Aztec Autumn

between it and me staggered as if by a heavy blow—including the guard and his captive Citlali—and several of the men lost their footing and fell down. Also, Citlali's discarded garments went whisking away from around her feet. I could not see anything to account for those happenings. But then I felt a shock as if cupped hands had abruptly slammed hard against both my ears. A mighty gale of wind, with the force of a stone wall falling, dashed against my ahuehuetl and every other tree in the vicinity. Leaves, twigs, small branches, all went hurtling away from the site of that awesome explosion. The wall of wind was gone as suddenly as it had come, but had I not been behind my tree, my cazoleta would have been blown clean of polvora and my arcabuz made useless.

When those people between me and the gate regained their balance, they stared horrified at the destruction within the stockade, and the fiercely blazing fire, and at the pieces of stone, wood, weapons—and their fellows— dropping from the sky. (Some of the men who had fallen did not get up; they had been hit by the things hurled straight outward by the blast.) The gate guard was the first to realize who was responsible for the disaster; he whirled again to face Citlali, a snarl contorting his visage. Citlali turned and ran, toward me, and the guard pointed his arcabuz at her back.

I pointed mine, too—at him—and squeezed the gatillo. My arcabuz performed exactly as it was supposed to, with a roar and a jolt that numbed my shoulder and rocked me backward a step or two. Where my lead ball went, whether it struck the guard or any of the others, I have no idea, because my view of them was clouded by the blue smoke I had created. Anyway, regretfully, I had not prevented the guard from discharging his own weapon. One moment Citlali was running toward me, her fine breasts bouncing lightly. The next moment, those breasts, her whole upper body, opened out like a red flower bursting into blossom. Gouts of blood and gobbets of flesh spewed out ahead of her to spatter on the ground, and onto those shreds of herself she fell face forward and lay still.

There was no sign or sound of pursuit as I fled down the hill. Evidently the discharge of my weapon had gone unheard, as I had expected, in the general tumult. And if I had hit anybody with the lead ball, his fellow soldiers probably assumed that he had been felled by one of the far-flung pieces of the fort. When I reached the lakeside, I did not stand about, waiting for an acali to come along. I strode straight out across the mudflats and then, knee-deep in the turbid water, waded all the way back to the city, staying close under the aqueduct's tree-trunk piles to avoid being seen from either shore. Once I got to the island, though, I had to wait awhile before I had an opportunity to slip unnoticed in among the crowds of people that had gathered there, buzzing excitedly as they gazed at the tower of smoke still hanging over Grasshopper Hill.

The streets were all but empty as I scuttled to our familiar colacion of San Pablo Zoquipan and to the house Citlali and I had shared for so long. I doubted that any Cathedral spy was still keeping watch—he would be down beside the lake with almost every other city resident—but if he was on duty, and if he challenged me or even followed me, I was fully prepared to kill him. Inside the house, I recharged my arcabuz, to be ready for that necessity or any other. Then I lifted to my back, with a tumpline around my forehead, the bale of my belongings that I had prudently packed beforehand. The only other things I took from the house were our little hoard of money—in cacao beans, tin snippets, a variety of Spanish coins—and my sack of salitre, the one polvora ingredient that might be hard to find elsewhere. With a piece of rope, I made a sling for my arcabuz, so it could be carried inconspicuously under my pack and sack.

On the street again, I saw none of the few passersby take any interest in my doings and, glancing back from time to time, saw no one following me. I did not head north to the Tepeyaca causeway by which my mother, my uncle and myself had so long ago entered the City of Mexico. If soldiers should be sent chasing me, the notarius Alonso would be in conscience bound to tell them that I was most likely going directly homeward, toward the Aztlan I had told him about. So I went west through the city instead, and across the causeway that leads to the town of Tlacopan. And there, as I stepped onto the mainland, I turned just long enough to shake my clenched fist back at the city—the city that had slaughtered both my father and my lover—swearing an oath that I would be back, to avenge them both.

Many things have happened in my lifetime that have forever hung heavy in my heart. The death of Citlali was one of those occurrences. And I have known many regrettable losses, leaving voids in my heart that never would be filled again. The death of Citlali was one of those occurrences, too.

I have just now spoken of her as my lover, and of course, in the physical sense, she was certainly that. She was also most lovable and loving—and for a very long while I would be desolate, bereft of her dear presence—but in truth I never loved her unreservedly. I knew it then, and I know it even better now, because, at a later time in my life, I would love with all my heart. Even if I had been totally and utterly smitten with Citlali, I could not have brought myself to marry her. For one reason, she had been the wife of another before me. I had been a second-best, so to speak. For another reason, I could never have hoped for children of my own, not by her, not with the sad example of Ome-Ehecatl always in view.

Though I am sure that Citlali was well aware of my feelings—or my insufficiency of them—she never gave the least hint of that awareness. She had said, 'I would do anything...' meaning that, if need be, she would die for me. And she had done just that, and more than that. With her successful accomplishment of my taunting farewell insult to the City of Mexico, she had won for both Ehecatl and herself not only my gratitude, but also that of the gods.

As I have said, Ehecatl would have had no hope of escaping damnation to the eternal nothingness of Mictlan—and neither would Citlali, since she had given birth only to a child too dreadfully defective for any of our priests to have accepted it for sacrifice to any god. But now Citlali had contrived to make sacrifices of both mother and child—and at the same time to annihilate many of the alien white men. That deed, worthy of a warrior hero, was certain to please all our old-time gods, so she and Ehecatl were assured of an afterlife of ease and opulence. I knew they both would be happy during that eternity, and I could even hope that the gods would benignantly bestow on Ehecatl the eyes to see the splendors of whichever afterworld they had gone to.

XIII

Our people have a saying: that a man who goes he knows not where does not need to fear losing the road. My only aim was to get well away from the City of Mexico before I turned northward into the unconquered lands. So, from Tlacopan, I took the roads that continued to lead me westward. In time, I found myself in Michihuacan, the homeland of the Purempe people.

This nation was one of the few in The One World that had never been subsumed or put under tribute by the Mexica. The chief reason for Michihuacan's sturdy independence in those days was that the Purempe artisans and armorers knew the secret of compounding a brown metal so hard and sharp that, in battle, the blades made of it easily prevailed over the brittle obsidian weapons of the Mexica. After just a few tries at subduing Michihuacan, the Mexica were satisfied to settle for a truce, and thereafter the two nations engaged freely in trade—or almost freely; the Purempecha never did let any other people of The One World learn the secret of their marvelous metal. Of course, that metal is no longer a secret; the Spaniards recognized it on sight as what they call bronce. And those brown blades could not prevail against the white men's even harder and sharper steel—nor their softer metal, the lead propelled by polvora.

Nevertheless, even with inferior weaponry, the gallant Purempecha fought more fiercely against the Spaniards than had any other nation thus invaded. As soon as those white men had conquered and secured what is now New Spain, one of the most cruel and rapacious of their captains, a man named Guzman, led a force westward from the City of Mexico—the same way I had just now come. His intent was to seize for himself as much land and as many subjects as his commander Cortes had acquired. Though the word Michihuacan means only 'Land of the Fishermen,' Guzman soon found—as the Mexica had found before him—that it could as well have been called Land of Defiant Warriors.

It cost Guzman several thousand of his soldiers to advance—and advance only creepingly—across the lush fields and rolling hills of that eye-pleasing countryside. Of the Purempecha, many more thousands fell, but there were always some remaining to go on fighting, undeterred. To slash and blast and burn his way to Michihuacan's northern border, where it abuts the land called Kuanahuata, and to its western edge, which is the coast of the Western Sea, took Guzman nearly fifteen years. (As I have mentioned, back when my mother, my uncle and I journeyed to the City of Mexico, we often had to circle warily around parts of Michihuacan in which bloody battles were still being waged.) As a warrior myself, I must concede, considering what it had cost Guzman in years and casualties, that he had fairly won the right to claim all that land and to give it a new name of his own choosing—New Galicia, honoring his home province back in Old Spain.

But he also did things inexcusable. He herded together the few Purempe warriors he had taken prisoner alive