When Mixtli's sister Tzintzin gets caught fingering herself as a child, her mother rubs chili powder into her vagina, making it burn real badly. After that point she becomes something of a slut. She forces herself on Mixtli and they have an incestuous relationship until the day she's chosen to play the virgin in a religious ritual. This causes problems for Mixtli at war school, because the boys have been playing the circle jerk game when they're supposed to be on guard duty, and then when one of them brings a slave woman for them to fuck, he can't get it up for the slave woman. He also has to hide his affair, because Aztecs have Abrahamic sexual mores (adultery, female fornication, sodomy, lesbianism, all capital offenses). This causes problems when Tzintzin is chosen for a virgin religious ritual, so she can't comply. Mixtli hears from his sadistic and unloving mother (a real social climber) that she ran off in the night, but he looks into it and believes that Tzintzin actually was killed by the local lord's son, who was an evil sadist who wanted to court her and would have been offended by the discovery of her whoredom.
Meanwhile, overlapping with this plot, Mixtli winds up being recruited to study at a neighboring king's university, and is assigned to serve as the retainer of the king's teenaged wife, who is the daughter of the Aztec emperor. He is expressly ordered to follow her every order. Mixtli soon learns that the princess/queen is a massive slut and orders him to paint portraits (it's one of his many skills) of the most handsome men, of which she selects the hunkiest and then chooses for affairs. Because he's an accessory to adultery of the Tlaltelolco king's wife, he knows he will die for it if it gets found out, but then he learns that she's actually killing off her lovers and then having them stripped to the bone, so the bones can be used to fashion perfect statues of her kills. His two best friends back home are recruited by her, and he realizes he has to stop her series of serial killings. So, he and his loyal slave boy Cozcatl (who's been given to him) go and trick the lord's son to a triste with the princess/queen, but it's a set-up.
In the following court proceedings, it is found that Mixtli and Cozcatl are to be banished, as is one of his two friends, but the other friend is put to death. It turns out the two friends are gay for each other, and the survivor swears revenge on Mixtli for causing the death of his lover. The lord's son is executed and stripped of all flesh below the head except for the groin area, and the queen/princess is knocked out and dragged into the middle of a garden labyrinth, then mounted on his (artifically straightened) penis, so when she wakes up from her slumber, she's in the middle of the labyrinth fully astraddle the rotting corpse/skeleton of her would-be lover, and she has no way of finding her way out so she dies of stress.
Then there's a bunch of non-perverted stuff about Mixtli going off to war, becoming a hero, and starting a career as a merchant. At one point the one friend jumps Cozcatl and cuts his penis off, because he thinks Mixtli is gay for Cozcatl. It turns out that's actually kind of true, because on one merchant expedition Mixtli gets horny and becomes a pederast (this was the point in the book where it started getting real uncomfortable).
So Mixtli eventually winds up buying a whore down in south Mexico on one trip, then feels guilty about it and buys the tavern the whore works in so that she can leave a respectable life. He fucks her in front of her two daughters, identical twins, because she insists that they know exactly what their mother does for a living (it's her first time whoring). Years later he comes back and discovers that he had knocked the whore up, but his old friend happened across her when she was ready to give birth, found out that she was with Mixtli's child, and then posed as a doctor so he could deliberately botch the delivery and kill them both. As it happens, Mixtli wound up there because he had the shit beat out of him in a robbery and convalesced there. During his recovery he falls in love with one of the two twins, but at first he doesn't realize they're different people, so he majorly embarasses himself.
Mixtli learns that one of the sisters, the one he loves more, Nyanya, knows the location of a rare purple dye that could make his merchant company extremely rich. They mount an expedition to get it (slaughtering the local priests who guard it) and end up fucking. They then get married, and the other sister gets really pissed about it. She claims it's because it's super gross to fuck both mom and daughter, but in reality it's clear (to everybody but Mixtli) that she's jealous of her sister.
At one point, Mixtli gets sent on a diplomatic mission (having learned to use the knowledge from his merchant expeditions to curry favor with the emperor) to Purempecha territory, who Jennings completely inaccurately depicts as a race of complete sexual deviants who have no morals. They're told to bring a set of retarded Siamese twins with them (the Aztecs kept a people-zoo for freaks) to give as a gift to the Purempecha king for a unique sex slave. The king is old and has no teeth, and he drinks human milk from the tit of a fat woman. He gets Mixtli and Nyanya extremely drunk and they have an orgy with a girl and boy, and the king fucks his Siamese twin tards, and at one point the Siamese twins make an appearance crawling around on all eight limbs like a crab.
Back home, Mixtli and Nyanya have a daughter, but Nyanya tragically dies in a giant flood, and he leaves the newborn daughter with Cozcatl and Cozcatl's wife for a few years while he wanders the world grieving and banging multiple tribal women he encounters, one of whom is also uncomfortably young. He raises his daughter up to her preteen years, and then he ends up fucking up things with Montezuma and gets sent to govern a new colony in the middle of nowhere as punishment.
He takes his daughter with him, and at one point goes out to do some diplomacy with a local tribe while the priests conduct a religious ritual. When gets back he is horrified to discover that they selected HIS daughter for the Xipe Totec sacrifice, which he forgot it was the time of year of. See, it's a great honor to be the sacrifice, but that sacrifice involves being raped (in Jennings' world; the rest of the ritual was real, but that part was made up), then being killed, flayed of your skin, and a little guy wears your skin like Buffalo Bill and dances around, so one of the first things he sees upon getting back is this creep strutting around in his daughter's naked skin. He orders his men to Rape of Nanking the entire town.
Much later in the story, he at one point (serving as a diplomat, still) has an encounter with La Malinche and Malinche makes up some nonsense, for reasons I can't remember, about them having sex so that they have blackmail on each other since she's Cortez's woman at the moment, but she also needs him to keep some secrets about her. He refuses, but she gets him drunk and forces herself on him, and the surviving sister (who he had since married out of obligation, but refuses to sleep with or show any kindness to, because he's deluded himself into thinking that she hates him) walks in on him while he drunkenly calls out the names of both his dead wife AND daughter while screwing La Malinche.
I can't remember anything else of a sexual nature that was messed up. Of course, the Aztecs are evil bastards when it comes to the torture and sacrifices, and there's lots of that too. Aside from Xipe Totec, the most memorable is the time they have two little kids (a boy and a girl) glue masks to their faces and then force them into a pool of water, so that they die in the water without shedding blood or drowning, because they die of normal asphyxiation, and their parents are in the crowd watching proudly. And the time our war hero Mixtli is celebrating his victory after the great sacrifice of 1487 and part of the ritual is that they get to eat that sweet, sumptuous "long pork" cut from the enemy. And when he learns that the meat the Chichimeca barbarians feed him is sun-dried baby.
I think Gary Jennings might be a potential violent psychopath.
