ELEVEN
2 Snake 1 Lizard 1 House
(Thursday 6th December 2012)
S
TUART SET DOWN
the binoculars in order to slap at something biting his wrist. Inspecting the palm of his hand, he found the mushed remnants of a mosquito the size of a bumblebee, along with what seemed like several fluid ounces of his blood, the insect’s last meal.
The rainforest. There was nothing here that wasn’t trying to sting you, eat you, poison you, suck your blood, or keep you awake half the night with hundred-decibel screeching. Anahuac, the holy land, cradle and hearth of the Empire. Well, you could fucking keep it.
He raised the binoculars and zeroed in again on the object of his scrutiny. It lay at a distance of two miles from his vantage point, across the placid blue waters of Lake Texcoco, on an island approximately a mile long. It covered the whole of the island, its walls rising sheer above the lake to a height of around a hundred metres, Stuart estimated.
Tenochtitlan, home of the Great Speaker. More citadel than city and more fortress than either.
Ziggurat rubbed shoulders with ziggurat. Some of them were topped with roof gardens, others with glassed-in solariums, a couple with aerodisc landing pads. There was one waterfront entry point only, a harbour with a road that led up to a large gate at the city’s southern tip. The gate was built as an inverted trapezoid, in true Aztec fashion, and was well defended. There was no other mooring place around the island perimeter as far as Stuart could see, but there were watchtowers at regular intervals along the walls and any number of armed patrol launches circling in the vicinity. Tenochtitlan had been designed to be unbreachable. The Great Speaker’s personal army, the Serpent Warriors, added a further layer of security.
Beside Stuart, Zotz shifted impatiently. “Seen enough?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
Ah Balam Chel’s second-in-command grunted and popped a flake of jatoba bark into his mouth to chew on; it settled his stomach.
As Stuart scanned Tenochtitlan’s roofline he caught sight of a private aerodisc making its descent towards the city. The moment the disc touched down, it was surrounded by a dozen Serpent Warriors. Some dignitary or other – an ambassador, a delegate here to crave a boon, a priest, perhaps even a High Priest – came down the gangplank. He waved warily at all the lightning guns that were pointed at him. Only after he had presented identifying documents and a seal of office were he and his entourage permitted off the rooftop, into the city. Several Serpents were posted to stand guard around the disc and would remain there until it was the dignitary’s time to leave.
Stuart turned his attention to the outer walls. They were impossible to climb. The battlements were too high to be reached by any kind of grappling device, and the stonework was pure traditional Aztec – slabs of basalt cut so precisely and wedged together so tightly that you couldn’t insert even a sheet of paper between them, never mind a piton or a fingertip. You’d have to be some kind of human spider to have any hope of scaling the walls successfully, and all the while you’d be inviting the Serpents in the watchtowers to take potshots at you. They were elite troops, the best of the best, cherry-picked from the ranks of Eagles and Jaguars all over the world. You could be sure that whatever they aimed at, they would not miss.
“Come on,” said Zotz. “We can’t stay here much longer. Serpent discs make regular sweeps along the lakeshore. Besides, we’re losing the light.”
“Sun’s still well above the horizon,” Stuart commented.
“You forget, Englishman, this is the tropics. When the sun goes down, it goes down fast.”
Stuart took one last look at Tenochtitlan, hoping against hope that he would find some gap in its defences, some chink in its armour of stonework and sentry. Perched in the middle of an inland sea, it was like a castle with an immense moat. Its army of protectors were disciplined and dedicated, and had the highest wage packet known in professional soldiering, with substantial bonuses awarded for exceptional initiative or diligence in the line of duty. The Great Speaker was ensconced in a remote, impenetrable bastion. He ventured out from it only on rare occasions, and outsiders could not get in unless they were invited, expected, and fully accredited.
So how on earth did Chel think Xibalba could pull off an assassination?
The question rattled around in Stuart’s brain as he followed Zotz back through the forest to their canoe. Chel claimed to have the basic ingredients of a plan, but Stuart had wanted to reconnoitre Tenochtitlan to assess the parameters of the situation first-hand before making any sort of commitment. If he was going to throw in his lot with Xibalba, he had to be satisfied that it would be a worthwhile exercise. No point jumping off the fence if there was nowhere to land.
On present evidence, Xibalba stood a cat’s chance in hell of killing the Great Speaker. Assuming they managed to get inside Tenochtitlan somehow, in terms of numbers, matériel and strategic capability they were no match for the Serpent Warriors. It wouldn’t even be a suicide mission, because that would imply the desired outcome could be achieved through sacrifice of lives. It would just be plain suicide.
Stuart and Zotz reached the edge of one of the tributary rivers that fed into Lake Texcoco. Their kapok-wood canoe was where they’d left it – hauled ashore and secreted among undergrowth. They slid it out onto the water and unshipped the paddles. There was an outboard, but they wouldn’t use that until later. A sudden burst of engine noise might attract attention.
The thin, flat-bottomed boat glided along against the sluggish current, propelled by its two oarsmen with slow, easy strokes. The sky purpled quickly and dusk fell, and the forest animals set up their usual nocturnal hullabaloo, as if this was the cue they had been waiting for. As the stars came out, everything with lungs and a throat started to shriek, gibber or howl, while everything that had chitinous body parts to scrape together started to chirp, all at deafening volume.
Zotz switched on a powerful lamp affixed to the canoe’s bows to light their way. Instantly a pair of eyes shone from the darkness of the riverbank. They disappeared from sight as the creature that owned them padded its way into the water and slithered under the surface with a just audible splash.
“Caiman,” said Zotz. “Didn’t look too big. Nine, maybe ten feet long.”
“Ten feet sounds big enough to me,” Stuart said. “Any danger to us?”
“Not unless it attacks.”
“But it won’t attack a boat.”
“Not unless it thinks the boat is a rival caiman coming to take over its territory or steal its mate.”
“How do we know it won’t think that?”
“We don’t. Just paddle.”
Zotz might have been joking. It was impossible to tell. The Mayan was a man of few words, with a set to his chin that suggested he didn’t suffer fools gladly and thought most people
were
fools. Stuart quite liked him. He wasn’t sure whether Zotz liked him back, but was proceeding on the assumption that he didn’t. Possibly Zotz regarded him as a rival, someone who might usurp his position as Chel’s right-hand man. Stuart could have assured him he needn’t worry on that front. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have anything to do with Xibalba at all. He owed the Mayan guerrillas a debt of gratitude, but beyond that, nothing.
As he and Zotz continued to plough their way upriver, Stuart recalled another night-time journey over water, made just four days earlier.
T
HE
X
IBALBA VAN,
damaged by ramming the paddy wagon side-on, just made it to Woolwich before the engine let out a wheezing groan and expired. The guerrillas dashed through the docklands, Stuart with them, until they arrived at a jetty where a small fishing vessel was waiting. The boat’s French captain, Beaudreau, cast off straight away, and they were soon chugging along Barking Reach, past the bleak tufted wastes of Hornchurch Marshes, out towards open sea.
Dry clothes were found for Stuart – a set of fisherman’s overalls – and as he stood at the taffrail and watched London recede in the boat’s wake he wondered when, if ever, he would return to the city. Perhaps never. How could he go back? He was a marked man now. There could be no more doubt who the Conquistador was. His life as a masked vigilante was over, and likewise his life as an obsidian importer. At a stroke, he had become an exile. From here on, Stuart Reston was a fugitive, a perpetual expatriate, forever on the run.
Chel joined him at the stern as the fishing vessel entered the chop and surf of the North Sea and began rounding the coastline of Kent.
“We were keeping an eye on you,” he said. “I thought you might be needing us at some point, once the Jaguars started taking an interest. It was careless, letting that detective woman outmanoeuvre you the way she did.”
“Maybe I knew all along I had Mayan guardian angels. Maybe I was relying on you coming to my rescue.”
“Maybe. Still, she got past your defences. You underestimated her.”
“Implying I was seduced.”
“Beguiled.”
“By the person who gave me this?” Stuart pointed to the fresh bruise that was swelling on his cheek, overlaying the bruise Vaughn had put there the previous day. “I don’t think so.”
“You should put her out of your mind anyway. That’s all over for you now. For better or worse, you’re with us.”
“For the time being.”
Chel made a dismissive gesture.
Overnight they crossed the Channel, reaching the port of Saint-Malo at dawn the next day. Captain Beaudreau was part of a French resistance network that had been conducting a campaign of passive, surly dissent for a couple of hundred years, ever since imperial annexation. They called themselves the Louisiens, after the monarch who chose to abdicate rather than rule a country that had just capitulated to the Empire. King Louis XVI was arrested at Marseilles attempting to steal away on a schooner bound for Malta. He was guillotined in the Place de l’Entente at the end of the Champs-Élysées before a throng of Parisian well-wishers who showered him with rose petals as he stepped from the tumbrel onto the scaffold. In revenge for this act of mass insubordination, a contingent of Jaguar Warriors, at the behest of newly anointed High Priest Napoleon Bonaparte, rounded up everyone in the square and put them to the guillotine as well.
The massacre had embedded itself in the French consciousness, festering there like an infected splinter. A certain element in the country refused to forget it. The Louisiens made sure that the hieratic caste didn’t have an easy time. They achieved this mostly by obstructing theocracy with bureaucracy. Edicts from the Palais Bourbon were seldom implemented in full and never with any haste. Sometimes the wheels of power turned so slowly they seemed to be standing still. Systematically and unobtrusively, a whole sector of the populace made it their role in life to collaborate as little as they could with their leaders while still staying the right side of outright noncompliance. Probably in no other country could this nuanced state of affairs have been achievable, and certainly nowhere but France could it have been carried out with the same sense of sangfroid.
From time to time the Louisiens took a more direct hand in frustrating the will of the powers-that-be, as now, by smuggling the Xibalba guerrillas, and the Conquistador too, out of Britain. At Saint-Malo the harbourmaster turned a blind eye to the fact that Captain Beaudreau claimed to have brought in a catch of one and a half tons of mackerel, dace and skate when his hold was in fact devoid of fish and his nets not even damp. The same harbourmaster then directed Beaudreau’s “crew,” who hardly looked like native Bretons, to a cargo truck standing at the quayside. Stuart and the Mayans got in the back. A lengthy, suffocating ride later, they were disgorged at the international airport at Nantes, along with the various items of luggage that had come over with them from London.
At the airport, tickets awaited them. Chel bought Stuart a set of new clothes at one of the concession shops and handed him a French passport with a photo of Stuart inserted. “We plan ahead,” he said.
For the foreseeable future, Stuart was René Jolicoeur, a botanist of dual French/Anahuac nationality who preferred to speak to the customs officers and airline staff solely in Nahuatl. “To show where one’s true loyalties should lie,” he explained, and not, of course, to cover up the fact that he barely knew any French beyond the few loan words that had been incorporated into Nahuatl.
The flight to Mayapan was the first time Stuart had ever travelled coach class, and he noted that neg-mass flight was considerably less slick and smooth when your seat was at the outer edge of the aerodisc, as opposed to being in the central cabin. Airsickness was a novel experience for him, but one, he supposed, he might have to get used to, now that he no longer had access to his many millions.
It wasn’t until that evening, however, as he lay in bed in a grimy hotel room in downtown Mayapan, that he grasped the momentousness of what had happened to him. Mosquitoes buzz-bombed his head. Ocarina-led disco music thumped from an open-fronted bar outside. Neon flashed through the threadbare curtains. The bedsheets reeked of other people’s sweat. The heat was atrocious, with only a clattery electric fan to alleviate it.
This was another world.
No, it was
the
world. Stuart just hadn’t had to experience it quite so intimately before. His entire life, he’d known wealth. It had insulated him from everything, like a wadding of cotton wool.
That was gone now, and he missed it.
Didn’t he?
What he did miss, suddenly, gut-wrenchingly, were his wife and son. Grief hit him with the force of a charging rhino, and he realised he’d not felt this way – so hopelessly hollow, so utterly bereft – since the day he first donned the armour of the Conquistador. Everything he’d done as the Conquistador, the manic stunts, the priest slayings, had helped prevent him from dwelling too hard on Sofia and Jake. His head had become perfectly clear, free from conflicting thoughts. He’d no longer felt the yearning, aching need to hug the son who wasn’t there any more. He’d no longer switchbacked between adoring and loathing the woman who had ripped the heart out of his existence.