Age of Aztec

by James Lovegrove

  “That’s Chimalmat,” Zotz informed Stuart.

  “Mrs Chel?”

  “They’re not married, though they might as well be, the way they argue sometimes. Chimalmat’s our resident mechanic, in case you couldn’t guess. She’s been out here for weeks maintaining that disc, keeping the damp and the bugs from getting into the works. She and the boss don’t like being apart for that long, so I doubt we’ll be seeing either of them for the next few hours, if you catch my drift.”

  Sure enough, Chel and Chimalmat disappeared into the aerodisc. She said she had something to show him, some technical problem she needed to discuss with him. He replied that he would give the matter his full attention and do all he could to help out. If either of them thought this coded talk was fooling anyone, they were sorely mistaken. Probably neither cared. They were like a pair of horny teenagers.

  The guerrillas chose tents for themselves, dumping their backpacks in front as claim markers. The tents were two-man, but there were enough of them that not everyone had to share. Stuart, for instance, had one to himself. The cabin was for Chel and Chimalmat’s exclusive use, their little love nest.

  Some of the guerrillas clambered into the relative coolness of their tents for a nap. Others went out to bathe in the pool and wash their clothes. Everyone was careful not to mention the events of the past twelve hours, the strange visitations in the forest. Chel had made it clear that topic of conversation was embargoed. There had been no weirdness. Nothing just happened. End of story.

  Zotz broke out a patillo board and found two of his fellow Mayans to play with. Stuart was invited to make up a four. He refused at first; Patillo was an Empire game, and for that reason alone, he scorned it. It was also far too dependent on the roll of the dice for his liking. Little skill involved. Zotz insisted, however, and in the end Stuart relented.

  They played several games, betting with matchsticks. The dice fell in Stuart’s favour often enough that he won twice, getting all his four pieces home first. In general, however, Zotz was the victor. He had a knack for throwing just the right number he needed to capture an opponent’s piece or occupy one square with two of his own pieces and form a blockade.

  “Luck, that’s all it is,” he told Stuart as he packed up the board afterwards. “I’ve always been lucky.”

  “That would account for your permanently sunny disposition.”

  “Don’t push it, Englishman,” came the reply. “Just because Chel thinks you’re hot shit, doesn’t mean we all have to. Frankly, nothing I’ve seen from you yet has impressed me. The Conquistador’s supposed to be this big action hero, but the evidence says otherwise. Big pussy more like. Always getting himself into difficulties. Screwing up at the crucial moment. If you ask me, we can manage without you, and we should. You’ll be nothing but a millstone round our necks.”

  For punctuation, Zotz hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat it at Stuart’s feet.

  The other two patillo players waited to see how Stuart would respond. The spitting was out-and-out provocation. Nobody could let an insult like that pass unchallenged.

  Stuart had no alternative. Zotz had set things up well and selected his moment with care. Ah Balam Chel wasn’t around to intervene and defuse the situation. This was where something got settled. Zotz didn’t hate Stuart; he just wanted the Englishman to prove his mettle, with other Xibalba men present to see it happen.

  “Pussy, huh?” Stuart said. “Well, that’s better than being a big fat cheat.”

  “What did you just call me?”

  “You heard. I saw you spinning the dice rather than throwing them. Pathetic, really. I mean, if there’d been money on the table, then I could understand. But in a friendly game? For matchsticks? That’s just sad.”

  “Say that again.” Zotz bellied up to Stuart. He was shorter by several inches, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Which part? The part about being a cheat, or the part about being pathetic?”

  “You want pathetic? I’ll tell you what pathetic is. It’s getting your butt kicked by a woman. We all saw that Jaguar detective taking you down, shoving you into the river mud. No self-respecting man should let himself be bested like that – by a girl half his size.”

  “Speaking of half my size, what’s the weather like down there, shrimp?”

  “I prefer ‘piranha.’ I eat big sluggish catfish like you for breakfast.”

  This wasn’t going to stop at putdowns, and both of them knew it. Blows would have to be traded too.

  Might as well get it over with.

  Stuart threw the first punch. Zotz was quick and ducked, then retaliated with a jab to Stuart’s midriff.

  What followed was vicious and inelegant. Stuart couldn’t decide if the fight was a genuine grudge match or just for show. Both, he thought. Zotz certainly didn’t hesitate to play dirty, trying head-butts and ball grabs and even going for an eye gouge. Stuart blocked, warding off all of the Mayan’s attacks, and in return he employed every close-combat technique the Eagles had taught him, aiming for nerve clusters and vulnerable spots such as the floating rib and the Adam’s apple. He had no wish to injure Zotz seriously, and he sensed the feeling was mutual. At the same time, it had to look authentic. They both had to acquit themselves well. Otherwise honour would not be served and Zotz would have nothing to show for picking the fight in the first place.

  The other guerrillas gathered round to egg on the fighters. The noise roused the ones indoors and brought them out. Soon everyone was cheering Stuart and Zotz on with gusto. Nobody was taking sides. They were simply relishing watching a good scrap.

  The two combatants ended up on the ground, scuffling like junkyard dogs. They rolled and hammered and elbowed and kneed, eventually falling into the pool. They reared up from the water and went at each other. They crashed under the surface sideways and staggered upright again.

  Stuart was tiring; the Mayan, too. They lumbered together in a bear hug, scrabbling below the water with their feet to kick each other’s legs from under them. They toppled simultaneously and rose to their knees, panting furiously. They grabbed each other’s shirtfronts, holding each other up now rather than brawling. One of Zotz’s eyes was swelling shut. Stuart could feel blood pouring from his nose.

  “Enough!”

  It was Chel, striding across the clearing, doing up his belt as he went. Chimalmat was close behind, fastening one strap of her dungarees back into place.

  “What is this?” the Xibalba leader bellowed. “I leave you alone for two minutes and a brawl breaks out? Explain yourselves!”

  Stuart looked at Zotz, Zotz at Stuart. In the Mayan’s eyes Stuart glimpsed what he took to be approval. Stuart nodded to him, an almost imperceptible tipping of the head. They had both performed as required. There was respect now, and the guerrillas knew Stuart was not to be trifled with.

  “It was nothing,” said Zotz to Chel. “A misunderstanding. I think Reston’s grasp of Nahuatl may be faulty.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Stuart said. “I used the wrong verb tense. Got my syntax muddled up. What sounded like a rude remark wasn’t meant to be. I’ll be more careful in future.”

  Chel appraised them both. His expression said he understood what was going on but couldn’t be seen to condone it. “Get out of the water, the pair of you. Don’t let this happen again.”

  As Stuart and Zotz waded exhaustedly out of the pool, Chel turned to Chimalmat. “Now, where were we? You said the neg-mass drive has been playing up.”

  “Yes,” said Chimalmat with a sly smile. “But I’m sure we can have it lifting off again in no time.”

  CHEL REAPPEARED AT dinnertime, looking deeply satisfied with his lot in life. He ate a hearty meal, and when the table talk strayed in the direction of what had been seen in the forest, as it couldn’t help but doing, he steered it back to more mundane subjects.

  That night, however, he posted men on guard round the edge of the clearing, on four-hour shifts. He said it was just a basic precaution, in case a
Serpent patrol should happen by.

  If anyone believed that, they were a fool.

  SIXTEEN

  8 Monkey 1 Lizard 1 House

  (Wednesday 12th December 2012)

  “YOU’RE STILL WITH us,” Ah Balam Chel said to Stuart. “You haven’t fled for the hills. That must mean you’re still interested.”

  “Where am I going to go round here? There’s a lot of rainforest to get lost in.”

  “You’d find your way back to civilisation if you had to. I think it’s now time I clued you in on the master plan. You’ve earned it. Follow me.”

  He led Stuart across the clearing. It was midmorning, after an uneventful night, and the men of Xibalba were taking the opportunity to laze around and do as little as possible. Some cleaned their rifles in a desultory fashion. Others flirted with Chimalmat, who enjoyed the attention and had fun parrying their innuendo with even cruder remarks of her own.

  “Hold on, we’re going inside thedisc?” Stuart gave a droll smile. “Does Chimalmat know?”

  Chel gave Stuart a blank look. The man had a remarkable capacity for ignoring the things it suited him to ignore.

  Inside, the aerodisc revealed itself to be a cargo transport model. There were few seats. Most of the interior was hold space, stripped of all adornment, bare down to the ribs of the airframe. The fittings showed their age, even a few specks of rust visible. Stuart reckoned the disc was at least forty years old, close to the end of its lifespan.

  “This’ll fly?”

  “It got here, didn’t it? And Chimalmat’s taken it up a couple of times since, to test it out.”

  “But it looks ready for the knackers’ yard.”

  “It is of some vintage, I admit. In fact, its destination before we got hold of it was the Mojave Desert.”

  Where it was going to be scrapped. There were aerodisc decommissioning plants all over the American southwest. Dismantling neg-mass drives was hazardous work, best carried out in remote uninhabited locations in case of accident. Antigrav particles, if not handled correctly, were deadly stuff.

  “But Xibalba has contacts in that region,” Chel continued.

  “Xibalba has contacts everywhere, it seems.”

  “Fellow travellers. Some of the native Americans in the southwest, especially the Anasazi and the Mogollon, haven’t forgotten how the Aztecs swept up across the border and subjugated them. Nor will they forgive the Empire for the way it treated all Americans, natives and settlers alike, during the War of Independence.”

  Every schoolchild was taught that the American War of Independence, more properly called the Act of Necessary Suppression, was a vainglorious failure. George Washington and his cronies foolishly attempted to sever all ties between their portion of the country and the Aztec-controlled areas. As well as battling on various fronts with their militiamen, they roped in the indigenous peoples in the southwest, using them to attack the Imperial territories from within, hoping to undermine through sabotage.

  It was all in vain, and the Empire’s retribution was swift and absolute. The punishments they meted out afterwards were terrible even by their own standards, and although the settlers suffered – Washington himself being hacked to death with an axe – it was the native Americans who bore the brunt. All members of the Hohokam nation, for instance, were forced at gunpoint to kill and eat one another. Most refused, and were repaid for their obstinacy by being staked out under the sun and skinned alive, then having fire ants poured on their flensed bodies. Many, though, did as bidden. Parents murdered and consumed their children, husbands their wives, in the belief that they would be allowed to live as a reward for their compliance. They weren’t.

  The history books were unequivocal: they had it coming. But even as a boy, Stuart had been appalled as he read the eyewitness accounts and studied the sometimes very graphic illustrations. In quelling the native Americans and ending the American uprising, the Empire had come very close to committing absolute genocide. They had also snuffed out whatever small spark of selfhood America had been kindling in its breast, leaving it what it was now – a spacious, largely undeveloped land full of natural resources which the Empire plundered freely and at will.

  America had had the potential to be the Empire’s greatest rival in the world. The Aztecs had turned it into a ghost country.

  “My friends in America got wind that I was looking for an aerodisc,” Chel said. “This one belonged to a German freight airline. Not the most elegant of vessels, but beggars can’t be choosers. It was diverted on its way to the breakers in Mojave and brought here. The official records have it lost at sea. A malfunction in the antigrav over the Atlantic. No great surprise, given its age and state of repair.”

  He showed Stuart to the cockpit. The controls were marked in German. Someone – Chimalmat was the likeliest candidate – had stuck pieces of tape on several of the instruments, with the Nahuatl words for their functions written on in marker pen.

  “You know,” Stuart said, “if I was a pro-Empire kind of guy and someone asked me ‘What have the Aztecs ever done for us?’ I’d have to say that the power of flight is certainly a point in their favour.”

  “Ah, but did they? Weren’t they just passing on a gift from the gods?”

  “True. If you believe that sort of bollocks.” Stuart slapped the cracked leather headrest of the pilot’s chair. “So, what are we intending to do with this particular fine specimen of Aztechnology?”

  “We” – Chel approved of Stuart’s use of the plural pronoun – “are going to fly it to Tenochtitlan and land there.”

  Stuart gave a hollow laugh. “And get blasted to buggery the moment we step out.”

  “Not if we don’t step out.”

  “Just sit there on the landing pad, then, and wait for Serpent Warriors to board. The slightest hint of something dodgy going on, and they’ll storm the disc all guns blazing. In a confined space, against dozens of them, I don’t rate our chances.”

  “Neither would I,” said Chel. “What you’re not seeing, Reston – and it’s not your fault, because you’re not in possession of the full facts – is that the Great Speaker himself will walk voluntarily up the gangplank, straight into our waiting arms.”

  “Yeah, right. Because he does that, climbs aboard random aircraft that touch down on his roof.”

  “He will if he’s under the impression that this is the disc that’s been chartered to fly him to China for a High Priestly conference due to take place on Two Flint Knife.” Chel grinned. He’d just played the card he’d been keeping up his sleeve all this time, and he was convinced it trumped all.

  “Conference?” said Stuart. “I didn’t know there was one happening.”

  “It’s not been widely advertised. These hieratic synods rarely are, for security reasons. Only much closer to the date does the information get released, a day or so, and then it’s touted all over the news networks, the biggest thing since, well, the last one. I happen to have heard about it well in advance thanks to an insider in Beijing. Preparations at the Forbidden City have been going on for months. It’s supposed to have been kept under wraps, but you can’t hide that much construction work or that level of heightened security around the venue. The more hush-hush the activity is, the more obvious it becomes that something big is in train.”

  “And your man in China knows for a fact that it’s a conference? All the High Priests are going to attend?”

  “He does. He’s an Anahuac, a cousin of a cousin of mine. Works in the building trade over there. He’s been supplying labour to the site. They’re putting up a convention hall right where one of the main palaces in the Forbidden City used to stand. They’re also raising a brand new temple ziggurat. There’s going to be some serious sacrificing once the Great Speaker blows into town.”

  “How do you know he’s on the level, your cousin’s cousin? Mightn’t the Empire have turned him? Could he be feeding you deliberate misinformation? Couldn’t this all be some Imperial plot to smoke Xibalba out?”
r />   “Ah, so suspicious,” said Chel. “And you are wise to be. However, I’m in absolutely no doubt that he’s telling the truth. He’s sympathetic to our aims, and what with that and our shared blood, I trust him implicitly. That’s why I’ve obtained this aerodisc. That’s why I’ve cooked up this kidnap plan.”

  “Kidnap? It isn’t going to stop at that, though, is it?”

  “No.” Chel looked grave. “It can’t. The Great Speaker has to die. And he has to die publicly, screaming, begging for his life. As a man, not a god. In mortal terror.”

  “In Beijing.”

  “That would be the ideal location. The world’s press are going to be there. It’ll be the focus of international media attention. Before hundreds of cameras, before millions of watching eyes, Xibalba will unmask the Speaker and show him to be a human being, as frail as any of us and as capable of dying. We will cut him down just as his priests have cut down so many countless others, and the Empire’s reign of terror will be over.”

  Off the top of his head Stuart could think of a dozen objections to this plan. The ways it could go wrong were many and obvious. For one thing, they had to make sure the Serpent Warriors at Tenochtitlan were fooled into believing this disc was the one that had come to fetch their master. For another, it was a distance of several thousand miles from Anahuac to Beijing. Could such a rusty old rattletrap make it that far? And assuming they got there in one piece and were able to stage a public execution for the Great Speaker, wasn’t there a chance people might be made to think it was faked? The Empire could claim the whole thing was a setup, with some hapless impostor duped into wearing a replica set of robes and golden mask. A replacement Great Speaker could be wheeled out at short notice and declare that a vicious prank had been played by enemies of the Empire and the world should pay it no attention.

  Chel studied his face and saw all the doubts there.

  But he saw something else as well.