Clash of Star-Kings

by Avram Davidson

  Macauley and Clay shook their heads when asked about Luis’s family. He had had no hopes in that family; that family had had no hopes in him. All of his hopes had been with the Moxtomí, and in their now-realizable hopes of reclaiming through purchase the lost Moxtomí communal, ejido, lands, the Moxtomí were fulfilling all of his dreams which were worthy of fulfillment.

  Mac said, “I didn’t even think he was listening when I explained about the dynamite. I didn’t even think he was paying attention when the balloon started going up, down there inside of the Monte. But he had been and he was, sure enough….”

  Jacob Clay winced, nodded. “It didn’t occur to me. Not to do what he did, not even to realize what he was doing when he was doing it.” But the memory of the young man came back strongly and clearly as he spoke: Luis, face no longer blissful and enchanted, but a strong and totally calm male face. Luis bending to pick up Macauley’s still lit, still burning puro, waiting until all the others — Great Old Ones, Moxtomi, and Jacob (with the help of young Deuh) carrying Macauley — had gotten out of the cave, then himself moving with deliberate haste and lighting the fuses from the cigar and tossing the sticks of dynamite — one against the opening through which most had entered, one against the larger opening the Old Ones had made for themselves — then moving purposefully against the third opening, the doorway of escape, and standing there with the burning charge in his hand so that none others might pass.

  Until it, too, had gone off.

  • • •

  Side by side the two Americans walked down towards the town. “We might have asked them for, oh, I don’t know — some sort of a souvenir, maybe,” Macauley said. “What do you think? Hey?”

  Jacob didn’t think so. “No one would believe us, anyway,” he said. “Unless we turned up with that whatever-it-was that they had. That machine or engine or …”He waved his hand, at a loss for words. “And from what they tell us about that, the sooner it gets lost, the better.”

  A passing herd-boy paused a moment as he came up to them.

  “Did you feel the temblor, Señors?” he asked.

  “What temblor, young one?”

  “Ah, you did not feel it, then. During the night, Señores, a temblor in the town. It cracked several of the steps upon the Monte Sagrado, and overthrew that old archway on the edge of the town. Other than that, no damage — ” He broke off to lope after his cattle.

  Macauley grunted. “As I understand it, though, after the exchange … or the transformation … whatever you want to call it — you saw it! Damn it! Did those things slide between the subatomic particles coming in and out and back again, or what? Hell…. But anyway, it’s my impression from what they were telling us that neither remaining … what’s the word I want? ‘Device,’ there … that neither remaining device is harmful.

  “Oh, well. You’re probably right, though. Nobody would believe us. Unless maybe the Saucer Cultists, and I guess we can do without that…. What do you suppose the devices are good for, now?”

  Jacob shrugged. “Making rain, maybe,” he said. They both laughed.

  Neither could resist going back to the Monte Sagrado and joining the crowd which stood and examined the cracked steps. “Securely, it was nothing more than a minor earthquake, such as has happened time after time here in the Valley,” someone was saying; (Jacob recognized him — the merchant Lopez, member of the Constitutional Ayuntamiento of the town) “possibly because of the proximity of los volcanes.”

  But not everyone agreed with him. And one old man, so agitated that he removed his enormous old-style sombrero and struck it with his hand, cried, “And I tell you, Don Procopio, that, securely, it is nothing of the sort! It is the work of el Tlaloc! A warning that he is not to be molested — ”

  Don Procopio Lopez scoffed. “Do you call yourself a Christian?” he demanded.

  The old man wagged his head. “I do, I do, and I tell you what every child knows: that el Tlaloc is himself a Christian, converted, probablemente, by the blessed Apostle Señor Thomas himself when el santo visited Mexico after the death of Our Lord — as witness that the emblem of the Tlaloc is a cross.” The crowd murmured. “Can anyone deny this?” the old man demanded.

  A market woman, of those who knelt hour after hour, usually, alongside a pile of produce, without visible show of weariness, now nodded her head vigorously.

  “Mira, Don Procopio, he has reason, this old one,” she said, emphatically. “The Tlaloc is very well where he is. It is said that he is himself a quality of saint — the saint of rain. How is it otherwise that the Holy Hermit made his home above the Tlaloc? Have the priests been molested by our Tlaloc? Has the bishop? No! Why then should the government and the military molest him?”

  Don Procopio began to perspire very slightly. On the one hand, he was a member of the government and obliged to defend its doings; on the other hand, he was a businessman, and his customers were right here in the crowd and not among los burocráticos in the Federal District. “You also have reason, Señora Veronica,” he declared. “I can assure you that is not the motive of our institutional and revolutionary government to molest el Señor Tlaloc, no, no — on the contrary — it is nothing more than the intention, without embargo, to remove him from his present obscure position in which he faces danger of destruction by earthquake and thus to bestow him with the utmost respect to a position of equal honor and greater salubrity — ”

  Macauley tugged at Jacob’s sleeve and muttered in his ear, “Let’s get on up and see what’s doing.” Jacob nodded. They gently slid through the crowd, which was already beginning to evince a degree of persuasion.

  “The time is past,” they heard Don Procopio orating, “when our national treasures and patrimonial heritages can be suffered to molder in the darkness. Does not the work of the Revolution still continue? Are not new schools, new centers of health and maternal care — ”

  Macauley murmured that he would not be surprised if Don Procopio did not eventually rise to the position of Alternate Member of the Chamber of Deputies, or something equally commensurate with his talents. “He’s wasting them peddling galvanized nails here in Los Remedios — hello! Soldados.”

  Sure enough, the entire cavalry troop seemed to be engaged on something quite important on and inside of the Monte Sagrado — not, to be sure, on horseback, though. There was much running back and forth, excited shoutings, and — as a sort of double-take — their way was barred by an armed guard. “Damn,” Mac said, low-voiced. “Look — picks, shovels, pit-props…. They’re going to excavate! I suppose that we might have known that they’d excavate! We should have realized! The militario was sent here to secure the Tlaloc … and they are damned well going to secure the Tlaloc! … or know the reason why. Damn, damn, damn.”

  The guard continued to face them with a sort of this-is-merely-me-in-my-official-capacity attitude, without menace or resentment. Orders, Señores, are orders, his face said … another time, and you can buy me a drink … but just don’t come any further or I shall be obligated to fusillade you.

  Jacob said, “I just thought of something. You suppose there’s anything left of the Tlaloc?”

  His friend sighed and shrugged and winced. “I just thought of something. You suppose there could be anything still alive in there?”

  “Ugg. Christ. Yes, I mean, I hope no. You mean — ”

  “I mean.” They faced each other. “Of course, there aren’t — weren’t — many of them….”

  “Who knows how they reproduce? Or what they might do? Just suppose that any of them are alive and say just enough to alert, say, the Air Force, to reconnoiter around the tops of Popo and Ixta before the Good Guys take off …?”

  There was then, in the indeterminate distance, a muffled scream. A shout. Many shouts. Another, or perhaps the same, scream. Less muffled. Growing louder. Feet running, trampling, stumbling. Voice shouting. The guard moved warily so that he was able to cover with his weapon both the two foreigners and what until that second had been his rea
r. And another soldier came into sight, face insane with fear. “¿Joven, que pasa?” the guard cried.

  “Ah — ah — ah — not masks — not masks — no hearts — no hearts!” the fleeing one screamed and babbled. “Ai, Jesusmaria, men whose hearts were torn out! — things of nightmares — ai! — ai!” He clawed at his eyes, staggered, slumped to the ground in a faint.

  “I guess that there was something still alive in there,” said Macauley, looking rather sick.

  Jacob swallowed. “And I guess we can guess what they’ve been up — ” He stopped abruptly. His eyes, Mac’s eyes, the eyes of the guard, all swung around to the opened gate which led into the depths of the Sacred Mountain. The sound was ragged and prolonged. It was repeated. And again. Jacob said, “Three volleys….”

  The guard had begun to tremble. “Oh, my mother,” he muttered. “What has this poor one seen? What are they shooting at in there?”

  They never knew if he ever found an answer. Very shortly a file of soldiers appeared at port arms, eyes staring and mouths sagging; at their head, their commanding officer. “… don’t know and don’t want to know,” he was saying in a high, tight voice only kept by great self-control from being a shout. “Wall them up, what’s left, forever, and — ” He stopped short on seeing the two foreigners.

  Macauley asked, crisply respectful, “Are all dead, colonel?”

  “Securely, they are all dead, and pray God they all remain so!” Something seemed to click behind the eyes of Coronel Benito Alvarez Diaz. He drew himself up. “I do not know exactly or even approximately what you may think you may be referring to, Sir Macauley,” he said. “But this I can assure you: the United Mexican States constitute a secular, a totally secular Republic; and as an educated man and a freemason I not only do not fear, I indeed totally defy all superstition, whether Christian or pagan!”

  His eyes blazed at them. Macauley made a gesture in between a salute and a bow. “I understand, Colonel, and I respect infinitely both your motives and the compliment of your confidence.”

  “It’s well…. Now, for the love of God, get out of here, say nothing, and let us all have a good, stiff drink!”

  • • •

  It was quite a good while later before Jacob got back to his own patio, walking with exaggerated care, and smelling strongly of Oso Negro gin. He found Sarah in so deep a mood of self-sorrow that she barely bothered to scream, “Where have you been all night, you son-of-a-bitch?” at him, as he, breathing heavily, pulled off his shoes with all four hands and needing every one of them, too.

  “Dispense, dispense,” he muttered. “Work of utmost importance to peace and happiness of future generations. Elder gods. Bad guys. Smelled real bad. Foreign names. Can’t pronounce. Don’t get wrong idea,” he cautioned, crawling onto the bed. “Some are all right. Best friends. But not in same neighborhood.”

  Sarah began to weep. It was all too much. Not alone that he had been gone all night and now had come home stinking drunk. But Lupita, evil and wicked and faithless Lupita, had yet again and yet once more failed to show up. And so once more and yet again she, lovable and put-upon Sarah, was left with a pile of dirty dishes and greasy pots and nothing to wash them in, or with, but ice-cold water. “You bastard,” she sobbed. “A lot you care!”

  From halfway along the bed Jacob opened one bloodshot eye. “Let one in,” he cautioned, “first thing you know: brings in his whole family.” He closed his eye, was instantly and catatonically unconscious, and began to snore like a demented lumber mill.

  • • •

  Señora Mariana, the landlady, and her sister, Señora Josefa, were properly sympathetic. “Ah, the poor pretty norteamericaness!” they sighed to her. “Yes, yes, we have sent to inquire, and the response is that la Lupita is not encountered at all today; no, no, Señora, she is not to be found. What barbarity!”

  “But why?” Sarah demanded. “Where can she have gone?”

  They shrugged. They shook their heads. “Thus it is, Señora. One takes the troubles to teach these girls the proper management of a household, and as soon as they have learned, what passes? Always, but always, Señora, they go off to ‘Mexico,’ where they can make more pesos. Thus it is today, Señora, but it was not thus when we were young. You are well off without that cruel Lupita. Very well off,” they nodded, seriously.

  Sarah thought that they might well be right. But … still…. What was she going to do? How would she manage, up here so high that water scarcely boiled, no O-cello sponge mops, no Campbell’s soups, no Comet cleanser, no detergents — and now: no maid?

  They did not entirely understand her, but they were sympathetic nevertheless. “Do not weep, poor pretty Señora,” they urged. “All men become drunk, but observe in how much more civilized a manner become drunk los norteamericanos! And as for a girl, pues, Señora, have no concern: my sister and I will inquire, we will seek, we will securely find you another girl to aid you.”

  Sarah smiled a wobbly but already-be gun-to-be-reassured smile. “You will?”

  “Oh, without doubt, Señora!”

  “Absolutely, Señora!”

  “Oh, good! That’s all right, then…. When?”

  “Mañana, Señora!”

  “Mañana!”

  • • •

  Partly as a result of the eloquence of Don Procopio in pointing out that active noncooperation might well result in peril to the basic Revolutionary principals of Effective Universal Suffrage and No Reelection of Presidents, and partly as a result of rumors that Colonel Alvarez Diaz had already shot a large number of resisters and interred their bodies up within the Monte Sagrado, further resistance to the removal of Tlaloc melted like snow in the summer sunshine.

  Further troops arrived, archaeologists arrived, engineers arrived, gigantic machinery of all sorts arrived, a special railroad spur was constructed; and so, little by little, and with infinite pains, the Tlaloc was slowly removed through a new-made opening in the side of Monte Sagrado, gently eased down the slope, hoisted aboard the flatcar, and conveyed and convoyed by day and by night slowly and carefully the entire length of the mas o menos line to its terminus in the ancient Estacion San Lazaro in the City of Mexico. Here it was placed with equally painstaking care onto the specially constructed, specially reinforced bed of the most powerful truck in the Federal District: and, slowly, slowly, slowly, under constant military and civil escort, conveyed along its route to its new home in the new Museum of National Antiquities and Patrimonial Treasures.

  Tlaloc’s fame had gone before him, as such things have a way of doing. By the time the truck was underway it was well past midnight. Nevertheless, the route, which passed by a total of twenty-seven churches and the cathedral, was lined with what traffic experts calculated must be at least two million of the five million inhabitants of the City of Mexico. As the truck bearing the gigantic stone head, its eyes half-closed, on its full lips an expression of infinite majesty and calm, passed on its slow way through the throng, not a sound was heard.

  Not a sound, that is, except the continual sound of the pouring down of what all observers and all records agreed was by far the heaviest cloudburst of rain ever seen on that date in any year in the entire Valley of Mexico.

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  Copyright © 1966 by Avram Davidson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting

  Cover Image(s) ©123RF.com

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the pro
duct of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-4592-8

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4592-4