War God (5 page)

He killed another man. And another. Sticky clots clung around his fingers where he gripped the knife. There was blood in his eyes, in his mouth, clogging his nose.

He rested a moment while the assistants prepared the next victim, and beckoned Ahuizotl, his high priest, whose bulging yellow eyes, blotchy skin, gaping nostrils, crooked teeth and lecherous monkey features greatly resembled those of the manipulative and vicious species of water monster after which he was named. The high priest was his man, bought and paid for, and he strode forward now in his black, blood-smeared robes.

‘You did not give me good advice,’ Moctezuma told him. His voice was soft, but there was a deliberate edge of implied threat and Ahuizotl looked worried.

As well you might
, thought Moctezuma
. As well you might.
I could have you strangled in your sleep.

Ahuizotl kept his eyes downcast: ‘I humbly apologise to Your Magnificence if I have failed you in any way. My life is yours to dispose of.’

‘Your life is always mine to dispose of …’

Ahuizotl began to bare his breast but Moctezuma reached out a bloody hand to stop him: ‘Spare me the theatricals. I don’t want your heart. Not yet anyway.’ He looked up at the sun which was high in the sky, standing close to noon. ‘The god does not appear to me,’ he said, ‘because we have not offered an adequate basket of victims. I expect you to remedy this situation, Ahuizotl. Be back here in two hours with five hundred and twenty young women for me to kill.’

‘Five hundred and twenty!’ Ahuizotl’s mournful face registered shock. ‘In two hours? Impossible.’

Moctezuma’s voice grew softer: ‘Why is it always your instinct to say “no”, Ahuizotl?’ he asked. ‘Learn to say yes if you wish the light of my presence to shine upon you.’

‘Yes, Magnificence.’

‘Very good. So I shall expect five hundred and twenty young women then?’

‘Yes, Magnificence.’

‘The younger the better. I do not insist that they be virgins. I don’t expect you to perform miracles, you see. But I want them here in two hours.’

Dumb witness to this exchange, still stretched across the sacrificial stone and awaiting the first cut, the next victim trembled. Nonetheless, Moctezuma noted approvingly, he continued to hold himself under some sort of control. That took courage. He raised the obsidian dagger and plunged it deep into the man’s bare chest, delighting in his screams as he sawed the blade savagely upwards, splitting the breastbone and exposing the palpitating heart.

‘Watch and be thankful as the Great Speaker of the Mexica takes your life,’ whispered Moctezuma. He began to cut again, busy now, with his nose in the gaping chest cavity, working close-up with the knife, soaked in streams of blood, severing the thick vessels that encircled the beating heart until the whole quivering, dripping organ came loose in his hands and he flung it on the brazier where it hissed and smoked.

Priests rolled the body away; even as they were butchering it, a new victim was dragged into place over the sacrificial stone.

Out of the corner of his eye Moctezuma saw Ahuizotl leaving the summit of the pyramid with three of his black-robed entourage – no doubt to round up the women he’d demanded for sacrifice.

‘Wait,’ he called after them.

Ahuizotl turned to look back.

‘Before you bring me the women,’ said Moctezuma, ‘you will bring me the Flesh of the Gods.’

Sometimes, an hour or two before being sacrificed, specially favoured victims were fed the mushrooms called
teonanácatl
, the ‘Flesh of the Gods’, which unleashed fearsome visions of deities and demons.

More rarely, the sacrificer himself would partake of the mushrooms.

After he had killed the last of the fifty-two young men, Moctezuma received a runner sent by Ahuizotl, who had climbed the pyramid to bring him a linen bag containing seven fat, finger-length mushrooms. Their silver-grey fish-belly skins gave way to shades of blue and purple around the stems. They exuded a faint, bitter, woody aroma.

Seven big
teonanácatl
amounted, Moctezuma knew, to a sizeable, probably terrifying, dose, but he was prepared to eat them to engineer an encounter with Hummingbird, war god of the Mexica, whose representative on earth he was. In the early days of his reign the god had come to him often as a disembodied voice speaking inside his head, present at every sacrifice, giving him commands, guiding him in every decision he took, but as the years passed the voice became fainter and more distant and, for the last five years, as the ominous year One-Reed slowly approached, he had not heard it at all.

Priests were still hovering round him but Moctezuma ordered them away, telling them he required two hours of perfect peace before the next bout of sacrifices began.

He watched as they filed down the steps. When complete silence fell he stripped off his sodden loincloth and advanced naked into the shadows of Hummingbird’s temple, clutching the bag of mushrooms.

The temple, which was built on the broad summit of the pyramid, was a tall stone building. Its two principal rooms were luridly illuminated by the guttering flames of burning torches.

Moctezuma put a mushroom in his mouth and began to chew. It tasted of death, of decay. He added two more and walked into the first room.

Lined up on both sides of the wall, skewered from ear to ear on long horizontal poles, taking their place amongst other, older trophies, were the dripping heads of the fifty-two men he’d spent the morning killing. He remembered some of their faces. Their wide, staring eyes. Their mouths frozen as they screamed their last.

He confronted one of the heads, pushed right up to it, glared into the vacant eyes, wiped blood from the high cheekbones and thin lips.

It made him feel powerful to encounter the so-recently living.

He moved on, into the second room.

Here, curiously patterned in the light and shadow cast by the flickering torches and the high, narrow windows, with a huge serpent fashioned from pearls and precious stones coiled about its waist, was Hummingbird’s squat and massive idol. Carved from solid granite, its eyes, tusks, teeth, claws, feathers and scales glittered with jade, polished horn and obsidian and the most precious gold and jewels; a golden bow was clutched in its right fist, a sheaf of golden arrows in its left, and a necklace of human hearts, hands and skulls was strung around its neck. The idol’s snarling mouth was smeared with gore and lumps of meat where priests had forced the half-cooked hearts of the victims through it into the reeking receptacle beyond.

Moctezuma sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the great idol and slowly and methodically ate the rest of the mushrooms.

For a very long time nothing happened. Then at last the disembodied voice he thought had deserted him was back inside his head:

‘Do you bring me hearts?’ the voice asked.

‘This medicine is bitter,’ complained Coyotl. ‘Why must I finish it?’

‘Because I say you must finish it,’ said Tozi. ‘I who obtained it for you at great expense. It will take away your pain.’

‘How great was the expense, Tozi?’ The little boy, who should have been born a merchant, was always inquisitive about anything to do with barter and exchange.

‘It was very great, Coyotl.’
Greater than you can possibly know
. ‘Pay me back by finishing it.’

‘But I hate it, Tozi. It tastes of … uggh – bird shit!’

‘So you’re some kind of expert on the taste of bird shit?’

Coyotl giggled: ‘It tastes like this medicine you are forcing me to eat.’ Despite his protests, he had already swallowed almost the whole first dose of the noxious-smelling red paste. He was stretched out quite comfortably on the ground, with his head in Tozi’s lap, and he now unwillingly ate the rest of the drug.

Coyotl was six years old. He was in the women’s pen, rather than amongst the males, because his genitals had been hacked off in infancy by his parents, leaving only a slit. This had been done as an offering to Tezcatlipoca, ‘Smoking Mirror’, Lord of the Near and the Nigh. Four days ago those same loving parents had dedicated the rest of their son to the war god Hummingbird, whose temple stood on the summit of the great pyramid, and had delivered him to the fattening pen to await sacrifice. The other women in the pen had shunned him, as they did all freaks and oddities, but Tozi had taken him under her wing and they had become friends.

‘You need to sleep now!’ she said. ‘Give the medicine a chance to do its work.’

‘Sleep!’ Coyotl’s response was high-pitched and indignant. ‘I don’t think so.’ But his eyes were already drooping closed.

Tozi was seated cross-legged. She blinked, rubbed her aching temples and yawned. She felt dizzy, perhaps a little sick. Though she had sustained it only for a five count, her brief, intense fade had exhausted her more than she’d realised. Her head nodded forward, sleep overmastered her and she dreamed, as she often did, of her mother the witch. In the dream, her mother was with her still, comforting her, teaching her and then, strangely, whispering in her ear, ‘Wake up, wake up …’

‘Wake up!’

It was not her mother’s voice! The moment of confusion between dream and reality passed and Tozi, now fully alert, found herself face to face with the beautiful young woman who’d haunted her earlier. ‘You …’ she began.

Then she choked back her words.

Behind the woman, less than fifty paces away, four of the black-robed priests of Hummingbird had entered the pen, followed by armed enforcers, and were hauling fresh victims aside.

Although momentarily preoccupied with other prisoners, the priests were moving fast and making straight for them.

‘Are you going to let them kill us?’ the woman said. She spoke in a throaty whisper, her voice low and filled with urgent power. ‘Or are you going to make us disappear?’

Tozi winced as a burst of pain struck her head. ‘Us?’ she said as the spasm passed. ‘What us?’

‘You, me and the little one,’ said the woman. She glanced down at Coyotl, who stirred and grumbled in his sleep. ‘Make us disappear the way you make yourself disappear.’

‘If I could make myself disappear, do you think I’d still be in this prison?’

‘That’s your business,’ the woman said. ‘But I saw what happened this morning. I saw you fade. Then you were gone.’

The woman was crouched next to her, her sleek black hair shadowing her face, her body emanating a warm, intense musk, and for the second time that day, Tozi felt the dangerous pull of a connection, as though she had known her all her life. Making no sudden movements that might attract unwelcome attention, she looked round, taking stock of their predicament, automatically tuning in to the feverish agitation of the crowd, probing to see if there was something she could use.

Whatever it was, it could not be another fade. She cursed herself for employing the spell of invisibility earlier, when it had not been a matter as desperate as this. But with her head pounding so very badly, Tozi knew it would be at least another day, perhaps two, before she dared risk it again.

The pen was massively overcrowded and the sudden arrival of the priests at this unexpected hour had sparked off a mindstorm of fear. Most prisoners knew not to bolt – that was the fastest way to be selected for sacrifice – but there was a general cringing and drawing back, as from the approach of a savage beast.

Tozi recognised the high priest Ahuizotl in the lead, a vigorous, evil-looking, mean-mouthed old man with mottled skin. His black robes and thick, shoulder-length grey hair glistened with oozing curds of freshly clotted gore, and his blunt, bestial face was set in an expression of thunderous rage. Flanked by his three assistants, also copiously smeared and splashed with blood, he cut a swathe across the crowded floor of the pen, selecting women – all young – whom he pointed out with furious jabs of his spear. Armed enforcers at once restrained the protesting, terrified, screaming victims and led them off.

‘I can only hide two of us from them,’ Tozi volunteered abruptly, ‘but I can’t hide three. So it’s you, or the kid.’

The woman pushed back her hair and a ray of sunlight, lancing deep into the prison through some crack in the roof, caught flecks of jade and gold in her irises and set her eyes ablaze. ‘You must save the child of course,’ she said.

It was the right answer.

‘I lied,’ Tozi whispered to the woman, ‘I think I can get all three of us out of this. Anyway I’m going to try.’

‘But …’

‘Stay still. Whatever happens, you have to stay still. You have to stay quiet.’

Tozi glanced up. Ahuizotl was pushing towards them, just twenty paces away, every angry lunge of his spear nominating another victim. This was a man who’d taken countless lives for Hummingbird and Tozi sensed his blood power. He would not be easy to deflect or confuse.

Neither were the younger priests to be underestimated, with their cruel sneers and long, lean fingers.

So she scanned groups of prisoners milling nearby and her eyes fell, with a feeling of real gratitude, on Xoco and two of her gang. They were off to the left, trying, like everyone else, not to attract the attention of the priests.