I Woman of Tepexpan11,000 B.C.
CIPAKI, Spear-Thrower, leads a band of nineteen men, women and children at The Hill, a two hundred foot mound in the Valley of Mexico. A figure-eight shaped lake lies from north to south, its glistening waters edged by emerald marshes. A waist-high sea of red grass stretches to foothills covered with pines and oaks; the higher ranges lie green and flower-studded below the snow line. The valley is the habitat of mammoths, giant sloths, pronkhorndeer, cameloids and a type of horse, all thriving in a warm humid climate. The Early Hunters move their camp three or four times a season, as much in search of food as an innate wanderlust from great migrations of the past, journeys lost in myth but real enough to ancestors crossing the land bridge from Asia to Alaska. Blood ties and plain terror bind the three families in Cipaki's band. Earthquakes rock the vast valley floor, active volcanoes close off three sides of the basin, constantly raining fire and ash and sending rivers of molten rock cascading into the lake with sky-high explosions of steam. XEAKI, Mouse, is the son of Cipaki's first wife. Mouse is seventeen, a miserable hunter, lazy and a sore disappointment to his intrepid father. IUITL, Feather, Cipaki's second wife suggests that Mouse will find purpose in life with a woman at his side. Mouse is indifferent to the idea. Cipaki is excited by the chance of a good fight: Finding a wife for his bone-lazy son entails a raid on another band in the valley. Packing up their possessions – stone tools, spear points, clubs, javelins, gourds and roots – the hunters leave The Hill and head north. In the past, the search would've been a long one for the valley was thinly-populated but in living memory this has changed. The big game has become scarce, the killing of a mammoth a rare event. A limitless abundance is ending amid severe climate changes brought by the last retreat of the glaciers, and increasing presence of man. The band sights another group robbing nests of waterfowl and attacks without warning. Iuitl clubs a woman and drags off her daughter, a thirteen year old seen as ideal mate for Mouse. The reluctant suitor takes no part in the battle for his bride: Mouse lost his footing and fell into a pig's wallow. Mouse mumbles a greeting when Iuitl presents him with her capture. The girl, ALOCTLI, Mouth-Biter laughs at a creature streaked with mud and excrement, an inauspicious start to their romance. Cipaki is wounded in the fight and dies. Besides the useless Mouse, there are two adult males in the band, neither with Spear-Thrower's skills. Iuitl, the huntress, takes charge as they move on. Aloctli is a sharp-tongued shrew who makes Mouse's life a misery. He frequently flees their fire and sits alone, refusing to let Aloctli approach. Mouse devotes hours to scraping the bones of animals with stone implements, making no useful items but letting his imagination soar. His most startling creation is the head of a coyote carved from the sacrum of a cameloid. One night, Mouse throws an animal skin over his shoulder and holds the coyote head in front of his face, dancing in the moonlight and howling like a wolf. He gets grudging respect from his family, who don't hide their alarm at the apparition. Iuitl leads her band when they join three other groups to hunt a pair of mammoths. The huge beasts are driven to the swamps, where their pursuers literally worry them to death with their spears and javelins. The animals are butchered on the spot, the hunters gorging themselves until they can eat no more. It's Iuitl's last hunt. She's accidentally stabbed in the melee and succumbs from her wounds. The huntress is given a simple burial beside the lake before her band heads back to The Hill. – In 1949, a geologist finds human remains in the old bed of Lake Texcoco. The skeleton appears to have been deliberately buried face down, with the legs drawn up under the body. The remains of Tepexpan Man are later found to belong to a woman no more than thirty years of age, five feet two inches, and not unlike a modern Mexican Indian. The band faces annihilation when the earth begins to shake and a plume of smoke rises from the surrounding mountains. With a thundering explosion, two volcanoes erupt tearing open the ground. The great lake is swept by a wind of fire, its waters becoming a boiling torrent. Mouse finds courage at last. He leads the survivors to a side pocket of the stricken valley, where they shelter in a tunnel-like cave, one hundred yards long and ending in a clover-leaf subterranean chamber. The cataclysm passes and Mouse and his family emerge from the natural lava tube like human ants. – Countless generations hence, the story is told of First Man, who came from a womb in the earth. Here, too, Sun and Moon saw first light.
II Plaza of Brilliant Serpents A.D. 519 – A.D. 550
Like his ancestor Mouse, MACUILLI TOCHTLI, Five Rabbit, has a gift for carving. His father, NAUI CUETZPALLIN, Four Lizard, was banished to a turquoise mine four hundred miles north of the Valley of Mexico. Macuilli Tochtli's mother came from the barbarian Chichimeca. Sixteen years old now, Macuilli Tochtli's father died when he was seven. His mother returned to the Chichimeca abandoning her newborn in the mining outpost located in the modern state of Zacatecas. One day early in A.D. 519, the venerable OME COATL, Two Serpent, a priest and engineer, comes from the capital to investigate a decline in the turquoise output. Ome Coatl travels with two lightly armed servants, indicative of the far-reaching sway of their civilization. Ome Coatl's probe of the mine lasts a week, bringing terror to the mine overseers and joy to one of the lowliest workers. Macuilli Tochtli carves a miniature jadeite mask that delights the old inspector. In this way, the boy becomes the protégé of the priest-engineer, invited to travel with him as he continues his tour through present-day Michoacan, Oaxaca and Puebla. Three months pass before Ome Coatl and the youth head back toward the Valley of Mexico. On their journey, few things impress Macuilli Tochtli as much as his mentor's respect for the miracle of corn, the priest frequently called on to bless fields of newly-planted milpa , a reverence instrumental in shaping Five Rabbit's destiny. A morning comes when an incredulous Macuilli finally stands on a pass overlooking a city covering nine square miles with two hundred thousand residents: Teotihuacán, greater in extent than Imperial Rome. The metropolis is dominated by a ceremonial center with two pyramids of the Sun (A clover-leaf lava tube found below the base in 1971 = the cave where Mouse and his family hid.) and of the Moon. A processional route flanked by smaller temples extends four miles: Place of the Brilliant Serpents. The palaces of the lords and priests of Teotihuacán lie at the south of the great avenue. A walled enclosure houses the royal family and the temples of the supreme deities, Quetzacoatl, Feathered Serpent, and Tlaloc, god of rain. Macuilli is apprenticed to a guild of stone-workers and quickly distinguishes himself working on an eighteen-foot idol representing the Water Goddess, Chalchiuhtlicue, "Her Skirt is of Jade." The colossal statue is carved fifteen miles from Teotihuacán, carried across the valley and raised on the summit of the two hundred foot Pyramid of the Sun. Macuilli's story reveals the drama of Teotihuacán, a civilization without equal in central Mexico until the rise of the Aztecs one thousand years later. Writing, the calendar, sophisticated astronomical and mathematical knowledge, city planning, architecture, and agronomy, all crystallized at Teotihuacan, “where the lords of the people woke from the dream of life to become gods.” Human sacrifice is rare, almost all worship centered on the miracle of maize. The Christ-like Quetzalcoatl, god of the morning and evening star, god of life and fertility, is celebrated with offerings of butterflies and snakes, unlike the Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli, "Hummingbird-on-the-Left," whose altars will be drenched in blood. Over seven years, the time it takes to carve the statue of the Water Goddess, Macuilli marries the daughter of Ome Coatl; he is re-united with the family of his father, Four Lizard; he discovers that his beloved Ome Coatl was responsible for Four Lizard's banishment; he ultimately accepts the priest-engineer's dying plea for forgiveness. Macuilli is briefly exiled for his refusal to betray the master sculptor he serves when the man is falsely accused of heresy. His triumphant return from the Turquoise Road to Teotihuacán climaxes with the birth of his son, MAHTLACLTI, Ten Reed. Celebrated as an artist, Macuilli's fame ultimately lies in a visionary plan for the best use of Teotihuacán's dwindling water supply. The city's soaring population is imperiled by drought. Macuilli designs a mighty irrigation scheme tapping eighty springs and linking them with a lake ten miles away. He labors thirty years on the network of canals and stone aqueducts, the triumph of his long life. – In A.D. 650, Macuilli's grandson, the priest TLAMACAZQUI, Giver of Things, sees the exhaustion of the valley's resources and penetration of the northern marches by Chichimeca hordes. The Giver of Things is slain in the final days of Teotihuacán burned to the ground by its barbarian invaders.
III The Aztec 1443 – 1468
An Aztec army of eight thousand in eight divisions commanded by EATING VULTURE camps on a plain in northern Oaxaca, lands of the Mixtec-Zapotec chief, Xochipola. The Zapotec is invited to surrender and pay perpetual tribute to the Aztecs. Xochipola's refusal increases Eating Vulture's fury. The Aztecs throw copal incense into a flaming pyre letting the fragrant smoke drift over the plain. Squadrons of four hundred archers in cotton armor fill the Aztec van; behind stand twenty battle groups armed with obsidian-bladed swords and lances, slaughter clubs and slingshots. The right flank is held by elite knights in fantastic headgear resembling ferocious eagles, ocelots and snakes. The ranks raise a tumult, striking their weapons against their shields. The knights maintain a deadly silence. All eyes are on the blazing pyre. When the fire burns out, the priests cast the ashes to the winds. "O miserable Zapotecs! Evil-smelling, stinking Zapotecs! So will you be scattered!" No Aztec squad is more impatient than the Long Hairs. Mostly in their teens, the boys get their name from unsightly tufts on the back of their heads left uncut since the age of ten. Their hair cannot be shorn until they've taken a live enemy in battle. Among the Long Hairs stand several young men showing contemptible proof of a lack of prowess and questionable pluck. The Long Hair, CE OZOMATLI, One Monkey, is eighteen, a hapless veteran of four battles who has yet to bring back a captive. Ozomatli's line can be traced to the sculptor-engineer, Macuilli Tochtli at Teotihuacán. The Teotihuacán diaspora gave rise to the Toltec civilization at Tula; to a new holy city at Cholula; and to small, independent chiefdoms in the Valley of Mexico. By 1440, several chiefdoms are united in a confederacy ruled by MOTECUHZOMA ILHUICAMINA, The Angry One, Archer of the Sky . Motecuhzoma I has begun the cycle of conquest that will subject millions to the rulers of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec island capital. – On their migration from the northwest, the Aztec were ordered by Huitzilpochtli, Hummingbird-on-the-Left, god of the sun and war, to adopt the name of Mexica, by which they were known to contemporaries. “Aztec” re-surfaced in eighteenth-century Spanish histories. On the Oaxaca battlefield, Eating Vulture's army routs the Zapotecs. Xochipola and hundreds of his warriors are killed. Ozomatli fights bravely and seizes a captive. An Aztec arrow kills the Zapotec, again denying his captor freedom from the stigma of Long Hair. The Aztecs enter the Zapotec capital and burn the enemy's temple, a symbolic act normally marking the end of hostilities. Xochipola was responsible for murdering a party of Aztec merchants that included an uncle of Ozomatli. Decreed Motecuhzoma: “It's my resolve that Xochipola's people be utterly destroyed and that no memory of them shall remain.” Eating Vulture engages in an orgy of bloodletting. Prime victims are led to a chopping block, where butchers carve their flesh for the Eagle Knights to devour at a victory feast. At Tenochtitlan, Ozomatli watches as his friends triumphantly lead their prisoners to be sacrificed to Huitzilpochtli. “Green head! Big-tuft-over-the-back-of-the head!” His comrade's jeers add to the boy's disgrace seeing his father's disappointment in his latest failure. TECPATI, Flint Knife, is one of the sharpest pochteca , a traveling merchant journeying to far-flung territories as much for commerce as to gather military intelligence. Six months after the Oaxaca campaign, Ozomatli is an apprentice to a merchant of Tlatelco, a neighboring city of Tenochtitlan. Except for an elite officer corps, the Aztecs have no standing army at this time, so the young warrior has returned to civilian life. Ozomatli is at the Tlatelco marketplace, when two assassins attempt to kill a young man. He single-handedly disarms the would-be killers and takes them captive, though this bold act won't allow him to cut his hair, the prisoners destined for hanging not sacrifice to the gods. Ozomatli saves the life of a favorite bastard of KING NEZHUALCOYOTL, Hungry Coyote, ruler of Texcoco, a city-state in a Triple Alliance with Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan. He is feted at the Texcoco court, a three hundred-room palace with a throne of gold, a labyrinth, a zoo, and “Nezhualcoyotl's Baths,” a playground of crystal pools and cascading waterfalls. Hungry Coyote, father of sixty sons and fifty-seven daughters, is renowned as an engineer, poet and jurist. Grateful that a favorite was spared, Hungry Coyote isn't against falsely accusing another son hoping that the young man will be condemned, for he covets his offspring's wife. The judge-poet's scheme miscarries. Despite occasional lapses, King Nezahualcoyotl is a benign ruler, defying his Aztec allies in forbidding human sacrifice and encouraging the worship of the old gods of Teotihuacán, especially Quetzalcoatl, god of life and fertility. War erupts between the Triple Alliance and the Chalcas, the last independent tribe in the valley. Ozomatli returns to the ranks of the Long Hairs. This time he finally takes a prisoner for sacrifice. When the man's heart is torn out, Ozomatli joyously whips off his great tuft, a man among men at last! Ozomatli's friendship with the young princes of Texcoco brings a summons from TLACAELEL, Man with the Liver, who occupies the office of “Snake Woman,” principal councilor to Motecuhzoma. Tlacaelel enlists Ocomatli as a spy at King Nezhualcoyotl's court. Here, the young Aztec becomes a confidant of the philosopher, GREY OWL, who has two daughters, MIAHUAXIUITL, Turquoise Maize Blossom, and TLILLIXIHUITL, Red Flowe. Turquoise Maize Blossom is fifteen, dark-eyed and lovely; Red Flower is thirteen, plump and crimson-cheeked. The delicate Turquoise Maize Blossom enchants Ozomatli. The jealous Red Flower begins a lovelorn quest to win the young man away from her sister. In 1449, the Valley of Mexico is ravaged by a plague of grasshoppers; winter brings heavy snows that ruin the harvest; floods inundate man-made chinampa gardens with brackish water. A two-year drought empties the tribute granaries and brings famine. Starving Aztecs sell themselves into slavery to survive: A young girl sold for four hundred ears of corn and a young man for five hundred. In a long line, Mexica wearing the wooden yoke upon their necks started the weary march down to the country of the Totonacs. (Frederick A. Peterson) During the famine, Ozomatli fights in the "Flower Wars," pre-set battles for taking a fixed number of prisoners for sacrifice. The enemy generals attend the ritual ceremonies concealed behind screens of sweet-scented blossoms. Ozomatli distinguishes himself in the tournaments and rises to the rank of Eagle Knight. Five years of privation are eclipsed by a "New Fire" ceremony marking the end of a fifty-two year cycle in the Aztec cosmic age. Fires in every temple, palace and house are extinguished. On the Hill of the Star at Culhuacán, Aztec priests keep vigil waiting to see the Pleiades cross the meridian at midnight, a sign that the universe will survive. When this happens, the priests kindle a fire using rubbing-sticks in the open chest cavity of a prisoner. The fire successfully drawn, the man's heart is cut out and fed to the flames. A bonfire is lit to signal that all's well with humanity and embers of the New Fire of Fifth Sun are carried to every corner of the empire. A day after the ceremony, the drought breaks. Motecuhzoma I orders that a new temple be built in gratitude to the gods. Aztec armies fan out to begin a drive for captives on an unprecedented scale, the start of the great expansion. Ozomatli marches with a division that pours down the plateau to conquer the tribes on the Gulf of Mexico. -- Among them, the Cempoalans who will be first to ally themselves with Cortés. – Tens of thousands are led back to Tenochtitlan for slavery and sacrifice. Ozomatli marries Turquoise Maize Blossom. Red Flower puts a curse on the union with the help of Tlacatecolotl, "Human Owl," a wizard skilled in black magic. Turquoise Maize Blossom dies in childbirth, leaving a son, QUIAHUITL, Little Rain. Ozomatli's grief is not assuaged despite knowledge that a woman's death in labor brings a glorious afterlife, one shared only with warriors slain in battle. Red Flower unashamedly renews her quest for the love of Ozomatli, now the Eagle Knight, BLOOD SERPENT. In 1466, General Blood Serpent is at the head of Motecuhzoma's army, when it smashes the Chalcas, ending a twenty-year contest and leaving the Aztecs supreme throughout the valley. The victory elevates Ozomatli, born the son of a pochteca , a class between commoner and noble, to the upper ranks of society. The following year, Motecuhzoma is sixty-nine and senses that his life is drawing to a close. He summons his half-brother, Tlacaelel, Man with a Liver, and proposes a final expedition. Tlacaelel appoints Ozomatli in command of the mission. General Blood Serpent faces no campaign more perilous, for he is asked to venture into the unknown realm between the human and the divine. Motecuhzoma sends him to find Aztlan, legendary birthplace of the Aztec tribe. It was a happy land, that land of Aztlan, said Eagle Man, guardian of the image of Huitzilopochtli. There were ducks and water birds and fish on that hill in the middle of the water; there was birdsong and the shade of trees. When our people left, all was changed. The very plants began to bite. (Frederick A. Peterson) Aztec chronicles tell of a journey of eighteen days in which Motecuhzoma's expedition reaches the fabled land, finding a lake where an old man paddles them across to a sandy island. The mother of Hummingbird-On-The-Left greets the visitors. – The legend is basis for the epic journey that concludes Ozomatli's story, his march leading to a lake in northern Michoacan. In years to come, this site will lie within the Hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan , where generations of my fictional Zavala family make their home.
When Ozomatli, Blood Serpent, prepares to leave Aztlan, Hummingbird-on-the-Left's mother gives him simple gifts for Motecuhzoma I, including a poor man's mantle, a breechcloth of maguey fiber and two pairs of sandals. The goddess recalls that she gave her only son, Huitzilopochtli, similar gifts when he left the sacred lake: My son took two pairs of sandals, one to go away and one to return. He said that he would conquer many states in their order, and in the same order would lose them. Let him come soon. (Frederick A. Peterson)
IV The Conquistador1517 – 1572
PASCUAL BERRERA ZAVALA'S earliest memory is from June 1502 when he was four and living at Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. A great hurricane devastated the town and destroyed a homeward-bound fleet that had just left the Ozama River sinking twenty vessels and sending five hundred to their death. Governor Nicholas de Ovando ignored warnings of the storm. Admiral Christopher Columbus, on his fourth voyage to the Indies, took his ships to a safe anchorage west of the Ozama and rode out the cyclone. Pascual's story opens in 1517 at Hispaniola, where his father JOSE MARIA ZAVALA owns a sugar cane plantation in the interior. The fifty-two-year-old Jose is a widower who came to the colony with Governor Ovando in February 1502, one of the few soldiers to brings his family, including his wife Rafaela and three children, Francisco, Ursula and Pascual. Rafaela died in 1505. Francisco and Ursula returned to Spain in 1509 following the inept Ovando into forced retirement. Christopher Columbus's son, Diego, replaced the governor. Jose Maria Zavala works his cane fields with slaves from Africa. – African labor is critical to the colony, only eleven thousand Taino surviving from an estimated million alive when Columbus landed in December 1492. – Jose Maria Zavala has a black mistress, Luz, mother of his two natural sons, Esdras and Pedro. Nineteen-year-old Pascual is a raw, half-savage young man of medium height with huge shoulders. His hair is short, curly and brown; his eyes are green and his features full and bright. A deep groove in his lower lip gives it the appearance of being split. Six years earlier, Pascual was at his father's side when he marched with Diego Velázquez on the conquest of Cuba. After thirty-six months, Jose Maria and his son returned to Hispaniola unhappy with a grant from Governor Velázquez, who gave Zavala a paltry allotment of Indians ( encomienda ) and a stretch of swampy land. In 1517, Pascual is a guard at Santo Domingo's Alcazar, the sumptuous palace of Diego Columbus. The governor is rarely at his post spending most of his time across the Atlantic in Spain. Diego is embroiled in an interminable lawsuit involving his father's contract with the Spanish crown, a vast school of sharks swimming in the old Admiral's wake. TRINIDAD HERNANDEZ is the daughter of the head groom at the Alcazar. A big, heavy-bosomed girl, round-faced and homely, she's blessed with a handsome dowry bestowed by a father anxious to see her wed to a high court official. The man's hopes are dashed when Pascual and Trinidad's couplings in his stables leave the girl pregnant.IGNACIO, “Nacho,” their first child is born in February 1519. Pascual greets marriage to Trinidad as a mixed blessing, for while she brings a fine bridal bounty, he sees the end of his vision of gold and glory. He knows nothing about Spain beyond his father's memories of Seville and Granada, yet has long dreamed of going “home,” not a poor planter's son but Don Pascual Berrera Zavala, a rich and noble knight of Castilla. Pascual's hopes rise again as news reaches Santo Domingo of new discoveries in lands west of Cuba with reports of gold and silver and a grand city that the Spaniards call “Great Cairo.” In early 1519, Velázquez, the governor of Cuba, sends an expedition led by thirty-four-year-old Hernán Cortés to Cozumel and Vera Cruz. When Cortés declares himself Chief Magistrate and renounces Velázquez's authority, Pánfilo de Narváez sails with nine hundred men to arrest the usurper. Enticed by the prospect of “Great Cairo,” Pascual joins the Narváez expedition and reaches Vera Cruz in late 1519. After a brief battle in which thick-witted Narvaez loses an eye and is defeated, Pascual and his comrades need little persuasion to join forces with Cortés. They march from the coast, not to Cairo but Tenochtitlan, where Motecuhzoma II greeted Cortés and his men peacefully the previous November. By now, relations with the invaders have deteriorated to a point where the Aztec ruler is under house arrest and his subjects preparing for a counter-offensive. Pascual's wonder upon reaching the Aztec capital is short-lived, for he arrives in late June 1520, only days before the event known as La Noche Triste , Night of Sorrows. The Aztecs rise and slay four hundred and fifty Spaniards, drive the rest out of the city and mass two hundred thousand allies for its defense. The siege of Tenochtitlan lasts ninety-three days; every causeway defended foot by foot, every plaza, palace and house. On the lake, thirteen brigantines manned by Spaniards and Tlaxcalan allies battle flotillas of one thousand canoes attempting to run the blockade of the city. On occasion, sixty-two Spaniards are taken alive, dragged to the summit of the great pyramid and sacrificed in full view of their helpless comrades. The outcome of the battle is uncertain until August 13, 1521, when Motecuhzoma's nineteen-year-old successor, CUAUHTÊMOC, Falling Eagle, is captured. Pascual plays a central role in these events, hero of a fight at the Causeway of the Feathered Man and commander of a brigantine that takes fire to the heart of the doomed city. His exploits put him in line for one of three hundred and seventy grants handed out to the conquerors of the Aztec “Jerusalem,” as one chronicler calls it: I have read about the destruction of Jerusalem but do not think the mortality was greater than here in Mexico. Most of the warriors died. The dry land and stockades were piled with corpses. The stench was so bad that each captain returned to his camp after Cuauhtêmoc's capture. Even Cortés was ill from the odors, which gave him a headache. (Bernal Diaz del Castillo) A more immediate reward for Pascual comes when he wins a prize in a game of dice: An Aztec prisoner, QAUHTLATOA, Talking Eagle, grandson of General Ozomatli, Blood Serpent. The twenty-nine-year-old warrior saw eleven members of his family die, all except his son, NAUI MEZATL, Four Deer, nine, and his sister, JADE BEE, fifteen. Pascual is tempted to wager his winnings in another round of dice, disgusted by the lack of spoils, only thirty pesos for each soldier. Instead, he employs Talking Eagle as guide in the city's ruins on a fruitless search for plunder. Soon after, a lasting bond is forged between the two enemies when Pascual prevents the rape of Jade Bee by a brutal Portuguese halberdier. In March 1522, Cortés sends Pascual with three Spaniards and twenty Aztecs under Talking Eagle on a reconnaissance mission one hundred and fifty miles north-west of Tenochtitlan. They journey to the lands of the Purepecha, whom the Spaniards call Tarascans. The tall, fine-featured Tarascans are the only tribe to smash an Aztec army in the past leaving twenty thousand dead on the battlefield. When the Aztecs asked for help against Cortés, the Tarascans vacillated. They sacrificed the ten Aztec messengers in hopes this would encourage the Tarascan spirits to intervene. No dialogue came from the other world. Traveling to the Tarascan capital at Tzintzuntzan in present-day Michoacan, Pascual sees for the first time the magic lake visited eons ago by General Ozomatli. The valley of Cuipopan is wide and fertile, the lake's shimmering waters reflecting the blue-ridged hills beyond. The valley is home to three Tarascan villages with nine hundred Indios, a fine number for a promising encomiend. Pascual's party gets a peaceful greeting from the Tarascan nobles. But when they invite King Tangaxoan to accept Jesus Christ and submit to Spain, the entire party is thrown into a stockade and held for sacrificial slaughter. Eighteen days pass while Tangaxoan and his elders debate their fate. Finally, one old lord says it will be unwise to kill these messengers, for the Tarascans will invite the same destruction as the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan. The captives are suddenly released, showered with gifts and sent back to Cortés with a promise that Tangaxoan will recognize as his new lord, the King of Spain. While Pascual waits for death in the stockade, he makes many vows to his own saints. He adds one more vow before he leaves the Tarascan capital: he will return to claim his valley of Cuipopan, The Place Where the Flowers Blossom.
Granted the encomienda of Cuipopan in 1523, Pascual Zavala occupies the Michoacan valley with Talking Eagle and his squad. The Aztecs become Zavala henchmen overseeing nine hundred Tarascans in three lakeside villages. Pascual exacts a heavy tribute from his Indians demanding corn, cloth, pottery, fish, and, above all, long hours of labor in his fields. The Tarascan villagers are led by SESIHANGARI, King Tangaxoan's nephew, with whom Talking Eagle clashes from the outset, an enmity fueled by ancient Tarascan-Aztec rivalries. The Tarascan's son, CHARACU, and Talking Eagle's sister, JADE BEE, fall in love, a match neither family welcomes, when the couple are married in 1525.
In 1528, Pascual sends for his wife, Trinidad Hernandez, and his son, Nacho. For five years, he has enjoyed an orgy of lovemaking with a “tribute” of Tarascan females chosen as concubines. Pascual is one of five hundred conquistadors driven back to their conjugal beds by the authorities at Mexico City. The adulterers are given a choice of re-uniting with their wives and children or facing expulsion from Paradise. Eighteen months after Trinidad and Nacho join Pascual, he leaves them in the stockade at Cuipopan to march with the expedition of Nuno de Guzmán going in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola. Guzmán is a monster whose cruelties against the Indians sicken even a hardened conquistador like Pascual. When raids on the Jalisco natives force them to capitulate, their emissary fails to placate Guzmán with slaves, gold or silver. He orders the man thrown to his dogs: We left him bitten all over at the threshold of his house, then set fire to it and to the town, although the fat man had come to us seeking peace. (Garcia del Pilar) While Pascual is away, Tarascan rebels attack his settlement. Guzman incited this uprising, having murdered the Tarascan king on his way to the north. Tangaxoan's feet had been burned to the ankles, as Guzman tortured him seeking details of a rumored treasure; the king was then dragged behind a horse and finally burned at the stake. His horrified subjects rose against the two hundred Spanish settlers of Michoacan. Trinidad Hernandez is five-months pregnant with TORIBIO ZAVALA . She leads the defense of the Zavala stockade, with eleven-year-old Nacho fighting his first battle at his mother's side. When all seems lost and death certain, Talking Eagle and the Aztecs arrive and carry the defenders to safety at a Franciscan monastery on Lake Patzcuaro. The decade 1530-1540 sees Pascual building an ingenio , a sugar plantation and mill at Cuipopan. Tarascans now have their foreheads branded with a Z that marks them as property of the Zavalas, an official enslavement in punishment for their rebellion. Pascual also owns twenty African slaves bought at Vera Cruz, among twenty thousand imported to New Spain. Pascual and Nacho explore lands north of Cuipopan, infested by nomadic Chichimeca tribes, who make periodic descents across the Rio Lerma to plunder the farms and villages of Spaniard and Tarascan alike. Nacho is still a teenager when he captures his first Chichimeca and takes him to his father. Pascual summarily beheads the raider. Talking Eagle is beside himself with joy, celebrating the triumph of the young Zavala, a boy who is a Long Hair no more! In 1540, this brutal landscape is tempered by an aging cleric who comes to the valley to select a site for one of his hospitals, Santa Barbara de Cuipopan . Don Vasco de Quiroga, bishop of Michoacan, establishes no simple infirmary but a haven for the Tarascans based on Thomas More's Utopia. Pascual finds Bishop Quiroga's new-fangled ideas baffling, especially the notion that Tarascans should work no more than six hours a day! There are rules for every aspect of religion, politics and humanity. Boys are to marry at fourteen, girls at twelve. Concubinage is outlawed. All luxury is dispensed with, the only clothing permitted, a white robe without ornament. Pascual is quickly at loggerheads with the padres over rights to his Indians and injury to his livelihood. Equally challenging is Pascual's mounting litigation with the Spanish Crown, which is having second thoughts about its grants to the conquistadors and seeks to stop tribute holdings from being passed on to the old soldiers' heirs. The veterans succeed in promoting a “New Life” for their encomiendas that will see them passed on for two centuries more. The inheritances are also protected by what's called the mayorazgo , an entailed estate that cannot be broken up, that will be key to the vast haciendas of the future. Amid these trials, it's galling for Pascual to be confronted by ALBERTO ZAVALA, son of his brother, Francisco who returned to Spain long ago. Alberto is an officious Crown lawyer sent to bring order to New Spain. How difficult his task will be is made perfectly clear by Nacho Zavala, scourge of the Chichimecas, and the wagonmaster Melchor Romero, the pair living by a code of fuego y sangre, blood and fire.
Prospecting for silver on the arroyo-scarred sierras north of Cuipopan, Nacho stakes a claim at the mining camp of Our Lady of Zacatecas, where a fabulously-rich mine is discovered in 1548. The Zacatecas site is at the turquoise diggings where Macuilli Tochtli grew up, Nacho's camp amid the ruins of the Teotihuacán frontier post. Within the year, Nacho's strike peters out and bankrupts him. Too proud to ask Pascual for help, he joins an expedition against the Chichimecas whose hunting grounds are invaded in the silver rush. The Silver Highway comes under perpetual ambush by bands of two- to three hundred naked nomads like the Guachichiles, "The Red Heads," the most perilous stretch covering two hundred miles from Queretaro to Zacatecas. The attacks escalate into the Chichimeca War that lasts forty years and sees as many as thirty thousand Aztecs and Tarascans in the field with the Spaniards. Nacho rides escort for the carros , massive wagons carrying a ton and a half of supplies, with multiple teams of mules, raised sides and loopholes that make them mobile fortresses. The boldest and most daring wagonmaster is the Basque, MELCHOR ROMERO , who becomes Nacho's sidekick in the brutal frontier conflict. The Chichimeca terrify the Spaniards, scalping captives alive or dead, placing a foot on their throats, grabbing their hair and yanking it to free the scalp. Their reed-thin obsidian arrows penetrate armor of eleven thicknesses of buckskin, a coat of mail, and a doublet. Retribution against the Chichimeca is savage. Those not butchered on the spot are sold as slaves at the silver mines, thrown to the bottom-most shafts where mercury eats into their legs. They never see the light of day until they leave the pits to return to their poverty-stricken pigsties and die of exhaustion. In March 1559, a Red Head horde attacks a ranch at Guanajuato, slaying everyone except the owner's wife and daughter. Employed to find them, Nacho scours the backlands of Gran Chichimeca for six months, escaping death a dozen times. He finds the mother riddled with arrows. The daughter is alive, totally naked and adorned with paint like Red Heads. ISABEL ORTIZ recovers from her ordeal and becomes the wife of her rescuer. Nacho's brother, Toribio, eleven years his junior, grows up influenced by the Franciscans at Lake Patzcuaro. A Franciscan lay brother, Toribio strives to convert the dwindling ranks of pagan Tarascans at Cuipopan. He enthusiastically supports the friars' plan to segregate the Indians in "congregations" and plants vineyards and mulberry trees to support the acolytes. Well-intentioned though they are, Toribio's ideas accelerate the spread of pestilence and decimate the Tarascans. A final blow comes when officials order that the plantings be uprooted to preserve the Crown's monopolies on wines and silks. Unlike obedient Toribio, Nacho and Melchor Romero clash directly with Spanish authority. – Melchor is a frequent guest at Cuipopan coming to visit his lover, HUANITA, Jade Bee's daughter. – Nacho narrowly escapes implication in the Martin Cortés – Avila conspiracy to overthrow Spanish rule but Melchor is caught carrying messages between plotters at Mexico City and the mining town of Zacatecas. In 1567, the tyrannical judge, Alonso Munoz, finds Melchor guilty and sentences him to be hanged and quartered. Eighty colonists die with Romero in the first struggle for liberty on American soil. Pascual's wife, Trinidad, had been the victim of a plague of 1553, which swept off most of Cuipopan's surviving Indians. Two years later, Pascual married the sixty-five-year-old widow, Leonora Torres, who by law had to re-marry within a year or her husband's encomienda will escheat to the Crown. Pascual hereby acquires a vast addition to the family holdings. In March 1572, widowed a second time, the old conquistador prepares for one final conquest: His life-long ambition to go "home" to Spain, to kneel upon the hallowed ground and kiss the hand of his sovereign. In that month, Don Pascual Berrera Zavala and his trusted lieutenant, Qauhtlatoa, Talking Eagle, set out for Mexico City and Vera Cruz. The island capital built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan is connected to the mainland by three causeways, the longest of five miles. The city streets are straight and broad, six carriages able to drive abreast on the widest boulevard. The public buildings and churches are built of quarried stone of brilliant hues, the most ornate being the royal mint where a thousand bars of silver are smelted weekly: The luxury and munificence of the mine-owners is wondrous to see. As a rule the wife of a mining man goes to church escorted by a hundred servants and twenty ladies and maids in waiting. She keeps open house and all who wish to do so may come to dine, a bell being rung for dinner and supper. (Henry Hawkins) Pascual and Talking Eagle join a throng of pilgrims going to a church a few miles north of the capital, where forty years earlier the Virgin appeared to the Indian, Juan Diego. Talking Eagle knows the hill of Tepeyac from long before the Spaniards came. The shrine of Guadalupe was the sanctuary of the Aztec deity, Tonantzin, the goddess mother. Together then, Pascual and Qauhtlatoa head for the coast, their trail following the track of Hernán Cortés. At Vera Cruz, Pascual is overcome by fever, Talking Eagle at his side when he breathes his last. The Aztec closes the eyes of one of the gods who came from the East when the earth of the Mexica was still one.
V The Wagonmaster's Daughter 1643 – 1692
The mestiza JACINTA ROMERO, great grand-daughter of the condemned wagonmaster Melchor Romero, has long flowing red hair and fiery green eyes. A tall striking woman, Jacinta moves easily among criollos, creole or colonial-born Spaniards, falling over themselves to make her mistress of their casa chica. Jacinta's father is the muleteer CRISTOBAL ROMERO, who cherishes a hope of seeing his daughter married to a rich creole but has as much influence over his strong-minded child as with the most contrary creature in his train. Only one woman perplexes him more and she is his employer, Dona Catalina de Erauso. Cristobal was running his own pack of mules on the Vera Cruz road, when Dona Catalina blocked his path, hair on her lip and a rapier in her hand, demanding that he work for her or starve. In January 1643, Cristobal and Jacinta travel to Acapulco to meet the “China Ship” making landfall at the end of an annual nine-thousand mile haul from Manila, "a voyage that's enough to make a man unfit for anything as long as he lives.” The port comes alive as caravans roll down to the coast bringing the merchants of Mexico City to trade for damasks, velvets, taffetas and white silks, Ming porcelains, Sung celadon bowls, pearls and spices. The fair is a haven for contrabandists swarming over the beach landings. At Acapulco, Jacinta meets Dona Catalina for the first time. Erauso is fifty-one and was in a convent in Spain as a girl. When the nuns beat her, she disguised herself as a man and fled to Chile. She become an ensign and celebrated swordsman. Killing a man in a notorious duel and facing death herself, Catalina's revelation that she was a woman, a nun and virgin won her a reprieve from the gallows. The Lieutenant Nun was sent back to Europe where she was a sensation, so intriguing to Pope Urban VIII that the Holy Father granted this daughter special dispensation to wear male clothing. Three years earlier, Dona Catalina had come back to New Spain, choosing the life of muleteer and establishing a monopoly on the colony's royal highways. A chronic duelist, she recently challenged a hidalgo who forbade her to see his wife. Dona Catalina was in love with the young woman. The authorities stopped the fight and privately warned the nun-ensign to end her illicit passion, the penalty for which was death. Dona Catalina and Jacinta forge a bond, partly sexual, partly driven by shared ambition for wealth and power. When Jacinta's father is bed-ridden with syphilis, she takes command of his mule trains leading to a bitter rivalry with Dona Catalina. By the time Catalina dies in 1650, Jacinta is still unmarried and possesses a personal fortune. She owns a house in the Mexican capital and a five hundred-acre rancho at Cuernavaca, which she uses as a mule-breeding station and secret meeting place with her many lovers. Jacinta is devoted to her brother, MARTINO ROMERO, ten years her junior. She gives him the best education possible and wants him to attend the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico. Martino is denied admission being judged “too dark-complexioned to pass as a creole.” – The concept of a Mexican cosmic race won't be accepted until the 20th century. – A few months with his sister's mules and Martino flees back to Mexico City and a crowd of noble rogues he sports with. Jacinta puts him in charge of a textile works she owns. A sweatshop staffed by convicts, Martino and his friends provoke a riot when they fornicate with the workers' women, all street prostitutes whom city authorities order be locked up in the factory at night. In 1653, Don Luiz Diaz de Villalobos arrives in Mexico City sent to America as a visitador , a special investigator appointed by the Crown. King Felipe IV is at war with the stubborn Lutherans. The Spaniards have recently suffered a series of disasters, including the loss of Portugal and its colonies annexed sixty years ago. Felipe has sent Visitador Villalobos with orders to see if more taxes and tributes can be squeezed from New Spain. When Don Luiz heads north from Mexico City in March 1653, his impressive suite that includes a private orchestra is transported by Jacinta's mule trains. The aging courtier recruits Jacinta as his traveling companion, his infatuation for the mestiza open and unbridled. Their journey takes them to Cuipopan now in the possession of ALFONSO ZAVALA and his brother PADRE DESIDERIO ZAVALA , grandsons of Nacho Zavala. The encomienda was escheated in 1620, the tribute already of negligible value with less than one hundred Tarascans surviving at the lake. Except for Cuipopan village and a patch of Indian communal lands, the Zavalas enjoy full title to the entire valley. Most of their lands are under wheat. A cattle herd of six thousand is grown for the mines of Guanajuato and Queretaro. The Zavalas continue to live in the crude blockhouse built in Pascual's day, flat-roofed and Moorish in appearance. Padre Desiderio recently added a private chapel built next to the main building. Fifty-eight year old Alfonso is patriarch of the Zavala clan but it's Padre Desiderio, twenty-seven years younger, hardnosed and venal, who heaps up earthly riches for the family. Desiderio is typical of a greedy class of secular priest flourishing among four thousand clerics of New Spain. Desiderio's parish includes several villages besides Cuipopan. Every married man pays one real a week for masses; bachelors, widows, widowers and spinsters are levied half a real for benefit of their souls. Each village furnishes the padre daily with two cocks, two hens, two wax candles, half a bushel of maize, one real's worth of butter and chile. A scale of payments for confessions depends on the age of the sinner and gravity of the transgression. Failure to meet any obligation can merit a whipping and time in the stocks. Don LAZARO DE LA CRUZ, a descendant of the Aztec, Talking Eagle, is cacique of Cuipopan. Desiderio helps Cruz extend his control over adjoining villages in return for a guaranteed labor supply at Cuipopan. Don Lazaro's collaboration also involves procuring young girls who work in the Zavala house, the most appealing virgins led to Padre Desiderio's quarters, for nightly communion with God's servant. His growing number of sins go unchallenged, except by the friars of Patzcuaro, their clashes with Desiderio reflecting a growing enmity between the regulars and secular clergy. Desiderio joins the visita , as it rolls toward the scattered towns and mining camps of Chihuahua, where big landholdings are already common, some with herds of more than one hundred thousand cattle. A skirmish with Chichimeca-Otomi bandits sends Don Luiz and his party running for shelter at one of these ranches, the property of Duarte Fernandes Sandoval, a Portuguese who settled in the colony during Spain's “captivity” of his country. Padre Desiderio is first to suspect that Sandoval is a Judaizer subject to scrutiny by the Holy Office. The plight of the Sandoval family mirrors the persecution of New Spain's conversos, New Christians, who stand accused of being crypto-Jews. In one auto-de-fé involving one hundred and nine Jews, fifty-seven perish in the dungeons of the Holy Office. Thirty-nine are restored to the Faith. Thirteen are handed over for execution at Mexico City, where a huge crowd of notables arrives in five hundred carriages to see them garroted and their bodies burned. One victim, Anica de Carvajal, who survived an auto-de-fé fifty years earlier is sixty-seven and suffering “a cancer of the breast so deep that her internal organs could be seen." One Jew steadfastly refuses to repent and is burned alive on the same spot where Aztecs sacrificed victims to Huitzilpochtli. Exposed and persecuted by Padre Desiderio, Duarte Sandoval manages to arrange for his family to flee the colony before he is tortured to death by officers of the Holy Inquisition. Desiderio's triumph is not for God alone. He buys the Jew's property for a pittance, Sandoval's lands becoming the first of the Zavala's northern holdings. By the end of the seventeenth century, their spread will cover one million acres. The visita is the first of several crossing points in the lives of Jacinta Romero and Desiderio Zavala. The padre's sexual advances are swiftly rebuffed, but he remains intrigued and comes to have a long and profitable relationship with the mestiza descended from the Aztec Jade Bee. Typically, the pair do business together, speculating on the wheat crop of Cuipopan and neighboring farms, ruthlessly hoarding their grain in a time of famine. While the Zavalas always look to HACIENDA SANTA BARBARA DE CUIPOPAN in Michoacan as their ancestral home, the branch established in the north comes to be based at LA ESPERANZA , south of the city of Chihuahua. As heir of the northern estates, Desiderio chooses JAIME ZAVALA , Alfonso's son who is every bit as ambitious and acquisitive as his uncle. Jacinta Romero's position in Spanish colonial society is exceptional, only sharpening the contrast in the lives of other mestizos and mulattos. Her story also exposes the rising tensions between colonial-born creoles and whites from Spain, known as peninsulares or more contemptuously, gachupines , “men with spurs,” who persistently discriminate against the Americanos, as they called themselves. Near the end of her days, Jacinta sees Martino Romero gamble away her fortune. Jacinta herself falls victim to the zeal of Archbishop Aguiar y Seixas, known for his love of the poor, hatred of cock-fighting and terror of females. Women are prohibited on pain of excommunication from entering his palace. Jacinta's past association with the notorious Catalina de Erauso makes her a target of the archbishop's vigilantes. The fanatics scour Mexico City looking for “troubled women,” who are sent to the asylum of Belen for salvation. Arrested and incarcerated in this hellhole, Jacinta is mercifully rescued by her old partner, Desiderio, who takes her to Cuipopan. She spends her last days in the village where Jade Bee lived. In 1692, Desiderio's land hunger is as great as ever. The seventy-year-old marches into New Mexico, where Pueblo Indians wiped out Spanish settlements in the previous decade. The padre is killed in an ambush, winning a place of honor in Zavala annals not merely the first great landowner but Desiderio the Martyr. ©2007 Errol Lincoln Uys |
