Aztec Rage (72 page)

W
E AWOKE TO
shouting outside.

“We're under attack!” Marina cried.

Only after pulling on my pants, did I grab my pistol and sword. After all, to die without pants on would be a great indignity.

I ran outside to find Marina. She had armed herself with a machete before pulling a blanket over her nakedness.

As we stood there in the hut's doorway, half-naked and well armed, the padre's aide-de-camp, Rodrigo, ran to us. “Come, there's trouble.”

When we hurried to the padre's quarters, we discovered that neither were we under attack by the viceroy's army nor were the criollo officers revolting.

“Poison,” the padre said. He spoke the word softy, as if it were hard for him to pronounce. “Someone has attempted to poison me.”

He pointed at a plate on the table. “It was in the beef.”

We followed his gaze. The dog that had adopted him lay on the floor, dead.

“I gave him a piece of beef,” the padre said.

“I fed the padre late,” his aide explained. “He wasn't hungry, but finally I convinced him he must take food or ruin his health.”

“Who prepares his food?” I asked.

“His cook.”

The cook was in his tent. He lay face down behind maize sacks. I knelt beside the body and turned it so I could see his face. His throat had been slit.

“Dagger,” I said. “Someone slit his jugular.”

No one had seen the attack on the cook. The padre's aide had found the tray on a table already there. He thought the cook had gone to relieve himself.

No one had seen anything suspicious. Whoever killed the cook and poisoned the padre's food had disappeared into the night.

When I returned with Marina to her tent, I saw Isabella and Renato standing outside the carriage. Something bothered me, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Awakening in the middle of the night, I realized what it was. When I had insulted Renato, he hadn't reached for his sword or pistol; he had grabbed for his dagger.

The cook had been killed by an expert knife man.

At first light I saddled Tempest and told Isabella, Renato, and the vaqueros that our route to Guadalajara would take us back over the mountain pass. “We will be less likely to face the viceroy's troops in the high rocks.”

After checking our stock and supplies, I made sure that Isabella's litter was properly hitched to the two mules. When we were ready to move out, I paused beside Renato, who was preparing to mount his horse.

“We must have peace between us, señor,” I said.

“Of course.”

“But be aware that I know you're a swine and that I'll no doubt kill you before this mission is over.” The devil must have put these words on my tongue.

As we left, the great, unwieldy multitude that was the padre's army was awakening like a big, sleepy, undulating beast. I waved to Marina and the padre. They stood on the front step of the padre's quarters and watched us leave.

I suspect the great Aztec horde was puzzled at turning away from the capital. The criollo officers were unhappy to abandon it. Having rubbed shoulders with those of greater book learning than myself, I had, in my own opinion, sharpened my mind against theirs in the way a whetstone hones a blade. Even so, I didn't know if the padre's retreat was wise.

I knew in my bones that what had occurred in those few moments yesterday in which the padre had by force of personality saved a great city from
being sacked, would be discussed and debated by scribes and historians for many lifetimes. It was as critical a moment as that when Caesar pondered crossing the Rubicon, when Anthony and Cleopatra lay in bed and discussed stealing an empire, when Alexander the Great pondered what he should do when he was informed that his father had been assassinated and the throne was contested. Jesus Christ experienced such a moment when he made the fateful decision to go to Jerusalem during Passover. Cortés had cast the dye when he ordered his own ships burned at Veracruz to strand his army on dangerous ground and force them to conquer or die.

Eh, I was beginning to surprise myself by my command of politics and history.

Turning in the saddle, I saw that Isabella and the bastardo nephew were staring at the horde of half-naked indios preparing for their march.

“Look at that multitude, you gachupines,” I shouted at the two of them over my shoulder. “Look at the peons you have spat upon because you thought God stood at your side. But they have God on their side now, and theirs is a terrible god of rage. They frighten you, don't they? They should, amigos, because they want what you have. Remember them well, because the next time you see them, they'll be burning your houses and rustling your haciendas . . . They'll take your silver and gold and the land you stole from them . . . They'll whip your backs and bed your women!”

I spurred Tempest and shot on ahead.

ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

T
HE GUADALAJARA REGION
was a long, hard ride from the encampment at Cuajimalpa. I drove our band on at a fast pace, trading our tired horses and mules along the way for fresh mounts, replacing the ones that went lame or simply wore out. I had mortified Isabella when I told her she couldn't bring her carriage or maid, but she endured the trip's hardship and boredom without complaint.

My problems with Renato subsided. We were both too occupied with the demanding pace to bump heads. Still I hadn't forgotten the way he caressed his dagger. And the more I was around him, the more suspicious I became of him. Besides his love of daggers, something else bothered me. He was a good rider, as good as I. While riding was second nature to a caballero, I found some of his mannerisms alien, such as the way he used a knife when he ate, how he was able to sit on his haunches and eat a plate of food as if he'd spent his life on the trail. I finally decided that what bothered me was his uncharacteristic hardness; wealthy young caballeros were notorious for their physical softness, not their survival skills.

I wondered whether he was really a young man of great wealth or a seasoned soldier of fortune hired to protect Isabella, kill her husband, defraud Hidalgo . . . and murder me.

I kept one man riding point a mile ahead of us and another scouting the rear, watching out for royal patrols and bandidos. Each time they spotted a large group of men in our area, we left the road. Besides my worthless life, I carried nearly twenty pounds of gold as ransom money—more than enough to tempt most men.

When we were a day's ride from Guadalajara, we heard that Torres had taken the city. I was amazed that a man unschooled in the military arts—and in his case also illiterate—could capture an important city.

Upon arrival, I permitted Isabella to check into an inn for the night. Instructing Renato to purchase fresh mounts for our trip to León, I immediately went to the government buildings at the city center to find José Torres, the rebel leader who had made himself master of the city.

I had been to Guadalajara only once, when I was fifteen and accompanied Bruto on a business trip. While silver-rich Guanajuato dominated the Bajío, Guadalajara was the largest city in the western region. Its wealth and prominence came not from mining but from its position as the region's marketplace for agriculture and its commercial center.

Torres had captured a real prize. Although the city of Guadalajara had a population of only about thirty-five thousand—about half of the number in Puebla and Guanajuato—the intendancy of the province was composed of over half a million souls, making it the third largest province in the colony. The administrative region of the intendancy extended to the Pacific Ocean and all the way along the coast north to the two Californias.

In many ways, Guadalajara and much of the Bajío had developed differently from the Valley of Méjico in the heart of the colony. Lacking the teeming indio population of the tradition-bound central plateau, the Guadalajara region developed a farming and ranching culture. Much to the displeasure of the gachupines, these small landowners were more independent in both attitude and deed than the peons of the central valley.

The city was founded by another of the breed of Spanish plunderers, Nuño de Guzmán, an enemy of Cortés in the snake pit of Spanish politics. In 1529, eight years after the fall of the Aztecs, Guzmán set out from the capital with an army to explore and subjugate the western region. Two years later he founded Guadalajara, although the city changed locales three times before settling at its present location. He called the region New Galicia, naming it after his native province in Spain, and anointed himself Marqués de Tonala, aping Cortés's noble title of Marqués del Valle.

In bringing the region under his authority, he brutally pillaged the land, burned villages, and enslaved indios. The indios called him
Señor de la Borca y Cuchillo
, implying that he used both noose and knife to kill. There's a story that he hanged six indio headmen—known as caciques—
because they didn't sweep the path he walked on. The viceroy ultimately tried him for his excesses and shipped him back to Spain.

After the great silver strikes in Zacatecas and Guanajuato, Guadalajara became a major provider of food and other needs of the mines.

As I walked through its main square at siesta time, I passed a couple performing a dance reminiscent of the courtship of doves, the jarabe. A dance of flirtation, the man vigorously pressed himself on his coy woman partner. I saw one version of the dance in which the woman pranced around a hat that her mate had tossed on the ground. The scene reminded me of the time I watched a sardana performed in Barcelona and of the machinations of the beautiful women I met there. And the one I was now dealing with.

Isabella and I had hardly spoken during the hurried journey. She gave me a smile whenever our eyes met, but I would keep my features blank, pretending that I wasn't affected.

I found the rebel leader at the governor's palace. A courier from the padre had already arrived, bearing a message that no attack was to be made on the capital yet. The message I bore was verbal: I told Torres that the destination of the padre's army was the Bajío but that the padre needed to know what support Torres could provide.

“As you can see, I captured the city for the padre and the revolution. I await the generalíssimo's arrival,” Torres told me. “The whole city will turn out to welcome the conquering hero when the padre honors us with his presence.”

Torres offered me more men to supplement the twelve I already had, but I declined. A dozen men I could pass off as vaqueros from a hacienda; if I arrived with a small army, I would arouse suspicion and start a war with the bandit leader.

I informed him that the word on the streets was that he governed well. He accepted my compliment with modesty.

“I've learned that running a city is impossibly complicated. Teaching a herd of jackasses to dance would be easier than administering to a city's needs and reforming its political system.”

I shook my head in wonderment as I stepped out of the government building. Miguel Hidalgo, a small-town priest, had raised an army that was shaking all of New Spain. Just weeks ago Torres had been a laborer on a hacienda, and now he had conquered and ruled the Guadalajara region: over half a million people.

I had been present with Marina when the padre told a short, stocky priest that he should raise an army and fight from the jungles in the Acapulco area. “Who's this priest that is supposed to raise this army?” I had asked her at the time.

She said his name was José María Morelos, a forty-five-year-old priest who had been born into poverty. He'd been a muleteer and vaquero until
the age of twenty-five, when he began his studies for the priesthood. Since becoming a priest, he had held curacies in small, unimportant places, administering to peons.

“How does the padre know that this man can raise an army and fight a war?” I had asked. I was a caballero—the best shot and best horseman in the whole colony—and I couldn't raise and lead an army.

“He has fire in his belly,” Marina said, “and Christ's love in his eyes.”

From a mine supplier, I bought black powder, fuses, and empty mercury flasks. I didn't know what to expect from the bandit who called himself General López, but I suspected that he would react better to a kick than a loving caress.

After dispatching a porter laden with my purchases to our camp, I strolled through the marketplace, where I spotted an ornate comb designed to secure women's hairdos. Shaped like a silver rose, it featured a pearl at its center and closely resembled a silver comb Isabella had favored when I courted her on the Guanajuato paseo. On impulse, I bought the haircomb and found my feet taking me to a barber. After a shave, haircut, and bath, I splashed a perfume of rose petals on my clothes to hide the trail smell and went to the inn where Isabella was staying.

She was almost a widow, wasn't she? I felt it was my duty to console her . . . and perhaps water her garden. That pudgy little marqués probably needed to tie a thong to his manhood and the other end to his wrist in order to find it.