“Well put, Tzitzi,” said Xipe Totec. “Told you we should kill him. Who’s in favour? Show of hands.”
There were loud murmurs around the table, a rumble of disgruntled agreement. Hands rose.
“Now, now,” said Quetzalcoatl firmly. “None of that. Everybody, settle. Mr Reston, sit back down.”
Stuart considered disobeying; weighed the options; sat.
“It’s interesting that you take this view,” Quetzalcoatl went on, “that we must be impostors.”
Stuart shrugged. “What else can you be? There are no gods. Never have been. And even if there were, I can’t imagine them being anything like you.”
“How so? In what way are we not what you imagine?”
“Gods aren’t physical. Touchable. Human.”
“Human we’ll set aside for now, but physical, touchable? Why not?”
“Where’s the otherworldliness? The mystery?”
“Is that what you want from gods? Distance? Ineffability?”
“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to get?”
“Tell me, Mr Reston, how much exactly do you know about the pantheon?”
“You mean apart from all the mythology I had shoved down my throat during religious instruction lessons at school? The mystery plays I kept getting dragged to by my parents? The references that priests constantly insert into their public speeches? Oh, not much.”
“You must be aware, then, that the gods bicker, the gods try to outdo one another, the gods eat, shit, fart, fornicate, just like people do. The gods aren’t paragons. They can die, too. Take what happened to Mayahuel, for instance.”
“That wanton slut,” muttered the crone known as Tzitzi. This, Stuart assumed, was Tzitzimitl, queen of demons. Or rather, meant to be her.
“Fine way to speak about your own granddaughter,” said Quetzalcoatl.
“Girl was no better than she ought to be. She deserved what I did to her.”
“Yes, yes,” Stuart said. “A charming story. A lesson in family values. Mayahuel wanted to bring humans happiness, and so she decided to share with them the recipe for pulque. Tzitzimitl wasn’t too pleased about this.”
“Why should we have given humans pulque?” Tzitzimitl grumbled. “If they couldn’t figure out how to make it for themselves, why should they have any help? It doesn’t always bring them happiness, anyway. Just makes them maudlin and sick most of the time.”
This was turning into the most surreal conversation Stuart had ever had. These people, nutjobs all, were adamant that they were gods. They were immersed in their various divine personas, playing them to the hilt. There was little point in him trying to persuade them otherwise. They wouldn’t listen. All he could do was play along, humour them, and hope he could get out of this place before any harm came to him. He didn’t think any of them could outfight him, but with nutjobs you never knew.
“So Tzitzimitl sent some of her demons to stop Mayahuel,” he said, “which seems a bit petty to me, but there you go. Quetzalcoatl was on Mayahuel’s side and hid her in a tree.”
“Disguised her as a tree, I think you’ll find,” Quetzalcoatl said. “Camouflaged her.”
“But the demons, the Tzitzimime, found her anyway and tore her to bits. Quetzalcoatl buried her bones.”
“With great sadness. She was a lovely creature, Mayahuel. Naïve, but sweet.”
“And from her bones, so it’s said, a spiny plant grew – agave – and Quetzalcoatl taught the Aztecs how to milk it for its sap, ferment the sap to ‘honey water,’ distil that further for greater potency, and hey presto, pulque.”
“An accomplishment of which I am justly proud.”
“Not that any of it actually happened,” said Stuart. “It’s just an explanatory myth. If it’s of any interest, it’s because it informs us that even gods aren’t above killing one another.”
“True enough, Mr Reston,” said Quetzalcoatl. “Nevertheless, being familiar with this tale of vindictiveness and murderous jealousy, and knowing it to be typical of divine behaviour, do you really still feel gods are ineffable? Perfect? Shouldn’t they in fact behave more like, well, the way you’re seeing us behave?” He touched a finger to his own chest, then indicated his companions.
“I’m not saying you people aren’t accurate representations of the pantheon. I’ve already told you I think you’re making a nice job of that. I just think I’d prefer gods, if we must have gods at all, who are a bit more, well, godly. A god is something one should look up to, isn’t it? By definition. Not something that’s just a human with a few extra bells and whistles.”
“Death,” Mictlantecuhtli intoned. “This little thing, this crawling bug, this worm, he insults us at every turn. Every word that comes out of his mouth is another drip of disrespectful venom. He is as contemptuous and discourteous as any of his kind. Death, I say. Swift and sudden. He must pay for his temerity.”
“I agree, Dark One.” This from Xipe Totec, who was half out of his seat, with an item of cutlery glinting in his hand. Stuart got up too and backed away from the table in order to give himself room to manoeuvre. Xipe Totec – the man who was claiming to be Xipe Totec – took a menacing step towards him. Stuart ran through all the permutations for disarming and crippling an opponent. For all that Xipe Totec was fit-looking and young, for all that he had a mad gleam in his eye and a reasonably sharp knife in his hand, Stuart was confident about being able to beat him. If all the other so-called gods piled in as well, that would be a different matter, but if Stuart made his treatment of Xipe Totec sufficiently brutal and devastating, perhaps he could scare them off and buy himself time to make a getaway.
Quetzalcoatl placed himself between the two of them. “Flayed One,” he warned Xipe Totec. “What did I say? This man is under my protection. You do not lay a finger on him.”
“Try and stop me, Plumed Serpent.”
“Don’t make me have to. Mr Reston’s problem is not a lack of deference. It’s that he’s labouring under a misapprehension. He still hasn’t perceived the full import of what’s in front of him, and he’s not to blame for that. He has somewhat been thrown in at the deep end. Would any of you, I wonder, on meeting gods for the first time, meekly accept they were what they said they were?”
“Maybe not,” said Azcatl, “if I had a human’s limitations and a human’s frailties. I wouldn’t want to believe they were gods, because that would drive home my own weakness and insignificance.”
“I’m just not one of the faithful,” Stuart said. “Sorry, folks. If you’d tried this stunt on almost anybody else, it might well have worked. You’ve really thought it through, all the little details, the interrelationships, everything. But I’ve had the belief trait, whatever little of it I was born with, burned out of me by life. You couldn’t have picked a worse test subject.”
People at the table were still bristling. Nothing he was saying pleased them.
“Mr Reston.” Quetzalcoatl laid an arm round his shoulders. “May I call you Stuart? Perhaps you’d like to walk with me, Stuart. Staying in this room and continuing to speak as you do might not be good for your health. My protection extends only so far. Xipe Totec ranks as high as I do. We are two of the Four. I can’t order him to keep his hands off you, I can only recommend and, perhaps, plead.”
“You’re telling me if I value my life, go with you.”
“That,” said Quetzalcoatl, “is exactly what I’m telling you.”
“Fine. Works for me.”
NINETEEN
Same Day
THEY EXITED THE refectory, leaving behind a baleful silence.
“I didn’t make myself any friends back there, did I?” said Stuart.
“Don’t judge them too harshly,” said Quetzalcoatl. “They’re not in the most forgiving of moods at present. They’re not sure why we’re back here after all this time, even though I’ve convinced them it’s essential. They felt this particular exercise was long over and done with. They don’t like treading over old ground.”
&nb
sp; “Whereas you...?”
“Whereas I feel we have unfinished business, and so do they, really, although they don’t want to admit it. We haven’t served the people of Earth as well as we ought and what’s being done in our name now isn’t right. There’s amends to be made. And so some of us, a handful of the pantheon, have returned.”
“Okay,” said Stuart as they climbed a flight of stairs to a higher tier of the upside-down, inside-out ziggurat. “From now on I’m going to take you, and everything you say, at face value. Frankly I don’t know why, as I think you’re bonkers, all of you. But you yourself seem decent enough, underneath it all. I don’t get the ‘oh-so-superior’ vibe off you that I get off the others. Or not as much of it.”
Quetzalcoatl smiled. “What would it take to make you believe?”
“A lot more than you’ve got. So: ‘unfinished business.’ Elucidate. You gods took off some five hundred solar years ago, allegedly. You’re back now. Why?”
“Why did we go, or why have we returned?”
“Either. Both.”
“If you know anything about us, you know why we went. My spat with Tezcatlipoca. The Smoking Mirror and I fought after he practised his foul deceit on me, when he got me intoxicated and gulled me into... Well, I don’t have to tell you what I did.”
“Shagged Quetzalpetlatl. Little sis.”
Quetzalcoatl winced. “Please. I don’t care to be reminded. I confronted Tezcatlipoca the morning after and we ended up brawling like tomcats. I was in a towering rage, though mainly at myself, not him. He’s a born trickster; he couldn’t help his own nature. I, who hold myself to a higher standard of behaviour, should have known better.”
“And when the dust settled, you were so embarrassed you felt it was time to go.”
“I’m still embarrassed, even after all this time. We had so much left to do, so much more to show the people of earth, so much more to give you. The Aztecs were meant to be just the beginning. They at the time were the most interesting nation on the planet, which is why we chose them. Not the most technologically astute – that would be the Chinese – nor the most culturally sophisticated – that would be the Italians – but they had a self-confidence that was remarkable, and a knack for adaptability, not to mention a ferocious drive. They were to be our starting point, whence a wave of advancement and progress would ripple outwards until it encompassed the globe. That was the plan, and Tezcatlipoca’s mischief and my own lack of self-restraint ruined it. We left with the project still running, partway done but nowhere near complete. It was an egregious mistake, as we’ve since learned.”
They mounted the next staircase.
“And now you’ve come to fix it,” Stuart said.
“If we can. What the Aztecs have done since we departed, what they’ve become, is not what we envisaged. The growth of this vast, sprawling, cruel Empire of theirs is the last thing we expected to happen, or wanted to. Rather than the Aztecs helping others with the gifts we gave them – what you call Aztechnology – they took it and used it to conquer and enslave, fashioning the world in their own image. But we still hope the situation can be remedied. The damage isn’t irreversible.”
“It really didn’t cross your minds that, left to their own devices, a bloodthirsty race like the Aztecs would run rampant? I thought gods had foresight.”
“You’re thinking of the infallible, omniscient model of god. That’s not us.”
Another tier up. They were one level below the ceiling, the surface.
“So what are you proposing?” said Stuart. “How are you going to undo what’s been done?”
“We have an idea.”
“Is it a better idea than Xibalba’s?”
“Perhaps. It certainly has a greater likelihood of success.”
“That wouldn’t be hard.”
“We have knowledge, Stuart,” said the man purporting to be divine. “We have capabilities far in excess of those of humans. You’ve seen that for yourself. With luck, though, we won’t have to resort to drastic measures. We’re looking for a peaceful, nonviolent resolution.”
“Which you’re going to try for, but Xibalba has to step aside first.”
“Step aside, or face the consequences.” Quetzalcoatl said this genially enough, but the words themselves were undeniably a threat. A sugar-coated cyanide pill was still cyanide.
“My guess is you want me to act as a go-between,” said Stuart. “That’s the reason I’m here. You’d like me to talk Chel out of going ahead with his plan, so you’ll be free to implement yours.”
“That’s exactly what I’m after. Call it a courtesy. We could simply eradicate Xibalba and have done with it, but we’re giving Chel a chance. Just the one chance. Back off and let us do it our way.”
“I’m not sure I have that much sway with him.” They were now ascending the staircase that led to the topmost tier. “Even if I was willing to do as you ask, I’m the new kid on the block, still an outsider. You’d be better off talking directly to him yourself.”
“Chel respects you. He knows you. I am a complete stranger to him. Also there’s his religious persuasion to consider. I would be repugnant to him – a heathen deity, anathema to all that he believes in. He wouldn’t listen. His faith would give him no choice but to spurn me.”
“I honestly have no idea how I’d broach the subject with him,” Stuart insisted. “I can’t imagine what sort of angle would work.”
“Try. That’s all I’m asking.”
“He’s dead set on killing the Speaker. It’s a point of honour, almost, with him.”
“Impress upon him that, for his own sake and the sake of his men, it would be wiser not to.”
“But if Chel won’t back down...”
“Then, Stuart, my advice to you would be get as far away from this place as you can before the trouble starts.” Again, Quetzalcoatl’s smile did little to mitigate the bald menace of what he was saying. “But I’m confident it won’t come to that,” he added, patting Stuart on the shoulder. “You’re a smart man. You have a way with words. You’ll manage. And here we are: the way back to the world.”
They had reached a final staircase, which rose to a rectangular hatch in the ceiling.
“Now where’s Xolotl got to?” said Quetzalcoatl. “He can guide you back to your encampment, to save you having to search for it yourself. Xolotl!”
There was a thumping of paws as Quetzalcoatl’s doglike companion, summoned by the sound of his name, came bounding out from a nearby corridor. In proper light, Stuart could see that Xolotl was truly ugly as dogs went. He was lumpenly muscular and sparsely furred, with long gangling limbs and a head that was far too round and big. Worst of all, one of his eyes was missing, the socket a puckered mess of scar tissue. He pulled up beside Quetzalcoatl, tongue lolling fatly from his mouth, dripping strings of drool onto the floor.
“Take Stuart back,” Quetzalcoatl said.
“Take Stuart back,” Xolotl echoed in reply, exactly simulating his master’s voice. He turned and looked at Stuart, and Stuart was convinced he saw depths of resentment and contempt smouldering in that single yellow eye.
“I can find my own way –” Stuart began, but Xolotl lunged past him and up the stairs.
“Take Stuart back,” Xolotl repeated as he climbed. It was remarkable. Reston didn’t see Quetzalcoatl’s lips move. The words actually seemed to be coming from the dog’s throat.
Xolotl touched the hatch with a forepaw. Suddenly there was a rectangular space in the ceiling. The sounds and damp odours of the rainforest drifted in. Trees reared above like cathedral columns, green sunbeams piercing down through their lush leaves like light through stained glass.
“Go on,” Quetzalcoatl said to Stuart. “You’ll be quite safe. Xolotl’s my other half. He won’t lead you astray.”
“All right,” Stuart said, not reassured.
“Best of luck, my friend.” Quetzalcoatl offered a warm, sincere handshake. “We’ll be monitoring your progress, so we’ll know ho
w you get on. I’m sure you won’t let us down.”
NO SOONER WAS Stuart out of the hatch than it disappeared. Or rather, a section of forest floor reappeared where the hatch had been. There was undergrowth, ferns, leaf mould. Nothing indicated the presence of a doorway or, for that matter, a massive building buried beneath the soil. Stuart trod on the spot where the hatch was, probing with his foot. Through a layer of mossy, spongy earth he could just detect the hardness of metal, but if he hadn’t known it was there he would never have thought to look for it. Whatever else these bogus gods might be, they were bloody ingenious, he had to give them that.
Xolotl let out an impatient growl.
“Yeah, yeah. ‘Take Stuart back.’ Coming.”
Stuart followed the lolloping one-eyed dog through the forest. Xolotl had a powerful but ungainly stride. He moved as though going on all fours was as unnatural to him as walking on its hindlegs was to an ordinary canine. Holy lore stated that Xolotl was Quetzalcoatl’s deformed twin, a constant reminder to the god that his own brilliant perfection should not be taken for granted. The absent eye, which had burst out of Xolotl’s head of its own accord, was the most obvious manifestation of this, a disfigurement that literally stared you in the face.
Soon Stuart began to hear distant voices – the sounds of the Xibalba camp. He was still no nearer a decision as to what to say to Chel. What could he tell him? That he’d just met a bunch of delusional individuals who had got it into their heads that they were gods? That they were evidently powerful, these madmen, and it might be as well to abort the assassination attempt?
Xolotl halted while he and Stuart were still just out of sight of the camp. He gestured with a forepaw.
“Stuart back,” he said, then about-turned and loped off in the direction they had just come.
Okay, Stuart thought. Not ventriloquism. Something else. Maybe some kind of radio transceiver implant? One that was linked to a device which galvanised the dog’s jaw and made it move in synchronisation with the words?
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