Aztec Autumn

by Gary Jennings

  I was immensely pleased to hear these things. The peoples mentioned by the scouts certainly were poorly armed, and just as certainly poorly organized in their uprisings. But they were helping me to keep the white man uneasy, apprehensive, perhaps awake at night. All of New Spain by now would be aware of those sporadic raids and my more devastating ones. New Spain, I hoped and believed, must be getting increasingly nervous and anxious about the continued existence of New Spain.

  Well, the Huaxtéca and others could contrive to make their sudden attack-then-flee forays almost with impunity. But I was now commanding what was practically a traveling city—warriors, slaves, women, whole families, many horses and a herd of cattle—unwieldy, to say the least, to move from battlefield to battlefield. I decided that we needed a permanent place to settle, a place stoutly defensible, whence I could lead or send either small forces or formidable forces in any direction and have a safe haven for them to return to. So I summoned various of my knights who, I knew, had done considerable traveling in these parts of The One World, and asked their advice. A knight named Pixqui said:

  “I know the very place, my lord. Our ultimate objective is an assault upon the City of Mexíco, southeast of here, and the place I am thinking of lies just about midway between here and there. The mountains called Miztóapan, ‘Where the Cuguars Lurk.’ The few white men who have ever seen them call them in their tongue the Mixton Mountains. They are rugged and craggy mountains interlaced with narrow ravines. We can find a valley in there commodious enough to accommodate our whole vast army. Even when the Spaniards learn we are there—as doubtless they will—they would have a hard time getting at us, unless they learn to fly. Lookouts atop the crags around our valley could espy any approaching enemy force. And since any such force would have to thread its way through those narrow ravines almost in single file, just a handful of our arcabuz men could stop them there, while our other warriors would rain arrows and spears and boulders down onto them from above.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “It sounds impregnable. I thank you, Knight Pixqui. Go, then, throughout the camp and spread the order for everyone to prepare to march. We will leave at dawn for the Miztóapan Mountains. And one of you find that slave girl Verónica, my scribe, and have her attend me.”

  It was the Iyac Pozonali who fetched you to me that fateful day. I had long been aware that he was often in your company, and regarding you with yearning looks. I am not oblivious to such things, and I have frequently been in love myself. I knew the iyac to be an admirable young man and—even before the revelation that transpired between us that day, Verónica—I could hardly have been jealous if it turned out that Pozonéli found favor in your eyes, as well.

  Anyway, you had already written your account of Nochéztü’s assault on the estancias—since you had been present there—so now I dictated the account of my own much more difficult assault on the trading post, you writing down all the words foregoing here, concluding with the decision to move to the Miztóapan. When I had done, you murmured:

  “I am happy, my lord, to hear that you intend soon to attack the City of Mexíco. I hope you obliterate it as you did Tonalá.”

  “So do I. But why do you?”

  “Because that will also obliterate the nunnery where I lived after my mother died.”

  “That convent was in the City of Mexíco? You never mentioned its location before. I know of only one nunnery there. It was very near the Mesón de San José, where I myself once lived.”

  “That is the one, my lord.”

  A somewhat disturbing but not dismaying suspicion was already dawning on me.

  “And you hold some grudge against those nuns, child? I have often meant to ask. Why did you flee that convent and become a homeless wanderer, finally to find refuge among our slave contingent?”

  “Because the nuns were so cruel, first to my mother, then to me.”

  “Explain.”

  “After her Church schooling, when my mother had had sufficient instruction in that religion, and had attained the age required, she was confirmed as a Christian and immediately took what they call holy orders—became a bride of Christ, as they say—and took residence in the convent as a novice nun. However, not many months later, it was discovered that she was pregnant. She was stripped of her habit and viciously whipped and evicted in disgrace. As I have said, she never told even me who it was that made her pregnant” You added bitterly, “I doubt that it was her husband Christ.”

  I pondered awhile, then asked, “Might your mother’s name have been Rebeca?”

  “Yes,” you said, astonished. “How could you possibly know that, my lord?”

  “I briefly attended that same Church school, so I know—some little—of her story. But I left the city about that time, so I never knew the whole story. After Rebeca’s eviction, what became of her?”

  “Bearing a fatherless bastard inside her, I daresay she was ashamed to go home to her own mother and father—her white patrón. For a time, she earned a precarious living, doing menial odd jobs about the markets, literally living on the streets. I was birthed on a bed of rags in some alley somewhere. I suppose I am fortunate to have survived the experience.”

  “And then?”

  “Now she had two mouths to feed. I blush to say it, my lord, but she went—what you call in your language ‘astraddle the road.’ And, she being a mulata—well, you can imagine—she could hardly solicit rich Spanish nobles or even prosperous pochtéca merchants. Only market porters and Moro slaves and the like—entertaining them in squalid little inns and even in back streets outdoors. Toward the end—I could not have been more than four years old—I remember having to watch her do these things.”

  “Toward the end. What was the end?”

  “Again I blush, my lord. From some one of her straddlings, she contracted the nanéua, the disease of uttermost shame and revulsion. When she knew she was dying, she went again to the convent, leading me by the hand. Under the rules of that Christian order, the nuns could not refuse to take me in. But of course they knew my history, so I was despised by all, and I had no hope of being accorded a novitiate. They simply used me as a servant, a slave, a drudge. Of all the work that needed doing, I did the lowliest, but at least they gave me bed and board.”

  “And education?”

  “As I have told you, my mother had imparted to me much of the knowledge that she herself had earlier acquired. And I have some facility at being observant and attentive. So, even while I labored, I watched and listened and absorbed what the nuns were teaching their novices and other respectable young girls in residence there. When finally I decided I had learned all that they could, however viciously, teach me there… and when the drudgery and beatings had become intolerable… that was when I ran away.”

  “You are one supremely remarkable girl, Verónica. I am immeasurably glad that you survived your wanderings and came at last to—to us.”

  I pondered some more. How best to say this?

  “From what little acquaintance I had with my schoolmate Rebeca, I believe it was her mother who gave you your white blood, and her father would have been a Moro, not some Spanish patrón. But that does not matter. What matters is that your father—whoever he was—I believe to have been an indio, a Mexícatl or Aztécatl. Thus you have three bloods in your veins, Verónica. That combination, I suppose, accounts for your uncommon comeliness. Now, mind you, I can only surmise the rest from the few hints dropped by Rebeca. But, if I am right, your paternal grandfather was a high noble of the Mexíca, a man brave and wise and truly noble in all respects. A man who defied the Spanish conquerors to the very end of his life. His contribution to your nature would account for your uncommon intelligence, and especially your astounding facility with words and writing. If I am right, that grandfather of yours was a Mexícatl named Mixtli—more properly Mixtzin—Lord Mixtli.”

  XXXI

  OOUR ARMY’S PROGRESS across the countryside was even slower now than before, because of our having to herd along t
he stupid, stubborn, shambling, recalcitrant cattle. Because my warriors were becoming understandably restive—I having turned them from warriors into mere escorts and herdsmen—I halted the army once along the way to give them an opportunity for bloodshed, raping and looting.

  That was at what had formerly been the Otomí people’s chief village, named N’t Tahí, but was now a town of estimable size, populated almost entirely by Spaniards and their usual retinues of servants and slaves, and renamed by them Zelalla. We left it as scorched and ruined and leveled as Tonalá, most of the leveling having been done by the Purémpe women’s granadas. And we left it unpopulated, except by corpses—hairless corpses, courtesy of the Yaki.

  I am gratified to report that my warriors departed from Zelalla with much more dignity and much less flamboyance than when they had departed from Tonalá—that is, not bedecked and bedizened in Spanish skirts and bonnets and mantillas and such. Indeed, for some while now, they had been getting ashamed—even the women and the most ignorant Moros—of all those gauds and baubles and steel breastplates. Besides their increasing embarrassment at wearing such unwarriorlike garb, they found the clothes dangerously constrictive in battle, and uncomfortably heavy even to march in, especially when sodden by rain. So all had been shedding those white men’s garments and ornaments, piece by piece, along the way—everything except the warm woolens usable as blankets and mantles—and we again looked like the true indio army that we were.

  In time, an excruciatingly long time, we did reach those Mountains Where the Cuguars Lurk, and they were exactly as Knight Pixqui had described them. With him in the lead, we wove our tortuous way through a maze of those narrow ravines, some only wide enough for a single horseman (or cow) to pass through, one after another. And eventually we did emerge into a not broad but lengthy valley, well watered, spacious enough for us all to camp comfortably, and even sufficiently green to provide grazing for our animals.

  When we had settled down and gratefully rested for two or three days, I summoned to me the Iyac Pozonéli and my darling scribe Verónica, and told them:

  “I have a mission for you two. I think it will not be a hazardous mission, though it will entail arduous travel. However”—I smiled—“I think also that you will not mind a long journey in close company with one another.” You blushed, Verónica, and so did Pozonéli.

  I went on, “It is certain that everyone in the City of Mexíco, from the Viceroy Mendoza down to the least market slave, knows of our insurrection and our depredations. But I should like to know how much they know of us, and what measures they may be taking to defend the city against us or to sally out and find and fight us in the open. What I want you to do is this. Go on horseback as fast and as far southeastward as you can, stopping only when you decide you are getting perilously close to any possible Spanish outposts. By my reckoning, that will probably be somewhere in the eastern part of Michihuácan, where it borders on the Mexíca lands. Leave the horses with any hospitable native who can tend them. From there, go on foot and dressed in the roughest of peasant garb. Take with you bags of some kind of marketable goods—fruits, vegetables, whatever you can procure. You may find the city solidly ringed about with sharp steel, but it must let supplies and commodities in and out And I think the guards will hardly be suspicious of a young peasant farmer and—shall we say?—his little cousin, headed for the market.”

  You both blushed again. I continued:

  “Just do not, Verónica, speak your Spanish. Do not speak at all. You, Pozonéli, I trust can talk your way past any guard or other challenger by mumbling Náhuatl and the few Spanish words you know, and gesticulating like some clumsy rustic.”

  “We will get into the city, Tenamáxtzin, I kiss the earth to that,” he said. “Have you specific orders for us, once we are there?”

  “I want both of you mainly to look and to listen. You, Iyac, have proven yourself a competent military man. You should have no trouble in recognizing whatever defenses the city is preparing for itself, or whatever preparations it is making in the way of an offensive against us. Meanwhile, go about the streets and the markets and engage the common folk in conversation. I wish to know their mood, their temper and their opinion of our insurrection, because I know from experience that some, perhaps many, will side with the Spaniards on whom they have come to depend. Meanwhile, also, there is one Aztécatl man—a goldsmith, elderly by now—you are to visit personally.” I gave him directions. “He was my very first ally in this campaign, so I want him warned that we will be coming. He may wish to hide his gold or even leave the city with it. And, of course, pass on to him my fond regards.”

  “All will be done as you say, Tenamáxtzin. And Verónica? Am I to stay protectively close by her?”

  “No need, I think. Verónica, you are an exceedingly resourceful girl. I want you merely to get within hearing distance of any two or more Spaniards conversing on the streets, in the markets, wherever, and eavesdrop—especially if they are in uniform or otherwise look like important persons. They will scarcely suspect that you can understand their talk, and it may be that you will learn even more than Iyac Pozondli about the Spaniards’ intended responses to our intended assault.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “I have also one specific instruction for you. In all that city, there is but a single white man to whom I owe the same warning that Pozonéli will give to the goldsmith. His name is Alonso de Molina—remember it—and he is a high official at the Cathedral.”

  “I know where it is, my lord.”

  “Do not go and speak that warning to him directly. He is, after all, a Spaniard. He might well seize you and hold you hostage. He most certainly would, if he should remotely suspect that you are my—my personal scribe. So write the warning on a piece of paper, fold it, put Alonso’s name on the outside and—without speaking, just with gestures—give it to any lowly churchman you find loitering about the Cathedral. Then get away from there as fast as you can. And stay away.”

  “Yes, my lord. Anything else?”

  “Just this. The most important order I can give you both. When you feel you have learned all you can, get safely out of the city, get safely back to your horses and get safely back here. Both of you. If, Iyac, you should dare to return here without Verónica… well…”

  “We shall safely return, Tenamáxtzin, I kiss the earth to that. If some unforeseen evil befalls, and only one of us returns, it will be Verónica. To that, I kiss the earth four hundred times!”

  When they were gone, the rest of us rather luxuriated in our new surroundings. We certainly lived well. There was more than enough cow meat to eat, of course, but our hunters ranged about the valley anyway, just to provide variety—deer and rabbits and quail and ducks and other game. They even slew two or three of the cuguars for which the mountains were named, though cuguar meat is tough to chew and not very tasty. Our fishers found the mountain streams abounding in a fish—I do not know what it is called—that made a delectable change from our mostly meat meals. Our foragers found all sorts of fruits, vegetables, roots and such. The plundered jugs of octli, chápari and Spanish wines were reserved to myself and my knights, but we now drank only sparingly of them. All we lacked was something really sweet, like the coconuts of my homeland. I do believe that many of our people—particularly the numerous slave families we had freed and brought along—would have been content to live in that valley for the rest of their lives. And they probably could have done so, unmolested by the white men, even unknown to the white men, to the end of time.

  I do not mean to say that we all simply lazed and vegetated there. Though I slept at night between silken Spanish sheets and under a fine woolen Spanish blanket—feeling as if I were a Spanish Marqués or viceroy—I was busy all day long. I kept my scouts roaming the countryside beyond the mountains, and reporting back to me. I strode about the valley, as a sort of inspector-in-general, because I had ordered Nochéztli and our other knights to train many more of our warriors to ride the many new horses we had a
cquired and to employ properly the many new arcabuces we had acquired.

  When one of my scouts came to report that not far to the west of our mountains was a crossroads Spanish trading post—similar to the one we had earlier vanquished—I decided to try an experiment I took a medium-sized force of Sobáipuri warriors, because they had not yet had the pleasure of participating in any of our battles, and because they had become proficient both at riding and at using the arcabuz, and I asked Knight Pixqui to accompany me, and we rode westward to that trading post

  I intended not really a battle, but only a feint. We galloped, hooting and howling and discharging our arcabuces, out of the woods into the open ground before the palisaded post. And, as before, from the ports in that palisade, thunder-tubes spewed a spray of lethal scraps and fragments, but I was careful to keep us out of their range, and only one of our men suffered a minor shoulder wound. We remained out there, dancing our horses back and forth, making our threatening war cries and extravagantly threatening gestures, until the stockade gate opened and a troop of mounted soldiers came galloping out. Then, pretending to be intimidated, we all turned and galloped back the way we had come. The soldiers pursued us, and I made sure that we stayed ahead of them, but always in their sight. We led them all the way back to the ravine from which we had left our valley.

  Still taking care that the soldiers should not lose us in those mazes, we baited them through one very narrow notch where I had already posted arcabuz men on either side. Just as Knight Pixqui had predicted, the first discharges of those arcabuces brought down enough soldiers and their horses to block the passage for all the others behind. And those, milling about in confusion, were in a very short time destroyed by spears, arrows and boulders propelled by other warriors I had posted on the heights above. My Sobáipuri of course were pleased to confiscate the weapons and the surviving horses of all those dead Spaniards. But I was mainly pleased to have proven that our hideaway was indeed invulnerable. We could hold out here forever, if need be, against any force sent to assail us.