Aztec Rage (27 page)

I thought the reference to the Athenian temple was clever. Raquel had shown me a picture of it when she was talking about places of wonder in the world. I marveled now that I had learned so much from her. Fortunately for me, she had come to Teotihuacán with her father. In her case, a woman's education had not been an entire waste.

“You're a perceptive hombre, Juan. Thieves are truly the bane of antiquity, not just here in New Spain but throughout the world. They've done
more damage to archeological sites than flood, fire, earthquake, and war.” He patted my shoulder. “I'm sorry I've promised the position to another. You would have made a fine servant.”

As I walked away Pepe the Lépero came toward me. He looked like a man with a mission.

“Stay away from my patrón,” he hissed, “or I'll put a dagger in your gullet.”

I tried to look frightened but could not keep from laughing. “You would have to steal one first.”

The lépero's fellow swine mimicked his threatening stare. That they had closed ranks with Pepe was odd. I knew this kind from my time in jail. Lépero scum were notoriously disloyal. Pepe had no doubt promised them something of value. After disloyalty, lépero scum favored laziness. Refusing to work, they would not lift a finger for anything except money for pulque or the means to avoid a prison flogging post.

So Pepe's offer to work for Carlos on the expedition was a lie. Such a trip would require more work in a few days than the parasite had rendered in his lifetime. And the notion of traveling to Cuicuilco would have been as incomprehensible to Pepe as a voyage across the great western ocean to the land of the chinos or a trip to Jupiter's moons.

Since he would not work for Carlos's money, Pepe and his men planned to steal it.

I squatted next to my pile of clothes, pretending not to notice what went on around the site. Carlos continued his work at the stone wall, copying the engravings. Pepe the Lépero huddled with his friends, drinking pulque. Occasionally, they shot greedy glances at Carlos.

Late that afternoon, the léperos left, all save Pepe. He hung around, cadging handouts from the capital's visitors. I wandered over to where Carlos was packing up his drawing materials.

“You quit a little early, Don Carlos.”

“Sí, the man who is to be my porter wishes to introduce me to his wife and family before we part for Cuicuilco. I sup with them tonight.”

“Ah, supper with his wife and children.”

I nodded and smiled like it was the most natural thing in the world for a lépero to take home a gachupine for dinner. I doubted that Pepe had a home other than the dirt his filthy body wallowed in when he passed out at night.

The young scholar wore what any modestly well-off gachupine would wear: a gold necklace with a pendant, a silver ring with a red stone, another silver ring with a lion's head on it, and a money pouch. Not great wealth, but to that swine herd, it was a lifetime's worth of thieving and begging.

I bid good-bye to Carlos and went back to my pile of goods, which I had paid an indio to watch. I saddled my mule and left the site, starting in
the direction I had seen the pack of vermin go, but veering off so I wouldn't run into them. I climbed a small hill with trees for cover.

I slipped the machete out of its sheath. Spitting on my whetstone, I honed the blade to a razor's edge. Bigger, stronger, and longer than whatever the léperos would wield, I had something else they lacked: I was a trained horseman and swordsman, as skilled in these arts as any caballero in New Spain. Still these léperos were dangerous in a pack. While none of them owned a knife or machete—such items were too valuable to trade for pulque—they would arm themselves with clubs spiked with razor-sharp pieces of obsidian and with obsidian knives. They could also fall back and pelt me with rocks.

Mostly, I feared their obsidian knives. The indios had long used the volcanic vomit for weapons. The Aztecs had refined its effectiveness, embedding it in wood to make swords, daggers, and spears that sliced better than a finely honed sword. Made of sharp black volcanic glass, their obsidian knives would be especially lethal at close quarters. And this was a region in which obsidian was found.

The léperos would use the obsidian to cut Carlos's throat after they clubbed him to the ground. Then they would rob him. The odds were they would be caught later and hanged, but I had met enough of them in jail to know they did not fear hanging the way people whose brains weren't pickled by evil-smelling indio brew.

I watched as Carlos and the lépero came out of the antiquity site, walking together. Since Carlos was not on his horse, the lépero must have told him that they were not going far. A village, which I assumed was their alleged destination, lay just beyond the hilly crest of their trail. A cluster of boulders, bushes, and small trees stood just before that crest. I stared down at it, certain the léperos waited there in ambush. A repeated stirring in the bushes confirmed my suspicions.

I saw their game. They would charge out of their hiding place and kill Carlos, perhaps giving Pepe a small cut to avert blame from him. Pepe would stagger back to the expedition's camp and cry out that he and Carlos were ambushed by bandidos.

No! Not bandidos. That wasn't going to be their cover story. Lepéros survived because they were devilishly clever and manipulative. They'd accuse
me
of the attack. And I had played right into their hands. If I had stayed back at the site, others would have seen me. And where would I be when the attack took place? Hiding alone in the trees nearby.

Now I was doomed if Carlos was murdered.

As Carlos and Pepe neared the crest, I gave the mule a kick with my heels. My mount moved faster but didn't propel itself into a gallop, and I had no spurs or quirt. Slapping it on the flanks with the flat of my machete, I yelled every obscenity I knew at it. It finally picked up its pace as it galloped downhill.

I must have looked like a madman, thundering downhill on a mule, waving a machete, screaming obscenities loud enough to wake the damned. I looked so deranged that the three léperos, charging out of their hiding places and about to stab Carlos, stopped dead in their tracks with weapons raised and stared.

Pepe yelled, “Bandido!” and ran. The other léperos scattered to the wind.

As I galloped toward Pepe on a course that would take me past where Carlos was standing, the Spaniard pulled his dagger and got atop a boulder to meet my charge. I steered the mule away from Carlos, shaking my head in wonderment at him as I went by. Was he was going to fight a mounted man armed with a machete with his dagger?

Pepe was running for his life up to the crest of the hill as I came up behind him. He glanced back in stark terror when he heard my mule hammering up to him. He veered off the road, climbing onto rocks along the edge of the crest of the hill. I went after him, still on the mule, going between the boulders until I couldn't go any farther on the animal. Dismounting, I tied its rein to a bush and went onto the rocks, machete in hand, to follow him. He again glanced frantically over his shoulder before jumping a narrow crevasse, his feet landing on loose gravel. He slipped, teetered for a moment, his arms flailing, and then pitched backward off the ledge, disappearing into the crevasse.

I turned around and went back to the mule, not bothering to see what happened to him. His crazed yell echoed a few seconds up the crevasse, long enough for me to know it was not a short drop.

When I came back down, Carlos had come off the boulder. He still had the dagger in his hand. On his face was a look of consternation and puzzlement. I halted the mule and saluted Carlos with the machete.

“At your service, Don Carlos. As you can see, I've lost my horse and my sword and must fight battles in even a poorer state than the patron saint of poor knight entrants, Señor Don Quixote himself.”

Carlos stayed rigid for a moment, not completely certain of what had come down, but the intentions of the léperos were obvious. Pepe's amigos were still racing over the hillside. Not far from us lay a wood club, a limb with a wicked wedge of obsidian embedded in it like an ax blade.

“A crude but nasty weapon,” I said. “A well-aimed swipe could decapitate a man.”

Carlos stared down at the club, a perplexed smile spreading across his face. He saluted me with his dagger.

“I am in your debt,
Don
Juan.”

That night Carlos filled a pot heaping with succulent beef, pork, chiles, and potatoes. And there was also a big chunk of bread—real bread, not corn tortillas, but bread made from wheat flour. We took the food and
went a good distance from the camp to share it. I ate ravenously, having supped for weeks on tortillas, beans, and peppers, the sustenance of the poor.

After eating, Carlos opened a jug of wine and nodded at me to follow him. It was after nightfall, but a full moon lit up the city of the dead. We walked slowly along, passing the jug between us.

“A magnificent place, is it not?” he said.

I agreed. Whatever was on Carlos's mind, he kept his counsel. He knew now I was not what I seemed, and I suspected that he was wise enough to understand that some secrets are best kept secret.

If my behavior confused him, I also did not understand Carlos. I had always assumed scholars, like learned priests, were womanly. Since they were indifferent to horses, swords, pistols, putas, and bottles of brandy, I assumed they lacked cojones. Carlos had surprised me. He showed big cojones: When I charged on the mule, waving a machete wildly, he had stood his ground with a dagger.

That he had stood his ground astonished me. I could not think of a single caballero in Guanajuato who would have leaped upon that boulder to face that attack.

I now knew I had more to learn about scholars, at least about this one. He was not a big man nor did he have the agile strength in his legs and upper body to make him a fine swordsman. He didn't ride his horse as if he'd been born in the saddle but as a townsperson more used to carriages. Yet he had stood his ground in the face of certain death. He was much man, despite his book learning.

“I'm not unaware that I owe you my life,” Carlos said. He handed me the jug of wine as we walked. “Nor am I unaware that I had been taken in by the lépero.”

“Por nada, señor.” It was nothing.

“You understand that I personally do not distinguish between the races of men. But tonight, even after saving my life, you could not eat with me because the others on the expedition would take offense. My savior would have to eat with the servants.”

I shrugged. “I would naturally eat with the servants, Don Carlos. I know my place.”

He took a swig of wine. “You can stop calling me ‘don.' My father was a butcher, and the only reason I attended university is because a wealthy patrón thought I had a gift for learning and paid my way.”

“The way you stood your ground, you earned the title.”

He gave me that puzzled look again. “After today, perhaps I should be calling you ‘don' as I did earlier.”

“I am a poor man and it honors me that—”

“Stop. You just lapsed into your gutter Spanish. Do you know how you addressed me after you chased the lépero to his death?”

My feet kept moving at an even pace, but my mind went flying. What had I done?

“You spoke Catalán.”

My heart pounded. “Of course, my patrón was from Barcelona. I heard him speak in that tongue many times.”

“You lapse back and forth between Catalán and Castilian.”

“My master spoke—”

“I don't care what your master spoke. It's not your command of the language; it's your tone. One moment you speak with the vulgar tone of the lower classes, the next you sound like the youngest son of a nobleman, the kind who refused to study but who can parrot what others have told him.” He held up his hand as I started another protest. “This is the last we will speak of this. Some matters are better left unspoken. You understand that not all the members of the expedition are scholars?”

I understood. Besides the soldiers, priests had come along, one of whom wore the green cross of the Inquisition. The Holy Office of the Inquisition typically sent an Inquisitor on such expeditions to ensure that any aspect of indio artifacts and history that offended the church was summarily suppressed.

In other words, the priest was a spy, constable, and hanging judge, cloaked with the power of the church, an entity that rivaled the viceroy in terms of its dominance in the colony and oftentimes was more powerful.

“We leave in two days for Cuicuilco. I will hire you and your animal at the rate the expedition pays for such services. You will have to dispose of your cargo of clothes because your mule will convey my equipment and personal items. Does that meet with your satisfaction?”

“Completely.”

“You are to avoid contact with other members of the expedition. If there are any problems along the road, let the soldiers take care of them. Is that understood?”

“Sí, señor.”

“And try to walk without strutting, especially when you see a pretty señorita. You look too much like a caballero.”

THIRTY-SIX