Aztec Rage (2 page)

The warhorses frightened me the most. It is said that it was not the small army Cortés brought with him twenty-odd years ago that defeated the mighty Aztec Empire, nor even the tens of thousands of indio allies he enlisted, but the sixteen great warhorses that carried him and his best fighting men into battle.

There were no beasts like these in the One World before the invaders came. The great warhorses had terrified the Emperor Montezuma and his Eagle and Jaguar Knights, the finest warriors in all the One World. The warriors believed the tall, powerful, four-legged creatures were gods; what else could these denizens from Another World be but spirits of the Earth and Sky? They ran like the wind, crushed any before them under their heavy hooves, and made the warriors on their backs a hundredfold more deadly than those on foot.

As a rider came closer, I realized that it was an indio on horseback.

¡Ayya!
I had never seen an indio on horseflesh before. Horses were powerful weapons in war, jealously guarded by the Spanish, who forbade indios from owning or riding them. Tenamaxti, our leader, told us that the Spanish had mounted the caciques, the chiefs, of their indio allies on horseback so their foot soldiers could better follow them in battle. “The traitors who fight for the invaders call the horses big dogs,” Tenamaxti told
us. “They rub the sweat of the horse onto themselves to get some of the beast's magic.”

Tenamaxti knows the invaders well, having lived in the Aztec capital the invaders now call Méjico City. He is known to the Spanish by the name they gave him, Juan Británico.

Horses were not the only thing forbidden to indios by our new masters. When our leaders and gods failed us, the invaders captured more than the gold of our kings; they enslaved us with a terrible servitude: the
encomienda
, vast grants of power and privilege, fiefdoms given to Spaniards. We called these white men on their grand horses
gachupines
, wearers of spurs, sharp spurs they used to rowel our backs bloody as they stole the food from our mouths.

Their mighty king, the one they call the Catholic Majesty, presses his seal on a piece of paper, and thousands of indios in a region are enslaved to a Spaniard who comes to the One World with one purpose: to grow rich on our labor. To this wearer of spurs we must give as tribute a share of all that we grow on our land or produce with our hands. When he wants a noble palace built for his comfort, we stop tilling our land and carry the stones and cut the timbers needed. We must tend his cattle and his horses but not touch the meat of the farm animals or mount the horses.
¡Ayya!
When he demands, we must lend him our wives and our daughters.

Is it any wonder that when Tenamaxti gave the call, we gathered as in the days of the great Aztec kings, bringing spears to kill these invaders who enslave us?

As I watched the dark figures in the fog, one who rode taller in the saddle than any other appeared.
¡Yya ayya!
It could be no other than the Red Giant himself, Pedro de Alvarado, the butcher of Tenochtitlán, a fiend with hair and beard the color of fire. Known for his rashness and cruelty, Alvarado was infamous second only to the Conqueror himself for his brutal atrocities.

He first earned fame—and evil reputation—when Cortés was forced to leave Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, and rush to Veracruz to defeat a Spaniard who had landed with a force of men, intending to deprive Cortés of his command. He left Alvarado behind in Tenochtitlán with eighty Spanish conquistadors and four hundred indio allies to hold the great city. Alvarado also held Montezuma captive. Paralyzed by his belief that Cortés had fulfilled the prophecy that the god Quetzalcóatl would return to claim the empire, Montezuma was easy prey.

While awaiting Cortés's return, Alvarado heard a rumor that the leaders of the city planned to take the remaining Spanish captive during a festival. A man of unlimited expediency and utter cruelty, Alvarado attacked first: As the festival began, his men opened fire on the people celebrating in the marketplace. But it was not Aztec warriors he blasted with cannons and had put to death with swords, spears, and harquebuses . . . a few notables
and warriors were killed, but a thousand women and children were slaughtered in the orgy of bloodletting.

Cortés defeated the Spanish commander who intended to usurp his authority and returned to the capital to find Alvarado and his men holed up in Montezuma's palace and besieged by Aztecs angered by the massacre of innocents. Not able to defend their position, Cortés led his men out of the city, and it was in the retreat that Alvarado, the Red Giant, gained his greatest fame.

On the evening that came to be called La Noche Triste, the Night of Sorrows, Alvarado achieved an immortal feat. The Spanish had retreated onto the causeways that led over the lake to the city. During heavy fighting, faced with a break in the causeway too wide for any man to leap, Alvarado, weighed down with heavy armor, turned his back on the Aztec warriors attacking him, ran to the edge of the causeway, stabbed his spear into the back of a drowning man who had already fallen into the water, and
vaulted over to the other side
.

Many times I had heard his amazing tale, and now I realized he was the powerful foe in the dark vision of my own death that had haunted me.

I could no longer lie upon the ground and tremble like a frightened child. I had to face the Red Giant. I rose, clutching my spear. In the tradition of a Jaguar Knight, I gave the cry of that fierce jungle beast to add the strength of the jaguar's god to my own.

Even through the din of battle that had erupted around us, Alvarado heard my cry. He swung in the saddle and turned to look at me. He spurred his great stallion, raised his sword and gave the cry of his war saint.
“For Santiago!”

I watched myself die.

The vision of my own bloodied, lifeless body that had long haunted my sleep flashed as the warhorse charged, carrying on its back the most famous warrior in the One World. My wooden spear, even with its razor-sharp obsidian point, would not penetrate either the horse's thick padded shield or the armor of the Spaniard. The only way to defeat the invader was to bring him down by making his horse fall.

I threw my body at the horse's knees, using my spear against the ground much as Alvarado had used a spear in his famous leap.

My body broke the stride of the warhorse as if the beast had run into a huge rock. It began to topple onto me. I saw it, slowly falling . . . like a big tree, gathering speed as it came down on me. I saw Alvarado's frantic, startled look as he, too, came down, toppled from his mount, flying headfirst to the rocky ground. I felt my bones breaking, my chest caving, no breath coming, as the huge warhorse crushed me—

TWO

Chihuahua, 1811

A
Y DE MÍ
!
I erupted from the nightmare, trembling and soaked in sweat. I rolled off the cot and stood on the stone floor of the dungeon cell, unsteady at first, my knees weak, my heart still pounding.

The dark dream of an Aztec warrior had come to me in sleep as far back as I could remember. A dream that was a vision of my own death. Why this nightmare had haunted me since I was a child, was a puzzle. It is said that I was born for the gallows, a gruesome fate I had narrowly escaped more than once. That I would die violently was not the stuff of dreams but the reality of the life I had led.

The boom of the muskets of the firing squad came from the courtyard on the other side of the wall. I staggered over to the cell door.
“¡Cabrones!”
I shouted through the judas window. I gave the thick wood door a good kick. “Bring my breakfast, you cabrones.”

This was my favorite taunt. A cabrón was a “he-goat,” a man who allowed other men to fornicate with his wife. Such an insult is a stake in the heart of any man, no?

I gave the door another kick.

Eh, I wasn't really hungry. In truth, hearing a firing squad perform in the prison yard just outside my cell wall had quickened my blood. It was a reminder that I would soon dance a chilena de muerte, a courtship dance of death, except my rapid steps and twirling handkerchiefs would be for my executioners rather than a lovely señorita.

A guard's face appeared in the judas window. “Keep shouting and you'll have mierda for breakfast.”

“Señor He-Goat, bring me a plate of carne and a jug of wine, or your wife will taste the power of a real man before I burn your casa and steal your horse.”

He fled, and I returned to my bed of straw. The musty smell of old wine hung in the cell, as if the monks who occupied it when the prison was a monastery had swilled too many jugs.

Like the colony's capital city, Méjico, “May-he-kô,” as the Spanish say it, Chihuahua was on a flat plain, almost surrounded by mountains. Several weeks' journey to the south of the capital, its official name was San Felipe de Real de Chihuahua, but it was known simply as the Lady of the Desert.

Nearly a mile higher than the distant sea, the region was not wet and
green like the Valley of Méjico but brown and parched, with stingy grasslands, even though soaring peaks of the Sierra Madre Range were snowcapped. In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, Chihuahua meant “dry, sandy place.” Dry, sandy snake pit, for one sentenced to die there.

Sobbing, the sounds of a man's anguish, came from the courtyard through the barred window above me. I covered my ears with my hands; I hated to hear a man's tears.

Shots boomed from the courtyard again. I flinched from the concussion of musket balls as they struck the rock wall at my back. The biting stench of black powder came through the window above me. Leaping up, I grabbed the window bars and shouted,
“¡Cabrones!”

Those he-goats would never hear Don Juan de Zavala whimper. I will not shame my Aztec blood with an act of cowardice when it is my turn to face the muskets. I will die as a Jaguar Knight facing the Flowery Death: No whimper, no plea for mercy would pass my lips.

I sat back down and wiped sweat from my face with the dirty sleeve of my shirt. Sweltering August heat barged its way into my cell through the same window that allowed in death and pathos from the courtyard.

I wondered who had just died on the other side of the wall. Was it a brave compañero I'd ridden with? They had come from every part of the land, by the hundreds, the thousands, and finally the tens of thousands, indios once again marching and fighting as Aztec warriors . . .

We had set the world on fire
.

Closing my eyes, I put my head in my arms and listened to the cadence of another firing squad marching to its post.

I had seen war on two continents, witnessed common people with uncommon passions bare their chests to the murderous blaze of musket volleys, felt the earth tremble beneath my feet from cannons roaring death, saw the sun blackened by roiling clouds of black-powder smoke . . . and lay in fields of crimson death . . .

So much pain. So much death
.

Again, the muskets cracked, and I returned to the window. “Aim true when I stand before you, bastardos! I spit on death!”

Eh, no man of good sense wishes to die, but I will depart this life knowing my name and deeds will not die with me but will thunder through the ages. Men will write songs about my final hours. Women will weep at the injustices heaped on me and at my indomitable courage as I fought mano a mano with Death, spitting in the Reaper's eye a thousand times and never knowing fear.

“Don Juan de Zavala was mucho hombre,” they will shout as tears blind their eyes.

Perhaps no songs will be written or tears will flow, but a man can dream of such things in his last moments, no? And I
am
mucho hombre. No man in New Spain sits taller in a saddle, drops a hawk on the wing with
a single pistol ball, parries a blade, or satisfies a woman's secret desires better than I. Nor has any man, the viceroy has proclaimed, committed more crimes against God, King, and Church.

Soon they will send a priest in to take my confession, to cleanse my soul. That will take much time, no? I have seen many things, have left my mark on many places, fought wars on two continents, and loved many women.

For certain, confessing all my transgressions will take countless hours. And it wouldn't be the first time a priest granted my sin-blackened soul forgiveness while an executioner readied his tools. But they made an error in assuming that I have a soul to save or to lose; I'm a gallows bird, born with a hangman's noose around my neck, my feet on a trapdoor ready to drop.

But the darkest stain on my soul has been to rot in this godforsaken cell of a dead, drunken monk while my captors tried to pry a secret from me. Neither the tedious interrogation of constables, the angry decrees of judges, nor the inquisitor's bone-cracking instruments of torture loosened my tongue. But prison walls have also prevented me from taking vengeance on one of the devil's own. And it is this unfinished business that arouses my passions, not the bullets that will be racing for my heart.