Aztec Rage (68 page)

She told me the Archbishop had stepped up the church's attack on the padre.

“Besides the excommunications, the church is having its priests denounce the rebels from their pulpits, fulminating that the rebels are not just seizing political power, that theirs is a godless attack on the church, to destroy the holy religion.”

Excommunication was a powerful weapon of the church. In its more extreme form,
vitandus
, which certainly would be the decree rendered, the excommunication barred the person from the sacraments of the church as well as from a Christian burial, in other words barring you from heaven itself when you died.

I dismissed the church's actions. “The padre knows the Inquisition well, and he already knows about the excommunication.”

“He can't ignore the allegations and charges. He has to publish his rebuttal. We're a Christian land, and regardless of how some of us feel, the people, even the indios, are bound to the church.”

“What other bad news do you have for me?”

“The viceroy has offered rewards for the leaders of the revolt. He's placed a price of ten thousand pesos on the heads of the padre and Allende, also promise of a pardon for anyone who kills or captures them.”

I shrugged it off. “A bounty on our heads was always expected.”

“That's not the bad news. They're only offering a reward of one hundred pesos for the bandido Juan de Zavala.”

NINETY-FIVE

T
HAT NIGHT
, I scoured the various inns in the area of the main square for Lizardi. It didn't take me long to find him. He welcomed me like a long lost brother, not out of brotherly love but out of love for my dinero.

“You're safe in the city,” he said. “The viceroy and gachupines are too busy trying to battle the revolt Hidalgo has incited to deal with a petty bandido like you. They've put a large reward on the head of its leaders.”

Lizardi didn't know I was part of the revolt. I told him that I'd gone north to Zacatecas after I left the capital. I also didn't volunteer that there was only a hundred-peso reward on my own head. I was outraged when Raquel said that the viceroy considered me only a small-time bandido instead of a great revolutionary hombre. For some strange reason, she found my anger amusing. How do you explain to a mere woman that a token amount was an offense against my machismo?

I steered the subject to the revolution. Naturally, Lizardi was
contemptuous—or perhaps, more accurately, jealous—of the pamphlets put out by sympathizers of the insurrections.

“The writers are almost always priests,” he sneered. “What does a priest know about life?”

I smothered a grin but couldn't help saying “Hidalgo is a priest, and so are some of his generals leading the rebellion.”

“They'll lose; they don't know how to fight a war. They're trying to win the support of the criollos with their publications. They shout long live the king, long live religion, death to the French. The dribble is put out by both sides. The war will be won by guns not words.”

I was able to obtain additional information from The Worm concerning the situation in the capital. Raquel, in her enthusiasm for social change, had a tendency to see events in a light favorable to the padre's cause. Lizardi, on the other hand, while he spoke of social change, really meant an increase in rights only for criollos like him. But being fundamentally against everything that everyone else was for, he gave me insights into the current situation, insights I found disturbing.

“The padre will never take Méjico City, at least not without destroying it. The battle here will be bloody.”

“I'm sure the padre does not expect the city to fall to its knees and surrender when he's at the causeway.”

“The padre is expecting a battle, but he is not expecting the destruction of the city, and that is what will happen. This city has the highest concentration of criollos and gachupines in the colony in ordinary times. Since the rebellion began, thousands more have flocked here for protection. They're terrified for their homes, their families, their lives and property. When the padre's army tries to take the city, for certain, the gachupines will fight; they have no other alternative. And most of the criollos will join them.”

I shrugged. “They'll lose. From what I have heard, the army of the padre swells more every day. The rumors are that it'll be one hundred thousand strong when it reaches here.”

“Over a hundred thousand Aztecs: a mindless multitude, not soldiers. What will happen when the fighting goes street by street?”

I already knew, but I had avoided confronting it. The same thing that happened in Spain when the people fought invaders: violence and chaos, the rape of the entire city.

Lizardi said, “In my opinion, when his rabble face thousands of regular troops and cannon fire, they'll show the feather and run, just as they did at Monte de las Cruces. Everyone knows the padre mainly uses his indios as cannon fodder.”

I didn't correct Lizardi on how the battle in the mountain pass went. I already knew that when Trujillo limped back to the capital with a fraction
of his command left, the viceroy had announced the battle as a great victory for the royals.

“Does the viceroy plan to send an army out to meet the padre's forces before they reach the city?

“How would I know? Am I a moth at his ear?”

Lizardi was more of an ankle-biting flea, but I let that pass in lieu of some flattery that might open his lips.

“They say on the streets that you know what the viceroy will do before he does it, that he reads your pamphlets for instructions on his next move.”

Shallow fellow that he was, he beamed at the outrageous lie and saluted me with his mug of wine. “True, I could run this war better than anyone. The viceroy sent Trujillo with only a couple thousand men to delay the padre's advance toward the city. Trujillo has proclaimed a great victory, but I have heard that the padre's rabble army routed him handily. In all modesty, I made a suggestion that buzzed around the city and has caught the viceroy's attention in a much more urgent way.”

“Which was?”

“To kill the padre, of course.”

“The ten-thousand peso reward—”

“No, no, no,” he shook his head, “that reward's for fools. They offer it in the hope someone standing close to the padre will suddenly stab him or shoot him. The chances of his inner circle betraying him are about as likely as the pope canonizing me. The reward was just for show.” Lizardi leaned close and spoke in a whisper. “The viceroy has hired an assassin to go in disguise and get close enough to the padre to kill him.”

“Do you know what disguise?”

“Who knows? My source for all this is a cousin who works as a personal notary for the viceroy. The viceroy tells him things in order to have them recorded for the history of his viceroyalty. He doesn't tell him everything, but he believes the lethal blow against Hidalgo is to come from one of his own compañeros.”

“Does the assassin have a name?”

“That's all I know; that it will be someone close to him.”

I wanted more information about this heinous plot, but after two jugs of wine, I learned little else, which meant I had gotten everything he knew and most of what he could make up. The only other thing of significance I got out of The Worm was the assassin's motive: money. And the reward, Lizardi heard, was staggering: one hundred thousand pesos! A large fortune, an amount the viceroy didn't dare make public, for it showed how panicked he was about the insurrection.

Lizardi did have more information about the viceroy's other actions concerning the rebels. “He has issued a decree that anyone taking up arms against his authority be shot within an hour of capture.”

“Doesn't give anyone a chance to prove innocence, does it?”

“Pleas of innocence or mercy are irrelevant. The peons hate all Spanish, and if they are not part of the revolt now, they might be in the future. But he has made an offer of a pardon to any rebel who shifts his loyalty to the government.”

Sí, the viceroy would give me a pardon . . . and then hang me and others like me as soon as the padre was defeated.

He said, “You know what the padre's calling it, don't you? A reconquest. Do you know how that terrifies us? When Cortés conquered the Aztecs, he completely destroyed their government, religion, even their culture, leaving them without books and schools, taking away all their land and stealing and raping their women, before loosening diseases that killed ninety percent of them.”

Lizardi stared at me with both disgust and horror on his face.

“What will happen to us if they win?”

I had to leave the city, to warn the padre of the possible assassination plot and advise him of the viceroy's defenses and troop movements.

I hurried to rejoin the padre's army, leaving behind a city racked with confusion and fear.

NINETY-SIX

I
MET UP
with the army midday at Cuajimalpa, having made good time on the road from the capital. Cuajimalpa was an “old” region in terms of human occupation in the New World; the name itself was of indio origin. During the centuries before the Spanish conquest, succeeding indio empires had ruled it. Marina believed the name had something to do with trees. She was no doubt right. It was a forest region of Las Cruces Mountains with an elevation higher than that of Méjico City. Here, wood was cut for the capital and water was sent down by aqueduct.

Hidalgo, Allende, and the other generals occupied an inn and buildings that ordinarily served diligences, the carriages that took passengers across the mountains via the Méjico City–Toluca road.

The sky was misty as I neared the first outpost of the padre's army. I found the clean, cool, wet air of the higher altitude refreshing after a couple days of smelling the capital's manure, open sewers, and dung-smoke fires. At the top of a rise, I turned in the saddle and looked back at the capital. A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds to give the city a flickering, shadowy glow, like the reflection of candles on a gilt altar. No one has ever called Juan de Zavala a man of God, but at times like this I have borne witness to the eerie beauty of my Master's touch.

Méjico City rested on the bone pile of a mighty pagan city, its great cathedral and viceroy palace on sacred grounds where Aztec temples and Montezuma's royal quarters had once stood. Like Cortés's men, I now stared at the distant city in fear and wonderment. I had marched with the army hundreds of miles, sat at countless campfires, plotted with my friends, and had spied on cities to ascertain their weakness. Against my will, I had come to care about our army and its fate.

Once, when Rachel and I discussed the hurricane of fire and blood that was descending upon the city, she told me about a great bird in ancient Egypt. Called the “phoenix,” it had bright red and gold plumage and a melodious cry. During any age, only one of the magnificent birds lived, though it counted its lifetime in centuries. As the end of its existence approached, its nest burst into flames, consuming the bird. Then, miraculously, from the pyre sprang a new phoenix.

“From the ashes of old civilizations rise new ones,” Rachel had said. “Most of the countries of Europe were once colonies of the Greek and Roman empires. From time immemorial, indios in the New World battled and destroyed each other, each new empire a little different than the one it displaced. The Spanish destroyed the indio nations and substituted their own laws and customs. Now it is time we americanos destroy Spanish dominance and launch a new epoch.”

I shook off my fears and urged Tempest on. I realized that educated people like Rachel knew best, that they had learned things from books that were more worldly than what I had learned in the saddle. They knew that to make way for the americanos, the Spanish had to be driven out. And they knew that it was necessary to destroy the great city in the valley so that a brave new world could rise from the ashes.