Aztec Blood

EIGHTY-FIVE

The next morning I was happy to be out of my Spanish clothes and into the rags of a lépero. From an indio currando I procured a pinch of the powder that the Healer had used to inflate my nose. I had stopped bathing after the don gave me the assignment, and even stopped washing my hands. Still, I would have had to roll in a pigsty for a week to have gotten back the true feel of the gutter.

I was anxious to test my old begging skills and was quickly disappointed as one person after another walked by me without dropping a single coin into my dirty palm. Contorting my limbs was out of the question. Not only might I be recognized, but lack of practice had stiffened my joints.

Weeping, wailing, pleading, whining—nothing brought a coin to me. Mexico was a city like Veracruz, but it was twenty times bigger and I assumed that gave me twenty times the opportunity to swindle. I soon learned that it merely increased the number of times I would be quirted or kicked.

Perhaps it is me, I thought. Being a lépero was like being a gentleman—it was not just the clothes one wore, not even just the way one walked or talked, but the way one thought. I no longer thought like a lépero and it showed to those I approached.

Giving it another try, I spotted a fine corner for begging at an inn near the marketplace. Inns catered to visitors, and visitors were more likely to open their purses. I was turned down immediately by a fat merchant—and then spotted an angry bull of a lépero ready to slit my belly for invading his territory.

I hurried away, deciding to take Don Julio's advice. I would wander among the people on the streets, especially the africanos and mulattos, keeping my ears and eyes open.

Veracruz had as many africanos and mulattos on the street as indios and español combined. Ciudad Mexico did not have that high a percentage of blacks, but their presence was significant. Black-skinned household servants were considered more prestigious than brown-skinned ones, and those with white skin were extremely rare. No lady of quality could call herself such unless she had at least one personal maid of African heritage.

And the Spanish bureaucracy, which categorized everyone according to blood and place of birth, created three different classes of africano. Bozales were blacks born in Africa; ladines were "acculturated" blacks who had lived in other Spanish domains, such as the Caribbean islands, before coming to New Spain; negros criollos were born in New Spain.

Even the Church had forsaken the poor africano. Unlike the feverish effort to save the soul of the indio, little effort was made to instruct the africano in Christianity. Africanos and mulattos were barred from the priesthood.

Fray Antonio believed that africanos were deliberately not taught Christ's message that all of us were equal in God's eyes.

Even more than the indio, the africanos thus continued their own, often strange, religious practices, some of which they had learned on the Dark Continent and others that they had acquired here—witchcraft, worship of strange objects, deviltry. They followed their own set of healers, sorcerers and pagan rites not dissimilar to those of the indio.

I encountered an africano woman selling love potions from where she sat on a blanket next to a building wall. She stirred the potion with the forefinger of a hanged man... shades of Snake Flower! I hurried along, determined not to donate a piece of my virile organ to her pot.

It is said that the Bozales, born in Africa and brought here aboard Portuguese slave ships, are much more submissive than either the ladines brought from the Caribbean or the criollos born here. Friendless, homeless, without family, pursued and captured like animals by slave hunters, starved and brutalized in the holes of slave ships, and then beaten into submission by vicious slave masters in the New World, africanos had been dehumanized into a work animal.

No large groups of africanos assembled on the streets, and I had to move among the smaller groups of two or three. The viceroy had forbidden africanos from assembling on the street or in private in groups of more than three. The penalty for a first offense was two hundred lashes while the slave's left hand was nailed to the whipping post. For a second offense, castration.

Even at a slave's funeral, no more than four male slaves and four female were allowed to come together to mourn the dead.

Almost all of the servants I observed were negros criollo. Not one had the fire expected from a slave fresh off a ship and still not broken to the yoke of slavery. What I heard was everything from amused contempt for their white masters to smothering hatred.

Don Julio had arranged for me to work a day in an obrajes. A small factory, usually no larger than a hacienda stable, the obrajes produced inexpensive products—cheap, coarse wool clothing and the like, goods that were not barred by finer imports from Spain.

The obrajes owners contracted with the authorities for prisoners. One arrested for a minor offense was sold to the shop owner by the authorities for a specific time. A sentence of three or four years for stealing something of little value or failing to pay a debt was common.

The system had great merit in the public mind. The officer who sold the prisoner had himself bought his position from the Crown. The sale helped him recoup his investment, and the prisoner earned his keep. It permitted the shop owners to produce goods cheaply while still turning huge profits. Most of the bond workers were chained to their work station for all their waking hours, being released only to take in food and eliminate waste.

Some workers were slaves who were not chained to their workplace but spent their days unloading raw materials and loading finished goods or running errands to pick up food or supplies. Investigating a shop for rumors, after a few hours I realized it was useless. The shop owner and his overseers kept the workers going at full speed at all times. I left and went back onto the streets.

I saw Ramon de Alva walking along the arcade on the main plaza. A young man about my own age was with him and at first I supposed him to be Alva's son, but realized that the similarity was in style, not physical appearance. They walked like predators, sizing up the next kill, and studied the world with hardened eyes. I followed them, puzzling over Mateo's remark that one day Ramon would tell me why he wanted me dead.

The younger man stirred a memory in me, but the recollection stayed out of reach, slipping away like a fish each time I reached to grab it. Noting the coach's coat of arms inscribed on its doors, I knew who the young man was. Luis. The last time I saw him he was the proposed betrothed of Eléna in Veracruz. His facial scars, the result of pox or some type of burning, remained with him. He was handsome despite them, but they coarsened his appearance.

On impulse, I followed the coach. It moved no faster in the heavy traffic than quick-footed pedestrians. I wanted to know where he lived. He was not only involved with Ramon, but was related to the old woman.

The palatial house that the coach stopped at bore the same coat of arms on the stone wall near the main gate. The house was near the Alameda on a street that held some of the finest palaces in the city. Clearly, Luis belonged to one of the most prominent families in New Spain.

I noted the house well, determined to investigate it further, and turned to leave after the carriage had entered the premises and the street guard went inside to assist the occupants. Another carriage pulled up as I started to walk away, and I stopped and pretended to examine something on the ground in the hope that it held the elderly matron and that I would get a fresh look at her.

Rather than entering the compound, the carriage stopped beside the main gate and a young woman stepped down from it unassisted. I shuffled toward her, toying with the idea of practicing my beggar skills on her, when she turned and looked at me.

Holy Mother of Christ! I stared into the face of a ghost.

The years since last I saw her had not left her food for worms in the grave but had turned her into a woman. What a woman! ¡Bella! Beautiful! The beauty Michelangelo created when God directed his hand to paint angels.

Gaping, I staggered to her, my knees weak. "I thought you were dead!"

A small scream escaped her lips as she saw me rush toward her in my lépero guise.

"No! No! It's me—from Veracruz. They told me you were dead."

The gate guard came at me with a whip. "Filthy beggar!"

I caught the blow on my forearm. Before going out on a street mission to expose violent insurrectos, I'd put on the metal forearm guard Mateo recommended. I blocked the whip with my right forearm, stepped in, and hit the guard across the face with the metal of my left one.

Eléna's carriage driver leaped off the coach, and I heard the pounding of footsteps from the courtyard. Scrambling around the carriage, I dashed across the street and ran between houses.

I returned home to shave my beard and change my filthy ragged hat and shirt for different filthy rags before I returned to the street to continue the slave investigation. In a few days my nose would be back to normal size, but I would not be recognized—they would be looking for a full-bearded lépero. It would be assumed that I had intended to attack Eléna. A lépero who attacked a gachupin would be sent to the silver mines for a life sentence at the hardest imaginable labor—if he was not hanged instead.

I wished I had struck Luis's face rather than the guard's. But I was more excited about Eléna than my increased peril.

"She's alive!" I thought, my heart pounding.

Why did the servant say she was dead? Was the servant merely mistaken—or was the picture not of Eléna? I rolled my memory over and over and decided that there was a good resemblance between Eléna and the girl in the picture, but no more than one might expect between sisters. Regardless of the solution to the mystery, the truth was that Eléna lived.

How was a half blood, a breed lower than a cur, filthier than a pig, with the habits of sloths and the rats that eat their own babies, to claim a Spanish beauty betrothed to nobleman? ¡Ay de mí! It suddenly struck me. She may already be married to Luis. If she was, I will kill him and marry his widow.

But she had seen me back on the streets as a lépero. Would I never shed my scabrous outer shell? Dirty feet, dirty hands, dirty face, dirty hair, unkempt, unbathed, how would I ever find a dark-eyed Spanish beauty like Eléna to love me if I am forever the Marqués de Beggars?

The only way I would ever be able to stand in the same room with her was if I possessed wealth and power.

My mind began to toy with ideas on how to become wealthy. Mateo had also condemned our lack of money and had spoken of the days when he made much dinero selling libros deshonestos.

Eh, amigos, I would have to sell many dirty books to make my fortune. But as with Hercules shoveling mierda from stables, there would be a reward after the dirty work was finished.

After spending a day on the streets, listening to the strange mélange of slave languages, I came to the conclusion that the africanos in the city were indeed agitated. A young servant girl had been beaten to death by an older Spanish woman, who believed that her husband was having sex with the girl. The Spanish woman did nothing to her husband because he forced sex on a servant girl, and of course, the authorities did not prosecute the woman for killing the girl.

I heard the words, "red frog," a number of times, as if it were a meeting place and I soon concluded that it might be a pulqueria.

Rushing back to the don's house, I found Mateo sleeping on a hammock in the shade of fruit trees. From the pile on the ground near the hammock, he looked like he had had a hard day drinking wine and smoking dog droppings.

"I know where the slaves meet secretly. A pulqueria called 'the Red Frog.' "

Mateo yawned and stretched his arms. "And you wake me from a wondrous dream for this? I had just slayed two dragons, won a kingdom, and was making love to a goddess when you interrupted me with your jabber."

"Excuse me, Don Mateo, Knight of the Golden Cross of Amadís of Gaul, but as one who would like to pay Don Julio back for the gracious food he provides, not to mention his hospitality above the stable, I learned a vital piece of information almost at the cost of my life. Tonight we must investigate fire-breathing africano rebels who meet at a den called the Red Frog."

Mateo yawned, took a long draw from a wine bottle, smacked his lips, and lay back. "I rented the establishment for the next several nights from the owner with the assistance of the Recontonería. We are offering free pulque to the slaves. If that doesn't get them talking, nothing will. The owner was most accommodating. Not even swine who run illegal pulquerias for slaves want a rebellion—bad for business."

Mateo went back to fighting dragons and rescuing beautiful princesses. I encountered Isabella going to my room. Feigning an interest in coats of arms, I described Luis's to her and asked her if she knew the family. She told me it was the family of Don Eduardo de la Cerda and his son, Luis. Isabella was a storehouse of gossip and rumor, and I quickly ascertained that Luis and Eléna were about to be betrothed.

That meant, that if I hurried, I could kill Luis without making her a widow.

EIGHTY-SIX

That night I was a server of pulque to slaves. The lowest possible grade of pulque, barely fermented and watered down, was the usual swill served to the slaves. But thanks to the generosity of Mateo Rosas, pulqueria proprietor extraordinare, they had pure pulque in which both cuapatle and brown sugar had been added to give it gusto.

Mateo took a taste of it before we opened the doors and spit it out.

"This stuff would burn the hair off a mule."

I soon discovered that the fifty africanos in the room, forty men and ten women, had a better constitution for strong drink than the indios. It took barrel after barrel before I could detect its affect in their eyes and voices. Soon, though, they were laughing and dancing and singing.

"We're going to run out of this swill pretty soon," Mateo whispered to me. "Get the agitators working."

Two africanos who had been recruited to obtain information were in the room. At my signal, one of them climbed atop a table and shouted for silence.

"Poor Isabella was killed by her master, beaten to death because the woman's husband raped her, and no one does anything about it. What are we going to do about it?"

Angry roars came every corner of the room.

Isabella? Too bad it was the wrong Isabella.

Soon the room was in an uproar as one person and another shouted solutions, most of which involved killing all the Spanish in the country. No one seemed to take notice that the generous bartender was Spanish.

More pulque made the rounds, and someone yelled that they needed a king to lead them. One candidate after another was shouted down, when one stood up and said his name was Yanga. It wasn't the Yanga I had known, and one of our agitators whispered to me, "His name's Allonzo and he's owned by a goldsmith."

But the name worked magic, and he was quickly elected "King of New Africa." His woman, Belonia, was elected queen on the first shout.

After that, everyone got drunker.

There were no plans made to obtain weapons, to recruit soldiers, establish a timetable, kill anyone.

We broke open the last barrel of pulque and walked out, letting the slaves enjoy themselves at no expense. We did this routine three more nights without any suggestion of insurrection. What we did confirm was that the slaves were victims of hopelessness.

"Tavern talk," Mateo said, disgusted. "That's all it is, just as the don thought. They are angry over the death of the girl and the injustices to themselves, but it's not enough of a spark to ignite them. These slaves are well-fed, little worked, and sleep on more comfortable beds than Isabella provides us. They are not like their brothers and sisters on the plantations, who are starved and worked to death. Bah! A friend's husband was not returning until late night from Guadalajara. Such a woman! And I missed a night of bliss to serve swill to slaves."

Don Julio returned from inspecting the tunnel the next day and Mateo and I reported to him.

"Talk, that is all I thought it was. I will report immediately to the viceroy. I'm sure he will be relieved."

The don had no assignment for us. I had suggested to Mateo that it was time for us to earn some money so we could live as gentlemen instead of stable boys, and he said he would think the matter over. I soon learned that he did more than think about it.

"The Recontonería representative is willing to finance the importation and sale of libros deshonesto, the more indecent the better. I have Seville contacts from the days when I was one of the great autors of comedias in that city. It would be little work for them to arrange for the purchase and shipment from Spain and for me to arrange to clear customs in Veracruz. The Recontonería operates there, too, and will provide me with names of each person who must be given a bite."

"What does the Recontonería get out of this?"

"Our heads if we cheat them. They have their own version of the royal fifth—they get one peso for every five that we earn."

"Is there any competition for this business?"

"There was, but we no longer have to worry about him."

"Why did he leave the business?"

"The Inquisition burned him in Puebla a week ago."

Life seemed bright as I went to bed that night Don Julio was pleased with our work on the slave revolt rumors. Mateo had a scheme to make us rich enough to afford the horses and clothes we needed to prance on the Alameda. I intended to become the richest man in New Spain by smuggling books banned by the Inquisition. And to marry the best woman in the colony.

¡Ay de mí! We mortals make many plans for our puny lives, but the Dark Sisters weave the Fates's shroud, not ourselves.

EIGHTY-SEVEN

Late that night I was awakened by noise on the streets and in the house. I instantly assumed that the house had been attacked. Don Julio had gone back to the tunnel, taking Mateo with him, leaving me as master of the house, at least in name, since Isabella barely permitted me into the main part of the house.

I grabbed my sword and found Isabella, Inez, Juana, and the servants huddled in terror.

"The slaves have revolted!" Isabella cried. "Everyone is fleeing to the viceroy's palace for protection."

"How do you know?"

Inez, the nervous little bird, flapped her wings and announced that we would all be murdered, with the women raped first.

Juana said, "People heard an army of slaves running through the streets, and the alarm has spread."

Clutching a strongbox, Isabella told the servants to follow her to the viceroy's and protect her.

"I need the servants for a litter for Juana!" I told her.

She ignored me and left, taking the frightened servants with her, even the africano servants trembling in fear at the slave revolt.

Carrying Juana on my back with her frail sticks of legs around my waist, I left the house with her and Inez. People were hurrying by, women with their jewel boxes and men with swords and strongboxes. All around me I heard word of one neighborhood after another entirely wiped out, murdered by the rampaging slaves, who were cutting up the victims and performing frightful rites over the remains.

Where had Mateo and I gone wrong? How could we have so misjudged the intent of the slaves? Even if the city survived, Don Julio and his two trusty spies would end up with our heads rolling off the chopping block.

Times like this caused my lépero instincts to surface, and my first thought was to get a fast horse out of the city—not out of fear of the slaves, but racing to the tunnel to warn Don Julio and Mateo that we had guessed wrong and must flee. I would have willingly left Isabella and Inez to the unkind hands of the slaves, but I could not abandon poor Juana.

The whole city appeared to have poured into the main plaza. Men, women, and crying children, most, like us, in bedclothes, screaming at the viceroy to put down the rebellion.

From a balcony of the palace, the viceroy called for silence. Criers at high places around the square one after the other repeated the viceroy's words.

"An hour ago a herd of pigs being brought into the city for market got loose and ran through the streets. People heard the pounding hooves and thought it was an army of slaves."

He was silent for a moment.

"Go home. There is no rebellion."

Among more primitive people, great moments in history are remembered and retold or sung time and time again around the night fire. Civilized peoples write the events down and pass their history onto their descendants in the form of marks on paper.

The night the people of the City of Mexico were panicked into believing a slave revolt was occurring because a herd of pigs had run through the city has been immortalized in a thousand diaries and recorded by historians at the university. Else who would believe that the people of one of the great cities of the world could behave so foolishly?

Would the tale have ended there, our children's children and thereafter could have laughed a little at the image of the great dons and ladies of the city running through the streets in their bedclothes, clutching their coin and jewels to their bosom. But the Spaniard is a proud beast, a conqueror of empires, a ravager of continents, and he does not take humiliation without drawing his sword and spilling blood.

Demands went to the viceroy to take care of the slave "problem." Don Julio's report that a king and queen had been elected and the tavern talk of rebellion were deemed proof that a rebellion was still imminent. Something had to be done by the viceroy to calm the fears and redress the shame.

The Audiencia, the high court of New Spain over which the viceroy presided, ordered the arrest of thirty-six africanos whose names had been recorded at the pulqueria the night Mateo and I got them drunk. Of those arrested, five men and two women were quickly found guilty of insurrection and hanged in a public square. Afterward, their heads were chopped off and displayed on pikes at the entrance to the causeways and the main plaza. The others were severely punished, the men whipped and castrated, the women beaten until blood flowed freely and bone on their backs glistened.

I did not attend the hangings and floggings, although most of the gentry of the city had been there, but I had the misfortune to come face-to-face with King Yanga and Queen Isabella. Their eyes followed me as I walked across the main plaza. Fortunately their impaled heads could not swivel on the pikes, and I was able to hurry away from their accusing gaze.

Mateo left for Veracruz to send off a letter to an old friend in Seville who would arrange for the purchase of books prohibited by the Inquisition. He would send the letter on one of the lobo ships that raced to avoid pirates between Veracruz and Seville in between voyages of the great treasure fleet.

To obtain a proper list that we thought would be appealing to buyers, we consulted the Inquisition's list of banned books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Mateo's eye went to the chivalric romances. Instead, I advised that we order some books for women who are married to bores and suffered unrequited passions, books in which a man is virile but whose hands are gentle yet forceful, and in whose arms the woman finds all the passion she will ever desire.

For persons whose tastes ran more to Roman orgies, I selected two books that would have made Caligula blush.

Added to that was a book on casting horoscopes, the casting of spells, and two of the scientific tomes I knew Don Julio harbored secretly in his library.

Though not all of the books were banned in Spain, they were all on the prohibited list in New Spain under the theory that they would pollute the mind of the indios. How many indios could afford to buy a book, and how many could read more than their name, had clearly not been taken into account. In truth, few indios could even read the list of banned books!

Eh, you ask, what is the motive for prohibiting the importation of books to keep indios who could not read from reading them? The real motive was to control the reading and the thoughts, not of the indios, but of the colonists. Permitting the criollos free rein in their thinking might stimulate contrary thoughts, such as those that festered in the Low Countries where the Dutch and others battled the Crown over religious and other differences.

Even using lobo boats, we waited over six months for the first shipment of books. Don Julio spent most of his days supervising the work on the tunnel, with an occasional visit to the city to argue with the viceroy's staff for the workers and supplies needed to do the work.

He left Mateo and me to our own vices, and we went quickly went to work when the books arrived. The man who had sold the banned libros had run a print shop just off the main plaza, near the building of the Inquisition. His shop had been abandoned, and his widow soon found there were no buyers for the business. Printing was not a popular profession anywhere in New Spain. Books could not be printed in the colony because the king had granted the exclusive right to sell books to a publisher in Seville. New World printers could only print items required by merchants and religious materials needed by the frays. The fact that this print shop was located almost adjoining the headquarters of the Inquisition and that its last owner had been burned meant no one was eager to acquire the business.

Before the books arrived, Mateo had arranged with the widow of the printer to rent the business in exchange for a percentage of our profits.

"It is a perfect cover for us," Mateo said.

"But it's nearly on the doorstep of the Inquisition!"

"Exactly. The Holy Office knows no one would be foolish enough to operate a prohibited business under their nose."

"Isn't that what the last printer was doing?"

"He was a drunk and a fool. He was supposed to send a case of religious printing to a convent in Puebla and a case of banned books to his partner in crime. Unfortunately, he had drunk enough wine that night to make him cross-eyed when he marked the boxes. So you can imagine what the nuns received..."

I wondered what he thought when the familiars of the Inquisition showed him the box that was supposed to contain pious tomes and instead had libros written by the devil himself. Had the printer been a lépero, he would have shown shock at the discovery and been aghast that Lucifer could turn prayers into lust.

"I still don't understand why we need the printer's business," I said.

"How did you plan to sell the books? Spread a blanket under the arcade in the plaza and lay the books out? The widow has a list of customers that the printer supplied. And customers know how to contact the printer's establishment."

While Mateo occupied himself in making contact with the printer's former customers, I found myself fascinated with the mechanism called a printer's press. I was intrigued both with the history of printing and how a press was used to put words on paper.

Without letting Don Julio know about my motives, I steered him into a conversation about the history of printing. He told me that words—and picture words like the Egyptians and Aztecs used—were originally etched in stone or marked on leather with dye. While the Aztecs and the Egyptians used bark and papyrus to make paper, better methods were known to the Chinese and learned by the Arabs from Chinese prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas in 751. The Arabs spread the knowledge of paper making across their Islamic world, and Moors carried it to Spain where the art was highly perfected. The Chinese were also the ones who perfected the art of printing by the use of moveable type.

The peoples of China have given the world many wonders, the don told me. The society was so amazing that when Marco Polo came back from their land and told his fellow Europeans of the things he had seen, they called him a liar.

"But the Chinese," Don Julio said, "like the Aztecs, were prisoners of their own writing techniques. Aztec picture writing and the thousands of marks used by the people of China does not lend itself easily to printing. It was a German named Gutenberg who used the Chinese techniques of moveable type and paper to print large numbers of books. He was doing this forty or fifty years before Columbus discovered the New World."

While the Chinese had originally used hardened-baked clay for type, the type in use for printing today was a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony, an alchemists combination of metals soft enough to be easily turned molten and molded into letters but hard enough to give thousands of imprints on paper before wearing out. The pieces of type are formed by pouring the molten lead into molds made from a special mixture of hard iron.

"Another great step in printing was the use of a codex rather than a roll," he said. Rolls of paper were difficult to handle and print on. When clever printers cut the rolls into sheets to be attached on one side like books are now done, the sheets could be run through a printing press.

"Book selling and making are not considered honorable trades," Don Julio said. He surprised me by informing me that he had once owned a print shop. "I used it to publish my scientific findings on the geography of New Spain and the mining industry. You will find the works in my library. I sold the press after it was discovered that my pressman was coming in at night to print libros deshonestos, showing people having sex with animals. He was arrested by the Inquisition and fortunately he had done the printing at a time when I had returned to Spain and hence could not involve me. I sold the press immediately for a pittance, happy that I had not been burned at the stake, with the scandalous sheets used to get the fire going."

He told me the viceroy called printing and book selling, which were customarily done out of the same shop, a vulgar profession.

And the Inquisition took special interest in those who printed books and other documents. Bishops often referred to it as a "black art" and the reference was not just to the color of ink. The Church frowned on reading other than that necessary for religious training and good moral character, which of course, is why the libros de caballerias like Amadís of Gaul were banned in New Spain.

The Inquisition paid particular attention to the printing business in New Spain and decreed that no book be printed or sold without permission of the Church. Since the king had sold away New World printing rights to Seville publishers, the range of books one could have published was few indeed even before the Inquisition became involved. One could even get in trouble for printing religious works, for Christian doctrine to appear in any language but Latin was considered heresy. Even a translation of the Bible into Náhuatl was seized. The Church wanted to ensure that it controlled what the indio read, just as it insisted upon not having the Bible translated into Spanish.

Permission to publish had to be obtained from the Inquisition, and the name of the bishop giving permission was to be noted on the front page of the book along with other information that had come to be included in the colophon—the title itself, the name of the author, the name of the publisher, and sometimes a sentence or two praising God.

Don Julio had told me that this title page originated from the days when medieval scribes placed their names, the date they finished their labors, and quite often a notation about the book or a short prayer at the end. He had several medieval works in his library, and he showed me the inscriptions at the end of the codices.

His library also contained the first book that was printed in the New World. Referred to as a Short Doctrine on Christianity, the Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua mexicana y castellana was published in 1539 by Juan Pablos, a printer from Italy, for Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of the City of Mexico. "The first book we know of," the don said, "but there are always rogues who would print their mother's sexual confessions and sell them for a few pesos."

The don's comments about book rogues only earning a "few pesos" proved to be prophetic. Mateo and I soon learned that after we paid off the book publisher and go-between in Seville, customs and Inquisition officials on two continents, the ravenous Recontonería in the colony, and the grieving widow who sold us the right to be criminals in her husband's shoes, we had almost nothing left for ourselves.

This put Mateo into a black mood and sent him off to drink and lust and fight. The failure of my first large criminal scheme, and with it my dream of being a hidalgo who could at least stand in the same room with Eléna without being horsewhipped, had left me pensive. My own dark mood was aggravated every time I thought about what had happened with the woman Maria. I refused to even think of her as my mother. As the fray said, I have no mother. I carried that mood with me to the print shop, where it had become my habit to tinker.

For some time I examined and experimented with the printing press in the shop we had acquired. Books had made me something more than a social outcast, at least in the minds of Fray Antonio, Mateo, and the don. Because books carried so much power, so many thoughts and ideas and knowledge, I had always considered that there was something divine about their construction, that perhaps they came into being in a blaze of heavenly light and fire, as I imagined the Ten Commandments must have come to Moses.

It was a shock to sit down at the printing press, take the six letters that formed the word "C-r-i-s-t-o," place them in a type holder and attach the holder to one of the two metal plates of the press, brush a few drops of ink over the letters, slip in a piece of paper, and bring the other plate of the press so the letters and the paper pressed together...

Santa Maria! When I saw my name in print, saw that like what God had done for Moses, I had created a work that could be passed down the ages, something of me that could be read by future generations besides the name on my headstone, I was so impassioned tears came to my eyes.

After that I played with the press, experimenting with type setting, until I had become rather proficient at it. All this knowledge came to fruit when I awoke Mateo to tell him what scheme had captured my thoughts.

He came out of sleep and bed with a dagger in hand, but lay back after threatening to quarter me with a dull blade.

"I have found our fortune."

He moaned and rubbed his forehead. "I am no longer interested in earning a fortune. A true hombre wins treasure with his sword."

"Mateo, it has occurred to me that if the works we spend so much money to import from the peninsula were printed here, we could make great profit on them."

"And if the king offered you his daughter and Castile, you could wear fancy clothes and eat the best food."

"It's not that difficult. We have imported copies of some of the best indecent books available in Spain. If we printed them, we would avoid the great expense of getting them here."

"Have you been kicked in the head by one of the don's horses? It takes a printing press to print books."

"We have a printing press."

"It takes knowledge."

"I have learned how to use the press."

"Workers."

"I can buy a bond servant that is heading for the obrajes."

"Someone to burn at the stake if the Inquisition finds out."

"I will obtain a very stupid bond servant."

We selected a very thin volume of lewd nonsense as our first project. Appropriately enough, our bond servant's name was Juan, the same as the printer of the first book in New Spain. He was not as stupid as I would have liked him to be, but he made up for it with greed. He had been sentenced to four years in the silver mines and to have been diverted to a print shop had saved his life—the average life span in the mines was less than a year for those sentenced to penal servitude.

Like myself, he was a mestizo and lépero, but unlike me, who had claims to being a gentleman, he epitomized the common concept that léperos are the product of abuse of pulque.

The fact that I had saved his life from the dreaded northern mines had not endeared me to him because he was a street animal. However, knowing how the mind of a lépero works, not just the avarice but the tainted logic, rather than paying him in the hopes he would not run away but remain faithful to the sentence imposed, I provided the opportunity for him to occasionally steal from me.

One of his most important benefits, besides the fact that his criminality and fear of going to the mines gave him a small amount of obedience, if not loyalty, to me, was the fact that he could not read or write.

"That means he won't know what's he's printing. I told him we are printing nothing but copies of the lives of saints and I have an engraving of the stigmata of San Francis that we will use over all our books."

"If he can't read or write, how can he set type?" Mateo asked.

"He doesn't read the books he's setting the type for, he's merely duplicating the letters in the book with letters from the type tray. Besides, I will set much of the type myself."

The first book we published in New Spain, which while not having the solemn tone of Bishop Zumárraga's work on Christian doctrine, and would have been considered scandalous by respectable people, was a great success.

Mateo was deeply impressed by the pile of ducats that was left over after paying our expenses. "We have cheated the author of his due, the publisher of his profit, the king of his fifth, the custom officials of their bite.... Cristo, you are a gifted scoundrel. Because of your talent as a publisher, I am permitting you to publish my own novel, Chronicle of the very remarkable Three Knights Tablante of Seville who defeated Ten Thousand Howling Moors and Five Frightful Monsters and set the rightful King upon the throne of Constantinople and claimed a Treasure larger than that held by any King of Christendom."

My dismay was revealed on my face.

"You do not want to publish a literary masterpiece that was proclaimed the work of angels in Spain and sold better than anything those dolts Vega and Cervantes ever wrote—or stole—from me?"

"It's not that I don't want to publish it, it's just that I don't think our little printing venture could do justice to—"

Mateo's dagger blade appeared under my chin.

"Print it."

We had been in the business for some months when we received our first visit from the Inquisition.

"We did not know you were in the business of printing," a fish-faced man wearing the uniform of a familiar of the Inquisition told me. His name was Jorge Gomez. "You have not submitted your materials to the Holy Office and obtained from it permission to print."

I had carefully prepared a cover story and had prominently displayed, the "book" on saints that we were printing. I apologized profusely and explained that the owner of the shop was in Madrid to obtain exclusive rights to print and sell in New Spain matters concerning saints.

"He left Juan and me here to prepare for full printing of the tomes when he returns with the royal license and presents it to the viceroy and the Holy Office."

I again expressed my regret and offered the man a gratis copy of the book when printing was completed.

"What else do you print while your master is gone?" the Inquisition official asked.

"Nothing. We cannot even print the complete book on saints until our master returns with enough paper and ink to finish the job."

Familiars were not priests but technically just "friends" of the Holy Office, volunteers who assisted the inquisitors. In truth, they wore the green cross of the Inquisition and acted as a secret constabulary who performed services ranging from acting as bodyguards to inquisitors, to breaking into homes in the middle of the night to arrest those accused and haul them to the dungeon of the Holy Office.

Familiars were feared by all. Their reputation was so dreadful that the king occasionally used the terror they strike to keep those around him from swaying in their loyalty.

"You understand that you are forbidden to print any books or other works without first obtaining the proper permission. If it should be found out that you were in fact involved in any illegitimate printing..."

"Of course, Don Jorge," I said, rewarding the honorific to a peasant whose closest encounter with being genteel was stepping in the manure of a gentleman's horse. "Frankly, we have so little to do until our master returns, if there are any simple printing jobs that we are capable of and can do as an accommodation for the Holy Office, we would be happy to do so."

Something stirred deep in the familiar's eyes. The eye motion, which I could not have defined at the time but that I have come to realize is a slight widening of the inner circle of the eye, is a reaction that few people except successful merchants and successful léperos would recognize.

The common name for the phenomena is greed.

I had been trying to think of a way to offer the official mordida but had hesitated. Some of these familiars had the reputation of being such zealots that they would refuse their own mother the mercy of the garret and let them burn slowly from the toes up. None the less, I had given "Don Jorge" an opening.

"The Holy Office does need assistance with certain printing jobs. We once used the printer who occupied these very premises, but he proved to be a tool of the devil."

I crossed myself.

"Perhaps I can assist until my master returns..."

He took me aside so that Juan could not hear.

"Is that mestizo a good Christian?"

"If his blood were untainted, he would be a priest," I assured him. He had assumed I was Spanish, and of course that made me a defender of the Faith unless I acted contrary.

"I shall return later with two documents that I will need copies of for priests and nuns throughout New Spain. The contents change occasionally and will need to be updated." He stared at me narrow-eyed. "To uncover blasphemers and Jews, the workings of the Holy Office must remain a secret. Any failure to maintain the secrecy would be akin to doing the devil's work."

"Of course."

"You must take an oath of secrecy never to reveal what you have been given to print."

"Of course, Don Jorge."

"I will bring you two documents today. These documents require a large number of copies, and you will be paid a modest recompense to cover the cost of ink. The Holy Office will supply the paper."

"Thank you for your generosity, Don Jorge."

So that was it. He would be collecting the full amount of printing costs from the Holy Office but only passing on to me enough to pay for supplies to keep me in business. And assuredly the excess would not find its way to a poor box.

Oh, the wiles and intrigues of men! While this sort of intrigue is expected from any official in the realm, one would think that those who served the Church would hold themselves in better stead with God.

"What are these documents?"

"The list of people suspected of being blasphemers and Jews," he said, "and the list of books prohibited by the Holy Office."

EIGHTY-EIGHT

"Converso. Suspected marrano. Accused by Miguel de Soto."

Mateo finished reading the entry about Don Julio on the Inquisition's black list. I had naturally kept a copy of the list of suspect people after printing it.

"Who is Soto and why has he made an accusation that Don Julio is a secret Jew?" Mateo pondered.

"I spoke to an auditor in the viceroy's countinghouse, whose tastes in reading would make Lucifer blush and repent. He says Soto buys and sells workers. He deals in bond servants, landless indios, luckless mestizos, anyone or group that is helpless and can be roped into a project. He contracted with the tunnel project to provide indios—thousands of them. Even considering that he had to bribe half the city's officials to get the contract, he still made an enormous amount of money. Why he would make an accusation against the don, I don't know, but I can guess."

"The don has accused him of providing poor materials and workmanship on the tunnel, causing it to fail?" Mateo said.

"No, he only provided workers for others. My guess is he's doing Ramon de Alva a favor."

"What does Alva have to do with Soto?"

"Miguel is his brother-in-law. So is Martin de Soto, who hauled timber and materials for bricks."

"What service did Alva provide on the tunnel project?"

"None—on the surface, at least. He appears to be only involved in running the business affairs of Don Diego Velez, Marqués de la Marche." Eléna's uncle, but my connection to Eléna was a better kept secret the Inquisition's list of accused. "Alva appears to have made himself a very rich man along with the Marqués. The auditor says that whatever the Soto's are involved in, you will find Alva."

"Your nemesis."

"My tormentor. And now the don's. Don Julio believes that failure to follow his instructions and poor workmanship and materials caused the tunnel to collapse. But he has difficulty proving it."

"He is accusing the ones who did the work of the misdeeds. Miguel Soto probably charged for ten workers for every one he provided. And his brother-in-law no doubt delivered half the bricks and timber he was paid for. If a scapegoat is ever needed, a converso will fall faster than anyone else. Soto and the others are blackening the don's name with their accusations about Judaism. There is no better way to destroy a man's life than to be dragged out of bed by familiars in the middle of the night."

"We must do something to help the don," I said.

"Unfortunately, this is not a matter that I can handle with a sword. The accusation has already been made, and to kill Soto would not remove it—to the contrary, it might raise more suspicion against Don Julio. We have to let the don know about the accusation so he is forewarned."

"How are we to do that? Shall I tell him that you and I are now the printing masters for the Holy Office?"

Mateo found no humor in my joke. "I suggest you dig deep into those tales you told on the street for your daily bread most of your life. Lying to a friend should not be difficult for a lépero."

"I will tell him I was walking by the Holy Office and saw the list on the street where someone had dropped it."

"Excellent. That is no more stupid a lie than any of the others you have used." Mateo yawned and stretched. "I think it is time to have that conversation with your friend Alva that I mentioned earlier."

"How do you plan to get him to talk to us?"

"Kidnap him. Torture him."

Don Julio looked up from the accusation list.

"You found this document on the street? You swear to me on the grave of your sainted mother?"

"Most assuredly, Don."

He threw the list into the fireplace and carefully stirred the ashes as it burned.

"Do not bother yourself about this. I have been accused twice before and nothing has come of it. The Holy Office will conduct an investigation and that can take years."

"Is there nothing we can do?"

"Pray. Not for me, but for the tunnel. If the tunnel fails again, it will be a contest as to who will be first—the viceroy who would have me hanged or the Holy Office who would burn me."

Busy with the printing of books banned by the Holy Office and the lists prepared by it, I left it to Mateo to devise a plan for the kidnapping of Ramon de Alva. Alva is not only a famous swordsman but rarely leaves his house unless surrounded by retainers, thus the plan must have the daring of El Cid and the genius of Machiavelli.

Working late at the print shop, I heard something drop at the back door. The door had a wooden slot in it that the previous owner, may he rest in peace, had used to receive orders from merchants when the shop was closed.

Though I had no intention of filling any orders, I went to check and found a package on the floor. I unwrapped it to find it contained a collection of handwritten poems and a note.

Señor Printer

Your predecessor would occasionally publish and sell my works with the money going to feed the poor on festival days. They are yours if you wish to continue the relationship.

A Lonely Poet

The note was written in a fine hand, as were the poems.

The poems stirred my heart—and my virile place. I read each of them over and over. I would not call the poems deshonesto, perverted; some of the books I publish have men and women coupling with animals—that is most foul. But while the poems that came through the back door were not of this scandalous nature, they could not be published in the ordinary course because they were of a very provocative tone. To me they had grace and beauty and truly defined the power and passion between a man and a woman. And they told of a woman's honest desires, not the emotion of the Alameda where women play at love while counting the pesos in your family tree, but the passion of real people who know nothing of each other but their touch.

Several people had asked about the poems of this "lonely poet," who was known by no other name. Having never heard of him, I made promises I never intended to keep to obtain the poems. Now I would have a market for a few of them, but unlike scandalous books, these poems would appeal to a small group that had more interest in passion than perversion. I doubted I would make enough money to feed one hungry lépero at festival time, but in publishing these poems I felt rather like the publisher of fine books.

The secret would have to remain with me. If I let Mateo know, he would insist we print his silly love poems. Or he would steal them.

I began the typesetting immediately. This was not a task I could leave to Juan the lépero—he would not be able to translate the handwriting into type print. Besides, I did not want his dirty hands on such beautiful words.

"I have a plan," Mateo said. He spoke quietly over a goblet of wine in a tavern.

"Alva owns a house that he keeps vacant for his trysts. The house is unoccupied except for a housekeeper who is half-blind and almost deaf. When he arrives, his retainers stay in the coach. If we were waiting for him instead of a woman, we could have a private conversation."

"How did you find out where he meets women?"

"I followed Isabella."

I was sorry I asked, sorry for the don.

Mateo had more of an idea than a plan. How to get us into the house without being detected was a major problem. Half blind, almost deaf, did not mean that she was dead—or stupid. We also had to know when a tryst was scheduled.

"Isabella is subject to Alva's schedule. Other than having her hair endlessly dressed or social functions, she has no time commitments. His personal attendant carries a message here to the house and will deliver it only to her maid. Her maid attends all of the assignations."

That was natural. No lady of quality would leave her house for shopping or to meet her lover unless she was accompanied by a servant woman. The maid was a large africano woman who had a strong-enough back to keep from being crippled when Isabella flew into rages for trivial mistakes and whipped the woman.

I gave the matter thought for two goblets of wine. Life on the streets in which I had to lie, cheat, steal, and connive had prepared me for these later roles in life. While Mateo was an autor of comedias for playhouses, I, Cristo the Bastardo, was an autor of life.

"Here is the plan," I said.

EIGHTY-NINE

Three days later I received instructions at the print shop to hurry home. I knew what the message meant: The lookout that Mateo had posted told him that Isabella had received a note to meet Ramon de Alva.

Mateo was waiting with the items we needed to implement the plan. He was a man who was never nervous, but for once his anxiety revealed itself. He would not have flinched to face the greatest swordsmen in Europe... but poisoning a woman terrified him.

"Did you put the herb in her soup?" he asked.

A little soup was all that Isabella ate before she left the house for her intercourse with Alva. They would have a full meal after they had satisfied their lust.

"Yes. Are you sure it will work?"

"Absolutely. In a few minutes Isabella's stomach will hurt so bad she will have to send for a doctor. She will also send her maid to Alva to let him know that she will not be at the love house."

"If this doesn't work, I will flay you like that naualli sorcerer flayed people and use your skin for a pair of boots."

I went to check on Isabella. The maid was leaving Isabella's bedroom as I approached. Before she closed the door behind her, I saw Isabella doubled up on her bed. Her groans made my heart leap with joy. She would only be sick for a few hours, and I had been tempted to make the poison strong enough to kill her.

"Is your mistress sick?"

"Yes, señor. I have to go for the doctor." She hurried away.

"The maid has gone for the doctor. I suspect from there she will walk directly to Alva's and pass the message to his man."

Mateo and I left the house and walked down the street to a coach awaiting us. It was not a fancy coach, but the carriage of a petty merchant who was happy to get three banned books for a night's use of it.

Inside the coach, we put on cloaks and full face masks, the type commonly used at the Alameda and parties. Mateo waited inside the coach; I, on the street, as the maid approached. As she came by me, I pretended to cough and then shook out a large handkerchief, shaking it so that dust from the cloth hit her in the face.

She kept walking, trying to brush away the dust with her hand.

I got into the coach and looked back as we rolled down the cobblestone street.

The maid was staggering.

The same indio herbal seller who sold me the herb that had gotten Isabella sick had supplied yoyotli, the hallucinatory dust that stole the mind of sacrifice victims and that the Healer had once used on me.

A few minutes later the coach rolled away from the love house, leaving Mateo and me in front.

We entered the unguarded gate and went directly to the main door. I pulled a cord that rang a bell inside. The bell was almost loud enough for a church tower. A few minutes later the housekeeper opened the door.

"Buenas tardes, señora," the housekeeper said.

Without saying a word, as none was needed in reply to a servant, Alva's love partner for the night, me, and my maid, Mateo, entered the house.

We were dressed as women and wearing masks.

We would not have fooled Alva for a moment.

We would not have fooled a one-eyed pirate a musket shot away.

We fooled an old woman who was half blind and almost deaf.

The old woman left us at the foot of the stairs to the bedrooms and wandered off, thoughts dribbling out of her head, something about the size of the don's new woman.

The bedroom selected for trysts was easy to determine—it was lit with candles, the bed linen had been freshly turned, and wine and sweetmeats were laid out.

We performed our preparations and sat down to wait.

"Remember, Alva is a famed swordsman," Mateo said. "If he is able to draw his blade, I will kill him. But he will kill you before I am able."

Ah, Mateo, always a comfort to a friend. And truthful. Had he not always said that as a swordsman I was a dead man?

Bedroom windows overlooked the courtyard below. We watched Alva arrive in his carriage, walk across the courtyard, and disappear under the covered way that led to the main door. Two of his men remained in the courtyard.

I sat with my back to the door at a small table that held wine and sweetmeats. We had discarded our female clothes except for a woman's hooded cape that I kept on to present a feminine back when Alva came in the door. My sword was in hand and so was my heart. I feared Alva less than I feared whatever revelations from the past he may possess.

The door opened behind me and I heard his heavy step as he entered.

"Isabella, I—"

The man had the instincts of a jungle cat. Whatever he could see from a rear view of me instantly put him on guard and he went for his sword.

I leaped from the chair, flashing my own sword, but before we could engage Mateo hit him on the back of the head with an ax handle. Alva fell to his knees and Mateo hit him again, not enough to knock him out but to stun him. We were immediately on him with rope, tying his hands behind him. Mateo looped another rope through the large round candleholder, as big as a carriage wheel, hanging from the ceiling. With a knife at Alva's throat, we maneuvered him under the chandelier. The end of the rope dangling from the ceiling was tied into a noose and we slipped it over Alva's head.

Together we hoisted him up by the neck until his feet were dangling. I slipped a chair under his feet and he was able to stand on the chair and keep from strangling.

When we were finished, Alva stood on the chair with his hands tied behind him and his neck in the noose. Mateo kicked the chair out from under him. He swung, wrenching for air; the candleholder creaked, and stucco fell from the ceiling.

I put the chair under his feet and let him struggle onto it.

Because I did not intend to kill the man unless it was necessary, besides wearing a mask I had pebbles in my mouth to disguise my voice.

"You killed a good man in Veracruz nearly seven years ago, a fray named Antonio, and you tried to kill a boy whom Antonio raised. Why did you do this? Who put you up to these black deeds?"

His voice was a gutter of anger that spewed filth.

I kicked the chair out from under his feet and he bounced and swung, his face red. When his features were convulsed with pain and nearly black from being strangled, I replaced the chair.

"Let's cut off his testicules," Mateo said. He poked the man in the groin with his sword to get across the point.

"Ramon, Ramon, why must you make us turn you into a woman?" I asked. "I know you killed the fray for someone else. Tell me who you performed the deed for, and you can go on using this place as your private whorehouse."

More filth spewed from his mouth.

"I know one of you is that bastard boy," he gasped. "I fucked your mother before I killed her."

I went forward to kick the chair out from under him. As I stepped up to the chair, Alva kicked me in the stomach. His boot caught me just below my sternum and took my wind and, for a moment, my life from me. I staggered backward and fell onto my rear on the floor.

The momentum caused by kicking me sent Alva swinging wildly off the chair. The carriage wheel candleholder broke loose as an entire section of the ceiling collapsed to the floor. A storm of debris and dust blinded me.

Mateo yelled and I saw Alva's dark form run by me and then the crash of wood as he flung himself headfirst through the closed window shutters. I heard his body hit the tiles on the roofed part of the courtyard. He yelled for help.

Mateo grabbed me. "Hurry!"

I followed him into the adjoining sitting room and onto a balcony. He had the rope we had been hanging Alva with in hand. He looped the noose around a post and swung over the side, sliding down the rope with his hands and feet. I followed before he hit the ground, grateful that this was not the first time Mateo had had to leave a bedroom with a threat behind him.

After discarding our clothes and masks and reassuming our roles as workers of Don Julio, we sat in a tavern and played primero, a card game Mateo was brilliant at losing money playing.

"Bastardo, we learned one interesting piece of information tonight—other than the fact that Alva is a tough hombre."

"Which is?"

"He killed your mother."

I never knew my mother and I had no real image of her, but the fact that this man claimed to have raped and murdered her were more nails in his coffin. The statement, even if I assigned it as a taunt, increased the mystery surrounding the past. What did Alva have to do with my mother? Why would it be necessary for a gachupin to kill an india girl? And the most mysterious of all—I knew for a fact that he had not killed her. As far as I knew, she was still alive.

"It will be a long time before we could ever hope to trick Alva into falling into our hands again," he said. "If ever."

"Do you think he will connect us back to Isabella?"

Mateo shrugged. "I think not. The conclusion will be that Isabella and the maid both were victims of bad food. But to ensure that there is no connection, I will be leaving tonight for Acapulco."

The Manila galleon was due in from the Far East. What his joining the excitement of the arrival of the galleon with its treasures from China, the Spice Islands, and India had to do with Alva discovering the identity of his attackers was another mystery to me. I had the unkind, but true, thought that he was leaving for Acapulco just to enjoy himself.

NINETY

With Mateo in Acapulco, the don at the tunnel project, and Isabella in a foul mood, I stayed away from the house as much as possible. When I was not in the print shop, I would take a walk along the arcade, stopping in a shop now and again.

I was working late in the shop when I heard the flap on the back door and the sound of a package dropping. Realizing it was probably the author of the romantic poems that I found so provocative and compelling, I raced to open the door and run into the alley. I saw the person fleeing, a slender built, short man with his hooded cape flapping as he ran. He disappeared around a corner. When I reached the corner, a carriage was already moving down the street. It was too dark to see any identifying marks on the carriage.

Walking back I was struck by the presence of the scent of a French water that I knew was popular with young women in the city. At first I thought it odd that a man would wear a scent, but there were many fops who wore not just French water, but such silks and lace that on inspection of their genitals one would expect to find a witch's teat instead of a pene. That a writer of romantic poetry might be the type who found other men attractive, entering by the back door as it is said, would not surprise me. Eh, the poems came through the back door, did they not?

The poems were once again visions of love that touched my romantic soul—the one well-hidden behind my lépero's scabrous one. I put aside a deshonesto play that I had been checking Juan's typesetting on and began typesetting the poems. No profit was made from the poet's books, but what a pleasure to lose one's self in the images of lovers in a heat of passion. Printing his works of honest passions, I felt that I was making amends for the works of lesser quality—and lesser morality—that I printed only to make money. It was much work for me to set the type for all of the poet's works, but I had found it very rewarding.

As I set the type, I thought about the play we were surreptitiously publishing. We printed more plays than books. While comedias were rarely performed in New Spain, they were more popular to read than books.

It occurred to me that money could be had quicker and easier simply by putting on plays, rather than selling printed copies. Plays had not reached the level of popularity or profitability in New Spain that they had in the mother country because those the Holy Office approved for the colonies were insipid comedies of manners or religious works. To have even submitted a play like the ones we print to the Holy Office for a permit to perform would have resulted in our immediate arrest.

I wondered if there was a play we could present that would prove popular yet yield the needed approval. A group of actors had come to town to present a play in a vacant area between the mint building and residences, but the play had only lasted a few performances. I watched the play while Mateo was in Acapulco and found it to be a very uninteresting rendition of Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna. I had been forewarned that the censor's knife had cut the heart from Vega's brilliant work and that a familiar would be in the audience with a copy to ensure that the deleted dialogue did not find its way back into the presentation. Added to this, the actors did not have their lines well rehearsed. I heard the actors had disagreed over which play was to be presented and who was to perform the lead roles. It was sad to watch such a wonderful, stirring play mouthed by people who were unable to instill within themselves the spirit of the character they were playing.

No nation had ever produced a writer as prolific as Vega. Cervantes called him a monster of nature because he was able to write plays in hours and had composed perhaps a couple of thousand. Fuente Ovejuna was a stirring tale, much in line with Vega's other great works that demonstrated how Spanish men and women of all classes can be honorable. I had read a true copy of the play, smuggled into the colony under the dress of an actress.

The name of the play, Fuente Ovejuna, was the name of the village where the action took place. Here again a nobleman was trying to dishonor a peasant girl, who was betrothed to a village youth. Laurencia is the peasant girl, but she is a smart, resourceful one. She knows what the nobleman, the commander, is really after when he sends his emissaries to her with gifts. He plans to dishonor her and cast her aside after he has had his pleasure. As she says about men in general, "All they want, after giving us much trouble, is their pleasure at night and our sorrow in the morning."

She can be a sharp-tongued wench. As one character puts it, "I bet the priest poured salt on her as he christened her."

When the commander returns triumphant from war, the village greets him with gifts. But the gift he wants are Laurencia and another peasant girl. Struggling against his adjutant who is trying to pull her into a room where the commander can take advantage of her, Laurencia says, "Isn't your master satisfied with all the meat he was given today?"

"He seems to prefer yours," the servant says.

"Then he can starve!"

The commander catches Laurencia in the forest and tries to take her by force, when a peasant boy who loves her, Frondoso, grabs a bow and arrow the commander had laid down, and holds off the knight until the girl escapes.

The commander is disgusted by the way the peasant girl resists him. "What boors these peasants are. Ah, give me the cities, where nobody hinders the pleasures of lofty men, and husbands are glad when we make love to their wives."

He discusses women with his aide, speaking of the women who will surrender themselves to him without a struggle. "Easy girls I love dearly and repay poorly. Ah, Flores, if they only knew their worth."

The cruel nobleman takes village girls by force as he pleases, but Laurencia manages to avoid him. He shows up at her wedding and has her bridegroom, Frondoso, arrested. The commander carries off Laurencia and beats her when she resists his rape.

She returns to her father and the men in the village, calling them "sheep" for permitting the commander to violate village girls. She tells the men of the village that after the commander hangs Frondoso, he'll come and hang the spineless men of the village. "And I'll be glad—you race of half men—that this honorable town will be rid of effeminate men and the age of Amazons will return."

Picking up a sword Laurencia rallies the women of the village around her, and declares they must take the castle and free Frondoso before the commander kills him. She tells another woman, "When my courage is up, we don't need a Cid."

Women knock down the castle door and storm in, facing the commander, just as he's starting to have Frondoso hanged. The village men enter with their weapons to help. But a woman says, "Only women know how to take revenge. We shall drink the enemy's blood."

Jacinta, a girl raped by the commander, says, "Let us pierce his corpse with our lances."

Frondoso says, "I won't consider myself avenged until I've pulled out his soul."

The women attack the commander and his men. Laurencia says, "Com' on women, dye your swords with their vile blood!"

Vega had the literary courage to put swords in the hands of women. I suspect that was why the audience, which was composed mostly of men, did not appreciate the play as much as I did.

Another great moral point of the play was the way the villagers stood together when they are tried for the commander's death before the king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. When the villagers are questioned and tortured to reveal who slayed the evil nobleman, each of them in turn names the culprit: Fuente Ovejuna. The village itself had taken justice in its hands.

Faced with an impossible situation, the king and queen leave the death of the commander unpunished.

From what few seats were sold for the play, I had no doubt that the rest of the city were not stirred by the actors.

The thought of putting on a comedia had been on my mind from the time I had been clandestinely printing offensive ones. But no matter how I struggled with the thought, I was always blocked by how I knew Mateo would react. He would insist that we do some foolish tale of hombria—if I had to sit through another hour of an honorable Spaniard killing an English pirate who had raped his wife...

I would have presented a play by Beelzebub if it made money, but besides their lack of artistic merit, Mateo's plays had the added disadvantage of being financial disasters.

I went home that night struggling with the idea of putting on a play that would provide great profit yet not run us afoul of the Inquisition. Restless, I grabbed a copy of Montebanca's Historia of the Roma Empire and read it by candlelight as I breathed the sweet fumes of the stable below. As the empire became more and more decadent, decomposing as its social and moral fabric rotted under one bad leader after another, the emperors had gotten more and more extreme in the entertainment they provided the people in the arena; no longer did it entertain people to see gladiators killing each other, soon small armies fought and men were pitted against wild beasts. I found among the more interesting gladiatorial contests the sea battles in which the arena was flooded and warships with gladiators aboard fought.

Dozing off, I wondered how one would flood a comedia de corral, which was often little more than the space between houses, to put on a battle of gladiators.

I awoke in the middle of the night with the realization that I already had the flooded arena.

Mateo returned from Acapulco after two weeks. He was in bad temper and had no scar to which he had ascribed a woman's name.

"Pirates sank the Manila galleon; I made the trip for nothing."

"Mateo, Mateo, my friend, my companion in arms, I have had a revelation."

"Did you walk on water, amigo?"

"Exactly! You have guessed it. We are going to put on a comedia—on water."

Mateo rolled his eyes and pounded the side of his head. "Bastardo, you've been inhaling some of that yoyotli that steals the mind."

"No, I've been reading history. The Romans sometimes flooded the arena and put on gladiatorial sea battles with warships."

"Did you plan to put this comedia on in Rome? Has the pope given you San Pedro's to flood?"

"You are such a doubter of genius. Have you looked around and seen that Ciudad Mexico is surrounded by water?—not to mention a dozen lagoons in and around the city."

"Explain this madness to me."

"We take great risk for small profit printing deshonesto plays and books and selling them. It occurred to me that we could put on our own comedia and make our fortune."

Mateo's eye lit up. "I will write the play! An English pirate rapes—"

"No! No! No! Everyone from Madrid to Acapulco has seen that story. I have an idea for a play—"

His hand brushed his dagger. "You don't want me to write the play?"

"Yes, of course, but based on a different story." That fortunately needed very little dialogue, I added silently to myself. "What is the greatest moment in the history of New Spain?"

"The conquest, of course."

"Besides those famous horses whose blood you invest in, Cortes had a fleet of warships. Because Mexico, Tenochtitlan, was an island with a causeway that could be easily defended by the Aztecs, Cortes had to attack the city over water. He had timber felled and beams cut and built a fleet of thirteen boats; installed them with masts, rigging, and sail. While the boats were being prepared, he employed eight thousand indios to dig a canal by which the boats could be launched on the lake."

Mateo, of course, knew the story better than me. Cortes put twelve rowers aboard each vessel, along with twelve crossbowmen and musketeers, a total of about half of the conquistadors in his army. None of the conquistadors wanted to be rowers, and he'd had to coerce men with sea experience to man the oars.

He equipped each boat with cannon taken from the ships that had carried him to New Spain and put the boats under the command of captains. He invested himself as admiral of the fleet and led an attack on the city as the rest of his force and indio allies attacked the causeway.

The fleet of little warships was countered by an Aztec armada, over five hundred war canoes, hosting thousands of warriors. As the two fleets closed the distance between them, Cortes knew all would be lost if the good Lord did not give them a fresh breeze to propel their ships into battle with such speed that they would not be overwhelmed by the enormous number of Aztec war canoes.

The Hand of God did enter the battle. A breeze came up that sent Cortes's ships crashing through the Aztec armada with a ferocity only matched by the fierceness of the conquistadors themselves.

"How did you plan to pay for the thirteen ships and five hundred canoes, not to mention several hundred conquistadors and five thousand Aztec warriors?"

"We need but one warship and two or three canoes. A lake barge can be turned into a warship by adding some false lines of timber and wooden cannon. Indios with canoes can be had for a few pesos each night."

Mateo had the nervous intensity of a jaguar on the prowl. He paced, seeing himself as the man who won an empire.

"Cortes would be the main player," he said, "fighting with the strength of ten demons, killing a dozen—no!—a hundred of the enemy, exhorting his men not to waiver, in his most desperate moment, on his knees, calling upon God to deliver wind."

"Naturally only a fine actor like yourself could pay the conqueror."

"There is a company of players in the city, stranded, their bellies getting thinner each day," he said. "They could be had for a place to sleep and a little wine and food until our boat is prepared."

"I leave matters requiring artistic judgment to one who has performed before royalty in Madrid. I will occupy myself with mundane matters of getting the warship built, printing announcements, and the selling of tickets."

And, praise God, collecting enough money to become the gentleman I had always wanted to be.

Preparations for the play proved to be easier than I had imagined. The viceroy's office and the Holy Office were more than willing to license a play that extolled God and the glory of Spanish conquerors. All of the negotiations were done in my persona of a print shop assistant commissioned by the fictitious autor of the play. Because of our connection to the don, we decided not to use our real names.

Late at night, while I was printing up handbills advertising the play, I heard the telltale drop of a package through the back door slot and I again rushed to the alley.

The poet was nearly to end of the alley when a dark figure jumped out in front of him. The poet screamed and ran back toward me.

A woman's scream.

Terrified, looking back where an attack was expected, the poet ran nearly into my arms. I grabbed the mask from the person's face.

"Eléna!"

She stared at me wide-eyed. "You!"

She spun around and ran back down the alley, flying around Juan the lépero whom I had posted in the alley.

No wonder the words of the poet had so inflamed my heart—they flowed from the heart and hand of the woman I loved! That Eléna was the author of the poetry was a shock. That she was capable of writing poetry in no way surprised me. As a young girl she had talked of disguising herself as a man to write poetry.

The drudgery of typesetting the poems had been rewarded by a moment in which we stood only inches apart.

What did she mean when she had exclaimed, You! Shock that she had seen the lépero again who had accosted her on the street? Or did she recognize me as the youth from Veracruz? I toyed with the word, "you," listening in my mind to her speaking it, sometimes in a tone of familiarity, other times a tone of derision creeping in.

Finally, sighing, realizing my thoughts of someday courting Eléna were more fanciful than Mateo's battles with dragons, I sat down with the papers she had delivered.

The material she left were not in fact poems but a play. Called Beatriz de Navarre, it was the tale of a woman with a jealous husband. He suspects her of infidelity after finding what appears to be a love note.

Determined to catch the two lovers red-handed, he spies on his wife's every move. He had truly loved his wife and their love had been passionate before his suspicions arose. But with suspicion eating at him, he treats her coldly, keeping his doubts to himself so he can catch her in the act. His wife reaches out for him but is rejected.

While lurking outside his wife's bedroom, he hears her telling someone how much she loves him, using very erotic language. Enraged, he breaks down the door. He finds no one but his wife in the room and assumes her lover has fled. Still in a rage, certain that the woman has been unfaithful to him, he draws his sword and thrusts it through her heart.

As she lies on the floor, her life slowly draining from the wound in her chest, she whispers to her husband that she has always been faithful to him, that she loved him, and had been immortalizing her love for him in a poem. She had been afraid to show it to him because he had forbidden her to even read poetry, much less write it.

After her last breath escapes from her, he picks up papers on the table where she had been writing. Reading the poem aloud, he realizes that the words he overheard outside her door were not to a man in her room, but a lover in her heart—she had been reading aloud the poem.

He had doubted her because he never realized that a woman was capable of placing her heart on paper in a poem. Women had neither the inclination nor the need to experience literature.

Heartbroken by having spilled the blood of his beloved, he kneels beside her and begs forgiveness, then plunges a dagger into his own heart....

Was I touched by the play because it was penned by a certain young woman in a carriage who saved my life and yearned to get an education? Perhaps, but the language, the words of the love poem Beatriz wrote to her husband, was also quite appealing to me. Eléna the poet had a talent for bringing words between lovers that were poignant, provocative, and, yes, with an eroticism that titillates the ear and private places.

Another one of the ideas that seize my mind and soul and bring the hounds of hell yapping at my heels came to me, an idea even more outrageous than Mateo's tales. I would put on a play that would tickle the fancy of Homer and Sophocles. From the money earned from Cortes's spectacular sea battle, I would produce Eléna's play. Not in her name, of course, but one I would make up to protect her. And I would have to devise a way to let her know that the poor lépero boy she had helped had repaid her by giving her everlasting glory—in anonymity.

Of course, I would have to trick the Holy Office and the viceroy to get the play performed and not let Mateo know I had stolen money to put on someone else's play. He would carry through his threat to flay me and rub my raw flesh with salt if he knew.

Eh, amigos, I had nothing to risk. I would simply replace the money I diverted from our play with the admissions sold for Eléna's play.

The thought of the sacrifices I would be making for love choked me up as I reread the play.

NINETY-ONE

We chose a lagoon near the Alameda for the reenactment of the lake battle between Cortes's fleet and the Aztecs. Handbills advertising the play had been distributed throughout the city, and criers proclaimed the magnificence of the play in every plaza.

I personally collected the admission price. Vendors of blankets for sitting on the grass, since there were only a few benches available, and the sale of candy and sweetmeats, owed me a percentage of all dinero collected.

The preparations went well and there was no room to sit or stand by the time I collected the last admission. But my fears were not relieved. Despite the simplicity of the story, Mateo was anything but a simple actor, managing to embellish even the most ungarnished role. I feared that the Mexico audience would boo him off the stage—or worse, Mateo might draw his sword at the audience instead of the other actors.

The play began with the conquistadors floating in on a warship that looked much like a barge that had been temporarily converted into a warship. Mateo-Cortes stood valiantly at the bow, sword in one hand, Holy Cross in another. Beside him was "Doña Marina," the india interpreter who had been so vital in forming alliances with indio nations, giving Cortes's little band the armies he needed to defeat the dreaded Aztec legions.

The "doña" had originally been cast from a woman in the troupe of traveling actors, but her husband and Mateo had fallen out, for reasons I never bothered to inquire about. Her replacement was a pretty young india girl. I had the misfortune of asking Mateo where he'd found her—a casa de las putas, of course.

I wore a mask, as a number of people in the audience and one of the actors did. Of course, mine was not for fashion, but disguise. Eléna was a lover of plays and despite the fact that a play was considered vulgar entertainment for a woman—and most wore masks to them—I was certain she would not pass up the opportunity to see so heralded a play.

My fears—and rapture—at seeing her again came true as she arrived in a coach with Luis and an older woman chaperone. I did not recognize the older woman, it was not the elderly matron who had been in the coach many years before. A servant followed them, with cushions and blankets for them to sit on.

I sold Luis tickets, careful not to meet eyes with him or Eléna, even with my face covered by a mask.

After the last admission had been collected, I posted myself so that I could abscond with the admission money if the audience became so inflamed over Mateo's bad acting that blood was drawn rather than just vegetables thrown. I could not see Eléna from my position. It hurt to know she was with Luis, and I was the better for not seeing them together.

As the barge-warship came into sight, the ominous beat of drums set the mood for the dark battle that was to come.

When the barge-warship was close enough, Mateo-Cortes told the audience that before he was old enough to kill an Infidel with a sword, the Moors had been defeated and driven from Spain. But while Spain was no longer threatened by the bloody Islamic horde, the nation had not found its place under the sun as a great empire. The opportunity came when Columbus discovered a whole new world to conquer.

"Because I sought fortune, adventure, and to bring the Cross to pagans, I, too, crossed the great ocean to the New World."

As with any Mateo speech, he talked so long that my eyes were beginning to get heavy and difficult to keep open. I had insisted upon inserting action between his long discourses, and to my relief, three indio war canoes, all I could afford, came into the lagoon. And the battle began—the wooden cannons on Cortes's ship coughed black powder smoke; more powder was lit on board the barge to create noise and a haze. A man hiding behind a blanket banged on a large metal drum to create the sound of cannon and musket fire, arrows without sharp heads flew, indios shouted curses and banged the Spanish with wooden spears, while the four conquistadors fought back. As an added touch, we had set several pieces of pitch-covered wood afire floating around the boats.

The indios mounted a surprisingly aggressive attack on "Cortes" and his men, who fought back just as aggressively. I watched, horrified, as the battle between indios and conquistadors intensified into actual combat. A conquistador was dragged off the ship and into the water and barely got away with his life as the triumphant indios tried to spear him like a fish.

Then another conquistador went into the water. A roar of delight came from the indios on the canoes as they threw themselves at men on the mock warship.

¡Ay de mí! This disaster was not planned. With the smoke, the fire, the shouting, the clash of swords and spears, the impression of a real battle was supposed to be created. But only the impression!

I clutched the money pouch, ready to flee, but stood rooted by fascination as I watched all my work in putting together the play being destroyed by the sudden inflamed passions of indios and españols, who forgot they were acting.

¡Santa Maria! A conquistador was stunned by a spear blow to the head and dragged off the warship. Indios swarmed up the sides of the ship. Only Mateo was left on his feet. The invaders grappled with Doña Marina, and her dress was torn off of her in the struggle.

I had a horrible thought. The indios are going to win!

If that happened, Mateo would not be booed from the "stage," his ticket collector would not be robbed, the crowd would tear us limb from limb.

My eyes sought out the familiar who sat with a copy of the play to make sure that the dialogue did not deviate from what had been approved. If he leaped to his feet and stopped the play, there would be a riot over the admission money.

Suddenly, Mateo-Cortes was here—there—everywhere, his sword flashing. One by one the indios abandoned the barge, mostly over the side and into the water. When there were no more indios aboard to fight, he leaped aboard a canoe and battered the indios left on it. Commanding the indios left in his canoe to bring him and the almost disrobed Doña Marina to land, he stepped ashore with his sword in one hand and a cross in the other. The cross was bloodied from breaking an indio's head.

The audience was on its feet roaring its approval.

We had constructed a six-foot-high model of Tenochtitlan's great temple to their war god and thrown red paint on it to create the impression of sacrificial blood. Mateo-Cortes climbed the steps and stood atop, holding sword and cross high. He gave a stirring speech about the glory of God and Spain, and how the riches of the New World and the bravery of its colonists had made Spain the most powerful country on earth.

The audience went wild with cheers and clapping.

Mateo had found his gift on the stage: action. He was not suited for standing on a stage talking to other actors or to the audience. Put a sword in his hand and an enemy before him, and he became... himself... a man with the courage of a lion, the daring of an eagle.

I leaned back against a tree, folded my arms, and looked up to the early evening sky, feeling the weight of the coins in the pouch around my neck.

Apologizing to my Aztec ancestors, I thanked God for not letting the indios win.

NINETY-TWO

With a hit play in the lagoon, even after paying expenses—including the burning of two canoes and half the barge a few days later—I was able to steal enough money from the pile I was saving for Mateo and me to put on Eléna's play.

I hired the actor and actress who had created the rift on the Cortes play and rented the same space and stage near the mint where they had put on their failed comedia.

The play had to be timed perfectly. I had submitted a written copy to both the Holy Office and the viceroy's staff to obtain the requisite permission and license. Naturally, I had to alter Eléna's story and dialogue because there was no possibility that either authority would grant permission as it was written. I changed the plot so that the woman read her husband's poetry rather than her own, because it would have been an unacceptable portrayal of women to have them intellectually superior to their husbands. I also toned down some of the passion in the woman's lines and gave the tale a happy ending—with their child, who only appeared at the end of the play, being hauled up to heaven after dying of the plague.

Of course, the version of the play I gave to the actors was Eléna's. My plan was to stage the play the following week when both the viceroy, archbishop, and bishop inquisitor were all in Puebla for the investiture of a bishop there. I would run the play for several nights, and then close it before they returned. As for the familiar whose duty it was to follow the script... I would post a lépero who would sprinkle him with a small amount of flower weavers' dust to disorient him as he approached.

Eléna would have her triumph, but the play would be closed by the time the most powerful men in New Spain got back to the city. Even if frays saw the play and found it profane, it would take several days to get a messenger to Puebla and back with permission to close it.

It would not do to get Eléna in trouble with the Inquisition for authoring what would be considered an indecent portrayal of a woman, yet I wanted her to know that her play had not been stolen but was being attributed to her. I also needed a scapegoat to take the blame when the inquisitors took action. I solved the problem by creating an autor named Anele Zurc, who had written and financed the play. The name was neither male nor female, and appeared to be vaguely foreign, perhaps Dutch, some of whom were citizens of the king. I would get a message to her, through her maid, that would subtly let her know that the name is hers, Eléna de la Cruz, written backward. The note would be signed, Son of the Stone, in reference to the lines from the Miguel Cervantes's play I had quoted to her in the carriage an eon ago.

Other than a couple of minor servant roles, Eléna's play only required two actors, the husband and wife, and I left to them artistic preparation of the play. I was busy collecting admissions to the Cortes play, and rounding up conquistadors and Aztecs for the roles as more and more became injured in the battles.

When the night came for the opening of the play, I was more excited than a man at the birth of his first son. I had hoped and prayed that Eléna had understood my message and would attend. After signing Son of the Stone, I could not risk letting her see me even under a mask—uncertain as to who I was and what my intentions were, she may have come with representatives of the viceroy and the Inquisition.

Needing someone to collect the admission money from the patrons, I choose an indio who worked for a shopkeeper near the print shop. After worrying about using a priest or other Spaniard to trust with the money, I chose the indio. I hid myself in the curtains beside the stage.

Eh, amigos, did you really think that I would risk my sweetheart's play being ruined by vulgar mosqueteros shouting down the hack actors and pelting them with tomatoes? And run the risk that the play would close almost as quickly as it opened? I sent Juan the lépero into the streets with free admissions slips for anyone who would come to the play. Giving a group of street people instructions on how to cheer the play as it went along, I passed coins among them with promises of more for those who showed the most enthusiasm.

When I saw Eléna come into the theater, I had to restrain myself from breaking from my hiding place and running to her. As usual, my fervor was dampened by the presence of Luis, who escorted her everywhere. I now knew it was common knowledge that they would marry, a circumstance that was a blade twisting in my heart.

When I saw the familiar sent to monitor the play walk by with his eyes watering and a great grin on his face, I knew it was safe to proceed. As usual, frays showed up, walking past the admission taker as if they were invisible.

During the play, my eyes were on Eléna rather than the actors. I could see that she was as thrilled about it as Luis was bored. She sat on the edge of her seat and stared at the action on the stage, her lips often moving, silently voicing the lines as the actors spoke them. She was radiant and beautiful and I felt privileged to have had the opportunity to repay the great debt—and pleasure—she gave me.

Halfway through the play the frays rushed out, no doubt offended by the words spoken by the actress. It was a long way to Puebla, I gloated to myself.

As the final scene unfolded, with the heroine lying on the floor, dying, revealing that she was the author of the poem, a group of frays and familiars suddenly entered. From my hiding place, I gawked as the bishop of the Holy Office of the Inquisition came in behind his priests and familiars.

"This comedia is canceled," the bishop announced. "The autor is to present himself to me."

The bishop had not gone to Puebla after all.

I fled with great haste.

Mateo was waiting for me in my room. "The Inquisition closed our play," he told me.

"Our play?" What was he talking about? He knew about the play I put on for Eléna! "How did you know? When did you find out?"

He threw up his hands in a plea for God to recognize the injustice. "The greatest performances of my life, and the bishop himself closed us. He took the admission money, too."

"He closed our play? Why did he close the play?" I was devastated. How could the bishop close a play that glorified Spain?

"Because of the love scene with Doña Marina."

"Love scene? There's no love scene with Doña Marina."

"A small rewrite," Mateo said.

"You added a love scene in the battle for Tenochtitlan? Are you insane?"

He tried to look remorseful. "At the conclusion of battle, a man needs a women in his arms to lick his wounds."

"At the conclusion? Your love scene took place on top of the temple? What happened to the sword and cross you were supposed to be holding?"

"I kept them in hand. Doña Marina, uh, assisted by getting down on her knees as I—"

"Dios mio. And I thought I had been foolish with my play."

"Your play?"

Once while traveling with the Healer I had stepped on a snake, and I looked down and saw that my foot was holding it down just behind the head. I had nothing in my hand to strike it and was terrified and perplexed—if I moved my foot it would bite me, yet I could not keep the pressure on it forever.

I had just stepped on another snake.

Pretending I hadn't heard Mateo, I started for the door. He grabbed me by the back of my doublet and pulled me back.

"You have been acting very strange, Bastardo. Please sit down and tell me what you have been doing while I was making us rich conquering the Aztecs." His voice was soft, almost mellow, like the purring of a tiger—just before it eats you. He never said "please" unless he was ready to rip out my throat.

Weary of intrigues, I sat down and told him everything—starting with Eléna in the carriage so many years ago, to discovering she was the erotic poet and putting on her play as a tribute to her.

"How much is left of our money?" he asked.

"I spent all that I had. The Inquisition took the rest. How much do you—"

He shrugged. It was a foolish question. What I did not steal and lose, he no doubt lost to cards and women.

I expected, no, I deserved, to be beaten for my treachery. But he seemed to take it all with the air of a philosopher as opposed to the mal hombre loco that I knew him to be.

He lit a stinking, rolled tobacco leaf. "If you had stolen it from me to buy a horse, I would kill you. But to buy a jewel for a woman, which is what you did, that is different. I cannot kill a man for loving a woman so much he would steal or kill for her." He blew foul smoke in my face. "I do it frequently."

The next morning I found that the Inquisition had seized the print shop and arrested Juan the lépero. He was ignorant of my identity and would be unable to put the inquisitorial hounds on my trail and too ignorant himself to be burned for blasphemy.

Overnight Mateo and I found ourselves out of the comedia business, out of the book business, out of money, and no longer the printers for the Inquisition.

The gloom worsened as rains fell heavily and Lake Texcoco began to rise. Our concern turned to Don Julio at a time when he suddenly needed our help.

NINETY-THREE

Don Julio, busy with the tunnel project, knew little of our activity except that Mateo had obtained a role in a play. Isabella refused to see the play, saying that it would be belittling for her to attend a play in which one of her "servants" appeared.

The don's lack of interest in our activities was out of character. He was usually concerned with our staying out of trouble. His preoccupation with the tunnel worried us because it meant things were not going well. We heard stories on the street that the tunnel continued to suffer problems.

The don called the swordsman and me into his library at the city house.

"You are to be a lépero again," Don Julio told me, "and once again be my eyes and ears and those of the king's."

This time it was silver train robberies. The silver area was centered about a hundred leagues north in Zacatecas. I knew something about the mining business despite having never seen one. Mateo claimed that I was like Don Julio in that I lusted for knowledge more than women, and there was much truth in his accusation. The don's library contained several books on mining techniques and included short histories of mining in New Spain; I read all that there was to know about silver mining, even though I was after a silver thief not a prospector, and I cajoled the don into sitting down with me and telling me more.

In 1546, Juan de Tolosa found a fantastic mountain of silver, La Bufa, at Zacatecas in the Chichimeca indio region. The discovery, and the many dozens that followed, turned New Spain into the richest silver-bearing place on earth.

Tolosa, the commander of a detachment of soldiers, established camp at the foot of a mountain called La Bufa by the indios. Tolosa gave gifts to the indios, trinkets and blankets, and in turn they took him to a place where they said the rocks were "living." The glowing spirit in the rocks was silver, and Tolosa went on to become one of the richest men in New Spain.

Soon a new type of conquistador arose in New Spain, prospectors who ventured north into dangerous indio country, where the savage Chichimeca were unconquered. The men braved bloodthirsty indios, who ate their captives, and fellow prospectors, who would have put a knife in their back for a silver lode. Often they worked in pairs, and when a find was made they constructed a small tower over the claim where one man stood with a musket while the other rushed to register the claim.

Zacatecas was considered by some to be the second city of New Spain, outshined only by the greater glory of Ciudad Mexico. But Don Julio said the boom city was like a barrel of fish—when the last bit of silver is pulled from it, there would be no more city. But until then it was a place where one day a man might be in mud up to his knees cursing mules as he carried supplies to the mines and the next find that he is a fine "gentleman" of New Spain, referred to as "Don," and perhaps purchase a noble title in the process.

Don Julio said, "We first had a landed nobility in New Spain when each conquistador was given a domain from which to collect tribute, then a merchant class when cities began to rise atop Aztec ruins. Now we have a silver nobility, men who discovered that the dirt in their fingernails was silver ore. These men buy titles and wives from noble families and build palaces. One day they heard the bay of mules and had manure stuck to the bottom of their boots, and the next their dirty ears were titillated by murmurs of "Señor Marqués," as they went by with a new coat of arms on the side of their carriage."

The don told me the story of a muleteer he knew who became a count. "With his earnings from his mule trains, he bought a mine abandoned because it had become flooded and no one knew how to drain the water. He consulted me, but I was too busy designing a way to keep Mexico City from being deluged to help him. However, he and a friend devised a way of tunneling the water out. He became wealthy enough that when his daughter married, he paved the way from his house to the church in silver."

The silver nobles sent to Spain, the king's fifth, aboard the treasure fleet that bought the luxuries of Spain—the finest furniture, swords, jewelry. From the Far East the Manila galleons brought them silk and ivory and spices.

"In a country of chinos named China, a great wall, hundreds of miles long, is being built to hold back barbarians from the north. It is said that the chino emperor is financing the building of this wall with New Spain silver obtained from the sale of silk."

I knew something of the place called China, or Cathay, because the don's library contained a copy of the travels of Marco Polo. Christopher Columbus, of course, thought his voyage would take him to China and had a copy of Marco Polo's book on the voyage with him.

Silver was not just for buying noble titles, but the king's fifth financed the perpetual wars that the Mother Country fought in Europe. To get that money, the silver was mined and refined in the north country and hauled to the capital on the back of mules. There, some of the bars were minted into coins and others were shipped whole to Spain on the treasure fleet.

The transfer of the plate to Veracruz once a year was done with a troop of soldados, and no bandit dared attack. But the metal came to the mint from the mining country in so many mule trains during the course of a year that it was impossible to protect all of them. A system had been set up in which bags of dirt were transferred in mule trains as decoys. When the banditos attacked, they were met with strong resistance by soldados pretending to be indio mule herders.

"The robbers have begun avoiding the false mule trains and attacking those only carrying silver. The viceroy wants to know why. The schedule for the false trains is made in the mint and sent by messengers to the mines. My suspicion is that someone in the mint is selling the information to the banditos."

"How about the messenger? Or at the mines?"

"Unlikely as to either. There are different instructions to the various mines, all in sealed pouches. From the way the bandits avoid the traps, they know the entire schedule, not that of just one mine. The only source of the complete schedule in one place is the mint."

"Am I to go into the mint and investigate?" My eyes were lit up envisioning stacks of gold and silver, some of it finding its way into my pockets.

"That would be putting a fox in to watch the chickens. No, your work will be on the outside, on the street as is the custom. Besides the mint director, who is above suspicion, there is only one man who has access to the list. You are to watch him for any suspicious contacts he makes. A new list is prepared weekly, and the suspect has access to it. He's the one who prepares the individual lists for the mines and gives them to the north country messenger. After that, he must pass it almost immediately to a conspirator who carries it north to the bandit gang. He may do it on his way home from the mint, sometime during the night, or even on his way to work in the morning. After that, it will be too late to have it in the hands of the bandits. I expect you to watch the man at the mint to see who he passes the information to."

He turned to Mateo. "You are to relieve Cristo during his watches. And have horses ready for both of you when it is time to follow the person carrying the stolen information north."

We told him we would start watching the mint official immediately. I said, "You look tired, Don Julio. More than tired. You must get away from the tunnel and rest."

"I will rest in the grave soon. The rains are falling heavily. Each day the water level for the city rises."

"The tunnel?"

"My plans were not followed. I have tried to patch it in a dozen places, but after I patch it in one place, the old water-logged adobe bricks permit it to cave in elsewhere. The earthquake a few days ago undid a year's work of clearing the tunnel. Have you heard that we have a prophet who says the tunnel will fail because a Jew built it? He doesn't even call me a converso."

I knew of the man, a Franciscan fray who had ran afoul of his holy order and no doubt had lost his mind. He became a wanderer in the streets, living off the charity of those who fear madmen. Earthquakes always frighten people because they are so severe in the valley. After the big earthquake, the monk preached in the plaza mayor, telling people that the city was Sodom and God was going to destroy it. Numerous small quakes followed the big one, and people panicked, crowding into churches.

Our surveillance of the mint employee did not reveal who he passed the silver trains list to. Yet the list had been passed, because robberies erupted again by a bandit gang that knew exactly what mule trains were carrying silver.

The more we observed the employee, the more we doubted that he was the culprit—yet he was the only one with the information. The messenger who delivered the lists to the mines was given sealed pouches by the employee. Had the messenger opened the pouches, the recipients would have known it.

The employee lived alone in a modest house with just one servant. Between the two of us, Mateo and I kept a close eye on him and his servant. There was never any opportunity for him to pass the information on.

Mateo let his beard grow, and I stopped trimming mine. Neither of us were anxious to be identified as the autors of the closed plays that were the talk of the town.

A visit to a goldsmith's shop finally revealed to me who the mint employee was passing the information on to. Don Julio had sent me to the goldsmith to pick up a gold chain and medallion he had purchased for Isabella's birthday. While I waited inside the shop, a man came in and ordered a gold ring for his wife, a very expensive ring. The purchaser was the messenger who carried the lists to the northern mines.

The only way the messenger could get his hands on the complete list was if the mint employee gave it to him. It struck me as to how the deed was done. The mint employee we watched was conspiring with the northern rider, giving him not just the individual lists to deliver to the mine owners, but a separate copy of the complete list for delivery to the bandits. We never saw the lists passed because the illicit transaction took place inside the mint when the rider was given the sealed pouches he was to legally carry.

When a new list was issued, Mateo and I followed the rider to the north. We had a copy of the man's schedule—all except for the rendezvous with the robbers.

We rode north toward Zacatecas, following the mint rider. It was a well-traveled road and we blended in with the merchants, mule trains, and officials on their way to the northern mines. Leaving the Valley of Mexico, the area the Aztecs called Anáhuac, Land by the Water, we rode into a more arid land. Not the great northern deserts that stretched endlessly, the vast sands of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola, but a land that was neither as wet as the valley nor as dry as the deserts.

Indios still ran wild in the territory surrounding Zacatecas, but they were naked and afoot, and it was rare that they would attack two well-armed men on horseback.

The indios of the region were called Chichimeca, a name the Spanish applied to many barbaric, nomadic tribes who still ate raw meat—some of it human. When thousands of miners invaded their territory, a fierce war had been fought with the indios. The battles had gone on for decades. Even after the viceroy's troops put down the last large-scale resistance, the fighting never stopped. The indios continued to live and war in small packs, claiming scalps, weapons, and women as their trophies.

"They are as naked as sin," Mateo told me. "The frays can't get them to put on clothes, much less live in houses and plant maize. But they are great fighters, masters with bows, fearless in an attack. No indios in New Spain are as fierce."

All of the attacks by bandits on the mule trains carrying silver had been in the Zacatecas area, and we were confident that the list would not leave the rider's hands until we reached the city called the Silver Capital of the World.

Zacatecas had the reputation of being the wildest place in New Spain, where fortunes were won and lost with the turn of a card, and men died just as quickly. A paradise for Mateo, but I was surprised that he was not excited about visiting the town.

"It lays claim to being a great city, but it has no spirit. Barcelona, Seville, Roma, Mexico, these are cities that survive the ages. As the don says, Zacatecas is a barrel of silver fish. When the fish are all caught, no more Zacatecas. Besides, there are a hundred men to every woman. What place can call itself a city in which men must find love in the palm of their own hand? There is no love or honor in the city."

I should have known that women would be behind his feelings for the city. To live for love and honor, or to die defending it, was the way of the chivalric knights.

Zacatecas was built in a basin of hills, at an altitude even higher than the Mexico valley. The hills were places of scrub brush and stunted trees. The entire mining region was an arid wilderness with few rivers and little cultivation of maize and other crops. The town was laid out with a plaza in the center where a church stood along with the alcalde palace. The better houses, and some were palaces, spread out from the central plaza. Beyond the heart of the city were an indio barrio and a barrio of freedmen and mulattos.

We had not kept close to the rider during the journey but now that we had arrived at a place where we believed the list would be passed, we closed the distance to keep him in sight. He went to an inn near the central plaza and we followed. We were taking our packs from the back of the horses to release the beasts to the care of the stable when we heard a loud, shrill laugh that had an abrasive, but familiar, ring to it.

Two men coming down the street were talking, and the larger of the two, an exceptionally ugly, corpulent man wearing a bright yellow, silk doublet and breeches, entered the inn.

They had not seen us and Mateo had ducked down, pretending to check something on the side of his horse. When he stood up, we looked at each other.

"Now we know who is getting the mint list," he said.

Sancho de Erauso, whose real name was Catalina de Erauso, the man-woman for whom I once violated an ancient tomb, was now in the business of robbing the king's silver.

"We can't go into the inn; she'll recognize us," I said.

Mateo shrugged. "It's been years since she saw us. We both now have beards, which is the fashion of this cold, dismay place. We look like a thousand other miners and muleteers."

I was not anxious to tempt fate with a woman who pretended to be a man and who was as strong as a bull and had the temperament of a spitting viper. "I don't think we should go in. Let's get the alcalde to arrest her."

"On what evidence? That she robbed a tomb years ago? We have no proof yet that she's involved with the silver robberies except that she frequents the same inn as the mint rider. We need to know where her gang is hiding so we can put them out of business."

Forced to enter the inn or play the coward, I followed Mateo inside. We took a table in a dark corner in the tavern area. Catalina and her companion were at a table across the room with the mint rider. We paid no attention to them, but I was certain Catalina's eyes put musket shots in us as we walked to our table.

Mateo ordered bread, meat, a slab of cheese, and a jug of wine.

As we ate, Mateo watched the people out of the corner of his eye. "He passed the list to Catalina and she gave him a pouch, probably gold."

"What do we do?"

"Nothing yet. When Catalina leaves, we'll follow her to see if she reports to anyone else and where her gang is hiding."

She left a few minutes later with her companion, and we followed slowly. They went to a stable at another inn, and we returned for our own horses. They left town on the road to Panuco, a mining town three leagues to the north. The richest mines in New Spain were in the area. But it was not to a mine, but another inn, a much smaller one, that their horses carried them. A carriage was stationed next to the stable. The carriage was not as rich and luxurious as the one bearing the same coat of arms that I had ridden in in Veracruz and seen in Mexico, but the heraldic bearings were unmistakably: the coat of arms of the de la Cerda family, the noble clan of Luis. Son of a marqués, he was the grandson of a woman who had an unfathomable murderous vendetta against me, and if rumor proved true, was soon to be the husband of the woman I loved.

Mateo noticed the intensity of my feelings, and I told him who owned the coach.

"Luis may not be connected to the robberies," Mateo said.

"He is. And so is Ramon de Alva."

"Have you learned from a witch the power of mind reading?"

"No, the power of silver. What was the name of the mint official who provides the list to robbers?"

"Soto, the same as Alva's brothers-in-law, but it's a very common name."

"I'm certain we'll find there's a relationship. Luis's family is also known to be involved in business dealings with Alva."

"All the dons of New Spain deal with each other."

I knew in my heart that Luis was involved. I could not explain to Mateo, but there was a certain darkness of heart to Luis that matched the same trait in Alva. Both men struck me as cold and ruthless. Eh, robbing silver trains was less reprehensible then killing thousands of indios with poor and inadequate materials in the tunnel, an activity I was certain Alva was involved in. And now I was certain he and Luis were involved in the silver robberies.

I got off my horse and handed the reins to him. "I'm going to find out for sure."

Sneaking around to the side of the inn, I gained access to a window. Not more than a few feet away, Catalina and Luis drank and talked like old friends—and conspirators. The man-woman suddenly turned and looked me in the eye. I gave myself away by panicking and running back to the horses.

"Luis and Catalina, they spotted me. What should we do?" I asked Mateo.

"Ride like the wind back to Mexico and report to Don Julio."

A fortnight later, after three changes of horses and cursed rain that dogged us the moment we crossed the mountains into the Valley of Mexico, we rode across a causeway into the city. Rain had pounded us as if the rain god had decided to wreak vengeance on us for the work we did in denying him blood sacrifices. Often we had to seek high ground to avoid meadows that had turned into small lakes. We sloshed through a foot of water crossing the causeway into the city. On some streets the water was up to our horses bellies.

Neither of us spoke. We were too tired, and too aware of the consequences that might follow to the don. The fact that we had solved the silver robberies would help the don's problem with the viceroy, I assured myself. But that a lépero, wanted for two murders, and a picaro, who should be banished to Manila, both employed by a converso, were to accuse rich, powerful men... ay, who was I fooling with my thoughts of truth and justice?

Worry ached my chest and stomach as we approached the don's house. It was only nine o'clock in the evening when we reached it. We were surprised that no light shone from the house. Isabella insisted upon maintaining the house with blazing candles inside and outside to let the world know how she shines, but none of the lights were lit. My lépero instincts would normally have been aroused by the difference in lighting, but we had rode as if the devil was on our tail. We were hungry and exhausted.

We dismounted at the main gate and opened it, two wet, muddy men walking their wet, muddy horses to the stable. The first indication of danger I had was movement in the darkness. Then Mateo's sword was drawn. I clutched clumsily at my own sword, but stopped as Mateo lowered his own.

A dozen men surrounded us, armed with swords and muskets. They wore the green cross of the Inquisition.

NINETY-FOUR

The inquisitors took our swords and daggers and tied our hands behind our backs as I plied them with questions.

"Why are you doing this? We've done nothing."

The only answer was a sudden rain burst, lashing us like a cat-o'-nine-tails from the sky. I knew very well who they were, but silence is considered guilt in the face of an accusation, so I was loud about my innocence, demanding that they present their credentials to Don Julio.

When my hands were tied, they pulled a black hood over my head. Rough hands steered me to a carriage. Before the hood went down, I saw Mateo hooded and being put into another carriage. When the hood went down, my ears became my eyes. The only sounds were the violent rain and the shuffling of feet. The sole words I heard when they separated us was a familiar calling me "the marrano," a secret Jew. That told me we were not being arrested for deshonesto books and plays but as part of Don Julio's tunnel problems. The Inquisition burned Jews. Of course, I could avoid being burned at the stake. I could tell them I was not really a converso Spaniard at all, that I have only been pretending to be a gachupin. That I was actually a mestizo wanted for the murder of two Spaniards. That way I would only be tortured, hanged, and my head mounted at the city gate.

Tlaloc, the rain god, wanted to drown the city. Don Julio, with his grand ideas to save the city with a tunnel, had gotten in the way of the god's vengeance.

My mind and body were strangely calm. True, I felt panic pull in my heart, but my thoughts were for Don Julio and his family, sweet, delicate little Juana and the nervous bird, Inez. Poor Inez. She had waited all her life for a terrible disaster to happen and now it came to her door in the middle of the night.

No concern stirred in me for Isabella. I was certain she would find a way to avoid the Inquisition, perhaps even collect a reward for turning in Don Julio. With her connection to Alva, no doubt she had already given a statement to the Inquisition. One did not need an Aztec diviner to fathom that, if it would help her, the don's wife would have told the Inquisitors we were devil worshippers who ate the flesh of Christians.

The coach rumbled on cobblestone streets, rain beating on the roof. I rocked back and forth in my seat and kept up questions in the hopes of learning something about the don's fate. The silence was not ignorance, but intimidation. Each unanswered question generated more anxious questions, more fear, and that was the intent. Fray Antonio had told me about his own experiences with the Inquisition, about the silence. But to have heard about it happening to someone else was different than experiencing it yourself.

I wanted to tell the men beside me that I knew what foul creatures they were. The secret army of the green cross. The hounds of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Men in black who came in the dark of night to drag you from your bed and take you to a place where you might never see the sun again. I wondered if "Don" Jorge was among them. If he identified me as the printer of profane books, they would burn me at the stake twice.

The heavy downpour stopped, and my world of sound became the heavy breathing of a man beside me and the hiss of water beneath the carriage wheels. I knew we had entered the main plaza when the sound of the carriage wheels changed. The dungeon of the Holy Office was not far.

The carriage stopped and the door opened. The man on my right got out and pulled me out after him. As I tried to cautiously step down, he gave me a jerk, causing me to miss the step. I twisted sideways as I fell, smacking the street stones with my left shoulder.

Silent hands lifted me up and directed me through a doorway. The floor suddenly was not there and I started falling, crashing against a wall. Hands grabbed me again and stabilized me. I was on a stairwell. Starting down it, my feet went out from under me and I began to stumble. I fell against someone in front of me, breaking my fall. I hit the steps, banging my head, and slamming down on the same shoulder that I had injured on the cobblestones.

Jerked to my feet, I was half dragged down a stairway. When we reached a floor, I was guided against a wooden frame. My hands were untied and retied, my doublet and shirt removed, so I was naked from the waist up. The hood came off. I was in a room, shadowy, almost dark, with large candles burning in the upper corner of two walls. The wood frame I was tied to was the notorious instrument called a rack. The room was a torture chamber.

The walls of stone glistened wetly. Water ran in streams on the floor. It made the dungeon atmosphere more gruesome. Even in normal weather conditions, the city's water table was so high that graves filled with water before the dirt was thrown in. The dungeon defied the tendency of any hole to fill with water more than a few feet deep. No doubt the Inquisition had the funds to construct a room that did not flood. Or, as the bishop of the Holy Office probably claimed, God kept the room from flooding so the inquisitors could do their work.

When I was securely tied, my mouth was gagged. The sound of struggling and Mateo cursing came from an adjoining room. The sounds stopped and I assumed he was gagged also. I wondered how many of these little chambers of horror were in this hellhole.

The familiars conferred across the room with two frays. The frays wore dark robes with hoods. I could not hear exactly what was being said, but again I made out the word "marrano."

The familiars left and the two frays slowly approached me. There was nothing hurried about their movements. I felt like a lamb staked out with jungle beasts about to rip out its guts.

They stood in front of me. The hoods went over their heads but did not completely cover their faces. Behind the edges of the cowls, their faces were as vague as fish in dark water. One pulled down the gag enough so that I could speak.

"Are you a Jew?" he asked. The question was asked in a very gentle tone, a fatherly tone, a father asking a child if it had been bad.

The kindly tone caught me by surprise and I stammered out a response, "I am a good Christian."

"We shall see," he murmured, "we shall see."

They began removing my boots and breeches.

"What are you doing? Why are you taking my clothes?"

Silence greeted my questions. The gag was pulled back over my mouth.

When I was naked, my legs were tied to the frame. The two frays began a minute examination of my body. One stood on a bench and parted my hair to view my scalp. They slowly moved down my body, looking at each mark, not just only scars, but moles and blotches, the shape of my eyes, even the few wrinkles on my face. Each carefully traced the lines on my palms. As they silently worked, one would gesture to the other to double-check a blemish or wrinkle.

They were looking for a sign of the devil on my skin.

The silliness of their actions struck me. I started to laugh and choked on the gag. The indignity of what these two priests were doing, touching my body, examining my skin, hair, even my virile part. Is this what they became priests for? To find the devil in a mole? To see demons in a wrinkle of skin?

As they examined my virile part, I realized that I was fortunate that the Aztec gods had stolen a piece of foreskin. The frays believed I was a Jew—with their twisted logic, had I not appeared circumcised, they would have concluded that as a Jew, I had been earlier circumcised and Lucifer had restored my foreskin so I could disguise myself as a Christian.

When they finished in front, the rack was swiveled so they could examine my backside. Ay! Did they think the devil was hiding up my back door?

They handled me like two butchers deciding how to carve a side of beef. No conclusions as to whether I bore the mark of the devil were stated to me.

Working my jaw, I slipped the gag far enough down my chin to mumble. I asked again, why I was being held, what the charges against me were.

The two frays were deaf to all but their own utterances and whatever messages they believed God whispered to them.

"The girl, Juana, has she been seized? She has special needs; her body is fragile. God would punish anyone who harmed a poor sick child like her," I threatened.

The mention of God's punishment got the attention of one fray. He looked up from checking for the devil between my toes. I could not discern his hooded features, but for a brief moment his eyes met mine. His eyes were black, blazing fire pits, dark flames in a fathomless well, a brooding wrath that invited me... nay, tried to suck me in. His eyes shared the same macabre madness of Aztec priests who tore out throbbing hearts and fed on blood like vampires.

After they had finished their examination, they unfastened my arms and legs and gave me my shirt and breeches to put back on. I was taken down a few steps to a stone corridor of cells behind iron doors with Judas windows. It was wetter at this level and my feet splashed in water above my ankles. Moans escaped through one of the judas windows as I walked by. An agonized voice came from another.

"Who's there? Please tell me, what is the date? The month? Have you heard of the family of Vicento Sanchez? Are they well? Do my children know their father still lives? Help me! For the love of God, help me!"

They opened a rusted iron door and gestured for me to enter. A shapeless black void lay before me. I hesitated to enter, fearful that it was a trick, that I was being dropped into a deep pit to die. One of the frays pushed me, and I stumbled into the cell, splashing in water up to my knees before my outstretched hands found a wall for support.

The door banged shut behind me, and I was immersed in complete darkness. Mictlan, the Land of the Dead, could not have been blacker. Hell could not frighten me anymore than I was by the complete absence of light.

Using my hands to feel, I slowly oriented myself to the room. Nay, not so much a room as a cesspool for vermin. With my arms stretched out on each side, I could touch the walls. A stone bench was my only refuge from the water. The bench was not long enough to lay down on. I sat with my back against a wall and my legs outstretched on the bench. The wall beside me continually bled water. Dripdripdripdrip! from the ceiling was unceasing and never failed to find my head no matter how I positioned myself. No blanket, no place to pass body waste except the cesspool itself. I already guessed that I would taste no water except what I excreted in.

The place was wet and cold, but the rats did not mind. Moreover, I sensed another presence in the room. Something cold and slimy slithered across my legs, and I cried out in terror. My first impression was a snake, but even a snake would turn its nose up at this hellish place. If it was not a snake, I wondered... what else felt cold and clammy and slithered?

¡Ay de mí!

Fear crawled up my skin. I breathed slowly in and out, keeping my panic from overwhelming me. I knew what they were doing, those fiends in the robes of mendicant brothers, creating fear and panic to demoralize me. I laughed to myself. They were certainly succeeding. The only thing that kept me from a complete breakdown was that Fray Antonio had told me of these horrors. Cold and shivering, I made a small prayer that God take my life but spare the others. I had not prayed much in my life, but I owed it to the don and his family who had treated me as one of their own. How was the don taking this abuse? Inez and poor Juana? What about my friend, Mateo? He was a strong man, stronger than me, certainly much stronger than the don and the women. He would do as well as anyone who suddenly awakens to find that sometime during the night he had been dragged to Dante's Infierno, only this cold Hell was administered by the Church, who had blessed his birth and would bless his death.

The world is a cruel place.

NINETY-FIVE

Days and nights passed. I saw no one and heard no sounds except my own fears and the soup ladle at my judas window. I counted the days by the meals, one in the morning, one at night, each time a cold gruel—sewer water with a few kernels of maize. Supper included a tortilla.

The fray bringing the food tapped on the window, and I put my bowl through the opening for him to fill. Straining to see through the small opening, all I saw was his dark cowl. I realized the anonymity served two purposes: The lack of human contact heightened the fear of those trapped in this nightmare, and it protected the monks from the revenge of prisoners who won their freedom but remembered the torture they'd suffered.

The food server never spoke. I heard others in cells calling out to him, sometimes wailing that they were dying or pleading for mercy, but there was no sign that a human being resided beneath the dark robe.

On the fourth day of my confinement, a bang on my door came even though I had already finished my morning gruel. I waded across as the food door flapped opened. Candlelight flooded through the slot. The light was dull, but my light-starved eyes felt stabbed with maguey needles as I stared at it.

"Come into the light so I can see your face," the man holding the candle said.

I did as instructed. After a moment the candle was removed. I heard the scrap of wood as he moved a stool into position so he could sit and speak to me through the window. Human contact! I was close to tears at the notion that someone wanted to speak to me. Now I would find out what had happened to the don and his family and what the charges were against me.

"I have come to hear your confession for the transgressions you have committed against God and His Church," the man said. His voice was a monotone, the tone of a priest reciting a prayer that he had recited a thousand times before.

"I have committed no crimes. What am I charged with?"

"I am not permitted to tell you the charges."

"Then how can I confess? If I don't know the charges, what should I confess to? I can confess to impure thoughts when I saw a woman. Frequenting a tavern when I should have been in mass."

"Those are for the confessional booth. The Holy Office demands that you confess to crimes. You know the true nature of those crimes."

"I have not committed any crimes." Standing in the cold water, my body shivered and the words came out with a stutter. Of course, I was lying. I had committed many crimes. But none against God.

"Your denial will not do. If you were not guilty, you would not have been arrested and brought here. This is a House of the Guilty. The Holy Office investigates each charge thoroughly before taking a person into custody. It does not hunt down the sacrilegious, they are drawn to it by God's hand."

"I was brought here by devils, not angels."

"That is blasphemous! Speak not that way—you will not gain the Lord's mercy vilifying His servants. Understand this: If you do not confess your crimes against God and His Church, you will be put to the question."

"You mean tortured?" Anger was rising in me because I realized the helplessness of my situation. If I confessed to religious crimes, I would find myself at an auto-da-fé stake with a fire roaring around me. And if I refused to confess to things I never did, I would be tortured until I confessed to them.

"Like all men who have lived and loved and fought," I said, "I may have transgressed at some time. But these are not insults to God, nor do they jeopardize my mortal soul. I confessed my sins to the Church and have been granted absolution. If there are other matters, you must tell me of what I am accused so I may tell you whether there is any truth to the tales."

"That is not how the Holy Office does its sacred work. I am not authorized to tell you the charges. You will learn those when you appear before the tribunal. But it will go easier on you if you confess now so you can put yourself at their mercy. If you do not confess, the truth will be wrenched out of you."

"What is the value of words drawn with pain? How can the Church treat its children like this?"

"The Church does not inflict pain. God guides the instruments; thus, the pain derives from the instrument, not the Church's holy hand. When blood is spilled or pain inflicted, it is the fault of the person, not the Church. Torture is not inflicted as punishment but to secure testimony."

"How does the Holy Office justify this?"

"San Dominic tells us that when words fail, blows may prevail."

I almost laughed and asked him to point to anywhere in the Bible where Jesus advocated violence, but held my tongue.

"Who is authorized to tell me the charges?"

"The tribunal."

"When will I see the tribunal?"

"After you confess."

"That is insane!"

"You have a bad attitude," he scolded. "You are trying to use reasoning that merchants use when they are buying bales of wool. This is not a negotiation over a side of beef or a game of primero. We do not worry about what cards are being held across the table or who is bluffing. God knows your sins. Your duty is to confess your transgressions. When you fail in that duty, the truth will be drawn from you."

"Your tortures draw confessions from the innocent, and I am innocent. I have nothing to confess. What happens then? Do you torture me to death?"

"God recognizes His own. If perchance you die without sin under torture, you will find everlasting peace. It is a just system, one approved by the Lord Himself. We are merely His servants. You are given an opportunity to confess before the truth is drawn from you. No one is punished until they have an opportunity to repent. Later, you will be brought before a tribunal and told the charges. The prosecutor will call witnesses who have made accusations against you. Your advocate will be able to call witnesses in your favor. Until that is done, you will not be punished."

"When will I be called before the tribunal?"

"After you confess."

"And if I don't confess?"

The man made a nasal sound that expressed his impatience with my stupidity.

"If you fail to confess, you are deemed guilty. The tribunal will determine the degree of your guilt and your punishment."

"All right," I said, "what if I confess right now? When will I be brought before the tribunal?"

"When it is ordered. For some, the call comes quickly. For others..."

"What have people said about me that makes you think I am a bad person?"

"You will be told at the time of the trial."

"But how can I prepare a defense to what people say if I don't even know who they are until the time of my trial?"

"We speak in circles, and I am tired of the game." He leaned closer to the opening and spoke in a whisper. "Because of the severity, I will tell you one of the charges so you can confess and hope for mercy. It concerns the Christian child."

"Christian child?"

"A missing child has been found dead in a cave, a little girl. The child was nailed to a cross in the same manner as our Savior. Unspeakable things had been done to her naked body. Within a foot of the terrible crime, Jewish wine and cups with the sign of the Jews was found. One cup was filled with wine and the blood of the child."

"What have I to do with this horror?"

"Witnesses saw you leaving the cave."

My shout of denial must have been heard all the way to the viceroy's palace. I threw up my hands, beseeching God in the darkness.

"No! I have nothing to do with this evil. Yes, I have transgressed. Holy Father in Heaven, I sold a few deshonesto books, I put on a play that offended some, but that is the extent of my crimes. I never touched a—"

My mouth snapped shut. A look of smug satisfaction had spread on his face. The story of the child had been a ruse, designed to shock me into confessing to true crimes. He had succeeded.

"New Spain seethes with Jews," he hissed. "They pretend to be good Christians, but they are plotting the death of all Christians. It is the duty of good Christians to denounce all false Christians, even in their own family."

"Why are you here?" I demanded.

"I have come to hear your confession so that I may advise the tribunal you have repented."

"You have heard it. I am a good Christian. I sold some profano books. I regret my transgressions, Send a priest in and I will confess to those matters I have stated. I have no others to reveal."

"I heard nothing about the Jewish activities of Don Julio and the rest of his family."

"You will hear no more from me because the tale you want to hear is a lie. When will I meet my advocate?"

"You already have. I am an abogado de los presos. Your advocate."

Later I was taken from my cell and brought to a room where racks and other torture implements were applied. Waiting for me was Don Jorge, the familiar who paid me to print the banned lists, and an old friend—Juan the lépero.

"That's him," Juan said. "He said the master of the print shop had gone to Madrid. I never saw anyone but him run it."

"To your knowledge, this man practices witchcraft and has shift with the devil?"

"Yes, yes," the lying lépero said. "I have seen him talking to the devil. Once I saw him swirling in the air with the devil sodomizing him."

I laughed. "This lépero trash would sell you his mother's love hole for a copper."

Juan pointed an accusatory finger at me.

"He cast spells on me. Forced me to do the devil's work."

"You are a work of the devil, you swine. Do you think anyone would believe such a crazy story from a social scab?"

I looked at the familiars standing by us for confirmation that no one would believe a lying street trash with such a ridiculous story. Their faces told me that the lépero would indeed be believed.

After being returned to my cell, day and night became one again, and I no longer knew how long I had been imprisoned as I lost track of the monotonous food servings. Body fat accumulated from years of feasting at the don's table slipped off my bones. Anxiety never left me. When would I be taken out from my cell and tortured? Would I be able to back up my brave words and endure it or cry like a baby and confess to whatever they asked? Worse than my anxieties, I wondered how the don and the poor ladies fared. If confessing to sex with the devil would have gotten them released, I would have willingly done so. But I knew that anything I confessed to would be used against them as members of the household. I considered implicating that puta bitch Isabella as having had sex with the devil, but again, when I made myself even an innocent witness to blasphemy, I was sealing my doom.

Being in the cold, wet cell twenty-four hours a day was torture in and of itself. Isabella, in her wildest imagination, could not have found me a more miserable place to bed down. Ay, I would have given several toes for a night stretched out in my warm, dry bed above the stable. I would have given them just to have slept with the horses.

When they came to get me, I knew not the day or the hour. My cell door suddenly opened, and I was painfully blinded by torchlight.

"Come forward," a voice instructed me. "Stretch out your hands."

I closed my eyes and crawled out of the cell. My hands were chained together. I had to be lifted to my feet because my legs would not support me. I no longer had feeling or strength in my limbs. The two frays, wearing what I had come to think of as demon robes, assisted me to the torture room.

My abogado was waiting.

"You have an opportunity to confess before you are put to the question," he said. "I am here to witness it."

"I confess that I have seen you suck men's pene in the manner of vipers," I said. "I confess that I have seen these two devil priests sodomize sheep. I confess—"

"You may proceed," he said to the frays. Nothing in his voice betrayed that he was in anyway offended by my insults. "He should not be wearing this." He removed my mother's cross.

As I was being strapped to a rack, he stood beside me and spoke in a conversational tone. "You are lucky you are in New Spain. This dungeon is no worse than a stroll on the Alameda compared to prisons on the peninsula. I once served in a prison in Spain whose dungeon is so deep it is called el infierno, hell itself. Nowhere could a face be made out without striking a light."

"Is that where your mother conceived you?" I asked, in a most polite tone.

"Cristo, Cristo, you should not speak badly of one whose only mission in life is to help people like you."

My laughter was interrupted as the chain on my wrists was attached to a hook. Frays raised me until my feet were off the ground. Weights were attached to my feet. I was lifted into the air as the hook was raised and then allowed to fall toward the floor, but stopped with a jerk just before my feet touched solid ground. I screamed as my arms and legs were almost pulled from their joints by the weights.

My attorney sighed. "You wish to tell me about Don Julio and the Jewish rites he practices?"

I do not remember what my reply was, but it angered him and delighted my torturers. No torturer likes an easy victim because it keeps them from demonstrating their skills. I do not even remember all that was done to me—at some point I was lying flat as if in a bed, my mouth was propped open with a piece of wood, and a linen cloth was put down my throat. Water was slowly poured onto the cloth and it drained into my stomach. I could breathe only with difficulty, and I was certain my stomach was going to burst. When vómito erupted, it gushed out my mouth and nose and choked me. To my regret, my advocate sidestepped the flow I directed at him.

No more words flowed from me, either in confession or condemnation, and they worked on me until they tired. When they finished, I was too weak and dizzy to walk to my cell, and they chained me to a rack until I could regain my feet.

I could have told them that they were wasting their time torturing me. They had drained me of all human feeling by the time they began pounding me with questions. I merely drooled and laughed insanely at their questions because I was too weak and in agony to formulate answers or insults.

The walls separating my torture chamber from the adjoining one were full of wide cracks. I heard the whimper of a female voice, and I strained to maneuver into a position where I could see into the chamber. When I did, I gasped from what I saw.

Juana was strapped naked to a rack. The poor soul's skinny, little body showed all of its bones. Two frays were examining her, and I could see that they had spread her legs and were using an instrument to see if she was a virgin. I remembered what Fray Antonio told me: If an unmarried girl's hymen was broken, they would accuse her of having had intercourse with the devil. And if it was intact, she still was accused of having the intercourse—they claimed the devil had repaired it with his black magic.

Fire from somewhere deep in my soul exploded, and life erupted in me again. I screamed obscenities at the frays and resisted the gag they tried to put on my mouth. I did not shut up until I was beaten into unconsciousness.

But, of course, as my advocate had so thoughtfully apprised me in our first interview, it was not the frays inflicting the pain by swinging the clubs, it was the clubs themselves.

NINETY-SIX

More darkness. Dripdripdripdrip from the ceiling.

More torture. Questions that went unanswered. I was so weak they now had to drag me out of my cell and down the passageway to where the rack awaited.

My body now anticipated the tortures so well that I screamed before they inflicted pain. I don't know exactly all that flew off of my tongue; but since the torture continued, they must not have liked my answers. I had picked up an extensive vocabulary of gutter expressions on the streets of Veracruz, comments about one's wife, daughters, sons, mother, and father. I applied these liberally to my lawyer and the priests.

I confessed many things. Each day I confessed more and more, screaming my sins to them, demanding that they burn me at the stake so I would not be cold anymore. But my confessions did not please them because I never implicated the don or his family.

Then it stopped—no more dragging me from my cell, no more screaming. I no longer had any sense at all of the passage of time or if it even passed. But life goes on even in the most dire of situations, and soon I had enough sense back to realize how many places I hurt. I had sores on my body from unhealed wounds and the constant dampness.

But then one day I saw him again, the man who claimed to be my advocate. He came after a food serving that I knew was breakfast only because there was no tortilla.

"You appear before the tribunal today for trial. They will bring you up in a few minutes. Do you have any witnesses in your favor?"

It was a long time before I answered him. Not because my mouth worked slowly, but because I wanted to form the words correctly. When I spoke, it was calmly and quietly.

"How can I know what witnesses to call if I am not told the charges? How can I call witnesses if I cannot leave my cell to speak to them? How can I call witnesses if you tell me the trial is about to start? How can I put on a defense if my advocate is a whore in the pay of the devil?"

I don't know how long I spoke to the closed food door. I believe my advocate left after my first sentence, but I continued to talk logically and reasonably to the door. It did not answer me back.

Inquisitors must develop the eyes of bats. The room where the tribunal met was as ill lit as the rest of the dungeon. Half a dozen men in secretive cowls were in the room. Their faces were lost in shadows, and their function hardly had meaning to me. My impression was that there were two inquisitors, a prosecutor, and a number of other people whose precise function escaped me, but they may have been judges. Scribes were also present, taking down the words spoken.

I was chained to the chair I was sat upon. My advocate sat away from me, as if I would give him some foul disease if he crept too close. Perhaps it was my smell. He did not look pleased with me. I suppose he is usually able to inform the tribunal that he had been successful at obtaining a confession from an accused, and my denial was demeaning to his skills as my abogado.

I heard the prosecutor read the charges, but they made no sense to me—vague allegations about heresy, being a secret Jew, blasphemy, and devil worship. That I was a corrupt person who sold banned books and put on two offensive plays were the only charges they had right.

My advocate rose and informed the tribunal that he had dutifully asked me to confess the truth of the charges three times, and I had refused. "Persuasion on the rack failed to loosen his tongue. He is now in the hands of God."

"I don't see God in this room," I said. "I see men who believe they serve God but do the Lord an injustice."

My statements were not greeted with the applause of a well-received comedia but a frown from one of the judges.

"If the prisoner speaks without permission again, give him the mordaza," he told the constable. A mordaza was a gag. I shut my mouth.

The chain of evidence against me began with testimony from inquisitors who had questioned me verbally about the Church, God, Christ, Jews, Satan, witches, and only heaven knows what else. The questions sounded like those that Fray Antonio had described as the Witches Hammer, in which there were no real answers and every response could be twisted.

"He was asked how many horns Satan has," the fray testified at the Inquisition hearing. "He replied that he didn't know. As we all know, Satan has two horns."

"Had I said two horns, he would have accused me of having personally seen Satan!" I shouted.

"The mordaza," the constable was told.

"I meant no offense, Monseñor. Please, I promise to keep my lips sealed."

Once more I avoided being gagged.

The first witness was called. She was masked, but I could tell from her voice it was a servant from Don Julio's house. She was a crazy old woman who was always seeing devils and demons everywhere she looked. We all knew she was harmless, but she had the queer sort of insanity that Inquisitors fed upon.

"I saw them dancing," she told the tribunal, "that one," meaning me, "the don, his sister, and his niece. They each took turns dancing with the devil."

The judges asked her questions about Jewish customs in the house, whether we observed the Sabbath on Saturdays, ate meat on Fridays; the old woman confirmed that we ate meat on Fridays, a lie, but in response to other questions she kept telling them about different acts with the devil. She was obviously crazy, babbling on about demonic things when asked about Jewish rites.

I don't think even these judges were impressed with her tales, other than specifically noting the violation of the proscription on eating meat on Fridays.

Poor Juana could not have danced with her weak legs if the devil had propped her up, but I kept my mouth shut.

The next witness was another masked woman, this one well dressed. I knew her identity immediately.

Isabella had come to help nail down my coffin lid. From her well-kept appearance, she had not tasted the Inquisition's dungeon, but I had expected no less.

I cringed as I listened to her testimony because there was some truth to it.

"You call this metal tube a 'starscope'?" a judge asked.

"That is what Don Julio called it. I knew nothing of such things, of course. My belief is that this blackguard," she indicated me, "had brought the foul instrument from Spain, smuggling it by the officials of the Holy Office who inspect for such blasphemies."

"And you say that the purpose of the instrument was to spy on heaven?"

"Yes, that and many other evil things that I have no knowledge of."

No knowledge but she could testify to them? Like the birth of our Savior, was this Immaculate knowledge? I could tell from the testimony that the inquisitors had not found the instrument. I suspected that Don Julio, fearful that he could encounter problems in the city over the tunnel, had hidden his banned books and the starscope on the hacienda.

She was asked questions about Jewish practices, and she denied them for good reason—such practices would incriminate her, too. But she got a blow in against Don Julio in another way.

"He forced me to lay with him during times when I was with my monthly blood."

Engaging in coitus during a woman's monthly disablement was a sacrilege because conception could not be had at that time. It was generally believed that Jews and Moors conducted themselves in this manner to keep from fathering children that would necessarily be raised as Christians.

"You have no children, señora?" a judge asked.

"That is true. But it is not my fault. My husband was a brutal man with a terrible temper. I lived in constant fear of him."

I had to fight myself to keep from leaping out of my chair and going for her throat. If there ever was a man who walked with angels in his relationship with his family and friends, it was the don.

A book was shown to her.

"This book is one that you turned over to the familiars, is that correct?"

"Yes. I never saw the book before; but after my husband was taken into custody, I noticed it in the library. He had kept it in a secret place."

"The book sets forth the rites of the practice of Judaism," the judge said.

"I know nothing of that. I am a good Christian. The book belonged to my husband. I am certain it must be the book he used when he and his family, including this one"—I could feel her glare through the mask—"practiced their dark rites."

This time I leaped from my chair.

"That's a lie. The book does not belong to the don, and I can prove it." I pointed at it. "The don brands his books with his initials along the edge, as is the custom among book owners. There is no brand. The book is false evidence!"

They gagged me.

Isabella was deliberately incriminating Don Julio and me with false evidence. The woman was motivated in life only by money and vanity. The Holy Office seized the property of those found guilty. It took no imagination to conclude that an arrangement had been made by which Isabella received property back in exchange for her testimony. Or Ramon de Alva could be behind her, getting rid of his lover's husband and the threat of exposure on the tunnel project at the same time.

The third witness was a man who I could not identify. He stated he worked for Don Julio on the tunnel project and that he had observed Don Julio and me scoff when he said that we should dedicate the tunnel to San Pablo. That he had later seen us carry an object into the tunnel, a six-pointed star. The object had no significance to him at the time; but now that a fray had enlightened him, he realized that what we carried was a mystic Jewish symbol, the Shield of David, that Jews attributed magical properties to.

I had never been to the tunnel, had never seen this six-pointed star-shield, but I would not have taken exception even if my mouth wasn't sealed. The matter of my guilt, and that of Don Julio, was predetermined. Nothing I could do or say, no appeal to reason, would suffice.

My advocate never asked a question of any witness.

My gag was removed and a judge asked if I wished to speak about the charges.

"The charges are nonsense," I said. "This trial has the same validity as the trial of another Jew a long time ago."

"Then you admit you are a Jew," the judge said.

"The Jew I referred to is our Savior, Jesus Christ, whose name was chosen for me to bear. I now see why I bear his name. I am to be martyred by false witnesses as He once was."

The tribunal was not pleased with my response. I was returned to the blackness of my cell. I was only in the cell for the night. My door opened and I was escorted out to be burned at a stake, I was certain. But instead I was taken to a large, ground-level cell that held five prisoners, including one I knew well.

Ignoring his embarrassment, I gave my amigo a great hug. Mateo took me into a corner and spoke to me in whispers.

"You have escaped the stake, but not severe punishment. You will get a hundred lashes and sentenced to the northern mines."

"How do you know?"

"My cousin in Oaxaca, who made his fortune buying land from indios after getting them drunk, has paid the Holy Office for my sins. He has proof our family line has purity of blood. I will be taken to Acapulco and placed aboard the Manila galleon. The ocean crossing is rivaled only by Charon's trip across the river Styx. Many of those who survive the brutal trip are eaten by the natives.

"I asked an accommodation for you, and he was told you were a suspected marrano, so exile to Manila was not possible. But he discovered that someone had paid for your life. A sentence to the mines is hardly less painful than being burned at the stake, but at least you live another day and... who knows?" He shrugged.

"And what of the don? Juana and Inez?"

His face darkened and he wouldn't look at me.

"The stake. They will be burned at the stake? Santa Maria," I whispered. "Is there no way to ransom them?"

"Inez and Juana are marranos."

"I don't believe it."

"They had a book of Jewish rites Isabella found."

"It was lying evidence. The don's initials were not on the book."

"The book was theirs, not the don's. I saw it at the hacienda. I also know they commonly practiced the rites. I have seen them. That's why the don banished them to the hacienda. And he forbade them from bringing any of their Jewish instruments or books with them. They brought it to the city, and Isabella found it and used it against them. I was shown the book by the frays and denied I had ever seen it."

"I don't care if they're Jews. They're my friends."

"Not friends, Bastardo, they're our family. And while we don't care, there are many who do."

"Nothing can be done?"

"If they repent, they will be strangled at the stake before the fire is lit. Because they are women, they might elude the stake altogether by repenting, but they refuse. It's Inez. The nervous little bird is determined to die a martyr for her beliefs, and little Juana, I think, is just tired of living. The don will not permit his sister and niece to die alone, so he also refuses to repent."

"Madness! These are ravings from a play written by a madman."

"No, Cristo, this is no play. Life is sadder than any comedia. And the blood is real. This is a living nightmare."

NINETY-SEVEN

An auto-da-fé was not just a burning, but a grand show in which different levels of punishment were issued. And while all in the cell were to be punished at the auto-da-fé, none were to die at the stake.

Mateo warned me that no one in the cell could be trusted. Those who were not already spies for the Inquisition would become spies to reduce their punishment.

After a few days my advocate came to see me. He informed me of the sentence that Mateo had already advised me of. I pretended surprise at hearing that I would be spared the stake. Hoping that I did not sound contrite, I asked why I had been spared.

"The Lord acts in mysterious ways," he said.

Auto-da-fé, act of faith.

A quemadera, a burning place, was established in a corner of the Alameda, with a wooden pavilion similar to that I seen erected for the notables to watch the landing of the new archbishop. Only this time they will hear a sermon by a fray of the Holy Office and the charges read; then they will watch human beings burned as if they were pigs roasted for a party.

Mateo, who had an eye and an ear at the Alameda even when the rest of him was encased with me in a cell, said that preparation for the auto-da-fé had been going on for over a week, and the whole country was excited about it. People would be traveling from all over New Spain to witness the punishments, the burning as the climax of the celebration. I say "celebration" because the event came replete with the fervor of a holy festival.

On the fateful day, the frays had us dress in sambenitos, a shirt and pants of rough cotton dyed yellow and decorated with red flames, devils, and crosses. We were led outside and placed on donkeys with our shirts lowered so that we were first naked from the waist up. Even the upper bodies of two convicted women were naked.

Drum beats, horns, and criers preceded us, then high officials of the Holy Office in their finest robes and silk stockings, carried in sedan chairs. Then came the familiars on horseback, in chivalry, finery, and armor, as if they were the highest knights of the land.

The balconies of the houses on our path were draped with brilliant tapestries and banners bearing the coat of arms of the owners. Wealth was displayed, too, as candelabras and vessels of the purest silver and gold were set upon the railings. The purpose of this ostentation escaped me, but my only wealth for most of my life had been a cross placed around my neck by my mother when I was a baby. Now even that was gone. My advocate had taken it.

Then came those of us wearing the sambenito. I soon found out why our torsos were left bare. People lining the streets threw rocks and rotten vegetables at us. With our shirts down, it hurt more. Lépero street riffraff who were used to the kicks and blows of their betters flung the sharpest stones.

Each of us carried a green candle, another sign that the Holy Office had conquered the devils within that had made us sin. Behind us came a cart carrying Don Julio, Inez, and Juana. I cried when I saw them and a familiar taunted me as a coward, thinking I wept for myself.

"Do not cry," Mateo told me, "the don wants to be honored by a man for his courage, not cried over by a woman. When he looks at you, show him with your eyes and face that you respect and pay homage to him."

The words did no good. I cried for the don, for the frightened bird of a sister who had finally found her courage, and for the niece woman-child whose bones broke easier than straw.

In the quemadera area, those of us to receive lashes were tied to posts. As I was tied, I looked up and saw the coat of arms of Don Diego Velez hanging from a balcony that a group of people stood upon. Ramon and Luis, the assassins of my life, were there. There was a movement beside Luis, and suddenly I was looking into the eyes of Eléna. She stared down at me for a moment, her eyes not going anywhere else in the quemadera. Before the first blow struck my back, she slipped away and disappeared from my sight.

I knew now who my savior was. I had suspected that she had ransomed me, but now I was certain. She had come not to see the suffering, but to see that her deed had not been betrayed and my punishment had not included the stake. And perhaps to let me know that she was repaying the Son of the Stone for the comedia.

Not to faint from the lashing was the sign of much man, but I prayed God to cause me to pass out so that I would not bear witness to the horror to be done to my family. My eyes I could avert, but my hands were tied and my ears wide open. My lashing post was closest to the pyres, and I would hear all.

At times my mind was lost as the whip struck my back. Men and women have died under the lash, but there were shouts from the crowd that my back was being spared because so much of the skin was still intact despite the hundred lashes. Eléna's mercy had also reached the hand that held the whip, but in this case I wished that I had died rather than remain awake.

Don Julio got off the cart and walked to the stake. A great roar went up in the crowd, a bloodthirsty howl as if each one of those thousands gathered had been personally harmed by the don. He ignored the crowd and walked as a king on his way to a coronation.

I suddenly realized what the bloodthirsty event reminded me of. In the reading of the classics under Fray Antonio's tutelage, I had read stories about the bloody sacrifices in the arena the emperors provided to entertain and appease the public. The Aztec sacrifices had also been done to entertain the public. Eh, man has not changed in thousands of years, he is still a beast.

Inez had to be helped along, and I knew not whether that was because of physical weakness or if her zeal was faltering. When I saw her face, brave and unafraid, I knew that the weakness was of body and not of spirit. She glowed with courage, and I shouted my admiration to her and again the whip tore at my back.

Juana I could not bear to even look upon. She was so tiny a single guard was able to gather her in his arms and carry her to her place of honor. A murmur swept through the crowd, and people turned their heads to avoid looking at her.

I averted my eyes and only know what I was told. Each stake had a garret strap wire around it connected to a turn handle on the backside of the post. If one repented, the executioner put the strap around the throat and twisted the handle, tightening the strap until the victim died of strangulation.

This act of mercy was performed only on those who repented and only by the viceroy's men rather than frays because clerics could not kill. Or so they claimed.

Don Julio and Inez refused to repent and were not given the act. I have been told by one close enough to hear that Juana also refused to repent, but that the executioner, whose black heart broke at her plight, pretended she had repented and strangled her, saving her from the slow excruciation of the flames. Another story was that a wealthy benefactor in the crowd had sent gold ducats to the executioner to ensure that Juana's suffering was short.

I heard the fires ignite, first the tinder, then the kindling, then the soaring flames. I heard the gasps, the screams; the sizzle of flesh, the terrible pop of exploding blisters and detonating fat. I tried to keep out the sounds of suffering by filling my mind with one word that I repeated over and over.

Revenge, revenge, revenge...

PART FIVE

...engendered in some prison, where wretchedness keeps its residence, and every dismal sound its habitation...

Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

NINETY-EIGHT

I did not journey to the northern mines on a pure-blood horse but on the floorboards of a mule-drawn prison-train, coffle chained to the wagon bed. I shared my corner of the wagon bed with a sambenito from the auto-da-fé who had gotten a hundred lashes and two years at the mines for sodomy. My sentence was for life; but since few survived more than a year in the mines, a life sentence was no great matter.

I waved good-bye to Mateo as I was taken to the prison-train. He would soon leave the Inquisition prison himself for his ocean voyage to Manila in the Filipinas, the place of banishment for New Spain's undesirables. Between the tropical fevers and the warring natives, the Filipinas was likewise regarded as a death sentence.

A dozen other men were chained with me, but other than the sodomite and myself, they were all petty criminals sold to the mines by the civil authority. The term of service for each was no more than a year, and most expected relatives to suborn their early release. One of them, a mestizo sentenced for stealing a sack of maize to feed his family, was making his second trip to the mines. The first had been a six-month's stretch for an overdue debt. Rather than extending the due date or adding on additional interest, the creditor had had him arrested, jailed, then sold to a mine for the amount of the debt.

At times the terrain was too steep and rugged for the wagon to carry us, and we had to get out and walk, our legs coffle chained one prisoner to the other. For the most part, though, we bounced in the rocking wagon, our backs an agony of whip welts, our spines jolted out of place by the hard shocks of the springless wagon.

The mestizo reminded me of the mine slave who'd been murdered before my eyes when I was a boy. I told him about the incident, and he told me stories of the mines. They were not pretty tales, but I needed to know all I could about my new prison. I had sworn to avenge my family and was determined not to die in a mine.

"We will be beaten on arrival so that we learn submission," he told us, "but not beaten so severely that we cannot work."

My back was still raw from the auto-da-fé's flogging—the one the crowd felt was not ruthless enough. The crowd's opinion notwithstanding, I knew even then I would carry those scars for the rest of my life—however long that was.

"For those with a life sentence, or who are slaves, they brand their faces just in case they try to escape," the mestizo said.

I can still see the brands that scarred the face of the mine slave when he was killed before me at the hacienda. One of the brands was a small "S" that probably was the initial of a Sanchez or Santos or a dozen other potential "S" names who owned the mine.

"Africano slaves and those given life sentences work the most dangerous job—breaking ore out of the mine face."

The mestizo looked at me as he spoke because everyone in the wagon knew of my life sentence. His coloring was almost the same as mine; but I was known as a Spaniard, a converso, and carried myself as one, and he gave no indication whether he knew we were both of mixed blood.

"The ore is broken out with iron picks then loaded into burden baskets with shovels," he said. "Cave-ins occur constantly, and many slaves die the first time their pick strikes."

Don Julio had told me that the mine owners do minimal timber-shoring because of the expense. Vast quantities of timber were required in the smelting process, and the wood had to be hauled over great distances. It was cheaper to replace workers than pay for timber.

We reached the hacienda de mina in slightly under two weeks. It overlooked a high, sheer cliff top, and a river ran through its land, bringing reliable water to this otherwise barren waste. However, it was quickly apparent that this hacienda was not a typical land estate, supported by crops and livestock. The gate swung open, and we entered a vast, smoking, self-sufficient compound, dedicated to wresting silver from an uncooperative mountain, then forcing the unwilling metal from the reluctant rock, which only grudgingly gave it up. The excavation of tunnels, the mining ore, and hauling it out—thousands upon thousands of loads—and then the refinement of that ore, separating the silver from the unprofitable dross, was what the hacienda de mina was about.

We entered the compound's soaring walls in chains and shackles. All the while I scrupulously studied everything—the black, gaping mouth of the mine shaft; the thunder of the stamping mill; the fuming roar of the refinery; the clanging, filthy, smoke-shrouded blacksmith shop; the long, malodorous, soot-fouled prisoners' barracks. Towering above us, the mine owner's huge, high, massively walled house, gessoed a stark white against so much squalor and darkness.

I contemplated the compound's surrounding whitewashed walls of thick adobe brick with special care. One day I would scale those soaring white walls and leave this obscene hellhole forever.

Indios came out of the hole in the ground like enslaved ants, one after another, sacks and burden baskets slung over their backs and tumplined across their foreheads, which, according to the mestizo, averaged a hundred pounds apiece—four-fifths the weight of the wiry men who carried them.

The ants dumped their loads in a pile near the stamping mill. I could see only a little of it as I was marched toward a barrack, but I was familiar with the process from reading the book Don Julio had written on the mining industry.

The rock and dirt carried out of the mines was crushed in the stamping mill then spread into large heaps across a stone-paved courtyard called a patio. Water was added to the minerals until they became muddy. Then an azoguero, a refiner, mixed mercury and salt into the mud. The mud was spread into thin cakes that were stirred and left to "cook." Later the silver was washed and heated until the mercury separated out. This amalgamation process took weeks to months, depending on the skill of the mixer and the grade of the silver.

Mercury, or quicksilver, was vital to the mining process, and the king held a royal monopoly on it. Most of it came from the Almaden mine in Spain.

In the outdoors area, where meals were taken, we were assigned to work crews. Each crew was overseen by an africano slave.

The man I was assigned to was several inches taller than I. He was powerfully built, had survived a decade of overseering mine slaves, and currently commanded a dozen or so. His body was scarred from innumerable mining accidents. He invariably reminded me of Rome's arena gladiators. His name was Gonzalo.

"Take off your shirt," he told me, whip in hand.

I removed my shirt. The scars on my back were red but no longer bled and were healing.

The whip lashed the back of my legs. I cried out, startled from the pain. Two men grabbed my arms and held me as he beat me five more times across the calves and the backs of my thighs.

"You are here to work, not to be flogged. I whip you so that you will work harder. I did not whip your back because it has not healed. I don't want you hurt so much that you can't work. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"As long as you work, you will be not be whipped—too often—and will be given decent food so you can work hard. If you try to escape, you will be killed. This is not a jail. You earn more time in jail for attempting to escape. Here you will be killed. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"If you are lazy and do not work, I will flog you worse than the familiars at the auto-da-fé. The second time I will cut off your ear. When you go below, you will see a nailing post where we impale the ears. Do you know what will happen the third time?"

"You will cut off my head."

Gonzolo grinned and struck me across the face with the buttstock of his whip. Blood squirted down my cheek. "You are right, but it is not good to be right too much. You are a work animal, not a man. When you talk to me, you must keep your eyes looking down so I know you respect me."

Indio dog handlers brought their mastiffs closer, snarling hell-hounds with snapping jaws.

"Some plot to escape from the sleeping house in the middle of the night. We had one man try that. He dug a hole through the house wall and ran for the hacienda wall. The dogs ate well that night."

He hit me again on the back of the legs.

"Do not attempt to hide any silver; you have nothing to spend it on. The first time you are caught hiding silver, you will lose an ear. The second time your head."

The whip lacerated my legs below the knees.

"Take him to be branded."

The two men held me as a blacksmith shoved a glowing hot iron with the initial "C" about the size of the first joint of my little finger. I flinched away from the iron and instead of a perfect "C," it smeared the letter across my cheek on the same spot where I was bleeding from the whip handle.

And so I began my life as a mine slave. Branded and flogged, I was allowed to eat and sleep only because dray animals need food and rest to work. The sleeping house was a windowless mud-brick building with only one door. Its purpose was imprisonment, and it succeeded admirably. No beds or rooms, it was just a long, narrow room with straw and scattered blankets on the floor.

There were two twelve-hour shifts down below plus more work topside, moving ore from the stamping-mill piles to where it was amalgamated on the patio. When one crew came in from its twelve-hour shift, the men ate, then went into the barracks, where they slept until it was time for their shift.

The crew I was assigned to shared the same sleeping space and blankets. When one crew left, another found a blanket in the straw and slept. We had no personal possessions except the clothes we wore. When our clothes rotted off, a ragged shirt or pants was provided from a pile gathered from men who had already died.

Each day we filed into the shaft head and descended by ladder from one tier to another, down to the main tunnel. In the mine, it was dark, damp, cold, dusty, and dangerous—and then, as we descended, it became so infernally hot that the sweat flooded from us in cataracts, and men dropped dead from lack of water. Our only light came from candles and small torches, and once beyond their glow we vanished into darkness.

Because of the darkness, escape would be easy; but there was no place to run to. The only way out was topside, where guards and dogs awaited.

Being a lifer, I spent part of my time working on blasting crews. We chipped and hammered and dug holes several feet deep into the mine face, then packed in the black powder—the same explosive used in cannons and muskets. We poured a line of black powder, lit it, and ran like hell.

A recent innovation, we were not adept at it, and given the lack of shoring timber, blasting carried with it serious problems. Whereas it did loosen a lot of rock—a single blast broke up more rock than a dozen men could loosen in a day with picks—it also loosened tunnel walls throughout the mine. Suffocating clouds of dust and debris blew through the tunnels with hurricane force, and cave-ins were commonplace. Men were routinely buried alive.

I was trapped by cave-ins every few days and only through the luck of the draw was able to dig my way out. Many were not so lucky. The mestizo who'd tried to educate me in the ways of the mines was buried alive the first week.

After blasting, we returned to the mine face with picks, shovels, and double-headed hammers to break up the rock and dirt.

The work was so excruciatingly arduous, we were fed not only beans and tortillas, but on alternate nights, meat. Consequently, after initial bouts of pain, dizziness, and the bite of the lash, my stamina improved. Any caballero who saw the muscles harden on my hands, arms, and back would instantly know I was no gentleman.

The mine owners used the de rato, or shortest route, method of mining. An ore vein was found and a tunnel began that followed the vein—twisting, turning, up the mountain, suddenly down it. Wherever the silver went, we went.

When I entered the mine, it was predawn and dark. And the sun was down when I came out. I no longer knew from personal experience whether the sun still warmed the earth or eternal night had fallen.

My world became one of darkness and drudgery. I was often too tired to even think and that helped heal the horror in my brain, forged by the fiery holocaust that had consumed Don Julio and his family.

Once I learned to deal with the arduous cycle of work, eating, sleep, and intermittent floggings, I began to think about breaking out. I knew escape could mean my death, but that was of no consequence. My greatest fear was dying anonymously in a cave-in, buried eternally under a mountain of rock—and never avenging Don Julio.

Escape would not be easy. The harsh physical conditions were more than matched by the brutal vigilance of the guards. Nonetheless, I gradually saw a way. Once, while waiting in an abandoned tunnel for the blasting to finish, I noticed a slender thread of light slanting through a crack about the thickness of a fingernail.

How did light penetrate a tunnel that was hundreds of feet beneath the earth's surface?

Gonzolo saw me staring at the light and laughed. "Do you think it's magic, marrano?"

"I don't know what it is," I confessed.

"It's coming through the mountainside. Crawl through that crack for ten or twelve feet, and you'll be standing above a river. Tell you what. Make it through that crack, and I'll let you leave this mine."

He laughed long and hard at his witless jest.

Someday I will not only walk out, I will strangle you with your whip, I promised myself.

But that certain slant of light stayed with me. Maybe it was Don Julio's training. He had taught me to question physical phenomena, and every question I asked myself about that stream of light produced the same answer: Beyond that wall of rock stood freedom.

All I had to do was work my way through the crack.

Obviously, hammering through a dozen feet of stone was not an option. But I did have something that would widen that crack in a heartbeat, and as a lifer I knew how to use it: black powder.

The crack already existed. I'd have to widen it by cramming enough powder in. After blowing that mountainside to kingdom come, I'd have to work my way out through all that rock... assuming the mountain did not fall upon my head...

Stealing the black powder would be difficult. The powder was stored in a windowless adobe hut with a locked iron door. As for the powder we used, it was brought in in small quantities and heavily guarded.

But when I packed the charges into the mine face, I was alone with it. If before each blasting, I could steal a pinch of the powder, secret it on my body, and hide it later, the small thefts would add up.

If I was caught, there would be hell to pay.

If I didn't try, I would die in the mine.

NINETY-NINE

Over a period of months I collected and hid the powder a thimbleful at a time near the crack in the abandoned tunnel. With a little of my wet urine, I created cakes out of it. After the cakes dried I broke them up and crushed them into what Don Julio called "maize" powder because each chunk was about the size of a kernel of maize.

With each surreptitious trip to the abandoned tunnel, I packed some black powder into the crack.

Stealing the powder, sneaking brief moments in the tunnel, packing the crack, the beatings, the cave-ins, sheer physical exhaustion were all taking a toll on me. By the time I was ready to make my move, I was more than just frantic, I was now deranged by the sheer horror and impossibility of what I was doing.

Furthermore, Gonzolo was after me. In order to pull all this off, I was increasingly late for work, and though once at the mine face I was among the hardest of workers, lateness was something Gonzolo would not tolerate.

That last afternoon when I arrived late at the mine face he struck me across the head with the buttstock of his quirt so hard my ears rung, then said, "Tonight, when I finish with you at the flogging post, marrano, you'll never be late to the mine face again. And you'll remember the Inquisition as angels of mercy. Assuming, that is, you survive what I give you."

So that was that; it was today or never.

For the rest of the shift, he would not let me out of his sight. When I carried back my burden baskets of ore, when I went to get black powder, tools, anything, everything, he was on me like a shadow. And when it was time for the shifts to change, he walked me back personally, his right hand locked on my elbow.

We were just passing the abandoned tunnel, when I turned to him and stopped. "I just want to ask you one favor," I said, in my most contrite voice, my eyes downcast.

I needed to make sure we were alone. Gonzolo was always the last man to leave the tunnels, and he automatically looked around for stragglers. The last men rounded the bend in the tunnel ahead, and we were alone.

"You have the right to ask nothing, marrano!" he hissed, and swung the whipstock at me again.

Mateo's fencing lessons at last bore fruit. I parried the blow with my double-headed mine hammer, then smashed him in the nose with its iron top. Grabbing him by the throat, I dragged him into the abandoned tunnel and slammed him into the wall.

"Die, you son of a whore, die!" I hissed in his face.

I backhanded the hammer into his left temple, killing him instantly—a death far more merciful than any he had dispensed.

Now I had two choices: blow this mountain to kingdom come or be tortured to death by an army of mine guards.

I hurriedly packed the rest of the hidden black powder into the crack and inserted the fuse. Down tunnel was the fire stove where we lit the brands we used to light the powder. I hurried down tunnel. I had to get to it before the next shift reached the shaft.

At the stove I took a brand—a small shank of wood soaked in pitch at the tip—from the brand box and lit it.

A guard shouted, "You, prisoner, what are you doing here? Where's Gonzolo?"

Another guard's voice said. "Why aren't you with the rest of your shift?"

I raced back to the abandoned shaft as fast as I knew how.

I beat them to the shaft and lit a fuse. I had no idea how effective it would be. It was little more than twine soaked in urine and black powder. I had no idea how fast it burned. It might burn in five seconds. It might not burn at all. I hadn't had time to test it.

Cupping the blazing brand, I lit the fuse as the two guards charged into the tunnel.

Both were armed with short swords, and again Mateo's instructions saved my life. When the first guard—a short, skinny africano with close-cropped hair and no front teeth—thrust at my throat, I slipped into my fencing-dancing posture and ducked. His momentum carried him into me, throwing him off balance and, at the same time, blocking any assault the other guard might be planning.

I drove my fist into his Adam's apple—while my heavy hammer pulverized his pelvis. He screamed and went limp in my arms.

Using his body as a shield I dodged his partner's sword blows while I groped for the short sword his partner had dropped on the tunnel floor. At last I had it in my hand. Letting the guard fall groaning, I faced the other guard, sword in one hand, hammer in the other.

Mateo had taught me that when fighting with rapier and dagger, the only practical use for the dagger was as a stabbing weapon. In other words, I was to occupy my opponent with my rapier, then kill him with my knife.

Well, this short sword wasn't a rapier and my hammer wasn't a dagger, but the strategy still seemed sound. Especially when combined with Mateo's other piece of irrefutable wisdom: Always stay on the attack.

I sprung at the man like a crazed tiger, the hammer raised and pulled back in my left hand, the sword blade flashing and feinting, cutting and thrusting in my right.

Seeing himself closely confined with an armed maniac, he turned and fled; and I raced after, thirsting for blood, crazed with rage.

Which was the only thing that saved my life. For the fuse worked all too well. It's two-foot length exploded in less than half a minute, sympathetically detonating a full two pounds of black powder I had hidden in the tunnel wall but had not had enough time to relocate down the tunnel and well out of the blast radius.

The explosion buried the guard and myself in a small mountain of collapsing rock. I came to slowly, groggily. By now I could hear voices coming from up the shaft. The next shift, plus guards, would be coming straight here to clear the rubble and learn what had happened.

I had killed a supervisor, two guards, and blown up half the shaft. I had to make good my escape. I scrambled back down the shaft to the abandoned tunnel. It had caved in too and was filled with rock and rubble almost to the ceiling. But through rock and rubble something else had broken through: light.

I scrambled over the deadfall like a cat. With hands and hammer I began clearing a jagged, foot-high crawl space. I could make it to the outside, I thought, except for one rocky scarp jutting up near the exit. I hoped and prayed I could break it off with my hammer.

The shouts up shaft were growing louder, and the crevice was groaning and shaking. I didn't have much time. Soon the guards would be here—and the mountain would come back down, resealing my escape hatch.

I shouldered my way into the crevice.

It was a tight, jagged, bloody crawl to the light, and what lay beyond God only knew. By the time I reached the bloody scarp, I was a mass of cuts and blood. Furthermore, I could hear men entering the abandoned shaft, meaning they would hear my hammer blows.

To hell with it.

I laid into the rocky scarp with both hands as hard as I knew how. The din of my hammer blows was loud enough to wake the damned, and the screams behind me grew louder. On the fourth blow, the scarp broke off and went flying off through the crevice. At the same moment, some man behind me grabbed my sandaled foot, crawled up the tunnel, and grabbed my thigh. I turned and was about to hammer his skull to pieces, when he shouted, "I'm coming with you!"

"Then come along," I shouted, "wherever the hell we're headed!"

Grabbing the outside edge of the crevice, I poked my head out. I had had several minutes to gradually adjust to the light, but still it was blinding. I shielded my eyes and kept moving. I had to get out before the guards came and grabbed us both.

I was halfway out of the crevice when my eyes adjusted enough that I could see the escape route. To my right, perhaps a hundred feet away, was a slanting fissure in the cliff face, transversing a good four or five hundred feet I couldn't see how far down it went, but it was my only shot I had to scramble across that vertical cliff and then work my way down the fissure.

Now the prisoner behind me was in hysterics. A guard had worked his way into the crevice and had his ankle.

"No, no!" he screamed. "I can't go back."

I shared his sentiments completely. The crevice—with a million tons of rock pressing down on it—was groaning and screaming like a dying animal. I groped a couple of handholds and swung out over the abyss. My sandals went flying off my feet, falling what looked to be forever into the roiling, white-water rapids below. It was just as well. My bare feet would be better in feeling out footholds.

I found one and started out across the cliff face toward the fissure.

One hundred feet, a foot at a time, as I worked my way across that wall of rock, it seemed more than a hundred miles. My feet and fingers trembled in agony, bled profusely, and, as if in sympathy, the mountain itself groaned, moaned, vibrated, as if agonizing over all the horrible pain I'd caused it.

Still I almost reached it. I was within five feet of the slanting fissure, down which I could climb, perhaps to safety. At least I wouldn't have to crawl across this cliff face like a frightened bug.

But the mountain would have none of it. I had hurt her too badly; and being a mountain, her vengeance was vast. My black power blasts had collapsed tunnels all over the mountain. Long-forgotten cracks and holes and fissures along that cliff face were exuding smoke and dust. To my right black smoke was still pouring out of the crevice I'd crawled through.

In fact a guard's head was poking out of the opening. He was black with mine dust, as was I, and he was screaming obscenities I could not hear because the mountain was also screaming. It was shaking and trembling, thundering and roaring—and a million tons of rock came down on the crevice, sealing it forever. From my perch I could hear and feel more and more tunnels collapsing all up and down the mountain. More puffs of smoke and dust billowed out of the cliff face.

A wolfish grin split my face, and I could not resist laughing. I had not only rid the mine of Gonzolo, I'd rid the mountain of the mine.

I reached out with my left hand for the slanting fissure, but instead of grabbing its edge, I was hit by the reverberation of a shaft cave-in on the other side of my piece of cliff. My left hand reached only air. The mountain shook me like a jaguar shaking a jungle rat. The outcrop my right hand clung to broke off, and I was holding onto nothing. The mountain was now vibrating furiously and shook me loose. It rid itself of its despoiler, and I was falling, falling, falling.