Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  “I expected that,” I said. “I will be more circumspect henceforth.”

  “One other thing,” said Pochotl. “I still regard your idea of revolution as foolish in the extreme. Consider, Tenamáxtli. You know how long it has taken me to make this one arcabuz. I believe it will work as warranted. But do you expect me or anyone to construct the thousands you would need to equal the weaponry of the white men?”

  “No,” I said. “No more need be made. If this one works as warranted, I shall use it to—well—acquire another from some Spanish soldier. Then use those two for the acquisition of two more. And so on.” Pochotl and Citláli stared at me, either aghast or struck with admiration, I could not tell. “But now,” I cried, jubilant, “let us celebrate this auspicious occasion!”

  I went out and bought a jar of the best octli, and we all drank happily of it—even little Ehécatl was given some—and we adults got sufficiently inebriated that, come midnight, Pochotl bedded down in the front room rather than risk encountering a patrol. And Citláli and I reeled and giggled as we went to our pallet in the other room, there to continue the celebration in an even more enthusiastic fashion.

  For my next series of experiments I made only clay balls no bigger than quails’ eggs, each containing a mere thumbnail’s measure of pólvora. These all burst asunder with little more noise than a castor pod makes when it explodes its seeds, so the local children soon lost interest in those, too. But they enjoyed a different amusement I gave them—asking them to be lookouts for me, prowling all the streets around, to run and warn me if they espied a patrolling soldier anywhere. Since I already knew I had made a satisfactory pólvora and had observed its nicely destructive behavior when ignited in tight confinement, what I was trying now was to find a way to set off a pólvora-packed ball, small or large, from a distance—some means more reliable than laying a trail of loose powder.

  I have mentioned the manner in which our people generally smoked our picíetl: rolled inside what we called a poquíetl, a tube of reed or paper that slowly burned along with the herb—not in a nonburning clay pipe, as the Spaniards do.

  Occasionally we, and the white men, too, liked to mix with the picíetl some other ingredient—powdered cacao, certain seeds, dried blossoms—to change its taste or fragrance. What I did now was to roll numbers of very thin paper poquíeltin that contained the herb mixed with varying traces of pólvora. An ordinary poquíetl burns slowly as a smoker puffs on it, but is likely to extinguish itself when laid down for a while. I thought the addition of pólvora would keep an unattended tube alight but still let it burn only slowly.

  And I was right Trying these tiny paper poquíeltin in varying circumferences and lengths and content of picíetl plus pólvora, I eventually hit cm the right combination. Inserted into the quill-hole of one of my miniature pottery balls, such a poquíetl could be lighted and would burn for a time—brief or prolonged, depending on its length-—before reaching the hole and demolishing the ball with that clap of noise. There was no way I could accurately time such things—for instance, to make a number of balls burst simultaneously. But I could make and trim a poquíetl to a length that, when lighted, would give me ample time to be far away from the scene when it burned down to the ignition hole. I could also be sure that no vagrant breeze or the footstep of some passerby would disrupt its burning, as could so easily happen with a loose powder trail.

  To verify that, I next did something so daring, hazardous and downright wicked that I did not even tell Citláli about it beforehand. I made another fist-size, pólvora-packed clay ball and inserted into its quill-hole a lengthy poquíetl. On the next sunny day, I put it into my waist pouch and walked from the house to the Traza, to the building I had long ago identified as the barracks of the lesser-ranking Spanish soldiers. There was, as always, a sentry cm duty at the entrance, armed and armored. Looking as stupid and inoffensive as I could manage, I sauntered past him to the corner of the building, and there stopped and knelt as if to dislodge a pebble from my sandal.

  I was able, both quickly and silently, to light the protruding end of the poquíetl, then to wedge the hard ball into the space between the corner stone and the street’s cobblestones. I glanced at the guard; he was paying me no attention; nor was anyone else on the crowded street; so I stood up and sauntered on my way. I had gone at least a hundred paces before I heard the bellow of the blast. Even at that distance, I also heard the whizzing of the flying shards, and one of them actually tapped me lightly on my back. I turned and looked, and was gratified to see the commotion I had caused.

  There was no visible damage to the building, except for a black, smoking blotch on its side, but two people were lying supine and bleeding near it—a man in Spanish dress and a tamémi whose yoke lay beside him. From out of the barracks came scampering not only the sentry but also numerous other soldiers, some of them only half-dressed, but all carrying weapons. Four or five of the indios on the street began running, from sheer terror at this unprecedented occurrence, and the soldiers went pelting after them. So I casually returned, to join the numerous others who stood about and gawked, obviously innocent of any involvement

  The Spaniard on the ground writhed and moaned, still alive, and a soldier brought the barracks medico to attend him. The unoffending tamémi, however, was quite dead. I was sorry, but I felt sure that the gods would regard him as having fallen in battle, and would treat him kindly. This had not really been a battle, of course, but I had struck a second blow against the enemy. Now, after two such inexplicable happenings, the white men had to have realized that they were suddenly beset by subversion, and they had to be disconcerted, perhaps even frightened, by that realization. As I had promised my mother and uncle, I had become the worm in the coyacapúli fruit, eating it from within.

  During the rest of that day, the soldiers—every one in the city, I think—fanned out among the colación neighborhoods, searching houses, market stalls, the bags or bundles carried by native men and women, even making some of those strip off their clothes. But they gave that up after only the one day, their officers probably having decided that if illicit pólvora existed anywhere, it could easily be hidden (as I had hidden mine), and that the pólvora’s separate ingredients, if any could be found, were totally innocuous and easily explainable. Anyway, they never got to our house, and I simply sat back and enjoyed the white men’s discomfiture.

  The next day, however, it was my turn to be discomfited, when a messenger came from the notarius Alonso—who knew where I lived—bidding me to appear before him at my earliest convenience. I dressed in my Spanish attire and went to the Cathedral and greeted him, again trying to look stupid and inoffensive. Alonso did not return my greeting, but gazed morosely at me for several moments before saying:

  “Do you still think of me every time you use your burning-glass, Juan Británico?”

  “Why, of course, Cuatl Alonso. As you said, it is a most useful—”

  “Do not call me ‘cuatl’ any more,” he snapped. “I fear we are no longer twins, brothers, even friends. I also fear that you have shed all pretense of being a Christian, meek and mild, respectful and obedient to that creed and to your superiors.”

  I said boldly, “I never was meek or mild, and I never have regarded Christians as my superiors. Do not call me Juan Británico any more.”

  Alonso glowered, but held his temper. “Hear me now. I am not officially involved in the army’s hunt for the perpetrator of certain recent disturbances of the peace of this city. But I am as concerned as any decent and dutiful citizen should be. I do not accuse you personally, but I know you have a wide acquaintance among your fellows. I believe you could find the villain responsible for those acts as quickly as you found for us that goldsmith when we needed one.”

  Still boldly, I said, “I am no more a traitor to my own people, notarius, than I am obedient to yours.”

  He sighed and said, “So be it, then. We once were friends, and I will not directly denounce you to the authorities. But I give you
fair warning. From the instant you leave this room, you will be followed and watched. Your every move, your every encounter, every conversation, every sneeze will be monitored and noted and reported. Soon or later, you will betray either yourself or another, perhaps even some person dear to you. If you do not go to the burning stake, be assured that someone will.”

  “That threat,” I said, “I cannot abide. You give me little choice but to depart from this city forever.”

  “I think that would be best,” he said coldly, “for you, for the city and for all who have ever been close to you.”

  He dismissed me forthwith, and one of the Cathedral’s tame indio servants made no attempt to be unobtrusive as he trailed me all the way home.

  XII

  I HAD RESOLVED to quit the City of Mexíco even before Alonso so coldly recommended that I do so. That was because I had despaired of ever raising an army of rebellion from among the city’s inhabitants. Like the late Netzlin—and now Pochotl—the local men were too dependent on their white masters to want to rise up against them. Even had they wanted to, they were by now so enervated and unwarlike that they would not have dared to make the attempt. If I was to recruit any men like myself, resentful of the Spaniards’ domination and bellicose enough to challenge it, I must retrace my journey hither. I must go again northward, into the unconquered lands.

  “You are more than welcome to come with me,” I told Citláli. “I truly have treasured the blessing of your nearness, your support and—well, everything you have meant to me. But you are a woman, and some years older than I, so you might find that I set too brisk a pace on the road. Especially since you would have to be leading Ehécatl by the hand.”

  “You are definitely going, then,” she murmured unhappily.

  “But not forever, despite what I said to the notarius. I fully intend to come back here. At the head of an armed force, I trust, sweeping the white men from every field and forest, every village, every city, including this one. However, that cannot be soon. So I will not ask you to wait for me, dear Citláli. You are still an exceedingly handsome woman. You may attract another good and loving husband, aquín ixnentla? At any rate, Ehécatl is old enough now for you to take the child with you when you tend the market stall. With what you earn there, and with the sum we have put by, and without my being an extra mouth to feed—”

  She interrupted, “I would wait, dearest Tenamáxtli, however long. But how can I hope that you will ever be back? You will be risking your life out there.”

  “As I would, Citláli, even if I stayed here. As you have been risking yours. If I had been caught in the crime of experimenting with the pólvora, you would have been dragged to the stake along with me.”

  “I risked that because it was a chance we were taking together. I would go anywhere, do anything, if only we did it together.”

  “But there is Ehécatl to consider …”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Then, suddenly, she burst into tears and demanded, “Why are you so determined to pursue this folly? Why can you not resign yourself to recognize reality, and bear with it, as others have done?”

  “Why?” I echoed, dumbfounded.

  “Ayya, I know what the white men did to your father, but—”

  “That is not reason enough?” I snapped. “I can still see him burning!”

  “And they slew your friend, my husband. But what have they done to youl Tenamáxtli, you have suffered neither injury nor insult, beyond those few words spoken long ago by the mesón friar. Every other white man you have mentioned, you have said only good things of him. The kindness of the man Molina, the other teachers who gave of their knowledge, even that soldier who started you on your quest for the pólvora…”

  “Crumbs from their table! The richly laden table that used to be ours! Whether my tonáli dictates that I shall succeed in restoring that table to our people, I do not know. But I am sure it bids me try. I refuse to believe that I was born to settle for crumbs. And I am wagering my life on that.”

  Citláli sighed so deeply that she seemed to shrink a bit. “How much longer will I have you by me? Or how little longer? When do you plan to go?”

  “Not immediately, for I will not slink away, like a techíchi dog, with its head hung low and its tail tucked under. I want to leave something for the City of Mexíco—for all of New Spain—to remember me by. And what I have in mind, Citláli, is one final crime that you and I can commit together.”

  I cannot refute what Citláli had said: that I myself had never had pain, deprivation, imprisonment or even indignity inflicted on me by the Spaniards. But, during my years in the city, I had met or become aware of a multitude of my fellows who had. There were, as I have mentioned, the onetime warriors branded with the G, and the other slaves branded with the mark of their owners. There were the wretched, drunken men and women I had seen beaten and minced to death by the patrols, as Netzlin had been. And I had seen the once-pure blood of our race diluted, dirtied and disgraced in the varicolored mongrel offspring of the Spaniards and Moros.

  Also I knew—not from personal experience, I rejoice to say, but from those very few who had somehow escaped—the horrors of the obrajes. These were vast, stone-walled, iron-gated workshops where cotton or wool was washed, carded, spun, dyed and woven into fabrics. The obrajes had first been established by the Spanish corregidores as a means of making a profit from convicted criminals. Criminal indios, I mean. Rather than just being locked up in idleness, such miscreants were put to that filthy, dreary and laborious work (and a cruelly demeaning work, for a man). They were paid no wages at all, were given only squalid quarters and no privacy whatever, were poorly fed, barely clothed, never let to bathe—and never let to leave the obraje until the expiration of their prison sentence, which few of them lived long enough to enjoy.

  And the obrajes were profitable, so much so that individual Spaniards set up their own, and were freely given state prisoners to work in them, until eventually there were not enough prisoners to go around. At which time, the obraje owners began wheedling our people into handing over their children. Those boys and girls, the owners promised, would be apprenticed to learn a trade that they could follow in later life, and meanwhile the parents would be saved the cost of their upbringing. Worse yet, the abbots and abbesses of Christian orphan asylums, such as that at the Refugio de Santa Brígida, were easily persuaded to give their indio wards a choice, as soon as the children were old enough to understand: either take holy orders, to become a Christian nun or friar, or be damned to go and live and labor in an obraje. (The orphans of mixed blood, such as Rebeca Canalluza, were exempted from that damnation, because the Christian asylum-keepers could not be sure that some Spanish parent might not someday come looking to acknowledge and claim them.)

  Whether or not the enslaved criminals had been deservedly convicted, those were at least grown men. The conscripted orphans and “apprentices” were not. But, just like the criminals, those boys and girls were almost never seen outside the obraje gates again. Like the criminals, they were worked unmercifully, often to death, and they suffered degradations and defilements that the grown men were spared. The obrajes were guarded and overseen not by their Spanish owners, but by cheaply hired Moros and mulatos. Those creatures delighted in showing their superiority to mere indio rustico children by beating and starving them, when they were not repeatedly forcing ahuilnéma upon the girls and cuilónyotl upon the boys.

  The Christian corregidores and alcaldes and the Christian owners of obrajes and the converted-Christian native tepísque all colluded in these atrocities, and the Christian Church connived at them, for their own aggrandizement, of course, but for another reason as well. The Spaniards had firmly convinced themselves that every single one of our people was a lazy, shiftless layabout who would never work unless compelled by imminent punishment, starvation or violent death.

  That was not and never had been true. In the old days, our able-bodied men and women had often been commandeered by their lords—whether loc
al nobles or Revered Speakers—to do unpaid labor, much of it drudging, on many a public project. In this city, for example, those had ranged from the building of the Chapultépec aqueduct to the erection of the Great Temple of Tenochtítlan. And our people did such work willingly, eagerly, because they regarded communal labor as just another way of getting together for cheerful social intercourse. They would undertake any task assigned to them if it was presented—not as a task—as an opportunity for convivial mingling. The Spanish masters could profitably have taken advantage of that trait in our people, but they preferred to use the lash and the sword and the prison and the obraje and the threat of the burning stake.

  I grant that there were some good and admirable men among the whites—Alonso de Molina, for one, and others whom I would meet in time to come. There was even one among the black Moros who would become my staunch ally, friend and fellow adventurer. And then there was you, mi querida Verónica. But of our encounter I will tell in its place.

  I grant, too, that my hoped-for overthrow of the white men’s regnancy was in truth intended, at least partly, as my personal revenge for the murder of my father. My aim may also have been partly ignoble—in that I, like any young man, would have gloried in being acclaimed by the populace as a conquering hero, or, if I died in the striving, being exuberantly welcomed by all the warriors of the past when I arrived in the Tonatíucan afterworld. However, I maintain that, even more, my aim was to upraise all our downtrodden peoples and to bring our One World back from oblivion.