Aztec Blood - Jennings Gary (книги онлайн бесплатно серия .txt) 📗
After the insides were removed, the victim was tied down to a peg and covered with ash until he was buried. Wood was piled on top and burned.
The punishment for the indio acting as a man was simpler: He was tied down to a log and covered with ash, to remain there until he died.
Who had the worse punishment, you ask? The one who acted as a woman or the one who acted as a man? While the man-woman's punishment makes my flesh crawl, he would die quickly from the incision. The man tied down and left to die would wither slowly, his pain and suffering enduring much longer. But I would take a lingering death over someone cutting a hole between my legs and reaching up to rip out my entrails.
Not all indio groups prohibited sodomy, and a few openly practiced it. Some Mayan tribes trained their boys to engage in sodomy during their youth. Until a boy was old enough to marry, well-to-do parents provided him with a male companion, a slave boy, to meet his sexual urges. This way he did not pursue girls, permitting them to remain virgins until marriage.
Balboa, who discovered the Pacific Ocean after trekking through the jungles of Panama, found homosexuality practiced among the chiefs at Quarequa. When he discovered that the king's brother and the brother's friends wore women's clothing and entered each other through the backdoor, he threw forty of them to his savage dogs.
One Caribbean tribe first castrated their young male prisoners, then used them sexually until they grew to adulthood, at which point they were killed and eaten. Heinous behavior, but there are many tales told today of unscrupulous Christians in Spain conducting a trade in Christian penes and foreskins to the Moors.
I have heard the Christian priests damn sodomy. They tell the indios that if they practice the crime against nature and do not repent, when they die they will descend to hell joined with their lover.
The fray once recounted to me that Saint Thomas Aquinas sanctioned prostitution on the grounds that it saved men from sodomy.
Sodomy was not the only crime against nature the Spaniards found existed in the New World. Some indio nobles had special wives who were trained to use their mouth to suck on their husband's pene in the manner of vipers.
Of course, such matters of the flesh were not restricted to the indios. Fray Antonio told me that Pope Alexander VI of the Spanish Borgias had five children. He betrothed his daughter Lucrezia at twelve to one nobleman—then broke it off when the girl was thirteen in order for her to marry another. When that marriage did not bring the political and financial rewards the pope anticipated, he had the marriage annulled on the grounds of impotency—despite the fact that his daughter was pregnant. Not to be daunted by such trivialities, the good pope issued one bull stating that his son, Lucrezia's brother, was the father—and another naming himself as the father of his daughter's child. Poor Lucrezia—her next husband was the son of the king of Naples, but her jealous brother strangled the man with his own hands.
Good King Filipe III, who has sat on the throne of Spain and Portugal during most of my lifetime, is said to have had thirty-two children from consorts. That is more than most Aztec kings fathered.
SIXTY-SIX
In one of those marvelous acts of fate that seemed so often to clear the path for Cortes, he had the great fortune to take possession of a slave girl who had been born a princess. Dona Marina, as she came to be called, had been born in the province of Coatzacualco, on the southeastern border of the Aztec Empire. Her father, a rich and powerful cacique, died when she was very young. Her mother married again and had a son. She conceived the nefarious idea of securing for her son Marina's rightful inheritance.
She accordingly feigned that Marina was dead but secretly delivered her into the hands of some itinerant traders of Xicallanco. She availed herself, at the same time, of the death of a child of one of her slaves in order to substitute the corpse for that of her own daughter and celebrated the obsequies with mock solemnity. The merchants sold the india maiden to the cacique of Tabasco, who delivered her to the Spanish as tribute.
In a strange way, my own childhood speaks so much of the intrigues and tribulations of Dona Marina's that, while my indio ancestors considered her a traitor, she earned that special place in my heart that I have spoken about.
Cortes had landed on the coast and encountered the indio culture but soon discovered that he was on the fringes of a vast empire ruled by a mighty emperor. He was in desperate need of information from the indios he encountered and in need of allies because alone, with a few hundred men, he could not hope to overwhelm a large empire.
Dona Marina brought along with her charms—she was to become Cortes's mistress and mother of his son, Don Martin—a gift for languages. She not only spoke the language of the indios that she had been sold into slavery to, but her native Aztec tongue, Nahuatl, as well. She was able to quickly pick up enough Spanish to act as interpreter and negotiator with the indio leaders Cortes came into contact with.
And her experiences from noble woman to slave and finally lover of the Spanish leader, gave her insights that she used to lead Cortes from danger. It was she who realized that fifty indios sent ostensibly as peace delegates to him were spies and assassins. Cortes had the hands of the men chopped off and sent them back to their leaders as examples of how he would deal with treachery.
It was Marina, too, who would interpret for Cortes when he finally reached Tenochtitlan and stood before Montezuma II. The emperor, whose imperial title was Revered Speaker, was informed by his messengers of the Spanish landing. Cortes in turn learned that the ruler of the vast empire was in a golden city in a high valley far from the blazing sands of the Caribbean coastline.
Aztecs scribes painted picture writing so that the emperor would be able to see what the Spaniards looked like. It was the Spanish horses more than anything that struck fear in the hearts of the indios. There were no beasts of burden in Mexico, no horses, mules, donkeys, or even oxen. The horses, strange and terrifying to the indios, were as fearsome to them as the cannons. They saw the rider and horse moving in unison, as if parts of the same animal, and they assumed that gods were mounted upon these fearsome beasts.
But the seeds of Aztec destruction did not begin with the landing of Cortes, but hundreds of years before in a city, a time, and a place when Aztecs were nomadic barbarians who wore animal skins and ate meat raw. When Montezuma saw the picture writing he was deeply disturbed. He was fifty-two years old at the time Cortes arrived, and the news of the landing brought home to him a decade of growing fear and suspicion and to the indios at large the culmination of several hundred years of myth—the return of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent.
Ay, poor Montezuma. He was a victim of his own fears—especially when his sister told him of her death dream in which she saw the return of a legend. The legend, of course, was that of the Plumed Serpent. Quetzalcoatl's story had as much love, murder, betrayal, and incest to have been written by Sophocles to entertain the ancient Greeks.
Quetzalcoatl was born in a One-Reed year. It was to become the most momentous date in indio history. He presided over Tula, the fabled Toltec city of gold and pleasure I visited in my dream. A great ruler, he erected wondrous temples and had artisans create sculptures, pottery, word-picture books, and other works of art that glorified the city. He was also a humane king who banned human sacrifice and permitted only the sacrifice of snakes and butterflies.
Those who favored human sacrifice feared that Quetzalcoatl was offending the gods by not giving them blood. They plotted his destruction, enlisting the help of three evil magicians. The evil magicians tricked Quetzalcoatl into becoming drunk on octli, the drink of the gods, now called pulque. In his drunken state he sent for his beautiful sister. He later awoke to find his sister naked beside him and realized he had bedded with her as he would a wife.
