Age of Aztec a-4

by James Lovegrove

  “You’ll have to hold it, sir.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be long.”

  “Who are you guarding, anyway?” Stuart demanded, gesturing past the minders. “Why’s his need more important than mine?”

  “I’d advise you to keep your tone civil, sir. You’re in the presence of His Holiness Jasper Marquand, priest of Birmingham.”

  “Oh.” Stuart cringed with feigned contrition. “I had no idea. How stupid of me. Of course I’ll wait outside ’til his holiness is finished.”

  He turned, and turned again, pivoting on the ball of his foot and swinging his briefcase into the face of the nearer of the two minders. As the man sank to his knees, clutching a shattered nose, Stuart delivered a knife-hand jab to the throat of the other minder, crushing his larynx. He whacked the briefcase against the first minder’s head, knocking him cold. The second was already close to unconsciousness, struggling to draw breath. Stuart locked an arm around his neck and put pressure on his carotid until he fainted.

  In all, it took less than fifteen seconds, and was as quiet as it was swift.

  Stuart approached the only cubicle with a closed door. From within came the sounds of someone grappling with an explosive digestive disorder.

  “Carling, is that you?” the priest called out. “I heard a bit of a scuffle. What’s happened? Has that insolent moron gone?”

  “All sorted, Your Holiness,” Stuart said in an approximation of the minders’ gravelly growl. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Bloody Moroccan food,” Jasper Marquand muttered. “You go there for a short break, some jollies with the local catamites, and what do you end up with? The worst case of the runs imaginable. Sun, sea, sodomy, salmonella. Never again, I tell you. Never again.”

  “If you insist, your holiness.”

  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.

  Stuart’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)

  The 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 hid
eous 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.

  After 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.

  The Great Speaker’s word was law. All who lived in Anahuac obeyed him, and in time all who lived in the rest of the world would too.

  His destiny was to extend the realm of the Aztecs beyond the Land Between The Seas until it covered every land and every sea.

  It was a destiny he gladly embraced.

  The appointment of Moctezuma II as the Great Speaker provided the play’s climax and was the moment everyone looked forward to. Traditionally it had to be a spectacular theatrical coup, as the old, mortal Moctezuma vanished and was replaced by a masked, robed figure who appeared as if from nowhere, conjured into being by the Four Who Rule Supreme. Sometimes there would be thunderflashes, sometimes wreaths of dry ice. Sometimes the Great Speaker would rise from below, sometimes descend from above. It didn’t really matter how he came on, as long he did so in a majestic and magical fashion.

  In this particular production, the actor lucky enough to have been given the role of His Imperial Holiness was lowered from the flies on a harness. Stroboscopic lights flickered all around him. Sound cues mimicked a tropical storm. Huge electric fans stirred up a kind of onstage cyclone. Everything was designed to give the impression of power and might, the crackle of primal energy, the churn of vast creative forces.

  The audience was so dazzled and deafened that, at first, no one noticed that the figure who was supposed
to be the Great Speaker didn’t actually resemble the Great Speaker at all.

  Slowly it dawned on them. Where was the extravagant, floor-sweeping robe? Where was the full-head mask — that near-featureless slab of gold?

  Confusion turned to consternation, and then to fear.

  Centre stage, surrounded by a very perplexed-looking quartet of actors portraying Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totec, stood…

  …the Conquistador.

  Who fixed the audience with a gimlet stare and shouted, “Bullshit!”

  The barrage of effects stopped abruptly, some backstage technician realising that the show had just been hijacked and leaping to hit the off button.

  “This is a fiction,” the Conquistador went on, addressing the rows of slack-jawed faces in front of him. “A complete fabrication. Revisionist garbage. Don’t believe a word of it. Shakespeare never wrote any such play, no matter what they tell you, and it never became some kind of underground mystery cult kept alive by pro-Aztec secret societies, because there were no such things. Britain stood solidly against the Empire to the last. Anyone who says otherwise is simply being the Empire’s parrot. Our rulers would have us think we wanted to be conquered all along, and only the pigheadedness of our monarchy and parliament kept that from happening. The truth is, we defied the Empire’s encroachment to the bitter end, all of us, the entire British people, and it cost us dear. It brought our country to its knees. It starved us, bankrupted us, nearly destroyed us. But we clung on, with the enemy coming at us on every shore, until it became clear that to continue would be suicide. We were the last nation to fall, the bravest. This play — this travesty — this farce — came into life after the Aztec hordes overran us, not before.”

  Some in the audience dared to boo. Others frowned, wondering whether there might not be something in what the Conquistador said.

  From the priests, there was only stony silence.

  The Conquistador peered imperiously around the amphitheatre. He had the stage, and an audience that was too startled and intimidated to move. He was going to make the most of it while he could.