Clash of Star-Kings

by Avram Davidson

  Bad enough that he, having come with warmth, should be greeted with coldness! Bad enough that his sincere inquiries had been repulsed with assumed ignorance and feigned indifference. Worse, he had been tricked! But worst of all, he had been given over to the custody and the ministrations of women, two old hags and a child, as though he were no more of a man than the infants on the earthen floor! It was not to be tolerated! Rage choked him — they did not think he was a man, then? Not worthy of masculine courtesy? So — he would show them if he were macho or hembra! He half-rose from where he was sitting….

  But the sudden ugly flame, which sprang more from outrage than from lust, died down quickly. The women were too old, dry and shriveled like mushrooms, and the girl was far too young — it would be like mounting a boy…. Besides, this was their village, they would certainly make a commotion, and Luis might indeed cease very suddenly to be very much macho at all after the men were finished with him.

  He muttered a Moxtomí thanks and farewell which almost choked him, and walked off with stiff and angry strides away from the cold and meager hamlet and its empty streets.

  With distance, however, came reflection; with reflection, forgiveness. Why should they have trusted him? What, after all, did they know of him? His overtures of friendship might, for ought they knew, have been false. Wasn’t his father a landowner? If he, Luis, were a Moxtomí, with a memory of loss of tribal communal lands which had gone on over the course of over four centuries, it might very well seem cause for suspicion…. Only — Why, now? Why had suspicion of his intentions (if such it was) never manifested itself before? Or, at least, never in this form? What had suddenly upset them … for they had, he now clearly recalled, been upset before he arrived. The source of their mistrust of him must therefore lie in something apart from him … and, almost certainly, in something apart from them….

  What could this be?

  He had no doubt that it lay, somehow, in the very matters he had desired to question them about; which he, in fact, had questioned them about. And since they would, and perhaps really could, tell him nothing, it thus behooved him to find out the answers himself and then tell them. His imagination began to soar once again, and, looking down from mental heights upon a landscape only partly imaginary, saw things it had been accustomed to see before. But now it saw clearly in detail as well as in outline things of which it had previously seen as only semi-concealed hints. He saw these so clearly and so richly that it no longer was possible for him to doubt them. In his disappointments with the modern world ruled by guerros and blancos of “purer” Spanish blood than he, in his sullen retreat from it, he had failed to appreciate that his knowledge of it could make it possible for him to use it for his own (and his friends’) ends — and thus totally to defeat it. Would this be machismo or not?

  Thus and therefore …

  He would not only find out the answers to the mysterious questions which must be not merely puzzling but vexing the Moxtomí — and thus gain their full friendship and confidence — he would do more than that; he would solve, somehow, (details did not concern him now) the basic Moxtomi question of all: how to regain the lost ejido lands, and by regaining them transform the Moxtomí from the huddled handful they now were to the prosperous people they had once been, and — with the help of Luis Lorenzo Santangel — would be once again.

  The sun on its way down seemed to turn the edges of the Valley into gold.

  III

  Robert Macauley, a stocky, self-contained sort of man with shrewd blue eyes and a large blond mustache, was the connection which had brought the Clays to Los Remedios … via the Concerning the Author note attached to a story of Macauley’s in a little magazine they happened to come across. Jacob had liked the story well enough, more than he had any of the others, which was less praise than it merited, but it was the words “now lives in Los Remedios, a small town in the State of Mexico” which had hooked their attention. They had moved, freshly married, from New York City, a place which Sarah declared contained no oxygen, to the Currier and Ives community of Pickering, Pennsylvania, wherein they had learned, by and by, a number of important things, such as that: it had, and for good reason, a suicide rate higher than Sweden or Japan; two can’t live as cheaply as one; their landlady, a virago with a face like a malevolent horse — ah, well….

  “If we can’t make more money, then let’s go where the money we can make will go further,” they said. And they said, “If we’ve got to move, let’s move far away in one jump.” And they said, almost in one breath: “ ‘Los Remedios, a small town in the State of Mexico’ — hey!” They wrote immediately to Macauley and received a fairly immediate reply containing the magic words, “My own expenses amount to about $50 a month,” and beat it the hell out of Pickering, Pa., one step ahead of litigious Mrs. Moomaw’s latest writ. The trip south, via a disintegrating station wagon whose sale to them almost seemed to have been arranged by Mrs. M., standard-gage, auto-bus, and narrow-gage r.r., so exhausted them that they couldn’t have moved any farther if Los Remedios had looked like the Pit of Purgatory instead of rather like an Andean village shoved north by a glacial drift. Finding Señora Mariana’s back patio house had been, they were not long in realizing, a stroke of luck, for Los Remedios was not much designed for accommodating foreigners.

  Another thing they soon picked up was that living there was not going to cost them anything as low as $100 a month, either. Curiosity mingling with annoyance, Sarah said, “Mac, how do you manage to live here on only $50 a month?”

  “I sleep with my landlady,” he said, very simply.

  “Oh. You didn’t tell us that.”

  “If I had, you wouldn’t have come, and I wanted some people I could speak English with.”

  Their expenses ran them something close to $200 a month, but this was still about $400 cheaper than life in Mrs. Moomaw’s semi-renovated barn, plus the fact that Señora Mariana would as soon have entered a brothel as a court of law. Besides her truly benevolent assistances, they had six rooms for $20, including a large studio with a skylight where Jacob Clay, a thin, frenetic man enraged by the difference between what he was writing and what he knew he was in theory capable of writing, typed and cursed and periodically poked his head out to see if the mail had come with assignments or checks. At least once a day they went over to Macauley’s house and at least once a day he came over to theirs. Another approximately $20 went to Lupita, but by now Lupita had managed to extinguish any guilt feelings either of them had had for paying such wages.

  So now, at the moment, while Jacob crouched at his typewriter like an outraged toad, and Sarah sulked her way through the dishes — only not very far through them: the water was cold — Macauley sat on the coping of a dry fountain in the patio and talked. He talked of his stories, for one thing, and his fears (in which Jacob, who mildly admired the stories, concurred) that despite their merits they were far too far out of current literary fashion to achieve any notable success. “So I decided to take time off — from the one about the childless aunt who schemes to replace her sister-in-law as Foremost Female Figure in the children’s lives … by the way, a standard plot item in Mexican soap opera … nobody cares about a philandering husband that much — and repair Lenita’s kitchen ceiling. I’d like to put in a fireplace but she wouldn’t know what to do with one. The Mexicans have never discovered the chimney, they ‘re moving right from the charcoal brazier to the atomic pile; meanwhile, let the smoke find its way out — that’s their attitude. It took me only about half the time that it would have taken a carpenter, but it would have driven a carpenter crazy to watch me!” he said, with cheerful pride. “Carpenters are always driven mad to see the way that miners work because we always do everything ass-backwards … according to them … but we get it done better and quicker. Any miner can handle wood, but did you ever see a carpenter who could handle explosives?”

  “No,” said Sarah, rubbing her rapidly chapping hands. “I didn’t know you used to be a miner …”

&nb
sp; “Once a miner, always a miner…. Say, don’t forget the procession tonight. You won’t want to miss that. It’s quite a thing.”

  She felt that she would gladly agree to miss every procession that ever was or would be, even if led by Jesus of Nazareth riding a zebra, in exchange for getting the dishes done. But of course nobody would take her up on it. She noticed that young Mexican who spoke the strained English come into the patio. Mac spoke to him in rapid Spanish, the boy asked something about Jacob, and Mac gestured to the study door. Sarah felt too subdued to warn him off, and besides, if Jacob shouted at the boy he might work off all his hostilities and be in a good and sympathetic mood towards her. She sighed heavily and looked glumly at the dishes.

  “Tell me about the procession,” she said, dully.

  “Jacob, you are busy?” Luis asked, entering the long room with its yellow-washed walls and long trestle table laden with piles of books and papers.

  Luis, entering, had no more substance or reality to Jacob Clay than, say, the Ghost of Purim Yet to Come. He thought of a sentence he wanted for his next paragraph, and smiled, vaguely. Luis, encouraged by the smile, came in and sat down in the cane-bottomed chair with the red, white, blue and green floral designs. Jacob jotted down the sentence in pencil; it was not quite ready to go through the typewriter. He looked up and gazed abstractedly at Luis in the chair, not altogether noticing either of them.

  “I can speak to you in confidence and in Español?” asked Luis. “I may to make the light?”

  Jacob muttered, “Sí, sí …” without more than barely understanding the question. It was getting on towards dusk. He peered up at the light, scowling. The light went on. Good. He began to reflect on the sentence. Absurd, that he should allow one paragraph to hold up this whole damned piece, but … mmm … how did it go, now? ahhh … He was not merely overwhelmed by this new calamity, he was by it … yeah … okay … mmm … so: He was? what? by it….

  “You are very kindly. Bueno. Entonces, mira, Jacobo — ” Luis began his confidences, haltingly to begin with, but with gradually increasing fluency. He felt no contradiction in explaining his secret problems to a foreigner; indeed, had Jacob not been a foreigner, Luis would never have dreamed of making him a confidant. True, Luis distrusted … feared … hated those of lighter skins — but only those of lighter skins who were Mexicans. It was they, after all, who had snubbed him; not the gringos, to whom all Mexicans were alike. Jacobo was as polite to him as he was to Don Umberto, the Municipal President. Let Don Umberto mutter about the loss of Tejas and Alta California by gringo conquest, gringo theft. How many thousands of hectares of ejido lands had not Don Umberto’s townsmen acquired that had once been conquered and thefted from the Moxtomí! It was not the Moxtomi, after all, who had lost Tejas and Alta California. Luis was as indifferent to the yanqui conquests there as any African nationalist was to Russian conquests in central or eastern Asia. It was his own losses he resented, not losses in general, and the enemies of his enemies he regarded as his friends.

  “Entiende, Jacobo, ayer en las montañas …”he said, earnestly.

  Jacob regarded him, serenely and unseeingly. He was not only overwhelmed by this new calamity, he was — he was — he was — Okay, he was what? washed out? flooded out? No … no … no … But something like it. Luis was talking. Luis was asking something. Who knows what. Jacob Clay made a sympathetic noise, continued to search his mind for the mot juste.

  • • •

  Robert Macauley smiled a smile of anticipated pleasure and stroked his golden mustache. A chance had been given him to enlarge on his favorite subject, The Secret History of Mexico. Usually he liked to reveal new entries for The Worst Thing That Happened to Mexico (“The worst thing that happened to Mexico was the expulsion of the Jesuits; literacy dropped seventy percent in a generation,” or “The worst thing that happened to Mexico was the publication of the Papal Bull against Freemasonry; liberalism and religion were divorced forever.”), but Little-Known Insights he cherished almost as much. Sarah’s question was right up his alley.

  “ ‘Who was the Holy Hermit of the Sacred Mountain?’ ” he repeated. “That’s a good question. Let’s precede it with another one. ‘Why is the Sacred Mountain sacred?’ Hey? I suppose that this town has been rebuilt a dozen times at least, since the Conquest … but I bet that if you traced on a map the route this procession will be taking you’d have a pretty good outline of its original boundaries and axis. Now, obviously, the Sacred Mountain was sacred when Huitzilopochtli or Quetzalcoatl used to have the concession. The old Aztec flay-’em-alive boys had one of their cardiectomy clinics on top of it, you can be sure of that. It’s got an unintenupted view of both Popo and Ixta, the Super-Sacred Macro-Mountains. And, naturally, Cortez and Padre Olmedo, his chaplain, didn’t waste any time in toppling the idols and setting up a cross in their place.

  “The Indians wailed a bit, but they didn’t really object too much. Know why? Know what their big objection was? That the Spanish cross didn’t have equidistant arms! Sure. The natives already had the cross as a religious symbol. The old bishops claimed this proved that St. Thomas the Wandering Apostle had stopped off here in Mexico on his way to India. And the Mormons, of course, claim that this proves that Jesus was here, just as Joseph Smith said. But the simple fact of the matter is — and there’s other proof connecting this with Monte Sagrado, I’ll get to that in a minute — the simple fact of the matter is, that a cross with equidistant arms was the ancient Mexican symbol of the rains which come blowing down bringing blessings from every direction, and all four cardinal points in particular. But still: what made this hill with the pyramid holier than any other hill with a pyramid? And particularly after it ceased to have the pyramid?”

  “Was there anything else on the hill?” asked Sarah, beginning to get interested despite herself.

  Mac smiled an a-hah sort of smile and raised his eyebrows and his index finger. “ ‘On’ it? ‘On’ it?”

  “Well, what then? Under it?” she said, at a venture.

  Instantly he leveled the index finger at her face. “Exactly. Exactly. How did you know? Who told you? They don’t usually care to discuss it with outsiders.”

  Sarah beamed and raised her hands, palms out, to the level of her ears, in one of her favorite gestures. “You mean that there is something under it? Oh my goodness!” She uttered a squeal of sheer delight.

  “What? Tell me? Hidden treasure?”

  “Tlaloc.”

  “Who? What — what?”

  ‘There’s a Tlaloc under, or perhaps I should say, inside, the Holy Mountain. A statue of the rain god. At least, some say there’s a whole statue. But all that’s visible is the head. I’m not sure there is any more than just a head. It’s in a sort of tunnel or cave, or — if my miner’s experience is my judge — a combination tunnel and cave. How they got it in there beats me, because the way is so narrow you more or less almost have to wiggle on your belly like a reptile — and it’s not carved out of any kind of stone that was ever found in, under, there, either.

  “Never mind how I got permission, I have certain strings I can pull if I need to,” he said, winking, “but it took some doing. The good clergy have done about all they could to christianize the surface of that little mountain, but nothing could ever de-paganize that head. Try to imagine it” — he said, glee giving way to sober sincerity — “this gigantic head — must be a good six feet up and down and across — eyes half-closed — broad nose — full lips — expression of infinite majesty and calm — ”

  “Gee — !”

  “ — nothing Aztec about it in the world, it must be pre-Aztec, Toltec, maybe, or even Olmec. And — get this, now: it’s situated under a sort of seepage spot from a spring … and the impression that you get, when you turn your flashlight on it, is that, well, damn it! That it’s sitting under a sort of gentle rain.”

  “Gee!”

  “Yes, exactly. Well … even though hardly anyone has ever seen it, because you’ve got to go thro
ugh the church precincts and the priests have got it closed off and shut up with a good ten stout gates with enormous locks, still, everyone knows it is there. All of which is background as to what makes the Holy Mountain holy. Now, as for the Hermit himself, well….”

  What the Hermit’s original name was, Macauley had been unable to learn; he wasn’t even sure that it was on record. But it was a matter of history that he had been some sort of pagan priest or attendant at Monte Sagrado when the Spaniards arrived and that he was just about the first to accept baptism. The Spaniards made him a catechist and, Roman Catholic priests being then and for a long while thereafter in short supply, his influence as a catechist was immense. In fact, he might well have become a Roman Catholic priest himself — except that no natives were ordained at that time at all. Weren’t trusted not to be relapsable, in short.

  But Juan Fernando, as his baptismal name was, nevertheless, had lived a devout religious life, never marrying, showing an excellent example, quietly exhorting and instructing, chastity, poverty and obedience and all that, respect of Spanish and Mexican alike … and, when he finally died, was buried right there.

  “Right up there?”

  “Right up there…. Only he didn’t stay buried. He’s still on view, in that glass-covered catafalque that they’ll bring around tonight. A sort of local example of popular canonization. To the Church, of course, he is no saint. But to the people, he’s very much a saint. Oh, a few times, some superscrupulous bishop has decided that this is an illicit cultus and has tried to suppress it. But not for long. The most the priests here will commit themselves to, if you ask them if it’s true, as the people say, that the Hermit takes off at night for Rome every now and then and serves the Pope at mass — oh, they’ll sort of click their tongues and give a quick shake of the head….