Aztec Rage (78 page)

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

A
T BAJAN WELLS
, a settlement had grown up around the watering hole, supplying travelers and mule trains that plied the trail to the northern territories. A small church was the centerpiece of the settlement. I followed the muleteer to the church. As we came into what passed for a town
square, the gate to a courtyard next to the church opened, and Renato stepped out. He was on the other side of the square. I gave Tempest a slap on his flank and surged forward, drawing my sword.

I hadn't covered half the distance to the bastardo when soldiers armed with muskets poured into the square from every direction.

I jerked Tempest's reins to change direction and break through a line of soldiers to my right.

“Shoot the horse!” Renato yelled.

A volley of musket fire erupted. A ball hit my left thigh, and I felt Tempest shudder beneath me as he went down. I slipped loose from him, hitting the ground with a force that knocked me breathless. I groped for my sword, which had fallen several feet from me, and got to my feet, swaying dizzily, sword in hand. My eyes were blurred, but I heard Renato shouting commands not to shoot me as he ran toward me with a dagger in hand. He didn't want me dead because he wanted to torture the location of the treasure from me.

As I staggered toward him to meet his charge, a horse and rider broke through the circle of soldiers, and I heard a familiar yell.

Marina! The warrior-woman had followed me.

She sped past me and drove her horse at Renato. More musket fire erupted. Her horse stumbled and went down. Like a circus trick-rider, Marina hit the ground feet first with her machete in hand. Her momentum sent her stumbling toward Renato as she tried to gain her balance. She almost ran into his arms. As she came up to him, still off-balance, she raised her machete to strike him. He stepped in, blocking her machete arm and plunged his knife into her gut.

“No!” I screamed. “No!”

He grinned at me as he put his free arm around her and pulled her against him, twisting the knife in her gut. She slipped to the ground at his feet as I limped and staggered toward him, blood flowing from the wound to my thigh. I was a dozen feet from him when I heard steps behind me. In the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the musket butt, and the back of my head exploded. I crashed onto the ground again, dazed.

“Don't kill him!” Renato screamed. “Take him to the well inside the courtyard.”

Two men grabbed me by the arms and dragged me through the open gate and across the churchyard to a water well surrounded by a round, adobe brick wall about three feet high. A wood frame built over the well held an iron pulley with a rope draped over it.

“You two stay,” he told the men who had dragged me. “The rest of you out, get out of here.”

I knew why he wanted privacy. He had not spared my life out of friendship.

Renato grabbed the rope that held the bucket used to retrieve water
from the well. He cut the bucket off and handed the rope to one of the men who had dragged me. “Tie it to his legs. Roll him over so I can tie his hands.”

As I lay face down in the dirt, Renato knelt down beside me and tied my hands behind my back with a leather thong.

“Eh, Señor Lépero, son of a whore, I knew you would come back to me.”

“I'll die before I tell you anything.”

“Yes, you will die soon but not until I am finished with you. Before I am done, you will beg me to send your soul to hell.”

He stood up and kicked my thigh wound. I gasped involuntarily from the pain.

“Pull him up,” he told his two aides, “and lower him into the well headfirst.”

Headfirst?

The bastardo was going to drown me. He was a smart hombre. Drowning was particularly nasty. I was told by my guerrilla friends in Spain that it was better to be chopped up or beaten to death than to be tortured by water. When you are cut or hit, you pass out or your body goes into shock, and the pain dulls. Not so with drowning because your body has a constant need to breathe, death being the only escape, and Renato would keep me from giving up the ghost until he was ready.

My feet went up first as the men pulled the rope. When they had me in the air above the ground, they released the rope, and I fell headfirst into the dark pit. On the way down I scraped my shoulder against the sharp edge of a rock that protruded from the well's inner wall. I didn't have time to yelp with pain as my shoulder ripped open before I hit the water.

For a moment the water was cool, a welcome relief from my wounds. I hadn't had the presence of mind to suck in and hold a breath of air before I was submerged, but it wouldn't have mattered. Water got into my nose immediately, and I gasped out whatever air I had. When air went out, water came in. I sucked it in, and my brain exploded in a flash of sparks. I jerked violently, compulsively, like a great fish that had just been hooked through the tail.

I suddenly realized I was being pulled up. When I was back at the top, Renato leaned over the edge and spoke to me.

“Where is my treasure? If you tell me, I'll let you live.”

I spat water and vomit at him.

They dropped me again, and I flew back down, ripping my back and snagging my wrists so hard on a protruding rock I thought I'd broken my arms before I hit the water. This time I went all the way, and my head hit the bottom. The blow gave me a brief flash of comfort as my body went dead, but a second later my lungs—against my will—sucked in water and burst into flames.

Through the fog enshrouding my brain, I realized that I had been hauled up and Renato had ordered the men to permit me to catch my breath. Like any good dungeon master, he knew that torture only worked on the living.

“Tell me where the treasure is, and I'll let you lead me to it,” the devil whispered in my ear.

“I will lead you to your grave.”

He ordered another plunge into the dark pit.

Wrestling with death, I fiercely pulled at the wet leather thong around my wrists and felt it yield. During the last drop, the wrist thong had briefly caught on one of the sharp stone protrusions jutting out from the inner well wall, and, yanking my arms up, I'd feared the caught thong would dislocate my shoulders, even as blinding agony seared through my joints. But then I'd felt the thong give as I broke from the sharp outcrop and continued my fall. I yanked again at the thong, and suddenly my hands were free.

When I was hauled back up, Renato leaned over the edge to taunt me. “This is your last chance, son-of-a-whore, if you don't—”

I reached out. Getting a hold on his jacket, I pulled him to me. He came over the short wall, grabbing onto me. As he fell toward me, I pushed him down, but he grabbed my waist. The weight was too much for the two men pulling the line. I heard a yell, and then Renato and I flew down the shaft. He struck the rock extending from the side of the wall with a
thunk
.

When we hit the water, we both went under, but I was jerked above the water line by the men with the rope. I got an arm around Renato's neck and held on. The men above couldn't pull us both up. He didn't struggle like a man with all his strength, and I realized he must have been stunned by the protruding rock. With my arm around his neck, I kicked off from the side with my feet and bashed his face into the stone wall again and again all the while it took them to haul us up.

The haulers had hooked a mule to the rope to haul us up, but I was the only one that made it. When we'd reached the top, I let go.

I lay on the ground, my wrists tied again, as they lowered a man to get Renato. They brought him up, dead . . . just the way I wanted the bastardo to be.

From the conversations around me, I picked up that they awaited orders from Lt. Colonel Elizondo. My brain was waterlogged but was working well enough for me to recognize the name of the officer in charge of the region for the revolution. He was to greet the padre and Allende when they arrived at the wells.

That a revolutionary leader would team up with Renato to steal money designated for the revolt wasn't implausible; men are universally greedy. To do it so blatantly, however, was strange. That I had been lured away from the army, captured, and tortured, would circulate through the camps tonight. How would Elizondo explain his actions?

A feminine voice from my past asked when the colonel would arrive. I twisted on the ground. She sat on a chair, shaded by an umbrella. On a table beside her were a bottle of brandy and a full glass. She fanned herself and smoked a cigarillo.

She had watched her lover torture and murder her husband, watched him torture me, watched her lover dragged dead from the well . . .

Her eyes lowered and met mine. They stared blankly at me. I could have been one of the peons she used as a doormat.

A troop of men entered the courtyard, and the man guarding me uttered Elizondo's name.

The crunch of boots, expensive boots, stopped next to my head. I twisted and looked up at the officer standing over me. He wore the insignia of a lieutenant colonel.

I had overheard from Allende's criollo officers that Elizondo had been a captain before the revolt and had asked Allende to make him a general. Allende had refused and promoted him merely to lieutenant colonel, saying he needed more soldiers, not more generals. Allende had made a bad decision, no?

“You are either very brave or very stubborn, señor,” he said.

“I am neither. The treasure belongs to the revolution and is in the hands of the padre. Renato never understood I could not give it to him. I didn't threaten the man with retribution from the padre. That would just have hastened my death.

“The revolution is over. In a short time the treasures stolen from the king will be in the proper hands.”

“Traitor!”

“No, a realist. The royals have won. Long live the king.” He smirked at me.

“The padre has a large army approaching—”

“The padre is not in command, Allende is. And the army is strung out for miles. I have instructed the leaders to come forward with their mounts and carriages to drink first so the wells can refill before the main army arrives. They'll find a surprise at the wells.”

It was a good plan. The leaders would fall into the trap. Once they had the heads, the army would be useless.

I grinned up at him. “You'll get your reward in hell for betraying your compañeros.”

“Actually, my reward from the viceroy will be quite handsome.” He turned to Isabella. “As you have heard, señora, your husband's treasure is gone. But perhaps I will be able to make your stay in the north . . . more pleasant than it has been.”

Without looking in my direction, she pointed at me with her foot. “Is there a reward for him?”

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

Mountains Where the Cougars Lurk, 1541

M
Y SOUL FLEW
with the night wind, carried along as the breeze moaned and whistled through the mountains. My people believe the wind's eerie song was the wail of spirits as they are swept to the Underworld. Their weeping was an evil omen to those who heard it because it attracted Xipe, the Night Drinker who drinks the blood of sinners during the hours of slumber.

Ayya!
I had no fear of the vampire's thirst—my life's blood had been left on the battlefield when I brought down the Red Giant and the great warhorse he had ridden. Don Alvarado had broken his neck when he hit the ground, but taking his life had also cost my own. My journey now was to Mictlan, the Dark Place, where the skull-faced Mictlantecuhtli reigned. But the Dark Place was not where souls came to rest—it was a vast, gloomy Underworld divided into nine hellish regions that had to be traversed during a four-year journey fraught with violent trials.

In the golden days when the gods of the Aztecs ruled the heavens, a warrior who fell in battle did not suffer the torment of the nine hells. Instead, the afterlife was a pleasant one. He ascended to the House of the Sun, one of the thirteen heavens, and traveled across the sky with the Sun God from dawn to dusk, as an honor guard for the fiery spirit. During the hours of darkness, they engaged in mock battles for enjoyment. There was feasting and the companionship of comrades and women. Women who died in childbirth, people who drowned or were struck by lightening, and those who went willingly to the sacrifice slab also found a place in the thirteen heavens, though not one so grand and privileged as that of the warrior.