Read Online Aztec Rage by Gary Jennings - Free Book Online

banging into a table and knocking its plates and goblets onto the floor. For a moment the room was silent. Then two dozen men stood and faced me. I was ready to take on every one of them.
    Daggers appeared in a dozen hands. Some had machetes as long as my arm. One had a rusty ball-and-cap pistol.
    I saw something in the corner of my eye. I started to duck as I realized a piece of iron pipe in the innkeeper’s hand was coming at my head. My reactions were too dulled. A light exploded behind my eyes, burst into a hundred fiery fragments, which in turn detonated into smaller slivers and shards that smoked, sizzled, and faded.

IN DURANCE VILE

ELEVEN
    M Y HEAD FELT as if Tempest had kicked it. I came to, lying on the inn floor, blood flowing down my face. People milled around me. I tried to rise, but a voice in the fog told me to stay down and kicked me in the ribs. I stayed down. The fog had lifted a little by the time two constables arrived. Listening to the innkeeper’s story, they booted me in the belly and bound my hands behind my back.
    â€œYou’re lucky they didn’t kill you,” a tall, uniformed constable said, as they led me to the jail. “If you had not been dressed as a caballero, they would have cut your throat and left you in the gutter. Do you think you can cheat an honest innkeeper of his due? An innkeeper works hard for his money; he’s not a worthless dandy like you.”
    â€œHe’s no caballero,” his partner said. Shorter and stockier, his uniform was dirt-smeared, rumpled, and his foul, floppy-soled boots had not been blacked in decades. He wore his beard and hair disheveled, and, like his partner, he wore a short sheathed sword strapped to his belt. He shook a heavy wooden truncheon in my face. “He’s a stinking lépero who robbed and killed to get those fancy clothes, then cheated a poor, hardworking innkeeper.”
    I had paid the innkeeper many times over, him and whoever else had plundered my possessions while I was unconscious. The silver buttons on my jacket and pants were gone. So were my silver belt buckle and cigarro case.
    Smart people, no? I should have thought of it myself: One button alone would have provided a fine meal and night’s lodging without the necessity of being beaten by a mob. Now the law was marching me to jail, my hands bound behind my back, a rope lashed to one ankle, its other end to the taller constable’s wrist. If I tried to run, he would jerk the rope and drop me like a vaquero toppling a tethered steer. Then his partner would club me into unconsciousness.
    We passed few people on the street because it was dark. For that I was thankful. When we arrived at the jail, the constables tied my ankle-rope to an iron ring and stepped aside. I watched curiously as each pitched a copper coin at a line scratched on the floor a dozen feet away.
    The winner was the short, stocky unkempt constable. Grinning at me, he sat on a bench and began pulling off one of his boots. “Take your boots off.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI won them.”
    I stared at him like the innkeeper had stared at me when I told him I had no money. “You can’t win my boots, you puta-bastardo.”
    He swung his truncheon at me but I was ready for him. Slipping under his swing, I rammed him with my head. But even as he toppled backward,his partner was yanking my ankle rope, causing my left leg to shoot straight up in the air and my body to flip forward. Standing on the back of my neck, the tall constable immobilized me until his companion found his own feet and clubbed me into submission.
    With pain in a dozen places and sure all the bones in my body were broken, I lay still and bleeding as my boots were removed and the silver trim stripped from my breeches.
    I was barefoot and coatless when they led me into the cell block. Clanging a pipe against the iron bars, they summoned a trustee from the cells below.
    Shaken, bleeding, knees trembling,