Aztec Rage (35 page)

Río Usumacinto

A
FTER TALKING TO
a trader, I informed Carlos that the only practical way to return to the coast was by boat. “We can trudge through muck for weeks, chopping our way through jungle, or we can hire boats and have a smooth trip down the river that would take just a few days.”

No one wanted to hack their way back to the coast.

“How big is this river you would have us take?” Carlos asked.

“I'm told it's muy grande. The Usumacinto is wide and deep and has a strong current to the sea. It will be a pleasure trip, amigo.”

I didn't mention that I was also told the river was infested with indio pirates who swarmed boats in canoes, crocodiles two or times as long as a man, mosquitoes said to be as huge as humming birds and voracious as vultures. Eh, I was tired of hacking through jungles, pulling mules out of mud, and carrying gachupines on my scarred back.

It took several days to sell the mules and arrange passage on three long river boats, each about forty feet long and crewed by three men who used long poles to push their boat through calm waters and push off from the riverbank and sand barges.

We began the journey not in the mighty Río Usumacinto, but a small, shallow, muddy waterway. The men manning the poles pushed us along the brown water while we baked in the sun and were bitten to the point of madness by the relentless mosquitoes.

In that moment of temporary madness, I asked the inquisitor-priest why God would create mosquitoes, and he snapped at me, “To question God's acts is a sacrilege!”

We finally linked up with the big river and began to float down it, with a light breeze keeping us mosquito-free. Things were quite pleasant if you did not count the hundreds of crocodiles that lined the riverbanks or stared darkly at us from the water.

“¡Ay de mi!. They are monsters,” I told a pole man.

“Truly,” he said. “Once in a while we lose a passenger overboard. Unless he gets back aboard instantly, he is pulled under, and the water boils red with his blood. Some of these creatures are big enough to swallow a person whole. One hunter killed a big one, and when they cut it open there was a fully clothed man inside.”

In the middle of the afternoon, the sky quickly turned black as Hades. A strong wind rose without warning, whipping stinging rain at us. We were only a couple feet above the water, and the wind whipped the river into a furious frenzy that nearly capsized the boats and sent us all into croc-infested water. But the violent storm passed as suddenly as it had risen. One moment the Furies flogged us; the next, brilliant sunlight shattered the Stygian gloom, and the sky was blindingly bright.

Like the jungle, the air on our River Styx was hot and humid, so thick you bathed in it. But we found no hint of shade, no vestige of relief.

We passed no towns our first two days down the river and viewed nothing on the banks save crocs, endless vegetation, and random scatterings of indio hunters and fishermen.

On the third day downriver, we reached a village called Palisadas, a depot for logs cut on the river, where an unpleasant surprise greeted us. A posse of constables with indio guides was waiting as our boats slid up to the embankment. I was almost ready to take my chances with the crocs when I saw them. Almost, I say. Only the inevitability of being ripped to pieces by those giant fiends kept me from diving into the water.

Believing I was to be arrested, I shrugged and shot a “sorry, amigo” look at Carlos, who gaped at the constables and then at me, his face filled with questions.

“Manual Díaz, step forward,” the chief constable said.

As I stepped forward reflexively, I caught myself;
He was asking for Díaz the military engineer,
whom they soon had in their custody, chained, and whose baggage they began searching while Díaz stared about dazed, a cow culled for slaughter.

Long conversations took place among the constables, the engineer, and Señor Pico, the head of the expedition, before we cast off again and started downriver. After we were underway, Carlos and I found a private space at the rear of the boat, where we lay upon baggage as he explained what happened.

“There is shocking news, a great deal of it,” he said. “The military engineer Díaz has been arrested for spying.” Carlos stared at me with a mixture of raw emotion—fear, horror, wonderment—”The customs inspectors searched a man trying to board a French ship at Veracruz and found plans for New Spain's military installations in his possession.”

Shades of Countess Camilla
. They obviously had found only a messenger, not the true spy. The countess had probably vouchsafed her passage by bedding the viceroy.

“Díaz has been arrested for treason, accused of supplying the French with the secrets of the colony's defenses.” He spoke as if the words were being pried out of him, as if someone other than himself were speaking. He knew Díaz was innocent, and it was ripping him up inside.

“We also have news from Spain. Something terrible has happened. The French have seized the country.” He stared at me, his face a mask of anguish. “Napoleon has taken both King Carlos and Ferdinand captive and is holding them in France, at Bayonne. Then he commanded that all the royal family be brought to France. In Madrid, the people learned that the king's nine-year-old son, Prince Don Francisco, was to be taken to France. Disturbed by the French takeover of the nation, and with their leaders doing nothing to resist it, the citizens gathered by the royal palace. When the carriages pulled up to carry the young prince and his party away, the people intervened.” Carlos began to sob.

“It occurred on the second day of May. People barred the French from kidnapping the prince, and the French troops opened fire on them with muskets and cannons, killing butchers and bakers and store clerks who were only trying to protect their country,” he said tearfully.

“When word of the massacre spread, people—men, women, and even children—grabbed whatever weapons they had. With kitchen knives and ancient muskets, clubs and shovels, and some with only their bare hands, they faced the finest troops in Europe, soldiers of the Emperor Napoleon, and fought them. For two days it was a terrible massacre. The French army slaughtered thousands of my people.”

Carlos broke down. I could see the same news was being discussed on all the boats. Some men cried, others shouted angry words, others just stared out at the river. But the tears did not last long; a cold rage seemed to settle down among the Spaniards.

Ay, if they knew Carlos had spied for the French . . .

My friend and mentor fell into a deep depression and remained in that black abyss most of the day. He did not speak to me again until late afternoon.

“I must tell you something,” he said.

“You should tell me nothing.”

In truth, I wanted to forget the subject. Carlos was too emotional. He might decide to confess to spying and get us both arrested . . . No, we would not be arrested, considering the present mood of the men on the expedition; we would be given a Viking funeral . . . while still alive.

He stared at me. “For some reason, I trust you. I know the face you show to the world is, like mine, a mask.” He waved away mosquitoes, a useless gesture that all of us made. “I am the spy they seek, not the engineer.” He blurted out the statement, expecting a reaction.

I gave him a sigh. “From your admiration of Napoleon and his reforms, I knew you had French sympathies. But why spying?”

He shook his head. “I told you about my professor, the one who died in an Inquisition dungeon. He introduced me not only to forbidden literature but to others of a like mind, people who had read the literature of revolutionaries. We met in secret and discussed ideas that could have been expounded upon in any coffee shop in Paris or Philadelphia but could have sent us to the rack in Spain.

“Do you understand my frustrations, Juan? We were only permitted to read books approved by the king and church. Those books taught the infallibility of kings and popes, traits we knew to be lies! And across our borders, a man had sprung from the fires of the French revolution and was transforming Europe.”

I had never thought of Napoleon as a savior for justice and truth, but as a man dedicated to conquest and power. He put the crown on his own head, not the people's. But Carlos was in no condition to have his ideals challenged.

He rubbed his face with his hands. “We started out posing as a literary society, but we weren't just a book club, we met to discuss forbidden ideas. Some of these meetings took place at the home of a noblewoman, a person of high rank.”

Yes, and I had met her. She had stabbed me once with her knife, and I had stabbed her back with my own tool.

“She is a woman of great . . . persuasion and great passion, for many things.”

Poor fool
, I thought. She must have bedded him, and he thought she loved him.

“When the opportunity came to join this expedition, she called on me to stand up for my ideals.”

She did “call” upon him: She coaxed him into bed, grabbed his garrancha and humped it as she whispered in his ear. Men are fools when it comes to a woman's wiles. When the countess got through with him, he would have sold his mother and sisters to French soldiers.

“It is my duty to confess my treason.”

I gasped aloud, feeling the rope they would put around his neck also tightening around mine. I instinctively made the sign of the cross to let Our Savior know I was still one of His needy sheep.

“That would be foolish, amigo.”

“I can't let Manuel Díaz take the blame, he'll be hanged.”

I waved aside Manual's stretched neck. “That's not true. You copied his fine drawing in a rough hand, no?”

He stared up at me. “How did you know?”

I shrugged. “Just a guess. Your awkward copying will save the engineer. How can they accuse him of giving drawings to the enemy when it is obvious that they were not done in his hand? As soon as they compare the engineer's
drawings with the ones seized from the spy, they will see that the plans are the stolen ones.”

His face lit up. “Are you certain?”

“Certain?” I leaned toward him. “Don Carlos, it happens that I have some considerable knowledge and experience with the work of constables in the colony. You may rely upon my word as if the Lord God Himself chiseled it in stone.”

“So Manuel will come to no harm?”

“Mi amigo, rest assured, Manuel will get special treatment.”

Very special treatment. The constables were probably already breaking his bones because they were not getting the answers they wanted. As for comparing the original and stolen sets of drawings, if Manuel had money and family, they might eventually intervene and save him from being drawn and quartered, the punishment for traitors, but only after he had been broken on the rack and he had rotted in a prison dungeon for years.

But I saw no point in bothering Carlos about such things and having him regurgitate confessions that would get us arrested and do nothing to help Manuel. I was surprised that Carlos didn't know that I was aware of his spying. For whatever reason, the countess had not gotten the information to him.

Carlos shook his head. “I don't know, Juan. I'm still afraid for Manuel—”

“Be afraid for
her
, amigo.”

“Her?”

“Your noblewoman. If they take you and torture the truth out of you, as they surely will, what will happen to her?”

He gasped. “You're right. They would arrest her. They—”

He couldn't say it so I made a cutting motion across my throat. “First they will take advantage of her, each of the jailers, those stinking, filthy creatures that are born and die in dungeons. When they are finished, they'll pass her around to any prisoner who has the price. Then, when it is time to carry out the king's justice, they'll draw and quarter her, tying each of her arms and legs to a different horse. Whipping the horses to the four cardinal directions, the beast will rip off her limbs, dragging away only her bloody stumps—”

He turned pale as a ghost, and his breath rasped like a death rattle. I thought he was going to faint, and I was prepared to catch him. Instead, he leaned over the railing and gagged into the river. I sucked on a foul-tasting indio cigarro and held his collar while he puked.

Did I not tell you what fools men are when it comes to petticoats? Now, Carlos would never confess to the king's men and jeopardize the countess. But I would be fortunate if I could just keep him alive; like any good man with a conscience, his next thought would be suicide.

¡Ay! Those hellhounds had sniffed out my trail once again and would soon be snapping at my heels. I would have to move fast, and the expedition moved very slowly. As soon as we reached the right place, I would flee the scholars and mosquitoes and board a boat bound for Havana.

FORTY-EIGHT

The Yucatán

W
E CONTINUED DOWNRIVER
, poling and flowing from the broad Río Usumacinto and Río Palizada to the Laguna de Términos, a large, shallow lagoon separated from the sea by a narrow bridge of land some called Términos and others called Carmen.