"Its n.o.blest exemplar."

I stared at him a long moment. Finally, shaking my head, I said, "In India, maybe, but don't voice those views too loudly around here. The Inquisition has a burning ground, too, and its glowing pinchers and blazing stakes have nothing to do with amour vincet omnia. Some of the women around here might not endorse your beliefs either."

"But you have Aztec blood in you as well. You carry in your heart the Aztec flame. They knew the truth of which I speak."

"They won't help you either when you're screaming on a rack or strung from a strapaddo."

Yet it was true about my indio ancestors. I had heard stories from Snake Flower and the woman I once called mother-stories of the many indio G.o.ds, of ancient worlds created and destroyed many times over, each new world "a Cycle of the Sun." Snake Flower told me our benighted world would one day die by fire.

And I knew, too, of Homer's Land of the Dead, his Elysian Fields, and G.o.ds on high.

I kept those views to myself as well.

But I listened with rapt fascination-and learned. Not only tales of his G.o.ds, but the secret arts of the mysterious East-stoicism, endurance, meditation, indifference to pain, and corporeal contortion. Contortion's skills alone took me hundreds of hours to perfect, but I practiced religiously. Eventually I was as supple as Gull. I could twist my joints as if they were the mellifluous sap that flows from the trees of our Rubber People.

Gull was a curious mentor. Tiny, with small delicate bones, he had for a time been a flyer of Papantla, that terrifying spectacle in which men swing from a rope around the towering tip of a vertiginous pole. Unfortunately for Gull, his line snapped one day, and like his namesake, he flew for real. Launched into s.p.a.ce like a slung stone, he soared and soared and soared. For a while it seemed he might even take wing, until he dropped like a rock.

His doomed flight terminated against an abandoned pyramid, its stony slope breaking both his legs. Unconscious for a month-"wandering through the Aztec nether world," which was how Gull put it-when he came to, he told me he'd seen wondrous sights: Creation's dawn, the extinction of stars, the death of the G.o.ds, the end of time. But he never walked again. Not that he complained. He said those sights would inspire him all his days.

"I am content," he said simply. "The True Self behind the mask remains faithful to itself, remote, fearless, impervious as stone."

For a time he appropriated another's legs. A huge lepero nicknamed "Mountain"-because of his height and heft-conveyed him on his shoulders. Mountain, however, was an inept thief, who in the end was ambushed by his vindictive victims. This murderous mob stripped his hide with a flogging cat, hacked off both his hands, and cauterized the wrists in boiling oil. In the years to come his severed stumps grew even more scarified and unsightly, none of which affected his l.u.s.t for life. He continually joked that his double amputations kept him out of the mines. Not even the alcalde wanted a handless slave. So Gull rode his mountainous shoulders, all the while contorting himself into monstrous convolutions, even as Mountain stuck his obscenely cauterized stubs under the nose of potential patrons and bellowed. "Alms! Alms for the handless, the legless, and the jointless!"

Gull was the brains, Mountain the feet, legs, and power. For a time they were the most successful beggars in Veracruz.

Until I came along and stole Gull's act.

The crowd parted for the vast procession of priests, friars, and nuns descending on the waterfront. Most of the priests wore a roughspun sackcloth of goat hair, wool, or burlap, their habits white, gray, brown, or black, depending on the order. Around their waists they wore rope belts. From their necks were strung wood-beaded rosaries. They held crosses before them. Cowls covered their heads. They favored hemp sandals, which kicked up dust as they marched. There seemed to be a contest as to whose robe could look the most threadbare. Several of the habits looked ready to dissolve off their bodies. Nor was much value placed on cleanliness. Sweat and dirt defaced habits and faces.

Fray Antonio had been one of them once-faithful to his vows of humility, good works, and poverty. Some of the priests and frays, however, clearly disdained that creed, clerics who rode in on horseback, wore shirts of fine linen and stockings of silk, whose monasteries were wealthy haciendas run by slave labor, and who lived like kings on the backs and sweat of the indio peons they had ostensibly come to save.

"The New World was conquered not only by the sword but by an army of priests," the good fray once told me. "Most gave everything they possessed, even their very lives, to bring Christ's cross to this benighted land. But these wicked ones arrive in silk and drive their flock like beasts of burden."

"For filthy lucre," I'd observed.

The fray nodded sadly. "And for a priest to pillage his flock, like a wolf on the fold, is a sin against G.o.d."

The great parade of priests and nuns swept by me. Holy men had arrived from all over New Spain, each order eager to outdo the other in hailing the new archbishop, and their music and dust billowed in the hot, warm air.

Their crosses extended before them, they sang "Te Deum" as they marched, a sacred paen to the Lord.

You are G.o.d:

We praise you.

You are the Lord:

We acclaim you.

You are the eternal Padre:

All creation worships you.

The religious orders commandeered the center of the street with great ma.s.ses of lay people pressing on them from all sides-merchants, hacendados, doctors, abogados, planters, blacksmiths, tavern owners, soldiers, mulatta mistresses, africano slaves, street leperos such as myself, highwaymen, cutpurses, wh.o.r.es. People flocked here for the ships' mail, for money from relatives, to welcome long-lost friends. Mestiza and india wives of sailors who saw their husbands once a year while the ships were unloaded, repaired, caulked, refitted. Then there were the merely curious, such as I.

More ships were entering the harbor, dropping and securing their mooring cables to the heavy bronze mooring rings sunk into the fort wall, praying that in the fort's lee they might be safe from the violent el norte storms. Longboats from sh.o.r.e had ferried the king's custom inspectors and representatives of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Already aboard, they examined all merchandise and baggage, except perhaps that of the archbishop and his entourage. The inquisitors quickly confiscated any works challenging or profaning church doctrine.

The crowd parted for another procession, and three pack horses trotted past us. Behind each rider were secured large clay jars in hemp baskets packed with straw. The jars were filled with la nieve, snow, from the great volcano Citlaltepetl, the highest mountain in all New Spain, and these riders were known as the posta de nieve, the snow post. This snow was packed into the jars along with tasty herbs and sugars and rushed from the mountain about thirty leagues away with continuous relays of fast horses to Veracruz, where it was served as a delicious concoction called sorbete. A special cold treat for the archbishop, it was a gift from the merchants of the town in hopes that it might help protect him from the dreaded vomito. It is only the second time I had seen the pack horses race through the streets with flavored snow. The last shipment had been to the deathbed of the previous alcalde. Dying of the vomito sickness, it was still said he died with his mouth full of cool sorbete and a smile on his face.

I could not imagine how sorbete tasted. I had never even held snow in my hand. Still my mouth salivated at the thought. Anyone who had such rare confections delivered to them from the high mountains was clearly blessed.

But then I felt blessed when Beatriz sold me stolen sugarcane for half the going rate.

The religious procession reached the docks. I wriggled my way to the edge of the procession, hoping to find enough s.p.a.ce to do my crippled octopus act. I had my chance amid a bevy of sober-faced nuns, several of whom were strumming lutes, all of them singing the "Te Deum."

Their music and singing were serene, their smiles beatific, and their eyes fixed longingly at the heavens, but they were a tough audience for me to play to. They never stopped singing, never stopped smiling, but not one of them reached under her habit for a reale, a crumb of bread, a rosary bead, nada. Not one of them showed me anything resembling love or pity or tenderness. When one of them glanced my way at all, she looked through me as if I wasn't there. The only one who paid me any mind at all was a sinister-looking mother superior directly above me, who glared at me.

She was almost standing on top of me, and I was tempted to sink my lepero teeth into her ankle just to let her know... I am also human. But then a large black boot stomped on my ostensibly crippled hand.

"Aaak!" I roared.

As I scrambled to my feet, a man grabbed me by the hair and pulled me away from the nuns. I looked up into his dark eyes and even darker grin. There was much about the man that conveyed a caballero, those gentlemen knights whose swords were pledged to G.o.d and king. His attire was rakish. Upon his head sat a fawn-colored, broad-brimmed hat with a large, black, feather plume circling the brim and one of b.l.o.o.d.y crimson rising above it. His red velvet doublet he wore sleeveless, and his fancy shirt of black linen had sleeves that billowed all the way down to his wrists. His black velvet breeches were stuffed into black, thigh-high riding boots of brilliantly burnished snakeskin, bush racer to be exact, the deadly serpent whose caress kissed you to h.e.l.l faster than a poxy strumpet. He wore no dress sword but a working weapon, a rapier of Toledo steel, its haft, like the backs of his wrists and hands, scored from hard use.

Yes, he radiated arrogance from horns to hocks. His red-gold mustache was exuberantly menacing, his beard short and pointed. His matching tresses cascaded over his shoulders in tight ringlets, one lock longer than the rest. This "love lock" he trussed with a ribbon, fashioned out of a lady's undergarment. He wanted the world to know he was a renowned rake and, as well, a seasoned swordsman.

But this was not a polished caballero, who slept on a fine bed with a treasure chest of gold at his feet. No younger son of a n.o.bleman who spurned the priesthood to follow the G.o.d of war. This was a sword for hire-a sword and a garrancha that took what it wanted.

Any impression that he was a gentleman knight was illusory.

I knew what he was the moment I laid eyes on him-picaro. I had read the tale of that infamous picaro, Guzman de Alfarache. Everyone who could read had read it, and later I would also learn of other legendary picaros, including the poet-swordsman, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo. One day I would even learn the true ident.i.ty of the man before me.

A picaro was an adventurous rogue who lived by his wits and his sword-often one step ahead of the law. Their reputation for knavery in Spain was as reprehensible as that of leperos in New Spain, and they were prohibited by law from entering New Spain. If detected aboard ship, they were detained and rerouted to the Filipinas, a h.e.l.lhole certifying almost certain death by marauding clans or malaria. The islands, across the great Western Sea and nearly to China, the land of the chinos, were discovered by Ferdinand Magellan, who gave his life there. Named after good King Filipe II, the islands are said to be both lovely and deadly.

The reasons were pecuniary rather than moral. Silver was Mother Spain's life's blood, and the Crown did not want that silver lifeline jeopardized by armies of picaro swordsmen hijacking the silver trains along trails and highways.

Still, the lure of so much silver and gold combined with the chance to escape the Old World's warrants and jails was hard to resist. Despite the threat of deportation to the Filipinas, many ships contained rogues who had sneaked or bribed their way aboard and who arrived in Veracruz with plunder in their hearts.

Now the one before me might have fooled the Crown's agents, but I saw through him right away. He was a rogue in a caballero's clothes. His clothes might have been aristocratic-and I'm sure the n.o.bleman he stole them from had paid dearly for them-but I recognized the worn heels, the fraying cuffs, the soiled sleeves. This was a man whose time and treasure went for fleshly pleasures, not fashionable dress.

Then there were his eyes. They had a reckless come-hither glint to them. They were the eyes of man who would buy you a drink one moment and cut your throat the next; who would accept your aid and comfort, then seduce your wife and daughters. These were the eyes of a killer, a highwayman, a rakeh.e.l.l, a debaucher of women, a man willing to sell his sword arm to the highest bidder. They were the eyes of a man who, unlike the rest of us, refused to cower in guilt and fear and who lived life on his own terms. Here was a man from whom I could learn much.

He treated me to a scintillating grin. It was quite overwhelming-wicked enough to break a bad woman's heart or turn a good woman bad. I was so taken by the singular dazzle of a flashing gold tooth, I almost missed him rubbing the two reales between his thumb and fingers. I naturally recognized his smile had the sincerity of a crocodile's tears.

"I have a mission for you, Chico Loco," he said.

"What mission?" I asked, my eyes fixed on the coins. Two reales was a day's wage for grown men and more than I'd ever possessed at one time in my whole life.