Age of Aztec

by James Lovegrove

  “We don’t. Just paddle.”

  Zotz might have been joking. It was impossible to tell. The Mayan was a man of few words, with a set to his chin that suggested he didn’t suffer fools gladly and thought most people were fools. Stuart quite liked him. He wasn’t sure whether Zotz liked him back, but was proceeding on the assumption that he didn’t. Possibly Zotz regarded him as a rival, someone who might usurp his position as Chel’s right-hand man. Stuart could have assured him he needn’t worry on that front. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have anything to do with Xibalba at all. He owed the Mayan guerrillas a debt of gratitude, but beyond that, nothing.

  As he and Zotz continued to plough their way upriver, Stuart recalled another night-time journey over water, made just four days earlier.

  THE XIBALBA VAN, damaged by ramming the paddy wagon side-on, just made it to Woolwich before the engine let out a wheezing groan and expired. The guerrillas dashed through the docklands, Stuart with them, until they arrived at a jetty where a small fishing vessel was waiting. The boat’s French captain, Beaudreau, cast off straight away, and they were soon chugging along Barking Reach, past the bleak tufted wastes of Hornchurch Marshes, out towards open sea.

  Dry clothes were found for Stuart – a set of fisherman’s overalls – and as he stood at the taffrail and watched London recede in the boat’s wake he wondered when, if ever, he would return to the city. Perhaps never. How could he go back? He was a marked man now. There could be no more doubt who the Conquistador was. His life as a masked vigilante was over, and likewise his life as an obsidian importer. At a stroke, he had become an exile. From here on, Stuart Reston was a fugitive, a perpetual expatriate, forever on the run.

  Chel joined him at the stern as the fishing vessel entered the chop and surf of the North Sea and began rounding the coastline of Kent.

  “We were keeping an eye on you,” he said. “I thought you might be needing us at some point, once the Jaguars started taking an interest. It was careless, letting that detective woman outmanoeuvre you the way she did.”

  “Maybe I knew all along I had Mayan guardian angels. Maybe I was relying on you coming to my rescue.”

  “Maybe. Still, she got past your defences. You underestimated her.”

  “Implying I was seduced.”

  “Beguiled.”

  “By the person who gave me this?” Stuart pointed to the fresh bruise that was swelling on his cheek, overlaying the bruise Vaughn had put there the previous day. “I don’t think so.”

  “You should put her out of your mind anyway. That’s all over for you now. For better or worse, you’re with us.”

  “For the time being.”

  Chel made a dismissive gesture.

  Overnight they crossed the Channel, reaching the port of Saint-Malo at dawn the next day. Captain Beaudreau was part of a French resistance network that had been conducting a campaign of passive, surly dissent for a couple of hundred years, ever since imperial annexation. They called themselves the Louisiens, after the monarch who chose to abdicate rather than rule a country that had just capitulated to the Empire. King Louis XVI was arrested at Marseilles attempting to steal away on a schooner bound for Malta. He was guillotined in the Place de l’Entente at the end of the Champs-Élysées before a throng of Parisian well-wishers who showered him with rose petals as he stepped from the tumbrel onto the scaffold. In revenge for this act of mass insubordination, a contingent of Jaguar Warriors, at the behest of newly anointed High Priest Napoleon Bonaparte, rounded up everyone in the square and put them to the guillotine as well.

  The massacre had embedded itself in the French consciousness, festering there like an infected splinter. A certain element in the country refused to forget it. The Louisiens made sure that the hieratic caste didn’t have an easy time. They achieved this mostly by obstructing theocracy with bureaucracy. Edicts from the Palais Bourbon were seldom implemented in full and never with any haste. Sometimes the wheels of power turned so slowly they seemed to be standing still. Systematically and unobtrusively, a whole sector of the populace made it their role in life to collaborate as little as they could with their leaders while still staying the right side of outright noncompliance. Probably in no other country could this nuanced state of affairs have been achievable, and certainly nowhere but France could it have been carried out with the same sense of sangfroid.

  From time to time the Louisiens took a more direct hand in frustrating the will of the powers-that-be, as now, by smuggling the Xibalba guerrillas, and the Conquistador too, out of Britain. At Saint-Malo the harbourmaster turned a blind eye to the fact that Captain Beaudreau claimed to have brought in a catch of one and a half tons of mackerel, dace and skate when his hold was in fact devoid of fish and his nets not even damp. The same harbourmaster then directed Beaudreau’s “crew,” who hardly looked like native Bretons, to a cargo truck standing at the quayside. Stuart and the Mayans got in the back. A lengthy, suffocating ride later, they were disgorged at the international airport at Nantes, along with the various items of luggage that had come over with them from London.

  At the airport, tickets awaited them. Chel bought Stuart a set of new clothes at one of the concession shops and handed him a French passport with a photo of Stuart inserted. “We plan ahead,” he said.

  For the foreseeable future, Stuart was René Jolicoeur, a botanist of dual French/Anahuac nationality who preferred to speak to the customs officers and airline staff solely in Nahuatl. “To show where one’s true loyalties should lie,” he explained, and not, of course, to cover up the fact that he barely knew any French beyond the few loan words that had been incorporated into Nahuatl.

  The flight to Mayapan was the first time Stuart had ever travelled coach class, and he noted that neg-mass flight was considerably less slick and smooth when your seat was at the outer edge of the aerodisc, as opposed to being in the central cabin. Airsickness was a novel experience for him, but one, he supposed, he might have to get used to, now that he no longer had access to his many millions.

  It wasn’t until that evening, however, as he lay in bed in a grimy hotel room in downtown Mayapan, that he grasped the momentousness of what had happened to him. Mosquitoes buzz-bombed his head. Ocarina-led disco music thumped from an open-fronted bar outside. Neon flashed through the threadbare curtains. The bedsheets reeked of other people’s sweat. The heat was atrocious, with only a clattery electric fan to alleviate it.

  This was another world.

  No, it was the world. Stuart just hadn’t had to experience it quite so intimately before. His entire life, he’d known wealth. It had insulated him from everything, like a wadding of cotton wool.

  That was gone now, and he missed it.

  Didn’t he?

  What he did miss, suddenly, gut-wrenchingly, were his wife and son. Grief hit him with the force of a charging rhino, and he realised he’d not felt this way – so hopelessly hollow, so utterly bereft – since the day he first donned the armour of the Conquistador. Everything he’d done as the Conquistador, the manic stunts, the priest slayings, had helped prevent him from dwelling too hard on Sofia and Jake. His head had become perfectly clear, free from conflicting thoughts. He’d no longer felt the yearning, aching need to hug the son who wasn’t there any more. He’d no longer switchbacked between adoring and loathing the woman who had ripped the heart out of his existence.

  The Conquistador had been a crutch, a way of coping with his bereavement. Without it, he was forced to face all the emotions he’d locked away and tried to deny were there. They flooded upwards, consuming him. Stuart sobbed on the creaking, thin-mattressed bed. In part, he was mourning the loss of his cushioned, moneyed lifestyle, but what he really was mourning was the loss of the two people who had made that lifestyle worthwhile, who had justified it for him.

  Prosperity was nothing without family. Only now, when he was deprived of both, did that truly make sense.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING came the news that there had been a spate of volcanic activity i
n Europe. It was on the tiny TV set jabbering away in a corner of the café where Stuart and the men of Xibalba ate their breakfast. Three major volcanoes had begun erupting yesterday – Vesuvius, Hekla and Etna – and two of them had since calmed down but the third, Etna, continued to spew out ash and lava, so much so that towns in the vicinity had been evacuated.

  Naturally this led talking-head commentators to speculate on whether the Great Speaker was sending some kind of message. Rarely did a cluster of eruptions occur unless it was at the Great Speaker’s command, and if he had given the order for the fusion plant at each site to stoke the earthly fires, why? It wasn’t just to push a few million tons more of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and keep the planet nice and toasty. What point was he making?

  The fact that one of the volcanoes was in Iceland suggested that the Faroe Islands fishing dispute was still an unresolved issue. Could it be that yet more sacrifices of Icelandic worthies would have to be made? The four diplomats had not sufficed?

  European High Priests would have to consult with the Great Speaker to learn why he was angered and how he could be appeased.

  In the meantime, Ah Balam Chel had his own interpretation of the matter.

  “You,” he said, pointing across the table at Stuart. “It’s you. You got away. Slipped the noose. And that’s made him very unhappy.”

  Stuart could see the logic in this. “They’re the three volcanoes closest to Britain,” he said, nodding, “and Reston Rhyolitic was in negotiations to take over the mining of an obsidian lode on Etna. That’d be why Etna’s the worst affected, the one still blowing its top. The Speaker’s telling me he knows all about me. This is a targeted fuck-you.”

  “Which, I imagine, irks you.”

  “I don’t know. It seems more petty than anything. An impotent gesture. Like flicking someone a V after they’ve left the room.”

  They spoke openly; there was nobody else in the café apart from the proprietor, and he was, Chel had said earlier, “a good man,” meaning aligned with the Xibalba cause. He also knew how to lay on a hearty breakfast: quinoa porridge, fried eggs, sourdough toast, boiled corn, fresh guava juice, plenty of everything.

  “So you don’t feel personally affronted?” Chel said.

  “If you’re trying to turn this into a feud between me and him...” Stuart finished off the sentence with a shrug.

  The Xibalba leader frowned, concerned. “Tell me you still wish to see the Speaker dead. Surely you do.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “That’s hardly the ringing declaration of intent I was hoping for. Need I remind you, Mr Reston, that without Xibalba you would right now be languishing in a cell at Scotland Yard? Were it not for us, the best you’d have to look forward to from this point on would be the final plunge of a priest’s knife into your chest, bringing to an end what would be days of torture.”

  “All right. I get it. You saved me from a fate worse than death. You think you should get something in return.”

  “Not just something. We want you. We want the Conquistador. We want all that he’s done, all that he embodies, all that he can do. We travelled a long way to meet you. We risked our necks for you. I think that deserves recognition.” Chel was aggrieved. All signs of his usual good nature were gone. He wore the scowl of a man who did not like to be denied what he felt was his due.

  Stuart was aware that he was in a room with a dozen hardened paramilitaries who would do whatever their leader asked of them. He was also in a foreign land where someone with his looks and complexion stood out like a sore thumb. Vaguely at the back of his mind there was the notion that Chel might, if so inclined, sell him out to the Jaguars. Psst. Listen. I know where that English troublemaker, the Conquistador, is. I’ll take you to where you can find him. He didn’t know Chel well enough to know if he was the vindictive type. He felt, however, that he shouldn’t cross the Mayan, just in case.

  “I’m not saying I’m not onside. Just saying we need to think about this. I need to think about this. There’s no point going off half-cocked. I have to have more intel. A clearer idea of what you have in mind.”

  “Ah well,” said Chel, looking and sounding placated. “For that, you’ll just have to stick with us.”

  By which Stuart understood him to mean, Your wagon is hitched to Xibalba. You’re one of us, whether you like it or not. One of the good-as-dead.

  CHEL HAD INFLUENCE and supporters within the Mayapan area. To those in the know, he was a local hero. What he desired, he got. He put the word about that he was looking for transportation. In no time at all he was in possession of a canvas-topped truck, military surplus. He also received donations of diesel from Xibalba sympathisers, enough jerry-cans of it to travel several hundred miles.

  It was a long, jolting journey out of the Yucatan Peninsula, through lush agricultural lowlands, round the rim of the Gulf of Anahuac, north through what had once been Olmec country, on towards the mountainous heart of the Land Between The Seas. They drove through dark and daylight, stopping only to top up the fuel tank, relieve themselves, and refill their bellies.

  A day and a half later they were in rainforested high ground. The roads were twisting and treacherous here. The main highways had hairpin bends that teetered above sheer, plummeting drops with often not even a crash barrier to give the illusion of safety. The back roads were worse still, their poor asphalting and the leftover debris from mudslides adding to the general hazardousness, but Chel insisted on using them as much as possible. Less chance of running into a random Jaguar stop-and-search patrol. Less likelihood of someone spying a Caucasian among a group of Anahuac nationals and reporting this suspicious incongruity to the authorities.

  Evening was falling as the truck pulled into a hill village perched at high altitude, just below the cloud line. Chel had cousins here, or cousins of cousins. He was vague on the true nature of the connection, perhaps not even sure himself. Distant relatives, at any rate, and they knew Xibalba’s goal and were broadly in favour. The guerrillas and Stuart were put up in the village longhouse, where bedrolls were laid out for them in rows.

  “From here to Tenochtitlan, it’s not far,” Chel said that night, as the villagers prepared to roast a wild pig in honour of their guests. “Forty miles in a straight line. We are near the Empire’s beating heart. The Great Speaker doesn’t know it yet, but his days are numbered.”

  “If he’s truly a god, then maybe he does know it,” Stuart said. “Divine omniscience and all that.”

  “But you don’t believe he is.”

  “Of course not. If he’s anything, he’s a man who dreams he’s a god, but more likely he’s a man who knows he’s just pretending. There’s a fiction to be maintained, and he maintains it. The entire Empire is predicated on a lie.”

  “And if we can spear that lie and kill it, then the whole structure surrounding it will die too.” The light of the cooking fire danced in Chel’s eyes. The smoke carried delicious smells.

  “I’d like to think so. But a ship without its captain will still float.”

  “But it won’t sail anywhere, will it?” Chel gave an impatient shake of the head. “You are, if I may say, Mr Reston, proving to be a lot more circumspect than I thought you would be. The Conquistador never struck me as a doubter. His actions carried the weight of absolute conviction. What has happened to that man?”

  “Maybe I need my armour,” came the sardonic reply. “Can’t function without it.”

  “Ah well, I can help you there. Come with me.”

  Chel led him across the village to a hut belonging to one of his relatives. He himself was lodged there. Some of the Xibalba luggage was stacked in a corner, and Chel unzipped a couple of large rucksacks and produced, bit by bit, Stuart’s Conquistador armour. The individual pieces were wrapped in items of clothing so that they wouldn’t clank against one another. The rapier was there, even the flechette gun.

  “It’s the one you wore at the theatre,” he said. “The one we removed from you.” />
  “You’ve had it all along?” Stuart picked up the morion helmet and examined it by the light of the hut’s solitary battery-powered lantern. He turned it this way and that, as if seeing it for the first time in years. That was how unfamiliar it seemed, here in this remote rainforest village, thousands of miles from home. Utterly out of context, and oddly nostalgic.

  “I told you I’d get the armour back to you. Now I have. Does it change your mind at all? Persuade you in any way?”

  Funnily enough, being reunited with his Conquistador outfit did restore some of Stuart’s sense of mission. He was reminded how invincible he felt while wearing it, how shot through with purpose. It was like some bizarre form of addiction. He was nothing – adrift, rudderless, at the mercy of the elements – without this steel carapace around him and these weapons in his hands. He was an empty shell, and the armour, a shell around shell, somehow made him whole.

  “I’ll need to see,” he said slowly. “Tenochtitlan, I mean. See it for myself. Because that’s where we’re going to have to go, isn’t it? And photographs are one thing – everyone knows what Tenochtitlan looks like – but there’s nothing like an eyeball recce to give you a true idea of the nature of a place, its strengths, its weaknesses.”

  Chel was encouraged by these words. “I think you should go. Definitely. Zotz can take you. He knows these parts well. Used to live at Tula, to the north.”

  Stuart could put a face to the name and knew Zotz was Chel’s lieutenant, but beyond that he’d had little to do with the man. “He seems trustworthy.”

  “Trustworthy!” Chel exclaimed. “Zotz would die for me, and I for him. I count him among my closest friends. I’m sure, once you and he have spent some time together, you’ll be able to say the same.”

  DURING THE JOURNEY to Lake Texcoco, Stuart didn’t feel that he and Zotz were becoming bosom buddies. Zotz seemed to have formed an opinion of him as an effete urbanite unused to hardship. And while there might be some truth in that, Stuart was determined to prove him wrong. As they trekked through the forest, Zotz hacking a path with a machete, he kept pace with him, didn’t lag behind. When it came to paddling the canoe, he gave it his all, tirelessly. He didn’t complain once or query Zotz’s lead. He rested only when Zotz decided to rest, never himself suggesting they take a break.