Aztec Autumn

young man was a soldier doing fowler duty at the lakeside, and he seemed amiable, perhaps because I was in Spanish garb and he took me to be a domesticated and Christianized manservant of some sort. He went on:

'Por supuesto, no comemos los cisnes. Demasiado duro a mancar.' And he took pains to make that clear to me, waggling his jaw in an exaggerated manner. 'Of course, we do not eat the swans. Too tough to chew.'

I had come here to the lakeside on other occasions, to watch what Pochotl had called the 'strange but effective means' employed by the Spaniards to harvest the waterfowl that descended onto the lake at every dusk. It was indeed a strange method, and it was done with the thunder-stick (properly called an arcabuz) and it was indeed effective.

A considerable number of the arcabuces were tied firmly to posts sunk in the lake's bank, the weapons pointing straight out across the water. Another battery of arcabuces was similarly tied to stakes, but pointing upward at various angles and in various directions. All those weapons could be tended and set off by a single soldier. First, he pulled a string and the leveled arcabuces boomed their flashes and smokes directly across the lake surface, killing many of the birds floating there and frightening the rest into sudden flight. At which, the fowler pulled another string, and those severally aimed, uptilted arcabuces fired all together, knocking whole swarms of the birds out of the air. Then the soldier would go about to all the weapons, doing something at the front of their tubes and something else at the rear of them. By the time he had completed that task, the birds would have calmed and resettled on the water, and the twofold slaughter would commence again. Finally, before full darkness came, the fowler would send out boatmen in acaltin canoes to collect the drifts of dead birds.

Though I had witnessed that procedure several times, this was the first time I had nerved myself to ask questions about it.

'We indios never used anything but nets,' I told the young soldier, 'into which we drove the birds. Your method is much more rewarding. How does it work?'

'Very simple,' he said. 'A string is tied to the gatillo of each of the leveled arcabuces.' (I was already puzzled, for gatillo means a 'little cat' or a 'kitten.') 'All those strings are tied to a single string for me to pull and fire those weapons all at once. Likewise, strings are tied to the gatillos of all the upward- aimed—'

'I could see that,' I said. 'But how does the arcabuz itself work?'

'Ah,' he said, and pridefully led me to one of the staked weapons, knelt beside it and began to point. 'This little thing here is the gatillo.' It was a bit of metal protruding from under the rearward part of the arcabuz, crescent-shaped to be pulled by a finger or, in this case, a string, and the kitten was inside a metal guard, evidently to prevent its being pulled accidentally. 'And this thing here is the wheel, which is spun by a spring that you cannot see, inside the lock there.' The wheel was just that—a wheel—but small, about the size of an ardite coin, made of metal and grooved with tiny teeth all around.

'What is a spring?' I asked.

'A narrow leaf of thin metal, wound into a tight coil by this key.' He showed me the key, then used it to sketch a small, tight spiral in the earth at our feet. 'That is what the spring looks like, and every arcabucero carries a key.' He inserted his into a hole in what he had called 'the lock,' turned the key a time or two, and I heard a faint grating noise. 'There, the wheel is ready to spin. Now, this thing here we call a cat's-paw.' It was another small metal piece, not like a cat's paw at all, but shaped more like a bird's head, gripping in its beak a bit of gravel. 'That stone,' the soldier explained, 'is a pirita.' And I recognized it as a tiny fragment of what we call the 'false-gold.'

'Now, we cock the cat's-paw back, ready to strike,' he went on, thumbing it backward with a click, 'and another spring holds it there. Then—observe—I squeeze the kitten, the wheel spins and at the same instant the cat's-paw slaps its pirita against the wheel and you will see a spray of sparks.'

Which is exactly what occurred, and the soldier looked more proud than ever.

'But,' I said, 'there was no flash or noise or smoke from the tube.'

He laughed indulgently. 'That is because I had not yet loaded the arcabuz or primed its cazoleta.'

He produced two large leather pouches and, from one of them, dribbled a small pile of dark powder into my palm. 'That is the polvora. See, now I pour a measured amount of it down the mouth of the canon here, and shove in behind it a small piece of cloth. Then, from this other pouch, I take a cartucho.' He showed me a small, transparent sac—like a bit of tied-off animal intestine—packed with little metal pellets. 'For shooting enemies or large animals, of course, we use a heavy round bala. But for birds we use a cartucho of perdigones.' Then, with a long metal rod, he tamped all the contents tightly down in there. 'Last of all, I put a mere touch of the polvora here on the cazoleta.' That was a little pan sticking out shelflike from the lock, where the sparks from the wheel and the false-gold would strike it. 'You will notice,' he concluded, 'that there is a narrow hole going from the cazoleta into the canon where the charge of polvora is packed. Now, here, I wind the spring and you squeeze the gatillo.'

I knelt down to the charged weapon with commingled curiosity, timidity and dread. But the curiosity was foremost, because I had come here and accosted the young soldier with precisely this end in mind. I put my finger through the guard beneath the arcabuz's lock, hooked it around the kitten and squeezed.

The wheel spun, the cat's-paw snapped down, the sparks sprayed, there was a noise like an angry little snarl and a puff of smoke from the powdered pan... and then the arcabuz rocked backward, and I flinched wildly away, as its mouth roared and spewed a flame and a bloom of blue smoke and, I had no doubt, all those death-dealing metal pellets. When I had recovered from the shock and the ringing in my ears, the young soldier was laughing heartily.

'?Caspita!' he exclaimed. 'I will wager that you are the first and only indio ever to fire such a weapon. Do not let anyone know that I let you do it. Come, you can watch me load all the arcabuces for the next fusillade.'

As I followed him, I said, 'Then the polvora is the absolute essential component of the arcabuz. The lock and wheel and cats and such are simply to make the polvora work as you wish it to.'

'Indeed, yes,' he said. 'Without the polvora there would be no firearms at all in the world. No arcabuces, granadas, culebrinas, petardos. Ni siquiera triquitraques. Nada.'

'But what is the polvora?' I asked. 'What is it made of?'

'Ah, now that I will not tell you. It was rash enough of me to let you play with the arcabuz. The orders are that no indio be allowed to handle any weapon of the white men, and my punishment for that would be dire. I certainly cannot reveal the composition of the polvora.'

I must have looked downcast, because he laughed once more and said, 'I will tell you this much. The polvora is obviously very much a man's property, for manly uses. But, oddly enough, one of its ingredients is a very intimate contribution from the ladies.'

He went on laughing as he went on working, and as I drifted away. He took no notice of my departure, nor had he noticed that the small amount of the polvora he had poured into my hand had gone into my own belt pouch, nor that I had picked up one of the wheel-winding keys I found lying beside one of the other arcabuces.

Bearing those items, I made my way to the Cathedral—hurrying thence, before I might forget any detail of the contrivances I had been shown. It was past the hour of Compline when I got to Alonso's workroom, so the notarius was not there, probably busy at his devotions. I found a blank piece of bark paper and, with a stick of charcoal, began to draw: the kitten and its guard, the cat's-paw, the wheel, the spiral of spring...

'Are you returned to work late this evening, Juan Britanico?' said Alonso, coming through the door.

I managed not to jump or act startled. 'Only practicing some word-pictures of my own,' I said offhandedly, crumpling the paper but holding on to it. 'You and I do so much translating of other scribes' work that I feared I might be forgetting the craft. So, having nothing better to do, I came back here to practice.'

'I am glad you did. I would like to ask you something.'

'A su servicio, Cuatl Alonso,' I said, hoping I did not look wary.

'I have just come from a meeting of Bishop Zumarraga, Archdeacon Suarez-Begega, the Ostiarius Sanchez- Santovena and various other custodians. They are all agreed that it is time the Cathedral was provided with more dignified and resplendent furnishings and vessels. We have been using makeshift paraphernalia only because a