Текст книги "Aztec Blood"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

"Slavery is an abomination," Don Julio told me, when I asked why he did not use slave labor. "I am ashamed to admit that my fellow Portuguese people dominate this trade, hunting poor africanos as if they were animals and supplying them to anyone with enough gold. I am also ashamed to admit that many slave owners are cruel and vicious people, who enjoy owning another human being, who get pleasure from the pain they inflict and would buy a slave just to abuse the poor soul. Many of these men breed with their female slaves, lying with them and even with the daughters they produced, without any thought that they are committing rape and incest."

Ayyo, well I knew the treatment of slaves, from seeing them on the streets of Veracruz, on visits to sugar plantations with the fray, and the incident in which I cut loose the slave called Yanga before he could be castrated.

A priest came once a month to service the village from a small chapel set at the foot of the hill. After meeting the priest, Mateo spit on the ground.

"Many brave frays have brought God and civilization to the indios. To this priest, there is only heaven and hell and nothing in between. Any transgression, no matter how small, is a mortal sin in this fool's head. He sees demons and devils in everything and everybody. He would turn his brother over to the Inquisition for missing confession."

I understood Mateo's concern. The priest had taken one look at Mateo and crossed himself and mouthed Hail Mary's as if he'd seen the devil. But I also agreed with Mateo about the priest. The priest had referred to me as a converso when I went to him for confession, believing of course that as Don Julio's cousin, my family stock had been Jewish. Naturally, I told him nothing of consequence in confession and instead made up small sins for him to redress with absolution. These little lies, of which I am certain God will forgive, were necessary because Don Julio insisted that both Mateo and I regularly attend church so that he could not be accused of running a Godless hacienda.

SEVENTY-TWO

Each day the men of the village left on horseback to tend cattle or on foot to work the fields. Some women stayed to nurture children and make tortillas, while others walked up the hill to cook and clean at the great house. Mateo became an overseer to the indio vaqueros, and I learned how to herd cattle. After a painful lesson, I also learned how to stay clear of a bull chasing a cow.

Those who lived in the City of Mexico or even Veracruz relied upon the viceroy and his army for protection, but the arm of the viceroy extends little beyond the large towns and main roads. Hacendados had to protect themselves, and their haciendas were as much fortresses as houses. The walls were made of the same mud-brick construction as the jacals of the indios, but many times thicker and higher. To protect against marauders—bands of mestizos, escaped slaves, and renegade Spaniards—the walls had to be thick enough so a musket shot could not breach them and high enough to make them difficult to climb. Timbers were used to support the walls and roofs of the inner building, but there was little wood in sight—visible was stone and the adobe mud bricks.

Inside the walls, the L-shaped living quarters occupied two-thirds of the space; a small stable and large courtyard completed the walled area. The horses, except for the don's personal stock, and all of the oxen used to work the ranch were corralled near the village. Outside the village were also barns and shops where almost everything that was needed to run the hacienda—from shoes for horses to leather for tackle and plows for the fields—were made.

The courtyard trees were plentiful, while green vines and flowers climbed the walls and sprayed color everywhere but on the cobblestones themselves.

It was to this place, a fortress, a village, a small feudal kingdom, I came to be transformed from a mestizo caterpillar to a Spanish butterfly.

The don would teach me science, medicine, and engineering, but his would be the scholarly professor's approach—quiet discussions and books to read, as if I was at university. My other teacher was a madman.

Mateo was my mentor for all that would make a "gentlemen" outside the realm of the scholarly—riding horses, sword fighting, dagger stabbing, musket shooting, dancing, wooing, and even sitting down at a table with a knife, fork, and plate all of silver. I had to fight my instinct to fill my gut with as much food in the least time possible out of fear that my next meal might not come as soon as my stomach demanded.

While Mateo had all the surface breeding of a gentleman, he lacked Don Julio's calm temperament and patience. He paid me in bruises for every mistake I made...

It was two years before I met Isabelle, Don Julio's wife, and when I did it was not with the great pleasure I had in meeting the rest of Don Julio's family. To pay what respect I can, the woman was beautiful yet vain, perfumed sweetly but rude, and ultimately a Medusa who had a head of snakes and turned to stone those around her.

Don Julio had no children, but he did have a family. His sister, Inez, a couple of years older than him, and her daughter, Juana.

The sister reminded me of a nervous little bird, pecking here and there, always watching over its shoulder for a predator. A somber figure, she always wore widow's black. I assumed that it was due to her husband's death, but later learned she donned the color when her husband ran off with a serving maid only a few months before her daughter was born. The husband was never seen again.

Juana, the daughter, was four years older than me. She was livelier than her mother, who still mourned the loss of a scoundrel. Unfortunately, while Juana's mind was sharp and her smile large, our Maker had not provided her with a body of the same worth. She was rail thin and brittle-boned. Her limbs had fractured several times and had not healed properly, leaving her half-crippled. She walked with the support of two canes.

Despite her weakness in body, she maintained a joyous attitude toward life and possessed an intelligence that I found amazing. I had been raised to believe that a woman's boundaries were children and cooking. To learn that Juana could not only read and write but shared with Don Julio a knowledge of the classics, medicine, and matters of the world's physical phenomena and the sky above was of great import to me. It brought to mind that young girl who allowed me to hide in the carriage and talked boldly of disguising herself as a man to gain an education.

The breadth and depth of Don Julio's learning also changed the way I looked at the world. He made me realize that the world was more exciting and challenging than I had ever imagined. Fray Antonio told me that over a hundred years ago, before the conquest of the Aztecs, in Europe had flourished a great era in which knowledge and learning long forgotten was reborn. It had produced men like Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, who founded Alcalá University, and Leonardo de Vinci of Italy, who was not only a painter but a military engineer who designed fortifications and war machines while studying the human body more thoroughly than any man of medicine.

Don Julio, like Leonardo, was a man of all seasons. He painted, studied the plants and animals of New Spain, knew more about medicine than most medical doctors, drew maps, not only of the mountains and valleys, but of the stars and planets, and was an engineer.

His skill at engineering was so renowned that the viceroy had given him the task of designing a great tunnel to avert flood waters from Mexica. The city was built on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. When it rained heavily, it came under threat of flood, and in some years flood waters overwhelmed the city. The tunnel was built to direct the waters out of the lake to keep the city from flooding. It was the greatest engineering project in New Spain or anywhere else in the New World.

¡Ay de mí!it would ultimately drown us in tragedy.

My presence with the family had to be accounted for. I could not keep up the pretense of being indio with Don Julio and the people around him. A major problem, besides my skin color and features, was the fact that I was growing a heavy beard even in my late teens. Indios had little hair on their faces. Mateo tried to convince me to shave the beard, telling me that señoritas preferred a clean-shaven face that they could rub against. But I had already been stripped of my indio disguise to become a Spaniard. I kept the beard. Neatly trimmed beards, especially sharply pointed goatees with mustaches, were the fashion of gentlemen, but I kept my beard full and long to hide my face. I also believed it made me look older and wiser.

Juana, Don Julio's niece, joked with me about the beard, asking what crime—or what woman—I was hiding from.

Don Julio was silent on the subject of my beard. He was equally silent about the mestizo boy from Veracruz who was wanted for heinous crimes. Don Julio and Mateo continued to treat the subject as they had done so earlier—with complete silence.

My suspicion was always that Don Julio knew even more than he let on. Once when I hurried into his library in the great house of the hacienda to speak to him, he was standing by the fireplace looking at a piece of paper. As I approached, he threw the paper into the fire. As it burned, I saw that it was an old reward notice for a mestizo known as Cristo the Bastardo. Fortunately, Cristo was a nickname for Cristóbal, and the latter was a popular name among Spaniards and indios.

As I said, I believed part of the reason Don Julio took me in as family was because he also bore a blood taint. One day when I was defending my life against Mateo as he taught me how to fight with a sword, I asked him why someone would call Don Julio a Jew.

"Don Julio's family were originally Portuguese Jews. In order to stay in Portugal soon after the discovery of the New World, many Jews converted to Christianity. Both conversos, those who converted willingly and Jews who only converted for appearances, were tolerated for the blood money they paid until King Filipe of Spain inherited the throne in Lisbon. When pressures increased, many conversos and secret Jews, marranos, came to New Spain. Don Julio came here over twenty years ago and since has brought many family members with him. Conversos are frequently suspected of being secret Jews. And even if the conversion to Christianity was faithful, in most people's eyes they carry the blood taint no matter how long ago their family had converted."

I knew something of the fate of Jews and Moors in Spain from Fray Antonio. At almost the same time that Columbus was sailing from Spain to discover the New World, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered the Jews to leave Spain.

"Before the banishment," Mateo said, "Jews and Moors were not only the wealthiest merchants, but the most educated people on the Iberian Peninsula. They were most often the doctors and merchants found in every town of any size. But every Jew and Moor in Spain and Portugal was forced to either convert to Christianity or leave. When they left, they were not allowed to take their gold or jewels. My Christian blood runs deep, but I can sympathize with Jews and Moors who had to face death or exile over their religious beliefs."

As one whose own blood was deemed tainted, I, too, found sympathy in my heart for people who could not prove purity of blood, limpieza de sangre. With my knowledge of languages, literature, and medicine, had I been indio, Don Julio could have held me out as an example of what the indigenous peoples were capable of, sort of a tamed and erudite noble savage. But as a mestizo, a carrier of the blood taint, it would not amuse but infuriate the gachupins.

The don could have had me keep up my indio disguise or even revert to the mestizo that I was. But he knew that I would never be able to advance and display the talents and scholarship he recognized in me. So I became a Spaniard.

The don introduced me as the son of a distant cousin who came to stay with him when both my parents were carried away by peste. Because the don was a gachupin, a wearer of spurs, people would assume that I, too, was born on the Iberian Peninsula.

One day I was a social outcast and the next a wearer of big spurs.

SEVENTY-THREE

"Parry left!" Mateo shouted at me as he delivered a rain of blows.

Learning how to be a gentleman was harder than learning how to be a lépero, I soon discovered—and more painful.

"You are fortunate, Señor Bastardo," Mateo said, "that you dwell in the Empire of the Spanish."

Mateo used the tip of his sword to flick an imaginary object off the front of my shirt. I also had a sword, but other than using it as a club to bludgeon with, I had no idea what to do with it.

"The Spanish are the Masters of the Sword," Mateo said, "and all the world knows it. The English swine, may San Miguel burn their souls and cast them down to hell, use short, thick swords to deliver blows in the hope that they will beat their opponents to death. The French are dainty fighters, all lace and perfume. They wish to love their opponents to death. The Italians, ha, the Italians, those arrogant bastards full of hot wind and bravado, they almostsucceed at being Masters of the Sword because of their speed and cunning, but they lack knowledge of the secret that makes Spaniards the greatest swordsmen on earth."

Mateo put the tip of his sword to my throat and lifted my chin an inch.

"I have been sworn to secrecy upon penalty of death by all the chivalric orders of Spain never to divulge this secret to anyone who does not have Spanish blood in his heart. You, my little bastardo-half-breed, are Spanish in a queer sort of way. But you must also swear an oath to God and all of his angels that you will never reveal this secret to anyone else because every man in the world wants to be a Spanish swordsman."

I was thrilled that Mateo had honored me with a secret of such magnitude.

He stepped back a couple of paces and drew an imaginary circle on the ground.

"The Circle of Death. You enter it with the Dance of the Blade."

I stared down at the ground where his sword had passed. Dancing? Deadly circles? Had Mateo been imbibing the don's wine again?

"The first thing you must understand is that there are two types of sword fighters, the quick and the dead." His sword flashed as a blur before my eyes. "What type of sword fighter are you, Bastardo?"

"The quick!" I slashed out with my sword like I was chopping down a tree. The sword flew out of my hand, and Mateo's sword was at my throat. The tip of his sword was under my chin; his dagger pushed against my gut. He put pressure on my chin with his sword and I stretched onto my tiptoes. Blood ran down my neck.

"You are dead, Chico. I ask God to grant you one more life so that I can teach you to fight with a sword, but when your training is over, there will be no more mercy. The next man you fight will either kill you—or be killed."

Mateo released the pressure on my throat.

"Pick up your sword."

I scrambled to get the blade, wiping blood from my neck.

"Stand before me with your feet together. Now take a step toward me. Extend your sword as far as you can and mark a spot in front of you and to each side."

After I scored the dirt with my sword, Mateo drew a circle around me, more to the front than to the back.

"That is the circle of death. It is not one circle, but a thousand, moving with you, moving with your opponent. It is liquid, like ripples in water, constantly moving, constantly changing, flowing toward you, flowing back."

Mateo faced me and stood at the edge of the circle. "The circle begins at the point you can reach across and inflict a wound or death on your opponent. From here I can hit your face, your chest, your stomach." He moved slightly to the left. "From either side I can get the sides of your body. I move a little more and I can slice the hamstring behind your leg. Remember, Chico, the circle is fluid—it changes with every step.

"And it belongs to bothof you. When you face another swordsman, one or both of you will close the space between you. When you get close enough to strike, the circle is created for both of you."

Along with the physical combat, Mateo gave me much verbal instruction about the uses of swords.

The dress rapier most men carried in town was lighter and fancier than the military swords and much less lethal.

"It will serve you well to fend off an attacker on a city street or in a duel of honor, and it is good for thrusting or cutting, but when you are in the thick of battle you need a weapon that will kill an opponent who may be wearing padding or even armor, one that can cut off an enemy's arm or head. A military sword will allow you to drive back a group of attackers or even cut your way through."

He demonstrated how the basket hilt protected the hand on a light sword. "The sword you duel with should have this type of hilt that protects your hand from a downward slice. But neither the dress sword you carry on the streets or the military sword you carry for protection outside a city should have an elaborate hilt. Why not?"

"Because, uh, becau—"

"Estupido!" He attacked with his rapier, the sword a blur as he struck me again and again, raising painful welts on my arms and legs.

"When you reach for a sword, whether it be from a sudden attack in battle or a sudden attack on a street from a robber, you may have only a split second to arm yourself. If there is a fancy hilt guard, you will grab it instead of getting a good grip on the hilt. When that happens, Bastardo, you will have a sword sticking in your throat before your own weapon is free of its scabbard. Most duels are arranged in advance. Thus you can use an elaborate hilt guard to protect your hand because you do not have to draw your sword to protect yourself from a sudden attack."

Not all swords are right for a particular man, he told me. The weight of the sword depends upon the strength of a man. "Much attention must be given to the length you need for your height and the length of your arms. If your sword is too long, you will not be able to uncross the blade from your opponent's without stepping back and putting yourself off balance. If it is too short, the circle of death will be smaller for your opponent because of his greater reach."

He showed me how to discover the length I needed. I held my dagger out arm length in one hand, the arm horizontal to the ground but the dagger held upward, and my other hand with my elbow crooked so the sword hilt was at my hip. "The sword should reach the grip of the dagger but not extend beyond," he said.

Everything else being equal, a tall man will prevail over a shorter man because he has a longer weapon and a longer reach.

"If your sword is too heavy, you will lack the speed to attack, parry, or counterattack. If it is too light, your opponent's blade will break it."

I had to build up strength, and I did this by practicing with a much heavier sword than either my dress sword or my military sword. "Your arm will think it is carrying the heavier sword, and you will be able to use your swords with greater speed and strength."

The dagger is a useless weapon for warding off blows. It has one good purpose: "When your blade is crossed with your opponent's, you stab him with your dagger before he can get his weapon uncrossed."

Ayyo, my Aztec ancestors would be proud to see that I was learning the fine art of killing from a true master. Mateo may have been a liar, a purloiner of poetry and women, but when it came to the art of killing, he was a master.

"You must always be the aggressor," he told me. "Not that you should start all fights—but once they start, you must counterattack so aggressively your opponent is on the defensive. And when a fight is inevitable and your opponent chooses to talk about it, while he is still concentrating on insulting you with words, you must pay him the greatest insult of all—put your dagger in his gut."

The aggressor almost always wins a fight, he said. He who strikes first is most often the one who will live to fight again. "But what is aggression?" Mateo asked. "It is not the charge of a bull or mindless slashing. Successful aggression derives from a combination of great defensive maneuvers and brilliant offense. Even if you are hacking your way through a troop of the enemy, you must make every slash count because the one you miss may cost your life."

Mateo viewed fencing as another form of dancing.

"A swordsman must adopt the posture of a dancer, standing tall with body straight, but with knees flexible. Only then can we move quickly. Rapiers extended before us, our opponent at bay, our feet must move like a dancer's, never pausing, always in motion, but not capriciously. Dancers do not move their feet any which way but in harmony with the music, their partner, their mind, and the rest of the body. You must hear the music and dance to the rhythm."

"Where does the music come from?"

"The music plays in your mind, the tempo created by the movements of you and your opponent, and you dance to it. Thrust, parry, dance, standing straight up, your arm extended, keeping him from drawing a circle around you, dance, dance."

Mateo pranced like a young girl at her first ball, and I made the mistake of giggling—his sword whizzed by my cheek and cut a locket of my hair.

"Laugh again and they will call you One-Ear instead of Bastardo. En garde!"

When I stumbled with my footwork, Mateo cursed me. "It is my fault to ask a lowly lépero to wield anything more strenuous than a begging cup. If you cannot dance because your feet and your brain are not in the same body, then at least think of it as swimming. You must use all of your body at once when you swim. Swim toward me, Bastardo, step, step, thrust, parry, and step– small steps, you oaf!If you tread on your dance partner's toes, he will thrust his sword into your throat."

Each day I learned more about pain. And I noticed more and more scars on Mateo's face, arms, and chest when he took off his shirt to rinse the heat and sweat from his body. He had a name for every scar—Inez, Maria, Carmelita, Josie, and other women he had fought duels of honor for. There were even scars on his back, one particularly nasty one when an angry father's thrown dagger caught him in the back after he leaped from a girl's balcony.

I began to accumulate my own scars from Mateo's angry slashing.

"You must follow your body's instinctive reaction, not your eye. A flashing sword lies to the eye because it moves quicker than the eye can follow. You sword must be in position to ward the blow and counter, relying on the eye to follow the action. Your eye will lie to you and kill you.

"I have studied under Don Luis Pacheco de Narvaez, the greatest swordsman in all the world, he who was a student of Caranza himself. Caranza taught that the fluid, dexterous dance, what he called La Destreza, was the way of the swordsman."

After months of practice, Mateo made his judgment of me as a swordsman.

"You are dead, dead, dead.You might be able to hack your way through a side of beef with a two-handed sword or maybe an indio who has been tied up and thrown on the ground, but you are too slow and too clumsy to survive against a good swordsman."

That glint of cunning came into his eyes that I have seen when he is about to cut another man's purse or steal his woman.

"Since you will never be able to survive with the skills of a gentleman, you must learn how to be a tricky swine."

"I want to be a gentleman!"

"A deadgentleman?"

The lépero in me decided the issue. "Show me how to be a swine."

"You have as much strength and skill—or lackof skill—in your left hand as in your right. Swordsmen call the left hand the devil's paw for good reason—the Church frowns on the use of the left hand, and most men are taught to use the right hand for sword fighting only, even if their left hand is their superior one. You are not a gentlemen. You can fight with the left hand. But you must understand that simply using your left hand against a skilled swordsman will not give you a great advantage—unless you combine it with surprise.

"I will teach you a movement that you can use in desperation when you realize that the swordsman you are up against is going to slice pieces of meat off of you until you bleed to death standing up. You begin the fight with your sword in your right hand and your dagger in the left. When you are out of the circle, you suddenly let your dagger drop and switch the sword to your left hand as you step into the circle. It means dropping your guard for the briefest moment, and he would put his point in your heart if you did not ward off the thrust"

"How do I ward off the thrust?"

"With your shield."

"What shield?"

Mateo pulled up one of his sleeves. He had a thin piece of bronze metal strapped to his arm. "You will use your "armored" arm to knock away his blade."

Armor in a duel was dishonorable to the extreme. Switching to the left hand during a fight was ungentlemanly. But I would rather be a live swine than a dead gentleman.

SEVENTY-FOUR

The first time I saw the don's wife, Isabella, she was stepping down from a coach in front of the great house at the hacienda. A flutter of silks and petticoats, her Chinese satin bodice was encrusted with gem stones, and she had pearls strung around her neck and both wrists. Her red, shoulder-length hair was all curls from the ears down.

I have seen beautiful women before—colorful mulattas on the streets of Veracruz, beautiful, dark-eyed india women in out-of-the-way villages—but none of the Spanish women I had seen compared to Isabella.

I was beside Don Julio as he helped her step from the coach, and I gaped as she descended. Had a servant not laid out a carpet upon the dusty ground to protect her shoes, I would have flung myself on the ground for her to step on. My mind swirled and I nearly passed out as a whiff of her perfume found me.

Mateo and I stood with our hands on our swords, our backs ramrod, in our finest clothes, as if an honor guard for a queen.

Don Mateo took Isabella by the arm and paused before us as he escorted her into the hacienda.

"May I present my young cousin, Cristóbal, and my aide, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo."

Isabella looked at us, her green eyes inspecting Mateo and me thoroughly, before turning back to Don Julio.

"Another poor relative to feed, and a blackguard to hide the silver from."

That was my introduction to Doña Isabella.

The great house had been an oasis of tranquillity since I had first been brought there to be molded into a gentleman. Other than the scholarly challenges of Don Julio, and an occasional kick or insult from Mateo when he became frustrated by my clumsiness, I was well-fed, slept in an actual bed, and begged the good Lord each night not to send me back to the streets of Veracruz—or the gallows.

With the arrival of Isabella, the house stopped being an oasis and became an el norte tempest. She was the center of everything—demanding and irritable to the servants, sweet and manipulative with Don Julio, rude to the don's sister, niece, and "cousin"; downright hateful to Mateo, who she treated as if he was going to abscond with her jewels at any moment. She referred to him not by name but as "that picaro."

We soon discovered that she had not come to be sociable. From overhearing a conversation between Don Julio and Isabella in the library, I learned she had grossly overspent her household budget for their home in the City of Mexico and had come demanding more money. The don was angry because it was no small amount of money Isabella needed. She had gone through a year's household expenses in a few months, a sizable amount since the house had a full staff of servants and Isabella surrounded herself with considerable luxury.

She told the don that the money had been stolen but admitted, when he questioned her, that she had not reported the loss to the viceroy or anyone else. The don was clearly incredulous, but when it came to dealing with Isabella, he was as helpless as everyone else.

After Isabella had been in residence for three days, I inadvertently was able to look upon her hidden beauty. I entered the antechamber next to the don's bedroom looking for a book the don had left there and found myself staring at Isabella naked from the waist up. She soaked in a small bathtub. The steamy brew smelled of roses.

I was struck dumb, but Isabella, without bothering to cover her bare breasts, simply looked at me. "You're a handsome boy, aren't you," she said, "but you need to shave that vulgar beard."

I ran from the room in terror.

"She's the don's wife," Mateo told me. "We must respect her. And we must never lust for her. One does not have passion for the wife of a friend."

Mateo spoke with such heated emotion that I feared he suspected me of such thoughts. I found this odd. Mateo had loved the wives of a dozen men. I found it interesting that he had such strong feelings about the wife of a friend. Such distinctions were part of the code of honor that I was learning, the code of hombriain which honor and amorous conquest both play large roles. A true manhas loved many times—but only honorably. One does not scale the wall to the bedroom of a friend's wife... but any other woman is fair game.

A code for women existed, too. A woman was to remain a virgin until marriage—and never be tempted afterward. Eh, amigas, did I say life was fair?

At times Mateo felt that he was a prisoner at the hacienda. He was a man of action and bossing vaqueros was not his brand of excitement. He would disappear for weeks at a time, and when he came back his clothes and body looked like the fur of a cat that had tangled with a pack of voracious dogs. Once he let me come with him, and we rode hard for days following a treasure map in search of Montezuma's legendary gold mine.

He had won the treasure map in a card game. The fact that the map could be a fake was not in the cards. We went near no large towns, but it was an exciting experience to jump on the horse and seek a lost treasure. We never found the mine. My suspicion was that Mateo had been duped into letting a fake map be used as a bet. Naturally, I was careful not to suggest the idea.