Gary Jennings - Aztec Autumn

"The marks, my lord, are only to nudge my memory. No one else could interpret them. And I do not pretend to have preserved your every word, but—"

"Prove it, girl. Read back to me something from this conversation." I reached out and indicated one of the leaves at random. "What was said there?"

It took you only a moment of study. " 'At some time in the future, the historians of The One World will be glad to have available—' "

"By Huitztli!" I exclaimed. "This is something most marvelous. You are something most marvelous. I have known only one other scribe in my lifetime, a Spanish churchman. He was not nearly so adept as you are, and he was a man approaching middle age. How old are you, Verónica?"

"I think I have ten or eleven years, my lord. I am not sure."

"Indeed? From the near maturity of your form, and even more from the refinement evidenced in your speech, I should have taken you to be three or four years older. How did you get so well educated at such a young age?"

"My mother was Church-schooled and convent-bred. She taught me from my earliest years. Just before she died, she placed me in the same nunnery."

"That explains your name, then. But if your mother was a slave, she could have been no ordinary Moro drudge."

"She was a mulata, my lord," you said, without embarrassment. "She disliked to talk much about her parentage—or my own. But children, of course, can divine much that is left unsaid. I surmised that her mother must have been a black, but her father a Spaniard of some fairly high position and prosperity, that he would pay to send a bastard daughter to school. Of my own father, she was so secretive that I have never been able even to conjecture."

"I have seen only your face," I said. "Let me see the rest of you. Undress for me, Verónica."

That took but a moment, because you wore only a single, flimsy, ankle-length, almost threadbare gown of Spanish style.

I said, "I once had all the gradations and degrees of mixed parentage described to me. But I have no experience of judging them on sight, except that I also once knew a girl who was, I believe, the product of a white mother and black father. As for you, Verónica, I would say that your grandmother's Moro blood shows only in your already budded breasts and dark nipples and already beginning tuft of ymáxtli down below. Your grandfather's Spanish blood, I would suppose, accounts for your delicate and very handsome facial features. But you do not have hairy armpits or legs, so your grandfather's Spanish white blood must have been later diluted. Also you are as clean and sweet-smelling as any female of my own race. It is easily apparent that your unknown father contributed some further and improving admixture to your nature."

"If it matters to you, my lord," you said boldly, "whatever else I am, I am also still a virgin. I have not yet been raped by any man and not yet been tempted to dally with any."

I paused to contemplate that forthright remark—you had said "tempted," you had said "not yet"—while I savored what I was looking at. And here I will honestly confide something. Even back then, at that tender age, Verónica, you were so womanly endowed, so physically beautiful and appealing—besides being intelligent and cultivated beyond your years—that you were a very real temptation to me. I might have asked you to become something more than just my companion and my scribe. But that notion flickered only briefly in my mind, because I was still mindful of the pledge I had made to the memory of Ixínatsi. In truth, though I would have rejoiced in a mutual intimacy, I dared not either tempt or cajole you to it, for I would have risked falling in love with you. And genuinely to love a woman was what I had sworn never to do again.

And, again in truth, it is as well that I did not, in view of what would later transpire between us.

And, still in truth, I did, nevertheless—inevitably, inescapably—come to love you dearly.

At that time, though, all I said was, "Get dressed again and come with me. We shall relieve the Purémpe women of some of the garments they pilfered from the Tonalá wardrobes. You deserve the finest of feminine garb, little Verónica. And you will need more of it, too—certainly underneath—if you are to ride a horse beside mine."

Not all of our subsequent conquests were accomplished as easily as that of Tonalá. While we remained encamped, I kept my scouts and swift-runners circulating in all directions roundabout, and from their reports, I decided to make our next assault on the Spaniards a double assault—simultaneous but at two separate, far-apart places. It would certainly serve to make the Spaniards ever more fearful that we were many in number, powerful in force of arms, fierce in our determination, capable of striking anywhere—not just the angry uprising of a few malcontent tribesmen but a genuine, landwide insurrection against all the usurper white men.

Some of the scouts informed me that some distance to the southeast of our camp lay a vast expanse of rich estancia farms and ranches, the proprietors of which had all clustered their residences close together—for convenience and neighborliness and mutual protection—at the center of that expanse of land. Other scouts reported that to the southwest of us was situated a Spanish crossroads trading post, doing a thriving business with traveling merchants and local landowners—but heavily fortified and guarded by a considerable force of Spanish foot soldiers.

Those were the two places I determined to hit next, and at the same time, Knight Nochéztli to lead the attack on the estancia community, I the attack on the trading post. And now I would give some of our previously unblooded (and envious) warriors their chance at fighting, at plunder, at glory, at god-pleasing death. So to Nochéztli I assigned our Cora and Huichol men and all our horsemen—among them Verónica, to be the chronicler of that battle. With me I took Rarámuri and Otomí warriors and all our accomplished arcabuz men. We left behind all those others who had participated in the taking of Tonalá—causing the Yaki, in their customary way, to mutter mutinously. Nochéztli and I carefully calculated our traveling times, to set the day on which we would make our separate, simultaneous sieges, and the later day of our rejoining, victorious, at our present camp—and then we marched away in our divergent directions.

As I have said, not all of my war went smoothly. My attack on the trading post seemed, at first, unlikely to result in any outcome that could be called victorious.

The place consisted mostly of the huts and shacks of the Spaniards' laborers and slaves. But those surrounded the post itself, which sat secure inside a palisade of heavy, close-abutted logs, all pointed at the top, with an equally massive gate, tight shut and barred within. From narrow slits in the log wall protruded the snouts of thunder-tubes. When our forces went, roaring and bellowing, at a run across the open ground at one side of the post, I expected we would only have to dodge the heavy iron balls that I had previously seen thrown by Spanish thunder-tubes. But these had been charged with bits of scrap metal, flints, nails, broken glass and the like. When they boomed out at us, there was no dodging the lethal spray they threw, and a great many of our warriors in the forefront of the attack fell horribly mutilated, dismembered, shredded to death.

Happily for us, though, a thunder-tube takes even longer to recharge than does a thunder-stick. Before the Spanish soldiers could manage that, we surviving warriors had made our way close against the stockade wall where the thunder-tubes could not be turned to aim at us. My Rarámuri men, true to their name of "Fast of Feet," easily swarmed up the rough-barked logs, and over them into the stockade. While some of those began at once to engage the Spanish defenders, others rushed to unbar the gate to let the rest of us enter.