Aztec Blood

a particularly foul curse. 'I see the resemblance,' he said. 'The bitch laid with him.'

Flinging me aside, he grabbed his whip and rushed across the stepping stones to the village on the other side of the river.

My mother's wails could be heard throughout the village. Later, when I returned to our hut, I found my mother huddled in a corner. There was blood on her face from her mouth and nose, and one of her eyes was already swelling shut.

'?Mestizo!' she yelled and struck me.

I recoiled in shock. To get a beating from others was bad enough, but to have my own mother blaspheme my mixed blood was unbearable. I ran from the hut to a rock hanging over the river. I sat and cried, stung more from my mother's words than the don's beating.

Later the fray sat down beside me.

'I'm sorry,' he said. He handed me a piece of sugarcane to suck on. 'You must never forget your place in life. Today you revealed medical knowledge. Had they known you read books... I can only shudder at the thought of what the don might have done to you.'

'Why did the don and the other man look at me so strangely? What did he mean when he said my mother had lain with someone else?'

'Cristo, there are things you do not know about your birth, that you can never be told. To reveal them would place you in danger.' He refused to say more to me, but he gave me a hug. 'Your only sin is that you were born.'

The fray's medicine was not the only kind practiced on the hacienda. The villagers and their sorceress had their own remedies. I knew the wide-leafed plants found in a few places along the riverbank had spiritual healing power over wounds. Feeling sorry because my mother had taken a beating for what I had done, I pulled a handful of these out, soaked them in water, and took them back to our hut. I spread them across my mother's cuts and welts.

She thanked me. 'Cristo, I know it is hard on you. One day many things will be revealed to you, and you will understand why the secrecy was necessary.'

That was all that she said.

Later, while the fray was still with the don and the majordomo, I sneaked into the fray's room and prepared a mixture of powder from his potions and applied them to my mother's face to reduce the pain. I knew the village sorceress used a potion of jungle herbs to cause sleep because she believed that good spirits enter the body during sleep and fight disease. I also believed in the healing power of sleep, so I went to her to obtain the herb to induce sleep for my mother.

  SIX

The hut of the sorceress was outside the village in a grove of zapote trees and bushes that had not been cleared for cornfields. A two-room mud hut with a maguey-thatched roof, it told the world it was the home of a witch-sorceress by the feathers and animal skeletons draped around the doorway. An eerie-looking creature that could only exist in a nightmare—the head of a coyote, the body of an eagle, the tail of a snake—hung above the doorway.

When I entered she was sitting crosslegged on the dirt floor. Before a small fire she heated green leaves on a flat rock. The seared, shriveling leaves gave off a pungent, smoky smell. Inside the hut was no less bizarre than the outer doorway. Animal skulls, some of which looked human and I hoped were monkeys, were scattered about and connected to a unearthly collection of misshapen forms.

Her name meant Snake Flower in the Aztec tongue.

Snake Flower was neither old nor young. Her india features were dark and sharp, her nose thin, her eyes black as obsidian but flecked with gold. Some villagers believed those orbs could steal souls and pull out eyes.

She was a tititl, a native healer skilled in herbal remedies and chants. She was also a practitioner of the darker arts—secret skills that Spanish law and logic would never comprehend. When the village cacique feuded with a mule train overseer, Snake Flower placed a curse on the overseer. After she shaped a clay doll in his image—but with the doll's guts hard as rock—the man's bowels impacted, and he was unable to eliminate waste. He would have died if the tititl in his own village had not made a duplicate doll with hard guts and smashed it to break the spell.

You say that this is foolishness and not magic? The play of childish savages? Is a tititl's magic anymore the work of savages than a priest's envisioning the devil in the shape of a man's garrancha? Or his dream of salvation from a dead man nailed to a cross?

Snake Flower did not look up when I entered her hut.

'I need a sleeping potion for my mother.'

'You have no mother,' she said, still not looking up.

'What? Even mestizos have mothers, witch-woman. It is sorcerers who are spawned from dirt and bat droppings. My mother needs a potion to help her sleep so the sleep spirits can fight the sickness.'

She kept stirring the green leaves, sizzling and smoking on the rock slab. 'A mestizo enters my hut and asks for favors and brings insults as his gifts. Have the Aztec gods grown so weak that a half-blood can insult one of pure blood?'

'My apologies, Snake Flower. My mother's injuries have made me forget my place.' I had softened my tone. While I did not believe in the power of gods and spirits, there are many mysteries that sorceresses know and many secret paths they walk. I did not want to find a snake in my bed or poison in my bowl because I had offended her.

'My mother needs the sleep medicine that only an Aztec spirit woman can prepare. I offer not only gratitude but a gift of magic.'

I tossed a small doeskin pouch on the dirt beside her.

She stirred the smoking leaves, not looking at the pouch or me.

'And what is this? The heart of a monkey? The ground bones of a jaguar? What magic does a mestizo boy know?'

'Spanish magic. A medical potion not as powerful as yours,' I added hastily, 'but different.'

I could tell she was intrigued but too proud to admit it.

'Magic from pale-skinned weaklings who cannot withstand the sun god without burning and fainting?'

'I brought it so that you can show the others in the village how weak and foolish Spanish medicine is. The powder inside is used by Fray Antonio to burn off skin growths. It is mixed with water and spread over the growth. After it disappears, a lesser amount is applied to keep the growth from returning.'

'Bah!' She flung the pouch across the room. 'My medicine is stronger.' She scraped green matter from the hot rock into a small clay cup. 'Here, mestizo, take this to Miahauxiuitl. It is the sleeping potion you seek.'

I stared at her. 'How did you know I would come for sleeping medicine?'

She laughed shrilly. 'I know many things.'

I reached for the cup, but she withdrew it. She stared at me, taking my measure. 'You shoot up like a corn stalk under a hot, wet sun. You are no longer a boy.' She pointed a finger at me. 'I give you this medicine to bring the sleeping spirits to Miahauxiuitl, but you will serve me in return.'

'In what way?'

She laughed shrilly again. 'You will see, mestizo, you will see.'

I hurried back to my mother, leaving the doeskin pouch with the sorceress. She had a growth on the back of her hand, the same type of growth that I had seen Fray Antonio treat on Spaniards with the mixture of mercuriales I left her. I knew her concern. Because she was unable to get rid of the growth on her own hand, villagers had begun to question her skills. How could she drive away the demons that bring sickness, when she could not cure herself?

On the way back to our hut, I smelled her potion and was curious to learn its ingredients. My nose detected honey and lime and octli, a powerful drink similar to pulque made from the fermented sap of the maguey. There were other herbs in it, one of which I later realized was yoyotli, a concoction Aztec priests used to sedate sacrificial victims before their hearts were cut out.

  SEVEN