lord."
"Now, you witnessed only the conclusion of the battle at Tonalá. I will recount for you the circumstances and incidents leading up to it. This you and I can do at leisure, while we are camped here, allowing me to sort out in my own mind the sequence of events, and allowing you to get accustomed to writing at my dictation, and allowing both of us to review and amend any mistakes that may be made."
"I am fortunate in having a retentive memory, my lord. I think we will not make many mistakes."
"Let us hope not. However, we will not always have the luxury of our sitting together while I talk and you listen. This army has uncountable one-long-runs to march, uncountable enemies to confront, uncountable battles to be fought. I should wish to have them all on record—the marches, the enemies, the battles, the outcomes. Since I must lead the marching, find the enemies, be in the forefront of the battles, I clearly cannot always be describing for you what is occurring. Much of it you will have to see for yourself."
"I also possess good eyesight, my lord."
"I will choose a horse for you, and teach you to ride it, and keep you ever by my side—except in the thick of battle, when you will be posted at a safe distance. Thus you will see many things only from afar. You must try to understand what you are seeing, and then try to make coherent record of it. You will seldom have long, quiet intervals in which to sit down with quill and paper. You may seldom even have a place to sit down. So you must contrive some way to make quick notes—on the spot or on the run—that later you can elaborate when, as now, we are encamped for a time."
"I can do that, my lord. In fact—"
"Let me finish, girl. I was about to suggest that you use a method long favored by the traveling pochtéca merchants for keeping their accounts. You pluck the leaves of the wild grapevine and—"
"And scratch on them with a sharp twig. The white marks are as enduring as ink on paper. Your pardon, my lord. I already knew that. In fact, I have been doing that—here and now—as you have been speaking."
You brought your hands out from behind your back, holding grape leaves and a twig. The leaves bore minute scratches that you had made without even looking at what you were doing.
More than a little astonished, I said, "You can make sense of those marks? You can repeat some of the words I have spoken?"
"The marks, my lord, are only to nudge my memory. No one else could interpret them. And I do not pretend to have preserved your every word, but—"
"Prove it, girl. Read back to me something from this conversation." I reached out and in
dicated one of the leaves at random. "What was said there?"
It took you only a moment of study. " 'At some time in the future, the historians of The One World will be glad to have available—' "
"By Huitztli!" I exclaimed. "This is something most marvelous. You are something most marvelous. I have known only one other scribe in my lifetime, a Spanish churchman. He was not nearly so adept as you are, and he was a man approaching middle age. How old are you, Verónica?"
"I think I have ten or eleven years, my lord. I am not sure."
"Indeed? From the near maturity of your form, and even more from the refinement evidenced in your speech, I should have taken you to be three or four years older. How did you get so well educated at such a young age?"
"My mother was Church-schooled and convent-bred. She taught me from my earliest years. Just before she died, she placed me in the same nunnery."
"That explains your name, then. But if your mother was a slave, she could have been no ordinary Moro drudge."
"She was a mulata, my lord," you said, without embarrassment. "She disliked to talk much about her parentage—or my own. But children, of course, can divine much that is left unsaid. I surmised that her mother must have been a black, but her father a Spaniard of some fairly high position and prosperity, that he would pay to send a bastard daughter to school. Of my own father, she was so secretive that I have never been able even to conjecture."
"I have seen only your face," I said. "Let me see the rest of you. Undress for me, Verónica."
That took but a moment, because you wore only a single, flimsy, ankle-length, almost threadbare gown of Spanish style.
I said, "I once had all the gradations and degrees of mixed parentage described to me. But I have no experience of judging them on sight, except that I also once knew a girl who was, I believe, the product of a white mother and black father. As for you, Verónica, I would say that your grandmother's Moro blood shows only in your already budded breasts and dark nipples and already beginning tuft of ymáxtli down below. Your grandfather's Spanish blood, I would suppose, accounts for your delicate and very handsome facial features. But you do not have hairy armpits or legs, so your grandfather's Spanish white blood must have been later diluted. Also you are as clean and sweet-smelling as any female of my own race. It is easily apparent that your unknown father contributed some further and improving admixture to your nature."
"If it matters to you, my lord," you said boldly, "whatever else I am, I am also still a virgin. I have not yet been raped by any man and not yet been tempted to dally with any."
I paused to contemplate that forthright remark—you had said "tempted," you had said "not yet"—while I savored what I was looking at. And here I will honestly confide something. Even back then, at that tender age, Verónica, you were so womanly endowed, so physically beautiful and appealing—besides being intelligent and cultivated beyond your years—that you were a very real temptation to me. I might have asked you to become something more than just my companion and my scribe. But that notion flickered only briefly in my mind, because I was still mindful of the pledge I had made to the memory of Ixínatsi. In truth, though I would have rejoiced in a mutual intimacy, I dared not either tempt or cajole you to it, for I would have risked falling in love with you. And genuinely to love a woman was what I had sworn never to do again.
And, again in truth, it is as well that I did not, in view of what would later transpire between us.
And, still in truth, I did, nevertheless—inevitably, inescapably—come to love you dearly.
At that time, though, all I said was, "Get dressed again and come with me. We shall relieve the Purémpe women of some of the garments they pilfered from the Tonalá wardrobes. You deserve the finest of feminine garb, little Verónica. And you will need more of it, too—certainly underneath—if you are to ride a horse beside mine."
Not all of our subsequent conquests were accomplished as easily as that of Tonalá. While we remained encamped, I kept my scouts and swift-runners circulating in all directions roundabout, and from their reports, I decided to make our next assault on the Spaniards a double assault—simultaneous but at two separate, far-apart places. It would certainly serve to make the Spaniards ever more fearful that we were many in number, powerful in force of arms, fierce in our determination, capable of striking anywhere—not just the angry uprising of a few malcontent tribesmen but a genuine, landwide insurrection against all the usurper white men.
Some of the scouts informed me that some distance to the southeast of our camp lay a vast expanse of rich estancia farms and ranches, the proprietors of which had all clustered their residences close together—for convenience and neighborliness and mutual protection—at the center of that expanse of land. Other scouts reported that to the southwest of us was situated a Spanish crossroads trading post, doing a thriving business with traveling merchants and local landowners—but heavily fortified and guarded by a considerable force of Spanish foot soldiers.
Those were the two places I determined to hit next, and at the same time, Knight Nochéztli to lead the attack on the estancia community, I the attack on the trading post. And now I would give some of our previously unblooded (and envious) warriors their chance at fighting, at plunder, at glory, at god-pleasing death. So to Nochéztli I assigned our Cora and Huichol men and all our horsemen—among them Verónica, to be the chronicler of that battle. With me I took Rarámuri and Otomí warriors and all our accomplished arcabuz men. We left behind all those others who had participated in the taking of Tonalá—causing the Yaki, in their customary way, to mutter mutinously. Nochéztli and I carefully calculated our traveling times, to set the day on which we would make our separate, simultaneous sieges, and the later day of our rejoining, victorious, at our present camp—and then we marched away in our divergent directions.
As I have said, not all of my war went smoothly. My attack on the trading post seemed, at first, unlikely to result in any outcome that could be called victorious.
The place consisted mostly of the huts and shacks of the Spaniards' laborers and slaves. But those surrounded the post itself, which sat secure inside a palisade of heavy, close-abutted logs, all pointed at the top, with an equally massive gate, tight shut and barred within. From narrow slits in the log wall protruded the snouts of thunder-tubes. When our forces went, roaring and bellowing, at a run across the open ground at one side of the post, I expected we would only have to dodge the heavy iron balls that I had previously seen thrown by Spanish thunder-tubes. But these had been charged with bits of scrap metal, flints, nails, broken glass and the like. When they boomed out at us, there was no dodging the lethal spray they threw, and a great many of our warriors in the forefront of the attack fell horribly mutilated, dismembered, shredded to death.
Happily for us, though, a thunder-tube takes even longer to recharge than does a thunder-stick. Before the Spanish soldiers could manage that, we surviving warriors had made our way close against the stockade wall where the thunder-tubes could not be turned to aim at us. My Rarámuri men, true to their name of "Fast of Feet," easily swarmed up the rough-barked logs, and over them into the stockade. While some of those began at once to engage the Spanish defenders, others rushed to unbar the gate to let the rest of us enter.
Still, the soldiers were no cowards, nor unnerved to the point of immediate surrender. Some, in ranks at a distance, belabored us with arcabuces. But my own arcabuz men, now well versed in the proper employment of that weapon, performed with equal accuracy and killing efficiency. Meanwhile, we others, with spears and swords and maquáhuime, fought the many other soldiers at close quarters and eventually hand to hand. This was no brief battle; the brave soldiers were prepared to fight to the death. And, finally, to that death they all went.
So had a lamentable number of my own men, both outside and inside the palisade. Since, on this march, we had brought no Swaddlers to attend our wounded, and since the post contained no horses on which to transport them, I could only instruct ou
r Swallowers to bestow a quick and merciful death on the fallen who were still alive but too badly injured to make our return march.
It had been a costly conquest, but still a profitable one. The trading post was a treasure house of useful and valuable goods—pólvora and lead balls, arcabuces and swords and knives, blankets and robes, smoked or salted stores of many good foods, even jugs of octli and chápari and Spanish wines. So, with my permission, we survivors celebrated our victory to the extent that we were all quite drunk and unsteady on our feet when we staggered away from there next morning. As I had done before, I invited the local slave families to come with us, and most of them did, carrying our bales and bags and jugs of plunder.
Arriving back at our encampment beyond the ruins of Tonalá, I was glad to learn from Nochéztli that his had been a much less difficult expedition than mine. The estancia community had been guarded not by trained soldiers, but only by the proprietors' own slave watchmen, naturally not armed with arcabuces, and not at all eager to repel an invasion. So Nochéztli had lost not a single man, and his forces had killed and raped and looted almost at leisure. They too had returned with great stores of foodstuffs and bags of maize and warm fabrics and usable Spanish clothing. Best of all, they had brought from those ranches many more horses and a herd of cattle nearly as numerous as those Coronado had taken north with him. We would no longer have to do much foraging or even hunting. We had food enough to sustain our whole army for a long time to come.
"And here, my lord," said Nochéztli. "A personal gift from me to you. I took these from the bed of one of those Spanish nobles." He handed me a neatly folded pair of beautifully lustrous silk sheets, only very slightly bloodstained. "I believe the Uey-Tecútli of the Aztéca should not have to sleep on the bare ground or a straw pallet like any common warrior."
"I thank you, my friend," I said sincerely, then laughed. "Though I fear you may incline me to the same self-indulgence and indolence as that of any Spanish nobleman."
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