Aztec Autumn

Also, your burning of army posts or hacienda buildings should distract their attention from whatever larger war preparations Pakapeti and I may be making elsewhere. Just one thing, though, Butterfly. Please do not molest any more of these villages here around Patzcuaro. Neither Padre Vasco nor his tame Mexica are our enemies.'

The woman assented, if grudgingly. G'nda Ke frowned and looked ready to challenge my instructions, but I turned my back on her and spoke to Tiptoe:

'We will go north from here, and we can start right now, if you are ready. I see you already have a traveling pack. Is there anything else you might require, anything I can provide for you?'

'Yes,' she said. 'As soon as possible, Tenamaxtli, I want a thunder-stick of my own.'

XV

'I insist,' she said, some ten or twelve days later. 'I want a thunder-stick of my own. And this will probably be our last opportunity for me to get one.'

We were crouched in some bushes on a knoll overlooking a Spanish guardhouse. That consisted of only a small wooden shack, in which were posted two soldiers, armed and armored, with a fenced pen alongside, containing four horses, two of them saddled and bridled.

'We could also steal a horse for each of us,' Tiptoe urged. 'And surely we could learn to ride them.'

We were at the northern border of New Galicia. Everything south of here was comfortably called by the Spaniards their Tierra de Paz, everything to the north was known as the Tierra de Guerra, and this area along the border was somewhat hazily described as the Tierra Disputable. From east to west along here, there was an army outpost like this one situated every few one-long-runs, and mounted patrols continuously prowled between them. All the soldiers were on the alert against any forays by war parties from the nations of the Tierra de Guerra.

Years earlier, these same or similar guards had paid little heed when my mother, my uncle and I—obviously innocuous travelers—had crossed some part of this border, going southward. But I dared not assume that the soldiers would be so inattentive this time. For one reason, I was sure that even the most negligent guardsman would happily detain and search a young woman as conspicuously unusual and attractive as Tiptoe—and probably would do more than that to her.

'Well?' she said, digging an elbow into my ribs.

I grumbled, 'I am not too eager to share you with someone else, especially a white someone else.'

'Ayya!' she scoffed. 'You did not hesitate to tell those other women to prostrate and prostitute themselves.'

'I was not so intimately acquainted with those other women. Nor did they have any consorts to object to their going astraddle the road. You do.'

'Then my consort can also rescue me before I am soiled beyond redemption. Shall we wait until one of those men leaves and you have only the one to deal with?'

'I suspect that neither man gets relieved until a patrol arrives from some other post. If you are really determined on this, we might as well act now. My weapon is charged. Go and employ yours. Your seductive self. When you have got your victim thoroughly bedazzled, and the other gawking, give a cry—of ecstatic admiration, anticipation, whatever—loud enough for me to hear, and I will come bursting through the door. Be prepared to seize and entangle your man while I slay the onlooker. Then together we will overpower yours.'

'The plan sounds simple enough. Simple plans are best.'

'Let us hope so. Just do not get so carried away that you neglect to utter that shout.'

She asked teasingly, 'Are you afraid that I might perhaps enjoy the embrace of a white man? Even come to prefer it?'

'No,' I said. 'Once you have got close enough to a white man to smell him, I doubt that you will prefer him. But I want this done quickly. There will be a patrol arriving sometime.'

'Then... ximopanolti, Tenamaxtli,' she said, mockingly taking her leave with utmost formality.

She stood up from among the bushes and walked down the slope—slowly, but not at all formally—undulating her hips as if she were doing what our people call the quequezcuicatl, 'the ticklish dance.' The soldiers must have glimpsed her through some peephole in their shack wall. They both came to the door, and except for one significant look that passed between them, they leeringly ogled her progress all the way, then very politely stepped aside for her to enter, and the door closed behind all three of them.

I waited, then, and waited and waited, but heard no summoning cry from Tiptoe. After a considerable while, I began cursing myself for having made my plan too simple. Did the soldiers suspect that the comely young woman had not been traveling alone? Were they simply holding her hostage while they waited, weapons at the ready, for her presumed companion to appear? Eventually I decided that there was only one way to find out. Risking the chance that one of the men was still keeping a lookout at the peephole, I stood up in plain view of the shack. When there came no explosion of polvora or shout of challenge, I scurried down the knoll, my own arcabuz at the ready. When still it seemed I had been unnoticed, I crossed the level ground before the shack and leaned an ear against the door. All I could hear was a sort of chorus of voices grunting. This puzzled me, but evidently Tiptoe was not being tortured to screaming, so I waited a little longer. At last, unable to bear the suspense, I gave the door a push.

It was not fastened in any way, and swung loosely inward, letting daylight into the dark interior. Against the shack's rear wall, the guards had built a shelf of planks, probably used by them alternately as a dining board and sleeping cot, but now being used for something else. On that shelf Tiptoe was stretched, her bare legs splayed apart and her mantle bunched up around her neck. She was silent, but she was squirming desperately, because both of the soldiers were raping her simultaneously. Standing at opposite ends of the shelf, one man had rammed his tepuli into her nether orifice, the other into her upper, and they were grinning lasciviously at one another while they pumped and grunted.

Instantly I discharged my arcabuz, and at that close distance I could not miss my aim. The soldier standing between Tiptoe's legs was slammed away from her and against the shack wall, his leather cuirass torn open and his chest abruptly bright red. Though the room was as instantly clouded with blue smoke, I could see the second soldier also lurch back, away from Tiptoe's head, and he also, curiously, was wet with much blood. Clearly he was still alive—he was shrieking like a woman—but he obviously posed no immediate danger to me, for he had both hands clutched to what remained of his tepuli, while it hosed out blood like a fountain's spout. I did not take time to grab for my other weapon—the obsidian knife I wore at my belt—but merely reversed my arcabuz in my one hand, holding it like a club. I reached out my other hand to the agonized soldier, who stood teetering and screeching in my face, snatched off his metal helmet and beat his head with the arcabuz's butt until he fell dead.

When I turned from him, Tiptoe had clambered off the plank shelf and stood, also unsteady on her feet, letting her mantle fall to clothe her nakedness, while she choked and coughed and spat onto the dirt floor. Her face, where it was not slick with juices, was a sickly greenish color. I took her arm and hurried her out into the open air, starting to say, 'I would have come sooner, Pakapeti—'

But she only reeled away from me, still making strangling noises, to lean on the fence of the horse pen, where a hollowed-out log trough held water for the animals. She plunged her head under the water, then several times tilted her head back to gargle the water in her mouth and spit it out, and meanwhile, with her cupped hands, scooped water up under her mantle to wash her nether parts. When finally she felt clean enough or composed enough to speak, she did so, but disjointedly, gagging and retching between words:

'You saw... I could not... shout...'

'Do not talk,' I said. 'Stay here and rest. I must hide the bodies.'

The very mention of the men made her face go ill and greenish again, so I left her and went into the shack. As I dragged one dead man, then the other, by the feet out of the door, I was struck by an idea. I ran again to the top of the knoll, and could espy no patrol or any other moving being either east or west. So I ran back down to the soldiers and clumsily, but as quickly as I could, I unstrapped their various pieces of metal and leather armor. When I could get to the heavy blue canvas uniforms beneath, I stripped those garments off the bodies, too. Several pieces of the clothing were ruined, either rent by the blast of my arcabuz or drenched with blood. But I salvaged and set aside one shirt, one pair of trousers, and a pair of stout military boots.

When they were unclad, the corpses were easier to move, but I was panting and sweating heavily by the time I had dragged each of them around to the far side of the knoll. There was thick underbrush there, and I thought I did a creditable job of hiding them and the remainder of their weapons in it. Then, with a torn shirt of theirs, I went back over the traces of our passage—my own tracks, their smeared blood, the broken twigs and