Aztec Rage (33 page)

“You don't read?”

“Of course not. Few of my kind can read.”

He buried the book deep in his pack but still looked at me with suspicion.

Worthless little toad. He didn't know what to do because he didn't have the courage to confront me head-on. If I had lied about being able to read . . . eh, not even his holy robes would have saved him from the Inquisition.

He moved away, and we continued working. We were nearly finished when I saw the lépero put something into his pocket. As I said, if it had been my amigo Carlos's, I would have exposed—and punished—the thief on the spot. I kept quiet, but the fray came out from behind a tree where he'd been hiding and screamed like a squawking bird at the lépero, “Thief! Thief!”

Others soon gathered around, and the fray dangled a chain holding a silver cross in front of the sergeant in charge of our military patrol.

“You see! These beggars cannot be trusted, they would steal the holiest of relics for a cup of pulque.” He pointed at the lépero. “Give him twenty lashes and send him back to town.” Then he glared at me. “Give them both twenty lashes.”

“But I did nothing!” I said.

“You're both lépero trash. Whip them.”

I stood, unsure of what I was going to do. If I fought back, I would have
to flee the expedition and lose my cover. But to accept a flogging when I had done nothing . . .

Soldiers led me to a tree adjacent to one selected for the lépero. My wrists were strung from a low-hanging tree limb.

I listened in tense anticipation as the lépero got his lashes. He screamed with each blow. Twenty lashes would bloody a back and scar it for life. I struggled with the rope holding my wrists, sorry that I hadn't resisted. I wished I'd killed a couple of the gachupines and fled.

Finally my turn came. I tensed as the man with the whip got behind me and cracked the whip. The sergeant played with me, cracking the whip next to my skin twice to tense me even more than I already was.

The first lash cracked, and I felt like hot irons had been laid across my back. I grunted, holding back the screams the lépero had made.

The second lash cracked, and I gasped, barely able to keep from screaming. I jerked harder on the ropes, anxious to break them and kill some of the fools who reveled in my pain.

Ay! Another lash ripped my back. I jerked harder on my bonds, but no sound came from my lips.

“This one thinks he is mucho hombre,” the sergeant told his audience. “We shall see how tough he is.”

The whip cut deeper than before. I gasped. It struck again, digging in. I could feel the blood running down my back.

“Stop!”

The voice was that of Carlos, but I couldn't twist around to see him. I leaned my weight against the tree. My back felt like it had been clawed by a jungle cat.

I heard arguing, but I couldn't follow it. Carlos was suddenly at my side.

“Did you help the lépero steal the cross?”

I grunted between my teeth. “Of course not. Why would I help such trash? I could take what I wanted myself.”

He cut my bonds.

“I'm very sorry,” he said. “Punishing you for another man's crime is outrageous.”

Fray Benito was across the way talking to other members of the expedition. His darkly intense disposition had been replaced by one of grinning animation. Spilling blood had lifted his spirits.

Ay! I couldn't exact revenge and stay with the expedition. I had to play the peon and keep my mouth shut. But, as God above rules and the devil below knows, this fray would pay for the blood of my flesh that he wrongfully spilled. I didn't know when or how I would strike, but the day would come when I would put the man's cojones in a vise and twist them.

Deep in thought, I suddenly realized the inquisitor-priest Fray Baltar was staring at me. He pointed a fat finger at me. “I saw the demon in you just now. Beware! Beware! I can sniff out evil. I will be watching you.”

FORTY-FOUR

Palenque

W
E SET OFF
toward the jungles to the south and the ancient Mayan city known as Palenque, from which we would journey to Chichén Itzá and other treasured Mayan sites in the Yucatán.

“We could go to the coast and take a boat south, shortening the journey, but no one wants to return to Veracruz,” Carlos told me as we walked together. As an expedition member, he had a mule to ride but frequently walked in order to talk to me. I couldn't ride my mule, which was bent under mountains of equipment and supplies.

“They fear the vómito negro. After arriving from Spain, we escaped Vera Cruz with only one death, but no one wants to risk the yellow fever again. So we will proceed south by land. Besides, we would have nothing to catalogue or investigate aboard a boat.”

He showed me on his map where our route would take us. “From Puebla, we proceed down to the Istmo de Tehuantepec, the narrow neck of New Spain that lies between the Gulf of Mexico on the Atlantic side and the Gulf of Tehuantepec on the Pacific side, and then on to San Juan Bautista. From there, we will turn inland and proceed to the ruins at Palenque, which are about thirty or so leagues from San Juan.”

I nodded. “The map, however, does not show the difficulty of the terrain. We will journey from this high plateau to the colony's jungle heart, from temperate mountains to the hot-wet, tropical jungle and rivers of the Isthmus and Tabasco. By the time we reach these indio ruins you seek, we may discover that the black vomit of the coast is less dreadful than the sweltering jungles we will face.”

Most of the journey toward San Juan Bautista was uneventful, but we were only days from the town when the rains started. After we descended from the plateau, rain came down continuously in showers, deluges, and mists, but this time the floodgates of heaven opened and water thundered down on us as if the Mayan gods cursed us for violating their territory.

In mud up to our knees, our mules would sink up to their bellies, and we would struggle to extricate them from the muck. ¡Dios mío! Insects ate us alive like rabid beasts; snakes, dangling from tree limbs, hunted us even as we walked beneath their bows. Those big, brutal, dragonlike demons of the rivers and swamps stalked us at every turn.

When your mount is up to its belly in mud, you have no choice but to
get off and battle the muck yourself. Soon even the gachupines got their feet wet.

The wounds from the whipping were still raw and painful when we reached the dense tropics. Each night as I squirmed in agony from their itch, or bled when the wounds reopened, I thought about the fray who caused them.

We crossed floodplains, rivers, lagoons, marshlands, and swamps, sloshing through the mud, swimming river fords alongside our mules. At some of the streams, when their horses couldn't carry them, we porters hauled the expedition members across on our shoulders. Only Carlos crossed all the streams on his own feet.

Often we hacked our way through vegetation so thick that only birds in flight could have negotiated our route. Swelteringly hot, dripping wet every moment, day or night, we were too far removed from the northern mountains and the great seas that hammered the coasts to breathe clean, cool air. We saw few people of European stock, encountering only an occasional mestizo trader and once a hacienda's criollo majordomo, but mostly we encountered indios from the scattered villages. A people time has forgotten, they lived no differently from the way they did when Cortés landed three centuries before or when God's Son trod the shores of Galilee.

The savages wore scant clothing and spoke no Spanish. Not that I called them “savages” in Carlos's presence. He regarded them as the “indigenous people” whom we had conquered, ravaged, raped, and exploited and whose culture we had shamelessly annihilated.

I personally cannot judge or evaluate their cultural achievements, but I must assert that the indios I met were physically impressive. Modest in stature, they were nonetheless powerfully built and obviously fit—all this despite the sickeningly hot climate, pestilential insects, and ubiquitous predators, such as alligators, jaguars, and pythons, which dogged them—and us—at every turn. Still, I could not share Carlos's glowing admiration for them. Their conspicuous absence of clothing, their ludicrous lack of weaponry and horses, combined with their pervasive profusion of blood-red body tattoos, which they colored with a foul-smelling ointment made from gum tree residues, inclined me to view them as less than civilized.

I found their criminal justice system barbaric as well. To punish the unjustified killing of a person, the killer was sentenced to be delivered to the relatives of the deceased. Once in the hands of the victim's family, the killer either had to pay his way out or was put to death. A thief had to pay back not only the value of what he stole but was indentured as a slave to the victim for a period of time, his internment determined by the value of the theft.

“An eye for an eye,” Carlos said.

“Not if you buy your way out of it,” I muttered under my breath.

For adultery, the guilty men were tied to a pole and delivered to the aggrieved husband. The husband had a choice of forgiving the crime or
dropping a large rock on the adulterer's head from a goodly height, thus killing him. Abandoned by the husband, the unfaithful wife lost the protection of her village, which led inevitably to slow, agonizing death.

I found it odd that in most villages the young men did not live in the same households with their parents. Instead, they were housed communally until they married. When Carlos asked a priest why they lived that way, the priest denounced the practice rather than provide an explanation.

This ignorance incensed Carlos. “The priests try to convert the indios to our faith, but the priests refuse to understand their old gods. Maybe if the priests knew the reasons for the customs better, they would convert more of them.”

Tempers were short, food moldy, and—except for the local indios—whomever we hired fell victim to fever and returned home. I endured the unendurable cheerfully, which surprised Carlos. I couldn't explain to him, of course, that living on the run, continually looking over my shoulder, accepting insults and humiliation from my inferiors, made our jungle trek seem relatively bearable.

I also assumed a new role, one that freed me from the camp's petty problems. The soldiers had proven so singularly inept at both tracking and marksmanship that Carlos had handed me a musket, powder, and ball and commanded me to bag the camp's fowl and game.

The rain, which now showed no sign of letting up, prevented our clothes and boots from ever really drying. It did give us temporary reprieve from the pestilential mosquitoes that plagued us day and night, biting and sucking our blood until our exposed hands and faces were covered with lividly inflamed, wickedly infected sores.

Each night before darkness fell, I hung an oiled tarp for Carlos to eat and sleep under. He invited me to share it with him, even though the inquisitor-priest and Fray Benito both frowned at Carlos's kindnesses to a peon.

I soon discovered that Carlos wanted me close by at night so he could talk. I knew more than he suspected but kept my tongue still. I asked few questions and mostly listened. A burden in him fought to escape, devils he had to exorcise one day.

Drinking more and more, Carlos leaned sideways on his bedroll, talking and sucking on a brass brandy flask. Brandy loosened his tongue, so much so that I sometimes feared he would get us both in trouble. Sitting up with my back against a tree, I listened to his whispered confidences and the buzz of mosquitoes.

As he stared up at the starry sky, he told me something that made me wonder if he had completely lost his mind.

“You know six planets circle the sun, don't you, with Saturn being the farthest from Earth?”

I didn't know, but I pretended I did.

“Despite the nonsense they speak in churches about heaven above,
astronomers with telescopes have discovered an incalculable number of suns, solar systems, and worlds like our Earth in the universe. The astronomers state with perfect logic and clarity that if life thrives on our Earth, then life must exist on other planets as well. Let me read you something from a set of knowledgeable books published by the British a few years before I was born called the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.”

He read from a piece of paper:

To an attentive confiderer, it will appear highly probable, that the planets of our system, together with their attendants, called satellites or moons, are much of the same nature with our earth, and destined for like purpose. For they are solid opaque globes, capable of supporting animals and vegetable.

He was so excited, his voice trembled. “Juan, there are people on other planets. Listen, it goes on to say that people even live on the moon!”

On the surface of the moon, because it is nearer us than any other of the celestial bodies, we discover a nearer resemblance of our earth. For, by the assistance of telescopes we observe the moon to be full of high mountains, large valleys, and deep cavities. These similarities leave us no room to doubt, but that all the planets and moons in the system are designed as commodious habitations for creatures endued with capacities of knowing and adoring their beneficent Creator.