Aztec Blood

by Gary Jennings

  "Amigos, heed my call. Gather around and you will see and hear regal wonderments, oft performed for the crowned heads of Europe, the Infidel sultans of Arabia and Persia, and the heathen emperors of Asia.

  "Remember a day in time when our proud land was overrun by the ravaging Moors. There were naught but a few small kingdoms where our lords held sway, and even these paid tribute to the Moors. That bitter tariff was not remitted in the gold dug from the earth but in the guise of gold-haired maidens, the fairest virgins in the land, whom each year the depraved Moorish king and his notables ruthlessly ravished."

  With histrionic hands and wonder-wide eyes, the dwarf began his lurid tale.

  "There was no Cid, no hero in our land, but, ah, there was a maiden who forswore the lewd lust of Moorish fiends. In alabaster garb, golden tresses trailing down her back, she burst into the council room where the Spanish king held court with his knights. Confronting them with their cowardly acts, she called them false men who sat on their swords while the flower of Spain's honor was desecrated and defiled."

  The diminutive thespian eyed the intense men and outraged women now assembled.

  "Do you know what this fair maid told them? She said to them that if they lacked the manhood to face the Moor, let women brandish Spanish steel and fight the Infidel in their stead."

  Every man in the crowd—as well as youths such as I—raged at the shame of those knights. Spain's greatest treasure was the honor of her men—and the sanctity of her women. To give our women to our enemies as tribute? Ay! Better to rip out my tongue, gouge my eyes, cut off my cojones.

  "Now, gather around all, as the dancers of La Nómadas sing for you 'The Maiden's Tribute.' "

  While the crowd of men were primarily interested in the dancing women, and especially the flashes of thigh the women showed when they lifted their skirts, I saw that the dwarf kept a close eye out for the Inquisitors and other priests wandering around the fair, even as the two men circulated with a hat to collect money. Meanwhile the women dancers sang:

  If the Moors must have tribute, make men your tribute money;

  Send idle drones to tease them within their hives of honey;

  For when 'tis paid with maidens, from every maid there springs

  Some five or six strong soldiers to serve the Moorish king.

  It is but little wisdom to keep our men at home;—

  While the words of the song were innocent enough, the body language of the women, who occasionally paused in a whispered aside to describe what a Moor would do to a Spanish virgin, was enough to get them arrested.

  They serve but to get señoritas, who when their time is come,

  Must go, like all the others, the moor's bed to sleep in;—

  In all the rest they're useless, and nowise worth the keeping.

  'Tis we have manly courage within the breasts of women,

  But you caballeros are all hare-hearted,

  Thus spoke that fearless señorita—

  The women dancing in front of me flung their skirts above their waists. They wore nothing beneath those swirling garments, and I gaped to glimpse that secret garden between their legs, which I'd so recently come to know. Of course, the men in the audience went wild and hurled their money into the hats.

  What was it about Spanish women that drove Spanish men wild? Spanish men can see a naked india or africana woman and look through them as if they were never there or see them merely as receptacles for their lust. But one brief glance at a Spanish woman's ankle or a furtive glimpse of her delectable throatline, and these same men are beside themselves with rapture. And, of course, these two actresses displayed more than a little ankle.

  "Pssss!" the dwarf hissed. "Cho!"

  The dancers even drew the attention of the two priests. Pushing into the crowd, the women dropped their skirts and sang "The Song of the Galley," a tune about a woman waiting for her lover, a prisoner of the Moors, to return.

  You mariners of Spain,

  Bend strongly on your oars,

  And bring my love again,

  For he lies among the Moors!

  You galleys fairly built

  Like castles on the sea,

  Oh, great will be your guilt,

  If you bring him not to me.

  The wind is blowing strong,

  The breeze will aid your oars;

  Oh, swiftly fly along—

  For he lies among the Moors.

  The sweet breeze of the sea

  Cools every cheek but mine;

  Hot is its breath to me,

  As I graze upon the brine,

  Lift up, lift up your sail,

  And bend upon your oars;

  Oh, lose not the fair gale,

  For he lies among the Moors!

  It is a narrow strait,

  I see the blue hills over;

  Your coming I'll await,

  And thank you for my lover.

  To San Maria I will pray,

  While ye bend upon your oars;

  'Twill be a sacred day,

  If you bring him from the Moors.

  No one reproached them for their lusty voices or whirling skirts, not even the two frays. Nor were these actors the same drab drudges in servant's livery disembarking from the treasure fleet. The traveling troupe had transformed itself. Gaudily attired, I realized now that their serving garb had been a disguise. The dockside inspectors diverted passengers of low character to Manila, almost certainly a death sentence, and actors were regarded as people of low, corrupting character. From time to time troupes had passed through Veracruz, and the fray had observed, "Not only does the king deny them entry here, in Spain when they die, the Church denies them entry into consecrated ground."

  "They fear actors will corrupt the dead?" I asked, innocently.

  "Actors, to the Church, are picaros by another name."

  After my clandestine reading of Guzman de Alfarache, I knew what he meant. I also understood why I was drawn to these rogues. True, their lives were disreputable, but so was mine; but unlike me, they had fun, flair, and flamboyance. They never worked and weren't afraid. People applauded them enthusiastically and put money in their hats. I received for my bone-cracking contortions little more than kicks and derision. They looked forward to travel, adventure, and lascivious ladies. I would die in a gutter or a slave labor mine. They would die in featherbeds between the legs of a sensuous señorita with a jealous rival banging on the door. The most I could hope for when my end came was a belly full of pulque, a comfortable bridge to sleep under, and a clap-stinking puta to ease my pain.

  But the picaros lived lives of high excitement, free as birds. Unlike the lépero, doomed to degradation by tainted blood, a picaro might pass as a duke—might become a duke! Picaros were not predetermined by blood. They were not simply born to their allotted fate; picaros were made. They did not gravitate to a structured life of perennial servitude. They did not die in the dark and the dust of silver mine cave-ins, lost, afraid, abandoned, alone. They relished their free will. They walked, talked, and addressed others, even their betters, with familiarity, a hopeful heart, irreverence, and most of all no fear. The picaro faced life with a free soul and a light step—even when he was stealing your purse or cutting your throat.

  And picaras! Oh! I had never seen such women before! Their eyes were bold; their blood was hot. While there were women of every color and blood in New Spain, mestizas, indias, mulattas, africanas, and españolas who were as lovely to behold, none of these women showed any freedom in their actions, not even the flamboyant mulattas who were permitted to wrap themselves in garish garb of rainbow hues but would never think of changing their station and state, of challenging their class, their caste, the shackles of their sex.

  All of these women may dress and adorn themselves up like scintillating flowers to please a man, but behind their manner and laugh, they know the man they flirt with is superior. But these picara women, who lifted their skirts, exposed their sex, and sang of women who mocked men and sla
ughtered Moors while their men cowered at home, these women were afraid of nothing. Not a man in that audience, unless his mind was reeling with vino, would have dared grab one of them. Nor would they have permitted it. They knew they were equal to these men—and more.

  When women became more important to me than magicians and sword swallowers, the kind of woman who knew her own strength would be the one to draw me. Including the silken muchacha in Veracruz for whom I swirled my manta as a cape. Although she was still young, her eyes had bespoken the same fiery freedom as the dancers.

  Often such women connoted danger, and—fool that I was—I knew even then I was drawn to them as to the edge of a smoking volcano, which could flare infernally at any time.

  Ay! That was then and this is now. If the innocent fifteen year old knew then what this grown man with the quill in his hands knows today in prison, Dios mio, I could have lined my pockets with gold and my bed with women.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When the women finished their respectful song and dance under the watchful eyes of the priests, the dwarf addressed the crowd again.

  "For the special enjoyment of all, in the hour before darkness a special performance of a comedia will be performed."

  A stir went through the crowd. A comedia was a play—a comedy, tragedy, or adventure story. I had never seen a play, and my heart jumped into my throat. I wondered if it was the same play they had announced in Veracruz.

  "If you want to see a pirate punished, a good man's honor restored, come to the comedia." He waved his hand grandly in the direction of the man named Mateo, who had slipped through the crowd to stand beside the dwarf's barrel. "This comedia comes from the hand of that great master of the stage whose works have been performed in Madrid, Seville, and before royalty, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo."

  Mateo took off his hat and made one of his grand sweeping bows.

  "The admission to this masterpiece," the dwarf said, "a mere reale."

  Ha! I had two reales in my pocket, obtained from the autor of the comedia itself. I could feast like a king and see the play. God was good. All is well in my life, I thought, momentarily forgetting that there was a snake in every paradise.

  My wandering took me into the section where indio sorcerers and magicians were selling their magic, reveling in the excitement as I rubbed shoulders with priests and nuns, whores and dons, vaqueros and indios, spurred ones and lowly half-castes, rugged soldados and perfumed dandies.

  I paused and watched a soothsayer predicting the future for people—an evil-looking, long-haired indio in a sinfully scarlet manta. Ugly slashes scarred both cheeks, and his face was streaked with jagged lightning flashes of flame yellow and blood crimson. He sat crosslegged on a blanket, shaking a dozen small bone fragments in a human skull, then throwing them across an indio blanket as if he were casting lots. From their pattern, he divined the course of a life or the answer to a prayer. I had seen tomorrow-tellers read their bones before on the streets of Veracruz. An indio now asked the magician to foretell his father's fate after a serious accident.

  "On the way here, my father slipped off the mountain path and fell. He cannot walk and refuses to eat. He simply lies on his back in great pain."

  The soothsayer betrayed no concern or care, questioning him dispassionately only about his father's Aztec birth name and sign.

  The man handed him a coin. The fortune teller rattled the bones in the skull and threw them on a dirty blanket. The pieces formed an obliquely oblong pattern.

  "The shape of a grave," he told the indio. "Your father will soon pass beyond this life's travail."

  I could not help but snort my skepticism. The old faker turned and gave me a menacing stare. Had I been an indio boy, I would have withered under his evil eye; but I was a lépero with a classical education—no, a picaro, which was how I now thought of myself. This new vision of myself as a gentleman-rogue gave my curiosity a freer rein. I should have walked away without tempting fate—and the grave's dark powers, which he clearly understood—but now I wanted to know more. So like Odysseus confronting the Cyclops, I taunted him.

  "The course of a man's life is not determined by the throwing of old bones," I said haughtily. "That is magic for old women and fools."

  Ay! The follies of youth. Fate's thread is woven for us all. That day so long ago at the fair, bones were cast for me and, unbeknownst to any but the gods, the paths of my life, my Aztec tonal, were laid out in the Tonalamatl, The Book of Fate. The friends and enemies I made that day I would meet throughout my life.

  The old man's face twisted into a feral scowl, then erupted in the savage snarl of a jungle cat. He shook a handful of bones at my face and muttered some incantation in an indio dialect I did not know.

  I quietly departed.

  Why tempt fate?

  "Mestizo. Your heart will be ripped out on the sacrificial block when the jaguars rise."

  The words, barely whispered at my back, were spoken in Náhuatl. I swung around to see who made this threat. An indio was moving through the crowd, and I was certain he was the culprit.

  I hurried away, not happy about my rash remarks and the omen they had provoked. It was not just the comment. It was the hateful tone in which it had been invoked. At the time I saw no connection between jaguars and sacrificial blocks, although I knew that the great jungle cats were sacred to the indios.

  At any other time I would have laughed off the indio's comment as just another insult leveled at my mixed blood, but this was the second threat to my life in a short space. I was not frightened by the indio's threat but angered.

  I wandered into the crowd, aggravated at both the insult and my hasty retreat in the face of what the fray would have derided as "superstitious foolishness." A picaro would have had a ready retort for a shaman's magical threats. Except the final threat had not come from the shaman but from a disembodied voice I still could not identify.

  I headed for the bookstalls, searching for Fray Antonio and Fray Juan. Fray Antonio would be there, browsing the books but not buying any. Any dinero that came his way he used to purchase food for the poor. I could, of course, filch a fine libro for him, but he, of course, would not approve.

  I spotted Fray Juan first, talking to a man near one of the bookstalls. As I approached, the man glanced around furtively, then led the fray to the area in back of the stalls.

  I immediately broke into a run when I recognized the man—the picaro, Mateo. There was no telling what kind of trouble he had in mind for the fray. Look at the trouble he'd gotten me into already, my run-in with the alcalde's wife and her witch's teat. The dwarf who hawked comedias and ballads for him might boast that Mateo had written and performed before the crowned heads of Europe, but I was immune to such braggadocio. I knew silken devils when I met them. Naive Fray Juan, however, believed the best about everyone and would find himself Mateo's unlawful prey.

  Behind the stalls Mateo was slipping him a book from beneath his cloak. When I approached them, Mateo reached for his dagger.

  "The boy is a brother's servant," Fray Juan explained to Mateo.

  Fray Antonio had described me the same way to the inquisitors to deflect their curiosity.

  Mateo did not seem to recognize me, which was understandable. Léperos were objects, not people, and by definition unmemorable.

  I hung back, subservient, but kept within earshot.

  "This book," Mateo said, continuing his pitch, "is one of the classics of chivalric romance, a sweeping epic, towering above Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin de Oliva. See for yourself—the lavish cover of Moroccan leather, the elegant Gothic script, the exquisite vellum, all for a pittance: a minuscule... ten pesos."

  Ten pesos! A pope's ransom. A month's wages for most men and for what? A chivalric romance? A stupid tale of knights and ladies, of dragons slain, kingdoms conquered, and damsals won. The very works that drove Quixote to joust with windmills.

  Fray Juan examined it fondly. "It doesn't look like vellum—"

  "You have my personal ass
urance as a lord of the realm that this paper was milled right on the Nile's venerable banks and shipped across the Mediterranean for the personal perusal of our saintly monarch in Madrid. Only by the most fortunate and auspicious of circumstances was this work of art diverted into my capable hands."

  "The people of the Nile make papyrus not vellum," I said.

  The picaro threw me a nasty look, but quickly returned to Fray Juan. The holy brother was now reading aloud the tome's flowery title.

  "Chronicle of the very remarkable Three Knights Tablante of Barcelona who defeated Ten Thousand Howling Moors and Five Frightful Monsters and set the rightful King upon the Throne of Constantinople and claimed a Treasure larger than that held by any King of Christendom."

  I roared with derision. "The title is a jest and so is the book. Cervantes's Don Quixote exposed these chivalry romances for what they are. Who would read such gibberish? Only an imbecile. Who would write idiosy? Only a lunatic."

  The fray, embarrassed, returned the book to Mateo and hurried away.

  I had started after the fray when I heard Mateo quietly say, "Boy."

  As I turned, his hand caught my throat with the speed of a striking snake. He jerked me toward him, his dagger already beneath my manta, probing my cojones.

  "I should geld you like a steer, you dirty, half-caste beggar."

  The point of the dagger cut into the soft flesh of my crotch, and a trickle of blood ran down my leg. He had the eyes of a pain-crazed animal insane with feral suffering. I was too scared to even beg.

  He shoved me to the ground. "I will not rip your throat out because I don't want your whore's blood splattering my hands." His sword was out, and he stood over me, its blade flashing over my throat. I expected my head to drop and roll, but the sword tip froze stock-still against my Adam's apple.

  "You spoke of that hijodeputa who wrote the saga of Quixote. If you mention his name one more time—the swine who plundered the stories, ideas, the truth, the very life of another, my life—I will not simply separate your head from your shoulders, I will strip your sorry hide an inch at a time and dress your carcass down with jalapeno and salt." The madman vanished, and I stared wall-eyed at the sky.