Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary (версия книг .txt) 📗

"Hush, my lord. Do not ask. You would not wish to know. I wish I did not." He gestured toward where the trees had been, now only charred poles amid a bed of smoldering embers. "I gave over everything into the hands of the kindly hearth goddess Chantico. Fire cleanses the earth of even unearthly things."

Nocheztli had recovered from the site of the Spaniards' ambush, besides the numerous arcabuces, the slain warrior Comitl's horse. So he and I were both mounted as we led our men off into the night—though I soon wished fervently that I had a saddle between me and the horse.

I again praised the new knight for having shown so much initiative during my absence, but added, "To make any use of those weapons you acquired for us, we must mix the powder for them and somehow find a source of lead."

"Well, my lord," he said, almost apologetically, "as to the first necessity, I know nothing whatever of making the powder. However, lacking any orders to the contrary, I decided, while we waited for news of you, to put the time to profitable employment. So we do have the lead, a good supply of it."

"You astound me, Knight Nocheztli. How ever did you contrive that?"

"One of our older Mexica warriors told me he was the son of a silversmith, therefore he knew that lead is often found in the same mines from which come the more precious silver, and the lead also is used in the process by which the mills refine that silver."

"By Huitztli! You actually went to the Spaniards' mines and mills?"

"Remember, my lord, I once before acted as your quimichi among the white men. I and others of our troop stripped down to our loincloths and sandals, and dirtied our faces and bodies, and, one by one, slipped past the mine guards and in among the laboring slaves. That was easy enough. The guards were hardly expecting anyone to sneak into slavery. The getting out again was rather more difficult, especially because lead is so heavy. But, thanks to my experience as a quimichi, we managed that as well. At least two twenties of the men behind us are carrying a lead ingot apiece in their provisions bags. And that Mexicatl son of a silversmith says he can easily melt the metal and cast it into balls with simple molds made of wood and wet sand."

"Yyo ouiyo ayyo!" I exclaimed, delighted. "We are much nearer to being equal in armament to the white men than I could have hoped. The compounding of the powder will be far less of a problem than the one you have already solved. Listen, now, and memorize this and share it with any under-officers whom you trust, in case something should happen to both you and myself. What the Spaniards call polvora was thought by our elders to be truly thunder and lightning, captured and confined, to be let loose when it suited the bearer. And those Spaniards still would not wish any of our race to know the secret of its making. It took me a long and weary while to discover it, but that process is simplicity indeed." I went on to explain about the three substances, how they were to be ground fine, and the proportions in which they were to be mixed.

Then, when I judged we were sufficiently distant from Compostela to stop for a night's rest, I went among the men and selected two twenties of those well muscled and with long legs, and told them:

"Tomorrow, when you have slept and refreshed yourselves, prepare to leave us and do some swift traveling. Give your arms and armor to your comrades and take only your mantles."

The first twenty I ordered to journey to the volcano Tzeboruko, which few of us had ever seen but all of us knew by reputation, from its so frequently erupting and causing great devastation in the villages around it. I was sure Tzeboruko's slopes would be thickly crusted with that mineral called azufre. The volcano is in the Nauyar Ixu region of what was now New Galicia, meaning that those twenty men would have to traverse Spanish-held territory.

"So I suggest that you go straight west from where we are now, to the coast of the Western Sea, and there commandeer boatmen to carry you south to the volcano, then back north again, bearing your mantle-loads of that yellow substance. You are not likely to encounter any enemy patrols on the sea."

To the other twenty I said, "You will betake yourselves directly to Aztlan. Since our fishermen there are accustomed to making salt to preserve some of their catch, they are certain to know of the bitter kind of salt that is called first-harvest. You are to load your mantles with that."

I added, to all those men, "You are to rejoin the army at Chicomoztotl—you know it, 'the place of the seven caverns'—in the mountains east of Aztlan, in the land where the Chichimeca tribe called the Huichol lives. The army will be there waiting for you. I urge you to get there, with your burdens, as soon as you can."

To Nocheztli I said, "You heard. Now give all our warriors leave to sleep, but widely dispersed among the trees, and with sentries staying awake by turns. Tomorrow you will march the army toward that Chicomoztotl, because I have other places to go. While you wait there for my return, put the men to work at forging lead balls and burning charcoal. Those mountains are amply forested. When the bearers bring you the azufre and salitre, start making supplies of the polvora. Then let the warriors already familiar with the arcabuz start training all others who show any aptitude in its use. In the meantime, send recruiters around among the Huichol and every other Chichimeca people farther afield, to persuade their men—with the promise of much killing and looting—to join our army of insurrection. The doing of those several preparations should keep everyone well occupied until I get back, and I hope to be bringing many more warriors with me. Right now, Nocheztli, have the two men holding that witch-woman G'nda Ke fetch her here. They need not do it tenderly."

They did not. They roughly hauled her before me, and they continued to grip her upper arms tight, even when she addressed me with an immodest request that she obviously intended to scandalize the most hardened and worldly of men.

"If you are about to offer G'nda Ke a choice of ways to die, Tenamaxtli, she would like to be raped to death. You and these two stalwarts employing her three orifices for the purpose."

But nothing she could say or do would surprise me in the least. I only said stonily, "I have other employment for you, before I cram your three orifices full of fire ants and scorpions. That is to say, you will go on living just exactly as long as you obey my orders. Tomorrow you and I will start for your Yaki country."

"Ah, it has been a long time since G'nda Ke last visited her homeland."

"It is well known that the Yaki detest outlanders even more than they detest each other, and that they prove it by ripping off the scalp of any imprudent stranger, before doing worse things to him. I shall rely on your presence to prevent any such misadventure, but we will take along the Ticitl Ualiztli, should it happen that his ministrations are required. These two stalwarts will also come with you—to guard you—and whatever else they do with or to you along the way, I do not care."

XXIII

The distance from our starting place to the Yaki lands is three times the distance between Aztlan and the City of Mexico, so my going there and my returning constituted the longest journey I ever made in my life.

I let G'nda Ke do the guiding of us, because she had come that way at least once before. For all I knew, generations of G'nda Kes had made the journey back and forth innumerable times during the sheaves of sheaves of years since that infamous first G'nda Ke had arrived among my ancestors in Aztlan. Those G'nda Kes' collective memory of this whole western part of The One World might well have been inscribed on this G'nda Ke's brain at birth, as plainly as a word-picture map.