Aztec Blood

by Gary Jennings

  With the mask-breastplate in hand, I crawled backward out of the passageway. My heart beat in my throat. I was crawling back into a hangman's noose. Don Julio, Mateo, and the soldados gathered around to view the treasure piece.

  "Magnífica. It is a fine piece," Don Julio said. "It will be sent to the viceroy. He will send it to Madrid for the king the next time the treasure fleet sails."

  On instructions from Don Julio, Mateo looped a rope around my neck with a wooden device where the knot should be. "If you try to run, the rope tightens it around your throat and strangles you. It's a trick I learned when I was a prisoner of the bey of Algiers."

  "Why do you save my life just to get me hanged? You must tell the don the truth. I am innocent."

  "Innocent? Perhaps not completely guilty this time, but innocent?"

  There was still no word between us that Mateo had cut off a man's head for me. It was not something I could reveal to my advantage, or I would have done so.

  "You betrayed Sancho," I said to him.

  He shrugged. "One does not betray her. You merely take action to avoid her treachery. Were either of us to expect any reward from her but a dagger in the back? Eh, amigo. Don Julio has one of these ropes around my neck, too; you just can't see it. But he is a man of honor and of his word. If I am faithful to him, it will not strangle me."

  "Who is he? I thought he was a doctor."

  "He is many things. He knows of surgery and medicines, but that is just a small part of his knowledge. He knows how these monuments came to be built and why the sun comes up in the morning and goes down at night. But the main concern for you is that he is the king's agent who investigates plots to steal the king's treasures and other intrigues. And he can have a man hanged."

  "What is he going to do with me?"

  Mateo shrugged. "What do you deserve?"

  Ay, that was the last thing I wanted the don to pass judgment on.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  I spent the night tied to the tree, a blanket thrown over me to ward off the cold. My anxiety and restrained posture made the night one of agony and worry. I knew how to deal with the Sanchos of this world. But this mysterious leader of the soldados was no one I wanted to tangle with. The next day before the noon meal, men from Oaxaca came to repair the temple.

  Don Julio's angry curses drifted over me as I sat like a dog tied to a tree, the fiendish collar around my neck. His venom was directed at the absent Sancho for damaging the ancient monument. He ignored the fact that it was his own man Mateo who had blown the hole in the wall. He instructed the indios on making repairs with a mortar made from straw and dirt similar to the adobe used to build houses with. He did not like defacing a great stone monument with mock adobe, and cursed that the art of building stone temples was dead. The temporary sealing would have to suffice until indios skilled in working with stone could be brought from the City of Mexico.

  Don Julio and Mateo sat down under the tree with me and took their midday meal.

  "Take the rope off of him," Don Julio said. "If he runs, kill him."

  I ate salted beef and tortillas in the shade of the tree and listened to Don Julio. I had come out second best when I tried to fool him at the fair because I said too much. This time I would select my lies carefully.

  "What's your name, your real name?" he asked.

  "Cristo."

  "And your family name?"

  "I have none."

  "Where were you born?"

  I made up a name for a village. "It's near Teotihuacan."

  He went on to ask me about my parents and my education.

  "Ay de mí, my father and mother both died from the peste when I was young. I was raised in the house of my uncle. He was a very learned man. He taught me how to read and write before he died. I am all alone in the world."

  "What about that fake healer. You told Mateo and Sancho he was your father."

  I almost groaned aloud. I needed to keep my lies consistent. "He's another uncle. I call him my father."

  "When we spoke at the fair for the Manila galleons, you said that Jaguar Knights would drive the Spanish from New Spain. Who told you that?"

  Before I could answer, he told Mateo, "Draw your sword. If he lies, chop off one of his hands."

  Eh, another person who expects me to lie and wants to butcher me. What is it about these gachupins and chopping up people?

  He asked the question again.

  "I offended an indio magician, one who tells the course of an illness or other matters by casting bones. I poked fun at him when he was performing his magic. When I was leaving, someone I did not get a good look at told me that I would be killed when the Jaguar Knights rose."

  "That is the only thing you know about the Jaguar Knights?"

  I hesitated only long enough for Mateo to draw his sword. I hastened with my tale, having seen what the man could do with a sword.

  "I witnessed a terrible thing." I told them about the night I accidentally came upon a sacrifice ceremony.

  "Interesting," Don Julio murmured. He seemed hardly able to contain his excitement. He said to Mateo, "I believe the boy stumbled onto the nest of the fanatics we seek."

  "This magician must have frightened him greatly for the boy to believe he was actually attacked by a were-jaguar."

  "What's a were-jaguar?" I asked.

  "A man who changes into the shape of a jaguar. In Europe, there are many legends of werewolves, men who become wolves. Among the indios, there is a belief that certain people have the ability to change into jaguars. In the Veracruz area where the People of the Rubber flourished an eon ago, there are many representations in statues and etching of were-jaguars."

  "Today it is the nauallis who shape-change," I said.

  "Where did you hear that word?" Don Julio asked.

  "From the Healer, my uncle. He, too, is a powerful magician, but he does not practice the dark magic. He says the change is made when a naualli drinks an elixir like the divine ointment."

  "What does your uncle know about this naualli?"

  "He doesn't like him. My uncle is a great healer, famous and welcomed in all of the indio villages. He told me that except for trips to fairs and festivals, the naualli stays in small villages in the area between Puebla and Cuicatlán. The town where the sacrifice took place is only a day from there. The naualli is known as a black magician. He can do killing curses. Put a curse on a dagger so that when you give it to an enemy, it stabs them. Of course I don't believe any of these things," I added hastily.

  Don Julio asked many more questions, starting again with the first time I saw the naualli and going over everything I saw from when I watched the mock battle between the indio knights to the cut on the naualli's face.

  When I was drained of information, Don Julio smiled at me. "You have an amazing memory. No doubt that is the secret of your ability with languages and with scholarly matters when you never went to school. You're a mestizo, of course, not an indio."

  I shot a glance at Mateo, but as usual, his eyes revealed nothing.

  "A mestizo, but you can affect the manners and speech of an indio." Don Julio patted his beard. "And a Spaniard. If you had been dressed as a Spaniard when I talked to you among the ruins, I would have not doubted you were born in Seville or Cadiz. Mateo, you could have used this young man in your acting troupe before the viceroy sent them to the Filipinas."

  Mateo visibly shuddered at the mention of the dreaded islands. Ah! I understood the hold Don Julio had on the picaro. Troublemaking Spaniards were not sent to the northern mines, but were vanquished to a place equally feared, a land Spaniards in New Spain without humor called the Infierno. The trip across the Western Sea that took a couple of months was so terrible that only half the prisoners on a galleon survived. After they landed, half of those who survived the voyaged died in the first few months from fevers, snakes, and pestilence as bad as that found in the jungles of the Veracruz coast and Yucatan.

  Eh, the rope that jerks my amigo Mateo is banishment to th
is español hell on the other side of the great waters. He and his actors really must be muy mal hombres to deserve such a fate. And the women? Were they doing the deshonesto zarabanda dance for Filipinas crocodiles? What was the actress letting into her tent at night now?

  "Only your generosity and kind spirit has kept me from joining my amigos, Don Julio. Because of your brilliance, insight, and wisdom, you recognized that I was as innocent as a newly ordained priest." Mateo spoke without a trace of sarcasm.

  "Sí, as innocent as the two mestizo tomb robbers we will be hanging—and this one whose fate has not yet been decided."

  I smiled humbly at Don Julio. "My kindly old uncle is half blind and nearly helpless. I must care for him, or he will perish."

  "Your uncle, if that's what he is, is a fake and a fraud who has cheated people from Guadalajara to Mérida. You are also an incorrigible liar and thief. Even facing a rope around your neck, you dared to lie to me about the fact the treasure mask was in easy reach. Had I accepted your story, you would have returned to break into the tomb again to recover it. Do you deny this?"

  "Don Julio," I whined, "you are a prince among—"

  "Be quiet while I decide your punishment."

  "I think the little scoundrel should get a hundred lashes," Mateo said. "It would teach him to have respect for the king's law."

  "And how many lashes would teach you to respect the law?" Don Julio asked.

  Mateo pretended to be examining a scuff on his boot.

  The don cursed the workers at the wall and went to them, shouting that their ancestors were turning over in their graves at the sight of their sloppy work.

  I glared at Mateo. "A hundred lashes, eh, amigo. Gracias."

  "I'm not your amigo, you little street cur." He showed the point of the sword. "Call me that again, and I will cut off one of your ears."

  Dios mio. Still the desire to slice me up.

  "Your pardon, Don Mateo. Perhaps I will tell Don Julio that you told me to hide the treasure so you could come back for it later."

  Mateo stared at me for a moment. I thought for certain that my ears were lost. His face convulsed and then he burst—into laughter. He slapped me on the shoulder so hard that I went over sideways.

  "Bastardo, you are a man after my own black heart. Only a true rogue would have thought of such an outrageous lie. There is no doubt that someday you will come to a bad end. Eh, but the stories you will be able to tell before they hang you."

  "You will both end up making your last confession to a priest when you have a rope around your necks." Don Julio had returned from threatening the indios with everlasting damnation if they did not do better work. "But in the meantime, I have an assignment for both of you."

  Mateo looked crestfallen. "You told me—"

  "I told you that a very bad transgression against the king would be worked off if we caught that bandito Sancho. Do you see her in chains?"

  "We saved a great treasure for the king."

  "I saved a great treasure for the king. You were not told to use black powder."

  "Sancho insisted that—"

  "You should have refused. You did great damage to a temple that has resisted harm since Julius Caesar talked to the Sphinx. It has occurred to my suspicious mind that you used the black powder to quickly get into the temple before I arrived with soldados."

  Don Julio was no one's fool. And I had not been wrong in my assessment of Mateo. Like Guzman, Mateo was unable to resist the temptation to acquire a treasure. All picaros shared the same fatal flaw: the soul of a knave.

  Mateo looked hurt. "Don Julio, on my honor—"

  "A dubious oath. Listen to me, amigos, like a priest I will grant you forgiveness for your sins; but unlike one, I can also keep you from the gallows—if you obey me and do the work I set out for you. These Knights of the Jaguar, as they style themselves, are well known to the viceroy. They are a small but violent group of indios who are determined to kill all Spanish and take control of the country."

  "Give me a hundred men, and I'll bring you the heads of all of them," Mateo said.

  "You couldn't do it with a thousand. You would never find them. The knights do not conduct themselves in the open. In the daytime they are simple indio farmers or hacienda workers. At night they are a murder cult that band together to kill Spaniards and indios who do not oppose Spanish rule."

  "They have killed Spaniards?" Mateo asked.

  "At least ten, perhaps more."

  "I have never heard of such a thing!" Mateo said.

  "The viceroy is withholding the information to keep people from panicking and spreading the fame of the cult. We are still dealing with scattered groups, but they must be stamped out. With the right leadership, an indio revolt could spread like wildfire. This naualli, despite his age, may be such a leader. We could have a widespread revolt on our hands, another Mixton War."

  "Then let's roast the black magician's feet over a hot fire until he tells us the names of his knights," Mateo said.

  "Amigo, you are so Spanish in your thinking," the don said. "That is exactly what the conquistadors did to Cuitláhuac, Montezuma's successor, after Tenochtitlan fell. They tortured him to find out where gold had been hidden. It didn't work after the conquest, and it would have even less effect today. These are no ordinary indio warriors, but fanatics. You," Don Julio indicated Mateo, "I am sure are familiar with the story of the Old Man and the Mountain. But," he smiled at me, "despite your wide range of knowledge, you may not be acquainted with this tale."

  "I have not heard of an old man and a mountain," I said.

  "Hundreds of years ago Christian armies went to the Holy Land to free it from the Infidels. During one of these crusades, a leader of a Muslim sect, Rashid ad-Din, sent his followers to murder his Arab enemies and Christian leaders. Because he had a mountain fortress, we called him the Old Man of the Mountain.

  "Our people called his followers Assassins, a corruption of an Arabic reference to them being hashish smokers. Marco Polo, a traveler from Venice, learned that the Assassins used hallucinatory substances before committing their heinous crimes. While their minds were slaves to these drugs, the Assassins believed that they had traveled to Allah's Garden of Paradise. They then set out to murder their enemies, knowing they would be caught and killed themselves. But they believed that after they were killed, having completing their murder assignment, they would return to paradise.

  "The Aztecs were even more adept at the use of drugs that control another's mind. One of the Jaguar Knights whom we managed to capture had taken drugs before his crime. Even under the most severe and enduring torture, he revealed little to the viceroy's men. The fact was that his mind was so altered by the drugs that he no longer knew the difference between his real existence and a place he called the House of the Sun."

  "The House of the Sun is heaven beyond the eastern waters," I said. "When an Aztec warrior dies in battle, rather than going to the underworld, his spirit goes to this paradise."

  Mateo tapped his sword on his boot. "This naualli may be the Old Man of the Mountain to these indios."

  "Exactly," Don Julio said.

  "And you want me to take this thieving little devil," Mateo waved the sword at me, "and find this practitioner of the black arts and get the truth from him."

  "Almost. I want you to catch him in the act so we can hang him."

  "I understand perfectly. But, of course, as a Spanish gentleman, I do not understand the language or the customs of these people. This fine young man should be sent to find this naualli. After he does, he can send for me. I will await his message at your house in the City of Mexico..."

  Mateo stopped as Don Julio shook his head. "I think it would be better if you were nearby when the boy flushed out the Jaguars. That way you could protect him. Besides, as you pointed out, he is an untrustworthy cur who must be watched."

  Mateo smiled at me; his eyes were not smiling. ¡Ay de mí! Once again he blames me!

  The man was a wolf in picaro's clo
thes. Someday I would tell him a secret, but this was not the time. But, amigos, I will let you in on the secret. Do you remember what he called me? Bastardo. But that is a name he had heard years ago at the treasure fleet fair. Sí, he knows I am the very one for whom he chopped off a man's head.

  FIFTY-NINE

  The Healer claimed that all things were preordained in this world, that the gods had carved in stone books how our lives would unfold from the moment we were born. I believed that the gods had brought Don Julio into my life and sent me on this mission for a reason. Had I known the terrible consequences that were to occur because of my dealings with the dark magician, I would have tried to avoid the tragic fate by running into the forest and hiding from this strange Spanish don who was a doctor, scholar, and agent of the king.

  That afternoon around the supper fire we received further instructions from Don Julio. Mateo plucked out little tunes on a guitar and drank wine from a goatskin as the don spoke.

  "You are to direct yourselves to the indio town where you witnessed the sacrifice. There, find out where the naualli is. From what your uncle told you, he will be somewhere in the region. You will also come across other indio magicians, healers, and sorcerers. You can pick up gossip and information from them. We want to know about the Jaguar Knights, every bit of information you can learn.

  "You are never to mention the Jaguar name. To do so in front of the wrong people would get your throat cut. Rather than questioning, which would do no good and raise suspicion, just listen. You are still a boy," he said to me, "and the indios will talk freely in front of you while they would not in front of a grown man. Keep your ears open, your mouth closed, and your feet ready to carry you quickly away.

  "Mateo, you will need a cover identity, too." Don Julio thought for a moment. "Guitars. You will be a merchant of guitars. I will get you several mules. One of my indio vaqueros will be your assistant I will send for him immediately. When you need me, he will ride to wherever I am."

  Mateo hit an irritating series of chords on the guitar. "I am a swordsman and a poet, not a merchant."