Aztec Rage Read online

  “You would complain to St. Pedro about the comforts of heaven.” I got down on my hands and knees and kissed the ground. “This is free ground—no stocks, chains, floggings, or lice.”

  “We will be poisoned by snakes and mauled by jaguars.”

  I shut my ears, lay on my back, and stared up at the night sky, my head on Tempest’s saddle. Unlike Lizardi, I was used to sleeping on hard ground, having done so on my hunting trips, though I’d always had food in my stomach and a fire to warm my feet.

  As I stared up at the night sky, I said, “Tomorrow is a new day.”

  “What kind of mindless remark is that? Every day is a new day.”

  “I have spent the first twenty-five years of my life as Juan de Zavala, gachupine caballero in the Bajío. Tomorrow I will be someone else, and who knows where my feet will take me?”

  “You will go back to Guanajuato feet first if the king’s constables catch up with us.”

  DOLORES

  TWENTY

  OUR DEPARTURE IN the morning put us on the road to the town of Dolores, more than a day’s ride northeast of Guanajuato. Dolores lay outside the mining country, but Guanajuato’s mountains made the going slow and tedious, oftentimes little more than a narrow path fit for a donkey hugging a sheer drop of hundreds of feet.

  Dolores was a slow-paced community of haciendas and rancheros. Its most attractive feature, besides the difficult path out of the Guanajuato mountains making it undesirable for a posse, was that I had no connection to the town.

  We stopped at a village of Aztecs where we ate a simple breakfast of beef rolled in corn tortillas.

  “This village is part of the Espinoza hacienda,” I told Lizardi. “I know Espinoza. He lives in Guanajuato. Two weeks ago, I would have stopped at his hacienda, and his servants would have prepared a feast and a fiesta.”

  After we descended down the mountains to a wider road, four men came out of the tree line near a hillcrest two hundred meters from us.

  “Vaqueros from a hacienda?” Lizardi asked. “Your friend Espinoza?”

  “They’re not vaqueros. Look at their mounts.”

  They had an odd assortment of mounts: Two were on mules, the other two rode donkeys. Vaqueros mostly rode horses, though a mule would not be unusual. The donkeys stood out—being small, donkeys were primarily used by indios to haul their crops, not by men who herded cattle—and these donkeys were even smaller than most.

  The clothes of the men were also jarringly mismatched, ranging from the rags of a lépero to the clothes of a gentleman. Even at that distance, I knew the man wearing the best clothing was a lowlife, not a gentleman.

  “They’re bandidos,” Lizardi said.

  “True.”

  “We have good horses; we can outrun them.”

  “You’re not a good enough rider. A hard chase over broken ground and steep mountain trails would unhorse you. Besides, I’m not running back in the direction we came, into the arms of pursuing posses.”

  The men on the hillside urged their mounts toward us. Only one appeared to have a pistol; the others wielded machetes.

  “There’s four of them,” Lizardi yelled. “We can’t fight!”

  “Like hell we can’t!” I drew the machete from its sheath and slapped Tempest’s rear with the flat of the blade, yelling “¡Vamos caballo! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!”

  Tempest shot forward. The stallion was my best weapon. He was a head taller than the mules, and the small donkeys only came up to his shoulder. But what the mules lacked in height they had in girth.

  I drove at a donkey rider first, spurring Tempest into the mount. The donkey went down as I slashed the bandido across his shoulder.

  The mule rider before me leveled his pistol at me. I had less fear of the pistol than I did of the men with machetes. The flintlock weapons were notorious for misfiring even in the hands of an experienced shooter. When the hammer-flint struck the steel plate, its spark was supposed to ignite the powder charge and blow the lead ball out the barrel, but any one of a dozen things could happen, eleven of them bad. A well-placed machete blow, on the other hand, had catastrophic consequences.

  Since the bandido had only one shot in his pistol, I was unperturbed.

  “¡Andale!” I shouted, driving Tempest at the shooter’s mule. The mule stumbled and spooked getting out of the way. The pistol went off, but the shot went wild as the rider was unhorsed.

  I wheeled about. The other mule rider came into machete range. Swinging the big broad blade like an axe, I caught him in the side of the neck, nearly decapitating him. As he dropped from the saddle, his head flopped and the mule bolted.

  Reining Tempest in, I wheeled him around. Their love of combat rapidly fading, the shooter had gotten back on his mule and had joined the other donkey rider, who had simply ridden by me and kept going in the direction of Guanajuato without offering a fight.

  As I anticipated, Lizardi’s horse had thrown him, but as he pulled himself to his feet, I saw that he had miraculously maintained a grip on the reins.

  But the battle wasn’t over yet. The bandido with the shoulder wound had remounted his donkey and was urging it toward Lizardi, knowing he would not get far on that small slow-footed burro with his life’s blood pouring from his shoulder. His machete in his good hand, his last chance at a fast escape was Lizardi’s horse.

  I slapped Tempest with the flat of the machete again and went for the donkey rider. Smarter than its rider, the burro heard the big horse’s hooves and veered off, heading back up the hill. I came up from the rear, laying open the bandido’s back with the machete. He screamed and dropped from his mount.

  I was surveying the battlefield when Lizardi came beside me on his horse. “You’ve killed two of them.”

  I saluted him with the bloody machete. “Have I thanked you for your courageous assistance, señor?”

  His mount still spooked by the violence and the blood, Lizardi had to fight the reins. “Fighting is for animals.”

  “True, but dying knows no bloodlines . . . as you almost found out.”

  I went through the pockets of the dead bandidos. In the pocket of one, I found only a few centavos and some coca beans, which among indios were negotiable currency. But the other had a neck pouch with pesos, silver and gold crucifixes, and expensive rosaries, the ones favored by wealthy old women and venal priests.

  Blood was on the two gold-chained crosses. It wasn’t blood I had spilled; the crosses had been in the pouch.

  “Bandido blood?” Lizardi asked.

  “No . . . and not Blood of the Lamb, either.”

  We dragged the two bodies into nearby bushes and brushed away the drag marks. When we were through, I stared up at the hill where we’d first spotted the bandidos.

  “Why do you keep staring up at that hill? We have to get out of here. There may be passersby, maybe even constables.”

  “They might be up there.”

  “Who?”

  “Whomever those trash killed. They must have killed them shortly before we came along. They didn’t have a chance to divide up their booty before they spotted us and thought they could increase their wealth.”

  We found them on top of the hill, tied sitting down with their backs to trees, their throats cut.

  “Priests,” I said. “They killed two priests.” I crossed myself.

  “They’re not priests. They’re Bethlehemite monks, a lay brotherhood known for its healing arts. But I suppose in the eyes of God they are the same as priests.”

  Lizardi and I both knelt. He offered a prayer, and I mumbled along with him as best I could. I admit that I was not suited for the church, but I was raised, as all in the colony were, to consider priests to be proof against life’s sins and temptations. To kill a priest was a great offense against God.

  An idea seized me as we got onto our feet.

  “Are there many of these—What did you call them?”

  “Bethlehemites. No, you don’t see many,” Lizardi shrugged. “Certainly not as ofte
n as you see other monks and brothers. They come over from Spain to do missionary work among the Aztecs, staying for a few years until they are replaced by others of the brotherhood. Skilled healers, they lack the evil reputation that doctors in general have, and I say that as the son of a medical man.”

  I rubbed my beard. “Señor Worm, the only thing that distinguishes us from these two bearded monks—other than their severed throats—are the robes they wear.”

  “What are you getting at? You think you can make yourself a monk by putting on a robe?”

  “ ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ as Caesar would say.” I wasn’t sure I had the Caesar quote accurate, but it captured my mood. “Were we not both seminary students? Besides, you say these two are not really priests, that they only look like priests. We, too, will only look like priests.”

  I slapped him on the back. “Brother José, let’s get these robes off these two and wash them in the river below before the blood dries. On our way to Dolores, you can instruct me on the tricks and alchemy your father uses in his treatments. Who knows, someone may need our healing services.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  BECAUSE WE HAD interrupted the bandits’ pillaging, the thieves had barely touched the monks’ baggage. We found food, wine, fresh linen, Bibles, medical supplies, and, most welcome of all, soap. We scrubbed clean at the river, washed the blood off the robes, and lit a fire to dry the clothes and cook a meal.

  We camped on a hillock off the road that night, watching it for a posse. The next morning, feeling human again with fresh clothes and our bellies full, we continued on the road to Dolores. As we set out, Lizardi correctly noted the flaws in my disguise.

  “Your horse is a pure-bred stallion, not at all what a monk would ride. Mine is much smaller and would be acceptable, but mules are more priestly. The two mules the bandidos had probably belonged to the monks. We need to trade the horses for mules.”

  He was right, but I wouldn’t give up Tempest even if the Lord High Constable himself were on my tail, not if the devil were to offer me a fine woman instead . . . Eh, perhaps that wasn’t true, but I was not about to trade Tempest for a mule.

  “If we get chased by constables, I will need Tempest.” I grinned at Lizardi. “To draw them away so you can make your escape.”

  “You refuse to wear the sandals we took off the monks and insist upon those caballero boots.”

  “You can’t control a stallion like Tempest with sandals. He obeys boots, quirts, and spurs, not the gentle touch of sandals.”

  Among the monks’ possessions were two saddlebags containing medical supplies. Lizardi went through the bags as we rode. He had assisted his physician father for several years and knew the purpose of the medicines and implements. He took a vial out of the monk’s medicine pack. “Monks use this elixir to clean wounds. Known as aqua feu, it can discolor hair and turn black hair lighter. We can mottle your stallion so he’s not such an obvious sloeberry thoroughbred.”

  I gave Tempest a brown forehead star and markings on his shoulders and rump so that he did appear more of a mixed breed.

  “This glass tube has mercury in it, the quicksilver you once sold to the mines to separate out silver.” He showed me a round glass tube about as thick as a finger and as long as a man’s foot. “It’s called a Celsius thermometer. You stick it in a patient’s mouth and wait ten or fifteen minutes. If he goes above this mark, thirty-seven degrees, he has a fever. You have to leave it in the mouth to get an accurate reading, so you must use a candle and bend down by the person’s chest to read it.”

  “So what does it mean if the person has a fever?”

  “It means . . .” he shrugged, “he’s sick.”

  “Any fool could tell when someone is sick. The person tells you that.”

  Shaking his head, he held up other items from the bags. “This is a small bone cutter,” he held up a two-handled instrument that looked like it would be best employed snapping twigs off tree limbs, “and this is a bone saw.”

  “The monks were barbers?”

  “No, many physicians now do surgery. My father is that kind of doctor.”

  I didn’t say anything, but the reason most surgery was done by barbers is because the practice is so dangerous and disreputable. As many people died from the surgery as from the injury. I had no intention of butchering patients like dressed-out deer.

  “The scalpels incise flesh, and a tourniquet chokes off bleeding.” He held up a contraption with a large screw holding two metal plates that in turn held leather straps that went around an arm or leg.

  “Here are medications, salves, oils of violets. A metal rod you heat red-hot for cauterizing, and, ah, amigo, this is especially for you.” He showed me a very thin, foot-long rod. “To extricate musket balls, you slip it into the wound and probe for the lead ball. Once you locate it, you use these forceps to extract it.” He held up an instrument that had scissor handles, but had two long narrow rods with “cups” on the end. “You clamp the lead ball between the cups and pull it out. Clever, eh?”

  “I’d just as soon leave the ball in me than dig into my flesh with that thing.”

  “Not if the wound became infected, you wouldn’t.” He pulled another instrument out of the bag. “This one you use on your worst enemy.”

  It was a silver tube, long, thin, and curved.

  “What is it?”

  “A catheter.”

  “A what?”

  “A catheter. This one is for a man. You stick it into the opening at the end of his penis and push it in.”

  “¡María Madre de Dios!” I shuddered and crossed myself. “Is this one of the Inquisition’s torture devices?”

  “No, it relieves blockage in a man’s urinary tract. The tube is hollow and permits the liquid to escape through it. The technique is ancient. Even the Greeks and Romans used it.”

  “It’s an instrument of the devil. Throw it away.”

  He put it back into a saddlebag. “You must know these things if you are called upon to treat a patient.”

  “If I am called upon to treat someone, I will cut his throat and say that it was God’s will.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  WHEN WE REACHED Dolores, we veered off the main road and circled partly around the town to enter from a different direction than one from Guanajuato. The town was under the jurisdiction of the Intendency of Guanajuato, as was much of the Bajío region.

  As we approached the town, we rode past a large vineyard. Row after row of grape vines twisted like snakes around acres of trellises, horizontal rope strands strung from stakes. The law forbade cultivating grapes, at least in quantity, but the constables often looked the other way when grapes were grown for personal use.

  Lizardi knew much more about the prohibition. “The king outlaws cultivation of the vine to insure that only wines produced in Spain are sold in the colony. This is obviously a commercial vineyard. Look at those wine cisterns. They’re for pressing. The fermentation barrels must be inside that building.”

  A young Aztec woman about my own age came across the road in front of us. She carried pruning shears.

  I saluted her, forgetting that I was wearing a monk’s cowl instead of a caballero’s hat. “Buenos días, señorita. We were wondering who owns this fine vineyard.”

  “It belongs to our church, Nuestra Señora de Dolores, padre.”

  Our Lady of Sorrow. The town had taken its name, Dolores, which suggested sorrow, sadness, or pain, from the church. Many towns adopted the name of their church as their own.

  A remarkably beautiful india with tanned skin, large brown eyes, long dark eyelashes, and waist-length ebony hair, she was tall for the women of her race, with shapely legs and graceful arms.

  Dismounting, I grinned at her. “I’m not a padre, señorita, but a lay brother, nor am I bound by priestly vows of chastity.”

  Her eyes widened, and I heard Lizardi groan. Perhaps lay brethren were not meant to be so frank with women?

  A priest came out of a building and was
hurrying toward us.

  “Who is that, señorita?”

  “Padre Hidalgo, the curate of our church.”

  Hidalgo was a little shorter than I. Large limbed and round shouldered, he was of somewhat stout proportions, with a casual but distinguished air about him. He was bald on top, with a ruff of white hair. His eyebrows were prominent and nose straight. As with most secular priests, he was clean shaven.

  He wore short black trousers, with black stockings made of a material similar to that of his trousers, a loose raglan also of black cloth, leather shoes with large buckles, and a long gown with a cape.

  The padre gave us a wide enthusiastic smile. “It is always good to see members of your fine brotherhood. Few orders are as dedicated as you Bethlehemites in treating the sick.”

  Lizardi introduced us: I was Juan García, and he Alano Gómez. Lizardi had insisted after we assumed the roles as lay brothers that I keep my first name the same. “Yours is the most common man’s name in the colony,” he had said, “and you’re not bright enough to remember a new name.”

  We were still at each other’s throats, at least with insults, but I’d decided we made a good team. Lizardi supplied book knowledge; I was wise in certain ways of men. We needed both sources of strength now that we had to act like priests but were not and had to know something about healing but didn’t.

  The priest had a scholarly stoop, created no doubt from hunching over books. His eyes were bright and clear, full of intelligence and curiosity. He appeared inquisitive, as if he analyzed everything that fell within his sight.

  “You must join us for dinner,” he said, “and, of course, you will lay your head on our pillows tonight. Marina, make sure to let the housekeeper know we will have special guests.”

  Lizardi and I mumbled our eternal thanks. Like the priest, I also had an exploratory mind—of sorts. I wanted very much to explore Marina in my bed that night.

  “Come, my brothers, let me show you what my indios have achieved.”