Aztec Blood

by neetha Napew

  After an hour's walk I saw indios leaving the main road to take a small trail. A wooden sign at the head of the trail said Huatúsco. I had heard the name before, but did not know whether it was a village or town. Nor did I know how far it was, or what I would do when I got there. When I saw the sign on the way to the fair I had asked the fray whether Huatúsco was a place of importance. He was not familiar with the place, but told me that it was probably an indio village. "There are dozens of trails off the road between Veracruz and the Valley of Mexico," he had said, "and most lead from one indio village to another."

  Plodding down the trail, no more than a foot-and-mule path, worries began to crowd out fear of pursuit. I had no money. How would I eat? One cannot beg for food from people who are so poor that a handful of maize and beans was a meal. How long could I steal before I got a spear in my back? Going into indio country was more frightening to me that hiding out in a city. As I had told the fray, in a jungle I would be food. But there were no cities for me to crawl into, and I had to get off the main road.

  Ay, I was not too young for work, but I had no skills. I had two hands and two feet, which made me capable of only doing the simplest manual labor. In a land where an indio's only virtue, in Spanish eyes, was as a dray animal, a teenage boy was not going to be in demand. Not that I could work for a Spaniard. New Spain was a big place but the Spaniards in it were small in number compared to the indios. Word that a mestizo had killed Spaniards would spread like the pox. I would have to avoid all Spaniards.

  I wondered how the picaro, Guzman, would have approached the problem. When he acted as a beggar one moment and an aristocrat the next, he changed the way he walked and talked.

  My knowledge of the Aztec tongue was picked up from indios on the streets of Veracruz and had improved from mingling with so many indios at the fair. It was not perfect; but there were so many indio tongues and dialects, my speech itself would not be that suspect. However, my appearance would.

  A mestizo was not an uncommon sight in towns and along the roads. But a half-blood would be noticeable in indio villages. I was taller for my age and lighter skinned that most indios, although I had spent years under the blazing sun of the tierra caliente and most of the year I was dark enough to be taken for an indio. The height was not as noticeable as the skin color because I would be taken for being older. My feet were already encrusted with enough dirt to hide their lineage.

  My hair was not as black as most indios, so I pulled my hat down on my head. For those few times when my hair would be exposed, I would need something, perhaps the charcoal from a dead fire, to darken it, but for now my feet were driven by the necessity to keep moving. Most Spaniards would not notice the difference anyway.

  Thinking about my appearance, as my dirty feet carried me along the trail, I decided that the way I walked and talked, the language of my body movements, were most likely to give me away. A lépero raised on the streets of a town would not have the quiet, stoic attitude that characterized the indio. Our voices were louder, our feet and hands moved faster. The indios were a defeated people, conquered by the sword, decimated by disease that killed nine out of ten of them, broken and slaughtered in mines and cane fields, shackled, branded, and ruled by the whip.

  I needed to adopt that stoic indifference that ubiquitously characterized the indio—except when he was drunk. When I came into contact with people, I would have to appear quieter, less assertive.

  I walked quickly and with no sense of direction except to keep one foot in front of the other and get away from whoever might be following. As I discovered during my earlier trip alone along the Jalapa road, I knew little of how to scrounge for food or find shelter in the wilds. An hour along the path I passed fields of corn. Indios who tended them gave me the same dark looks that I had experienced on the Jalapa road. Ay, these indios were stoic but not estúpido. Like a man watching another lusting after his woman, these peóns saw the hunger in my eyes when I gazed at their tall, slender, shapely stalks of corn.

  In the city, many dark stories were told of Aztec tribes in the trackless jungles and mountains who still performed human sacrifices and ate the victims afterward. These tales were entertaining tales on a city street—not here in indio country.

  It had rained earlier and the sky said it would rain again soon. I had nothing with which to light a fire, nor was there wood dry enough to burn. It came before I had trudged another hour, first in a mist and then as a downpour. I welcomed the rain because it would hinder and discourage a search for me. But I had to find shelter.

  I came to a small village, no more than a dozen huts. I saw no one except a dark-eyed, naked child staring from a doorway, but I sensed other eyes on me. There was no place for me in this little village of indios and I kept going. If I had stopped to even beg a tortilla, I would be remembered. I wanted to be looked upon as just another person returning from the fair.

  A fray on a mule followed by four indios servants on foot passed me. I was tempted to stop and tell him my story of woe but wisely kept going. As Fray Antonio told me, not even a priest would accept the word of a lépero accused of murdering Spaniards.

  I walked through the mud of another village, rain still falling. Dogs barked at me and one chased me until I hit it with a rock. The indios raised dogs for food; and if I had had the makings of a fire, I would have butchered the mongrel and had a juicy leg of dog for dinner.

  Soon my hat was wet atop my head, my manta soaked on my shoulders, and my pants and shirt equally as soaked. My sparse clothing was well enough to weather the heat of the coast, but I shivered in the cold rain that followed me like a bad omen.

  More cornfields and thatched houses with corncribs overflowing tempted me as I went by. My stomach growled until it was too weak to complain. I came to a maguey field and looked around. Not seeing anyone, I went to one of the plants that was in the process of being harvested. I was too tired to search for a secret cache. There was probably no hidden supply anyway. A small field, it probably belonged to an indio who used it for his personal consumption and sold a little.

  The heart of the plant had already been cut out. Hollowed pieces of reed were stacked nearby. I broke off a piece to suck out the juice of the plant. I tried repeatedly until I was finally able to extract juice. I hated the sour, rancid flesh taste and smell of the unfermented juice of the maguey, but it would ward off starvation.

  The punishing rain from the gods came down harder and harder. I was forced to leave the trail to find cover under broad-leafed vegetation. I arranged the wide leaves over me and curled up in a ball. ¡Ay de mi! Again, it came to me how little I knew about the indio side of life, that part of my ancestry that had been connected to this land since time immemorial. I felt like an intruder in the land, someone the indio gods, who had retreated into the jungles and mountains, looked down on with contempt.

  No matter what I did, how I shifted, the rains found me. I shivered wet and cold and miserable until I finally slipped into a troubled sleep.

  I dreamt of dark things, things without shape but that left me with deep fear and foreboding when I awoke. It was still dark, the middle of the night. The rain had stopped. The air had turned warmer and the black night filled with fog. As I lay silently, trying to shake off the fright I still felt from the dream, I heard something moving in the bushes and my fears became ablaze.

  I listened intently, not moving a muscle, barely breathing. The sound came again. Something was moving in the brush, not far from me. The dread raised by my dreams was still with me and my first thought went to evil. The most evil thing of the night was Night Ax, the ferocious Aztec forest spirit that waylaid travelers who were foolish enough to journey after dark. Night Ax—a headless entity with a wound in its chest that opened and closed with the sound of an ax striking wood—stalked the night, seeking the unwary. People heard someone chopping wood in the dark. When they went to investigate, Night Ax chopped off their head and stuck the head inside his chest opening.

  Night Ax was
a fiend mothers used to scare children into behaving. Even I had had the threat that unless I minded, Night Ax would come and chop off my head. The threat came not from Fray Antonio, of course, but from the street people who spent the night at the House of the Poor.

  The noise I heard was not the sound of chopping wood but of something moving through the bushes, something big. As I listened I was certain that it was the sound of the New World tiger, the jaguar. A hungry jaguar was faster and as deadly as Night Ax.

  I lay frozen in fear until the sound of movement was long gone. Even the silence that followed in the wake of the sounds was eerie. I had heard stories of other creatures, snakes that could crush every bone in your body and deadly spiders as big as a man's head. Neither made a sound before it was atop of you.

  I told myself that the sounds were noises one would normally hear in the dark; the night birds, beetles, and crickets were silent because it was too wet for them to stick their heads out of their shelter, but the fear nagged me that they were silent because something bigger and more deadly was looking for a victim.

  I slept fitfully and this time my dream took form—I dreamt I had amputated the fray's head instead of the prostitute's leg.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  At the first hint of dawn I left the bushes and got back on the trail. My clothes were wet, and I needed to hurry along to get my body warm. With the rising sun, the dampness of the vegetation turned to steam. For a while I could not see more than a couple dozen feet of trail ahead. As I walked the road climbed higher, and soon I broke out of the fog and into sunshine and blue sky.

  I rubbed dirt on my face and hands to darken my skin and kept my head down when I passed people. Late in the afternoon, weak from hunger, I came to a clearing in which half a dozen different encampments were being set up for the night. They were all indio traders. Most carried their goods on their back and a few even had a donkey. There were no mules in sight. Few indios could afford a donkey, much less the larger animal that cost almost twice the price of a donkey.

  I needed food but my fear was too great to even approach the indios. These men who traveled from village to town would be more sophisticated and in possession of much more information than simple farmers. I had determined that I was going to steal maize from the next unattended field I came to and eat it raw.

  Shying away from the encampment, I started into the bushes to avoid contact with any of them when I saw a familiar figure. The Healer who used snakes to cure ills was unloading bedding and supplies from his donkey. The last time I had seen the man he had sold me a worthless piece of volcano excrement.

  I hurried over to help him unload, greeting the old man in Náhuatl. He showed no surprise at my sudden appearance or my assistance.

  "I'm happy to see you again," I said. "Do you remember me from the fair?"

  "I remember, I remember. I have been expecting you."

  "Expecting me? How did you know I would come?"

  A flock of birds chattered overhead as they flew by. The old man pointed up at them. He made a throaty noise, akin to a raspy chuckle. He gestured at me to continue the unloading. As I unloaded the donkey, he knelt and began to make a dinner fire.

  The sight of the fire brought a long, loud cry from my stomach. Any intention I had of coercing the Healer to return the money faded as I helped him prepare food. Guzman often traveled with an older person. The old indio sorcerer could no doubt use a young man to assist and serve him, both while traveling and in his act.

  Soon I had my belly full from hot tortillas, beans, and chilies. My hunger cured, I squatted beside the dying fire while the Healer smoked a pipe. The pipe was elaborately carved in the shape of an Aztec god that was a common stone figure at many old ruins—Chac-Mool, laying on his back with his belly up. The hearts torn from the breasts of sacrificial victims were thrown into the bowl he held on his belly as food for the gods.

  The bowl was now full of tobacco that the Healer lit.

  I could see that the Healer was a sorcerer with many different types of magic in his sorcerer's bag. He was, of course, a Tetla-acuicilique, he-who-recovers-the-stone, a sorcerer who removed sickness-causing objects from the body. I had seen fakers retrieve small stones from the sick on the streets of Veracruz.

  I had also heard of sorcerers who could understand the secret language of birds and could divine a person's fate from them. These sorcerers were considered preternaturally gifted and commanded high fees from indios. There was an Aztec word for those who divine by the flight and song of birds, but I did not know it.

  "I ran away from my Spanish master," I told him. "He beat me much and worked me more than a pair of mules."

  I elaborated upon the lie as only a lépero can. The old man listened silently, smoke curling from his pipe. It occurred to me that the smoke might tell him that I was lying, but the only sound that came from him was a low hum. Soon I felt the lies sticking in my throat.

  Finally he got up and handed me a blanket from a pack removed from the donkey.

  "We leave early tomorrow," he said. His face revealed nothing, but his voice was soothing. I felt both like crying and telling him the truth, but I was not sure how he would react to a tale of murder. I curled up under the blanket, relieved. More man just a full stomach, I had found a guide in the wilderness.

  Again, I mourned Fray Antonio, my father in life if not in blood. It had not been a perfect life with the fray. Drinking and fornicating were numbered among his sins. But I never doubted the fray's love.

  As I lay upon the ground, staring up at the night sky, I thought about the old matron and the killer Ramon. There was a living person who could provide the answers to their murderous rage toward me. The woman who raised me, Miahi. I assumed she was still alive. She would have the answers to what happened in the past that has erupted and spewn smoke and fire in my life. From years of listening to the fray when he had too much vino, I know she had left for the City of Mexico with some of his money and that there had been no word from her since. He called her a puta, but I did not know if that was his anger speaking or her occupation.

  Before I dozed off I saw an indio merchant pull up his pant leg and prick his leg with a sharp piece of obsidian. He rubbed some of the blood on the tip of his walking staff and let more drops fall to the ground.

  I looked over to the Healer with a question on my face. He made a low, chuckling sound like the song of certain birds. "You have much to learn about the Way of the Aztec. Tomorrow you will start learning how to walk the Path."

  THIRTY-NINE

  The next morning I heard hooves, and I went off into the bushes as if I needed to relieve myself. It was a mule train led by a Spaniard on horseback. After the last mule passed, I crept back out. I caught the eye of the Healer and turned away shamefaced.

  The other travelers who had been camped around us moved on, but the Healer paused to smoke his pipe. I assumed he was going to tell me that I could not accompany him. When we were alone in the clearing and the donkey packed, the old man disappeared into the bushes for some time. When he came back he squatted next to a flat rock and worked berries and tree bark into a dark mush.

  He motioned me over and applied the stain to my face, neck, hands, and feet. I took the rest of the paste and rubbed it on my chest. From a pack on the mule he gave me pants and a shirt that were made of a coarse maguey material to put on instead of my softer cotton clothes. An old hat of dirty straw went on my head to complete my conversion into a rural indio.

  "Women use this to color their hair," he said about the dye. "It will not wash off, but it will wear off in time."

  Still shamefaced at having tried to deceive him, or at least for having gotten caught at it, I mumbled my thanks.

  He was not finished. Taking powder out of a pouch, he had me sniff it. I sneezed repeatedly, and my eyes teared. Still, he made me sniff it several times more. My nose burned and blood throbbed in it.

  Before we set off down the road, he had me look into his mirror of polished obsidian. I
swear he had a hint of a grin on his face when he gave me the mirror.

  My nose was fat, puffed up. The fray would not have recognized me if we had passed on the street.

  "It will stay swollen for a week," the Healer said.

  "What do I do then?"

  "Sniff more."

  "I don't like that stuff. Is there something else we can do?"

  His twittering hum grew a little louder.

  "Cut off your nose."

  We loaded the donkey. The last thing that went on the pack animal was a reed basket.

  "What's in the basket?" I asked.

  "Snakes."

  I shuddered. Snakes. Eh, they could not be poisonous, otherwise the Healer couldn't do his act, handling them and even concealing them in his mouth. But who knew? Perhaps the old sorcerer had a special covenant with the Snake God that made him immune from the bite of a snake.

  He handed me the donkey's lead rope and we went down the trail.

  As we walked, the Healer told me that Spanish medicine does not work on indios.

  "We are one with the land. The spirits of our gods are everywhere, in every stone, every bird, in the trees and the grass, the maize on the stalk, the water in the lake, and the fish in the stream. The Spanish have only one god."

  "The Spanish conquered the indios." I spoke gently, out of respect for the old man's feelings.

  "They have a powerful god, one who speaks through their muskets and cannons and horses that carry a man swiftly into battle. But the Spanish conquer only what the eye can see. Our gods are still here," he pointed to the jungle, "and there and all around us. Gods that carry sickness in the air, gods that warm the earth so the maize will feed us, gods that bring rain, and angry gods that throw fire down from the sky. These the Spanish never conquered."