Aztec Rage (36 page)

Though many leagues in each direction, the lagoon was only about seven feet deep. While its depth was shallow, its dangers were many: one side of it was mangrove swamps infested with crocodiles. El norte storms routinely battered the lagoon, capsizing boats and fattening its flotillas of crocs, but we made the crossing on an uneventful day.

As soon as we cleared the mud banks of the swamps, we hoisted our sails and caught a fresh breeze. The island of Términos came low on the horizon, its white houses vividly visible.

“Many pirates have held Términos,” Carlos told me. “English, French, Dutch, even Spanish ones took turns holding the island in the century following the Conquest. Less than a century ago, a Spanish don expelled the pirates. Most of the interest in Términos, besides as a base to attack shipping, was control of the wood that was cut upriver and brought down by boats.”

The island's main town consisted of two long parallel streets of houses and other buildings, with a fort guarding the entrance to the harbor. Ships drawing more than nine feet had to stay a distance offshore, where they were loaded and unloaded with small craft called ships' tenders.

In town, I found no ships making the Havana run. Instead I would have to take a coastal boat to ports where the ships visited more frequently, either to Veracruz or to the ports of Campeche or Sisal in the Yucatán.

I didn't want to ship out of Veracruz, which was no doubt packed with the king's constables, all of whom were on the lookout for spies. The expedition's plan was to proceed by boat to Campeche, the closest Yucatán port, then travel overland through various ancient Mayan cities before terminating the journey at Mérida, the main city on the peninsula, and its port of Sisal. My only recourse was to stay with the expedition as far as Campeche, for sure, and perhaps even on to Sisal if there was no ship available at Campeche.

For the trip along the coast to Campeche, the entire expedition was loaded into one boat, called a bungo, a two-masted flat-bottomed craft of about thirty tons that carried logs downriver and along the coast. Once again, mules were left behind, sold to a mule trader for a much lower price than they would have brought at Campeche.

Carlos had little to say after his confession on the river. Most of the expedition members had taken badly to the jungle conditions, Carlos among them. The whole bunch looked sick and wane, and most were plagued by fevers. I found it interesting that the porters, myself included, suffered through the jungle miasma better than the gachupines.

Two days of sailing along the coast toward the Yucatán Peninsula took us to Campeche, a town built on the coast between two raised fortified areas. We landed at a long stone pier that extended about 250 paces out into the bay.

Before the Conquest, Campeche was a major town of the province of Ah Kin Pech, which meant “serpent tick,” in reference to a pest that infested the Yucatán region. The community that existed before the Conquest was said to have been sizable: several thousand dwellings.

Spaniards took longer to subjugate the Yucatán than they did the heart of the colony. It took two years of bloody contention to conquer the Aztecs. In the Mayan Campeche region, battles raged over a couple of decades before Francisco de Montejo conquered the area in 1540–1541 and founded the town of Villa de San Francisco de Campeche on the site of the Mayan village of Kimpech. Campeche became one of the main ports on the Gulf, controlling the Yucatán trade in its own region, with salt, dye-wood, sugar, hides, and other products passing through it.

Pirates had routinely pillaged the town. In the seventeenth century, Sir Christopher Mims took the town for the English, and other buccaneers took it twice more over the next twenty years. In 1685, pirates from Santo Domingo set fire to the town and ravaged the surrounding countryside for five leagues. They burned enormous stores of hardwood because the authorities would not pay the ransom they demanded for the wood.

To ward off pirate attacks and defend against England's threat on the high seas, Campeche developed into a well-fortified town. Surrounded by a wall and a dry ditch, Campeche had four gates, including one that opened on the pier. Well protected against attack by both land and sea, forts to the east and west—with two batteries beneath the western one—commanded the high ground.

Entering the town, I found it to be a handsome community with some buildings in the Old Moorish and Spanish style: buildings surrounded a square in the center, with piazzas on each side of the square and a fountain and tropical garden in the middle.

Carlos and the other expedition members were settled into two inns across from each other, near the main square, while I was given a room at a nearby stable.

“You are privileged to sleep among the animals,” Carlos said, grinning. “Did not our Lord Jesus first come to us in a stable?”

While I wandered the town, I ate a local favorite, a taste I had not experienced before: young shark stewed with garlic and chile. I drank a bottle of wine and leered at lovely señoritas. Soon, I found myself at the port, inquiring about boats to Havana and was told that one would be leaving tomorrow at first light.

I would be on it. The ship, which drew much more water than the flat-bottomed bungo that brought us to the town, could not moor closer than a couple leagues. I arranged for a small boat to row me out to sea so I could board before dawn. It took nothing to book passage but my presence and dinero. I was short on money, but I had served Carlos well, saved him from the hangman, no less, and my conscience would not be offended if I helped myself to some of his gold.

When I went to the inn where Carlos was staying, I found him in bed and suffering from the fever that had plagued many of the expedition. His skin was burning hot, and he was shaking and suffering shakes and chills. The attack could go on for hours, perhaps until the next morning. I gave him a dose of the medicine we used for the fever, a substance obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree.

Coming down the stairs, I heard words spoken among expedition members in the main room that put a chill worse than malaria down my spine.

Constables! Díaz, the engineer, had convinced authorities that his plans had been stolen and copied. A search was going to be made of the baggage of all members of the expedition.

I rushed back upstairs. Was it possible that Carlos still had the plans in his baggage? Not even he could be that naïve and foolish, I told myself.

I was wrong,
María Madre de Dios!
He still had the drawing of a fortification near Puebla. The fool should never have left Spain; he was a danger to himself when he stepped outside the hallowed halls of a university.

Alternatives flew through my mind, including climbing out the window and getting to the port to find a rowboat that would take me out to the Havana-bound ship immediately. But I couldn't leave Carlos sick and helpless; he'd become my amigo, and I didn't have many in my brief life. I couldn't leave him to face the danger alone.

I thought about burning the papers, but that would leave tale-tell ashes, not to mention I had no fire going in the room. By the time I got one lit, the constables would be at my side. Even if I ate the paper, the constables would be relentless unless they had their criminal and the evidence. They needed to complete their mission.

The only thing to do was to give them the evidence and the culprit and hope that would satisfy them. If the constables were still around tomorrow
asking questions, and Carlos had broken the fever, fool that he was, he would end up telling them his sins, and we'd both get arrested.

Taking the contraband plan, I left Carlos's room and quickly went down the hallway to the door from which I had seen Fray Benito exit earlier. He was now downstairs with the other expedition members, speaking to the constables. His arrogant tone as he discoursed on what should be done to traitors carried all the way up the stairs.

I rummaged through his baggage and found the book that bore the false title about a “saint's” life. Slipping the book out of its cover so the pornographo contents would be obvious, I put the plans between the pages and put it back into the baggage.

I left the room and barely got back to Carlos's room when I heard the stamp of the boots of the constables coming up the stairs. I was sitting beside Carlos, wiping sweat off his face, when the constables opened the door.

“My patrón is sick, señor,” I told the constable standing in the doorway. He looked back at another man behind him. Neither man looked eager to enter a sick man's rooms.

“Tell the servant to throw out the bags,” the other man said. “We'll search them first, then have the man moved so we can search the room.”

With a couple “Sí, señors,” I put Carlos's bags in the hallway. They were going through them when another constable came rushing out of Fray Benito's room.

“I found them!” he shouted. “And look at what else I found. A pornographos!”

I can't tell you how watching the fray being dragged from the inn, his hands and feet in chains, soothed the scars on my back. I made the sign of the cross as they led the stunned fray by me. The head of the expedition and the sergeant in charge of the guard saw me, and they both made the gesture. No doubt they thought I had asked God to save the poor fray's soul. Truthfully, I was
thanking
God; I knew now that, for certain, heaven sided with me.

I admit that I amazed myself every time I survived some demonic plan that could bring a hangman's rough rope against the soft flesh of my neck. The only thing I could attribute my abilities to was the many times I hunted wild beasts. None of the two-legged animals I had encountered were as hard to anticipate as a jaguar or a wolf.

The ship to Cuba sailed without me, and I was at Carlos's bedside the next morning. He felt well enough to sit up and drink chocolate. I could not flee and leave Carlos to find out that another man had been arrested for his sins. I had to be there to explain what happened.

I told him about the fray. “Don Carlos, I confess I was driven to do this thing in part because I knew he was an evil man. And besides my desire to
protect you, I knew it was necessary to once more give the viceroy's men a diversion so they did not seek out the countess. We both must pray—” I made the sign of the cross. I felt it implied I had God's blessing.

He listened quietly, quite surprising me by the calm manner in which he took the news. After I was finished, he said, “I have met many good priests, often finding that those at the parish level have led lives of hard work and sacrifice for their flock, but Fray Benito was the worse kind of priest, as bad as the Inquisitors. The world will benefit if they take his robes. I am just relieved that Díaz, the engineer, has been cleared of the charges.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “I, too, am relieved. Now, let me get your breakfast.”

I got up, but he stopped me as I opened the door.

“How did you know she was a countess?”

I paused and raised my eyebrows. “Señor?”

“I don't recall mentioning her title.”

“You did it when you were delirious.” I lied and started out.

“Don Juan.”

I stuck my head back in. “Señor?”

“You are a very dangerous man.”

“Sí, señor.”

I closed the door and went quickly down the steps.

Now what did he mean by that?

FORTY-NINE

F
RAY BENITO WAS
shipped to Veracruz, and I wanted to put distance between us and Campeche in case he talked his way out of being a spy. Carlos told me that the inquisitor-priest had written a letter to the bishop at Veracruz, vouching for the fray and asserting someone had planted the map and porno-graphos on him. I don't think the Inquisitor wrote the letter out of friendship; I had seen him and Benito huddled together with books, and I'm sure he feared the fray would implicate him.

Before we left Campeche, we heard stories that a rebel chieftain had taken the name of a warlike Mayan king of old, Canek, and had been terrorizing the Yucatán, practicing the “old ways”: war and human sacrifice. The governor in Mérida had sent soldiers to capture him but stated publicly that the chief and his followers had fled to Guatemala.

I told Carlos he should argue for more soldiers to accompany us, but he said the expedition didn't have the dinero. “Besides, the warring chief has fled.”

“The same two feet that took this bloodthirsty devil south can bring him back again—if he left in the first place.”

Carlos ignored my concerns. As I've said, he was very intelligent . . . when it came to
book
learning.

“We'll encounter many ancient sites in the Puuc Hills region on our way to the ancient city of Chichén Itzá,” Carlos told me when we were en route. “We'll examine only a couple of them because the expedition can't go on forever. Many of us are anxious to return home now that our country has been invaded. You understand, don't you, what side I'll be fighting on?”