Harbinger of the Storm

by Aliette de Bodard

  This from a man who had just become heir-apparent to the Mexica Empire. I stifled a smile. "I'm sure you can live with it. Come on. Let's find Mihmatini and tell her the good news, and then I'll go back to the Duality House and finish Ceyaxochitl's vigil."

  We strolled out of the Imperial Palace, past the Serpent Wall, and into the familiar crowd of the Sacred Precinct. The Fifth Sun was overhead, beating down upon us, the heavens bright and impossibly blue. Blood ran down the steps of the Great Temple, going underground to settle into the grooves of the disk, sealing again and again the prison of She of the Silver Bells, and the star-demons were gone. Everything was right with the world, or as right as it could be.

  Except…

  Except that, at the edge of the sky, I could see them, the same storm clouds as in the heartland, slowly closing in, grey and swollen and angry, a reminder of the god's presence. And I didn't need Mictlan's magic to see the skeleton beneath Tizoc-tzin's skin. We had put a dead man on the throne, an empty husk, animated only by magic and the blessing of a god.

  When Huitzilpochtli's blessings and magic ran out – and they always did – what would happen then?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No novel is written in a vacuum, especially a research intensive one like Harbinger of the Storm. Accordingly, I would like to thank the livejournal communities ancient_americas, ask_a_historian and little_details for helping me narrow down the date of Axayacatl's death. Traci Morganfield, as usual, was a stupendous help, both with sources and with general support – her continued faith and enthusiasm for the series was a great help to keep me going through the terrible middle of this volume. Likewise, Marion Larqué's enjoyment (she read both books in record time) kept me writing throughout.

  Dave Devereux, whom I met in 2009 at Eastercon in Bradford, turned out to be a dab hand at murder methods, and provided me with several poisons for causing the symptoms I wanted for Ceyaxochitl's death (though I do wish to note that I find his expertise slightly worrying and am not entirely sure I want to have dinner with him, in spite of his obvious culinary skills).

  Justin Pilon read both the synopsis and the novel, and provided awesome feedback on both – not to mention provided awesome advertising for book one. Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, in addition to being a fabulous writer herself, provided me with much-needed space to unwind and fascinating discussions on culture and cultural identity.

  The writers of the Villa Diodati workshop provided interesting conversations on novel writing, novel promotion and general brainstorming, as well as great food and great company: Deanna Carlyle, Nancy Fulda, Stephen Gaskell, Sara Genge, Floris Kleijne, Chance Morrisson, Ruth Nestvold, John Olsen, Ben Rosembaum, and Jeff Spock.

  The members of my writing group Written in Blood read the second draft of this and helped me fix several broken moments, as well as cut down on the number of characters involved in court intrigues. Many thanks to Keyan Bowes, Dario Ciriello, Janice Hardy, Doug Sharp, Juliette Wade and Genevieve Williams for making this a smoother and easier read.

  A humbling number of people promoted book 1 online and offline (in addition to those mentioned above): Kevin J Anderson, Elizabeth Bear, Lauren Beukes, Blackwatch, Dave Brendon, Tobias Buckell, Stephanie Burgis and Patrick Samphire, Seb Cevey, Andy Cox, Electra aka starlady38, Emmanuel Chastellière, Tom Crosshill, Pat Esden, Roy Gray, Dave Gullen, Rob Haines, Colin Harvey, Caroline Hooton, Chris Kastensmidt, J. Robert King, James Maxey, Lucas Moreno, Cara Murphy, Nik aka Loudmouthman, Gareth L. Powell, Stefan Raets, Julia Reynolds, Roxane aka edroxy, Angela Slatter, M.J. Starling, Rob Weber (alias Val online), Sean Williams, Russell Wilcox, Maria Zannini at Online Writing Workshop, the T-Party writers' workshop, Danie Ware and the Forbidden Planet staff involved with my signing and bookselling there, and to everyone else who talked about the book, reviewed it, or was kind enough to let me blather about my writing in their corner of the web. In the promotion department, special thanks go to Janice Hardy, who in addition to having a sharp eye for structure and conflict, is also an awesome graphic designer and provided me with Servant of the Underworld bookmarks and business cards.

  As always, many thanks to the AR crew, Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris, and to my agents John Parker and John Berlyne at Zeno Agency for the enthusiasm, the responsiveness, and for putting up with my more naive questions on the world of publishing and deadlines.

  And finally, to my family: to my paternal grandparents, whose house was always a treasure-trove of books; to my maternal grandmother, my bà ngoai, who took care of me as a child, and still does; to my parents, for always being there; and to my sister, who promoted the book to all and sundry across Europe, from Spain to Finland. And, last but not least, thanks to my husband Matthieu, who, not content with being dragged to London to see a (wonderful) exhibition on the Aztecs, cheerfully suggested suspects, brainstormed rituals and plotted bloody murders with me, in addition to reading the first draft of this with his usual critical eye.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  French by birth, Aliette de Bodard chose to write in English – her second language – after a two-year stint in London. Though she has trained as an engineer (graduating from Ecole Polytechnique, one of France's most prestigious colleges), she has always been fascinated by history and mythology, especially those of non-Western cultures. Her love of mysteries gave her the idea to write a series of crossgenre novels which would feature Aztecs, blood magic and fiendish murders.

  She is a Campbell Award finalist and a Writers of the Future winner. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and Fantasy magazine, and has been reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction. She is now hard at work on her third novel – the next in the Obsidian and Blood series.

  She lives in Paris, where she has a job as a computer engineer.

  www.aliettedebodard.com

  Extras…

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  As I mention in the afterword to Servant of the Underworld, writing a book set in Aztec times carries with it a number of challenges, not the least of which is reconstituting a history we know little about. As usual, any egregious mistakes are my own, and not those of the sources I consulted.

  The other challenge is how to make the civilisation intelligible for modern readers. Most Aztec names are long; for the longer the name was, the most prestigious it was. They are also replete with a number of phonemes barbarous to English ears such as "tz" or "tl". Accordingly, I took the decision to simplify matters somewhat. The inhabitants of the city of Texcoco are in fact the Acolhuas (much as those of the city of Tenochtitlan are the Mexica-Tenochca); but given how little they were referred to, I used the word "Texcocan", which has the merit of having a clear common root with "Texcoco".

  Similarly a number of names were simplified. I chose to refer to the She-Snake by his title rather than by his name, the rather long and unwieldy "Tlilpopoca-tzin"; and Nezahualtzin's full name is in fact "Nezahualpilli-tzin", quite a mouthful. Most other names chosen were deliberately short, useful for us but something that would have been highly disrespectful in Aztec times.

  I twisted history in several respects, perhaps the most notable being the addition of the High Priest for the Dead to the highest level of religious hierarchy. The histories only mention the High Priest of Tlaloc and the High Priest of Huitzilpochtli as supreme religious authorities, but I needed a triumvirate in order to justify Acatl's presence at Court.

  And, while it is true that the Great Temple, the centre of religious life in Tenochtitlan, was rebuilt and enlarged multiple times (one of the most notable expansions being the one started by Tizoc and continued by his successor Teomitl), the huge disk I describe underneath the temple was not, in fact, in this location. The disk, which showed the dismembered body of Coyolxauhqui, She of the Silver Bells, was in fact set at the bottom of the Great Temple steps. The bodies of the sacrifices would tumble down the steps, and fall onto the disk, re-enacting the primal sacrifice of She of the Silver Bells, and ensuring Huitz
ilpochtli remained dominant.

  Harbinger of the Storm is set a year and a half after its predecessor, Servant of the Underworld. It concerns itself with the matter of the imperial succession, a thorny problem in a society which had no formal system of inheritance and relied instead on a group of elders and important noblemen (the council) to designate the man they thought fit to rule the Mexica Empire.

  We have little record of what actually happened around Axayacatl-tzin's death, save that the year of his death coincided with a total eclipse of the sun. I chose to situate the eclipse in the days following his death, which puts his death in the winter season, towards the end of the Aztec year. Obviously, given the symbolism of the Revered Speaker as representative of the Southern Hummingbird Huitzilpochtli, and the latter's ties with the Fifth Sun, the proximity of an eclipse to his death would have seemed deeply ominous to the Aztecs.

  The She-Snake is worth a brief mention here; he was part of the duality which underpinned most Nahuatl thought. Just as most gods had a female counterpart, the Revered Speaker, the representative of Huitzilpochtli, had his counterpart in the Cihuacoatl, the She-Snake. The former was in charge of what we would call external policy, such as making war; the latter handled internal matters like order in the city, the Sacred Precinct and the palace. This is the same duality we find at the lowest level between husband and wife, the husband taking care of external affairs like going to war and taking care of the fields, while the woman was the one responsible for running the household. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the She-Snake had his own palace, I chose to have Axayacatl's She-Snake take his quarters in the Imperial Palace in order to keep him closer to the plot.

  The very first She-Snake was Moctezuma I's brother Tlacaelel, the man who is credited with rewriting the history of the Mexica Empire to give them their divine destiny to conquer the world, as well as restructure the religion around the mass sacrifices to their tribal god Huitzilpochtli. Many sources have him live well into the reign of Teomitl, but I have taken the more likely explanation offered notably by Nigel Davies, that he died in Axayacatl's reign, leaving his son Tlilpopoca to ascend to the position in his place.

  The ritual to access the Mexica heartland was inspired from the one described in Fray Diego Durán's account (in The History of the Indies of New Spain, as collected in The Flayed God), in which the wise men of Moctezuma's reign go to beseech Huitzilpochtli's guidance, and are berated by the god's mother for having forgotten their humble origins. Part of the mother's speech I used as an inspiration for Huitzilpochtli's angry questions in the heartland.

  Another character is worth a mention, Nezahual is perhaps most known as the wise old man who announced the arrival of the Spanish to the then-Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II. Revered as a sorcerer, Nezahual is also known for being a great lover: he had 2,000 concubines (though only 40 bore him sons). His reign was the golden age of Texcoco. I therefore chose to give him as a patron god Quetzalcoatl, who was most often associated with knowledge and benevolent progress.

  Finally a brief note on geography. This volume sees Acatl and Teomitl stay mostly with the Imperial Palace, with two notable exceptions. The pleasure gardens they visit in chapters 17-18 are those of Texcotzingo, built by Nezahual's father. Their ruins are still extant in Mexico. The other place, Teotihuacan, is much more famous. The ruined pyramids bear witness to a civilisation that flourished around 150 BC-700 AD, dominating the Basin of Mexico. By the time the Aztecs came, only the ruins of the temple complex remained, which the Aztecs believed to have been built by gods. The Aztecs believed Teotihuacan to be the place where the sun had risen into the sky, hence its name, which roughly translates as "The Place Where the Gods Emerged". The ruins themselves were walled off and became a place of pilgrimage. In the shadow of the wall a busy city-state flourished. It is in this newer city that Nezahual, Acatl and Teomitl find sleeping quarters.

  THE HISTORICAL SETTING

  Like its predecessor Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm is set in late fifteenth-century, near the apex of the Mexica (Aztec) Empire. Unlike its predecessor, it is far more concerned with the political intrigues of the court. The Mexica Empire had a very peculiar, semi-hereditary system of leadership, as evidenced in this book. We don't have many records of how the deliberations went, but I suspect they were much shorter and less protracted than in the book, as the next Revered Speaker was often chosen in the wake of the funeral for the latest.

  Though the choice was theoretically between all members of the imperial family, the eleven Revered Speakers the length of the Mexica Empire were mostly chosen from the brothers of the previous title-holder or from those of fraternal descent – ¬ if they weren't the brother of the previous one, they were a nephew or great-nephew. The She-Snake, who could claim a line of descent from the brother of Moctezuma I (the Revered Speaker before Axayacatl) would have been an unlikely but possible candidate, particularly if Tizoc-tzin had been found unworthy. Xahuia's son would have been a possibility also, but still more unlikely. Ironically, the second-best candidate would have been Teomitl, as Manatzpa himself proposes, though he would have been considered very young for the position. Five years later, when Teomitl acceded in turn to the Turquoise-and-Gold Crown, the annals note that he was specifically chosen for his youth and dynamism.

  I took some other liberties with the setting. I added Acatl, High Priest for the Dead, to the duo of High Priests at the apex of religious hierarchy (the histories mention both the High Priest of the Southern Hummingbird and that of the Storm Lord). And you will probably have guessed that Teomitl's planned first marriage with Mihmatini is entirely fictional as well. In reality, as Acatl mentions, the first marriage would have sealed a diplomatic alliance. It's not impossible that it would have involved one of Nezahualtzin's sisters or daughters, giving these two a further reason to remember each other.

  The town of Texcoco plays a large part in this book. By 1481, the Triple Alliance formed between Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan was mainly spearheaded by the first two cities. The inhabitants of Texcoco were actually the Acolhuas (just as the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan are the Mexica), but I stuck with "Texcocans" so as not to muddy the waters in a book already loaded with characters and factions.

  The gardens Acatl, Teomitl and Nezahual-tzin visit in the course of chapter 18 are those of Texcotzingo. They were built by Nezahual-tzin's father and dedicated to the god Tlaloc, and were said to be a true wonder, though very little remains of them today.

  Teotihuacan, the Birthplace of the Gods, plays a particular role in Mexica mythology. the ruins of the rich civilisation which had built it were mistaken by the Mexica as the work of the gods. The huge pyramids were deemed to be the tombs of the gods, who had given their lives at the beginning of the age so that the Fifth Sun might rise (hence the renaming of the central alley as the Alley of the Dead). By the 15th Century, Teotihuacan had become a centre for pilgrimages – the ruins fenced off by a great wall, while the bustling, new city was further west.

  Nezahual-tzin is actually Nezahualpilli-tzin (his name means the Fasting Prince/the Hungry Prince, and the name of his father, Nezahualcoyotl, means the Fasting Coyote). I shortened it for ease of reading. Nezahual-tzin is best remembered in Aztec history as a canny old sorcerer ; it was he who prophesied to Moctezuma II the arrival of strangers from beyond the seas, though he did not live to see the Spanish arrive. Aside from his mysterious powers (which I attributed to Quetzalocatl, god of Wisdom and Knowledge), Nezahualtzin is mainly remembered for the size of his harem (around

  2000 concubines, and 144 children), and for his unbending sense of fairness. He executed his own son for adultery, and one of his Mexica concubines for multiple murders, almost sparking a Mexica-Texcocan war. Many historians, including Nigel Davies, have suspected Nezahual-tzin of being less than eager to wage war, preferring to stay at home and indulge in the luxury of his palace, which would have annoyed Ahuizotl, a strategist always eager to campaign with his soldiers.

  Th
e interplay between Ahuizotl/Teomitl and his brother Tizoc is, again, the stuff of speculation. What we do know about Tizoc is that he had the shortest and most lacklustre reign of the Mexica Emperors. His coronation war was a dismal failure, and his reign one series of mediocre campaigns after another. There is a hypothesis that his death after only five years of rule was the work of sorcerers, possibly in the pay of his over-eager brother Ahuizotl. What he is best remembered for is for starting a large-scale rebuilding of the Great Temple, which would later be completed by his brother and successor Ahuizotl, a dedication mainly remembered for the scale of human sacrifices offered at this occasion, as if to truly make clear the Empire's domination, or to imprison again a great goddess…

  As to the occult stuff… The disk that Acatl and Teomitl discover underneath the Great Temple in chapter 2 is a much larger version of an existing work of art which lay at the feet of the pyramid; each sacrifice would tumble down the steps and come to rest on the dismembered image of She of the Silver Bells, re-enacting the Southern Hummingbird's primal sacrifice and sealing again the alliance of the Mexica with their tribal god.