Age of Aztec (6 page)

The toilet flushed. The bolt unlatched.

Stuart kicked the door violently inward. It struck the priest on the forehead and he staggered back. Stuart grabbed him, spun him round, and slammed him down face first onto the toilet bowl. He repeated the action twice more, until blood flowed freely and Marquand was gibbering in pain and distress.

“Please,” the priest begged, “I can give you money. However much you want. Please stop hurting me.”

“I already have money,” said Stuart, “and as for hurting you, that’s not what I’m here for.”

“What, then? Anything. Name it.”

“You dead. That’s all.”

Marquand bucked in sheer terror. Stuart took a firmer grip on him and plunged his head deep into the toilet. He held the priest’s face under the water until his struggles ebbed and became death twitches. He kept him there for another minute, just to be sure, before letting go. Remarkably, he had managed to get very little water on himself, just the odd splash here and there on his suit and shirt cuffs.

He exited the cubicle and went to deal with the minders. Unfortunately for them, he couldn’t leave them alive. They had seen his face and might be able to identify him to the Jaguars; at the very least, furnish a decent description. He gave each man’s head a short, sharp twist, separating skull from Atlas bone. Then he lugged the bodies into two empty cubicles and shut them in.

He washed his hands at the basin and sprinkled cold water on his face. His heart rate was returning to normal. The adrenaline surge that came with murder had begun to abate.

He stared hard at his reflection. A handsome but hollow man stared back. He composed himself. Hand-combed a stray lock of hair into place. Adjusted his tie.

Businessman Stuart Reston emerged from the gents and sauntered over to rejoin the passport queue. Within twenty minutes, he was out of the building and hailing a taxi.

Not long after that, a janitor wheeled his cleaning cart into the gents to give the place its hourly spruce-up.

His screams of horror could be heard halfway across the terminal.

S
TUART’S PENTHOUSE FLAT
boasted enviable views of the Thames, all the way from Blackfriars Bridge to Limehouse Reach. He stood on the balcony with a glass of whisky and a bowl of pistachios and watched the sun sink into the red fires of the western horizon. One of London’s few remaining pigeons alighted on the balustrade with a dainty coo. It was soon seen off its perch by a brash macaw and went flapping mournfully away, merging with the grey dusk. The more colourful bird sidestepped along the handrail, bowing and scraping, begging for a nut. Stuart showed it what he thought of that by swiping a fist at it. The macaw got the message.

Stuart was aware he had taken a ridiculous risk, slaying the priest like that at the airport. He had gone off-mission. The chances of being caught
in flagrante
had been huge.

He’d not been able to help himself, though. Once Marquand went into the gents, his fate had been sealed. Had Stuart believed in the gods, he would have said it was a gift from them. He had felt the familiar tingle of cold certainty in his gut:
what you are about to do is right, and righteous
. After that, there’d been no turning back.

Indoors, he flicked on the TV, and there on the news they were talking about Priest Marquand. “A vicious assassination,” said the reporter on the spot. “Murdered in cold blood at Heathrow Airport by an unknown assailant as he returned from a
trecena
-long cultural exchange trip to north Africa.”

“Cultural exchange trip,” Stuart echoed dryly.

Then the inevitable. “Is this the work of the Conquistador? The Jaguar Warriors have refused to speculate. Certainly nobody at the scene reports seeing an armoured figure matching the Conquistador’s description, but it has all the hallmarks, from the choice of victim to the sheer wanton brutality of the execution. The alternative theory is a copycat killing. Someone inspired by the Conquistador’s example is targeting the hieratic caste, mimicking his methods. If so, could this be the first of many such attacks? Are we seeing the beginning of a widespread civil uprising?”

Stuart raised an eyebrow. “Now that would be interesting.”

Leaving the television to jabber to itself, he went to the walk-in wardrobe that adjoined his bedroom. Suits and shirts hung in neat rows. Dozens of pairs of shoes sat, polished to a gleam, on racks. Stuart passed them by and halted at the far end. He felt for the hidden spring catch that released a secret sliding panel. The rear of the wardrobe opened up, and there in an alcove stood several suits of steel armour, perched on mannequins. Rapiers and flechette guns were mounted on the walls. Black masks dangled slackly from pegs.

Stuart could not suppress a smile. It was like some glorious treasure trove – a museum exhibit crossed with a functioning arsenal.

He reached out and stroked the nearest suit of armour.

“Soon,” he said, as though soothing a baby to sleep. “Soon.”

FOUR

7 Movement 1 Monkey 1 House

(Wednesday 28th November 2012)

T
HE SPOTLIGHTS AROUND
the Regent’s Park amphitheatre dimmed, and the audience hushed. The stage lights came up. The performance began.

A woman entered from the wings, dressed as the hermaphroditic god/goddess Ometeotl, half male, half female. She performed an elaborate, graceful dance set to a score that fused traditional instruments – clay flutes and ocarinas, mainly – with a contemporary pop rhythm. As she darted from one side of the stage to the other, her stance and style changed. On the left, she was all stomping, square-shouldered machismo. On the right, she was lighter-footed, more feminine.

She was Oneness In Duality, the coming together of opposites. She was the primordial flux that existed before the first great age. She was neither one thing nor the other, and both at once.

Her dance culminated in a symbolic birth. As the music crescendoed, from between Ometeotl’s legs (and up through a trapdoor) the Four Who Rule Supreme emerged.

First came Quetzalcoatl, resplendent in feathers and scales.

Next, Tezcatlipoca in a dark mirror-bedecked costume, amid swirls of smoke.

Then Huitzilopochtli, the wings on his back blurring like a hummingbird’s.

Finally hideous Xipe Totec, the Flayed One.

They were followed by Tlaloc, lord of rain and lightning, and a rapid procession of lesser deities, including the thirteen Lords of the Day and the nine Lords of the Night.

As Ometeotl faded into the background, his/her work done, the Four Who Rule Supreme danced around Tlaloc in a circle, each at his respective cardinal compass point. Then began a series of individual dances, accompanied by corps members representing the beings who lived during each of the first four great ages.

Primitive earth dwellers, giants who could uproot whole trees with their bare hands, thundered about in the first age, whose ruler was Tezcatlipoca.

Tezcatlipoca was supplanted violently by Quetzalcoatl. The two gods were born rivals, dark versus light, uncertainty versus stability, cunning versus integrity. Quetzalcoatl’s age was an age of air and wind, and his subjects were monkey men who flew among the treetops like leaves on the breeze.

Tezcatlipoca returned and struck Quetzalcoatl to the ground, usurping him. The third great age was a time of rain, and Tlaloc was set in place as its lord and master by Tezcatlipoca. Quetzalcoatl brought it to a close with a downpour of fire from the sky, which wiped out the global population of winged, turkey-like folk.

The fourth age belonged to Chalchiuhtlicue, jade-skirted goddess of streams and still water. Amphibious fish men thrived in this time, which ended in a massive, all-erasing flood.

The next age began with Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca setting aside their differences and suing for peace, since up until now their strife had inflicted so much carnage and devastation. The two moved in beautiful balletic unison, mirroring each other’s posture and gestures, to an elegant, waltz-like tune.

To mark their truce they collaborated in the slaughter of the she-beast Tlaltecuhtli. Transforming themselves into giant serpents, they seized the many-mouthed monster and tore her to bits. From her mutilated body a fresh world was formed. Her hair became vegetation. Her eye sockets became caves. Hills and valleys were her nose, mountains her shoulders.

This miraculous if messy metamorphosis was rendered through a variety of forms of stagecraft: props, puppetry, mime, and shifts in the lighting that revealed backdrop images painted on successive layers of scrim. The audience appreciated it immensely, cheering and applauding as the fifth great age – the current age – took shape before their eyes.

But where were the people? Who would inhabit the earth now? Quetzalcoatl descended into the underworld, Mictlan, to retrieve bones of the ancestor races, from which he intended to create a brand new race. Mictlantecuhtli, the Dark One, the god who presided over Mictlan, tried to trick and entrap him, but Quetzalcoatl outsmarted him at every turn. He evaded the Dark One’s devious snares and surfaced victorious with an armful of broken bones. These he handed to the snake goddess Cihuacoatl, who ground them to powder in a bowl. Then every god donated drops of blood, Cihuacoatl mixed it all together, and hey presto, humans appeared.

Again, the audience loved it, including the twenty-strong group of priests who occupied the best seats in the house. While everyone else had to make do with hard, bleacher-like benches, the priests sat in cushioned comfort on a specially erected platform at the centre of the amphitheatre’s arc. Bowls of fresh fruit and maize snacks had been laid on for them, and they were regularly doused with a mist of insect repellent to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The platform blocked the view of the stage for dozens of people in the rows behind, but nothing could be done about it and nobody complained. The presence of priests at the performance was indisputably an honour and, thanks to the theatre’s publicity department, had been heavily touted in the press and on TV. The show ran nightly, weather permitting, but never until this evening had any of their holinesses attended, and in such numbers too. The dancers and actors were, as a consequence, giving it their all, and the audience members were doing their bit by showing more than usual enthusiasm for the action onstage – even those who couldn’t see much more than the backs of the priests’ heads.

A
FTER THE INTERVAL,
the performance switched from dance to drama, in order to tell how the non-aggression pact between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca foundered and the god of smoke and mirrors played a vile trick on his brother.

The original text of this play was said to date back to Shakespeare, who composed it towards the end of his life after becoming a secret convert to the Aztec faith. Of course it was never staged in his lifetime, nor during the many calendar rounds that followed, at least not in public. With the Aztec Empire busy storming the gates of Europe and threatening to lay siege to Britain, that would have been tantamount to treason. Only after Britain finally fell to the Empire, just over a hundred solar years ago, did the play emerge into the light of day.

By then, Shakespeare would have been hard pushed to recognise it. His draft – assuming it ever existed – had been handed down through the generations orally. A process of continual revision and updating had taken place with each clandestine rendition. Lines had been added and removed. New scenes had been improvised, old ones discarded.

The basic narrative, however, which every schoolchild learned almost as soon as he or she could talk, stayed the same. The story beats were as familiar to people as the beats of their own hearts.

One day, Tezcatlipoca held up his scrying mirror to Quetzalcoatl, promising to reveal to him his true face.

The mirror falsely showed, not a magnificent god in the prime of his life, but a withered, decayed old man with a long white beard.

“This,” said Tezcatlipoca, “is the truth of what you are – the truth of all flesh.”

Quetzalcoatl was appalled; repelled.

To calm him in his agitation, Tezcatlipoca gave him a goblet of
pulque
laced with magic mushrooms.

Quetzalcoatl took a sip. Liked it. Drank deep.

He fetched his younger sister, Quetzalpetlatl, and made her drink too.

They lay together, the siblings, inebriated beyond all sense and propriety. They copulated. They slept.

The following morning, Quetzalcoatl, utterly ashamed, took his leave of the world. He could rule it no longer, not after committing the sin of incest. He was not worthy.

The other gods elected to go with him, even deceitful Tezcatlipoca, who was likewise ashamed by his own behaviour.

They left behind them the sum of their knowledge and wisdom – their arts, their crafts, their technology – for humans to use as they saw fit.

And they bestowed the gift of eternal life on one man, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II, who would forever after be known as the Great Speaker and would rule in the gods’ stead, their voice on earth.