War God (28 page)

Shikotenka and Acolmiztli grinned at one another in disbelief. Then they were running, hidden by darkness, the moon now entirely lost to view in dense cloud. With no need to crawl through the grass any more, they went up the hill at a sprint and in moments reached the hollow where the fifty were waiting.

Tree was at the ridge with the men ready behind him in full battle order. ‘So we just go straight in?’ he said. ‘Like I wanted to do at the beginning?’

‘We go straight in,’ said Shikotenka with a grim smile.

How fickle were the gods, he thought, and how inscrutably they meddled in the lives of men.

As Malinal’s head began to clear from the beating she’d taken in the plaza, she discovered she had somehow already reached the great pyramid and begun to climb the wide northern stairway. On both sides, stationed at every third step, were guards holding guttering torches, and she saw she was part of a long line of prisoners ascending between them. She felt a helping hand pressed into the small of her back and turned to find Tozi right behind her. ‘Coyotl?’ she asked, her voice cracking.

‘Gone,’ Tozi said. Her chalk-white face was smeared with blood. ‘Ahuizotl put him in the other line. I’ve lost sight of him.’

‘It’s my fault!’ sobbed Malinal. Though she hardly knew Coyotl, the intensity of the last hours was such that she was overwhelmed to be separated from the anxious, intelligent little boy, and filled with guilt for her part in what had happened. ‘Ahuizotl did it to spite me. If I hadn’t been holding Coyotl, he wouldn’t have taken him.’

‘It’s not your fault that Ahuizotl is an evil, hateful old man,’ said Tozi. ‘You gave Coyotl love. That’s what you should remember.’

They were climbing very slowly, sometimes standing in place for a long count before shuffling up another step or two and halting again. The warm wind that had risen earlier was blowing more strongly now; overhead thick clouds raced across the face of the moon, and round Malinal’s feet a foaming, clotting tide of human blood flowed from the summit platform and rolled ponderously down the steep, narrow steps. It was slippery and treacherous. It accumulated in shallow pools spreading out across the plaza at the base of the pyramid. It filled the air with a sour, terrifying stink.

Malinal’s stomach cramped and heaved and bile rose in her throat. Though the cruelty and excess of the Mexica were nothing new to her, she was overwhelmed by the horror and depravity of this vast pageant of murder. Her stomach cramped again; this time she couldn’t hold it back, and she threw up in a hot, spattering, choking gush.

‘What a hero she is!’ yelled one of the guards sarcastically.

‘How brave!’ sneered another. ‘A whiff of the knife and she spews her guts!’

There came the thumping, rumbling sound of flesh striking stone as priests threw a pile of a dozen bleeding torsos over the edge of the summit platform. They tumbled down the steps like clumps of viscid fruit fallen from some evil tree, trailing streamers of guts, rolling and bumping wildly until they came to rest in the plaza below. Something heavy and wet had brushed against Malinal’s leg as they went past, and now her stomach heaved uncontrollably again; she doubled over, dry-retching, gasping for breath, to the general hilarity of the guards.

As the spasm passed, she straightened and spat, hatred scourging her like acid. What a vile, vicious race these Mexica truly were – a race of arrogant, strutting, loud-mouthed bullies whose greatest pleasure was the desecration of others.

A race whose wickedness and cruelty knew no bounds.

Malinal was filled with impotent rage, wanting to punish them, to visit retribution upon them, to make them experience the same humiliations they inflicted, but she knew at the same time that none of this could ever happen, that she would continue to climb the pyramid, passive and unresisting as a dumb animal on its way to slaughter, and that when she reached the top she would be killed.

A soldier approached, carefully descending the steps, picking his way through the blood. Slung round his neck he carried a huge gourd containing some liquid and into it he dipped a silver cup that he offered to each prisoner in the line.

Most drank.

When it came to Malinal’s turn she asked the soldier, who had a big, plain, honest, sunburned face, what he was offering her.

‘Why it’s
Iztli
, of course.’

‘
Iztli
?’

‘Obsidian-knife water.’ He glanced towards the summit of the pyramid, less than fifty paces above them, reverberating with the agonised screams of the next victim. ‘Drink!’ He held out the silver cup. His tone was almost beseeching, his eyes level and kind, wrinkled with laughter lines. ‘Drink, beautiful lady.’

‘What will it do?’

He looked meaningfully again to the summit of the pyramid, then back down. ‘It will dull your pain, lady.’

As Malinal reached out, Tozi lunged up from the step below and knocked the cup aside. ‘It’s not about dulling pain! Listen to those screams! They don’t give a shit about our pain. They use
Iztli
to dull our wits. They use it to make us docile so we’re easier to bring under the knife.’

The kind eyes of the soldier had turned indifferent. ‘Your loss,’ he shrugged, refilling the cup and moving down past Tozi to the next victim, who drank greedily.

Malinal was thinking,
Maybe I don’t mind being docile so long as there’s no pain when the knife opens my chest
. She was about to call the soldier back, but Tozi silenced her with a glance and whispered: ‘No! We have to stay alert. This isn’t over yet.’

Malinal looked closer and saw that something was back in the girl’s eyes, a spark, a fire, that had fled after the fade and her subsequent catastrophic fit in the pen.

There was another outburst of horrific screams and the whole line, like some monstrous centipede, shuffled two steps closer to the summit.

‘What are we going to do?’ Malinal asked. The heart that was soon to be ripped from her chest was pounding against her ribs; the blood that was soon to be drained from her body was coursing through her veins and beating in her ears.

Tozi suddenly smiled and Malinal caught a fleeting glimpse of unsuspected depths in her strange new friend – of a sweet, otherworldly innocence beaming through the chalk and charcoal, and through the deeper disguise of the tough, streetwise beggar girl in which she concealed her witchiness. ‘I thought all my powers were gone,’ she said, ‘maybe gone forever. But right after they took Coyotl, something started to come back …’

The line trudged another dreadful step upward.

‘I don’t know what it is yet,’ Tozi continued. ‘But there’s something there! I can feel it!’

‘Will you try to fade us again?’

‘No! It’s not that.’

‘Why so sure?’

‘I’ve tried already – before we started climbing the steps, just for a second or two – but it didn’t work.’

‘Is it the thing you call the fog?’

Tozi shook her head: ‘No, not the fog.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know! I wish I did! But there’s something there I can use. I’m sure of that. I just have to find it.’

More screams went up from the summit of the pyramid, close now, though still out of sight because of the steep slope of the stairway. There was the distinct wet
crack
that the obsidian knife makes when it splits a human breastbone, followed by a high-pitched gurgling screech and a sudden pulse of blood gushing over the top of the steps.

Ahead of them, her swaying pendulous buttocks pitifully uncovered by a flimsy paper loincloth, a young Totonac woman who had likewise refused the
Itzli
suddenly turned in her tracks, reached out her hand and gripped Malinal’s shoulder. ‘I can’t bear this!’ she screamed. Her eyes were rolling. ‘I can’t stand it any more.’ She gave Malinal a forceful shove, almost dislodging her from the slippery step and said, ‘Jump with me right now! You and me together! Let’s throw ourselves down. The fall will kill us. It’s better than the knife …’

A death chosen rather than a death inflicted? Malinal could see the point of that. And it would have the added advantage of cheating the bloodthirsty gods of the Mexica.

But such a death was not for her while there was still hope, and Tozi had given her hope. She swayed, pulled her shoulder free of the Totonac’s grip. ‘Jump if you must,’ she told her. ‘I won’t try to stop you but I won’t go with you.’

‘Why not? Don’t you understand what will be done to us there?’ The woman turned her face up to the summit of the pyramid, still hidden by the gradient.

‘I understand,’ said Malinal, ‘and it’s OK. You take care of your death and I’ll take care of mine.’

With groans of fear, whispered prayers, and the slack, dull faces of
Iztli
intoxication, the prisoners continued to shuffle upwards, pausing for long moments, then climbing again. Only those near the very top could see the altar and the sacrificial stone, but the butchered torsos of women who’d climbed the steps moments before continued to be thrown down by the priests, a constant reminder of what was to come.

Up a step. Stop.

Up two steps. Stop.

Though the moon was again behind cloud, the whole summit was brightly lit by torches and braziers, and Malinal began to see first the heads, then the shoulders, then the upper bodies of the team of sacrificers on the summit platform.

Ahuizotl was there!

How could he not be, since he’d want to gloat over her death?

Her fingers curled into claws.

Beside the high priest was Cuitláhuac who had also shared her bed.

And there, nude, bathed from head to toe in blood, working with furious efficiency, his face fixed in an ecstatic grin, was the coward Moctezuma, who she’d seen shit himself with fear.

Whack! Crack! In went the obsidian knife again, saturating the white paper garments of the next victim with bright red blood in an instant. Arteries were severed, more blood fountained into the air, and with a horrible, rending squelch, the heart was out.

Malinal distinctly heard Moctezuma say, apparently to thin air: ‘Welcome, Lord. All this is for you.’ Then at once another victim was stretched over the sacrificial stone and the Totonac woman climbed the final step to the summit platform and stood waiting, watching the killing team busy with their tasks. As the knife rose and fell she turned with a sad smile on her face, stretched her arms out beside her like wings and stood poised over the plunging stairway.

Cuitláhuac saw the danger first and barked an order for her to be held, but as the guards closed in she grappled with one of them, somehow unbalanced him, and tumbled with him over and over down the steep stairs, rolling and bouncing, their bodies pounded and broken into bloody shards long before they reached the bottom.

Malinal knew Moctezuma to be a superstitious man.

An ignominious suicide, carried out in his presence, snatching a beating human heart from Hummingbird’s grasp, could never be anything other than a very bad omen indeed – one for which Ahuizotl as high priest must surely be held responsible. The snakeskin drum, the conches, the trumpets all instantly ceased their din and in the ghastly silence that followed the only sound to be heard came from Tozi. It was that same soft, insistent whisper she’d used when she’d faded them in the pen – and in the same way it now rose in intensity, seeming to deepen and roughen, becoming almost a snarl or a growl.

Ahuizotl took a step forward. His eyes found Malinal but drifted past her. He seemed shocked and disoriented.

Was he imagining the terrible ways Moctezuma would punish him?

Or was Tozi getting inside his head?

Malinal was beginning to hope her friend really had got her powers back when she felt Moctezuma’s blood-rimmed glare drill into her skull as his four helpers grasped her by the arms and legs and threw her down on her back over the sacrificial stone.

It was truly a night of the gods, torn by winds and storm. Thunder rolled and huge black clouds harried the fleeing moon, sometimes reducing her to a flicker of balefire, sometimes allowing her furious and jaundiced face to peer through, sometimes shutting off her light entirely as though a door in heaven had closed.