What she felt for Juan she couldn’t express or even understand. Although her feelings for Juan were in her heart, he stirred her desires, too. He was also different than other men in a way that was important to her—he respected her, not because she was a woman, but as a person.
Raised in a society in which women were rarely taught to read and didn’t know the breed of one horse from another, Juan excited her because he was interested in her opinions and ideas.
That he was a wanted horse thief and bandido who might end up with his neck stretched at the end of a rope was intimidating, but if they traveled north and started fresh in a land where questions weren’t asked … she could help Juan build his dream of a horse ranch … maybe even start a family …
She was knocked out of her musing when her carriage came to an abrupt halt as they entered the long road that led to most of the horse ranches of the wealthy outside of the city.
Carlos raced his horse up to the open carriage. His expression scared her—he was grim and wild-eyed.
“Where is he?”
“Who?” she asked.
“The bandido posing as Antonio.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Shut up! You’re lying!”
She gaped at him, mortified. He had never spoken to her before with such venom in his voice.
“I know you’ve seen him. Your aunt saw you sneaking out. They’re coming for me, but I’m going to kill him first before they find me.”
“Drive on!” she shouted to her groom.
Carlos shot the groom in the head.
“I’ll make sure he comes looking for you,” he said.
NINETY-FOUR
I WAS RUBBING down Rojo in front of El Mestizo’s stable when my benefactor arrived, and I watched him step out of his carriage. I resisted the urge to run over and give him a hand and instead pretended I didn’t see what an effort it was for him to move his pained body.
He supported himself with a cane, and I didn’t look over to him until he was seated on a bench, with his back to the stable wall. His head was tilted up to catch the sun. His skin had a gray pallor, the color of flesh attacked by maladies that eat body and soul, only in this case it had been the hand of man and not of God that had sucked his lifeblood.
He was lucky to be alive, but his body would never recover, and I wondered how long he would live.
“I wish I had a good woman who would give me a rubdown as often as this horse gets one,” I said.
He said nothing, just sat still, soaking up the sun, and I went back to rubbing the stallion’s coat. I was saddling Rojo when he spoke.
“I felt from the first moment I saw you that fate had placed you before me, but I had always thought that you were on a collision course with my brother. It is a great surprise—and a pleasure—for me to discover that God’s intent was to save my life.”
“Señor, I don’t know anything about God’s intentions, but I know I would have died begging while crawling on all fours if not for you.”
“What I did took a few coins I didn’t earn. Anyone could have done the same thing with little effort. But you are the kind of man that my father would have wanted holding a sword beside him. There are few such men left—neither my brother nor I are among them.”
That wasn’t true, at least in the case of El Mestizo, who had survived the tortures of the damned and had not given up his brother’s folly.
I told him that as we drank brandy and I smoked tobacco.
This was the last time I would see my benefactor, and we both knew it. I was sure that by now there would be posses in all directions from the city searching for me.
I stayed awhile longer and talked to him, getting him to laugh as I described my adventures with the countess in Vera Cruz and Mexico City.
“The woman has more tricks than an indio conjuror,” I told him.
We barely spoke of Carlos, though he admitted that the man’s refusal to show the stallion in public had raised a few eyebrows over the years, but no one wanted to delve too closely—Carlos was part of the Cortés family by marriage, and the horse was of the bloodline of Cortés’s own warhorse, so it would have been sacrilege to have questioned either.
“Besides, nobody wanted to probe any deeper,” he said.
When I got up to leave, he didn’t ask me where I was heading and I didn’t volunteer it. It didn’t matter—we both knew I would never be back to the city or anywhere else my face was known.
I had a question that had been on my mind since the day I woke up in the stable and saw him staring down at me.
“Why? Why me? You speak of fate, of your brother. What is it? Why did you help me?”
“You’re my nephew. More than that, the two greatest bloodlines in all the Americas run in your veins.”
The words didn’t mean anything.
If he had told me I was the king of Spain I would have found it no more dumbfounding than for him to tell me I was his nephew—a Cortés.
“I knew it when I saw you. Your mother was a granddaughter of Montezuma and a Toltec princess he married before the conquest. Because she was both Toltec and Aztec royalty, she grew up as a ward of my father on his hacienda in the Oaxaca area.”
“More likely a prisoner of your father,” I said, “to keep her from rallying indios against the invaders.”
“Perhaps, but my father did not have the same disrespect and contempt for indios that many others who had not fought them have. He witnessed their courage. But that aside, your mother was a beautiful young woman. So lovely that my brother … impregnated her.”
My blood rose. “You mean he raped her.”
El Mestizo turned away for a moment before coming back to meet my eye. “I don’t know what happened. A pretty young india girl, a young caballero who had too much to drink—whatever took place, understand that the marquis is not a bad person. I was raised in the shadow of my father, and no one expected anything from me. He was still a boy when our father died and he was pushed out front, with everyone in the colony expecting him to be the warrior-conqueror that our father was.”
“Eh, my heart bleeds for the rich bastard,” I joked, but my guts were wrenching and my heart was choking in my throat. I realized I had a tight grip on my pistola. “How did my mother end up in a whorehouse?”
“My brother’s Spanish mother, Juana, was responsible for that. My father had already recognized one offspring of an india—me—as a son. Juana, the Spanish aristocrat he married after the conquest, wanted to make sure there were no more claims against what she wanted for her own children. My father was already dead, or he would never have permitted it.”
“Your father stole an empire, abandoned your mother, and gave what should have been your inheritance to your younger brother.”
El Mestizo smiled. It caught me by surprise.
“My father won an empire, the same way the Aztec and every other indio empire ever did, through force of arms. He married a Spanish woman instead of my mother, and left his title and estate to his Spanish son because that was the only way they could be kept in the family. If he had left it to me, the king would have forfeited it.”
“Your brother—does he know?”
He nodded. “Doña Bernaldina suspected it when she saw you at the viceroy’s ball.”
“Ah … so I got the invitation to their party so she could get a look at me without soot on my face.”
My head was swirling, and I could see that El Mestizo was tiring badly, barely able to sit up straight.
“I’ll help you into the house.”
He waved me off. “No, leave me here to enjoy the sun. I can feel its warmth healing my broken soul.” He smiled up at me. “Go on, Don Juan Cortés y Montezuma. Take the fine horse you stole from me and go far enough away so the viceroy forgets you ever existed. When we meet again, we will both be in hell.”
“No, amigo, I have felt el diablo’s grip on my ankles many times, and I know he is getting impatient waiting for me, but you will sing
with the angels and drink fine brandy while I sup on worms at the Dark One’s table.”
* * *
Martín Cortés, the second Marquis del Valle de Oaxaca, was coming up the road to the house as I was leaving it.
He stopped his horse and stared at me, keeping his features blank, his thoughts a secret.
I stopped the stallion abreast with him.
“How is my brother?”
“As well as any man whose bones and flesh have been broken for a crime he didn’t commit can be.”
“Those who did this to him will pay.”
“No, they won’t,” I said. “Because you are not the man to do it. You’ll sulk back to Madrid or wherever the king decides you’ll go and keep your mouth shut because you have the cojones of a mouse.”
He reacted as if I had slapped him in the face—which I had—jerking out his quirt and raising it.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No, señor, I do not know you.”
I rode on, not looking back. I did not want to ever see his face again.
NINETY-FIVE
THE MAN WAS waiting for me as I came through the ranch gate and onto the road. He was sitting on his horse a hundred feet from the gate—just sitting there, smoking a tobacco twist, no gun in hand.
I didn’t know his name but we had met before, in a manner of speaking. He was the one I had observed on the ledge watching murderers attack and kill Rios and his coachmen.
Seeing him again made my flesh crawl.
I had had a premonition that something would go wrong with my plan to head north and leave my problems in the dust Rojo kicked up. Things had been going too well. I knew it was time for something to go wrong.
I settled Rojo into a slow walk as I sized up the situation and looked around to see if any more surprises could be waiting for me.
I had a pistola in a holster strapped under the right side of my jacket that I could pull with my left hand and one attached to the saddle I could pull with my other hand.
Not seeing anyone else lurking around, I kept a steady eye on the man as Rojo slowly took me to him. I didn’t see a weapon in his hand, but I knew he had to have one in easy reach.
If this was going to be a shoot-out, my biggest advantage lay in having it occur before we got into a range where pistolas were reasonably accurate because the guns I had were a little unusual.
From Uncle Ramos’s fine collection of weapons, I had chosen two dueling pistolas; a sword with a hard, Toledo steel blade; and a dagger that was sharp enough to shave cleanly with. Examining the dueling pistolas, I had learned that Uncle Ramos had been both clever and devious because one of the barrels was rifled.
Rifling involved making a spiral cut into the inside of a barrel so that when the ball fired, it would spin and go straighter as it fired out. It was a very expensive process and would be considered ill-mannered to have the spiral grooves done to dueling pistols. Eh, the last thing anyone wants on the field of honor is to have the pistolas accurate. Most duels end up as draws because the shots go wild.
There were interesting things about the dueling pistolas. Ramos had three made—even an ignorant lépero like me knew only two are used in a duel. Two pistolas were exposed in the wood case, but the weight of the box had not felt right to me after I removed them. I found the third one, the gun with the rifled barrel, in a secret compartment.
When I confronted the majordomo with the hidden pistola, he confessed that, over twenty years earlier, Ramos had had the rifled gun made and concealed in a way so that after his opponent had chosen one of the two exposed weapons for the duel, Ramos could take the rifled one himself without anyone noticing.
But his opponent had backed off to the challenge, so the gun was still a virgin. I carried it now in the holster concealed beneath my jacket.
Sitting on his horse, the man still had not touched a weapon as I slowly moseyed up to him. His lips were twisted in a sardonic grin, his face full of malicious amusement.
“Don Carlos has your woman,” he chuckled. “He says he wants to talk to you.”
“Keep grinning at me like that and I’m going to cut your lips off.”
That didn’t sit well with him.
I tensed as I saw his hand brush his pistola, but he wasn’t ready yet. He just kept his grin.
He was a coward—that was why he had stayed back and let the two men he had hired do the killings. He would shoot me only when I had my back turned to him. I knew that because the man and his master were different from street trash only in the clothes they wore, which meant Carlos wasn’t waiting to talk to me.
Once we got to Carlos’s ranch and he stepped out to confront me, this man would shoot me in the back. I knew Carlos’ way of thinking.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Carlos took no chances, and neither did his assassin.
I didn’t muse over my conclusion but reacted out of pure instinct.
I grabbed my Toledo blade by the hilt and pulled it out, swinging it in one fluid motion. As it came across in the air, the blade caught a beam of sunlight and reflected like a diamond. The cutting edge of the blade caught him across the throat.
The man went off his horse backward, and I didn’t bother looking to see if he still had his head—he deserved to die. I was his executioner, not his murderer, but I still didn’t enjoy killing. I wiped the blade on my bandana and threw the bandana away.
I planned to take a roundabout way to get to Carlos’s ranch, hopefully one he would not be watching. Not wanting the executed man’s horse to return to Carlos before I got there, I tied its reins to a tree.
“We have more business to take care of,” I told Rojo.
My gut twisted thinking about Mercedes—if Carlos had harmed her, he would not die quickly.
NINETY-SIX
FROM A HILLOCK near the heart of his hacienda, I scouted out the main buildings of Carlos’s ranch. I saw no vaqueros working, no movement at all, and that surprised me.
Witnesses, I thought—Carlos sent them packing because he didn’t want anyone around who could talk about the murders.
Mercedes would also be a witness. He would have to kill her, too. And he would have killed his hired assassin, as well, because he knew too much.
Ayyo … gachupins created such bloody complications as they competed with each other for more things—more gold, more prestige, or whatever else they lusted after.
In my mind I placed Carlos on the second floor of the main house watching for me and his man to approach from the direction of the road.
I descended from the hill in the back, pistola in hand, having Rojo jump one corral fence to keep my approach mostly blocked by outbuildings and then over another fence.
As he came off the second jump, Rojo turned his head left. I followed his gaze and saw the barrel of a musket poking out of a window.
The musket went off, and I felt the stallion jerk under me. My feet were already kicking out of the reins as he went down on his right side. I couldn’t clear him fast enough, and I hit the ground with my left leg under Rojo’s flank, my pistola flying out of my hand.
The stallion let out a screeching cry of pain and kicked, but he couldn’t get up.
I reached for the backup pistola on the left side of the saddle, my leg still pinned under Rojo, when a shadow fell across me and something slammed into my head, knocking the senses out of me for a moment.
Like a snake still thrashing even after its head’s been cut off, my hand went back up to grab for the pistola but another hand beat me to it.
Carlos glared down at me, his face a mask of hate and rage.
He stomped me in the stomach. “You are a filthy bug, a disgusting lépero. You have ruined everything I have worked for!” He cocked my pistola. “Now it’s my turn.”
He grunted and stumbled, his knees buckling until he knelt beside me. Mercedes was behind him, a fire log in her hand.
He still had the pistola in his hand, and as he brought it around to shoot m
e in the face, I punched him in the abdomen, not with my fist but with the spring blade I had taken from the countess and attached to my own wrist.
His eyes bulged and he gaped at me as I pulled the blade out and swung up, sticking it in the soft flesh under his chin.
NINETY-SEVEN
I KNELT BESIDE Rojo and gave him one last rubdown, tears freely flowing down my face as I took my pistola and ended his suffering.
I felt like I had just lost a good friend.
Mercedes refused to let me take her to El Mestizo.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said. “I’m going with you to help you build that new life you’ve been talking about.”
“That’s insane. You know nothing except instructing servants and flirting with caballeros.”
“You can teach me. If you can learn how to be a gachupin, I can learn how to be a mestizo.”
We rode out of the ranch together, with her mounted behind me on the best stallion I could find from Carlos’s herd of horses. I didn’t take El Rey, but left it for the viceroy to find and deal with.
“I can ride a horse myself,” she said, but I told her to wait because we would get hers on the way.
“Why can’t we take one of these?”
“We’re going north to raise horses, and I want to do it with a horse that has the bloodline of the conquest—one that carries the bloodline of the finest stallion in New Spain—like Rojo.”
“Where are you going to find such a horse?”
“In its mother’s womb not far from here. Ayyo! I almost got hanged because I let Rojo make love to her.”
“Will the owner sell the mare to you?”
“Sell it?” I howled with laughter. “Woman, mestizos don’t pay for horses.”
“We steal them!” she shouted.
FORGE BOOKS BY GARY JENNINGS
Aztec
Journeyer
Spangle
Aztec Autumn
Aztec Blood