Текст книги "Aztec Blood"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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To the fray it was Casa de los Pobres, the House of the Poor. To him it was as much a house of God as the finest cathedrals in Christendom. It was a long, narrow, wood shack. The planks that made up its walls and roof were thin and rotted from the brutal rains, winds, and heat. Sand and dust blew in, and the whole place shook during a norte. I slept on dirty straw next to whores and drunks and squatted near the fire twice a day to get a tortilla filled with frijoles. This simple meal was a fine feast for those who only knew the streets.

Turned out onto the streets of the meanest city in New Spain, over the next couple of years blows and curses would recast me from being a hacienda boy to a street leper, a lépero. Lying, thieving, conniving, and begging were only a few of the talents I acquired.

I confess that I was not a saintly boy. I sang not hymns but a cry of the streets—a cry for alms! "Charity for a poor orphan of God!" was my song. Often I covered myself with dirt, rolled back my eyes, and twisted my arms in obscene contortions, all but wrenching them out of their sockets, in order to extricate alms from fools. I was a mudlark with the voice of a mendicant, the soul of a thief, and the heart of a waterfront whore. Half español, half indio, I was proud to bear the noble titles of both mestizo and lépero. I spent my days barefoot and dirty, keening my alms cry, cadging filthy lucre from silken grandees, who, when they looked down at me at all, grimaced with contempt.

Do not cast stones at me like that bishop did to the poor fray when he took the holy cloth from him. The streets of Veracruz were a battlefield in which you could find riches... or death.

After a couple of years, the dark cloud that had come over us suddenly at the hacienda disappeared. I was past my fourteenth birthday when the shadow of death fell across our path again.

It was a day in which there was both death and riches on the streets.

I had writhed, contorted, and begged near the fountain in the center of the city's main plaza; and though my alms cup remained empty, I was not particularly chagrined. Early that morning I had struggled through Dante Alighieri's La divina commedia.Eh, do not think I read this tome for pleasure. The fray insisted I keep up my education. Because our library was so limited, I had to read the same books over and over. Dante's dark journey, guided by Virgil through the descending circles of hell, the inferno, to Lucifer at the bottom of the pit, were not unlike the baptism I received when I was first cast out onto the streets of Veracruz. Whether I would someday be purged of my sins and enter paradise were still unanswered questions.

The fray had been loaned the epic poem by Fray Juan, a young priest who had become his secret friend despite the fray's fall from grace with the Church. Fray Juan had been made party to my secret education. That morning, after I recited the poem in my bumbling Italian, Fray Antonio had beamed and boasted of my prowess with knowledge, and Fray Juan had agreed. "He drinks up knowledge like you do that fine Jerez wine I bring from the cathedral," Fray Juan had said.

Of course, my scholarship was a secret known only the between the friars and me. The punishment for lettering a lépero was prison and the rack. Had our secret leaked out, wecould have been the entertainment of the day.

For entertainment it was. This day, half the city had gathered in their Sabbath finery—accompanied by small children, fine wines, and costly comestibles—to watch a flogging. Excited by the prospect of blood, they had a glow in their cheeks and malice in their eyes.

An overseer in a tan, buckskin jerkin, leather breeches, and black, knee-high boots was lining thirty bound and ragged prisoners up by sixes and loading them into caged, mule-drawn prison wagons. He had a dark beard, a dirty, low-slung felt hat, and mean eyes. He made promiscuous use of the cuarate-quirt, punctuating its cracks with bloodcurdling oaths:

"Get in there, you miserable sons of dray beasts and putas. In there or you'll curse the mothers you never knew for giving you birth—you murdering, thieving, pimping hijodeputa."

They lumbered painfully under his whip, with teeth gritted, into their portable prisons.

His charges were on their way to the silver mines of the north, but for the most part they weren't "murdering, thieving, pimping hideputas." Most were mere debtors, sold into peonage by their creditors. In the mines they were to work off their obligation. At least that was the illusion. In plain fact, when food, clothing, housing, and transport compounded their debt, the bill burgeoned irretrievably.

For most the mines were a death sentence.

Most of the prisoners were mixed bloods. The city alcalde—the viceroy's commander of the city—periodically swept the streets, throwing out of work léperos into jail. From there they were transported to the northern mines.

That could be me,I thought, with grim foreboding.

The alcalde peddled these unfortunates to the northern mines, lined his coffers, and, according to gachupins, reduced the city's infamous stink.

I stared at the mestizo prisoners, ill at ease. Indios had once comprised the entire mine force, until slavery and disease had killed them off in shocking numbers. The fray believed that ninety-five out of every hundred had been annihilated, and the king himself had at last forbade forcing them into bondage. Not that his decree had had much effect. Tens of thousands still died in tunnels, smelters, and pits, to say nothing of the cane fields and sugar mills. Others succumbed in the obrajes, small factories often occupied with the spinning or dying of wool and cotton, where they were chained to their workplaces.

The king could decree all he might, but in the jungles and mountains, where there were no laws, the hacendados held brutal sway.

The crowd cheered, and three guards dragged a runaway slave to the flogging post for his mandatory one hundred lashes. Once he was gagged and strung up, the sergeant-of-the-guard paced off the requisite distance, and the black-snake cracked. Blood bloomed, and his back was laid bare, his ribs and backbone shockingly white under the flayed flesh. Wine cups were raised, and the crowd thundered its approbation. Despite the gag, his screams soared above the crowd's roar.

The whip rose and fell, rose and fell, and I averted my eyes.

At last the hundredth lash was done.

"Lice," a man near me said. The voice belonged to a merchant, whose protruding belly and exquisite raiment bespoke great wealth, rich food, and rare wine. His delicate wife, garbed in silk and shaded by a parasol held by an africano slave, was at his side.

"These street léperos breed like bed bugs," she agreed, nodding her disdain. "If the alcalde didn't sweep them from the gutters, we would trip over them every third step."

The man was a gachupin, a wearer of spurs, born in Spain and representing the Crown's interests. The gachupin roweled us at every turn—whenever they wanted our women, our silver, our lives.

The king found criollos, the pure-blood Spaniard born in New Spain, too distant to trust, so he sent peninsulares to lord over them.

I heard a second commotion. A cocky, lépero street boy pelted a foraging vulture with a rock, shattering its right wing. A dozen lépero urchins, none older than nine or ten, now joined him, tethering the crippled bird to a tree. Once secured, they whipped it with a stick.

A big, ugly, bastard of a bird—over two feet tall and five across, even with its broken wing—it had been drawn by the smell of the mine prisoner's blood. As had its comrades, a dozen of whom spiraled above the plazula. As the crowd dispersed, they began a slow descent. Unfortunately, this one had been in too much of a hurry.

One of the boys had a twisted arm, mirroring the warped vulture wing. I'd heard on the streets that a beggar king, who bought the bastards off of whores, had disarticulated the elbow joint of this young beggar to increase his street value. Fray Antonio dismissed such allegations as "rumor and false report," describing the alleged Beggar King as "a luckless mendicant." He referred to lépero boys and girls, not as "lice" and "vermin," but as "Children of the Lord" since few of us knew who our fathers were. Conceived through rape or a whore's dissembled lust, we were despised by all save God.

The gachupin, however, loathed us, and in the end they held sway. The alcalde hanged that "luckless mendicant," the Beggar King, in the plazula, then dismembered him in fourths. His body parts were currently gibbeted above the city gate.

Whatever his disputed paternity, the crippled urchin was now impaling the zopilote's privates with a fishing spear.

I yanked it out of his hand. "Try that again," I said, shaking it in his young face, "and I'll bury this spear in your cojones."

The boys—younger and smaller than myself—instantly cowered. Such was life on the Veracruz streets. Might made right. We routinely awoke to find our closest compadres dead in the streets or in a transit jail en route to the mines.

I was, of course, better off than most. I had straw to sleep on and poor-house rations to eat. Furthermore, the fray, at personal peril, had educated me. Through the fray and his books, I knew other worlds.

I dreamed of Troy's fall and Achilles in his tent, not the torture of birds.

  TEN

But even as I watched the muleteers haul the caged men to the northern mines, even as I watched the tethered vulture flop in circles on the ground, I knew I was being watched.

In a stately carriage of burnished oak and cedar, plush velvet and rich leather, gleaming fittings and magnificent dray horses, less than fifty paces away an old woman studied my every move. Haughtily aristocratic, she was accoutred in black silk, festooned with pearls, gold and gemstones; a coat of arms graced the carriage door.

She was thin as a reed—little more than parchment and bones—and all her money would never resurrect the blush of youth.

She was no doubt the doyen head of some great house, grown old and mean and murderous. She reminded me of some old raptor on the hunt, with talons arched, eyes ravenous, belly growling.

Fray Antonio was entering the square, and she turned to study him.

Bald, slope-shouldered, he was a man with troubled features. He not only worshipped the cross, he bore it. He absorbed the pain of others and carried it bleeding in his heart; New Spain had exacted from the fray a mortal toll.

To the léperos and other half castes, he was God's Mercy on Earth, his small, wooden shack in the casta barrio providing the only shelter and sustenance many of us would ever know.

Some said that Fray Antonio fell from grace through his ample sampling of the sacramental wine. Others said he had a weakness for easy women. But in the end, I believe, his insistence upon ministering to all equally, including indios and outcasts, was his sin.

The fray had seen the old woman staring at me and apparently did not like what he saw. He hurried to the carriage, his gray robe flapping, his leather sandals trailing dust.

A commotion to my right diverted my attention. The mestizo mine slave was cut free from the flogging post. He slid groaning to the ground. His ribs and backbone still glistened ivory white. The man who'd flogged him was cleaning his whip in a bucket of brine. Removing the whip, he shook it out, cracking it four or five times.

He then poured the bloody brine over the prisoners raw back. The mestizo howled like a pain-crazed dog, gone mad with feral suffering, after which the guards hauled him to his feet and dragged him off to a nearby prison wagon.

I turned back and the fray was standing next to the carriage. Both he and the matron stared at me. Fray Antonio shook his head, denying something. Perhaps she thought I'd stolen something from her. I quickly glanced at the caged mestizos. Did the alcalde send young boys to the northern mines? I suspected he did.

My fear quickly turned to anger. I had stolen nothing from this gachupin!It was true that I could not remember everything I had stolen on the streets. Life was hard, and you did what you could to survive. But this cheerless hag with her raptor eyes was no one I would rob.

Suddenly the fray was rushing for me in his alarmed shuffle, his eyes fearful. Slipping a pen knife from under his robes, he jabbed his thumb. ¡Santa Maria!Mother of God! I wanted to howl like the man I'd just seen flogged. Had this rich matrona respectable stolen the friar's wits?

He gathered me against his musty robes. "Speak only Náhuatl," he whispered hoarsely. The wine on his breath was as rank as his rotting robes.

He jabbed his bleeding thumb against my face, each time leaving a small bloody mark.

"Mierda! What the—"

"Don't touch them!" His voice was as harried as his features.

He pulled my straw hat down to cover more of my face, and then grabbed me by the neck and rushed me to the old woman. I stumbled along with him, still clutching the fishing spear I had taken off the guttersnipe.

"As I told you, Doña, it's not him; this is just another street urchin. See, he's sick with the peste!" he said as he pushed my hat off of my forehead, exposing the red blotches on my face.

The old woman drew back in horror. "Go!"she barked to her driver.

She slammed the window shutter as the driver whipped the horses.

As the coach rumbled across the cobblestones, a wheeze of relief escaped from the fray. He mumbled gracias a Diosand crossed himself.

"What is it, Fray? Why did you make me look like a plague carrier?" I rubbed my face with both hands.

"It's a trick nuns have used to keep from being raped when their convent is attacked." Still in the grip of fright, he fingered his rosary, leaving bloody marks on the beads.

Gawking at the fray, I started to speak, but he waved away my questions. "Do not ask what I cannot answer. Just remember, bastardo chico, if a gachupin speaks to you, answer in Náhuatl and never admit you are a mestizo."

I wasn't sure I could pass for an indio. I was neither as dark as one nor as light as a Spaniard, but I was already as tall as most adult indios. I could more readily pass as a Spaniard.

My protests were silenced by a disturbance behind me.

The vulture I'd protected gave a sharp squawk!at a laughing street boy prodding it with a stick. The boy drove the stick into the bird's chest.

  ELEVEN

All I knew in those days were the Veracruz streets and the fray's books. Not that I lacked cleverness or curiosity. As a beggar, my conniving was notorious. While many a lépero worked those same rough-and-tumble streets, none did so as ingeniously as I.

This day, a year later, I served my vigil in the doorway of a closed shop two streets up from the docks, and it should have been a lucrative perch. The treasure fleet was arriving, and spectators on their way to the harbor passed by the hundreds. Ships, laden with the goods of old Spain, were anchoring to unload and refill their holds with New Spain's treasure.

While the great City of Mexico, the place my Aztec ancestors called Tenochtitlán, was said to be the Venice of the New World, a city of canals and wide boulevards and palaces of the rich, Veracruz was the conduit through which all riches flowed, a temporary treasure trove, to be sure. The colony's wealth arrived in rough-stamped silver and gold, in rum kegs and molasses barrels, which were loaded aboard the treasure fleets, which carried it to Seville and to the king in Madrid. Of course, none of it enriched our City of the True Cross. For all its illusory wealth, Veracruz remained a pestilential sinkhole of sand, jungle heat, and el norte storms, whose incoming treasure had to be hidden from the marauding hordes of French and English pirates who lusted after her bounty as some men lust after a woman's flesh.

The city itself was continually in shambles. Its buildings—thrown together with wood, mud brick, and crude whitewash—were in constant disrepair. Frequently flattened by storms, routinely razed by fires, our city was forever rehearing itself like the phoenix.

Still the fleet arrived each year, escorted by flotillas of warships, and this year the fleet's arrival was even more dramatic. Aboard the admiral's flagship was the recently appointed archbishop of New Spain, the second most powerful man in all New Spain, nearly equal to the viceroy himself. If the viceroy died, became incapacitated, or was recalled, the archbishop often assumed the viceroy's mantle until the king chose a replacement.

Hundreds of priests, friars, and nuns from throughout New Spain were visiting the port to welcome the archbishop. The streets teemed with their sacred orders, sweating in their rough-spun robes of gray and black. They shared the streets with an army of merchants who had come to claim their goods from the ships and transport them to the great fair in Jalapa. High in the mountains en route to the City of Mexico, the Jalapa air was not poisoned by our pestilential swamps.

Nonetheless, pleading for alms was no easy matter—not even with the treasure fleet arriving. The streets were packed, the people distracted. A portly merchant with his equally prodigious wife threaded their way through the crowd. Expensively attired, they radiated riches. Léperos on all sides whined for handouts, but were ruthlessly spurned. Still I was nothing if not resourceful. An ancient East Indian—taken ill in our hospice—had taught me the art of contortionism, in which I soon excelled. By relaxing each joint, I could dislocate my elbows, knees, and shoulders, and contort my limbs into positions God never imagined. I quickly transmogrified myself into a monster.

As the merchant and his wife came abreast of my doorway, I crawled out of it and whimpered. They both gasped. As they hurried around me, I brushed up against the woman's dress and sobbed my alms cry: "Alms for the poor disfigured orphan!"

She almost jumped out of her skin.

"Give him money," the woman shouted at her husband.

The man threw a copper coin at me. It missed the woven basket, strung from my neck, and hit me in my right eye. I grabbed the coin with my one uncontorted hand—before one of the other street léperos sprang on it like a spitting diamondback.

I quickly realigned my limbs.

Should I have been ashamed of my life? Perhaps. But it was all I could do. Fray Antonio did his best for me, but his best was a bed of straw behind a dirty curtain on one side of the dirt-floored hovel and beyond that hovel no future at all. A lépero by definition lived by his wits—by begging, lying, stealing, conniving.

Ayya! A shove from behind suddenly sent me sprawling in the street.

A swaggering caballero with a stunningly beautiful mulatta on his arm, stepped over me without even looking down. To him I was less than a dog. He was a wearer of spurs, and I was something to rowel. Yet even at my tender age, I was more enthralled by his exotic, erotic woman than his sword and swagger. She was doubtless the offspring of an español father and africana mother, her father, most likely, a slave owner and her mother one of his chattels.

"Ah, we Spanish love the tawny ladies," the fray once told me while in his cups, and it seemed to be the case. The most ravishing became mistresses of the buena gente, the wealthiest of the gachupin. Those not so exquisite became household servants. Some women were passed hand-to-hand, loaned to friends, or hired out for breeding like blooded horses. When the flush of beauty faded, many were sold into houses of prostitution. Being a mulatta mistress was not a secure profession.

Still the woman on the Spaniard's arm played her role with knowing aplomb.

She, too, stepped over my sprawling remains, swinging her insolent hips like they were a silver mine, her flamboyant dress flouncing, her perfumed breasts bouncing, her thick, red-tinted hair flung casually over one shoulder. Glancing over her shoulder, she allowed me a cruel, crooked grin.

I could not help but admire her apparel. Like mestizas and indias, mulattas were forbidden to wear European-style clothing, but while mestizas and indias wore simple peón garb—formless dresses, usually of white, coarse cotton—mulattas' clothes were as flamboyant as the brilliantly feathered mantles of the Aztec priests. This one wore her silk petticoat long and full, double ribbons trailing behind it like faithful retainers. Her waistcoat fitted her like a bodice, girdled with pearls and knots of gold, her skirts laced with vermilion and trimmed with gold thread. Her sleeves were broad and open at the end, draped with silvery silk. But her tawny breasts were what drew me. Covered only by long, twisted coils of red-streaked hair, into which gold and silver thread had been meticulously woven, their dark nipples darted artfully out of their hiding places, peeked briefly at the surrounding world, then discreetly receded from view.

In these areas mulattas were freer than our high-born ladies. Any Spanish woman daring to expose her flesh would have been horsewhipped, but mulattas were exempt property, not people.

Nor did the caballero's costume suffer from undue reticence. From his wide-brimmed, brilliantly plumed hat down to his high-topped, brightly burnished boots, jangling with silver spurs, his attire was almost as extravagant as the woman's.

"My brothers in the Church," the fray told me once, "bemoan the fact that so many men prefer mulattas over their wives. But many times I have seen these lovely women visit themthrough the church's back door."

Still I resented the way the caballero had pushed me aside. Léperos were treated worse than curs, but I resented it more than other half-castes because I was educated, which was more than most Spaniards and their silken ladies, even those living in palatial homes, could say. In fact, I not only read and wrote Spanish, I was fluent in Náhuatl, the language of my Aztec ancestors. I was proficient—no, I excelled—in Latin andGreek. I had read the classics in three languages, and on the waterfront had picked up smatterings of several more languages. My ear for foreign tongues was so acute, the goodly fray sometimes called me his "Little Parrot."

Of course, Fray Antonio had forbidden me to reveal these skills to anyone.

"Never divulge your learning," he warned me during my very first lesson—and during every lesson subsequently. "The Inquisition will not believe a lépero literate, without Lucifer's complicity, and they will reinstruct you according to their lights—and those who letter léperos as well. Believe me, theirs are lessons neither of us wish to learn. I know. So never flaunt your learning, unless you wish to while away your years in the Inquisition's dungeons. Unless you prefer to stretch your limbs on their strappados, whipping posts, and racks."

The fray's warning became as much a part of my lessons as amo, amas, amat.

The fray also taught me—through my mastery of the classics—the fallacy of pureza de sangre,the purity of blood so important to the spur wearers. Blood does not define our worth. With comparable instruction, a mestizo can equal, even surpass the purest blooded dons in Spain. I was living proof.

But like the indios, who hid their hatred behind stoic masks of indifference, I, too, repressed my rage. But all the while I knew the gachupin weren't my betters. Had I but silver and gold—and a fine carriage, a caballero's grand attire, a Toledo blade, and a mulatta mistress on my arm—I, too, would be un hombre macho de le gachupin grande,a great man of the big spurs.

A young Spanish girl in a green flowing gown laced with white silk came out of the goldsmith's shop nearby. I crossed the wharf to intercept her, preparing to do my crippled dog act for her. Until I saw her face. Her eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. I was no longer able to writhe on my hands and knees and play the fool than I could make the sun stand still.

She had dark, demure eyes, her face the soft pale of great ladies whose complexions never suffer from the sun. Her hair was long, brilliantly black, cascading over her shoulders in luxurious waves. She was but a girl, a year or two younger than my fifteen, but she carried herself with regal bearing. In a few years Spanish gente would die on swords for her favor.

Caballeros treated wellborn señoritas with gallantry, even in New Spain; and when a puddle of early morning rain blocked her path, I, too, felt called upon to play the chivalric fool. Undoing my manta, the indio blanket I wore slung over my right shoulder and under my left arm, I rushed to her.

"Señorita! Bernaldo de Carpio, Knight of Castile, salutes you."

Bernaldo, of course, was a Spanish hero second only to El Cid in the hearts of the people of Spain. He slew the French hero, Roland, at the Battle of Roncesvalles, saving the peninsula. As with so many epic tales of Spain, Bernaldo was wronged by the treachery of his own king and vanished into exile.

The girl's eyes widened as I rushed over to her. I flung my manta like a cape over the puddle. Bowing deeply, I gestured for her to step on the blanket.

She stood rooted like a tree, her cheeks flushing. At first I thought she was going to order me out of her sight. Then I realized she was fighting back a smile.

A Spanish youth came out of the goldsmith's behind her, a boy a year or two younger than me, but already as tall as me and more muscular. He was darker in complexion, his features pocked, and he seemed in a dark mood. He had apparently been out riding because he was wearing gray riding breeches, a red, sleeveless doublet over a matching linen shirt, knee-high, ebony riding boots with wickedly sharp rowels, and he carried a horsewhip.

When the crop struck my right cheek, I was caught flat-footed.

"Get out of here, you filthy lépero swine."

Rocked on my heels, anger overwhelmed me. If I hit him, I would be lashed to the whipping post, flogged senseless, then sent to die in the mines. There was no greater offense than to attack a gachupin. I did not care. When he raised the whip a second time, I clenched my fists and started toward him.

She stepped between us. "Stop it! Leave him alone."

She swung around to me. Taking a coin from her pocket, she handed it to me. "Take this. Go."

Grabbing my manta from the muddy water, I flung the coin in the puddle and walked away.

Pride goeth before a fall; and like a woman's smile, pride would return to haunt me.

  TWELVE

Cannon fire from across the bay announced that the archbishop was coming ashore. The flowing crowd carried me to the docks to welcome in the big ships. The treasure fleet had left Spain six weeks earlier: forty-one ships sailing out of Seville. Sixteen were bound for Veracruz, while the others went to other Caribbean ports in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Jamaica.

For weeks mountains of goods had piled up at the waterfront, where they would be loaded aboard the ships. The treasure and other products of New Spain were unloaded in Seville once a year. The ships returned to Veracruz laden with skins of oil and wines, barrels of figs, raisins, olives, coarse wool called kersey, fine linen, and iron ingots. Endless kegs of quicksilver were also there for the mines—with which to leech the pure silver out of Zacatecas's earth and ore.

As I neared the harbor, I saw the products of New Spain ready to be loaded aboard the ships after the Spanish goods were unloaded. The colonies produced silver, sugar, molasses, rum, cochineal, indigo, chocolate, and hides.

Cochineal was a dye, developed by the Aztecs, its garish crimson prized by Spanish royalty. Its gaudy hue derived from a dark insect called the cochineal, which always resembled in my mind a dog tick. Our india women harvested the female cochineal from cactus pads with the flick of a feather. The insects were boiled to the bursting point, then dried and bundled into hemp bags.

Vertiginous stacks of sacked coca beans tottered above the waterfront, and in Spain they would be worth a fortune. There, the chocolatlwould be pounded in a mortar together with small, very hot green chili, a vanilla pod, and some aniseed. Maize flour and water would be added, and the whole concoction brought to a boil.

The Spanish also added sugar to the drink, which made it as habit-forming there as it was here to our women—and here its hold over them is undeniably powerful. Our women drink so much of it in church, prepared by their servants, that the bishop had issued an edict prohibiting the practice. He became very sick afterward and rumors spread that some of the women had poisoned him.

The beverage, coco, was created by the Aztecs. Forbidden to the common people, chocolatlwas imbibed solely by the nobility and considered sacred. The most famous of these Aztec connoisseurs was Montezuma, their emperor, who drank numerous cups a day, cold. Its beans, ubiquitously treasured, were used throughout New Spain as currency. Some even believed chocolatlto possess spirit power, that chocolatlmixed with menstrual blood was an irresistible love potion.

The exotic cargoes of the Manila galleons also poured into Veracruz. Ivory and sandalwood from East India; silk and tea from China; Chinese porcelain as well, packed in pepper grains and other spices to keep it from breaking—these were all hauled from the Acapulco port by mule train.

As I reached the waterfront, I saw the ships anchor and moor in the lee of San Juan de Ulúa, the island fort less than a musket shot from the city. Disembarking passengers in longboats were already coming ashore. Clambering out of their boats, they all dropped to their knees in prayer, many kissing the ground. Some priests broke down and sobbed, not because they'd survived the savage sea, but because they believed they'd landed on hallowed ground. By their lights Veracruz was indeed the City of the True Cross, welcoming them to a land where the Sacred Church claimed heathen souls by the millions.

In celebration of the archbishop's arrival, two thousand head of cattle had been driven through the city streets at dawn, their hooves all but shaking us out of bed. The streets still stank like a stable. The purpose for this cattle drive was ostensibly medicinal. The holy fathers held that cow respiration cleansed the air of pestilence, specifically the plague-infested swamp fumes befouling our city. Thus the heaving herd would deliver our sainted archbishop from the dreaded peste. When I asked the fray about the curative value of panting cattle, he grumbled, "The Lord acts in mysterious ways."